The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Afterward, the group visited over little square-cut sandwiches, tucking into the food with an appetite that made me hate them all. The few children in attendance sniffed out Ruth, who couldn’t bring herself either to play or stand off. Jonah and I held up the wall, just watching people smile and enjoy one another. When anyone came by to say how sorry they were, Jonah thanked them mechanically and I told them it wasn’t their fault.

  A man came up to us. I hadn’t seen him during the service. He seemed as negligent with age as any adult. He was in his early thirties, ten years older than was decent in anyone. He seemed to me the perfect color, just the cinnamon side of clove. He walked up to us, shy, certain, curious, his eyes rimmed with red. “You boys cook,” he said. His voice struggled. “You boys really hum.”

  He couldn’t smile. He kept looking around the room, ready to bolt. I couldn’t understand how someone I didn’t know could feel such grief for my mother.

  “Is that good or bad?” Jonah asked.

  “Real good. Good as it gets. You remember I told you that.” He bent down, his blood-streaked eyes at our level. He stared at us, himself remembering. “You,” he accused Jonah, index finger out. “You sound like her. But you.” His hand swung around in a slow quarter circle. “You are like her. And I’m not talking shade.”

  The man straightened up and peered down on us. I felt Jonah turn fierce, even before I heard him. “How would you know? Do you even know us?”

  The man held up his disarmed palms. They looked like mine. His palms would have looked no different had he been white.

  “Hey, hey. Keep cool, cat.” He sounded like what Thad and Earl would have died to be able to imitate. “I just know is how I know.”

  Jonah heard it, too. “You were close to her or something?”

  The man only looked at us, his head sliding from side to side. We amazed him, and I couldn’t say how. He couldn’t accept our being, but he found it wonderful, even comic. He put his hands on each of our heads. I let him. Jonah shook free.

  The man backed off, still shaking his head, filled with sad wonder. “You two really hum. Remember that.” He looked around the room again, afraid of being caught, or maybe wanting to be. “You say hello to that Da of yours. From Michael, okay?” Then he turned from the sorrowing party and left.

  We found our father drawing Feynman diagrams on the back of a napkin for two of his Columbia colleagues. They were arguing about the reversibility in time of elementary colliding particles. It seemed obscene, that they should be talking about anything other than death or Mama. Maybe, for Da, they were talking about both.

  Jonah broke up the session. “Who’s Michael, Da?”

  Our father turned away from his colleagues, a blank across his face. We were simply the next people intent on getting him to solve a problem for them. “Michael?” Failing to recognize the name of this new elementary particle. He looked at us, registered who we were. Something engaged. He grew frightened and excited, all at once. “Here?” Jonah nodded. “A tall man? About a hundred and ninety centimeters?” We looked at each other, frightened. Jonah shrugged. “A fine-looking man? Narrow face? One of his ears does this?”

  Da flipped down his right ear flap to mimic the fold we’d both noticed. He never mentioned the cinnamon. First thing anyone else would want to know. Our father never even asked.

  “Yes?” he asked. “This is him?” Still happy, still scared. He looked about the room, matching Michael’s own furtive look. “Where is he?”

  Jonah shrugged again. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Da’s face drained as pale as the day he came up to Boston to tell us about Mama. “Away?”

  I nodded at the imbecile question. Something had gone wrong, and it was Jonah’s and my fault. I nodded, trying to right things. But Da never even saw me. Our father was never at home in his body. The thing was squat and his soul was slender. When he moved, he slumped along next to himself like an overpacked suitcase. But at least this once, he ran. He moved through the rooms so quickly, the surrounding conversations were sucked up into his wake. Jonah and I scrambled to chase after him.

  Da ran outside, on the street, ready to dash on through the passersby. He got as far as the first cross street. I watched him from half a block back. He didn’t belong in this neighborhood. He fell off the edge even of this street’s broad spectrum.

  The buzz of conversation kept spilling from the little rented hall behind us. Da turned and rejoined us, beaten. The three of us went back in. The hum hushed at our entrance. Da looked around at the gathering, still trying to smile.

  Jonah asked, “He was somebody we know or something?”

  “He said I look like Mama.” I sounded like a child.

  “You both look like your mother.” Da refused to look at us. “All three of you.” He took off his glasses and pressed his eyes. He slipped his glasses back on. The smile, the grin of disbelief, the slow shake of the head left him. “My boys.” He wanted to add, My JoJo, but couldn’t. “My boys. That was your uncle.”

  SPRING 1949

  I’m seven years old when our father tells me the secret of time. We’re halfway up the steps from 189th Street, climbing toward the next way camp along our route, a place called Frisch’s Bakery on Overlook Terrace. Pick a Sunday near Easter in the spring of 1949.

  My brother Jonah is eight. He climbs the stairway like a tank, two stairs to my labored one. In this year, Jonah’s hips still come up near my sternum. He climbs as if he wants to leave me in his distant past. He probably would if Da didn’t hold us together, one boy in each whitened hand.

  Our father has worked on time since time began. He was working on it even before my brother was born. I can’t get enough of the idea: Jonah nothing, not even a speck of dust, and my father already at work, not even missing us, not even knowing that company is coming.

  But now, this year, we’re here with him. We make this long pilgrimage to Frisch’s together, stopping to catch our breath. “To catch up with ourselves,” Da says. Jonah has already caught up with whoever he is, tugging at the leash of our father’s arm, smelling adventure just up this stone-paved hill. I’m winded and need the rest. All this is half a century ago. The day has brittled in the interim, like a box of old postcards from Yellowstone and Yosemite laid open in a spring-cleaning purge. Anything I remember now must be half invention.

  We pass people who recognize my father from when he used to live here. “Before I met your mother.” The sound of this frightens me. My father greets some of them by name. He says hello as if he just saw these strangers the day before. These people—older than the moon and stars—are cool to him, distant in a way Da doesn’t see. They flick us a look, and we are all the explanation they need. Already I’m used to seeing all that Da won’t notice.

  Our Da watches his old neighbors walk along Bennett Avenue in stunned persistence. The war is four years over. But even now, Da seems unable to figure how we’ve all been spared. Spring 1949, he and his boys, moored halfway up the steps to Overlook. He shakes his head, knowing something none of his former Washington Heights neighbors would ever believe, now or in a lifetime of Sundays. Everyone is dead. All those names no more than myths to me—Bubble and Zadie and Tante—everyone we never knew. All of them gone. But all still here, in the shake of our Da’s head.

  “My boys.” Da says the word to rhyme with voice. He smiles, lamenting what he must say. “Now is nothing but a very clever lie.” We should never have believed in it, he says. Two twins have dismantled the old illusion. Somehow the twins have our names, although twins are the last thing my brother and I are. “One twin, call him Jonah, leaves the earth forty years before, traveling in a rocket near the speed of light. Joey, the other twin, stays home on earth. Jonah comes back, and this you cannot guess: The twin brothers aren’t the same age anymore! Their times have run at different speeds. Joey, the boy who stays at home, he is old enough now to be his brother’s grandfather. But our Jonah, the rocket boy: This one has jumped into his broth
er’s future, without ever leaving his own present. I tell you: This is, every word, true.”

  Da nods, and I see he is serious. This is the secret of time that no one can guess, that no one can accept, except that they have to. “Every twin has his own tempo. The universe has as many metronomes as it has moving things.”

  The day in question must be fine, because I no longer feel it. Perfect weather disappears, in time. Even back now, the world already seems outdated. The war is over; everyone who isn’t dead is free to do anything. At eight and seven, my brother and I wait for the stream of breakthroughs that will revive the planet and make us feel finally at home. Mechanical stairs, to lift us up to Overlook without moving. Visual telephones on your wrist. Floating buildings. Pellets that change into any food you want—just add water. Dial-up music, everywhere on demand. This brick and iron city is something I’ll remember in old age, with the same head-wagging smile of bewilderment my father resorts to, here in this foreign country, in this false now.

  I see my impatience mirrored in Jonah’s eyes. This whole place is backward, outmoded. There aren’t even rocket ships yet, except for the one those twins use to split time in two. We know what they’ll look like already, and what planets we’ll take them to. The only thing we don’t know is how long it’ll take until they finally arrive.

  I look at Da and wonder if he’ll live to see them, these speed-of-light ships he tells us about. Our father is obscenely old. He has just turned thirty-eight. I can’t imagine what fluke has let him live so long. God must have heard about his work, all the different-speed clocks, and given our Da a clock with a mainspring all its own.

  We reach the stairs’ crest, the sidewalk on Overlook Terrace. We bear left, toward Frisch’s Bakery, past a steel mesh trash can I remember better than yesterday. In front of that can, there’s a dead bird. We can’t be sure what kind, because it’s coated in a chocolate swarm of ants. We walk along, past that paint-scabbed bench where, one night a quarter of a century later, back in a Washington Heights I’ll no longer recognize, I’ll tell the kindest soul I’ll ever meet that I can’t marry her. Today, an old man—maybe twenty—owns the bench. He slings one arm over the backrest and points his shoulders toward eternity. He has on a banded hat and thick, pilling suit. I look at the man, and remember him. He looks back at us, jumping from boys to father and back, his eyes confused—the confusion we produce everywhere but home. Before he turns to deliver some hostile greeting, Jonah yanks Da guide-dog style across the street, toward Frisch’s, and further explanation.

  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 Mondel 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.