Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The host asks his guests to comment. The watchdog says, At very best, this is a case of an amateur modifying a toxic microorganism without really knowing —

The writer cuts in: Amgen does that all the time. Monsanto. Half our corn and ninety percent of our soybeans are biohacked, and we put them in our mouths on blind faith .

Amgen is run by trained scientists, not a retired musician working at the kitchen sink with no idea what he’s doing .

Trained scientists have produced more disasters than all the amateurs combined .

The blast of an air horn like something out of Götterdämmerung drives Els across the lane. In his rearview mirror, an eighteen-wheeler rides up his tailpipe. He jerks right. The semi blasts past him, wailing. When the truck pulls back in front of Els, the driver hits the brakes. The front of the Fiat kisses the truck’s bumper.

The watchdog is talking. He has panicked the whole nation.

The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist .

The host patches in another caller. A trembling woman says that scientists were behind the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Els pulls one stuck hand off the wheel and kills the radio. An exit floats into view, and he takes it. He hits the rumble strip twice on his way up the ramp. He follows a local road for a long time, trying to regain control of his body. He pulls into a gas station in Vandalia that clings to the intersection of two empty state highways. He fills the tank and hands the cash to a bearded anarchist who looks like he wouldn’t turn in Hitler.

Els sits at a picnic table behind the station, under a blue spruce, nursing a turkey wrap and flipping through a copy of the Times that the convenience center stocked by accident. He finds himself on page A10: “Homebrew Genetic Modifier Heard Beat of Different Drummer.” The article psychoanalyzes Peter Els’s biohacking by considering his decades of audience-hostile avant-garde creations. A little vomit spasms into Els’s mouth. He folds up the paper and leaves it on the picnic table, under a stone.

He opens the door to the Fiat, and a voice shouts, Hey! Els turns, hands rising. The wild-bearded anarchist stands in the doorway of the gas station, rigid. It’s a relief, almost, caught at last. The fugitive motif has gone on too long. He’s tired. He smiles at his accoster, surrendering.

I forgot , the man says. You get a free drink with that turkey thingie.

Els sits in the parked car, his hands revolting. The free drink, his alibi, splatters when he brings it to his lips. Through the windshield, he watches a family of four parade into the convenience mart. The little girl, her sweatshirt advertising a megachurch, fixes him in a telephoto gaze. Arrest is just a matter of time. What he has done and what he has failed to do must both be paid for. The good of the many demands it.

Kohlmann’s phone has ridden beside him on the death seat since Champaign. He takes it and turns it on. Too late for the traceable device to hurt him. He has only eighty miles to St. Louis, and his destination. The Joint Task Force can have him, once he finishes there.

His fingers flail at the on-screen keys. He punches in an address memorized years ago. It has always been a little fictional, no place he would live to see. But the Voice figures out the route in seconds, door to door. All he needs to do is accept the GPS’s higher power.

The route unfolds in front of him — an hour and a half. His limbs are clammy and his skin metallic. He pries open the glove compartment. A stack of loose CDs spill out onto the passenger side floor, none of them what he needs. He leans over into the chaos-strewn backseat and rakes through dozens more cracked and unhinging jewel boxes, finding nothing that can help him.

Then he remembers: all the tunes in the world are his. He plugs the smartphone into the car stereo and pecks in his search. The piece bubbles up with a few pokes of his index finger. It’s music that will get him as far as he needs to go. Shostakovich’s Fifth — a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.

Serratia can split several times an hour, when conditions are right. Double a few times, and soon you’re talking real numbers.

The overture begins with almost nothing: one oboe, one English horn, and one bassoon. They play in unison at first, a theme filled with anticipation borrowed from a mass by Ockeghem. The unison divides; one melody becomes two, then two become four, rising and stretching. Dawn in the free city of Münster, Northern Rhineland, January 1534.

The first tradesmen trickle through the Prinzipalmarkt. Vendors set up their stalls, and customers congregate. Two violas join the reed trio. An ermine-trimmed noble draws a retinue across the market square to a swell in the trombones and cellos. Over the course of several dozen patient measures, dawn turns into full-on morning.

Streets radiate from the prosperous plaza, lined by step-gabled houses and pinnacled façades. To the east, the commanding Gothic Rathaus. To the north, the cathedral spire. Brisk commerce fills the marketplace. The orchestra begins a vast prolation canon — copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords. Then the shock of a baritone cuts through the sound:

Fire, air, the rain, the sun — the Lord made all things common, for our shared joy.

The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain.

Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!

Some of the chorus stop their buying and selling long enough to shush him. They sing of recent calamities throughout the empire that must not reawaken. Rothmann’s baritone shines out above them.

God gave us the world, whole. We’ve wrecked it, and fight over the crumbs. No wonder you’re miserable — all of you!

A trio of merchants caution the preacher, above the massed strings. They say the years of chaos must stop. The city needs peace and prosperity; all else is rabble-rousing noise. The words form islands of triadic consonance in the orchestra’s atonal surge.

Others come to Rothmann’s defense. The man hurts no one. Let him preach what heaven tells him. The merchant trio become a sextet, a plea for harmony, productivity, wealth. But the preacher laughs them off in a swelling solo:

Peaceful? Productive? The Prince-Bishop wants you productive! Producing for the Prince. Fools! For peace, you’ve traded away your souls.

The ill, the oppressed, the unemployed, and the merely spiritual begin to flock to Rothmann’s side. Old clashes break out across the stage. The cast splits into a freewheeling double chorus, its two factions feeding the rising excitement. Chords stack up and melodies clash above a turning ground bass. Each time the cycling figure returns, its texture thickens. Rothmann shouts above the fray — curt and thrilling melodic anagrams of the original, aching theme.

God put joy into your body — real joy! Live in the light. Live in full beauty. Live in the common air.

A sudden modulation into a remote harmonic region, and four men on horseback appear from the wings. At their head is the tailor’s apprentice, John of Leiden, a charismatic man with a flowing beard. To a brass fanfare, in a heroic tenor, he leads his posse in a motet. They come from the Netherlands at the bidding of Jan Matthias, the baker turned prophet, who has identified Münster as the place where God will begin the world’s end. Rothmann, they sing, is clearing the way for the long-delayed heavenly kingdom.