Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The year has had no real spring. Much of the country jumps straight from December to June. In Barstow, it’s August already. The freak weather may be nothing to worry about. Not for extremophiles, anyway. Bacteria need worry about almost nothing.

After the burger joint, Els pulled into a gas station run by the company that recently put five million barrels of oil into the Gulf. For the last several miles, Richard’s car had been running on fumes. Els stuck his credit card into the pump and surrendered his location. No alarms sounded. As the gas flowed into the tank, Els imagined that he might be charmed, that he might, in fact, get the four more hours he needed to redeem his whole life.

In a corner of the station’s lot, near the air pump, he sat in the driver’s seat of the Accord and tweeted some more. The phrases rolled out of him, dozens at a pop, no more than 140 characters each.

I was after the kind of music that reminds the brain what it felt like, back when we lived forever.

I wanted a piece that would say what this place would sound like long after we’re gone.

He tweeted like that white-throated sparrow in the arboretum just days ago, reinventing tonality a triad at a time. By midafternoon when he pulled into Barstow and tweeted again, he had almost eighty followers. The messages were spreading by themselves.

Coming to this place would feel like design, if he were a better designer. The Voice brought him here. The name popped out from the smartphone map: Barstow. He’d always wanted to make the pilgrimage. Stumbling on this town was like those few times — the frantic dance in the middle of the Borges Songs , the awful dead-drop in the middle of Brooke’s sonnet, the slow build through the last twenty minutes of The Fowler’s Snare— when the music wrote itself and all Els had to do was take dictation.

The highway is narrow, and the backdrafts of passing cars rock him. Els edges along the shoulder, probing another stretch of rail. On such a spot, eight forsaken Depression hitchhikers scribbled bottle-messages to no one. Eight anonymous pleas, turned into an ethereal, banal, subversive, conservative set of microtonal mini — folk songs, Harry Partch’s signature piece: Barstow. Easy place to land in, hard place to get out of.

It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age 19. 5 feet 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.

His scour of a hundred yards of rail turns up a wasp’s nest, a bumper sticker for a towing service, an obscene rhymed couplet, several pairs of initials, a chiseled tumorous phallus, and a broken heart. Also, many sphinxlike scratchings that might as well have come from another planet. Els climbs back into the Accord. Before turning Richard’s key in the ignition, he sends off another tweet, by the hobo Partch, now an accessory before the fact:

American music has one of its greatest bulwarks in bumdom.

He’d read the words in graduate school, half a century ago, in another backwater town, one where Partch lived and left right before Els arrived on the scene. The words have stayed with him, through everything. Maybe he botches the exact phrase. Mutation happens.

Partch, if anyone, knew that. Burned the first fourteen years of his music in a potbellied stove in New Orleans and started over at twenty-nine, cutting himself off from the mainland forever. A Carnegie grant to visit Yeats in Dublin, where he sold the old poet on a revolutionary setting of Oedipus . A few months later: homeless and broke, thumbing for rides and begging meals across the length of 1930s California—“California! Land of oncoming Los-es and Las-es, Sans and Santas, Virgins, Conceptions, and Angels!” Eight years adrift, sleeping wild or camping in hobo shanties, jumping freights, catching diseases, going hungry, and reinventing music.

Gentlemen: Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for an easy handout.

Tramp Quixote, visionary bum, indigent in a collapsing country. Prophet in the wilderness, sure that only an outsider could find the way through . A man of no compromises. A mean drunk. Gay, for what that was worth, like so many of the century’s best composers. In any case: Did not work and play well with others. And convinced that the salvation of music required cutting an octave into forty-three pitches.

Marie Blackwell. Age nineteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, considered pretty. One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Object: matrimony.

Even to hear his spectral music, Partch had to invent a whole orchestra of outré instruments. Forced by visions into carpentry. Hence the Zymo-Xyl, built of hubcaps and liquor bottles. The diamond marimba, bass marimba, bamboo marimba, mazda marimba, and quadrangularis reversum. Adapted violas and guitars. The harmonic canons, with their sliding bridges, tuned anew for every new piece. The kithara, the gourd tree, the cone gongs, the spoils of war. A whole series of chromelodeons, organs whose keys sliced half-steps into slivers. And of course the cloud chamber bowls, a copy of which sat in Els’s living room and helped alert the federal government to the fact that here was a house worth raiding.

Dear Marie, a very good idea you have there. .

A new railing swings into view, and Els hits the brakes. Behind him, a Ford Expedition honks and veers out to avoid slamming him. The vehicle screams past. Els pulls up onto the shoulder and stares at the stretch of pavement across which, in another world, he’s lying smeared.

Then he rises from the dead, pulls out the smartphone, and tweets again. He tweets the formula for his homebrew. He tweets program notes about how the piece was made. One flick, and a new wave of messages heads out into the world’s largest auditorium.

Possible rides: January sixteenth, fifty-eight. January seventeenth, seventy-six. January eighteenth, nineteen. January nineteenth, six. January twentieth, eleven. To hell with it — I’m going to walk!

Els steps from the car and inspects every inch of the guardrail as if it’s the score of the Jupiter . And it almost is, so full of scratches is it, both random and deliberate. He can’t stop looking. People, nature, and chance have scrawled all over the metal bumper. Sleeper cells, covert messages everywhere. Who knew how much is going on, written down into these invisible inches?

Pencil on paint, from 1940: of course his hitchhikers are long gone. Every railing in Barstow postdates them. But every railing is full of their offspring, millions of scribbles from descendant generations. With the sun starting to drop and the traffic picking up, the search feels senseless and urgent, and everything it turns up seethes with life.

Jesus was God in the flesh.

Partch was right about so much. Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn’t want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”

But the man was wrong, Els decides, in thinking that forty-three pitches put you any closer to infinity than twelve.

Els leans back against the dusty hood of Richard’s leased car and pulls out Klaudia Kohlmann’s smartphone. He tweets:

Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found an instrument free of all such bars.

Partch again: “I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it. .” That’s all that I tried to do, as well.