A BITTER NOVEMBER night, the pitch-black edge of campus, and Maddy guides the microbus filled with amplifiers and cables belonging to the band she sings for—a psychedelic quintet called Vertical Smile—across the frozen sheets of street as if she’s piloting a one-seat Skeeter ice boat across the frozen lakes of her Minnesota childhood. All the while she hums, under her breath, the B-side of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”: “Why.”

Oblivious, she chants the tune, as if her id were mumbling a sexed-up rosary. Her humming is what has set this hook so deep in him. Six weeks earlier, Els tacked up a three-by-five card on the notice board at Smith Hall. Looking for clear-voiced high soprano to read through four hard new songs. Must not be afraid of strange. Madolyn Corr was his lone responder. She showed up at the practice room at the arranged time, overly confident of her attractions: five-foot-four, with a pageboy, in a green velour miniskirt. They read through his piece together from the pencil-scrawled score. Peter struggled through the accompaniment and Maddy Corr stopped every few measures to say, I’m not sure the human voice can do that. Soon the score bore so many corrections that reading it was like doing paleontology.

Her sound was witty, almost comical. She had a nice, warm soubrette, but a hint too light and Papagena for his Borges songs. What he wanted was spinto, or even a coloratura. But Els was grateful for any voice at all that could hit the notes. They woodshedded together for two hours, he for his piece and she on the promise of nothing but pizza and beer. When they got to the end of the fourth song, she stood next to the piano bench, happy-frowning, the look that, years later, he’d call her frog face.

Well?

Well, what?

Well, what do you think?

She considered the question for too long.

Pretty eerie.

And that was all she gave him—a kiss-off reply that should have furled his sails for good. He would have sent her away with professional thanks and never seen her again, if not for that promise of pizza and beer. Half an hour later, waiting for their deep-dish mushroom and running out of gossip about the local musical pecking order, she started humming to herself, happy but unaware, her eyes periscoping the crowded room, checking out the men. She looped through a little four-bar phrase, again and again, and the phrase she looped through, without thinking, was from Peter’s third Borges song, the sudden lyrical announcement:

He did not work for posterity,

nor did he work for God,

whose literary preferences were

largely unknown to him.

And Peter, who’d written the songs for forever and for no one, but also to strike remorse in the heart of the woman who’d cut him loose from across the Atlantic four years earlier, now wanted only to put his ear up to the clavicle of this other, warmer woman and hear what there was inside her so worth humming about.

Doing anything later? he asked.

Depends, she answered, her mouth full of melted provolone. How much later?

For two weeks they walked everywhere, under the color-shot trees and out into the harvested fields. The last few deciduous flares of October played against clear eggshell skies, and Els’s adopted town had never looked so beautiful. Maddy Corr told him about her favorite harebrained scheme.

Know what would be a total trip? Take a dozen friends up to my family’s fifty acres in Crow Wing County and farm it. It’s sandy as hell, but you could grow cranberries. There’s a cottage, a barn. The chicken coop could be winterized. Farm by day, make music under the oaks at night!

Els shook his head at the miracle of her. You have a dozen friends?

She laughed, thinking he was joking. How about you? Forbidden fantasies, Mr. Composer?

But Els had none, unless it was to have already written Ligeti’s twenty-part, micropolyphonic Requiem before Ligeti did.

Maddy’s eyes crossed a little when he went on too long about harmonic structure. She had no need to talk about music, only to make it. But in her presence, Els couldn’t help himself. He told her about every sketch lying dormant in his workbooks. She laughed and dared him toward her, fingers fluttering underhand. Bring it on, champ. Let’s see what you got.

She showed him her latest art: a quilt bigger than both of them, pinwheels of azure and ochre. She wrinkled up her nose. Learned how to do this from my maiden aunt when I was twelve. Kind of an old lady hobby, isn’t it?

Something magical to it: rags into riches, scraps into art. Els ran his fingers over the intricate design, its moons and suns and stars. Does it mean something?

Maddy snorted and wrapped the thing around him. It means you don’t have to be cold at night, if you don’t want to. That night they slept under it together, and it turned out she was right. Soon after, she began to steal his shirts and work them into her next, more dazzling design.

Nights with Maddy were a slow build. In a few small steps, she taught Peter the cadence of her desire. They moved on her kapok mattress like a single, eight-limbed thing. All the fragments of Els’s desire came together like that effortless fugato Mozart’s Jupiter had predicted, back in childhood. And for the first time in years, Clara’s decision to leave Els for dead felt luckier than anyone could have guessed.

Without meaning to, he told Maddy Corr about a pan pipe dream all his own. They were lying in bed, site of all their best discussions. I want to write music that will change its listeners.

Change how?

Move them beyond their private tastes. Bring them to something outside themselves. He lifted one arm into the air, the wistful reach of a thwarted lover. Does that sound crazy?

She reached up, too, and drew his skyhook hand back down to her chest. Crazy’s up to you.

I’m not sure what that means.

Those hundred thousand peace protesters, trying to levitate the Pentagon?

Okay, Els said. I get it. Crazy.

No! She crushed his fingers in hers until he winced. They could have done it, if they’d really wanted to. Science is built on stranger things.

He rolled over and draped his arms over the fall of her hip. Keep talking, he told her. I’m listening.

Cage again: “What is the purpose of writing music? . . . A purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”

Four weeks on, Els and this humming woman slalom in the dark, late for the evening’s spectacle, searching for a building they can’t find. They have directions, but the hopeless kind of directions midwesterners give: north, south, east, west. Left and right would be too easy. It’s as if the brain of every farmer out here in the endless Cartesian plan of prairie is magnetized. Maddy is a bubble of tantric bliss behind the wheel, forever a sightseer in her own life. She pilots the microbus like a dogsled, and Els won’t live to see twenty-seven.

Her ear always hears him, in every key. She turns to look, takes his elbow, and smiles. The microbus skids sideways down the street, sending an oncoming car to the curb.

You’re worried about being late? For somebody who consults the I Ching to answer journalists’ questions?

I don’t want to miss anything.

A week ago, at a gathering in the student union, Els heard Cage tell a distraught composer, If you want to order creation around, that’s your problem, not mine. Well: guilty as charged. Creation is much in need of ordering. That’s what Els thought composing meant. But Cage’s creation has other plans, and Els just wants to understand them.

Three months ago, at the performance of Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, Els watched the pianist crawl under the instrument and wallop it with a mallet. Someone in the audience began to scream. The widow of a venerable School of Music professor stormed up onstage and started hurling chairs at the soloist. The police arrived and hauled the widow away as she shouted, Ladies and gentlemen, this is no laughing matter! But everyone around Els in the hall just chuckled and applauded, sure that the antics were all part of the piece in question.

There! Els yelps, and points off into the dark, where clumps of people converge on a dappled brick cow palace wrapped in pools of light. The Stock Pavilion. That afternoon, the building was full of sheep being led through a ring in front of a judges’ reviewing stand. Tonight, it’s the venue for Musicircus, a multimedia extravaganza staged by the master of chance, who has, for the last half a year, been leading this land-grant university to hell twelve ways to Sunday.

Maddy coaxes the microbus into a parking spot. The pavilion throbs when they step out, even from half a block away. They make their way to the crowded doorway, where bursts of thunder and light escape the building every time the doors open. A dazed clump of people already bail out of the building, shaking their heads, palming their ears, and discharging some top-shelf profanity.

Inside, it’s something out of Dante. The cavernous oval swarms with people gone feral under the waterfalls of light. Bands, dancers, and actors perform on platforms throughout the space. Down on the show floor, milling past the livestock judging stands, spectators jostle, jockey, flinch, and wince, grinning, wigging, gaping, shrieking, and freaking at the happy havoc. They drift in a giant clockwise whirlpool, like Mecca hajjis circling the Kaaba, around a tower of rubber tubes and lead pipes in the center of the show floor, on which they take turns banging.

Maddy clutches Peter’s arm. He pulls her close, and together they plunge into the bacchanal. Above them, in the steel trusses, floats a corona of balloons ranging from tiny exclamation points to weather gondolas. An old man presses past them, closer than he needs to, smiling at Maddy and Els as if possessing a great secret. A roar goes up nearby. By the time Els steers them to the cause, the roar has floated farther downstream. A thrilled kelpie races around, trying to herd the wayward humans into something like a flock.

Up on a pipe-fit scaffold, a woman singer in a red velvet gown tries to negotiate a forlorn duet with a dancer on a platform several feet away. Any signals they send each other are swallowed up in the caldera of noise. Nearby, a string quartet saws away at atomized messages for no one. Muffled shouts erupt from a further platform. Els turns to see a scarecrow slashing a silver flute through the air like he’s threatening to kill someone.

Maddy points: high on the wall at the far end of the pavilion, like a tender Big Brother or clowning Chairman Mao, a man’s giant face sweeps from a scowl to a manic laugh and back again. The film loops, and Els stares at the seamless transformation, three, four, five times in a row. Nothing changes, except for the Imp Saint’s litany, playing through Els’s head: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. But Els never makes it to eight, let alone sixteen. Maddy, frisky now, draws him deeper into the maelstrom.

They explore, like a vicar and his wife who’ve stumbled upon the parish’s routine underground orgy. They run across three colleagues from the School of Music, an acquaintance from Cine Club, and two neighbors from Maddy’s rooming house, blitzed out of their minds and giggling. An alto who sings with Maddy in concert choir snags them from behind. They lean in close to hear her. She points to the dancers on platforms above the turning crowd. That’s Claude Kipnis! That’s Carolyn Brown!

Who’re they? Els yells back.

The alto shrugs. Famous people!

Children scream in meteoric arcs across the crowded floor, batting at fallen balloons. In the stands behind the oval livestock gauntlet, a few shell-shocked loners take cover, plugging their ears. Part of Els wants to flee, too. But most of him needs to be here, in the belly of this beast.

Each inhalation of craziness fills Els’s veins with something dark and viscous. If this is music, then he’s lost. If this is composition, then everything he has tried to write is wrong. Musicircus: Cage’s latest way of saying how noise is music by its maiden name. But in this insane din, Els can’t for the life of him remember why that idea held such promise once. This night wants to strip him of every belief, to pull him down into mere sensation, the place of no desire, of pure listening.

But listen to what? To the eve of destruction. To the air raid siren of things to come. To the explosion of Els’s own quaint and laughable ambitions. To a deafening freedom.

Then, drifting on the human current, bumming a match to light his cigarette and gossiping with a spectator, there’s Cage, twenty feet away. Els has been close to him before, but never like this. He tugs Maddy toward the perpetrator, ready for art. But coming in starboard, hard and low, a gray eminence cuts across their bow. A formidable woman who has attended every Germanic chamber concert Els has ever slunk into confronts tonight’s ringleader. She shouts at the startled composer with such stentorian force that she might be yet another circus act, called for by the coin-tossing score.

Mr. Cage. Are you a fraud?

Cage presses his brow, examines his cigarette, and looks off to the strobing lights that bounce off the drifting balloons. His face clears, relieved. No.

He casts his cigarette to the pavilion floor and stubs it out with one toe. Something religious to the gesture. Smiling, he slips through the crowd and back up on a performance platform, where he joins a quintet pouring water into different-sized bowls and tapping them, taking their time cues from an elaborate piano roll. Els stands in front of the platform, watching the Kabuki mimes tap at their liquid-filled bowls. For a moment, in some America deep in his neocortex, he can hear every ringing pitch the mute bowls make.

A face brushes his earlobe. Raw charge ripples down his neck and into his shoulders. Maddy, purring, Had enough?

He swings around to her. Serious? It’s just getting going.

She waves at the surrounding chaos, her lips a boggy smile. She shouts something, but the words die halfway across the defile. He leans in, and she shouts again. I pretty much get the picture, Peter. Don’t you?

The shout, too, is a kind of music. She stands with her head tilted, grinning at the gimmick all around them. The drumlins of her breasts beneath her Elizabethan blouse and the gap at the top of her hip-clinging jeans ought to be all the happening he needs. But there’s something here he can’t leave yet. His hands improvise in fake sign language: he needs to listen a little longer. She shrugs, asks him with a trill of her fingers if he’ll be okay walking home, pulls him to her by the lapels of his ratty bomber jacket, and kisses him. The old man of seventy standing next to them nods in recall.

You do not need to leave your room. Don’t even listen. Simply wait. The world will offer itself to be unmasked. It has no choice.

Time turns to nothing. His ears dilate. The longer Els stands still, the more the music pulls apart. His hearing sharpens, able now to pick out strands buried in the babble. Dixieland trombones. A descending lamento bass played on a fretless Fender. A psychedelic reworking of “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane,” against the ceaseless banging on the lead pipe sculpture. Puccini mocks the furious electronic permutations of a piece by Matthew Mattison, whose old épater la bourgeoisie sounds housebroken in this surge of crazed elation. It’s Ives and his overlapping marching bands all over again.

Hours pass. Midnight, but the crowd shows no signs of thinning. Something catches his eye, high up in the flanking stands: a man seated by himself, conducting. He cues the crowd with precise waves of his arms, the way young Peter once conducted his father’s vinyl Toscaninis. Els knows the man, though they’ve never met. Richard Bonner, doctoral candidate in theater arts, three years Els’s senior. Famous for directing last season’s deranged Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in an old folks’ home, and for coming to a peace rally on the Quad dressed as a sepoy from the Bengal Native Infantry, circa 1850.

The invisible baton dips. The conductor’s fingers curl, demanding a crescendo. And on cue, the crowd delivers. Els watches this show above the show, until the lone impresario holding this spectacle together feels himself being spied on and turns to face his observer. Bonner’s hands point like two cap pistols at Els and click, like some Rat Pack singer playing the Vegas Sands. Then he waves at Els to come join him up in the stands for the aerial play-by-play.

As Els draws near, Richard Bonner leaps to his feet and grabs his hand. Peter Els. As I live and breathe! What do you think? Should we all rush out and kill ourselves?

Els confines himself to what he hopes is a fuzzy grin. The impresario pats the riser beside him and sits back down. Els takes the designated place. They sit and watch, up in the grandstands above the end of the world. Bonner’s hands can’t help scooping and directing. Now and then he issues a burst of color commentary.

Above the noise of the Happening, Els can make out only a quarter of what the man says. Under the paving stones, the beach! Meet the fucking Jetsons, man! You know who supplied those weather balloons? Chanute Air Force Base. You know what else Chanute is supplying to the jungles on the other side of the world? No, of course you don’t. You’re a masterpiece guy, aren’t you? Gimme that old-time religion. People getting fragged in your living room, and you’re still trying to sweet-talk beauty into a quickie.

All the while, Richard Bonner grazes on sweets he has squirreled away in half a dozen pockets. Smashed-up oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper. Good & Plenty out of the purple-pink box. These he shakes like Choo Choo Charlie and offers to Els, who’s surprised to find himself ravenous. They sit chomping candy and watching the revels, like they’ve known each other since the Pleistocene.

Bonner sighs big, the contentment of someone who has come home at last. Say hello to the permanent future. You gotta love this shit.

Do I? Els asks.

Come on, bubala. It’s art.

Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.

Do let art know that, huh? For its own good.

The party’s dying and Els hears himself turning earnest. Still, he wades in. It’s like he and this guy have been having this fight all their lives.

People can’t stand too much anarchy. They need pattern. Repetition. Meaningful design.

People? People will do whatever the times tell them to. I mean, look at you, man!

Els does: long-sleeve paisley shirt, green bomber jacket, and brown corduroy bell-bottoms. Nothing unusual. Bonner is all black denim and leather, what Els would call a greaser.

You can’t make people like psychosis, Els insists.

Oh, please! Bonner points. I saw you down there digging it. It’s after midnight and you’re still here.

You can’t even call it a piece. It’s a dead end. A one-off novelty.

Bonner’s great right eyebrow shoots up, a cartoon arch. Man. Novelty’s our only hope. Surplus leisure time is the single greatest challenge to the industrial state. Right behind property-sharing Asians in black silk pajamas, of course.

This thing will be finished after tonight. Over and done.

Chunks of Good & Plenty fly from Bonner’s mouth. You jest! They’re gonna revive this every year, like Oklahoma or Carousel. They’ll be mounting nostalgic revivals of it in posh London museums in half a century.

Calm falls over Els. He and this strange man, deep in a new country, the future beyond figuring. What is music, that he needs to bring it to heel? The Stock Pavilion, this backwater town, the whole experimental nation, have all gone stark, raving mod. But this lavish anarchy won’t hurt him. He can survive, even steal from it, and fashion a new song he can’t yet make out.

Battered by cacophony, he grows huge. The thousand noisy tourists turn into a single organism, and then a single cell, passing millions of chemical signals a minute between its organelles. Plans blind us to the possible. Life will never end. The smallest sound, even silence, has more in it than the brain can ever grasp. Work for forever; work for no one.

Bonner’s words yank Els from his trance. The best part of a piece like this? It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. The whole planet could call this thing a con job. And the man would still be free.

They get thrown out of the Stock Pavilion with the rest of the stragglers around two a.m., when the organizers of Musicircus start striking the set so that the place will be empty again by eight. That’s when the cows will be led back onto the showroom floor and the next generation of agricultural scientists—the future’s real masters—can go on learning how to keep a ravenous nation in beef patties.

Bonner and Els, cast out into the midwestern midwinter, their ears ringing like mallet-struck glass bowls, make their way back across campus in the swirls of bitter wind. Deep in words, they weave and reel like drunks. They pause on a lamp-lit street corner, Bonner making elaborate points, jabbing Els in the chest for emphasis. Els tells Bonner about his new compositional hopes, with a detail he hasn’t yet tried on Maddy. He wants to use regions of cycling pitch groups to create forward motion without resorting to the clichés of standard harmonic expectation, but without falling into serialism’s dead formality.

Listen to you, Maestro. You’re a damn centrist, is what you are. Admit it. And fasten your seat belt, baby. Both sides are going to beat your ass black and blue.

Els tells Richard Bonner about Maddy, his bold Sinbad soprano in the tiny idealist’s body. He mentions the Borges songs, which he and Maddy are preparing for a recital in the new year. Bonner perks up.

I’ll choreograph. The words issue from Bonner’s mouth in arctic cumulus puffs.

It’s a song cycle, Els says. She just . . . sings.

You need a choreographer. Send me the score on Monday.

Els feels hung over, having drunk nothing but mayhem all night. He takes leave of Bonner outside Maddy’s rooming house. They shake hands, a grip that Bonner turns into one of those thumb-clasping peace handshakes. Say yes to how things are.

You’re a damn alien, aren’t you? Els tells the director. Outer space. Admit it.

Bonner does. With gusto. And hugs his newfound associate good night.

Els climbs the staircase of Maddy’s college commune, skirting a cairn of cat turd left in the center of the first-floor landing. She’s asleep under her most beautiful quilt, an array of suns and planets. He wakes her up, high on the now-audible future.

You, the sleepy soubrette says. She presses her hair into the dip of his sternum. What time is it?

Time for every freedom the miracle year offers. Maddy is logy at first, but game, won over by his need, so fresh and fierce, here, a few hours before dawn. She falls asleep again the minute they’re over the finish line. He lies, arms around her, frantic with hope and eager for a future that fills with astonishing new things.

Saturday morning is on him, from one measure to the next. When light pours in through Maddy’s hand-made curtains, he rises and dresses and heads across the Quad to campus town, where he forages for breakfast. Coffee, donuts, two oranges, and a Daily Illini. The proof of what already feels like a brief mass hallucination splashes across page one: “Musicircus Rocks Stock Pavilion.” Below it, a smaller headline proclaims, “Johnson Demands Honorable Peace.”

He brings his breakfast treasures home to a woman just now stirring. She opens her eyes on him as he hovers over her student bed, breaks into a grin, and throws her arms around his neck. An old folk song crosses his mind, one that will take him thirty more years to turn into variations: What wondrous love is this, oh my soul?

Partch: “I went south toward any god who softly whistled . . . the one spot where I would ‘choose to abide’ was already far behind.”

He sat beside Klaudia on the bench in Shade Arbors’ front oval. Soon-to-be-dead people gardened in nearby plots, and clouds of pollinators grazed the air like it would be everywhere forever spring. Els’s erstwhile therapist and late-life fling faced him and grimaced. Have you been handling farm animals?

I’m sorry. My workout clothes.

Sweating like a pig. Something’s the matter.

He rubbed his face. Seems I’m in a little trouble.

She looked at him slant. What trouble could such a man get in? Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

He told her of his morning. The facts came out of his mouth, as implausible as any sounds he’d ever made.

She shook her head. They raided your house?

A squad in hazmat suits, yellow police tape circling his lawn: all a bizarre invention. The agents had been after someone else. Someone dangerous.

The police raided your house, and you came to teach your class.

You were all waiting. Nowhere else to go.

I don’t understand. Laboratory equipment? Some kind of fancy chemistry set?

He wanted to tell her: there were, in a single cell, astonishing synchronized sequences, plays of notes that made the Mass in B Minor sound like a jump-rope jingle.

What on earth were you doing?

He’d been trying to take a strand of DNA, five thousand base pairs long, ordered to spec from an online site, and splice it into a bacterial plasmid.

Learning about life, he said.

Klaudia stared, as if the sweet nonagenarian needle-pointer across the hall from her had pulled out from under the bed a box of merit badges from the Schwesternschaften der Hitler-Jugend.

Why do this, Peter? She’d asked the question often, back when she was still pretending to be his therapist.

Why write music that no one wants to hear? It kept me out of trouble.

Don’t be coy. What were you doing?

As far as Els knew, the nonsense string would live alongside the bacterium’s historical repertoire, silently doing nothing. Like the best conceptual art, it would sit ignored by the millions of trades going on in the marketplace all around it. With luck, during cell division, the imposter message would replicate for a few generations, before life got wise and shed the free rider. Or maybe it would be picked up, inspired randomness, and ride forever.

Nothing, Els said. Call it composing. Proof of concept.

What concept?

It didn’t seem to matter now.

Are you a terrorist?

His head jerked back. Klaudia appraised him. Well? Are you?

He looked away. Oh, probably.

Who taught you how to modify cells?

I just follow the recipes.

How did you learn enough to—

I audited a class. I read four textbooks. Watched fifty hours of instructional clips. It’s all pretty straightforward. No one seems to realize how easy.

From a lifetime away, he heard himself tell a government agent: Easier than learning Arabic.

How long have you been . . .?

He dipped his head. I started two years ago. I wasn’t . . . doing anything else. I came across an article about the DIY biology movement. I couldn’t believe that amateurs were altering genomes in their garages.

I can’t believe people breed poisonous snakes in their basements. But I feel no compulsion to join them.

He couldn’t tell her: He’d missed his calling. Science should have been the career, music just a hobby. He’d lived through the birth of biotech, that whole new art. He might have lived a useful life, contributed to the age’s real creative venture. Genomics was right now learning how to read scores of indescribable beauty. Els just wanted to hear, before the light in his tent went out.

Kohlmann gazed at him as she had years ago, when he was paying her to dismiss his nameless anxieties. Are you crazy?

The thought has crossed my mind.

You didn’t think the authorities would be a little jumpy, so near to Jihad Jane’s base camp?

I wasn’t thinking jihad, at the time.

Kohlmann groaned and palmed her eye sockets. Peter—couldn’t you have taken up bridge, like the rest of us? Continuing ed courses?

A tremor in her dowel forearm, and Els realized: she had Parkinson’s. He’d seen her weekly for eighteen months and had never noticed. They’d spoken about nothing all that while aside from The Rite and Pierrot.

I’m going to have a cigarette now, Kohlmann said. I’m fifteen minutes overdue.

You’re smoking? Since when did you start smoking?

Don’t nag. I quit for twenty years, by promising myself I could start again at seventy-five.

Kohlmann lit a cigarette and took an enormous drag. They sat silent, combed by a breeze. In the sky above, a contrail spread into frayed yarn. She let out the smoke, sighing.

They raided your house and missed you. Are they total fuckups?

Any other day of the week, they’d have had me. But on Mondays I’m always out before dawn.

Didn’t they think . . .? She read some faint inscription off her fingernails. You’re going to make things a lot worse by running.

The word shocked him. He wasn’t running. He was sitting in a gated retirement community, waiting until it was safe to go home and take a shower.

The task force people said they weren’t charging me with anything.

You think there’s no warrant for you now?

No one has served one yet.

He had two choices: turn himself in wherever suspected bioterrorists were supposed to turn themselves in and disappear into the wasteland of legal detention, or make himself scarce for a few days while the FBI discovered that he was doing nothing that thousands of other garage genetic engineers around the country weren’t doing. By Friday, the fire drill would be over.

He told Klaudia as much.

You might as well sign a confession. They’ll ruin what’s left of your life, just to make a lesson of you.

I haven’t broken any laws. They’re not going to waste their time on sunset hobbyists. They have real terrorist networks to go after.

Klaudia turned her cigarette around and peered into the burning end. Her face wrinkled and she shook her head.

What? he demanded.

Her hand traced the air, pointing at threats on the horizon. Excuse me, but a lot has happened in this country while you’ve been away.

He looked off toward the garden plots, where a doddering field gang prepared the beds for tomatoes and squash. It seemed a substantial leap of faith, to believe you’d still be there for the harvest.

Kohlmann waved the glowing cigarette at him like a laser pointer. He remembered why they weren’t a couple.

Everyone’s an enemy now. The Swiss detained Boulez for something he said in the sixties about blowing up opera houses. John Adams told the BBC that his name is on a list. The authorities harass him every time he flies.

You’re joking. Why?

Because of Klinghoffer.

Els had to laugh: the name John Adams, on a sedition list. Ironies turned on ironies, like the moons in a hand-cranked toy solar system. Once, he’d sat on a panel at Columbia, a fatuous firebrand of thirty-seven, claiming that composers had a moral obligation to be subversive. The best music, he pronounced, was always a threat. He winced now at the manifesto. But still, his skin prickled at the news that a composer had made the government watch list.

Adams, Els said. Fabulous music. A handful of transcendent works. He’ll live.

Klaudia stopped making love to her cigarette’s last millimeter. Live?

Her voice was thick with sardonic notes. Music with intricate harmonies, complex rhythms? You might as well write a medical thriller in Mayan glyphs.

She waved her hand over him, the Pope rescinding a blessing, and launched into an account of a terrorism arrest in Albany—a missile sale where all the missiles belonged to the FBI and all the terrorists were bribed into purchasing them. Els didn’t hear. He was savoring the idea that art—an Adams masterpiece—could still be dangerous. It gave him unearned cachet, being dogged by the same Homeland Security hounding Adams. At that moment, someone was combing through the archives for data about Peter Els, scanning his scores to see if he’d ever written any music that might alarm the Joint Security Forces.

Then he remembered. He had written such a thing: his disastrous historical drama, The Fowler’s Snare.

I think I should make myself scarce, he said. A couple of days. Give them some time to sort my laundry.

Her look iced him. Els rubbed his nose and tried again.

It’s just . . . I’ve got this thing about handcuffs.

Kohlmann stubbed out her cigarette on her shoe sole and slipped the butt into her back pocket. She fished in her striped Incan jerky bag and removed the smartphone.

I suppose this makes me an accomplice after the fact. She handed him the device, waving it away. There’s a map thingie in there. Knows where you are. Let me give you an address.

He took the device and played. He stroked and pinched the screen, typing with his thumbs the way Fidelio used to sing. He pulled up the mapping app. The former music box was now a compass needle floating above the site of Shade Arbors, Naxkohoman, Pennsylvania. She dictated an address, which he keyed in. A thin green line materialized, running from the needle off the screen.

Klaudia Kohlmann smacked her forehead with the butt of her hand. Shit. You’ll need the charger.

She rose and hobbled toward the facility. At the automatic glass door, she wheeled around. Don’t even think about moving.

More Partch: “I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it . . .” That’s all that I tried to do, as well.

Els cradled the four-inch screen. Driving instructions unfurled alongside the postage-stamp map, too small for seventy-year-old eyes to read. He looked up, toward the garden plots. The air droned like the tinnitus that had plagued him in his sixties and made him want to mercy-kill himself. One low trill split into two, a minor second. The interval turned metallic. A moment more, and the pitches collapsed back into unison.

The ringing resumed, a Lilliputian air raid. The new chord bent into more grating intervals—a flat third, widening to almost a tritone—a glacial creation like Xenakis or Lucier, one of those cracked Jeremiahs howling in the wilderness, looking for a way beyond. The sky-wide trill filled the air with sonic pollen, like the engines of a fleet of interstellar spaceships each the size of a vanilla wafer. It filled the air at every distance, too sweet for locusts or cicadas. Bats didn’t shriek in broad daylight, and birds didn’t sing in chorus. Something abundant and invisible was playing with harmony, and Els turned student again.

A quartet of Shade residents came through the sliding glass, William Bock among them. Seeing his teacher, the ceramic engineer stopped to listen. Holy crap! What’s that?

The guessing began, but no theory held up. In the distance, children with pennywhistles, wind clacking the branches, the hiss of pole-mounted power transformers, a murmuration of starlings, rooftop ventilation units, a muffled marching band drilling on a school football field miles away.

That’s how Lisa Keane, dressed for gardening, found them, a geriatric flash mob standing on the front walk, looking skyward at nothing.

Frogs, she told them. Tree frogs. Singing to each other.

Amphibians improvising, toying with fantastic dissonant choruses: it seemed no less outrageous to Els than his own life.

I can’t tell you what species, Keane said. Two dozen dialects, in these parts.

Els asked, What are they saying?

Oh: The usual. It’s cool and moist. We’re alive. Come here. What else is there to sing about?

This was the woman whom music didn’t move. Els closed his eyes, transcribing airborne harmonies from a time when sending a message over distance was life’s best feat. Listen to this: listen to this.

How long have they been going?

Oh, I don’t know. A hundred million years?

No. I mean . . . how long, this year?

The ex-Benedictine calculated. Off and on every morning for the last month.

Bock said, Get out of town!

In another minute, the miracle wore thin and the group wandered off to the shuttle bus. Soon only Keane, Els, and a bent man who moved like a broken-winged eagle were left clinging to the harsh serenade.

At last Kohlmann returned, dangling a power adapter. Oh, geez. What now?

Els pointed treeward at the strobing sound. Kohlmann scowled.

Ach—nature, again? The whole thing is out of control.

Tree frogs, Keane said.

It surprised Els: the ex-nun had a crush on the transactional analyst.

Okay, Kohlmann conceded. Tree frogs. And we need to know this . . . why?

Lisa Keane grazed Kohlmann’s forearm and shot her a crumpled smile. Amphibia would not trouble anyone much longer. She waved goodbye and headed down the walk toward her square of cultivated earth.

Klaudia handed Els the adapter. You figure it out. Just do what the Voice tells you, even if you think she’s wrong. Her ways are mysterious, but the Voice has a higher plan for you.

Els said, Can you tell me where I’m going?

My son’s cabin, in the Alleghenies. He and his swarm go in for that kind of thing. Grazing in the poisonous plants. Picking diseased ticks out of each other’s scalps. Got it from his father.

I can’t camp in your son’s house.

They love having other crazies use the place. The four of them are cutting their way through Indonesia with machetes at the moment. You should see my grandchildren. It’s all the bovine growth hormone.

You don’t want the federal government . . .

Kohlmann clucked her tongue and wagged her finger like a tiny wiper. Phhh. The key is stuck in an abandoned wasp’s nest in the rafter above the back door. I think there’s a telephone hiding in that thing, somewhere. If you get in trouble, punch the little phone button and tap “Me.”

I can’t take your phone.

I’ve got two more.

But your mail. Your music. Your Web.

I’ve been trying to get off the thing for five months. You’re helping me manage my addiction. She sat up on the bench, pretending to rejuvenation. Hey! Listen. You hear that? Little reptiles, singing!

Els stared down at the device in his lap. Why are you doing this for me? I mean, considering . . .

Shut up and use it. I’ve got unlimited everything. None of this minutes shit.

I’ll get it back to you. This weekend.

She waved him off. Fine. And when you get to the cabin? Do me the favor and shower.

He stood and stepped toward the parking lot, now far away. He glanced back at Kohlmann. Her right hand visored her eyes.

Thank you? she asked.

He didn’t understand the question. For what?

She hooked a thumb back toward the entrance.

For today. I’ve listened to that thing a dozen times and never heard it until this morning.

My cultures can’t be called back now. They’re off and doubling, like the brooms of the sorceror’s apprentice.

Richard Bonner took Els’s four art settings of Borges texts and turned them into madcap theater. He made Maddy and the ensemble—horn, oboe, cello, piano, and percussion—start all over again. At first Els tried to manage the damage. He stood at his new friend’s elbow during rehearsals, pointing out what might not be realistic. But realism was Bonner’s punching dummy. Let’s try this, he’d say every few minutes, and if Els or Maddy or any of the players objected, the giant Texan son of an abusive evangelist shot back, A little experiment is going to kill you?

Richard paid Maddy strange court, wooing her for a larger plan. Els didn’t get it; he expected his wholesome, quilting girlfriend to shrink from the man’s mania. But Maddy lapped up Bonner’s every attention. He brought her jewels—rococo things that no sane person would let touch their body: a varnished gecko skull on a brass stick pin. A clasp made from a cicada corpse. Guileless Maddy wore them with gusto.

Look at you! Richard said. You look like a vestal virgin in heat.

But she held her own against him. Once, when he was trying to get her to walk like a robot, Maddy grabbed Richard by the chamois shirt, twisted the cloth in her fist, and asked, You need this? I could make something interesting with it.

Richard doled out props at every rehearsal: gas masks for the players to wear during the third song. Malay shadow puppets to wave in the air. Kalimbas, which he got Els to write into the percussionist’s part. Els prayed that the Salvation Army would run out of treasures before the players ran out of patience.

Long after the performers headed off to Murphy’s each night, Bonner insisted that he and Els huddle up and keep tinkering. He had other obligations—thesis, theater performances, maybe even a personal life, though Els saw no hint of one. And yet, for this one volunteer project—someone else’s graduate recital—he had endless energy. Els wondered if he might be addicted to pep pills. But Richard had no need of amphetamines. He ran on sufficient built-in demons—hellfire father, suicide mother, a younger sister sealed up in cortical seizures—that no amount of labor would ever exorcise.

Bonner’s plans for the Borges Songs called for costumes, a bank of sixteen-millimeter projectors, and dance. He alone saw how all the moving parts would come together. Richard mapped out the steps he wanted from Maddy—the spastic thrusts, flicks, and slashes. He demonstrated, and his clumsiness came so close to unfettered happiness that Els had to look away.

Maddy froze up at the choreographer’s weirder requests. I can’t do that.

You can. It gets easier.

I’ll look like a fool.

You look like a force of nature. You’ll see.

Els sat in the empty theater, watching his songs turn as strange as death. Maddy thrust out her arms and canted her shoulders, a holy clown. Els wanted to protect the gawky, ambushed soprano from this fate she didn’t sign on for. But she needed no protection. The game was already lost, and she meant to face doom bravely.

To Bonner, Madolyn Corr’s every inept plié was found art. The man couldn’t stop choreographing. He stood in front of the flinching quintet, left hand clasping his right elbow, two fingers pressed to his hairline, smirking as if all history were one long shaggy dog joke whose punch line he was now permitted to deliver. He’d scan the score, regard the palette of possible victims, and swoop.

The percussionist dug Bonner’s hijinks; the pianist just laughed. The other three threatened a walkout. Bonner faced them down.

You gonna sit there with a broom up your sphincter, afraid to tap your feet? You’ve all forgotten where music comes from. Why do you think they’re called movements?

And, howling all the way, the musicians turned back into dancers.

The piece was one of those commercial flights to Paris that found itself heading down to Havana. But by December, Els’s embarrassment at the hijacking turned into excitement. He expanded the score where Bonner’s shambolic theater called for more. The academic piece began to breathe and bleed. The pair of them—pushing and prodding and trumping one another—lifted the notes into a new place.

Fights: Yes. Fits of temper and pique. Too many stressful hours together for anything less. But Richard turned even war into creative charades.

The collaborators were crossing the dark Quad one icy night, wasted by hours of rehearsing, but carried along by the strangeness coming alive under their care. Richard stopped on the long diagonal, his hands conducting the air. How do you like seeing your cold little fish swimming in the great big ocean?

Els drew up next to him. How do you like seeing your random thrashing get some form?

The choreographer craned toward the gibbous moon. Maestro. We work pretty well together, don’t you think? It seems to me that half of life’s problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

Els recoiled. His boots slid on the packed snow, and he would have fallen if Bonner hadn’t grabbed his elbow. Bonner smacked Els in the back of the skull and cackled.

Oh, fuck off! Don’t look at me like that, man. You got a problem with something?

Richard snapped his finger and waved the parade onward. After a hundred-yard silence that he seemed to feast on, he grabbed Els again. Maestro, listen. I’m happy, for you, that she has one. And a marvelous one, I have no doubt.

Then he was all business again—Borges and Brecht and new plans for getting infinity up onto that cramped little stage.

There’s joy in a minor key, a deep pleasure to be had from hearing the darkest tune and discovering you’re equal to it.

The performance was set for late January, the day before Peter Els’s twenty-seventh birthday. Bonner’s notoriety was good for business. Maddy’s Vertical Smile groupies turned out to hear the band’s lead singer. Peter’s composer friends showed up, to gauge the competition. Mattison was there, near the front of the hall, waiting to be unsatisfied. Word had gotten around that the patients were running the asylum. It made for a decent house.

As the room filled, Bonner staked out a seat halfway down the right aisle. When the players came onstage to polite applause, Richard retreated to where Els sat, in the back of the hall. The horn started its stutter-step stall, a figure picked up by the cello, then the oboe. As the three instruments played their patient delaying game, Madolyn crept down the right aisle in a gray tunic—Cleopatra with a gecko-skull brooch and a cicada in her hair. She edged toward the stage, stopped, cringed and recoiled, then retreated to the chair Bonner had vacated. The audience was baffled, but the band played on.

Ratchet and wood block prodded the delaying motif, which cycled through dissonant parallel intervals in the cello, horn, and oboe. Maddy rose from her seat, lurched toward the stage, hesitated, lost her nerve again, and sat back down. The audience tittered, as nervous as they should have been.

The piano blasted through the stuttering material and broke it loose. All five instruments fell into a flowing stream. Maddy bolted from her seat and jerked her unwilling body up the stairs and out to center stage, where, shocked by a sudden rush of will, she sang:

The truth is,

truth is,

truth is . . .

The truth is that we live out our lives

putting off all that can be put off . . .

On a downbeat, the pitch group changed to Hypophrygian, an old church mode. The instruments circled in tight stretti of dense materials. Then the projectors fired up—twin beams from opposite sides of the hall, coating the singer in colors. Near the bottom of her register, Maddy sang a legato line that twisted like a tunnel in an ancient tomb:

Perhaps we all know deep down . . . that we are immortal.

At the word immortal, the lines sailed up into a series of ringing forte chords in the piano and a frenzy of handbells.

The three melodic instruments reached a blistering peak of arpeggios, then froze. The projectors blacked out. The sound decayed in the dampening hall. Awkward Maddy beckoned out over the audience’s heads. Her grasping hands and desperate glances made half the room turn and look. Then, over the pianissimo horn and oboe, she wove through the four pitches of a diminished seventh:

And that sooner . . .

Sooner or later . . .

Sooner, or sooner or later . . .

Later . . . or later . . . later . . .

The projectors blazed again, along with a choir of antiphonal taped voices. Images pelted the hall’s walls in a time-lapse cavalcade that ran from Edison’s electrocuted elephant to Edward White tethered to his Gemini capsule by a twenty-five-foot umbilical above the blue Earth. The pianist placed his forearms across the keyboard and undulated. Horn, oboe, and cello built a corona of minor seconds while the percussionist rolled sponge mallets on a suspended china cymbal. On a fixed pitch in the middle of her range, rising three steps at the end of the line, Maddy, motionless, intoned:

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

Who was in the audience that night? Students of cultural anthropology in tie-dyed kurtas and beards like shoe brushes. A doctor of philology about to embark on a career selling discount furniture off of flatbed trucks. A long-haired, sloe-eyed woman with the “Desiderata” on her bathroom wall, who woke up nightly, convinced she’d burn for what she’d done. Retired social scientists certain that consumer democracy had ten more years, tops. An agitator with a mind like lighter fluid who ended up owning a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade. A scholar of German idealism who believed that the universe was coming to know itself. An atmospheric scientist wondering if the planet might be about to slow-cook to death. An ethnomusicologist who’d spend the next forty years proving that music evaded every definition. In all, a hundred people whose offspring would someday know all things and become immortal.

The first song ended; the audience coughed and shifted. Giggles rippled through the seats near Els. The woman to his left leaned toward her companion and pantomimed the winding of a crank. Els turned to Richard. Bonner’s face shone. He cackled like a melodrama villain and rubbed his hands, keen for the feast of abuse that only art can bring. Three songs left, and hot, tourniquet pains were shooting down Els’s left arm at ten-second intervals.

The second song consisted of just two ideas: a dotted trochee pulse, like a lopsided metronome, overlaying itself at different intervals, and a cycle of suspensions forever falling into other suspensions and failing to resolve. Maddy flexed and squared her shoulders, leaning forward and reaching out while being drawn back, swaying in place, trapped in what struck her as someone else’s body.

Time is a river which carries me along,

she sang, on a tone row that flowed by like chant. Then the long phrase’s lyric answer:

But I am the river.

Each time the players rested, they passed various colored globes in slow arcs over their heads. Images painted them—stretched and compressed clocks, the throbbing sine wave of an oscilloscope, atomic nuclei, spinning galaxies. The tone row returned, transposed and inverted.

Time is a tiger that devours me.

Then the answering cantilena:

But I am the tiger.

At the third couplet, the images spilled over the musicians and onto the back wall: rebels in Biafra, riots in Detroit, bombers in Da Nang, and the young Che, who’d died only a few months before. Maddy, stilling her trembling limbs, sang like no one would ever hear.

Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.

The cycle of suspensions faded. The ghostly films, too, froze on a frame of a sinking supertanker, before going dark. The audience coughed and shifted again and checked their watches. Els wanted to slink off and be dead somewhere for a very long time.

Then came the scherzo romp. Maddy sang the words about working for neither posterity nor God, whose tastes in art were largely unknown. The players passed around an eight-note figure, tricked up with every species of counterpoint Els could manage. The antics climaxed with singer and players all threatening to leave the stage in a combined hissy fit, but coming back together for the cadence.

Listening, Els heard the total lie. He wrote for the future’s love, and for the love of an ideal listener he could almost see. He saw how he might expand the music, make it stranger, stronger, colder, more huge and indifferent, just as soon as this concert was over.

But a breeze blew through the final song, and the skies cleared onto pure potential. Maddy gathered herself, as if laid out for her own funeral, at peace at last with the previous three outbursts. All dancing stopped, and the back wall hung on a single black-and-white photograph of a few diatoms a handful of microns wide, their silica casings carved like the finials of Gothic cathedrals. Above the piano’s pulse, the cello and horn overlaid a tune of outmoded yearning, like the start of Schumann’s Mondnacht, in disguise. Maddy sang a slow, stepwise rising figure, a blue balloon coming up over the horizon:

We are made for art . . .

The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They’d spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

She nudged the phrase up another perfect fourth:

We are made for memory . . .

Something seized his arm. Richard. Els turned, but the man’s face was fixed on the stage, as if he hadn’t already heard the melodic prediction two dozen times in the last two days.

The pianist broke off in the middle of an ostinato, stood up, and left the stage. Maddy reached out, palm up, but couldn’t stop him. The reduced ensemble kept turning over notes that now lined up to reveal themselves as a permutation of the delaying fragment that had opened the first song. The horn, too, grew forgetful; he stood and wandered, climbed down the front of the stage and into the audience. Maddy looked on, touching her cheek, unable to call him back. Puzzled, she carried on:

We are made for poetry . . .

The remaining trio turned oddly consonant. The oboist set her oboe on the music stand and left. The cellist carried on for a while, intrepid, with a figure lifted from the Bach D minor suite, while the percussionist haloed him on xylorimba. Then, succumbing to the inexorable, the cellist, too, set down his instrument, and walked up the aisle to the exit. Maddy, lost in thought, failed to notice. She stood alone onstage with the percussionist, who stuttered away on the wood block.

Or perhaps . . .

Maddy sang, shaking her head at the baffling melody and backing away, her arms drawing in as if sieving the wind:

Or perhaps we are made for oblivion.

The percussionist tapped a last dotted rhythm into his block of wood. The stage went black, and it took the house five enormous seconds to decide that the piece was done. Right before the applause, Els heard a nearby baritone whisper, Frauds.

The clapping came from far away. The musicians reassembled for bows. Maddy shaded her eyes and stared out into the dark, looking for the perpetrators and seeing only shadows. Bonner yanked Els to his feet, where he bobbed several times like a water-drinking toy duck. Els turned to see his friend regarding the audience with cool amusement.

People came up to Els after, wanting to take the measure of this audacity. They wanted to get up close, to see if he’d really escaped. Someone put his arms around Els’s shoulders and said, That was something. Someone said, So interesting. Someone said, I liked it, I think. Els thanked and grinned and nodded, seeing no one.

A bald man in a gabardine suit decades out of date slunk up and whispered an emaciated thank-you. Els offered his hand, but the man held his up as if they were defective. I don’t often get to hear, he murmured, something so . . . He backed away, flinching in gratitude.

A six-foot-tall woman who looked like deposed royalty squeezed his shoulder from behind. Els wheeled, and she asked in a Spanish accent, What was that supposed to be about?

Around him in the emptying hall, clots of people were grooming and seducing each other. Els smiled at the majestic woman and said, About twenty-four minutes.

Her eyes flashed. It seemed longer somehow, she said, and turned into the lingering crowd.

Mattison emerged from a nearby cabal. He saluted Els with two fingers. You have them all scratching their heads. The most praise his mentor would ever give him.

Across the thinned room, Els saw Bonner seated in the empty first row, staring at the abandoned stage. Richard didn’t turn when Els dropped into the seat beside him.

“Made for oblivion,” Richard said, in an odd monotone. Check. Now what?

Els sat playing castanets on the pads of his thumbs. We could take it on the road. Bloomington. Hyde Park. Ann Arbor.

Could, Bonner said, meaning no. All his mania from the last half dozen weeks had collapsed into mere agitation. His eyes fixed on a series of invisible one-reelers projected in front of him.

Pleased? Els asked.

What’s that?

I said, are you pleased?

And I said, what’s that?

Somewhere in Bonner’s skull, across great, arid expanses all the way to the horizon, the shit-storm of invention was gathering again. The hall had emptied. At last the composer stood and said, See you?

Richard nodded, but to some other question.

Els caught up with Maddy, out in the foyer with three of the musicians. She was flushed and floating, astonished to have run the gauntlet and survived.

Well, she said, when Els came up. That was an experience!

What she means, the oboist said, is, “Never again!”

I liked your chart, the cellist told Els. But I still think it’d be sweeter without the fire drills.

The oboist laughed. You know what Stravinsky said at the premiere of Pierrot? “I wish that lady would shut up so I could hear the music.”

The group wrangled for a while over music’s soul, as performers will do before heading out for weed and beers. The pianist and horn player were already at Murphy’s, half a pitcher ahead of everyone. The percussionist drummed on Els’s shoulder.

Time to get wasted. You two coming?

Maddy looked at Els, who begged off. Mind if I go? she asked.

Can I talk to you for a minute first?

Meet us over there, the percussionist called over his shoulder as the trio disappeared.

It was good, Peter, Maddy said. Those songs have something. I heard new things in them, even tonight.

Els helped her into her long buckskin coat. From behind, he clasped her upper arms. You were unreal.

She softened and backed into him. Was I?

From another planet. Madolyn. I love you.

She scrunched her neck and smiled. You love those songs.

I saw something in you tonight. Something I didn’t know was there.

No, she said, and would not meet his eyes. That was performance.

We should get married. Join our lives.

She studied the score etched into the linoleum floor, humming, frantic but soundless.

Move somewhere neither of us has ever been. Find a place and make it ours. Read to each other at night. Take care of one another.

He pressed every button she had. Discover America. Turn life’s rags into a bright quilt. Levitate the Pentagon.

She shook her head at his list, the way she had at the end of the fourth song. She clamped his wrist in a polygraph grip and scrutinized his eyes.

Let’s walk.

Snow was falling, compounding the already knee-high drifts. They walked for a long while, in talk that quieted into something like telepathy. And by midnight, Peter Els was thawing in his love’s bed, hurting with a hope he’d never felt. He was twenty-seven, too old now for selective service, and engaged to be married. And the future held music so fine and clear all he needed was to take dictation.

They wed two weeks later at the Urbana courthouse. Richard Bonner was their lone legal witness. They would suffer their families’ anger later. No one else had to hear this promise.

Maddy made her own dress, of apricot taffeta, pinned with an orchid that cost a week’s worth of Peter’s stipend. Peter dressed in cambric and corduroy. Richard wore his usual black leather. He was there with Els, in the courthouse bathroom, for the retching.

If I didn’t know better, Bonner said, keeping Els’s head from banging the faucet, I’d say you have stage fright.

Els could only groan.

What are you afraid of? I’m assuming you’ve already seen her naked.

Oh, Jesus. Richard. What if I’m wrong for her? What if this isn’t meant to be?

Es muß sein, Maestro.

What if I ruin this woman’s life?

Oh, that would be awful! Especially after swearing to use your powers only for good.

Richard, what am I doing?

You’re leaping, Peter. For the first time in your life. And it’s a thing of beauty.

Bonner sponged the flecks off Els’s collar with a paper towel, then frog-marched him down the courthouse hall alongside the suspects in blue jumpsuits and handcuffs being led off to their own arraignments. Maddy grabbed him outside the courtroom and shook him. We’re good, Peter. Really good! She was radiant throughout the service, and every word the judge pronounced threatened to send her into another giggling bout. Afterward, on the street, Richard serenaded them on a silver kazoo wrapped in pink ribbon. Bach’s Wachet auf: It seemed to Els a very good tune, one that a person might still do all kinds of things with.

And even the least threatening tune will outlast you by generations. There’s pleasure in knowing that, too.

That year is a chance-built symphony. A string of scabrous nightclub burlesques. A psychedelic double album made up of the wildest percussive tracks. Els hears about Tet one afternoon after teaching his ear-training class. Johnson’s bombshell lands not long after.

Bonner directs a mad, high-speed Man and Superman, with incidental music by Els. But his madness is a bagatelle compared to the nightly news: King killed. Rolling riots in every city. The Columbia takeover. The Battle for Paris. Resurrection City on the Washington Mall. Warhol shot. Kennedy killed.

Bonner gets arrested in a campus bar for standing on a table and peeing in a beer mug for Peace. Els and Maddy bail him out.

While yippies trash the stock exchange and the Soviets crush the Prague Spring, Els composes thirty-six variations on “All You Need Is Love,” in the style of everyone from Machaut to Piston. He and Bonner stage a play-in of the “Love Variations” in front of Smith Hall, under the frieze carved with Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina. One hundred performers read through a nonstop tag-team performance.

Something’s happening here. The world egg threatens to crack open. Els’s music cracks open, too, trying to say what’s going on. He and Bonner mount a cabaret in the courtyard of the Illini Union for Turn In Your Draft Card Day. They work up an Eisler-Weill drag show called I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

On New Year’s Eve, Bonner forces the old married couple out on a freezing midnight picnic, deep in the South Farms, under the stars. The trio sit on the iron ground and eat cold lentils, sardines on celery, and frozen Twinkies.

A meal fit for lunatics and saints, Bonner declares. Olympian, he leans back on his elbows. Who knew a guy like us could have such friends?

Steam escapes their mouths, and, huddled together, they toast the vanishing year. Maddy pours the champagne into paper cones. Bonner insists they clink. Bubbly spills from the mushy flutes onto the frozen earth.

To putting the past to bed, Richard toasts.

To waking the future, Els says.

To staying in the Beautiful Now, Maddy adds, although they’re already leaving.

They come across a cardboard box blowing through the snowy fields. They use it as a three-person toboggan, sledding down the only geological feature for two hundred miles that can be called a hill. Bonner tears the box into three pieces, which he distributes.

Hold on to these. We’ll reassemble right here, top of this hill, in fifty years.

Maddy laughs. Synchronize your watches.

Walking home in the cold, toting his scrap of cardboard, pressed between his wife and wild friend, Els hears a piece in his head, music like the kind Schumann reported hearing as he slipped into madness—an instrument of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on Earth. The harmonies are rich and braided, leading to an unprepared Neapolitan sixth, a rediscovery of naïve sequences, and the melody feels so inexorable that he knows it’ll be waiting for him intact when he next sits down to a sheet of virgin staff paper.

But when Peter wakes in the new year, he fails to remember even hearing the piece. By the time he does, a few days later, it’s too late to transcribe. All that’s left is a blurred contour, disembodied music hinting at something magnificent just out of reach.

I always loved best those tunes written for those who listen on other frequencies.

They’re still a trio later that spring, wandering the domed Assembly Hall, that cavernous radioactive mushroom that Cage and Hiller have filled with more happy pandemonium. Seven amplified harpsichords duel with 50 monoaural tape machines and 208 FORTRAN-generated tapes playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, and Schoenberg, all sliced into short genetic chunks then recombined at random. Bonner and the Elses, in their fluorescent overalls—handed out free to the dazed visitors—gawk at a Stonehenge ring of polyethylene screens on which six dozen projectors cast thousands of slides and films. Outside, 48 more enormous screens circle the building’s quarter-mile circumference. They turn the whole colossal structure into a pulsating saucer that has come to Earth for refueling and a little galactic-backwater R & R.

The smell of pot seeps from the crowds camped out in the central arena. People lounge or wander about. It’s music, Els keeps reminding himself. Music that has reached the end of a thousand-year exploration.

Too much, Maddy says. My mind’s blown.

Bonner flips his hands in the air, juggling invisible moons. We could have done this, with a few more bucks.

But the show is beyond Els. Cage, Hiller, and the army of believers who mount HPSCHD have disappeared into liberty. They refuse to impose decisions on any listener. Composition is no longer the goal; all that counts now is awareness, this flickering, specious present, a dive into raw phenomena. And that’s a plunge Els will never be able to make. Or so he figures, at twenty-eight.

Maddy strolls around the flying saucer, laughing. She stops to rag-pick the trash for interesting textiles. Peter follows in his wife’s happy wake. She has become a season ticket holder for the festival of weirdness Els has inflicted on her these last twenty months. He loves her steady refusal to descend to liking or not liking, those sentimental actions that have nothing to do with listening. Her awe at the range of human desire turns Peter himself back into a spectator in his own life. He falls into orbit beside her; Richard is off buying a poster, for a price determined by the I Ching.

Maddy hums to herself, a snippet of Mozart fished from the randomness. Mozart, the man who invented the musical dice game, two short centuries ago.

Peter, she says, looking away, at a slide of the Crab Nebula. He knows what she’ll say before she says it. An oddness has come over her these last few days, a frightened flush, waiting for its moment. What else can it be? Nothing else is big enough for her to keep secret from him for so long.

Peter? Company’s coming.

He stops and listens, hearing, above the din, a small, high voice.

Peter?

You’re sure?

She spreads her palms, shrugs, and smiles.

When?

I don’t know. December? We’ll find out. Peter? Don’t worry. We’re good. We’re good! We can do this. Everybody does.

He jerks, objecting. No, that’s not . . . This is incredible. The two of us? Are you kidding?

She has to laugh at him, standing there, overcome, his eyes like outer planets. And that’s how Richard finds them moments later.

Laughing gas? Bonner says. They’re giving away laughing gas somewhere?

HPSCHD runs for almost five hours. Several thousand people wander through. Two months later, men walk on the moon. Four more weeks, and half a million people gather on a farm in upstate New York for a weekend of rain, mud, and music. By then the trio has abandoned Champaign-Urbana—the Elses for Boston, where Maddy gets a job teaching singing in an elite junior high, and Bonner for Manhattan, to squalor and a gauntlet of unpaid positions in experimental theaters.

And on the first day of winter, Els meets his burping, giggling, raging, laughing, squalling daughter, her tiny foot between his fingers an astonishment he can’t take in. This perfect, working creature, self-assembling, self-delighting, the brightest whim that could ever exist, and he’ll never make anything to compare to her for pure wonder.

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what has become of the women?

Els followed the Voice. He did as She instructed, down to the pointless twenty-minute detour through Clarion. The gadget found its trio of geosynchronous satellite beacons twenty-two thousand miles high, and triangulated from them the one spot on Earth where Els could be. From there, it skimmed through a digitized database of eight million miles of road and took Els to the one place on Earth he wanted to go. Giving in to machine navigation was an infantile luxury. And the Voice came through in the end, dropping him off on the stoop of the Kohlmann summer cottage just before dark.

The abandoned wasp’s nest hung right where Klaudia said. Els extracted the key and let himself into a room reeking of nature and vacation. The lodge was lined in cedar-paneled nostalgia and furnished in cushioned pine from the fifties. The whole house showed signs of hasty evacuation. Football jerseys and high-tech sneakers lay scattered about. Stray lights had been left on, which Els went about turning off before he sat down to collect himself.

He found nuts and cereal in the pantry, and a dozen apples in the refrigerator crisper. He helped himself to a glass of Finger Lakes Chardonnay and some frozen pound cake. The washing machine stood in a utility room off the back of the kitchen. He stripped off his painter pants, waffle shirt, and stale underwear. Then he stood under the shower in the rustic bathroom, naked, sagging, and scalded, waiting for explanation.

Fed and clean, he had no need of anything but sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. He rooted around the possessions of his unknown benefactors, scavenging for diversion. Magazines abounded—old Smithsonians and Outdoors, as well as scattered issues from more specialized offerings. It seemed possible to append the word magazine to any string of words—Not Your Grandfather’s Clock Magazine; Power Balance Holographic Wrist Channeler Magazine—and still come up with a product that needed only the right focus group to find its way into circulation.

Reading wasn’t possible. All Els was good for was music. Shelves in the front room held three dozen jewel boxes—road trip listening, left here in the vacation home alongside battered Parcheesi sets and moldy quiz books. Ripped copies of Ella Fitzgerald’s Verve Songbooks, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine. There was a time when the proliferation of so many musical genres left Els cowering in a corner, holding up the Missa Solemnis as a shield. Now he wanted alarm and angry dream, style and distraction, as much ruthless novelty as the aging youth industry could still deliver.

He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him. He looked around the cottage for something to play it on. In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box. He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world. A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass. The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences. The melodic machete went straight through Els’s skin. It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power. The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear.

Many years ago Els had made a vow to run from no art but let every track play through to its end. He looked out the window, past the gravel drive, through the stand of birches, remnants of the vast, vanished northern hardwood forest, listening to this droll Armageddon. The band had been around for half of Els’s life, servicing the need for anarchy written into people’s cells. He wondered which of this middle-class, outdoorsy family was responsible for the disc. Probably not Mom, although the thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.

The song was one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. Surprise was not its goal, and the pattern laid down in the first four measures drove the tune on in a storm surge. But after two minutes, it sprouted a hallucination in the relative minor floating above the thrash, and for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude—the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Els paused the disc, but the Chopin persisted. Four measures, with a little altered voice-leading at the end, turned back on themselves in an endless, lamenting loop—one of those tuneful fragments that signaled the onset of a temporal lobe seizure. But the sound came from somewhere in the house. He wandered through three different rooms before finding it: Klaudia’s smartphone. The one that had guided him here.

Words hovered on the screen: “Incoming Call, Kohlmann, K.” He pressed the answer icon, and held the world’s portal up to his ear.

You’re all over the news, Kohlmann said, trying for sardonic but landing on scared.

Yes, Els said. I saw the camera trucks this morning.

This morning. It wasn’t possible.

Klaudia said, Google yourself. The clips are up already.

Of course they were. Retired professor of music flees scene of terrorism raid. Verrata College officials express dismay.

What else? Els asked. You sound . . .

Your bacteria. You said they were harmless.

Something slurred in his brain. I said the species wasn’t dangerous in ordinary situations.

Storm troopers were assaulting the cabin, from the direction of the kitchen. Els set the phone down and headed toward the invasion. He’d pressed the pause button on the boom box, and the pause had chosen that moment to time out. He looked for eject, and in the onslaught of sound couldn’t find it. He yanked the cord from the wall, then walked back to the bedroom and retrieved the phone.

Back. Sorry.

What the hell was that?

Your grandsons’ music.

Ach. We’re finished, aren’t we?

What about my bacteria? Els asked.

Nineteen people in hospitals across Alabama have been infected with your strain. The CDC says nine people dead.

A long caesura, the sound of what terror would be, when it grew up.

My strain? In Alabama?

Kohlmann read from another screen: Serratia marcescens. That’s the one, right?

There was nothing to say, and Els said it.

The FBI wants to talk to you.

This . . . none of this makes sense. The FBI told the press what bacteria I was culturing?

But he didn’t need reminding: Everybody was the press now. Everyone knew everything, as it happened.

The journalists think I . . .? They can’t be that stupid. Were all these patients on IV drips, by any chance?

Google it, Klaudia told him. That’s what the FBI is doing, I’m sure.

Jesus, Els said.

And call me. They can’t trace you to my phone, can they?

About your phone, he said. Chopin?

What can I say? It does something to me. Play that at my funeral, please?

He promised. But he wasn’t sure an audience with chronic focal disorder would sit through it.

A friend says: “I just heard the strangest song ever.” Do you run away or toward?

He sat out back behind the cottage on the edge of a maple grove, his head bowed over the device. In the dark, with that lone beam of white splashed across his face, he read the accounts. Nineteen Alabamans sick and nine dead. Nine people out of a hundred thousand annual American deaths by hospital infection—more than car wrecks and murders combined. The public, drowning in data, might never have registered the story. But he had turned accident into something panicworthy.

All the infected patients had indeed been on a catheter. All six hospitals were in greater Birmingham. All got their IV bags from the same supplier. Either someone had accidentally contaminated a batch, or America was under siege again. In normal times, most people could figure the odds. But the times would never be normal again.

Els’s eyes adjusted to the screen, the lone bright spot in the surrounding dark. He searched his name and found student ratings of his teaching, a recent Brussels performance of his forgotten chamber symphony, and old chatter about the 1993 premiere of The Fowler’s Snare. Searches on the Alabama outbreak led to a gigantic methane dome under the thawing tundra that was belching into the atmosphere massive amounts of greenhouse gas that would speed the process that released them.

Reporters speculated about why a retired adjunct professor of music had been manipulating human pathogens in his den. Neighbors attested to his quiet politeness, although one described him as standoffish and another mentioned the atonal sounds emanating from his house at odd hours. The Joint Security Task Force could not comment on ongoing investigations, but they were interested in any information concerning the whereabouts of Peter Els.

Opera buffa had turned seria. He had no choice. He had to return home and explain, if only to keep a jumpy country from going off the rails again. But he’d already explained everything to Coldberg and Mendoza, and still they’d raided him. Now the Alabama infections vindicated them. Threat once again kept the precarious democracy intact. Els would have to be punished, in proportion to the thrill he’d given the collective imagination.

A hundred yards off, through the dense maples, the windows of the neighbors’ cabin threw off an amber glow. The undergrowth on all sides boomed with calls and alarms, an animal Visions Fugitives. His frantic flight caught up with him, and Els fell asleep in the deck chair under the trees. The smart screen dimmed, then timed out, then slipped from his hands. Sometime in the night he woke, and, realizing where he was, blundered into the house to a soft bed. Toward dawn, from a sleep filled with epidemics, he heard the E Minor Prelude pulsing again. But not until the next morning—a brilliant, balmy, and innocent thing, like the first day of creation—did he find the phone again, lying on the grass as if it had fallen out of the sky.

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

Even in dried-out memory, those years in Boston are fresh and green. Els and Maddy drive a seventeen-foot U-Haul trailer filled with their combined worldly belongings across Ohio and Pennsylvania to the doorstep of their one-bedroom apartment in the Fens. They port a queen-sized mattress up the stairs on their heads. Els fusses over his gravid wife, making her stop and rest every few steps. She laughs off his anxieties. I’m pregnant, Peter. Not crippled. In fact, the thrill of nesting gives her energy for three.

For Maddy, it’s an easy commute by T to Brookline and New Morning, the private freedom school modeled on Neill’s Summerhill. The starry-eyed school board hired her after she declared in her interview that a rich musical exposure could turn any child into a creator. By the time Labor Day rolls around, she’s showing. Her progressive employers pretend to be thrilled.

While swelling Maddy teaches junior high kids how to barrel through dissonant choruses and mallet their way to freedom on Orff instruments, Els picks up odd jobs. He gives private clarinet lessons. He hires himself out as a music copyist. He writes concert reviews for the Globe, at fifty dollars a pop.

At night, they watch classic thirties Hollywood films on the oldies station, on a tiny black-and-white set with tinfoil attached to the rabbit ears. Maddy quilts and Peter glances through scores while Barrymore tells Trilby, “Ah, you are beautiful, my manufactured love! But it is only Svengali, talking to himself . . .”

A week after Halloween, he lands a job beyond his boldest fantasies: gallery guard at Mrs. Gardner’s fake Venetian palazzo, half a mile down the Fenway. He can walk there in minutes. They pay him to stand motionless all day in the Spanish Cloister or the Gothic Room or the Chinese Loggia, guarding paintings and writing music in his head. Days of silent meditation contribute as much to his musical development as all his years in graduate school. For a decade, he has busied himself with intricate, ingenious forms. Now he begins to hear a stream—simple, broad, and adamant—purling beneath his feet.

He lingers for entire afternoons in front of Vermeer’s The Concert, listening to that still trio’s silent harmonies. The bowed head, the wave of the singer’s curved fingers conduct the strains of frozen music for no audience but him, in this distant future. Soon enough, those players, too, will go missing forever.

Richard Bonner writes letters now and then, from his illegal loft in SoHo. A few times he even calls, despite the ruinous expense of long distance. He’s always either euphoric with new projects or ready to press the button that will vaporize humanity. Once, he sends a small commission Els’s way—a request for a two-minute piece to accompany a gallery installation. The job pays nothing, but it’s Els’s first contribution to the downtown scene.

December comes, and with it, a snow that paralyzes Boston. Maddy is huge; she waddles about toting a globe on her out-thrust pelvis. When her time comes, their car-owning next-door neighbor is nowhere to be found. Peter must run out in the street and flag down a passing Buick, to hitch a ride to the hospital.

Then infant Sara is there, in all her blotchy astonishment. They huddle in their snowbound cocoon: twin parents bowed over a minuscule wailer, who changes by the hour. Els writes no music for two months; he’s nothing but diapers and basinet and back-patting, getting that living tube to burp. His daughter mewls and cackles, and that’s all the concert he needs. Maddy lies around the apartment languorous, hypnotized, enslaved by this parasite that turns her into a brainless host. They all three do nothing but live. Even yanked awake in the dead of night, Els finds this life finer than any art. These six weeks—the fullest he’ll ever live. But the prelude is over in a few brief bars. Maddy’s back conducting the chorus at New Morning by Washington’s birthday.

Peter takes a leave from the museum to stay home and raise his infant girl. When Maddy returns from work each night to swallow up Sara, Els fusses. Careful; you’re scaring her. Wash your hands first!

The sea slug learns to locomote, shoving herself across the floor on four floppy limbs. Her lips burble and whir, like her mother’s humming in embryo. Peter takes his girl everywhere, in a papoose strapped across his chest. He sings to her all day long. He sings her to sleep each night, as she chants along and reaches for the pitches where they float in the air. “Hot Cross Buns” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider”: What more music could a person ever need?

From the start, she’s her own creature. Everything goes in her mouth. What can’t be eaten is there only to test her will. And Sara won’t be thwarted. She’s born a conductor, and the world is her orchestra. She cues the giant adults with her index finger: You: get over here! Me: over there! Life is a puzzle to shift and slide until the solution, so clear already in this infant’s mind, comes free.

Her parents find the bossy Von Karajan game hilarious, the first few hundred times. Then exhausting. Then a little scary. One tough night, after a two-hour epic bedtime war of attrition, Peter and Maddy lie slumped against each other, wasted zombies. The air is stained with baby reek—spit-up and talcum. Peter gazes up at the plaster-cracked ceiling, an alternate notation system he can’t read.

She has a will.

Maddy flops backward on the bed. And she always finds a way.

Plays me like a Strad.

Me, too. How’d she learn that so fast?

Look at us. Remember when the hardest thing in the world was writing a grant?

Maddy breathes out, her soubrette long gone. Not the life you were hoping for, is it?

No, Peter agrees, a little surprised. It’s far more.

“But my lamps were blown out in every little wind. And lighting them, I forget all else again.” (Tagore)

He starts to write again. A scribbled gesture one day, then a theme, then a few measures. Over several months, he sketches a short scherzo for small ensemble. In the wilds of stay-at-home fatherhood, music changes. His little tricks and signatures soften and expand. He’ll sit working at the electric piano in the corner of the bedroom while his daughter plays on the other side of the wall, rapping at her tiny xylophone, imitating him, chanting the pitchless pitches of infancy.

He crosses over into her room, and she blooms. She slaps the mallet on the shiny metal keys in ecstasy.

What are you saying, Sary-bear?

The name makes her rap faster, gladder. The keys ring out—red, purple, sea-green.

What’s that? Say it again!

She shrieks and strikes at all the keys in the rainbow.

Wait. I know! You’re saying . . .

He helps her hold the mallet. They touch the keys together in the magic order. He sings.

There once was a girl named Sar-a!

She laughs and grabs her hand free, hits the keys that she’s already hearing.

She comes from the present er-a!

She hums hard, whacking as many keys as she can reach.

The future had better beware-a!

Yes, she screeches: That’s it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

He goes back into his bedroom, to his own keyboard, where he steals from her, those scattered fa-do-sol-la fragments of deep origin. She toddles in, tries to help, pushes keys for him. No, darling, he says. This is daddy’s piece. But it isn’t, really. Everything is hers.

By day’s end, he has the start of a new berceuse, which he tests on her at bedtime. She’s the only hearer the piece may ever have. Who else would listen to such a thing? It’s too wild for the billion lovers of radio tunes, too blissful for the handful who need their music recherché.

But his daughter likes the song, and she’s all the audience he needs. Sara is his experiment in what the ear might come to hear, when raised on sounds from a happy elsewhere. She giggles at his sudden melodic turns. Her face crinkles in puzzled glee. Her turn now to ask him: What are you saying? But it’s only music on a summer’s evening, even as a bouncy ballpark organ floats into the window, blown through the air from Fenway, the bat’s crack, the distant whispered roar of a crowd, and a berceuse that leaves the saucer-eyed girl squealing in primal delight.

Outside the apartment, there are gas lines, wildfire inflation, the Middle East heading to Armageddon again. But inside, their days bring the real dramas. A cough. A fever. A fall against the coffee table that makes her bite through her lower lip. Two short years ago, he wanted to write music that changed what music was. Now he just wants to keep his daughter from changing too much, too fast.

Pushing Sara’s stroller through the Victory Gardens, Els sees with terrible clarity the hubris of his twenties. He can’t for his life imagine why he ever signed on for the full Faust ride. For years, he’s struggled to write something thorny and formidable, as if difficulty alone ensured lasting admiration. Now he sees that what the world really needs is a lullaby simple enough to coax a two-year-old to lay down her frantic adventure each night for another eight hours.

On the playground near the art museum, Sara stands and chants to the sky: “This Old Man.” The words are babble, the rhythm rough, and the melody little more than a crayon smear. But to Els, the old man is as recognizable as God. Rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. Hemlines rise and fall, but the present is forever convinced it has found the Tailor’s pattern. The manifestos of Peter’s twenties—the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades—feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the academy champions these days? Els has been away too long to know. But he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic. Music cut from new whole cloth? No such material. The emperor will always be as naked as a jaybird, as nude as Sara slapping the waves of her bath, shrieking those patty-cake melodies she makes up on the spot.

The girl is in love with music. At four, she blossoms with solfeggio. By four and a half, she stumbles through the Mozart Sonatina in C with what strikes her besotted father as real feeling. She plays for him, improvised instruments: Horns made of rubber shower hose. Oatmeal boxes strung with rubber bands. The game must always go a certain way, and she never gets tired of playing.

What am I saying, Daddy? she demands, and lays into the piano with every finger she has.

He listens. You’re saying, “Okay, Mom; I’ll eat green food.”

Yes! Maddy calls from the kitchen.

No! Sara shouts, and tries more furious chords.

I know! You’re saying, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

Wrong! she says. Try again! And her tune goes as frantically jagged as anything Els has written.

Wait, he says, tipping his head to hear. Keep going. I almost have it. You’re saying, “I’m loved, and life is good!”

The music collapses, suddenly bashful. She turns her face away from him, her mouth crumpled in a shy maybe.

FIVE YEARS IN the Fens apartment pass like the Minute Waltz. His fellow Illinois grads have scattered into university music labs across the U.S. He listens to their gnomic tapes, studies their gnostic scores. Musical resistance still strikes him as worthy. Between Nixon, the endless war, and a radio spectrum filled with bland self-pity and sales jingles, there’s more to resist than ever. But he listens, and can’t get traction.

One night, bent over the low kitchen radio, nursing a bowl of butter pecan while the ladies sleep, he hears the spectral wails of Crumb’s Black Angels, for electric string quartet. Thirteen images from the dark land, barbaric and glorious, a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse. The sounds come from another galaxy. Infinite sonic possibility unfurls in front of Els, and he can’t move. He can’t even think which way he would move, if he could.

The very next night—heaven’s DJ toying with him—it’s George Rochberg’s third string quartet. Rochberg, rigid serialist, now serves up a bouquet reeking of lyric consonance, right down to bald-faced imitations of Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms. It’s like a heretic giving the benediction: a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness.

And yet: what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. It makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve. The piece sounds naïve at best, at worst banal. But strangely willing to sing.

Afterward, the announcer explains: Rochberg’s young son, dead of a brain tumor. Now the archaic tonality makes perfect sense. The real mystery is how Rochberg could write anything at all. If something happened to Els’s daughter, fast asleep on the other side of the bedroom wall, composing would be done forever.

MUSIC GETS AWAY from him. In this one town alone, fantastic new inventions premiere every week at dozens of venues on both sides of the Charles. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the Brahmins from the bohemians. Els no longer needs to; he and his daughter wander hand in hand through the rose bower in the Fens, chattering to each other in a secret language, collaborators in a whole new genre of spontaneous invention.

Let’s make something, he tells her.

Make what? she asks.

He picks a fallen flower out of the dirt. Let’s make a rose nobody knows.

She pouts, lip like a slug. What do you mean?

Something good.

Good how? she says, but her face has already begun to guess.

Good slow, he suggests.

No, she corrects. Good fast.

Okay. Good fast. Something that’s never been. You start.

She sings a little. He adds some notes. They walk and invent, and the day is the song they’re making. They finish the piece at the keyboard when they get home.

IT BECOMES THEIR rolling litany. Let’s make something. Make what? Something good. Good how? Good and grumpy? No: Good and gentle. Good and treelike. Good like a bird.

Maddy catches them out one evening, giggling at some private nonsense over dinner.

What is it with you two? What’s the big secret these days?

Secret what? Els says, words that send his daughter into hysterics.

Sara holds her finger up, japing. Tips her head. Secret good!

Maddy swats at them. Fine! Be that way.

Jealous? Els asks.

Maddy stands and clears the dishes. Forget I asked.

Sara, anxious: No, Mom! You can know. We’re making things.

What kind of things?

Songs. Songs that nobody knows.

HE FINDS THE girl on the day after Christmas, under the small blue spruce filled with popcorn strings and paper ornaments, laying out her new alphabet blocks in patterns on the floor. She spaces them at varied distances, in gaps that she adjusts and readjusts until each one is perfect.

Els watches awhile, but can’t break the code. Bear? What are you making?

They’re our songs, she tells him. Look.

And she shows him how the system works. The distance between blocks, the height in the line, the colors like the keys of her xylophone: she’s invented notation. Written down secrets for the distant future, for no one, or for anyone who wants to hear. Els can’t stop looking—at the blocks, at the score, at the girl. It’s music from out of something that, a few dozen months before, was nothing but the sequences hidden in a single cell.

I wanted music to be the antidote to the familiar. That’s how I became a terrorist.

We need a bigger place, Maddy says. She’s six. She can’t keep sleeping in a walk-in closet.

Beyond arguing. Yet moving out of their apartment for a larger one, down the Green Line toward Coolidge Corner, feels to Peter like a perp walk out of Eden at angel’s sword point.

Sara starts school at New Morning, where Maddy is now assistant director for the arts. Quilting has fallen by the wayside. Els returns to part-time at the museum. He picks up more copy jobs; he spends weeks at a time transcribing other people’s notes and articulations, bar by bar, into clean, perfect systems of staves. He loves the work, a chameleon trying on alien colors.

But at night, in an office carved out of the Brookline apartment’s guest bedroom, Els starts work on his first real piece in three years. He tinkers after midnight, teetering between splendor and defeat. Over several weeks, a new style takes shape, one he only slowly begins to hear. Except the style isn’t new at all. He remembers describing it to Richard Bonner almost a decade ago, on a dark, frozen campus in the middle of the cornfields.

He talks Maddy through the sketch—a piece for piano, clarinet, theremin, and soprano, to words from Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China.” The piece consists of regions of mutating rhythmic fragments dominated by fixed intervals, constantly cycled and transposed. The intervals build to a peak of dissonance before relaxing into something like denouement. There’s no fixed tonality, but the sequence still propels the listener’s ear through a gauntlet of expectation and surprise. The method feels like a way forward, a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress.

“The Great Wall” fits together, stone by stone. He plays sections for Maddy on their little forty-four-key electric piano, trying to get her to sight-sing. It’s not hard, even for a voice that hasn’t sung much in recent years. And it’s interesting enough to go over well at one of the contemporary music venues in Cambridge or Kenmore. They’d only need two other players; Peter could manage the clarinet part himself.

You do not need to leave your room.

Only sit at your table and listen.

Don’t even listen;

simply wait, be quiet,

still and solitary.

The world will offer itself to be unmasked.

It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Maddy nods at the guided tour. She smiles at his crimes and clever reconciliations. Her eyes spark with the memory of old campaigns the two of them waged together, not all that long ago. For a moment, her face is that humming girl’s, the pageboy who was game to run through anything. But when they reach the end of the read-through, she’s the assistant director of New Morning School’s arts program again.

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 . . . well: 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.

A pop culture blog linked to a list of books raided from Peter Els’s house. Good Germs, Bad Germs. Plagues and Peoples. Someone had cherry-picked the titles, out of a thousand books in his library, for maximum fear and thrill. Coldberg, Mendoza, and friends were leaking him. The government wanted him hung in public.

He pecked terms into Kohlmann’s phone—Els, Serratia, Naxkohoman—until it dawned on him, late again, that his every keystroke was settling forever into multiple server logs that the FBI would comb through on no more grounds than they’d used to raid his house. Somewhere out East—Maryland or Virginia—and elsewhere out West—in the Bay Area, near Sara—there were buildings, white and boxy, multistory, concrete, and windowless, where people at workstations in fluorescent cubicles eavesdropped on all the world’s suspicious searches, watching for patterns in the flow of hot words, a list that now included Els, Serratia, and Naxkohoman. The logs would record the machine that sent the queries. And the querying machine had GPS tracking. If Klaudia’s device could lead Els to this cabin, it could lead the FBI to her device.

Els powered down the smartphone and pushed it across the breakfast nook. When he shut his eyes, he could see a cadre of hazmat suits dismantling the Kohlmanns’ little house in the woods.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

The books on Els’s shelves did tell a secret history, but one beyond any government’s ability to control. Once he discovered the suppressed evidence, all the standard accounts of human affairs turned comical and self-serving. Trade, technology, nations, migrations, industry: the whole drama was really being orchestrated by Earth’s five nonillion mutating microbes.

A year of reading, and the scales fell from Els’s eyes. Bacteria decided wars, spurred development, and killed off empires. They determined who ate and who starved, who got rich and who sank into disease-ridden squalor. The mouth of any ten-year-old child housed twice as many bugs as there were people on the planet. Every human body depended on ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, and one hundred times more bacterial genes than human ones. Microbes orchestrated the expression of human DNA and regulated human metabolism. They were the ecosystem that we just lived in. We might go dancing, but they called the tune.

A short course in life at its true scale, and Els saw: Humanity would lose its war of purity against infection. The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain. For two centuries, humans had dreamed of a germ-free world, and for a few years, people even deluded themselves into thinking that science had beaten the invaders. Now contagion was at the gates, the return of the repressed. Multiple resistant toxic strains were rising up like angry colonial subjects to swamp the imperial outposts. And in a way that Els could not quite dope out, the two nightmares infecting the panicked present—germs and jihadists—had somehow found their overlap in him.

None of the sites reporting on Peter Els’s raided library mentioned those other books in his possession—battle manuals that agitated for all-out assault on the general public over the last hundred years. Boulez’s Orientations. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. Messiaen’s Technique de mon langage musical. That war had ended long ago, and its struggles were of no consequence to any but the dead. When the body was under attack by invisible agents from every direction, why worry about a thing as vaporous as the soul?

Does it hurt to know that any piece of music, however sublime, can be turned into a unique large number?

A knock on the door and there’s Richard Bonner, on the threshold of the Brookline apartment, which all at once feels like a bourgeois doll’s house.

What’s for dinner?

Peter can only stand and gape. At last his arms grapple at the ghost. Jesus God, Richard! What are you doing here?

If you don’t love me anymore, I can leave.

But faster than Els can stand aside, the choreographer breezes in. With the briefest upbeat, Bonner is seducing the wife, pulling the daughter’s pigtails and getting her to bark like a seal, criticizing the art on the walls, and rearranging the secondhand furniture to better effect.

At the sight of his old friend, arcs of color and readiness well up in Els. Summer camp tumbles down from out of the sky, and a thousand urgent projects enlist him. Years too late, the new decade comes to town. Richard is here; and with Richard near, a man might make anything.

Maddy is cross, behind her woozy smiles. You might have given us a little warning. I’d have cooked you a real meal.

Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you’ll zag. Creation’s Rule Number Two.

What’s Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul’s straight man.

Zag when they think you’ll zig.

Soon enough, over impromptu gin fizzes, the impresario gets everybody dressed up—a hobo tux for Peter, a feather boa for Maddy, and a crocodile tutu for the girl. He makes Sara fetch her long-outgrown toy piano. Ready? The Twinkle Variations. Like there’s no tomorrow. I’ll sing! What the duet lacks in grace they make up for in decibels. Sara slaps the plastic ivories, laughing like a banshee.

They sit down to leftovers. Richard never stops chattering, even to breathe. He brings the New England hicks up to date on every fad that has fluttered through Manhattan in the last few years. Stunned Sara can’t even eat. She sits with fork halfway to open mouth, gazing at this trumpet-lipped, tangled-hair messenger who fills their dowdy apartment with news of a world so much wilder than hers.

Maddy suggests an after-dinner walk, but Richard waves her off. He produces a backpack full of other seductions—reel tapes, half-finished scripts, sketches, notations like secret code. He pulls Els to the corner desk and commences the composer’s reeducation.

He plays the spawn of Terry Riley’s bit of West Coast craziness, In C. Gibson, Glass, Reich, Young: a whole school has formed while Els wasn’t looking. Sara spins around giggling with her eyes closed in the middle of the living room, trancing out to the trippy hypnosis. Maddy, cleaning the dishes, stops long enough to cock an eyebrow at the proceedings: Relentless, no? Her look is schoolmarmish. But schoolmarming is what she does for a living. The former soprano, once game for any tune, now grins and shakes her head.

Richard lies back on the sofa, shifting in ecstasies. You hear what this is, don’t you?

Boring? Els ventures. Banal arpeggios of little harmonic interest, looping over and over. Czerny on acid.

The first real revolution in music for fifty years.

Els tips his head and shrugs. But he keeps listening. If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If four, try eight. Music was never what he thought it was. Why should it start behaving now?

They listen as if the world is lost. They’re back in school again, with all life’s root discoveries still before them. The music makes time wax and wane like a fickle moon.

Maddy sweeps through the room, scooping up her daughter from her listening post on the rug. Sorry, gentlemen, we need to sleep.

No, gentlemen, Sara shouts. We need more!

Go ahead, Richard tells the ladies. His hand traces obeisant rococo curls. Sleep away! You won’t bother us a bit.

Maddy kicks his shins, and the men kill the music. Mother whisks her daughter off to her bedroom and the night’s last story. But the men don’t budge from their improvised atelier. The scores come out, and the two old collaborators go on murmuring by lamplight, long after both girls are safely asleep.

Bonner says: There’s something going on in New York. The city is headed to hell. Homeless everywhere. Basic social fabric, unraveling. But the downtown performance scene has never been stronger. It’s sprouting like toadstools on a grave.

Richard’s sales pitch unfolds like one of those minimalist glaciers. The director has found a fairy godmother, appearing from an aerie in the upper altitudes of Central Park West to throw him some cash. She was waylaid by a piece of Bonner street theater involving one hundred volunteer dancers dressed in ordinary work clothes, planted throughout a square-block area of Midtown, who, at synchronized intervals during rush hour, turned to stone, as in a child’s game of statue maker. The guerrilla ballet played for three straight days and ended without explanations just as word of the performance began to spread around town.

From the tenth-story window of her foundation’s office on West Fifty-seventh, the fairy godmother chanced to glance down on dozens of sudden fossils. They gave her that goose-flesh feel of shared doom she looked for in art. She was moved, not so much by the freeze-ups themselves, but by the logistics that had gone into assembling so anonymous, ephemeral, and near-invisible a work. It took her three dozen phone calls to trace the insurgent dance back to its demented maker.

Now she’s throwing money at me to turn it into a film!

Els shakes his head. A film? Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?

But Bonner has no purpose. Bonner is pure energy, a taste for prankish novelty, and a sense of bottomless despair when he isn’t, as he still insists on calling it, working.

The two men take the crackpot notion out onto Beacon Street. They walk inbound, back toward the Fens. Bonner maps out a plan involving video cameras with long-focus lenses dangled out of forty-story windows, zooming in and out on the street below. He needs a musical score that can also zoom in and out on demand. He wants cycles within cycles, intricate, interlocking instrumental figurations, each recorded on separate tracks so the whole piece can materialize and dematerialize at will, the parts fading and surging, splitting off, then swelling again into a churning whole.

Sounds brilliant, Els says. But why not get one of those New York minimalist guys to write it for you?

Bonner freezes on the bridge over the MassPike, a sudden statue.

Well, fuck you, too.

Els recoils, stunned. It has taken him years to grasp the obvious: Richard Bonner is as thin-skinned as a child. The critics are powerless to harm him; he thrives on their attacks—the more vicious, the better. But a friend might scar the man for life without even knowing he’d drawn blood.

I happen to have, Els says, improvising, several beautiful ideas that might work.

Bonner starts up the parade again. We don’t need beauty, Maestro. We need music.

Package deal. Just to be safe.

Safety will kill you, you know.

I’m aware. Creation’s Rule Number Three.

They make their way home an hour before dawn. Els fashions a little nest for Richard on the sofa. The impresario sleeps through the family’s morning rituals and the departure for school. And he’s gone, on a train back to the city, by the time Maddy returns home.

Does it help to know that any large number, however random, hides a masterpiece? All you need is the right player.

What can Els remember about that night’s duet?

It’s a real commission, he tells his wife, over the remains of a curt ratatouille. They sit at that rickety green-painted table with the Dover Thrift Edition of Emerson’s Nature shimming up the short leg. A thousand bucks. Can you believe it?

She looks at him over her drained wine glass, a nick in its cheap rim. The look says: Really? The look says: Don’t bullshit me.

Of course, I’ll have to spend a little time down there. Rehearsing and recording.

Peter, she says. The word is ancient. Weary.

Peter turns to his daughter. Hey, Bear? Want to play something? Maybe your new Mikrokosmos piece? Sara pokes off to the other room and its little upright piano, in that slurry of bliss and caginess, the prelude to youth.

Maddy holds his gaze. We can’t live like this. You need to find a job.

A job? I’ve had six jobs in four years. I’ve been earning . . .

Something full-time, Peter. A career.

He looks through the window on the twilight neighborhood, as if the threat emanated from outside. I have a career.

Maddy inspects her hands. You have a daughter.

The words enrage him. I am a good father.

Her fingers go up into her hair, rooting. She doesn’t want to do this, either. It strikes Els then, or somewhere near then, that he hasn’t heard her hum for more than a year.

She goes to the sink and fills it with pots and pans scavenged from a trio of thrift shops.

Look, Els says. It’s real money. A high-profile project in New York.

Maddy sighs in the rising steam. You could make more per hour by tuning pianos.

He tries to remember when he last saw her quilting. A Romanian folk tune, harmonized in modal contrary motion, issues from the other room. The tune sounds to Peter like the final word on longing. Maybe he should make a living tuning pianos.

It’s a step, he tells his wife, more gentle than defensive. If the film runs . . . it might lead to . . .

Woman washing dishes. Not softly.

Maddy, he’s paying me . . .

Really, Peter? She turns to face him. A thousand dollars? Minus commutes to New York? Train tickets, restaurants, hotel rooms . . .?

WHAT’S THE TIMBRE of this piece? Two slight instruments, say oboe and horn, their intervals trickling out through the open window into the vacant autumn courtyard. Two parents, keeping their voices low to keep from disturbing the rustic song their little girl plinks out in the adjoining room.

Peter’s words are flinty. He tastes them as they leave his mouth, the tang of things to come. You never liked him, did you?

He feels himself serpentine. Creation’s Rule Number One: Zag when they think you’ll zig. But Maddy’s surprise is honest, flushed out in the open.

Who—Richard? Richard’s a perfectly charming poseur. He’ll have all the fame he wants, soon.

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. The man’s our closest friend.

This isn’t about Richard. You’ve had . . . you’ve been at this how long? And you’ve written half a dozen short pieces that have been played a total of five times.

His hands marimba. He reaches across the table for hers, then stops. For two measures, nothing.

And now I have a commission for something substantial. This is what we’ve been sacrificing for. A chance to break out.

Break out? She laughs a single, sharp high A. Peter: It’s experimental music. The game’s over. Nobody’s listening. They never will.

So what are you saying? You want me to pitch it all?

Her head takes two full swings before he sees she’s shaking it. Her lips form a stillborn smile. Adulthood, Peter.

The provable world holds her hostage, and she can’t cross back over to him. Raising a child has brought her to this brute pragmatism. Any one of her needs make his look like puerile fantasy.

The girl wanders in, her body hunched and furtive. She takes his hands. Dad? Can we make something?

Make what? he’s supposed to say. Instead, he says, Soon, sweetie. She goes back to the living room and pounds on the keys.

From the sink, Maddy says, You could do what every other living composer has to do. Get a university job. And on your summer breaks . . . She turns and holds her hands up, dripping dishwater. Write whatever music floats your boat.

The folk song from the other room breaks off in midphrase. Els cups his ears, then his nose. He breathes into the mask he’s made. Then his fingers push up and over his forehead.

I could, he concedes. But I’d need more pieces on my résumé. More performances. This film score would make me more competitive.

Competitive! You’ve never even tried. How many positions have you applied for, in the last six years?

He feels no need to answer. He has fallen into a place equal parts panic and peace. He searches for a line of Cage: “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight.” But the line won’t save him.

What are you afraid of, Peter?

Failure. Success. The wisdom of crowds. Knowledge of what his notes must sound like, to everyone who isn’t him.

Calamity from the living room: Sara slamming her patty-cake mitts across four octaves. In one smooth ball-change, Maddy turns back into supermom, gliding into the living room. Hey, hey, hey. What are you doing, lady?

I’m playing something and nobody’s even hearing it!

That’s as good as it gets, Peter Els wants to tell his daughter. Creation’s Rule Number Four. Little girl, anywhere, without an audience: so long as no one listens, you’re better than safe. You’re free.

There is another world, the world in full. But it’s folded up inside this one.

He couldn’t stay in the cottage. If the Joint Task Force tracked him here, they’d trash the place without hesitation. Kohlmann would be drawn into the middle of his nightmare. She, too, might be held until cleared—an accessory to terror, the hidden half of the Naxkohoman sleeper cell.

For one more night, Els slept in the bed of his unmet benefactors. He kept off the Web and ducked all calls from Klaudia. No more data hostages. The next morning, he scavenged a last breakfast and took stock. He had half a tank of gas, the clothes on his back, and Klaudia’s smartphone, which he was now afraid to touch. In his wallet was the two hundred dollars he’d taken from the cash machine the morning of the raid.

The moment he used his credit card or withdrew more cash from an ATM, they had his coordinates. His every transaction went straight to searchable media—part of an electronic composition too sprawling for any audience to hear.

He got in the Fiat and took the interstate back toward Naxkohoman. On the outskirts of town, he followed the familiar state highway spur until he was twenty miles northeast of his house. And there, at the drive-through of a bank branch he often used, he took out another five hundred dollars, the most the machine allowed. From behind a window of smoky glass, a video camera turned him into a short film with no soundtrack aside from the Fiat’s furtive engine.

The thousands of moving parts of the digital passacaglia, the packets of proliferating information, circulated in a way that he couldn’t hope to understand. His plan was crudeness itself: keep moving, and leave as few footprints as possible. He pocketed the ejected stack of cash, glanced sideways into the dark lens, and rolled the Fiat back onto the road.

Two blocks from the bank, he stopped and gassed. He paid with his card, since his bread-crumb trail already led to this block. Do you need a printed receipt? No, thank you. Then he got back on I-80 west. The shallow meanders of highway focused him. He drove for a long time, emptied of thought, as marked as an endangered creature wearing a tracking tag.

In the afternoon, almost back to his Allegheny hideout, he pulled into a convenience center off the interstate. He bought gas again, paying in cash this time. Security cameras seemed harder to search than credit card databases. The store’s smells left him faint with hunger. Amid the aisles of saturated fats and corn syrup he found a shelf of omegas and antioxidants, stranded through some demographic miscalculation. He stocked up, feeling oddly excited, as if on a long-delayed holiday escape with his national parks passport waiting to be stamped. The meal went down in four minutes, in the corner of the truck stop parking lot.

At the intersection with I-79, in a Zen trance, Els turned south. He followed the signs to Pittsburgh, guided by shaped chance. A rush hour construction snarl slowed him to a crawl. At last he broke and resorted to the radio.

The dial swarmed with ecstasy, dance, and rage. Els shied away from music, keeping to the shallows of talk. But the talk washed over him, unintelligible. Two think-tank economists had written a book arguing for the abolishment of the Department of Education. A congresswoman likened the EPA to al-Qaeda. A spokesman for a citizens’ action group called the New Minutemen threatened reprisals if the President’s fascist health care bill wasn’t trashed. The spliced-together monologues played in his ears like an experimental radio theater piece from 1975.

The shakes set in as he hit that narrow finger of West Virginia. The sun had fallen, and his body was succumbing again to the absurdity of hunger. Somewhere in the dusk of eastern Ohio he pulled off at a rest stop. He ate dinner out of vending machines and slept in the reclined driver’s seat, using a rain poncho he found in the trunk for warmth. Sleep went no deeper than a series of loosely affiliated stupors. The envelope of noise in which he floated—the grind of eighteen-wheelers, the vampire cleaning crew who readied the facility for the next day’s assaults—combined in a spectral chorus. He came awake a little after four a.m. hearing Penderecki’s Hiroshima threnody, a piece he hadn’t listened to for twenty years.

Morning was long, flat, and straight, with the sun at his back. A double dose of coffee, donuts, and headline radio powered him through Columbus. The fragile alliance between Cairo’s Copts and Muslims was falling apart, days after they’d protected each other from the regime’s police. A twenty-five-year-old Korean beat his mother to death for nagging him about computer games, then played on for hours, charging the session to the dead woman’s card.

Toward noon, outside a town called Little Vienna, long after the AM chatter plunged him into his own chronic focal difficulty, Els heard his name coming out of the radio. Fatigue and malnourishment couldn’t explain the hallucination. A Pennsylvania college professor was wanted for questioning regarding the deaths of nine Americans by bacterial contagion. And as exhibit one of evidence against him, music poured out of the car’s five speakers. Twelve measures of baritone aria:

Nothing is more beautiful than terror,

More terrible than His coming.

All that is high will be made low . . .

The second act of The Fowler’s Snare: John of Leiden, King of the New Jerusalem, reaching his crazed zenith. The sole recording Els knew of had sat in the bottom of a cardboard box in his various closets for eighteen years. Some enterprising journalist had found another copy and discovered the incriminating passage. The music had long gone unheard by all but a few listeners. Now it made its belated radio debut, for a panicked audience of hundreds of thousands.

Eighteen years on, Richard’s libretto—that pastiche of Rilke and Isaiah—made Els wince. But the singer’s expansion of the germ motif sounded righteous, even brazen. A good melody was a miracle, with all the surprise inevitability of a living thing. A strange sensation warmed him, and it took Els a moment to name it: pride.

The orchestration cut through his interstate haze—eighty people blowing and sawing away, while a lunatic praised the beauty of terror. The tune was a clear incitement to violence, and Els felt himself being hung in the court of public opinion. Contemporary opera making it onto AM radio: such was the power of threat Level Orange.

After twelve seconds—a broadcast eternity—the aria faded out. The news went on to a story about the boom in black market Adderall sweeping America’s high schools. Els killed the radio. His hands bounced on the wheel. All at once, seventy seemed perilous. He eased his foot off the accelerator. A lion-maned woman on a cell in a dinged-up Volvo pulled out to pass him. A bulging Ford Expedition shot through behind her; two towheaded boys in the backseat flicked obscene gestures as they passed. A caravan filed by, each occupant turning to gawk at the gray-haired moving violation. Els looked down at his speedometer: he’d slowed to forty-eight. A lone highway cop, running his plates for going too slow, would finish him. “Prophet of Beautiful Terror, Apprehended.”

By pure will, he forced the car back up to sixty-two. He flipped the radio on again and fished for pop tunes. He didn’t stop until the gas tank made him. At a truck stop, he stocked up on shrink-wrapped sandwiches. Then he pressed on through Indiana into eastern Illinois. He pulled off for the night at a roadside motel on the north edge of Champaign-Urbana, not ten miles from where he met his wife, conceived his daughter, and befriended the one man in all the world whose opinion still mattered to him.

It seemed as good a place as any to be caught and held forever.

Listen deep down: most life happens on scales a million times smaller than ours.

He spent his nights composing for Richard. First the film soundtrack, then a pitched percussion accompaniment for a brittle but thrilling piece of voice theater that never made it beyond a few Village apartments. By then Els was going down to New York every few weeks. Maddy never tried to stop him; she was just his wife, after all. But she refused to drive him to the bus station. This is your baby, Peter. You do what you need.

At home, he worked at the electric piano, under headphones, deaf and muted to the world. Sara stamped on the floor in the next room, jealous of this thing he was trying to raise from the dead. Once she came to him and demanded, Let’s make something.

Daddy is, Daddy said.

No, she shouted. Something good.

Good how?

Good like a rose that nobody knows.

They tried, but the rose had plans of its own.

Then one night Maddy, too, stopped by with a commission. She came into his study, so much more slender and circumspect than she’d been in her grad student days, and grazed her fingernails across his back. She glanced at his score in progress and smiled, all their proxy skirmishes of the last few months forgiven. Write me a song, she said.

She meant: Something singable, not art. No occult noises for gatherings of alienated prestige-mongers. A tune that could play on the radio, steeped in desire and mystery. The kind that most people need and love.

Come on, write me something, she said. Almost soubrette again. Something simple. Her eyes said: One last romp. Her mouth said: Bet you can’t.

PETER TOOK THE dare and slept on it. The next morning, while guarding Titian’s Rape of Europa from vandals, he fashioned a melody out of all the rules from Intermediate Theory that he’d long ago discarded. He built his air on top of an expansive descending bass. Anchored by a stirring pedal point, it leapt free to a surprise stunning chord right before the half cadence. The irresistible hook, like a bruised cloud blowing off in a June breeze, left behind a blue swathe that caught the heart and lifted it into a bird’s-eye view of things to come. Song, just song, the enigma of it, the warmth and longing. The three-minute forever.

He took the melody home with him, planed and trued it, fitted it up with irresistible harmonies, and played it for his wife. He had no words: only scat, on a melody that sounded more discovered than invented. By the end, he had his two girls singing descant on the chorus and laughing out loud.

Sara couldn’t get enough of the trivial tune. Even Maddy was caught humming the hook around the apartment. The earworm was as brutal as a bad case of flu. Maddy shook her head at the song’s total delight. Oh, you missed your calling!

So he had. A dozen such tunes over the course of a career, and he might even have saved lives.

The realization softened and saddened them both. It’s good, Peter, Maddy admitted. It’s really good. And for the first time in months, so were they.

Two days later, Peter told his wife that he needed to head down to New York again for a few days, to talk with Richard about a new ambitious work. Maddy recoiled from the announcement. She looked like he’d French-kissed her, only to bite through her tongue. But she recovered quickly enough.

Do what you like, she told him. But be ready to like whatever you do for a very long time.

Richard had secured funds from his fairy godmother to put together a chamber ballet oratorio based on the transhumanist Fyodorov. The plan called for five veterans from the Judson Dance Theater, eight Tribeca new music militants, and four singers—SATB—performing in shifts over the course of twelve hours. Els would do the music, of course: he was now part of the Bonner package deal. They called the project Immortality for Beginners.

Some new, brutal urgency was taking shape in a Lower Manhattan slammed by an oil crisis, mugged by inflation, tattooed with Day-Glo tags, whacked out on blow, buried under uncollected trash, and sliding into bankruptcy. Punk had blown the top of pop’s skull off, and downtown concert music was on high alert. The scene was stripping down—postminimal, pulsed, machinic. The music grew a skin of brushed steel and smoky glass. It sounded to Els almost nostalgic, like a holy cantillation for a city slipping down into the East River ooze.

Richard kept a bed for Els in a third-floor studio above a junk shop on the Lower East Side. So long as you came and went in sunlight and kept the lock bar wedged against the front door, the place was as safe as houses. Els squatted there when he came to town to hammer out his cosmic collages with his collaborators. He could have stayed anywhere; he lived, in those days, inside his swirling Fyodorovian choruses, with their vision of an evolved future that would come to know all things, control all atoms, perfect the body, stop death, and revive every person who ever lived. The mad Russian’s Common Cause spelled out everything Els had once wanted from music: the restoration of everything lost and the final defeat of time.

But immortality proved lethal. Maddy met every new announcement of another New York trip with stoic and pleasant nods. He’d spend the train ride down in awe of her, of her growing, no-nonsense poise. Her self-possession seemed the equal to every upheaval. She’d given him years to make his mark—so many of them—and he hadn’t delivered. And yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing at all he could gift her back, except this holdout search for what the world wouldn’t give.

One evening back in Brookline, Peter looked up from his score-in-progress to see New Morning’s new principal across the room in a baggy cardigan, at work at her own desk on urgencies he knew nothing about. Camped at his feet, which she clung to these days, his third-grader was busy drawing maps of Umber, an invented world that Sara spent all her free time populating. Umber had races and nationalities, politics and languages, catastrophic wars and great eras of peace. It survived contagious pandemics and man-made depressions. It had folk songs for every race and an anthem for every nation. Maddy worried about the girl’s obsession with the place. But Peter wanted to tell his daughter: Yes: make something good. Live there.

And sitting at his desk, scoring his systems for half a handful of listeners, Peter realized that he lived on the very best planet available. Music was pouring out of him, music that danced and throbbed and shouted down every objection. Composing was all he wanted to do, all he could do, and he would do it now with all he had.

Maddy? he said.

She looked up, alerted by his gentleness.

We could live there. Start new. Just like—

Where? Sara asked, excited. New York?

Maddy’s mouth twitched, ready to smile at the punch line. She didn’t say: Don’t be ridiculous, Peter. She didn’t say: You know I can’t leave my job. She didn’t ask what the hell he was thinking. She just stared at him, incredulous and very, very tired.

The way he’d remembered it, everything happened in that shared glance. On that downbeat, he left a wife who’d given him a decade of unearned patience, abandoned a daughter who wanted only to make things with him, and stepped out into free fall. For nothing, for music, for a chance to make a little noise in this world. A noise that no one needed to hear.

For years, he blamed Fyodorov, those choruses from the growing oratorio, with their slow, progressing ecstasies as inevitable as death. Whatever we love will live again. Every disastrous adventure in this life would be cloned and resurrected. Everyone who ever lived would get a better second act. All his vanished lake-splashing cousins, his loner father and lonely mother, the teachers he needed to impress, the friends he never dared open to, the endless parade of museum visitors, mute and motionless as the paintings he guarded: all would be brought back to life and made whole. Countless failed hopes, forever redeemed by the right sequence of notes.

The way he saw it, Els was leaving nothing; there was nothing in life he could leave. He and his daughter would walk once more through the Victory Gardens, giving all the rose varieties ridiculous theme songs. He and his wife would sing together again, old inventions from student days. Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

All dead wrong, of course. Life turned out to be one shot, stray and mistaken, a single burst scattered on the air.

He held his wife’s eyes, waiting for her to see.

Yes! his daughter shouted, from her pads full of scribbles on the floor. Let’s go someplace. Someplace good.

But Maddy heard another tune, nearer and louder. No, she said. Not me. I live here.

HE TOOK HIS girl to her favorite soda fountain to tell her. He ordered her a Black Cow: a work of art that demanded every atom of her eight-year-old attention. He told her, Your mother and I still love each other. And we both love you more than ever. It’s just. She has work she has to do. And so do I.

Hold it, the girl said.

Nothing’s going to change. We’ll still make things together. Still be like we always were.

Wait, Sara shouted. Soon the shout was full-voice shrieking. He couldn’t make her stop, and when she did, the silence was worse. It said, as clear as silence ever said anything: Never ask me to make things with you again.

A grammar but no dictionary, sense but no meaning, urgency without need: music and the chemisty of cells.

Richard consoled Els, when he got the news. Sorry, Maestro. I truly am. We loved that woman. I thought the three of us would be together forever.

Thought wrong, Els told him.

Lost the one with the vagina, Richard said.

Looks that way.

And the kid. Oh, geez.

Bonner palmed his face and pressed long and hard. At last he said, Well, you have your work. Maybe she’ll come around.

Peter Els joined the community of souls in orbit around Richard Bonner. He surrendered to a collaborative excitement not altogether distinguishable from panic. Inspiration came at him from the strangest places, and there were days when he could pull marvelous sequences of notes out of a subway conversation. He had his work, and there was no end of work, work so good that it felt, sometimes, like death.

ELS STILL SAW them often, his wife and daughter. But Maddy was no longer his wife, and six months on, Sara had fled to some farther, imaginary planet. Maddy wouldn’t take the girl to New York. Els had to come up to Boston, staying in rentals in Somerville and Jamaica Plain. On his third visit after the separation, he asked the sullen child for the latest news from Umber. He always did. It was like asking how things were with her friends.

The girl gave a pragmatic shrug. Bingo and Felicita went to war.

Yes? Els said. That’s happened before, right?

She shook her head. They didn’t stop, this time.

By autumn, Sara asked to quit piano. Maddy, enlightened educator, didn’t resist. She and Peter fought about the decision over the phone.

What a waste, he said. She’s twice as musical as I was at her age.

And . . .?

And she’ll kick herself later, when she grows up.

His ex-wife said, You want to give her adulthood without regret?

Soon other crises made the piano seem child’s play. The girl swallowed a fistful of aspirin—to see how it would feel—and wound up in the ER. She poured fingernail polish on a friend’s new platform shoes and called another girl she knew a limp dildo.

A what? Peter asked his ex-wife. Does she even know—

I asked, Maddy interrupted. She was a little hazy on the details.

Peter’s suggestions for how to handle the girl no longer counted. He’d thrown away his vote the day he packed up his four crates of salvage from the Brookline apartment. He was the cause, and never again a cure.

Maddy stayed perfectly pleasant over the phone, and, in person, the most cheerful of distant acquaintances. The posture, impeccable: Here’s your daughter; have her back by dinner. Graceful, stately. Maddy, too, had missed her calling. She should never have left the stage.

She broke the news to Els long-distance, with the studied levelheadedness that was now her art. She’d married Charlie Pennel, the longtime superintendent of New Morning. Peter knew the man. His wife had worked for him for years.

The ink on their divorce papers was still wet. You might have told me in advance.

Really, Peter? Why is that?

How long has this been in the works?

He could hear Maddy’s amusement in her mouth’s small muscles. Peter! What are you suggesting?

Not suggesting anything. You do what you need to.

I thought I might.

Every playful thing in her now disgusted him. He hung up. Ten minutes later he called her back to wish her well. He got her machine, and left no message.

He spent a week humiliating himself, calling old friends and neighbors, pretending to be catching up after years of neglect. Then he’d ask, stony-casual: Did you make it to the wedding? When at last he found a guest, he insisted on being tortured with a full description. The music was straight-up Mendelssohn, played by a small ensemble of gifted students from New Morning.

IMMORTALITY FOR BEGINNERS came to life, a vigorous corpse flower. Twelve hours of music was an eternity. Els wrote long, slowly mutating, terraced fantasias that pulsed and sighed and exploded. He scattered the peaks and valleys. He borrowed from voices dead for centuries and made them chatter posthumously. And he repeated, recombined, and looped everything until the whole was wide enough to stretch from dawn to dusk.

Bonner loved the finished score. He pointed to a favorite extended passage. It’s hilarious, Peter. I didn’t know you were so nasty.

What are you talking about? Els asked.

The question surprised Richard. I thought . . . you mean this part isn’t a parody of reactionary crap?

No, Els told him. It is reactionary crap.

But Richard adored the eclectic score. His choreography was in-your-face, rancid, and divine: slung hips and puzzled arms, heads twisting in synchrony, glances raised and lowered like divine lunatics reading a celestial tabloid. He had to cycle the performers, who spelled each other out, relay-style, over the course of the monster marathon.

The piece took most of a year to put together, and it was over in a day. From sunrise to sunset on a Saturday in July, bewildered listeners filtered through a renovated warehouse loft in the old butter and eggs district, watching crazies proclaim the coming reconstruction, from pure information, of everyone who ever lived. Most stayed for a while and left shrugging, but a few souls camped out, lost in the endless middle of things. The Times review ran five hundred words. It admired the choreography’s giddy novelty and called the music of thirty-nine-year-old Peter Els evasive, anachronistic, and at times oddly bracing. But this reviewer admits to leaving after an hour and fifty-three minutes.

The party afterward, in the gutted loft, lasted almost as long as the performance. Everyone was spent. Els pushed his way into the drained celebration. The Velvet Underground growled out of someone’s cheap boom box, homesick and way too loud. Richard started throwing stuffed grape leaves at the bottles of wine lined up on a long sideboard across the room. Each time he knocked one down, he’d do a little Martian hornpipe and spout obscene rhymed couplets. The cast stood by, watching the show. Two male dancers started a color commentary.

That’s what happens when you stop sleeping for two weeks.

And add some creative pharmacology.

Bonner heard the pair and began pelting them with crudités. A young, splay-toothed oboist named Penny came up to Richard, touched his elbow, and asked if he was okay. Bonner flipped the back of his hand as if to return a Ping-Pong ball and slapped the girl across her face. The room went dead, and Els, who’d known the man longest of anyone, stepped up to Richard and took his arm. The choreographer reeled on him.

Oh, fuck me with a rubber mallet! Look who’s here. If it isn’t the morals police.

Come on, Richard, Els said, working an arm around Bonner’s shoulder. Closing time.

Bonner shoved him. Don’t touch me! Get your little chickenshit hands off . . .

Els recoiled.

Richard pointed at him, his thumb a gun site. You, my friend, will never be more than a polite mediocrity.

The whole ensemble froze in a ring around the two men. Stunned dancers with daubs of face paint still rimming their eyes looked on as Lou Reed purred, “Shiny, shiny, shiny,” into the echoing air. It might have been a coda to the Bonner staging that had just played for the last twelve hours.

Have I done something to you? Els asked. Hurt you in some way?

Someone said, Finally lost it. Someone said, Make him puke; he’ll be fine.

Bonner aimed at Els and clicked off a shot with his finger. Then another.

Els said, You didn’t like the score? You should have told me months ago, when I could have done something about it.

Bonner reeled on him. You, my friend, will never make anything but steamy, creamy, lovely shit. Know why? You need to be loved too much. He turned on the tittering audience: Who wants to give Tune Boy here a little love? Somebody? Anybody? Come on! He’ll trade you pretty things for it.

Els held up his palms, like some medieval Jesus stepping from the tomb. He turned and threaded his way out of the room, pulling free of the few pairs of hands that tried to stop him. And so beginner’s immortality came to an end.

A WEEK LATER, Bonner traced Els through mutual friends to the tenth floor of a Brutalist apartment block in Long Island City and sent him a singing telegram: four white suburban kids in tuxes crooning “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” Els didn’t bother to reply.

He got a job working nights as a cake decorator for a bakery in Queens. By day, he apprenticed as an unlicensed plumber’s assistant, knocking around in a blasted van through the Upper East Side, repairing the fixtures of the rich and famous. Once he helped rebuild a shower stall for James Levine, who looked frailer in person. He fraternized with no one but his two plumber bosses, his geriatric neighbors, and the Dominican grocery cashiers who rang up his cold cuts and cereal. On bad nights, when his body demanded release, he used the past: Maddy as she was the night she sang his Borges songs.

From time to time, melodies occurred to him, broad melancholy phrases from places he’d forgotten—listening with Clara, lessons with Kopacz, those years of war with Mattison, the songs he and Sara used to improvise. He never bothered to write the phrases down.

He did write one piece in those months, an odd, glinting setting of Pound’s “An Immortality.” On the day they met, Maddy had coached Els on what a soprano could and couldn’t do. Now he took everything she’d told him and threw it away. He wrote for a voice that could reach any note, one that might levitate the Pentagon if it wanted. He added two parts for unspecified instruments, lines that billowed like ribbons on the page. The harmonic language was a wash of things old, new, borrowed, and blue. It sounded like a troubadour song come loose in time. It sang of love and idleness; nothing else was worth the having.

He copied the chanson on cream-colored parchment and mailed it to his ex-wife. He dedicated it “To Madolyn Corr, on the occasion of her marriage. May the future change the past for the better.” She never acknowledged receipt. Not long after Els sent the gift, he learned that Maddy, Sara, and Charlie Pennel were moving to the western suburbs of St. Louis to start an alternative school.

OUT IN THE void of the Central Time Zone, Sara rediscovered music. At eleven, Andy Gibb. At twelve, Anne Murray. Then came thirteen’s key change. When she next came to visit him in New York, she was a torn T-shirted fake anarchist with “London Calling” on her Walkman, and he, an old guy whose music was worse than a museum. They were supposed to spend ten days together. They ran out of things to talk about in ten minutes. He took her around town. The only place that interested her was CBGB.

The second night of her stay, he told her, Let’s make something.

She looked at him puzzled. She doped out the question and shuddered. I’ll pass, thanks. A long week later, she was gone, and he didn’t see her again for another year.

HE WORKED ON the edge of the city, celibate, for almost four years. He saved money. He listened to everything he could put his hands on. He stopped anticipating, stopped making edicts, stopped planning. Mostly, he waited. For what, he wasn’t sure.

One April Saturday night, he swallowed half a hit of acid that he’d gotten two years earlier from the percussionist for Immortality for Beginners. Peter had hidden the tab away in his sock drawer, for when he felt equal to extinction. At some point in that year-long night, he found himself on top of a high-rise near Gantry Plaza, looking out over a silk sheet of water on a shimmering green quilt of a city. While he watched, the great, urgent message of the future took shape and revealed itself to all who could peel free from themselves and hear. Life was infinitely clear, infinitely redeeming. He scribbled the message into his pocket notebook, where he kept all his musical ideas. The words were a perfect mnemonic, and just rereading them would forever rejoin him to the endlessly brocading transfiguration. He would need only look at the words again a year from now, or fifty, and they’d turn his every anxiety into a matter for laughter and embrace.

The next day, he lay still and did nothing as his cells knitted back together. Then work took him up again. A week went by before he glanced into his notebook. There he discovered the magic reminder: “Keep living.”

He heard about a cabin up in New Hampshire in the foothills of the White Mountains that a friend of his boss was trying to rent. The place was tiny, and a year’s rent was less than he now paid every three months. All he needed was a reference, and his boss supplied one without reservation.

No offense, Mozart, but you aren’t cut out for plumbing. You always struck me as more of the mad backwoodsman type.

Els packed up his half a dozen boxes of salvage. Clothes that would serve him for a few more years, until they dissolved from washing. Polaroids of his father and mother, sister and brother. A picture of a woman who had been his wife, with a gecko skull on her chest and a cicada in her hair. A stack of printed parts and handwritten scores. A quilt: Night in the Forest. Reels and cassettes of music of his that he no longer recognized. A song his seven-year-old daughter had written for him called “Good Days Are Best.” And a scrap of torn cardboard that had once been part of an improvised toboggan. And still something in him waited to scribble down the tune that would raise everyone he ever knew from the dead and make them laugh with remembering.

If a lion could sing, we’d know it right away as a song.

Els went to New Hampshire to escape New York for a season. He stayed ten years. Later, he could recite everything he did in that decade in a little under five minutes, and leave out nothing crucial.

And yet those years in the woods were the most productive of his life. He got stronger. He believed, for a while, in his body. In spring, he’d walk up into the White Mountains, into the vistas of Cole and Kensett and Durand. Twelve-mile days were his specialty. He composed as he hiked, and he kept his ideas intact until he got back to the bungalow. In summers he biked; in the autumn, he chopped wood. In winters, he shoveled out by hand the two-hundred-foot gravel drive that connected him to civilization.

He ate well, by the standards of the day. He read every work of eccentric history that the North Conway Public Library owned. That’s how he met the librarian, Trish Sather, who soon began to visit Els at his bungalow twice a week, on nights when her husband and son had hockey practice. Trish would park a quarter mile from the house, fooling no one. Peter cooked for her, they’d have gentle sex, and if time remained, from their hundred minutes, they wound up talking books or playing backgammon. It was a kind of love, although neither ever used the word. Afterward, Trish would shoot home, push her bookmark forward thirty-five pages in War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, and settle at the kitchen table, ready to cheer her returning boys’ triumphs and nurse their tragedies. Like the making of strange musics—their affair was a victimless crime.

Trish liked cowboy songs, and she played Els no end of the old high lonesome. Three sad ballads and they were stupid with desire, taking no more than the rest of the album side to find what they each needed. This happy arrangement lasted until the night, some twenty months on, when Trish, under the flannel sheets and topped by Maddy’s quilt, stroking her pill-swollen breasts, said, You don’t really trust me, do you?

What do you mean? he asked, knowing already.

You write music all day long, every day. Even Sundays. And you’ve never played me a single song.

Els went limp and sighed. The sound angered her.

What? I embarrass you? You think I’m too big a dipshit to get what you do?

He sat up, suddenly middle-aged. There’s nothing to get.

You won’t even let me try.

He looked around the room, his cabin. His soul was a house on fire, and he had to get out.

I don’t have a tape player, he said.

She squinted at him. In my car.

They sat in her Gremlin, windows up and engine idling, surrounded by autumn and listening to warped, years-old tapes on a cheap deck. He played her the work he’d saved from the last quarter century. Greatest hits—maybe an hour’s worth in all. He knew it would make her late, that she’d have to lie her way back into her own home. The last piece was a clear, high-voiced girl he once knew, singing, Time is a fire that consumes me. But I am that fire.

Bright sparks going over a mountainside. Whelp, he said, when the concert ended. That’s my life.

She sat behind the wheel in the dark cab, her teeth clamped to a fingernail. She seemed more stymied than chagrined.

Well, shucky darn, Peter. Sometimes it’s fine. But other times? It just sounds . . .

Like noise? he suggested.

Outside, the geese were heading south.

Els ended things two weeks later. Thereafter, he bought his books in garage sales and dime-store bins. Only when he heard that the Sathers had moved up to Burlington did he return to the library reading room.

CABIN ECCENTRICS WERE common in those parts, and the villagers knew his species. Word got around that he’d been some New York bohemian who had some kind of breakdown. One night, half crazed with loneliness, he wandered into a bingo game at the American Legion. His ear had grown acute with so much silence, and he heard a vet at a nearby table tell his wife, Look who’s here! The burnout artist.

He lived simply, earning a little money as a builder’s assistant and handyman for the elderly. He spent almost nothing, except for food and his criminally low rent. For a while, he tried to send Maddy child support, but she never cashed his checks.

When Sara was a sophomore in high school, she sent him a letter accusing him of being the reason why people thought she was a freak. He flew her out for a visit. For three days she lay on the couch, fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube, answering his every suggested activity with, No thanks; I’m good. She listened to jackhammer, monochordal drones that he could hear through her earbuds from the other room.

The day before she flew back to Missouri, she asked, Could you buy me a personal computer? Mom doesn’t think I need one.

You’re interested in computers?

Her eyes swept up behind her lids. Why is that so hard for people to believe?

It’s not at all, he said. You can do amazing things with them.

She lifted her head from the armrest of the couch, trying to spot the trap.

I once wrote music algorithms on some of the earliest mainframes.

Huh, she said. That might have been cool. And the duet was over for another year.

In New Hampshire’s lost notch, Els’s music abandoned all pretense of system. He fell back on a diversity that bordered on plagiarism. He’d lived all his life under the tyranny of originality. Now he was free to be as derivative as he needed.

The sketches began to flow again: a double concerto for bass clarinet and sopranino sax. World Band—a juggernaut symphonic pastiche that ran a fourteen-note motif through a dozen ethnic styles. A setting of Rupert Brooke’s “Safety,” for tenor and brass quintet:

Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;

And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

Els sent the score of World Band to an acquaintance from grad school who ran a festival in the Low Countries. Something in the piece—perhaps the virtuoso kitsch—caught on with a European audience tired of having to work so hard for pleasure. The new music ensemble that premiered it in Utrecht took it on tour, playing it throughout the Île-de-France and Rhineland. One day he got a royalty check for a little over four hundred dollars—about a tenth what his boyhood paper route paid him for the same number of hours’ work. He pranced around the cabin cackling and rubbing his hands. Then he remembered God taunting the rabbi after his Sabbath hole in one: So? Who you gonna tell?

HIS BROTHER CALLED, out of the blue. Els hadn’t spoken with him in three years. Paul’s voice still sounded like a punk of ten, but with a finger dragging on the record.

Paulie! Jesus, how are you? I can’t believe you’re calling. Who died?

After five fat seconds of nonplussed silence, Paul replied, Mom.

Carrie Els Halverson had been visiting London with a high school girlfriend she’d rediscovered after her second husband Ronnie came out and left her. The two were inseparable, traveling together twice around the world. But this was Carrie’s first trip to a country where they drove on the left, and on a pretty June morning in 1986, she stepped off a curb in Westminster and was hit by a cab that didn’t even have time to sound its quaint horn.

Peter flew to England. Paul met him at Heathrow. He’d grown so large, slow, and sallow that Peter didn’t recognize him. Between them, they managed to contact their sister, in an ashram in Maharashtra. Susan sent back a muddled telegram, the last Els would ever receive, about how their mother hadn’t died but was simply becoming something else. The brothers had the body cremated, and they spread the ashes illegally in a corner of Chelsea Physic Garden. This was on the second day of summer. The sky was ridiculous with blue. Peter tried to say a few words and found he couldn’t. His brother touched his shoulder.

That’s okay. I knew her, too.

In the three days they spent handling death’s logistics, Peter was surprised to discover how much he enjoyed his adult brother. Paul swam in a sea of theories. Everything from the morning’s headlines to the license plates of buses had hidden significance. But Paul’s torrent of interpretations had something joyous to it. Buried patterns everywhere. It sounded, sometimes, almost like musicology.

They sat in a pub in Holborn the night before Paul’s return home, drinking viscid beer and eating gravy-doused pastries. Paul shared some insights into the Challenger explosion and its relation to the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Peter gazed upon his brother’s still-woolly head, now flecked with gray, and he regretted all the years they’d been out of touch. Paul had met his niece only twice. It took death to bring the brothers together.

Why is this, Paul? Peter asked.

Why is what?

Loners should stick together, shouldn’t they?

The idea baffled the giant man. They wouldn’t be loners then, would they?

Across the oaky pub, people at pushed-together tables sang club football songs, swaying to more communal pleasure in three minutes than Peter’s music had created in thirty years. Another sing-along poured from a television above the bar. Paul examined the bottom of his dinner plate for any revealing fragments of text.

Peter said, Remember how angry you got, that I didn’t understand rock and roll?

His brother stopped investigating and frowned. What are you talking about?

You tied me up and forced me to listen.

Did I? Sheesh.

You threatened to wash my ears out with soap.

No, no. That must have been your other brother.

You were right, Paulie. I was deaf.

Paul waved him off. Just as well you never got into that stuff. A lot of those songs use subliminal persuasion techniques.

Serious?

Paul nodded. The whole industry employs a fair amount of thought control, these days.

Paul had never heard a note of Peter’s adult compositions. He put Peter’s vocation on par with their sister Susan’s esoteric vision quests. It would have been fun to sit with Paul and some Boulez or Berio, to learn whatever secret messages he might hear.

What do you listen to now? Peter asked.

Paul set down the dinner plate, shook his head, and shot his little brother a quizzical smile. I’m an adult, Petey. I listen to talk radio.

THAT NIGHT, AS they went to bed in their shared room in a Bloomsbury B and B, Paul asked, So how have you been making ends meet?

I’m not, really, Peter confessed.

Well, you’re all set now.

Peter stretched out on his lumpy twin bed. What do you mean?

Mom was sitting on a lot. Ridiculously overinsured, too. Even split three ways, you’ve got enough to keep on writing any weirdness you want for a good long while.

Peter sat up against the headboard, his hands cupping his ears, listening to the music of chance. His actuary brother lay in a bed three feet away, annotating newsweeklies in tiny, all-caps letters. A tune materialized in Peter’s head from across a great distance. Placing it wasn’t a problem. He could name that tune in one note.

‘Kay, Paul announced, when his scribbling hand got sore. Lights out.

Peter lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of a Hammond chord organ as his parents sang. There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream. His voice shocked the muted room.

What was Mom listening to these days?

From Paul’s bed there came a muzzy, puzzled grunt. I don’t have the foggiest. A snort of embarrassment turned into the simplest sob. Then nothing. Then a steady, pitched snore that kept Peter company long into the night.

Insecurity will always be a growth industry. The economy now depends on fear.

The evening had turned icy when he entered Illinois. Now he sat in the motel parking lot with the engine off, sealed in a cocoon of fogged glass. Starving, woozy, and saddle sore, he wiped a portal in the windshield and looked outside. Six feet above the car, against the wall of the faux-folksy chain motel, was a thing that looked like something NASA might send to the outer planets. Security camera. In another life, Els had read that the average city resident appeared on video a few hundred times a day. The fact hadn’t bothered him, then.

Els flipped his collar up around his face, calling even more attention to himself, and stepped into the cold. Cars thrummed from the interstate and frontage road to the south. To the north, towering halogen streetlights illuminated a fairyland of chain stores. Down a car-choked gauntlet of stoplights there spread a copy of the same preassembled strip that seeped northward from Naxkohoman, emblazoned with logos that every toddler in the country learned along with her ABC’s.

A street sign shone in the distance: Town Center Boulevard. When Els lived in this town, there’d been nothing here but the richest topsoil in the world, all the way to the horizon.

The lobby of the motel was a cartoon Southwest: quarry tile, muted earth tones, and above the reception desk, pastel paintings of Pueblos. He’d somehow wormholed through into Arizona. A circus-colored popcorn machine stood between the reception desk and a small breakfast area. The room stank of synthetic butter. A bowl of apples so perfect they might have been props for a musical about Eden sat on the reception desk. On the wall above, a flat-screen newscast split into three simultaneous video feeds with two text crawls and a title box beneath.

A twenty-five-year-old in T-shirt and blue blazer looked up from his computer and smiled. Els braced, but the clerk kept grinning.

Hey, there! What can I do you for tonight?

Els glanced over his shoulder, gauging the distance to the lobby door. Would you have a single free?

You might be in luck, the clerk said. He punched some keys and bugled victory. Smoking or non?

The clerk produced a sheet for Els to fill out. Name, address, phone, contact info, driver’s license, make and model of car, plate number . . .

Els took the form and held it in front of him. I’m paying cash.

No problem! the clerk assured him.

Els stood, pen in hand, regarding the form. The clerk looked up from the computer and swiped the air.

Not to worry. It’s just for the files.

Els filled in the form, inventing freely.

You have a loyalty card? the clerk asked. Triple-A? Anything?

Els blinked.

AARP? Maybe you left your card at home? No problemo. Ten percent off, for the man with the honest face.

Els traded his money for a key card. On the molding behind the desk, another little webcam glared at him with a cyclops eye.

The room was like the afterlife in a French existentialist novel. Bed, chair, bedside table, clock-radio, wall-mount TV. You could sail to the next galaxy in it, or serve out a life sentence in its minimum-security oblivion. Els showered, almost scalding himself. He lay in a towel on the bed and flipped on the television. He found the news channel, cowering between fourth-generation reality shows. The day’s events unfolded in twenty-second clips. The screen filled with shaky footage from Cairo. Tens of thousands of people fanned out across Liberation Square, clapping, chanting, and marching. As in every large production Els had ever worked on, chaos called the tune. The demonstrators, after dwindling to a trickle, were back in force, in numbers beyond anything the nascent Arab Spring had yet seen. The military were changing sides; the protesters sensed triumph, and all because of one infectious melody.

With a quick crosscut, the scene turned into a Bollywood musical. A singer drifted his way across the square, singing an upbeat tune that could have been the theme song to a sitcom about young cosmopolitans enjoying their star-crossed lives. People held up hand-lettered signs. Vendors proffered food while lip-synching along. Old men in knit caps and women in headscarves mouthed the hopeful, defiant words, which scrolled across the bottom of the screen. The anthem had gone viral over the weekend, saving the revolution.

One more government brought down by a catchy hook. Another crosscut, and the song morphed back to reality. The crowd of euphoric protesters probed each other for clues to what would happen next. Els saw why Socrates wanted to ban all those modes.

But for now, the Cairo correspondent said, this revolution seems to have turned around . . . on a song.

Els stood, shut off the television, and found Kohlmann’s phone. Merely powering it up created more traceable data. He didn’t care. The phone played a little tune and reported eight missed calls and a dozen texts. He dialed.

Where are you? Klaudia said, before he heard a ring. Are you all right?

That had all the earmarks of a trick question. I’m fine. I’m alive.

Have you heard the latest?

Probably not, Els said.

All the IV bags from the Alabama deaths came from the same pharmacy.

Of course, Els said. But let me guess: somehow that story isn’t getting as much coverage as the first.

They still haven’t ruled out malicious tampering at the pharmacy site itself.

Oh, for God’s sake.

The authorities are advising increased vigilance at similar facilities.

Giving the all clear, while asking everyone to stay terrified.

Your man from the FBI dropped by to talk. Somebody here must have alerted them about the class.

Oh, Christ.

He asked if we knew your whereabouts. He wanted to know if you were preaching anything crazy.

What did you tell him?

We told him it doesn’t get crazier than Messiaen. Lisa Keane had some pretty good notes, which she shared with the man. Turns out he had someplace he needed to get to. You’d think we Q-tips terrified young people.

Did they ask about your phone?

Don’t worry. If they do, I’ll tell them you stole it.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Els stayed on in England after Paul flew home. Expense no longer mattered. He could stay for years now, without any sacrifice.

He saw the poster on a notice board in the back of St. Paul’s. He might have created it by imagining. A concert: prestigious Baroque chamber ensemble playing works by unknown composers at St. Martin-in-the-Fields that Saturday. The music had no interest whatsoever for Els. But in the middle of the photo—a dozen musicians in concert dress—holding a cello, was the mother of Clara Reston.

Then the mother turned into the child. The girl had cut her four-foot fall of hair. She wore a tight perm now, silver-blond. Els rejected the evidence, until the evidence rejected every explanation except Clara.

He went to the concert. The two hours of formulaic music were shot through with fleeting, wild phrases and startling harmonies that wouldn’t occur again until the twentieth century. Els couldn’t decide what was clumsiness and what was neglected genius. It didn’t matter: the night held out a string of misshapen pearls that might have gone forgotten forever.

All he could hear was the Firebird. Els couldn’t take his eyes off the cellist. She stroked her instrument as she had at twenty, her graceful neck nuzzling the fingerboard. Something was different about her, aside from the hair and weight and middle age. It took Els many measures of Sweelinck to name it: she had turned mortal.

She was bolting from the church with her packed instrument when he found her. He stepped in front of her. She stopped, annoyed, and then, with a cry, she wrapped him in a bear hug without letting go of her cello. She stepped back, girlish, flushed, palm to her forehead, taking her own temperature. I can’t believe it. It’s you! Her accent had drifted British. Els wondered if she’d forgotten his name.

She pulled him down into a pew. What are you doing in England? The timbre of her voice said: You found me.

Els felt the strangest impulse to lie. To say he’d sought her out, that she was the reason for this, his first ever trip abroad. But he told her of his mother. She cupped her mouth in pain, although Clara and Carrie Els had never been more than wary rivals.

But how did you know about the concert? she asked, when Els was done.

Pure chance.

Her eyes went wide, as if adulthood had taught her, too, that chance was an order no one could yet see.

They sat in the pew, racing through the last quarter century. Clara had lived three years for each of Els’s one. She’d taken a First at Oxford. A year after their final disastrous phone call, she married a Rhodes Scholar, whom she divorced soon after, when he returned to the States to enter politics. Two years of graduate research at Cambridge; then something happened that she couldn’t talk about, and she took off for the Continent. After a stint in the pit of the Zurich Opera, she bounced around Germany for a decade, playing with various broadcast orchestras. She auditioned for the Baroque ensemble, which had been her family for the last four years. She remarried, a British conductor six years younger than she was, with a growing reputation.

We’re more good friends than . . . man and wife, anymore.

Els thrust his juddering hands into his pockets. No children?

She smiled. When was that going to happen? You?

A daughter, he told her. Very bright. Angry at me. Studying computer science at Stanford.

Not chemistry? Clara fixed her eyes on Els’s shoulders.

No. It’s machines, for her. At least they’re predictable.

He looked away, into the cavernous space emptying of people. Up in the galleries and behind the choir, the wide window lancets were sheets of black. Buzz from the departing audience floated up into the flattened barrel vault and echoed off the clouds, shells, and cupids. Els gazed around the frowsty barn—half meeting house, half wedding cake. And he told her of his life.

Twenty-four years, and almost nothing to say. He’d studied composition, taken on the fierce cravings of the avant-garde. He’d worked a dozen jobs of no significance. He’d married, had a family, and abandoned it for a pile of mostly unplayed creations now almost four feet high.

All your fault, he said, warmed by a strange joy. I would have been so much better off playing chamber music with my chemist colleagues on Saturday nights.

Her bow hand found her neck. I shipwrecked you!

For years, all I wanted was to write music that would twist your gut.

You’re doing pretty good now, she said.

But then . . . I got caught. You know: a certain rhythm, a sequence of intervals. And something would spring open, like the tumblers of a lock . . .

It was, he suddenly felt, as good a life as any. Spin the wheel, roll the twelve-sided dice, push them around, hoping to find the future. Even a three-minute piece could run to more permutations than there were atoms in the universe. And you got three-score years and ten, to find one that was sublime.

He heard himself bungling this, the explanation he thought he’d never get a chance to give. But Clara nodded; she’d always had a good ear. She stared off into the bare, paneled aisles. A laugh tore out of her, and she stood. She took him in one arm and her cello in the other, and hustled them from the church through the admiring thank-yous of the thinning crowd.

They wound up in a subterranean restaurant in St. Martin’s Lane. It was dark, noisy, and indifferent, with candles and a tiny Persian carpet on the table. Clara managed to be both measured and giddy. She ordered an expensive Bordeaux and offered a toast: To unearned forgiveness. I was a monster, Peter. One confused little shit of a girl. Forgive me?

Nothing to forgive, he said, but clinked her glass anyway. They tried to talk music, but their worlds were separated by three centuries. They had no more common cause now than cannibals and missionaries. It stunned him; he’d misread her love of music from the start. Not revolutionary: recuperative. He’d gotten the whole game wrong. Still, her eyes were soft over the rim of her glass as he spoke of their old discoveries. Her mouth curled up with happy embarrassment.

What are you thinking? he demanded. Where are you?

At my house. Summer before college. Two babies! Listening to those Strauss songs.

He cringed in the dark, but corrected nothing. I remember.

Tell me about your music. I want to hear everything.

There wasn’t a single score or recording on this island he could show her. At best, he could whistle her bits of tune—like selling your car by scratching off a few flecks of paint to show prospective buyers.

Funny, he said. Right before I made this trip? I was just beginning to learn how music really worked.

Clara’s eyes widened. She pressed two fingers against her lips. You have to come home with me! Oh, not . . . There’s something I need to show you.

She wouldn’t tell him. They settled up and left the restaurant like runaways. Els sat on the wrong side of her Ford, driving with no steering wheel. He leaned back in the tunnel of London lights. Soon enough, she pulled up in front of a row of Georgian terraced houses. The inside felt like one of those London pocket museums. Old engravings covered the walls and the heavy furniture sprouted festoons. Even the foyer was a wonder cabinet. She’d stepped from their shared Levittown childhood into the highborn eighteenth century.

She nudged him into the sitting room and sat him in stuffed leather. Then she addressed a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The thing she sought lay on an upper ledge, in a system of labeled cardboard coffers. She had to climb up a trolley ladder to reach it. The sight of her legs from under her concert black, ascending the rungs, threatened to kill him.

At last she waved something aloft, singing the first few notes of Bach’s Et Resurrexit. She descended triumphant, crossed the room, and put the prize in his hands.

The sheets were a letter he’d posted to himself, into a distant future. His adolescent musical penmanship ambushed him. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere. But somewhere was an awfully big place.

He followed the staves of his first apprentice piece, laughing at all the car wrecks and crazy inspirations. Every choice seemed tender green and bumbling. But how much life the music had! How much hunger to give and excite. All his adult sophistication would never get it back.

All he could do was stare and grin. Young Turk, full of groundless optimism. Every single element of his style had changed. Music had been ground up in the mangle of years. And still he studied the notes, and learned.

He looked up, incredulous. You kept this?

Her head bobbed like a teenage girl’s. Behind her, her shelves sagged under the legacies of a life richer than he could grasp. And yet, she’d saved this student sketch.

Why?

She took the score back and tugged him to the baby grand that dominated the adjacent room. She slipped off her concert heels and sat him on the piano bench.

Come on. Let’s try it.

Clara laughed her way through the upper lines, leaning into the turns with gusto. Their hands collided as they staked out the keys, struggling to catch the boy’s buckshot notes. Their shoulders pressed together, as if this four-hands act were their standard Saturday night ritual. They resumed the little phrase that they’d had to set aside for a moment, a quarter century before. All went onward and outward; nothing at all important had collapsed.

They crossed the finish line together in a rough approximation of what the boy might once have had in mind. Clara, gleeful, shook her head and patted the pages. Great, isn’t it? For a first go?

Els shrugged. He needed to show her a quarter century of work that could vindicate this first attempt. She had shipwrecked him. But he wanted to prove that shipwreck might still be luckier than anyone could suppose.

Again! Clara insisted. And the second time through, the thing breathed.

She grabbed his wrist when they finished. Peter! I’m so happy. I feel . . . retrieved. She fell into a cloudy silence, head bowed, stroking the keys. I’m surprised you’d even say boo to me.

She took him into her tiny galley kitchen and opened a Château Margaux. Wine in hand, they toured her collection. Her walls were crowded with Renaissance woodcut processions and copperplate Baroque fêtes. Four small oils depicted saints in a rainbow of surprise. But the photos were what grabbed Els. He couldn’t stop looking: Clara from every missing year. At twenty-five, in a sleeveless black dress, ridiculously confident and free. At thirty-two, in front of the castle in Prague, gemütlich but wary. A woman of thirty-nine, kissing the hand of Arvo Pärt, before anyone knew the man’s name.

She returned to the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. Come on, she said, taking him by two fingers. Something else to show you. And she led him up the half-width staircase toward another forgotten thing, put on pause awhile, a lifetime back.

She sat him on her four-poster. They lay back, on top of the nineteenth century eiderdown. She kept his fingers. Els felt the wine, the distance of the past, this woman as familiar as breathing. He bought time, entertaining her with accounts of SoHo spectacles, Richard Bonner’s paranoid flamboyance, the Brooke sonnet to safety that would never be heard. When he ran out of material he made things up, almost like a real composer. She laughed and drew his hand up underneath her concert shirtwaist.

They fell silent in the woozy warmth. Sobered, she took his hand away and studied it. You could stay a bit, she said. She flinched as she spoke, waiting to be berated.

Els steadied his glass and leaned against her. Alertness coursed through him. She was right: He could. There was nowhere in the world he had to get to. His passport was in his inside jacket pocket. No one waited for him anywhere. Home was a technicality, and the future held no real obligations aside from filing taxes and dying. The one inexplicable wound of his past had spontaneously healed. Nothing left to prove, and no one to impress or punish.

He felt impossibly cold. He heard her say, You’re shaking.

Yes, he said. His arms and legs convulsed and wouldn’t stop. Clara bent forward, then lowered herself to him. They clung without thought. She shifted to fit, and he matched her—a minimalist ballet. Both were where they had to get, and they stayed in that place, free from time, until the doorbell rang.

Clara leapt up and smoothed down her silk wrinkles to no effect. It was well after midnight. Her face flushed with apology. She pulled back her hair, pleaded with her eyes, and padded down the narrow stairwell in her stockings.

Els lay alone in the bedroom of a woman he didn’t know from Eve. He looked up: triglyphs and metopes ringed the room, and below them, a light floral frieze. The cultivated serenity resembled something he might have guarded once, in his museum days. This was the room of the fearless girl of sixteen who’d taught him how to prize the new above all things. He rose from the bed and straightened the eiderdown. On the Belle Époque nightstand next to her pillow was a set of silver hairbrushes and an old edition of Jowett’s Plato. Something clicked, and Els saw what he hadn’t, all those years ago. Even as a girl, Clara Reston had hated the real world.

Voices issued from downstairs: two people, speaking low. Els heard only the cadence, but that was enough: a short comic opera of chirrups and murmurs. Warmth turned to confusion, then furtive explanation, then annoyance, wheedling standoff, and a tense good night. The door shut. Feet padded up the stairs, and Clara eased back into the room.

Her eyebrows rose as she crossed to him. Sorry about that. Where were we?

She took his fingers, the same fingers that had once frozen to the faceplate of a public phone, feeding it quarters on an arctic night weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, through the walls of her Georgian terrace house, came elevated doses of radiation from Chernobyl, thirteen hundred miles away.

That was nothing, she told his hands.

He held still and supposed she was right.

This matters more.

For years, he’d tried to write music that would make this woman say those words. Now he didn’t believe them. They were no better than that boy’s apprentice piece—passionate but clumsy. The Clara he’d imagined for decades would have laughed at them.

Peter. You looked me up. Despite everything. It’s astonishing.

He freed his hands. Hers patted the air between them.

I want you to know that nothing is off the table. Nothing is impossible.

I should go, he said.

Later, he couldn’t remember getting downstairs. He did retain an image of her standing in the foyer saying, Peter. This is wrong. Something brought you here. Don’t throw this away.

But he’d thrown away much worse already in his life, and the real cleaning hadn’t even started. He scribbled his New Hampshire address on the back of his ticket stub. She didn’t want to take it. He left it on the Empire guéridon at the foot of the stairs.

Thank you, he said. For everything.

He had a thought bordering on elation: even death was lucky, and no real loss. But nothing short of music could explain that thought to her. She was still shaking her head, unbelieving, when he pulled the door shut behind him.

HE NEVER SAW her again—not in this life, nor in any other, except on those nights when he lay awake sensing the piece he was supposed to write but had so far failed to find. But he did hear from her one more time. A package reached him in New Hampshire two years later, covered in Her Majesty’s pastel silhouettes. In it was his apprentice piece, the song from “Song of Myself,” the dare he’d taken from her once, at twenty-one. With it came a card, a picture of Mahler’s composing hut at Maiernigg. Inside the card was a signed blank check drawn on an English bank. The note read, “This is a formal commission. I want you to set the next stanza. For clarinet, cello, voice, and whatever else you need. Three minutes minimum, please.”

He’d known the poem by heart once but now had to look it up. The lines jumped off the page, setting themselves to a preexisting music. I depart as air. I bequeath myself to the dirt. If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

He filled in the check for forty pounds, which he figured would cover the frozen phone call, twenty-five years of compounding interest, and international transfer fees. But he didn’t cash it. He put it in a manila envelope along with his apprentice piece, Clara’s card, her letter of commission, the Whitman lines, and a few quick sketches. He carried the packet around with him over the next twenty-five years, and it was sitting at peace in a four-drawer steel filing cabinet in Naxkohoman when the FBI raided his house in search of dangerous materials.

I hoped my nonsense pattern would have no effect at all.

It wasn’t possible—getting lost in a simple grid where he’d lived for almost a decade. Like fumbling the notes to “Happy Birthday.”

But the place had changed much more in forty-two years than Els had. New buildings everywhere, the visionary projects of discredited decades. The whole arts ghetto of shabby bungalows had been wiped out. Els searched for the house where he and Maddy first slept together. He couldn’t even find the block it had stood on. The blocks themselves had been rearranged, taken over by behemoth enterprises of steel, stone, and bulletproof glass.

He stood on a small plaza in front of what claimed to be the Music Building. It looked like the love child of a logic problem and a crossword puzzle. Across the street, the fly towers of a massive performing arts complex stood against the night sky like three container ships on a collision course.

A string quartet carrying their instruments picked their way around him where he lingered on the sidewalk. They were all Asian and impossibly young. Two of them massaged four-inch touch screens with their thumbs. The violist slowed as she passed. May I help?

Els shook his head and tried to grin. He wanted to ask what they were rehearsing. Nothing from his era—of that he was sure. Those old manifestos would sound to these children like the crude stabs of a dulled cutting edge.

He ducked into the corner coffee shop—a watering hole for bohemians since long before Els arrived in town. He’d sat inside it a thousand and one times, hammering out the future of American music with those who were going to shape it with him. Everything about the place had changed, starting with the name. But it was still filled with twenty-year-old makers, plotting the revolution.

Els stood at the counter, staring up at a menu of hot beverages that took up the whole wall. Nine-tenths of the offerings hadn’t existed the last time he stood in that spot and ordered. The current barista sported a spectacular geometric tat that ran like the Andes from the nape of her neck down into her chartreuse tank top and reappeared in the naked small of her back, above the drawstring of her pajama bottoms. Earth had nothing like her, in his youth. To go through life as a living work of art: it seemed to Els a splendid thing. He asked for a recommendation and she made him an echinacea.

Four dozen people spread through the dim rooms. No one so much as glanced in his direction, let alone pegged him as the deranged Pennsylvania bioterrorist. Bystander effect, Genovese syndrome. He was safest now in crowds. And crowds of the young, who tended to look away, embarrassed, from anyone careless enough to have let himself get old.

He found a corner and nursed his concoction, listening to ambient dub coming over the speakers. The tables were painted with wispy enamel scenes that spoke of psychosis or hallucinogens. Els’s depicted a girl turning into a tree. At the next table—a pulsing bull’s-eye—two earnest young Apollonians, one of each sex, pored over a score. Els eavesdropped and spied on the pages. The score—like every score these days—looked like a published work of art. Such typesetting would have cost him four months’ rent, when he was the age of these children. The work was for chamber orchestra, lush with melodies that everyone in the audience would leave the hall humming. It contained just enough passing dissonance to reassure listeners that it had heard the rumors about the previous century.

Even little Darmstadt in the prairies: colonized by the same neoromantic loveliness that the whole world now embraced. Who gave those signals? Everybody to the other side of the boat. The boy pointed out ingenious features of the work while the woman studied and nodded. The piece’s comeliness sounded in Els’s ear, even over the café noise and the looping ambient dub. At twenty-five, Els would have found the thing insipid and reactionary. At seventy, he wished he’d written it at twenty-five.

Then, as if from embryo in Els’s own fugitive mind, a solo soprano launched an open vowel on the air. How . . . The voice, like a sterilized needle. Small. The melody wove through the contours of a harmonic B minor scale, one word per note:

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.
How small a thought.

The boy at the next table stopped, ruffled by the sound. Then he returned to the systems under his hands. But the woman who’d no doubt share his bed tonight shushed him and pointed skyward. What is this?

Her lover glared and shook his head. After two more beats, Els said, Reich. Wittgenstein. Proverb.

The boy swung toward Els’s table, glowering at a noise from the fourth dimension. The woman turned to Els and murmured, Thank you. She caught his eye a moment, confused about why she should recognize this total stranger.

The odds against my sequence doing anything biological were almost infinite. But almost doesn’t count.