Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The boy walks between them, a hand in each of theirs. Fear takes years off the child. Frightened, he seems no more than seven. He speaks with a mania that makes him impossible to understand.

“I would like very much to see you again,” David Strom says over the boy’s head.

What she has dreaded and known. Hoped against and held still for. “Forgive me,” she says, unable to do the same. “It’s impossible.” She wants to say, This is a law of matter, like the ones you study. Nothing to do with you or me. The physics of the world we belong to. The simplest is.

But the physicist makes no response. He points to the Memorial, where Miss Anderson’s words still ring. “That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.”

Ode is shocked he doesn’t know Lincoln. Delia is shocked when the boy calls the Emancipator a racist. David Strom is too baffled to be shocked by anything.

They make camp on the steps. Her job is to scout for a frantic Negro searching for his lost kin. His job is to comfort the boy. This he does with an ease that stuns her. For the boy’s entertainment is every bit the man’s. Within a minute, they’re talking about the stars and planets, frequencies and wavelengths, distances so great, no message can cross them and be read, matter so dense that space collapses into it, places where the rules of length and depth get bent double and flipped about in the Creator’s trick mirror. She hears the man tell the boy, “Every moving thing has its own clock.” Then she hears him go back on himself, say there is no time, that time is simply unchanging change, no less and no more.

This so hooks the boy that for a minute, he forgets he’s lost. He fills with the million questions of boyhood — the rule-break of rocket ships, the speed of light, the curve of space, the unfolding flow, frozen messages skipping free. How? Where? Who? She watches the two of them hatch travels to any dimension. She flashes on her own prejudice: What’s a black boy want, wasting time with this? But then: Do whites own the heavens, too, like they own “O mio Fernando”?

The boy grows wild with ideas. She hears the man answer, not with impossibles, but with the same suspended maybe with which he listened to the impossible contralto. The same way he listened to Delia herself: notes first, tune after. She frowns: Of course there is no time. Of course there’s nothing but standing change. Music knows that, every time out. Every time you lift your voice to sing.

He sits on the steps in his rumpled suit, just talking to the boy. The simplest thing in the world. The most natural. And the boy lights up, leveling challenge after challenge in wondrous attack. She sees him like this for years to come, boys at a table, questions and answers. And then she sees him never. Her heart tightens round itself, closing up with a death so practical, she cannot counter it.

The boy jerks up from his pleasure, alarmed. “How come you two together? Don’t you know about black and white?”

She knows. Over the Potomac, a few hundred yards from where they sit, love between a white man and black woman is a crime worse than theft, worse than assault, punishable as harshly as involuntary murder. David Strom glances at Delia for explanation, the official adult line. She has none.

The boy shakes his head at her. She should know. “The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they gonna build their nest?”

Now the German jerks up, a shock beyond reflex. “Where have you heard this?” The boy cups his hands into his armpits, scared. “This is a Jewish saying. How have you learned this saying?”

The boy shrugs. “My mama sang it. My uncle.”

“Are you Jewish?”

The laugh rips out of Delia, before horror can stop it. This man’s eyes beg her for an explanation. She could end her own life now, easily.

The scientist can’t fathom it. “This is a Jewish saying. My grandmother used to say this. My mother. They meant people must never… They thought that time…”

But she knows what they thought. She knows this man’s people, without a word. All in his face: the end they have tried to stave off with this ban, and the ban that has come to end them anyway.

He’s undone by wonder. “How can you know this, unless… This is remarkable. You have this, too?”

All in his face, and hers: that danger so great that it forces this ban. There is no threat greater than extinction in closeness. The threat that drove the voice of a century out of doors. The threat of all singing. We do not fear difference. We fear most being lost in likeness. The thing no race can abide.

She remembers everything, all that must come to them. The sound is everywhere in her. Now it’s right in her range: my country, thee, thee. She knows this boy. He’s fighting to bring himself into being, willing them the way on.

“The bird and the fish can make a bish. The fish and the bird can make a fird.” He chants the words, raps them, a cantering, desperate rhythm. A continent rising. Syncopated pitches in time. All he wants is to go on playing. All available combinations. Go on singing himself into existence, starting up my piece, my song.

That fierce, haunted beat shakes the white man loose. He, too, places the boy. Who else? What else? The inevitable enters him with the full force of discovery. “The bird can make a nest on the water.”

My mother looks out on the long space spreading in front of them. “The fish can fly.” She drops her eyes and colors deeply.

“You are blushing,” my father exclaims. Already learning.

“Yes.” My mother nods. Agreeing, and worse. “Yes. We have this, too.”