Powers, Richard: Orfeo

Fifty-two years of listening, and Els still can’t say how the thing is done. How the notes find that precise signature of doubt and hope. The bliss of giving up. Grief too great to be bought off by the promise of an afterlife. A song that predicts the end of its own tradition. But this time through, near his own cadence, Els no longer hears the prediction buried in the songs, but only the memory of discovering them once, at the end of youth. Of Clara stroking him, the storm of eighteen.

Clara laid it all out for him, after the songs ended: How two years after the premiere, Mahler’s own five-year-old Maria died of scarlet fever. How the composer’s shattered wife took up with another man. How Mahler himself died soon after, of a diseased heart, at fifty. And three years on: the war, the death of a generation, the collapse of the absurd empire whose end his music had long foretold. .

Peter learned the sequel soon enough: How the dead Maria’s half-sister, Manon, the daughter of Alma and the man with whom she betrayed Mahler, died three decades later, of polio. How Alban Berg brought the dead sister back to life in his Violin Concerto, an atonal miasma that climaxed in a chilling Bach chorale. How music blurred the line between prophecy and recall.

Els wraps himself in the rising storm, feeling the madness one more time. The children were taken away from me. I had no say. The crazed gale draws up short. It hangs on a diminuendo; the clarinet, contrabassoon, and harp shrink to nothing. And here is where Clara broke off in mid-caress and grabbed him. The skin on the old man’s forearm puckers, where the ghost of the girl takes hold.

Then the damning glockenspiel, mute for three songs, silent for so long that the ear forgets the forecast from song one. Child’s toy, funeral chime, a light in the night. A bell from out of the pitch-black; a shock but no surprise. A sound that makes hope sound primitive.

Hear that? Clara said, her voice as serene as the singer’s now is. A music box. From the nursery.

The music turns sickly sweet. The storm lifts in a heartbeat, and the sky in all directions clears. The singer says, They rest, they rest in their mother’s house. But everything about the eerie music box insists, You dream .

For years after that first listen, Els read everything on the Kindertotenlieder he could find. He even struggled through articles in German. Every analysis insisted that the last song ended in otherworldly consolation. He knew beyond a doubt that it did not. Something more was happening in those final measures, and to hear it, all a person had to do was listen. He searched for a long time for someone to confirm the eviscerating lilt of that final, music-box lullaby. Years passed, the articles piled up, and at last Els reached the one possible conclusion: music said only what the ear could bear to hear.

Listen, Clara said. These are the deaths that start everything.

Mahler to Bruno Walter: “How dark is the foundation on which our lives rest!”

He killed the player and called his daughter. Stupid superstition. But a simple enough safeguard, with no downside. It was three hours earlier on the Pacific Coast. She would already be hard at work, preparing for tomorrow morning. They had talked three days before. But that was then.

Sara was VP for research of the second-largest data-mining firm in the Northwest. Her company figured out how to make advertisements chase their target users around the Web and read their minds. In her spare time, she competed in standard-course triathlons. Her fortieth birthday present to herself had been surviving a double Olympic distance out in Hawaii. She sat on the board of two museums. She spent her vacations volunteering for an NGO that transferred obsolete supercomputers to sub-Saharan countries. She wasn’t married; she wasn’t even single. Men who weren’t scared of her were usually sociopaths.

Els got her voice mail. Lifetimes ago, in the seventies, when Sara was still a child and Els was still her father of record, he’d hung up in alarm the first time he called a friend and got a machine. It took him years to stop bellowing at answering tapes — repeating, spelling out his name, falling into fatuous improvisation or flustered silence. These days, it shocked him to get a live person.

It’s your father, he told the machine . Give me a ring.

He hadn’t even crossed the length of the room to the kitchen when she called back.

What’s wrong?

It’s Fidelio, he answered. She’s dead.

A pause came across the line. For decades in the classroom, Els had told his composition students that rests were the most powerful elements in a composer’s palette. The negative space, that little, ambiguous leap before the Heil. The silences were the thing that the notes were powerless to reach.

How?

A stroke, I think. I didn’t get an autopsy.

I’m sorry, she said. She was good to you.

Another prolonged fermata, the only sound he could bring himself to make. At last she said, Are you okay?

Sar? he managed . I’ve been thinking. There’s an opening at Shade Arbors.

You’ve taken up golf?

A gated thing, south of the college.

Gated thing.

A condominium association. You know. There’s a bar and a restaurant right there. They even have a gym.

You want to move into a nursing home?

Not a nursing home. Retirement community. The nurses are only there if you need them.

Are you crazy?

You told me you don’t like me living alone.

I meant rent out the back bedroom or hire a girlfriend. Not move into some assisted living death trap.

This house has a million stairs. You don’t want me falling and breaking a hip.

Please. No one falls and breaks their hips. That was, like, a nineties television scare campaign. You’re seventy years old. Seventy’s nothing. Seventy is the new forty-five.

Do you remember how you could never go to bed without hearing Saint Anthony preach to the fishes?

Don’t change the subject. You don’t need this. You’re young. Healthy. I can get you a new dog.

How’s your mother? he asked.

She has a Facebook page, Dad. You can stalk her there.

What are you listening to these days? He’d always relied on Sara to tell him what was happening in the world of real music.

Listening? She laughed . I listen to Bloomberg. When I have time. Swear to me you aren’t moving anywhere.

He swore.

I’m so sorry about Fidelio, she said. She was a good one.

She’s only gone out, he wanted to say, and doesn’t feel like coming home.

I’ll find you another. I’ll get on it tonight. How do you feel about border collies ?

He could hear her clicking keys, already searching, even before he said good night.

I wanted to believe that music was the way out of all politics. But it’s only another way in.

The thermal cycler, acquired for a few hundred dollars online, was getting some good PCR product yields. He couldn’t wrap his brain around what happened inside the quarter-thimble reaction tube: the fragments cleaving, the jumbled bases assembling themselves onto the exposed templates, the strands of DNA doubling and redoubling, exploding into incomprehensible numbers. The thought of it made him feel religious.

For raw materials, Els relied on a pair of online shops that would have struck him as insane two years ago. One was named Mr. Gene, like some bargain reseller or used-car salesman. Between the two sites, he could buy all kinds of made-to-order materials without breaking the bank. Do-it-yourself bio: the latest mushrooming cottage industry. A computer, a credit card, and a little patience, and a person might customize a living thing.