Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Do I? Els asks.

Come on, bubala. It’s art.

Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.

Do let art know that, huh? For its own good.

The party’s dying and Els hears himself turning earnest. Still, he wades in. It’s like he and this guy have been having this fight all their lives.

People can’t stand too much anarchy. They need pattern. Repetition. Meaningful design.

People? People will do whatever the times tell them to. I mean, look at you, man!

Els does: long-sleeve paisley shirt, green bomber jacket, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms. Nothing unusual. Bonner is all black denim and leather, what Els would call a greaser.

You can’t make people like psychosis , Els insists.

Oh, please! Bonner points. I saw you down there digging it. It’s after midnight and you’re still here.

You can’t even call it a piece. It’s a dead end. A one-off novelty.

Bonner’s great right eyebrow shoots up, a cartoon arch. Man. Novelty’s our only hope. Surplus leisure time is the single greatest challenge to the industrial state. Right behind property-sharing Asians in black silk pajamas, of course.

This thing will be finished after tonight. Over and done.

Chunks of Good & Plenty fly from Bonner’s mouth. You jest! They’re gonna revive this every year, like Oklahoma or Carousel . They’ll be mounting nostalgic revivals of it in posh London museums in half a century.

Calm falls over Els. He and this strange man, deep in a new country, the future beyond figuring. What is music, that he needs to bring it to heel? The Stock Pavilion, this backwater town, the whole experimental nation, have all gone stark, raving mod. But this lavish anarchy won’t hurt him. He can survive, even steal from it, and fashion a new song he can’t yet make out.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

Bonner’s words yank Els from his trance. The best part of a piece like this? It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. The whole planet could call this thing a con job. And the man would still be free .

They get thrown out of the Stock Pavilion with the rest of the stragglers around two a.m., when the organizers of Musicircus start striking the set so that the place will be empty again by eight. That’s when the cows will be led back onto the showroom floor and the next generation of agricultural scientists — the future’s real masters — can go on learning how to keep a ravenous nation in beef patties.

Bonner and Els, cast out into the midwestern midwinter, their ears ringing like mallet-struck glass bowls, make their way back across campus in the swirls of bitter wind. Deep in words, they weave and reel like drunks. They pause on a lamp-lit street corner, Bonner making elaborate points, jabbing Els in the chest for emphasis. Els tells Bonner about his new compositional hopes, with a detail he hasn’t yet tried on Maddy. He wants to use regions of cycling pitch groups to create forward motion without resorting to the clichés of standard harmonic expectation, but without falling into serialism’s dead formality.

Listen to you, Maestro. You’re a damn centrist, is what you are. Admit it. And fasten your seat belt, baby. Both sides are going to beat your ass black and blue.

Els tells Richard Bonner about Maddy, his bold Sinbad soprano in the tiny idealist’s body. He mentions the Borges songs, which he and Maddy are preparing for a recital in the new year. Bonner perks up.

I’ll choreograph . The words issue from Bonner’s mouth in arctic cumulus puffs.

It’s a song cycle, Els says. She just. . sings.

You need a choreographer. Send me the score on Monday.

Els feels hung over, having drunk nothing but mayhem all night. He takes leave of Bonner outside Maddy’s rooming house. They shake hands, a grip that Bonner turns into one of those thumb-clasping peace handshakes. Say yes to how things are.

You’re a damn alien, aren’t you? Els tells the director. Outer space. Admit it.

Bonner does. With gusto. And hugs his newfound associate good night.

Els climbs the staircase of Maddy’s college commune, skirting a cairn of cat turd left in the center of the first-floor landing. She’s asleep under her most beautiful quilt, an array of suns and planets. He wakes her up, high on the now-audible future.

You, the sleepy soubrette says. She presses her hair into the dip of his sternum. What time is it?

Time for every freedom the miracle year offers. Maddy is logy at first, but game, won over by his need, so fresh and fierce, here, a few hours before dawn. She falls asleep again the minute they’re over the finish line. He lies, arms around her, frantic with hope and eager for a future that fills with astonishing new things.

Saturday morning is on him, from one measure to the next. When light pours in through Maddy’s hand-made curtains, he rises and dresses and heads across the Quad to campus town, where he forages for breakfast. Coffee, donuts, two oranges, and a Daily Illini . The proof of what already feels like a brief mass hallucination splashes across page one: “Musicircus Rocks Stock Pavilion.” Below it, a smaller headline proclaims, “Johnson Demands Honorable Peace.”

He brings his breakfast treasures home to a woman just now stirring. She opens her eyes on him as he hovers over her student bed, breaks into a grin, and throws her arms around his neck. An old folk song crosses his mind, one that will take him thirty more years to turn into variations: What wondrous love is this, oh my soul?

Partch: “I went south toward any god who softly whistled. . the one spot where I would ‘choose to abide’ was already far behind.”

He sat beside Klaudia on the bench in Shade Arbors’ front oval. Soon-to-be-dead people gardened in nearby plots, and clouds of pollinators grazed the air like it would be everywhere forever spring. Els’s erstwhile therapist and late-life fling faced him and grimaced. Have you been handling farm animals?

I’m sorry. My workout clothes.

Sweating like a pig. Something’s the matter.

He rubbed his face. Seems I’m in a little trouble.

She looked at him slant. What trouble could such a man get in? Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

He told her of his morning. The facts came out of his mouth, as implausible as any sounds he’d ever made.

She shook her head. They raided your house?

A squad in hazmat suits, yellow police tape circling his lawn: all a bizarre invention. The agents had been after someone else. Someone dangerous.

The police raided your house, and you came to teach your class.

You were all waiting. Nowhere else to go.

I don’t understand. Laboratory equipment? Some kind of fancy chemistry set?

He wanted to tell her: there were, in a single cell, astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B Minor sound like a jump-rope jingle.

What on earth were you doing?

He’d been trying to take a strand of DNA, five thousand base pairs long, ordered to spec from an online site, and splice it into a bacterial plasmid.

Learning about life, he said.