Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The young man’s mother arrived and started scolding her son. The crowd, the police, the man, his mother, his brother all closed on one another. More police, more pull, the crowd restive with history, and the night turning warm. There was a scuffle, the simplest kind of beginning. A club in the face that lands in the face of everyone looking on.

The crowd grew to a thousand, and the police radioed for more help. This was around 7:30, as we were listening to the tape: “Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.” The producer was crying and cursing Jonah for laughing at him.

Over on Avalon, all music stopped. Someone spit on the officers as they hauled the man, his mother, and his brother off to jail. Two patrolmen waded into the crowd, guns in the air, to arrest this next wave of offenders. By 7:40, as Jonah and I stood on the hot sidewalk in front of the studio, the police were pulling away under a hail of stones.

We chanced onto the news on the car radio as we left the studio. Reports of the gathering riot broke into the Top 40 countdown. Jonah looked at me, connecting. “Let’s have a look.”

“A look? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on. From a distance. It’s over by now anyway.” I was driving. Something in him made me. He pointed me south, navigating by a combination of news report and acute hearing. He got us on South Broadway, then over onto eastbound Imperial Highway. He made me pull over and then got out. He stood there on the pavement, just listening. “Joey. You hear that?” I heard only traffic, the usual background of shouts and sirens, routine urban insanity. But my brother heard whole bands of the spectrum I couldn’t, just as all week long he’d heard sounds on our tapes hidden to the rest of us. “ Listen!Are you deaf?”

He packed us back in the car and steered us northeast. We hooked right, where madness materialized in front of us. Crowds of people lined the streets of the tinderbox neighborhood, just waiting for the match. We crept another block east. I pulled over and checked the map, as if the outbreak might be marked there. The Mustang was a death trap, as stupid a car as we could have chosen to drive. Straight through our windshield, down the street, a mass condensed, drifting from block to block, stopping cars by force and stoning them, the only alternative to justice. The streets were the same as most in L.A. — white-walled arroyos of small one-family dwellings. Only, down this one, a creature lumbered out of some filmic dream. The laws of physics bent the air around us. It was like watching a flock of starlings twist and blot the sun. Like watching a funnel cloud dissolve the house across the way.

The crowd hit a pebble in its path and veered. Jonah was hypnotized by the movement, thrilled. They were going after any moving cars, pelting them with stones. At any minute, they’d smell the last notes of Dowland still clinging to us, and charge. I should have turned the car around and fled. But this drifting, methodical mob was so far beyond the rules of ordinary life that I sat paralyzed, waiting to see what happened. The crowd was like stirred bees. They surged and attacked a police outpost. The officers broke and scattered from the advance. No one gave orders, but the mass moved as if under single command. The forward edge swung west, toward us. I came out of my spell and turned the car around hard, cutting across the bewildered trickle of traffic.

“What are you doing?” Jonah yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?” For the first time in my life, I ignored him. Somehow, I got us back on the northbound Harbor Freeway. Our hotel, back near View Park, felt more unreal than the trance we’d just witnessed. Neither of us slept.

The morning papers were filled with the story. But the thing they reported was not the thing we’d seen. The official accounts were stunted, deluding, clinging to the unreal. The radio performed feats of heroic denial. Everyone in the hotel was buzzing. The streets that Thursday morning wore a bright, forced cheer that barely masked the rush of expectation. Even as the city tried to talk itself down, it braced for the night to come.

We checked in with the studio at noon for last-minute touch-ups. But all was well: Yesterday’s takes sounded even better in the light of day. I blessed our luck; Jonah couldn’t have recorded the piece again, not after the previous night. Even the Harmondial people saw how shaken he was. No one could assimilate the news. The engineers joked nervously with us, as if we might turn, in front of them, from Elizabethan troubadors to looters. By four o’clock that afternoon, the producers sent us off with hugs and great predictions for our debut release. We were all set to head back to LAX for an evening flight. We had a couple of hours.

“Joey?” His voice was more spooked by itself than anything. “I need another look.”

“Another… Oh, no, Jonah. Please. Don’t be crazy.”

“Just a detour on the way to the airport. Joey, I can’t get it out of my head. What did we see last night? Like nothing I’ve ever come close to in my life.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to get close to it again. We were lucky to get out without incident.”

“Without incident?”

I hung my head. “I mean to us. The rest — what were we supposed…?” But Jonah wasn’t interested in my defense. He was already going after the missing bit in his education, the thing that no teacher had yet given him. He felt the years still ahead trying to signal him. He needed to go back, to hear. He no longer trusted anything but the sense that would finally kill him.

Jonah drove, a concession to my rage at him. We reached the previous night’s neighborhood just after five o’clock. The blocks off the expressway should have satisfied him. The streets sparkled with smashed shop windows, a carpet of fake diamonds. Here and there, the soot of extinguished fires coated the stucco and concrete. Knots of teens edged up and down the sidewalks. The only visible whites were armed and uniformed. Jonah pulled the Mustang into a deserted lot. He shut off the engine and opened his door. I made no objection; you can’t object to what you don’t believe is happening.

He didn’t even look at me. “Come on, brother.” He was out through the other end of the scrap-strewn lot before I could yell at him. I locked my door — ridiculous to the end — and raced to catch up. The crowd had swelled again to thousands, double the night before. Already that ranging group mind was taking over. The police were lost, worse even than the newspaper accounts. You could see it in their faces: We’ve given them so much; why are they doing this? Their strategy was to set up a perimeter, contain the violence to the immediate neighborhoods, and wait for the National Guard. Jonah scouted the police border, finding a gap in it between a package store and a burned breakfast dive. After twenty-four years of hiding indoors, my brother chose that night to come outside.

We passed down the alley, through the break in the police cordon. The street cutting just in front of us flowed with running hallucination. Three cars, rolled over onto their carapaces, poured blackened flames into the air. Firemen fought to get close enough to douse the fireballs, but the crowd beat them back with rocks and stood over the blazes, tending them.

No one scored out the chaos. It just unfolded around us in a horizon-wide ballet. Three dozen people materialized in front of us to trash a greengrocer’s. Their bodies worked at the task, neither excited nor functional. They cohered around the job, a band of tight improvisers handing one another supplies — hammers, axes, gas cans — as if passing so many relay-race batons. The cadence was eerie, a slow, resistant, underwater, paced rage, workmanlike, as if the plans for apocalypse had been perfected over generations.