Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

For some months, our life had looked increasingly unreal. Now I lost all sense of what real was supposed to look like. Jonah knew. “Here we go. All out in the open now. Straight-up tribalism — everything anyone wants. Something solid to believe in. We’ve been killing one another over imaginary membership for a million years. Why change this late in the day?”

My brother’s take on the human species had never been complicated. Now it was simplifying down to a single perfect point. People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear. He’d seen enough. Jonah turned his back on the whole time frame of earthly politics, and I could no longer call him back. Every passing day only confirmed him. None of us knew how to live here, at the rate of life we were given.

The two of us were running up to an engagement in Storrs, Connecticut, in a borrowed Impala — just a shade too pale to be pulled over and frisked — when Jonah, in the passenger seat, leaned toward me and confided, “I know why they killed him.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“They killed him because he was coming out both barrels against Vietnam.”

“Viet — That’s insane.”

He waved his hand in front of the dash, the whole panorama of interstate. Danger on all sides. “His attacks, last year. ‘America’s the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.’ Sending out blacks to kill yellows. Come on. You show me the person in power who’s going to let some darkie preacher shut down a game like that.”

I checked my speed. “You’re saying the government… The CIA…” I felt like a fool just pronouncing the letters.

Jonah shrugged. He didn’t care which acronym had pulled the trigger. “They need the war, Joey. It’s like housecleaning. Forces of good. Making the world safe. Onward, upward, oneward.”

The skin on my neck turned to scales. He’d gone the way of the country at large. My brother, always grandiose, had taken that last little baby step upstream. But something in me relaxed at his words. If he’d arrived here, too, then there was no conflict. Ruth could come back. I could tell her what had happened to him. We could be together, the three of us again, as we had never been. No enemies, aside from everyone. I’d believe whatever the two of them told me.

I had no strong feelings about the war, except to avoid it. Now this spillover was killing people across 125 cities. On every long car ride now, Jonah spun through the dial, searching for counterculture songs. He’d weave a Dies Irae cantus firmus around the melodies, that same gift for counterpoint that had stunned my parents during our music evenings and made them think they had a duty to send him away to boarding school. The fatal facility that stunted his life. And when the three or four predictable funk or folk guitar chords failed to accommodate the harmonies he spun, he’d curse the tone-deaf arrangements and threaten to firebomb the nearest record store.

The war took us over. Everything became a referendum on it. Love-fests, pot parties, sit-ins, draft-card bonfires, Upper West Side benefits that threw together militant radicals and shameless philanthropists: Everything became the war. My brother sat next to me on an upholstered Chevy seat, weaving counterpoint around the words, “There’s something happening here.” The old order was taking its last twilight gasp; some spiraling hope was breathing its first. My brother hummed along, obbligato, above “Stop, hey: What’s that sound?” But no one could say what that sound was or just what future it was trying to buy.

The war took Phillipa Schuyler. That wonderous little girl, the daughter of hybrid vigor, the celebrated heroine of Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day, whose Five Little Piano Pieces were among the first keyboard works Jonah and I ever learned, died in Da Nang. The musical prodigy burned to death in a helicopter crash in a war zone, on her way back from Hue. Her country had loved the girl for the shortest moment, until she passed through puberty and lost her status as a freak of nature. When precocity failed her, all those whom hybrid vigor threatened with extinction turned the full force of purebred unity against her. She fled to Europe, playing to acclaim from crowned families and heads of state. She toured internationally as Felipa Monterro, racially, nationally, and historically ambiguous. She published five books and wrote articles in several languages. She became a correspondent. And she fell from the sky and died on a bungled humanitarian mission to rescue schoolchildren whose village was about to be overrun. She was thirty-seven.

The news devastated Jonah. He’d loved the girl, on nothing more than her sheet music and our parents’ accounts. He’d imagined she’d hear of him someday, that they would meet, that anything might happen between them. I, too, had always thought so.

“Just us now, Mule,” he told me. Just us, and the tens of thousands just like us, whom we’d never come across.

From Hue and Da Nang — hamlets no atlas of ours carried — the war came home. At Columbia, what started as an SDS-led demonstration ended with a unit of twenty-year-olds taking over the president’s office in Low Library, where they set up an autonomous people’s republic. Across that postage stamp of campus where our father worked, the latest American revolution played out in microcosm. Half a dozen buildings were occupied, besieged, and sacked over the course of a war that lasted longer than the latest one between the Arabs and Israel.

Da had no lab to worry about losing. He’d always carried his science around with him in his head. But even this much he failed to protect. He didn’t even know about the battle for Morningside Heights until two days in, when he strolled across the south end of the Campus Walk and noticed a disturbance in the distance. Good empiricist, he investigated. Within minutes, he was enveloped in bedlam. The thousand police President Kirk had summoned to drive the protesters from campus were achieving their only possible result: tear gas, stones, clubs, and bodies flying in all directions. Da saw an officer laying into the legs of a prostrate student and ran up to stop the beating. He took a club in the face and went down. He was lucky the jittery policeman didn’t shoot him.

His cheekbone collapsed into the back of his face and had to be rebuilt. I had no way of reaching Ruth, nor did I know whether she’d care. Jonah and I went to see Da in the hospital after the surgery. In the hall to his room, a nurse blocked our path until we convinced her we were the man’s sons. We couldn’t be his sons, she thought. We weren’t the same color. Maybe she thought we were the thugs who’d put him here, come back to finish the job.

Da still bobbed under the anesthetic. He looked through the gauze wrappings holding in his face. He seemed to recognize us and tried to sit up in the hospital bed to sing. He flipped a weak hand up to his mummified head and droned, “Hat jede Sache so fremd eine Miene, so falsch ein Gesicht!” Hugo Wolf’s “Homesickness,” a song Jonah used to sing, before the words meant anything. Everything had so strange a countenance, so false a face.

Jonah saluted. “How’s our cheekless wonder? You feeling better? What do the docs say?”

The question set Da to singing again, Mahler this time:

Ich hab’ erst heut’ den Doktor gefragt,

Der hat mir’s in’s Gesicht gesagt:

“Ich weiss wohl, was dir ist, was dir 1st:

Ein Narr bist du gewiß!”

Nun weiss ich, wie mir ist!

Only today I asked the doctor,

And he told me to my face:

“I know exactly what’s wrong with you:

You are surely a fool!”

Now I know what’s wrong with me!

He sounded like a flock of geese rushing south. The performance went right through my intestines. Jonah cackled like a crazy man. “Da! Cut it out. Quit with the jaw movements. You’ll collapse your face again.”