Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

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 new. 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.