Orfeo (40 page)

Go to the piano
, he commands. She sneers, but does.

Hit a key
.

She shrugs—whatev
.
She, at least, doesn’t bother to ask which one. She chooses G-sharp. Lovely, intense,
and
perverse. This one will have a future.

Tell me what you hear.

She shrugs again, stone-faced.
G-sharp below middle C.

Again
.
What else?

Nothing at first. But awareness spreads through her, ten times faster than it dawned on him, back in the day. She hits the key, snorts, pounds the thing again, three times in a row. Then she starts the long arpeggio, plunking her way up the overtone series.

So what?
she says, trying to scowl and failing miserably.

She knows. It’s all over her face, a message already charging into her future. For every pitch that ever reaches your ear, countless more hide out inside it. The things he can never tell her, the music he never wrote: it’s all rolled up, high up there, in the unhearable frequencies.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.

They slaughter infected poultry all across Asia. A holocaust of birds. Birds die by the millions, infected or not. Safety is a concept piece, at best.

Human cases break out by the hundreds: Egypt, Indonesia, China. The numbers are small, still, but the real outbreak will start just like this.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, researchers breed variant strains of H5N1 in generations of ferrets. Three months and five small mutations later, they’ll succeed in turning the virus airborne. It’s a simple enough experiment, one that tens of thousands of DIYers could re-create at home. A disease that kills half of those it infects, grown as contagious as the common cold. Governments and agencies will try to suppress the data. But soon enough, the recipe will spread around on the Internet at the speed of thought.

This happens in the Age of Bacteria, which began about 3.5 billion years ago.

Out East, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a molecular geneticist makes a novel organism from scratch, one with its own genetic code. It won’t be dangerous, a panel of scientists says, unless it escapes the lab. Everything gets loose, a panel of historians says. Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.

The guardians carry on flying their nightly sorties. Drones gather data from all the planet’s hotbeds. Recon units comb those last few holdout places that elude the grid. Virtuoso interpreters of chatter listen in on all frequencies. Everywhere, agents break up attacks before they’re even planned.

In another few weeks, an airborne squad will drop into the compound of the supreme artist of panic—fugitive these last ten years—and slaughter him. That death will change nothing. Panic, like any art, can never be unmade.

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.

Sixty-one came, and sixty-two subito, a few days later. For two years, Els worked at Verrata and listened to nothing but Bach. He taught ear training and sight singing, then came home and listened each night to everything the old contrapuntist ever wrote. Nothing else. It was a discipline, like jogging or doing crosswords. An escape from the night sweats of his own century.
The Well-Tempered Clavier
became his daily bread. He went through the suites, concertos, and trio sonatas. He pored over the two-hundred-plus cantatas three times through. The study focused him. He felt like a student again, a beginner in his own life.

After two years of listening, Els woke one morning and realized that he was done, even with Bach’s bottomless buffet. The surprises were over. The brilliance had gone routine. He could anticipate every outlandish dissonance hidden in those independent lines. And where do you go, once you’ve memorized the sublime?

He went to Mozart. He pored over the
Jupiter,
as a scholar might. But even the cosmic finale was lost in familiarity, or something worse. The notes were all still there, audible enough. But they’d flattened out, somehow, lost their vigor. And the phrases they formed sounded metallic and dun. It took him some weeks to realize: His hearing had changed. He was just sixty-five, but something had broken in the way he heard.

Els made an appointment with a specialist. His symptoms puzzled Dr. L’Heureux. The doctor asked if Els experienced any changes in coordination. Any confusion or disorientation.

Oh, probably
, Els told him. But only the musical confusion worried him.

Are you having any trouble finding the right words?

Els had never in his whole life been able to find the right words.

Dr. L’Heureux made Peter walk a straight line, count backward by sevens, arm-wrestle, and stand still with his eyes closed. He didn’t ask his patient to sing or name a tune.

Dr. L’Heureux ordered a scan. The scanner was a large tube much like one of those Tokyo businessmen’s hotels. It hummed to itself as it probed, a microtonal drone that sounded like La Monte Young or the cyclical chanting of Tibetan monks.

Doctor and patient sat in a consulting room examining slices of Els’s cortex. The scallops and swirls looked like so much cauliflower. Dr. L’Heureux pointed at bits of Els’s spirit and heart and soul, naming regions that sounded like vacation spots in the eastern Mediterranean. Peter followed the magic lantern show. He nodded at the doctor’s explanations, hearing another libretto altogether. What was it about music’s obsession with Faust? Spohr, Berlioz, Schumann, Gounod, Boito, Liszt, Busoni, and Mahler, down through Prokofiev, Schnittke, Adams, and Radiohead. Centuries of bad conscience, long before the Nazis burnt the temple of High Music to the ground.

It seemed to Els, as another slice of his brain filled the screen, that classical music’s real crime was not its cozy relations with fascism but its ancient dream of control, of hot-wiring the soul. He pictured Faust looking at his own neurons on a monitor—his bottomless hunger laid bare, his desire for mastery swirling through his brain like cigarette smoke curling in the air. As full knowledge filled the seeker at last, Mephistopheles, at his elbow, would sing,
Now we’re both paid in full
.

Once such an infant opera would have flooded the folds of Els’s brain in spikes of color. Now he looked at a stilled sea.

Els pointed to a speck of gray-black Sargasso.
What’s that?

Dr. L’Heureux nodded, confirming a diagnosis Els didn’t even know he’d made.
That’s a lesion. A small dead spot.

Dead?

A small transient ischemic attack.

The doctor pointed out another.

The scans of many people your age show the same thing.

Ah
, Els said.
So there’s nothing to worry about
.

Dr. L’Heureux nodded.
Perfectly normal.
Perhaps a lesion had taken out his sarcasm detector.

Els asked how much of a person’s brain could be dead and still qualify as normal. The question confused Dr. L’Heureux. He seemed not to make a strong distinction between normal and dead. And all the medical evidence was on his side.

Yet the tiny gray islands in his silver brain reassured Peter. Whatever musical facility he’d lost was not his fault. He wasn’t being punished. The scattered dead spots on the screen joined together into a pattern. The islands of silence shaped the still-surging ocean of noise around them. He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.

Dr. L’Heureux described the virtues of exercise. He mentioned possible medications and dietary changes. But Els had stopped listening. He asked,
What about my musical facility?

Dr. L’Heureux’s shoulders made a helpless appeal. He mentioned a name: acquired amusia. It had a variety of possible causes. There was no treatment.

Something in his words tipped Peter off. A tone he could still hear.

This is going to get worse?

Dr. L’Heureux’s silence suggested that it would not get better.

Els went home, into a world of changed sound. Listening to music felt like looking at a flower show through sunglasses. He knew when the intervals shocked or surprised, soothed or blossomed. He just couldn’t feel them.

Rain and thunder, the sides of mountains bathed in flowing orange, frantic delight, the sizzle of cities at night, feasts of self-renewing tenderness, the heaven of animals: the most ravishing harmonies turned into secondhand, summarized reportage. Music, the first language, direct transcription of inner states, the thing words used to be before they bogged down with meaning, now read like a curt telegram.

For a few days, he could still tell what sounded different. Then, little by little, he couldn’t. The brain got used to anything, and soon Els’s new ears were all he’d ever had. He listened less for subtle rhythms and harmonic contour, more for melody and timbre. Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage, rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-prog, neo-soul, new jack swing . . . He’d never dreamed that people could need so many kinds of music.

A year of listening to the new world confirmed him. He’d waited his whole life for a revolution that he’d already lived through and missed. The airwaves were full of astounding sound—a spectrum of grief, craziness, and joy so wide he couldn’t step far enough back to make sense of it all. As more and more people made more and more songs, almost every piece would go unheard. But that, too, was beautiful. For then, almost every piece could be someone’s buried treasure.

His students grew younger and the music wilder, but Els went on teaching the same basic rules. While he trained students how to hear seventh chords in the third inversion, the globe went over the financial brink. The entire web of interlocking con jobs came unraveled. Trillions of dollars disappeared back into fiction. The college lost half its endowment. They asked Els to retire. He volunteered to keep teaching for free, but the law forbade it.

He returned to the life of a sole proprietorship, but now without a way to pass the days. Still, the days passed, many in a major key. He had his phone calls with his daughter, whose every word delighted him. He had her gift, Fidelio, his elated companion on long walks nowhere. There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

At sixty-eight, Els could think about the question only a little at a time. He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.

Deep in his stuffed armchair, Els read about the chemical cascades that music set off inside the body of a listener. Sometimes, he felt as if that night with Clara by the banks of the Jordan River back in Bloomington had never happened, and he’d stayed a chemist instead of heading down music’s mirror fork.

People now made music from everything. Fugues from fractals. A prelude extracted from the digits of pi. Sonatas written by the solar wind, by voting records, by the life and death of ice shelves as seen from space. So it made perfect sense that an entire school, with its own society, journal, and annual conferences, had sprung up around biocomposing. Brain waves, skin conductivity, and heartbeats: anything could generate surprise melodies. String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin. No listener would ever need more than a fraction of the music that had already been made, but something inside the cells needed to make a million times more.

In the fall of 2009, while fast-walking Fidelio around the long loop of the arboretum, Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything he’d ever written.

Fidelio strained at the leash. The tug pulled Els to his feet and dragged him toward the duck pond. The dog splashed into the water, her paws churning up a pattern of dotted rhythms and accented attacks. Duets, trios, even a brash sextet spread outward across the pond’s surface. The tiny maelstrom of intersecting ripples contained enough data to encode an entire opera. Find the right converting key and the score might tell any musical story there was: Man uses tunes to bargain with Hell. Man trades self for a shot at the lost chord. Man hears his fate in the music of chance.

His whole history, recorded in a few haphazard splashes of water: the idea was mad. But music itself—the pointless power of it—was mad, too. A six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God. A few notes on a shakuhachi unlocked the afterlife. A simple tavern sing-along left millions longing for their nonexistent homes on the range. A hundred thousand years of theme and variations, every composer stealing from every other, and none of it had any survival value whatsoever.