Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Klaudia stared, as if the sweet nonagenarian needle-pointer across the hall from her had pulled out from under the bed a box of merit badges from the Schwesternschaften der Hitler-Jugend.

Why do this, Peter? She’d asked the question often, back when she was still pretending to be his therapist.

Why write music that no one wants to hear? It kept me out of trouble.

Don’t be coy. What were you doing?

As far as Els knew, the nonsense string would live alongside the bacterium’s historical repertoire, silently doing nothing. Like the best conceptual art, it would sit ignored by the millions of trades going on in the marketplace all around it. With luck, during cell division, the imposter message would replicate for a few generations, before life got wise and shed the free rider. Or maybe it would be picked up, inspired randomness, and ride forever.

Nothing, Els said. Call it composing. Proof of concept.

What concept?

It didn’t seem to matter now.

Are you a terrorist?

His head jerked back. Klaudia appraised him. Well? Are you?

He looked away. Oh, probably.

Who taught you how to modify cells?

I just follow the recipes.

How did you learn enough to—

I audited a class. I read four textbooks. Watched fifty hours of instructional clips. It’s all pretty straightforward. No one seems to realize how easy.

From a lifetime away, he heard himself tell a government agent: Easier than learning Arabic .

How long have you been. .?

He dipped his head. I started two years ago. I wasn’t. . doing anything else. I came across an article about the DIY biology movement. I couldn’t believe that amateurs were altering genomes in their garages.

I can’t believe people breed poisonous snakes in their basements. But I feel no compulsion to join them.

He couldn’t tell her: He’d missed his calling. Science should have been the career, music just a hobby. He’d lived through the birth of biotech, that whole new art. He might have lived a useful life, contributed to the age’s real creative venture. Genomics was right now learning how to read scores of indescribable beauty. Els just wanted to hear, before the light in his tent went out.

Kohlmann gazed at him as she had years ago, when he was paying her to dismiss his nameless anxieties. Are you crazy?

The thought has crossed my mind.

You didn’t think the authorities would be a little jumpy, so near to Jihad Jane’s base camp?

I wasn’t thinking jihad, at the time.

Kohlmann groaned and palmed her eye sockets. Peter — couldn’t you have taken up bridge, like the rest of us? Continuing ed courses?

A tremor in her dowel forearm, and Els realized: she had Parkinson’s. He’d seen her weekly for eighteen months and had never noticed. They’d spoken about nothing all that while aside from The Rite and Pierrot.

I’m going to have a cigarette now , Kohlmann said. I’m fifteen minutes overdue.

You’re smoking? Since when did you start smoking?

Don’t nag. I quit for twenty years, by promising myself I could start again at seventy-five.

Kohlmann lit a cigarette and took an enormous drag. They sat silent, combed by a breeze. In the sky above, a contrail spread into frayed yarn. She let out the smoke, sighing.

They raided your house and missed you. Are they total fuckups?

Any other day of the week, they’d have had me. But on Mondays I’m always out before dawn.

Didn’t they think. .? She read some faint inscription off her fingernails. You’re going to make things a lot worse by running.

The word shocked him. He wasn’t running. He was sitting in a gated retirement community, waiting until it was safe to go home and take a shower.

The task force people said they weren’t charging me with anything.

You think there’s no warrant for you now?

No one has served one yet.

He had two choices: turn himself in wherever suspected bioterrorists were supposed to turn themselves in and disappear into the wasteland of legal detention, or make himself scarce for a few days while the FBI discovered that he was doing nothing that thousands of other garage genetic engineers around the country weren’t doing. By Friday, the fire drill would be over.

He told Klaudia as much.

You might as well sign a confession. They’ll ruin what’s left of your life, just to make a lesson of you.

I haven’t broken any laws. They’re not going to waste their time on sunset hobbyists. They have real terrorist networks to go after.

Klaudia turned her cigarette around and peered into the burning end. Her face wrinkled and she shook her head.

What? he demanded.

Her hand traced the air, pointing at threats on the horizon. Excuse me, but a lot has happened in this country while you’ve been away.

He looked off toward the garden plots, where a doddering field gang prepared the beds for tomatoes and squash. It seemed a substantial leap of faith, to believe you’d still be there for the harvest.

Kohlmann waved the glowing cigarette at him like a laser pointer. He remembered why they weren’t a couple.

Everyone’s an enemy now. The Swiss detained Boulez for something he said in the sixties about blowing up opera houses. John Adams told the BBC that his name is on a list. The authorities harass him every time he flies.

You’re joking. Why?

Because of Klinghoffer.

Els had to laugh: the name John Adams, on a sedition list. Ironies turned on ironies, like the moons in a hand-cranked toy solar system. Once, he’d sat on a panel at Columbia, a fatuous firebrand of thirty-seven, claiming that composers had a moral obligation to be subversive. The best music, he pronounced, was always a threat. He winced now at the manifesto. But still, his skin prickled at the news that a composer had made the government watch list.

Adams , Els said . Fabulous music. A handful of transcendent works. He’ll live.

Klaudia stopped making love to her cigarette’s last millimeter. Live?

Her voice was thick with sardonic notes. Music with intricate harmonies, complex rhythms? You might as well write a medical thriller in Mayan glyphs.

She waved her hand over him, the Pope rescinding a blessing, and launched into an account of a terrorism arrest in Albany — a missile sale where all the missiles belonged to the FBI and all the terrorists were bribed into purchasing them. Els didn’t hear. He was savoring the idea that art — an Adams masterpiece — could still be dangerous. It gave him unearned cachet, being dogged by the same Homeland Security hounding Adams. At that moment, someone was combing through the archives for data about Peter Els, scanning his scores to see if he’d ever written any music that might alarm the Joint Security Forces.

Then he remembered. He had written such a thing: his disastrous historical drama, The Fowler’s Snare.

I think I should make myself scarce , he said . A couple of days. Give them some time to sort my laundry.

Her look iced him. Els rubbed his nose and tried again.

It’s just. . I’ve got this thing about handcuffs.

Kohlmann stubbed out her cigarette on her shoe sole and slipped the butt into her back pocket. She fished in her striped Incan jerky bag and removed the smartphone.

I suppose this makes me an accomplice after the fact. She handed him the device, waving it away. There’s a map thingie in there. Knows where you are. Let me give you an address.