Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Come. We sing. We make a little trio. Where are the altos? We need altos.”

Jonah only egged him on. After a while, Da settled down. He craned up and said, “My boychiks,” as if we’d just arrived. He couldn’t rotate his head without shattering. We sat by his bedside for as long as Jonah’s attention permitted. Da perked up again as we got ready to leave. “Where are you going?”

“Home, Da. We have to practice.”

“Good. There’s a cold soup in the refrigerator. Chicken from Mrs. Samuels. And Mandelbrot in the bread box, for you boys. You boys like that.”

We looked at each other. I tried to stop him, but Jonah blurted, “Not that home.”

Da just blinked at us through his bandages and waved away our jokes. “Tell your mother I’m just fine.”

Outside, on the street, Jonah preempted me. “He’s still doped up. Who knows what they have him on?”

“Jonah.”

“Look.” His voice swung out at me. “If he loses his job, we can start worrying about him.” We walked in silence toward the subway. At last he added, “I mean, it’s hardly the kind of job where craziness is a liability.”

We performed in Columbus, at Ohio State, a pocketbook auditorium paneled in dark wood. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred people in attendance, half of them at student prices, scoping out the object of controversy. We’d have lost money on coming out if we hadn’t had bookings in Dayton and Cleveland, too. Jonah must have felt something, some sense of what was already racing to happen to him. There, in that random hall, in front of an audience that didn’t know what hit them, for an hour and ten minutes, he sang like nothing living.

Once, when I was a child, before Mama died, I dreamt I was standing on the front stoop of the house in Hamilton Heights. I leaned forward without stepping and lifted off the stoop, surprised that I could fly. I’d always been able to, only I’d forgotten. All I needed to do was lean forward and let it happen. Flying was as easy as breathing, easier than walking through the neighborhood where my parents put me down. That was how Jonah sang that night in the middle of distant, dislodged Ohio. He landed on the most reticent pitches from a fixed point in the air above, like a kingfisher catching silver. He hit attacks and came off every release without a waver. Each note’s edges tapered or sustained according to innermost need. His line bent iridescent, a hummingbird turning at will and hovering motionless, by the beat of its wings, even fusing air and flying backward. His sound spread to its full span, huge as a raptor, all taloned precision, without a trace of force or tremor. His ornaments were as articulate as switches and his held notes swelled like the sea trapped in a shell.

Technique no longer dictated what sound he could or couldn’t make. The full palette of human song was his. Every protection racket he’d lived through gave him something to sing about, something to escape. He’d always been able to hit the notes. Now he knew what the notes meant. In his mouth, hope hung, fear cowered, joy let loose, anger bit into itself, memory recalled. The rage of 1968 fueled him and fell away, amazed by the place he made of it.

His sound said, Stop everything. The votes are in. Nothing but listening matters. I had to force myself to keep playing. I stumbled, pulled along in his wake. To do him justice, to match what I heard, my fingers turned extraordinary evidence. For the shortest while, I, too, could say everything about where we’d come from. Playing like that, I didn’t love Jonah because he was my brother. I loved him — would lay down my life for him, already had — because, for a few unchanging moments onstage, backing up into the crook of the piano, he was free. He shed who he was, what he wanted, the sorry wrapper of the self. His sound traveled into sublime indifference. And for a while, he brought back a full working description for anyone to hear.

That’s how the music came out of him. Silk slid across obsidian. The tiniest working hinge in a carved ivory triptych the size of a walnut. A blind man, lost at a street corner in a winter city. The disk of affronted moon, snagged in the branches of a cloudless night. He leaned into the notes, unable to suppress his own thrill in the power of making. And when he finished, when his hands dropped down flush to his thighs and the bulge of muscle above his collarbone — that cue I always watched like the tip of a conductor’s baton — at last went slack, I forgot to lift my foot off the sustain. Instead of closing the envelope, I let the vibrations of that last chord keep traveling and, like the sign of his words on the air, float on to their natural death. The house couldn’t decide if the music had ended. Those three hundred midwestern ticket holders refused to break in on the thing they’d just witnessed or destroy it with anything so banal as applause.

The audience wouldn’t clap. Nothing like it had ever happened to us. Jonah stood in the growing vacuum. I can’t trust my sense of time; my brain still ran that tempo where thirty-second notes laze through the ear like blimps at an air show. But the silence was complete, soaking up even the constant coughs and chair creaks that litter every concert. It grew until the moment for turning it into ovation was lost. By silent agreement, the audience held still.

After a lifetime — maybe ten full seconds — Jonah relaxed and walked offstage. He walked right past me on the piano bench without looking my way. After another frozen eternity, I walked off after him. I found him in the stage wing, fiddling with the sash ropes that ran up into the theater’s fly tower. My look asked, What happened out there? His answered, Who cares?

The spell over the audience chose that moment to break. They should have gone home in their chosen silence, but they didn’t have the will. The clapping began, halting and stunted. But making up for the late start, it turned into a riot. Bourgeois normalcy was saved for another evening. Jonah resisted going back and taking a bow. He’d had enough of Columbus. I had to shove him out, then wait a step and follow along behind him, smiling. They brought us back four times, and would have gone five except that Jonah refused. The third curtain call was the point when we always trotted out an encore bonbon. That night made an encore impossible. We never even looked at each other. He dragged me out to the loading dock before anyone could come backstage to congratulate us.

We headed to our campus guest room at a trot. Five years ago, we might have giggled in triumph the whole way. But that night, we were grim with transcendence. We got to the student guest house in silence. The all-reaching creature became my brother again. He undid his tie and took off his burgundy cummerbund even before we entered the elevator to our room. In the room, he lost himself in gin and tonics and televised jabber. For a while, he’d hovered above the noise of being. Then he nose-dived back in.

The world we returned to likewise fell apart. I could no longer tell cause from effect, before from after. Robert Kennedy was shot. Who knew why? The war — some war. Chickens roosting. Impossible to keep track of what futures were being decided or what scores were being settled. Thereafter, all crucial decisions would be made by sniper. Paris boiled over, then Prague, Peking, even Moscow. In Mexico City, two of the world’s fastest men raised their black fists in the air on the Olympic medal stands in a silent, world-traveling scream.

Toward the end of summer came Chicago. The city hadn’t yet recovered from “shoot to kill.” We were supposed to perform at a summer festival up at Ravinia, on the eighteenth of August. Jonah, on a hunch, canceled. Maybe it was the hippies’ threat to lace the city water supply with LSD. We stayed in New York and watched the show on television. The presidential nomination turned into a bloodbath. It ended as every recent battle for our souls had: with an airlift of six thousand troops equipped with every weapon from flamethrower to bazooka. “Democracy in action,” Jonah kept repeating to the flickering screen. “Power of the vote.” Filled with his own helplessness, he watched the country descend into the hell of its choice.