Silverberg Robert

Gianni

Gianni

by Robert Silverberg

“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 meanfull 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.

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Silverberg Robert Gianni

Gianni by Robert Silverberg