Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  All he could do was stare and grin. Young Turk, full of groundless optimism. Every single element of his style had changed. Music had been ground up in the mangle of years. And still he studied the notes, and learned.

  He looked up, incredulous. You kept this?

  Her head bobbed like a teenage girl’s. Behind her, her shelves sagged under the legacies of a life richer than he could grasp. And yet, she’d saved this student sketch.

  Why?

  She took the score back and tugged him to the baby grand that dominated the adjacent room. She slipped off her concert heels and sat him on the piano bench.

  Come on. Let’s try it.

  Clara laughed her way through the upper lines, leaning into the turns with gusto. Their hands collided as they staked out the keys, struggling to catch the boy’s buckshot notes. Their shoulders pressed together, as if this four-hands act were their standard Saturday night ritual. They resumed the little phrase that they’d had to set aside for a moment, a quarter century before. All went onward and outward; nothing at all important had collapsed.

  They crossed the finish line together in a rough approximation of what the boy might once have had in mind. Clara, gleeful, shook her head and patted the pages. Great, isn’t it? For a first go?

  Els shrugged. He needed to show her a quarter century of work that could vindicate this first attempt. She had shipwrecked him. But he wanted to prove that shipwreck might still be luckier than anyone could suppose.

  Again! Clara insisted. And the second time through, the thing breathed.

  She grabbed his wrist when they finished. Peter! I’m so happy. I feel . . . retrieved. She fell into a cloudy silence, head bowed, stroking the keys. I’m surprised you’d even say boo to me.

  She took him into her tiny galley kitchen and opened a Château Margaux. Wine in hand, they toured her collection. Her walls were crowded with Renaissance woodcut processions and copperplate Baroque fêtes. Four small oils depicted saints in a rainbow of surprise. But the photos were what grabbed Els. He couldn’t stop looking: Clara from every missing year. At twenty-five, in a sleeveless black dress, ridiculously confident and free. At thirty-two, in front of the castle in Prague, gemütlich but wary. A woman of thirty-nine, kissing the hand of Arvo Pärt, before anyone knew the man’s name.

  She returned to the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. Come on, she said, taking him by two fingers. Something else to show you. And she led him up the half-width staircase toward another forgotten thing, put on pause awhile, a lifetime back.

  She sat him on her four-poster. They lay back, on top of the nineteenth century eiderdown. She kept his fingers. Els felt the wine, the distance of the past, this woman as familiar as breathing. He bought time, entertaining her with accounts of SoHo spectacles, Richard Bonner’s paranoid flamboyance, the Brooke sonnet to safety that would never be heard. When he ran out of material he made things up, almost like a real composer. She laughed and drew his hand up underneath her concert shirtwaist.

  They fell silent in the woozy warmth. Sobered, she took his hand away and studied it. You could stay a bit, she said. She flinched as she spoke, waiting to be berated.

  Els steadied his glass and leaned against her. Alertness coursed through him. She was right: He could. There was nowhere in the world he had to get to. His passport was in his inside jacket pocket. No one waited for him anywhere. Home was a technicality, and the future held no real obligations aside from filing taxes and dying. The one inexplicable wound of his past had spontaneously healed. Nothing left to prove, and no one to impress or punish.

  He felt impossibly cold. He heard her say, You’re shaking.

  Yes, he said. His arms and legs convulsed and wouldn’t stop. Clara bent forward, then lowered herself to him. They clung without thought. She shifted to fit, and he matched her—a minimalist ballet. Both were where they had to get, and they stayed in that place, free from time, until the doorbell rang.

  Clara leapt up and smoothed down her silk wrinkles to no effect. It was well after midnight. Her face flushed with apology. She pulled back her hair, pleaded with her eyes, and padded down the narrow stairwell in her stockings.

  Els lay alone in the bedroom of a woman he didn’t know from Eve. He looked up: triglyphs and metopes ringed the room, and below them, a light floral frieze. The cultivated serenity resembled something he might have guarded once, in his museum days. This was the room of the fearless girl of sixteen who’d taught him how to prize the new above all things. He rose from the bed and straightened the eiderdown. On the Belle Époque nightstand next to her pillow was a set of silver hairbrushes and an old edition of Jowett’s Plato. Something clicked, and Els saw what he hadn’t, all those years ago. Even as a girl, Clara Reston had hated the real world.

  Voices issued from downstairs: two people, speaking low. Els heard only the cadence, but that was enough: a short comic opera of chirrups and murmurs. Warmth turned to confusion, then furtive explanation, then annoyance, wheedling standoff, and a tense good night. The door shut. Feet padded up the stairs, and Clara eased back into the room.

  Her eyebrows rose as she crossed to him. Sorry about that. Where were we?

  She took his fingers, the same fingers that had once frozen to the faceplate of a public phone, feeding it quarters on an arctic night weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, through the walls of her Georgian terrace house, came elevated doses of radiation from Chernobyl, thirteen hundred miles away.

  That was nothing, she told his hands.

  He held still and supposed she was right.

  This matters more.

  For years, he’d tried to write music that would make this woman say those words. Now he didn’t believe them. They were no better than that boy’s apprentice piece—passionate but clumsy. The Clara he’d imagined for decades would have laughed at them.

  Peter. You looked me up. Despite everything. It’s astonishing.

  He freed his hands. Hers patted the air between them.

  I want you to know that nothing is off the table. Nothing is impossible.

  I should go, he said.

  Later, he couldn’t remember getting downstairs. He did retain an image of her standing in the foyer saying, Peter. This is wrong. Something brought you here. Don’t throw this away.

  But he’d thrown away much worse already in his life, and the real cleaning hadn’t even started. He scribbled his New Hampshire address on the back of his ticket stub. She didn’t want to take it. He left it on the Empire guéridon at the foot of the stairs.

  Thank you, he said. For everything.

  He had a thought bordering on elation: even death was lucky, and no real loss. But nothing short of music could explain that thought to her. She was still shaking her head, unbelieving, when he pulled the door shut behind him.

  . . .

  HE NEVER SAW her again—not in this life, nor in any other, except on those nights when he lay awake sensing the piece he was supposed to write but had so far failed to find. But he did hear from her one more time. A package reached him in New Hampshire two years later, covered in Her Majesty’s pastel silhouettes. In it was his apprentice piece, the song from “Song of Myself,” the dare he’d taken from her once, at twenty-one. With it came a card, a picture of Mahler’s composing hut at Maiernigg. Inside the card was a signed blank check drawn on an English bank. The note read, “This is a formal commission. I want you to set the next stanza. For clarinet, cello, voice, and whatever else you need. Three minutes minimum, please.”

  He’d known the poem by heart once but now had to look it up. The lines jumped off the page, setting themselves to a preexisting music. I depart as air. I bequeath myself to the dirt. If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

  He filled in the check for forty pounds, which he figured would cover the frozen phone call, twenty-five years of compounding interest, and international transfer fees. But he didn’t cash it. He put it in a manila envelope along with his apprentice piece, Clara’s card, her
letter of commission, the Whitman lines, and a few quick sketches. He carried the packet around with him over the next twenty-five years, and it was sitting at peace in a four-drawer steel filing cabinet in Naxkohoman when the FBI raided his house in search of dangerous materials.

  I hoped my nonsense pattern would have no effect at all.

  It wasn’t possible—getting lost in a simple grid where he’d lived for almost a decade. Like fumbling the notes to “Happy Birthday.”

  But the place had changed much more in forty-two years than Els had. New buildings everywhere, the visionary projects of discredited decades. The whole arts ghetto of shabby bungalows had been wiped out. Els searched for the house where he and Maddy first slept together. He couldn’t even find the block it had stood on. The blocks themselves had been rearranged, taken over by behemoth enterprises of steel, stone, and bulletproof glass.

  He stood on a small plaza in front of what claimed to be the Music Building. It looked like the love child of a logic problem and a crossword puzzle. Across the street, the fly towers of a massive performing arts complex stood against the night sky like three container ships on a collision course.

  A string quartet carrying their instruments picked their way around him where he lingered on the sidewalk. They were all Asian and impossibly young. Two of them massaged four-inch touch screens with their thumbs. The violist slowed as she passed. May I help?

  Els shook his head and tried to grin. He wanted to ask what they were rehearsing. Nothing from his era—of that he was sure. Those old manifestos would sound to these children like the crude stabs of a dulled cutting edge.

  He ducked into the corner coffee shop—a watering hole for bohemians since long before Els arrived in town. He’d sat inside it a thousand and one times, hammering out the future of American music with those who were going to shape it with him. Everything about the place had changed, starting with the name. But it was still filled with twenty-year-old makers, plotting the revolution.

  Els stood at the counter, staring up at a menu of hot beverages that took up the whole wall. Nine-tenths of the offerings hadn’t existed the last time he stood in that spot and ordered. The current barista sported a spectacular geometric tat that ran like the Andes from the nape of her neck down into her chartreuse tank top and reappeared in the naked small of her back, above the drawstring of her pajama bottoms. Earth had nothing like her, in his youth. To go through life as a living work of art: it seemed to Els a splendid thing. He asked for a recommendation and she made him an echinacea.

  Four dozen people spread through the dim rooms. No one so much as glanced in his direction, let alone pegged him as the deranged Pennsylvania bioterrorist. Bystander effect, Genovese syndrome. He was safest now in crowds. And crowds of the young, who tended to look away, embarrassed, from anyone careless enough to have let himself get old.

  He found a corner and nursed his concoction, listening to ambient dub coming over the speakers. The tables were painted with wispy enamel scenes that spoke of psychosis or hallucinogens. Els’s depicted a girl turning into a tree. At the next table—a pulsing bull’s-eye—two earnest young Apollonians, one of each sex, pored over a score. Els eavesdropped and spied on the pages. The score—like every score these days—looked like a published work of art. Such typesetting would have cost him four months’ rent, when he was the age of these children. The work was for chamber orchestra, lush with melodies that everyone in the audience would leave the hall humming. It contained just enough passing dissonance to reassure listeners that it had heard the rumors about the previous century.

  Even little Darmstadt in the prairies: colonized by the same neoromantic loveliness that the whole world now embraced. Who gave those signals? Everybody to the other side of the boat. The boy pointed out ingenious features of the work while the woman studied and nodded. The piece’s comeliness sounded in Els’s ear, even over the café noise and the looping ambient dub. At twenty-five, Els would have found the thing insipid and reactionary. At seventy, he wished he’d written it at twenty-five.

  Then, as if from embryo in Els’s own fugitive mind, a solo soprano launched an open vowel on the air. How . . . The voice, like a sterilized needle. Small. The melody wove through the contours of a harmonic B minor scale, one word per note:

  How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

  How small a thought.

  The boy at the next table stopped, ruffled by the sound. Then he returned to the systems under his hands. But the woman who’d no doubt share his bed tonight shushed him and pointed skyward. What is this?

  Her lover glared and shook his head. After two more beats, Els said, Reich. Wittgenstein. Proverb.

  The boy swung toward Els’s table, glowering at a noise from the fourth dimension. The woman turned to Els and murmured, Thank you. She caught his eye a moment, confused about why she should recognize this total stranger.

  The odds against my sequence doing anything biological were almost infinite. But almost doesn’t count.

  The soprano starts up again, repeating the same falling line. But now a second voice echoes her, a beat and a half behind. The two lines clasp and catch, throwing off sparks of consonance and dissonance, shocks made by a melody out of phase with itself. They cadence on a perfect fourth, joined by a ghostly double.

  In the night café, students flirt and study and browse. They sit on barstools at a counter along the plate-glass window, each with a private clamshell, checking on the ten million Facebook frenemies they will meet in heaven. In a cushioned pit behind them, an apprentice engineer in down vest and cargo pants holds his head in his hands as equations proliferate on canary legal sheets all around him. A couple in the far corner are in tears. On an overstuffed sofa ten feet from Els, a woman presses her face into an old baize-bound book. The barista pins her tumbling hair back up with a chopstick. The music might be cha-cha, for all anyone hears. But it’s a proverb from the year 1995: Dayton Accords. Oklahoma City. Nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. The first planet discovered outside the solar system. It’s all, to Els, just yesterday, but to these café denizens, as quaint and sepia as any March of Time newsreel.

  The echoing lines slow to half speed, reprising the song’s first measures. Augmentation, it was called once, worlds ago, before MIDI. The two-part canon turns into a trio. Choirboy clarity thickens, then smears out as thin as gold leaf. The posters on the walls, the painted tables, the bodies huddled in booths and stretched out on sofas—everything around Els dissolves into wet crepe. The couple at the next table freeze, alerted. The woman’s soul is all up in her ears. The boy leans forward in a frightened crouch; someone is doing a thing better than he ever will.

  Voices align and interfere. Bliss starts to jar. The lines weave a standing wave, a sonic moiré. Then those pulsing chords cadence again at another perfect fourth.

  An organ emerges from nowhere. It blends into the held pedal point while two tenors bob in parallel above. Els’s lips twist in unwilling joy. The ancient harmonies spread through his bloodstream like an opiate. He grows light-headed on the parody, the imitation Pérotin, these sounds from the Notre Dame School, from the dawn of harmony. The bar lengths keep altering; Els can’t hear how to count them. Soon counting doesn’t matter. Time is nothing; only these changeless changes are real. The soprano lines echo and multiply:

  How small a thought

  It takes to fill

  a whole life.

  The twin tenors lift free above the organ’s drone. There was a time—as recent as the year this music was written—when such an exercise in smoky nostalgia would have appalled Els. For years these canons would have sounded like pure kitsch, needing only a drum machine, a scratch track, and a little overdubbed rap to become the latest caustic mashup.

  Tonight, he finds it rebellious, even radical. Sopranos again, in unison: tandem seraphim floating through each other’s lines, even slower now, at wider intervals, without a single breath. They sail up and above a vibraphone whose dotted rhythms turn the lo
ng sustains into a pocket infinity.

  The raucous café—industrial frother jet on the espresso machine, clink of mugs and cups from the kitchen, laughter and shouted politics from the back room’s upper loft—has no need of forever. Half the clientele have their own earbuds, the other half use this music, if at all, only as protection from the terrors of silence.

  But these canons at unison glide on. Voices unfold above the driving vibes. Their intervals cycle through clashing dissonance. The collisions start to sound like a requiem for the millennium-long search for novel harmonies, a search now done. The sounds could be an elegy for those scant ten centuries when chant became melody, melody blossomed into harmony, and harmony pushed outward in ever more daring border raids on the forbidden. This innovative phasing piece, collapsing back into ars antiqua. Organum again: the sound of possibility, after the map of the possible is all filled in.

  A girl at a nearby table bows over a textbook filled with symbols. She curls her hands around her mug campfire-style, warming them in the steam. She frees one hand to drag a highlighter over a crucial formula. She grabs the mug and sips, deaf to the record of that reckless rush of Western music that ran too fast from Dorian mode to Danger Mouse. But her head nods to the changing bar lines, under the spell of something she doesn’t even know she hears.

  Above the room’s two dozen contrapuntal conversations, over the relentless vibraphones, the singers harp over and over on their lone idea:

  How small

  a thought

  it takes

  to fill

  a whole

  life.

  The words rock and breathe. Els has seen the idea leaping through texts across two and a half millennia, from Antiphon and the Dhammapadas on through Maddy’s beloved Merton. He himself has set those texts to music, banged on the doors of that smallest thought for his whole life without ever getting in. He’d wanted to be a chemist, to add to the world’s useful knowledge. He’d wanted to repay his first love, the one who taught him how to listen. He’d wanted to see the world with his wife, to grow old with her; but he’d abandoned her after a dozen years. He’d never dared to want a daughter; then he had one, and afterward, he lived solely to make things with her. She’d grown up a thousand miles away, a holiday visitor, shoulders hunched and eyes wary, her hair hacked into different geometrical shapes each time he saw her, forever resenting that small thought that had taken over his life.