Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

For the regionals, we traveled to Washington. We’d reached the stage where even a loss would be bankable. Jonah was the youngest singer left in the running. But Jonah had his eyes on a single distant prize. And the America’s Next Voices competition was just a hostage in that vaster campaign.

The semifinals were held at the auditorium at Georgetown. We stayed in a cheap hotel a good hike to the northeast. Any hotel at all was still a novelty. The clerk at the check-in asked whether we wanted the afternoon rate.

That evening, without a word to each other, we rolled out and found ourselves near the Mall. We’d heard our family’s founding legend so often in so many ways that we had to see the place where our parents had met. The same place, only later: We still believed, despite a lifetime of our father’s lessons, that where and when were independent variables.

I never imagined that a spot so filled with landmarks could feel so empty. Hundreds of people walked out on the nation’s front lawn, even at that hour. Yet it looked deserted. I’d imagined crowds — tens of thousands. But this green openness felt evacuated, a civil defense drill. We crossed the long rectangle, neither of us saying much, both looking for something we couldn’t find: The thing that had caused our parents to keep seeing each other, after that day when they should have gone their separate ways.

We played the next day, for more ghosts than there were healthy bodies in the audience. For the first time in my life, my arms locked in stage fright. I knew the disease had always been there, waiting like an aneurysm, terror ticking toward its debut. It chose that moment to step out. The two of us, in black tie, walked to center stage, a dozen football fields from the wings. We bowed our shallow, synchronized dips, like two water-drinking toy birds. I went to the keyboard and Jonah took up his post, grazing the crook of the piano. I looked out on the audience, who were clapping curiously on the strength of our rumor. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything. Not even an echo.

I sat down in front of the empty music rack — I always played from memory. I rubbed my knuckles for emergency circulation. The judges asked for “The Erl-King.” A dozen other composers besides Schubert have set Goethe’s fake medieval ballad, and all their settings are dead. Only this one has stumbled onto forever.

We set out on our customary gallop. Once Jonah and I had rehearsed a tempo, we rarely varied more than two beats a minute. You could have set anyone’s Swiss watch to us, except maybe that of the Bern patent clerk who got us into this. Perfect pitch served Jonah well over the years. But perfect meter had been even more useful. We took off running in the all-stakes darkness:

Who rides so late through a night so wild?

It is a father, holding his child…

Midway through that second line, I seized up with memory lapse. I hit a rock, and my body went on sailing so far away, I couldn’t even see it land. The rich, definitive harmonies under my fingers spun out in a horrible Tristan chord. I stopped, leaving my brother galloping along in the dead of night over a yawning expanse of nothing.

When he realized I wouldn’t be coming back anytime in this lifetime, Jonah reined in, although, in his air-bound scamper, he briefly considered bolting a cappella through the rest of the piece. The hall reeled from the shock of his voice and its violent silencing. Jonah never turned from the crook of the piano to look at me. He glanced at his shoes, a rude joke playing across his face. He took a crisp step forward and said, “We’re going to take this again, from the top. Once more with feeling!”

The house tittered, with spatters of mortified applause. Even then, Jonah didn’t turn to see if I’d recovered. He placed his right hand back upon the piano, just as before we were thrown. Then he inhaled and floated back into place, past certain that I’d join him. His sureness crucified me. The landscape beneath my fingers turned to bog. When the keys firmed, I watched them snap into a crazy chorus line, gapped where they shouldn’t have been.

Nothing of the piece remained. Not the key signature, the melody, the first note, nor the name. It had to be one of three songs, but which three, I had no clue. All I could grab onto was my forgetting. Panic cheered me on, every hint of the notes I needed skidding off, a floater just to the right of my chasing eye.

I saw the hall empty out, a big vaudevillian hook extending from stage left to extract us. I sat and unlearned every piece I’d ever memorized, the film running backward, reversing Juilliard, undoing Boylston, wiping out Hamilton Heights, until I touched bottom at my very first memory: the sound of my mother singing.

Then, my mother’s voice grew into my brother. Jonah was aloft again. All I had to do was sit quietly and listen. I must have been playing along, racing the wild late night, because I heard the piano there, underneath. But I was pure audience. Under my oblivious fingers, the line galloped as it never had. The cause lost, Jonah sang with death incarnate sitting on his shoulder, the ride that much wilder because of the heart-stopping stumble. We hit that state performers live for: unforgiving eternity, nothing between the notes and the instant past they rushed toward.

Rivers didn’t turn in their course to track his sound. Animals didn’t fall dead or stones come to life. The sound that came out of him made no difference in the known world. But something in that hall’s listeners did stop, flushed out of hiding, exposed for two beats, naked in a draft of daylight, before bolting again for cover.

Afterward, a judge broke the confidentiality rules and told Jonah they’d written us off. “Then you came out for round two and annihilated them.” That was his word: annihilated. The more deadly music was, the better.

I gave him my ultimatum on the train back north, heading home with an engraved plaque and a date for the national finals, in Durham, at Christmas. We sat side by side, without touching. Jonah’s hands fidgeted with freed energy, conducting a silent symphony into the dark.

“Get rid of me, Jonah.”

“Are you mad? You’re my rabbit’s foot. My shrunken-headed voodoo doll.” He reached over to rub my hair, his good-luck charm, one degree nappier than his. He knew I hated that.

“We got a break we shouldn’t have. I was finished. Total amnesia. I could be lying there still.”

“Ach. I knew you’d recover.”

“You knew more than I did.”

“I always do, Joey.”

“I’m dragging you down. Even when I’m on the mark, I’m just ballast.”

“Ballast is good. Keeps ships steady.”

“You need someone who’s your equal.”

“I have that.”

He talked me back to myself, just like rehearsal: over and over, the same passages, smoothing, interrogating, dismantling, reassembling. But in my shame, I needed to torch everything and elevate quitting to something noble.

Desperate, Jonah fought dirty. “We’re in the finals. All the marbles. December. There’s no chance in hell I can find someone…”

“I’ll play for the finals. God help me, I’ll do whatever I can do for you. But after that…”

“After that, we’ll talk.”

My brother is standing, as alone as birth, just to the right of center stage in the old music building at Duke, Durham, North Carolina. He towers in place, listing a little bit toward starboard, backing up into the crook of the grand piano, his only safety. He curls forward, the scroll on a reticent cello. His left hand steadies against the piano while his right cups itself in front of him, holding some now-lost letter. He grins at the impossibility of being here, breathes in, and sings.

These few minutes are the sole point of our long self-burial. We’ve spent our adolescence underground just for this, this winning, dragging the prize back up to the light of day. The sweet release comes out of his mouth as if he has just found it. But under his breath — that fountain of air on which this prize floats like a ball on a plume — his skill is burnished to the hardest finish. His sound is automatic, autonomic, so honed, we could walk away and leave it out here onstage alone: music perfect to the point of absentee, exuberant, flexing all the musculature of joy, without the slightest visible effort.