Powers, Richard - Orfeo

In fifty minutes, the sun shed enough energy to power civilization for a year. Six thousand people died; thirteen thousand were born. One hundred days of video were uploaded to the Web, along with ten million photos. Twelve billion emails went out, eight-tenths of them spam. A dozen of them involved terror plans, real or fantastic. The angel came and passed over again — eternity in an hour.

During the last louange —that slow violin climb beyond the top stair — the group of old people sat lost in their own listening, braced against the rising pitch. They were an outlawed sect, a church-basement AA meeting, a study group prepping for the pop quiz of death.

The music climbed up into nothingness, and ended. Els shut off the phone and looked up. His house was surrounded by yellow bunting reading do not cross. He’d sleepwalked across town to teach a class, when he should have driven straight to the main police station half a mile from his home and turned himself in.

Well, he began. But someone shushed him.

Lisa Keane held up one palm. Could we please just. .? Paulette Hewerdine pressed three fingers over her mouth, ambushed by the thought of an old and careless cruelty. Shields swung his head like a searchlight. Each held on, a little longer, to the silence of their choosing.

The engineer Bock was first to speak. Holy crap. That was fifty minutes? I now know how to double my remaining life.

No one seemed to need anything more from Els. For the better part of an hour, they’d done nothing but listen. There was nothing to do now but come up slowly enough to avoid the bends.

The eight of them stood, shaking off one of those spells of syncope that old people grow skilled at covering up. They grinned at each other: What the hell was all that? Then the flood of talk, the partisan atmosphere of a première.

Shields and Keane stood near the coffeepot arguing like undergraduates. Bock and Baroni were already halfway down the hall to the cafeteria, their arms windmilling, when Klaudia Kohlmann grazed Els’s shoulder. You going to give us homework?

Her words woke Els. He called out to the stragglers, Listen — I may have to cancel next week. He pointed at his left wrist, which had not seen a watch for fifteen years. If you don’t hear from me by Wednesday, assume I’m tied up.

Or (more Cage) “the mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience.”

A Friday night in winter, late in ’67, and Peter rides shotgun in the borrowed secondhand microbus, a little frantic because the Happening started at eight — fifteen minutes ago — and neither he nor the luminous Madolyn Corr has the faintest idea where the Stock Pavilion is. They’re looking for a beaux arts, barrel-vaulted, red-brick, pre-slaughterhouse animal show rink on the south campus, down toward the round barns. No such place seems to exist.

Maybe Cage made it all up, Maddy says. He’d do that, wouldn’t he? Some kind of Zen koan?

Els peeks out from behind his fingers. I’m pretty sure that was a stop sign , he whimpers.

We’re good! Maddy turns to him sidesaddle as the microbus swerves, and she gives his biceps a reassuring squeeze. We’re good!

Only weeks ago, this assured, game, knowing girl from the North Country landed in the middle of Els’s life, and the film went from black-and-white to Day-Glo in a single jump cut. Last night, in her bed, that fresh new continent, she perched over him, mock-worried, taking his face in her hands like a surgeon takes a wound under the loupes. She squinted at him, cooing, Mr. Composer. What is it? What’s wrong? Behind the muscles of his own face, he could feel the evidence she laughed at — the perilous open prospects, the wonder bordering on pain, and how could he explain it? This bright confusion, the discovery that he might have a real companion in this life, after all.

I’m happy, he told her.

You sound surprised.

You have a good ear.

She took his hand in the dark. What is it that you do with your fingers all the time?

What?

She showed him, tapping out rhythms with her second finger on the pad of her thumb.

Oh, that! Nervous habit.

You look like the Buddha making a mudra.

He hadn’t done it for years, not since Clara. He didn’t even realize he’d started up again until that moment. The taps — miniature pieces, rushing out to populate the future.

I’m singing.

Mr. Composer, she said, crawling on top of him. You got something to sing about?

He does. And the somethings are all her. She can blow away a year’s worth of his fear with a single amused pout. She pulls him out of himself, into the broader neighborhood, the worldwide scavenger hunt. Her groove is wide and sure enough to hold them both.

A BITTER NOVEMBER night, the pitch-black edge of campus, and Maddy guides the microbus filled with amplifiers and cables belonging to the band she sings for — a psychedelic quintet called Vertical Smile — across the frozen sheets of street as if she’s piloting a one-seat Skeeter ice boat across the frozen lakes of her Minnesota childhood. All the while she hums, under her breath, the B-side of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”: “Why.”

Oblivious, she chants the tune, as if her id were mumbling a sexed-up rosary. Her humming is what has set this hook so deep in him. Six weeks earlier, Els tacked up a three-by-five card on the notice board at Smith Hall. Looking for clear-voiced high soprano to read through four hard new songs. Must not be afraid of strange. Madolyn Corr was his lone responder. She showed up at the practice room at the arranged time, overly confident of her attractions: five-foot-four, with a pageboy, in a green velour miniskirt. They read through his piece together from the pencil-scrawled score. Peter struggled through the accompaniment and Maddy Corr stopped every few measures to say, I’m not sure the human voice can do that. Soon the score bore so many corrections that reading it was like doing paleontology.

Her sound was witty, almost comical. She had a nice, warm soubrette, but a hint too light and Papagena for his Borges songs. What he wanted was spinto, or even a coloratura. But Els was grateful for any voice at all that could hit the notes. They woodshedded together for two hours, he for his piece and she on the promise of nothing but pizza and beer. When they got to the end of the fourth song, she stood next to the piano bench, happy-frowning, the look that, years later, he’d call her frog face.

Well?

Well, what?

Well, what do you think?

She considered the question for too long.

Pretty eerie.

And that was all she gave him — a kiss-off reply that should have furled his sails for good. He would have sent her away with professional thanks and never seen her again, if not for that promise of pizza and beer. Half an hour later, waiting for their deep-dish mushroom and running out of gossip about the local musical pecking order, she started humming to herself, happy but unaware, her eyes periscoping the crowded room, checking out the men. She looped through a little four-bar phrase, again and again, and the phrase she looped through, without thinking, was from Peter’s third Borges song, the sudden lyrical announcement:

He did not work for posterity,

nor did he work for God,

whose literary preferences were

largely unknown to him.

And Peter, who’d written the songs for forever and for no one, but also to strike remorse in the heart of the woman who’d cut him loose from across the Atlantic four years earlier, now wanted only to put his ear up to the clavicle of this other, warmer woman and hear what there was inside her so worth humming about.