Up on a pipe-fit scaffold, a woman singer in a red velvet gown tries to negotiate a forlorn duet with a dancer on a platform several feet away. Any signals they send each other are swallowed up in the caldera of noise. Nearby, a string quartet saws away at atomized messages for no one. Muffled shouts erupt from a further platform. Els turns to see a scarecrow slashing a silver flute through the air like he’s threatening to kill someone.
Maddy points: high on the wall at the far end of the pavilion, like a tender Big Brother or clowning Chairman Mao, a man’s giant face sweeps from a scowl to a manic laugh and back again. The film loops, and Els stares at the seamless transformation, three, four, five times in a row. Nothing changes, except for the Imp Saint’s litany, playing through Els’s head: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. But Els never makes it to eight, let alone sixteen. Maddy, frisky now, draws him deeper into the maelstrom.
They explore, like a vicar and his wife who’ve stumbled upon the parish’s routine underground orgy. They run across three colleagues from the School of Music, an acquaintance from Cine Club, and two neighbors from Maddy’s rooming house, blitzed out of their minds and giggling. An alto who sings with Maddy in concert choir snags them from behind. They lean in close to hear her. She points to the dancers on platforms above the turning crowd. That’s Claude Kipnis! That’s Carolyn Brown!
Who’re they? Els yells back.
The alto shrugs. Famous people!
Children scream in meteoric arcs across the crowded floor, batting at fallen balloons. In the stands behind the oval livestock gauntlet, a few shell-shocked loners take cover, plugging their ears. Part of Els wants to flee, too. But most of him needs to be here, in the belly of this beast.
Each inhalation of craziness fills Els’s veins with something dark and viscous. If this is music, then he’s lost. If this is composition, then everything he has tried to write is wrong. Musicircus: Cage’s latest way of saying how noise is music by its maiden name. But in this insane din, Els can’t for the life of him remember why that idea held such promise once. This night wants to strip him of every belief, to pull him down into mere sensation, the place of no desire, of pure listening.
But listen to what? To the eve of destruction. To the air raid siren of things to come. To the explosion of Els’s own quaint and laughable ambitions. To a deafening freedom.
Then, drifting on the human current, bumming a match to light his cigarette and gossiping with a spectator, there’s Cage, twenty feet away. Els has been close to him before, but never like this. He tugs Maddy toward the perpetrator, ready for art. But coming in starboard, hard and low, a gray eminence cuts across their bow. A formidable woman who has attended every Germanic chamber concert Els has ever slunk into confronts tonight’s ringleader. She shouts at the startled composer with such stentorian force that she might be yet another circus act, called for by the coin-tossing score.
Mr. Cage. Are you a fraud?
Cage presses his brow, examines his cigarette, and looks off to the strobing lights that bounce off the drifting balloons. His face clears, relieved. No.
He casts his cigarette to the pavilion floor and stubs it out with one toe. Something religious to the gesture. Smiling, he slips through the crowd and back up on a performance platform, where he joins a quintet pouring water into different-sized bowls and tapping them, taking their time cues from an elaborate piano roll. Els stands in front of the platform, watching the Kabuki mimes tap at their liquid-filled bowls. For a moment, in some America deep in his neocortex, he can hear every ringing pitch the mute bowls make.
A face brushes his earlobe. Raw charge ripples down his neck and into his shoulders. Maddy, purring, Had enough?
He swings around to her. Serious? It’s just getting going.
She waves at the surrounding chaos, her lips a boggy smile. She shouts something, but the words die halfway across the defile. He leans in, and she shouts again. I pretty much get the picture, Peter. Don’t you?
The shout, too, is a kind of music. She stands with her head tilted, grinning at the gimmick all around them. The drumlins of her breasts beneath her Elizabethan blouse and the gap at the top of her hip-clinging jeans ought to be all the happening he needs. But there’s something here he can’t leave yet. His hands improvise in fake sign language: he needs to listen a little longer. She shrugs, asks him with a trill of her fingers if he’ll be okay walking home, pulls him to her by the lapels of his ratty bomber jacket, and kisses him. The old man of seventy standing next to them nods in recall.
You do not need to leave your room. Don’t even listen. Simply wait. The world will offer itself to be unmasked. It has no choice.
Time turns to nothing. His ears dilate. The longer Els stands still, the more the music pulls apart. His hearing sharpens, able now to pick out strands buried in the babble. Dixieland trombones. A descending lamento bass played on a fretless Fender. A psychedelic reworking of “Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane,” against the ceaseless banging on the lead pipe sculpture. Puccini mocks the furious electronic permutations of a piece by Matthew Mattison, whose old épater la bourgeoisie sounds housebroken in this surge of crazed elation. It’s Ives and his overlapping marching bands all over again.
Hours pass. Midnight, but the crowd shows no signs of thinning. Something catches his eye, high up in the flanking stands: a man seated by himself, conducting. He cues the crowd with precise waves of his arms, the way young Peter once conducted his father’s vinyl Toscaninis. Els knows the man, though they’ve never met. Richard Bonner, doctoral candidate in theater arts, three years Els’s senior. Famous for directing last season’s deranged Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in an old folks’ home, and for coming to a peace rally on the Quad dressed as a sepoy from the Bengal Native Infantry, circa 1850.
The invisible baton dips. The conductor’s fingers curl, demanding a crescendo. And on cue, the crowd delivers. Els watches this show above the show, until the lone impresario holding this spectacle together feels himself being spied on and turns to face his observer. Bonner’s hands point like two cap pistols at Els and click, like some Rat Pack singer playing the Vegas Sands. Then he waves at Els to come join him up in the stands for the aerial play-by-play.
As Els draws near, Richard Bonner leaps to his feet and grabs his hand. Peter Els. As I live and breathe! What do you think? Should we all rush out and kill ourselves?
Els confines himself to what he hopes is a fuzzy grin. The impresario pats the riser beside him and sits back down. Els takes the designated place. They sit and watch, up in the grandstands above the end of the world. Bonner’s hands can’t help scooping and directing. Now and then he issues a burst of color commentary.
Above the noise of the Happening, Els can make out only a quarter of what the man says. Under the paving stones, the beach! Meet the fucking Jetsons, man! You know who supplied those weather balloons? Chanute Air Force Base. You know what else Chanute is supplying to the jungles on the other side of the world? No, of course you don’t. You’re a masterpiece guy, aren’t you? Gimme that old-time religion. People getting fragged in your living room, and you’re still trying to sweet-talk beauty into a quickie.