Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

We found our father drawing Feynman diagrams on the back of a napkin for two of his Columbia colleagues. They were arguing about the reversibility in time of elementary colliding particles. It seemed obscene, that they should be talking about anything other than death or Mama. Maybe, for Da, they were talking about both.

Jonah broke up the session. “Who’s Michael, Da?”

Our father turned away from his colleagues, a blank across his face. We were simply the next people intent on getting him to solve a problem for them. “Michael?” Failing to recognize the name of this new elementary particle. He looked at us, registered who we were. Something engaged. He grew frightened and excited, all at once. “Here?” Jonah nodded. “A tall man? About a hundred and ninety centimeters?” We looked at each other, frightened. Jonah shrugged. “A fine-looking man? Narrow face? One of his ears does this?”

Da flipped down his right ear flap to mimic the fold we’d both noticed. He never mentioned the cinnamon. First thing anyone else would want to know. Our father never even asked.

“Yes?” he asked. “This is him?” Still happy, still scared. He looked about the room, matching Michael’s own furtive look. “Where is he?”

Jonah shrugged again. “He’s gone.”

“Gone?” Da’s face drained as pale as the day he came up to Boston to tell us about Mama. “Away?”

I nodded at the imbecile question. Something had gone wrong, and it was Jonah’s and my fault. I nodded, trying to right things. But Da never even saw me. Our father was never at home in his body. The thing was squat and his soul was slender. When he moved, he slumped along next to himself like an overpacked suitcase. But at least this once, he ran. He moved through the rooms so quickly, the surrounding conversations were sucked up into his wake. Jonah and I scrambled to chase after him.

Da ran outside, on the street, ready to dash on through the passersby. He got as far as the first cross street. I watched him from half a block back. He didn’t belong in this neighborhood. He fell off the edge even of this street’s broad spectrum.

The buzz of conversation kept spilling from the little rented hall behind us. Da turned and rejoined us, beaten. The three of us went back in. The hum hushed at our entrance. Da looked around at the gathering, still trying to smile.

Jonah asked, “He was somebody we know or something?”

“He said I look like Mama.” I sounded like a child.

“You both look like your mother.” Da refused to look at us. “All three of you.” He took off his glasses and pressed his eyes. He slipped his glasses back on. The smile, the grin of disbelief, the slow shake of the head left him. “My boys.” He wanted to add, My JoJo, but couldn’t. “My boys. That was your uncle.”

Spring 1949

I’m seven years old when our father tells me the secret of time. We’re halfway up the steps from 189th Street, climbing toward the next way camp along our route, a place called Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook Terrace. Pick a Sunday near Easter in the spring of 1949.

My brother Jonah is eight. He climbs the stairway like a tank, two stairs to my labored one. In this year, Jonah’s hips still come up near my sternum. He climbs as if he wants to leave me in his distant past. He probably would if Da didn’t hold us together, one boy in each whitened hand.

Our father has worked on time since time began. He was working on it even before my brother was born. I can’t get enough of the idea: Jonah nothing, not even a speck of dust, and my father already at work, not even missing us, not even knowing that company is coming.

But now, this year, we’re here with him. We make this long pilgrimage to Frisch’s together, stopping to catch our breath. “To catch up with ourselves,” Da says. Jonah has already caught up with whoever he is, tugging at the leash of our father’s arm, smelling adventure just up this stone-paved hill. I’m winded and need the rest. All this is half a century ago. The day has brittled in the interim, like a box of old postcards from Yellowstone and Yosemite laid open in a spring-cleaning purge. Anything I remember now must be half invention.

We pass people who recognize my father from when he used to live here. “Before I met your mother.” The sound of this frightens me. My father greets some of them by name. He says hello as if he just saw these strangers the day before. These people — older than the moon and stars — are cool to him, distant in a way Da doesn’t see. They flick us a look, and we are all the explanation they need. Already I’m used to seeing all that Da won’t notice.

Our Da watches his old neighbors walk along Bennett Avenue in stunned persistence. The war is four years over. But even now, Da seems unable to figure how we’ve all been spared. Spring 1949, he and his boys, moored halfway up the steps to Overlook. He shakes his head, knowing something none of his former Washington Heights neighbors would ever believe, now or in a lifetime of Sundays. Everyone is dead. All those names no more than myths to me — Bubbie and Zadie and Tante — everyone we never knew. All of them gone. But all still here, in the shake of our Da’s head.

“My boys.” Da says the word to rhyme with voice. He smiles, lamenting what he must say. “ Nowis nothing but a very clever lie.” We should never have believed in it, he says. Two twins have dismantled the old illusion. Somehow the twins have our names, although twins are the last thing my brother and I are. “One twin, call him Jonah, leaves the earth forty years before, traveling in a rocket near the speed of light. Joey, the other twin, stays home on earth. Jonah comes back, and this you cannot guess: The twin brothers aren’t the same age anymore! Their times have run at different speeds. Joey, the boy who stays at home, he is old enough now to be his brother’s grandfather. But our Jonah, the rocket boy: This one has jumped into his brother’s future, without ever leaving his own present. I tell you: This is, every word, true.”

Da nods, and I see he is serious. This is the secret of time that no one can guess, that no one can accept, except that they have to. “Every twin has his own tempo. The universe has as many metronomes as it has moving things.”

The day in question must be fine, because I no longer feel it. Perfect weather disappears, in time. Even back now, the world already seems outdated. The war is over; everyone who isn’t dead is free to do anything. At eight and seven, my brother and I wait for the stream of breakthroughs that will revive the planet and make us feel finally at home. Mechanical stairs, to lift us up to Overlook without moving. Visual telephones on your wrist. Floating buildings. Pellets that change into any food you want — just add water. Dial-up music, everywhere on demand. This brick and iron city is something I’ll remember in old age, with the same head-wagging smile of bewilderment my father resorts to, here in this foreign country, in this false now.

I see my impatience mirrored in Jonah’s eyes. This whole place is backward, outmoded. There aren’t even rocket ships yet, except for the one those twins use to split time in two. We know what they’ll look like already, and what planets we’ll take them to. The only thing we don’t know is how long it’ll take until they finally arrive.

I look at Da and wonder if he’ll live to see them, these speed-of-light ships he tells us about. Our father is obscenely old. He has just turned thirty-eight. I can’t imagine what fluke has let him live so long. God must have heard about his work, all the different-speed clocks, and given our Da a clock with a mainspring all its own.

We reach the stairs’ crest, the sidewalk on Overlook Terrace. We bear left, toward Frisch’s Bakery, past a steel mesh trash can I remember better than yesterday. In front of that can, there’s a dead bird. We can’t be sure what kind, because it’s coated in a chocolate swarm of ants. We walk along, past that paint-scabbed bench where, one night a quarter of a century later, back in a Washington Heights I’ll no longer recognize, I’ll tell the kindest soul I’ll ever meet that I can’t marry her. Today, an old man — maybe twenty — owns the bench. He slings one arm over the backrest and points his shoulders toward eternity. He has on a banded hat and thick, pilling suit. I look at the man, and remember him. He looks back at us, jumping from boys to father and back, his eyes confused — the confusion we produce everywhere but home. Before he turns to deliver some hostile greeting, Jonah yanks Da guide-dog style across the street, toward Frisch’s, and further explanation.