It’s very intense, Peter. I wish I had time to learn it.
He finds a group of whacked-out New England Conservatory classico-jazzers, who program the piece on an evening at Brown Hall. The audience is the usual hardy few who frequent such premieres, hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce. On the night of the premiere, Maddy begs off. We can’t take a six-year-old to a two-hour avant-garde concert. She’ll melt down.
Why should she be any different than everyone else? Peter asks.
His wife wants to smile, but can’t quite manage. I’m sorry, she says. We’ll listen to the tape? Later?
Sure, he answers. All the time in the world.
Wish me luck, he tells his daughter, on the way out the door.
No! Sara says. No luck without me!
The piece goes over better than Peter hoped. In fact, seated in the audience, he hears the clarinet slip free for a moment of the churn in the theremin and set off on a line that surprises him with its grace. He can hear all the sparkling false relations, the spin of a piano sequence that wants to get out and see the world. Edgy yeses; chance deliverance. And then, that glorious downbeat when the soprano wades in to wash it all away. For a moment, something: Something good. Good free. Good growing. The world at his feet.
The serialists in the audience smirk. The aleatory people are nonplussed. But two or three of the nonaligned are. . welclass="underline" call it moved. A fierce, redheaded ectomorph wrapped in a black knit shawl corners him afterward, her eyes alight.
It’s about isolation, isn’t it? The power of indifference.
She’s a luscious vampire, craving anything with warm blood. Els’s brain issues emergency orders to all provinces: drool, gape, grovel. It boggles him that a woman like this could want anything from any composer, let alone him.
Music isn’t about things, he says. It is things.
She scrunches her face, flinches, and before Els can clarify, she corners the theremin player and asks him for a demo.
Peter comes home with phone numbers and dates for future concerts and even a business card from a conservatory dean, with a dangled half promise of a commission. He shows Maddy. Musicians with business cards. Like little kids with car keys.
Sara jumps, grabbing for the paper trinket. I need that for me!
He toys with his little girl, spider-style, then gives her the card. He doesn’t need it, anyway.
Maddy puts a palm on Peter’s chest, to slow him. He’s flying, it’s true. But he has received more adult attention tonight than he’s gotten since he left school. Shocking, to feel how much he’s missed it. A germ motif blows through his cortex, an old prophecy that he somehow forgot.
Maddy takes the dean’s business card back from her objecting daughter. She studies it, excited. But she doesn’t hum.
You think they might have something for you?
Two beats, and he decodes her. She means: a real job. She makes no open charge. She doesn’t have to. He hasn’t pulled his weight in their little workers’ cooperative since Sara started preschool. Not unless you counted the hours spent staring at the brutal blank page, pushing note heads around on five-lined paper, trying to recover a fugitive language that no one would understand, even if he did discover its grammar. Clear, now: his wife has no reason to count those hours as anything other than an expensive and self-indulgent glass bead game.
The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.
Trees, rolling hills, hours of speckled light, and a cottage stocked with food all confused him into forgetting he was a criminal. On the second morning, he walked at random into the national forest and found himself on a trail along a swollen creek. The trees were still leafing, and the stream cut through sandy outcrops the color of indolence.
Three miles down the trail, the gravity of his situation hit home. He imagined the charges against him. Obstructing a federal investigation. Evading arrest. Cultivating a known pathogen. Indulging in patent insanity. Even as he hiked, investigators pored over their labeled biohazard bags, looking for links to the multiple hospital deaths. Farce, calamity, and government agencies: it would make a great sequel to his one foray into opera.
He sat down on a rotting log gilled with lichen and fungi. All around him, new hardwoods greened out from the carpet of last year’s dun leaves. The creek scouring its rocky bed sounded like things Els once made with computer-doctored tape loops.
A young couple came down the trail, waving a furtive hello. They glanced away, caught in guilty pleasure on this stolen weekday. When their high-tech jackets disappeared into the undergrowth, a great emptiness took hold of Els. He felt as thin, flaked, and shiny as gold leaf on a reclining Buddha.
He stood and stumbled back the way he came. The woods were far from wild. Where deep blends of hemlock, oak, beech, and pine once ran all the way to the seaboard, only a few managed stands of black cherry and maple remained. The public owned the thin layer of topsoil, but the subsurface mineral rights were in private hands. Drilling had started up again — fracking, shale extraction — more ingenious gleaning, for fuels ever harder to reach.
Chopin’s prelude greeted him as he came through the cottage door. The device went mute by the time he found it. Its screen showed three missed calls from Klaudia, no messages. His finger hovered on the callback button. But he couldn’t cope yet with any new developments.
He punched in his daughter’s number. The keys bleated — a retro audio joke — with the old dual-frequency touch tones that had once delighted little Sara. Often in Brookline he’d played phone-pad tunes to make her laugh, until a comic jig he invented rang through to Emergency Services. Perhaps that false alarm, decades old, still sat in some ancient police database. There were composers from as late as the eighteenth century who left behind no record beyond a baptismal entry. Even Beethoven had no birth certificate. But Els’s footprints were everywhere. People three hundred years from now could discover which performance of The Rake’s Progress he’d bought online.
He needed only to hear Sara’s voice. When they’d last talked, he still had his house, innocence, and anonymity. His life’s biggest crisis was choosing music for his dog’s funeral. Since then his brain had become a sustained cluster chord. Two minutes of his fiercely sensible daughter would clear his head.
His finger stopped on Sara’s sixth digit. He killed the device and set it down. From what little Els had read, Patriot legislation had ended the restrictions on search and seizure. If Joint Security Task Force was trawling for his chatter, they’d be listening to his daughter.
Els launched the phone’s browser and searched again. Hits on his name were growing as fast as any virulent culture. The president of Verrata College promised full support for the investigation and called on Peter Els to surrender for questioning. The online site where Els bought his custom DNA claimed he’d given them a college lab procurement number. That was a lie; anyone with a Visa could have bought everything he did.