Free Orfeo by Richard Powers Page A

assertion of certainty:
All goes onward
Onward and outward
Outward: nothing collapses . . .
     
    Then came the transforming final phrase, the one that was waiting for him when he reached it, almost as if he’d envisioned it all along.
    Teasing out the piece on a baby grand in a music building practice room gave him a pleasure so complete it might as well have been illegal. Clara was right: he was shaped to do this work, even if the work had no use for anyone alive or dead. Paying off his stepfather’s wasted investment, putting in years of scut work at minimum wage, playing to empty auditoriums peppered with a handful of listeners hostile and indifferent: his entire misspent life spread out in front of Peter. Drunk on birthing up this first-time thing, he saw the future, and he recognized it from way back when.
    For weeks, turning and shaping, Els saw everything: the young men and the old, the women and children, alive and well, needing no one but him to spring them. He stepped off into the void and felt no fear. It didn’t even feel like a choice. Chemistry died an easeful death. But that death was different from what anyone might imagine, and luckier than even an old man of seventy could yet suppose.
    He surprised Clara at semester’s end, with a fresh copy. She sat on the foot of her dorm room bed, under the poster of the young Casals, reading and nodding in silence. When she looked up, her wet eyes looked almost timid. Still, she smiled that all-foretelling smile. Well, she said. Bravo. Encore.
Pythagoras, discoverer of harmony’s math, also discovered my bug: Serratia marcescens . It looked like blood seeping out of old food.
     
     
    Clara’s reward waited for him at the year-end concert. The program was some attempted Cold War rapprochement: Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s Firebird. Els loved it all, even those baggy exotics. Something had happened to his ear, and in that month, everything from Machaut to the “Mickey Mouse Club March” struck him as a masterpiece.
    Playing in orchestra felt like sitting in the general assembly. Each section set off on the agenda of its own private timbre, but all combined under one baton into a surprise leviathan. From his perch in the center of the winds, Els glanced to his left, over the lip of his music stand, past the conductor, to see Clara in profile, second chair, her cello nestled in the vee of her long black concert skirt, her white silk blouse tightening against her breasts as the instrument rocked and breathed. She played like a distracted Firebird, her graceful neck pressed against the fingerboard of her instrument, her bow arm tracing out sideways-eight infinities in the air. As the slashing accents set off Kashchei’s infernal dance, Clara glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking. And as if it were scored into the note heads on the staves in front of him, Els saw what dance waited, later that night, when the music ended .
    What had they done together, until then? Incandescent things. Crimes against their upbringing that left Els stunned by the cunning of his lust and wracked with holdover Lutheran guilt. But these were the early days of the New Frontier. His own daughter would giggle her way through worse by age sixteen. No self-respecting thirteen-year-old in 2011, keeping public stats on her social network page, would even consider it sex.
    After the concert, Els found Clara in the orchestra rehearsal room, putting her cello into its coffin. The Russian music and her bohemian soul left her so flushed she couldn’t talk. The night’s plan was so obvious in their furtive faces that Peter was sure her resident director would detain them both for questioning when they snuck into her dorm to borrow her rich roommate’s Beetle. They had no route. Clara sat abandoned in the car, still in concert clothes, feet up on the dash, open to fate and free of the Earth’s pull. Peter’s hands shook on the wheel. They drove to the quarries outside of town,