Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I shrugged. "I played the piano once. As you know."

Franklin smiled. "I played the accordion. I could make 'Five Hundred Miles' sound as if it had been transposed into kilometers. At eighteen, I applied to music conservatory. Chopin etudes on the squeeze box for my audition. Went to art school."

He looked at me, decided to get the worst out of the way. "You know, the professor came to music late in life. He says the whole enterprise caught him by surprise. Other noises, other tunes. Said he spent years committing to memory the entire repertoire. But somewhere along the way, he's pared Western music down to just what he can carry." His voice fell, forced-cheery. Todd shook his head.

But this time, we didn't stop at Dr. Ressler's collapse into the microcosm of those few dozen measures. He became animated, demanding to know my favorite pieces. I gave over a couple hostages. He accused me of being hopelessly stuck on mainstream war-horses. He challenged me with a dozen composers, none of whom were more than names to me. "These are the folks who are writing music right now. Your contemporaries. But who bothers listening? We're reduced to the three-minute unison synthesizer banks while an electronic drum loop programmed to bash out every other beat mercifully drowns out the hermaphrodite wailing about how it feels good to feel bad. It's a war zone out there. Lose-lose situation. Another concert hall rendition of Finlandia for folks with the heavy jewelry on the one hand, and three anemic teenagers called "The Styro Detritus' on the other."

In a minute, he recovered. "The trick to listening," he said, lifting me by the hand, "is to hear the pieces speaking to one another. To treat each one as part of an enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of everything that ever worked, seemed beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and had to be replaced. Music can only mean anything through other music. You have to be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage to the second Viennese school, in Schönberg the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude. And every new sleeper that Glass welds together gives new breath to that rococo clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980, can we at last hear what pleasing the Esterhazys is all about."

He was performing for me. By then we were in the bedroom, but for a wholly different seduction than we'd explored at my place. Franklin's dirty clothes were stacked into prim piles, interleaved with notebooks. He cleared away a state-of-the-art turntable, expensive but not well cared for. He went to the top shelf of his closet. There, stretching from end to end where the sweaters usually went, was a wall of records, arranged by spine color in rainbow spectrum. He dug out a disk, mumbling, "Have a seat. No. Take the bed. Lie down and close your eyes."

I did as instructed. Eyes closed, I heard everything: Todd shuffling the record jacket, the domestic argument in the flat downstairs, the sound of breaking bottles, someone being sick in the street below, Dr. Resslcr putting up a disk pack on a spindle across town, the first snow of the year falling on my mother's Midwest grave. I heard the hollow of high-fidelity speakers, the muffled pop of needle touching, and the sandy scuttling of crabs across the worn record surface.

A deep harp pulse, then a double reed, followed by a muted horn choir: before I realized that the piece had started, a door opened beneath me, and I fell effortlessly into another place. An orchestral work, but deployed in a chamber, slower and more melancholy than any music I've ever heard, a sound written after the history of the human race was only a faint memory.

I didn't possess the sophistication to say when it had been written. I didn't even worry it. The notes took occupancy, a horizon of tones stretching in all directions; I was at the center of the sound. Someone was singing, a contralto, although it took me measures before I identified voice as that new, ravishing instrument that had entered. She sang in a language I didn't know but understood perfectly. The song was so agonizingly drawn-out — sustained loss unfolding in the background of a peaceful scene — that I couldn't make the pulse out. One measure became eight; eight crystallized into sixteen. I knew that sound: the last day of the year.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben; Sic hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen, Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben….

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet. Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.

I couldn't say how long it lasted; I was stunned to learn later that it took less than ten minutes. Just as the tune seemed reconciled to ending, its texture thinned to nothing, the strings waited on the verge of resolution, that reed hung on a suspension, and the whole chord stood still in space, frozen, refusing forever to give up the moment of quick here now. Then the portal closed; I came back to this man's room, all the noises of his apartment and the street, noises I had designed my life around not hearing.

He waited a suitable moment before ruffling the silence. "Well? What was that all about?" Didn't he know already? I snapped my head up, opened my eyes, saw him again in the corner of the room, sitting amid his notebooks and clothes and rummage treasures. He hadn't moved during the piece. Had he meant to use the music to win me, heart and frozen soul, he could not have succeeded better with my assistance.

"I don't know," I answered sharply. I closed my eyes and let my head drop back to the bed. "I don't speak German."

He laughed at my hostility. "Not the text, goof. The music. What does that tune mean?"

I was auditioning all over again. I was to tell him what that frozen chordal unfolding contained. Against my will, I wanted to answer correctly. Wanted badly. But anything I might say would be wrong. I kept still and waited, knowing that the least sound would give me away. I could think of nothing to add to the notes. But my interviewer waited just as patiently for the thing he wanted from me. I would have hummed that infinitely patient theme out loud by way of explaining what it meant, if I thought my voice could carry it. I said nothing for as long as nothing was possible, then came out with, "It's about leaving."

Todd sat up. "I've been waiting forever for someone to hear that." Unable to leave well enough alone, he added, "The most beautiful delaying gesture ever written."

He identified the tune as one of the Rückert Lieder by Mahler. He would play it again for me later, under different circumstances, when it would sound completely changed. But this time, over the sea in America, in 1983, in a cluttered, unzoned apartment, between two people who couldn't, despite themselves, have the first idea of what was going on out there, in the real house of cartels, conspiracies, and national states, it sounded completely out of place and time: a round, bitter, beautifully inviting rearguard action against loss. But we didn't understand, yet, just how much there was to lose.

"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," he said, coming over to where I waited. "I have gotten lost in the world. Although der Welt, feminine, seems to be in the dative: maybe 'to the world.' Abhanden is definitely not the tantalizing choice: abandoned. False cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would say, if they were French."

I hated him at that moment. His arrogance ruined for me what sound I could still just make out. Truth was, I was not a native speaker. I had studied it once, but had gotten nowhere. Had he played any other piece, I would have heard little, maybe nothing at all. I would have flunked the audition if the piece he'd chosen hadn't been so clearly a sound track for the only thing on God's earth I have an ear for. I wanted to be outside in the cold. I wanted to be by myself, in the apartment I had left a man to get. To die away from the world's noises, to live alone in a quiet place. In that song.