A new railing swings into view, and Els hits the brakes. Behind him, a Ford Expedition honks and veers out to avoid slamming him. The vehicle screams past. Els pulls up onto the shoulder and stares at the stretch of pavement across which, in another world, he’s lying smeared.
Then he rises from the dead, pulls out the smartphone, and tweets again. He tweets the formula for his homebrew. He tweets program notes about how the piece was made. One flick, and a new wave of messages heads out into the world’s largest auditorium.
Possible rides: January sixteenth, fifty-eight. January seventeenth, seventy-six. January eighteenth, nineteen. January nineteenth, six. January twentieth, eleven. To hell with it — I’m going to walk!
Els steps from the car and inspects every inch of the guardrail as if it’s the score of the Jupiter. And it almost is, so full of scratches is it, both random and deliberate. He can’t stop looking. People, nature, and chance have scrawled all over the metal bumper. Sleeper cells, covert messages everywhere. Who knew how much is going on, written down into these invisible inches?
Pencil on paint, from 1940: of course his hitchhikers are long gone. Every railing in Barstow postdates them. But every railing is full of their offspring, millions of scribbles from descendant generations. With the sun starting to drop and the traffic picking up, the search feels senseless and urgent, and everything it turns up seethes with life.
Jesus was God in the flesh.
Partch was right about so much. Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn’t want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”
But the man was wrong, Els decides, in thinking that forty-three pitches put you any closer to infinity than twelve.
Els leans back against the dusty hood of Richard’s leased car and pulls out Klaudia Kohlmann’s smartphone. He tweets:
Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found an instrument free of all such bars.
Partch again: “I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it. .” That’s all that I tried to do, as well.
All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.
As he types, somewhere under a viaduct, in the hard rain of memory, other travelers wait for a ride.
Looking for millionaire wife. Good looking, Very handsome, Intelligent, Good bull thrower, Etcetera. You lucky women! All you have to do is find me, you lucky women. Name’s George.
Els tweets:
The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.
He remains like this, leaning on the hood, tweeting, almost comfortable, almost at peace. Every minute he stays out here raises the risk of a state cruiser stopping and picking him up for vagrancy. But he’s charmed now, protected by the god of harebrained schemes.
A text arrives and fills his screen: The class wants to know if all this will be on the final exam. KK.
He smiles and sends off a reply: Believe it. Then another chorus of tweets, and he gets back in the car.
From Barstow he turns north into the Central Valley, up the length of the state where Partch once bummed rides and transcribed the speech of strangers into notebooks filled with hand-drawn staves. He heads north, toward the spot that once made Partch scribble down in ecstasy: In the willowed sands of the American River, within the city, I gaze up at the enthillion stars and bless the giver. And she shall be multiply blessed, for at every approaching dusk I shall thumb my nose at tomorrow. .
At nightfall, he orders huevos rancheros at a diner in a truck stop near Buttonwillow off of I-5. Word of mouth has pushed him over the thousand-follower mark. Readers retweet his messages. A comment posted under a feature on bioterrorism at a prominent news site is the first to announce the fact to a wider public: The biohacker Bach is improvising in public. Confessing to his crime.
All night long, discovery lights up in scattered nodes across the Net. A sound engineer calculates how many DNA base pairs it would take to encode five minutes of symphonic music. Someone uploads five minutes of old VHS footage from a performance of The Fowler’s Snare. A couple who live a mile from Peter Els’s house in Naxkohoman fall violently ill, and detail their symptoms in their blog. A mass email starts to circulate, with links to information on what to do if you suspect you’ve been exposed to Serratia marcescens. “Please send this information to anyone you think might need it.”
A journalist wonders out loud on his Facebook page whether @Terrorchord is in fact Peter Els or just another anonymous fear-artist aiming for a couple of minutes of power. A semi-prominent morals policeman posts an eloquent rant on how music has been taken over by frauds: “Music that can’t be read, played, or listened to: now I’ve heard everything.” The post starts sprouting contrarian comments within ten minutes. Two mathematicians debate how hard it would be to decode the base-four music and play it back. Someone reports that government scientists have already isolated and sequenced the variant strain, which contains a gene for multiple antibiotic resistance. A young woman composer describes having heard the file that Peter Els spliced into the genome — a piece for small ensemble that’s breakneck and free.
By morning in California, the lines are humming. An activist from Maine argues that anyone who has altered a living germ line so recklessly should be put to death. A law student argues that the tweets themselves are a form of terrorism, and that by current practice, the perpetrator can be held in indefinite detention without trial. Writers on an obscure new music zine decide that for the first time in years, someone is singing a whole new song.
Here’s wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you. Why in hell did you come, anyway?
Els sleeps in the Accord, in a slot behind the rest stop north of Lost Hills. He dreams of bumdom, that bulwark of American art. In his dream, ordinary people chatter to each other, millions of massed solos, in pitches and rhythms so rich that no scale or notation can capture them. All night long, the orchestra of long-haul freight whipping up and down the interstate accompanies him.
He wakes and heads north. He can reach his daughter’s place by evening. There is no plan. There’s only that old hobo tune: Make me down a pallet on your floor. When I’m broken and I got nowhere to go.
Missing me one place, search another.
A man sits in his car in a roadside rest area and types into a phone. He writes: I started with a rhythm that said: “Move now. You’ll be holding still for a very long time.” Then he presses post.
He tells about a piece that he wrote, a melody from a time that speech can no longer reach. He types of harmonies spreading through the piece in long, self-replicating chains. The messages go out to satellites and back down to servers that send them all across the face of the planet.
He says what the piece sounds like: Like the porous edge between hope and fear. I tried to make my germ sound like the music I loved at sixteen, discovering a new monument every few hours. I tried to make it sound like a tune my five-year-old daughter once spelled out in colored blocks across the living room floor.