The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica

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152 22 Mikala sat at her keyboard and allowed herself a Bach riff. If she couldn’t write, at least she could play. The keyboard felt especially silky today, her hands loose and fluid, and she played Bach’s C minor Prelude with her whole body. To be perched in a glass room over the South Pole, warmed by the sun pouring in the windows, letting her fingers run free, was lovely. She closed her eyes as she played and imagined what it would have been like to have composed that herself. Did the notes flow, all in a stream, from his heart to his fingertips, and he said Aha? Or did he write each note separately, laboriously, dragging melody from his musical core, bit by bit, until one day there was a score? At Juilliard, her fellow students always seemed so full of purpose as they described the ways in which they figured out the time, colors, dynamics, pitches, and orchestrations of their compositions . Back then, she’d had to fight the stigma of Redwood Grove, of being a nature girl, as if the only music she had ever heard was birdsong and snow falling off branches. She’d never claimed to be mystical. Yet even when she got the highest scores on music theory tests, even though she could name the composer and performers of just about any classical piece she heard, she’d been aware of a certain distrust toward her methods, which weren’t so much unorthodox as nonexistent. Each piece she composed came to her in a different way. Of course after her post-graduate work had been so successfully performed and recorded, fewer people voiced their misgivings about how she came to her music. But she’d never been able to shake the feeling that she didn’t really know how to compose, that each piece of music she happened to write was a gift, maybe her last one. This had never felt more true than now. It was all so confusing. As a trained musician, Mikala knew that much of what Andy had taught her was goofy, but still she longed to recapture that innocence. Because it had been meaningful , the way he had her listening to the layers of wind tearing through the forest, one along the ground, hushed and mellow, another through the canopy, complicated and loud, and a third freely over the tops of the trees, flying at a high pitch. He would hold a hand up at the sound of the first drops of rain on their tin roof and say, “Shh. Listen.” He would tell her that the wind and rain were the Great Mother’s music. As a child, this worldview was utterly magical. She, Pauline, and Andy would sit with mugs of fragrant green tea and listen. They still did, when she was home. She felt guilty when she found herself discounting Andy’s lessons . He and Pauline had made so many sacrifices for her. The Redwood Grove community had split up not once but twice because of Mikala. True, the first time, when Marcus had the FBI swarming all over the property, she was still in the womb. But the second time, when Andy insisted on the special piano teacher in San Francisco, she was eight years old. The collective argued for three months about whether anyone deserved a bigger share of the resources just because of an alleged greater natural gift. The con- flict ended with a group of five adults and four children leaving Redwood Grove. The remaining members agreed to pay for Mikala ’s music lessons as well as season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony. They also bought an old car to accommodate these excursions. Even though the adults, and some of the other children, took turns accompanying her to the concerts, and even though these outings became favorite bartering commodities in the commune’s economy, Mikala felt as if she still owed the community for the years of privilege they’d afforded her. Sarah used to get so angry at Mikala’s feelings of guilt and always argued that she’d more than 153 paid them back through hundreds of free concerts and years of free piano lessons for anyone who wanted them. Still. There was the very fact of her birth, which caused the necessity of sheltering Marcus’s guilt, which in turn put the entire...