Powers, Richard - Orfeo

We did some silly things. We thought people could learn to love anything.

She braces. They can’t ?

They can’t, Els says. God. We had energy. We had ideas. We had daring. We had invention for every need. The dreamers outnumbered the charlatans. Then we woke up.

His words slap her, and her face falls. He can’t imagine why his apostasy should bother her. Her music is so lavish and satisfying it’s closer to the 1860s than to the sixties in question. Still she hangs her head, mourning iconoclasm. She’ll never have the pleasure of creative destruction. Nothing to break anymore. Everything already broken and glued back together in a mosaic of pretty bits, too many times to count.

Nobody wanted that stuff. Very little of it will ever be played again.

Through the window, October stretches out, cloudless and amnesic. According to this blue, nothing significant happened last month, with more lovely nothing in the extended forecast. Els stretches. There’s a tune in his ear like the fifties rock and roll his brother force-fed him after tying him to a chair in the family basement.

Turns out that people want a very few things.

He’s a boy again, listening to his father’s hi-fi. Young Person’s Guide. The Orchestra Song . The tympani’s two tones are always the same tones: Do Sol, Sol Do. Do Sol Sol Sol Do. And now the long, strange trip of his sixty years, all that wandering through distant keys, doubles back to tonic, that exploded home.

He can’t for the life of him figure out how, but he’s upset her.

Gramps? Jen’s voice wavers. It sounds so generous. Fresh. She pouts with the same force that drives her music on into badass brilliance. Like you don’t give a shit who comes with. I love that!

He can’t even pat her on the head. There are laws against that, and laws beyond those laws. He waits too long to say anything, and his silence humiliates her.

You tried so many things , she blurts . Why’d you stop?

He says, Not your business . And at once regrets the words as much as any music he has ever written.

Her eyes blink and her head snaps back. She closes the clamshell of her computer and shoves it in her pack.

Jen , he says, helpless to say what he should. She stops, waits, vacant, her hand fighting her Amazon hair.

Go to the piano , he commands. She sneers, but does.

Hit a key .

She shrugs — whatev. She, at least, doesn’t bother to ask which one. She chooses G-sharp. Lovely, intense, and perverse. This one will have a future.

Tell me what you hear.

She shrugs again, stone-faced. G-sharp below middle C.

Again. What else?

Nothing at first. But awareness spreads through her, ten times faster than it dawned on him, back in the day. She hits the key, snorts, pounds the thing again, three times in a row. Then she starts the long arpeggio, plunking her way up the overtone series.

So what? she says, trying to scowl and failing miserably.

She knows. It’s all over her face, a message already charging into her future. For every pitch that ever reaches your ear, countless more hide out inside it. The things he can never tell her, the music he never wrote: it’s all rolled up, high up there, in the unhearable frequencies.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.

They slaughter infected poultry all across Asia. A holocaust of birds. Birds die by the millions, infected or not. Safety is a concept piece, at best.

Human cases break out by the hundreds: Egypt, Indonesia, China. The numbers are small, still, but the real outbreak will start just like this.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, researchers breed variant strains of H5N1 in generations of ferrets. Three months and five small mutations later, they’ll succeed in turning the virus airborne. It’s a simple enough experiment, one that tens of thousands of DIYers could re-create at home. A disease that kills half of those it infects, grown as contagious as the common cold. Governments and agencies will try to suppress the data. But soon enough, the recipe will spread around on the Internet at the speed of thought.

This happens in the Age of Bacteria, which began about 3.5 billion years ago.

Out East, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a molecular geneticist makes a novel organism from scratch, one with its own genetic code. It won’t be dangerous, a panel of scientists says, unless it escapes the lab. Everything gets loose, a panel of historians says. Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.

The guardians carry on flying their nightly sorties. Drones gather data from all the planet’s hotbeds. Recon units comb those last few holdout places that elude the grid. Virtuoso interpreters of chatter listen in on all frequencies. Everywhere, agents break up attacks before they’re even planned.

In another few weeks, an airborne squad will drop into the compound of the supreme artist of panic — fugitive these last ten years — and slaughter him. That death will change nothing. Panic, like any art, can never be unmade.

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.

Sixty-one came, and sixty-two subito, a few days later. For two years, Els worked at Verrata and listened to nothing but Bach. He taught ear training and sight singing, then came home and listened each night to everything the old contrapuntist ever wrote. Nothing else. It was a discipline, like jogging or doing crosswords. An escape from the night sweats of his own century. The Well-Tempered Clavier became his daily bread. He went through the suites, concertos, and trio sonatas. He pored over the two-hundred-plus cantatas three times through. The study focused him. He felt like a student again, a beginner in his own life.

After two years of listening, Els woke one morning and realized that he was done, even with Bach’s bottomless buffet. The surprises were over. The brilliance had gone routine. He could anticipate every outlandish dissonance hidden in those independent lines. And where do you go, once you’ve memorized the sublime?

He went to Mozart. He pored over the Jupiter, as a scholar might. But even the cosmic finale was lost in familiarity, or something worse. The notes were all still there, audible enough. But they’d flattened out, somehow, lost their vigor. And the phrases they formed sounded metallic and dun. It took him some weeks to realize: His hearing had changed. He was just sixty-five, but something had broken in the way he heard.

Els made an appointment with a specialist. His symptoms puzzled Dr. L’Heureux. The doctor asked if Els experienced any changes in coordination. Any confusion or disorientation.

Oh, probably , Els told him. But only the musical confusion worried him.

Are you having any trouble finding the right words?

Els had never in his whole life been able to find the right words.

Dr. L’Heureux made Peter walk a straight line, count backward by sevens, arm-wrestle, and stand still with his eyes closed. He didn’t ask his patient to sing or name a tune.

Dr. L’Heureux ordered a scan. The scanner was a large tube much like one of those Tokyo businessmen’s hotels. It hummed to itself as it probed, a microtonal drone that sounded like La Monte Young or the cyclical chanting of Tibetan monks.

Doctor and patient sat in a consulting room examining slices of Els’s cortex. The scallops and swirls looked like so much cauliflower. Dr. L’Heureux pointed at bits of Els’s spirit and heart and soul, naming regions that sounded like vacation spots in the eastern Mediterranean. Peter followed the magic lantern show. He nodded at the doctor’s explanations, hearing another libretto altogether. What was it about music’s obsession with Faust? Spohr, Berlioz, Schumann, Gounod, Boito, Liszt, Busoni, and Mahler, down through Prokofiev, Schnittke, Adams, and Radiohead. Centuries of bad conscience, long before the Nazis burnt the temple of High Music to the ground.