Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Two policemen pulled him over. One white, one Hispanic. Because the rear license plate was hanging down a little. Robert told me the day before that he was going to fix it. He got out of the car. He always got out when the police stopped him. He always wanted to take the issue back to them. He got out of the car to tell them he knew all about the license plate. But they knew all about the license plate, too. It came out at the hearing. They ran the number through their system while they were pulling him over. So what those two cops saw was a big, belligerent former Panther with a record coming out of the car at them. Robert always carried his wallet in his front coat pocket. Said he didn’t like to sit on his fortune. He reached into his coat pocket to get his wallet, and these two cops swung into covered positions behind their doors, guns drawn, yelling at him to freeze. He whipped his hand out of the coat to get it up in the air. I know it. He knew exactly…”

Ruth handed me the baby. She jerked her hands in the air in the oddest way. No place to put them. She wrapped them around her head and pressed, forcing back what was left of her brain.

“Why do I even have to say this? You know before I tell you. So old. Oldest song in the whole sick hymnal.” Her words were stale paste. I strained to hear her. “Nothing you can do with your life, but this country’s going to make you a cliché. The shining emblem of your kind.”

Little Robert began to shriek. I had no clue what to do. I hadn’t held a baby for twenty years. I bounced him, a dotted rhythm, and it helped a little. I hummed, long and low, a ground bass. My nephew put his hand to my chest in wonder. He felt the note there, and his wails turned into startled laughter. The sound brought Ruth back. She stood and traced small circles around the bed. Little Robert squealed, hand to my chest, demanding more.

“The thing was, Joey, they didn’t kill him. If they’d killed him, we might have had an uprising, even in Oakland. They did exactly what years of training primed them to do. They aimed for the legs with rubber riot-control bullets, and managed to shatter his right kneecap. Knocked him to the pavement, where he lay screaming. When he got through the pain, he started cursing them out with American history. They probably wanted to put a metal bullet through his skull just for naming them. The paramedics came. Twenty-two and a half minutes after they were called. They got him on the operating table and cut open his knee. According to the autopsy, he died of complications due to anesthesia.”

She stopped and took little Robert back from me. He started wailing again, reaching for my chest. He was ready to nose-dive out of her arms for a chance to feel those vibrations again. Only when Ruth hummed would he calm down. I listened to her notes. Untrained, a little hoarse. But full as the ocean when the moon pulled.

“The man didn’t die from complications, Joey. He died from simplifications. Simplified to death.” The last word fell off, near silence. “There was a hearing but no trial. Two-week suspension from the force for one, and three weeks for the other. No criminal charges. Justifiable precautionary measure in a high-risk situation. Meaning a war zone. Everybody knows. Every nigger coming at the law, reaching into his coat pocket…”

Her voice bottomed out. Had anyone put a gun in her hands, she could have gone into the street and used it without aim or emotion. Ruth toted her child in automatic circles around our dead uncle’s room, humming as the boy needed her.

“Everybody knows. Oldest song and dance there is. We can’t even hear it anymore, it’s so in us. Not a lynching, see? Just self-defense. Not murder; an accident. Not racism; just an unfortunate reaction that his profile created in… Tell me another one, Joey. One that doesn’t turn everyone in it into a… One of the cops sent me a grief-stricken apology by registered mail.”

“Which one?”

“Does it matter? The white. Does it matter? None of it…none of this would have happened if…” If this wasn’t this world. “What else you want to know, Joey? What else you want me to tell you?” She stopped pacing and faced me, a reference librarian handling a nuisance client. What else? About Robert’s death, about Robert, about the police, about the hearing, about Oakland, about the law, about the oldest song there is, the song of songs that trumps all others? How can you sing? How can you sing the things you sing? “Ask me. I know every detail. All the events I wasn’t there to live through. I’m trapped in it, Joey. Again and again. What am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to tell you?”

I thought she was breaking down. Then I realized that she wasn’t talking to me at all. These last two questions were for her son, who only smiled at me from the curl of her arm and tried to vocalize.

Ruth turned to me, numb. “You sleep.” The words branded me, an accusation. It was too late for me to change my ways now, this late at night.

Sleep was beyond imagining. I lay in bed at 2:00A.M., turning over a hundred times before the clock’s minute wheel turned over once. I couldn’t locate myself: upstairs, turning in bed, in the middle of a house whose banned image had run my life without my once being able to form it. When I did sleep, my dreams filled with sirens and gunfire.

I went downstairs at 5:30, unable to stay in that padded coffin another minute. I needed to sit, there at the hour before anyone else was alive, and steal my way back into this house I’d long ago lost. Going downstairs, I saw Jonah tearing up the steps behind our uncle Michael, with a boy not yet four struggling to keep up with them. A force of nature stood at the stair bottom, shouting, No running in this house! The house had shrunk, like a fetus in formaldehyde. Only the contour of these stairs remained, and the sound of our running.

I wasn’t the first awake. Dr. Daley sat at the kitchen table, hunched over last night’s newspaper. He had on a shirt and tie, changed from yesterday’s. He looked up at my footfall. He’d been waiting for me, whatever the hour. He studied me from his chair, his face demanding to know what we were to make of a waste so large. Who taught people to throw away the thing they most feared losing?

“Cup of coffee?”

“Please.”

“How do you take it?”

“I…”

The smallest hint of amusement staked out his mouth. “Milchkaffee? Halb und halb?”

“Something like that.”

He sat me down and brought me coffee, just right, as if he’d seen me make it. The color of my sister’s hand. Dr. Daley sat across from me and folded the paper in neat quarters. “Do you want to hear my definition of life? Of course you do. Harassment and coffee, day after day. All right. First. You talked to your sister?”

“Briefly.”

“So you know what you’ve come home to.” I nodded, but I knew nothing. All I could hear was that one-syllable locale. He held silent for the barest moment, giving a eulogy he’d had to give too often in his life. He tightened his lips and returned to the unlivable. Public again. “Now then. Your father.”

It took me a long sip before I realized he was asking a question. Then I couldn’t figure out what the question was. “I… My father?”

“Yes. David. How is the man?” He wouldn’t look at me. No one knew the first thing about anyone else.

“There’s no saying,” I said. And I couldn’t manage any more.

My grandfather looked up, diagnosing my answer. His chin made a tiny lift and fall. “I see. How long ago?”

“Ten years. I’m sorry — twelve. Almost thirteen. Nineteen seventy-one.”

“I see.” He pressed his hands against his face. Nothing more to outlive. “Your sister will want to know. You know that?”