Powers, Richard - Orfeo

He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power. The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear.

Many years ago Els had made a vow to run from no art but let every track play through to its end. He looked out the window, past the gravel drive, through the stand of birches, remnants of the vast, vanished northern hardwood forest, listening to this droll Armageddon. The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.

The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude — the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting The Well-Tempered Clavier .

Els paused the disc, but the Chopin persisted. Four measures, with a little altered voice-leading at the end, turned back on themselves in an endless, lamenting loop — one of those tuneful fragments that signaled the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. But the sound came from somewhere in the house. He wandered through three different rooms before finding it: Klaudia’s smartphone. The one that had guided him here.

Words hovered on the screen: “Incoming Call, Kohlmann, K.” He pressed the answer icon, and held the world’s portal up to his ear.

You’re all over the news , Kohlmann said, trying for sardonic but landing on scared.

Yes , Els said. I saw the camera trucks this morning .

This morning. It wasn’t possible.

Klaudia said, Google yourself. The clips are up already.

Of course they were. Retired professor of music flees scene of terrorism raid. Verrata College officials express dismay.

What else? Els asked. You sound. .

Your bacteria. You said they were harmless.

Something slurred in his brain. I said the species wasn’t dangerous in ordinary situations.

Storm troopers were assaulting the cabin, from the direction of the kitchen. Els set the phone down and headed toward the invasion. He’d pressed the pause button on the boom box, and the pause had chosen that moment to time out. He looked for eject, and in the onslaught of sound couldn’t find it. He yanked the cord from the wall, then walked back to the bedroom and retrieved the phone.

Back. Sorry.

What the hell was that?

Your grandsons’ music.

Ach. We’re finished, aren’t we?

What about my bacteria? Els asked.

Nineteen people in hospitals across Alabama have been infected with your strain. The CDC says nine people dead.

A long caesura, the sound of what terror would be, when it grew up.

My strain? In Alabama?

Kohlmann read from another screen: Serratia marcescens. That’s the one, right?

There was nothing to say, and Els said it.

The FBI wants to talk to you.

This. . none of this makes sense. The FBI told the press what bacteria I was culturing?

But he didn’t need reminding: Everybody was the press now. Everyone knew everything, as it happened.

The journalists think I. .? They can’t be that stupid. Were all these patients on IV drips, by any chance?

Google it, Klaudia told him. That’s what the FBI is doing, I’m sure.

Jesus, Els said.

And call me. They can’t trace you to my phone, can they?

About your phone , he said. Chopin?

What can I say? It does something to me. Play that at my funeral, please?

He promised. But he wasn’t sure an audience with chronic focal disorder would sit through it.

A friend says: “I just heard the strangest song ever.” Do you run away or toward?

He sat out back behind the cottage on the edge of a maple grove, his head bowed over the device. In the dark, with that lone beam of white splashed across his face, he read the accounts. Nineteen Alabamans sick and nine dead. Nine people out of a hundred thousand annual American deaths by hospital infection — more than car wrecks and murders combined. The public, drowning in data, might never have registered the story. But he had turned accident into something panicworthy.

All the infected patients had indeed been on a catheter. All six hospitals were in greater Birmingham. All got their IV bags from the same supplier. Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.

Els’s eyes adjusted to the screen, the lone bright spot in the surrounding dark. He searched his name and found student ratings of his teaching, a recent Brussels performance of his forgotten chamber symphony, and old chatter about the 1993 premiere of The Fowler’s Snare. Searches on the Alabama outbreak led to a gigantic methane dome under the thawing tundra that was belching into the atmosphere massive amounts of greenhouse gas that would speed the process that released them.

Reporters speculated about why a retired adjunct professor of music had been manipulating human pathogens in his den. Neighbors attested to his quiet politeness, although one described him as standoffish and another mentioned the atonal sounds emanating from his house at odd hours. The Joint Security Task Force could not comment on ongoing investigations, but they were interested in any information concerning the whereabouts of Peter Els.

Opera buffa had turned seria. He had no choice. He had to return home and explain, if only to keep a jumpy country from going off the rails again. But he’d already explained everything to Coldberg and Mendoza, and still they’d raided him. Now the Alabama infections vindicated them. Threat once again kept the precarious democracy intact. Els would have to be punished, in proportion to the thrill he’d given the collective imagination.

A hundred yards off, through the dense maples, the windows of the neighbors’ cabin threw off an amber glow. The undergrowth on all sides boomed with calls and alarms, an animal Visions Fugitives. His frantic flight caught up with him, and Els fell asleep in the deck chair under the trees. The smart screen dimmed, then timed out, then slipped from his hands. Sometime in the night he woke, and, realizing where he was, blundered into the house to a soft bed. Toward dawn, from a sleep filled with epidemics, he heard the E Minor Prelude pulsing again. But not until the next morning — a brilliant, balmy, and innocent thing, like the first day of creation — did he find the phone again, lying on the grass as if it had fallen out of the sky.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.