The soprano starts up again, repeating the same falling line. But now a second voice echoes her, a beat and a half behind. The two lines clasp and catch, throwing off sparks of consonance and dissonance, shocks made by a melody out of phase with itself. They cadence on a perfect fourth, joined by a ghostly double.

In the night café, students flirt and study and browse. They sit on barstools at a counter along the plate-glass window, each with a private clamshell, checking on the ten million Facebook frenemies they will meet in heaven. In a cushioned pit behind them, an apprentice engineer in down vest and cargo pants holds his head in his hands as equations proliferate on canary legal sheets all around him. A couple in the far corner are in tears. On an overstuffed sofa ten feet from Els, a woman presses her face into an old baize-bound book. The barista pins her tumbling hair back up with a chopstick. The music might be cha-cha, for all anyone hears. But it’s a proverb from the year 1995: Dayton Accords. Oklahoma City. Nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. The first planet discovered outside the solar system. It’s all, to Els, just yesterday, but to these café denizens, as quaint and sepia as any March of Time newsreel.

The echoing lines slow to half speed, reprising the song’s first measures. Augmentation, it was called once, worlds ago, before MIDI. The two-part canon turns into a trio. Choirboy clarity thickens, then smears out as thin as gold leaf. The posters on the walls, the painted tables, the bodies huddled in booths and stretched out on sofas—everything around Els dissolves into wet crepe. The couple at the next table freeze, alerted. The woman’s soul is all up in her ears. The boy leans forward in a frightened crouch; someone is doing a thing better than he ever will.

Voices align and interfere. Bliss starts to jar. The lines weave a standing wave, a sonic moiré. Then those pulsing chords cadence again at another perfect fourth.

An organ emerges from nowhere. It blends into the held pedal point while two tenors bob in parallel above. Els’s lips twist in unwilling joy. The ancient harmonies spread through his bloodstream like an opiate. He grows light-headed on the parody, the imitation Pérotin, these sounds from the Notre Dame School, from the dawn of harmony. The bar lengths keep altering; Els can’t hear how to count them. Soon counting doesn’t matter. Time is nothing; only these changeless changes are real. The soprano lines echo and multiply:

How small a thought

It takes to fill

a whole life.

The twin tenors lift free above the organ’s drone. There was a time—as recent as the year this music was written—when such an exercise in smoky nostalgia would have appalled Els. For years these canons would have sounded like pure kitsch, needing only a drum machine, a scratch track, and a little over-dubbed rap to become the latest caustic mashup.

Tonight, he finds it rebellious, even radical. Sopranos again, in unison: tandem seraphim floating through each other’s lines, even slower now, at wider intervals, without a single breath. They sail up and above a vibraphone whose dotted rhythms turn the long sustains into a pocket infinity.

The raucous café—industrial frother jet on the espresso machine, clink of mugs and cups from the kitchen, laughter and shouted politics from the back room’s upper loft—has no need of forever. Half the clientele have their own earbuds, the other half use this music, if at all, only as protection from the terrors of silence.

But these canons at unison glide on. Voices unfold above the driving vibes. Their intervals cycle through clashing dissonance. The collisions start to sound like a requiem for the millennium-long search for novel harmonies, a search now done. The sounds could be an elegy for those scant ten centuries when chant became melody, melody blossomed into harmony, and harmony pushed outward in ever more daring border raids on the forbidden. This innovative phasing piece, collapsing back into ars antiqua. Organum again: the sound of possibility, after the map of the possible is all filled in.

A girl at a nearby table bows over a textbook filled with symbols. She curls her hands around her mug campfire-style, warming them in the steam. She frees one hand to drag a highlighter over a crucial formula. She grabs the mug and sips, deaf to the record of that reckless rush of Western music that ran too fast from Dorian mode to Danger Mouse. But her head nods to the changing bar lines, under the spell of something she doesn’t even know she hears.

Above the room’s two dozen contrapuntal conversations, over the relentless vibraphones, the singers harp over and over on their lone idea:

How small

a thought

it takes

to fill

a whole

life.

The words rock and breathe. Els has seen the idea leaping through texts across two and a half millennia, from Antiphon and the Dhammapadas on through Maddy’s beloved Merton. He himself has set those texts to music, banged on the doors of that smallest thought for his whole life without ever getting in. He’d wanted to be a chemist, to add to the world’s useful knowledge. He’d wanted to repay his first love, the one who taught him how to listen. He’d wanted to see the world with his wife, to grow old with her; but he’d abandoned her after a dozen years. He’d never dared to want a daughter; then he had one, and afterward, he lived solely to make things with her. She’d grown up a thousand miles away, a holiday visitor, shoulders hunched and eyes wary, her hair hacked into different geometrical shapes each time he saw her, forever resenting that small thought that had taken over his life.

Pitches cluster above the throbbing vibes. The piece has lasted twice as long as any self-respecting song and shows no sign of stopping. A voice at the next table says, Let’s get out of here. The boy points his rolled-up score at the ceiling. Can’t hear myself think! The woman he’ll lose but never quite forget smiles back, demurring. The boy stands and slips on his coat, halfway gone already. His friend takes longer to saddle up her backpack. Els watches, caught in the snare of these tangling lines. It’s clear in the way she follows her love to the café’s side door. She’s reluctant to leave with the thousand-year secret about to be revealed.

She turns at the door, surprised by the song’s sudden brightening. She catches Els’s eye and frowns. He holds up two fingers in a covert wave. She waves back, baffled, and disappears into the night. She, too, will die wanting things she won’t even be able to name. Her shed boyfriend will look forever for a music that will revive this night. A few steps into the embracing air outside this café and they’ll both be bewildered, old.

Outside the picture window, a copper moonrise. It hangs above the horizon, four times bigger than it should be. A fist wheels and flickers in front of the reddish disc: a bat, hunting by echo-map, flying in paths so skittish they seem random.

A change of color pulls him back into the music. After so much phasing, circling around the same unchanging key, the switch to E flat minor comes like a thunderclap from a cartoon sky. Wittgenstein’s proverb—that one small thought—darts off into unprepared regions. The effect electrifies Els: one simple veer that changes everything. Where the replicating voices once chased one another down broad meanders, now they turn and flow back upstream.

Melodic inversion: the oldest trick going. But it hits Els like naked truth. The sopranos chase each other up a cosmic staircase, driven higher by the lurching vibraphones. The phrases shorten and slow, like one of those boggling Einstein thought experiments with trains and clocks Els could never wrap his head around. Leading tones clash, hinged on the half step between natural and harmonic minors. How can simple, pulsing lines build to such tension, when they run nowhere at all?

Voices leapfrog into chords that alternate between hopeful and unbearable. He glances up again, but the music has made no more imprint on these rooms than would a stranger’s death on the other side of the globe. The girl with the baize book searches the bottom of her mug for evidence into the theft of her cappuccino. The students with clamshells lined up in front of the plate-glass window haven’t budged. The barista flirts with the dishwasher, a Latino with a ponytail down to the tip of his scapula. The engineer in cargo pants sleeps like a baby, face pressed against his canary-yellow pad.

A stutter in the vibraphones propagates itself. And now the meter, too, starts to evade Els. This phasing motor pattern mutates, a slow metamorphosis, slipping from one crystal lattice to another and another, turning into diamond under the constant pressing. The three high voices braid upward, stepwise by minor thirds, in a triple canon:

How

Small

A

Thought

It

Takes

Then the parallel tenors rush back in. Twelfth and twenty-first centuries alternate, competing with each other. Those two broad streams flow together into a further sea.

That glimpse of open ocean, at six minutes, lasts no more than a few sustained measures. When the splendor passes, it beaches Els again in this place, a visitor from the future come back to intercept his own past. He sits here, years too late, knowing everything. Music has turned out to be the very thing he was taught to scorn. All his fellow composers have scattered on the winds of changing taste. But the young are still here, still in a hurry for transcendence, still ready to trade Now for something a little more durable . . .

Through the picture window, the bat hangs motionless in front of a frozen moon. Before Els can decide that he can’t be seeing right, the bat is gone. The sopranos start to swell again,

To

Fill

A

Whole

Life . . .

The words turn into open syllables. A moment of uncertainty, a wavering between keys: Does that D want to return to B minor, as in the beginning? Will the road lead back to E-flat minor, or leap free into a wilder place? The path bends again; E-flat in the soprano, followed immediately by a half step lower, and he’s flooded with loss, the sound of something said that can never be taken back.

The dim rooms—these painted tables and ratty sofas, the window-long counter, the sunken mosh pit, the booths with their tawny lamps—fill up with generations, sitting beside Els. He feels the hundreds of years of café debate, the thousands of lives spent arguing over perfection. He hears the musical turf wars that will rage on long after all the debaters are gone . . . Those countless twenty-year-old songwriters, dead before he came here, and those eager heirs who won’t arrive for centuries yet: they’re all chattering on to each other, in the trance of these phasing canons, the slowly changing chords of all the adamant, brute-beautiful songs of the young still to come.

Another modulation, and the ghosts disperse. He wants the piece to be over. Not because of the thrilling sameness: monotony could almost save him now. Because of the waves of connection lighting up long-dark regions in his head. He knows better, but can’t help it: these spinning, condensed ecstasies, this cascade of echoes, these abstract patterns without significance, this seamless breathing leaves him sure, one more time, of some lush design waiting for him.

Eleven minutes in—the endless dominant pedal point in the organ, the scraping seconds in the tenors—and the piece breaks through into a clearing. The three sopranos slow so much that their message stretches out almost past hearing:

H

o

w

s

m

a

l

l

a

t

h

o

u

Each change in the phased melody, now falling again, as it did in the beginning, flows through the bobbing tenor line. Figure swaps with ground, and back again. Tenors and sopranos envelop one another. Canon and organum at last merge. The two halves of this braid, across their eight-century gap, weave together so seamlessly it’s clear now how they were shaped from the start solely for this reunion.

The piece spreads outward, its pitches like recombinant germs. The notes condense, incandescent. Shifting harmonies blaze into an old man’s head. Layered parts swell and fall, split and multiply, collide and detonate, filling a life too small to hold them.

At a booth six feet away, a balding student of thirty sits in front of a brushed silver laptop, staring at Els. He’s one of those brilliant Asperger cases who come to town to study political economy and stay forever, working for the rest of their lives as bag boys at the Co-op. He squints through his Lennon glasses, taking Els’s measure. Then he bows his head and taps his keys.

A moment later, he peeks again. A glance at Els, a glance at his browser. Maybe it’s nothing; Els has lost the ability to figure. He rises and drifts across the room, a diagonal feint toward the orders counter. There he comes about, back to his surveillant, and heads for the door. As he reaches it, the interminable quarter hour of proverb ends. Voices that poured in waves out of the café’s speakers fall silent. Els keeps walking, past the creamery station, along the orders counter, through the packed and noisy tables, out into the bracing air.

He trots to the car, head down, feeling eyes on him. He reaches the Fiat and realizes where he is. Two hundred yards to the south is the Old Music Building, where he once lived. In a minute, he’s standing in front of the Beaux Arts temple with Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and Palestrina carved in the pediment. Palestrina no longer seems so laughable. Haydn now seems the odd man out. Another hundred years, and who knows? The group mind may scoff at that interloper, Bach.

He drifts behind the building to the Quad, that spot where the two long southern diagonals cross. The place where, once, in another life, on an ice-bound January night at the beginning of creation, a young man told him, Half of life’s problems would be solved if only one of us had a vagina.

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he’d do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

He stands on the X and stares down the long diagonals at the prospect of a life sentence. He can die in prison a public enemy, a musical Unabomber, reviled and ridiculed for a simple act of curiosity. Or he could try again.

Stray undergrads, their smartphones glowing, drift through the dark. The Asperger political economist in the Lennon glasses has already called in his coordinates. Someone has tracked the Pennsylvania plates and staked out his car. But for a moment, nothing can touch him. He was made for this fugitive life, destined for it four decades ago. Made to return here, da capo, after so long a time away. Made for art, made for memory, made for poetry, made for oblivion.

THE RECEPTION DESK is empty and breakfast not yet out when he comes down before dawn the next morning. He leaves his key card on the empty counter. And he’s fifty miles west on I-72 before he admits to where he’s going.

The only harmless works are sterilized, and the only safe listeners are dead.

His music changed during those years in the woods. He embraced those gestures that had threatened him only a few years before. Minimalist, with maximal yearnings. He layered ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations, as if something unparalleled were coming, right around the corner. Now and then, a piece got heard in New York or abroad. By the end of the globalizing eighties, Els had developed what, in the dim light of a few cryptlike new music venues, looked almost like a reputation.

Stretched out in a rocking chair one evening in the North Conway Public Library, taking a break from reading about medieval heretics, he spotted a baby-fat face sprouting out of the collar of a batik shirt on the cover of an arts magazine on the wall-length rack. The hairline had eroded and a pair of ridiculous blue goggles gave him the look of a cartoon professor. But the face japing at Els from across the room was as familiar as shame.

He crossed the room like a dancer in a trance and opened to the cover article. His eyes skipped across the page.

Bonner’s violent elation is among the few games in town grandiose and surreal enough to compete with this year’s headlines . . . His limb-jutting, head-swiveling choruses dance through Tiananmen, chain across the Baltic states, and climb on the sledgehammered Berlin Wall, before most of us have even registered the events.

The list of the man’s achievements read to Els like parody: a revival of Gershwin’s Oh, Kay!, with the Prohibition bootleggers changed to South Bronx crack dealers. A Handel Xerxes that came straight from Idi Amin’s Uganda. A Glimmerglass succès de scandale casting Nancy and Ron Reagan in a phantasmagoric Verdi Macbeth. Bedlam-filled ballets featuring Iranian revolutionaries, prancing running backs, and camouflaged Sandinistas—spastic kaleidoscopes of rapture and cataclysm. A sidebar in large type quoted Bonner: “The best art always feeds gossip.” The idea seemed to have earned him an international reputation.

In disbelief, Els tracked down every magazine mention of Richard Bonner that the library owned. So when, a couple of months later, early in the new year, Bonner came stumbling up Els’s gravel drive near dusk, it seemed like just another coup de théatre. The diatribe started from twenty yards away.

How the fuck is anyone supposed to find this place? There aren’t any house numbers. No damn street names. And you’re living in some kind of reconditioned chicken coop.

Els stood in the door of his besieged home. Bonner jogged up and bear-mauled him. He kissed Els Russian-style. Then he shoved him back into the cabin.

Look at this: The works! Electricity. Furniture. Running water. I’m crushed, Maestro. I thought this was supposed to be the woods.

What are you doing here? Els asked. How did you get my address?

Bonner twisted Els’s head one way then the other. Hmm. This whole nature fad agrees with you.

Els tore free. Thought you’d just pop in, after six years? Seven?

Bonner pouted and dropped his hand. Could be.

You remember the last thing you said to me?

Hey! Statute of limitations.

My music was shit and always would be.

I know. I’m a pig, aren’t I?

Bonner broke away and toured the room. He picked up and sniffed a fireplace log. He ran his fingers down the spines of Els’s books. He glanced out the window at some invisible assailant. The man had put on maybe thirty pounds.

Amazing trip up here, he said. Got me a five-hour education in West Coast hip-hop.

Bonner stopped fiddling, crossed to Els, and rested an elbow on each of his shoulders. How would you like to help ruin my career?

I take it you’re staying for dinner, Els answered.

ELS POACHED A WHITEFISH. Richard contributed a bottle of Malbec out of the trunk of his car, two fistsfuls of dietary supplements, and an account of his latest coup. Els listened in monosyllables.

It seems, Richard said, that City Opera wants a work for their 1993 season.

Els had to laugh, and did.

I know, Bonner said. Not possible, right? The kind of thing they offer to real artists. Not punk boho kids.

Bravo, Richard. You’ve arrived. What’s the piece?

You’re not listening, dickhead.

And then Els was. The opera board had decided that a bankable iconoclast of Bonner’s rep might revive a dying house on controversy alone. They’d given him carte blanche to settle on a libretto and choose a composer.

I told them I want you. They think I’m nuts.

Only when his chunk of fish went down did Els bother to say, They’re right.

But they hired me to be nuts. You see the beauty here?

Night had fallen. Outside, above the town’s holdout lights, the mountains darkened. A raiding raccoon clicked across the roof shingles. An owl sang half a mile away.

Don’t make me beg, Bonner said.

When could I ever make you do anything?

Richard slumped back in the Shaker chair, his neck against the top slat. Something’s happened, Peter. The game’s gone flat. I’m playing myself. Formula transgression. Turn the crank, and out come the little predictable spurts of stylized outrage.

Els stacked the dirty dinnerware, studying the problem as if it were the Sunday crossword.

Doesn’t sound like anything I can help you with.

Richard manacled Els’s wrist. Don’t game me, asshole. You want me to tell you I need you?

Els withdrew his trapped wrist, sat, and steepled his fingers to his lips.

Don’t give me that Buddha shit either, Bonner said. You remember everything. We used to discover things. Laws of science. We worked for God, once, you and me. And anyone who didn’t like it could go save themselves.

As Els remembered it, God’s preferences had been largely unknown to them. Yet he held still and listened.

Bonner slipped into a fantasia for the audience of one. The whole globe’s convulsing. But this country is walking around in a gauzy, super-sized, antidepressant-laced, MTV-fueled cocoon. Game Boys and Party Girls. Fuck: I’m not making art. I’m just the next consumer-friendly dose of distraction for people who’re bored by halftime spectacles.

You want something, Els said.

Bonner looked at him, startled by the insight. Dying for it.

And you don’t know what.

Oh, but I do. I want to wake people from their dream of safety.

And you think I can help you do that.

You’re the only person I’ve ever met who wants more than I do. Look at you! Not afraid to torch your entire life. Writing for no one.

Els didn’t bother to correct either lie. He stood and took the dirty dishes into the kitchen. He returned with two cartons of ice cream and two spoons. Bonner grabbed a spoon and set to work on both cartons at once. Els just watched, thinking the man might be abusing some prescription drug.

He said, You are a miserable human being. Why should I put myself through that again?

Bonner nodded mid-scoop, agreeing with everything. Because your stuff with me is the best work you’ve ever done.

You’ve got a problem, Richard.

You don’t say. Bonner raised his spoon in the air and sang, News, news, news, news, news, news, news has a . . . has a . . . has a kind of mystery . . .!

So what is it? You’re a repressed queer? Is that your great secret?

Bonner swung the spoon like fencing foil. Oh, fuck off. Queer, straight: Who makes these things up? Is anybody anything?

You’re manic?

Bonner dove back into the box. What does that even mean? He fished for bits of nut in the melting mass of cream. We’re either hungry or dead. Don’t talk to me about finer distinctions.

Els went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on and fill the sink with hot suds. A large mammal was foraging around the trash on the back porch. He didn’t bother to scare it away. When he returned to the dining room with tea, Bonner was still launching his frontal assault on the melting cartons. Els picked up the other spoon and started in. He leaned on his elbows and poked at the butter pecan, as if conducting a flea orchestra.

Every time we’ve worked together, you’ve ended up insulting me.

Every time? Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.

Els flipped the spoon across the room and stood. Bonner grabbed his hand.

Peter. I have to. Everything satisfying disgusts me. I have to keep . . .

Els sat and rested his hands in his lap. He stared at his small white draftsman’s table in the next room. Bonner followed his gaze. A thought drifted through Els like a crane across a Chinese landscape painting. He held up a finger, and vanished. After some minutes, he returned with a square of torn cardboard.

Bonner took it. What the hell’s this? Some kind of concept piece?

Els waited. Recognition was slow in coming.

Oh, Jesus. You’re kidding me. You saved . . .? Bonner started to laugh—stress hysterics. Didn’t I say you were the one person crazier than me? He sobered, looked up at Els, and squinted.

Els squinted back. How do you plan to sell City Opera on an unknown composer?

I told them you were the only person I’d work with. Now shut the fuck up and let’s make something.

Bonner tugged Els down the dark road where he’d left the rental. Then the two of them drove the quarter mile back up the hill into Els’s driveway. Richard got out and took two hulking green duffel bags from the trunk. He offered one to Els. Peter looked at the vintage military issue stenciled with a long Polish name.

Are you moving in?

What’s it to you, Maestro? Come on. Could you give me a hand, here?

Yes: I’m guilty of playing God. But thousands of such creatures have already been composed, and millions more are coming.

In the morning, when Els came out to the kitchen, Bonner was in the front room jabbing and thrusting. Els thought another squirrel had come down the chimney at night and Richard was chasing it. Richard loped around in a vulpine circle, then made several klutzy lunges. He looked like a teenage boy writhing in a private sports fantasy. Els fought back a horrified laugh. The man was inventing. Coping. Call it dance.

That morning, they packed a lunch and walked through snow calf-deep up into the mountains. Els figured Bonner would be gasping for air after twenty minutes, but Richard held tough. He talked straight through the two-hour climb, his words steaming in the January air. He laid out what he wanted for the opera. He’d spent his entire life fleeing from narrative, and now he discovered, to his surprise, that it might not be too late to embrace the kind of storytelling that the world craved.

Els proposed biography. The life of Thomas Merton—the contemplative mystic who inspired millions with his thoughts on inner divinity but who never contacted his own illegitimate child. Bonner shot down the idea without explanation. Els then suggested the chemist Gerhard Domagk, who tested his newly discovered sulfa drug on his dying daughter, was arrested by the Gestapo for winning a Nobel, and ended up aiding the Nazi cause.

Where do you come up with these things? Bonner asked.

A guy can read a lot when he lives alone.

Bonner plowed through the drifts, considering. At last he said, No touching human intimacy. Let’s face it, Maestro. Neither one of us knows shit about being a human. Not our thing.

Richard knew only that he wanted something epic—a story that swept the cast up into a collective fate. Something that would shatter the audience. Something with sweep.

Historical drama, Els said. People at war with things as they are.

That’s it, Richard declared. I knew you were my monkey.

In the snow, dotted by long stretches of silence, Bonner’s vague fancies solidified. Els listened, now and then interrogating. He led them up to a ledge overlooking Crawford Notch. They stopped to share hot noodle soup right out of the thermos. The gorge was luminous, blanketed with snow. Els kept telling Bonner to look, but Richard was busy.

Maybe the Challenger explosion, he said. No, okay, you’re right. How about the fall of one of these Eastern strongmen? Ceausescu. Honecker.

After half a dozen slugs of soup and several more proposals—Jonestown, the Red Brigade—Bonner grew fidgety. I’m dying here, man. And you aren’t helping.

You want ecstasy, Els said. Transcendence.

Is that asking too much?

You want real opera.

Bonner nodded.

Real, all-out, outrageous opera, a hundred years out of date. But you’re trapped in current events.

The words struck Bonner like a revelation. Jesus, you’re right. I’m stuck in the damn headlines.

In the death grip of the present. When what you really want is Forever.

Maestro. Bonner put down the thermos. I’m listening.

Els gazed out on the pristine vista. No contemporary politics. Something old. Alien. Uncanny.

Go on, Bonner commanded. And Els did.

Siege of Münster, 1534.

Bonner held his frozen hands in the soup’s steam and grinned. Let’s hear.

They broke camp and headed back. The snow started up again, and darkness fell well before they reached the car. But by then both men were deep in details, lost to the clock. When they got back to the house, Bonner was faint with hunger. But he refused to break for dinner until Els finished the story.

Els sent him to bed with books. Richard read all night and didn’t wake until noon the next day. Despite the hour, he insisted on his loping workout before the day could begin. Afterward, the two men began to outline a three-act libretto.

When they finished the outline two days later, red-eyed and covered in salt-and-pepper stubble, they looked like twin prophets of their own deranged sect.

I knew this already, Bonner said, tapping the sheaf of paper and shaking his head. I was looking for this, before I even knew I was looking.

He was still mystified as they packed the car. This is it, Peter. Euphoria versus the State. Like the damn thing was waiting for us. How the hell did you ever come across it?

I told you. Live alone, and you come across a lot.

The two men stood by the rental in puffy down coats, planning to meet again in another month, after Bonner had briefed the City Opera brass. Bonner wanted to draft the libretto himself. Using primary sources, he could have a first draft in three months. Els assured him that there was plenty of music to write, even in advance of the first words.

Richard got in the car and started it. The rental’s tailpipe spit a plume into the clear air. Then the director got back out and grabbed the composer, as if they were still young.

Peter? Thank you.

Els waved him away. He stood until the car disappeared down the tree-lined road. Then he went back inside the cabin to the piece he’d been working on for months—the stacks of staff paper on his drawing table with their hundreds of sketches for the first act of that same opera the two men had just mapped out together.

Life fills the world with copies of itself. Music and viruses both trick their hosts into copying them.

The radio names him twice in the first two hours out of Champaign. A government spokesperson says that scientists are trying to determine if the bacteria taken from the home of Peter Els, the so-called Biohacker Bach, have in fact been genetically altered. Els waits for the speaker to admit that the strain that killed the patients in Alabama wasn’t his. Instead, the announcer returns to say that, in yet more bacterial news, the deadly outbreak of E. coli in Germany may have come from tainted Spanish vegetables.

Through the Fiat’s windows, miles of stark black tillage begin to green. Nothing about the spare beauty looks like a country under any kind of threat. But at ten a.m., on a syndicated public radio interview program, Els learns just what he has unleashed.

The show is on the dangers of garage biology. A rash of hospital deaths, the host begins. Supermarket contaminations in several countries. A do-it-yourself genetic engineer working with toxic microbes, now on the run from the authorities. The sounds reach Els from a great distance, as if the whole segment is one of those sampled, chopped-up, looped, and reassembled song quilts that are again all the rage, half a century after their invention. How scared by all of these stories should you be?

For insight, the host welcomes a Bay Area writer whose book on the growing amateur microbiology movement Els has read. The man talks of garage scientists numbering in the thousands.

Who are these people? the host asks.

The writer gives a frustrated chuckle. Lots of folks. Libertarians, hobbyists, students, entrepreneurs, activists. They’re old-style citizen scientists in the spirit of Jenner and Mendel. This is cheap, democratic, participatory biotech. Closing it down would be a mistake.

The show turns to the director of a safety watchdog group, who maps out the worst-case scenario. The problem is, she says, between mail-order synthetic DNA and a kitchen stocked with a thousand dollars of gear, an amateur could create a new lethal pathogen. Given how many people want to harm this country, biopunk is one of the greatest threats facing us.

The writer laughs her off. Skiing is hundreds of times more dangerous.

A bipartisan Washington commission on WMDs and terrorism predicts a major bioterror attack in the next couple of years, the watchdog says.

The host asks, What can we do to prevent that?

We need to build on the success of the TSA, the watchdog answers.

The writer howls. The TSA hasn’t detected a single terrorist action since its inception!

That proves their effectiveness.

The host throws open the call-in lines. The first caller asks if this killer E. coli in Europe is a terrorist act. Both experts say no. The caller hangs up unconvinced.

Els hears the next caller’s fury before she speaks three words. This man, she says, creating germs in his own laboratory—people have died, and this man needs to be found and stopped before he harms anyone else.

The host asks his guests to comment. The watchdog says, At very best, this is a case of an amateur modifying a toxic microorganism without really knowing—

The writer cuts in: Amgen does that all the time. Monsanto. Half our corn and ninety percent of our soybeans are biohacked, and we put them in our mouths on blind faith.

Amgen is run by trained scientists, not a retired musician working at the kitchen sink with no idea what he’s doing.

Trained scientists have produced more disasters than all the amateurs combined.

The blast of an air horn like something out of Götterdämmerung drives Els across the lane. In his rearview mirror, an eighteen-wheeler rides up his tailpipe. He jerks right. The semi blasts past him, wailing. When the truck pulls back in front of Els, the driver hits the brakes. The front of the Fiat kisses the truck’s bumper.

The watchdog is talking. He has panicked the whole nation.

The nation has been panicked for ten years. And if spreading panic is the measure, every news anchor is a terrorist.

The host patches in another caller. A trembling woman says that scientists were behind the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Els pulls one stuck hand off the wheel and kills the radio. An exit floats into view, and he takes it. He hits the rumble strip twice on his way up the ramp. He follows a local road for a long time, trying to regain control of his body. He pulls into a gas station in Vandalia that clings to the intersection of two empty state highways. He fills the tank and hands the cash to a bearded anarchist who looks like he wouldn’t turn in Hitler.

Els sits at a picnic table behind the station, under a blue spruce, nursing a turkey wrap and flipping through a copy of the Times that the convenience center stocked by accident. He finds himself on page A10: “Homebrew Genetic Modifier Heard Beat of Different Drummer.” The article psychoanalyzes Peter Els’s biohacking by considering his decades of audience-hostile avant-garde creations. A little vomit spasms into Els’s mouth. He folds up the paper and leaves it on the picnic table, under a stone.

He opens the door to the Fiat, and a voice shouts, Hey! Els turns, hands rising. The wild-bearded anarchist stands in the doorway of the gas station, rigid. It’s a relief, almost, caught at last. The fugitive motif has gone on too long. He’s tired. He smiles at his accoster, surrendering.

I forgot, the man says. You get a free drink with that turkey thingie.

Els sits in the parked car, his hands revolting. The free drink, his alibi, splatters when he brings it to his lips. Through the windshield, he watches a family of four parade into the convenience mart. The little girl, her sweatshirt advertising a mega-church, fixes him in a telephoto gaze. Arrest is just a matter of time. What he has done and what he has failed to do must both be paid for. The good of the many demands it.

Kohlmann’s phone has ridden beside him on the death seat since Champaign. He takes it and turns it on. Too late for the traceable device to hurt him. He has only eighty miles to St. Louis, and his destination. The Joint Task Force can have him, once he finishes there.

His fingers flail at the on-screen keys. He punches in an address memorized years ago. It has always been a little fictional, no place he would live to see. But the Voice figures out the route in seconds, door to door. All he needs to do is accept the GPS’s higher power.

The route unfolds in front of him—an hour and a half. His limbs are clammy and his skin metallic. He pries open the glove compartment. A stack of loose CDs spill out onto the passenger side floor, none of them what he needs. He leans over into the chaos-strewn backseat and rakes through dozens more cracked and unhinging jewel boxes, finding nothing that can help him.

Then he remembers: all the tunes in the world are his. He plugs the smartphone into the car stereo and pecks in his search. The piece bubbles up with a few pokes of his index finger. It’s music that will get him as far as he needs to go. Shostakovich’s Fifth—a condemned man writing the accompaniment to his own execution.

Serratia can split several times an hour, when conditions are right. Double a few times, and soon you’re talking real numbers.

The overture begins with almost nothing: one oboe, one English horn, and one bassoon. They play in unison at first, a theme filled with anticipation borrowed from a mass by Ockeghem. The unison divides; one melody becomes two, then two become four, rising and stretching. Dawn in the free city of Münster, Northern Rhineland, January 1534.

The first tradesmen trickle through the Prinzipalmarkt. Vendors set up their stalls, and customers congregate. Two violas join the reed trio. An ermine-trimmed noble draws a retinue across the market square to a swell in the trombones and cellos. Over the course of several dozen patient measures, dawn turns into full-on morning.

Streets radiate from the prosperous plaza, lined by step-gabled houses and pinnacled façades. To the east, the commanding Gothic Rathaus. To the north, the cathedral spire. Brisk commerce fills the marketplace. The orchestra begins a vast prolation canon—copies of a single germ, sped up or slowed down, pitched at various intervals. The tangle of lines gives way to pulsing chords. Then the shock of a baritone cuts through the sound:

Fire, air, the rain, the sun—the Lord made all things common, for our shared joy.

The fireplug preacher Rothmann, in his dark robes, mounts the stone bank rimming the plaza’s fountain.

Whoever says “This is mine, that is yours”—that man steals from you!

Some of the chorus stop their buying and selling long enough to shush him. They sing of recent calamities throughout the empire that must not reawaken. Rothmann’s baritone shines out above them.

God gave us the world, whole. We’ve wrecked it, and fight over the crumbs. No wonder you’re miserable—all of you!

A trio of merchants caution the preacher, above the massed strings. They say the years of chaos must stop. The city needs peace and prosperity; all else is rabble-rousing noise. The words form islands of triadic consonance in the orchestra’s atonal surge.

Others come to Rothmann’s defense. The man hurts no one. Let him preach what heaven tells him. The merchant trio become a sextet, a plea for harmony, productivity, wealth. But the preacher laughs them off in a swelling solo:

Peaceful? Productive? The Prince-Bishop wants you productive! Producing for the Prince. Fools! For peace, you’ve traded away your souls.

The ill, the oppressed, the unemployed, and the merely spiritual begin to flock to Rothmann’s side. Old clashes break out across the stage. The cast splits into a freewheeling double chorus, its two factions feeding the rising excitement. Chords stack up and melodies clash above a turning ground bass. Each time the cycling figure returns, its texture thickens. Rothmann shouts above the fray—curt and thrilling melodic anagrams of the original, aching theme.

God put joy into your body—real joy! Live in the light. Live in full beauty. Live in the common air.

A sudden modulation into a remote harmonic region, and four men on horseback appear from the wings. At their head is the tailor’s apprentice, John of Leiden, a charismatic man with a flowing beard. To a brass fanfare, in a heroic tenor, he leads his posse in a motet. They come from the Netherlands at the bidding of Jan Matthias, the baker turned prophet, who has identified Münster as the place where God will begin the world’s end. Rothmann, they sing, is clearing the way for the long-delayed heavenly kingdom.

Rothmann embraces them, and together, in long, brazen lines of modal melody, they sing in ecstatic counterpoint:

Mine and Thine, Thine and	One false world is ending,
Mine?	The true one will soon arrive.
Live in light! Live in beauty!	No fulfillment but in hunger.
There is no life without dying	No safety but through danger.
into the One.	Ready yourself: the day is
Where else to place your hope,	here.
your joy, your love?

In the building passacaglia, Rothmann works his way downstage to join John of Leiden. He asks the prophet to baptize him again, to give him the danger of rebirth. He and John sing a buoyant duet, each line based on a different tetrachord. John leads Rothmann to center stage and into the marketplace fountain. The singing stops and the orchestra falls silent.

A solo cello starts up Luther’s baptismal chorale, Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam. The two men enter the fountain up to their waists. A second cello harmonizes the first in simple fifths and thirds. The Dutchman lowers Rothmann until the preacher goes under. Strings now play all four lines of the chorale, its harmonies nudged by accidentals into a mad experiment. Rothmann stays underwater way too long. He lunges back up, gasping and dripping. The orchestra launches a triumphant treatment of the chorale in the driving harmonies from the early 1990s, the sounds of the falling Wall.

The spectacle awes the market crowd. An old woman asks for her own full immersion. She sings the most haunting aria of the first act: So near the grave, I find this birth. Together, John of Leiden and Rothmann baptize her. Two weeping girls in their teens demand to be next, while tradesmen stop to witness.

A trill in the flutes alerts the stage. The woodwinds rush forward through a flurry in the horns. A march unfolds, so forceful that even the skeptics are caught up in it. More bodies plunge into the fountain. The reborn emerge from the water and wander offstage in a state of grace. Once in the wings, they run back behind the flats, slip into dry clothes, and reenter stage right, as newcomers to the commotion. So the chorus multiplies until belief is everywhere.

The march carries the crowd along on a public flood. A clear key—E major—emerges, rich with the vengeance of shared faith. Believers and unbelievers, foreigners and natives, prophets and merchants, the elect and the damned, swirl together in a frenzied tutti.

By now even the untrained ear can hear how all the scene’s material—the opening theme, Rothmann’s aria, John of Leiden’s motif, and Luther’s chorale—fit together into this gathering chorus. As the ever-renewing crowd plunges into the pool, Rothmann and the Dutch messengers, lifted up by the circling strings, sing a simple, unison, Gothic lullaby drawn from the words of Saint Paul:

Darkness is passing,

The night is over,

A new dawn makes its way.

My piece might be all around you, and you’ll never know. Cellular songs everywhere, by the hundreds of millions.

The terror of an empty auditorium, two weeks before opening. Two thousand five hundred empty seats. Four and a half rings of balcony, stacked up like a beehive. Scattered bodies dot the sea of red. Els cowers near the front of the house while, onstage, dozens of builders put the last touches on the City of God.

He has needed forty months to deliver 170 minutes of music. During those years, the war that has lasted since his childhood comes to an end. The evil empire crumbles into a dozen-plus countries. All the world’s data weaves together into a web. In the desert on the far side of the planet, Els’s country goes to war, made godlike by technology. The apocalypse of smart bombs and computer screens would all have made for dazzling opera if Els hadn’t already been busy with one—an opera as strange to the present as the present has become to him.

His work is over now. The brainstorming, the interminable phone conferences, the fights over cuts and simplifications. The score has been frozen for weeks, past fixing. Still, he hangs around in the cavernous hall, sitting twenty rows back from the orchestra pit, keeping the final stages of production together on the sheer force of his teeth-gritting will.

Behind the singers, in the recesses of the great stage, carpenters complete the cathedral’s west portal. Siege engines slide by on dollies. Artisans in overalls snap a pair of volutes into place on a towering flat that hangs from a batten. It panics Els, still, to count the people employed to bring to life something that began on his cabin’s drawing table. He still can’t quash the urge to jump up and shout, Oh, no, thank you! Please don’t bother.

The goal seemed simple enough: raise the dead and make them sing. And Els has done that, these last three years. His ghost dictation filled hundreds of pages. For forty months, he has hoarded the pile of manuscript, showing it to his collaborators only under threats of violence. Every few months, he glimpsed something worthwhile in the growing score. Once, near the finish, he caught his breath at the sounds of real inspiration.

Bonner and his thugs came and took the pages away from him by force. And somehow in the course of a few more months, the team of craftsmen have turned his obscure secret formulae into theater. He’s stunned, sitting in the crepuscular hall, to discover how good the first act sounds—how often it captures the bright, poisonous, ample world he lived in during his thousand-day trance.

The pit orchestra is a special forces team. Four decades ago, Els’s tricky polyrhythms and kaleidoscope of keys would have been unplayable. But these seventy crack musicians, raised from infancy on perfect recordings, tear through his score as through a show-tune medley. The leads, too, are superb. The self-styled prophet and his sexy consort, the ousted bishop returning at the head of a powerful army, the demented tailor-king: all sung by shining young singers.

Bonner is everywhere at once—upstage, downstage, offstage in the wings, charming, berating, flattering, cajoling. He seduces the singers of both sexes, reblocks their entrances and exits. He sinks into dark reveries or belts out their arias the way he hears the phrases in his mind’s ear. The man strides through the theater the way the bedecked prophets parade through rebel Münster, and the awed cast regards him with that same wavering reverence that Münster gives the rogue Anabaptists.

He confesses to Els, far out of earshot of the cast, Every show I’ve done in the last two decades has been warm-up for this. You’ve served me up the perfect pitch, and I intend to hit it out of the park.

And a city rises up at his bidding: walls and towers, council chamber, the nave of a great cathedral. The set has all Bonner’s favorite mechanical gimmicks. It rotates and reassembles itself. There’s scrim projection, of course, with thousands of now digitally driven images. The costumes are way over budget. The production adds several hundred thousand dollars of debt to the company’s already shaky ledger. The businessmen try to rein in the uprising, but Bonner tells them what any good rebel prophet knows: every rich donor on earth will follow you to the stars, if they think you can reach God on His unlisted number.

Three months into composing, Els discovered that the opera had already been written: Meyerbeer’s Le prophète. Any real composer would have learned the mid–nineteenth century drama in school; but Els’s education was hijacked by the avant-garde. He called Bonner in a panic.

Richard, I’ve sunk you. We’re finished.

When Els calmed down enough to give the details, Bonner just laughed.

Peter, are you shitting me? Meyerbeer? That piece of fluff? It’s a damn love story.

It’s John of Leiden, Matthias, the siege. Everyone’s going to think we ripped it off.

Your point? Bonner asked. Of course it’s a rip-off! The cave paintings of Lascaux were a rip-off. Everyone who’s ever made anything is ripping off somebody, living or dead.

More fires followed, which Bonner had the time of his life running around putting out. He turned an angry cast uprising into a cathartic breakthrough. In three days of shuttle diplomacy, he resolved an ego war between the conductor and the choral director. He threw the crew’s continuous litany of insults and injuries into Münster’s cauldron and let the flavors simmer.

Now Els settles in to watch the master work an eleventh-hour miracle on the second act. Bonner channels the scene as if he’d been there when it first unfolded, four and a half centuries ago. The prophet Matthias and his raven-haired wife Divara stand in a plaza blue with night. The music is an ethereal vesper. They and their disciple, John of Leiden, strike a pact with Knipperdollinck, the leader of the guilds. Together, the men dash through the streets, urging the populace to repent. And in one quick fantasia, the Anabaptists occupy Town Hall.

The council takes no arms against the uprising. They mean to exploit the chaos for their own ends. They pass a law protecting liberty of conscience. The rebels rise up ascendant, and sanity is finished.

A brass fanfare launches the crowd into a midnight saturnalia. They tear through the cathedral smashing paintings and sculptures. To a deep, carnal surge in the strings, they set the city library ablaze. Matthias sings his scourging aria, Get out, you godless ones, and never come back! In the dark auditorium, the tune again sounds to Els like a gift from nowhere, a thing he wrote from dictation.

The chorus picks up where the aria leaves off. By scene’s end no one is left in the city but the Children of God. They make the rounds, pilgrims of the future, greeting each other as Brother and Sister. They sing, a community forging itself anew on pure love. Els springs from his seat and staggers up the aisle to hear how the madness sounds at the back of the house. It sounds good. Scary good. Even inspired.

Knipperdollink, Matthias, and John celebrate inside the seized palace. In a noble trio, they praise the divine plan that has handed them an entire city. From a balcony above a crowded square, Knipperdollink decrees that all property will be held in common, in warehouses, to be given to the poor. The crowd takes up the decree in a gathering fugue. Those who object are seized by soldiers and led away.

On the thrust stage, a solo messenger sings of the spread of the millennial dream across the north. Scarcely a village or town where the torch is not glowing in secret . . . But in fact, Münster is surrounded. A coalition of neighboring states sends armies and digs earthworks. Els paces in the aisle, watching the noose close around his breakaway city. The siege music needs more horns—he can hear that now—more glee for the Prince’s armies, closing in on the believers. But the measures are set, and they seem to be flying.

On the city ramparts, Matthias receives an Easter order from God. The world’s end is under way. He leads a handful of men on a sortie against the entrenched invaders. They’re cut into bloody chunks and scattered for vultures. Poetry, prophecy, and slaughter run together in an interlude so beautiful Els can’t believe he wrote it.

The city devolves to John, the bastard, failed tailor. When the man sings, his words almost don’t matter. From childhood, he has loved only theater. He has wasted years writing, producing, and performing plays, acting the hero in his innermost fantasies. And now fate gives him an entire city as a stage on which to turn that fantasy real.

From the back of the cavernous auditorium, Els flinches from the coming attack. One swift downbeat releases a percussive hailstorm that sends the playwright prophet screaming naked through the streets. The eerie lighting, Bonner’s projections, and Els’s manic music leave the man flat on his back, staring up at heaven, mute with ecstasy. When he comes to, Act Three has begun, and with it, the end.

The failed tailor proclaims himself King. He sings, All the works of men give way now to the work of God. He establishes polygamy and takes Divara, Matthias’s stunning widow, as the first of his fifteen new wives. One quick change of tempo, and the communal kingdom of God on Earth embraces free love.

Prepared by a life of amateur theatricals, John assumes military command. He beats back an assault by the Prince Bishop’s forces in a scene that leaves even the stagehands holding their breath. His followers pour into the Town Hall square to sing one more broad chorus of belief: The Word has become Flesh and dwells in us. One King over All . . .

A dim thought forms at the base of Els’s brain. He has been here before. He himself has taken part in this ecstatic uprising gone wrong.

The breaking wave of this music pulls him back down the aisle. He lowers himself into another seat, mid-house, testing the scene from yet another vantage. It’s still good. It dizzies him to think: This time, the revolution might just work. Two hundred people have combined to revive a story half a millennium old, and tonight, in this late dress rehearsal, the tale feels ready, at last, to open.

Then Bonner slides into the seat next to his. Three beats ago, the director was deep in the wings, climbing the scenery and herding the cast with a list of rehearsal notes longer than God’s grievances against humanity. Now he holds a folded-over newspaper in one hand and smacks it with his other. There’s glee in Richard’s eyes. Vindication. Fear, maybe, and a little true madness. Maestro. You’re not going to believe this. You’re a damn prophet. Art predicting life, with two weeks to showtime!

You’ll walk by as if there’s nothing there: In the grout of your bathroom tiles. In the air you breathe.

Moderato, to begin with. The opening measures of a condemned man’s testimony played across a landscape of black earth and brown stubble. Relentless midwestern farmland and Shostakovich’s Fifth: both spread in front of Els, pliant, empty, and terrifying, made for each other.

The jagged theme and its canonic echo tore out of the Fiat’s speakers. He’d heard the movement too many times in this life to count. He knew how the thing was built; he’d long ago analyzed every phrase to death. He’d memorized the spare counterpoint, the canonic echoes, the chromatic ambiguity, the concision, the relentless reworking of that blunt first theme. But the piece that played across three Illinois counties was altogether new to him.

Once, when he was young, Els had believed that music could save a person’s life. He could think of nothing now but all the ways it might get a person killed.

From the first leaping figure in the strings, Els heard again the problem with music. Even the slightest tune sounded like a story. Melody played on the brain like a weather report, an avowal of faith, gossip, a manifesto. The tale came across, clearer than words. But there was no tale.

Despite himself, in that first bleak figure in the strings, the one that would reappear in so many guises before the end, Els made out the maker’s miserable life: driven into the public arena, forced to choose between penance and revolt, heresy and faith, while his life hung on whatever story the state imagined that it heard.

Els piloted the car toward the setting sun, back into the firestorm of 1936. An adventurous composer, at the top of his Orphic game, brilliant, unpredictable, admired by everyone. For two years, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District played to near-total acclaim. Then the Pravda article—“Muddle Instead of Music”—a rabid, all-out attack on Shostakovich and everything his music stood for. Problem was, the anonymous author turned out to be that culture fan and amateur music critic, Stalin.

From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing . . . The music grunts, moans, pants, and gasps . . . leftist muddle instead of natural, human music . . .

In one clean sweep, the killer of millions names the twenty-nine-year-old composer an enemy of the people.

The people expect good songs . . . Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all . . .

Stalin saves a final flourish for the end. This is playing at things beyond reason that can end very badly.

Overnight, the official press is thick with condemnations. It calls for an end to formalist cleverness. It commands Shostakovich to reform and embrace a simple, affecting realism. The opera—a farrago of chaotic, nonsensical sounds—drops from sight, worse than dead.

Nothing for the man to do but pack his bag and wait for the two a.m. knock on the door.

Disappearance is epidemic that year. Mass arrests and exiles—the Kirov flow. Tens of thousands are plucked from their apartments every month. Artists, writers, directors—Erbshtein and Gershov, Terentyev, Vvedensky and Kharms. The poet Mandelstam, jailed for terrorist acts. Shostakovich’s own mother- and brother-in-law, arrested for sedition. The NKVD does not make mistakes. And all of society, guilty of complicit silence.

Then the shadow falls on Shostakovich. The composer asks his powerful admirer Marshal Tukhachevsky for help. Tukhachevsky appeals to Stalin to spare Shostakovich. Soon the marshal himself is arrested and executed.

Brittle, tense, and close to suicide, Shostakovich works on. But the piece that comes out of him is worse than the first offense. The Fourth Symphony: filled with audible treason. Days before the premiere, Shostakovich suppresses the piece and chooses to go on living.

To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.

Through the windshield to the west, Els looked out on a featureless gulag only waiting for him, the latest public enemy.

Shostakovich: Cut off my hands, and I will still write music holding the pen in my teeth. But kill him, and the only tunes left would be the ones the state picked out for his funeral. Forced, then, to surrender or die. And so, the Fifth: A Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.

For a few dozen miles, Els followed that response into its final, surprise freedom. He kept to the speed limit; every car on the road blew past him with scorn. Light traffic headed back East, from where he came. The futility of the interstate came over Els: you all stay there, and we’ll stay here, and let’s call an end to it.

The ominous tune and empty miles concentrated him. Deep inside a traumatized country still dreaming of security, he listened. The sounds would soon be like those stone-carved glyphs so eroded no one could read them anymore. But over the Fiat’s worrisome new rattle, for one last time Els heard the Fifth choose between truth and survival.

The tune wandered as if in shock: strident minor sixths and thirds, then murmuring fourths. Fragments flared up, alternating between fight and surrender. At last there arose something like a pulse, a timid motor rhythm driving toward a goal as amorphous as the one Els now chased. There came a lassitude, a yielding to chance. The music pressed on toward some still-deniable cri de coeur. It barreled forward, now a march, or perhaps a parody of one, lumbering on like a huge, blind beast.

The movement offered up anything Els might want to find in it—hope, despair, stoic surrender. A reprobate crawling back into the fold. A flaming blow for conscience. The towns clicked past: Stubblefield, Pocahontas. But the music was all Leningrad, the night of the premiere—the whole city listening through Stalin’s ears, waiting for judgment. Waiting to hear whether the rogue composer would stay true to his art or beg for mercy, be spared or disappear.

The sun slipped below the line of the windshield, and Els flipped down his visor. In the field to his right, a hulking green machine bigger than a summer dacha dragged itself down the black grooves of earth, over a slight hummock, all the way out to the horizon. The deranged Allegretto started up. The desolate theme from the first movement turned into a lurching waltz, a deep-woods Russian folk tune, a triumphal horn call, a halfhearted military band. Vintage Shostakovich: a cavalcade of perky, grim, mocking, and sardonic snips, reaching for the one freedom that would always be available, however complete the disaster: the condemned man’s dance.

Then the Largo. Strings and light winds, harp and celesta, spun a long, eerie elegy, pushing the first movement’s theme into a place beyond further harm. Tremolo played against a figure of rapped-out alarm. Els had heard the movement too many times to make out anything new. But for a quarter hour, the naked pain stretched out in front of him, a virgin outing. It spoke of whatever was left, after the worst that humans did to each other.

At the premiere, they cried openly, not caring that they wept. The whole audience—victims of the present’s catastrophe—knew what the Largo said. Millions dead, tens of millions sent to the gulag. And no one had dared speak the fact in public, until this music.

Those who showed up that night to hear the accused man grovel heard, instead, this. Here was music simple and populist, just as Stalin commanded, and in a language whose anguish everyone recognized. Naming the crime so bluntly should have been suicide. But to convict Shostakovich for speaking out, the state would have to admit to crimes worthy of this Largo.

The hard midday light began to soften. Stubbly farmland gave way to the edges of urban sprawl. Traffic thickened. He passed a semi stopped on the shoulder. The Fiat shuddered from the shock wave. A laugh tore out of Els at the huge downbeat of the final movement. He caught his own glance in the rearview mirror, and beyond that, toward the vanishing point, flashing red lights.

For one last time, the pound of tympani launched Els into that demonic march: driving brass punctuated by skittering winds. Crescendo, accelerando, then the flood of strings falling into formation. The car crept up above seventy, ready to break for it. Els scouted the gathering traffic. What was this hell-for-leather madness? This shrill joy, never so crazed, so inevitable.

The march: Russian to the bone. Easy enough to hear triumph—hip-booted regiments of Cossacks, heads sideways, goose-stepping past Lenin’s mausoleum. That’s how Els’s teachers had taught him to hear it. Kopacz, Mattison . . . That’s how Western listeners had heard the march, as late as the nineties: Shostakovich throwing together a blast of Soviet Realist bombast, a sellout finale to save his neck.

The lights in the Fiat’s rearview swelled and gained, even as the strings released a torrent of screeching bats into the air. Clear now: a squad car, pursuing its prey. Els’s foot pumped on the accelerator. The bats gave way to demented jubilation, and the ancient car shuddered. He was going well over eighty when, all around him in the sealed compartment, martial grandiosity exploded into forced festivity.

He eased off the pedal. The flashing lights closed the distance in a couple of measures. From the moment he’d fled his cordoned house, Els knew he’d be caught. But he never imagined he’d be plucked off the highway outside of Marine, Illinois. Satellites could read license plates from geosynchronous orbit. Any vehicle on the road ended up on spy cam several times an hour. Kohlmann’s phone was as good as a tracking anklet. Someone in a windowless cubicle in Langley had tipped off an Illinois state trooper in real time.

The lights swam up in his rearview mirror. Els signaled and slowed. As he pulled over onto the shoulder, the cop blasted past in the left lane. The lights vanished in a pretty twinkle half a mile away before Els stopped his brittle giggling.

He pulled onto the shoulder, quaking. The music turned into scattered night whispers, rumors in a dark minor. Through banks of doubt, a grim snare drum. Then something burst through the miasma and galloped to a sudden finish. Triumph, or its bitter parody. The People, perhaps: their directed, collective will. Or perhaps the outlaw artist, exit laughing.

Els pulled back out onto the interstate. In the sealed car, aftershock hung in the air as it must have done in Leningrad on the night of the public trial. The audience on its feet for thirty minutes, the conductor holding the score above his head . . . And long before Czar Joseph and his Central Committee even have a chance to reach a verdict, the sentence is passed: set free—free to write again, free to be muddled, formalist, esoteric, and unclear, free to satirize, to disgust, to offend, free to pursue whatever shape the notes might take.

Yet the secret police are never wrong, and the work of security is never done. It will all happen again, the ambush from above, the public attack by the engineer of human taste. Shostakovich, sentenced to a lifelong cat-and-mouse game, perpetual target in the war against dissonance, dissidents, and discontent. His music, always variations on the dead man’s jig. Decades later, long after Stalin’s death, the composer will still wear a packet around his neck containing the full text of the article “Muddle Instead of Music.” The words will give him the freedom that only an enemy of the people can feel.

Els merged left, into the lanes feeding toward the Mississippi. The shakes dampened and disappeared, replaced by a great lightness. The siren of the squad car, the germ of a musical idea. The last echo of the Allegro died away, plunging him into the hum of engine and wheels. Once it might have sounded like silence; now the road noise was symphonic.

The smartphone chimed and a window popped up on the screen. He swerved onto the rumble strip, trying to read the message there. The music player was asking him to vote. Two bright icons presented themselves: thumbs up or thumbs down. He had only to click—a swift judgment from his box seat—to decide the fate of the piece again.

He made it to the gathering outskirts of St. Louis. A strip mall, a housing division. Before long Saarinen’s great arch soared up from the horizon, the gateway to the West.

The trained ear can hold up an empty shell and make out the sea it came from.

He reads through the newspaper article that Bonner thrusts at him. A sect of property-sharing polygamists has proclaimed an autonomous city of God somewhere in central Texas. At first he thinks it’s a demented marketing campaign that Bonner has dreamed up for Fowler’s opening: the ecstatic believers, camped out in the desert, singing, praying, and waiting for time to end. The bungled raid by the ATF. The FBI laying siege to the believers’ compound in a cordon as tight as the Prince Bishop’s earthworks around Münster.

Too familiar to take in. What is all this?

Bonner’s doing something with his mouth: call it smiling. He glances at the stage, where John of Leiden, sword in hand, heads into Act Two’s closing barnburner aria, The glory of all the Saints is to wreak vengeance . . .

Yeah—how about that? Been going on for weeks. Who knew? Shit happens while you’re busy.

Els scrambles out of his seat and turns up the aisle. Bonner grabs his wrist.

Where you going?

Els doesn’t know. To the nearest television set. To the library. To the office of the artistic director of City Opera to plead innocence.

He lowers himself back into the chair. What do you know about this? He sounds absurd, accusatory.

Only what I read in the papers.

Els stares again at the fulfilled prediction. This can’t be happening.

Bonner’s face lights up. I know, huh? Total gold mine. Somebody’s watching over us.

Els wants to punch the man. Instead, he scrambles back to his feet. Richard doesn’t bother grabbing him again. Els jogs up the aisle and out of the hall, just as the run-through of Act Three begins.

In hours, he knows as much about Waco as anyone. He holes up in his room in Richard’s apartment, camped in front of the TV, surrounded by newspapers. He watches the standoff escalate its nightmare logic: The empire’s war machines. The siege works, cutting off the rebels from the outside. The core of believers huddled around their messiah, living on rainwater and stockpiled rations. He hardly needs to watch; he’s spent three years composing it.

Richard finds him that night watching videotape of the compound taken from an Army helicopter: a few dozen religious zealots bunkered down against the most powerful government on Earth. A voice-over says that the siege is costing the taxpayers a million dollars a week. The camera pans across a nearby caravan of RV vehicles—campers who show up to see how the standoff will play out. They sit along the road in folding chairs, playing cards and barbequing, waiting for the climax of this live theater.

Els speaks in a spectral treble, without turning to look. This isn’t coincidence.

Bonner’s arms are full with pad thai and the day’s rehearsal notes. Peter. Turn it off. Let’s eat.

What does this mean? It has to mean something.

It means we’re a genius, you and me. Absolute psychics.

People will think we . . .

There’s no end to what people might accuse them of. Unearned luck. Very bad taste. Opportunism. Some Faustian bargain.

Richard, Els says. We have to stop this.

Right. I’ll get right on the horn to Janet Reno.

Els doesn’t hear. He’s staring at his fisted knuckles. The news segues to a story about the World Health Organization declaring TB a global emergency. Bonner eats; Els watches him. It’s not the siege of Waco Els needs to stop. It’s the siege of Münster.

Two days later, ATF forces overrun the compound. Armored assault vehicles, engineering tanks, tear gas, grenade launchers. Then fire. Els might have told them: everything will burn. Scores of adults and two dozen children, shot, exploded, and immolated, and every detail of the finale beamed around the world on live television.

No need to watch through to the end. Els knows the end; he’s already written it. He stands in Bonner’s apartment in fetid clothes, fingers pressed to his head, waiting to be told what to do. Receiving no commands, he heads out into the blazing day and hops a cab uptown to Lincoln Center.

Richard is in row three, laying into the starving throngs of Münster. I want to hear hope! he shouts. You still believe that God is going to come down and fuck the Prince Bishop and his entire paid mob up the ass!

Els drops into the chair across the aisle. When Bonner sets the onstage planet revolving on its own again, Els tells him the news. The director stares as if Els were a college intern on the lighting crew who has started to give him blocking advice.

Peter, I’m kind of busy. We have previews in six days. Is there something you need?

We can’t do this, Els says.

Bonner blows a raspberry and twists his palms toward heaven. He hoots. His smile is brighter than it has been since Knipperdollinck’s understudy went over the edge of the orchestra pit and smashed his coccyx.

You’re out of your damn mind.

Okay, Els says. We just have to postpone . . .

Bonner snickers. There’s no other reasonable response.

We can go next season, Els says. Or later this—

Peter. Get real. We’ve put these people three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. Even a two-night delay would kill them.

Truth is, since the standoff in Texas became a headline, sales for the show have gone from poky to brisk, and opening night now has a reasonable chance of selling out. Marketing has gotten behind the opera with renewed vigor; they’ve started plastering stickers across the existing posters and flyers: Come See the News That the Past Already Knew.

Innocent children, Els says. Burnt to death by American law enforcement agents.

There’s confusion onstage, an altercation over the scene’s blocking. Bonner trots toward the crisis. Els dogs him.

Not our fault, Bonner tells him, without turning.

Els grabs him by the elbow. Listen to me. The minute people see . . . We can’t capitalize on this. It’s obscene.

True bafflement crosses the director’s face. The accusation is so bizarre it interests him. This is your story, Maestro. You want to quit, now that it’s real?

THERE’S SOMETHING TO say for a short third act: rapid rising action and a race to the finish. It takes only a recitative and two arias for the Prince Bishop to rally support in the north and tighten the snare of death around the crazed kingdom. The City of God can do nothing but play out its fate in a succession of otherworldly choruses. The siege seals up; food vanishes. A gentle siciliana in the harps and flutes predicts starvation. The believers hold out by eating every dog, cat, and rat within the walls. Then grass, dirt, and moss, shoe leather and old clothes, and finally the flesh of the dead, all to a lilting 12/8 dance.

John, the Messiah, the World’s King, retreats into his beloved amateur theatricals. He turns the final days into a great masque. Revels fill the town square, and the cathedral hosts an obscene Mass. Raunchy figures in the high winds grope and snipe at each other. Chopped-up snatches of sacred chant circle and rise until the entire orchestra turns into a spinning bacchanal.

In a flurry of brass, a group of the tailor King’s starving subjects flee the city. But the Prince’s armies pin them in the shallow meadows between the siege works and city walls. The refugees drag about, foraging the grass like desperate animals until they coat the ground with corpses. The music goes mad; sul ponticello harmonics slither through the strings.

Every player in the orchestra plunges into the surging tutti. The attackers enter a city turned to walking dead. They offer the citizens safe passage for surrender, then slaughter them the moment they lay down their arms.

Knipperdollinck and John, the amateur thespian, are tortured with red-hot irons and hung in cages from the tower of Saint Lamberti. But throughout his ordeal, the fallen savior makes no sound. His final aria—his last public performance—is total silence accompanied by a halo of strings.

The music falls away to a pianissimo mime. Then, from nowhere, it comes back glorious. The anticipation theme from the opening bars of the opera returns, anchored by the cellos and trombones. Augmented now, it unfolds in growing astonishment. A chorus of dead souls fans across the stage singing the De Profundis. The tune bends ten centuries of musical idiom into stunned wonder. Few in the first-night audience can follow the harmonic vocabulary. But the house breaks into applause as soon as the conductor drops his arms.

His colleagues force Els up onstage. He stumbles up in his white tie, blinded by the shining blackness. There’s sound everywhere, like the hiss of his father’s records that he woke to, as a child, on those nights when he’d fall asleep listening. He can’t make out what the static is saying or what this audience has heard. He hears only the cries of burning children, the snickering of fate, the great sucking sound of his endless vanity.

He looks out over the audience, sick. This is what he has wanted his whole life—a roomful of grateful listeners. And now the room wants something from him. An explanation. An apology. An encore.

Someone to Els’s right—a crazy man, an old friend—takes Els’s fist and lifts it into the air. To his left, a resurrected John of Leiden beams. The conductor, the choral director, the choreographer, all the assembled leads and chorus flank him. Massacred believers and besieging mercenaries hold hands and bow, smiling at each other and at Els, the maker, celebrated at last, vindicated after all his long years outside. Els turns and plows through the happy cast, trying to escape into the gap in the velvet curtains before the contents of his gut come up into his mouth. In this, too, he fails.

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

The man-made peak of Monks Mound loomed up from along the interstate. Once it had been the center of a city larger than London or Paris, a site for communal and dangerous art. Now it was part of a museum visited only by schoolchildren under duress. Its massive cone made Els want to turn off the highway, get out of the car, and climb. Cahokia seemed as good a place as any to be captured. But he was too close to his goal to be taken now.

The road bore hard to the right, and the Mississippi, without warning or comparison, spread in front of him. Water filled the landscape in both directions, and he saw that flowing lake as if he were the first fugitive ever to stumble across it.

The Voice took him by divine convolution deep into St. Louis’s southwestern suburbs. All Els had to do was stay on the road and obey. The neighborhood, when he reached it, surprised him: so different from what he’d pictured for thirty years. Stately homes sat back from the street behind moats of lawn. Brick and dressed stone, half-timbering, Federal, Tudor, Greek Revival, Queen Anne—houses as adept at faking styles as Stravinsky.

A weekday afternoon, and the streets betrayed no habitation. Even the corner park was empty. Everything human had taken itself indoors. The capering gray squirrels might as well have inherited the Earth.

The Fiat nosed up to the empty curb. Els had seen pictures over the years—his daughter and her parade of misfit friends, standing in front of the house in all seasons. Soft yellow lights shone out from the discreet façade. He sat in the car, thinking how this ambush might be the worst idea he’d had since setting up his home microbiology lab. He dialed the long-memorized number.

The phone rang, but the lights and shadows in the house didn’t change. At last, a deep, professional, and suspicious voice demanded, Hello?

The once-soubrette had turned contralto. Who’s calling? Two accented eighth notes and a quarter: a descending fifth followed by a rising sixth. The soothing three-note tune turned exquisite, and Els took two beats too long to answer, Maddy.

The rise and fall of her breath reverberated in the air of her cavernous house. Far away, Els heard what sounded like an exercise tape, the spritely orders of health fascism.

I’m sorry, she said, unapologetic. Who is this?

It’s Peter, he said, not recognizing his own voice.

Silence came from the other end, in timbres beyond Els’s powers to orchestrate. That was the thing about sounds. Even their absence had more shades than any ear could hear.

Peter, she said.

He wanted to tell her: It’s all right; life happens.

But the ID says Kohlmann.

Yes, he said, in a way that suggested how many parties might be listening in. She’d always had a good ear.

Where are you? Maddy asked, her voice thick.

Half a laugh came out of Els. Funny you should ask.

For some seconds, she said nothing. Then the teal drapes in the front bay window pulled back, and there stood the partner of his youth, the one who’d believed in the mind’s ability to levitate the Pentagon. She put her hand to the glass. He did the same, from the driver’s side of the Fiat. She hung up.

All life long, he’d had that composer’s gift of being able to tell exactly how long a minute lasted. He counted four of them. At last he shut down the phone and started up the car again. There was no more plan. He’d drive until caught, in a motel somewhere in the Dakotas.

The car nosed from the curb. Then the house door opened. She had on a long olive shirtdress and gray tailored vest. She was thicker and shorter than he remembered. Her feet edged down the front flagstone path like the taps of a blind person’s cane.

She let herself into the Fiat, slid down into the passenger seat, and swung to him. She looked at his ragged face and shook her head.

Rule Number One, he said. Zag when they think you’ll zig?

The corner of her lip twisted. Neither leaned in, in the slightest.

What are you doing here, Peter?

He stared at her, flooded with the past. She flicked the back of her hand toward the windshield and said, Drive.

He drove, to her direction. They followed a suite of quiet residential streets, emerging onto a commercial boulevard. They said nothing, as if they were a sunset couple taking their ten thousandth car ride together in this life. He wanted to give her the wheel, to see if she still drove like she was sailing an ice boat across a windy northern lake.

I’ve missed you, Maddy.

She sniffed and scratched her nose. Please. No nostalgia. It’s unbecoming in a bioterrorist.

She guided him into the parking lot of a mall the size of a breakaway Balkan state. Els panicked.

I can’t.

You’ll be fine, she said. No one’s looking for a couple.

He angled the Fiat into a slot and killed the engine. He turned to look at her.

You’re beautiful, he told her. Perfectly unchanged.

Oh, Christ! You never could see, could you? She held her sagging arms out and tipped her head forward, revealing her roots. The lines around her lips and eyes were cuneiform cuts in baked clay. Els shrugged.

Seeing is overrated.

They sat in the parked car, hands in laps. Down the lane in front of them, a woman pushed a cart loaded with a cardboard box big enough to live in. Maddy peered forward, intent on something Els couldn’t see.

Well, she said. You can’t have done what they’re saying you did.

I think I must have, Els said.

You’ve just turned some stupid misunderstanding into a federal offense by acting like a criminal.

A foolish hope welled up in Els. She was always so wise. The windows were fogging up. Maddy painted idle petroglyphs on the passenger-side glass.

Modified bacteria? Phht. You can’t even microwave a bowl of tomato soup.

No, Els said. I did that.

She shook her head. Impossible.

Any intelligent college kid—

Oh, Peter. I don’t believe this. Her hand snaked out, fending off the fact. They were seventy years old. They’d been divorced for a third of a century. But here they were, fighting on their first date.

Have they charged me with anything specific?

The hand came back down over her eyes and massaged her forehead. Lordy. And I thought you were naïve at twenty-five.

You thought I . . .? You were the wild idealist.

She looked out the window, at a different past. On the sidewalk in front of the burnished brass and black granite entrance, three women riding Segways handed out red, white, and blue tote bags. Half a dozen children dressed as boarding school wizards trotted into the mall, late for some arcane experiment. Maddy shook her head.

And you’re the biggest threat to national security since that propane-filled Pathfinder in Times Square.

He started to cackle. Maddy turned to him, and the fear in her face fed his laughter. His eyes watered at his absurdity, and he couldn’t stop. She put a hand on his knee. The shock of her touch sobered him. He raised his arm and caught his breath.

Sorry. It’s the stress. Losing it.

She tugged on his trouser crease. Come on. Let’s get some food into you.

A carousel spun in the center of the food court, a swirl of colored lights, mirrors, and a calliope. At one end of a large ellipse of food stalls, four bulky men clad in denim and sweatshirts played guitars and sang into mics, songs to listen to while driving across desiccated places in trucks very high off the ground. At the other end, a chorus line of child wizards were getting gunned down one by one by the voice vote of a merciless crowd.

With awful ease, Maddy secured two slices of pizza and a pair of fizzy drinks. They sat across from each other at a red molded table that would still be around long after the race had cooked itself to death. Four dozen people ate at nearby tables. A few hundred drifted around the ring of franchises. Most of them had seen his picture all week long. But none noticed him.

From across the table, he looked at the woman who had driven to Boston with him in a seventeen-foot rental truck, while carrying his child. A minute of gazing, and it seemed she’d had crow’s-feet and paper skin and liver spots for as long as he’d known her.

So how much trouble would you say I’m in?

Maddy considered the question from a vantage far away. Oh, they want to put you in jail for a very long time. You’re the perfect bogeyman.

Graves, her placid features seemed to say, were just the thing for dancing on.

People are buying gas masks. Purification pills. You’re the toast of the Internet.

Yes, he said. Finally famous.

She flipped a piece of melted cheese back onto her slice and squinted at it, a horoscope. So you really did this thing.

What thing?

Genetic whatever.

Yes.

You modified the DNA of a living thing?

He shrugged. Hundreds of companies do that every day.

Why, Peter? What ever possessed you?

A tune he couldn’t name issued from the twanging guitars of the old men in denim on the soundstage.

It’s astonishing, he said.

What is?

The things that happen down there.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

He couldn’t begin to tell her. Life. Four billion years of chance had written a score of inconceivable intricacy into every living cell. And every cell was a variation on that same first theme, splitting and copying itself without end through the world. All those sequences, gigabits long, were just waiting to be auditioned, transcribed, arranged, tinkered with, added to by the same brains that those scores assembled. A person could work in such a medium—wild forms and fresh sonorities. Tunes for forever, for no one.

He pleaded with her, palms bared.

Not you, Peter. You’re doctoring toxic organisms?

More throbbing counterpoint poured out of the PA system from down the concourse in the heart of the mall. It collided with the power rock from the stage, the calliope, and the chorus of beeps and chimes from a hundred smart and mobile devices. He could no more hear his thoughts than he could see the constellations at noon.

A middle-aged couple sat down at the next table, sharing a soft-serve cone and holding hands like teenagers. But Maddy didn’t lower her voice.

Was this some performance piece? Some kind of avant-garde stunt? Getting your revenge on the thankless public by scaring them shitless?

He barked a single-syllable laugh. That would be an idea.

Then what? Have you broken any laws?

None. There aren’t many to break.

Hope flashed across Maddy’s face. Then turn yourself in.

The answer: so simple, so obvious. For a moment, he was ready. Then he remembered.

I believe I’ve burnt that bridge.

Why, Peter? I don’t understand.

She looked up across the ellipse of eateries and pointed. There, near the food court entrance, two men in uniforms, a slant rhyme for police, nosed through the unnoticing crowd. Mall security. Panic filled Els. But he needed only fifteen seconds to do what he’d come here to do. He leaned forward, but didn’t touch her.

Mad? Before I met you, I thought I was going to be a chemist. That’s what I studied in college.

I know this, Peter. I was your wife, you know.

I’m sorry. I’m rambling.

So, what are you saying? That this was all some kind of vicarious fantasy? The road not taken?

In a way. I was . . . I was trying . . .

Oh, shit. Her hand rose and her eyes widened. You were composing. In DNA?

It did sound ludicrous. But what was music, ever, except pure play?

She stared at him as she’d done once, the night they broke. The night she’d said, The game is over. Nobody’s listening. They’re never coming back.

What is it you want? she hissed.

Her anger surprised him. The stored years. He’d never wanted anything but to give back something as fine as he’d been given. To make something worth hearing, and to send it out into the world.

Listen, he told her. I made a mistake.

She smoothed back her thinned hair. Apparently.

No, he said. Not the genetics. I’d do that all again.

The mall security officers looped up the concourse. They stopped to flirt with the Latina fast-food counter help. In another moment, they came abreast of the seating area, scouting the crowd. Els braced and hid his face. Maddy smiled at the heavyset officer as they passed the table. The man saluted her with one finger to the brow. The two guards ambled on, toward the wizard talent show. Maddy blew out her cheeks and exhaled. She would have made the greatest accomplice that any musical terrorist could have wanted.

When he could talk again, Els said, I think I must have been mentally ill.

Maddy swung to face him, twisted her head. This is what I’m wondering.

No. Back then. I never should have left you and Sara for music. Even to change the world.

He’d said the last thing he needed to say in this life. Peace came over him, one he hadn’t felt since Fidelio died. She looked away, her gaze now as blank as the past. The middle-aged lovers at the next table—married, but so obviously not to each other—stood and walked away, giggling and licking ice cream off each other’s fingers.

We already had music, Els said. All the music anybody might want.

The high lonesome denim band went into some kind of finale. The child wizard contest was coming down to the final four. Maddy inspected the food court—the sounds they had—then turned back to the sounds he still wanted.

This cell thing. You were trying to live forever?

Could be, Els admitted.

Her chest rose and fell. That was always your problem. She looked for something in the bottom of her cup. I only ever wanted now.

They sat in the cauldron of sound and light, as they once had in Cage’s Musicircus. He held his pepperoni crust aloft. This was our first meal.

Was it? She asked.

You’d just read through my Borges songs. I’d posted an ad at the Music Building, promising pizza for an hour of woodshedding. You answered.

Did I? I was always hungry back then.

I was mad at you for not loving them at first listen.

Oh! She looked up, surprised. But I did!

He fell back, puzzled. He’d driven here to admit to this woman the central mistake of his life. But more mistakes than he could number filled the air around him. Something loosened in him, a landslide of dread. Your quilt, he said. I buried it with the dog.

She shook her head, not getting him.

I was in bad shape. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Oh, for God’s sake. She pawed the air. I’ll make you another while you’re in prison.

Really? You’re quilting again?

Retirement. Something to do.

Careful, he said. That’s how it starts.

She reached across the red plastic table and covered his fist in her palm. Her hand was cold. Her shot skin no longer held in heat. Peter. They’re going to use you. Make a lesson out of you.

He opened his hand and took her finger. His life had been full of fearless music. The trick was remembering the sound of it, now that it was no longer playing.

She squeezed his hand hard, then flicked it away. Speaking of which. Your daughter is beside herself. She’s tried every possible way of reaching you for the last three days. She told me last night she was afraid you might kill yourself.

Tell her I’m good. Tell her I’ll be all right.

You want me to lie to her?

His eye fell on a kiosk near the center of the court. Its banner read BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NATURAL BEAUTY . . .

Tell her what I told you.

All right, she said. I can do that. But you should tell her yourself.

Maddy stood and stacked the trash, the plastic plates and disposable silverware.

It was all fear, she said. Fear got us. By the way: Who’s Kohlmann?

The name came from another planet. So did the note of jealousy. Els glanced at Maddy, but his ex-wife was taking a last, too-large mouthful of now-congealed cheese and trying to hide her pleasure.

Friend. With a phone.

She led Els to the garbage station, where they jettisoned their final meal. Then they ran the gauntlet of shops back toward the entrance, Maddy leading, Els stumbling two steps behind her, through the world’s endless profusion.

Outside, it had begun to drizzle. At the car, Maddy said, Let’s blame Richard.

Els snapped a finger. Perfect! Why didn’t I think of that?

They slipped into the Fiat as if they’d just made a pit stop and it was now back to the highway, license plate bingo, and the annual trip to Yosemite. She fiddled with his shoulder, absently, as he cranked the engine.

How does he seem to you these days?

He goosed the pedal. You hear from him?

Wait. You don’t?

He backed out of the parking slot right in front of an SUV, whose driver laid into his horn for a full ten seconds. The Fiat lurched forward. The lot was a maze of perverse and pointless turns, leading nowhere but toward more shops.

He said, I haven’t spoken to the man for seventeen years.

She took her hand back into her lap. He called me a few months back. He’s in a clinical field trial out in Phoenix. New Alzheimer’s-arresting drug.

Phoenix? Els asked. His head was wrong. He was driving at random. Why Phoenix?

Because that’s where the old people are.

He turned toward her, but she looked away. He looked back to the parking lot, crisscrossed with hazards.

She said, He calls sometimes.

He’s calling you?

Only at night. When he’s terrified. Mostly around two a.m. Charlie wants to kill him.

Does he . . . is he . . .?

Much the same, Maddy said. For now. A little flakier. Early-stage. That’s why he’s in the trial. He’s pinning everything on this drug. He calls me up to prove that it’s working. He talks like the two of you are as thick as ever.

Els didn’t even see the stop sign until he was through it. He pressed on, his field of vision narrowing to a brown tube.

You’re in touch. I thought you hated him.

Richard? I loved Richard. And I loved you. I just hated the two of you together.

After two more capricious right turns, he asked, Where exactly am I going?

I was just going to ask. Peter? Her chin rose and fell; her eyes shot down the road. What are you going to do? You don’t think I can shelter you, do you?

Of course not, he said.

I can help you, she told the glove compartment. Get you a lawyer. Run interference. Character witness. Whatever you need. There’s still the law, isn’t there? You are innocent, right?

He caught her eye. Too late for foolish optimism. She closed her eyes and held up one hand.

Let’s not go there yet.

He’d gotten them onto a quiet residential street full of modest ranch houses. He nosed the car to the curb along a maple-lined parkway. The rain had turned real and the sky was indigo.

I . . . he began. I don’t need anything. Just your forgiveness.

Maddy grinned, a grim Minnesota girl’s grin. You’re an idiot. How am I supposed to forgive that?

He couldn’t hold her look. He said, Mad. Meeting you like this . . .? Ten minutes ago, I was ready to surrender.

Yes, she said. She placed a palm on his shoulder and turned away. But now you need to get to Arizona.

SHE GUIDED HIM to another chain motel, not far from westbound 44. This one looked like a Swiss chalet. An early start the next day, and he’d be in Amarillo by nightfall. She went in to rent the room. He waited in the parking lot, underneath a streetlamp that buzzed like something Ming the Merciless might use to torture freedom fighters on Mongo.

She came back to the car with the room key, laughing. Why do I feel like I’m cheating on my second husband with my first?

She gave him Richard’s address. Then she guided him to her bank. She made him park on the street while she walked up to the machine and drew out enough money to get him to Arizona.

Thank you, he said. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.

If you don’t, I’ll get the law on you.

You know . . . they might pay you a visit.

You think?

Fearless, she was now. Or very tired of fear. Tired of giving it everything she was afraid it might take.

He, too, was exhausted. You need to get back home. Charlie must be starting to worry.

Peter! Are you trying to save my marriage?

Small twists in her pitch and rhythm told him: she was autonomous. And she had been for a long time. Her melody insisted that everyone ended up autonomous in the end. Had they known as much when they were young, they might have grown apart together.

On the way back to her house, he remembered he had something urgent to ask her, but couldn’t remember what. Instead, he said, When was the last time you sang?

Three hours ago. While showering. You?

He pulled up to the curb where he’d phoned her a lifetime before. Night had fallen. The past that he needed to atone for had vanished. He killed the engine and they sat a moment in the dark. Maddy patted the dashboard of the Fiat.

Can I go with you tomorrow?

She grinned at his confusion, until he found her.

You always do, he said.

She undid her seat belt and shook her head. It was a good piece, Peter. The two of us. I’d sing it again.

She leaned over and kissed him. We’re good, she said. Really. Then she opened the passenger door and flooded the little remade past with light.

I depart as air.

He wanted to destroy the opera and start again, now that he knew what it meant to be burnt alive.

He couldn’t stop a single performance. The three-hour exercise in transcendence got dragged into the shit-storm of human events. He fled back to New Hampshire, but the noise about The Fowler’s Snare followed him. Bonner gave interviews on his behalf. Art, Richard proclaimed, didn’t take moral stands. All opera did was sing.

The production made the cover of Opera News. The Times reviewer called Fowler “visionary” and labeled Els “the mad Prophet’s prophet.” An article in New Music Review by one Matthew Mattison concluded, “One stroke of luck has turned a nostalgic exercise into something electric.”

Reporters couldn’t get enough of the eerie coincidence. They praised Els for an artistic bravery he never possessed. They faulted him for failing to exploit the full political significance of an event he couldn’t have predicted.

City Opera extended the run. Dallas and San Francisco wanted to mount productions while the freakish story was still hot. Els refused all requests, and for a few weeks his refusal itself became industry news.

Bonner drove up in mid-June, to bully Els into compliance. Even the next day, Els couldn’t remember the details. Richard got no farther than the driveway. The altercation happened there, on the obliging gravel. The talk started out civil enough. Richard spoke of creative duty, of all the people Els owed, of the moral cowardice of abandoning one’s work.

There were words, rich, inventive, and pitched. Someone shoved the other, and shoving became punches. All Els could remember in any detail was Bonner dusting himself off and getting back in his car. He promised to sue Els for everything he was worth. Worth nothing, Els only laughed.

All further contact between them went through a lawyer. Els stood his ground. He made sure The Fowler’s Snare would never be performed again. The fight merited a moment of gossip in musical circles. Then those circles moved on to morbid Eurotrash productions of Mozart with underwater nudity and thrilling new hybrids of rock and rave, Broadway and Bayreuth.

Els didn’t follow those developments. He was done with musical progress. He was done with Richard Bonner. This time the break was permanent. That much was obvious, the minute the dancer stood up bloodied from the gravel drive.

Two years after The Fowler’s Snare closed forever, the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City went down. Els heard the news on public radio while making dinner. There was talk of Arabs and hidden terror cells. But anniversaries are no accident, and Els knew at once just what slow war this attack continued. For the first time in two years, snatches of robust music formed in his mind. Lush instrumental passages, pushing outward in a mad rush: Act Four, he guessed, or Act One of an unwelcome sequel. The story was dark and resonant—worth splendid music. But by then Els believed that music’s job was to cure listeners of drama forever.

A letter arrived one day, forwarded from City Opera. It was from the pianist who’d premiered Els’s Borges Songs in graduate school. Once a weed-loving closet jazzer, the man now signed himself the dean of fine arts of Verrata College, a small liberal arts school in eastern Pennsylvania. Fowler had blown him away. “If you’re ever looking for a way to make ends meet,” the dean said, “you can always do some teaching for us.”

He didn’t need cash so much as he needed protection from the psych ward. Structured activity might keep at bay all the thoughts brought on by extended silence.

Verrata saved him and gave him the sustainable oblivion he needed. He moved back down to the Mid-Atlantics and took up the gristmill work of an adjunct professor. He taught five courses a semester: a mix of ear training, sight singing, and basic theory and harmony. His days were a gauntlet of Fixed-Do slogs, with him as tonality’s drill sergeant. Like every adjunct, he was a stone-dragging serf helping to build a very wide pyramid. But exploitation suited his need for penitence.

He threw himself into the crushing routine. A few semesters of teaching the rudiments of music made him realize how little of the mystery of organized vibrations he’d ever understood. The whole enigma unfolded in front of him, and he stood back from it as baffled as a beginner. He tried to tell his freshmen the simplest things—why a deceptive cadence makes a listener ache or how a triplet rhythm creates suspense or what makes a modulation to a relative minor broaden the world—and found he didn’t know.

Not knowing felt good. Good for his ear.

He still composed sometimes, at his desk between student conferences, or sitting in the thick of the college commons, although he never bothered to put any notes to paper. Tiny haiku microcosms spilled out of him, five-finger exercises in peace that fragmented into lots of beautiful, fermata-held rests.

Students came, learned, and left. Some suffered through their solfeggio exercises, masters of the taciturn eye-roll. But others he changed forever. To the best of his student composers, Els said, Do not invent anything; simply discover it. One or two of them understood him.

The years went by, and he worked as hard and well as he could. He gardened. He learned how to cook. He took up long morning walks. One day, his daughter called him out of the blue. She was passing through Philadelphia for a conference her start-up was attending. Els met her at a noisy chowder house. The diffident girl of twenty who’d spent long, secluded hours on dial-up bulletin boards in multi-user dimensions was having a ball inventing whole new imaginary worlds again. Only this time it was called entrepreneurship.

Five minutes of conversation with this short-haired, soft-suited, velvet-shirted stranger, and he was in love all over again. And weirdly comfortable, as if they’d gone on chatting away in their own language for all those missing years.

So what exactly is data mining? he asked.

Okay, Sara said, wiping the white linen napkin across her twisting lips. Say you wanted to know how many hours a week midwestern urban professionals between the ages of twenty-five and thirty spend listening to crunk.

Wait, her father said. Start from the beginning.

A very good place to start.

She’d ended up much like her mother: solid, flourishing, in love with work. She came back out East four months later, and they went to New York to look at paintings together. Then the calls started. First every Sunday evening, then expanding to two or three times a week. She did enjoy him. But he was her project, really. She seemed to feel some need to look after him, a fix for all those years when he failed to look after her. She sent him a dog for his birthday. She bought him books and sent him discs and concert tickets. She vetted his television viewing and took him with her once to Hamburg. She did everything but say: Let’s make something, Daddy. Something good.

All the while, he worked. He had the esteem of his colleagues, the respect of his neighbors, and the occasional affection of his better students. After some years, it shocked Els to discover that, for the first time in his life, he was almost happy.

I bequeath myself to the dirt.

Near Amarillo, the sun dropped huge and bronze below the horizon. Els kept to the radio. One hundred outbreaks of avian flu throughout Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. Fatal cases in Egypt and Indonesia and Cambodia and Bangladesh and Dakahlia. Infected wild birds were showing up in the abandoned radioactive wasteland zones around Fukoshima. The newsreader couldn’t suppress the thrill in his voice. Something was happening, at last. If not this flu season, then the next.

Els pressed on past the city. The plan was to make it to Phoenix in one more push the next day. Anxiety stained his clothes, and he would have no fresh ones anytime soon. Home and comfort were no more than nostalgic folk songs. He’d badly misjudged the vast, callous vacancy of the West. The featureless Panhandle stretched out in front of him, da capo ad nauseum.

A flyspeck town near the New Mexico border beckoned, and he pulled off. A mile and a half up a dark road he found a mom-and-pop place with a sign whose half-darkened neon letters read like Martian script. A Holiday Inn Express beckoned from across the way, but Els chose the churlish motel without a second thought. Fifteen hours of solo driving: the sensation was not unlike sitting through a fifty-year-old experimental art film five times in a row. His vision swirled, and the asphalt of the parking lot as he baby-stepped across it bobbed like the sea. Only the thought of lying down forever kept him moving.

A single-story elbow of rooms bent around the weed-shot parking lot. The building had seen better times, but the times could never have been too good. A line of windows hid behind heavy curtains, and the roar of retrofitted air conditioners kept up a steady drone. The insects in the air, the plane overhead, and the blood coursing in his ears combined into a spectral masterpiece.

A bouquet of Pine-Sol filled the tiny lobby, with its walls of stucco and knotty pine. Behind the ironing board of a front desk, a sun-beaten old man in chinos and a tee reading Outta My Face preempted the guest before he could say hello.

Cash only, tonight.

The man’s voice was a wondrous, geared machine. Els said, Deal.

The proprietor didn’t even pretend to paperwork. The eleven most hated words in the English language: I’m from the government, and I’m here to collect your receipts. But politics and art made strange bedfellows, and Els was fine with allies wherever he found them.

The room smelled of tobacco and microwave popcorn, but the bed was soft, and Els felt lucky beyond saying. He opened the particleboard closet and stood in front of it, feeling the urge to unpack. The absence of a bag made that difficult. His head buzzed and in his ears, the slap of tires against the seams in the highway continued to beat out a steady andante.

A TV tilted from the wall like an altarpiece. He flipped it on, for tranquilizing. The headline news channel featured a pet care business that was booming in the advent of the Rapture, only weeks away. He turned on the smartphone. The FBI could zero in on the device and raid the room, so long as they let him take a hot shower first. Searching on his name produced too many citations even to skim. It left him vaporous, diffused, and a little exhilarated. He chucked the phone on the bed, stripped, went into the funky, pine-paneled bathroom, and got under the spray.

The pelt of hot water against his skin sizzled like cymbals. The ringing in his ear changed pitch as he clenched his jaw. Toweling dry, he heard the great night music from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra so clearly that he was sure it came through the motel walls. He stood and listened. The piece, its thick brocade of brass, seemed to him uniquely worth saving from the last century’s runaway bonfire. Making such a thing could justify a life. But the piece was a charity commission, and the maker died a miserable pauper’s death a year and a half later, mourned at his funeral by eight people including his wife and son.

Fatigue pulled Els down to the bed. With what strength remained, he set the clock radio for five a.m. The minute he slipped under the coarse, pilled sheets, he heard Chopin’s Vision. Groping on the bedstand to shut it off, he saw his own name on the glowing screen: Els, S.

He fumbled the phone on and mumbled, Sara. Something like his daughter’s voice came back at him.

Daddy. Oh, God, what are you doing?

He thought he might still be sleeping, his head on the pillow. Maddy must have given her the number from off of the caller ID. Technology, family, love: prisoner of them all.

He said, Hey, Bear. You okay?

Daddy, what’s wrong with you? Her voice was strange and hoarse.

Don’t worry. I’m fine.

Where are you? Wait. Don’t say anything.

Your mother told you that I—

Shut up, she said. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

He held the phone in a stunned silence. Data everywhere.

What the hell did you think you were doing? she said. Then: Don’t answer that.

She said nothing more for a very long time. At last she bleated, You haven’t done anything. You’re innocent.

He sat up and flicked on a light, as if there were a reason.

I don’t think so, he said. Not anymore.

They have nothing on you. Nothing that would stand up.

Google me, he said.

God! I’m Googling you ten times an hour.

His daughter, his ducats.

It’s all garbage, she said, desperate. Scared people spouting shit.

That’s just it. I’ve panicked millions. I’m going to release a new killer strain.

Dad. Shut up and listen. Just tell them the facts.

If he’d ever possessed something so quaint, he’d long ago mislaid it.

You have support. Powerful people. They’re saying you’re the victim of a paranoid culture.

Serious?

Plead ignorance. You got sucked up into a stupid hobby. Naïve and misguided. It’s obvious. Your whole . . .

She didn’t need to complete the thought. His whole life—naïve and misguided. A long apprenticeship for this final act of bad judgment.

I’ve found you representation, she said. The best. The firm that defended that microbiologist performance artist in Buffalo. They’ll work pro bono, for a cut of any damages. Hold on. I need my notes.

Something rose in him through his fatigue: the spiraling perpetual motion of the Bartók finale. He filled with pride for this remarkable woman, his one perfect composition, however little credit he could take for the finished work.

Her phone clunked as she picked it up again.

The sooner you do this, the easier it’ll be to clear things up. You were frightened and ran. They’ll understand that.

Yes, he thought. If they understood anything, it was fear. Lightness came over him and he said, You used to write music, remember? You invented a whole system of notation using your colored blocks. You were amazing.

Please, she said.

I just saw your mother.

She mentioned.

I told her I made a mistake.

You did, Sara said, the words skidding in pitch. Stop making more, and we’ll forgive you.

Okay. I can do that. I can surrender.

Don’t call it that.

What should I call it?

Fixing things, she said.

He must have started to doze already, even before goodbyes, because the next thing he knew, it was five a.m. and the clock radio was playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” so soft and sad and slow and minor and faraway that the haunting tune might have been Fauré’s Elegy.

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.

Her face is a Renaissance profile against the October sky blazing through his office window. She waves two fingers at the score on the screen in front of her, and a sinuous duet pours out of the speakers, sung by a MIDI patch of sampled human voices standing in for virtuoso singers who don’t yet exist.

Jen, this one: not the first Jen he has worked with in this sunny room, and she won’t be the last. But by every useful metric, surely the most magnificent. Tall, clunky, voluble, half goof, half gazelle, and her dyed-fuchsia curls fly everywhere, however often her fingers rake the mane. Her laughs are percussive, her questions mellifluous. She breathes in instruction and breathes out ingenious freedom. And for one hour every week, he gets to watch her breathe.

He’s written no real music in the eight years since Fowler. And yet, she’s here to study composition with him. He’s sixty. She’s twenty-four, eight years younger than his daughter, and starved for anything he can tell her about sound. She wants to squeeze out of him the last thousand years of harmonic discoveries. But he has little to teach that isn’t already within her hungry reach.

Jen’s duet swings upward into a sequence of stunning chords before settling into a cantabile. Then the cantabile broadens. He once put something similar into an ancient octet—the apprentice piece that won him the chance to work with Matthew Mattison. Back then, he still clung to the vestiges of Neo-Romanticism. Now Neo-Romanticism, unkillable vampire, is back with a vengeance. His student outpouring was reactionary, anachronistic; Jen’s is hip and current. Other than that, the gestures are much the same.

He listens to her irrepressible waltz, as familiar as yearning. Then, just when Els has it pegged, the tune explodes into a wild fugato, leaving young Peter’s precious student tinkerings in the dust. He turns toward the girl, amazed. She sneaks a glance his way, mugging a little, impish, a conspirator’s grin. She’s pleased, not with herself but with this marvelous mechanical bird she has stumbled across while out wandering.

They sit shoulder to shoulder, facing the music, nodding to the beat. Now and then he jots something into a pocket notebook. When his pleasure in her devices overflows, he’ll flick her elbow or kneecap with his fingernail.

Four weeks earlier, a quartet of passenger planes turned the dream of the present into a greasy plume. The whole world watched the cycling images in narcotic dread and could not look away. Days passed when even buying a dozen eggs felt like hubris. People kept saying that life had changed forever, but Els couldn’t see how. He’d lived too long for the fallen towers to seem like anything more than history’s next nightmare installment. Terrors as large had struck every decade he’d lived through. Only they’d always happened somewhere else.

On day five, Stockhausen called it the biggest work of art there ever was, compared to which every other composer’s work was nothing.

On day six, Jen came to her tutorial. She sat in her usual chair, her face bloated and red. Oh, man! she told him. Every note I put down seems grotesque. Self-indulgent, after this.

It took all the self-control of a swami at sixty to keep from holding the girl’s jittery hand. Simply wait, he wanted to tell her. Be quiet, still, and solitary. Music will offer itself to you, to be unmasked. It has no choice.

Now, a month on, she’s in full sail again, and the world lies in ecstasy at her feet. She hasn’t forgotten anything; she’s remembered. Who will tilt this footrace from Death to Love, if not her? And these full-out, cascading kaleidoscopes, their interlocking syncopations, are her weapons of mass enchantment. Her duet darts like swallows; soon, the voices are joined by ondes Martenot, contrabassoon, and bass clarinet in manic motor rhythms. Then a battalion of spiccato cellos and double basses. Tubular bells, of course. How not? And fanfares served up by a double helping of trombones.

The music works its way to a whirling waterspout, then explodes into strobing suspensions. Jen leans forward into the breakers of her own ocean, grinning like a demon. She’s managed to delight herself again with her God-given right to strike a pose, to play on the fantasies of any willing listener.

The piece plunges off a cliff into blissful silence. In the aftermath, the maker can’t suppress a satisfied giggle. Huh? she teases him. Where does such confidence come from? Whadya think?

I have two words for you, he intones. And one of them is Holy . . .

The praise makes her levitate. He stands and crosses to the piano, where he demonstrates for her a better way to handle a clumsy moment near the piece’s climax. She has reinvented a kind of quasi-fauxbourdon, lush and archaic, like the kind Brahms might have used. But her voice leading is all wrong. She doesn’t know the models, the ones that have solved all her problems already. There’s too much more to hear than the mere past. She listens to music all day long; her tastes are catholic and indiscriminate. She has shown him the tunes on her player, scrolled through the titles in her promiscuous trove. Now and then she leaves gifts in his in-box, music for the end of time: Radiohead, Björk, the Dillinger Escape Plan. The songs startle Els. They’re jewels, rich with dissonance and unstable rhythms. They sound like the experiments of half a century ago—Messiaen or Berio—reborn for a wider public. Maybe that’s how long it takes to go from germ to general acceptance in this world. Maybe the key to acclaim is simply to live long enough.

But then, maybe acclaim is just the foyer to death.

For every solo discovery Jen makes, Els must point her toward dozens more. The world’s bounty has overflowed, and the young are washed away in it. Human ingenuity was doomed from the first, to do itself in with abundance. Of the making of many musics, there is no end.

His fingers step through the keys, spelling out his proposed alternative. He glances up as he plays. His gaze locks onto her chestnut eyes as he talks her through the solution. The girl shakes her head.

God, I wish I could do that.

Do what? He’s done nothing but trace out a well-mapped progression, one known for centuries.

Stand at the keyboard and knock those things out. While talking!

Oh, stop. You just played me a fifteen-minute piece with a billion notes in it.

That’s not me, she says. That’s Sibelius!

Confusion lasts only an instant. Not the Finn: the composition software. The program that turns an average tunesmith into Orpheus. And if a student were to ask Els where to put her energies—into mastering the past or mastering that interface . . .

He recrosses the room and sits next to her again. He waves his finger at her screen. Time for surgery. For him, Jen is always ready to repair. She goes to work on her own keyboard, like a kid releasing global thermonuclear war. He marvels again at the sheer power of the tools: cut-and-paste harmonies, point-and-click tone painting, one-button transposition. With a few deft flicks, a handful of raw building blocks becomes a new two-minute stunning tutti. Els wags his head in sad astonishment: five weeks of work for him, back in the day.

Oh, you children are like gods.

Children? she asks, her eyebrows aerobic. Is that how you see me?

It’s the most coquettish thing she has ever said. She’s still high on the power of her piece, the sheer trip of playing it for her mentor. Yes, he thinks. A child with breasts. With brains. With the most delicious insouciance he has come across in decades.

When I was your age, he tells her, we used to have to find a nice flat stone, polish it up, get a chisel . . .

She listens, brows furled. Then she tsks and shoves his shoulder. Sure, Gramps.

Again, he says, pointing at her machine. He feels himself enjoying her, enjoying this, enjoying even music again. From the top. Once more with feeling.

She does as commanded, and though the reprise of the revised piece sends their lesson into overtime, neither of them gives the minute hand a second thought. Sounds fill their ears and the notes scroll past. The music is everywhere again, lush and naïve and searching out the best in both Apollo and Dionysus.

For a few short measures, the layers turn strange and cold as moonlight. Oh! Els says, clapping. I like that bit!

You should, she says. I ripped you off!

He thinks she’s joking. She’s not. The pulse drives on ahead, but his ears turn wary. He waits for the piece to end before confronting her.

You did what?

Her face is shaped for grinning. I found it in a piece you wrote . . . Your Borges songs?

We are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. He’s forgotten the work was ever published, and if she’s gone and ordered a copy of the score, it will be the first dollar of royalties Els has made in years.

I owe you an ice-cream cone.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Means she has done something good with his old obscure formulas. Putty, sanding, and a paint job, and the thing is all shiny again, better than new.

What were you doing, hunting down my old stuff?

The words scare her, a key he’s never seen. Gramps? she asks. She looks at the offending passage. It’s pretty beautiful.

Oh? So beauty’s back, is it?

How much must have changed in the world of musical taste, since he last took its temperature, for those old provocations to be accused of such a crime. He smiles at sounds from very far away—the antics at the piece’s premiere, Maddy and the players dancing around the little auditorium to Richard’s imperial bidding.

What? Jen says. She’s ready to laugh along, if she should. What’d I say?

He shakes his head. Old friends, he says. Crazy people.

She frowns, wondering if she’s supposed to understand. But perplexity rolls off her as easily as recent history. She belongs to the first generation to use the mantra whatever without exasperation. It doesn’t matter to her what he’s babbling about. His words are nothing; she wants his tunes.

It’s Monday, 6:20. She’s late for something—dinner at the dorm, a lover’s tryst, a week-starting pub crawl with friends. But her eyes search upward in the air, as if the score of his old songs were printed there. I learn so much from what you write.

Wrote, he wants to say. Her zeal seems genuine enough. But then, she’s capable of extracting instruction and delight from a ten-second ad jingle.

He wants to tell her: Hold on to what you know right now. Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time’s end and recollect the dead as if they’re all still here. Because they are.

He folds his hands behind his neck. We had some strange notions back then.

I know. The sixties! Even the name excites her. A daughter of a revolution that did not happen as she imagined.

We did some silly things. We thought people could learn to love anything.

She braces. They can’t?

They can’t, Els says. God. We had energy. We had ideas. We had daring. We had invention for every need. The dreamers outnumbered the charlatans. Then we woke up.

His words slap her, and her face falls. He can’t imagine why his apostasy should bother her. Her music is so lavish and satisfying it’s closer to the 1860s than to the sixties in question. Still she hangs her head, mourning iconoclasm. She’ll never have the pleasure of creative destruction. Nothing to break anymore. Everything already broken and glued back together in a mosaic of pretty bits, too many times to count.

Nobody wanted that stuff. Very little of it will ever be played again.

Through the window, October stretches out, cloudless and amnesic. According to this blue, nothing significant happened last month, with more lovely nothing in the extended forecast. Els stretches. There’s a tune in his ear like the fifties rock and roll his brother force-fed him after tying him to a chair in the family basement.

Turns out that people want a very few things.

He’s a boy again, listening to his father’s hi-fi. Young Person’s Guide. The Orchestra Song. The tympani’s two tones are always the same tones: Do Sol, Sol Do. Do Sol Sol Sol Do. And now the long, strange trip of his sixty years, all that wandering through distant keys, doubles back to tonic, that exploded home.

He can’t for the life of him figure out how, but he’s upset her.

Gramps? Jen’s voice wavers. It sounds so generous. Fresh. She pouts with the same force that drives her music on into badass brilliance. Like you don’t give a shit who comes with. I love that!

He can’t even pat her on the head. There are laws against that, and laws beyond those laws. He waits too long to say anything, and his silence humiliates her.

You tried so many things, she blurts. Why’d you stop?

He says, Not your business. And at once regrets the words as much as any music he has ever written.

Her eyes blink and her head snaps back. She closes the clamshell of her computer and shoves it in her pack.

Jen, he says, helpless to say what he should. She stops, waits, vacant, her hand fighting her Amazon hair.

Go to the piano, he commands. She sneers, but does.

Hit a key.

She shrugs—whatev. She, at least, doesn’t bother to ask which one. She chooses G-sharp. Lovely, intense, and perverse. This one will have a future.

Tell me what you hear.

She shrugs again, stone-faced. G-sharp below middle C.

Again. What else?

Nothing at first. But awareness spreads through her, ten times faster than it dawned on him, back in the day. She hits the key, snorts, pounds the thing again, three times in a row. Then she starts the long arpeggio, plunking her way up the overtone series.

So what? she says, trying to scowl and failing miserably.

She knows. It’s all over her face, a message already charging into her future. For every pitch that ever reaches your ear, countless more hide out inside it. The things he can never tell her, the music he never wrote: it’s all rolled up, high up there, in the unhearable frequencies.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.

They slaughter infected poultry all across Asia. A holocaust of birds. Birds die by the millions, infected or not. Safety is a concept piece, at best.

Human cases break out by the hundreds: Egypt, Indonesia, China. The numbers are small, still, but the real outbreak will start just like this.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, researchers breed variant strains of H5N1 in generations of ferrets. Three months and five small mutations later, they’ll succeed in turning the virus airborne. It’s a simple enough experiment, one that tens of thousands of DI Yers could re-create at home. A disease that kills half of those it infects, grown as contagious as the common cold. Governments and agencies will try to suppress the data. But soon enough, the recipe will spread around on the Internet at the speed of thought.

This happens in the Age of Bacteria, which began about 3.5 billion years ago.

Out East, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a molecular geneticist makes a novel organism from scratch, one with its own genetic code. It won’t be dangerous, a panel of scientists says, unless it escapes the lab. Everything gets loose, a panel of historians says. Life is an escaped experiment, say the artists, and the only real safety is death.

The guardians carry on flying their nightly sorties. Drones gather data from all the planet’s hotbeds. Recon units comb those last few holdout places that elude the grid. Virtuoso interpreters of chatter listen in on all frequencies. Everywhere, agents break up attacks before they’re even planned.

In another few weeks, an airborne squad will drop into the compound of the supreme artist of panic—fugitive these last ten years—and slaughter him. That death will change nothing. Panic, like any art, can never be unmade.

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.

Sixty-one came, and sixty-two subito, a few days later. For two years, Els worked at Verrata and listened to nothing but Bach. He taught ear training and sight singing, then came home and listened each night to everything the old contrapuntist ever wrote. Nothing else. It was a discipline, like jogging or doing crosswords. An escape from the night sweats of his own century. The Well-Tempered Clavier became his daily bread. He went through the suites, concertos, and trio sonatas. He pored over the two-hundred-plus cantatas three times through. The study focused him. He felt like a student again, a beginner in his own life.

After two years of listening, Els woke one morning and realized that he was done, even with Bach’s bottomless buffet. The surprises were over. The brilliance had gone routine. He could anticipate every outlandish dissonance hidden in those independent lines. And where do you go, once you’ve memorized the sublime?

He went to Mozart. He pored over the Jupiter, as a scholar might. But even the cosmic finale was lost in familiarity, or something worse. The notes were all still there, audible enough. But they’d flattened out, somehow, lost their vigor. And the phrases they formed sounded metallic and dun. It took him some weeks to realize: His hearing had changed. He was just sixty-five, but something had broken in the way he heard.

Els made an appointment with a specialist. His symptoms puzzled Dr. L’Heureux. The doctor asked if Els experienced any changes in coordination. Any confusion or disorientation.

Oh, probably, Els told him. But only the musical confusion worried him.

Are you having any trouble finding the right words?

Els had never in his whole life been able to find the right words.

Dr. L’Heureux made Peter walk a straight line, count backward by sevens, arm-wrestle, and stand still with his eyes closed. He didn’t ask his patient to sing or name a tune.

Dr. L’Heureux ordered a scan. The scanner was a large tube much like one of those Tokyo businessmen’s hotels. It hummed to itself as it probed, a microtonal drone that sounded like La Monte Young or the cyclical chanting of Tibetan monks.

Doctor and patient sat in a consulting room examining slices of Els’s cortex. The scallops and swirls looked like so much cauliflower. Dr. L’Heureux pointed at bits of Els’s spirit and heart and soul, naming regions that sounded like vacation spots in the eastern Mediterranean. Peter followed the magic lantern show. He nodded at the doctor’s explanations, hearing another libretto altogether. What was it about music’s obsession with Faust? Spohr, Berlioz, Schumann, Gounod, Boito, Liszt, Busoni, and Mahler, down through Prokofiev, Schnittke, Adams, and Radiohead. Centuries of bad conscience, long before the Nazis burnt the temple of High Music to the ground.

It seemed to Els, as another slice of his brain filled the screen, that classical music’s real crime was not its cozy relations with fascism but its ancient dream of control, of hot-wiring the soul. He pictured Faust looking at his own neurons on a monitor—his bottomless hunger laid bare, his desire for mastery swirling through his brain like cigarette smoke curling in the air. As full knowledge filled the seeker at last, Mephistopheles, at his elbow, would sing, Now we’re both paid in full.

Once such an infant opera would have flooded the folds of Els’s brain in spikes of color. Now he looked at a stilled sea.

Els pointed to a speck of gray-black Sargasso. What’s that?

Dr. L’Heureux nodded, confirming a diagnosis Els didn’t even know he’d made. That’s a lesion. A small dead spot.

Dead?

A small transient ischemic attack.

The doctor pointed out another.

The scans of many people your age show the same thing.

Ah, Els said. So there’s nothing to worry about.

Dr. L’Heureux nodded. Perfectly normal. Perhaps a lesion had taken out his sarcasm detector.

Els asked how much of a person’s brain could be dead and still qualify as normal. The question confused Dr. L’Heureux. He seemed not to make a strong distinction between normal and dead. And all the medical evidence was on his side.

Yet the tiny gray islands in his silver brain reassured Peter. Whatever musical facility he’d lost was not his fault. He wasn’t being punished. The scattered dead spots on the screen joined together into a pattern. The islands of silence shaped the still-surging ocean of noise around them. He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.

Dr. L’Heureux described the virtues of exercise. He mentioned possible medications and dietary changes. But Els had stopped listening. He asked, What about my musical facility?

Dr. L’Heureux’s shoulders made a helpless appeal. He mentioned a name: acquired amusia. It had a variety of possible causes. There was no treatment.

Something in his words tipped Peter off. A tone he could still hear.

This is going to get worse?

Dr. L’Heureux’s silence suggested that it would not get better.

Els went home, into a world of changed sound. Listening to music felt like looking at a flower show through sunglasses. He knew when the intervals shocked or surprised, soothed or blossomed. He just couldn’t feel them.

Rain and thunder, the sides of mountains bathed in flowing orange, frantic delight, the sizzle of cities at night, feasts of self-renewing tenderness, the heaven of animals: the most ravishing harmonies turned into secondhand, summarized reportage. Music, the first language, direct transcription of inner states, the thing words used to be before they bogged down with meaning, now read like a curt telegram.

For a few days, he could still tell what sounded different. Then, little by little, he couldn’t. The brain got used to anything, and soon Els’s new ears were all he’d ever had. He listened less for subtle rhythms and harmonic contour, more for melody and timbre. Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage, rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-prog, neo-soul, new jack swing . . . He’d never dreamed that people could need so many kinds of music.

A year of listening to the new world confirmed him. He’d waited his whole life for a revolution that he’d already lived through and missed. The airwaves were full of astounding sound—a spectrum of grief, craziness, and joy so wide he couldn’t step far enough back to make sense of it all. As more and more people made more and more songs, almost every piece would go unheard. But that, too, was beautiful. For then, almost every piece could be someone’s buried treasure.

His students grew younger and the music wilder, but Els went on teaching the same basic rules. While he trained students how to hear seventh chords in the third inversion, the globe went over the financial brink. The entire web of interlocking con jobs came unraveled. Trillions of dollars disappeared back into fiction. The college lost half its endowment. They asked Els to retire. He volunteered to keep teaching for free, but the law forbade it.

He returned to the life of a sole proprietorship, but now without a way to pass the days. Still, the days passed, many in a major key. He had his phone calls with his daughter, whose every word delighted him. He had her gift, Fidelio, his elated companion on long walks nowhere. There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?

At sixty-eight, Els could think about the question only a little at a time. He read what he could find—the distilled knowledge of hundreds of experts. He couldn’t follow all the physiology. The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why. It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died. Nobody could say why Barber moved listeners and Babbitt didn’t, or whether an infant might be raised to weep at Carter. But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.

Deep in his stuffed armchair, Els read about the chemical cascades that music set off inside the body of a listener. Sometimes, he felt as if that night with Clara by the banks of the Jordan River back in Bloomington had never happened, and he’d stayed a chemist instead of heading down music’s mirror fork.

People now made music from everything. Fugues from fractals. A prelude extracted from the digits of pi. Sonatas written by the solar wind, by voting records, by the life and death of ice shelves as seen from space. So it made perfect sense that an entire school, with its own society, journal, and annual conferences, had sprung up around biocomposing. Brain waves, skin conductivity, and heartbeats: anything could generate surprise melodies. String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin. No listener would ever need more than a fraction of the music that had already been made, but something inside the cells needed to make a million times more.

In the fall of 2009, while fast-walking Fidelio around the long loop of the arboretum, Els watched a wet oak leaf fly through the air and stick to his windbreaker. He peeled it free, studied its surface, and saw rhythms inscribed in the branching veins. He sat down, a little dazed, on a boulder at the side of the path. His hand grazed the rock’s surface, and the pits played pitches like a piano roll on his skin. He looked up: music floated across the sky in cloud banks, and songs skittered in twigs down the staggered shingles of a nearby roof. All around him, a massive, secret chorus written in extended alternate notation lay ripe for transcribing. His own music had no corner on obscurity. Almost every tune that the world had to offer would forever be heard by almost no one. And that fact gladdened him more than anything he’d ever written.

Fidelio strained at the leash. The tug pulled Els to his feet and dragged him toward the duck pond. The dog splashed into the water, her paws churning up a pattern of dotted rhythms and accented attacks. Duets, trios, even a brash sextet spread outward across the pond’s surface. The tiny maelstrom of intersecting ripples contained enough data to encode an entire opera. Find the right converting key and the score might tell any musical story there was: Man uses tunes to bargain with Hell. Man trades self for a shot at the lost chord. Man hears his fate in the music of chance.

His whole history, recorded in a few haphazard splashes of water: the idea was mad. But music itself—the pointless power of it—was mad, too. A six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God. A few notes on a shakuhachi unlocked the afterlife. A simple tavern sing-along left millions longing for their nonexistent homes on the range. A hundred thousand years of theme and variations, every composer stealing from every other, and none of it had any survival value whatsoever.

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els’s damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Fidelio pulled at the leash, a more present need. The banks of the pond were damp, and Els’s shoes sank into the muck. He took a stick and scraped the mud from his soles. Each scrape flung away millions of species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, micro-algae, actinomycetes, nematodes, and microscopic arthropods—billions of single-cell organisms, each pumping out tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins. This torrent, too: chemical signaling, mind-shattering tone clusters, deafening festivals of invention for anyone who cared to attend.

Somewhere in the billions of base pairs in those millions of species there must be encoded songs, sequences that spoke to everything that had ever happened to him. Music to abandon a wife and child by. The lifelong rondo of a friendship gone wrong. Hermit songs. Songs of love and ambition and betrayal and failure and repentance. Even the evening hymn of a retired industrial chemist whose one regret was living so far from his grandchildren.

Els turned from the pond and tugged the dog back onto the macadam loop. Cars shot up and down the nearby street. A low-slung Mustang slunk by, spilling over with a cranked-up anthem of pounding love. Fidelio dashed about in ecstasies, chasing butterflies, barking at phantoms that operated on frequencies Els couldn’t hear. Panting to keep up, with only half the animal’s legs, Els slipped the leash off the retriever’s neck—a little violation of the law that hurt no one and carried at most a nuisance fine. The dog shot toward a sycamore a hundred yards away and stood at the base, barking, as if her happy, pitched howls might induce her prey to hurl itself out of the branches and sacrifice itself to the circle of life.

And in that moment, the idea came to him. It assembled itself in Els’s head as he stood and watched Fidelio baying: music for an autumn evening, a ring of thanksgiving, with no beginning or end. He’d signed on for the full ride long ago, and all that remained was to be true to the dreams of his youth and take them to their logical extreme. He could make his great song of the Earth at last—music for forever and for no one . . .

A few days earlier, on the radio, lying in bed before falling asleep, he’d heard soundtracks extracted from DNA—strange murmurings transposed from the notorious four-letter alphabet of nucleotides into the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. But the real art would be to reverse the process, to inscribe a piece for safekeeping into the genetic material of a bacterium. The precise sounds that he inscribed into the living cell were almost immaterial: birdsong, a threnody, the raw noise of this arboretum, music spun from the brain that those self-replicating patterns had led to, four billion years on. Here was the one durable medium, one that might give any piece a shot at surviving until alien archaeologists came by to determine what had happened to the wasted Earth.

Digitize a composition into a base-four strand, then put the tape inside the player. You’d have to allow for the slow drift of mutation that reworked every genome. But that endless change in the musical message would be more like a feature than a bug. As far as Els knew, the medium was virgin territory. Soon it, too, would be covered with graffiti. But he could get there early and play for one last moment in a newfound land. No storage medium longer-lasting than life.

He would spend his remaining days seeing what might be done in the form, and learning to hear a little of life’s great ground bass along the way. With a little time, patience, a web connection, the ability to follow instructions, and a credit card, he might send a tune abroad again, into the very distant future, unheard, unknown, everywhere: music for the end of time.

Els dropped to his knees, patted the ground, and whistled. Fidelio came bounding back, delirious with frantic and unqualified love. Els leashed the dog, bundled her back into the car, and drove home with an urge to work that he hadn’t felt since his opera had fallen into earthly politics years ago. He’d heard a way that he might redeem, if not the past, then at least his youthful sense of the future. Making things felt strange again, and dangerous. Patterns might yet set him free.

That evening, he set to work ordering parts for a home laboratory.

And filter and fibre your blood.

He’s sure the game is over the minute he walks into the clinic. The night clerk looks up from the reception desk, alert. Els gazes back, with the courage of one already lost.

I’m here to see Richard Bonner.

The clerk keeps eying him. I’m sorry. We’re closed for visits.

I’m his brother. It’s a family emergency. I’ve driven all the way from Texas.

The clerk gets on the phone. In a moment, he says, Mr. Bonner? Chuck here. Sorry to call so late. Your brother is here? To see you? From Texas?

In the endless pause, Els edges back toward the foyer. The clerk cradles the phone to his face and examines Els. Which brother?

Els rolls his eyes. Pure Verdi. Peter, he says. How many does he think he has?

The clerk repeats the name into the phone. He waves his hand while talking, for no one who can see. Invisible gestures—like music for the deaf. The wait stretches out. The clerk shakes his head and listens. Els gauges the distance to the front door.

The clerk hangs up and smiles. I’m supposed to send the bastard through.

The facility is opulent. A central lounge with leather couches and a beaded cathedral ceiling opens up onto a cactus garden. There’s a tiny library with magazines and paperbacks. The women’s wing leads down a pale raspberry hallway; the men’s is hunter-green. Dozens of ink and watercolor washes of animals in a peaceable kingdom line the hall. Past the nurses’ station, through a half-open door, is a small lab, its shelves full of glassware and boxes of medication.

Els passes a room with a movie screen, then a small gym where a handful of ancient women grind away on treadmills while youthful aides take their vitals. In a sunny atrium, four gray-haired men in golf shirts and khaki slacks hunch over a table playing an elaborate board game involving thousands of colored cubes. Two younger men with stopwatches and clipboards observe.

Richard stands in a doorway at the end of the long hall. He looks like he’s wearing stage makeup, the greasepaint formula for old age. He grabs Els by the shoulders, scrutinizing the effects of seventeen years. He wags his head, refuting the evidence.

You’re supposed to be in hiding. Did I get that wrong?

It’s Bonner, but it isn’t. He’s inches shorter. Something around the eyes has been ravaged. Els looks down and sees the interstate still sliding by beneath him. He’s too blasted to form words. Bonner pulls him to his chest in an awkward clutch. The release is abrupt and a little confused.

Richard’s mouth comes open, laughter without sound. He studies Els, puzzled. Look at you. Quite a pickle you’ve gotten yourself into, Maestro. Come on. I’ve got stuff to show you.

He pulls Els into the room. Number 18 is a narrow country. There’s a twin bed, a desk and chair, a tiny dresser, a wall-mount TV, and a wheelchair-accessible bathroom. Richard crosses through the deluxe dorm room to a stack of papers. He picks through the teetering tower. Nothing is what he’s looking for. Els sits, unbidden. An intentional tremor takes Richard’s hands—a vibrato so wide it can only be a side effect of the experimental drug. He’s beyond frail, hulled out, fighting for that lone resource of any consequence, focus.

A shout of triumph—Ha!—and he waves the prize aloft. Here we go. He crosses to where Els sits and hands him the article. It’s about a squad of CIA analysts—self-styled “vengeful librarians”—who spend their lives combing through several million Web posts a day.

What do you think? Richard says. Our next . . . our next thing. Show.

Before Els can even stammer, Richard shoves more recent clippings into his hands. There’s an article about the installation artist Ai Weiwei, now languishing somewhere in a Chinese prison for tweeting a post that played on the word jasmine. There’s an article on a blockbuster film about a runaway pandemic, set to be released on September 11. There’s an article about a man arrested for building a nuclear reactor in his kitchen. And, of course, several articles about the Biohacker Bach.

They all fit together, Richard says. We just have to find out how.

His words are rushed, shorthand. There’s not much time, and the task keeps getting bigger, the longer they put it off. He implores Els, ambitious, impatient to knuckle down and concentrate, while concentration is still possible.

Els’s tinnitus starts to blare. Yellow highway lines pulse in his eyes. He can hear Bonner’s words, but he can’t understand them. He looks back down at the articles in his hand: Someone’s trying to send him a message, but in a language of weird blips and bleeps. Some unreadable, avant-garde thing.

Wait, he says. You knew I was coming?

Richard blinks. No. Did someone say I did?

They look at each other, an arms race of bewilderment.

Richard breaks first. Oh. You mean . . . come here, eventually? Oh, eventually, sure. I knew.

He pats the provinces of his body, looking for a hidden cookie to pop in his mouth. He’s the kid from the stands of the University of Illinois Stock Pavilion on a cold night in 1967, shouting lunatic manifestos into the maelstrom. Under the paving stones, the beach.

Richard grins, reading his collaborator’s mind one last time. Forgiven? Again?

Nothing to forgive.

I’m sure there is, Richard corrects. I just can’t . . .

No. You were only . . .

Els doesn’t know how to say what his friend was. What this one aggravating, insufferable man managed to bring into his life.

You were an asshole, is all. Always.

Richard shrugs. How was I to the music?

I think you might have loved it, Els says.

Bonner walks to the window and peeks out through the blinds. What was the big one called? The opera?

Early Alzheimer’s looks, to Els, much like his old friend. The Fowler’s Snare.

That’s it, Richard says. That’s from the Bible or something? And there was one, lasted for hours, in New York? Something about bringing dead people to life?

Els himself needs half a minute to remember. Bonner turns back into the room, searching again. Why did you want to quit all that?

He stops to stare at his hands, and the search ends. You know what our problem was? When you want Perfect, even Magnificent seems shabby.

This is the case, Els says.

The old dancer swats the air. Never mind. New project. You’ve gotten us off to a fantastic start. Killer Theater. I’ve been dreaming about somebody doing this for a long time.

Els hides his bafflement in a coughing jag. It’s the Phase One wildcard drug babbling. Or maybe it’s the last thrashing of a mind that never committed to anything so trivial as sense. Els lays the clippings down on the student desk and studies this alien man, his one friend.

Richard, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Come on, Bonner shouts. Who gets this kind of audience? Millions of people are following your act. You can’t afford to refund that many tickets, Maestro.

He puts his arm around Els’s shoulders and leads him out into the hall. The pair of them wander back down the corridor toward civilization, leaving the door to Number 18 hanging open. There’s nothing in the room to steal except a stack of project ideas, and nobody to steal them except for three dozen human guinea pigs.

You may find this worth . . . worth seeing, Richard says. The drug is called Consolidol. The disease is called shit. God knows what anybody else is called. They all have interchangeable little names, the fuckers. Lots of women named Leslie.

From down the hall comes a man as large as both of them, with a Marine buzz cut and a goiter like a grapefruit. He waves from a distance. Drawing near, he shouts, You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?

Els is lost. Richard answers, Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some . . .

The giant draws close enough to muss Richard’s hair. Richard, incredibly, abides the attack. The giant waves at Els and mouths, Hi, hi!

Richard starts again: and let him have some plaster . . . some . . .

Or some loam, the giant supplies, his goiter shaking with pleasure.

. . . or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall . . .

Bruno, the giant says, sticking out his hand.

Els takes it and suffers the massive crushing. Paul, he says.

You visiting?

. . . or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall . . .

Yes, Peter says. Just leaving, in fact.

And let him hold his fingers thus. The giant holds up his fingers in a sideways chink of V in front of his shining eye.

Shut the fuck up, Richard barks. Right. And let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper.

If that may be, the giant says, then all is well. Come, sit down, every mother’s son, and rehearse your parts.

He waves, and ambles on past, down the hall.

Richard turns to Els and asks, So what dose do you think he’s getting? Twenty thingies? Five? Or salt water? Those are your three choices.

Els shrugs. If we’re betting, I’d say twenty.

Oh, we’re betting, all right. Hundreds of millions of dollars. And I’d bet the same as you. So tell me. What dose you think I’m getting?

I don’t know, Els says.

The fuck you don’t. I’ve spent forty years reading that damn play. Four hours a day, this last month. More hours than all these other jokers combined. It’s about fairies, you know.

He stops to turn his pockets inside out. He births up a handful of forest-green jelly beans and studies them like they’re pebbles from the moon. He pops a few and staggers down the hall again.

The worst of it? Memorizing Dream was my idea.

You . . . Els stops, thinking better. Then plunges in anyway. You directed it, in graduate school. Set in an old folks’ home.

I didn’t! Richard exclaims. Did I?

He walks oddly, listing toward port. They pass the small weight room, and a trio of old, broad women call to him. In a moment, they’re out in the hall, headbands and jerseys soaking, taking turns pressing their sweat to Bonner’s body. The shortest of them purrs and says, What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

The fuck is this? Bonner snarls. Summer of Love? What are you supposed to be—the three whosits?

Isn’t he adorable? the short one asks Peter.

The oldest of the Graces frowns at Els and taps her temple. I know you from somewhere.

The middle one takes her wrist. No, you don’t, Jean.

Did you grow up in Glencoe? Did you go to New Trier? You look so familiar.

Els grins and shakes his head.

Let’s go, Jean, the middle one says. Come on, babe.

Were you in the Peace Corps, by any chance?

Richard ambles away, singing, Good night, ladies. Els tags along in his wake.

O, how I love thee! the short Grace calls after them from down the hall. How I dote on thee!

Richard waves without turning, over his shoulder.

Jean shouts at Els from down the hall, Are you a musician or something?

They meet more subjects in the central lounge. The talk is all variations on their one shared theme: Is the stuff working? They’re bound together in a fierce pharmaceutical camaraderie. The whole facility feels like one of those sci-fi stories set on an interstellar craft, with generations of travelers who are born, live, and die in transit, creeping across the galaxy in search of a new star system. Everyone greets Richard like a long-lost friend, and Richard greets them all in return as if he’s just discovered, too late in life, that friendship may be a comfort to a man. The disease has gentled him.

They duck out together on the back deck. Richard paces. You see how it goes here. We work out. Take tests. Play games. Every twitch monitored. Memorize whatchama . . . Shakespeare. We’re doing a little run-through next week.

He shakes his head, dismisses his bottomless despair with a flick of his fingers.

And we wander around trying to guess who’s getting what dose. Watching for a sign that we’re not hosed for eternity. The damned and the saved. Every day it gets a little more obvious. I know what they’re giving me, anyway. And there’s no placido effect, I can tell you.

Placebo, Els says.

Placebo, Richard drawls. The natural Texas accent he spent a lifetime suppressing. My father wanted me to lead a normal life. He just couldn’t pronounce the word normal. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his sagging jeans and nods, nods again—Placebo, placebo—turning in tight circles on the redwood deck, a philosopher at last, a Peripatetic, spiraling into enduring dusk.

Give it time, Els says.

Got no time.

But if the drug is working for these other . . . if nobody’s getting sick . . .

On my bad days? I hope someone strokes out, so no one gets what I can’t have.

But once the test is over . . .

Phase Two, Richard says. Then Phase Three, and Phase Four. Final approval by the FBI—the whatnot.

Els can’t think of the agency’s name, either.

Then they have to set up factories for making the stuff, big time. I’ll be drooling on myself years before it comes to market.

He grabs Els by the wrist, pulls him under the halogen deck light. Hell of a finale, isn’t it? Yours is better. We need to work on yours.

He drops Els’s hand and signals him to wait. He ducks back inside the facility and is gone for a long time. Els can’t say how long. His metronome is shot by stress and three days of driving. At last Richard comes back, carrying a telescope as if it were a large Torah. He pats the instrument. My alibi.

A tripod dangles under his arm; Els grabs it as it slips.

They hate when we leave without signing out, Bonner says. They think we’re going to wander off and forget where we live. Can you imagine?

He stumbles down the deck stairs, arms full of optics, gleeful again, getting away with something. Call it art.

Come on. Star party. Once you hear the music of the spheres, the stuff you earthlings make is a bore.

Bonner leads the expedition across the back parking lot, down half a block, into a parkway a tiny bit darker than the surroundings. There’s a ring around the moon tonight—cold and huge and blue, a halo against the gauzy black. Els can’t stop staring at it, monstrous and beautiful. Richard wrestles the telescope up onto the spread tripod, to a running commentary.

I’m going fast, Peter. Like a sugar cube in water. I write myself notes in a little notebook. To remind me of things. Then I can’t figure out the note.

Els stands by helpless, understanding the man at last.

That’s why you had to come now, Bonner says. While there’s still time to do this.

Els asks, Do what?

Richard hoists the scope and secures the mount clamps. He swings the sighting scope into place, inspects the objective, and bends down to peer into the eyepiece. The long day wanes, he recites, singsong. The slow moon climbs. He hunches next to the tube, his eye to the cosmic keyhole, and peers into the universe. He might be waiting for a bus that comes around to this part of the galaxy once every epoch. Come, my friend, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.

Now and then, Richard tweaks the right ascension control knob. He almost looks like he knows what he’s doing. A massive sigh escapes him, as wide and filmy as the night sky. He straightens and steps back. Have a look.

Els does. The field of view is black.

Once you hear the music of the spheres, Bonner says, as if the idea has just occurred to him, the stuff you earthlings make is a bore.

What am I looking at? There’s nothing there.

Look harder.

Els does. There’s still nothing there. There’s nothing there for a long time. Then there is.

From behind him, in the dark parkway, Richard says, So tell me what you have.

Els pulls his face from the eyepiece. Seconds pass. What do you mean?

What’s the piece?

What piece? Els says.

Richard smirks at the evasion and won’t be taken in. You’re saying you were doing real genetic engineering? Trying to create a new form of life?

No, Els says.

So out with it. What do you have for me?

Too many miles have passed since home for Els to be sure.

I didn’t get very far.

That’s where your collaborator comes in.

I was trying to put music files into living cells.

A pause, a last flare-up of telepathy, and Richard laughs like a hyena.

What’s wrong with eight-tracks? So what does it sound like?

Richard. There is no piece. This was all proof of concept. They raided me before I could learn how.

Bonner scowls, puzzled by how a smart man can have such trouble with the obvious. There is. There is a piece.

No.

You’re not listening.

Bonner gazes through the scope again. Els stands nearby. He tunes in to the night, the cars and air conditioners. He listens, a little quieter, a little harder. Sounds everywhere, but still no piece. There’ll be no piece forever.

Then there is.

Oh, he says. Oh. You’re saying . . . You mean . . .

But Bonner, like music, doesn’t mean things. He is things. Things that can never be unmade.

The two of them start in again, like they’d only paused the old project for a moment, long enough for it to ripen. Bonner has been tinkering with an idea since first hearing of Els’s flight. Els has been working on the thing since childhood, his chance encounter with Jupiter. They talk, Els to Bonner, Bonner to the stars, through his lensed tube. They hum to each other, and the piece takes shape. Richard dials the pitch and yaw and roll of the scope in tiny increments, checking the eyepiece after each minor adjustment.

This is your baby, he tells his friend. Make it live.

The piece turns lethal. Music to panic a whole country. A thing of silence and nothingness. Required listening. Els feels the madness of it, and the brisk Phoenix night, the lights from the clinic, the traffic whipping back and forth on the nearby boulevard all say: Hear, and be afraid forever.

Use that Web thing—Tweety Bird. Tell the whole world, in short little bursts.

Bonner points across the way, to the glow of the clinic. We can use the machines in the lobby. Say that it’s all out there, spreading. Everywhere. Released into the wild. An epidemic of invisible music.

Els laughs, but it’s not a laugh. They’ll kill me, you know. The minute I . . . The idea rushes away from him, like the five recombining lines of the Jupiter.

You got a problem with that? You weren’t doing anything else, were you?

Els presses his skull with both hands. Fatigue and the fugitive life catch up with him, because this all suddenly sounds suicidal and very, very doable.

Tell me, Bonner says. What was it that you wanted from, from . . . He cranks his right hand, spooling up all the music Els ever tried to write.

There’s a place Els has been to, a few times in this life. A place free from the dream of security, where the soul beats to everything with a rhythm. And every one of his few visits there has reminded him: We’re entitled to nothing, and soon to inherit. We’re free to be lost, free to shine, free to cut loose, free to drown. But part of a harmony beyond the ear, and able, for a moment, to move.

I wanted awe.

Richard claps his hands. Done. Living music, swimming around in the water supply.

Surprise, Els says. Suspense.

Oh, they’ll be hanging on every measure.

Refreshment. A sense of the infinite.

Fear, you mean.

And change, Els thinks. Eternal mutation. For a beat, he forgets the piece isn’t real.

He comes clean. Beauty.

Richard’s eyes crinkle at the mention of the guilty secret. His lips twist up. Fine. What’s more beautiful than music you can’t hear?

Els looks up at the clear desert sky, speckled with light, even above this suburban sprawl. They’ll crush me like a bug.

Richard steps toward his friend and lays one hand on his shoulder. His eyes soften into something like sympathy. The words he wants evade him. But the look says: They’ll crush you anyway, even if you never make a peep.

He waves back toward the scope. Have a look.

Els puts his eye to a burst of stars. They cluster, a blue star nursery, spraying out new worlds. He feels like he did two years ago, when he first looked at a glowing stain of cells under the 1,000x objective and realized that life happens elsewhere, on scales that have nothing to do with him.

He calls out. Behind him, Richard chuckles. Once you hear the music of the spheres, the stuff you earthlings make is a bore.

The stars come toward him in a stippled rush. He pulls his head away. Richard is staring at the clinic half a block off—at the experiment that offered him hope and served up saline. He says, How much can they hurt you, anyway?

Els doesn’t answer. Words are for people who know things.

Richard squints into the distance. You have to do this. The largest audience for an experimental piece in history.

You always wanted me dead, Els says. Didn’t you?

Bonner is elsewhere. Eye of man hath not seen, he says. He stops, muddled. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen . . .

The words dissolve. There’s an agonizing gap, which Els is powerless to fill. It strikes him, the one small compensation to where Bonner is going. Every look, every listen, will be like the first.

Something, something, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

Richard points: Flashing lights. A van and three cars, one of them unmarked, slink into the circular front drive of the clinic. Men in riot gear issue from the vehicles and fan out. A dozen of them rush the main entrance. Challenges ring out in English and Spanish. The clerk at the reception desk has at last remembered the face on last night’s news.

Bonner surveys the piece of theater as if it’s something he once choreographed. By the look on his face, the blocking is all wrong.

He turns to Els. You ready for this?

Whatever this is, the answer is no. Richard beckons and Els follows. They head around to the far side of the clinic buildings, to the long-term parking lot, leaving the telescope and mount in the middle of the empty field.

The building screens them from the officers a few dozen yards away. Shadows of shock troops dart down the windows of the men’s wing while two old men stumble toward a rented Accord. Bonner bends down near the right rear tire, like he’s hiding behind the vehicle or praying. He reaches up inside the wheel and withdraws a key.

This way, I can always find it. If I can find the car.

He hands the key to Els. Els can’t take it. His arms are numb. Freedom has come for him, impossible, huge, cold, blue, and he’ll drown, way out in the middle of it, out of sight of all land.

Take it, man. It’s just a rental. What’s a little grand theft auto, once they have you for terrorism? You’re doing the world a favor. They should have taken my license away four months ago.

Richard closes Els’s fist around the key. One last recital, his eyes say. You can do this. Make it something even this distracted world will hear. It will only hurt for a moment.

Els presses the fob and slips into the driver’s-side door. Panic slams him, but he surfs through it. He pats his pocket; the smartphone is still there. Giddy with fear, he starts to laugh. He rolls down the window. Bonner looms above the door.

If only one of us had a vagina, Els says, half of life’s problems would be solved.

Richard recoils. What a very curious thing to say.

Els backs the Accord out of its slot, points it toward the curving parkway, a stone’s throw behind the assembled police cars. He turns to wave to Richard. But Bonner is already walking, back turned, hunched, hands in pockets, headlong into the drama, ready to direct it, if they’ll let him. Creation’s Rule Number One. Zag when they think you’ll zig.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.

On the shoulder of an old state highway in Barstow, California, Peter Els, terrorist, stops to examine the railing. Looking is pointless. The scribbles on the guardrail that he’s looking for are long gone. Even the railing itself must have been replaced, maybe more than once. God knows how many hundreds of miles of highway rails must run through Greater Barstow. The scribbles exist nowhere except in the music that remembers them. Still, he stops to look. He has never stopped to read a guardrail before.

The Mojave sky is as lustrous as a painted backdrop. Heat ripples off the scrubland that runs in every direction around the crater of the city. A few hours earlier, over lunch—a sack of steaming ground meat picked up at a drive-through off the interstate—he began to tweet. Figuring out the system gave him childish pleasure. He created an account and chose a username—@Terrorchord. He spent a few tweets proving that he was this year’s fugitive. Then he moved from exposition into the development section.

I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged.

I was sure that no one would ever hear a note. This was my piece for an empty hall.

What was I thinking? I wasn’t, really. I’ve always been guilty of thinking too much . . .

The year has had no real spring. Much of the country jumps straight from December to June. In Barstow, it’s August already. The freak weather may be nothing to worry about. Not for extremophiles, anyway. Bacteria need worry about almost nothing.

After the burger joint, Els pulled into a gas station run by the company that recently put five million barrels of oil into the Gulf. For the last several miles, Richard’s car had been running on fumes. Els stuck his credit card into the pump and surrendered his location. No alarms sounded. As the gas flowed into the tank, Els imagined that he might be charmed, that he might, in fact, get the four more hours he needed to redeem his whole life.

In a corner of the station’s lot, near the air pump, he sat in the driver’s seat of the Accord and tweeted some more. The phrases rolled out of him, dozens at a pop, no more than 140 characters each.

I was after the kind of music that reminds the brain what it felt like, back when we lived forever.

I wanted a piece that would say what this place would sound like long after we’re gone.

He tweeted like that white-throated sparrow in the arboretum just days ago, reinventing tonality a triad at a time. By midafternoon when he pulled into Barstow and tweeted again, he had almost eighty followers. The messages were spreading by themselves.

Coming to this place would feel like design, if he were a better designer. The Voice brought him here. The name popped out from the smartphone map: Barstow. He’d always wanted to make the pilgrimage. Stumbling on this town was like those few times—the frantic dance in the middle of the Borges Songs, the awful dead-drop in the middle of Brooke’s sonnet, the slow build through the last twenty minutes of The Fowler’s Snare—when the music wrote itself and all Els had to do was take dictation.

The highway is narrow, and the backdrafts of passing cars rock him. Els edges along the shoulder, probing another stretch of rail. On such a spot, eight forsaken Depression hitchhikers scribbled bottle-messages to no one. Eight anonymous pleas, turned into an ethereal, banal, subversive, conservative set of microtonal mini–folk songs, Harry Partch’s signature piece: Barstow. Easy place to land in, hard place to get out of.

It’s January twenty-six. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age 19. 5 feet 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.

His scour of a hundred yards of rail turns up a wasp’s nest, a bumper sticker for a towing service, an obscene rhymed couplet, several pairs of initials, a chiseled tumorous phallus, and a broken heart. Also, many sphinxlike scratchings that might as well have come from another planet. Els climbs back into the Accord. Before turning Richard’s key in the ignition, he sends off another tweet, by the hobo Partch, now an accessory before the fact:

American music has one of its greatest bulwarks in bumdom.

He’d read the words in graduate school, half a century ago, in another backwater town, one where Partch lived and left right before Els arrived on the scene. The words have stayed with him, through everything. Maybe he botches the exact phrase. Mutation happens.

Partch, if anyone, knew that. Burned the first fourteen years of his music in a potbellied stove in New Orleans and started over at twenty-nine, cutting himself off from the mainland forever. A Carnegie grant to visit Yeats in Dublin, where he sold the old poet on a revolutionary setting of Oedipus. A few months later: homeless and broke, thumbing for rides and begging meals across the length of 1930s California—“California! Land of oncoming Los-es and Las-es, Sans and Santas, Virgins, Conceptions, and Angels!” Eight years adrift, sleeping wild or camping in hobo shanties, jumping freights, catching diseases, going hungry, and reinventing music.

Gentlemen: Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for an easy handout.

Tramp Quixote, visionary bum, indigent in a collapsing country. Prophet in the wilderness, sure that only an outsider could find the way through. A man of no compromises. A mean drunk. Gay, for what that was worth, like so many of the century’s best composers. In any case: Did not work and play well with others. And convinced that the salvation of music required cutting an octave into forty-three pitches.

Marie Blackwell. Age nineteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, considered pretty. One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Object: matrimony.

Even to hear his spectral music, Partch had to invent a whole orchestra of outré instruments. Forced by visions into carpentry. Hence the Zymo-Xyl, built of hubcaps and liquor bottles. The diamond marimba, bass marimba, bamboo marimba, mazda marimba, and quadrangularis reversum. Adapted violas and guitars. The harmonic canons, with their sliding bridges, tuned anew for every new piece. The kithara, the gourd tree, the cone gongs, the spoils of war. A whole series of chromelodeons, organs whose keys sliced half-steps into slivers. And of course the cloud chamber bowls, a copy of which sat in Els’s living room and helped alert the federal government to the fact that here was a house worth raiding.

Dear Marie, a very good idea you have there . . .

A new railing swings into view, and Els hits the brakes. Behind him, a Ford Expedition honks and veers out to avoid slamming him. The vehicle screams past. Els pulls up onto the shoulder and stares at the stretch of pavement across which, in another world, he’s lying smeared.

Then he rises from the dead, pulls out the smartphone, and tweets again. He tweets the formula for his homebrew. He tweets program notes about how the piece was made. One flick, and a new wave of messages heads out into the world’s largest auditorium.

Possible rides: January sixteenth, fifty-eight. January seventeenth, seventy-six. January eighteenth, nineteen. January nineteenth, six. January twentieth, eleven. To hell with it—I’m going to walk!

Els steps from the car and inspects every inch of the guardrail as if it’s the score of the Jupiter. And it almost is, so full of scratches is it, both random and deliberate. He can’t stop looking. People, nature, and chance have scrawled all over the metal bumper. Sleeper cells, covert messages everywhere. Who knew how much is going on, written down into these invisible inches?

Pencil on paint, from 1940: of course his hitchhikers are long gone. Every railing in Barstow postdates them. But every railing is full of their offspring, millions of scribbles from descendant generations. With the sun starting to drop and the traffic picking up, the search feels senseless and urgent, and everything it turns up seethes with life.

Jesus was God in the flesh.

Partch was right about so much. Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red. He doesn’t want red at all, but he gets red, and is presumed to like it.”

But the man was wrong, Els decides, in thinking that forty-three pitches put you any closer to infinity than twelve.

Els leans back against the dusty hood of Richard’s leased car and pulls out Klaudia Kohlmann’s smartphone. He tweets:

Partch on the piano: “Twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” I found an instrument free of all such bars.

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

All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.

As he types, somewhere under a viaduct, in the hard rain of memory, other travelers wait for a ride.

Looking for millionaire wife. Good looking, Very handsome, Intelligent, Good bull thrower, Etcetera. You lucky women! All you have to do is find me, you lucky women. Name’s George.

Els tweets:

The key was futility. Music, pointless music for a while, will all your cares beguile.

He remains like this, leaning on the hood, tweeting, almost comfortable, almost at peace. Every minute he stays out here raises the risk of a state cruiser stopping and picking him up for vagrancy. But he’s charmed now, protected by the god of harebrained schemes.

A text arrives and fills his screen: The class wants to know if all this will be on the final exam. KK.

He smiles and sends off a reply: Believe it. Then another chorus of tweets, and he gets back in the car.

From Barstow he turns north into the Central Valley, up the length of the state where Partch once bummed rides and transcribed the speech of strangers into notebooks filled with hand-drawn staves. He heads north, toward the spot that once made Partch scribble down in ecstasy: In the willowed sands of the American River, within the city, I gaze up at the enthillion stars and bless the giver. And she shall be multiply blessed, for at every approaching dusk I shall thumb my nose at tomorrow . . .

At nightfall, he orders huevos rancheros at a diner in a truck stop near Buttonwillow off of I-5. Word of mouth has pushed him over the thousand-follower mark. Readers retweet his messages. A comment posted under a feature on bioterrorism at a prominent news site is the first to announce the fact to a wider public: The biohacker Bach is improvising in public. Confessing to his crime.

All night long, discovery lights up in scattered nodes across the Net. A sound engineer calculates how many DNA base pairs it would take to encode five minutes of symphonic music. Someone uploads five minutes of old VHS footage from a performance of The Fowler’s Snare. A couple who live a mile from Peter Els’s house in Naxkohoman fall violently ill, and detail their symptoms in their blog. A mass email starts to circulate, with links to information on what to do if you suspect you’ve been exposed to Serratia marcescens. “Please send this information to anyone you think might need it.”

A journalist wonders out loud on his Facebook page whether @Terrorchord is in fact Peter Els or just another anonymous fear-artist aiming for a couple of minutes of power. A semi-prominent morals policeman posts an eloquent rant on how music has been taken over by frauds: “Music that can’t be read, played, or listened to: now I’ve heard everything.” The post starts sprouting contrarian comments within ten minutes. Two mathematicians debate how hard it would be to decode the base-four music and play it back. Someone reports that government scientists have already isolated and sequenced the variant strain, which contains a gene for multiple antibiotic resistance. A young woman composer describes having heard the file that Peter Els spliced into the genome—a piece for small ensemble that’s breakneck and free.

By morning in California, the lines are humming. An activist from Maine argues that anyone who has altered a living germ line so recklessly should be put to death. A law student argues that the tweets themselves are a form of terrorism, and that by current practice, the perpetrator can be held in indefinite detention without trial. Writers on an obscure new music zine decide that for the first time in years, someone is singing a whole new song.

Here’s wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you. Why in hell did you come, anyway?

Els sleeps in the Accord, in a slot behind the rest stop north of Lost Hills. He dreams of bumdom, that bulwark of American art. In his dream, ordinary people chatter to each other, millions of massed solos, in pitches and rhythms so rich that no scale or notation can capture them. All night long, the orchestra of long-haul freight whipping up and down the interstate accompanies him.

He wakes and heads north. He can reach his daughter’s place by evening. There is no plan. There’s only that old hobo tune: Make me down a pallet on your floor. When I’m broken and I got nowhere to go.

Missing me one place, search another.

A man sits in his car in a roadside rest area and types into a phone. He writes: I started with a rhythm that said: “Move now. You’ll be holding still for a very long time.” Then he presses post.

He tells about a piece that he wrote, a melody from a time that speech can no longer reach. He types of harmonies spreading through the piece in long, self-replicating chains. The messages go out to satellites and back down to servers that send them all across the face of the planet.

He says what the piece sounds like: Like the porous edge between hope and fear. I tried to make my germ sound like the music I loved at sixteen, discovering a new monument every few hours. I tried to make it sound like a tune my five-year-old daughter once spelled out in colored blocks across the living room floor.

Every message, a melody. He tweets how he hired musicians, rehearsed and recorded the song for no one. Cars pull up next to his. People amble past his hood, suspecting nothing. They use the facilities. They buy lunch out of vending machines. They get back into their machines and drive away.

He goes on writing, of music converted into a string of zeros and ones, then converted again into base four. He writes of Serratia’s chromosome ring, five million base pairs long. He tweets how he divided those two numbers to produce a short key. Of how he had that key custom-made for him. Nothing you can’t order online these days.

The account grows happy, almost prolific. All in short, joyous bursts about how he turned a living thing into a jukebox—a sequence of meaningful patterns to add to the ones scored by billions of years of chance. He presses a button and the message sets out into the biosphere, where it will live and copy itself for a while. He tweets of how he let his music go. Of how it’s spreading in the air all around, in the grout of your bathroom tiles. A tune you might be breathing in right now, one you’ll never be able to hear.

The tweets condemn him.

I left the piece for dead, like the rest of us. Or for an alien race to find, a billion years after we go extinct.

I haven’t a clue what the piece will do. Nothing, probably. Maybe you’ll forget the thing is even there. After all, it’s only a song.

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

The listener gets red and feels the beating sun. The listener gets blue and sees the sky. The listener gets green and sets out to sea.

Colors pour into the mobile concert hall. They come from the radio at first: Strings in a rocking sigh. A long sustain, the sound of the day ending. Nothing left to be frightened of; nothing left to discover. But seven chords in, a shimmer of horn, and on the next measure’s pickup, a soprano sings:

Amor mío, si muero y tú no mueres,

Amor mío, si mueres y no muero,

no demos al dolor más territorio . . .

Love, if I die and you don’t,

Love, if you die and I don’t,

let’s not give sadness any more ground . . .

The words meander like a languid river. But soon enough a swirl of unstable harmonies pushes the sound into a wider place. This music, half a dozen years old, could be a hundred. It’s shot through with Mahler at his most serene. The few dissonances it admits to are dappled and transient, as if the perfected terrors of the last century changed nothing, and even now, even in this year, home might still be intact, and nearer than you think.

The rocking figure returns, doubled now by horn. In that pulse, the soprano finds her way back to the wide first theme: no hay extensión como la que vivimos. No place is greater than where we live. And for a few measures, down this stretch of generic interstate, it’s as good as true.

You’ve heard the piece before, three years ago, and on first listen, it sounded like mere sentiment. Movie music. Sprinkles of South American hue and charm, Villa-Lobos via Ravel. A place we couldn’t get back to anymore, even if it still existed. Now comes this radio reprise, served you by a programmer who likes to insist that first hearings are always wrong.

The culprits are known to you: Peter Lieberson, Pablo Neruda. But such names are at best composite pseudonyms. These phrases assembled over centuries, the work of more anonymous day laborers than history will ever credit. You’re in there yourself, down a branch of the self-spreading Net, stepfather of a fleeting mood or modulation, vector for new infections.

What might a listener never know about this song? How it was composed for the woman who sings it now. How she led the composer to this love, this poem. Love, if you die . . . How the singer died just months after this premiere.

And does it change anything in these phrases, so shameless and lavish, to know that the composer is next? He’ll be dead in a few days. That’s why the radio plays these songs: a eulogy in advance. But listen, and the music forecasts another passing, one even older than the harmonies it uses.

Decades ago, this man, too, wrote like a believer in the infinite future. He studied at the feet of fearsomely progressive masters. Music poured out of him, splendid with math and rigor, music like a formal proof, heady stuff admired by dozens, perhaps even hundreds of discerning connoisseurs. He reveled in all those once-required shibboleths, now given up as so much discredited zeal. But this song—ah, this one will travel, go everywhere, get out and see the world, and even the tone-deaf will hear something forgotten in it.

So what to do with that failed revolution, the hundred years of uncompromising experiment? The need for something beyond the ordinary ear: Disown it? Discipline and punish? Shake your head and smile at the airs of youth? No: Strangeness was your voluntary and your ardent art. You fought alongside the outsiders for something huge, and knew the odds against you. No take-backs now. No selective memory; no excuses. There’s only owning up to everything you ever tried for, here at the end of the very long day.

But what to do with this—these love songs, the autumnal harmonies hurting your chest? What to call it? A repudiation. A return. A hedge. A sellout. A deathbed conversion. A broadening. A diminishment. Music to kill the last fifty miles of a cross-country drive.

Call it nothing, then, or call it music, for there are no movements or styles or even names for the sounds that wait for you, where you’re headed. Listen, and decide nothing. Listen for now, for soon enough there’ll be listening no longer.

The music tenses. A quick raising of stakes, a nervous drawing in: a gesture stolen from somewhere, sure, but where? From no one in a position to sue. The touch of conventional suspense breaks the spell; you would have built a different contrast. And that’s the curse of a life spent looking for transcendence: nothing real will ever suffice, nothing that you won’t want to tweak. And yet, and still—another swell, a rhythmic fault line, a change of instrumental color, and you think: Why not? Then even approval gives way to simple hearing.

El tiempo, el agua errante, el viento vago . . .

Time, flowing water, shifting winds. The dying composer has gone on record: he wants to apologize to generations of his students for leading them down a mistaken path. Wrong back then, the music says, but righted at last, here at the finish line. It’s a happy enough story, and one that should hold until the flock wheels next and the changing winds of fashion declare again who’s in, who’s out, who loses, and who wins. There will be reverses still; that’s how music works. Listen, only listen, and do not worry too much about keeping score. Reunion has you now, for a while, and a while is all you get. The grip of this enchantment lasts no more than a moment. Pudimos no encontrarnos en el tiempo. Love, we might never have found each other in time.

They thaw you, the rays of this late sun. But soon enough these harmonies, too, will set and cool. Even beauty exhausts itself and leaves the ear wanting other sounds. Need will turn to something harder, some training ground for the difficulty to come. But for a while, this song, this one.

The first, expanding figure returns one more time. All the notes align, and it’s like you’ve written them yourself. Not here, not in this life, not in the world where you worked and lived. But maybe in the one you might have reached, in time. Esta pradera en que nos encontramos. In this meadow where we meet. The long, luxurious lines forecast your past and remember your future in detail. You can’t imagine how you missed the fact, for all those years. It might have been okay, even fine, to have written something so simple and pacific. To have made a listener want to be more than she is.

And yet: You did what you did and made what you made. Here you are. And to tell the truth, this meadow had its moments. Oh pequeño infinito! O little infinity! We give it back. We give it back.

YOU STAND IN the evening rain, on the steps of her trim gingerbread. The Voice got you here, a last, best act of navigation. She opens, a woman in the foyer of middle age. Her face freezes in the happy irritation she’s prepared for someone else. She, your cells’ lone heir and executor, is busy with joys and fears you don’t even have the right to ask about. But now her whole task is you. She swallows her half scream back down her throat and pulls you inside.

There’s anger and there’s excitement. Hurried questions, distress and fuss thrust at you, along with a serving of noodles left over from a dinner for one. She towels dry your hair. The words pour out of her, unbearable. But they won’t need bearing for long. Are you feverish? What happened to your lip? What’s wrong with you? Jesus, Daddy, try to eat something.

She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale. The curtains have just been ironed. The throw pillows pile up on the sectional in chilling symmetry. Photos of her crossing finish lines in tech clothing and various stages of pain grace the walls. Four posture-correcting ladder-back chairs surround the dining room table as if they’ve been lined up with a ruler. An umbrella stand flanks the front door and, next to it, a shoe rack with several identical coral-colored running shoes. All a gift from you, this rage for rational management. It’s what happens when you teach an eight-year-old that nothing—nothing at all—is secure.

But there’s a piano, too. A six-foot baby grand, its keyboard open, Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood on the music rack, and the lid open on the short stick. It doesn’t seem possible.

You’re playing again? Why didn’t you say anything?

She doesn’t answer. She’s at the window, glancing up and down the street, then pulling shut the curtains.

On the near side of the music rack is a photo: A young man and woman amusing themselves together. The man crouches over a toy piano, arms above his head, fingers poised to pounce on the tiny keys. The woman holds up one hammy palm, eyes closed, her mouth a ringing O! You knew those kids, knew the photographer. How long did it last, that amateur duet? Not even ten years, from start to finish. Pero este amor, amor, no ha terminado. But this love, Love, has no finish line.

In the background of the photo grins a fearless girl. She’s in the kitchen now, making tea with an electric kettle and tea bags taken from an elegant roundel. Two vanilla wafers for each of you. She comes back into the dining room where you sit, her brows a single mound of worry in the middle of her forehead.

You think: My only decent composition.

Other photos on the sideboard tell the truer story: preteen and her fledgling half-sister, at the foot of a bumper Christmas tree. Mother, stepfather, and happy grad, her mortarboard caught in midair. Young woman and her feckless man in front of Half Dome, their walking sticks raised in a mock-joust. All the dense, long years of daily being, the real heft of it, not the mere soundtrack you imagine. You know nothing of her causes, the pulls on her compass, what she does all day to pay the mortgage on this trim place. In her life, you were mostly an itinerant sower of pain. And still she came and found you out in your self-made wilderness, kept you phone company every week when you had none, bought you a dog.

She sits and pours. First the tea, then a cookie go into her mouth like she’s blowing on a pitch pipe.

Please tell me you didn’t write those things.

The ones that proliferate like living things, all over the Net. You’d like to tell her that. You almost could. It’s almost true.

You shrug, and the shrug makes her curse you. The pent-up stress of forty years. More profanity, and she starts to cry. You take her hands, but she flicks yours away and pulls hers to her neck. She closes her eyes, bows her head, pinches the bridge of her nose. You see wild gray strands in her hair. You, who never see anything.

Her voice wavers like a student violin. I don’t get you. What are you trying to do?

But music doesn’t do. It is. Dust in the wheat, sand among the sands.

So many noises abroad tonight, it’s hard to add a thing. The air fills with trivial ecstasies. And here, at last, it’s enough to attend, to keep still and add nothing to the mix. The spring wind takes the metal blinds and scrapes them against the window casement. There are sirens, miles away. Fire or violence, someone’s life ending. A trickle of radio from a passing car. The chirping of gadgets. The chime of a glockenspiel broadcast from an ice-cream truck three blocks and sixty-six years away. The television of neighbors through the townhouse walls, tuned to the eternal national talent show. The hum of air conditioners, like frogs in the trees. A cheering crowd, an echoing PA. A cloud of buzzing insects and the silent pings of bats that hunt them in crazy knots across the sky. The coursing of blood in the capillaries of your ears. No place is greater than where you lived.

I wanted to make you proud.

She shakes her head, incredulous. Proud? I thought you were God.

Until I left.

She shakes her head, denying the denial.

The phone rings. She finds the offending device and kills it. But not before you hear the ringtone three times. It’s as familiar as breathing, but you can’t place it. Then you can.

What is that? Where did you . . .?

She doesn’t answer you—you, the one person on Earth who doesn’t need that ringtone identified. Instead, she rises and whisks the tea service away before you can finish. No lingering, this one. There are problems to solve, systems to work, old nightmares to keep from reprising.

You can stay here. I’ll hide you. We’ll call that lawyer tomorrow, the one I told you about. He’ll figure out something.

You hear the first van pull up and a door open. She looks at you, thick with hope, ready to believe that even now, every misguided public confession might still be called back. Then her face clouds over again with pain. You really did that?

You squint: Did what? There’s much to plead guilty to. But you want to be sure.

She can’t stop looking, scrutinizing you for evidence. Her eyes say: You turned a living cell into a music box? A CD? Something in the look could almost pass for excitement.

Somebody says they’ve isolated it already. Somebody uploaded . . .

No, you say. Not possible.

The rattle and thump of another van, on the other side of the house. Boots hitting pavement. You can’t make out how many. Then your daughter asks what she hasn’t asked since childhood.

What does it sound like?

Her eyes shoot toward the piano. A shy request: Play it for me, this thing that the world will only ever be able to guess at. Once, on another coast, you told a terrified eight-year-old, Nothing is going to change. We’ll still be like we always were. Now your frightened forty-two-year-old triathlete data miner needs another lie.

A cordon assembles around the house. The pound of boots, the sawtooth whine of something electronic.

It’s a fine piano, better than any you’ve ever owned. You try out a few chords. They ring like the brightest future. Your fingers say: Love, let’s not give sadness any more ground. They remember something, your digits, a song you wrote for her mother, way back when, on a dare. After a few stumbles, it comes back. Resurrected.

She laughs in surprise. Oh, no! You didn’t. You didn’t use that.

No; you smile, a little puckish. No, you’re right. It seems important to be as far out of the house as possible when they reach you, as free and clear as you can get. You say, I can’t believe you remember that one.

On the far side of the music rack is a bud vase filled with fresh-cut lily of the valley. It’s ready-made, if a little theatrical. Useful to have something in your hand, and the bud vase will look much like lab glassware in the dark. You pick it up and hold it to you.

You’d be surprised, she says.

You look down at the keys, those twelve repeating black and white prison bars. There’s something in there that you’d still love to jailbreak, even here, even this late, tonight. You will not find the key in this life. But the still-unfolding sounds, the music you felt and lost, the combinations you just missed finding, the dangerous songs still waiting to be made: y así como no tuvo nacimiento no tiene muerte. No birth, and so no death. That river of remembered futures will go on without you, changing nothing but its course, its lips. This love, Love: this love has no end.

Listen, you say. Hear that?

She goes to the window and lifts the curtain. A cry tears out of her. Oh, shit. Her body retreats from the glass and her arms fend off the fact. Shit! Her eyes dull and dilate. Her face goes gray. Daddy, she pleads. No. Oh, please, no.

Sara, you say. Safe though all safety’s lost. Sar? Let’s make something.

She shakes her head, sick with terror. Her eyes search yours: Make what?

Something good. Good loud. Good lively. A rose no one knows.

When she nods, even a little, you’ll head to the door and through it. Run out into a place fresh and green and alert again to whole new dangers. You’ll keep moving, vivace, as far as you can get, your bud vial high, like a conductor readying his baton to cue something luckier than anyone supposes. Downbeat of a little infinity. And at last you will hear how this piece goes.