A tinny munchkin backbeat trailed from her earbuds in her wake. Els couldn’t make out the flavor of her bliss. This park, these advance spring flowers, the sixty-degree air stolen from paradise, were colored for her by invisible instruments that no one but she could hear.
She ran down the path ahead of him, now and then reaching across with her right arm and grabbing at the arm cuff, as in a tricky cross-hands Chopin étude. It dawned on Els: she was canceling songs.
At the wooded edges of the pond to the south, the spring migration was gathering. Els counted the different calls, but lost track around eleven. Fresh, surprising music that escaped all human conventions: the very thing he’d spent his life searching for was here all along, free for the listening.
Off to his left, a crow cawed in the branches of a gaunt pine. Nearby, something small began to trilclass="underline" an invisible soloist reinventing melody, as it had done for millions of years before human ears. Els trotted, light in the scattered racket of the morning chorus. The jogger appeared again through a clearing, still executing her merciless verdicts. She averaged half a minute between swipes — judge and jury in a kangaroo court. Every few dozen steps she condemned the Now Playing to the dustbin of history.
Her player must have contained thousands of tracks tagged by artist, year, genre, and user rating. A few menu clicks and she could be the Minister of Culture for her own sovereign state of desire. Yet she turned away twenty times as many auditioners as she let through. The explanation came to Els after another quarter mile: shuffle — the Monte Carlo game that had changed music forever. She was running through her several thousand tunes like random speed-date suitors. Songs were breaking over her in waves of wild accident — the mix-and-match mashup that was her birthright.
She rounded the southeast corner of the park, toward the high school, flicking away tunes like evolution’s demiurge. She was looking for something, the perfect sonic drug. And the medicine chest was endless: the laughing gas of a forties big band, a highball of brassy show tunes, punk heroin, techno-ecstasy, folk songs like a pack of tobacco, the hashish trance of Pali chanting, a caffeinated Carnatic raga, cocaine-tinged tango. .
A player filled with her private reserve, and still the random shuffle produced dozens of songs in a row that had to be killed. Or maybe she was streaming on mobile broadband—3 or 4 or 5G, or whatever generation the race had reached by that morning. A server farm on the far side of the planet was piping down one hundred million tracks of recorded music into her blood pressure cuff, and none suited. The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste. How many tunes did anyone need? One more. The next new one.
All the bogus bacterial blood is a pigment called prodigiosin. From prodigiosus—strange, remarkable, wondrous — a prodigy.
The sun had risen and the neighborhood was waking. Car wheels a block away thrummed on the asphalt. Els rounded the park’s southwest corner and passed the driveway of a mock-Tudor house, where a man in navy sweats and a T-shirt — Gravity: Not Just a Good Idea — was putting two plastic trash cans the size of a Mercury space capsule out on the curb. The man waved to Els as if they knew each other. Els waved back, in case they did.
He’d see what he could discover, online. Maybe the ACLU had a hotline. Coldberg and Mendoza had no warrant. His rights had surely been violated.
The goddess came up behind him again, her step matching the latest beat coming through the thin white wires. A Persian tar improvisation to cure melancholy. A Ukrainian funeral lament. Every tune in creation lined up in her shuffled stream, waiting to take its ten-second turn.
Els stepped off into the grass as she shot by. Above him, in the branches, the air still rang with birdsong. Check the day. Drop it, drop it, pick it up, pick it up. What cheer, what cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer? Why don’t you come to me? Messy sprung rhythms spilled out over every bar line Els could draw for them. If any grand, guiding rule held these rhythms together, Els was too crude and long-lived a creature to hear it. The racket was like the local combined middle schools set loose with a copy of GarageBand. Surplus bothered no one here. The noise washed over him, brisk and urgent and shining.
Through that clatter came a news flash. Three strong notes descended in a major triad, then riffed on the tonic in a dotted rhythm:
Sol, mi, do-do-do-do-do-do-do. .
A thing no bigger than a child’s fist was asserting a chord as brazen as any that a kid Mozart might plunk out prior to taking it through a maze of rococo variations. Els scanned the trees, but the perp hid. Maybe the bird had ripped off a playing child or heard the notes spill out of a summer convertible. Birds were big on mimicking. Mozart’s pet starling liked to mock the theme from his G Major Piano Concerto, K. 543. Australian lyre birds could mimic camera shutters, car alarms, and chain saws so perfectly they passed for real.
With two brisk tweaks of pitch the bird launched another descending arpeggio, like a pranking Beethoven having one over on the audience:
Fa me do-do-do-do-do-do-do. .
The bird might as well have chirped Eureka or sketched out a circle in the dirt with a twig in its beak. Much of twentieth century music had been lost to the idea that the diatonic scale was arbitrary and exhausted, part of the bankrupt narrative that had led to two world wars. Nothing mattered but finding a new language. Now this feathered thing sat up in the branches, singing its triads and making a fool of him. Evolution had its innermost needs, tens of millions of years old.
The goddess startled Els; he couldn’t imagine how she’d lapped him again so soon. She saw him standing paralyzed under the trees and stopped. She pulled the white wires from her ears.
Are you okay? Her accent — thick, nasal, and Mid-Atlantic — came straight out of Philly.
Els pointed. The bird answered for him, its perfect phrase. The goddess’s eyebrows pulled down; her lips twisted.
White-throated sparrow! She opened her mouth wide, and a clear, bright alto poured out. Poor Sam Peabody-peabody-peabody. .
The bird answered, and the imitator laughed.
Thank you, Els said. I’ve never heard that one.
Oh-migod. I love that bird. I wait for him, every spring.
She backed away, turning on one heel as if she’d never broken stride.
Wait, Els said. The lone benefit of age: you could ask anything and frighten no one. He raised both hands and pointed at each ear. What are you listening to?
She should have jogged off without saying another word. But the young knew that life would henceforth be forever lived in a fishbowl, and they liked it that way. The names of her tracks were doubtless being beamed to her social networking page, even as she nixed them.
The buds lay draped across her shoulder, like a stricken stick insect. She took them in her fingers.
I’m sorting through some new stuff. Tagging things for later.
I hope you have a tag for “sooner,” too?
The words wrinkled her forehead. Song came from the trees. Sam tried out a fresh new triad. Delight distracted the girl, and she forgot the question.
When she looked back down, Els grinned. Why listen to anything else, if you can hear that?
The goddess laughed, not getting the joke.