Orfeo (13 page)

But then, the man had also written, many times in many ways,
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

Music is awareness flowing in through the ear. And nothing is more terrifying than being aware.

He wanted to go home, shed his walking clothes, take a shower, and eat lunch. But camera crews encircled his house and lab techs were autopsying his dog for biotoxins. His face would be all over the local news by afternoon. Renown had evaded Peter Els his whole life. Now he had only to drive home and wave his arms, and he’d become America’s most famous living composer.

His brain was pure noise. Els drove at random, turning often, his eyes on the rearview mirror. The strip mall where he bought his groceries swung into view. He turned in. The familiar gauntlet of shops felt like the set for a comic operetta: tanning salon, weight loss clinic, dentist-in-a-box, Pretty Nails, Eyemart.

Els sat in the parked car, hands under his armpits. At last, he fished his phone out of the glove compartment. Sara had made him swear to keep one there, for road emergencies. She failed, however, to make him promise to keep it charged. The green phone button did nothing; the screen reflected his face in a postage stamp of black. He rummaged around for the car adapter among the piles of books and CDs in the backseat, without luck.

Something like the space shuttle pulled into the slot next to him. Its running board came up to the middle of the Fiat’s window. Waves of pounding bass passed through the hulls of both vehicles and shook Els’s torso like a Vitamaster belt massager. Whole windshield-shattering subcultures had grown up around that sonic violence: dB shoot-outs, video sites featuring women whose hair whipped about in the winds of sound. Deafness as the price of ecstasy: any composer had to admire the bargain.

The van’s engine cut out, the body-bruising waves ceased, and the parking lot reeled under the sudden evacuation. A close-cropped, thirtyish man in work shirt, chinos, and huaraches got out, peering at a shopping list as he headed into the supermarket. He looked like one of the stalwart patrons of those extravaganzas in abandoned SoHo sweat shops that Els had helped mastermind decades ago.

The dashboard clock jerked Els back. At that moment, eight people with four feet in the grave were convening in the Shade Arbors main common room, notepads in hand, waiting for their teacher to come run their ninth music appreciation class of the season. Twentieth Century Landmarks. God knew he had an excuse to miss. Were his students to die in their sleep tonight without this week’s lecture on classical music and the Second World War, they would still pass the final exam.

A gutted phone booth, dead these last few years, sat in the strip mall parkway. All the nation’s public phones had vanished. He considered bumming a cell phone off of someone in the supermarket. It didn’t seem advisable, given his morning.

He had to get to a lawyer. He needed to prepare an explanation, something to justify those few casual experiments that now seemed criminal, even to him.

He started the car and pointed it toward the gated retirement community. If someone there heard the news already and called the police, then that’s how the piece would play out. He, at least, would have hit all his marks, met all his obligations, and followed the printed score.

Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t yet destroyed.

Els stood in the coral foyer of Shade Arbors in front of the curving reception desk. His pulse was presto and he felt as furtive as a walking mug shot, as if he were wearing a bandolier of yellow police tape draped across his chest. But the receptionist greeted him like an old friend.

He cut through the reception area, flinching each time a logo-emblazoned staffer passed. A woman shaped like the letter
f
walking into a stiff headwind cut across his bow. Another skipped alongside him, toting a mini-oxygen cylinder in a crocheted sling. The place had the air of an Ensor carnival, and Els was just another mummer in the monstrous parade. Flesh kneaded loose by gravity, vessel-popped limbs pushing tartan-wrapped aluminum walkers, liver-spot continents that floated on oceans of pallid face, spoon-wide gaps in smiles, necks thinned out to tendons above colorful golf-shirt collars, heads crowned in bony domes: each of them as awed by age as children by their first snowfall.

Els’s students waited for him in the main common room. Two sat in wing chairs by the fake fireplace, testing their memory with a deck of famous-painting flash cards and cursing like Sicilian dockworkers. Six others sat on the couches flanking the kidney-shaped central table, deep in an argument about whether trees pollute. They dressed in bright tracksuits and knockoff cross trainers—games day on a landlocked cruise ship. The Q-tips, they called themselves.
White at both ends, with a stick in the middle.

The group brightened at Els’s entrance.
You’re late,
someone said.
Culture’s waiting.
Someone else said,
So
what train wreck are we listening to this week?

Els leaned against the river-stone wall, breathing hard. The too-warm room stank of floral-scented hand sanitizer. Triclosan: antibacterial in a hundred consumer products, probable carcinogen, breeder of bacterial super-races. But no one was closing down that lab.

What happened to you?
Lisa Keane asked.

Els shrugged, still in his painter pants and waffle shirt. They’d never seen him more casual than oxford button-down.
Forgive me
.
My morning has been a little . . . avant-garde.

They waved off his apologies. No one seemed to have heard a thing. On a flat-screen TV behind the couches, a famous ideologue adulterer embezzler with his own nationally distributed brand was sticking pins into the groin of a presidential voodoo doll for the entertainment of thirty million people. The next local news came on at noon. Els had until then.

Could we . . . ?
He waved at the screen and twisted an imaginary knob, though no TV in the Northern Hemisphere had used knobs for years. William Bock, erstwhile ceramic engineer, jumped up from the love seat and doused the set.

Els looked out the big bay window onto a stand of pines. He had the distinct impression of having disappeared into one of those Central European allegorical novels that Clara always urged on him, years ago. Those books had always filled him with a dread hope, a feeling between falling in love and dying. He looked around the room at his companions in decrepitude, on their last-minute search for cultural burial swag. Some finish-line respite from the present’s endless entertainment.

It’s been a hell of a morning. I locked myself out of the house. And I’m afraid I locked my notes in. Can we reschedule?

Disappointment rippled through the room. Piccolo and pizzicato violins.

You don’t love us anymore?

Locked yourself out? Time to book a room with us.

We’re all here,
Lisa Keane said.
Let’s listen anyway. We don’t really need the lecture.

They didn’t really need the music. Yet the pattern was as old as dying. A sudden turn in the aging body after the back straightaway, a need for more serious sound. Els had seen it in every uptown concert he’d ever attended: everyone in the audience, old. Auditoriums a whitecapped sea. For years he’d thought that these incurables were the survivors of another time, the children of early radio’s doomed project of cultural uplift. But the years passed, the old died away, and more old people came to replace them. Did something happen to the fading brain, some change in meter that made it turn away from the three-minute song? Did old people think that
classical
held the key to deathbed solace, an eleventh-hour pardon?

I’m sorry
, he said
. I didn’t bring a single disc. They’re sitting in a stack in the living room, on top of my lecture notes.

Klaudia Kohlmann, the retired clinical therapist who’d talked Els into this teaching gig, tipped herself out of her overstuffed chair, crossed to where he stood, and drew a small black slab out of her Incan shoulder bag. She held out the weapon as if she meant to phaser him. He took it and flipped it on, watched by the eight people who’d come for their next installment in the further adventures of an endlessly dying art.

Els gazed at the tiny black rectangle. Like a detonator in an action film, it possessed one button. He pressed it, and the screen filled with a white-shrouded figure in a small rowboat near a rocky outcrop covered with cypresses.

He fingered the miracle again. All of recorded music—a millennium of it—nestled in his hand. Els looked out across the sleeper cell of ancient pupils who waited for their payoff. It crossed his mind to tell them that the Joint Security Task Force wanted him and he really must be going. He glanced back down and flicked at the screen. Two more menus flashed by, leaving him with a patient prompt and a tiny thumb keyboard.

Although he no longer believed it told a coherent story, Els had given the group the last century’s major milestones in rough chronological order. He’d led them from Debussy to Mahler, from Mahler to Schoenberg, revealing the parent’s genes still hiding out in the child. He described the riots at the premiere of
The Rite of Spring
. He played them
Pierrot Lunaire,
those whispers on the edge of a moonlit abyss. He took them down into the Great War. He raced them through the frantic twenties and thirties, Futurism and free dissonance, Ives and Varèse, polytonality and tone clusters, and the scattered attempts to return to a home key that had been forever blown away. And still, each week, his clutch of core listeners kept coming back for more.

The group followed his account like it was an old Saturday serial—
The Perils of Pauline
—a footrace between triumph and disaster forever coming down to the wire. And as the sessions unfolded, Els found himself cheating, stacking the deck. He cherry-picked the evidence, the way NASA had done when they sent their golden record billions of light-years through space and wanted to make a good first impression on the neighbors.

In this way, he’d taken his eight pupils up to the year of his birth. And today, he’d wanted to give them a piece that proved how catastrophe might be luckier than anyone supposed.

Kohlmann handed him a cable to the room’s speaker dock.
Come on
.
Don’t leave us hanging.

Els pecked into the search box: F-O-R.

A drop-down list leapt ahead of each keystroke, predicting his desire. The top of the list had the most likely suspects:
Howlin’ for You. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. For All We Know.
The bottom of the list: there was no bottom.

He fed in more letters: T-H-E. The thinned list was still infinite.
Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked. Sing for the Moment. For the First Time.

Els typed on: E-N-D. The planet-sized catalog zeroed in on several dozen suspects.
For the End. Waiting for the End. Ready for the End of the World.
Two more letters—O-F—and there it was, in the middle of the drop-down list, in a dozen different performances:
Quartet for the End of Time
.

All my music ever wanted was to tunnel into forever through the wall of Now.

The last day of spring 1940. The Nazis pour into France. Just past the crumbling Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht captures three musicians fleeing through the woods. Henri Akoka, an Algerian-born Trotskyite Jew, is caught clutching his clarinet. Étienne Pasquier, acclaimed cellist and former child prodigy, surrenders without a struggle. The third, organist-composer Olivier Messiaen, a weak-eyed birder and religious mystic who hears in color, has saved nothing in his satchel but a few essentials: pocket scores of Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, and Bach.

Days before, all three Frenchmen were playing in a military orchestra at the citadel at Verdun. Now their captors march them at gunpoint, with hundreds of others, to a holding pen near Nancy. They walk for days without food or drink. Several times, Pasquier faints from hunger. Akoka, a big-hearted, hardheaded man, pulls the cellist up and keeps him going.

At last, the prisoners arrive at a courtyard where the Germans distribute water. Fights break out among the captives. Packs of desperate men battle each other for a few swigs. The clarinetist finds Messiaen seated far from the fray, reading a score from his pack.

Look
, the composer says.
They’re fighting over a drop of water
.

Akoka is a pragmatist.
We just need to get some containers so they can distribute it
.

The Germans round up their prisoners and force them on. At last the column arrives at a barbed-wire enclosure in an open field. The three musicians mill about with hundreds of others in the summer rain. Their country is lost. The entire French Army is routed, captured, or dead.

The rain stops. A day passes, then another. There’s nothing to do but wait under an indifferent sky. The composer produces a solo for clarinetist, saved from the captured citadel. Akoka sight-reads it, standing in a field full of prisoners. Pasquier, the cellist, serves as human music stand. The piece, “Abyss of the Birds,” grew from Messiaen’s dawn military watches, when the day’s first chirps would turn into a morning orchestra. It passes the captive time.

Henri Akoka is a good-natured joker, who likes to say,
I’m going to go practice now
, when he’s off to take a nap. But this music disconcerts him. Impossibly long crescendos, tumults of free rhythm: it resembles no music he has ever heard. Six years before, Akoka took the
premier prix
at the Paris Conservatory. He has played for years in the Orchestre National de la Radio. But this piece is the hardest solo he has ever seen.

“I’ll never be able to play it,” Akoka grumbles.