Students came, learned, and left. Some suffered through their solfeggio exercises, masters of the taciturn eye-roll. But others he changed forever. To the best of his student composers, Els said, Do not invent anything; simply discover it. One or two of them understood him.
The years went by, and he worked as hard and well as he could. He gardened. He learned how to cook. He took up long morning walks. One day, his daughter called him out of the blue. She was passing through Philadelphia for a conference her start-up was attending. Els met her at a noisy chowder house. The diffident girl of twenty who’d spent long, secluded hours on dial-up bulletin boards in multi-user dimensions was having a ball inventing whole new imaginary worlds again. Only this time it was called entrepreneurship.
Five minutes of conversation with this short-haired, soft-suited, velvet-shirted stranger, and he was in love all over again. And weirdly comfortable, as if they’d gone on chatting away in their own language for all those missing years.
So what exactly is data mining? he asked.
Okay, Sara said, wiping the white linen napkin across her twisting lips. Say you wanted to know how many hours a week midwestern urban professionals between the ages of twenty-five and thirty spend listening to crunk.
Wait, her father said. Start from the beginning.
A very good place to start.
She’d ended up much like her mother: solid, flourishing, in love with work. She came back out East four months later, and they went to New York to look at paintings together. Then the calls started. First every Sunday evening, then expanding to two or three times a week. She did enjoy him. But he was her project, really. She seemed to feel some need to look after him, a fix for all those years when he failed to look after her. She sent him a dog for his birthday. She bought him books and sent him discs and concert tickets. She vetted his television viewing and took him with her once to Hamburg. She did everything but say: Let’s make something, Daddy. Something good.
All the while, he worked. He had the esteem of his colleagues, the respect of his neighbors, and the occasional affection of his better students. After some years, it shocked Els to discover that, for the first time in his life, he was almost happy.
I bequeath myself to the dirt.
Near Amarillo, the sun dropped huge and bronze below the horizon. Els kept to the radio. One hundred outbreaks of avian flu throughout Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. Fatal cases in Egypt and Indonesia and Cambodia and Bangladesh and Dakahlia. Infected wild birds were showing up in the abandoned radioactive wasteland zones around Fukoshima. The newsreader couldn’t suppress the thrill in his voice. Something was happening, at last. If not this flu season, then the next.
Els pressed on past the city. The plan was to make it to Phoenix in one more push the next day. Anxiety stained his clothes, and he would have no fresh ones anytime soon. Home and comfort were no more than nostalgic folk songs. He’d badly misjudged the vast, callous vacancy of the West. The featureless Panhandle stretched out in front of him, da capo ad nauseum.
A flyspeck town near the New Mexico border beckoned, and he pulled off. A mile and a half up a dark road he found a mom-and-pop place with a sign whose half-darkened neon letters read like Martian script. A Holiday Inn Express beckoned from across the way, but Els chose the churlish motel without a second thought. Fifteen hours of solo driving: the sensation was not unlike sitting through a fifty-year-old experimental art film five times in a row. His vision swirled, and the asphalt of the parking lot as he baby-stepped across it bobbed like the sea. Only the thought of lying down forever kept him moving.
A single-story elbow of rooms bent around the weed-shot parking lot. The building had seen better times, but the times could never have been too good. A line of windows hid behind heavy curtains, and the roar of retrofitted air conditioners kept up a steady drone. The insects in the air, the plane overhead, and the blood coursing in his ears combined into a spectral masterpiece.
A bouquet of Pine-Sol filled the tiny lobby, with its walls of stucco and knotty pine. Behind the ironing board of a front desk, a sun-beaten old man in chinos and a tee reading Outta My Face preempted the guest before he could say hello.
Cash only, tonight.
The man’s voice was a wondrous, geared machine. Els said, Deal.
The proprietor didn’t even pretend to paperwork. The eleven most hated words in the English language: I’m from the government, and I’m here to collect your receipts. But politics and art made strange bedfellows, and Els was fine with allies wherever he found them.
The room smelled of tobacco and microwave popcorn, but the bed was soft, and Els felt lucky beyond saying. He opened the particleboard closet and stood in front of it, feeling the urge to unpack. The absence of a bag made that difficult. His head buzzed and in his ears, the slap of tires against the seams in the highway continued to beat out a steady andante.
A TV tilted from the wall like an altarpiece. He flipped it on, for tranquilizing. The headline news channel featured a pet care business that was booming in the advent of the Rapture, only weeks away. He turned on the smartphone. The FBI could zero in on the device and raid the room, so long as they let him take a hot shower first. Searching on his name produced too many citations even to skim. It left him vaporous, diffused, and a little exhilarated. He chucked the phone on the bed, stripped, went into the funky, pine-paneled bathroom, and got under the spray.
The pelt of hot water against his skin sizzled like cymbals. The ringing in his ear changed pitch as he clenched his jaw. Toweling dry, he heard the great night music from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra so clearly that he was sure it came through the motel walls. He stood and listened. The piece, its thick brocade of brass, seemed to him uniquely worth saving from the last century’s runaway bonfire. Making such a thing could justify a life. But the piece was a charity commission, and the maker died a miserable pauper’s death a year and a half later, mourned at his funeral by eight people including his wife and son.
Fatigue pulled Els down to the bed. With what strength remained, he set the clock radio for five a.m. The minute he slipped under the coarse, pilled sheets, he heard Chopin’s Vision. Groping on the bedstand to shut it off, he saw his own name on the glowing screen: Els, S.
He fumbled the phone on and mumbled, Sara. Something like his daughter’s voice came back at him.
Daddy. Oh, God, what are you doing?
He thought he might still be sleeping, his head on the pillow. Maddy must have given her the number from off of the caller ID. Technology, family, love: prisoner of them all.
He said, Hey, Bear. You okay?
Daddy, what’s wrong with you? Her voice was strange and hoarse.
Don’t worry. I’m fine.
Where are you? Wait. Don’t say anything.
Your mother told you that I—
Shut up, she said. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
He held the phone in a stunned silence. Data everywhere.
What the hell did you think you were doing? she said. Then: Don’t answer that.
She said nothing more for a very long time. At last she bleated, You haven’t done anything. You’re innocent.