Orfeo by Richard Powers Page B

irregular rhythms.
    The best thing to do was to turn himself in. His picked-through belongings would prove his innocence. But Joint Security agents had his notebooks, full of their fantasias on bacterial modification. They had his computer, with its cache and browsing history. Hours from now, they would identify the sites he’d visited the previous afternoon—the ricin recipes; the anthrax.
    Back out on the sunlit street, campus felt foreign and diffident. Students in shorts and tees, their bared limbs sporting wholesome tattoos, swerved around him without looking up from texting. Els took the diagonal path toward the Music Building. A small, voluble, promiscuously friendly professor of violin walked toward him, waving. Coming here was madness; he spun around and fled.
    He hurried back to the car and headed to an ATM on the other side of campus. The screen of the drive-up cash machine threatened him with several choices. Els withdrew two hundred dollars. How soon would the transaction be traceable? A video camera behind the smoky glass gaped at him, and he brushed the bangs from his eyes.
    He drove to the public library, three blocks away. It was empty at this hour, except for mothers with small children, other retirees, and street people. In a carrel near the first-floor periodicals, he settled in to clear his head. Two months before, in this same spot, he’d read a magazine article about new Patriot Act provisions. Something about the government being able to keepcitizens confined indefinitely on no evidence. All he could remember from the story now was the phrase “hold until cleared.”
    In another few hours, the news would break. Els headed to the stacks on the second floor. He stood in front of the life sciences, running his finger down the spines, inventorying the titles he’d checked out over the two years since his obsession began. A memoir by the top scientist in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program. A social history of plagues. A book called Escape from Evolution. With a few keystrokes into the right databases, an investigator could find every incriminating title that Peter Els had read over the last ten years.
    A groan escaped him. The sound startled an ashen librarian with dancer’s hands who sat at the reference desk near the top of the stairs.
    Is everything all right?
    Yes, Els said. Forgive me.
    He got back into the car and drove. Coming down Linden, he saw the local news channel vans from two and a half blocks away. He panicked and turned left on Taylor. The crime scene shrank to nothing in his wake.
Researchers sprayed Serratia in hospitals, to study bacterial drift. Biology students rinsed in it, to watch it travel by touch.
     
     
    Clara had told him how Mahler sent the young Alma Schindler the manuscript of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony without any explanation. Alma sent it back, inscribed with the word “Yes.” Weeks later, they married. That’s how it was to have been for Peter and Clara. Then Clara went to Oxford to study music on a full scholarship, where, in quick succession, she chalked up a trio of men whose accomplishments made Peter’s look like amateur hour.
    Clara never bothered to tell Els the rest of the Mahler courtship fable. Only when Alma entered Gustav’s life did his music descend into real despair. Battles, lies, betrayal, death. All the stoic affirmation of the young songs and symphonies— What the Universe Tells Me, etc. — ran smack into incurable bitterness. Adorno called Mahler ein schlechter Jasager : a poor yes-sayer. Once Alma entered his life and the two of them began flaying each other raw, Mahler could do nothing but continue saying the word, with less and less conviction or cause. And deep in his own free fall, young Peter kept listening to the music, well beyond the point where its poor and desperate yes could help him.
The Army used Serratia for decades to test bioweapons: San Francisco, New York subways, Key West. But I’m the wanted