Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The gaze of the man next to her freezes on the headline. His eyes keep scanning back and forth, the lines of text forcing his head through a stiff, refusing no. He struggles, not with the words, but with the ideas they pretend to stand for. Words don’t exist yet for what these words brush up against. She reads in secret, looking over his shaking shoulders.NEW AGE USHERED. His gaze remains unchanged.IMPENETRABLE CLOUD OF DUST HIDES CITY. Delia thinks: This city.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH.SECRECY ON WEAPON SO GREAT THAT NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW OF THEIR PRODUCT.

They heard last night on the radio. Confirmation of what her household long ago knew. But the story goes real for her now, seeing the words in print, in this Negro subway car. TheDAY OF ATOMIC ENERGY begins for this unchanged underground train. The jet-black man next to her shakes his head, mourning tens of thousands of dead brown skins, while for the rest of the car, life passes for what it had passed for the day before. A woman across from her in a red silk hat checks her lips in a compact mirror. The boy in a smashed fedora to her left studies his Racing Form. A little girl, ten, out of school for the summer vacation, skips up the aisle, finding a shiny dime some unfortunate has dropped.

She shouts at the whole car, in her skull. Don’t you see? It’s over. This means the war is over. But the war isn’t over, not for any of them. Never will be. Just one more story on a weary, turning page.JET PLANE EXPLOSION KILLS MAJOR BONG.KYUSHU CITY RAZED.CHINESE WIN MORE OF “INVASION COAST.” One more numbing war report, after a lifetime of war.

NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW. How do the reporters presume to know that, a day after the blast? She knew. She’s known for almost a month, since the secret desert testing.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH. She knows just how awed the scientists are, lit by the flash of the work they’ve done. In the cloud enveloping her, Delia Strom almost misses her stop. She dashes through the train doors as they start to close. She wanders up to the surface, then into her familiar pharmacy. A moment ago, she was filled with purpose. But when the clerk asks her what she wants, she can’t remember. Something for her hurt child. The smallest imaginable hurt, and its even smaller comfort.

Something the shade of melted clay. Tough gray rubber and hard white cap. She grips it to her all the ride back. The bottle is a skinned lapdog, half as large as her little one, and twice as resilient. At home, she covers his wounded foot with it. The day is so hot already, they’ve made his invalid’s bed right inside the window casement, his little swollen foot practically hanging out the screens. Her Joey can’t understand why his mama wants to inflict him with freezing cold. But he suffers the torture with a smile meant to absolve her.

Her husband, the awestruck scientist, finds her in the kitchen, laying furiously into the bottom of the saucepan with copper cleaner. “Everything is good?”

She drops the scouring pad and grips the lip of the sink. She’s pregnant again, in her fifth month, past the early spells of bodily revolt. This is a different dizziness. “Everything,” she says, “is what it is.”

Two years ago, when Charlie was still alive, when it might have kept her flesh and blood from harm, she wanted this bomb. Now she only wants her husband back, the world she knows. Those hundred thousand brown bodies. How many of them children, as small or smaller than her JoJo? Hundreds of men involved: scientists, engineers, administrators. He can’t have contributed anything. Nothing the others wouldn’t have figured out on their own. He’s never told her just what part he worked on. Even now, she can’t ask.

At night, in bed, she wants to whisper, Did you know? Of course he knew. But what her David knows, she can only guess at. He’s never done anything but play with the world, that bright hypnotic bauble. Like Newton, he says: gathering pretty shells on the beach. His life’s work, chosen because it is more useless than philosophy. Avoiding trouble, evading detection, expelled anyway. Jews and politics do not mix. She remembers his interview with that national academic honor society: “Are you a practicing Jew?” How he almost lied, on principle, just to force them out of hiding. And how they rejected him anyway, claiming, “We don’t accept people who renounce their given faiths.”

She watches as he undresses, hanging his rumpled trousers on a chair, exposing his shocking whiteness, a strangeness even greater than she’d suspected before they married. Stranger, even, than the strangeness of men. This white, this man, this unpracticing Jew, this German shares her room with her. But the room they share is stranger than either of them.

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.”