Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  The Mojave sky is as lustrous as a painted backdrop. Heat ripples off the scrubland that runs in every direction around the crater of the city. A few hours earlier, over lunch—a sack of steaming ground meat picked up at a drive-through off the interstate—he began to tweet. Figuring out the system gave him childish pleasure. He created an account and chose a username—@Terrorchord. He spent a few tweets proving that he was this year’s fugitive. Then he moved from exposition into the development section.

  I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged.

  I was sure that no one would ever hear a note. This was my piece for an empty hall.

  What was I thinking? I wasn’t, really. I’ve always been guilty of thinking too much . . .

  The year has had no real spring. Much of the country jumps straight from December to June. In Barstow, it’s August already. The freak weather may be nothing to worry about. Not for extremophiles, anyway. Bacteria need worry about almost nothing.

  After the burger joint, Els pulled into a gas station run by the company that recently put five million barrels of oil into the Gulf. For the last several miles, Richard’s car had been running on fumes. Els stuck his credit card into the pump and surrendered his location. No alarms sounded. As the gas flowed into the tank, Els imagined that he might be charmed, that he might, in fact, get the four more hours he needed to redeem his whole life.

  In a corner of the station’s lot, near the air pump, he sat in the driver’s seat of the Accord and tweeted some more. The phrases rolled out of him, dozens at a pop, no more than 140 characters each.

  I was after the kind of music that reminds the brain what it felt like, back when we lived forever.

  I wanted a piece that would say what this place would sound like long after we’re gone.

  He tweeted like that white-throated sparrow in the arboretum just days ago, reinventing tonality a triad at a time. By midafternoon when he pulled into Barstow and tweeted again, he had almost eighty followers. The messages were spreading by themselves.

  Coming to this place would feel like design, if he were a better designer. The Voice brought him here. The name popped out from the smartphone map: Barstow. He’d always wanted to make the pilgrimage. Stumbling on this town was like those few times—the frantic dance in the middle of the Borges Songs, the awful dead-drop in the middle of Brooke’s sonnet, the slow build through the last twenty minutes of The Fowler’s Snare—when the music wrote itself and all Els had to do was take dictation.

  The highway is narrow, and the backdrafts of passing cars rock him. Els edges along the shoulder, probing another stretch of rail. On such a spot, eight forsaken Depression hitchhikers scribbled bottle-messages to no one. Eight anonymous pleas, turned into an ethereal, banal, subversive, conservative set of microtonal mini–folk songs, Harry Partch’s signature piece: Barstow. Easy place to land in, hard place to get out of.

  It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age 19. 5 feet 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.

  His scour of a hundred yards of rail turns up a wasp’s nest, a bumper sticker for a towing service, an obscene rhymed couplet, several pairs of initials, a chiseled tumorous phallus, and a broken heart. Also, many sphinxlike scratchings that might as well have come from another planet. Els climbs back into the Accord. Before turning Richard’s key in the ignition, he sends off another tweet, by the hobo Partch, now an accessory before the fact:

  American music has one of its greatest bulwarks in bumdom.

  He’d read the words in graduate school, half a century ago, in another backwater town, one where Partch lived and left right before Els arrived on the scene. The words have stayed with him, through everything. Maybe he botches the exact phrase. Mutation happens.

  Partch, if anyone, knew that. Burned the first fourteen years of his music in a potbellied stove in New Orleans and started over at twenty-nine, cutting himself off from the mainland forever. A Carnegie grant to visit Yeats in Dublin, where he sold the old poet on a revolutionary setting of Oedipus. A few months later: homeless and broke, thumbing for rides and begging meals across the length of 1930s California—“California! Land of oncoming Los-es and Las-es, Sans and Santas, Virgins, Conceptions, and Angels!” Eight years adrift, sleeping wild or camping in hobo shanties, jumping freights, catching diseases, going hungry, and reinventing music.

  Gentlemen: Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for an easy handout.

  Tramp Quixote, visionary bum, indigent in a collapsing country. Prophet in the wilderness, sure that only an outsider could find the way through. A man of no compromises. A mean drunk. Gay, for what that was worth, like so many of the century’s best composers. In any case: Did not work and play well with others. And convinced that the salvation of music required cutting an octave into forty-three pitches.

  Marie Blackwell. Age nineteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, considered pretty. One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Object: matrimony.

  Even to hear his spectral music, Partch had to invent a whole orchestra of outré instruments. Forced by visions into carpentry. Hence the Zymo-Xyl, built of hubcaps and liquor bottles. The diamond marimba, bass marimba, bamboo marimba, mazda marimba, and quadrangularis reversum. Adapted violas and guitars. The harmonic canons, with their sliding bridges, tuned anew for every new piece. The kithara, the gourd tree, the cone gongs, the spoils of war. A whole series of chromelodeons, organs whose keys sliced half-steps into slivers. And of course the cloud chamber bowls, a copy of which sat in Els’s living room and helped alert the federal government to the fact that here was a house worth raiding.

  Dear Marie, a very good idea you have there . . .

  A new railing swings into view, and Els hits the brakes. Behind him, a Ford Expedition honks and veers out to avoid slamming him. The vehicle screams past. Els pulls up onto the shoulder and stares at the stretch of pavement across which, in another world, he’s lying smeared.

  Then he rises from the dead, pulls out the smartphone, and tweets again. He tweets the formula for his homebrew. He tweets program notes about how the piece was made. One flick, and a new wave of messages heads out into the world’s largest auditorium.

  Possible rides: January sixteenth, fifty-eight. January seventeenth, seventy-six. January eighteenth, nineteen. January nineteenth, six. January twentieth, eleven. To hell with it—I’m going to walk!

  Els steps from the car and inspects every inch of the guardrail as if it’s the score of the Jupiter. And it almost is, so full of scratches is it, both random and deliberate. He can’t stop looking. People, nature, and chance have scrawled all over the metal bumper. Sleeper cells, covert messages everywhere. Who knew how much is going on, written down into these invisible inches?

  Pencil on paint, from 1940: of course his hitchhikers are long gone. Every railing in Barstow postdates them. But every railing is full of their offspring, millions of scribbles from descendant generations. With the sun starting to drop and the traffic picking up, the search feels senseless and urgent, and everything it turns up seethes with life.

  Jesus was God in the flesh.

  Partch was right about so much. Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn’t want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”

  But the man was wrong, Els decides, in thinking that forty-three pitches put you any closer to infinity than twelve.

  Els leans back against the dusty hood of Richard’s leased car and pulls out Klaudia Kohlmann’s smartphone. He tweets:

  Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found
an instrument free of all such bars.

  Partch again: “I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it . . .” That’s all that I tried to do, as well.

  All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.

  As he types, somewhere under a viaduct, in the hard rain of memory, other travelers wait for a ride.

  Looking for millionaire wife. Good looking, Very handsome, Intelligent, Good bull thrower, Etcetera. You lucky women! All you have to do is find me, you lucky women. Name’s George.

  Els tweets:

  The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.

  He remains like this, leaning on the hood, tweeting, almost comfortable, almost at peace. Every minute he stays out here raises the risk of a state cruiser stopping and picking him up for vagrancy. But he’s charmed now, protected by the god of harebrained schemes.

  A text arrives and fills his screen: The class wants to know if all this will be on the final exam. KK.

  He smiles and sends off a reply: Believe it. Then another chorus of tweets, and he gets back in the car.

  From Barstow he turns north into the Central Valley, up the length of the state where Partch once bummed rides and transcribed the speech of strangers into notebooks filled with hand-drawn staves. He heads north, toward the spot that once made Partch scribble down in ecstasy: In the willowed sands of the American River, within the city, I gaze up at the enthillion stars and bless the giver. And she shall be multiply blessed, for at every approaching dusk I shall thumb my nose at tomorrow . . .

  At nightfall, he orders huevos rancheros at a diner in a truck stop near Buttonwillow off of I-5. Word of mouth has pushed him over the thousand-follower mark. Readers retweet his messages. A comment posted under a feature on bioterrorism at a prominent news site is the first to announce the fact to a wider public: The biohacker Bach is improvising in public. Confessing to his crime.

  All night long, discovery lights up in scattered nodes across the Net. A sound engineer calculates how many DNA base pairs it would take to encode five minutes of symphonic music. Someone uploads five minutes of old VHS footage from a performance of The Fowler’s Snare. A couple who live a mile from Peter Els’s house in Naxkohoman fall violently ill, and detail their symptoms in their blog. A mass email starts to circulate, with links to information on what to do if you suspect you’ve been exposed to Serratia marcescens. “Please send this information to anyone you think might need it.”

  A journalist wonders out loud on his Facebook page whether @Terrorchord is in fact Peter Els or just another anonymous fear-artist aiming for a couple of minutes of power. A semi-prominent morals policeman posts an eloquent rant on how music has been taken over by frauds: “Music that can’t be read, played, or listened to: now I’ve heard everything.” The post starts sprouting contrarian comments within ten minutes. Two mathematicians debate how hard it would be to decode the base-four music and play it back. Someone reports that government scientists have already isolated and sequenced the variant strain, which contains a gene for multiple antibiotic resistance. A young woman composer describes having heard the file that Peter Els spliced into the genome—a piece for small ensemble that’s breakneck and free.

  By morning in California, the lines are humming. An activist from Maine argues that anyone who has altered a living germ line so recklessly should be put to death. A law student argues that the tweets themselves are a form of terrorism, and that by current practice, the perpetrator can be held in indefinite detention without trial. Writers on an obscure new music zine decide that for the first time in years, someone is singing a whole new song.

  Here’s wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you. Why in hell did you come, anyway?

  Els sleeps in the Accord, in a slot behind the rest stop north of Lost Hills. He dreams of bumdom, that bulwark of American art. In his dream, ordinary people chatter to each other, millions of massed solos, in pitches and rhythms so rich that no scale or notation can capture them. All night long, the orchestra of long-haul freight whipping up and down the interstate accompanies him.

  He wakes and heads north. He can reach his daughter’s place by evening. There is no plan. There’s only that old hobo tune: Make me down a pallet on your floor. When I’m broken and I got nowhere to go.

  Missing me one place, search another.

  A man sits in his car in a roadside rest area and types into a phone. He writes: I started with a rhythm that said: “Move now. You’ll be holding still for a very long time.” Then he presses post.

  He tells about a piece that he wrote, a melody from a time that speech can no longer reach. He types of harmonies spreading through the piece in long, self-replicating chains. The messages go out to satellites and back down to servers that send them all across the face of the planet.

  He says what the piece sounds like: Like the porous edge between hope and fear. I tried to make my germ sound like the music I loved at sixteen, discovering a new monument every few hours. I tried to make it sound like a tune my five-year-old daughter once spelled out in colored blocks across the living room floor.

  Every message, a melody. He tweets how he hired musicians, rehearsed and recorded the song for no one. Cars pull up next to his. People amble past his hood, suspecting nothing. They use the facilities. They buy lunch out of vending machines. They get back into their machines and drive away.

  He goes on writing, of music converted into a string of zeros and ones, then converted again into base four. He writes of Serratia’s chromosome ring, five million base pairs long. He tweets how he divided those two numbers to produce a short key. Of how he had that key custom-made for him. Nothing you can’t order online these days.

  The account grows happy, almost prolific. All in short, joyous bursts about how he turned a living thing into a jukebox—a sequence of meaningful patterns to add to the ones scored by billions of years of chance. He presses a button and the message sets out into the biosphere, where it will live and copy itself for a while. He tweets of how he let his music go. Of how it’s spreading in the air all around, in the grout of your bathroom tiles. A tune you might be breathing in right now, one you’ll never be able to hear.

  The tweets condemn him.

  I left the piece for dead, like the rest of us. Or for an alien race to find, a billion years after we go extinct.

  I haven’t a clue what the piece will do. Nothing, probably. Maybe you’ll forget the thing is even there. After all, it’s only a song.

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  The listener gets red and feels the beating sun. The listener gets blue and sees the sky. The listener gets green and sets out to sea.

  Colors pour into the mobile concert hall. They come from the radio at first: Strings in a rocking sigh. A long sustain, the sound of the day ending. Nothing left to be frightened of; nothing left to discover. But seven chords in, a shimmer of horn, and on the next measure’s pickup, a soprano sings:

  Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,

  Amor mío, si mueres y no muero,

  no demos al dolor más territorio . . .

  Love, if I die and you don’t,

  Love, if you die and I don’t,

  let’s not give sadness any more ground . . .

  The words meander like a languid river. But soon enough a swirl of unstable harmonies pushes the sound into a wider place. This music, half a dozen years old, could be a hundred. It’s shot through with Mahler at his most serene. The few dissonances it admits to are dappled and transient, as if the perfected terrors of the last century changed nothing, and even now, even in this year, home might still be intact, and nearer than you think.

  The rocking figure returns, doubled now by horn. In that pulse, the soprano finds her way back to the wide first theme: no hay extensión como la que vivimos. No place is greater than where we live. And for a few measures, down this stretch of
generic interstate, it’s as good as true.

  You’ve heard the piece before, three years ago, and on first listen, it sounded like mere sentiment. Movie music. Sprinkles of South American hue and charm, Villa-Lobos via Ravel. A place we couldn’t get back to anymore, even if it still existed. Now comes this radio reprise, served you by a programmer who likes to insist that first hearings are always wrong.

  The culprits are known to you: Peter Lieberson, Pablo Neruda. But such names are at best composite pseudonyms. These phrases assembled over centuries, the work of more anonymous day laborers than history will ever credit. You’re in there yourself, down a branch of the self-spreading Net, stepfather of a fleeting mood or modulation, vector for new infections.

  What might a listener never know about this song? How it was composed for the woman who sings it now. How she led the composer to this love, this poem. Love, if you die . . . How the singer died just months after this premiere.

  And does it change anything in these phrases, so shameless and lavish, to know that the composer is next? He’ll be dead in a few days. That’s why the radio plays these songs: a eulogy in advance. But listen, and the music forecasts another passing, one even older than the harmonies it uses.