Answer the phone, just this once! Damn his contrarian, geniusy refusal to have a cell phone like everyone else. Damn his unwillingness to look at e-mail more than once a week. Damn his lack of concern about his useless, broken fax machine. Answer, please, answer.

Rebecca was usually tolerant and understanding of George’s eccentricities, as was he when it came to her very different (and admittedly far less imposing) quirks. Right now she wished he lived in a somewhat more predictable fashion. She wished she could depend on him a bit more. She wished, in other words, that he were just a little bit more of a grown-up. It’s not that he was unreliable or untrustworthy. He was possibly the most honest and straightforward person she had ever met, in fact. It was just that he could be anywhere, doing anything on this beautiful September afternoon, inevitably in pursuit of some new material for his music. Maybe he was sitting right there working beside the answering machine, inspired by the clicking, like an autistic child mesmerized by a dust mote, making more of the exquisite music that had won prizes and made his a household name.

Genius flowed from George Botkin, or rather, everything in the world somehow flowed through him and came out transmuted into sounds that were unlike any music, unlike anything anyone had ever made on earth before. If what Flaubert said is true—that “language is like a cracked kettle on which we hammer crude rhythms to make bears dance, while we long with our music to move the stars,” then George Botkin’s music was what all of humankind longed for with every spoken word.

Why did his music stir people so powerfully? Why did it have such universal appeal? What made it work? Everyone recognized that George Botkin’s music was overwhelmingly beautiful, but why? Many critics and scholars had pondered these questions for years. Writing in the Times, a certain critic famously began his review of the historic debut of the Protein Rhapsodies with the words, “Why do we admire a sunrise? Is truth beauty, or beauty truth?” George Botkin’s music was called, by various critics at various times, lucid, transparent, muscular, vividly distinct, confoundingly jazzy yet classical, strangely intimate, deceptively accessible, formally brilliant, outrageously melodic, and profoundly odious (a minority viewpoint).

There was something childlike in George Botkin’s energy and creativity. Rebecca secretly thought he resembled his music, the energy and charm of it. Because George was confident and believed in his talent, there were people who thought him self-centered. But this wasn’t really fair. He simply knew what he could do.

George played the piano very naturally starting at the age of five. His musical memory was impressive, and from a young age he could reproduce almost anything he heard—to the consternation of his parents, who weren’t always entertained by his renderings on the piano of the NBC chime, a truck downshifting on a hill, the piercing laugh of the next-door neighbor, or gulls screaming at a garbage dump. His strange, perpetual singing made him an agreeable if noisy child. As he grew older, he was disappointed that other children didn’t have their own songs, though they were often happy to copy his. On the first day of school, proud to be a first grader at last, George spontaneously sang a joyful song about the smell of new chalk, to everyone’s laughter. He learned to keep his music private for several years after that. Smells and colors, street lights, words, clouds, the thud of the newspaper hitting the front porch, the lumpy seams in the toes of his socks, everything and anything always stirred musical patterns in his mind. How sad that most other people didn’t seem to have their own music at all.