She has to laugh at him, standing there, overcome, his eyes like outer planets. And that’s how Richard finds them moments later.
Laughing gas? Bonner says. They’re giving away laughing gas somewhere?
HPSCHD runs for almost five hours. Several thousand people wander through. Two months later, men walk on the moon. Four more weeks, and half a million people gather on a farm in upstate New York for a weekend of rain, mud, and music. By then the trio has abandoned Champaign-Urbana — the Elses for Boston, where Maddy gets a job teaching singing in an elite junior high, and Bonner for Manhattan, to squalor and a gauntlet of unpaid positions in experimental theaters.
And on the first day of winter, Els meets his burping, giggling, raging, laughing, squalling daughter, her tiny foot between his fingers an astonishment he can’t take in. This perfect, working creature, self-assembling, self-delighting, the brightest whim that could ever exist, and he’ll never make anything to compare to her for pure wonder.
What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what has become of the women?
Els followed the Voice. He did as She instructed, down to the pointless twenty-minute detour through Clarion. The gadget found its trio of geosynchronous satellite beacons twenty-two thousand miles high, and triangulated from them the one spot on Earth where Els could be. From there, it skimmed through a digitized database of eight million miles of road and took Els to the one place on Earth he wanted to go. Giving in to machine navigation was an infantile luxury. And the Voice came through in the end, dropping him off on the stoop of the Kohlmann summer cottage just before dark.
The abandoned wasp’s nest hung right where Klaudia said. Els extracted the key and let himself into a room reeking of nature and vacation. The lodge was lined in cedar-paneled nostalgia and furnished in cushioned pine from the fifties. The whole house showed signs of hasty evacuation. Football jerseys and high-tech sneakers lay scattered about. Stray lights had been left on, which Els went about turning off before he sat down to collect himself.
He found nuts and cereal in the pantry, and a dozen apples in the refrigerator crisper. He helped himself to a glass of Finger Lakes Chardonnay and some frozen pound cake. The washing machine stood in a utility room off the back of the kitchen. He stripped off his painter pants, waffle shirt, and stale underwear. Then he stood under the shower in the rustic bathroom, naked, sagging, and scalded, waiting for explanation.
Fed and clean, he had no need of anything but sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. He rooted around the possessions of his unknown benefactors, scavenging for diversion. Magazines abounded — old Smithsonians and Outdoors, as well as scattered issues from more specialized offerings. It seemed possible to append the word magazine to any string of words—Not Your Grandfather’s Clock Magazine; Power Balance Holographic Wrist Channeler Magazine—and still come up with a product that needed only the right focus group to find its way into circulation.
Reading wasn’t possible. All Els was good for was music. Shelves in the front room held three dozen jewel boxes — road trip listening, left here in the vacation home alongside battered Parcheesi sets and moldy quiz books. Ripped copies of Ella Fitzgerald’s Verve Songbooks, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine. There was a time when the proliferation of so many musical genres left Els cowering in a corner, holding up the Missa Solemnis as a shield. Now he wanted alarm and angry dream, style and distraction, as much ruthless novelty as the aging youth industry could still deliver.
He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power. The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear.
Many years ago Els had made a vow to run from no art but let every track play through to its end. He looked out the window, past the gravel drive, through the stand of birches, remnants of the vast, vanished northern hardwood forest, listening to this droll Armageddon. The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude — the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Els paused the disc, but the Chopin persisted. Four measures, with a little altered voice-leading at the end, turned back on themselves in an endless, lamenting loop — one of those tuneful fragments that signaled the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. But the sound came from somewhere in the house. He wandered through three different rooms before finding it: Klaudia’s smartphone. The one that had guided him here.
Words hovered on the screen: “Incoming Call, Kohlmann, K.” He pressed the answer icon, and held the world’s portal up to his ear.
You’re all over the news, Kohlmann said, trying for sardonic but landing on scared.
Yes, Els said. I saw the camera trucks this morning.
This morning. It wasn’t possible.
Klaudia said, Google yourself. The clips are up already.
Of course they were. Retired professor of music flees scene of terrorism raid. Verrata College officials express dismay.
What else? Els asked. You sound. .
Your bacteria. You said they were harmless.
Something slurred in his brain. I said the species wasn’t dangerous in ordinary situations.
Storm troopers were assaulting the cabin, from the direction of the kitchen. Els set the phone down and headed toward the invasion. He’d pressed the pause button on the boom box, and the pause had chosen that moment to time out. He looked for eject, and in the onslaught of sound couldn’t find it. He yanked the cord from the wall, then walked back to the bedroom and retrieved the phone.
Back. Sorry.
What the hell was that?
Your grandsons’ music.
Ach. We’re finished, aren’t we?
What about my bacteria? Els asked.
Nineteen people in hospitals across Alabama have been infected with your strain. The CDC says nine people dead.
A long caesura, the sound of what terror would be, when it grew up.
My strain? In Alabama?