Powers, Richard - Orfeo

But the place had changed much more in forty-two years than Els had. New buildings everywhere, the visionary projects of discredited decades. The whole arts ghetto of shabby bungalows had been wiped out. Els searched for the house where he and Maddy first slept together. He couldn’t even find the block it had stood on. The blocks themselves had been rearranged, taken over by behemoth enterprises of steel, stone, and bulletproof glass.

He stood on a small plaza in front of what claimed to be the Music Building. It looked like the love child of a logic problem and a crossword puzzle. Across the street, the fly towers of a massive performing arts complex stood against the night sky like three container ships on a collision course.

A string quartet carrying their instruments picked their way around him where he lingered on the sidewalk. They were all Asian and impossibly young. Two of them massaged four-inch touch screens with their thumbs. The violist slowed as she passed. May I help?

Els shook his head and tried to grin. He wanted to ask what they were rehearsing. Nothing from his era — of that he was sure. Those old manifestos would sound to these children like the crude stabs of a dulled cutting edge.

He ducked into the corner coffee shop — a watering hole for bohemians since long before Els arrived in town. He’d sat inside it a thousand and one times, hammering out the future of American music with those who were going to shape it with him. Everything about the place had changed, starting with the name. But it was still filled with twenty-year-old makers, plotting the revolution.

Els stood at the counter, staring up at a menu of hot beverages that took up the whole wall. Nine-tenths of the offerings hadn’t existed the last time he stood in that spot and ordered. The current barista sported a spectacular geometric tat that ran like the Andes from the nape of her neck down into her chartreuse tank top and reappeared in the naked small of her back, above the drawstring of her pajama bottoms. Earth had nothing like her, in his youth. To go through life as a living work of art: it seemed to Els a splendid thing. He asked for a recommendation and she made him an echinacea.

Four dozen people spread through the dim rooms. No one so much as glanced in his direction, let alone pegged him as the deranged Pennsylvania bioterrorist. Bystander effect, Genovese syndrome. He was safest now in crowds. And crowds of the young, who tended to look away, embarrassed, from anyone careless enough to have let himself get old.

He found a corner and nursed his concoction, listening to ambient dub coming over the speakers. The tables were painted with wispy enamel scenes that spoke of psychosis or hallucinogens. Els’s depicted a girl turning into a tree. At the next table — a pulsing bull’s-eye — two earnest young Apollonians, one of each sex, pored over a score. Els eavesdropped and spied on the pages. The score — like every score these days — looked like a published work of art. Such typesetting would have cost him four months’ rent, when he was the age of these children. The work was for chamber orchestra, lush with melodies that everyone in the audience would leave the hall humming. It contained just enough passing dissonance to reassure listeners that it had heard the rumors about the previous century.

Even little Darmstadt in the prairies: colonized by the same neoromantic loveliness that the whole world now embraced. Who gave those signals? Everybody to the other side of the boat. The boy pointed out ingenious features of the work while the woman studied and nodded. The piece’s comeliness sounded in Els’s ear, even over the café noise and the looping ambient dub. At twenty-five, Els would have found the thing insipid and reactionary. At seventy, he wished he’d written it at twenty-five.

Then, as if from embryo in Els’s own fugitive mind, a solo soprano launched an open vowel on the air. How. . The voice, like a sterilized needle. Small. The melody wove through the contours of a harmonic B minor scale, one word per note:

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

How small a thought.

The boy at the next table stopped, ruffled by the sound. Then he returned to the systems under his hands. But the woman who’d no doubt share his bed tonight shushed him and pointed skyward. What is this?

Her lover glared and shook his head. After two more beats, Els said, Reich. Wittgenstein. Proverb.

The boy swung toward Els’s table, glowering at a noise from the fourth dimension. The woman turned to Els and murmured, Thank you. She caught his eye a moment, confused about why she should recognize this total stranger.

The odds against my sequence doing anything biological were almost infinite. But almost doesn’t count.

The soprano starts up again, repeating the same falling line. But now a second voice echoes her, a beat and a half behind. The two lines clasp and catch, throwing off sparks of consonance and dissonance, shocks made by a melody out of phase with itself. They cadence on a perfect fourth, joined by a ghostly double.

In the night café, students flirt and study and browse. They sit on barstools at a counter along the plate-glass window, each with a private clamshell, checking on the ten million Facebook frenemies they will meet in heaven. In a cushioned pit behind them, an apprentice engineer in down vest and cargo pants holds his head in his hands as equations proliferate on canary legal sheets all around him. A couple in the far corner are in tears. On an overstuffed sofa ten feet from Els, a woman presses her face into an old baize-bound book. The barista pins her tumbling hair back up with a chopstick. The music might be cha-cha, for all anyone hears. But it’s a proverb from the year 1995: Dayton Accords. Oklahoma City. Nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. The first planet discovered outside the solar system. It’s all, to Els, just yesterday, but to these café denizens, as quaint and sepia as any March of Time newsreel.

The echoing lines slow to half speed, reprising the song’s first measures. Augmentation, it was called once, worlds ago, before MIDI. The two-part canon turns into a trio. Choirboy clarity thickens, then smears out as thin as gold leaf. The posters on the walls, the painted tables, the bodies huddled in booths and stretched out on sofas — everything around Els dissolves into wet crepe. The couple at the next table freeze, alerted. The woman’s soul is all up in her ears. The boy leans forward in a frightened crouch; someone is doing a thing better than he ever will.

Voices align and interfere. Bliss starts to jar. The lines weave a standing wave, a sonic moiré. Then those pulsing chords cadence again at another perfect fourth.

An organ emerges from nowhere. It blends into the held pedal point while two tenors bob in parallel above. Els’s lips twist in unwilling joy. The ancient harmonies spread through his bloodstream like an opiate. He grows light-headed on the parody, the imitation Pérotin, these sounds from the Notre Dame School, from the dawn of harmony. The bar lengths keep altering; Els can’t hear how to count them. Soon counting doesn’t matter. Time is nothing; only these changeless changes are real. The soprano lines echo and multiply:

How small a thought

It takes to fill

a whole life.

The twin tenors lift free above the organ’s drone. There was a time — as recent as the year this music was written — when such an exercise in smoky nostalgia would have appalled Els. For years these canons would have sounded like pure kitsch, needing only a drum machine, a scratch track, and a little overdubbed rap to become the latest caustic mashup.