Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Blood trickling out of bread at the siege of Tyre rallied Alexander’s beaten troops to victory.

Eighteen months pass: three short chamber works and two small song cycles. A young man huddles in a phone booth outside the student newspaper office. In his pocket is a wrinkled blue onionskin aerogram that has taken two weeks to reach him. The world has just escaped annihilation by a few beats. Nuclear silos in an aerial reconnaissance photo of an impoverished tropical island: Peter Els has other worries.

The aerogram is covered in a wispy, Elvish script. “Peter, Dear. Please don’t think I’ve turned promiscuous, here in Merrie England, but life seems to have gotten complicated.”

He waits to place the call until well past midnight, when the rates are low. It’s morning on the other side of the planet. No phone at the dorm, and he must come to this public booth with a fistful of coins. Judging by the abandoned campus streets, that nuclear exchange has already come and gone. The air is so bone-crushingly cold that his bare hand sticks to the metal phone faceplate when he takes off his gloves to dial.

She answers mezzo, muffled, and time-lagged, the gap it takes her voice to travel the length of the transatlantic cable. Peter?

He shouts into the receiver, and his own voice echoes back at him in a canon at unison.

From the first phoneme, it’s a terrible mistake. They speak like people playing bughouse chess. He asks for clarification, then elucidations to her clarifications, then glosses on her elucidations. His quarters pour into the slot at a staggering rate and he hears himself say things like, First of all, I’m not shouting . A week’s rent, then two, then three disappear, and still he can’t tell what this blithe woman is saying to him or what he’s supposed to do with a worthless degree in music composition and a minor in chemistry, without the sole audience that matters. He asks her what’s changed and she answers: nothing.

So everything’s finished, then? Dead?

Her silence says that even early death might be luckier than he thinks.

There’s something playing in the background, on her stereo, in her little stone room in a medieval college cloister on the other side of the globe. Mahler. Mahler at breakfast, and although she denies it, he knows she has company. Another set of eager, learner’s ears.

But even now, in this frosted phone booth, under a streetlight that steams in the sublunary cold, melodies occur to him — devices and forms he never could have come up with on his own. His swollen, graying fingers fumble with the aerogram. He wants to scribble out a mnemonic to help him retrieve these sounds, once the concert is over, but he’s too numb to grip a pen.

So it was all a lie, he says. It all means nothing.

The echo turns her voice into a stretto. Peter. This has to happen. It’s something good, for both of us.

So this is it.

Stop being so dramatic. You’ll see me again. Life isn’t all that—

He needs two tries to settle the receiver back on the hook. His fingers are too weak to yank open the phone cabin door and free him. He fumbles out of the booth and starts to walk, down a street slick with black ice and empty of a single soul. His spine stiffens against the shock of the gelid night. He exhales, and air freezes to his upper lip. He breathes in, and it crystallizes on the walls of his lungs. He needs to go only six blocks. After two, he thinks: I’m in real trouble. He considers knocking on the door of the nearest house. But he’d be dead by the time anyone let him in.

He reaches his apartment, where his claws try to gain entry. His limbs are frostbitten, and by the time he gets inside, his face is numb. Even the icy tap water scalds like flame. His back has sprained itself from shivering. He crawls in bed and stays there for sixteen hours.

When he gets up, it’s to throw himself into work. Nothing can save him but a new piece — something bright and brutal and unforgiving.

Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things. And for all those years, in fifty-four pieces from fragments for solo flute and tape to full orchestra and five-part chorus, his music will circle around the same vivid gesture: a forward, stumbling surge that wavers, sometimes in a single measure, between the key of hope and the atonal slash of nothingness.

We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You’ll see me again. But you’ll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.

The miraculous mass at Bolsena, 1264: A fallen priest watched the host bleed on his robe during Communion. Faith restored.

The night was short and fitful, and his brief stint of unconsciousness did little for Els. In the worst of his suite of dreams, he had to defend Shostakovich’s third string quartet from a public tribunal. The tribunal accused the piece of being elitist, irresponsible, formalist, and full of coded misanthropy. Els tried to show the judges how rich the thing was, how full of splendid horror. But the tribunal only added those qualities to the charges.

Then the prosecutor turned the case against Els himself. He produced letters to Clara and Maddy in which Els confessed to loving certain kinds of music because most people found them worthless and ugly. The case went against him as he watched, and jurors from all over the Web weighed in with contempt and proposed humiliations. The dream took Els by the throat, and he woke up sucking air. Even surfacing in his raided house felt like a relief.

Joint Security Task Force: a federal outfit. No real threat had happened anywhere in the country for half a dozen years. A retiree with a kitchen lab in a rural college town was the worst they had to deal with.

He rocked himself out of bed and attended to his body. In the bathroom, he decided to make some inquiries after all. He’d send an email to that colleague of his in the Law Department. Safer: he’d visit her office and lay out everything. Then he’d call the numbers on the business cards Mendoza and Coldberg had given him and begin the whole process of straightening things out. Dealing with bureaucracies required no more than the patience of an animal and the simplicity of a saint. He could fake both, for a while.

But first, his Monday ritual: the Crystal Brook walking loop, followed by blueberry pancakes. Then he could place some calls before the midmorning class on twentieth century landmarks that he ran each week at Shade Arbors, for people so old they were landmarks themselves.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise. His greatest art now was to walk two hours before the neighborhood woke. Moving his legs left him blissful. Had he discovered the routine in young adulthood, he might have long ago amassed a portfolio of playful, exuberant creations that pleased him and gave delight to others.

He threw on his workout clothes — baggy gray painter paints and maroon waffle shirt — and drank his tea in his traditional happy silence. Then he grabbed the Fiat keys from the hook by the back door and called the dog. The dog didn’t answer.

It made no sense in a grand, American way: driving a mile to walk three. When he pulled up to Crystal Brook Park, the predawn sky was beginning to peach. Someone in the throes of early womanhood was already out jogging on the macadam loop. Wildflowers covered the ground, their colors soft in the sentinel light. White snowdrops, yellow aconite, and a carpet of crocuses almost indigo ran alongside scattered blooms whose names Els didn’t know, although he’d seen them every spring for decades. The morning air smelled silly with possibility.