Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Breaking is what gives the flow direction. Broken voices. Broken traces. Broken promises. Broken lives. Broken bonds. Whether it exists or not, time has been putting in overtime.

He works a private system, trancelike, lost in some nowhen, plugging variables into a hedge spread whose complexities he no longer bothers to explain to me. “Augustine said he knew what time was so long as he didn’t think about it. But the minute he thought about it, he did not know.”

He turns those thickening features on me, that cheerful look of mourning, the tunnel of those eyes hollowed out by every moment they have looked through. He gazes out at me from across the chasm of his intractable paradox. His four gnarled fingers on his right hand rise up to wipe his brow, tracing the same reflex path they’ve followed a hundred times every day of this life. His eyes gleam with the pleasure that each day’s impregnable strangeness gives them. If time, in fact, still exists, it must be a block, a resonance made by this standing wave’s equation. The lives he has yet to live through are already in him, as real as the ones he has so far led.

“A curve in configuration space,” he says. I don’t know if he’s found one, lost one, or is riding one. “Time must be like chords. Not even a series of chords. An enormous polytonal cluster that has the whole horizontal tune stacked up inside it.”

No time at all has passed — none to speak of. I look down at the man’s profile, the raised shield of a forehead, the prow of nose, the set chin as familiar to me as mine. The hair is mostly gone now, the eyes a sallow sag. But I can see the belief still lingering in the folds of his eyelids: The tenses are a stubborn illusion. The whole unholy trio of them have no mathematically distinct existence. Past and future both lay folded up in the misleading lead of the present. All three are just different cuts through the same deep map. Was and will be: All are fixed, discernible coordinates on the plane that holds all moving nows.

I’m pushing thirty. I don’t know where my sister is. My brother has abandoned me. Every large city in America has burned. The house is now some horror of a suburban Jersey tract home that none of us ever lived in. Da’s in his study, hunched over still more drawings. He works away furiously on the one problem I need him to solve. But as always, he can’t solve the ones he cares about. He’s telling me, “There is no such thing as race. Race is only real if you freeze time, if you invent a zero point for your tribe. If you make the past an origin, then you fix the future. Race is a dependent variable. A path, a moving process. We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all.”

He and I can’t possibly be related. No one who knows me or my family could possibly say this. But everyone else who might tell him as much has gone. Mama is dead, Jonah has emigrated, and Ruth is in hiding. It falls to me, my solo job, to remind my father of everything he has forgotten since he was my age, everything bright and obvious he’s broken away from, in the run of mathematical time. His ruined family. What ruined them. The woman he married. Why he married her. The experiment they ran. The odds against him surviving his own experiment.

But I can’t wrap my head around what he is trying to tell me. I bend down and drop my head on his shoulder. My hand goes up to his chest, to hold him back from this irreversible place he already half-inhabits.

He’s on his last bed, before the long one. In a hospital, back in Manhattan, ten minutes by cab from the study that he will never work in anymore. He’s talking to me about multiple worlds. “The universe is an orchestra that, at every interval, splits into two full ensembles, each one continuing on a different piece. As many whole universes as there are notes in this one!”

I need some proof that he’s still in control, there inside the smiling, wasted shell. Some proof that he did not put our entire future on the line — worse, our pasts — on something so tenuous as arithmetic.

“Ha!” Da barks, knocking my head up off his shoulder, startling my hand back into my lap. He’s found something, some disparity overlooked, some hidden term that smoothes all asymmetries. Or just some unbearable abdominal pain.

I wait for a day when there isn’t much suffering, and ask, “Did you ever decide who wins?”

He knows what I mean: mechanics or thermodynamics. Relativity or the quantum. The too big or the too small. The river or the ocean. Flow or standstill. The only problem he’s ever worked on. The one that occupies him, even in these last hours. He tries to grin at me, has to save up his strength for the monosyllable: “When?”

“At the end.”

“Ach! My Yoseph.” His wasted yellow arm tries to cuff my neck, reassuring. “If there is no beginning, how can there be an end?” I will go mad. The planes of his shoulder muscle slide over one another in a concerted churn beyond the reaches of the subtlest equation.

I’ll never get closer to him than now. He looks straight at my need but refuses to comfort or deny. He’s prepared for any outcome. Pleased, even, at the confusion he has created. The bets are all in. The results are unrolled. Somewhere, our future is already real, although we can’t yet know just how real, stuck as we are in the specious present. He shrugs again, his hand in the air, conducting. His eyes laugh at the world’s reel. His look wants to say, How do you want things to come out? What will you do if they don’t?

“A dead finish,” he says. “A photo finish. Down to the wire.”

We live through a chunk of moments as frozen as that photo. He gets no better. Doctors mill about us in a data-seeking daze, clinicians exercising every charm they know, trying to influence the outcome, already run. Da will leave, and I’ll be forever in the dark. This is my one certain prediction. The world will lead me through every available ignorance.

“Do you know what time is?” His voice is so soft, I think I’m making it up. “Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

I reply as he taught me, long ago, the year my voice broke. “You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another.”

August 1955

Now is a full summer’s end. The boy is fourteen, a shining child with a full, round face. No one in creation exudes more confidence. He walks down the aisle of a long southbound train, a spring in his step that he thinks is everyone’s God-given right. He glances out the slicing window, seeing the whole world strut along in the other direction, peeling away. He has grown up breathing the air of a large northern city. He imagines he’s free.

In the pocket of his natty trousers, he carries a photo from last Christmas: a newly minted teen posing with his radiant mother. In the picture, his hair is cropped, like all boys his age. His snazzy white Christmas shirt, crisp and concert-ready, still bears the traces of its department-store folds. Under the arrow points of crimped collar, a bright new tie pokes out, a golden stripe running down its middle. His face glows, a three-quarter moon with the earth’s shadow just slipping off its right side. His eyes light with confidence, as if he is the ring bearer at a large, loving wedding. All life lies in front of him. His boyish beauty makes him happy, or perhaps his joy makes him beautiful.

His mother, in the black-and-white photo, is in blue. Her dress is rimmed with a white lace collar and ruffled sleeves. A holiday necklace sparkles at her throat. Her hair spills in a hive of curls. Her right hand drapes across her son’s neck, resting on his shoulder. The boy looks dead-on into the camera, but the woman smiles off past the photo’s edge, beyond her boy, her soft, reddened lips a little lifted, her eyes sparkling, recalling the holiday surprise she has planned, later that afternoon.