Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Suppose I’m flying past you near the speed of light…”

Delia’s head jerks upright. Her father has gone mad. Both of them: madder than anything in this country’s whole toxic drugstore could make them. David Strom leans forward, for the first time this evening, in his element. “Yes.” He grins. “Go on. I follow.”

“Then according to relative motion, you are flying past me at the same speed.”

“Yes,” Strom says with all the delight he just gave their playing. Here at last is something he can talk about. “Yes, this is exactly correct!”

“But that’s what I can’t understand. If both of us are moving, then we both think the other’s time slows down, relative to ours.”

“This is good!” David’s glee is spontaneous. “You have made a study of this matter!”

William Daley’s teeth clench. His eyes test the other’s for condescension, a level gaze that would expose all patronage. But here is only pleasure, mind pushing through loneliness to a surprise meeting.

“Your time is slower than mine. Mine is slower than yours. It makes a joke out of reason.”

“Yes.” The man actually giggles. “That, too, is true! But only because our reason was created at very slow speeds.”

“It smacks of utter nonsense.” Dr. Daley stops short of saying useless parasitism or Jewish plot. But his outrage is more than public. “Which one of us is right? Which one of us really ages faster?”

“Ah!” David nods. “I understand. This is now a different question.”

Delia listens to the closest thing she’ll ever hear to a teatime chat in the monkey house. The light-speed slowing of time is easier to believe than these two men. The room goes liquid. She must key on either the speech or the speakers, though both are hopeless. Her father has indeed made a thorough study, but the man she drags home will never know why. And yet David, too, is locked in a contest she can’t understand. His work feels stranger to her, in this moment, than the most closed tribal ritual. It smells of unguents and incense. It sits like a prayer shawl pulled around the man’s shoulders.

She studies the white one, then the black. Their animated battle is too much for her. Her father’s disbelief knows no bounds. “The laws of physics are the same,” the foreigner insists, “in any uniformly moving system.” Her father sits still, forgoing reason, trying to embrace the impossible.

They strike a truce of mutual awe, a truce that alarms Delia more than open warfare. Forgotten by them both, she retreats to the remaining domain of common sense. Maybe she’s lost her citizenship there, as well. Maybe her mother will bar her entry.

But Nettie Ellen is standing in front of the stove, as she was before dinner, when Charlie drove her to tears. Now her face is dry. She holds a towel, although the dishes are done. She looks down into a space in front of her, one that Delia, too, can see. She seems not to hear her daughter enter. When she speaks, it’s to the pit in front of her. “You two seem strong together. Like nobody can hurt you. Like you already lived through a bunch more days than you have.”

Her mother has stumbled onto her incredible truth. The man’s alien notions, his curved space and slow-running time, that Easter afternoon on the Mall have somehow given them time enough to find each other. The bird can love the fish for no other reason than their shared bewilderment, turning in the blue.

“That’s the crazy thing, Mama. That’s what I can’t figure out. More days than we…”

“That’s good,” Nettie says, wheeling around to face the sink. “You’re gonna need all the preparation time you can get.”

If she means it as a reprimand, it still can’t match the pain Delia has already sown. She wants to hug her mother for this blessing, however backhanded. But the blessing has damaged them both enough already.

Her mother looks up, fixing Delia’s eye. From ten years away and another city, the daughter is saying, She’s so small. Thin as a bar of soap at the end of the wash week. “You know what the Bible says.” Nettie Ellen works her mouth to citation. “You know…” But nothing more comes from her moving lips than a whole “cleave” and half an “unto.”

Not for the last time, they trade things too hard for speaking. Delia takes the idle dish towel from her mother’s hands and returns it to the rack. She turns her mother’s shoulders, and together they head out front to reclaim the male strangeness assigned to them. They don’t link arms as they might have, once. But still, they walk together. Delia makes no effort to prepare her mother, for that would insult them all. All must watch the others fly past, each to his own clock.

They find the men turning from contest to outright pact. William and David hunch toward each other, hands on knees, like they’re pitching pennies out in the alley. They’ve formed an alliance in the face of the universe’s fundamental law. Neither looks up as the women enter. The doctor of medicine still scowls, but a scowl wrestling with the angel of insight. “So you’re saying that my now happens before your now?”

“I am saying that the whole idea of ‘now’ cannot travel from my frame of reference to yours. We cannot talk of ‘instantaneous.’”

Nettie shoots her girl a frightened look: Is the man speaking English? Delia just shrugs: the vast futility of the male race. She settles down into that time-crafted dismissal, one that rejoins her to her head-shaking mother while all the while drawing her closer to her betrothed-to-be.

“In case you gentlemen have failed to notice, it’s getting late.” Nettie Ellen shakes her finger at the window, the undeniable outside. Telling time by darkness: nothing to it.

“This is what you call our legendary hospitality.” William winks at David.

Strom scrambles to his feet. “I must go!”

Nettie Ellen throws up her hands. “Now that’s just the opposite of what I’m telling you. I’m saying, You sure you want to be jumping on a train at this hour?”

Delia watches her mother struggle mightily to be spontaneous. The offer she’d make without thinking, in any world but this, crawls up in her throat and sticks. Nor is Delia wholly ready for her mother to extend it. To lodge the man under the same roof as her parents… She stands at attention, wincing. Her foreigner, too, waits politely, trying to brake from the speed of thought, to slow the moment enough to see what’s happening. The three hosts stand nodding at their guest, each waiting for the other to say, There’s a spare bed in the downstairs room.

They stand forever. Then forever stops. Michael and Charles burst into the room, too excited to speak. The little one gets the words out first. “The Germans have invaded Poland. Tanks, planes—”

“It’s true,” Charles says. “It’s all over the radio.”

All eyes turn to the German in their midst. But his search out the woman who has brought him here. Delia sees it, faster than the light from his face can reach her: a fear that leaves him her dependent. Everything this man’s culture touches, it sets alight. His science and music struggle to take in this war they’ve let happen while away in their playful, free flights. And in a single blitzkrieg, all that the man has ever cared for burns.

She sees, in that flash, what this news means. And she never stops to question. His family is dead, his country unreachable. He has no people, no place, no home now but her. No other nation but their sovereign state of two.

Carolina asks, “What exactly are you boys?” And our answer drops on us, overnight: America’s Next Voice. Not current; just next. Not fame, exactly, but never again the freedom of obscurity.