The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  If Da is serious, the universe is impossible. Every chunk hurtling loose, all its measures liquid and private. I take my father’s arm. The ground squishes under my feet like pudding. I’ll have nightmares for weeks—drooping people zooming up and contracting before my eyes, pleading incoherently like those caramel voices from our record player as Jonah and I drop nickels on the turntable. I feel myself going nuts, and all because of my father’s pet experiment: Can you free a mind to think in relative time, before it has set into absolutes?

  “But if everybody’s on their own clock … ?” My voice scatters. My courage, too, like the pigeons from my brother’s screech. “What time is it, really?” I sound like my own frightened child, a small flood-tossed boy who can’t get past his first timeless question: Is it tomorrow yet?

  Da beams. “Ah, you have it, boychik. I knew you would. There is no single now, now. And there never was!”

  As if to prove the ridiculous claim, he walks us up the last little neck of island to a hidden valley in the Heights. Behind a rim of trees is an ancient monastery. “The Cloisters,” Da says. Behind that, the even older river, which he doesn’t bother naming. We push through a hole in the side of the air and go back six hundred years.

  “Here is the fifteenth century. But if we turn here, we go into the fourteenth.” Da points to the centuries, like places. I’m turned around, like Mama sometimes gets when we go down into the subway and wind up on the wrong platform. If the past is older than the present, then the future must be younger. And we must all go backward with each passing year.

  “This building is not a real building. It is a nice big … hmm?” Da jumbles his hands together, looking for the word. “A mixed-up puzzle picture. Bits and pieces, from places with all different ages. Cut up in the Old World and shipped off to the New for rebuilding. Brought together into one museum, like a little index. A versammeled word book of our past!”

  He says “our,” but that’s the salad he makes of English. We always have to figure what his words really are. This is not our past. No American, I know, has ever set foot here, except by getting lost. It seems to me that every spot on earth must be a diorama, like the kind Jonah and I make with Mama: Apollo giving Orpheus his first lyre, or Handel sitting at his desk and writing the Messiah in twenty-one days. Each spot its own now, its own never.

  “It collects, here, five different abbeys from France,” Da says. He names them, and the names pass into the empty future.

  “How did they get the buildings over here?” I ask.

  My brother shoves me. “Stone by stone, dummy.”

  “How did they get them?” Da is gleeful. “Rich Americans stole them!”

  A guard glares at us, and Jonah and I hustle Da down the walkway to safety. We turn into a courtyard of arches that shelters a garden. It reminds me of a place, the school I’ll live in, years from now. Holding up each arch are two stone columns. Each column sprouts a crown of stone vines, strange snakelike ropes and coils, ancient creatures in the undergrowth. Some of these figures do things small boys shouldn’t see and adults don’t. Jonah and I race, high-speed heel-toe, around the courtyard, giggling at the taboo messages sent by stone carvers seven hundred years dead. Around us are scores of brutal paintings on wood. We’re in some stone-carved children’s tale, the world’s rough boyhood.

  Da reins us in with a palm to each of our shoulders, keeps us from knocking over Europe’s priceless baby pictures. How many museums we’ll dash or drag through—Modern Art, Indian, Jewish, Met, Cooper-Hewitt, Hall of Fame for Great Americans—how many exhibits we’ll absorb, rapt, obedient, or bored, on our way to meeting our future selves. But for some reason, this museum grabs Jonah even more than the giant toboggan of dinosaur bones down on Eighty-first. He stands in front of a suit of armor, ready to take it on in personal combat. I don’t know what he sees—some kings and catapults fantasy, knights slaying dragons, a boy’s bedtime tale. He’s giggling, ready to move into some secret wing hidden in time that no one has yet discovered.

  Da steers us on. I’ll always obey that hand. We enter a room, dark, gray, and cold, the stone heart of some fantastic castle, cut out and transplanted to this place, hidden at the tip of our island. “Will you see this picture?” Da asks. He points to a wall-sized curtain of heavy cloth, a huge green rug filled with flowers. I look for a picture in the monster thing. There are millions of them, hiding in the vegetation.

  “What is there? What do you see?” Da waits, happy, for my answer. “An Einhorn, yes? What does English name him?”

  “Unicorn,” Jonah says. The word is everywhere, on all the signs. Da doesn’t read them.

  “Unicorn? Uni-corn!” The word delights him.

  The beast is huge and white, filling the entire frame. Da cocks back and looks. He stares at a point through the unicorn, behind the tapestry, beyond the wall it hangs on. He takes his glasses off and leans in. He mutters something in German I can’t make out. He asks, “What is this picture of?”

  Jonah is looking, too. But he’s not as desperate to answer as I am. My eye runs a loop-the-loop. The wall carpet is too big to take in whole. I can’t put the parts together, can’t even see them all from my eye level. The unicorn sits in a makeshift prison, a round three-rung fence it could step over politely if it wanted. A fancy green belt hangs around his neck, something Mama might put on for church. The thing I think is a fountain is really the unicorn’s tail. A dancing midair ghost turns out to be the beast’s beard. He sits or he lies or he rears up; I can’t figure it out. His horn looks as long as his entire body. Behind him is a tree with letters floating in it—A and D, or A and a backward E. Maybe these are the unicorn’s initials.

  Then I see it: the chain. One end of the chain is clamped to the tree, and the other is fastened to the unicorn’s collar. The collar is a cuff, and the unicorn is caught, a prisoner, forever. All over his body are wounds, stab marks I didn’t see at first. Spurts of cloth blood pour out of his side.

  “He’s captured. The humans got him. He’s a slave.” I tell Da what the picture is, but he’s not satisfied.

  “Yes, yes. He’s trapped. They have him in their craft. But what is the picture of ?”

  I feel my face starting to cry. I stamp my feet, but a look from Jonah stops me in my steps. “I don’t know. What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

  “Look up close.” He nudges me. I step. “Step closer.”

  “Da!” I want to cry again. “The guard will get me.”

  “The guard will not get you. You are not the guard’s slave! If this guard tries to get you, I will get this guard!”

  I step as close as I dare, ready at any second to be caught and sentenced. All three of us will be chained forever, imprisoned in old gray stone.

  “Good, so, my Yoseph. What is the picture of?” I still don’t know the answer, let alone the question. So Da tells me. “Knots, boychik. The picture is of knots, no less than every picture we live in. Little knots, tied in the clothing of time.”

  He doesn’t mean clothing, I’m almost sure. But for a moment, I see what he sees. Every now, made from every motion on earth, is a little tied colored thread. And if you can find a place to see it from, all the threads combine, tied in time, into a picture, bound and bleeding in a garden.

  Jonah loses interest in Da’s lessons. Clocks, knots, time, Einhorns: My brother is past all of it, already leaping clean into his own future. He wanders into another room, where Da and I must track him down. He fidgets in front of a golden music stand in the shape of an eagle. On the stand is a book, and in the book, antique music. It looks nothing like the music I’ve known how to read for as long as I’ve known how to read words. It’s unlike any music we’ve ever seen. It has no bars, and not enough lines per stave. Jonah works at the notes, humming away furiously. But he can make nothing that sounds like a tune. “I can’t get it. It’s totally crazy.”

  Da lets the two of us puzzle awhile before giving us the key. Or not the key, since this is music b
efore there were such things. He gives us the secret of pitches in time. The click of counting, back when the world beat to another pulse. The shape of duration, before measures existed.

  The three of us stand in this cold stone room, chanting. I don’t know the word for it yet, but I can do it as easily as breathing. We huddle in this pastiche of jumbled-up monasteries, this American treasure-grab, trapped inside a knot in the cloth of time as snarled as a fraying sweater, a Jew and his two light black sons, singing “Veni, veni,” Europe’s wake-up tune, sung to itself before it woke up and took over the globe. We chant softly but audibly, even as people filter into the room around us. I feel their disapproval. We are too free, in this museum of good breeding. But I don’t care what they think of us, so long as this thread of music continues to unravel and the three of us keep drawing it outward, around ourselves.

  When we get to the end of the parchment, we stop and look. People are sitting in banks of wooden chairs that have been set up for a concert. Some of them turn to glare at us. But Da beams, rubbing our tufts of hair. “My boys! You know how to make it, now. The language of time.”

  He leads us to the front of the block of chairs, where we sit. This is the reason we’ve come. The magic Mandelbrot was just a stopping point, fuel to get us here. All along, we’ve been heading toward this free concert, this stolen and rebuilt ruin of history.

  Sunday, spring 1949. The world is older than I ever imagined. Yet each year that it has ever lived through hides out somewhere in an archlined courtyard. This room smells of moss and mold, lacquers and shellacs, things stored too long in linty pockets, brittle paper returning to reeds. I don’t share this room’s when, even though I sit in it. Only by some miracle that Da doesn’t explain to me can I see it at all. Every spot on earth has its own clock. Some have reached the future already. Some not yet. Each place grows younger at its own pace. There is no now, nor ever will be.

  Now that a concert is coming, my brother stops jittering. He ages as I watch, and soon he’s sitting stiller, straighter, more eager than any adult. But he jumps up from his chair and claps like crazy the minute the singers walk out. The singers are all in black. Their stage is so small, they crowd in almost on top of us. Jonah leans forward in gladness to touch one of the women, and the singer touches him back. The whole audience laughs along with her, until Da’s arm settles Jonah back into the seat.

  Silence falls, erasing all separateness. Then the silence gives way to its only answer. This is the first public concert I will remember ever hearing. Nothing I’ve already lived through prepares me for it. It runs through and rearranges me. I sit at the center of a globe of sound pointing me toward myself.

  It doesn’t occur to me, at the age of seven, that a person might luck upon such a song only once a lifetime, if ever. I know how to tell sharp from flat, right singing from wrong. But I haven’t yet heard enough to tell ordinary beauty from once-only visits. I will look for this group throughout my life—on vinyl, then tape, then laser pit. I’ll go to performances in hope of resurrection and come away empty. I’ll search for these singers my whole life, and never come any closer than suspect memory.

  I could track the group’s name down, in the museum’s records for that Sunday concert fifty years ago, twenty years before the idea of reviving the first thousand years of European music had occurred to more than a curatorial few. I could look all the singers up: Every year we pass through is hidden away, if not in a cloistered scriptorium somewhere, then in a bank of steel filing cabinets and silicon chips. But anything I’d find would only kill that day. For what I thought I heard that day, there are no names. Who knows how good those singers really were? For me, they filled the sky.

  There is a sound like the burning sun. A sound like the surf of blood pumping through my ears. The women start by themselves, their note as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the present is. Keee, the letter-box slots of their mouths release—just the syllable of glee little Ruth made before we persuaded her to learn to talk. The sound of a simple creature, startling itself with praise before settling in for the night. They sing together, bound at the core for one last moment before everything breaks open and is born.

  Then reee. The note splits into its own accompaniment. The taller woman seems to descend, just by holding her pitch while the smaller woman next to her rises. Rises a major third, that first interval any child any color anywhere learns to sing. Four lips curve upon the vowel, a pocket of air older than the author who set it there.

  I know in my body what notes come next, even though I have nothing, yet, to call them. The high voice rises a perfect fifth, lifting off from the lower note’s bed. The lines move like my chest, soft cartilage, my ribs straying away from one another, on aaay, into a higher brightness, then collapsing back to fuse in unison.

  I hear these two lines bending space as they speed away from each other, hurling outward, each standing still while the other moves. Long, short-short, long, long: They circle and return, like a blowing branch submitting again to its shadow. They near their starting pitch from opposite sides, the shared spot where they must impossibly meet back up. But just before they synchronize to see where they’ve been, just as they touch their lips to this recovered home, the men’s lines come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting game, a perfect fourth below.

  More lines splinter, copy, and set off on their own. Aaay-laay Aaay-laay-eee! Six voices now, repeating and reworking, each peeling off on its own agenda, syncopated, staggered, yet each with an eye on the other, midair acrobats, not one of them wavering, no one crashing against the host of moving targets. This stripped-down simple singsong blooms like a firework peony. Everywhere in the awakened air, in a shower of staggered entrances, I hear the first phrase, keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt. Harmonies pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere, each melody praising God in its own fashion, and everywhere combining to something that sounds to me like freedom.

  All around me in this room, listeners fly back into their pasts. I won’t see, until I’m much older, how they’re airlifted back before the Berlin crisis, nestled in their beds before the A-bomb, hiding as yet uninventoried from the numbering authorities, back before everyone has died, back before the unicorn lay chained in its pen of flowers, back before that now that never was, even with so many listeners needing to flee it. But I’m not brought back. Just the opposite. This music flings me forward, toward the speed of light, shrinking and slowing until I stop at that very spot where all my future selves put down.

  It has been years now since I’ve been to the northern end of Manhattan. I say now, though my father taught me long ago, when my mind was still dilatable, not to be taken in by such things. Frisch’s Bakery has disappeared, deported, replaced by a video-rental store with a gamecartridge sideline, or one of those neighborhood stalls sealed up behind an accordion grate for longer than anyone remembers. Last time I visited, half a decade ago, the neighborhood streets were still in upheaval—this time from Jewish to Dominican—the turning tide of immigration, forever advancing on a shore it can never reach. Forty thousand islanders were settling in to their new, desperate nation, with Fort Tryon up on the colony’s old Heights protecting them from well-off Jersey and the ravaged Bronx.

  And underneath the fortress, at the island’s very tip: that imitation, changeless garden. I’ve been up to the Cloisters only once since Jonah sang there in the late sixties. The image sickens me: a hodgepodge of bottom-dollar Romanesque and Gothic fragments, assembled paradise, a stone’s throw from forty thousand Dominicans trying to survive New York’s inferno. The ancient pasteup job must feel even more ancient now that the world has descended into endless youth. It must still draw its audience, the bewildered and dying, those who slip through their shell-shocked urban nightmare for a glimpse of a world before the crash of continents, when art still imagined us as one.

  We’re walking back toward 191st Street, and the subway home. I don’t know how we got from the Cloisters here. A piece
is missing, frames clipped from the final cut. The concert has ended, but the sound goes on growing in my ears. It happens again, just as it did in the piece itself. No sooner do the clear, high voices bring in the melody than the low foundations pick it up and multiply.

  We walk back a different way than we came. For a moment, I’m panicked. Then I’m just amazed that south followed by east can so perfectly undo north followed by west. Jonah laughs at me, but Da doesn’t. He finds it amazing, too. “Space is commutative. It does not matter in what order you take the axes. Why this should be, I have no good reason!”

  We pass a building that has gone wrong. “What is this, Da?” I’m glad Jonah asks. I’m frightened to.

  Da stops and looks. “This is a shul. A synagogue. Like the one I took you to on a Hundred and—”

  Da will not notice. But this is not like the one he took us to. I try to read the words scrawled across its front door, but they’ve been scrubbed almost invisible. Da won’t help me sound out the missing ones. All he’ll say is, “Christian Front. Who could believe such people can come back now?”

  “Da said now,” I tease, and Jonah picks up the taunt. But Da only gives us the crooked edge of his grin. He takes our hands, one each, and walks on. He studies the sidewalk where we step, as if the cracks he always swears are safe might be more dangerous than he thought.

  We’re a block away when he says, “Hitler called it a Jewish plot.”

  “What?” Jonah asks. “What’s a plot?”

  “Relativity.”

  “What’s relativity?” I say.

  “Boychik! What we’re just talking about! All those different-running clocks.”

  For me, a lifetime has intervened. But I want to keep him talking, forever, if possible. So I ask, “Why?”