Orfeo Read Free Page B

funerals.
     
     
    Carnegie Elementary, Fisk Junior, Rockefeller High: Peter Els survives them all, propelled from Dick and Jane to gerunds and participles, the Monitor and Merrimac , Stanley and Livingstone, tibias and fibulas, acids and bases. He memorizes “Hiawatha’s Childhood,”“Ozymandias,” and “The New Colossus”; their rich dotted rhythms fill the dead spots of his late afternoons.
    By twelve, he masters the mystic slide rule’s crosshair. He toys with square roots and looks for secret messages in the digits of pi. He calculates the area of countless right triangles and maps the ebb and flow of French and German armies across five hundred years of Europe. Teachers rotate like the circle of fifths, each of them insisting that childhood give way to accumulating fact.
    He loves his music lessons best. Week by month by year, the clarinet yields to him. The études his teachers assign unlock ever more elaborate and enchanted places. He seems to be something of a native speaker.
    It’s a gift , his mother says.
    A talent, his father corrects.
    His father, too, is obsessed with music, or at least with ever-higher fidelity. Every few months, Karl Els invests in clearer, finer, more powerful components until the speakers cabled to his vacuum tube stereo amp are bigger than a migrant worker’s bungalow. On these he bombards his family with light classics. Strauss waltzes. The Merry Widow. The man blasts, “I am the very model of a modern Major General,” until their pacifist neighbor threatens to call the police. Every Sunday afternoon and four nights a week, young Peter listens to the records spin. He combs through the changing harmonies, now and then hearing secret messages float above the fray.
    And it’s on his father’s stereophonic rig that Peter, age eleven, first hears Mozart’s Jupiter . A rainy Sunday afternoon in October, boggy hours of excruciating boredom, and who knows where the other kids are? Upstairs listening to The Blandings or The Big Show, playing jacks or pickup sticks, or spinning the bottle down in Judy Breyer’s basement. Deep in Sunday malaise, Peter works his way through his father’s micro-groove records, looking for the cure to his perpetual ache that must be hiding somewhere inside those colored cardboard sleeves.
    Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by: destiny and noble sacrifice, nostalgia for a vanished innocence, and a minuet so elegant it bores the bejeezus out of him. And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.
    Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.
    Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.
    At six minutes into the amazement, the five galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter’s ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a