Kohlmann read from another screen: Serratia marcescens. That’s the one, right?
There was nothing to say, and Els said it.
The FBI wants to talk to you.
This. . none of this makes sense. The FBI told the press what bacteria I was culturing?
But he didn’t need reminding: Everybody was the press now. Everyone knew everything, as it happened.
The journalists think I. .? They can’t be that stupid. Were all these patients on IV drips, by any chance?
Google it, Klaudia told him. That’s what the FBI is doing, I’m sure.
Jesus, Els said.
And call me. They can’t trace you to my phone, can they?
About your phone, he said. Chopin?
What can I say? It does something to me. Play that at my funeral, please?
He promised. But he wasn’t sure an audience with chronic focal disorder would sit through it.
A friend says: “I just heard the strangest song ever.” Do you run away or toward?
He sat out back behind the cottage on the edge of a maple grove, his head bowed over the device. In the dark, with that lone beam of white splashed across his face, he read the accounts. Nineteen Alabamans sick and nine dead. Nine people out of a hundred thousand annual American deaths by hospital infection — more than car wrecks and murders combined. The public, drowning in data, might never have registered the story. But he had turned accident into something panicworthy.
All the infected patients had indeed been on a catheter. All six hospitals were in greater Birmingham. All got their IV bags from the same supplier. Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.
Els’s eyes adjusted to the screen, the lone bright spot in the surrounding dark. He searched his name and found student ratings of his teaching, a recent Brussels performance of his forgotten chamber symphony, and old chatter about the 1993 premiere of The Fowler’s Snare. Searches on the Alabama outbreak led to a gigantic methane dome under the thawing tundra that was belching into the atmosphere massive amounts of greenhouse gas that would speed the process that released them.
Reporters speculated about why a retired adjunct professor of music had been manipulating human pathogens in his den. Neighbors attested to his quiet politeness, although one described him as standoffish and another mentioned the atonal sounds emanating from his house at odd hours. The Joint Security Task Force could not comment on ongoing investigations, but they were interested in any information concerning the whereabouts of Peter Els.
Opera buffa had turned seria. He had no choice. He had to return home and explain, if only to keep a jumpy country from going off the rails again. But he’d already explained everything to Coldberg and Mendoza, and still they’d raided him. Now the Alabama infections vindicated them. Threat once again kept the precarious democracy intact. Els would have to be punished, in proportion to the thrill he’d given the collective imagination.
A hundred yards off, through the dense maples, the windows of the neighbors’ cabin threw off an amber glow. The undergrowth on all sides boomed with calls and alarms, an animal Visions Fugitives. His frantic flight caught up with him, and Els fell asleep in the deck chair under the trees. The smart screen dimmed, then timed out, then slipped from his hands. Sometime in the night he woke, and, realizing where he was, blundered into the house to a soft bed. Toward dawn, from a sleep filled with epidemics, he heard the E Minor Prelude pulsing again. But not until the next morning — a brilliant, balmy, and innocent thing, like the first day of creation — did he find the phone again, lying on the grass as if it had fallen out of the sky.
There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.
Even in dried-out memory, those years in Boston are fresh and green. Els and Maddy drive a seventeen-foot U-Haul trailer filled with their combined worldly belongings across Ohio and Pennsylvania to the doorstep of their one-bedroom apartment in the Fens. They port a queen-sized mattress up the stairs on their heads. Els fusses over his gravid wife, making her stop and rest every few steps. She laughs off his anxieties. I’m pregnant, Peter. Not crippled. In fact, the thrill of nesting gives her energy for three.
For Maddy, it’s an easy commute by T to Brookline and New Morning, the private freedom school modeled on Neill’s Summerhill. The starry-eyed school board hired her after she declared in her interview that a rich musical exposure could turn any child into a creator. By the time Labor Day rolls around, she’s showing. Her progressive employers pretend to be thrilled.
While swelling Maddy teaches junior high kids how to barrel through dissonant choruses and mallet their way to freedom on Orff instruments, Els picks up odd jobs. He gives private clarinet lessons. He hires himself out as a music copyist. He writes concert reviews for the Globe, at fifty dollars a pop.
At night, they watch classic thirties Hollywood films on the oldies station, on a tiny black-and-white set with tinfoil attached to the rabbit ears. Maddy quilts and Peter glances through scores while Barrymore tells Trilby, “Ah, you are beautiful, my manufactured love! But it is only Svengali, talking to himself. .”
A week after Halloween, he lands a job beyond his boldest fantasies: gallery guard at Mrs. Gardner’s fake Venetian palazzo, half a mile down the Fenway. He can walk there in minutes. They pay him to stand motionless all day in the Spanish Cloister or the Gothic Room or the Chinese Loggia, guarding paintings and writing music in his head. Days of silent meditation contribute as much to his musical development as all his years in graduate school. For a decade, he has busied himself with intricate, ingenious forms. Now he begins to hear a stream — simple, broad, and adamant — purling beneath his feet.
He lingers for entire afternoons in front of Vermeer’s The Concert, listening to that still trio’s silent harmonies. The bowed head, the wave of the singer’s curved fingers conduct the strains of frozen music for no audience but him, in this distant future. Soon enough, those players, too, will go missing forever.
Richard Bonner writes letters now and then, from his illegal loft in SoHo. A few times he even calls, despite the ruinous expense of long distance. He’s always either euphoric with new projects or ready to press the button that will vaporize humanity. Once, he sends a small commission Els’s way — a request for a two-minute piece to accompany a gallery installation. The job pays nothing, but it’s Els’s first contribution to the downtown scene.
December comes, and with it, a snow that paralyzes Boston. Maddy is huge; she waddles about toting a globe on her outthrust pelvis. When her time comes, their car-owning next-door neighbor is nowhere to be found. Peter must run out in the street and flag down a passing Buick, to hitch a ride to the hospital.
Then infant Sara is there, in all her blotchy astonishment. They huddle in their snowbound cocoon: twin parents bowed over a minuscule wailer, who changes by the hour. Els writes no music for two months; he’s nothing but diapers and basinet and back-patting, getting that living tube to burp. His daughter mewls and cackles, and that’s all the concert he needs. Maddy lies around the apartment languorous, hypnotized, enslaved by this parasite that turns her into a brainless host. They all three do nothing but live. Even yanked awake in the dead of night, Els finds this life finer than any art. These six weeks — the fullest he’ll ever live. But the prelude is over in a few brief bars. Maddy’s back conducting the chorus at New Morning by Washington’s birthday.