Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Four turns on, he nosed back down Taylor, up to Linden. From half a block away, he watched a hazmat suit on his roof stick a pole down his chimney. Another was testing Ziploc samples with a handheld meter out of the rear of one of the vans. In the backyard, two men scraped mud from his ex-wife’s quilt and collected it in sample bottles. At their feet was a ten-gallon plastic storage box filled with a lump of muddy ochre. Fidelio.

Els hung at the corner stop sign. He needed time. He’d broken no laws. Coldberg and Mendoza had charged him with nothing. They’d only told him to stay close. He needed an hour to calm down and prepare a story. The Fiat pulled straight through the intersection and kept on going.

He drove at random. To clear the static in his head, he flipped on the radio. An Emmy-award-winning actor was holding his ex-wife hostage in her Aspen condo. Els found himself on the western edge of campus. He could park and go find Kathryn Dresser, for legal advice. But she’d only tell him to put his faith in the hands of the same authorities who were gutting his house for no reason.

Campustown’s commercial strip loomed up on his right, and he turned in. Students drifted in front of his car like targets in the easy levels of a video game. The street stank of fried food. He’d had nothing to eat since the night before. He parked at a meter that still had forty minutes on it, and for an instant he felt like this was his lucky day.

In the corner of a chain coffee shop he sat and nursed breakfast: frothy almond milk and a blueberry muffin as big as a small ottoman. Tension turned his waffle shirt rancid with sweat. Through speakers mounted around the room came a thumpy, hypnotic, overproduced, swollen, irresistible river of lust. The groove looped around three pitches — tonic, minor third, and tritone — while a singer chanted dense, allusive words in shifting, irregular rhythms.

The best thing to do was to turn himself in. His picked-through belongings would prove his innocence. But Joint Security agents had his notebooks, full of their fantasias on bacterial modification. They had his computer, with its cache and browsing history. Hours from now, they would identify the sites he’d visited the previous afternoon — the ricin recipes; the anthrax.

Back out on the sunlit street, campus felt foreign and diffident. Students in shorts and tees, their bared limbs sporting wholesome tattoos, swerved around him without looking up from texting. Els took the diagonal path toward the Music Building. A small, voluble, promiscuously friendly professor of violin walked toward him, waving. Coming here was madness; he spun around and fled.

He hurried back to the car and headed to an ATM on the other side of campus. The screen of the drive-up cash machine threatened him with several choices. Els withdrew two hundred dollars. How soon would the transaction be traceable? A video camera behind the smoky glass gaped at him, and he brushed the bangs from his eyes.

He drove to the public library, three blocks away. It was empty at this hour, except for mothers with small children, other retirees, and street people. In a carrel near the first-floor periodicals, he settled in to clear his head. Two months before, in this same spot, he’d read a magazine article about new Patriot Act provisions. Something about the government being able to keep citizens confined indefinitely on no evidence. All he could remember from the story now was the phrase “hold until cleared.”

In another few hours, the news would break. Els headed to the stacks on the second floor. He stood in front of the life sciences, running his finger down the spines, inventorying the titles he’d checked out over the two years since his obsession began. A memoir by the top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. A social history of plagues. A book called Escape from Evolution. With a few keystrokes into the right databases, an investigator could find every incriminating title that Peter Els had read over the last ten years.

A groan escaped him. The sound startled an ashen librarian with dancer’s hands who sat at the reference desk near the top of the stairs.

Is everything all right?

Yes, Els said. Forgive me.

He got back into the car and drove. Coming down Linden, he saw the local news channel vans from two and a half blocks away. He panicked and turned left on Taylor. The crime scene shrank to nothing in his wake.

Researchers sprayed Serratia in hospitals, to study bacterial drift. Biology students rinsed in it, to watch it travel by touch.

Clara had told him how Mahler sent the young Alma Schindler the manuscript of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony without any explanation. Alma sent it back, inscribed with the word “Yes.” Weeks later, they married. That’s how it was to have been for Peter and Clara. Then Clara went to Oxford to study music on a full scholarship, where, in quick succession, she chalked up a trio of men whose accomplishments made Peter’s look like amateur hour.

Clara never bothered to tell Els the rest of the Mahler courtship fable. Only when Alma entered Gustav’s life did his music descend into real despair. Battles, lies, betrayal, death. All the stoic affirmation of the young songs and symphonies— What the Universe Tells Me, etc. — ran smack into incurable bitterness. Adorno called Mahler ein schlechter Jasager : a poor yes-sayer. Once Alma entered his life and the two of them began flaying each other raw, Mahler could do nothing but continue saying the word, with less and less conviction or cause. And deep in his own free fall, young Peter kept listening to the music, well beyond the point where its poor and desperate yes could help him.

The Army used Serratia for decades to test bioweapons: San Francisco, New York subways, Key West. But I’m the wanted criminal.

Until Els stood in that phone booth after midnight, pleading with a stranger on another continent, the coins freezing to his hands, he had nothing like a yes of his own worth saying. Then Clara left, and the real music came. It was one of those arcane exchanges people in operas make with mysterious visitors. The moment the woman with the four feet of hair abandoned Peter to life alone in the barren Midwest, strange, vital, viral creations began pouring out of him.

Every one of those pieces was a message aimed at that now-alien woman. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. If the least of his manuscripts had ever come back to him penciled with so little as an exclamation mark, Els would have been at Heathrow two days later, in debt to the tune of a transatlantic flight, ready for whatever hope Clara wanted to dangle in front of him.

Instead, he headed off alone to make a new base camp in that little Darmstadt in the prairies. Champaign-Urbana in the early 1960s: an island in the archipelago of I-80 avant-garde, a breeding ground for mutant musical strains surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn, soybean, and rural, religious America in every direction. The perfect place for six more years of school.

A golden age was breaking out in that progressive boondocks. The adventurers who taught composition — Hiller and Isaacson, Johnston, Gaburo, Brün, Hamm, Martirano, Tenney, Beauchamp — made up new rules as fast as they could break them. The infamous Festival of Contemporary Arts and the first electro-acoustic facility in America turned the whole scene into a brilliant party. The spell of math and the pull of charged particles: Els recognized the place even before he hit town.

That self-inventing outpost on the edge of the endless cornfields felt like a new Vienna. In his first five days as a graduate student, Els met more composers than he’d met in his previous twenty-two years. Overnight, his ear grew wanton, and he gorged on things that had only recently terrified him. He joined a listening group studying Persian dastgāhs. He attended talks on music and information theory. Music and the social contract. Music and physiology.