Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

My family cowered in the celebrating room. Robert drifted to his mother’s side, guilty, caught in the act. She slunk toward me, as if I, of all people, offered safety. “Robert,” Ruth told the boy, in that same weary fear with which she sent the bird and the fish, homeless, away, “that’s your uncle.”

“I know,” the boy scolded. He tried, in his excitement, to avoid the eyes of all adults. He pointed at me. “Your brother.”

Then Jonah stood beside us. “You hear that? Did you hear?” He reached to hug his sister.

Ruth stepped back. “Don’t! Too long. You can’t just…” She lost control of her voice. But she refused to cry.

Robert clenched, ready to protect her. Jonah grazed Ruth’s arm, deniable free comfort. Then he turned to clap my shoulder. “You’re a genius. The van Karajan of music. Now that’s using the stick.” He looked down at the half-sized figure at his waist. Recognition knocked him back. “Neph,” he said, exploring his own awe.

“What’s that?” Robert asked, a sucker for a puzzle. “Something like a nephew?”

Jonah nodded soberly. “A lot like a nephew.” He looked up at Ruth. “Amazing. He’s beautiful.”

“Why should that be amazing?” Cold as memory.

“That’s not. My luck is.”

Robert screwed his face up. “Your voice does funny things.”

“My standing here at all. My seeing you.”

Ruth snapped her head away. “You’re heavier,” she said. She looked back. Jonah held out his arms and looked down the length of his body. “I mean…” She traced her own throat.

“Don’t say heavier. Say richer.”

“Why are you here? Why did you come back?”

The child chorus drifted reluctantly from the room to their next assignments. My students. Jonah raced to the door to slap their hands. It bought him time. He came back, talking to Robert, gazing around the room. “Look at this! I had no idea. So this is your school!”

“My mama’s,” Robert said.

“Yours,” Ruth told her child. Tears now. But the voice was hers.

“Fantastic,” Jonah said. “I haven’t had so much fun with singing since…” He looked at Robert. “Since I was you. You heard what that sounded like? This is it. This is the next thing. People have never heard anything like this.”

Ruth’s laugh was incredulous. “Maybe not your people.”

“I’m serious. That was a sound. We could get there. Make this go. Play anywhere. I’m telling you. People need this.”

Ruth was shaking her head, her mouth pulling at her ears. “People have had this forever.”

“Not me.”

“Exactly.”

“Ruth. I’m here. I’m asking. You can’t leave me hanging.”

“You left us.”

“You have your work,” I said.

He dismissed me. “We’ve been on autopilot for almost two years. It’s pretty much over, antiquity. Heaven has played. I need something closer.”

“You?” I searched for irony, but he was grave. “You can’t quit. It’s a dying art. Who’s going to keep it alive if you quit?”

“Never fear. Western concert music is in the able hands of millions of Koreans and Japanese.”

Ruth felt it then, too. The bottomless well he’d fallen into. My sister held her son by the shoulders, armor in front of her. She reached out over Robert and cupped the back of Jonah’s neck. “Some folks die the way they were born.”

“All folks,” I said.

A smile ripped through Jonah. His sister was talking to him. Touching him. Didn’t matter what she was saying, how many barbs.

“Neph?” Jonah looked down at Robert. The future’s court of appeals. “Sing with me?”

“My mama says you’re a land unto yourself. You always make your own rules.”

“Where did you hear that?” Ruth said. “I never in my life…”

“You ever break the law?”

Jonah regarded his flesh’s half-sized image. “All the time. Me and your uncle JoJo here? We trashed them all. Major-league transgressors. We broke laws you never even heard of.”

Robert shot me a doubtful look. But his doubt floundered when he saw me remembering. “You ever go to jail?”

Jonah shook his head. “They never caught us. We were in the papers a few times, leading suspects. But they never caught up with us.” And he made a sign, swearing the boy to secrecy.

“You ever kill anyone?”

Jonah thought. No more hiding. “A couple times. Pushed a woman in an oven once. I wasn’t much older than you.”

The boy looked to his mother for help. Ruth pressed her hand to her shaking lip. Robert looked at me, sense’s last resort. I motioned toward the deserted room. “I need to straighten up here.”

Ruth wrestled free of herself. “And I’ve got a school to run. And you, young man. Don’t you need to be somewhere? Mrs. Williams, for math? Hmm?”

“Know what else you need?” I could hear it in Jonah’s voice. Desperate fishing. “An African name. Like your brother.”

It stopped them both, mother and son. Ruth stared. “How do you know about African names?” How do you know about his brother?

“Oh, please. I’ve been to Africa many times. On tour. Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire. They love us there. We’re more popular in Lagos than we are in Atlanta.” He took his nephew by the shoulders. “I’m going to call you Ode. Good Bini name. It means ‘Born along the road.’”

The child checked his mother. Ruth cast up her hands. “If the man says so.”

“What does Kwame mean?”

“Haven’t a clue. Ode is the only one I know. That’s what they named me, last time I was there.”

“Ode?” Robert asked, doubtful.

His uncle said, “Roger.”

“Ode,” Robert said, pointing at me. Got it?

I showed him my palms. “Fine with me. From now on. Until you tell me to stop.”

He dashed off to his last class, criminally late. The abandoned adults fell silent. Ruth and Jonah traded a few hostages, both trying hard to leap twenty years. She and I walked him out to the parking lot, where he grew eager all over again.

“Come on. Bird and Fish, Incorporated. Why not? Make a new species? Old wine in new bottles. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Be great for the kids. Talk about education. This thing could be the best thing ever for your school.”

“How would it do anything for this school?” Even Ruth’s suspicion sounded administrative. I looked at her through Jonah’s widening eyes.

He stared at her across confusion too wide to bridge. “Come on. Classics meets the streets. Make your baby hipper and smarter. There’s a ready market. The country’s been waiting for it.”

She hung her head and let it shake, awed by the distance. She couldn’t help snickering. “‘Waiting’? You really mean it, don’t you?” She tipped her face skyward. “Oh God. Where do I start?”

He smiled back, desperate. “Start by picking your top kids and letting me find us a promoter.”

“Where have you been living? Have you no eyes?”

“The eyes are only mediocre. But the ears are extraordinary.”

“Then listen, damn you. Listen, for once.”

“I did. It’s good, Ruth. Better than either. Better than identity. Hybrid vigor.”

She slumped in the face of his hopelessness. He wanted it to be capitulation. But he saw what it was. In an instant, he knew: This chorus was the thing he’d trained for his whole life. And somehow his life’s devotion — his uncompromising will, his wriggling free, always toward this unseen goal, untyped, note by note, perfecting his own line — was exactly what would keep this all-keys choir from ever being his.

When he spoke, he was a child, broken and bare. “You think about it. No rush. I’ll put some ideas together. I’ll call you before we head to L.A.”