The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  He made me promise again to tell Ruth, first thing in the morning. I told him to go to the hospital and have his ear looked at as soon as we hung up. And to call me when he’d spoken with a doctor.

  “Doctor, Joey? They’re all tied up. Real things. Death and such. Not some foreigner’s hurt ear.” He gasped for air. From the far end of a bad connection, he went into a suffocation fit. The one that all his youthful panic attacks had been all along remembering.

  I talked him down, as I had done so many earlier times. I walked him around his hotel room. And then he was calm again, wanting to talk on into the night. I kept telling him to call for help, but he didn’t want to hang up on me. “Tell her, Joey. Tell her I’ve been there. Tell her nobody’s done. Everyone’s going somewhere else. Next time. Next time.”

  I got him off the phone at last. “A doctor, Jonah. Your ear.” I tried to sleep but couldn’t. In my waking dreams, the shells that held us encased cracked open like chrysalises, and the fluid that was us flowed out, like reverse rain, back up into the air.

  Hans Lauscher found him the next morning, a little after ten o’clock, when Jonah failed to show up for breakfast. He was stretched along the bed, still dressed, on top of the bedspread. The stream of dried blood down one side of his pillow made Hans think he’d hemorrhaged. But my brother had simply stopped breathing. The television in his hotel room was on, tuned to the local news.

  REQUIEM

  We buried Jonah in Philadelphia, in the family cemetery. A month later, Ruth and I flew out to perform at his European memorial. The service was held in Brussels, in half a dozen languages, all of them sung. There was no eulogy, no remembrance but music. Dozens of people sang, people Jonah had performed with throughout the last years of his life. Our piece was the most recent, and surely the rockiest. Ruth sang “Bist du bei mir,” that little song of Bach’s that Bach never wrote:

  If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

  to my death and to my rest.

  Ah, how pleasant would my end be,

  with your dear hands pressing

  shut my faithful eyes!

  We sounded as if we hadn’t made music since our mother’s funeral. Like we were music’s shaky discoverers, the first to have stumbled across the form. Like we might never make it back to tonic. Like tonic was going someplace else, always a moving do. Like everyone would have to own every song, before the end. Ruth sang as she remembered him, no part of us barred. And he was in her voice.

  It was the first time my sister had ever been abroad. She stood at the top of the Kunstberg, the Mont des Arts, crying over how every curbside banality struck her with wonder. For a long time, she couldn’t place the feeling that gripped her. Then, in the middle of the Grande Place, we overheard a light-skinned, angular-featured black couple marveling over the guildhalls in Portuguese.

  “Nobody here has the slightest idea where I come from. Nobody cares how I got here. They’re not even trying to guess. I could be anyone.” The utter freedom terrified her. “We have to get back to America, Joey.” Our hellish utopia, that dream of time. The thing the future was invented for, to break and remake.

  “How far is Germany?” I told her, and she shook her head, unsteady. “Next time.”

  Little Robert identified himself to every stranger by his African name. It thrilled him to be asked if he came from the Congo. By the time we flew back to the Bay, he was chattering at the flight attendants in both French and Flemish.

  If our father was right, time doesn’t flow, but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. But then, in such a world, who we are must be all things.

  So I stand on the edge of the reflecting pool with my two nephews. We’ve left their mother, over her vocal objections, back at the Smithsonian. “I don’t see why I can’t just hang out there in the crowd, next to you. I won’t say a word.”

  “We been over this a million times,” her eldest says again. “You promised me, before we started.”

  “How much unity can this thing proclaim if the women have to stay home?”

  “The women don’t have to stay home. The women get to go anyplace in our nation’s capital they want. Why don’t you go visit Howard? Didn’t your Papap …”

  “Maya Angelou’s going to be there. She’s a woman. She’s going to give a speech.”

  “Mama. You promised. Just … give us this?”

  So it’s just we three men, there on the Mall. I’m going to be discovered and sent home. At any moment, my nephews will make me go wait for them, back in the hotel room.

  Kwame stands in this runaway crowd, scared by its magnificence. A mild October, but he’s shaking. He’s wobbly on his pins, like a bamboo beach house in a heavy tide. This is his doing, his atonement, his escape plan, and he stakes himself on it working. Still, he’s staggered by how many other stakeholders have turned out for the day.

  He has managed to stay in the free world for a full two years. One speeding ticket, one apartment eviction, but no more slavery. “It’s over,” he tells me. “That me is dead.” He’s been out for two years, and in that time he has worked four jobs and played with three different new bands. The jobs have gotten harder and the music a shade more melodic. Two months ago, he became a welder. When he landed it, he told me, “I’m staying with this one for a while, Uncle JoJo.” I told him I was sure he would.

  He stands in the milling crowd, talking to a perfect stranger, a bronze man almost my age in a University of Arizona sweatshirt, with a son years younger than Robert. “Not sure I’m crazy about the man,” the stranger says, apologetic.

  “Nobody’s crazy about the man,” Kwame reassures him. “The man’s a hatemonger. But this whole thing’s bigger than the man.”

  “Did you know Farrakhan is a trained concert violinist?” I contribute this, even at the risk of irritating Kwame. A put-down and tribute. Remembering all passing things.

  “Get out of here. No shit?” Both men are amused—the crediting and discrediting.

  “How do you play a violin through a bow tie that size?” It’s the last thing our unknown friend says before the crowd swallows him.

  Kwame watches the man disappear, holding his son’s hand. Delinquent, remembering, my nephew calls out a panicked “Robert!”

  “Ode,” comes the angry voice from two yards behind him.

  “Whatever, brother. You stay close, you hear me?”

  “Hear you,” the sullen eleven-year-old answers. But only because his brother rules.

  Kwame is the boy’s god, and the older boy can do nothing about it. When Kwame went to prison, little Robert was inventing complex number games, whole systems of calculation. When he returned, his little brother wanted nothing more than to follow him down to damnation. “School’s for fools,” the child told him. Resolute, proud, and as shrewd as the god he modeled on. “Fools and house niggers.”

  “Who told you that? You give this field nigger the man’s address. I’m a have a little parlay with him.”

  But the boy read his brother’s every word as an initiation rite, a test of his downness. “You playing me. You like school so much, how come you’re not still in it?” You like caveboys so much, how come you got a record?

  “Don’t you close that book, bean boy. Stop being so cat. Your father. Your father studied math, Beanie. Don’t you know that?” And your grandfather. Where do you think you got it from?

  To this, his little brother only shrugged. The whole ascendant, world hip-hop culture exposed all the million futilities of such Tomming. That was then. This is now.

  “Beanie. You’re my ticket onward. Don’t you think big no more?”

  Ode only smiled, seeing through the psych-out. There was nothing bigger, in his eyes. Nothing bigger than his ex-con brother.

  This is my oldest nephew’s penance, the reason we’re here. He wouldn’t have made us fly out to Washington, wouldn’t even have crossed the street for something so slight as self-affirmation, if not for his brother. Kwame knows w
hat self is his. We’re here only for Robert, who every two minutes threatens to disappear into the crowd in search of the real action.

  I turn around and stare down the length of the reflecting pond to the steps of the memorial. The woman who sang on those steps because she could not sing inside has died, two years ago, in April, just as Kwame left prison. An alto singing scraps of Donizetti and Schubert changed my nephews’ lives. No, that makes no sense. Her impromptu concert did not change them. It made them.

  Kwame follows my glance back along the length of the Mall. But he can’t see the ghost. The sight of the Lincoln Memorial twists my nephew’s features. “Man’s a bald-faced nigger-hater. Why we still worship him? Freed the slaves? Mother didn’t free nothing.”

  “We’ll see,” I say. Kwame just stares at me, as if I’ve finally gone over. I shake his shoulder. “Caught between a racist cracker and an anti-Semite minister of God. Between a piece of marble and one very hard place. What’s a brother to do?”

  The brothers to our right throw us a look. Those in front of us turn around, smiling.

  The podium comes to life and the signifying begins. At any moment, Kwame and Robert will ask to move up front, just a little, without me. Some tacit understanding: Nothing personal, Uncle bro, but this whole healing thing isn’t really about you. But in this life, even as I stiffen for it, the request never comes.

  The papers will count a grudging couple of hundred thousand. But this is a million if it’s a man. Tens of millions; whole lifetimes of lives. I’ve never stood in a gathering so large. I expected claustrophobia, agoraphobia, the choke of old stage fright. I feel only an ocean of time. Things reaching themselves. The feeling grows, strange and magnificent and tainted as anything human, only many times bigger.

  I can’t say what my nephews see. Their faces show only thrill. A million is nothing to them. Nothing alongside the size of their transmitted world, the giant screens, the monster concerts in international surround sound, the global transports that their world daily broadcasts. But maybe they’re right where I am, every bit as awed by this millionfold makeshift fix, this pressing to redeem. Maybe they feel it, too, how likeness has it all over difference, for sheer terror. If there’s no mix, there’s no move. This is what the million-man minister means, despite what he thinks he’s saying. Who is enough, in being like himself? Until we come from everyplace we’ve been, we won’t get everywhere we’re going.

  Kwame cranes to see the podium and make out the speakers. Robert—Ode—wasted by all the talk, finds a friend his age. They size each other up and move into the aisle to teach each other moves. The celebrities, songwriters, and poets take their turns, then give way to the minister. He plays the crowd. He brings out Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. He takes a shot at Lincoln, at the Founding Fathers, and Kwame has to cheer him. He says how all prophets are flawed. He says how we are more divided now than the last time we all stood here. He starts to ramble, to invoke weird numerologies. But all the numbers come down to two. A long division.

  “So, we stand here today at this historic moment.” The sound fans out, tiny and metallic, lost in the endless space it must fill. “We are standing in the place of those who couldn’t make it here today. We are standing on the blood of our ancestors.”

  People on all sides of us call out names. Some massive church. My nephews know the drill anyway, by another path. “Robert Rider,” Kwame calls. His voice breaks, not because he remembers, but because he can’t. “Delia Daley,” he adds. He might go further back.

  “We are standing on the blood of those who died in the Middle Passage … in the fratricidal conflict …”

  Those around us name their dead, and because he feels me standing there, my nephew adds, “Jonah Strom.”

  The notion’s so crazy I have to laugh. Transformed by death: my brother’s operatic debut at last. Then I hear little Robert bragging to his newfound friend, “My uncle died in the Los Angeles riot.” And I suppose, in some world, he did. His last performance on that long, self-singing vita.

  “Toward a more perfect union.” The minister does not know whereof he speaks. Union will undo his every call to allegiance, if allegiance doesn’t do us all in first. I’m standing in this million-man mass, a billion miles away, grinning like the idiot my brother knew I was. An old German Jew proved it to me, lifetimes ago: Mixing shows us which way time runs. I have seen the future, and it is mongrel.

  Kwame chooses that moment to whisper to me. “The man’s a chickenhead. Thing’s fuckin’ obvious to anyone who’s clocking. Only one place we can go. Everybody’s going to be a few drops everything. What the fuck? I say let’s just go do it and get it done with.”

  I shake my head and ask him. “Where do you think you got that from?”

  The minister is going for a record-breaker. But he has the crowd to help him. We wave our hands in the air. We give fistfuls of money. We embrace total strangers. We sing. Then the classically trained violinist tells us, “Go home. Go back home to work out this a-tone-ment … Go back home transformed.” We end like every other thwarted, glorious transformation in the past, and all the pasts to come. Home: the one place we have to go back to, when there’s no place left to go.

  But our boy has other destinations, farther afield. The speeches break up and the crowd folds into itself, embracing. Kwame hugs me to him, an awkward promise. We part from the clinch embarrassed, and look around for Robert. But he’s vanished. We see the friend he was hanging with, but the boy has no idea where Robert has gone. Kwame shakes him, almost yelling, and the frightened child starts to cry.

  My nephew descends into his worst recurrent nightmare. And mine. This is his doing. He’s brought his brother here, keeper-style, thinking to undo his own influence. He waved off all Ruth’s warnings. He promised her a thousand times: “Nothing can go wrong.” He’s kept the boy on the shortest of leashes, all through this mammoth crowd. And now, in the first dropped glance, we’ve lost the child, as if he were just waiting for the chance to break free.

  Kwame is frantic. He runs in all directions at once, toward any half-sized figure, shoving men aside to get past. I try at first to keep up with him. But then I stop short, a sense of peace coming over me, so great that I think it will be fatal. I know where Robert has gone. I could tell Kwame. I have the whole piece, the whole song cycle there, intact, in front of my sight-singing eyes. The piece I’ve been writing, the one that’s been writing me since before my own beginning. The anthem for this country in me, fighting to be born.

  I try to tell my nephew, but I can’t. “Don’t panic,” I say. “Let’s stay close by. He’s around here somewhere.” In fact, I know exactly how close the lost boy is. As close as a promise to a long-forgotten friend. As close as the trace of tune turning up in me at last, begging me to compose it.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Kwame shouts. “I got to think.” My nephew can’t even hear himself. He runs through all the options that cloud his desperate brain. He plays out every scenario, sure that only the worst can ever happen, finally, to the likes of us. He’s lost his brother in a million dispersing men. This is his final punishment, for all he’s done and left undone.

  And then his brother emerges from the underworld, there in front of us. He’s jogging toward us from up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He waves smartly, as if he’s only been away on a prearranged outing, no more than five minutes, max. In truth, it can’t have been much longer. For Kwame, it’s been another jail sentence. Life.

  Relief spills over into rage. “Where the fuck have you been, Bean? What are you trying to do to me?” Strung out, fatherless. At the mercy of every past. He’d slap the boy if I weren’t there.

  The look of bewildered adventure falls from Robert’s face. He stares out on the place he’s come back to. He shrugs and folds up his arms like shields in front of his chest. “Nowhere. Just out talking. Meeting people.” The question that was bursting in him dies unasked. Kwame, too, his head sunk down, hears all the promises he has just made mocking him,
as vain as any music.

  “Well?” Ruth greets us, ready for all the stories. “How do you feel? Was it amazing?”

  All three of us keep silent, each boy for his own reasons.

  “Come on. Tell me. What did they say? Was it everything you … ?”

  “Ruth,” I warn.

  Her eldest puts his chin on the crown of his mother’s head and cries.

  Not until that long flight back across the continent does Ode ask. And then, not us, but his mother. It’s dusk when we get to the airport, and night for the length of the flight. We rise up over the layer of cloud, nothing above us but darkness. Kwame, across the aisle from me, is writing a song about the march. He needs to redeem it. The song is all in his head, committed to memory. He hands me the phones for his disc player. “Ay yo trip. New L.A. crew. Check out the bomb bass line.”

  I place it in two notes. “Gregorian cantus firmus.” A Credo already a millennium old by the time Bach used it.

  “No shit?” His eyes glint, fishing for me. “Motherfucker makes a def sample.” He takes the phones back, slaps his thighs in a haunted, broken rhythm. The day’s panic is already just a memory. All notes are changing again. “Me and my crew, we got to get jumpin’.”

  This, too, is forever true. “Mine, too,” I tell him. My piece is inside me, ready for writing down—the same piece that has long ago written me. My crew is inside me, jumping at last. And the first jump they make will be, as ever, back.