Powers, Richard - Orfeo

I wanted music to be the antidote to the familiar. That’s how I became a terrorist.

We need a bigger place , Maddy says. She’s six. She can’t keep sleeping in a walk-in closet.

Beyond arguing. Yet moving out of their apartment for a larger one, down the Green Line toward Coolidge Corner, feels to Peter like a perp walk out of Eden at angel’s sword point.

Sara starts school at New Morning, where Maddy is now assistant director for the arts. Quilting has fallen by the wayside. Els returns to part-time at the museum. He picks up more copy jobs; he spends weeks at a time transcribing other people’s notes and articulations, bar by bar, into clean, perfect systems of staves. He loves the work, a chameleon trying on alien colors.

But at night, in an office carved out of the Brookline apartment’s guest bedroom, Els starts work on his first real piece in three years. He tinkers after midnight, teetering between splendor and defeat. Over several weeks, a new style takes shape, one he only slowly begins to hear. Except the style isn’t new at all. He remembers describing it to Richard Bonner almost a decade ago, on a dark, frozen campus in the middle of the cornfields.

He talks Maddy through the sketch — a piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano, to words from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The piece consists of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed. The intervals build to a peak of dissonance before relaxing into something like denouement. There’s no fixed tonality, but the sequence still propels the listener’s ear through a gauntlet of expectation and surprise. The method feels like a way forward, a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.

“The Great Wall” fits together, stone by stone. He plays sections for Maddy on their little forty-four-key electric piano, trying to get her to sight-sing. It’s not hard, even for a voice that hasn’t sung much in recent years. And it’s interesting enough to go over well at one of the contemporary music venues in Cambridge or Kenmore. They’d only need two other players; Peter could manage the clarinet part himself.

You do not need to leave your room.

Only sit at your table and listen.

Don’t even listen;

simply wait, be quiet,

still and solitary.

The world will offer itself to be unmasked.

It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Maddy nods at the guided tour. She smiles at his crimes and clever reconciliations. Her eyes spark with the memory of old campaigns the two of them waged together, not all that long ago. For a moment, her face is that humming girl’s, the pageboy who was game to run through anything. But when they reach the end of the read-through, she’s the assistant director of New Morning School’s arts program again.

It’s very intense, Peter. I wish I had time to learn it.

He finds a group of whacked-out New England Conservatory classico-jazzers, who program the piece on an evening at Brown Hall. The audience is the usual hardy few who frequent such premieres, hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce. On the night of the premiere, Maddy begs off. We can’t take a six-year-old to a two-hour avant-garde concert. She’ll melt down .

Why should she be any different than everyone else? Peter asks.

His wife wants to smile, but can’t quite manage. I’m sorry , she says. We’ll listen to the tape? Later?

Sure , he answers . All the time in the world.

Wish me luck , he tells his daughter, on the way out the door.

No! Sara says. No luck without me!

The piece goes over better than Peter hoped. In fact, seated in the audience, he hears the clarinet slip free for a moment of the churn in the theremin and set off on a line that surprises him with its grace. He can hear all the sparkling false relations, the spin of a piano sequence that wants to get out and see the world. Edgy yeses; chance deliverance. And then, that glorious downbeat when the soprano wades in to wash it all away. For a moment, something: Something good. Good free. Good growing. The world at his feet.

The serialists in the audience smirk. The aleatory people are nonplussed. But two or three of the nonaligned are. . well: call it moved. A fierce, redheaded ectomorph wrapped in a black knit shawl corners him afterward, her eyes alight.

It’s about isolation, isn’t it? The power of indifference.

She’s a luscious vampire, craving anything with warm blood. Els’s brain issues emergency orders to all provinces: drool, gape, grovel. It boggles him that a woman like this could want anything from any composer, let alone him.

Music isn’t about things, he says. It is things .

She scrunches her face, flinches, and before Els can clarify, she corners the theremin player and asks him for a demo.

Peter comes home with phone numbers and dates for future concerts and even a business card from a conservatory dean, with a dangled half promise of a commission. He shows Maddy. Musicians with business cards. Like little kids with car keys.

Sara jumps, grabbing for the paper trinket. I need that for me!

He toys with his little girl, spider-style, then gives her the card. He doesn’t need it, anyway.

Maddy puts a palm on Peter’s chest, to slow him. He’s flying, it’s true. But he has received more adult attention tonight than he’s gotten since he left school. Shocking, to feel how much he’s missed it. A germ motif blows through his cortex, an old prophecy that he somehow forgot.

Maddy takes the dean’s business card back from her objecting daughter. She studies it, excited. But she doesn’t hum.

You think they might have something for you?

Two beats, and he decodes her. She means: a real job. She makes no open charge. She doesn’t have to. He hasn’t pulled his weight in their little workers’ cooperative since Sara started preschool. Not unless you counted the hours spent staring at the brutal blank page, pushing note heads around on five-lined paper, trying to recover a fugitive language that no one would understand, even if he did discover its grammar. Clear, now: his wife has no reason to count those hours as anything other than an expensive and self-indulgent glass bead game.

The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.

Trees, rolling hills, hours of speckled light, and a cottage stocked with food all confused him into forgetting he was a criminal. On the second morning, he walked at random into the national forest and found himself on a trail along a swollen creek. The trees were still leafing, and the stream cut through sandy outcrops the color of indolence.

Three miles down the trail, the gravity of his situation hit home. He imagined the charges against him. Obstructing a federal investigation. Evading arrest. Cultivating a known pathogen. Indulging in patent insanity. Even as he hiked, investigators pored over their labeled biohazard bags, looking for links to the multiple hospital deaths. Farce, calamity, and government agencies: it would make a great sequel to his one foray into opera.

He sat down on a rotting log gilled with lichen and fungi. All around him, new hardwoods greened out from the carpet of last year’s dun leaves. The creek scouring its rocky bed sounded like things Els once made with computer-doctored tape loops.

A young couple came down the trail, waving a furtive hello. They glanced away, caught in guilty pleasure on this stolen weekday. When their high-tech jackets disappeared into the undergrowth, a great emptiness took hold of Els. He felt as thin, flaked, and shiny as gold leaf on a reclining Buddha.