Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Like it was my calling, Joey. Out of my mind! I started walking around, marking people. Started with myself. I thought I was the angel of the Lord, putting a safe marker on everyone I could find. Passover. Everybody was going to be medium brown. That was the plan anyway. Somebody didn’t want to be painted. Smashed me into a wall and spilled what was left all over me. Next thing I know, policeman’s got my neck pinned to the concrete with a riot stick. They throw me into an armored van and haul me off to a station, where they take my statement. I should have lied to them. Told them I was someone else. They wouldn’t even fucking book me. I couldn’t even get myself arrested. They’re holding thousands of people for curfew violation, and they toss me back. Too many real criminals. You sing what? You live where? And they believed me. Figure nobody could make up that scale of madness. They send me to the fucking hospital! Damn them to hell. I didn’t stay. I came right back here and called you.”

He made me promise again to tell Ruth, first thing in the morning. I told him to go to the hospital and have his ear looked at as soon as we hung up. And to call me when he’d spoken with a doctor.

“Doctor, Joey? They’re all tied up. Real things. Death and such. Not some foreigner’s hurt ear.” He gasped for air. From the far end of a bad connection, he went into a suffocation fit. The one that all his youthful panic attacks had been all along remembering.

I talked him down, as I had done so many earlier times. I walked him around his hotel room. And then he was calm again, wanting to talk on into the night. I kept telling him to call for help, but he didn’t want to hang up on me. “Tell her, Joey. Tell her I’ve been there. Tell her nobody’s done. Everyone’s going somewhere else. Next time. Next time.”

I got him off the phone at last. “A doctor, Jonah. Your ear.” I tried to sleep but couldn’t. In my waking dreams, the shells that held us encased cracked open like chrysalises, and the fluid that was us flowed out, like reverse rain, back up into the air.

Hans Lauscher found him the next morning, a little after ten o’clock, when Jonah failed to show up for breakfast. He was stretched along the bed, still dressed, on top of the bedspread. The stream of dried blood down one side of his pillow made Hans think he’d hemorrhaged. But my brother had simply stopped breathing. The television in his hotel room was on, tuned to the local news.

Requiem

We buried Jonah in Philadelphia, in the family cemetery. A month later, Ruth and I flew out to perform at his European memorial. The service was held in Brussels, in half a dozen languages, all of them sung. There was no eulogy, no remembrance but music. Dozens of people sang, people Jonah had performed with throughout the last years of his life. Our piece was the most recent, and surely the rockiest. Ruth sang “Bist du bei mir,” that little song of Bach’s that Bach never wrote:

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

to my death and to my rest.

Ah, how pleasant will my end be,

with your dear hands pressing

Shut my faithful eyes!

We sounded as if we hadn’t made music since our mother’s funeral. Like we were music’s shaky discoverers, the first to have stumbled across the form. Like we might never make it back to tonic. Like tonic was going someplace else, always a moving do. Like everyone would have to own every song, before the end. Ruth sang as she remembered him, no part of us barred. And he was in her voice.

It was the first time my sister had ever been abroad. She stood at the top of the Kunstberg, the Mont des Arts, crying over how every curbside banality struck her with wonder. For a long time, she couldn’t place the feeling that gripped her. Then, in the middle of the Grande Place, we overheard a light-skinned, angular-featured black couple marveling over the guildhalls in Portuguese.

“Nobody here has the slightest idea where I come from. Nobody cares how I got here. They’re not even trying to guess. I could be anyone.” The utter freedom terrified her. “We have to get back to America, Joey.” Our hellish utopia, that dream of time. The thing the future was invented for, to break and remake.

“How far is Germany?” I told her, and she shook her head, unsteady. “Next time.”

Little Robert identified himself to every stranger by his African name. It thrilled him to be asked if he came from the Congo. By the time we flew back to the Bay, he was chattering at the flight attendants in both French and Flemish.

If our father was right, time doesn’t flow, but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. But then, in such a world, who we are must be all things.

So I stand on the edge of the reflecting pool with my two nephews. We’ve left their mother, over her vocal objections, back at the Smithsonian. “I don’t see why I can’t just hang out there in the crowd, next to you. I won’t say a word.”

“We been over this a million times,” her eldest says again. “You promised me, before we started.”

“How much unity can this thing proclaim if the women have to stay home?”

“The women don’t have to stay home. The women get to go anyplace in our nation’s capital they want. Why don’t you go visit Howard? Didn’t your Papap…”

“Maya Angelou’s going to be there. She’s a woman. She’s going to give a speech.”

“Mama. You promised. Just…give us this?”

So it’s just we three men, there on the Mall. I’m going to be discovered and sent home. At any moment, my nephews will make me go wait for them, back in the hotel room.

Kwame stands in this runaway crowd, scared by its magnificence. A mild October, but he’s shaking. He’s wobbly on his pins, like a bamboo beach house in a heavy tide. This is his doing, his atonement, his escape plan, and he stakes himself on it working. Still, he’s staggered by how many other stakeholders have turned out for the day.

He has managed to stay in the free world for a full two years. One speeding ticket, one apartment eviction, but no more slavery. “It’s over,” he tells me. “That me is dead.” He’s been out for two years, and in that time he has worked four jobs and played with three different new bands. The jobs have gotten harder and the music a shade more melodic. Two months ago, he became a welder. When he landed it, he told me, “I’m staying with this one for a while, Uncle JoJo.” I told him I was sure he would.

He stands in the milling crowd, talking to a perfect stranger, a bronze man almost my age in a University of Arizona sweatshirt, with a son years younger than Robert. “Not sure I’m crazy about the man,” the stranger says, apologetic.

“Nobody’s crazy about the man,” Kwame reassures him. “The man’s a hatemonger. But this whole thing’s bigger than the man.”

“Did you know Farrakhan is a trained concert violinist?” I contribute this, even at the risk of irritating Kwame. A put-down and tribute. Remembering all passing things.

“Get out of here. No shit?” Both men are amused — the crediting and discrediting.

“How do you play a violin through a bow tie that size?” It’s the last thing our unknown friend says before the crowd swallows him.

Kwame watches the man disappear, holding his son’s hand. Delinquent, remembering, my nephew calls out a panicked “Robert!”

“Ode,” comes the angry voice from two yards behind him.

“Whatever, brother. You stay close, you hear me?”

“Hear you,” the sullen eleven-year-old answers. But only because his brother rules.

Kwame is the boy’s god, and the older boy can do nothing about it. When Kwame went to prison, little Robert was inventing complex number games, whole systems of calculation. When he returned, his little brother wanted nothing more than to follow him down to damnation. “School’s for fools,” the child told him. Resolute, proud, and as shrewd as the god he modeled on. “Fools and house niggers.”