Orfeo by Richard Powers Page A

black, all-caps words—do not cross—hummed in the wind.
    Men in white hoods and hazmat suits carried equipment out of his front door. A trio in business suits directed traffic. Coldberg stood at the top of the concrete steps, swiping at a mobile device. Through the gap between the houses, in the far corner of Els’s backyard, two more hazmat suits were digging up Fidelio’s grave.
    Els edged the car to the curb, his hands fighting the wheel. The scene might have been a European shock-opera staging of the final scene of Boris Godunov. Men in puffy white space suits stacked his belongings in storage bins, which they labeled and photographed and placed in the backs of the vans. They moved with practiced efficiency in their hoods and gloves, like biohazard beekeepers. One of the hooded foot soldiers toyed with Els’s digital lab scale. Another cradled Els’s computer tower as if rescuing an infant from a fire. A box of lab glassware sat in the front lawn. On top of it, in a sealed two-gallon Ziploc, lay Els’s sixteenth-century print of Arabic music.
    The squad went about stripping his house, as if in an installment of bad reality TV. Els wanted to run out of the car and shout down the intruders. Instead, he sat watching the impossible scene in a haze of presque vu. The middle-aged flight attendant across the street stood in her yard shooting pictures with a cell phone until one of the dress-suited men crossed over and made her stop. A triumphant shout came from the backyard excavation. Els slouched down on the car seat, shading his face. When the man in the suit turned back to the house, Els eased the Fiat away from the curb and out into the open street.
    He had to think. In a sweep of left turns, he rounded the adjacent block. A wartime image of the inside of his house popped into his head: CD jewel cases strewn on the floor, books riffled and cast around, the cloud chamber bowls shattered, lab equipment and chemicals confiscated in a hundred labeled baggies. Pictures and papers, sketches for aborted compositions, all picked over by white-suited troops.
    Four turns on, he nosed back down Taylor, up to Linden. From half a block away, he watched a hazmat suit on his roof stick a pole down his chimney. Another was testing Ziploc samples with a handheld meter out of the rear of one of the vans. In the backyard, two men scraped mud from his ex-wife’s quilt and collected it in sample bottles. At their feet was a ten-gallon plastic storage box filled with a lump of muddy ochre. Fidelio.
    Els hung at the corner stop sign. He needed time. He’d broken no laws. Coldberg and Mendoza had charged him with nothing. They’d only told him to stay close. He needed an hour to calm down and prepare a story. The Fiat pulled straight through the intersection and kept on going.
    He drove at random. To clear the static in his head, he flipped on the radio. An Emmy-award-winning actor was holding his ex-wife hostage in her Aspen condo. Els found himself on the western edge of campus. He could park and go find Kathryn Dresser, for legal advice. But she’d only tell him to put his faith in the hands of the same authorities who were gutting his house for no reason.
    Campustown’s commercial strip loomed up on his right, and he turned in. Students drifted in front of his car like targets in the easy levels of a video game. The street stank of fried food. He’d had nothing to eat since the night before. He parked at a meter that still had forty minutes on it, and for an instant he felt like this was his lucky day.
    In the corner of a chain coffee shop he sat and nursed breakfast: frothy almond milk and a blueberry muffin as big as a small ottoman. Tension turned his waffle shirt rancid with sweat. Through speakers mounted around the room came a thumpy, hypnotic, overproduced, swollen, irresistible river of lust. The groove looped around three pitches—tonic, minor third, and tritone—while a singer chanted dense, allusive words in shifting,