Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

His hands speak. Mirth spills from him, a jowled elf of empiricism. He tries out on us, his last three contacts with the outside world, the latest, most outrageous shaggy-dog story his physics has yet concocted. “It’s incredible!” His outrage and delight are children of the same mixed marriage. The silverware is mounting a sprawling performance of Faust. His eyes moisten with the thought of this latest bizarre twist to the quantum world. “Nature is not invariant with regard to time. The mirror of time has broken!”

Jonah raises both hands. “We didn’t do it, Daddy-o. We didn’t break nothing.”

Da nods and shakes his head at the same time. He takes off his glasses, daubing his eyes. He’s like a bachelor suffering the toasts of his friends the evening before his wedding. “You can’t believe this.” He holds out both palms to keep the invisible forces of nature from rushing him to the punch line. “The electrically neutral kaon.”

Jonah pinches his smirk between thumb and index finger. “Ah, yes! The Electrically Neutral Kaon. The latest British beat group, right?”

“Yes, of course! A rock group!” Our father waves his hands in front of him, canceling all jokes. He removes his glasses again and starts over. “This kaon flips between particle and antiparticle in a way that should be reversible in time. But it isn’t.” As the terminology gets more technical, the accent thickens. “Imagine! A strange particle, an antistrange particle, that can somehow tell forward from backward. The only thing in the universe that knows the difference between past and future!”

“The only thing in your universe.”

“Ruth? Again, please?”

“Everything in my universe knows the difference between past and future. Except you.”

Da nods, humoring her. “Let me explain this to you.”

Ruth is on her feet. She’s Mama, only a shade darker. Faster. “Let me explain this to you. I’m sick of this total self-absorption.”

Da looks at Jonah, his lay-world touchstone. “What’s eating her?” The slang, wrapped in his Teutonic accent, sounds like a big-band leader in a Beatle wig.

“Ruthie wants to know if she’s a Schwarze, a half Schwarze, an anti- Schwarze, or what?”

“Fucker.”

Da doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. Particles decay, irreversibly, all over my father’s face. But he remains a study in rapid calculation. He looks at his daughter, too late, and sees. “What’s this about, sweetheart?”

She’s desperate, begging, full of tears. “Why did you marry a black woman?”

Their eyes lock. He denies this sneak attack. “I did not marry a black woman. I married your mother.”

“I don’t know who you think you married. But my mother was black.”

“You mother is who she is. First. Herself, before anything.”

Ruth recoils from his present tense. She would rush into his arms for safety. “Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.”

Da wheels, danger on all sides. This is not the route down which his mind inclines. His face works up an objection: “I’m not a white man; I’m a Jew.” The hands illustrate, start to rise like a flock of meanings. But he’s smart enough to strangle them in flight. His words inch over this landscape, looking for cover. “Abraham married a black concubine. Joseph…” He points at me as if I were my namesake’s keeper. “Joseph married an Egyptian priestess. Moses said the stranger who comes to live with you, who takes up as your family, will become as one who is born in your own country. Solomon, for God’s sake! Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter.”

I don’t know this man. Whole vanished generations, ancestors whose existence I’ve never imagined rise up from their pebble-strewn graves. My father, the protector of no doctrine, the believer in nothing but causality, turns before my eyes into an interpreter of the Torah. I can’t bear Ruth’s silence. I blurt out, “Goodman. Goodman and… Schwerner.” I surprise myself, remembering the names, even though they died just last summer — Freedom Summer, when Jonah and I were performing in Wisconsin.

“What about them?” Ruth challenges.

“Two white men. Two Jews, like Da. Like us. Two men who didn’t have the luxury…you’re talking about.”

“You wouldn’t know anything about luxury, would you, Joey? These men were no older than you two. Your age, out there on the front line. Chaney died for being black. Those other two were in the line of fire.”

My throat would make sounds, but I can’t shape them.

“The Jews can’t help us,” Ruth says. “It’s not their fight.” Her voice betrays the universe she needs from Da. The one he can’t give her.

“Not our fight? Not our fight?” Our father teeters on the edge of the irreversible. “If one drop makes a Schwarze, then…we’re all Schwarzen.”

“Not all of us.” My sister falls away. She is ten again. Breaking. “Not all of us, Da. Not you.”

This is how my family spends Christmas of 1964. I would say our last, but the word means nothing. For every last breaks forward into a next. And even last things last forever.

My Brother as Faust

Fame caught Jonah when he was twenty-four. It felt as if he’d been singing lifetimes. In fact, he was still a child, by every measure but skill.

The skill had solidified, each one of his teachers handing him some piece of foundation. Jonah’s trick was to keep the skill as fresh as that moment fifteen years before, when he startled our parents by joining their quotations game. He walked out onstage bemused, in front of growing audiences who’d heard through the musical mill that something remarkable was happening. He looked around the hall as if about to ask directions from the nearest usher. My hands touched the keys, and he opened up, amazed.

And somehow Jonah would convince each audience that he, too, was discovering the purity of his tone that very night. His face lit up, ambushed by this wondrous accident. The room would draw in a collective breath, witnesses at the birth. He ran a kind of devout, aesthetic con game, all in the higher service of the notes. I can fly! He pulled off the stunt four dozen times in the course of a year, and every time, it took my breath away.

His fast passages hung motionless in flight, every note audible: one of those stop-action photographs — a bullet halfway through the width of a playing card, or a corona of milk after the droplet hits. He had more power now, but his pitches were still so focused, they could pierce cloth. He found the mystery of tone that all his teachers had carried on about, each one meaning something different. His sound was secure. He never faltered, never made you feel you needed to stave off disaster with your own concentration. Even at the top of his range, he floated for measures without strain. His warmth passed into your ears like a whispered confidence, a friend you’d forgotten you had.

Maybe splendor is nothing but convention. Maybe the corroded soul can still mimic a saint. Who knows how we hear care or decode comfort? But all these things were Jonah’s when he sang, even when he sang in languages he didn’t speak. Singing, he owned what his speaking voice disowned. For the space of an hour, over the run of three octaves, my brother constructed grace.

In February of 1965, three black men gunned down Malcolm X a few blocks from where Da fed us Mandelbrot and taught us the secret of time. We performed the night of his murder, in Rochester, New York. While thousands marched from Selma to Montgomery, we were driving from East Lansing to Dayton. The night Rochester exploded, we sang in St. Louis. When Jacksonville burned, we played Baltimore.

Every one of those nights, Jonah used Da’s secret of time. Leave the earth at unthinkable speed and you can jump into another’s future. His beauty in that year came from freezing out everything that wasn’t beautiful. While he sang, nothing else mattered.