Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Kwame had the wordsBY ANY MEANS tattooed across his belly. He sculpted geometrical shapes into his cropped hair and wore a shirt readingSICK IS on its back andMY MUSE on its front. He came home with failing grades, strings of unexcused absences. The harder Ruth tried to get through to him, the deeper he tunneled.

Then Kwame and four friends — including his copilot Darryl — were caught in the school bathroom, next to a toilet with enough methamphetamine floating in it to kill a racehorse. It wasn’t clear which boys were the leads and which only sang in the chorus. Ruth argued at the school hearing that what her son needed most was meaningful discipline, something both he and his school could turn to real use. But after Kwame quoted an Ice Cube lyric in his own defense, the principal opted for expulsion.

Ruth found him a private school that took probationary cases. It was a boarding school, like his uncles had gone to centuries ago, but with a somewhat different curriculum. This one was strictly votech. Ruth couldn’t afford to send Kwame there, even with contributions from me. But keeping him out would have bankrupted her.

“Every night,” she told me, “it’s always the same. I dream someone in uniform is holding his head down to the concrete with a gun.”

It seemed to me his school was working. When I saw Kwame now, he felt lighter, less brittle, with less of that junked-up edginess. He still chopped the air with his crooked forearms and folded his fingers into his armpits defensively. But his humor flashed faster and his diatribes were more likely to include himself as a fair target. He and two friends formed a band called N Dig Nation. Kwame rapped and played the record player. “I do the ones and twos.” His rhythms were so dense and irregular, I couldn’t write them down, let alone clap them. The band played for pulsing gatherings of high school kids, each crowd larger and more hypnotically satisfied than the last.

I sent Jonah and Celeste cards every Christmas and birthday. I wrote a couple of real letters, telling him about our venture: Ruth’s endless energy, Kwame’s struggles, my teaching games, the current crop of genius first graders, the set of pitched percussion instruments we had managed to buy for my classroom. I didn’t mention my lingering emptiness. I sent everything off to the Brandstraat. For a year, I heard nothing back. I wasn’t even sure the man still lived in Europe.

He called me in March of 1989. Just after midnight. I picked up the phone and heard the great horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. After four notes, I was supposed to come in on the third below. I didn’t. I just listened to him sing another two measures before he crumbled away in scolding. “Shame, shame! We’ll have to give you a measure of pickup next time.”

“Or try another piece,” I said, only half-awake. “What’s up, brother?”

“You’re a cool cat, Joey. So I owe you some letters. I’m calling, okay? That’s what’s up.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Everyone I know or care for. We’re coming to the States. The group.”

“No joke? You? Here?”

“I’m calling before I come, so you won’t rag me.”

“Voces Antiquae does their first North American tour.”

“We could have done it years ago. All in the timing. Did you like the Gesualdo?” I paused so long, we both figured things out. “You never bought it. You never even looked it over in a music store? How about the stuff before that? The Lassus? The hocket song collection?”

I took a breath. “Jonah. Lassus? Hockets? Not where I live. Not in my neighborhood.”

“What do you mean? You live in the Bay, right? They don’t have music stores in Berkeley?”

“I’ve been busy. This teaching gig is two full-time careers. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been anywhere but the school, the grocery store, or the Laundromat. In fact, I can’t tell you the last time I was at the Laundromat. Berkeley might as well be Zanzibar.”

“What the hell? You teach music, don’t you?”

“You’d be amazed how big the field is. So what’s this tour about? I can’t believe you’re finally going to give your countrymen another shot at you.”

“Twelve cities, eight weeks.” He was really wounded, and fighting not to sound it. “I guess I’m lucky there are still twelve cities left in the States that book oldies acts, huh?”

“That’s counting Dallas and Fort Worth separately, right?”

“We’re playing your little backwater at the beginning of June.”

“My little… Not possible.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not possible’? You telling me I don’t know where we’re booked?”

“I’m telling you there’s no way you’re singing in Oakland.”

“Oakland, San Francisco. Same place, right?”

My laugh was like hot tea going down my windpipe. “You come out, I’ll show you around. So how’s everyone in the group? How’s Celeste?” Now his rest told everything. Too late, I asked, “How long ago?”

“Let’s see. Within the last year. It’s fine. Mutual consent. What do they call it? Amicable.”

“What happened?”

“You know these mixed marriages. They never work out.”

“Was there…someone else involved?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’” He spelled it out for me. Kimberly Monera, the blond, bloodless, anemic ghost, had tried to come back to him. Brown child in tow, Tunisian marriage smashed, famous father disowning her, she showed up in northern Europe. She hunted Jonah down and told him that he’d been lodged in the dead center of her imagination, with no one else even close, her whole music-ruined life. “I did nothing, Joey. Didn’t even touch her, except to turn her back around to face Italy and pat her shoulders good-bye.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You think I do?” His voice sounded as it had at fourteen. “As soon as I sent her away…nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“I mean, I felt nothing. Zero. Total anesthesia. I didn’t even want to look at Celeste. I didn’t even want to sit in the same room with her. Don’t blame her for splitting. And it wasn’t just her. Sleeping, eating, drinking, playing, singing: everything that used to be pleasure. Gone.”

“How long did that last?”

“How long? What time is it now?”

I panicked, as if it were still my job to keep the show rolling. “But you’re still recording. Still performing. You’re about to do the debut American tour.”

“Funny thing. Get the discs. Have a listen. Somehow, it’s done wonders for my voice.”

I felt myself slipping back into his orbit. I had to lash out. “Send me one. You have my damn address. Send me one, and I’ll listen.”

He asked about Ruth, and then about his nephews. I gave him the short version. By the time he hung up, I was deep in all the numbness that had swallowed him. Our worlds had fallen off each other’s radar. His performance in San Francisco would have come and gone, and I’d never have heard about it, even in passing.

Three weeks later, a stack of discs arrived. Inside was a short note. “I’m having tickets sent out. For the four of you, or whoever you can scalp them to. See you in June.”

The picture on the Gesualdo CD shocked me. The whole of the newly reconstituted Voces Antiquae stood in a midrange shot in the portal of a Gothic church. They were all white. From that distance: every one of them. I got as far as getting the disc out of the shrink wrap and putting it in the player. But I couldn’t bring myself to listen.

“Go with me,” I begged Ruth. “Not for him. For me. When was the last time I asked you for anything?”

“You ask me for something every week, Joseph. You ask for more gear than my science teachers.”