Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The day before she flew back to Missouri, she asked, Could you buy me a personal computer? Mom doesn’t think I need one .

You’re interested in computers?

Her eyes swept up behind her lids. Why is that so hard for people to believe?

It’s not at all, he said. You can do amazing things with them.

She lifted her head from the armrest of the couch, trying to spot the trap.

I once wrote music algorithms on some of the earliest mainframes.

Huh , she said. That might have been cool. And the duet was over for another year.

In New Hampshire’s lost notch, Els’s music abandoned all pretense of system. He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. He’d lived all his life under the tyranny of originality. Now he was free to be as derivative as he needed.

The sketches began to flow again: a double concerto for bass clarinet and sopranino sax. World Band —a juggernaut symphonic pastiche that ran a fourteen-note motif through a dozen ethnic styles. A setting of Rupert Brooke’s “Safety,” for tenor and brass quintet:

Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Els sent the score of World Band to an acquaintance from grad school who ran a festival in the Low Countries. Something in the piece — perhaps the virtuoso kitsch — caught on with a European audience tired of having to work so hard for pleasure. The new music ensemble that premiered it in Utrecht took it on tour, playing it throughout the Île-de-France and Rhineland. One day he got a royalty check for a little over four hundred dollars — about a tenth what his boyhood paper route paid him for the same number of hours’ work. He pranced around the cabin cackling and rubbing his hands. Then he remembered God taunting the rabbi after his Sabbath hole in one: So? Who you gonna tell?

HIS BROTHER CALLED, out of the blue. Els hadn’t spoken with him in three years. Paul’s voice still sounded like a punk of ten, but with a finger dragging on the record.

Paulie! Jesus, how are you? I can’t believe you’re calling. Who died?

After five fat seconds of nonplussed silence, Paul replied, Mom.

Carrie Els Halverson had been visiting London with a high school girlfriend she’d rediscovered after her second husband Ronnie came out and left her. The two were inseparable, traveling together twice around the world. But this was Carrie’s first trip to a country where they drove on the left, and on a pretty June morning in 1986, she stepped off a curb in Westminster and was hit by a cab that didn’t even have time to sound its quaint horn.

Peter flew to England. Paul met him at Heathrow. He’d grown so large, slow, and sallow that Peter didn’t recognize him. Between them, they managed to contact their sister, in an ashram in Maharashtra. Susan sent back a muddled telegram, the last Els would ever receive, about how their mother hadn’t died but was simply becoming something else. The brothers had the body cremated, and they spread the ashes illegally in a corner of Chelsea Physic Garden. This was on the second day of summer. The sky was ridiculous with blue. Peter tried to say a few words and found he couldn’t. His brother touched his shoulder.

That’s okay. I knew her, too.

In the three days they spent handling death’s logistics, Peter was surprised to discover how much he enjoyed his adult brother. Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.

They sat in a pub in Holborn the night before Paul’s return home, drinking viscid beer and eating gravy-doused pastries. Paul shared some insights into the Challenger explosion and its relation to the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Peter gazed upon his brother’s still-woolly head, now flecked with gray, and he regretted all the years they’d been out of touch. Paul had met his niece only twice. It took death to bring the brothers together.

Why is this, Paul? Peter asked.

Why is what?

Loners should stick together, shouldn’t they?

The idea baffled the giant man. They wouldn’t be loners then, would they?

Across the oaky pub, people at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years. Another sing-along poured from a television above the bar. Paul examined the bottom of his dinner plate for any revealing fragments of text.

Peter said, Remember how angry you got, that I didn’t understand rock and roll?

His brother stopped investigating and frowned. What are you talking about?

You tied me up and forced me to listen.

Did I? Sheesh.

You threatened to wash my ears out with soap.

No, no. That must have been your other brother.

You were right, Paulie. I was deaf.

Paul waved him off. Just as well you never got into that stuff. A lot of those songs use subliminal persuasion techniques.

Serious?

Paul nodded. The whole industry employs a fair amount of thought control, these days.

Paul had never heard a note of Peter’s adult compositions. He put Peter’s vocation on par with their sister Susan’s esoteric vision quests. It would have been fun to sit with Paul and some Boulez or Berio, to learn whatever secret messages he might hear.

What do you listen to now? Peter asked.

Paul set down the dinner plate, shook his head, and shot his little brother a quizzical smile. I’m an adult, Petey. I listen to talk radio.

THAT NIGHT, AS they went to bed in their shared room in a Bloomsbury B and B, Paul asked, So how have you been making ends meet?

I’m not, really , Peter confessed.

Well, you’re all set now.

Peter stretched out on his lumpy twin bed. What do you mean?

Mom was sitting on a lot. Ridiculously overinsured, too. Even split three ways, you’ve got enough to keep on writing any weirdness you want for a good long while.

Peter sat up against the headboard, his hands cupping his ears, listening to the music of chance. His actuary brother lay in a bed three feet away, annotating newsweeklies in tiny, all-caps letters. A tune materialized in Peter’s head from across a great distance. Placing it wasn’t a problem. He could name that tune in one note.

’Kay, Paul announced, when his scribbling hand got sore. Lights out.

Peter lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of a Hammond chord organ as his parents sang. There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream. His voice shocked the muted room.

What was Mom listening to these days ?

From Paul’s bed there came a muzzy, puzzled grunt . I don’t have the foggiest . A snort of embarrassment turned into the simplest sob. Then nothing. Then a steady, pitched snore that kept Peter company long into the night.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

The evening had turned icy when he entered Illinois. Now he sat in the motel parking lot with the engine off, sealed in a cocoon of fogged glass. Starving, woozy, and saddle sore, he wiped a portal in the windshield and looked outside. Six feet above the car, against the wall of the faux-folksy chain motel, was a thing that looked like something NASA might send to the outer planets. Security camera. In another life, Els had read that the average city resident appeared on video a few hundred times a day. The fact hadn’t bothered him, then.