Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

Eleven minutes in — the endless dominant pedal point in the organ, the scraping seconds in the tenors — and the piece breaks through into a clearing. The three sopranos slow so much that their message stretches out almost past hearing:

H

o

w

s

m

a

l

l

a

t

h

o

u

Each change in the phased melody, now falling again, as it did in the beginning, flows through the bobbing tenor line. Figure swaps with ground, and back again. Tenors and sopranos envelop one another. Canon and organum at last merge. The two halves of this braid, across their eight-century gap, weave together so seamlessly it’s clear now how they were shaped from the start solely for this reunion.

The piece spreads outward, its pitches like recombinant germs. The notes condense, incandescent. Shifting harmonies blaze into an old man’s head. Layered parts swell and fall, split and multiply, collide and detonate, filling a life too small to hold them.

At a booth six feet away, a balding student of thirty sits in front of a brushed silver laptop, staring at Els. He’s one of those brilliant Asperger cases who come to town to study political economy and stay forever, working for the rest of their lives as bag boys at the Co-op. He squints through his Lennon glasses, taking Els’s measure. Then he bows his head and taps his keys.

A moment later, he peeks again. A glance at Els, a glance at his browser. Maybe it’s nothing; Els has lost the ability to figure. He rises and drifts across the room, a diagonal feint toward the orders counter. There he comes about, back to his surveillant, and heads for the door. As he reaches it, the interminable quarter hour of proverb ends. Voices that poured in waves out of the café’s speakers fall silent. Els keeps walking, past the creamery station, along the orders counter, through the packed and noisy tables, out into the bracing air.

He trots to the car, head down, feeling eyes on him. He reaches the Fiat and realizes where he is. Two hundred yards to the south is the Old Music Building, where he once lived. In a minute, he’s standing in front of the Beaux Arts temple with bach, beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina carved in the pediment. Palestrina no longer seems so laughable. Haydn now seems the odd man out. Another hundred years, and who knows? The group mind may scoff at that interloper, Bach.

He drifts behind the building to the Quad, that spot where the two long southern diagonals cross. The place where, once, in another life, on an ice-bound January night at the beginning of creation, a young man told him, Half of life’s problems would be solved if only one of us had a vagina.

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he’d do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

He stands on the X and stares down the long diagonals at the prospect of a life sentence. He can die in prison a public enemy, a musical Unabomber, reviled and ridiculed for a simple act of curiosity. Or he could try again.

Stray undergrads, their smartphones glowing, drift through the dark. The Asperger political economist in the Lennon glasses has already called in his coordinates. Someone has tracked the Pennsylvania plates and staked out his car. But for a moment, nothing can touch him. He was made for this fugitive life, destined for it four decades ago. Made to return here, da capo, after so long a time away. Made for art, made for memory, made for poetry, made for oblivion.

THE RECEPTION DESK is empty and breakfast not yet out when he comes down before dawn the next morning. He leaves his key card on the empty counter. And he’s fifty miles west on I-72 before he admits to where he’s going.

The only harmless works are sterilized, and the only safe listeners are dead.

His music changed during those years in the woods. He embraced those gestures that had threatened him only a few years before. Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming, right around the corner. Now and then, a piece got heard in New York or abroad. By the end of the globalizing eighties, Els had developed what, in the dim light of a few cryptlike new music venues, looked almost like a reputation.

Stretched out in a rocking chair one evening in the North Conway Public Library, taking a break from reading about medieval heretics, he spotted a baby-fat face sprouting out of the collar of a batik shirt on the cover of an arts magazine on the wall-length rack. The hairline had eroded and a pair of ridiculous blue goggles gave him the look of a cartoon professor. But the face japing at Els from across the room was as familiar as shame.

He crossed the room like a dancer in a trance and opened to the cover article. His eyes skipped across the page.

Bonner’s violent elation is among the few games in town grandiose and surreal enough to compete with this year’s headlines. . His limb-jutting, head-swiveling choruses dance through Tiananmen, chain across the Baltic states, and climb on the sledgehammered Berlin Wall, before most of us have even registered the events.

The list of the man’s achievements read to Els like parody: a revival of Gershwin’s Oh, Kay! with the Prohibition bootleggers changed to South Bronx crack dealers. A Handel Xerxes that came straight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. A Glimmerglass succès de scandale casting Nancy and Ron Reagan in a phantasmagoric Verdi Macbeth . Bedlam-filled ballets featuring Iranian revolutionaries, prancing running backs, and camouflaged Sandinistas — spastic kaleidoscopes of rapture and cataclysm. A sidebar in large type quoted Bonner: “The best art always feeds gossip.” The idea seemed to have earned him an international reputation.

In disbelief, Els tracked down every magazine mention of Richard Bonner that the library owned. So when, a couple of months later, early in the new year, Bonner came stumbling up Els’s gravel drive near dusk, it seemed like just another coup de théatre . The diatribe started from twenty yards away.

How the fuck is anyone supposed to find this place? There aren’t any house numbers. No damn street names. And you’re living in some kind of reconditioned chicken coop.

Els stood in the door of his besieged home. Bonner jogged up and bear-mauled him. He kissed Els Russian-style. Then he shoved him back into the cabin.

Look at this: The works! Electricity. Furniture. Running water. I’m crushed, Maestro. I thought this was supposed to be the woods.

What are you doing here? Els asked. How did you get my address?

Bonner twisted Els’s head one way then the other. Hmm. This whole nature fad agrees with you.

Els tore free. Thought you’d just pop in, after six years? Seven?

Bonner pouted and dropped his hand. Could be.

You remember the last thing you said to me?

Hey! Statute of limitations.

My music was shit and always would be.