Richard closes Els’s fist around the key. One last recital, his eyes say. You can do this. Make it something even this distracted world will hear. It will only hurt for a moment.
Els presses the fob and slips into the driver’s-side door. Panic slams him, but he surfs through it. He pats his pocket; the smartphone is still there. Giddy with fear, he starts to laugh. He rolls down the window. Bonner looms above the door.
If only one of us had a vagina, Els says, half of life’s problems would be solved.
Richard recoils. What a very curious thing to say.
Els backs the Accord out of its slot, points it toward the curving parkway, a stone’s throw behind the assembled police cars. He turns to wave to Richard. But Bonner is already walking, back turned, hunched, hands in pockets, headlong into the drama, ready to direct it, if they’ll let him. Creation’s Rule Number One. Zag when they think you’ll zig.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.
On the shoulder of an old state highway in Barstow, California, Peter Els, terrorist, stops to examine the railing. Looking is pointless. The scribbles on the guardrail that he’s looking for are long gone. Even the railing itself must have been replaced, maybe more than once. God knows how many hundreds of miles of highway rails must run through Greater Barstow. The scribbles exist nowhere except in the music that remembers them. Still, he stops to look. He has never stopped to read a guardrail before.
The Mojave sky is as lustrous as a painted backdrop. Heat ripples off the scrubland that runs in every direction around the crater of the city. A few hours earlier, over lunch — a sack of steaming ground meat picked up at a drive-through off the interstate — he began to tweet. Figuring out the system gave him childish pleasure. He created an account and chose a username—@Terrorchord. He spent a few tweets proving that he was this year’s fugitive. Then he moved from exposition into the development section.
I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged.
I was sure that no one would ever hear a note. This was my piece for an empty hall.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t, really. I’ve always been guilty of thinking too much. .
The year has had no real spring. Much of the country jumps straight from December to June. In Barstow, it’s August already. The freak weather may be nothing to worry about. Not for extremophiles, anyway. Bacteria need worry about almost nothing.
After the burger joint, Els pulled into a gas station run by the company that recently put five million barrels of oil into the Gulf. For the last several miles, Richard’s car had been running on fumes. Els stuck his credit card into the pump and surrendered his location. No alarms sounded. As the gas flowed into the tank, Els imagined that he might be charmed, that he might, in fact, get the four more hours he needed to redeem his whole life.
In a corner of the station’s lot, near the air pump, he sat in the driver’s seat of the Accord and tweeted some more. The phrases rolled out of him, dozens at a pop, no more than 140 characters each.
I was after the kind of music that reminds the brain what it felt like, back when we lived forever.
I wanted a piece that would say what this place would sound like long after we’re gone.
He tweeted like that white-throated sparrow in the arboretum just days ago, reinventing tonality a triad at a time. By midafternoon when he pulled into Barstow and tweeted again, he had almost eighty followers. The messages were spreading by themselves.
Coming to this place would feel like design, if he were a better designer. The Voice brought him here. The name popped out from the smartphone map: Barstow. He’d always wanted to make the pilgrimage. Stumbling on this town was like those few times — the frantic dance in the middle of the Borges Songs, the awful dead-drop in the middle of Brooke’s sonnet, the slow build through the last twenty minutes of The Fowler’s Snare—when the music wrote itself and all Els had to do was take dictation.
The highway is narrow, and the backdrafts of passing cars rock him. Els edges along the shoulder, probing another stretch of rail. On such a spot, eight forsaken Depression hitchhikers scribbled bottle-messages to no one. Eight anonymous pleas, turned into an ethereal, banal, subversive, conservative set of microtonal mini — folk songs, Harry Partch’s signature piece: Barstow. Easy place to land in, hard place to get out of.
It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age 19. 5 feet 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.
His scour of a hundred yards of rail turns up a wasp’s nest, a bumper sticker for a towing service, an obscene rhymed couplet, several pairs of initials, a chiseled tumorous phallus, and a broken heart. Also, many sphinxlike scratchings that might as well have come from another planet. Els climbs back into the Accord. Before turning Richard’s key in the ignition, he sends off another tweet, by the hobo Partch, now an accessory before the fact:
American music has one of its greatest bulwarks in bumdom.
He’d read the words in graduate school, half a century ago, in another backwater town, one where Partch lived and left right before Els arrived on the scene. The words have stayed with him, through everything. Maybe he botches the exact phrase. Mutation happens.
Partch, if anyone, knew that. Burned the first fourteen years of his music in a potbellied stove in New Orleans and started over at twenty-nine, cutting himself off from the mainland forever. A Carnegie grant to visit Yeats in Dublin, where he sold the old poet on a revolutionary setting of Oedipus. A few months later: homeless and broke, thumbing for rides and begging meals across the length of 1930s California—“California! Land of oncoming Los-es and Las-es, Sans and Santas, Virgins, Conceptions, and Angels!” Eight years adrift, sleeping wild or camping in hobo shanties, jumping freights, catching diseases, going hungry, and reinventing music.
Gentlemen: Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for an easy handout.
Tramp Quixote, visionary bum, indigent in a collapsing country. Prophet in the wilderness, sure that only an outsider could find the way through. A man of no compromises. A mean drunk. Gay, for what that was worth, like so many of the century’s best composers. In any case: Did not work and play well with others. And convinced that the salvation of music required cutting an octave into forty-three pitches.
Marie Blackwell. Age nineteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, considered pretty. One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Object: matrimony.
Even to hear his spectral music, Partch had to invent a whole orchestra of outré instruments. Forced by visions into carpentry. Hence the Zymo-Xyl, built of hubcaps and liquor bottles. The diamond marimba, bass marimba, bamboo marimba, mazda marimba, and quadrangularis reversum. Adapted violas and guitars. The harmonic canons, with their sliding bridges, tuned anew for every new piece. The kithara, the gourd tree, the cone gongs, the spoils of war. A whole series of chromelodeons, organs whose keys sliced half-steps into slivers. And of course the cloud chamber bowls, a copy of which sat in Els’s living room and helped alert the federal government to the fact that here was a house worth raiding.
Dear Marie, a very good idea you have there. .