Oh, that would be awful! Especially after swearing to use your powers only for good.
Richard, what am I doing?
You’re leaping, Peter. For the first time in your life. And it’s a thing of beauty.
Bonner sponged the flecks off Els’s collar with a paper towel, then frog-marched him down the courthouse hall alongside the suspects in blue jumpsuits and handcuffs being led off to their own arraignments. Maddy grabbed him outside the courtroom and shook him. We’re good, Peter. Really good! She was radiant throughout the service, and every word the judge pronounced threatened to send her into another giggling bout. Afterward, on the street, Richard serenaded them on a silver kazoo wrapped in pink ribbon. Bach’s Wachet auf: It seemed to Els a very good tune, one that a person might still do all kinds of things with.
And even the least threatening tune will outlast you by generations. There’s pleasure in knowing that, too.
That year is a chance-built symphony. A string of scabrous nightclub burlesques. A psychedelic double album made up of the wildest percussive tracks. Els hears about Tet one afternoon after teaching his ear-training class. Johnson’s bombshell lands not long after.
Bonner directs a mad, high-speed Man and Superman, with incidental music by Els. But his madness is a bagatelle compared to the nightly news: King killed. Rolling riots in every city. The Columbia takeover. The Battle for Paris. Resurrection City on the Washington Mall. Warhol shot. Kennedy killed.
Bonner gets arrested in a campus bar for standing on a table and peeing in a beer mug for Peace. Els and Maddy bail him out.
While yippies trash the stock exchange and the Soviets crush the Prague Spring, Els composes thirty-six variations on “All You Need Is Love,” in the style of everyone from Machaut to Piston. He and Bonner stage a play-in of the “Love Variations” in front of Smith Hall, under the frieze carved with Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina. One hundred performers read through a nonstop tag-team performance.
Something’s happening here. The world egg threatens to crack open. Els’s music cracks open, too, trying to say what’s going on. He and Bonner mount a cabaret in the courtyard of the Illini Union for Turn In Your Draft Card Day. They work up an Eisler-Weill drag show called I’m a Stranger Here Myself.
On New Year’s Eve, Bonner forces the old married couple out on a freezing midnight picnic, deep in the South Farms, under the stars. The trio sit on the iron ground and eat cold lentils, sardines on celery, and frozen Twinkies.
A meal fit for lunatics and saints, Bonner declares. Olympian, he leans back on his elbows. Who knew a guy like us could have such friends?
Steam escapes their mouths, and, huddled together, they toast the vanishing year. Maddy pours the champagne into paper cones. Bonner insists they clink. Bubbly spills from the mushy flutes onto the frozen earth.
To putting the past to bed, Richard toasts.
To waking the future, Els says.
To staying in the Beautiful Now, Maddy adds, although they’re already leaving.
They come across a cardboard box blowing through the snowy fields. They use it as a three-person toboggan, sledding down the only geological feature for two hundred miles that can be called a hill. Bonner tears the box into three pieces, which he distributes.
Hold on to these. We’ll reassemble right here, top of this hill, in fifty years.
Maddy laughs. Synchronize your watches.
Walking home in the cold, toting his scrap of cardboard, pressed between his wife and wild friend, Els hears a piece in his head, music like the kind Schumann reported hearing as he slipped into madness—an instrument of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on Earth. The harmonies are rich and braided, leading to an unprepared Neapolitan sixth, a rediscovery of naïve sequences, and the melody feels so inexorable that he knows it’ll be waiting for him intact when he next sits down to a sheet of virgin staff paper.
But when Peter wakes in the new year, he fails to remember even hearing the piece. By the time he does, a few days later, it’s too late to transcribe. All that’s left is a blurred contour, disembodied music hinting at something magnificent just out of reach.
I always loved best those tunes written for those who listen on other frequencies.
They’re still a trio later that spring, wandering the domed Assembly Hall, that cavernous radioactive mushroom that Cage and Hiller have filled with more happy pandemonium. Seven amplified harpsichords duel with 50 monoaural tape machines and 208 FORTRAN-generated tapes playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, and Schoenberg, all sliced into short genetic chunks then recombined at random. Bonner and the Elses, in their fluorescent overalls — handed out free to the dazed visitors — gawk at a Stonehenge ring of polyethylene screens on which six dozen projectors cast thousands of slides and films. Outside, 48 more enormous screens circle the building’s quarter-mile circumference. They turn the whole colossal structure into a pulsating saucer that has come to Earth for refueling and a little galactic-backwater R & R.
The smell of pot seeps from the crowds camped out in the central arena. People lounge or wander about. It’s music, Els keeps reminding himself. Music that has reached the end of a thousand-year exploration.
Too much, Maddy says. My mind’s blown.
Bonner flips his hands in the air, juggling invisible moons. We could have done this, with a few more bucks.
But the show is beyond Els. Cage, Hiller, and the army of believers who mount HPSCHD have disappeared into liberty. They refuse to impose decisions on any listener. Composition is no longer the goal; all that counts now is awareness, this flickering, specious present, a dive into raw phenomena. And that’s a plunge Els will never be able to make. Or so he figures, at twenty-eight.
Maddy strolls around the flying saucer, laughing. She stops to rag-pick the trash for interesting textiles. Peter follows in his wife’s happy wake. She has become a season ticket holder for the festival of weirdness Els has inflicted on her these last twenty months. He loves her steady refusal to descend to liking or not liking, those sentimental actions that have nothing to do with listening. Her awe at the range of human desire turns Peter himself back into a spectator in his own life. He falls into orbit beside her; Richard is off buying a poster, for a price determined by the I Ching.
Maddy hums to herself, a snippet of Mozart fished from the randomness. Mozart, the man who invented the musical dice game, two short centuries ago.
Peter, she says, looking away, at a slide of the Crab Nebula. He knows what she’ll say before she says it. An oddness has come over her these last few days, a frightened flush, waiting for its moment. What else can it be? Nothing else is big enough for her to keep secret from him for so long.
Peter? Company’s coming.
He stops and listens, hearing, above the din, a small, high voice.
Peter?
You’re sure?
She spreads her palms, shrugs, and smiles.
When?
I don’t know. December? We’ll find out. Peter? Don’t worry. We’re good. We’re good! We can do this. Everybody does.
He jerks, objecting. No, that’s not. . This is incredible. The two of us? Are you kidding?