Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  He listens to her irrepressible waltz, as familiar as yearning. Then, just when Els has it pegged, the tune explodes into a wild fugato, leaving young Peter’s precious student tinkerings in the dust. He turns toward the girl, amazed. She sneaks a glance his way, mugging a little, impish, a conspirator’s grin. She’s pleased, not with herself but with this marvelous mechanical bird she has stumbled across while out wandering.

  They sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the music, nodding to the beat. Now and then he jots something into a pocket notebook. When his pleasure in her devices overflows, he’ll flick her elbow or kneecap with his fingernail.

  Four weeks earlier, a quartet of passenger planes turned the dream of the present into a greasy plume. The whole world watched the cycling images in narcotic dread and could not look away. Days passed when even buying a dozen eggs felt like hubris. People kept saying that life had changed forever, but Els couldn’t see how. He’d lived too long for the fallen towers to seem like anything more than history’s next nightmare installment. Terrors as large had struck every decade he’d lived through. Only they’d always happened somewhere else.

  On day five, Stockhausen called it the biggest work of art there ever was, compared to which every other composer’s work was nothing.

  On day six, Jen came to her tutorial. She sat in her usual chair, her face bloated and red. Oh, man! she told him. Every note I put down seems grotesque. Self-indulgent, after this.

  It took all the self-control of a swami at sixty to keep from holding the girl’s jittery hand. Simply wait, he wanted to tell her. Be quiet, still, and solitary. Music will offer itself to you, to be unmasked. It has no choice.

  Now, a month on, she’s in full sail again, and the world lies in ecstasy at her feet. She hasn’t forgotten anything; she’s remembered. Who will tilt this footrace from Death to Love, if not her? And these full-out, cascading kaleidoscopes, their interlocking syncopations, are her weapons of mass enchantment. Her duet darts like swallows; soon, the voices are joined by ondes Martenot, contrabassoon, and bass clarinet in manic motor rhythms. Then a battalion of spiccato cellos and double basses. Tubular bells, of course. How not? And fanfares served up by a double helping of trombones.

  The music works its way to a whirling waterspout, then explodes into strobing suspensions. Jen leans forward into the breakers of her own ocean, grinning like a demon. She’s managed to delight herself again with her God-given right to strike a pose, to play on the fantasies of any willing listener.

  The piece plunges off a cliff into blissful silence. In the aftermath, the maker can’t suppress a satisfied giggle. Huh? she teases him. Where does such confidence come from? Whadya think?

  I have two words for you, he intones. And one of them is Holy . . .

  The praise makes her levitate. He stands and crosses to the piano, where he demonstrates for her a better way to handle a clumsy moment near the piece’s climax. She has reinvented a kind of quasi-fauxbourdon, lush and archaic, like the kind Brahms might have used. But her voice leading is all wrong. She doesn’t know the models, the ones that have solved all her problems already. There’s too much more to hear than the mere past. She listens to music all day long; her tastes are catholic and indiscriminate. She has shown him the tunes on her player, scrolled through the titles in her promiscuous trove. Now and then she leaves gifts in his in-box, music for the end of time: Radiohead, Björk, the Dillinger Escape Plan. The songs startle Els. They’re jewels, rich with dissonance and unstable rhythms. They sound like the experiments of half a century ago—Messiaen or Berio—reborn for a wider public. Maybe that’s how long it takes to go from germ to general acceptance in this world. Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.

  But then, maybe acclaim is just the foyer to death.

  For every solo discovery Jen makes, Els must point her toward dozens more. The world’s bounty has overflowed, and the young are washed away in it. Human ingenuity was doomed from the first, to do itself in with abundance. Of the making of many musics, there is no end.

  His fingers step through the keys, spelling out his proposed alternative. He glances up as he plays. His gaze locks onto her chestnut eyes as he talks her through the solution. The girl shakes her head.

  God, I wish I could do that.

  Do what? He’s done nothing but trace out a well-mapped progression, one known for centuries.

  Stand at the keyboard and knock those things out. While talking!

  Oh, stop. You just played me a fifteen-minute piece with a billion notes in it.

  That’s not me, she says. That’s Sibelius!

  Confusion lasts only an instant. Not the Finn: the composition software. The program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus. And if a student were to ask Els where to put her energies—into mastering the past or mastering that interface . . .

  He recrosses the room and sits next to her again. He waves his finger at her screen. Time for surgery. For him, Jen is always ready to repair. She goes to work on her own keyboard, like a kid releasing global thermonuclear war. He marvels again at the sheer power of the tools: cut-and-paste harmonies, point-and-click tone painting, one-button transposition. With a few deft flicks, a handful of raw building blocks becomes a new two-minute stunning tutti. Els wags his head in sad astonishment: five weeks of work for him, back in the day.

  Oh, you children are like gods.

  Children? she asks, her eyebrows aerobic. Is that how you see me?

  It’s the most coquettish thing she has ever said. She’s still high on the power of her piece, the sheer trip of playing it for her mentor. Yes, he thinks. A child with breasts. With brains. With the most delicious insouciance he has come across in decades.

  When I was your age, he tells her, we used to have to find a nice flat stone, polish it up, get a chisel . . .

  She listens, brows furled. Then she tsks and shoves his shoulder. Sure, Gramps.

  Again, he says, pointing at her machine. He feels himself enjoying her, enjoying this, enjoying even music again. From the top. Once more with feeling.

  She does as commanded, and though the reprise of the revised piece sends their lesson into overtime, neither of them gives the minute hand a second thought. Sounds fill their ears and the notes scroll past. The music is everywhere again, lush and naïve and searching out the best in both Apollo and Dionysus.

  For a few short measures, the layers turn strange and cold as moonlight. Oh! Els says, clapping. I like that bit!

  You should, she says. I ripped you off!

  He thinks she’s joking. She’s not. The pulse drives on ahead, but his ears turn wary. He waits for the piece to end before confronting her.

  You did what?

  Her face is shaped for grinning. I found it in a piece you wrote . . . Your Borges songs?

  We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. He’s forgotten the work was ever published, and if she’s gone and ordered a copy of the score, it will be the first dollar of royalties Els has made in years.

  I owe you an ice-cream cone.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  Means she has done something good with his old obscure formulas. Putty, sanding, and a paint job, and the thing is all shiny again, better than new.

  What were you doing, hunting down my old stuff?

  The words scare her, a key he’s never seen. Gramps? she asks. She looks at the offending passage. It’s pretty beautiful.

  Oh? So beauty’s back, is it?

  How much must have changed in the world of musical taste, since he last took its temperature, for those old provocations to be accused of such a crime. He smiles at sounds from very far away—the antics at the piece’s premiere, Maddy and the players dancing around the little auditorium to Richard’s imperial bidding.

  What? Jen says. She’s ready to laugh along, if she should. What’d I say?

  He shakes his head. Old friends, he says. Crazy people.

 
She frowns, wondering if she’s supposed to understand. But perplexity rolls off her as easily as recent history. She belongs to the first generation to use the mantra whatever without exasperation. It doesn’t matter to her what he’s babbling about. His words are nothing; she wants his tunes.

  It’s Monday, 6:20. She’s late for something—dinner at the dorm, a lover’s tryst, a week-starting pub crawl with friends. But her eyes search upward in the air, as if the score of his old songs were printed there. I learn so much from what you write.

  Wrote, he wants to say. Her zeal seems genuine enough. But then, she’s capable of extracting instruction and delight from a ten-second ad jingle.

  He wants to tell her: Hold on to what you know right now. Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time’s end and recollect the dead as if they’re all still here. Because they are.

  He folds his hands behind his neck. We had some strange notions back then.

  I know. The sixties! Even the name excites her. A daughter of a revolution that did not happen as she imagined.

  We did some silly things. We thought people could learn to love anything.

  She braces. They can’t?

  They can’t, Els says. God. We had energy. We had ideas. We had daring. We had invention for every need. The dreamers outnumbered the charlatans. Then we woke up.

  His words slap her, and her face falls. He can’t imagine why his apostasy should bother her. Her music is so lavish and satisfying it’s closer to the 1860s than to the sixties in question. Still she hangs her head, mourning iconoclasm. She’ll never have the pleasure of creative destruction. Nothing to break anymore. Everything already broken and glued back together in a mosaic of pretty bits, too many times to count.

  Nobody wanted that stuff. Very little of it will ever be played again.

  Through the window, October stretches out, cloudless and amnesic. According to this blue, nothing significant happened last month, with more lovely nothing in the extended forecast. Els stretches. There’s a tune in his ear like the fifties rock and roll his brother force-fed him after tying him to a chair in the family basement.

  Turns out that people want a very few things.

  He’s a boy again, listening to his father’s hi-fi. Young Person’s Guide. The Orchestra Song. The tympani’s two tones are always the same tones: Do Sol, Sol Do. Do Sol Sol Sol Do. And now the long, strange trip of his sixty years, all that wandering through distant keys, doubles back to tonic, that exploded home.

  He can’t for the life of him figure out how, but he’s upset her.

  Gramps? Jen’s voice wavers. It sounds so generous. Fresh. She pouts with the same force that drives her music on into badass brilliance. Like you don’t give a shit who comes with. I love that!

  He can’t even pat her on the head. There are laws against that, and laws beyond those laws. He waits too long to say anything, and his silence humiliates her.

  You tried so many things, she blurts. Why’d you stop?

  He says, Not your business. And at once regrets the words as much as any music he has ever written.

  Her eyes blink and her head snaps back. She closes the clamshell of her computer and shoves it in her pack.

  Jen, he says, helpless to say what he should. She stops, waits, vacant, her hand fighting her Amazon hair.

  Go to the piano, he commands. She sneers, but does.

  Hit a key.

  She shrugs—whatev. She, at least, doesn’t bother to ask which one. She chooses G-sharp. Lovely, intense, and perverse. This one will have a future.

  Tell me what you hear.

  She shrugs again, stone-faced. G-sharp below middle C.

  Again. What else?

  Nothing at first. But awareness spreads through her, ten times faster than it dawned on him, back in the day. She hits the key, snorts, pounds the thing again, three times in a row. Then she starts the long arpeggio, plunking her way up the overtone series.

  So what? she says, trying to scowl and failing miserably.

  She knows. It’s all over her face, a message already charging into her future. For every pitch that ever reaches your ear, countless more hide out inside it. The things he can never tell her, the music he never wrote: it’s all rolled up, high up there, in the unhearable frequencies.

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.

  They slaughter infected poultry all across Asia. A holocaust of birds. Birds die by the millions, infected or not. Safety is a concept piece, at best.

  Human cases break out by the hundreds: Egypt, Indonesia, China. The numbers are small, still, but the real outbreak will start just like this.

  Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, researchers breed variant strains of H5N1 in generations of ferrets. Three months and five small mutations later, they’ll succeed in turning the virus airborne. It’s a simple enough experiment, one that tens of thousands of DIYers could re-create at home. A disease that kills half of those it infects, grown as contagious as the common cold. Governments and agencies will try to suppress the data. But soon enough, the recipe will spread around on the Internet at the speed of thought.

  This happens in the Age of Bacteria, which began about 3.5 billion years ago.

  Out East, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a molecular geneticist makes a novel organism from scratch, one with its own genetic code. It won’t be dangerous, a panel of scientists says, unless it escapes the lab. Everything gets loose, a panel of historians says. Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.

  The guardians carry on flying their nightly sorties. Drones gather data from all the planet’s hotbeds. Recon units comb those last few holdout places that elude the grid. Virtuoso interpreters of chatter listen in on all frequencies. Everywhere, agents break up attacks before they’re even planned.

  In another few weeks, an airborne squad will drop into the compound of the supreme artist of panic—fugitive these last ten years—and slaughter him. That death will change nothing. Panic, like any art, can never be unmade.

  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.

  Sixty-one came, and sixty-two subito, a few days later. For two years, Els worked at Verrata and listened to nothing but Bach. He taught ear training and sight singing, then came home and listened each night to everything the old contrapuntist ever wrote. Nothing else. It was a discipline, like jogging or doing crosswords. An escape from the night sweats of his own century. The Well-Tempered Clavier became his daily bread. He went through the suites, concertos, and trio sonatas. He pored over the two-hundred-plus cantatas three times through. The study focused him. He felt like a student again, a beginner in his own life.

  After two years of listening, Els woke one morning and realized that he was done, even with Bach’s bottomless buffet. The surprises were over. The brilliance had gone routine. He could anticipate every outlandish dissonance hidden in those independent lines. And where do you go, once you’ve memorized the sublime?

  He went to Mozart. He pored over the Jupiter, as a scholar might. But even the cosmic finale was lost in familiarity, or something worse. The notes were all still there, audible enough. But they’d flattened out, somehow, lost their vigor. And the phrases they formed sounded metallic and dun. It took him some weeks to realize: His hearing had changed. He was just sixty-five, but something had broken in the way he heard.

  Els made an appointment with a specialist. His symptoms puzzled Dr. L’Heureux. The doctor asked if Els experienced any changes in coordination. Any
confusion or disorientation.

  Oh, probably, Els told him. But only the musical confusion worried him.

  Are you having any trouble finding the right words?

  Els had never in his whole life been able to find the right words.

  Dr. L’Heureux made Peter walk a straight line, count backward by sevens, arm-wrestle, and stand still with his eyes closed. He didn’t ask his patient to sing or name a tune.

  Dr. L’Heureux ordered a scan. The scanner was a large tube much like one of those Tokyo businessmen’s hotels. It hummed to itself as it probed, a microtonal drone that sounded like La Monte Young or the cyclical chanting of Tibetan monks.

  Doctor and patient sat in a consulting room examining slices of Els’s cortex. The scallops and swirls looked like so much cauliflower. Dr. L’Heureux pointed at bits of Els’s spirit and heart and soul, naming regions that sounded like vacation spots in the eastern Mediterranean. Peter followed the magic lantern show. He nodded at the doctor’s explanations, hearing another libretto altogether. What was it about music’s obsession with Faust? Spohr, Berlioz, Schumann, Gounod, Boito, Liszt, Busoni, and Mahler, down through Prokofiev, Schnittke, Adams, and Radiohead. Centuries of bad conscience, long before the Nazis burnt the temple of High Music to the ground.

  It seemed to Els, as another slice of his brain filled the screen, that classical music’s real crime was not its cozy relations with fascism but its ancient dream of control, of hot-wiring the soul. He pictured Faust looking at his own neurons on a monitor—his bottomless hunger laid bare, his desire for mastery swirling through his brain like cigarette smoke curling in the air. As full knowledge filled the seeker at last, Mephistopheles, at his elbow, would sing, Now we’re both paid in full.