Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Only a crazy person would care. But Fidelio’s response thrilled Els. It returned him to all those years in the wilderness, pushing the human ear toward places it wouldn’t gladly go, searching through musical math for a shortcut to the sublime. Fidelio, that happy creature baying at the whims of Els’s clarinet, hinted at something in music beyond taste, built into the evolved brain.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music’s exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

He still believed the thing was there. But with his dog dead and he himself on the waiting list, he no longer believed he’d find it in this lifetime.

Maybe I made a mistake. But Cage says: A “mistake” is beside the point. Once anything happens, it authentically is.

He went out to the backyard with a flashlight, a shovel, and a lump wrapped in a quilt. He picked a spot by a line of boxwoods that Fidelio had loved to mark. Already, the little plot was covered over with a dense mat of weed species. Life traded in a profligate overkill that never failed to stun him. Els set the flashlight into the crook of a honeysuckle, took up the shovel, and dug.

The thump of his sole on the rung and the snick of the shovel whiffing into stony earth set a calming two-step. When the hole was deep enough to hold the companion of his late years, he put down the shovel and picked up the body. Fidelio now felt light, like something had left her in the hour and a half since she’d died.

He stood on the edge of the hole, considering the quilt. His ex-wife had made it from their spent clothes more than forty years ago, in the happiest stretch of their shared years. The quilt was large and luminous, in deep shades of cerulean, jade, emerald, and chartreuse. The pattern was called Night in the Forest, and Maddy had taken almost two years to complete it. Alongside the set of cloud chamber bowls, it was the finest thing Els owned. Sanity demanded that he salvage, clean, and leave it on a shelf for his daughter to find when he died. But Fidelio had died in this quilt, the most uncomprehending of deaths, comforted only by the familiar coverlet. If humans had a soul, surely this creature did. And if humans did not, then no gesture here was too fine or ridiculous. Els apologized to Maddy, whom he hadn’t seen in decades, and placed the bundle into the earth.

The quilt-wrapped corpse nestled in the pit of loam. By the flashlight’s glow, Night in the Forest glistened in rich, cool tones. For a moment, those dark greens redeemed all the pain that he and Maddy had ever inflicted on each other.

Humming to himself a slowly unfolding upward phrase, Els picked up the shovel again. Six times in the course of his seven decades, he’d been forced to remember how grief made you love the smallest, most mistaken thing. This was the seventh.

A voice said, What are you doing? Els gasped and dropped the shovel.

Startled by that startle, the voice called out, It’s me.

Standing on a lawn chair, the neighbors’ eight-year-old peeked out over the slats of the wooden fence. Eight-year-old children, wandering around unsupervised in the middle of the night. Els couldn’t remember the boy’s name. Like all boys’ names in the age of social networking, it began with a J.

What’s that? J asked in a silky whisper.

I’m burying my dog.

In that?

It’s like a grave offering.

J knew all about grave offerings from multiplayer online games.

You can bury them in your yard?

She liked it back here. Nobody has to know, right?

Can I see it?

No, Els said. She’s peaceful now.

Els picked up the shovel and scooped dirt into the hole. J watched, rabid with interest. He’d seen several thousand deaths already in his young life. But a careful burial was the wildest novelty.

The hole became a modest mound. Els stood over it, looking for the next step in this ad hoc service.

She was a good dog, Fidelio. Very smart.

Fidelio?

Her name.

That’s long for Fido or something?

This dog could sing. This dog could tell pretty chords from harsh ones.

Els didn’t mention that she preferred the harsh ones.

J looked suspicious. What did she sing?

Everything. She was very broad-minded. Els took the flashlight and waved it toward the fence. You think we should try to sing something for her?

J shook his head. I don’t know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

I wanted to remember how life really worked and see if chemistry still wanted something from me.

Eight-year-old Peter hides in the pantry of his mock-Tudor home, cowering in his Gene Autry pajamas, spying on his parents, flouting every law of God and man. He doesn’t care about being caught. He’s doomed already, anyway. The Reds had exploded an A-bomb weeks before, and Karl Els has told the assembled fathers of the neighborhood, over ribs barbequed in an enormous pit, that the planet has another five years, tops. The cookout is the neighborhood’s last hurrah. With the ribs gone, all those condemned fathers and their wives gather around the Els Hammond chord organ, a gin glass in every other hand, a chorus of sloshed innocents singing goodbye. They sing:

There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream,

and the nightingale sings ’round it all the day long.

Big brother Paul is asleep in the attic bedroom, one story above. Susan frets in her crib at the foot of the stairs. And Peter stands in the surge of these chords, listening to America’s farewell song. The notes float and rise. They turn speech as pointless as a radio ventriloquist. Light and darkness splash over Peter at each chord change, thrill with no middleman. The pitches topple forward; they fall beat by beat into their followers, obeying an inner logic, dark and beautiful.

Another milky, troubled chord twists the boy’s belly. Several promising paths lead forward into unknown notes. But of all possible branches, the melody goes strange. One surprise leap prickles Peter’s skin. Welts bloom on his forearms. His tiny manhood stiffens with inchoate desire.

The drunken angel band sets out on a harder song. These new chords are like the woods on the hill near Peter’s grandmother’s, where his father once took them sledding. Step by step the singers stumble forward into a thicket of tangled harmonies.

Something reaches out and trips the tune. His mother’s fingers lose their way. She stabs at several keys, all of them wrong. The gin-waving singers tumble laughing into a ditch. Then, from his hiding place, the pajama-boy sings out the pitches of the lost chord. The ensemble turns to face the intruder. They’ll punish him now, for breaking more rules than anyone can count.

His mother tries the suggested chord. It’s startling but obvious — better than the one she was searching for. The gin-soaked singers cheer the child. Peter’s father crosses the room and nips him on the rump, sends him back up to bed with a suspended sentence. And don’t come back down unless we need you again!

TWO MONTHS LATER, young Peter stands clutching his clarinet in the wings at his first citywide competition. Every pleasure, he has already learned, must turn into a contest. His mother wants to spare him the gladiator ritual. But his father, who — so claims brother Paul — killed a German rifleman in the war, declares that the best way to protect a boy from public judgment is to subject him to heavy doses.

Someone calls Peter’s name. He stumbles onstage, his head full of helium. Bowing to the room of utter blackness, he loses his balance and staggers forward. The full house laughs. He sits down to play his piece, Schumann’s “Of Strange Lands and People.” His accompanist waits for a nod, but Peter can’t remember how the tune starts. His arms ooze jelly. Somehow his hands remember the way. He blows through the piece too fast, too loud, and by the time he finishes he’s in tears. The applause is his cue to run offstage, humiliated.