Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

With each step that he pulls away from me, Jonah’s clock slows down. But if his clock slows, it only makes him more impatient. Jonah races and slows; Da dawdles and speeds up. He’s still talking, as if we can follow him. “Light, you see, always flies around you at the same speed. Whether you run toward it or away. So some measure must shrink, to make that speed stand still. This means you cannot say when a thing happens without saying where, in what frame of motion.”

This is how he talks. He has gone a little crazy. This is how we know it’s Da. He can look down this length of Sunday street and see no single thing at rest. Every moving point is the center of some hurtling universe. Yardsticks shrink; weight gets heavier; time flies out the window. He pokes along at his own pace. I try to keep our three hands linked. But there’s too much difference. Jonah flies and Da drags, and soon Da’s time will run so fast, we’ll lose him to the past. He doesn’t really need us. He doesn’t need any audience at all. He’s with Bubbie and Zadie, with his sister and her husband, working on a way to bring them back.

I try to make him laugh, humor him. “The faster you go, the slower your time?”

But Da just hikes up his face, approving my silliness.

A car races past, faster than Jonah. “That car’s clock is wrong? Too slow?”

Our father chuckles, a loving-enough dismissal. He doesn’t say, The difference, at low speeds, is insignificant. The difference, for him, is monumental. “Not too slow. Slower than yours. But fast enough for himself!”

I don’t have a clock. But I don’t bother reminding him. He’ll give me one for Christmas, later this year. And he will warn me, so gravely that I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, never to set it backward.

“The driver of that car,” he says, although the car is long gone, “gets older slower than you.”

“So if we all drove around fast…” I begin. My father watches me work through it, his face all encouragement. “We’d live longer?”

“Longer, by who?”

He’s asking me. Really asking. But the question must be a trick. Already I’m searching for the trick answer.

“Remember that for us, in our frame, our own clocks slow down not at all!” He speaks as if he knows I won’t catch up to this message for years. I’m the receiver and messenger all in one, expected to carry the message to myself, somewhere far from now. “We cannot jump into our own futures,” he tells the future me. “Only into someone else’s.”

I look down the street onto this slurry of moving times, and it’s too crazy. Clocks and yardsticks softer than taffy. Time all fractured and oozing, sliding at different rates, like an excitable choir that cannot set a tempo. If now is really so fluid and mad, how can we even meet here, Da and I, long enough to talk?

Jonah’s gone, disappearing into the doorway of what must be Frisch’s. I have a daymare, seeing myself round the corner and enter the shop, fifty years old, a hundred, even older than Da, but not knowing how old I’ve become until Jonah looks at me in horror.

“The faster you go, the stranger measurement gets.” Da sings the words. He rocks his head while he walks, like a conductor. “Close to the speed of light, very strange indeed. Because light still passes you at light speed!” He whips his hand through the now-warped air.

“If you speeded up past the speed of light…” I start, happy at the thought of going back.

“You cannot go past the speed of light.” His voice stings with displeasure. I’ve done some wrong, offended him. My face crumples. But Da doesn’t notice. He’s off somewhere, measuring with a yardstick that shrinks to zero.

Jonah waits for us in Frisch’s. He’s caused a clamor that falls silent as soon as we enter. In the bakery, Da turns foreign. He and Mr. Frisch speak in a language not quite German, one I follow only in ghostly outline.

“Why are they numbered?” I whisper.

“Numbered?” Da, the numbers man, asks. I tap his arm to show him where. Da hushes me, which he never does. “ Sha.You ask me again, this time next year.”

But he’s just said that there is no this time next year.

Mr. Frisch asks me something I can’t understand.

“The boy doesn’t speak,” Da says. Although I speak fine.

“Doesn’t speak! How can they not speak? I don’t care what they are. What they look like. How are you raising these boys?”

“We are raising the best we can.”

“Professor. We’re disappearing,” the baker says. “They want us everywhere gone. They almost have succeeded in this. Our people need every life. Doesn’t speak!”

We leave, nodding and waving, making our peace with Mr. Frisch, Da carrying our magic foreign substance, Mandelbrot, under his arm. This is a food Mama can’t make. Only Frisch’s sells the exact Mandelbrot that Da used to eat before he came to the United States. To Jonah and me, it looks like a good, sweet bread, but hardly worth the long trip north. To Da, it’s from another dimension. A time machine.

We hoard our treasure in a bag of greasy paper, hauling it up to Fort Tryon. My father can barely contain himself. He snitches two pieces by the time we sit on the benches lining the park’s snaking path. We sit by ourselves. Other people sit, too, but never next to us. Da doesn’t notice this. He’s busy. His face, when he puts the magic substance in his mouth, is like light racing itself to a standstill.

“This is it,” he shouts, crumbs flying outward like new galaxies being born. “This is the same Mandel bread I’m eating when I’m your age.”

The idea of my father at my age makes me feel ill.

“The same one!” Pleasure stops my father from saying more. Mandelbrot, that rare substance only available in Germany, Austria, and Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook, goes into his mouth and transforms him. “Oh. Oh! When I was you…” Da begins, but memory overwhelms him. He puts a hand on his stomach, closes his eyes, and shakes his head in grateful disbelief. I see a small child, me, devouring the bread just now entering his mouth. The same one.

Da is still that child, the one I’m already ceasing to be. His mind races at such a speed, his clock has all but stopped. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t ask us twice as many questions as we can answer. It’s exhausting. Could time be matter, sideways? Might it have joints, like the grooves in a brick wall? Might there come a time when water will flow uphill? With thoughts like that, he could easily dissolve like a lump of sugar in the hot tea of his own ideas.

“Every moving person has his own clock?” I ask knowing the answer. But the question keeps him seated. It keeps him eating the Mandelbrot, for the moment, out of danger.

Da nods, and the motion makes his next bite miss his mouth.

“And nobody sees their own clock running funny?”

He shakes his head. “Nobody’s clock is running funny. When you speed past another, they think your clock runs slow.” He draws a corkscrew sign for crazy in the air. The sign most others would draw for him.

“Both people think the other is slow?” The thought is too outrageous even to dismiss.

Jonah loves the idea. He giggles and juggles three wadded-up dough balls of Mandel bread, a little solar system. Da applauds, scattering crumbs in all directions. Every pigeon in the five boroughs is on us in a pack. Jonah lets loose a high B, the delighted screech of childhood. The pigeons scatter.

If Da is serious, the universe is impossible. Every chunk hurtling loose, all its measures liquid and private. I take my father’s arm. The ground squishes under my feet like pudding. I’ll have nightmares for weeks — drooping people zooming up and contracting before my eyes, pleading incoherently like those caramel voices from our record player as Jonah and I drop nickels on the turntable. I feel myself going nuts, and all because of my father’s pet experiment: Can you free a mind to think in relative time, before it has set into absolutes?