Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Time travel.”

Dr. Erichson chuckled. “All travel is time travel. But yes. That seems to be what he was after.”

“Is this idea real? Or is it just numbers?”

“Your father believed that any equations permitted by physics are, in some sense of the word, real.”

All things that are possible must exist. He’d said so all his life. That was his creed, his freedom. It was the thing, alongside music, that most moved him. Perhaps it was music to him. Whatever the numbers permitted must happen, somewhen. I didn’t know how to ask. “These loops are real? Physics really allows them?”

“If any physics allows the violation of causality, that physics is wrong. Every scientist I know believes this. It’s the law on which all others are based. Yet as far as General Relativity is concerned, these equations would indeed apply, given a universe where the galaxies had a favored rotation. If this is the case, General Relativity needs repairing.”

The star charts. The endless tables. “What did he find out? What did he…conclude?”

“Well. I can’t afford to put real time into this. At a glance, it seems he hadn’t yet detected any preference.”

Another direction of rotation everyplace you looked. “But if he had?”

“Well, the equations exist. Time would close back upon itself. We could live our lives always. Folding onto ourselves, forever.”

“If he didn’t find a preferred rotation, does it mean there is none?”

“That, I can’t answer. I haven’t the time for this problem that your father did. Forgive me.”

“But if you were a betting man?”

He thought slowly, about something we weren’t designed to wrap our thoughts around, at any speed. “Even with a closed timelike loop…” He belonged to my father’s people: the people who needed to get things right. “Even then, you could travel back into a given past only if you’d been there already.”

I formed an image for his words, but it became something else even as I fondled it. My father had needed some way to get back to my mother, to send her a message, to deflect and correct all that had happened to us. But in Dr. Erichson’s universe, the future was as unfixable as the past was fixed.

“No time travel?”

“Not in any way that might help you.”

“What happens is forever?”

“This seems to be the case.”

“But it’s possible to change what hasn’t happened yet?”

He thought for a long time. Then: “I’m not even sure what such a question means.”

Autumn 1945

She turns to see her JoJo, the little one, standing in his doorway, holding his ice bag up to the incurable sprain. The slammed front door still shudders with her father. Delia Strom turns from it, reeling, and there is her little boy, crippled already by selflessness, watching the thing that will grind him underfoot. He just stands there, offering, terrified, ready to give away everything. Sacrificed to something bigger than family. Something that trumps even blood.

She sweeps the boy into her arms, sobbing. It scares the child more than what has just happened. Now his brother’s up, too, tugging her leg and telling her everything will be okay. David, the equation solver, stands behind her, looking through the door’s glass for any moving shadow out on the street. She turns to him. He holds one hand on the knob, ready to chase down the street after her father. But he doesn’t move.

Neither boy asks where their Papap is. It could be tomorrow for them already. It could be next week. Papap here; Papap gone. They are still trapped in the eternal now. But they see her crying. They’ve heard the hostility, even without understanding. Already she’s losing them to this larger thing, the invention that will take them. Already they’ve been identified. Already the split, the separate entrance, the splintering calculus.

“Nothing,” David says, looking through the pane. She doesn’t know what he means. Her father has left her with this man, this bleached man with the accent, who helped to build that final blinding-white weapon. “There is nothing. Come. We all go to bed. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Darüber können wir uns morgen noch Sorgen machen. ”

Hitler’s language. She never once thought that thought, all during the war. She stayed alongside him, singing lieder — German tunes, German words — for four long years, afraid of being heard and turned in by the neighbors. But still, she kept their part-song vigil, safeguarding that sound against its many mobilized uses. They both cheered this war: war against pedigreed supremacy, against the final nightmare of purity. Whatever the Allies killed in Berlin was to have died here, too. But nothing has died back home. Nothing but her willful ignorance. Her father has walked out on her. Walked out on her for forgetting a war one hundred times longer and more destructive, the piecemeal annihilation of a people. Walked out on her for walking out. You’ve thrown in your lot. Chosen your side. But she has chosen nothing, nothing but a desire to be through with war and to live the peace she and hers have already paid for so many times over.

There is no peace. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow— tomorrow, already — they’re too ashamed even to look each other in the eye. David goes to work, and what exactly that work is, she can only guess. He leaves her alone with the boys, as her father has left her alone with the family she has made. Alone with two children, from whom she must hide all the doubt in creation. She reads to them from someone else’s books. She plays with them — die-metal trucks and dowel houses that come from someone else’s construction dreams. In the afternoon, they sing together, the boys outdoing each other in naming and making the notes. If her father is right, then all the wrongness of the world is right. If her father is right, she must begin to tell her children: This is not yours, nor this, nor this, nor this … She can’t sacrifice her boys to that preemptive lynching, not today or ever. But if her father is right, she must ready them. If he’s right, then all of history is right, permanent, inescapable.

But her father’s resolution only stiffens hers. She won’t surrender anything. Yes, of course: She’ll give them warmth, welcome, riffing, the congregating joy of call and response, a dip in that river, deep enough to sport in all their lives. She must give them the riches that are theirs by birth. Negro. American. Of course they must know the long, deadly way those terms have come. But she refuses to give them self by negation. Not the old defeating message that they’ve already been decided. All she can give them is choice. Free as anyone, free to own, to attach themselves to any tune that catches their inner ear.

But maybe her father is right. Maybe it’s only their lightness that gives them even the slightest leeway. Maybe choice is just another lie. There is a freedom she wouldn’t wish on anyone. She takes her boys outside, west, toward the river, down to the nearest strip of green in all this stone, the three of them out in the open air for all to appraise. She sees their triad of tones through the parkgoers’ gazes. Her body flinches, as always, under the assault. She hears what her neighbors call this freedom she would give. Striving. Passing. Turning. But what of her boys’ other family, that lineage she knows nothing about, cleaned out, solved, finally, by this world that stands no complications? Isn’t that family every bit as much theirs?

In the park, her boys climb on a set of concrete stairs as if it’s the greatest playground ever built. Each step is a pitch they cry out as they pounce on. They turn the staircase into a pedal organ, chasing up the scale, hopping in thirds, stepping out simple tunes. Two other children, white, see their ecstasy and join, hurtling up and down the flights, screaming their own wild pitches until their parents come shepherd them away, their averted glances apologizing to Delia for the universal mistake of childhood.