Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Why go on believing it if it upsets you?”

“It’s mathematics,” he thunders. “Belief has nothing to do with the numbers.”

“Fix the numbers, then. Make them listen to you.”

Da heaves a breath. “This is exactly what they will not do.”

I’m in hell. My parents aren’t even arguing. Worse. To argue, they’d have to understand each other. Our Da can understand nothing anymore. He’s come to the conclusion that there is no time.

“No time for what?” I ask.

He shakes his head, stricken. “For anything. At all.”

“My, my.” Mama laughs, and Da flinches at the sound. “Where has the time gone? It was here just a minute ago.”

It doesn’t exist, says Da. Nor, apparently, does motion. There is only more likely and less likely, things in their configurations, thousands, even millions of dimensions, hanging fixed and unmoving. We put them in order.

“We feel a river. In reality, there is only ocean.” And my father is at the bottom of it. “There is no becoming. There is just is.”

Mama waves him off and heads to the front room to clean. “Excuse me. Can’t keep my dirt waiting. Call me when you get the universe started up again.” She chuckles from the end of the hallway, a laugh lost under the roar of her upright vacuum.

I’m alone with Da in his study, but I can give him no comfort. He shows me the undeniable calculations. Everything spelled out in meticulous detail, like a full pocket score of an inevitable symphony. He speaks less to this lecture room of one desperate student than to some hidden examiner. “In mechanics, the film can run in reverse. In thermodynamics, it cannot. You would know at once, by the feel of the current, if you were swimming against the stream of time. But Newton wouldn’t. Neither would Einstein!”

“Don’t let them in the water,” I suggest.

He points out a tiny solo equation buried in his notes’ cluttered orchestration. “This is the timeless wave function of Schrödinger.”

He doesn’t mean timeless. Who knows what he means?

“This is the only way we have. The only thing for tying the universe to subatomic pieces. The only one to satisfy the constraints of Mach. The function that must connect the too big with the too small.”

It seems important to him that the thing move. But the universe’s wave function stands still. The score hangs in eternity, unable to progress from start to last except in imagined performance. The piece everywhere always already is. Our family’s musical nights have led him to this insight. Music, as his hero Leibniz says, is an exercise in occult mathematics by a soul that doesn’t even know it’s counting.

“We are the ones who make a process. We remember the past and predict the future. We feel things breaking forward. Make an order for before and after. But in the other hand…”

“ Onthe other hand, Da.” Forever teaching him.

“On the other hand, the numbers do not know…” He stops, baffled. But true to the sheets full of symbols, he rallies. “The laws of planetary motion say nothing about clockwise or counterclockwise. The year might be running summer, spring, winter, fall, and we wouldn’t be able to say! That bat driving the ball forward comes to the same thing as the ball driving the bat back. This is what we mean by a system being predictable. By a deterministic world. Time falls away, an unneeded variable. With Einstein, too. One set of reversible equations already fixes for us the whole series of unfolding time. Plug in a value for any moment of time, and you know the values for all other moments, before and after. We say that the present completely causes the future. But it’s a funny think?”

“ Thing, Da. A funny thing.”

“That’s what I said! A funny think, as far as the mathematics? We can say also the present has determined the past. One path, whether you walk down it or up.” His right-hand fingers cut a swathe across his left palm. Then his hands reverse. “It’s not even that fate has already been decided. Even that idea is itself still too trapped in the notion of flow.”

He still works on other, more movable things. He solves a thousand unsolved problems, important papers, where his name appears nowhere except in the acknowledgments. He keeps his colleagues publishing, long after his own flow stops. His colleagues marvel at him, so deep in his debt that they will never tunnel out. They say he doesn’t work forward from the problems they hand him. He jumps into the future, where he sees the answers. Then works his way back to the here and now.

“You could make a fortune,” they tell him.

“Ha! If I could take messages from the future, money would be the last thing I’d waste my time on!”

Mama says he can only solve problems for his colleagues, not for himself. “Oh, my love! You can’t crack the ones you care about. Or maybe you only care about the ones not even you can wrap your head around?”

He’s never once tried to wrap his head around what time is doing to us, to our family. He struggles, in his study, to do away with time. But the world will do away with all five of us before then, if it can. Da’s score of scribbles distresses him more than any slur ever leveled at him. He studies his pile of scrawl the way he reads those letters from Europe, the endless unanswering answers to the hanging questions he rewrites and resends, every year, to changing addresses abroad. He’s lost his family. His mother and father, his sister, Hannah, and her husband, who was not even a Jew. No one can tell Da that they’re still alive. But no one will tell him they’re dead.

Mama says they would have found us by now. If the German officials that Da writes to can’t say where they are, then that says everything. But Da says, “We cannot speak about what we do not know.” And beyond that, he doesn’t.

In Europe, he tells me, the horse races are run around the oval backward. I think: You give your winnings to the track, then wait until the race reaches its start to see how much you bet. I love the idea: Jonah and me, already with him, over in Europe, back before Da has even come to America to meet Mama. What a surprise we’ll be to her. I laugh at the idea of meeting all Da’s missing relatives, of them meeting us, before we’re even born, before they all go to the place Mama tells us they have almost certainly gone to.

But for the answers he needs, there is no certainty. Da gets another letter, emptied of all content but bureaucracy. He shakes his head, then starts another hopeless letter back. “Birthplace of Heisenberg,” he says. “Of Schrödinger’s cat.” In his same study, after another year, he tells me, “We have no access to the past. All our past is contained in the present. We have nothing but records. Nothing but the next set of histories.”

He holds his head while looking at the pictures he has drawn, the ones that kill time. He searches for the flaw in what he fears he’s just proved. He mutters about Poincaré’s recurrence, about any isolated system returning to its initial state an endless number of times. He speaks of Everett and Wheeler, of the entire universe budding off into copies of itself at every act of observation. Sometimes he forgets I’m there. He’s still at his desk half a decade later. I’m in college. Mama’s finished vacuuming for good, done with all cleaning. I stand behind Da, chopping his hunched shoulders. He hums with preoccupied gratitude, but in a minor key. Time may exist again, according to the numbers. He’s not sure. He’s even less sure if that would be cause for celebration.

Increasingly — time’s arrow — he makes no distinction between absurd and profound. His universe has begun to contract for him, time running backward toward some youngest day’s Big Crunch. There are secrets buried in gravitational relativity that even its discoverer had not foreseen. Secrets others won’t uncover for years to come. And he’s foreseeing them. He draws a picture of what quantum gravity will have to look like. He counts up all the curled-up dimensions that we will need just to survive the four we are already lost in.