Orfeo (10 page)

He’d see what he could discover, online. Maybe the ACLU had a hotline. Coldberg and Mendoza had no warrant. His rights had surely been violated.

The goddess came up behind him again, her step matching the latest beat coming through the thin white wires. A Persian tar improvisation to cure melancholy. A Ukrainian funeral lament. Every tune in creation lined up in her shuffled stream, waiting to take its ten-second turn.

Els stepped off into the grass as she shot by. Above him, in the branches, the air still rang with birdsong. Check the day. Drop it, drop it, pick it up, pick it up. What cheer, what cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer? Why don’t you come to me? Messy sprung rhythms spilled out over every bar line Els could draw for them. If any grand, guiding rule held these rhythms together, Els was too crude and long-lived a creature to hear it. The racket was like the local combined middle schools set loose with a copy of GarageBand. Surplus bothered no one here. The noise washed over him, brisk and urgent and shining.

Through that clatter came a news flash. Three strong notes descended in a major triad, then riffed on the tonic in a dotted rhythm:

Sol, mi, do-do-do-do-do-do-do . . .

A thing no bigger than a child’s fist was asserting a chord as brazen as any that a kid Mozart might plunk out prior to taking it through a maze of rococo variations. Els scanned the trees, but the perp hid. Maybe the bird had ripped off a playing child or heard the notes spill out of a summer convertible. Birds were big on mimicking. Mozart’s pet starling liked to mock the theme from his G Major Piano Concerto, K. 543. Australian lyre birds could mimic camera shutters, car alarms, and chain saws so perfectly they passed for real.

With two brisk tweaks of pitch the bird launched another descending arpeggio, like a pranking Beethoven having one over on the audience:

Fa me do-do-do-do-do-do-do . . .

The bird might as well have chirped
Eureka
or sketched out a circle in the dirt with a twig in its beak. Much of twentieth century music had been lost to the idea that the diatonic scale was arbitrary and exhausted, part of the bankrupt narrative that had led to two world wars. Nothing mattered but finding a new language. Now this feathered thing sat up in the branches, singing its triads and making a fool of him. Evolution had its innermost needs, tens of millions of years old.

The goddess startled Els; he couldn’t imagine how she’d lapped him again so soon. She saw him standing paralyzed under the trees and stopped. She pulled the white wires from her ears.

Are you okay?
Her accent—thick, nasal, and Mid-Atlantic—came straight out of Philly.

Els pointed. The bird answered for him, its perfect phrase. The goddess’s eyebrows pulled down; her lips twisted.

White-throated sparrow!
She opened her mouth wide, and a clear, bright alto poured out.
Poor Sam Peabody-peabody-peabody . . .

The bird answered, and the imitator laughed.

Thank you,
Els said.
I’ve never heard that one.

Oh-migod. I love that bird. I wait for him, every spring.

She backed away, turning on one heel as if she’d never broken stride.

Wait,
Els said. The lone benefit of age: you could ask anything and frighten no one. He raised both hands and pointed at each ear.
What are you listening to?

She should have jogged off without saying another word. But the young knew that life would henceforth be forever lived in a fishbowl, and they liked it that way. The names of her tracks were doubtless being beamed to her social networking page, even as she nixed them.

The buds lay draped across her shoulder, like a stricken stick insect. She took them in her fingers.

I’m sorting through some new stuff. Tagging things for later.

I hope you have a tag for “sooner,” too?

The words wrinkled her forehead. Song came from the trees. Sam tried out a fresh new triad. Delight distracted the girl, and she forgot the question.

When she looked back down, Els grinned.
Why listen to anything else, if you can hear that?

The goddess laughed, not getting the joke.

You have a lovely voice,
Els said. He wanted to say: Worth waiting for every spring.

Pleasure reddened the jogger’s face.
Thanks
.

She edged away. Els ached to call her back. Faust’s parting shot to life: Stay awhile; you’re so beautiful. But then, he felt like saying that to everything, these days. She smiled, put the buds back in her ears, waved, and looked again up into the tree, at the invisible maker. Then she turned back to the jogging track, and, like so much else that Els took for granted on that disastrous morning, vanished forever.

Prodigiosins kill fungus, protozoa, and bacteria. They might even cure cancer. Their red is the color of pure possibility.

It’s 1963, Els’s final month at that massive musical factory pumping out performers from the fields of rural Indiana. All winter long, he’s studied with Karol Kopacz, and now it’s spring, his last undergraduate May. Old
Klangfarben
Kopacz: Polish by way of Argentina, one of those aging terrors from the era of cultural giants who died in the war and were resurrected in the Americas, the marble guardians of a lost art. From what Els can tell, Kopacz hasn’t put a note in front of the public for twenty years. The man seems to care nothing for music anymore, though he knows it better than most people know how to breathe.

Els sits in his mentor’s office in a corner of the Old Music Building. Every surface of Karol Kopacz’s lair, including the baby grand, is heaped high with moldering books and papers, loose scores, records long divorced from their cardboard sleeves, brass Shiva Natarajas, a broken bandoneón, a stringless oud, plates of forgotten sandwich, and a framed photo of an almost handsome younger man underneath the bear paw of Stravinsky that Kopacz has never bothered to hang. Channels through the clutter lead from the door to the desk, the desk to the piano, the piano to the veined leather love seat where cowed composition students sit and take their weekly beatings.

Every seven days, Peter Els brings the man the best that his green soul can generate. Kopacz sits and scans Els’s systems in silence. Then he tosses the scores back, saying,
Lots of traffic and no cops
, or
Too many peaks, not enough valleys.
For days afterward, Els rages against the man’s glib dismissals. But a month later, he’s always in complete agreement.

Today Els brings a thing of antic splendor for solo piano. It feels fresh, quirky, and young, everything art ought to be. It’s an openhearted gamble, keen with both reason and love.

His professor looks at the first measure and grimaces.
What is all this?

It’s a compact chromatic phrase, packed with every one of Western music’s twelve available notes, twice over. Els stole the idea from Henry Cowell, who may have stolen it from Scriabin, who surely stole it from someone even older.

Go to the piano
, Kopacz commands. Peter does as told. He may be a budding revolutionary, but he’s an obedient one.

Hit a key
.

Els reaches out one finger.
Which . . .
?

The émigré presses one hoary hand over his eyes, as if the genocidal century has finally caught up with him and he can flee no farther.

Peter hits a key.

Thank you
, his mentor says, oozing grace
. What do you hear?

C?
Peter tries. His brain scrambles for the real answer.
C-two. Great C.

Yes, yes,
Kopacz snaps.
What else? Again!

Bewildered, Peter restrikes the note.

Well? Mother of God. Just listen.

Els strokes the key. He doesn’t understand. It might be a foghorn at night. It might be the singing radiator from his childhood bedroom. It might be the first note of the first prelude of the first book of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
. He strikes again, harder, but says nothing.

His teacher hangs his head and groans for civilization’s sad waste.
Just listen
, he begs.
Stay inside the sound.

Els does. The building’s torrent of heating switches off, audible now that it stops. He hears the plosives of two people bickering. Down the hall, someone runs through the Adagio from the
Pathétique.
Someone else grinds out four measures from the Elgar Cello Concerto until it sounds like Fluxus. A soprano vocalizes in rapid chromatic swells and dips, the cartoon cue for seasickness. Something that sounds like a large cardboard box knocks against the brick wall at six-second intervals. Outside, a young couple flirts in muffled Spanish. Blocks away, a siren makes its way toward someone’s life-erasing disaster. Through it all, Karol Kopacz sits slumped at his desk, face in his hands, drowning in bitter music.

Els blocks him out and listens. He focuses until the note he keeps striking breaks in two. Obvious, what else is there, now that he stops assuming that there’s nothing else to hear.

I also hear C-three
.

He braces for abuse. But his teacher barks in triumph.

Thank you. Maybe your ear does function, after all. What else?

Relief turns back into panic. Surely there’s more to the game. But since Peter can now hear the G above that octave C, a perfect fifth shining out like a ray through cloud, he’s forced to say so.

Go on,
the displaced Pole commands. Now the game is flushed out into the open. Above that perfect fifth, a perfect fourth. Els has never before taken the fact seriously: hovering above any tone is twice that tone, and triple it, and on up the integers.

He has the map; he knows what islands must be out there, farther off at sea. He stops breathing and concentrates himself. Soon he thinks he can hear the C above the G above the C above the original C ghosting in his ear. He claims as much, and glances at his teacher for a reward. Kopacz’s curled fingers wave lazy ellipses in the air: Don’t stop now.

Higher still, there hides a major third, then a minor one, and out above that, the entire harmonic series. Els knows the sequence; he could cheat with impunity. But he’s still a beginner in his own life, saddled with virulent idealism. He won’t claim any pitch he can’t in fact hear.

It dawns on Els that even a newborn must feel suspense and resolution, tensions drawn from this series of concealed pitches that the ear detects without knowing. For a beat or two, he flirts with apostasy; maybe the laws of harmony aren’t a straitjacket imposed by random convention, after all. He strikes the key harder. It blots out the performance students down the hall, struggling to master their craft. He strains to extract that E above the third C, high up the rainbow of this single note. But the longer he listens, the more that pitch is lost in the angry hum of the fluorescent lights.

E
, Kopacz taunts, in a half reverie.
Another G. B-flat above that
.

Peter can’t tell if the man claims to hear those pitches, or if, like a high-energy physicist, he’s simply asserting their theoretical existence. Audible or not, they’re all present: every pitch in the chromatic scale. Sweet stability and crashing discord, the palette for everything from sultry seduction to funeral mass, and Peter has gone his whole life hearing nothing but the fundamental.

Kopacz holds Els’s composition up in the air with his left hand. He smacks it with the wiggling fingers of his right.
How many busy little notes do you need to play at once? Use a single C
,
and be done with it
.

Peter glares, but his teacher doesn’t notice. The man busies himself with pushing back the frenzied referendum of his white hair. He slumps in his broken Bauhaus chair and commands,
Now: C-sharp.

When the bell rings, ending the lesson, it sounds to Peter Els like the
Tristan
chord. He drops the score of his frenetic piano prelude in the green dumpster behind the Music Building, on top of scraps of drywall, a broken desk, and bales of waste office paper. He retreats to his dorm cell and digs in. From behind the union, the bullhorn-led call-and-response of a demonstration floats across Dunn Meadow. The chants for justice sound, in his ear, like ardent folk choruses begging to be orchestrated.

He works late, purging his style of all its superfluous flash and dazzle. He lets the phone nag on, a burr that becomes a whole parfait of pitches. Unanswered knocks on the door ring like tympani. The muffled joy of two new LPs released that very week seep through his cinder-block walls, two wildly different records that will go on to remake the world and leave a wake of nostalgia for decades to come
.
He hears these sounds the way Debussy heard his first gamelan band.

His desk drawer squeak turns into a tone poem and the hinge of his dorm room door soars like a Heldentenor. Briefly, Els’s music retreats into a staggering simplicity. But two months later, he’s back to his arcane self, the lesson lost, or not so much lost as tucked away, in a whole spectrum of overtones beyond his ear’s ability to hear.

M. H. Gordon gargled
Serratia
and recited Shakespeare in the House of Commons, 1906, to see if speech spread germs through the air.

In the Fiat on the way back, Els resisted the urge to turn on the radio. Not that the news frightened him anymore: by the time the Apocalypse came, we’d all long since have habituated. But the ride home took only five minutes, and anything he might learn about the Libyan no-fly zone or the Fukushima radiation cloud was not worth the further atomization of his brain. Two years earlier, he’d come across the first reports about chronic focal difficulty, from a source he could no longer remember. Since then, he’d tried to take his media in nothing smaller than fifteen-minute doses.