Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The great mystery of those days was how many people still thought the journey worth the effort. Audiences sat for hours in somber black-box theaters to listen to a rash of abstruse blips and bleeps. Even downstate Illinois crawled with people — bright, energetic, hip, inventive explorers in loud stripes and madras and sideburns the shape of Idaho — people on the verge of a newfound America of sound.

In the middle of this efflorescence, the Imp Saint came to town. He walked into that wasteland of corn like the Apostle Paul wandering into the boonies of Lystra. A chance toss of the I Ching led Els to John Cage. Yet chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived. The Imp Saint himself had written as much: every item in existence was linked to every other.

But then, the man had also written, many times in many ways, I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

Music is awareness flowing in through the ear. And nothing is more terrifying than being aware.

He wanted to go home, shed his walking clothes, take a shower, and eat lunch. But camera crews encircled his house and lab techs were autopsying his dog for biotoxins. His face would be all over the local news by afternoon. Renown had evaded Peter Els his whole life. Now he had only to drive home and wave his arms, and he’d become America’s most famous living composer.

His brain was pure noise. Els drove at random, turning often, his eyes on the rearview mirror. The strip mall where he bought his groceries swung into view. He turned in. The familiar gauntlet of shops felt like the set for a comic operetta: tanning salon, weight loss clinic, dentist-in-a-box, Pretty Nails, Eyemart.

Els sat in the parked car, hands under his armpits. At last, he fished his phone out of the glove compartment. Sara had made him swear to keep one there, for road emergencies. She failed, however, to make him promise to keep it charged. The green phone button did nothing; the screen reflected his face in a postage stamp of black. He rummaged around for the car adapter among the piles of books and CDs in the backseat, without luck.

Something like the space shuttle pulled into the slot next to him. Its running board came up to the middle of the Fiat’s window. Waves of pounding bass passed through the hulls of both vehicles and shook Els’s torso like a Vitamaster belt massager. Whole windshield-shattering subcultures had grown up around that sonic violence: dB shoot-outs, video sites featuring women whose hair whipped about in the winds of sound. Deafness as the price of ecstasy: any composer had to admire the bargain.

The van’s engine cut out, the body-bruising waves ceased, and the parking lot reeled under the sudden evacuation. A close-cropped, thirtyish man in work shirt, chinos, and huaraches got out, peering at a shopping list as he headed into the supermarket. He looked like one of the stalwart patrons of those extravaganzas in abandoned SoHo sweat shops that Els had helped mastermind decades ago.

The dashboard clock jerked Els back. At that moment, eight people with four feet in the grave were convening in the Shade Arbors main common room, notepads in hand, waiting for their teacher to come run their ninth music appreciation class of the season. Twentieth Century Landmarks. God knew he had an excuse to miss. Were his students to die in their sleep tonight without this week’s lecture on classical music and the Second World War, they would still pass the final exam.

A gutted phone booth, dead these last few years, sat in the strip mall parkway. All the nation’s public phones had vanished. He considered bumming a cell phone off of someone in the supermarket. It didn’t seem advisable, given his morning.

He had to get to a lawyer. He needed to prepare an explanation, something to justify those few casual experiments that now seemed criminal, even to him.

He started the car and pointed it toward the gated retirement community. If someone there heard the news already and called the police, then that’s how the piece would play out. He, at least, would have hit all his marks, met all his obligations, and followed the printed score.

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t yet destroyed.

Els stood in the coral foyer of Shade Arbors in front of the curving reception desk. His pulse was presto and he felt as furtive as a walking mug shot, as if he were wearing a bandolier of yellow police tape draped across his chest. But the receptionist greeted him like an old friend.

He cut through the reception area, flinching each time a logo-emblazoned staffer passed. A woman shaped like the letter f walking into a stiff headwind cut across his bow. Another skipped alongside him, toting a mini-oxygen cylinder in a crocheted sling. The place had the air of an Ensor carnival, and Els was just another mummer in the monstrous parade. Flesh kneaded loose by gravity, vessel-popped limbs pushing tartan-wrapped aluminum walkers, liver-spot continents that floated on oceans of pallid face, spoon-wide gaps in smiles, necks thinned out to tendons above colorful golf-shirt collars, heads crowned in bony domes: each of them as awed by age as children by their first snowfall.

Els’s students waited for him in the main common room. Two sat in wing chairs by the fake fireplace, testing their memory with a deck of famous-painting flash cards and cursing like Sicilian dockworkers. Six others sat on the couches flanking the kidney-shaped central table, deep in an argument about whether trees pollute. They dressed in bright tracksuits and knockoff cross trainers — games day on a landlocked cruise ship. The Q-tips, they called themselves. White at both ends, with a stick in the middle.

The group brightened at Els’s entrance. You’re late, someone said. Culture’s waiting. Someone else said, So what train wreck are we listening to this week?

Els leaned against the river-stone wall, breathing hard. The too-warm room stank of floral-scented hand sanitizer. Triclosan: antibacterial in a hundred consumer products, probable carcinogen, breeder of bacterial super-races. But no one was closing down that lab.

What happened to you? Lisa Keane asked.

Els shrugged, still in his painter pants and waffle shirt. They’d never seen him more casual than oxford button-down. Forgive me. My morning has been a little. . avant-garde.

They waved off his apologies. No one seemed to have heard a thing. On a flat-screen TV behind the couches, a famous ideologue adulterer embezzler with his own nationally distributed brand was sticking pins into the groin of a presidential voodoo doll for the entertainment of thirty million people. The next local news came on at noon. Els had until then.

Could we. .? He waved at the screen and twisted an imaginary knob, though no TV in the Northern Hemisphere had used knobs for years. William Bock, erstwhile ceramic engineer, jumped up from the love seat and doused the set.

Els looked out the big bay window onto a stand of pines. He had the distinct impression of having disappeared into one of those Central European allegorical novels that Clara always urged on him, years ago. Those books had always filled him with a dread hope, a feeling between falling in love and dying. He looked around the room at his companions in decrepitude, on their last-minute search for cultural burial swag. Some finish-line respite from the present’s endless entertainment.

It’s been a hell of a morning. I locked myself out of the house. And I’m afraid I locked my notes in. Can we reschedule?

Disappointment rippled through the room. Piccolo and pizzicato violins.

You don’t love us anymore?

Locked yourself out? Time to book a room with us.