How
Small
A
Thought
It
Takes
Then the parallel tenors rush back in. Twelfth and twenty-first centuries alternate, competing with each other. Those two broad streams flow together into a further sea.
That glimpse of open ocean, at six minutes, lasts no more than a few sustained measures. When the splendor passes, it beaches Els again in this place, a visitor from the future come back to intercept his own past. He sits here, years too late, knowing everything. Music has turned out to be the very thing he was taught to scorn. All his fellow composers have scattered on the winds of changing taste. But the young are still here, still in a hurry for transcendence, still ready to trade Now for something a little more durable. .
Through the picture window, the bat hangs motionless in front of a frozen moon. Before Els can decide that he can’t be seeing right, the bat is gone. The sopranos start to swell again,
To
Fill
A
Whole
Life. .
The words turn into open syllables. A moment of uncertainty, a wavering between keys: Does that D want to return to B minor, as in the beginning? Will the road lead back to E-flat minor, or leap free into a wilder place? The path bends again; E-flat in the soprano, followed immediately by a half step lower, and he’s flooded with loss, the sound of something said that can never be taken back.
The dim rooms — these painted tables and ratty sofas, the window-long counter, the sunken mosh pit, the booths with their tawny lamps — fill up with generations, sitting beside Els. He feels the hundreds of years of café debate, the thousands of lives spent arguing over perfection. He hears the musical turf wars that will rage on long after all the debaters are gone. . Those countless twenty-year-old songwriters, dead before he came here, and those eager heirs who won’t arrive for centuries yet: they’re all chattering on to each other, in the trance of these phasing canons, the slowly changing chords of all the adamant, brute-beautiful songs of the young still to come.
Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.
Eleven minutes in — the endless dominant pedal point in the organ, the scraping seconds in the tenors — and the piece breaks through into a clearing. The three sopranos slow so much that their message stretches out almost past hearing:
H
o
w
s
m
a
l
l
a
t
h
o
u
Each change in the phased melody, now falling again, as it did in the beginning, flows through the bobbing tenor line. Figure swaps with ground, and back again. Tenors and sopranos envelop one another. Canon and organum at last merge. The two halves of this braid, across their eight-century gap, weave together so seamlessly it’s clear now how they were shaped from the start solely for this reunion.
The piece spreads outward, its pitches like recombinant germs. The notes condense, incandescent. Shifting harmonies blaze into an old man’s head. Layered parts swell and fall, split and multiply, collide and detonate, filling a life too small to hold them.
At a booth six feet away, a balding student of thirty sits in front of a brushed silver laptop, staring at Els. He’s one of those brilliant Asperger cases who come to town to study political economy and stay forever, working for the rest of their lives as bag boys at the Co-op. He squints through his Lennon glasses, taking Els’s measure. Then he bows his head and taps his keys.
A moment later, he peeks again. A glance at Els, a glance at his browser. Maybe it’s nothing; Els has lost the ability to figure. He rises and drifts across the room, a diagonal feint toward the orders counter. There he comes about, back to his surveillant, and heads for the door. As he reaches it, the interminable quarter hour of proverb ends. Voices that poured in waves out of the café’s speakers fall silent. Els keeps walking, past the creamery station, along the orders counter, through the packed and noisy tables, out into the bracing air.
He trots to the car, head down, feeling eyes on him. He reaches the Fiat and realizes where he is. Two hundred yards to the south is the Old Music Building, where he once lived. In a minute, he’s standing in front of the Beaux Arts temple with bach, beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina carved in the pediment. Palestrina no longer seems so laughable. Haydn now seems the odd man out. Another hundred years, and who knows? The group mind may scoff at that interloper, Bach.
He drifts behind the building to the Quad, that spot where the two long southern diagonals cross. The place where, once, in another life, on an ice-bound January night at the beginning of creation, a young man told him, Half of life’s problems would be solved if only one of us had a vagina.
They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he’d do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.
He stands on the X and stares down the long diagonals at the prospect of a life sentence. He can die in prison a public enemy, a musical Unabomber, reviled and ridiculed for a simple act of curiosity. Or he could try again.
Stray undergrads, their smartphones glowing, drift through the dark. The Asperger political economist in the Lennon glasses has already called in his coordinates. Someone has tracked the Pennsylvania plates and staked out his car. But for a moment, nothing can touch him. He was made for this fugitive life, destined for it four decades ago. Made to return here, da capo, after so long a time away. Made for art, made for memory, made for poetry, made for oblivion.
THE RECEPTION DESK is empty and breakfast not yet out when he comes down before dawn the next morning. He leaves his key card on the empty counter. And he’s fifty miles west on I-72 before he admits to where he’s going.
The only harmless works are sterilized, and the only safe listeners are dead.
His music changed during those years in the woods. He embraced those gestures that had threatened him only a few years before. Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming, right around the corner. Now and then, a piece got heard in New York or abroad. By the end of the globalizing eighties, Els had developed what, in the dim light of a few cryptlike new music venues, looked almost like a reputation.
Stretched out in a rocking chair one evening in the North Conway Public Library, taking a break from reading about medieval heretics, he spotted a baby-fat face sprouting out of the collar of a batik shirt on the cover of an arts magazine on the wall-length rack. The hairline had eroded and a pair of ridiculous blue goggles gave him the look of a cartoon professor. But the face japing at Els from across the room was as familiar as shame.