Powers, Richard - Orfeo

He has the map; he knows what islands must be out there, farther off at sea. He stops breathing and concentrates himself. Soon he thinks he can hear the C above the G above the C above the original C ghosting in his ear. He claims as much, and glances at his teacher for a reward. Kopacz’s curled fingers wave lazy ellipses in the air: Don’t stop now.

Higher still, there hides a major third, then a minor one, and out above that, the entire harmonic series. Els knows the sequence; he could cheat with impunity. But he’s still a beginner in his own life, saddled with virulent idealism. He won’t claim any pitch he can’t in fact hear.

It dawns on Els that even a newborn must feel suspense and resolution, tensions drawn from this series of concealed pitches that the ear detects without knowing. For a beat or two, he flirts with apostasy; maybe the laws of harmony aren’t a straitjacket imposed by random convention, after all. He strikes the key harder. It blots out the performance students down the hall, struggling to master their craft. He strains to extract that E above the third C, high up the rainbow of this single note. But the longer he listens, the more that pitch is lost in the angry hum of the fluorescent lights.

E , Kopacz taunts, in a half reverie. Another G. B-flat above that .

Peter can’t tell if the man claims to hear those pitches, or if, like a high-energy physicist, he’s simply asserting their theoretical existence. Audible or not, they’re all present: every pitch in the chromatic scale. Sweet stability and crashing discord, the palette for everything from sultry seduction to funeral mass, and Peter has gone his whole life hearing nothing but the fundamental.

Kopacz holds Els’s composition up in the air with his left hand. He smacks it with the wiggling fingers of his right. How many busy little notes do you need to play at once? Use a single C, and be done with it .

Peter glares, but his teacher doesn’t notice. The man busies himself with pushing back the frenzied referendum of his white hair. He slumps in his broken Bauhaus chair and commands, Now: C-sharp.

When the bell rings, ending the lesson, it sounds to Peter Els like the Tristan chord. He drops the score of his frenetic piano prelude in the green dumpster behind the Music Building, on top of scraps of drywall, a broken desk, and bales of waste office paper. He retreats to his dorm cell and digs in. From behind the union, the bullhorn-led call-and-response of a demonstration floats across Dunn Meadow. The chants for justice sound, in his ear, like ardent folk choruses begging to be orchestrated.

He works late, purging his style of all its superfluous flash and dazzle. He lets the phone nag on, a burr that becomes a whole parfait of pitches. Unanswered knocks on the door ring like tympani. The muffled joy of two new LPs released that very week seep through his cinder-block walls, two wildly different records that will go on to remake the world and leave a wake of nostalgia for decades to come. He hears these sounds the way Debussy heard his first gamelan band.

His desk drawer squeak turns into a tone poem and the hinge of his dorm room door soars like a Heldentenor. Briefly, Els’s music retreats into a staggering simplicity. But two months later, he’s back to his arcane self, the lesson lost, or not so much lost as tucked away, in a whole spectrum of overtones beyond his ear’s ability to hear.

M. H. Gordon gargled Serratia and recited Shakespeare in the House of Commons, 1906, to see if speech spread germs through the air.

In the Fiat on the way back, Els resisted the urge to turn on the radio. Not that the news frightened him anymore: by the time the Apocalypse came, we’d all long since have habituated. But the ride home took only five minutes, and anything he might learn about the Libyan no-fly zone or the Fukushima radiation cloud was not worth the further atomization of his brain. Two years earlier, he’d come across the first reports about chronic focal difficulty, from a source he could no longer remember. Since then, he’d tried to take his media in nothing smaller than fifteen-minute doses.

The account of the thirty-eight-year longitudinal study had shaken him: Two researchers, one now dead, had spent thirteen thousand days in blinding tedium, testing people. The study was more rigorous than elegant. But the brute data were undeniable. Over almost four decades, people in every North American demographic had lost, on average, somewhere around one-third of their “sustained focusing interval.” The two researchers — whose names Els failed to retain — documented significant declines in how well people could filter out distractions and attend to simple tasks. The country’s collective concentration was simply shot. People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before, back in the waning days of analog existence.

The blogs bounced the story around for half a dozen days. Then chronic focal difficulty disappeared into its own symptoms. Collapses in phytoplankton and fish populations and honeybee hives, bedbugs and cyberworms, obesity and killer flu: life was awash in too many disorders to pay any one of them more than a few minutes’ mind. But the study gave Els the same shudder he’d felt the day he first saw a list of the top one hundred terms that passed through the world’s largest search engine. Soon afterward, he began choosing silence over any kind of background listening.

In silence, he drove back home. He saw the commotion just before turning onto Linden. His first thought was that his next door neighbor had had another heart attack. Two cream-colored, windowless vans sat in Els’s drive. A sedan stretched alongside them, in the parkway. Streamers of yellow tape cordoned off his house in a geometric proof gone wrong. The repeating, black, all-caps words — do not cross — hummed in the wind.

Men in white hoods and hazmat suits carried equipment out of his front door. A trio in business suits directed traffic. Coldberg stood at the top of the concrete steps, swiping at a mobile device. Through the gap between the houses, in the far corner of Els’s backyard, two more hazmat suits were digging up Fidelio’s grave.

Els edged the car to the curb, his hands fighting the wheel. The scene might have been a European shock-opera staging of the final scene of Boris Godunov. Men in puffy white space suits stacked his belongings in storage bins, which they labeled and photographed and placed in the backs of the vans. They moved with practiced efficiency in their hoods and gloves, like biohazard beekeepers. One of the hooded foot soldiers toyed with Els’s digital lab scale. Another cradled Els’s computer tower as if rescuing an infant from a fire. A box of lab glassware sat in the front lawn. On top of it, in a sealed two-gallon Ziploc, lay Els’s sixteenth-century print of Arabic music.

The squad went about stripping his house, as if in an installment of bad reality TV. Els wanted to run out of the car and shout down the intruders. Instead, he sat watching the impossible scene in a haze of presque vu. The middle-aged flight attendant across the street stood in her yard shooting pictures with a cell phone until one of the dress-suited men crossed over and made her stop. A triumphant shout came from the backyard excavation. Els slouched down on the car seat, shading his face. When the man in the suit turned back to the house, Els eased the Fiat away from the curb and out into the open street.

He had to think. In a sweep of left turns, he rounded the adjacent block. A wartime image of the inside of his house popped into his head: CD jewel cases strewn on the floor, books riffled and cast around, the cloud chamber bowls shattered, lab equipment and chemicals confiscated in a hundred labeled baggies. Pictures and papers, sketches for aborted compositions, all picked over by white-suited troops.