Powers, Richard - Orfeo

As his pencil spilled lines onto the blank page, all Els had to do was listen and guide each new note to its foreordained place: They are alive and well somewhere . He could write for forever; he could write for no one. He wasn’t choosing: simply detecting, as if he were running a dozen different assays to determine an unknown that, by reactive magic, precipitated out in the bottom of his test tube, solid and weighable.

The song took shape; he focused the nub of his will to a sharp point. Fear lost all traction, and that current of well-being he’d experienced a few times before in life, listening to the Jupiter or stumbling into Mahler, flooded into him. A cherry-picker taller than a redwood plucked him out of the rubble-filled culvert where he lay and lifted him to the watch room of a lighthouse. The worst that could happen in throwing his life away revealed itself to be a blessing. Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

The piece was simplicity itself: a triplet-driven, Phrygian figure in the high voices, while beneath, arpeggios moved in contrary motion, in wide slow waves. Each new entry took the evolving figure into higher registers. The blend strained toward something archaic, a folk tune an ethnographer might find in a remote mountain village of a failing monarchy, to bring back to his studio in the decadent capital and flesh out with volunteer harmonies.

He stole from Mahler, to be sure: the blurred boundary between major and minor. The shaky key regions that wheeled off, before the end, into wildness. A spinning waltz, a distant brass band. Slow ascent tumbling down in a heartbeat, only to climb again in the reprieve of the next measure. All the individual components had a familiar air. But the thing as a whole had never quite existed before Peter wrote it down.

Building toward the climax, Peter discovered that he’d laid its foundation well in advance, in the germ material of the opening phrases. A four-note figure, drawn from the original triplets, rose and expanded into a five-note one, which overflowed into the full, rising, seven-note assertion of certainty:

All goes onward

Onward and outward

Outward: nothing collapses. .

Then came the transforming final phrase, the one that was waiting for him when he reached it, almost as if he’d envisioned it all along.

Teasing out the piece on a baby grand in a music building practice room gave him a pleasure so complete it might as well have been illegal. Clara was right: he was shaped to do this work, even if the work had no use for anyone alive or dead. Paying off his stepfather’s wasted investment, putting in years of scut work at minimum wage, playing to empty auditoriums peppered with a handful of listeners hostile and indifferent: his entire misspent life spread out in front of Peter. Drunk on birthing up this first-time thing, he saw the future, and he recognized it from way back when.

For weeks, turning and shaping, Els saw everything: the young men and the old, the women and children, alive and well, needing no one but him to spring them. He stepped off into the void and felt no fear. It didn’t even feel like a choice. Chemistry died an easeful death. But that death was different from what anyone might imagine, and luckier than even an old man of seventy could yet suppose.

He surprised Clara at semester’s end, with a fresh copy. She sat on the foot of her dorm room bed, under the poster of the young Casals, reading and nodding in silence. When she looked up, her wet eyes looked almost timid. Still, she smiled that all-foretelling smile. Well, she said. Bravo. Encore.

Pythagoras, discoverer of harmony’s math, also discovered my bug: Serratia marcescens . It looked like blood seeping out of old food.

Clara’s reward waited for him at the year-end concert. The program was some attempted Cold War rapprochement: Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s Firebird. Els loved it all, even those baggy exotics. Something had happened to his ear, and in that month, everything from Machaut to the “Mickey Mouse Club March” struck him as a masterpiece.

Playing in orchestra felt like sitting in the general assembly. Each section set off on the agenda of its own private timbre, but all combined under one baton into a surprise leviathan. From his perch in the center of the winds, Els glanced to his left, over the lip of his music stand, past the conductor, to see Clara in profile, second chair, her cello nestled in the vee of her long black concert skirt, her white silk blouse tightening against her breasts as the instrument rocked and breathed. She played like a distracted Firebird, her graceful neck pressed against the fingerboard of her instrument, her bow arm tracing out sideways-eight infinities in the air. As the slashing accents set off Kashchei’s infernal dance, Clara glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking. And as if it were scored into the note heads on the staves in front of him, Els saw what dance waited, later that night, when the music ended.

What had they done together, until then? Incandescent things. Crimes against their upbringing that left Els stunned by the cunning of his lust and wracked with holdover Lutheran guilt. But these were the early days of the New Frontier. His own daughter would giggle her way through worse by age sixteen. No self-respecting thirteen-year-old in 2011, keeping public stats on her social network page, would even consider it sex.

After the concert, Els found Clara in the orchestra rehearsal room, putting her cello into its coffin. The Russian music and her bohemian soul left her so flushed she couldn’t talk. The night’s plan was so obvious in their furtive faces that Peter was sure her resident director would detain them both for questioning when they snuck into her dorm to borrow her rich roommate’s Beetle. They had no route. Clara sat abandoned in the car, still in concert clothes, feet up on the dash, open to fate and free of the Earth’s pull. Peter’s hands shook on the wheel. They drove to the quarries outside of town, left the car on a pull-off in front of a dense stand of pines, and walked into the thick dark.

Leaf stuff tripped her up, and Clara had to carry her high heels. Deep in the copse, she staggered into him and whispered, Time to get serious . The tip of her tongue followed the words into his ear canal.

She pulled Els to the ground onto a bed of Scotch pine needles six inches deep. She swept her pleated black concert skirt to her waist and straddled him. Her silk blouse billowed open, and her four feet of hair tented him in a Botticelli skein. She lowered herself with a strange, sharp cry of elated betrayal that he’d try to re-create in various combinations of instruments for the next forty years. She gripped his shoulders and pushed them against the needles, a bare threat: Do we understand each other? He cuffed her neck and made her look at him. He nodded.

As she took him, a bright light pulsed in his temples. It struck him that he was having a stroke, and he didn’t care. Two more flashes, and Els focused. The white turned into a high-beam searchlight, sweeping the woods. On the far edge of the pines, two policemen were peering into the windows of the parked Beetle.

His legs jerked; he tried to push her off. But before he could scramble to his feet and surrender, she pinned him back against the earth. Her eyes were manic, swimming. Her lips moved. Something criminal and pianissimo came out of them. Don’t move.

An officer called, twice, Hello? Els twisted, and Clara fought him down again.

Don’t. Move .

A beam sliced across the nearby grass. Pinned under Clara, Els went slack. His skin heard her body-long pulse. She was shuddering now, her mute mouth open, and it took Els several heartbeats to understand that shudder. Searchlights swept through the black grove. A voice called out again, now farther off. At last the police gave up, retreated to their vehicle, and drove away. Peter and Clara lay as narrow as death, on the floor of a night forest distilled by cold. The whole dark woods were speaking, and nothing said a thing.