Powers, Richard - Orfeo

This is your baby, he tells his friend. Make it live.

The piece turns lethal. Music to panic a whole country. A thing of silence and nothingness. Required listening. Els feels the madness of it, and the brisk Phoenix night, the lights from the clinic, the traffic whipping back and forth on the nearby boulevard all say: Hear, and be afraid forever.

Use that Web thing — Tweety Bird. Tell the whole world, in short little bursts.

Bonner points across the way, to the glow of the clinic. We can use the machines in the lobby. Say that it’s all out there, spreading. Everywhere. Released into the wild. An epidemic of invisible music.

Els laughs, but it’s not a laugh. They’ll kill me, you know. The minute I. . The idea rushes away from him, like the five recombining lines of the Jupiter.

You got a problem with that? You weren’t doing anything else, were you?

Els presses his skull with both hands. Fatigue and the fugitive life catch up with him, because this all suddenly sounds suicidal and very, very doable.

Tell me, Bonner says. What was it that you wanted from, from. . He cranks his right hand, spooling up all the music Els ever tried to write.

There’s a place Els has been to, a few times in this life. A place free from the dream of security, where the soul beats to everything with a rhythm. And every one of his few visits there has reminded him: We’re entitled to nothing, and soon to inherit. We’re free to be lost, free to shine, free to cut loose, free to drown. But part of a harmony beyond the ear, and able, for a moment, to move.

I wanted awe .

Richard claps his hands. Done. Living music, swimming around in the water supply.

Surprise , Els says . Suspense.

Oh, they’ll be hanging on every measure.

Refreshment. A sense of the infinite.

Fear, you mean.

And change, Els thinks. Eternal mutation. For a beat, he forgets the piece isn’t real.

He comes clean. Beauty .

Richard’s eyes crinkle at the mention of the guilty secret. His lips twist up. Fine. What’s more beautiful than music you can’t hear?

Els looks up at the clear desert sky, speckled with light, even above this suburban sprawl. They’ll crush me like a bug.

Richard steps toward his friend and lays one hand on his shoulder. His eyes soften into something like sympathy. The words he wants evade him. But the look says: They’ll crush you anyway, even if you never make a peep.

He waves back toward the scope. Have a look.

Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.

He calls out. Behind him, Richard chuckles. Once you hear the music of the spheres, the stuff you earthlings make is a bore.

The stars come toward him in a stippled rush. He pulls his head away. Richard is staring at the clinic half a block off — at the experiment that offered him hope and served up saline. He says, How much can they hurt you, anyway?

Els doesn’t answer. Words are for people who know things.

Richard squints into the distance. You have to do this. The largest audience for an experimental piece in history.

You always wanted me dead, Els says. Didn’t you?

Bonner is elsewhere. Eye of man hath not seen , he says. He stops, muddled. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen . .

The words dissolve. There’s an agonizing gap, which Els is powerless to fill. It strikes him, the one small compensation to where Bonner is going. Every look, every listen, will be like the first.

Something, something, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

Richard points: Flashing lights. A van and three cars, one of them unmarked, slink into the circular front drive of the clinic. Men in riot gear issue from the vehicles and fan out. A dozen of them rush the main entrance. Challenges ring out in English and Spanish. The clerk at the reception desk has at last remembered the face on last night’s news.

Bonner surveys the piece of theater as if it’s something he once choreographed. By the look on his face, the blocking is all wrong.

He turns to Els. You ready for this?

Whatever this is, the answer is no. Richard beckons and Els follows. They head around to the far side of the clinic buildings, to the long-term parking lot, leaving the telescope and mount in the middle of the empty field.

The building screens them from the officers a few dozen yards away. Shadows of shock troops dart down the windows of the men’s wing while two old men stumble toward a rented Accord. Bonner bends down near the right rear tire, like he’s hiding behind the vehicle or praying. He reaches up inside the wheel and withdraws a key.

This way, I can always find it. If I can find the car.

He hands the key to Els. Els can’t take it. His arms are numb. Freedom has come for him, impossible, huge, cold, blue, and he’ll drown, way out in the middle of it, out of sight of all land.

Take it, man. It’s just a rental. What’s a little grand theft auto, once they have you for terrorism? You’re doing the world a favor. They should have taken my license away four months ago.

Richard closes Els’s fist around the key. One last recital, his eyes say. You can do this. Make it something even this distracted world will hear. It will only hurt for a moment.

Els presses the fob and slips into the driver’s-side door. Panic slams him, but he surfs through it. He pats his pocket; the smartphone is still there. Giddy with fear, he starts to laugh. He rolls down the window. Bonner looms above the door.

If only one of us had a vagina, Els says, half of life’s problems would be solved.

Richard recoils. What a very curious thing to say.

Els backs the Accord out of its slot, points it toward the curving parkway, a stone’s throw behind the assembled police cars. He turns to wave to Richard. But Bonner is already walking, back turned, hunched, hands in pockets, headlong into the drama, ready to direct it, if they’ll let him. Creation’s Rule Number One. Zag when they think you’ll zig.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.

On the shoulder of an old state highway in Barstow, California, Peter Els, terrorist, stops to examine the railing. Looking is pointless. The scribbles on the guardrail that he’s looking for are long gone. Even the railing itself must have been replaced, maybe more than once. God knows how many hundreds of miles of highway rails must run through Greater Barstow. The scribbles exist nowhere except in the music that remembers them. Still, he stops to look. He has never stopped to read a guardrail before.

The Mojave sky is as lustrous as a painted backdrop. Heat ripples off the scrubland that runs in every direction around the crater of the city. A few hours earlier, over lunch — a sack of steaming ground meat picked up at a drive-through off the interstate — he began to tweet. Figuring out the system gave him childish pleasure. He created an account and chose a username—@Terrorchord. He spent a few tweets proving that he was this year’s fugitive. Then he moved from exposition into the development section.

I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged.

I was sure that no one would ever hear a note. This was my piece for an empty hall.

What was I thinking? I wasn’t, really. I’ve always been guilty of thinking too much. .