Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“France?”French was his worst singing language. He’d always mocked the place. “To do what? Go back to lieder?” I worked to keep my voice neutral. Like an ex-wife encouraging her husband to go out dating again.

“I’m tired of it, Joey. Tired of singing alone. Unless you… Where am I going to find another accompanist with telepathy?”

I couldn’t tell if he was asking or rejecting me. “What are you going to do, then?” I saw him singing Maurice Chevalier songs in the Metro, a felt hat catching the centimes.

“There has to be life beyond opera and lieder. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”

“What’s yours?” Each answer seemed more murderous than the last.

“Wish I knew. It has to be out there.” He fell silent again, ashamed of surviving. I felt him working up again to ask me to come out and join him. But I never got the chance to turn him down. When he spoke again, it was to more than me. “Joey? Have him a little memorial service. Just us? Play something good for him. Something from the old days.”

“We already did.”

I felt it go through him, the stab of freedom he’d gone after. “You sure you don’t want me to come back?”

“You don’t need to.” I gave him that much.

“Joey, forgive me.”

I gave him that, too.

It took me several days to grasp that I didn’t have to go in to the hospital anymore. There was nothing to do but close up Da’s house. I came up for air, browsed the papers, caught up on what had happened while I was away in death’s waiting room. The National Guard had killed some college students. The FBI was arresting priests for helping people burn their draft cards. Hoover issued a nationwide warning against “extremist all-Negro hate-type organizations.” He meant my sister and her husband, all the criminal elements that undermined my country.

I wanted out of Fort Lee as fast as possible. First, I had to go through the house and its contents. The few family keepsakes of value I put into rented storage. The man’s wardrobe, unchanged since 1955, I packed off to the Salvation Army. I sold the piano Da had bought for me, along with the few valuable pieces of furniture, and put the cash in a certificate of deposit for Ruth and Robert Rider.

I looked in my father’s jumbled files for an address for my mother’s family. I found one in his lists of contacts, that wad of three-by-five cards he kept bound with a thick rubber band. The card, in my father’s handwriting, was younger than it looked. It was thumbed-up, dog-eared, and smudged enough to be a faked antique. At the top, on the double red line, in caps, ran the name DALEY. Below it was a Philadelphia street address. There was no telephone number.

I pulled the card out of the rubber-banded pack and left it out on the kitchen counter. I looked at it a hundred times a day for three days. One call to directory assistance, and within two minutes, I could be talking to my unknown relatives. Hello, this is your grandson. This is your nephew. Your cousin. They’d ask me, And where do you live? What do you do? How come you sound like you do? Where could I go from there? I couldn’t use Da’s death as an excuse for making contact. Their own daughter had died, and that hadn’t brought us back together. Every time I looked at the address, I felt the distance compound down all the years of my life. The gap had widened so far, I couldn’t even find my side of it. The rift was too big to do anything but preserve.

My father’s contact file had no card with the name STROM on the top. It had shocked me, while he was dying, to hear him even speak of his family. There was no one on his side to give this news. You can jump into the future, he often told us, all the while we were growing up. But you can’t send a message back into your own past. All I could do with Da’s death was file it away, a message to some later self who’d know what to do with it.

Toward the rest of the house’s goods, I was merciless. Nothing even made me flinch until I hit my father’s professional papers. I knew nothing about my father’s last work, aside from his needing to prove that the universe favored a direction of spin. After several days of poring over the toppling paper towers in his study, I knew I’d never be able to cope on my own. Unlike music, his physics had some real-world meaning, however abstract that meaning had become. He’d published nothing of consequence for years. But I was terrified that the handwritten scrawl and the tables of figures scattered around his study might hide some scrap of worth.

I called Jens Erichson, Da’s closest friend at Columbia, a high-energy physicist who happened to be an amateur singer. He was Da’s rough contemporary, the colleague in the best position to appraise all my father’s piles of Greek scribbling from his final months. He greeted me warmly over the phone. “Mr. Joseph! Yes, of course I remember you, from years ago, before your mother… I sometimes came up to your house, for musical evenings.” He was delighted to learn I’d become a musician. I spared him the messy details.

I couldn’t stop apologizing. “I shouldn’t saddle you with this. You have your own work.”

“Nonsense. If the will made no provisions for professional executor, it’s because David assumed I’d be there. This is nothing. Heaven knows, he solved enough problems for the rest of us over the years.”

We set up a time for him to come by. I took him into the study. An involuntary sigh escaped his lips when he saw what was waiting. He hadn’t imagined what he’d signed on for. We spent two days, like archaeologists, boxing up and labeling the papers. The work required gloves, a whisk broom, a field camera. Dr. Erichson took the boxes with him back to the university, over my conscience-stricken stream of gratitude. I put the house on the market and returned to Atlantic City.

I checked in with the Glimmer Room. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Mr. Silber no longer needed my services. He’d hired another piano player, a sandy blond guy from White Plains named Billy Land, who learned to play on a Hammond B3 and who could play all of Jim Morrison and the Doors in at least three different keys, sometimes all three at once. Everyone had what they needed. I was free at last. I thought about asking Teresa to see about getting me a job at the saltwater taffy plant.

Dr. Erichson called me after three weeks. “There are some portions of interest in the papers. With your permission, I’ll pass those along to the interested parties. The other ninety percent…” He struggled with how to lay it out for me. “Did your father ever mention to you the concept of preferred galactic rotation?”

“Many times.”

“He got this concept from Kurt Gödel, down in Princeton.” The fellow refugee my father had called the greatest logician since Aristotle. “The work goes back a quarter century. Gödel found equations compatible with Einstein’s General-Field Theory. I don’t know quite how to say this. They allow time to coil up upon itself.”

Something from my childhood pushed up above water. Old dinner-table conversations, from a prior life. “Closed timelike loops.”

Dr. Erichson sounded both surprised and embarrassed. “He told you about them?”

“Years ago.”

“Well he came back to them, at the end. The mathematics is in place. It’s peculiar, but simple. Once the conditions are identified, the extraction of the looping solutions is straightforward. At the limits of gravitation, General Relativity permits at least the mathematical possibility of a violation in causality.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your father was exploring curves in time. On such a curve, events can move continuously into their own local future while turning back onto their own past.”