Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

Who was in the audience that night? Students of cultural anthropology in tie-dyed kurtas and beards like shoe brushes. A doctor of philology about to embark on a career selling discount furniture off of flatbed trucks. A long-haired, sloe-eyed woman with the “Desiderata” on her bathroom wall, who woke up nightly, convinced she’d burn for what she’d done. Retired social scientists certain that consumer democracy had ten more years, tops. An agitator with a mind like lighter fluid who ended up owning a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. A scholar of German idealism who believed that the universe was coming to know itself. An atmospheric scientist wondering if the planet might be about to slow-cook to death. An ethnomusicologist who’d spend the next forty years proving that music evaded every definition. In all, a hundred people whose offspring would someday know all things and become immortal.

The first song ended; the audience coughed and shifted. Giggles rippled through the seats near Els. The woman to his left leaned toward her companion and pantomimed the winding of a crank. Els turned to Richard. Bonner’s face shone. He cackled like a melodrama villain and rubbed his hands, keen for the feast of abuse that only art can bring. Three songs left, and hot, tourniquet pains were shooting down Els’s left arm at ten-second intervals.

The second song consisted of just two ideas: a dotted trochee pulse, like a lopsided metronome, overlaying itself at different intervals, and a cycle of suspensions forever falling into other suspensions and failing to resolve. Maddy flexed and squared her shoulders, leaning forward and reaching out while being drawn back, swaying in place, trapped in what struck her as someone else’s body.

Time is a river which carries me along,

she sang, on a tone row that flowed by like chant. Then the long phrase’s lyric answer:

But I am the river.

Each time the players rested, they passed various colored globes in slow arcs over their heads. Images painted them — stretched and compressed clocks, the throbbing sine wave of an oscilloscope, atomic nuclei, spinning galaxies. The tone row returned, transposed and inverted.

Time is a tiger that devours me.

Then the answering cantilena:

But I am the tiger.

At the third couplet, the images spilled over the musicians and onto the back wall: rebels in Biafra, riots in Detroit, bombers in Da Nang, and the young Che, who’d died only a few months before. Maddy, stilling her trembling limbs, sang like no one would ever hear.

Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.

The cycle of suspensions faded. The ghostly films, too, froze on a frame of a sinking supertanker, before going dark. The audience coughed and shifted again and checked their watches. Els wanted to slink off and be dead somewhere for a very long time.

Then came the scherzo romp. Maddy sang the words about working for neither posterity nor God, whose tastes in art were largely unknown. The players passed around an eight-note figure, tricked up with every species of counterpoint Els could manage. The antics climaxed with singer and players all threatening to leave the stage in a combined hissy fit, but coming back together for the cadence.

Listening, Els heard the total lie. He wrote for the future’s love, and for the love of an ideal listener he could almost see. He saw how he might expand the music, make it stranger, stronger, colder, more huge and indifferent, just as soon as this concert was over.

But a breeze blew through the final song, and the skies cleared onto pure potential. Maddy gathered herself, as if laid out for her own funeral, at peace at last with the previous three outbursts. All dancing stopped, and the back wall hung on a single black-and-white photograph of a few diatoms a handful of microns wide, their silica casings carved like the finials of Gothic cathedrals. Above the piano’s pulse, the cello and horn overlaid a tune of outmoded yearning, like the start of Schumann’s Mondnacht, in disguise. Maddy sang a slow, stepwise rising figure, a blue balloon coming up over the horizon:

We are made for art. .

The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They’d spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

She nudged the phrase up another perfect fourth:

We are made for memory. .

Something seized his arm. Richard. Els turned, but the man’s face was fixed on the stage, as if he hadn’t already heard the melodic prediction two dozen times in the last two days.

The pianist broke off in the middle of an ostinato, stood up, and left the stage. Maddy reached out, palm up, but couldn’t stop him. The reduced ensemble kept turning over notes that now lined up to reveal themselves as a permutation of the delaying fragment that had opened the first song. The horn, too, grew forgetful; he stood and wandered, climbed down the front of the stage and into the audience. Maddy looked on, touching her cheek, unable to call him back. Puzzled, she carried on:

We are made for poetry. .

The remaining trio turned oddly consonant. The oboist set her oboe on the music stand and left. The cellist carried on for a while, intrepid, with a figure lifted from the Bach D minor suite, while the percussionist haloed him on xylorimba. Then, succumbing to the inexorable, the cellist, too, set down his instrument, and walked up the aisle to the exit. Maddy, lost in thought, failed to notice. She stood alone onstage with the percussionist, who stuttered away on the wood block.

Or perhaps. .

Maddy sang, shaking her head at the baffling melody and backing away, her arms drawing in as if sieving the wind:

Or perhaps we are made for oblivion.

The percussionist tapped a last dotted rhythm into his block of wood. The stage went black, and it took the house five enormous seconds to decide that the piece was done. Right before the applause, Els heard a nearby baritone whisper, Frauds.

The clapping came from far away. The musicians reassembled for bows. Maddy shaded her eyes and stared out into the dark, looking for the perpetrators and seeing only shadows. Bonner yanked Els to his feet, where he bobbed several times like a water-drinking toy duck. Els turned to see his friend regarding the audience with cool amusement.

People came up to Els after, wanting to take the measure of this audacity. They wanted to get up close, to see if he’d really escaped. Someone put his arms around Els’s shoulders and said, That was something. Someone said, So interesting. Someone said, I liked it, I think. Els thanked and grinned and nodded, seeing no one.

A bald man in a gabardine suit decades out of date slunk up and whispered an emaciated thank-you. Els offered his hand, but the man held his up as if they were defective. I don’t often get to hear, he murmured, something so. . He backed away, flinching in gratitude.

A six-foot-tall woman who looked like deposed royalty squeezed his shoulder from behind. Els wheeled, and she asked in a Spanish accent, What was that supposed to be about?

Around him in the emptying hall, clots of people were grooming and seducing each other. Els smiled at the majestic woman and said, About twenty-four minutes.

Her eyes flashed . It seemed longer somehow , she said, and turned into the lingering crowd.