Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I try to tell my nephew, but I can’t. “Don’t panic,” I say. “Let’s stay close by. He’s around here somewhere.” In fact, I know exactly how close the lost boy is. As close as a promise to a long-forgotten friend. As close as the trace of tune turning up in me at last, begging me to compose it.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kwame shouts. “I got to think.” My nephew can’t even hear himself. He runs through all the options that cloud his desperate brain. He plays out every scenario, sure that only the worst can ever happen, finally, to the likes of us. He’s lost his brother in a million dispersing men. This is his final punishment, for all he’s done and left undone.

And then his brother emerges from the underworld, there in front of us. He’s jogging toward us from up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He waves smartly, as if he’s only been away on a prearranged outing, no more than five minutes, max. In truth, it can’t have been much longer. For Kwame, it’s been another jail sentence. Life.

Relief spills over into rage. “Where the fuck have you been, Bean? What are you trying to do to me?” Strung out, fatherless. At the mercy of every past. He’d slap the boy if I weren’t there.

The look of bewildered adventure falls from Robert’s face. He stares out on the place he’s come back to. He shrugs and folds up his arms like shields in front of his chest. “Nowhere. Just out talking. Meeting people.” The question that was bursting in him dies unasked. Kwame, too, his head sunk down, hears all the promises he has just made mocking him, as vain as any music.

“Well?” Ruth greets us, ready for all the stories. “How do you feel? Was it amazing?”

All three of us keep silent, each boy for his own reasons.

“Come on. Tell me. What did they say? Was it everything you…?”

“Ruth,” I warn.

Her eldest puts his chin on the crown of his mother’s head and cries.

Not until that long flight back across the continent does Ode ask. And then, not us, but his mother. It’s dusk when we get to the airport, and night for the length of the flight. We rise up over the layer of cloud, nothing above us but darkness. Kwame, across the aisle from me, is writing a song about the march. He needs to redeem it. The song is all in his head, committed to memory. He hands me the phones for his disc player. “Ay yo trip. New L.A. crew. Check out the bomb bass line.”

I place it in two notes. “Gregorian cantus firmus.” A Credo already a millennium old by the time Bach used it.

“No shit?” His eyes glint, fishing for me. “Motherfucker makes a def sample.” He takes the phones back, slaps his thighs in a haunted, broken rhythm. The day’s panic is already just a memory. All notes are changing again. “Me and my crew, we got to get jumpin’.”

This, too, is forever true. “Mine, too,” I tell him. My piece is inside me, ready for writing down — the same piece that has long ago written me. My crew is inside me, jumping at last. And the first jump they make will be, as ever, back.

Little Robert sits in the window seat, his mother next to him. He fidgets from Ohio to Iowa, craning to see something out of the square of window. But the pane refuses to reveal anything but an opaque black wall.

“What you looking at, honey?”

He stops, ashamed at being caught.

“What is it? You see something up there?”

“Mama, how high are we?”

She can’t say.

“How far are we from Mars?”

She’s never thought to wonder.

“How long would it take…? Mama?”

More questions than he’s asked her since he was seven. She sees his old sandbox love of math trying to reenter him. A signal, beckoning. She braces for the next question, praying for her sake that she won’t miss them all.

“Mama, wavelength’s like color, right?”

She’s almost sure. She nods slowly, ready to improvise if need be.

“But pitch is wavelength, too?”

She nods more slowly now. But still yes.

“What wavelength do you think they are — on other planets?”

Her face contorts. The answer struggles up from where she’s held it so long. Words pour into my sister, words I’ve forgotten years ago. Words waiting for the past to reach them. She jerks upright, as if she’ll stop the plane, turn around, parachute out over the Mall. No time to lose. “Where on earth…? Who did you hear that…?”

She feels her son coil back into his armor, and she breaks. An injured laugh, an uncompleted tune. Someone walking toward her who she thought was buried. Of course. The message was for him, her child. Not beyond color; into it. Not or; and. And new ands all the time. Continuous new frequencies. Where else could such a boy live?

She bends over him and tries to say it. “More wavelengths than there are planets.” Her voice is everywhere but on pitch. “A different one everywhere you point your telescope.”

Thee

The boy is lost, cutting back and forth in the indifferent crowd, on the verge of howling. A colored boy, one of hers. He runs in one direction, stops, hopeless, then cuts back. The crowd is not hostile. Only elsewhere.

Her German man, this helpless foreigner she has just said good-bye to forever, calls out. “Something is wrong?” And the boy almost bolts from them, lost for good.

“That’s all right, now.” Something old in her speaks. “We ain’t gonna hurt you.”

And he comes to them. As if his mother never once warned him about the danger of strangers. He comes to them, struck by a thing so strange, he can’t help himself. She can’t imagine what puts such astonishment in his face. And then, of course, she can.

He asks where she comes from. “Not far,” she tells him, knowing what he really wants to ask.

“My brother’s lost.”

“I know he is, honey. But we’re gonna help you find him.”

He tells her his name. One she has never heard of. She tries to get the child to show them where he lost his brother. But the long, receding lines of Washington, the drift of the dispersing crowd, and the boy’s growing fear dislocate him. He drags them to a spot, refuses it, and drags them off again.

It saves her from her own displacement. She walks uncertainly, still under the spell of Miss Anderson’s otherworldly power. The threads of that sound still coat her, like a cobweb she sweeps at but can’t comb free. Something anxious between her and this man, some tie they shared a moment ago that she doesn’t even want to think of straying near. No link but a common love of the repertoire. No force but the voice they’ve just lived through. But something more: the way he heard her singing along, aloud to herself, and felt it as a gift, a given. The shock of it, to be taken just this once, not as another species, nor as the identical same. To be heard simply as someone who knows and can hit the notes. Who has the right and the reason to produce them.

She’s glad they have this boy. His closer crisis holds them together a little longer. They have already said good-bye. The continent of this German’s ignorance, the sweet land of liberty that denies him the slightest toehold of comprehension, spreads out, uncrossable, in front of them. She can’t be the one to explain it to him. To tell him what wars he has fled into, replacing the ones he just escaped. The list of what they can never know of each other is longer than infinite. Curiosity must die, as always, in the cradle. But for just these few moments, they share this lost boy.

The German fascinates this Ode. Something he can’t make out, that stops all figuring. “Where you from?” he asks, and the man answers, deadpan, “New York.”

“My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?”

“I haven’t been there very long.”