Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

At the keyboard, my fingers could generally do what my head wanted. My voice, so much closer to my brain, could rarely seize the prize. At times, Jonah sloughed me off like a kid flung from the end of a playground chain of Crack the Whip. But our calisthenics brought me up to speed, the speed of stillness, of Abbess Hildegard’s extraplanetary flight: vita vite omnis creature.

In this way, one day, years before any justice should have allowed it, I recovered a voice. The singer I’d begun life as came back from the dead. Jonah fished me out of myself, all but intact. “How did you know? How could you be sure I was still in there?”

“You used to sing. All the time. Under your breath. At the keyboard.”

“Me? Never. You lie.”

“I’m telling you, Joseph. I don’t lie anymore. I used to hear you.”

It didn’t matter how he knew, or what he thought he’d heard. I could sing. I’d do: a darker take on his genetic material, solid enough to carry the bass. When I was ready at last — the outward confirmation of his inner ear — Jonah added Celeste. For the first time since our school days, my brother and I made music with someone who wasn’t us.

I’d grown no closer to Celeste in Ghent than we’d been in the airport parking lot the day they picked me up. She and my brother had the rapport that exists only between two people incomprehensible to each other. They chattered all the time, but never about the same thing at once. When the three of us were together, the French blazed past my ability to split the elided syllables. Then Celeste would address me in an English so joyously makeshift, all I could do was nod and pray. At nights, in our ancient row house, I heard them doing each other, three stories below. They hummed to each other, like Penderecki’s threnody, like Reich, Glass, the new minimalists, the latest rage in stylish circles. Their voices ascended in slurred quarter tones, crested in held dissonant intervals, then cooled off by appoggiaturas. They were busy turning themselves into a new species, and for that, they needed a new courtship song.

So I’d heard Celeste Marin’s singing voice already, before we sang together. This daughter of Caribbean business elites — generations of mixed-race rum magnates — sang with antillais abandon. But I wasn’t prepared for our French fourteenth-century trios. When we three made our first attempt to harmonize, I stopped after eight notes. Her voice was Jonah’s, pitched up into soprano again, before his voice broke forever. Whatever her voice had sounded like in her days at the Paris Conservatory, before she met Jonah, it now sounded more like a female Jonah than Ruth or Mama ever had.

We tried out a piece — a Solage chanson: “Deceit Holds the World in Its Domain.” We surged to the end on rising delight. The last note died away, dust motes suspended in the light of light. I was beside myself. It had been lifetimes since I’d felt so lifted, so afraid. I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing what we had. Neither, it turned out, could Jonah. I heard him climbing the wooden stairs to my crow’s nest. He came into my room without knocking and sat on the foot of my bed in the dark. “Jesus, Joey. This is it. We’re home free.” I saw him in silhouette punch the air like some teenager finding himself alone with the ball in the end zone. “All my life. All my life, I’ve been waiting for this.” But he couldn’t say what “this” was.

“What about the others?” Some hunger had caught hold of me. I was ready to cast the others aside, rather than let them slow us down even a beat.

Jonah laughed in darkness. “You’ll see.”

I saw, the next week, when all six of Jonah’s hand-selected voices met to sight-read. The others had been singing together in assorted groups for two years, honing their precision sacraments. They’d sprung their combined sounds on audiences in Gothic ghost towns around the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They knew what they might do together, and were having trouble keeping their secret. But five-sixths is as shy of perfection as any fraction. Every new voice starts a group out again, from zero.

I went into that first rehearsal wrecked by stage fright. These people owned the world that I only glimpsed now from a distance. They’d spent their life singing; I was a recovering pianist. The languages we sang were theirs by birth; I got through them by phonetics and prayer. My brother staked his reputation on me. Everything set up for me to fall neatly on my ambiguous face. All I had was a scrap of prophecy, the days through which I came.

We read through a chanson by Dufay—“Se la face ay pale”—and then that oldest of parody masses, based on the same tune. It felt like breaking into a tomb that had been sealed for half a millennium. Ten years later, the rage for authenticity would prohibit using women’s voices at all. But for a brief moment, we thought we had the future pegged and the past cleanly identified.

When the body breaks free of its boundary skin, it rises. How many people, trapped in time’s stream, get to feel, even for an instant, that they’ve climbed up out of the current and onto the banks? Jonah grabbed the tenor and the women lifted, three steps and a leap into weightlessness, scraping the keystone of the highest vault. Their certainty powered me, and the notes rolled off the page into the air without my doing much but spotting them.

The blend was so tight that each new imitative line sounded like the same voice curling back on itself. I’d stepped in front of a dressing room mirror and splintered into whole societies. Now and then, the released lines collapsed back into the unity that birthed them. The universe, Da once proved to his own satisfaction, could be described by a single electron, traveling back and forth in time along an infinitely knotted path whose resulting connect-the-dots shapes formed all the matter in existence.

When we finished, the silence we’d opened rang like a bell. Peter Chance, who sang like a van Eyck angel but who spoke like an unsexed Anthony Eden, took out a pencil and began making tiny reprimands in his part. “Anyone care to place a modest wager on our prospects?”

Celeste asked Jonah for a translation. A grinning Marjoleine deGroot supplied it, for Jonah was staring up at the roof beams, exultant. We looked at one another the way musicians do, slant but seeing all, every one of us terrified to try it again. We wanted to put the sheet music down, walk away, and forever protect that moment. Jonah returned to earth and pulled another mass out of his binder. “Shall we have a go at the Victoria?”

The Victoria sailed up past the Dufay, dropped notes and all. The shower of sound from our initial try gave way to the first feel for how to group-drive this thing. Heaven’s signal bled in and out, like an FM station in a storm. But the message was firm in us. We sprang loose, cut capers, wheeled about. I was their man. My brother had known. When the notes stopped, Hans Lauscher looked down the bridge of his nose and said, “You are hired. How much do you want an hour?” His accent shocked me: the ghost of my father’s.

Celeste blessed me in profuse island slang. Marjoleine, with the closest thing to glee her native climate permitted, threw her Flemish arm over my shoulder and thumped me as if I’d just put a header in the back of the net in a qualifying match against the Netherlands. “You don’t know how many basses we have already tried! Good voices, too, but just not right with us. Why didn’t you come to us sooner? How much time we would have saved.” I looked at Jonah. He grinned without embarrassment, as pleased with his duplicity as he was with his brilliant hindsight.

The fusing of six jagged personalities didn’t happen at once. The delicate dance of negotiated tensions obeyed its own musical shorthand. We had our daily doses of nervous outbursts and repaired hysterics. We practiced in a ring of black music stands, everyone but the fastidious Hans in stocking feet. Sometimes we taped ourselves on an old reel-to-reel, and then the six of us lay flat on our backs against the wood floors of our warehouse stage, conducting our prior lives, singing unison encouragements to the fixed fossil record.