“It’ll take six hours to prepare you,” Dr. James said, his long nose twitching with enthusiasm for Staunt’s project. “The brain has to be cleared of all fatigue products, and the autonomic nervous system needs a tuning. When would you like to begin?”
“Now,” Staunt said.
They cleansed and tuned him, and took him back to his suite and put him to bed, and hooked him into his metabolic monitor. “If you get overexcited,” Dr. James explained, “the monitor will automatically adjust the intensity of your emotional flow downward.” Staunt was willing to take his chances with the intensity of his emotional flow, but the medic was insistent. The monitor stayed on. “It isn’t psychic pain we’re worried about,” Dr. James said. “There’s never any of that. But. sometimes—an excess of remembered love, do you know?—a burst of happiness—it could be too much, we’ve found.” Staunt nodded. He would not argue the point. The doctor produced a hypodermic and pressed its ultrasonic snout against Staunt’s arm. Briefly Staunt wondered whether this was all a trick, whether the drug would really send him to his Going rather than for a trip along his time-track, but he pushed the irrational notion aside, and the snout made its brief droning sound and the mysterious dark fluid leaped into his veins.
Ten
He hears the final crashing chords of The Trials of Job, and the curtain, a sheet of dense purple light, springs up from the floor of the stage. Applause. Curtain calls for the singers. The conductor on stage, now, bowing, smiling. The chorus master, even. Cascades of cheers. All about him swirl the glittering mobile chandeliers of the Haifa Opera House. Someone is shouting incomprehensible jubilant words in his ear: the language is Hebrew, Staunt realizes. He says, Yes, yes, thank you so very much. They want him to stand and acknowledge the applause. Edith sits beside him, flushed with excitement, her eyes sparkling. His mind supplies the date: September 9, 1999. “Let them see you,” Edith whispers through the tumult. A hand claps his shoulder. Wild eyes blazing into his own: Mannheim, the critic. “The opera of the century!” he cries. Staunt forces himself to rise. They are screaming his name. Staunt! Staunt! Staunt! The audience is his. Two thousand berserk Israelis, his to command. What shall he say to them? Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! He chokes on his own appalling unvoiced joke. In the end he can do nothing but wave and grin and topple back into his seat. Edith rubs his arm lovingly. His glowing bride. His night of triumph. To write an opera at all these days is a mighty task; to enjoy a premiere like this is heavenly. Now the audience wants an encore. The conductor at his station. The curtain fades. Job alone on stage: his final scene, the proud bass voice crying, “Behold, I am vile,” and the voice of the Lord replying to him out of a thousand loudspeakers, filling all the world with sound: “Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency.” Staunt weeps at his own music. If I live a hundred years, I will never forget this night, he tells himself.
Eleven
“The copter went down so suddenly, Mr. Staunt. They had it on the stabilizer beam all through the storm, but you know it isn’t always possible—”
“And my wife? And my wife?”
“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”
Twelve
He sits at the keyboard fretting over the theory and harmony. His legs are not yet long enough to reach the piano’s pedals: a nuisance, but temporary. He closes his eyes and strikes the keyboard. This is the key of C major, the easy one. The tonic chord. The dominant. Why did they wait so long to tell him about these things? He builds chord after chord. I will now moderate into the key of D minor. Modulate. I do this and this and this. He is nine years old. All this long hot Sunday afternoon he has explored this wondrous other language of sounds. While his family sits frozen by the television set. “Henry? Henry, they’re going to be coming out of the module any minute!” He shrugs. What does the moonwalk matter to him? The moon is dead and far away. And this is the world of D minor. He has his own exploring to do today. “Henry, he’s out! He came down the ladder!” Fine. Tonic. Dominant. And the diminished seventh. The words are strange. But how easy it is to go deeper and deeper into the maze of sound.
Thirteen
“The faculty and students take great pleasure, Mr. Staunt, to present you on the occasion of your one-hundredth birthday with this memorial of a composer who shared your divine productivity if not your blessed longevity: the original manuscript of Mozart’s ‘Divertimento in B,’ Köchel number—”
Fourteen
“A boy, yes. We’re calling him Paul, after Edith’s father. And what an odd feeling it is to tell myself I have a son. You know, I’m forty-five years old. More than half my life gone, I suppose. And now a son.”
Fifteen
The sun is huge in the sky, and the beach is ablaze with shimmering heat-furies, and beyond the crescent of pink sand the green Caribbean rests against its bed like water in a quiet tub. These are the hours when he remains under cover, in some shady hammock, reading, perhaps making notes for an essay or his next composition. But there is the girl again, crouched by the shore, gently poking at the creatures of the tidal pool, the shy anemones and the little sea-slugs and the busy hermit crabs. So he must expose his vulnerable skin, for tomorrow he will fly back to New York, and this may be his last chance to introduce himself to her. He has watched her through this whole week of vacation. Not a girl, exactly. Surely at least twenty-five years old. Very much her own person: self-contained, coolly precise, alert, elegant. Tempting. He has rarely felt so drawn toward anyone. Preserving his bachelorhood has been no chore for him; he glides as easily from woman to woman as he does from city to city. But there is something about the eyes of this Edith, something about her smile, that pulls him. He knows he is being foolish. All this is pure fantasy: he has no idea what she is like, where her interests lie. That look of intelligence and sympathy may be all his own invention; the girl inside the face may in truth be drab and empty, some programmer on holiday, her soul a dull haze of daydreams about glamorous holovision stars. Yet he must approach. The sun pounds his sensitive skin. She looks up, smiling, from the tidal pool. A purple sea-slug crawls lightly across her palm. He kneels beside her. She offers him the sea-slug, and he lets it crawl on his hand, and they laugh, and she points out limpets and periwinkles and barnacles for him, until there is a kind of contact between them through the creatures of this salty pond, and at last he says, feeling clumsy about it, “We haven’t even introduced ourselves. I’m Henry Staunt.”
“I know,” Edith says. “The composer.”
And it all becomes so much easier.
Sixteen
“—and the gold medal for the outstanding work in extended symphonic form by a student under sixteen years of age goes, as I’m sure everyone has already realized, to Henry Staunt, who—”