Back out on the sunlit street, campus felt foreign and diffident. Students in shorts and tees, their bared limbs sporting wholesome tattoos, swerved around him without looking up from texting. Els took the diagonal path toward the Music Building. A small, voluble, promiscuously friendly professor of violin walked toward him, waving. Coming here was madness; he spun around and fled.
He hurried back to the car and headed to an ATM on the other side of campus. The screen of the drive-up cash machine threatened him with several choices. Els withdrew two hundred dollars. How soon would the transaction be traceable? A video camera behind the smoky glass gaped at him, and he brushed the bangs from his eyes.
He drove to the public library, three blocks away. It was empty at this hour, except for mothers with small children, other retirees, and street people. In a carrel near the first-floor periodicals, he settled in to clear his head. Two months before, in this same spot, he’d read a magazine article about new Patriot Act provisions. Something about the government being able to keep citizens confined indefinitely on no evidence. All he could remember from the story now was the phrase “hold until cleared.”
In another few hours, the news would break. Els headed to the stacks on the second floor. He stood in front of the life sciences, running his finger down the spines, inventorying the titles he’d checked out over the two years since his obsession began. A memoir by the top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. A social history of plagues. A book called Escape from Evolution. With a few keystrokes into the right databases, an investigator could find every incriminating title that Peter Els had read over the last ten years.
A groan escaped him. The sound startled an ashen librarian with dancer’s hands who sat at the reference desk near the top of the stairs.
Is everything all right?
Yes, Els said. Forgive me.
He got back into the car and drove. Coming down Linden, he saw the local news channel vans from two and a half blocks away. He panicked and turned left on Taylor. The crime scene shrank to nothing in his wake.
Researchers sprayed Serratia in hospitals, to study bacterial drift. Biology students rinsed in it, to watch it travel by touch.
Clara had told him how Mahler sent the young Alma Schindler the manuscript of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony without any explanation. Alma sent it back, inscribed with the word “Yes.” Weeks later, they married. That’s how it was to have been for Peter and Clara. Then Clara went to Oxford to study music on a full scholarship, where, in quick succession, she chalked up a trio of men whose accomplishments made Peter’s look like amateur hour.
Clara never bothered to tell Els the rest of the Mahler courtship fable. Only when Alma entered Gustav’s life did his music descend into real despair. Battles, lies, betrayal, death. All the stoic affirmation of the young songs and symphonies—What the Universe Tells Me, etc. — ran smack into incurable bitterness. Adorno called Mahler ein schlechter Jasager: a poor yes-sayer. Once Alma entered his life and the two of them began flaying each other raw, Mahler could do nothing but continue saying the word, with less and less conviction or cause. And deep in his own free fall, young Peter kept listening to the music, well beyond the point where its poor and desperate yes could help him.
The Army used Serratia for decades to test bioweapons: San Francisco, New York subways, Key West. But I’m the wanted criminal.
Until Els stood in that phone booth after midnight, pleading with a stranger on another continent, the coins freezing to his hands, he had nothing like a yes of his own worth saying. Then Clara left, and the real music came. It was one of those arcane exchanges people in operas make with mysterious visitors. The moment the woman with the four feet of hair abandoned Peter to life alone in the barren Midwest, strange, vital, viral creations began pouring out of him.
Every one of those pieces was a message aimed at that now-alien woman. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses. If the least of his manuscripts had ever come back to him penciled with so little as an exclamation mark, Els would have been at Heathrow two days later, in debt to the tune of a transatlantic flight, ready for whatever hope Clara wanted to dangle in front of him.
Instead, he headed off alone to make a new base camp in that little Darmstadt in the prairies. Champaign-Urbana in the early 1960s: an island in the archipelago of I-80 avant-garde, a breeding ground for mutant musical strains surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn, soybean, and rural, religious America in every direction. The perfect place for six more years of school.
A golden age was breaking out in that progressive boondocks. The adventurers who taught composition — Hiller and Isaacson, Johnston, Gaburo, Brün, Hamm, Martirano, Tenney, Beauchamp — made up new rules as fast as they could break them. The infamous Festival of Contemporary Arts and the first electro-acoustic facility in America turned the whole scene into a brilliant party. The spell of math and the pull of charged particles: Els recognized the place even before he hit town.
That self-inventing outpost on the edge of the endless cornfields felt like a new Vienna. In his first five days as a graduate student, Els met more composers than he’d met in his previous twenty-two years. Overnight, his ear grew wanton, and he gorged on things that had only recently terrified him. He joined a listening group studying Persian dastgāhs. He attended talks on music and information theory. Music and the social contract. Music and physiology.
Then, education. In the sixth week of his twentieth century formal analysis class, he arrived breathless over the previous night’s performance of Barber’s Hermit Songs. The class hooted. A stunned Els appealed to the professor.
It’s a great piece, don’t you think?
The man stifled his amusement and looked around for the hidden camera. Sure, if you still dig beauty.
Els sat through the session humiliated. He raged against the man at the grad student Murphy’s happy hour, but no one backed him up. When he checked out a recording of Hermit Songs from the music library the following week, he found them banal and predictable.
He’d learn the truth from Thomas Mann later that semester: Art was combat, an exhausting struggle. And it was impossible to stay fit for long. Music wasn’t about learning how to love. It was about learning what to disown and when to disown it. Even the most magnificent piece would end up as collateral damage in the endless war over taste.
The idea sickened Els. He flirted with dropping out. He lay in bed until noon, planning to head back East to a job sweeping floors or delivering the mail. He could start over in chemistry. But bewilderment forced him back onto campus. Bewilderment and the need to hear whatever that hooting consensus was hearing.
He was sitting in that same formal analysis in late November, staring at the professor’s winklepickers as the man danced around the Carter Variations for Orchestra, when the door to the classroom flew open. A senior doctoral candidate in musicology burst into the room saying, They’ve killed him. They’ve killed him. The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything. The messenger’s face was as washed out as an unfixed Polaroid, and his right hand traced odd, gnostic signs in the air. The president, he said. They shot him through the head.