Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Half a laugh came out of Els. Funny you should ask .

For some seconds, she said nothing. Then the teal drapes in the front bay window pulled back, and there stood the partner of his youth, the one who’d believed in the mind’s ability to levitate the Pentagon. She put her hand to the glass. He did the same, from the driver’s side of the Fiat. She hung up.

All life long, he’d had that composer’s gift of being able to tell exactly how long a minute lasted. He counted four of them. At last he shut down the phone and started up the car again. There was no more plan. He’d drive until caught, in a motel somewhere in the Dakotas.

The car nosed from the curb. Then the house door opened. She had on a long olive shirtdress and gray tailored vest. She was thicker and shorter than he remembered. Her feet edged down the front flagstone path like the taps of a blind person’s cane.

She let herself into the Fiat, slid down into the passenger seat, and swung to him. She looked at his ragged face and shook her head.

Rule Number One, he said. Zag when they think you’ll zig?

The corner of her lip twisted. Neither leaned in, in the slightest.

What are you doing here, Peter?

He stared at her, flooded with the past. She flicked the back of her hand toward the windshield and said, Drive.

He drove, to her direction. They followed a suite of quiet residential streets, emerging onto a commercial boulevard. They said nothing, as if they were a sunset couple taking their ten thousandth car ride together in this life. He wanted to give her the wheel, to see if she still drove like she was sailing an ice boat across a windy northern lake.

I’ve missed you, Maddy .

She sniffed and scratched her nose. Please. No nostalgia. It’s unbecoming in a bioterrorist.

She guided him into the parking lot of a mall the size of a breakaway Balkan state. Els panicked.

I can’t.

You’ll be fine, she said. No one’s looking for a couple.

He angled the Fiat into a slot and killed the engine. He turned to look at her.

You’re beautiful , he told her. Perfectly unchanged.

Oh, Christ! You never could see, could you? She held her sagging arms out and tipped her head forward, revealing her roots. The lines around her lips and eyes were cuneiform cuts in baked clay. Els shrugged.

Seeing is overrated .

They sat in the parked car, hands in laps. Down the lane in front of them, a woman pushed a cart loaded with a cardboard box big enough to live in. Maddy peered forward, intent on something Els couldn’t see.

Well, she said . You can’t have done what they’re saying you did.

I think I must have, Els said.

You’ve just turned some stupid misunderstanding into a federal offense by acting like a criminal.

A foolish hope welled up in Els. She was always so wise. The windows were fogging up. Maddy painted idle petroglyphs on the passenger-side glass.

Modified bacteria? Phht. You can’t even microwave a bowl of tomato soup.

No , Els said. I did that .

She shook her head. Impossible.

Any intelligent college kid—

Oh, Peter. I don’t believe this. Her hand snaked out, fending off the fact. They were seventy years old. They’d been divorced for a third of a century. But here they were, fighting on their first date.

Have they charged me with anything specific?

The hand came back down over her eyes and massaged her forehead. Lordy. And I thought you were naïve at twenty-five.

You thought I. .? You were the wild idealist.

She looked out the window, at a different past. On the sidewalk in front of the burnished brass and black granite entrance, three women riding Segways handed out red, white, and blue tote bags. Half a dozen children dressed as boarding school wizards trotted into the mall, late for some arcane experiment. Maddy shook her head.

And you’re the biggest threat to national security since that propane-filled Pathfinder in Times Square.

He started to cackle. Maddy turned to him, and the fear in her face fed his laughter. His eyes watered at his absurdity, and he couldn’t stop. She put a hand on his knee. The shock of her touch sobered him. He raised his arm and caught his breath.

Sorry. It’s the stress. Losing it.

She tugged on his trouser crease. Come on. Let’s get some food into you.

A carousel spun in the center of the food court, a swirl of colored lights, mirrors, and a calliope. At one end of a large ellipse of food stalls, four bulky men clad in denim and sweatshirts played guitars and sang into mics, songs to listen to while driving across desiccated places in trucks very high off the ground. At the other end, a chorus line of child wizards were getting gunned down one by one by the voice vote of a merciless crowd.

With awful ease, Maddy secured two slices of pizza and a pair of fizzy drinks. They sat across from each other at a red molded table that would still be around long after the race had cooked itself to death. Four dozen people ate at nearby tables. A few hundred drifted around the ring of franchises. Most of them had seen his picture all week long. But none noticed him.

From across the table, he looked at the woman who had driven to Boston with him in a seventeen-foot rental truck, while carrying his child. A minute of gazing, and it seemed she’d had crow’s-feet and paper skin and liver spots for as long as he’d known her.

So how much trouble would you say I’m in?

Maddy considered the question from a vantage far away. Oh, they want to put you in jail for a very long time. You’re the perfect bogeyman.

Graves, her placid features seemed to say, were just the thing for dancing on.

People are buying gas masks. Purification pills. You’re the toast of the Internet.

Yes, he said. Finally famous.

She flipped a piece of melted cheese back onto her slice and squinted at it, a horoscope. So you really did this thing.

What thing?

Genetic whatever.

Yes.

You modified the DNA of a living thing?

He shrugged. Hundreds of companies do that every day.

Why, Peter? What ever possessed you?

A tune he couldn’t name issued from the twanging guitars of the old men in denim on the soundstage.

It’s astonishing, he said.

What is?

The things that happen down there.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

He couldn’t begin to tell her. Life. Four billion years of chance had written a score of inconceivable intricacy into every living cell. And every cell was a variation on that same first theme, splitting and copying itself without end through the world. All those sequences, gigabits long, were just waiting to be auditioned, transcribed, arranged, tinkered with, added to by the same brains that those scores assembled. A person could work in such a medium — wild forms and fresh sonorities. Tunes for forever, for no one.

He pleaded with her, palms bared.

Not you, Peter. You’re doctoring toxic organisms?

More throbbing counterpoint poured out of the PA system from down the concourse in the heart of the mall. It collided with the power rock from the stage, the calliope, and the chorus of beeps and chimes from a hundred smart and mobile devices. He could no more hear his thoughts than he could see the constellations at noon.

A middle-aged couple sat down at the next table, sharing a soft-serve cone and holding hands like teenagers. But Maddy didn’t lower her voice.