Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  My aunt calls the washerwoman mugrosa, dirty, and apestosa, smelly, but I saw her as dusty and worn out from labor. I suppose if you had to hobble about washing clothes and pulling loads through a wringer washer on the rooftop in the summer heat, you’d be smelly too. “She had two girls, an older one, Teresa, from another man, of course. And a younger girl whose name I can’t remember. Because they were the kind of women who would get involved with anyone.

  “Yes, she had a fellow who lived up there on the roof with her. But after the younger one was born, the sinvergüenza left them, and your grandmother would find her work. Your grandmother was just trying to be kind. Do you think she would’ve had her around had she known the gossip?”

  “But I remember the girl, and she looked just like my father, only darker.”

  “What are you saying! She didn’t look like your father! She went with us to Acapulco. You have photos of her.”

  I’m astounded. I thought I made up this part of the story. I thought I made up several parts of my novel, but later someone tells me it really happened. The things I think I imagined are true, and the things I remember as truly happening … ? But maybe it’s the elder who was my father’s daughter. After all, my father came home periodically on leave.

  Aunty goes on with her story, still talking about the younger girl. “Somebody put the idea in her head about your father. That girl tried to get money from us after you’d all gone back to Chicago, and when she couldn’t, she robbed us. I didn’t call the police because of her mother. But let me look for the photos of Acapulco. And the letters from your father in Korea. I’ll look and we’ll set this all straight.”

  Is it only a good story, not a true one? And if it is true, is it too ugly for fiction, made dirty with theft and accusations, blackmail and bigotry, the same prejudices one class, one race, has about another?

  Then Aunty proceeds to unravel another family secret, one she thinks I don’t know. I do, but I want to hear how she will tell it. It’s about when the grandfather was a colonel in the Mexican army, stationed on the coast at Tampico. He had a mistress there who was el amor de su vida … . But this is my version of the story, not Aunty’s.

  “Mama moved us there for two years to keep an eye on him. One day Little and I discovered that so-and-so talking to Father at the barracks. We chased her with sticks all the way back to her door, so she would leave him alone. Father was so mad he sent us back to Mexico City after that.”

  Aunty chuckles with pride over her victory over la fulana even though it happened more than a half century ago.

  I want to ask her about her father. Didn’t she think she should’ve beaten him up too? But I don’t bring up this detail since she seems so pleased with herself.

  Poking under the bed, all I’ve found is other people’s dirt. Everyone has told me something I didn’t know, or that they didn’t know I knew.

  And I wonder, are all stories like this, the natural events much more complicated than the artificial story each of us weaves with ourself as the hero, in the center of the universe.

  Aunty tells me, “I went to visit your father at the hospital at the end and told him, ‘Look, you’re not the father of that girl. When Luz was pregnant, you were in Korea. The dates don’t coincide. So there!’”

  And then, as if she knows how I feel, Aunty adds to me: “You have nothing to feel guilty about.”

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did Father say when you told him?”

  “Nothing. That’s the end of the story. What else could he say?”

  Then it’s my turn to say nothing.

  Modulation

  Richard Powers

  DO

  FROM EVERYTHING THAT TOSHI Yukawa could later determine, the original file was uploaded to one of those illegal Brigadoon sites that appeared, drew several thousand ecstatic hits from six continents, then disappeared traceless, twelve hours later, compressing the whole arc of human history into a single day: rough birth, fledgling colonies, prospering community, land grabs and hoarding, shooting wars, imperial decay, and finally, much gnashing of teeth after the inevitable collapse, which seemed to happen faster each time through the cycle. The kind of site that spelled music t-u-n-z.

  Yukawa—or the artist formerly known as free4yu—was paid to spend his days trawling such sites. When he was twenty-six, the Recording Industry Association of America surrounded his apartment, coming after him to the tune of $50,000 and four years in prison. He was now twenty-eight, out on parole, and working for his old enemies. His job was to study the latest escalations in the arms race that kept a motley army of hackers, crackers, and slackers running roughshod over a multibillion-dollar industry, and then to develop the next counteroffensive to try to reclaim file-sharing no-man’s-land.

  By Yukawa’s count, the average illegal file server could satisfy half a million happy customers across the planet before being shut down. Most looters rushed to grab this week’s tops of the pops. But even files with no identifying description could rack up hundreds of downloads before the well went dry. Much later, Yukawa guessed that the infected track might have installed itself onto as few as fifty initial machines. But as his friends in digital epidemiology were quick to point out, all it took to start a full-fledged epidemic was a single Typhoid Mary surprise package slipping through quarantine.

  DI

  A week before the music changed, Brazilian journalist Marta Mota was grilling a strike brigade attached to the Second Infantry Division near Baqubah in the explosive Iraqi province of Diyala. She was looking for a story for the Folha de S. Paulo, some new angle in the endless war that hadn’t already been done to death. The stress the combatants had lived with for years had broken her in three days. All she wanted was to get back to her apartment in Tatuapé and write some harmless feature about local rampant corruption.

  On the day before she left Baqubah, she interviewed a young American specialist who called himself Jukebox. He described, in more detail than anyone needed, how part of his informal job description involved rigging up one of the M1127 Stryker Reconnaissance vehicles with powerful mounted speakers, in order to pound out morale-boosting music for the unit during operations. “What does this music do?” Marta asked the soldier, in her lightly accented English. The question bewildered him, so she asked again. Jukebox cut her off, somewhere between impatience and amusement. “What does it do! That depends on who’s listening.” When she pressed for details, Jukebox just said, “You know what the hell it does.”

  At his words, Marta Mota snapped back in time to Panama, listening as American Marines tried to flush Manuel Noriega out of his bunker with massive waves of surround-sound Van Halen. That was two decades ago, when she was still a fledgling journalist in her twenties, absolutely convinced that the right story could change the conscience of the species. Since then, in combat zones on three continents, she had written up far more soul-crushing sounds.

  She asked what music the Stryker vehicle pumped out, and Jukebox gave a rapid-fire list: the soundtrack of the globe’s inescapable future. She asked for a listen. He pulled out something that looked like those slender, luxury matchboxes set out on the tables in her favorite Vila Madalena jazz club. She inserted the ear buds and he fired up the player. She yanked the buds out of her ear, howling in pain. Jukebox just laughed and adjusted her volume. Even at almost mute, the music was ear-stabbing, brain-bleeding, spine-crushing stuff.

  “Can you copy some of these tracks onto my player?” she asked, and fished her device out of her bag. She would write up the musical recon operations later, in Frankfurt, while on her way back home.

  The sight of her three-year-old player reduced Jukebox to tears of mirth. He pretended to be unable to lift it. “What does this beast weigh, like half a pound!”

  RE

  On the campus of a midwestern college dead center in one of the I-states, in the middle of a cornfield that stretched three hundred miles in every direction, a recently re
tired professor of ethnomusicology walks through a dusting of snow across the quad to his office in the music building to begin his permanent evacuation. Jan Steiner was supposed to have vacated back in August, to surrender his coveted space to a newly hired junior faculty member; it’s now mid-December, the semester over, and he’s still not started culling.

  Born in the late twenties to a German-speaking family in Prague, Steiner came to the States just before half his extended family was rounded up and sent east. He moved from a Czech enclave in Queens to Berkeley and Princeton, and from there, he went on to change the way that academics thought about concert music. He has taught at his privileged college for as long as anyone alive, and he has occupied his office one semester longer than the college allows.

  He follows the stone path through a break in a hedge and comes alongside the Doric temple to Harmony. For the first time in years, he notices the names chiseled into the building’s limestone frieze: Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and—after decades, he still can’t help smiling—Carl Maria von Weber. It could’ve been worse; there’s a University of California music building that celebrates the immortality of Rameau and Dittersdorf. His parents revered these names above any humanitarian’s; beyond these names, they said, the rest was noise. Steiner’s father went to his grave holding his son partly responsible for the twilight of these gods.

  Once, at the peak of the iconoclastic sixties, Jan Steiner suggested that all these names be unceremoniously chiseled out of their limestone and replaced by thousands of names from all places and times, names so numerous and small they would be legible only to those willing to come up close and look. Like all his writing from those heady days, his jest had been deadly serious. The whole sleepy campus was outraged; he’d almost been driven to finding work elsewhere. Now, a third of a century on, when the college would probably leap at such a venture, Jan Steiner no longer has the heart to propose it again.

  Before Steiner and his like-minded colleagues set to work, scholars wrote about music mostly as an aesthetic experience, masterpieces to be celebrated in religious terms. After his generation’s flood of publications, music took its place among all other ambiguous cultural work—a matter of power relations, nationalism, market forces, class contestation, and identity politics.

  Jan Steiner gazes up at the Doric temple’s entablature, circa 1912, and squints in pain. Could he still tell Palestrina from Allegri, in an aural police lineup? When did he last listen to anything for pleasure? If this building were to collapse tomorrow, what would he advocate, for the replacement frieze? Just spelling out the solfege syllables of the chromatic scale smacked of Eurocentrism.

  He lets himself into the building’s side door and makes his way up to the second story. Even on a snowy December Sunday, the practice rooms are going full tilt. He walks past the eight cubicles of baby grands—Pianosaurus Rex in full, eighty-eight-key sprint. The repertoire has certainly expanded in his half a century on campus. The only fragment of sound in the whole polychordal gauntlet he can name is the John Cage emanating from the empty cubicle on the end.

  Other voices, other rooms: he’s given his life to promote that, and the battle is all but won. Scholarship has discovered the ninety-eight percent of world music it hitherto suppressed. Elitism is dead; all ears are forever opened wide. So why this pall he’s been unable to shake for these last several months? Perhaps it’s the oppressiveness that Paul Hindemith once attributed to Bach in his last years in Leipzig: the melancholy of accomplishment.

  He unlocks his oaken office door and flicks on the light. The tomb is overflowing. Every flat surface including the dark linoleum floor is piled with precarious paper towers. Monographs bulge off the shelves. Folders and collection boxes stack almost to the fluorescent lights. But he can still put his finger on any desired item, in no more than a few minutes. The problem is desire.

  Now he must judge every scrap. There’s too much to save, but it would stop his valve-repaired heart to throw any of it out. Five decades of iconoclasm. The college library might sift through it and keep anything of value. But who in the last five years has set foot in the college library?

  He drops into his desk chair and stares again at the awful severance gift from his retirement party. The department presented the mobile device to him in a teary ceremony: a clock, calendar, appointment book, phone, Web browser, and matter transporter, but mostly a bribe to get him to quit quietly. The thing also, incidentally, plays music. Even the name sounds like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He should have known, half a century ago, that music, like the most robust of weeds, would eventually come in pods.

  And this one came preloaded with every piece of music he has ever written about, recorded, or championed. Turkish hymns and Chinese work-camp songs, gamelan orchestras and Albanian wedding choirs, political prisoners’ anthems and 1930s radio jingles: his entire life’s work arranged for an instrument that everyone could learn to play without any effort. What were his colleagues thinking, giving him his own back? What he needs is music he hasn’t yet discovered, any sound at all that hasn’t disappeared into the oversold, derivative, or market branded. He grabs the device, flips it on, and blunders through the menu screens, looking for a song he might somehow, by accident, have blessedly forgotten.

  RI

  On the night before the exploit launched, Mitchell Payne was on his way from Los Angeles to the Sydney 8-Bit Chiptune Blowout. The first humans to grow up from infancy on video games had stumbled inadvertently into young adulthood, a condition that left them stricken with nostalgia for the blips and bleeps of their Atari childhood. And where there was nostalgia, there were always live concerts. The Sydney event was Mitchell’s third such extravaganza. The chiptune phenomenon had hit North America ten months ago, which meant it would soon erupt into mass consciousness and be dead by this time next year. But until such demise, Mitchell Payne, leading Futurepop composer and perhaps the greatest real-time Roland MC-909 Groovebox performer of his generation, had found another way to help pay off his Sarah Lawrence student loans.

  The one-hundred-and-fifty-grand debt didn’t worry him so much. What bothered him, as he hunkered down over Palmyra Atoll for the next hour’s installment of in-flight entertainment from the Homeland Security Channel, was the growing conviction that at twenty-three, he no longer had his finger on the pulse. He had lost his lifelong ability to keep one measure ahead of the next modulation. He’d recently scored only seventy-two percent on an online musical genre test, making stupid mistakes such as confusing acid groove, acid croft, acid techno, and acid lounge. He blamed how busy he had been, trying to master the classic eight-bit repertoire. He told himself that he had just overthought the test questions, but in reality, there was no excuse. Truth was, he was slipping. Things were happening, whole new genres crossbreeding, and he was going to be one of those people who didn’t even hear it until the next big thing was already in its grave and all over the cover of Rolling Stone.

  But he had more pressing worries. In Sydney, he’d be up against some classic composers, the true giants of the international chiptune movement. Without some serious art on his part, they’d laugh him off the stage. Fortunately, his material was beyond awesome. He pulled his laptop out of his carry-on and fired up the emulator. He flipped through his sequences again, checking tempi, fiddling with the voicing of chords. Then he peeked again at the climax of his set, an inspiration he still couldn’t quite believe he’d pulled off. He’d managed to contrapuntally combine the theme from Nintendo’s Donkey Kong with Commodore 64’s Skate or Die, in retrograde inversion. The sheer ecumenical beauty of the gesture once more brought tears to his eyes.

  When he looked up again, the in-flight entertainment had graduated to that new reality show, Go for the Green, where ten illegal alien families compete against each other to keep from getting deported. He watched for a few minutes, then returned to his hard drive’s 160 GB of tracks. But before he could determine where he’d gone wrong in discriminating betwe
en epic house, progressive house, filtered house, and French house, the stewardess was on the sound system asking everyone to turn off and stow all portable devices in preparation for landing in Sydney.

  MI

  Toshi Yukawa took too long to realize the danger of the virus. He’d seen the chatter on the pirate music discussion boards, the reports of files that downloaded just fine then disappeared from the receiving directory. Some guy named Jarod would complain that his file count was broken after syncing with his Nano. Some guy named Jason would report that the same thing was true on his Shuffle. Another guy named Justin would confirm for his Zen. Then another guy named Dustin would chime in, “Get a Touch, you freaking noobs, it’s been out for weeks.”

  Any file that hid itself was trouble. He ran some tests on the twelve machines behind his router firewall: five subdirectories were compromised. He could discover nothing else until he synchronized these machines with portable devices. After syncing, three different handhelds—a music player, a pocket PC, and even a cell phone—showed flaky file counts. Yukawa realized that he was looking at something technologically impossible: the very first backdoor infection of multiple music players.

  The ingenuity of the code humbled Yukawa. The main file seemed to figure out what kind of mobile device was attached to the host computer, then loaded in the appropriate code. But the ingenuity got better, and worse. On next check, Yukawa’s five suspicious desktop directories had multiplied to twelve. The malicious payload was attaching itself to other files.

  What kind of person would want to punish music traffickers? There were the geek hacker athletes, virtuosi like Toshi had been, simply giving their own kind of concert on their own astonishing instruments, regardless of the effect on the audience. There were always the terrorists, of course. Once you hated freedom, it was just a matter of time before you hated two-part harmony. But when he saw how this new virus could spread, Toshi Yukawa wondered if he wasn’t being set up. Maybe some of his colleagues at the Recording Industry Association had developed the ultimate counterstrike for a world where two hundred million songs a day were sold, and even more were borrowed. And maybe his colleagues had simply neglected to tell him about the new weapon.