Els sat in the parked car, hands under his armpits. At last, he fished his phone out of the glove compartment. Sara had made him swear to keep one there, for road emergencies. She failed, however, to make him promise to keep it charged. The green phone button did nothing; the screen reflected his face in a postage stamp of black. He rummaged around for the car adapter among the piles of books and CDs in the backseat, without luck.
Something like the space shuttle pulled into the slot next to him. Its running board came up to the middle of the Fiat’s window. Waves of pounding bass passed through the hulls of both vehicles and shook Els’s torso like a Vitamaster belt massager. Whole windshield-shattering subcultures had grown up around that sonic violence: dB shoot-outs, video sites featuring women whose hair whipped about in the winds of sound. Deafness as the price of ecstasy: any composer had to admire the bargain.
The van’s engine cut out, the body-bruising waves ceased, and the parking lot reeled under the sudden evacuation. A close-cropped, thirtyish man in work shirt, chinos, and huaraches got out, peering at a shopping list as he headed into the supermarket. He looked like one of the stalwart patrons of those extravaganzas in abandoned SoHo sweat shops that Els had helped mastermind decades ago.
The dashboard clock jerked Els back. At that moment, eight people with four feet in the grave were convening in the Shade Arbors main common room, notepads in hand, waiting for their teacher to come run their ninth music appreciation class of the season. Twentieth Century Landmarks. God knew he had an excuse to miss. Were his students to die in their sleep tonight without this week’s lecture on classical music and the Second World War, they would still pass the final exam.
A gutted phone booth, dead these last few years, sat in the strip mall parkway. All the nation’s public phones had vanished. He considered bumming a cell phone off of someone in the supermarket. It didn’t seem advisable, given his morning.
He had to get to a lawyer. He needed to prepare an explanation, something to justify those few casual experiments that now seemed criminal, even to him.
He started the car and pointed it toward the gated retirement community. If someone there heard the news already and called the police, then that’s how the piece would play out. He, at least, would have hit all his marks, met all his obligations, and followed the printed score.
Be grateful for anything that still cuts. Dissonance is a beauty that familiarity hasn’t yet destroyed.
Els stood in the coral foyer of Shade Arbors in front of the curving reception desk. His pulse was presto and he felt as furtive as a walking mug shot, as if he were wearing a bandolier of yellow police tape draped across his chest. But the receptionist greeted him like an old friend.
He cut through the reception area, flinching each time a logo-emblazoned staffer passed. A woman shaped like the letter f walking into a stiff headwind cut across his bow. Another skipped alongside him, toting a mini-oxygen cylinder in a crocheted sling. The place had the air of an Ensor carnival, and Els was just another mummer in the monstrous parade. Flesh kneaded loose by gravity, vessel-popped limbs pushing tartan-wrapped aluminum walkers, liver-spot continents that floated on oceans of pallid face, spoon-wide gaps in smiles, necks thinned out to tendons above colorful golf-shirt collars, heads crowned in bony domes: each of them as awed by age as children by their first snowfall.
Els’s students waited for him in the main common room. Two sat in wing chairs by the fake fireplace, testing their memory with a deck of famous-painting flash cards and cursing like Sicilian dockworkers. Six others sat on the couches flanking the kidney-shaped central table, deep in an argument about whether trees pollute. They dressed in bright tracksuits and knockoff cross trainers — games day on a landlocked cruise ship. The Q-tips, they called themselves. White at both ends, with a stick in the middle.
The group brightened at Els’s entrance. You’re late, someone said. Culture’s waiting. Someone else said, So what train wreck are we listening to this week?
Els leaned against the river-stone wall, breathing hard. The too-warm room stank of floral-scented hand sanitizer. Triclosan: antibacterial in a hundred consumer products, probable carcinogen, breeder of bacterial super-races. But no one was closing down that lab.
What happened to you? Lisa Keane asked.
Els shrugged, still in his painter pants and waffle shirt. They’d never seen him more casual than oxford button-down. Forgive me. My morning has been a little. . avant-garde.
They waved off his apologies. No one seemed to have heard a thing. On a flat-screen TV behind the couches, a famous ideologue adulterer embezzler with his own nationally distributed brand was sticking pins into the groin of a presidential voodoo doll for the entertainment of thirty million people. The next local news came on at noon. Els had until then.
Could we. .? He waved at the screen and twisted an imaginary knob, though no TV in the Northern Hemisphere had used knobs for years. William Bock, erstwhile ceramic engineer, jumped up from the love seat and doused the set.
Els looked out the big bay window onto a stand of pines. He had the distinct impression of having disappeared into one of those Central European allegorical novels that Clara always urged on him, years ago. Those books had always filled him with a dread hope, a feeling between falling in love and dying. He looked around the room at his companions in decrepitude, on their last-minute search for cultural burial swag. Some finish-line respite from the present’s endless entertainment.
It’s been a hell of a morning. I locked myself out of the house. And I’m afraid I locked my notes in. Can we reschedule?
Disappointment rippled through the room. Piccolo and pizzicato violins.
You don’t love us anymore?
Locked yourself out? Time to book a room with us.
We’re all here, Lisa Keane said. Let’s listen anyway. We don’t really need the lecture.
They didn’t really need the music. Yet the pattern was as old as dying. A sudden turn in the aging body after the back straightaway, a need for more serious sound. Els had seen it in every uptown concert he’d ever attended: everyone in the audience, old. Auditoriums a whitecapped sea. For years he’d thought that these incurables were the survivors of another time, the children of early radio’s doomed project of cultural uplift. But the years passed, the old died away, and more old people came to replace them. Did something happen to the fading brain, some change in meter that made it turn away from the three-minute song? Did old people think that classical held the key to deathbed solace, an eleventh-hour pardon?
I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t bring a single disc. They’re sitting in a stack in the living room, on top of my lecture notes.
Klaudia Kohlmann, the retired clinical therapist who’d talked Els into this teaching gig, tipped herself out of her overstuffed chair, crossed to where he stood, and drew a small black slab out of her Incan shoulder bag. She held out the weapon as if she meant to phaser him. He took it and flipped it on, watched by the eight people who’d come for their next installment in the further adventures of an endlessly dying art.
Els gazed at the tiny black rectangle. Like a detonator in an action film, it possessed one button. He pressed it, and the screen filled with a white-shrouded figure in a small rowboat near a rocky outcrop covered with cypresses.