Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  Els went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on and fill the sink with hot suds. A large mammal was foraging around the trash on the back porch. He didn’t bother to scare it away. When he returned to the dining room with tea, Bonner was still launching his frontal assault on the melting cartons. Els picked up the other spoon and started in. He leaned on his elbows and poked at the butter pecan, as if conducting a flea orchestra.

  Every time we’ve worked together, you’ve ended up insulting me.

  Every time? Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.

  Els flipped the spoon across the room and stood. Bonner grabbed his hand.

  Peter. I have to. Everything satisfying disgusts me. I have to keep . . .

  Els sat and rested his hands in his lap. He stared at his small white draftsman’s table in the next room. Bonner followed his gaze. A thought drifted through Els like a crane across a Chinese landscape painting. He held up a finger, and vanished. After some minutes, he returned with a square of torn cardboard.

  Bonner took it. What the hell’s this? Some kind of concept piece?

  Els waited. Recognition was slow in coming.

  Oh, Jesus. You’re kidding me. You saved . . . ? Bonner started to laugh—stress hysterics. Didn’t I say you were the one person crazier than me? He sobered, looked up at Els, and squinted.

  Els squinted back. How do you plan to sell City Opera on an unknown composer?

  I told them you were the only person I’d work with. Now shut the fuck up and let’s make something.

  Bonner tugged Els down the dark road where he’d left the rental. Then the two of them drove the quarter mile back up the hill into Els’s driveway. Richard got out and took two hulking green duffel bags from the trunk. He offered one to Els. Peter looked at the vintage military issue stenciled with a long Polish name.

  Are you moving in?

  What’s it to you, Maestro? Come on. Could you give me a hand, here?

  Yes: I’m guilty of playing God. But thousands of such creatures have already been composed, and millions more are coming.

  In the morning, when Els came out to the kitchen, Bonner was in the front room jabbing and thrusting. Els thought another squirrel had come down the chimney at night and Richard was chasing it. Richard loped around in a vulpine circle, then made several klutzy lunges. He looked like a teenage boy writhing in a private sports fantasy. Els fought back a horrified laugh. The man was inventing. Coping. Call it dance.

  That morning, they packed a lunch and walked through snow calf-deep up into the mountains. Els figured Bonner would be gasping for air after twenty minutes, but Richard held tough. He talked straight through the two-hour climb, his words steaming in the January air. He laid out what he wanted for the opera. He’d spent his entire life fleeing from narrative, and now he discovered, to his surprise, that it might not be too late to embrace the kind of storytelling that the world craved.

  Els proposed biography. The life of Thomas Merton—the contemplative mystic who inspired millions with his thoughts on inner divinity but who never contacted his own illegitimate child. Bonner shot down the idea without explanation. Els then suggested the chemist Gerhard Domagk, who tested his newly discovered sulfa drug on his dying daughter, was arrested by the Gestapo for winning a Nobel, and ended up aiding the Nazi cause.

  Where do you come up with these things? Bonner asked.

  A guy can read a lot when he lives alone.

  Bonner plowed through the drifts, considering. At last he said, No touching human intimacy. Let’s face it, Maestro. Neither one of us knows shit about being a human. Not our thing.

  Richard knew only that he wanted something epic—a story that swept the cast up into a collective fate. Something that would shatter the audience. Something with sweep.

  Historical drama, Els said. People at war with things as they are.

  That’s it, Richard declared. I knew you were my monkey.

  In the snow, dotted by long stretches of silence, Bonner’s vague fancies solidified. Els listened, now and then interrogating. He led them up to a ledge overlooking Crawford Notch. They stopped to share hot noodle soup right out of the thermos. The gorge was luminous, blanketed with snow. Els kept telling Bonner to look, but Richard was busy.

  Maybe the Challenger explosion, he said. No, okay, you’re right. How about the fall of one of these Eastern strongmen? Ceauşescu. Honecker.

  After half a dozen slugs of soup and several more proposals—Jonestown, the Red Brigade—Bonner grew fidgety. I’m dying here, man. And you aren’t helping.

  You want ecstasy, Els said. Transcendence.

  Is that asking too much?

  You want real opera.

  Bonner nodded.

  Real, all-out, outrageous opera, a hundred years out of date. But you’re trapped in current events.

  The words struck Bonner like a revelation. Jesus, you’re right. I’m stuck in the damn headlines.

  In the death grip of the present. When what you really want is Forever.

  Maestro. Bonner put down the thermos. I’m listening.

  Els gazed out on the pristine vista. No contemporary politics. Something old. Alien. Uncanny.

  Go on, Bonner commanded. And Els did.

  Siege of Münster, 1534.

  Bonner held his frozen hands in the soup’s steam and grinned. Let’s hear.

  They broke camp and headed back. The snow started up again, and darkness fell well before they reached the car. But by then both men were deep in details, lost to the clock. When they got back to the house, Bonner was faint with hunger. But he refused to break for dinner until Els finished the story.

  Els sent him to bed with books. Richard read all night and didn’t wake until noon the next day. Despite the hour, he insisted on his loping workout before the day could begin. Afterward, the two men began to outline a three-act libretto.

  When they finished the outline two days later, red-eyed and covered in salt-and-pepper stubble, they looked like twin prophets of their own deranged sect.

  I knew this already, Bonner said, tapping the sheaf of paper and shaking his head. I was looking for this, before I even knew I was looking.

  He was still mystified as they packed the car. This is it, Peter. Euphoria versus the State. Like the damn thing was waiting for us. How the hell did you ever come across it?

  I told you. Live alone, and you come across a lot.

  The two men stood by the rental in puffy down coats, planning to meet again in another month, after Bonner had briefed the City Opera brass. Bonner wanted to draft the libretto himself. Using primary sources, he could have a first draft in three months. Els assured him that there was plenty of music to write, even in advance of the first words.

  Richard got in the car and started it. The rental’s tailpipe spit a plume into the clear air. Then the director got back out and grabbed the composer, as if they were still young.

  Peter? Thank you.

  Els waved him away. He stood until the car disappeared down the tree-lined road. Then he went back inside the cabin to the piece he’d been working on for months—the stacks of staff paper on his drawing table with their hundreds of sketches for the first act of that same opera the two men had just mapped out together.

  Life fills the world with copies of itself. Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.

  The radio names him twice in the first two hours out of Champaign. A government spokesperson says that scientists are trying to determine if the bacteria taken from the home of Peter Els, the so-called Biohacker Bach, have in fact been genetically altered. Els waits for the speaker to admit that the strain that killed the patients in Alabama wasn’t his. Instead, the announcer returns to say that, in yet more bacterial news, the deadly outbreak of E. coli in Germany may have come from tainted Spanish vegetables.

  Through the Fiat’s windows, miles of stark black tillage begin to green. Nothing about the spare beauty looks like a country under any kind of threat. But at ten a.m., on a syndicate
d public radio interview program, Els learns just what he has unleashed.

  The show is on the dangers of garage biology. A rash of hospital deaths, the host begins. Supermarket contaminations in several countries. A do-it-yourself genetic engineer working with toxic microbes, now on the run from the authorities. The sounds reach Els from a great distance, as if the whole segment is one of those sampled, chopped-up, looped, and reassembled song quilts that are again all the rage, half a century after their invention. How scared by all of these stories should you be?

  For insight, the host welcomes a Bay Area writer whose book on the growing amateur microbiology movement Els has read. The man talks of garage scientists numbering in the thousands.

  Who are these people? the host asks.

  The writer gives a frustrated chuckle. Lots of folks. Libertarians, hobbyists, students, entrepreneurs, activists. They’re old-style citizen scientists in the spirit of Jenner and Mendel. This is cheap, democratic, participatory biotech. Closing it down would be a mistake.

  The show turns to the director of a safety watchdog group, who maps out the worst-case scenario. The problem is, she says, between mail-order synthetic DNA and a kitchen stocked with a thousand dollars of gear, an amateur could create a new lethal pathogen. Given how many people want to harm this country, biopunk is one of the greatest threats facing us.

  The writer laughs her off. Skiing is hundreds of times more dangerous.

  A bipartisan Washington commission on WMDs and terrorism predicts a major bioterror attack in the next couple of years, the watchdog says.

  The host asks, What can we do to prevent that?

  We need to build on the success of the TSA, the watchdog answers.

  The writer howls. The TSA hasn’t detected a single terrorist action since its inception!

  That proves their effectiveness.

  The host throws open the call-in lines. The first caller asks if this killer E. coli in Europe is a terrorist act. Both experts say no. The caller hangs up unconvinced.

  Els hears the next caller’s fury before she speaks three words. This man, she says, creating germs in his own laboratory—people have died, and this man needs to be found and stopped before he harms anyone else.

  The host asks his guests to comment. The watchdog says, At very best, this is a case of an amateur modifying a toxic microorganism without really knowing—

  The writer cuts in: Amgen does that all the time. Monsanto. Half our corn and ninety percent of our soybeans are biohacked, and we put them in our mouths on blind faith.

  Amgen is run by trained scientists, not a retired musician working at the kitchen sink with no idea what he’s doing.

  Trained scientists have produced more disasters than all the amateurs combined.

  The blast of an air horn like something out of Götterdämmerung drives Els across the lane. In his rearview mirror, an eighteen-wheeler rides up his tailpipe. He jerks right. The semi blasts past him, wailing. When the truck pulls back in front of Els, the driver hits the brakes. The front of the Fiat kisses the truck’s bumper.

  The watchdog is talking. He has panicked the whole nation.

  The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist.

  The host patches in another caller. A trembling woman says that scientists were behind the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

  Els pulls one stuck hand off the wheel and kills the radio. An exit floats into view, and he takes it. He hits the rumble strip twice on his way up the ramp. He follows a local road for a long time, trying to regain control of his body. He pulls into a gas station in Vandalia that clings to the intersection of two empty state highways. He fills the tank and hands the cash to a bearded anarchist who looks like he wouldn’t turn in Hitler.

  Els sits at a picnic table behind the station, under a blue spruce, nursing a turkey wrap and flipping through a copy of the Times that the convenience center stocked by accident. He finds himself on page A10: “Homebrew Genetic Modifier Heard Beat of Different Drummer.” The article psychoanalyzes Peter Els’s biohacking by considering his decades of audience-hostile avant-garde creations. A little vomit spasms into Els’s mouth. He folds up the paper and leaves it on the picnic table, under a stone.

  He opens the door to the Fiat, and a voice shouts, Hey! Els turns, hands rising. The wild-bearded anarchist stands in the doorway of the gas station, rigid. It’s a relief, almost, caught at last. The fugitive motif has gone on too long. He’s tired. He smiles at his accoster, surrendering.

  I forgot, the man says. You get a free drink with that turkey thingie.

  Els sits in the parked car, his hands revolting. The free drink, his alibi, splatters when he brings it to his lips. Through the windshield, he watches a family of four parade into the convenience mart. The little girl, her sweatshirt advertising a megachurch, fixes him in a telephoto gaze. Arrest is just a matter of time. What he has done and what he has failed to do must both be paid for. The good of the many demands it.

  Kohlmann’s phone has ridden beside him on the death seat since Champaign. He takes it and turns it on. Too late for the traceable device to hurt him. He has only eighty miles to St. Louis, and his destination. The Joint Task Force can have him, once he finishes there.

  His fingers flail at the on-screen keys. He punches in an address memorized years ago. It has always been a little fictional, no place he would live to see. But the Voice figures out the route in seconds, door to door. All he needs to do is accept the GPS’s higher power.

  The route unfolds in front of him—an hour and a half. His limbs are clammy and his skin metallic. He pries open the glove compartment. A stack of loose CDs spill out onto the passenger side floor, none of them what he needs. He leans over into the chaos-strewn backseat and rakes through dozens more cracked and unhinging jewel boxes, finding nothing that can help him.

  Then he remembers: all the tunes in the world are his. He plugs the smartphone into the car stereo and pecks in his search. The piece bubbles up with a few pokes of his index finger. It’s music that will get him as far as he needs to go. Shostakovich’s Fifth—a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.

  Serratia can split several times an hour, when conditions are right. Double a few times, and soon you’re talking real numbers.

  The overture begins with almost nothing: one oboe, one English horn, and one bassoon. They play in unison at first, a theme filled with anticipation borrowed from a mass by Ockeghem. The unison divides; one melody becomes two, then two become four, rising and stretching. Dawn in the free city of Münster, Northern Rhineland, January 1534.

  The first tradesmen trickle through the Prinzipalmarkt. Vendors set up their stalls, and customers congregate. Two violas join the reed trio. An ermine-trimmed noble draws a retinue across the market square to a swell in the trombones and cellos. Over the course of several dozen patient measures, dawn turns into full-on morning.

  Streets radiate from the prosperous plaza, lined by step-gabled houses and pinnacled façades. To the east, the commanding Gothic Rathaus. To the north, the cathedral spire. Brisk commerce fills the marketplace. The orchestra begins a vast prolation canon—copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords. Then the shock of a baritone cuts through the sound:

  Fire, air, the rain, the sun—the Lord made all things common, for our shared joy.

  The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain.

  Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!

  Some of the chorus stop their buying and selling long enough to shush him. They sing of recent calamities throughout the empire that must not reawaken. Rothmann’s baritone shines out above them.

  God gave us the world, whole. We’ve wrecked it, and fight over the crumbs. No wonder you’re miserable—all of you!

  A trio of merch
ants caution the preacher, above the massed strings. They say the years of chaos must stop. The city needs peace and prosperity; all else is rabble-rousing noise. The words form islands of triadic consonance in the orchestra’s atonal surge.

  Others come to Rothmann’s defense. The man hurts no one. Let him preach what heaven tells him. The merchant trio become a sextet, a plea for harmony, productivity, wealth. But the preacher laughs them off in a swelling solo:

  Peaceful? Productive? The Prince-Bishop wants you productive! Producing for the Prince. Fools! For peace, you’ve traded away your souls.

  The ill, the oppressed, the unemployed, and the merely spiritual begin to flock to Rothmann’s side. Old clashes break out across the stage. The cast splits into a freewheeling double chorus, its two factions feeding the rising excitement. Chords stack up and melodies clash above a turning ground bass. Each time the cycling figure returns, its texture thickens. Rothmann shouts above the fray—curt and thrilling melodic anagrams of the original, aching theme.

  God put joy into your body—real joy! Live in the light. Live in full beauty. Live in the common air.

  A sudden modulation into a remote harmonic region, and four men on horseback appear from the wings. At their head is the tailor’s apprentice, John of Leiden, a charismatic man with a flowing beard. To a brass fanfare, in a heroic tenor, he leads his posse in a motet. They come from the Netherlands at the bidding of Jan Matthias, the baker turned prophet, who has identified Münster as the place where God will begin the world’s end. Rothmann, they sing, is clearing the way for the long-delayed heavenly kingdom.

  Rothmann embraces them, and together, in long, brazen lines of modal melody, they sing in ecstatic counterpoint:

  Mine and Thine, Thine and Mine?