The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  He can’t have contributed much to this bomb. You can’t turn an atom into twenty thousand tons of TNT on anything so imaginary as time. He’s explained it to her, his accidental expertise, his spin-off ability to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core. Still she can’t see his connection. His colleagues have kept him around—through Columbia, Chicago, New Mexico, all those epic train rides—as nothing but their puzzle-solving, happy mascot. The one who helps others find what they’re after.

  Four months before, he became the least-published member of his department ever to make permanent faculty. His colleagues bent the rules, granting him tenure largely for the one paper he published while still in Europe, the one his friends say will keep his name around for years. She has tried to read it, slipping down its pages as down a glass mountain.

  Then, only two more papers since his arrival, and those got written only because he was bedridden with glandular fever. The American work simply never materialized. The stream of follow-on discoveries exists only in his mind.

  Still, the department has given him security for life, if only for selfish reasons. Even those who believe David’s own lifework will forever come to nothing have never profited more from any other colleague. First, there are the students. The shy ones, the ones with no English, even when it’s their native tongue. The ones who go out in public as if climbing the scaffold. The ones who wear the same white short-sleeved shirts and cotton pants, even in the dead of winter. They adore the man and crowd his lectures. They’d lay down their lives for him. Already they land sterling jobs—Stanford, Michigan, Cornell—their work fueled by tricks of insight derived from their beloved teacher.

  “What’s your secret?” she asked him once. She with students of her own.

  David shrugged. “The ones without talent can’t be taught. The ones with talent need not to be taught.”

  The department might have kept him on for his teaching alone. But there’s more—far more. He wanders the halls of the building with a fountain pen and a pocket score of Solomon tucked under his arm, waiting for offices to open at the sound of his step and pull him in. Or he’ll sit in the coffee room, scanning his score, humming to himself until some stumped colleague slumps down next to him and bemoans the latest obstinate equation. Then, for the price of a cup of coffee, he leads them to answers, scribbling out the groundwork on a paper napkin. Not that he ever solves the problem. His mastery of any but his own small corner of time is dusty at best. He has no great skill at formulas, although he loves that game of estimation they all call “Fermi problems”: How far does one crow fly in the course of a lifetime? How long would it take to eat all the bowls of cereal made from a hundred-acre cornfield? How many notes did Beethoven write in his life? Whenever he pesters her with such questions, she replies: “Far.” “A heap of days.” “Just enough for us to listen to.”

  But for the price of a cup of coffee, he gives them something invisible. They leave clutching the magic napkin, staring at the scribbles before they fade, sure that they could have seen the way forward themselves, given a little more time. But this way is faster, cleaner, lighter. No one can say exactly what David does. Nothing rigorous. He just displaces them. Moves them around the sealed space until they find the hidden door. He scribbles on the white napkin, relying more on pictures than equations. His colleagues complain that he doesn’t really use reason. They accuse him of jumping ahead in time to that point where the researcher has already solved his problem, then coming back with some rough description of solutions yet to come.

  His pictures are the flattened traces he brings back from later worlds: imps climbing up and down staircases. Snaking queues of moviegoers waiting to enter a theater by two separate doors. Zigzag arrows with heads and tails hooking up in tangled skeins: the experimental, extended notation. Those whose work he helps dislodge must then pester him, needing to know how he always finds, in single lightning flashes, the angle that aligns.

  “You must learn to listen,” he says. If particles, forces, and fields obey the curve that binds the flow of numbers, then they must sound like harmonies in time. “You think with your eyes; this is your problem. No one can see four independent variables mapping out a surface in five or more dimensions. But the tuned ear can hear chords.”

  His colleagues dismiss this talk as mere metaphor. They think he’s hiding something, storing up his secret method until it delivers the one blinding insight he’s after. Or perhaps he’s in it for the endless free cups of coffee.

  Delia, though, believes him, and knows how it is. Her husband hears his way forward. Melodies, intervals, rhythms, durations: the music of the spheres. Others bring him their deadlocks—particles spinning backward, phantom apparitions in two places at once, gravities collapsing on themselves. Even as they describe the hopeless mysteries, her David hears the rich counterpoint coded in the composer’s score. This, she sees, lying in bed watching him undress, is how he helped them build their bomb. He did no real work except to free up the thoughts of men who made the design. All of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and catch.

  Her husband undoes the collar of his shirt and struggles out of its sleeves. The flaps of fabric go slack onto their haphazard hanger. She will turn his closet right again after he leaves for school in the morning. He moves across the room in T-shirt and boxers, this night’s peace in his eyes. The war is over, or it will be soon. Work can begin again, free from nuisance politics, the showdown of power, the assorted evils that he, a secular Jew in love with knowing, would never have chosen to mix in. Life can resume, safe at least, if never again the way it was before such safety. This is her husband, padding over the floorboards to their August bed, across a distance harder to guess than any Fermi problem.

  She wants to ask, Is this what you thought? One cog in the largest engineering project ever. Nothing. She wants to ask him exactly what he did, what subsection of this invention he made possible. But he closes the distance to her before she finds the nerve. He bends his weight onto the bed, and just as every night, their two adjacent hues shock each other into being. His eyes drop to the greater mystery. He puts his hand on her thickened middle, the third life they’ve started there. He says something soft she can’t catch, neither English nor German, but in a language far older than both, an earliest benediction.

  It’s August, too hot for the slightest touch. He rubs her with a little alcohol on a cotton rag that they keep on the bed stand. For a minute, she is cool. “You have not felt sick today?”

  Because she does not lie to him, she says to the road-map ceiling, “A little. But it wasn’t the baby.”

  He shoots her a look. Does he know? Always the same question. And no one can give her an answer that won’t, itself, go forever begging. He looks away from her ripened belly. He swings his feet onto the bed. He lifts the undershirt above his head, bares the chest she can’t quite learn. He lies back on the mattress, his shoulders pressed down into the sheet and his hips lifted, like a wrestler bucking free of a pin. In one smooth motion, he draws his boxers down his legs. A final fish wiggle and he’s naked, his undershorts a soft missile arcing onto the chair. How many nights has she seen him undress? More than the miles a crow lives to fly. How many more will be given to her? Fewer than the notes in a Beethoven allegro.

  She lies in bed, six inches from a man who has helped—what? Begin a new age. Helped his awe-blind friends think the unthinkable and place it squarely into this world. She might ask him, and gain only his confusion. She can come no closer than flush alongside him. Every human a separate race. Each one of us a self no one can enter. How has this man found his way to this bed? How has she? Here they are, a little more than five years on in their marriage, and already there’s no hope of saying. Even less chance of saying where another five years will leave them. She casts herself—her solitary, sole race—forward another five years into this new age. Then fifty more, and further. She sees herself blocked, breaking out, becoming something ne
w. She feels what this unknowable man next to her so often insists: “Everything the laws of the universe do not prohibit must finally happen.”

  He lies naked along her nakedness. He on top of the flat sheet, she half under. She can’t sleep, however hot the night, without some cover. A hundred thousand people gone in one airborne flash, and she needs a sheet to sleep. She, too, wanted this device. She, too, asked him to hurry. An evil large enough to end the larger evil. Now the war is over, and life—whatever they might yet make of it—begins again. Now peace must rise to the horrors war has left. Now the world must become one people. If not one, then billions.

  The one person who is her husband lies back in his own body. He slips his palms behind his neck, elbows protruding into a ship’s prow, his face the figurehead. In profile, he grows strange, another species. Would he have taken on this marriage had he known what the days would bring? Their endless battle just to step out of the house, walk down the block, go shopping. The times they must pretend to be strangers, slight acquaintances, employer and servant. The passive attacks and murmured violence he came to this country to escape. The low-grade war no blinding flash will ever end.

  She should never have let him, knowing what he didn’t. How much she’s dragged him into. How much she’s made impossible. And yet, the children: as inevitable as God. Now that they live, they had to, all along. Her two little men, her JoJo, who could never not be. And this new third life on the way, sleeping in her, soft and round as an Indian mound: already a story that always was. She and this man are here only to ensure these three.

  Her husband turns to her. “What will we do for schooling?”

  He reads her mind, as he has once a day since the mind-reading day they met. She needs no other proof that this war is theirs, the one they were meant for. School will kill them. The daily bruise of their lessons will make grade-standard schoolyard assaults look like ice-cream socials. Her JoJo, like those magazine illusions: paper white against one crowd, lamp black against the other. Already, they belong nowhere. Their oldest has perfect pitch. She’s tested it already: infallible. He seems to be training his brother in the same. They play together, paint, hold their lines in complex rounds. They love themselves, love both their parents, see no shades between. All this will die in school’s brutal curriculum.

  “We could school them at home.” Writing her mind, reading his.

  “We could school them ourselves. You and I, the two put together.”

  “Yes.” She shushes him. “Between the two of us, we can teach them a great deal.”

  He lies back quiet, content in their plans. Maybe that is whiteness, manness. Safe within himself, even on a day like this day. Even with all that has happened to his own family. In a minute, his contentment leads to what it always does. His night to start tonight: He hums a tune. She can’t say what it is. Her mind is not naming yet, but keeps inside the phrase. Something Russian: the steppes; onion domes. A world as far away from hers as this world permits her. And by the time his slow Volga tune comes into its second measure, she’s there with the descant.

  This is how they play, night after night, more regular than sex, and just as warming. One begins; the other harmonizes. Finds some accompaniment, even when she has never heard the tune, when it comes down out of the attic from some musty culture no one would claim to own. The secret’s in the intervals, finding a line half free of the melody, yet already inside it. Music from a single note, set loose to run in unfolding meter.

  Humming in bed: softer than love, so as not to wake their two sleeping children. This third, as close as her abdomen, won’t mind hearing. She sings, tuning with a man who has as little sense of her past as she has of these haunted Czarist chords. His whole family has vanished, leaving behind no hard fact to mourn. He’s left his handprints on a bomb that takes a hundred thousand lives. It’s August, too hot for the lightest touch. But when they fade and settle down to sleep, no angels watching over them out of the newly stripped skies, his fingers brush against the small of her back and hers reach out behind him to rest, for the next half hour anyway, upon the familiar strangeness of his thigh.

  Her father writes David a long letter, started the day after the second bomb and finished three weeks later. “Dear David.” How their letters always begin: “Dear William.” “Dear David.”

  This incredible news explains everything you couldn’t tell me over the last two years. I’ve come to appreciate what you must have carried inside you, and I thank you for giving me as much of a sense of this as you were able.

  With the rest of America, I give praise to whatever power there is that this chapter in human history is at last over. Believe me, I know how much longer it might have dragged on had science not succeeded in producing this “cosmic bomb.” If nothing else, I thank you for Michael’s sake. But so much else about this development eludes me that I feel I must write you for clarification.

  Delia watches her husband read, blinking the way he does when baffled by words.

  I have no trouble in accepting the first explosion. It seems to me politically necessary, scientifically triumphant, and morally expedient. But this second blast is little more than barbaric. What civilized people could defend such action? We have taken tens of thousands more lives, without even giving that country a chance to absorb the fact of what hit it. And for what? Merely, it seems, to project a final superiority, the same world dominance I thought we were fighting this war to end …

  David Strom gapes at his accuser’s daughter. “I don’t understand. He means I’m to answer for this?” He hands the paper to his wife, who speeds through it. “I am not the one to talk about this bomb. Yes, I’ve done work for the OSRD. So did half of our scientists. More than half! I did a little thinking about neutron absorption. A little later, I helped people to figure a problem surrounding the implosion. I did more work on electronic countermeasures that were never developed than I did for this device.”

  Delia reaches out and grazes her husband’s arm. What can her touch feel like to him? His words relieve her a little, suggest the answers beyond her asking. But here: this letter, a sheet between them. Her father’s question has weighed on her for weeks. And her husband, she sees, has not yet asked it of himself. David takes the page back from her, resuming his penance at the pace of the foreign reader:

  This country must know what it’s in danger of pursuing. Surely it sees how this act will look to history. Would this country have been willing to drop this bomb on Germany, on the country of your beloved Bach and Beethoven? Would we have used it to annihilate a European capital? Or was this mass civilian death meant, from the beginning, to be used only against the darker races?

  Too much for David. “Yes,” he shouts. She has never heard this strain in him. “Surely. Of course I would use this against Germany. Think what Germany has used against everyone who is my relation! We have bombed all the German cities, by daylight and by nighttime. Flattened all the cathedrals. We were racing to make this final bomb before Heisenberg. Alle Deutschen …”

  She nods and cups his elbow. Her father, too, cheered David’s war work, what little David could tell him. The doctor, too, urged all speed to ring in the American future as quickly as possible. But her father was backing a thing invisible to him.

  Know that I don’t blame you, but only need to ask you these few matters. You have seen up close what I can only speculate about. I had in mind a different victor, a different peace, one that would put an end to supremacy forever. We were fighting against fascism, genocide, all the evils of power. Now we’ve leveled two cities of bewildered brown civilians … You may not understand my racializing these blasts. Maybe you’d have to spend a month in my clinic or a year in the neighborhoods near mine to know what I wanted this war to defeat. I’d hoped for something better from this country. If this is how we choose to end this conflict, what hope can we have for peacetime?

  No doubt this extraordinary turn of events looks different to you, David. That’s why I’m writing. If yo
u could show me what I’ve failed to understand, I’d be much obliged.

  Meanwhile, rest assured that I do not consider you to be supremacy, power, barbarity, Europe, history, or anything else but my son-in-law, whom I trust is taking care of my girl and those astonishing grandsons of mine. May Labor Day find you all well. I look forward to hearing back from you. Ever, William.

  David finishes and says nothing. He’s listening; this much she must always love in him. Holding out for a hint of harmony. Waiting to hear the music that will answer for him. “I can get on a train.” His voice is a frayed rope. “Go out to Philadelphia and see him.”

  “Don’t talk crazy,” she tells him, trying for comfort and missing by a wide margin.

  “But I must speak with him. We must try to understand this, face-to-face. How can I do this thing, through writing, when nothing of what I must say is in my language?”

  She takes him in her arms. “The doctor can come pay us a house call if he wants to talk. When was the last time we had him out here? He can come see his boys and have a listen to this little bun in the oven. You men can drink brandy and decide how best to fix civilization’s future.”

  “I don’t drink brandy. You know this.” She has to laugh at the droop in him. But he does not lift at her laughing.

  Her idea is inspired. She floats an open invitation just as Dr. Daley debates whether to attend the big postwar conference on the latest developments in sulfa drugs and antibiotics hosted by Mount Sinai and Columbia. Mixing pleasure and business appeals to the doctor’s efficiency. He arrives at the house on a September evening. Jonah and Joseph are on their feet and flying to the door at his knock. They sing “Papap” at the top of their voices, primed all day for the man’s arrival. Delia peers down the corridor as they bang into each other, each reaching for the handle to let their grandfather in. Joseph still favors his twisted ankle. Or maybe she imagines it. She has her hands full with basting bulb and ladle, but she towels clean in a moment and is off to the door, two steps behind her boys.