Robert
Silverberg: Gianni
I had been writing professionally for more than a quarter
of a century--this is 1981 I'm talking about--and my stories
had appeared in every important magazine that published
science fiction except one: Playboy. I had never
sent one there. I don't know why; over the years it had
published a ton of fine s-f stories by the likes of Ray
Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl, Richard Matheson,
Robert Sheckley, Kurt Vonnegut, and on and on and on. Why,
I asked myself belatedly, was I not allowing myself to be
included in that list?
So I wrote "Gianni"
and sent it off to Alice K. Turner, who had just taken over
as fiction editor of Playboy, and back from her with
the speed of light, more or less, came an acceptance and
a check of very significant size. She did, however, want
one little revision in the story. I had written it as a
first-person narrative told by Dave Leavis, the time-travel
scientist. Alice said I had picked the wrong narrator. Would
I mind rewriting it so that Sam Hoaglund, the public-relations
man, told the tale?
I didn't see how that
could be done. A first-person story's entire structure is
inherently bound up in the character and style of its narrator:
it seemed impossible to turn this one inside out and make
it work Alice's way. I told her so. She replied that she
would be coming out to California the following week: could
we have dinner and discuss it?
So we did. I showed
up at the restaurant she had chosen, Berkeley's Chez Panisse,
with Playboy's uncashed check in my jacket pocket.
I figured I'd have to return it after refusing to do the
rewrite. Alice showed up with something too: a photocopy
of the story in which she had sketched out how to
do the rewrite. I stared at it in amazement. Somehow she
had figured out how, with a few deft strokes, the whole
narration could be tossed across to a different narrator!
It was a stunning technical stunt.
So I gave in, and Playboy
published the story with Hoaglund as the narrator. Later
I reprinted it in a book of my own in its original form.
Which version is better, I have no idea, but I prefer my
own because it's my own. Long afterward, I asked Alice what
she would have done if I had simply said no to the revision
and handed her back the check. She said she would have published
the story my way, in that case. But she suspected that things
wouldn't come to that pass, and she was right.
GIANNI
Robert Silverberg
copyright 1981 by Agberg, Ltd.
"But why not Mozart?" Hoaglund said, shaking his head.
"Schubert, even? Or you could have brought back Bix Beiderbecke,
for Christ's sake, if you wanted to resurrect a great musician."
"Beiderbecke was jazz,"
I said. "I'm not interested in jazz. Nobody's interested
in jazz except you."
"And people are still
interested in Pergolesi in the year 2008?"
"I am."
"Mozart would have
been better publicity. You'll need more funding sooner or
later. You tell the world you've got Mozart sitting in the
back room cranking out a new opera, you can write your own
ticket. But what good is Pergolesi? Pergolesi's totally
forgotten."
"Only by the proletariat,
Sam. Besides, why give Mozart a second chance? Maybe he
died young, but it wasn't all that young, and he
did his work, a ton of work. Gianni died at twenty-six,
you know. He might have been greater than Mozart if he'd
had another dozen years,"
"Johnny?"
"Gianni. Giovanni Battista.
Pergolesi. He calls himself Gianni. Come meet him."
"Mozart, Dave. You
should have done Mozart."
"Stop being an idiot," I said. "When you've met him, you'll
know I did the right thing. Mozart would have been a pain
in the neck, anyway. The stories I've heard about Mozart's
private life would uncurl your wig. Come on with me."
I led him down the
long hallway from the office past the hardware room and
the timescoop cage to the airlock separating us from the
semidetached motel unit out back where Gianni had been living
since we scooped him. We halted in the airlock to be sprayed.
Sam frowned and I explained, "Infectious microorganisms
have mutated a lot since the eighteenth century. Until we've
got his resistance levels higher, we're keeping him in a
pretty sterile environment. When we first brought him back,
he was vulnerable to anything -- a case of the sniffles
would have killed him, most likely. Plus he was a dying
man when we got him, one lung lousy with TB and the other
one going."
"Hey," Hoaglund said.
I laughed. "You won't
catch anything from him. It's in remission now, Sam. We
didn't bring him back at colossal expense just to watch
him die."
The lock opened and
we stepped into the monitoring vestibule, glittering like
a movie set with bank upon bank of telemetering instruments.
The day nurse, Claudia, was checking diagnostic readouts.
"He's expecting you, Dr. Leavis," she said. "He's very frisky
this morning."
"Frisky?"
"Playful. You know."
Yes. Tacked to the
door of Gianni's room was a card that hadn't been there
yesterday, flamboyantly lettered in gaudy, free-flowing
baroque script.
GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI
Jesi, January 3 1710 -- Pozzuoli,
March 17 1736
Los Angeles, Dec. 20 2007 --
.
Genuis At Work!!!!
Per Piacere, Knock Before
You Enter!
"He speaks English?"
Hoaglund asked.
"Now he does," I said. "We gave him tapesleep the first
week. He picks things up fast, anyway." I grinned. "Genius
at work, eh? Or genuis. That's the sort of sign I
would have expected Mozart to put up."
"They're all alike, these talents," Hoaglund said.
I knocked.
"Chi va là?"
Gianni called.
"Dave Leavis."
"Avanti, dottore illustrissimo!"
"I thought you said
he speaks English," Hoaglund murmured.
"He's frisky today,
Claudia said, remember?"
We went in. As usual
he had the blinds tightly drawn, shutting out the brilliant
January sunlight, the yellow blaze of acacia blossoms just
outside the window, the enormous scarlet bougainvillea,
the sweeping hilltop vista of the valley and the mountains
beyond. Maybe scenery didn't interest him -- or, more likely,
he preferred to keep his room a tightly sealed little cell,
an island out of time. He had had to absorb a lot of psychic
trauma in the past few weeks; it must give you a hell of
a case of jet-lag to jump 271 years into the future,
But he looked lively,
almost impish -- a small man, graceful, delicate, with sharp,
busy eyes, quick, elegant gestures, a brisk, confident manner.
How much he had changed in just a few weeks! When we fished
him out of the eighteenth century, he was a woeful sight,
face lined and haggard, hair already gray at twenty-six,
body gaunt, bowed, quivering. He looked like what he was,
a shattered consumptive a couple of weeks from the grave.
His hair was still gray, but he had gained ten pounds; the
veils were gone from his eyes; there was color in his cheeks.
I said, "Gianni, I
want you to meet Sam Hoaglund. He's going to handle publicity
and promotion for you project. Capisce? He will make
you known to the world and give you a new audience for your
music."
He flashed a brilliant
smile. "Bene. Listen to this."
The room was an electronic
jungle, festooned with gadgetry: a synthesizer, a telescreen,
a megabuck audio library, five sorts of data terminals and
all manner of other things perfectly suited to your basic
eighteenth-century Italian drawing room. Gianni loved it
all and was mastering the equipment with astonishing, even
frightening, ease. He swung around to the synthesizer, jacked
it into harpsichord mode and touched the keyboard. From
the cloud of floating minispeakers came the opening theme
of a sonata, lovely, lyrical, to my ear unmistakably Pergolesian
in its melodiousness, and yet somehow weird. For all its
beauty there was a strained, awkward, suspended aspect
to it, like a ballet performed by dancers in galoshes. The
longer he played, the more uncomfortable I felt. Finally
he turned to us and said, "You like it?"
"What is it? Something
of yours?"
"Mine, yes. My new
style. I am under the influence of Beethoven today. Haydn
yesterday, tomorrow Chopin. I try everything, no? By Easter
I get to the ugly composers. Mahler, Berg, Debussy -- those
men were crazy, do you know? Crazy music, so ugly.
But I will learn."
"Debussy ugly?" Hoaglund
said quietly to me.
"Bach is modern music
to him," I said. "Haydn is the voice of the future."
Gianni said, "I will
be very famous."
"Yes, Sam will make you the most famous man in the world."
"I was very famous
after I -- died." He tapped one of the terminals. "I have
read about me. I was so famous that everybody forged my
music, and it was published as Pergolesi, do you know that?
I have played it, too, this 'Pergolesi.' Merda, most
of it. Not all. The concerti armonici, not bad --
not mine, but not bad. Most of the rest, trash." He winked.
"But you will make me famous while I live, eh? Good. Very
good." He came closer to us and in a lower voice said, "Will
you tell Claudia that the gonorrhea, it is all cured?"
"What?"
"She would not believe
me. I said, The doctor swears it, but she said, No, it is
not safe; you must keep your hands off me; you must keep
everything else off me."
"Gianni, have you been
molesting your nurse?"
"I am becoming a healthy
man, dottore. I am no monk. They sent me to live
with the cappuccini in the monastery at Pozzuoli,
yes, but it was only so the good air there could heal my
consumption, not to make me a monk. I am no monk now and
I am no longer sick. Could you go without a woman for three
hundred years?" He put his face close to Hoaglund's, gave
him a bright-eyed stare, leered outrageously. "You will
make me very famous. And then there will be women again,
yes? And you must tell them that the gonorrhea, it is entirely
cured. This age of miracles!"
Afterward Hoaglund
said to me, "And you thought Mozart was going to be too
much trouble?"
When we first got him, there was no snappy talk out of him
of women or fame or marvelous new compositions. Then he
was a wreck, a dazed wraith, hollow, burned out. He wasn't
sure whether he had awakened in heaven or in hell, but whichever
it was left him alternately stunned and depressed. He was
barely clinging to life, and we began to wonder if we had
waited too long to get him. Perhaps it might be wiser, some
of us thought, to toss him back and pick him from an earlier
point, maybe summer of 1735, when he wasn't so close to
the grave. But we had no budget for making a second scoop,
and also we were bound by our own rigid self-imposed rules.
We had the power to yank anybody we liked out of the past
-- Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Jesus, Henry the Eighth--but
we had no way of knowing what effects it might have on the
course of history if we scooped up Lenin while he was still
in exile in Switzerland, say, or collected Hitler while
he was still a paperhanger. So we decided a priori
to scoop only someone whose life and accomplishments were
entirely behind him, and who was so close to the time of
his natural death that his disappearance would not be likely
to unsettle the fabric of the universe. For months I lobbied
to scoop Pergolesi, and I got my way, and we took him out
of the monastery eighteen days before his official date
of death. Once we had him, it was no great trick to substitute
a synthetic cadaver, who was duly discovered and buried,
and so far as we have been able to tell, no calamities have
resulted to history because one consumptive Italian was
put in his grave two weeks earlier than the encyclopedia
used to say he had been.
Yet it was touch and
go at first, keeping him alive. Those were the worst days
of my life, the first few after the scooping. To have planned
for years, to have expended so many gigabucks on the project,
and then to have our first human scoopee die on us anyway--
He didn't, though.
The same vitality that had pulled sixteen operas and a dozen
cantatas and uncountable symphonies and concerti and masses
and sonatas out of him in a twenty-six-year lifespan pulled
him back from the edge of the grave now, once the resources
of modern medicine were put to work rebuilding his lungs
and curing his assorted venereal diseases. From hour to
hour we could see him gaining strength. Within days he was
wholly transformed. It was almost magical, even to us. And
it showed us vividly how many lives were needlessly lost
in those archaic days for want of the things that are routine
to us--antibiotics, transplant technology, micro-surgery,
regeneration therapy.
For me those were wondrous
days. The pallid, feeble young man struggling for his life
in the back unit was surrounded by a radiant aura of accumulated
fame and legend built up over centuries: he was Pergolesi,
the miraculous boy, the fountain of melody, the composer
of the awesome Stabat Mater and the rollicking Serva
Padrona, who in the decades after his early death was
ranked with Bach, with Mozart, with Haydn, and whose most
trivial works inspired the whole genre of light opera. But
his own view of himself was different: he was a weary, sick,
dying young man, poor pathetic Gianni, the failure, the
washout, unknown beyond Rome and Naples and poorly treated
there, his serious operas neglected cruelly, his masses
and cantatas praised but rarely performed, only the comic
operas that he dashed off so carelessly winning him any
acclaim at all--poor Gianni, burned out at twenty-five,
destroyed as much by disappointment as by tuberculosis and
venereal disease, creeping off to the Capuchin monastery
to die in miserable poverty. How could he have known he
was to be famous? But we showed him. We played him recordings
of his music, both the true works and those that had been
constructed in his name by the unscrupulous to cash in on
his posthumous glory. We let him read the biographies and
critical studies and even the novels that had been published
about him. Indeed, for him it must have been precisely like
dying and going to heaven, and from day to day he gained
strength and poise, he waxed and flourished, he came to
glow with vigor and passion and confidence. He knew now
that no magic had been worked on him, that he had been snatched
into the unimaginable future and restored to health by ordinary
human beings, and he accepted that and quickly ceased to
question it. All that concerned him now was music. In the
second and third weeks we gave him a crash course in post-Baroque
musical history. Bach first, then the shift away from polyphony--"Naturalmente,"
he said, "it was inevitable, I would have achieved it myself
if I had lived"--and he spent hours with Mozart and Haydn
and Johann Christian Bach, soaking up their complete works
and entering a kind of ecstatic state. His nimble, agile
mind swiftly began plotting its own directions. One morning
I found him red-eyed with weeping. He had been up all night
listening to Don Giovanni and Marriage of Figaro.
"This Mozart," he said. "You bring him back, too?"
"Maybe someday we will,"
I said.
"I kill him! You bring him back, I strangle him, I trample
him!" His eyes blazed. He laughed wildly. "He is wonder!
He is angel! He is too good! Send me to his time, I kill
him then! No one should compose like that! Except Pergolesi.
He would have done it."
"I believe that."
"Yes! This Figaro
-- 1786 -- I could have done it twenty years earlier! Thirty!
If only I get the chance. Why this Mozart so lucky? I die,
he live--why? Why, dottore?"
His love-hate relationship
with Mozart lasted six or seven days. Then he moved on to
Beethoven, who I think was a little too much for him, overwhelming,
massive, crushing, and then the romantics, who amused him--"Berlioz,
Tchaicovksy, Wagner, all lunatics, dementi, pazzi,
but they are wonderful. I think I see what they are trying
to do. Madmen! Marvelous madmen!"-- and quickly on to the
twentieth century, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok,
not spending much time with any of them, finding them all
either ugly or terrifying or simply incomprehensibly bizarre.
More recent composers, Webern and the serealists, Penderecki,
Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti, the various electronicists
and all that came after, he dismissed with a quick shrug,
as though he barely recognized what they were doing as music.
Their fundamental assumptions were too alien to him. Genius
though he was, he could not assimilate their ideas, any
more than Brillat-Savarin or Escoffier could have found
much pleasure in the cuisine of another planet. After completing
his frenzied survey of everything that had happened in music
after his time, he returned to Bach and Mozart and gave
them his full attention.
I mean full
attention. Gianni was utterly incurious about the world
outside his bedroom window. We told him he was in America,
in California, and showed him a map. He nodded casually.
We turned on the telescreen and let him look at the landscape
of the early twenty-first century. His eyes glazed. We spoke
of automobiles, planes, flights to Mars. Yes, he said, meraviglioso,
miracoloso, and went back to the Brandenburg concerti.
I realize now that the lack of interest he showed in the
modern world was a sign neither of fear nor of shallowness,
but rather only a mark of priorities. What Mozart had accomplished
was stranger and more interesting to him than the entire
technological revolution. Technology was only a means to
an end, for Gianni--push a button, you get a symphony orchestra
in your bedroom: miracoloso!--and he took it entirely
for granted. That the basso continuo had become obsolete
thirty years after his death, that the diatonic scales would
be demoted from sacred constants to inconvenient anachronisms
a century or so later, was more significant to him than
the fusion reactor, the interplanetary spaceship, or even
the machine that had yanked him from his deathbed into this
brave new world.
In the fourth week
he said he wanted to compose again. He asked for a harpsichord.
Instead we gave him a synthesizer. He loved it.
In the sixth week he
began asking questions about the outside world, and I realized
that the tricky part of our experiment was about to begin.
Hoaglund said, "Pretty soon we have to reveal him. It's
incredible we've been able to keep it quiet this long."
He had an elaborate
plan. The problem was twofold: letting Gianni experience
the world, and letting the world perceive that time-travel
as a practical matter involving real human beings--no more
frogs and kittens hoisted from last month to this--had finally
arrived. There was going to be a whole business of press
conferences, media tours of our lab, interviews with Gianni,
a festival of Pergolesi music at the Hollywood bowl with
the premiere of a symphony in the mode of Beethoven that
he said would be ready by April, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera. But at the same time we would be taking Gianni on
private tours of the L.A. area, gradually exposing him to
the society into which he had been so unilaterally hauled.
The medics said it was safe to let him encounter twenty-first-century
microorganisms now. But would it be safe to let him encounter
twenty-first-century civilization? He, with his windows
sealed and his blinds drawn, his eighteenth-century mind
wholly engrossed in the revelations that Bach and Mozart
and Beethoven were pouring into it--what would he make of
the world of spaceways and slice-houses and overload bands
and freebase teams when he could no longer hide from it?
"Leave it all to me,"
said Hoaglund. "That's what you're paying me for, right?"
On a mild and rainy
February afternoon Sam and I and the main physician, Nella
Brandon, took him on his first drive through his new reality.
Down the hill the back way, along Ventura Boulevard a few
miles, onto the freeway, out to Topanga, back around through
the landslide zone to what had been Santa Monica, and then
straight up Wilshire across the entire heart of Los Angeles--a
good stiff jolt of modernity. Dr. Brandon carried her full
armamentarium of sedatives and tranks ready in case Gianni
freaked out. But he didn't freak out.
He loved it--swinging round and round in the bubbletop car,
gaping at everything. I tried to view L.A. through the eyes
of someone whose entire life had been spent amid the splendors
of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, and it came up
hideous on all counts. But not to Gianni. "Beautiful," he
sighed. "Wondrous! Miraculous! Marvelous!" The traffic,
the freeways themselves, the fast-food joints, the peeling
plastic facades, the great fire scar in Topanga, the houses
hanging by spider-cables from the hillsides, the occasional
superjet, floating overhead on its way into LAX--everything
lit him up. It was wonderland to him. None of those dull
old cathedrals and palazzi and marble fountains here--no,
everything here was brighter and larger and glitzier than
life, and he loved it. The only part he couldn't handle
was the beach at Topanga. By the time we got there the sun
was out and so were the sunbathers, and the sight of eight
thousand naked bodies cavorting on the damp sand almost
gave him a stroke. "What is this?" he demanded. "The market
for slaves? The pleasure house of the king?"
"Blood pressure rising
fast," Nella Brandon said softly, eyeing her wrist-monitors.
"Adrenalin levels going up. Shall I cool him out?"
I shook my head.
"Slavery is unlawful,"
I told him. "There is no king. These are ordinary citizens
amusing themselves."
"Nudo! Assolutamente
nudo!"
"We long ago outgrew
feeling ashamed of our bodies," I said. "The laws allow
us to go nude in places like this."
"Straordinario!
Incredibile!" He gaped in total astonishment. Then he
erupted with questions, a torrent of Italian first, his
English returning only with an effort. Did husbands allow
their wives to come here? Did fathers permit daughters?
Were there rapes on the beach? Duels? If the body had lost
its mystery, how did sexual desire survive? If a man somehow
did become excited, was it shameful to let it show? And
on and on and on, until I had to signal Nella to give him
a mild needle. Calmer now, Gianni digested the notion of
pass public nudity in a more reflective way, but it had
amazed him more than Beethoven, that was plain.
We let him stare for
another ten minutes. As we started to return to the car,
Gianni pointed to a lush brunette trudging along by the
tide-pools and said, "I want her. Get her."
"Gianni, we can't do that!"
"You think I am eunuch? You
think I can see these bodies and not remember breasts in
my hands, tongue touching tongue?" He caught my wrist. "Get
her for me."
"Not yet. You aren't
well enough yet. And we can't just get her for you.
Things aren't done that way here."
"She goes naked. She
belongs to anyone."
"No," I said.. "You
still don't really understand, do you?" I nodded to Nella
Brandon. She gave him another needle. We drove on, and he
subsided. Soon we came to the barrier marking where the
coast road had fallen into the sea, and we swung inland
through the place where Santa Monica had been. I explained
about the earthquake and the landslide. Gianni grinned.
"Ah, il terremoto,
you have it here too? A few years ago there was a great
earthquake in Napoli. You have understood? And then they
ask me to write a Mass of Thanksgiving afterward because
not everything is destroyed. It is very famous mass for
a time. You know it? No? You must hear it." He turned and
seized my wrist. With an intensity greater than the brunette
had aroused in him, he said, "I will compose a new famous
mass, yes? I will be very famous again. And I will be rich.
Yes? I was famous and then I was forgotten and then I died
and now I live again and now I will be famous again. And
rich. Yes? Yes?"
Sam Hoaglund looked
over at him and said, "In another couple of weeks, Gianni,
you're going to be the most famous man in the world."
Casually Sam poked
the button turning on the radio. The car was well equipped
for overload and out of the many speakers came the familiar
pulsing tingling sounds of Wilkes Booth John doing Membrane.
The subsonics were terrific. Gianni sat up straight as the
music hit him. "What is that?" he demanded.
"Overload," Sam said.
"Wilkes Booth John."
"Overload? This means
nothing to me. It is a music? Of when?"
"The music of right
now," said Nella Brandon.
As we zoomed along Wilshire Sam keyed in the colors
and lights too, and the whole interior of the car began
to throb and flash and sizzle. Wonderland for Gianni again.
He blinked, he pressed his hands to his cheeks, he shook
his head. "It is like the music of dreams," he said. "The
composer? Who is?"
"Not a composer," said
Sam. "A group. Wilkes Booth John, it calls itself. This
isn't classical music, it's pop. Popular. Pop doesn't have
a composer."
"It makes itself, this
music?"
"No," I said. "The
whole group composes it. And plays it."
"The orchestra. It
is pop and the orchestra composes." He looked lost, as bewildered
as he had been since the moment of his awakening, naked
and frail, in the scoop cage. "Pop. Such strange music.
So simple. It goes over and over again, the same thing,
loud, no shape. Yet I think I like it. Who listens to this
music? Imbecili? Infanti?"
"Everyone," Sam said.
That first outing in Los Angeles not only told us Gianni
could handle exposure to the modern world but also transformed
his life among us in several significant ways. For one thing,
there was no keeping him chaste any longer after Topanga
Beach. He was healthy, he was lusty, he was vigorously heterosexual--an
old biography of him I had seem blamed his ill health and
early demise on "his notorious profligacy"--and we could
hardly go on treating him like a prisoner or a zoo animal.
Sam fixed him up with one of his secretaries, Melissa Burke,
a willing volunteer.
Then, too, Gianni had
been confronted for the first time with the split between
classical and popular music, with the whole modernist cleavage
between high art and lowbrow entertainment. That was new
to him and baffling at first. "This pop," he said,
"it is the music of the peasants?" But gradually he grasped
the idea of simple rhythmic music that everyone listened
to, distinguished from "serious" music that belonged only
to an elite and was played merely on formal occasions. "But
my music," he protested, "it had tunes, people could
whistle it. It was everybody's music." It fascinated him
that composers had abandoned melody and made themselves
inaccessible to most of the people. We told him that something
like that had happened in all of the arts. "You poor crazy
futuruomini," he said gently.
Suddenly he began to
turn himself into a connoisseur of overload groups. We rigged
an imposing unit in his room, and he and Melissa spent hours
plugged in, soaking up the waveforms let loose by Scissors
and Ultrafoam and Wilkes Booth John and the other top bands.
When I asked him how the new symphony was coming along,
he gave me a peculiar look.
He began to make other
little inroads into modern life. Sam and Melissa took him
shopping for clothing on Figueroa Street, and in the cholo
boutiques he acquired a flashy new wardrobe of the latest
Aztec gear to replace the lab clothes he had worn since
his awakening. He had his prematurely gray hair dyed red.
He acquired jewelry that went flash, clang, zzz, and pop
when the mood-actuated sensoria came into play. In a few
days he was utterly transformed: he became the perfect young
Angeleno, slim, dapper, stylish, complete with the slight
foreign accent and exotic grammar.
"Tonight Melissa and
I go to The Quonch," Gianni announced.
"The Quonch," I murmured,
mystified.
"Overload palace,"
Hoaglund explained. "In Pomona. All the big groups play
there."
"We have Philharmonic
tickets tonight," I said feebly.
Gianni's eyes were
implacable. "The Quonch," he said.
So we went to The Quonch. Gianni, Melissa, Sam, Sam's
slice-junkie livewith, Oreo, and I. Gianni and Melissa had
wanted to go alone, but I wasn't having that. I felt a little
like an overprotective mother whose little boy wanted to
try a bit of freebasing. No chaperones, no Quonch, I said.
The Quonch was a gigantic geodesic dome in Pomona Downlevel,
far underground. The stage whirled on antigrav gyros, the
ceiling was a mist of floating speakers, the seats had pluggie
intensifiers, and the audience, median age about fourteen,
was sliced out of its mind. The groups performing that night
were Thug, Holy Ghosts, Shining Orgasm Revival and Ultrafoam.
For this I had spent untold multi-kilogelt to bring the
composer of the Stabat Mater and La Serva Padrona
back to life? The kids screamed, the great hall filled
with dense, tangible, oppressive sound, colors and lights
throbbed and pulsed, minds were blown. In the midst of the
madness sat Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), graduate
of the Conservatorio dei Poveri, organist of the royal chapel
at Naples, maestro di capella to the Prince of Stigliano--plugged
in, turned on, radiant, ecstatic, transcendent.
Whatever else The Quonch
may have been, it didn't seem dangerous, so the next night
I let Gianni go there just with Melissa. And the next. It
was healthy for both of us to let him move out on his own
a little. But I was starting to worry. It wouldn't be long
until we broke the news to the public that we had a genuine
eighteenth-century genius among us. But where were the new
symphonies? Where were the heaven-sent sonatas? He wasn't
producing anything visible. He was just doing a lot of overload.
I hadn't brought him back here to be a member of the audience,
especially that audience.
"Relax," Sam Hoaglund
said. "He's going through a phase. He's dazzled by the novelty
of everything, and also he's having fun for maybe the first
time in his life. But sooner or later he'll get back to
composing. Nobody steps out of character forever. The real
Pergolesi will take control."
Then Gianni disappeared.
Came the frantic call
at three in the afternoon on a crazy hot Saturday with Santa
Anas blowing and a fire raging in Tujunga. Dr. Brandon had
gone to Gianni's room to give him his regular checkup, and
no Gianni. I went whistling across town from my house near
the beach. Hoaglund, who had come running in from Santa
Barbara, was there already. "I phoned Melissa," he said.
"He's not with her. But she's got a theory."
"Tell."
"They've been going
backstage the last few nights. He's met some of the kids
from Ultrafoam and one of the other groups. She figures
he's off jamming with them."
"If that's all, then
hallelujah. But how do we track him?"
"She's getting addresses.
We're making calls. Quit worrying, Dave."
Easy to say. I imagined
him held for ransom in some East L.A. dive. I imagined swaggering
machos sending me his fingers, one day, waiting for fifty
megabucks' payoff. I paced for half a dreadful hour, grabbing
up phones as if they were magic wands, and then came word
that they had found him working out with Shining Orgasm
Revival in a studio in West Covina. We were there in half
the legal time and to hell with the California Highway Patrol.
The place was a miniature
Quonch, electronic gear everywhere, the special apparatus
of overload rigged up, and Gianni sitting in the midst of
six practically naked young uglies whose bodies were draped
with readout tape and sonic gadgetry. So was his. He looked
blissful and sweaty. "It is so beautiful, this music," he
sighed when I collared him. "It is the music of my second
birth. I love it beyond everything."
"Bach," I said. "Beethoven.
Mozart."
"This is other. This
is miracle. The total effect--the surround, the engulf--"
"Gianni, don't ever
go off again without telling someone."
"You were afraid?"
"We have a major investment
in you. We don't want you getting hurt or into trouble or
--"
"Am I a child?"
"There are dangers
in this city that you couldn't possibly understand yet.
You want to jam with these musicians, jam with them, but
don't just disappear. Understood?"
He nodded.
Then he said, "We will
not hold the press conference for a while, I am learning
this music. I will make my debut next month, maybe. If we
can get booking at The Quonch as main attraction."
"This is what you want
to be? An overload star?"
"Music is music."
"And you are Giovanni
Battista Pergo--" An awful thought struck me. I looked sidewise
at Shining Orgasm Revival. "Gianni, you didn't tell them
who you--"
"No. I am still secret."
"Thank God." I put
my hand on his arm. "Look, if this stuff amuses you, listen
to it, play it, do what you want. But the Lord gave you
a genius for real music."
"This is real music."
"Complex music. Serious
music."
"I starved to death
composing that music."
"You were ahead of
your time. You wouldn't starve now. You will have a tremendous
audience for your music."
"Because I am a freak, yes. And in two months I am forgotten
again. Grazie, no, Dave. No more sonatas. No more
cantatas. Is not the music of this world. I give myself
to overload."
"I forbid it, Gianni."
He glared. I saw something
steely behind his delicate and foppish exterior.
"You do not own me,
Dr. Leavis."
"I gave you life."
"So did my father and
mother. They didn't own me either."
"Please, Gianni. Let's
not fight. I'm only begging you not to turn your back on
your genius, not to renounce the gift God gave you for--"
"I renounce nothing.
I merely transform." He leaned up and put his nose almost
against mine. "Let me free. I will not be a court composer
for you. I will not give you masses and symphonies. No one
wants such things today, not new ones, only a few people
who want the old ones. Not good enough. I want to be famous,
capisce? I want to be rich. Did you think I'd live
the rest of my life as a curiosity, a museum piece? Or that
I would learn to write the kind of noise they call modern
music? Fame is what I want. I died poor and hungry, the
books say. You die poor and hungry and find out what
it is like, and then talk to me about writing cantatas.
I will never be poor again." He laughed. "Next year, after
I am revealed to the world, I will start my own overload
group. We will wear wigs, eighteenth-century clothes, everything.
We will call ourselves Pergolesi. All right? All right,
Dave?"
He insisted on working
out with Shining Orgasm Revival every afternoon. Okay. He
went to overload concerts just about every night. Okay.
He talked about going on stage next month. Even that was
okay. He did no composing, stopped listening to any music
but overload. Okay. He is going through a phase, Sam Hoaglund
had said. Okay. You do not own me, Gianni had said.
Okay. Okay.
I let him have his
way. I asked him who his overload playmates thought he was,
why they had let him join the group so readily. "I say I
am rich Italian playboy," he replied. "I give them the old
charm, you understand? Remember I am accustomed to winning
the favors of kings, princes, cardinals. It is how we musicians
earned our living. I charm them, they listen to me play,
they see right away I am genius. The rest is simple. I will
be very rich."
About three weeks into
Gianni's overload phase, Nella Brandon came to me and said,
"Dave, he's doing slice."
I don't know why I was surprised. I was.
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. "It's showing
up in his blood, his urine, his metabolic charts. He probably
does it every time he goes to play with that band. He's
losing weight, corpuscle formation dropping off, resistance
weakening. You've got to talk to him."
I went to him and said,
"Gianni, I've stopped giving a damn what kind of music you
write, but when it comes to drugs, I draw the line. You're
still not completely sound physically. Remember, you were
at the edge of death just a few months ago, body-time. I
don't want you killing yourself."
"You do not own me."
Again, sullenly.
"I have some claim
on you. I want you to go on living."
"Slice will not kill
me."
"It's killed plenty
already."
"Not Pergolesi!" he
snapped. Then he smiled, too my hand, gave me the full treatment.
"Dave, Dave, you listen. I die once. I am not interested
in an encore. But the slice, it is essential. Do you know?
It divides one moment from the next. You have taken it?
No? Then you cannot understand. It puts spaces in time.
It allows me to comprehend the most intricate rhythms, because
with slice there is time for everything, the world slows
down, the mind accelerates. Capisce? I need it for
my music."
"You managed to write
the Stabat Mater without slice."
"Different music. For
this, I need it." He patted my hand. "You do not worry,
eh? I look after myself."
What could I say? I
grumbled, I muttered, I shrugged. I told Nella to keep a
very close eye on his readouts. I told Melissa to spend
as much time as possible with him and keep him off the drug
if she could manage it.
At the end of the month,
Gianni announced he would make his debut at The Quonch on
the following Saturday. A big bill--five overload bands,
Shining Orgasm Revival playing fourth, with Wilkes Booth
John, no less, as the big group of the night. The kids in
the audience would skull out completely if they knew that
one of the Orgasms was three hundred years old, but of course
they weren't going to find that out, so they'd just figure
he was a new side-man and pay no attention. Later on Gianni
would declare himself to be Pergolesi. He and Sam were already
working on the altered PR program. I felt left out, off
on another track. But it was beyond my control. Gianni now
was like a force of nature, a hurricane of a man, frail
and wan though he might be.
We all went to The
Quonch for Gianni's overload debut.
There we sat, a dozen
or more alleged adults, in that mob of screaming kids. Fumes,
lights, colors, the buzzing of gadgetized clothes and jewels,
people passing out, people coupling in the aisles, the whole
crazy bit, like Babylon right before the end, and we sat
through it. Kids selling slice, dope, coke, you name it,
slipped among us. I wasn't buying but I think some of my
people were. I closed my eyes and let it all wash over me,
the rhythms and subliminals and ultrasonics of one group
after another, Toad Star, then Bubblemilk, then Holy Ghosts,
though I couldn't tell one from the next, and finally, after
many hours, Shining Orgasm Revival was supposed to go on
for its set.
A long intermission
dragged on and on. And on.
The kids, zonked and
crazed, didn't mind at first. But after maybe half an hour
they began to boo and throw things and pound on the walls.
I looked at Sam, Sam looked at me, Nella Brandon murmured
little worried things.
Then Melissa appeared
from somewhere, tugged at my arm and whispered, "Dr. Leavis,
you'd better come backstage. Mr. Hoaglund. Dr. Brandon."
They say that if you
fear the worst, you keep the worst at bay. As we made our
way through the bowels of The Quonch to the performers'
territory, I imagined Gianni sprawled backstage, wired with
full gear, eyes rigid, tongue sticking out--dead of a slice
overdose. And all our fabulous project ruined in a crazy
moment. So we went backstage and there were the members
of Shining Orgasm Revival running in circles and a cluster
of Quonch personnel conferring urgently, and kids in full
war-paint peering in the back way and trying to get through
the cordon. And there was Gianni, wired with full overload
gear, sprawled on the floor, shirtless, skin shiny with
sweat, mottled with dull purplish spots, eyes rigid, tongue
sticking out. Nella Brandon pushed everyone away and dropped
down beside him. One of the Orgasms said to no one in particular,
"He was real nervous, man, he kept slicing off more and
more, we couldn't stop him, you know--"
Nella looked up at
me. Her face was bleak.
"OD?" I said.
She nodded. She had the snout of an ultrahypo against
Gianni's limp arm and she was giving him some kind of shot
to try to bring him around. But even in A.D. 2008, dead
is dead is dead.
It was Melissa who said afterward through tears, "It was
his karma to die young, don't you see? If he couldn't die
in 1736, he was going to die fast here. He had no choice."
And I thought of the
biography that had said of him long ago, "His ill health
was probably due to his notorious profligacy." And I heard
Sam Hoaglund's voice in my mind saying, "Nobody steps out
of character forever. The real Pergolesi will take control."
Yes. Gianni had always been on a collision course with death,
I saw now; by scooping him from his own era we had only
delayed things a few months. Self-destructive is as self-destructive
does, and a change of scenery doesn't alter the case.
If that is so--if,
as Melissa says, karma governs all--should we bother to
try again? Do we reach into yesterday's yesterday for some
other young genius dead too soon, Poe or Rimbaud or Caravaggio
or Keats, and give him the second chance we had hoped to
give Gianni? And watch him recapitulate his destiny, going
down a second time? Mozart, as Sam had once suggested? Benvenuto
Cellini? Our net is wide and deep. All of the past is ours.
But if we bring back another, and he willfully and heedlessly
sends himself down the same old karmic chute, what have
we gained, what have we achieved, what have we done to ourselves
and to him? I think of Gianni, looking to be rich and famous
at last, lying purpled on that floor. Would Shelley drown
again? Would Van Gogh cut off the other ear before our eyes?
Perhaps someone more
mature would be safer, eh? El Greco, Cervantes, Shakespeare?
But then we might behold Shakespeare signing up in Hollywood,
El Greco operating out of some trendy gallery, Cervantes
sitting down with his agent to figure tax shelter angles.
Yes? No. I look at the scoop. The scoop looks at me. It
is very very late to consider these matters, my friends.
Years of our lives consumed, billions of dollars spent,
the seals of time ripped open, a young genius's strange
odyssey ending on the floor backstage at The Quonch, and
for what, for what, for what? We can't simply abandon the
project now, can we?
Can we?
I look at the scoop. The
scoop looks at me.
