Powers, Richard - Orfeo

He stood and stumbled back the way he came. The woods were far from wild. Where deep blends of hemlock, oak, beech, and pine once ran all the way to the seaboard, only a few managed stands of black cherry and maple remained. The public owned the thin layer of topsoil, but the subsurface mineral rights were in private hands. Drilling had started up again — fracking, shale extraction — more ingenious gleaning, for fuels ever harder to reach.

Chopin’s prelude greeted him as he came through the cottage door. The device went mute by the time he found it. Its screen showed three missed calls from Klaudia, no messages. His finger hovered on the callback button. But he couldn’t cope yet with any new developments.

He punched in his daughter’s number. The keys bleated — a retro audio joke — with the old dual-frequency touch tones that had once delighted little Sara. Often in Brookline he’d played phone-pad tunes to make her laugh, until a comic jig he invented rang through to Emergency Services. Perhaps that false alarm, decades old, still sat in some ancient police database. There were composers from as late as the eighteenth century who left behind no record beyond a baptismal entry. Even Beethoven had no birth certificate. But Els’s footprints were everywhere. People three hundred years from now could discover which performance of The Rake’s Progress he’d bought online.

He needed only to hear Sara’s voice. When they’d last talked, he still had his house, innocence, and anonymity. His life’s biggest crisis was choosing music for his dog’s funeral. Since then his brain had become a sustained cluster chord. Two minutes of his fiercely sensible daughter would clear his head.

His finger stopped on Sara’s sixth digit. He killed the device and set it down. From what little Els had read, Patriot legislation had ended the restrictions on search and seizure. If Joint Security Task Force was trawling for his chatter, they’d be listening to his daughter.

Els launched the phone’s browser and searched again. Hits on his name were growing as fast as any virulent culture. The president of Verrata College promised full support for the investigation and called on Peter Els to surrender for questioning. The online site where Els bought his custom DNA claimed he’d given them a college lab procurement number. That was a lie; anyone with a Visa could have bought everything he did.

A pop culture blog linked to a list of books raided from Peter Els’s house. Good Germs, Bad Germs. Plagues and Peoples. Someone had cherry-picked the titles, out of a thousand books in his library, for maximum fear and thrill. Coldberg, Mendoza, and friends were leaking him. The government wanted him hung in public.

He pecked terms into Kohlmann’s phone — Els, Serratia , Naxkohoman — until it dawned on him, late again, that his every keystroke was settling forever into multiple server logs that the FBI would comb through on no more grounds than they’d used to raid his house. Somewhere out East — Maryland or Virginia — and elsewhere out West — in the Bay Area, near Sara — there were buildings, white and boxy, multistory, concrete, and windowless, where people at workstations in fluorescent cubicles eavesdropped on all the world’s suspicious searches, watching for patterns in the flow of hot words, a list that now included Els, Serratia, and Naxkohoman . The logs would record the machine that sent the queries. And the querying machine had GPS tracking. If Klaudia’s device could lead Els to this cabin, it could lead the FBI to her device.

Els powered down the smartphone and pushed it across the breakfast nook. When he shut his eyes, he could see a cadre of hazmat suits dismantling the Kohlmanns’ little house in the woods.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

The books on Els’s shelves did tell a secret history, but one beyond any government’s ability to control. Once he discovered the suppressed evidence, all the standard accounts of human affairs turned comical and self-serving. Trade, technology, nations, migrations, industry: the whole drama was really being orchestrated by Earth’s five nonillion mutating microbes.

A year of reading, and the scales fell from Els’s eyes. Bacteria decided wars, spurred development, and killed off empires. They determined who ate and who starved, who got rich and who sank into disease-ridden squalor. The mouth of any ten-year-old child housed twice as many bugs as there were people on the planet. Every human body depended on ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, and one hundred times more bacterial genes than human ones. Microbes orchestrated the expression of human DNA and regulated human metabolism. They were the ecosystem that we just lived in. We might go dancing, but they called the tune.

A short course in life at its true scale, and Els saw: Humanity would lose its war of purity against infection. The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain. For two centuries, humans had dreamed of a germ-free world, and for a few years, people even deluded themselves into thinking that science had beaten the invaders. Now contagion was at the gates, the return of the repressed. Multiple resistant toxic strains were rising up like angry colonial subjects to swamp the imperial outposts. And in a way that Els could not quite dope out, the two nightmares infecting the panicked present — germs and jihadists — had somehow found their overlap in him.

None of the sites reporting on Peter Els’s raided library mentioned those other books in his possession — battle manuals that agitated for all-out assault on the general public over the last hundred years. Boulez’s Orientations . Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. Messiaen’s Technique de mon langage musical . That war had ended long ago, and its struggles were of no consequence to any but the dead. When the body was under attack by invisible agents from every direction, why worry about a thing as vaporous as the soul?

Does it hurt to know that any piece of music, however sublime, can be turned into a unique large number?

A knock on the door and there’s Richard Bonner, on the threshold of the Brookline apartment, which all at once feels like a bourgeois doll’s house.

What’s for dinner?

Peter can only stand and gape. At last his arms grapple at the ghost. Jesus God, Richard! What are you doing here?

If you don’t love me anymore, I can leave.

But faster than Els can stand aside, the choreographer breezes in. With the briefest upbeat, Bonner is seducing the wife, pulling the daughter’s pigtails and getting her to bark like a seal, criticizing the art on the walls, and rearranging the secondhand furniture to better effect.

At the sight of his old friend, arcs of color and readiness well up in Els. Summer camp tumbles down from out of the sky, and a thousand urgent projects enlist him. Years too late, the new decade comes to town. Richard is here; and with Richard near, a man might make anything.

Maddy is cross, behind her woozy smiles. You might have given us a little warning. I’d have cooked you a real meal.

Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you’ll zag. Creation’s Rule Number Two.

What’s Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul’s straight man.

Zag when they think you’ll zig.

Soon enough, over impromptu gin fizzes, the impresario gets everybody dressed up — a hobo tux for Peter, a feather boa for Maddy, and a crocodile tutu for the girl. He makes Sara fetch her long-outgrown toy piano. Ready? The Twinkle Variations. Like there’s no tomorrow. I’ll sing! What the duet lacks in grace they make up for in decibels. Sara slaps the plastic ivories, laughing like a banshee.