Orfeo (17 page)

Maddy points: high on the wall at the far end of the pavilion, like a tender Big Brother or clowning Chairman Mao, a man’s giant face sweeps from a scowl to a manic laugh and back again. The film loops, and Els stares at the seamless transformation, three, four, five times in a row. Nothing changes, except for the Imp Saint’s litany, playing through Els’s head:
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
But Els never makes it to eight, let alone sixteen. Maddy, frisky now, draws him deeper into the maelstrom.

They explore, like a vicar and his wife who’ve stumbled upon the parish’s routine underground orgy. They run across three colleagues from the School of Music, an acquaintance from Cine Club, and two neighbors from Maddy’s rooming house, blitzed out of their minds and giggling. An alto who sings with Maddy in concert choir snags them from behind. They lean in close to hear her. She points to the dancers on platforms above the turning crowd.
That’s Claude Kipnis! That’s Carolyn Brown!

Who’re they?
Els yells back.

The alto shrugs.
Famous people!

Children scream in meteoric arcs across the crowded floor, batting at fallen balloons. In the stands behind the oval livestock gauntlet, a few shell-shocked loners take cover, plugging their ears. Part of Els wants to flee, too. But most of him needs to be here, in the belly of this beast.

Each inhalation of craziness fills Els’s veins with something dark and viscous. If this is music, then he’s lost. If this is composition, then everything he has tried to write is wrong.
Musicircus
:
Cage’s latest way of saying how noise is music by its maiden name. But in this insane din, Els can’t for the life of him remember why that idea held such promise once. This night wants to strip him of every belief, to pull him down into mere sensation, the place of no desire, of pure listening.

But listen to what? To the eve of destruction. To the air raid siren of things to come. To the explosion of Els’s own quaint and laughable ambitions. To a deafening freedom.

Then, drifting on the human current, bumming a match to light his cigarette and gossiping with a spectator, there’s Cage, twenty feet away. Els has been close to him before, but never like this. He tugs Maddy toward the perpetrator, ready for art. But coming in starboard, hard and low, a gray eminence cuts across their bow. A formidable woman who has attended every Germanic chamber concert Els has ever slunk into confronts tonight’s ringleader. She shouts at the startled composer with such stentorian force that she might be yet another circus act, called for by the coin-tossing score.

Mr. Cage. Are you a fraud?

Cage presses his brow, examines his cigarette, and looks off to the strobing lights that bounce off the drifting balloons. His face clears, relieved.
No.

He casts his cigarette to the pavilion floor and stubs it out with one toe. Something religious to the gesture. Smiling, he slips through the crowd and back up on a performance platform, where he joins a quintet pouring water into different-sized bowls and tapping them, taking their time cues from an elaborate piano roll. Els stands in front of the platform, watching the Kabuki mimes tap at their liquid-filled bowls. For a moment, in some America deep in his neocortex, he can hear every ringing pitch the mute bowls make.

A face brushes his earlobe. Raw charge ripples down his neck and into his shoulders. Maddy, purring,
Had enough?

He swings around to her.
Serious? It’s just getting going.

She waves at the surrounding chaos, her lips a boggy smile. She shouts something, but the words die halfway across the defile. He leans in, and she shouts again.
I pretty much get the picture, Peter. Don’t you?

The shout, too, is a kind of music. She stands with her head tilted, grinning at the gimmick all around them. The drumlins of her breasts beneath her Elizabethan blouse and the gap at the top of her hip-clinging jeans ought to be all the happening he needs. But there’s something here he can’t leave yet. His hands improvise in fake sign language: he needs to listen a little longer. She shrugs, asks him with a trill of her fingers if he’ll be okay walking home, pulls him to her by the lapels of his ratty bomber jacket, and kisses him. The old man of seventy standing next to them nods in recall.

You do not need to leave your room. Don’t even listen. Simply wait. The world will offer itself to be unmasked. It has no choice.

Time turns to nothing. His ears dilate. The longer Els stands still, the more the music pulls apart. His hearing sharpens, able now to pick out strands buried in the babble. Dixieland trombones. A descending lamento bass played on a fretless Fender. A psychedelic reworking of “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane,”
against the ceaseless banging on the lead pipe sculpture
.
Puccini mocks the furious electronic permutations of a piece by Matthew Mattison, whose old
épater la bourgeoisie
sounds housebroken in this surge of crazed elation. It’s Ives and his overlapping marching bands all over again.

Hours pass. Midnight, but the crowd shows no signs of thinning. Something catches his eye, high up in the flanking stands: a man seated by himself, conducting. He cues the crowd with precise waves of his arms, the way young Peter once conducted his father’s vinyl Toscaninis
.
Els knows the man, though they’ve never met. Richard Bonner, doctoral candidate in theater arts, three years Els’s senior. Famous for directing last season’s deranged
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
set in an old folks’ home, and for coming to a peace rally on the Quad dressed as a sepoy from the Bengal Native Infantry, circa 1850.

The invisible baton dips. The conductor’s fingers curl, demanding a crescendo. And on cue, the crowd delivers. Els watches this show above the show, until the lone impresario holding this spectacle together feels himself being spied on and turns to face his observer. Bonner’s hands point like two cap pistols at Els and click, like some Rat Pack singer playing the Vegas Sands. Then he waves at Els to come join him up in the stands for the aerial play-by-play.

As Els draws near, Richard Bonner leaps to his feet and grabs his hand.
Peter Els. As I live and breathe! What do you think? Should we all rush out and kill ourselves?

Els confines himself to what he hopes is a fuzzy grin. The impresario pats the riser beside him and sits back down. Els takes the designated place. They sit and watch, up in the grandstands above the end of the world. Bonner’s hands can’t help scooping and directing. Now and then he issues a burst of color commentary.

Above the noise of the Happening, Els can make out only a quarter of what the man says.
Under the paving stones, the beach! Meet the fucking Jetsons, man! You know who supplied those weather balloons? Chanute Air Force Base. You know what else Chanute is supplying to the jungles on the other side of the world? No, of course you don’t. You’re a masterpiece guy, aren’t you? Gimme that old-time religion. People getting fragged in your living room, and you’re still trying to sweet-talk beauty into a quickie.

All the while, Richard Bonner grazes on sweets he has squirreled away in half a dozen pockets. Smashed-up oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper. Good & Plenty out of the purple-pink box. These he shakes like Choo Choo Charlie and offers to Els, who’s surprised to find himself ravenous. They sit chomping candy and watching the revels, like they’ve known each other since the Pleistocene.

Bonner sighs big, the contentment of someone who has come home at last.
Say hello to the permanent future. You gotta love this shit.

Do I?
Els asks.

Come on, bubala. It’s art.

Art is not a mobocracy
.
It’s a republic.

Do let art know that, huh? For its own good.

The party’s dying and Els hears himself turning earnest. Still, he wades in. It’s like he and this guy have been having this fight all their lives.

People can’t stand too much anarchy. They need pattern. Repetition. Meaningful design.

People? People will do whatever the times tell them to. I mean, look at you, man!

Els does: long-sleeve paisley shirt, green bomber jacket, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms. Nothing unusual. Bonner is all black denim and leather, what Els would call a greaser.

You can’t make people like
psychosis
, Els insists
.

Oh, please!
Bonner points.
I saw you down there digging it. It’s after midnight and you’re still here.

You can’t even call it a piece. It’s a dead end. A one-off novelty.

Bonner’s great right eyebrow shoots up, a cartoon arch.
Man. Novelty’s our only hope. Surplus leisure time is the single greatest challenge to the industrial state. Right behind property-sharing Asians in black silk pajamas, of course.

This thing will be finished after tonight. Over and done.

Chunks of Good & Plenty fly from Bonner’s mouth.
You jest! They’re gonna revive this every year, like
Oklahoma
or
Carousel
. They’ll be mounting nostalgic revivals of it in posh London museums in half a century.

Calm falls over Els. He and this strange man, deep in a new country, the future beyond figuring. What is music, that he needs to bring it to heel? The Stock Pavilion, this backwater town, the whole experimental nation, have all gone stark, raving mod. But this lavish anarchy won’t hurt him. He can survive, even steal from it, and fashion a new song he can’t yet make out.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

Bonner’s words yank Els from his trance.
The best part of a piece like this? It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. The whole planet could call this thing a con job. And the man would still be free
.

They get thrown out of the Stock Pavilion with the rest of the stragglers around two a.m., when the organizers of
Musicircus
start striking the set so that the place will be empty again by eight. That’s when the cows will be led back onto the showroom floor and the next generation of agricultural scientists—the future’s real masters—can go on learning how to keep a ravenous nation in beef patties.

Bonner and Els, cast out into the midwestern midwinter, their ears ringing like mallet-struck glass bowls, make their way back across campus in the swirls of bitter wind. Deep in words, they weave and reel like drunks. They pause on a lamp-lit street corner, Bonner making elaborate points, jabbing Els in the chest for emphasis. Els tells Bonner about his new compositional hopes, with a detail he hasn’t yet tried on Maddy. He wants to use regions of cycling pitch groups to create forward motion without resorting to the clichés of standard harmonic expectation, but without falling into serialism’s dead formality.

Listen to you, Maestro. You’re a damn centrist, is what you are. Admit it. And fasten your seat belt, baby. Both sides are going to beat your ass black and blue.

Els tells Richard Bonner about Maddy, his bold Sinbad soprano in the tiny idealist’s body. He mentions the Borges songs, which he and Maddy are preparing for a recital in the new year. Bonner perks up.

I’ll choreograph
. The words issue from Bonner’s mouth in arctic cumulus puffs.

It’s a song cycle,
Els says.
She just . . . sings.

You need a choreographer. Send me the score on Monday.

Els feels hung over, having drunk nothing but mayhem all night. He takes leave of Bonner outside Maddy’s rooming house. They shake hands, a grip that Bonner turns into one of those thumb-clasping peace handshakes.
Say yes to how things are.

You’re a damn alien, aren’t you?
Els tells the director.
Outer space. Admit it.

Bonner does. With gusto. And hugs his newfound associate good night.

Els climbs the staircase of Maddy’s college commune, skirting a cairn of cat turd left in the center of the first-floor landing. She’s asleep under her most beautiful quilt, an array of suns and planets. He wakes her up, high on the now-audible future.

You,
the sleepy soubrette says. She presses her hair into the dip of his sternum.
What time is it?

Time for every freedom the miracle year offers. Maddy is logy at first, but game, won over by his need, so fresh and fierce, here, a few hours before dawn. She falls asleep again the minute they’re over the finish line. He lies, arms around her, frantic with hope and eager for a future that fills with astonishing new things.

Saturday morning is on him, from one measure to the next. When light pours in through Maddy’s hand-made curtains, he rises and dresses and heads across the Quad to campus town, where he forages for breakfast. Coffee, donuts, two oranges, and a
Daily Illini
. The proof of what already feels like a brief mass hallucination splashes across page one: “Musicircus Rocks Stock Pavilion.”
Below it, a smaller headline proclaims, “Johnson Demands Honorable Peace.”

He brings his breakfast treasures home to a woman just now stirring. She opens her eyes on him as he hovers over her student bed, breaks into a grin, and throws her arms around his neck. An old folk song crosses his mind, one that will take him thirty more years to turn into variations: What wondrous love is this, oh my soul?

Partch: “I went south toward any god who softly whistled . . . the one spot where I would ‘choose to abide’ was already far behind.”