Powers, Richard - Orfeo

He ends up in the bathroom, puking his guts into the toilet. Vomit flecks his clip-on bow tie when he comes out to face his mother. She wraps his head into her breastbone and says, Petey. You don’t have to do this anymore .

He pulls free of her, horrified. You don’t understand. I have to play .

He wins second prize in his age group — a pewter G clef that his parents put on the mantelpiece next to his brother’s 1948 little league Division B fielding trophy. Three decades later, the thing will turn up wrapped in newspaper in his mother’s attic, a year after her death.

I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

Carnegie Elementary, Fisk Junior, Rockefeller High: Peter Els survives them all, propelled from Dick and Jane to gerunds and participles, the Monitor and Merrimac , Stanley and Livingstone, tibias and fibulas, acids and bases. He memorizes “Hiawatha’s Childhood,” “Ozymandias,” and “The New Colossus”; their rich dotted rhythms fill the dead spots of his late afternoons.

By twelve, he masters the mystic slide rule’s crosshair. He toys with square roots and looks for secret messages in the digits of pi. He calculates the area of countless right triangles and maps the ebb and flow of French and German armies across five hundred years of Europe. Teachers rotate like the circle of fifths, each of them insisting that childhood give way to accumulating fact.

He loves his music lessons best. Week by month by year, the clarinet yields to him. The études his teachers assign unlock ever more elaborate and enchanted places. He seems to be something of a native speaker.

It’s a gift , his mother says.

A talent, his father corrects.

His father, too, is obsessed with music, or at least with ever-higher fidelity. Every few months, Karl Els invests in clearer, finer, more powerful components until the speakers cabled to his vacuum tube stereo amp are bigger than a migrant worker’s bungalow. On these he bombards his family with light classics. Strauss waltzes. The Merry Widow. The man blasts, “I am the very model of a modern Major General,” until their pacifist neighbor threatens to call the police. Every Sunday afternoon and four nights a week, young Peter listens to the records spin. He combs through the changing harmonies, now and then hearing secret messages float above the fray.

And it’s on his father’s stereophonic rig that Peter, age eleven, first hears Mozart’s Jupiter . A rainy Sunday afternoon in October, boggy hours of excruciating boredom, and who knows where the other kids are? Upstairs listening to The Blandings or The Big Show, playing jacks or pickup sticks, or spinning the bottle down in Judy Breyer’s basement. Deep in Sunday malaise, Peter works his way through his father’s micro-groove records, looking for the cure to his perpetual ache that must be hiding somewhere inside those colored cardboard sleeves.

Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by: destiny and noble sacrifice, nostalgia for a vanished innocence, and a minuet so elegant it bores the bejeezus out of him. And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.

Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.

At six minutes into the amazement, the five galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter’s ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a small but crucial part of everywhere.

When silence sets him down once more, he no longer believes in the place. He wanders around dazed for the rest of the afternoon. The family house denies that anything just happened. His lone proof is on the record, and for the next three days, Peter wears out the vinyl with dropping the needle onto it. Even his father yells at him to listen to something else. He falls asleep nightly to the cascade of notes. All he wants to do forever is to take the magnificent timepiece apart and put its meshed gears back together again. To recover that feeling of being clear, present, here , various and vibrant, as huge and noble as an outer planet.

Jupiter beckons, but each visit is a little weaker. Within a month, Peter gives up, trapped again on the unrelenting Earth. He rattles through the rooms and slams the doors of the split-level ranch. He bikes in fury, up and down the cluster of streets lined with homes just like his, streets that twist along each other like a thumbprint whorl. Tunes trickle out from kitchen windows, melodies as savory as the scent of brisket and cabbage. But Peter has no patience for them anymore. His ear has left and gone elsewhere.

He falls out of step with the neighborhood. The pleasures of others begin to baffle him, given where he’s been. Sports feel like pointless seesaws, movies grow way too cheery, and loud cars depress him. He hates the gray, flat, fake, cardboard worlds of TV, although once, to trance himself, he sits and gazes for half an hour at a screen of boiling static, a message from deep space. And even after he kills the tube, he goes on staring at the shriveling periscope in the center of the screen, a portal to that place he can’t get back to.

By thirteen, Peter Els is out of sync with the whole eight-cylinder, aerodynamic zeal of America. He no longer cares whom his tastes embarrass. He needs nothing but his math and his Mozart, the maps back to that distant planet.

One endless June Saturday in Peter’s fourteenth year, his brother Paul and friends abduct him from his bedroom and drag him down to the half-finished basement, where they lash him to a barstool and make him listen to 45s on a portable turntable the size of a steamer trunk. “Maybellene.” “Earth Angel.” “Rock Around the Clock.” They force-feed him hits, sure that they can break the kid and remake him into something a little less square. They even toss around the idea of shock therapy.

Come on, cat. Pull your head out of your ass and listen.

Peter tries. That one’s great , he says . Nice walking bass.

He does his best to sound enthused, but the posse sees through him. They drill another tune into him: “The Great Pretender.” It’s a catchy sing-along that turns into Chinese water torture after the first chorus.

So what’s the problem this time, knucklehead ?

There’s no problem! It’s just that . . He closes his eyes and calls out, downbeat by downbeat: Tonic. Subdominant. Dominant. Those guys need to learn some new chords.