Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Fatigue pulled Els down to the bed. With what strength remained, he set the clock radio for five a.m. The minute he slipped under the coarse, pilled sheets, he heard Chopin’s Vision . Groping on the bedstand to shut it off, he saw his own name on the glowing screen: Els, S.

He fumbled the phone on and mumbled, Sara. Something like his daughter’s voice came back at him.

Daddy. Oh, God, what are you doing?

He thought he might still be sleeping, his head on the pillow. Maddy must have given her the number from off of the caller ID. Technology, family, love: prisoner of them all.

He said, Hey, Bear. You okay?

Daddy, what’s wrong with you? Her voice was strange and hoarse.

Don’t worry. I’m fine.

Where are you? Wait. Don’t say anything .

Your mother told you that I—

Shut up, she said. Don’t, don’t, don’t .

He held the phone in a stunned silence. Data everywhere.

What the hell did you think you were doing? she said. Then: Don’t answer that.

She said nothing more for a very long time. At last she bleated, You haven’t done anything. You’re innocent.

He sat up and flicked on a light, as if there were a reason.

I don’t think so, he said. Not anymore.

They have nothing on you. Nothing that would stand up.

Google me, he said.

God! I’m Googling you ten times an hour.

His daughter, his ducats.

It’s all garbage , she said, desperate . Scared people spouting shit.

That’s just it. I’ve panicked millions. I’m going to release a new killer strain.

Dad. Shut up and listen. Just tell them the facts.

If he’d ever possessed something so quaint, he’d long ago mislaid it.

You have support. Powerful people. They’re saying you’re the victim of a paranoid culture.

Serious?

Plead ignorance. You got sucked up into a stupid hobby. Naïve and misguided. It’s obvious. Your whole. .

She didn’t need to complete the thought. His whole life — naïve and misguided. A long apprenticeship for this final act of bad judgment.

I’ve found you representation, she said. The best. The firm that defended that microbiologist performance artist in Buffalo. They’ll work pro bono, for a cut of any damages. Hold on. I need my notes.

Something rose in him through his fatigue: the spiraling perpetual motion of the Bartók finale. He filled with pride for this remarkable woman, his one perfect composition, however little credit he could take for the finished work.

Her phone clunked as she picked it up again.

The sooner you do this, the easier it’ll be to clear things up. You were frightened and ran. They’ll understand that.

Yes, he thought. If they understood anything, it was fear. Lightness came over him and he said, You used to write music, remember? You invented a whole system of notation using your colored blocks. You were amazing.

Please , she said.

I just saw your mother.

She mentioned.

I told her I made a mistake.

You did, Sara said, the words skidding in pitch. Stop making more, and we’ll forgive you.

Okay. I can do that. I can surrender.

Don’t call it that.

What should I call it?

Fixing things , she said.

He must have started to doze already, even before goodbyes, because the next thing he knew, it was five a.m. and the clock radio was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” so soft and sad and slow and minor and faraway that the haunting tune might have been Fauré’s Elegy .

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.

Her face is a Renaissance profile against the October sky blazing through his office window. She waves two fingers at the score on the screen in front of her, and a sinuous duet pours out of the speakers, sung by a MIDI patch of sampled human voices standing in for virtuoso singers who don’t yet exist.

Jen, this one: not the first Jen he has worked with in this sunny room, and she won’t be the last. But by every useful metric, surely the most magnificent. Tall, clunky, voluble, half goof, half gazelle, and her dyed-fuchsia curls fly everywhere, however often her fingers rake the mane. Her laughs are percussive, her questions mellifluous. She breathes in instruction and breathes out ingenious freedom. And for one hour every week, he gets to watch her breathe.

He’s written no real music in the eight years since Fowler. And yet, she’s here to study composition with him. He’s sixty. She’s twenty-four, eight years younger than his daughter, and starved for anything he can tell her about sound. She wants to squeeze out of him the last thousand years of harmonic discoveries. But he has little to teach that isn’t already within her hungry reach.

Jen’s duet swings upward into a sequence of stunning chords before settling into a cantabile. Then the cantabile broadens. He once put something similar into an ancient octet — the apprentice piece that won him the chance to work with Matthew Mattison. Back then, he still clung to the vestiges of Neo-Romanticism. Now Neo-Romanticism, unkillable vampire, is back with a vengeance. His student outpouring was reactionary, anachronistic; Jen’s is hip and current. Other than that, the gestures are much the same.

He listens to her irrepressible waltz, as familiar as yearning. Then, just when Els has it pegged, the tune explodes into a wild fugato, leaving young Peter’s precious student tinkerings in the dust. He turns toward the girl, amazed. She sneaks a glance his way, mugging a little, impish, a conspirator’s grin. She’s pleased, not with herself but with this marvelous mechanical bird she has stumbled across while out wandering.

They sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the music, nodding to the beat. Now and then he jots something into a pocket notebook. When his pleasure in her devices overflows, he’ll flick her elbow or kneecap with his fingernail.

Four weeks earlier, a quartet of passenger planes turned the dream of the present into a greasy plume. The whole world watched the cycling images in narcotic dread and could not look away. Days passed when even buying a dozen eggs felt like hubris. People kept saying that life had changed forever, but Els couldn’t see how. He’d lived too long for the fallen towers to seem like anything more than history’s next nightmare installment. Terrors as large had struck every decade he’d lived through. Only they’d always happened somewhere else.

On day five, Stockhausen called it the biggest work of art there ever was, compared to which every other composer’s work was nothing.

On day six, Jen came to her tutorial. She sat in her usual chair, her face bloated and red. Oh, man! she told him. Every note I put down seems grotesque. Self-indulgent, after this.

It took all the self-control of a swami at sixty to keep from holding the girl’s jittery hand. Simply wait, he wanted to tell her. Be quiet, still, and solitary. Music will offer itself to you, to be unmasked. It has no choice.

Now, a month on, she’s in full sail again, and the world lies in ecstasy at her feet. She hasn’t forgotten anything; she’s remembered . Who will tilt this footrace from Death to Love, if not her? And these full-out, cascading kaleidoscopes, their interlocking syncopations, are her weapons of mass enchantment. Her duet darts like swallows; soon, the voices are joined by ondes Martenot, contrabassoon, and bass clarinet in manic motor rhythms. Then a battalion of spiccato cellos and double basses. Tubular bells, of course. How not? And fanfares served up by a double helping of trombones.