In Els’s living room, the uniforms looked harsher and more hardware-laden. The three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with books and CDs unnerved the male officer. He stepped over the gate and down the hall to the covered lump lying on the floor, where he turned back the sheet.
That dog trusted me, Els said.
Goldens are good dogs, the woman said.
That dog loved everybody. I’m surprised she lasted fourteen years.
The male officer pulled the quilt back over the corpse. He retreated down the hall and stepped back over the gate. He fingered his belt: baton, handcuffs, communicator, keys, pepper spray, flashlight, gun. His brass name bar read Mark Powell. You’ll have to contact Animal Care and Control.
I thought I’d. . Els thumbed toward the back of the house. Give her a decent burial. She loved it back there.
You have to call Animal Care and Control, sir. Reasons of public health. We can give you the number.
Ah! Peter Els raised his brows and nodded, as if all kinds of mysteries at last made sense. The woman gave him a number. She assured him that the law required the call and that nothing could be easier.
Officer Powell scanned the shelves of CDs: thousands of discs, the latest obsolete technology. A large wooden frame, like a freestanding coat rack, stood against one wall. Several sawn-off water-cooler bottles hung from the frame by bungee cords.
Powell touched his belt. Judas Priest!
Cloud chamber bowls, Els said.
Cloud chamber? Isn’t that some kind of. .?
It’s just a name, Els said. You play them.
You’re a musician?
I used to teach it. Composition.
A songwriter?
Peter Els cupped his elbows and bowed his head. It’s complicated.
What do you mean, ‘complicated’? Techno-folk? Psychobilly ska?
I don’t write much anymore.
Officer Powell looked up. Why not?
A lot of music in the world.
The communicator on the policeman’s belt hissed and a woman’s voice issued phantom instructions.
True, that. A lot of everything.
The officers swung back toward the front door. Off the dining room, a study stood open. The room’s shelves swelled with beakers, tubing, and jars with printed labels. A half-sized refrigerator stood next to a long counter, where a compound microscope sat hooked up to a computer. The white metal body, black eyepieces, and silver objective looked like an infant Imperial Stormtrooper. More equipment covered a workbench on the far wall, glowing with colored LCDs.
Whoa, Officer Powell said.
My lab, Els explained.
I thought you wrote songs.
It’s a hobby. It relaxes me.
The woman, Officer Estes, frowned. What are all the petri dishes for?
Peter Els wiggled his fingers. To house bacteria. Same as us.
Would you mind if we. .?
Els drew back and studied his interrogator’s badge. It’s getting a little late.
The police officers traded glances. Officer Powell opened his mouth to clarify, then stopped.
All right, Officer Estes said. We’re sorry about your dog.
Peter Els shook his head. That dog would sit and listen for hours. She loved every kind of music there is. She even sang along.
When the police left the house, the wind had died and the insects paused their eerie explorations. For half a measure, as the officers headed down the sidewalk, there came a softness bordering on peace. The dark calm lasted all the way to the car, where the pair at once began placing calls.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t, really. I’ve always been guilty of thinking too much. This was doing, pure and simple.
The dog answered only to Fidelio, from the moment Els first used the name. Music launched her into ecstasies. She loved long, held intervals, preferably seconds, major or minor. When any human sustained a pitch for more than a heartbeat, she couldn’t help joining in.
There was method to Fidelio’s crooning. If Els held a D, the dog went to E-flat or E. If Els moved to Fidelio’s pitch, the dog slid a semi-tone up or down. If a human chorus held a chord, the dog sang a note that wasn’t in it. Whatever pitches the pack served up, Fidelio found one that hadn’t yet been taken.
In the creature’s howling, Els heard the roots of music — the holy society of small discord.
The few solid studies Els could find on the musicality of dogs suggested they resolved only about a third of an octave. But Fidelio always came within a whole tone of any pitch Els sang. Research into the effects of musical genres on dogs claimed that heavy metal agitated while Vivaldi sedated them. No great shock: Els had once declared, in one of the few interviews he’d ever been asked to give, that The Four Seasons should come with the same warning label as any powerful tranquilizer. This was years before the birth of the calm-a-pet industry: Music Dogs Love, Vol. 1, Soothe Your Animal, Tunes to Play While You’re Away.
At twenty-one, Els had worshipped at the shrine of Wagner. So he knew about Peps, Wagner’s spaniel muse and the cowriter of Tannhäuser. Peps would lie at Wagner’s feet under the piano while he worked. If a passage didn’t please Peps, the dog leapt up on the desk and howled until Wagner abandoned the idea. There were years when Els could have used such a candid critic, and Fidelio might have obliged. But Els had stopped writing music by the time Fidelio came along.
Like Peps, Fidelio was good health to her owner. She reminded Els when to eat or walk. And she asked for nothing in return but to be part of the two-dog pack, loyal to her alpha and free to howl whenever the music played.
Els read about other musical dogs. There was the bulldog Dan, immortalized in the eleventh of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, who growled at out-of-tune singers. The bull terrier Bud had performed a Stephen Foster medley in the White House for Eleanor and Franklin D., five years before Peter was born. Thirty years later, as Els wandered through a John Cage Happening in Urbana, Illinois, Lyndon Johnson and his mutt Yuki performed a duet on camera for a stupefied nation. In the three short decades from Bud to Yuki, biplanes had given way to moon rockets and Aldis lamps had become the ARPANET. Music had gone from Copland to Crumb, from “A Fine Romance” to “Heroin.” But nothing at all had changed in the music of dogs.
Fidelio’s appetite for singing never wavered. Not for her, the insatiable need for novelty. She never tired of warhorses, but neither did she recognize anything Els played her, however often she heard it. A permanent, moving dance, in an eternal Standing Now: that’s how she took in every piece they listened to together, night after night, for years. Fidelio loved all the great landmarks of the twentieth century, but she perked up just as happily to the digital chimes of an ice-cream truck from blocks away on a summer’s evening. Hers was a connoisseurship Els would have traded his for, in a heartbeat.
I had no idea what might happen. That’s the trouble with making things. You never do.
Was tonality out there—God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom? Fidelio became Els’s lab animal, his experiment in musical universals. The dog got excited simply watching Els fetch the scuffed clarinet case of his childhood. Duet time again: she’d start baying before Els played a note. The first thing to check was octave equivalence. Els held a tone, and the dog answered in a mournful interval. But if the clarinet jumped an octave, the dog held steady, as if the pitch hadn’t changed at all.