The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Jonah learned to seduce the microphone and compensate for its brutalities. Under the pressure of compromise, our takes took on the edge of live performance. In the baffled, soundproofed room, Jonah grew incandescent. He sang, posting his voice forward to people hundreds of years from now.

  The third night, after we got the Wolf within a few vibrations of how it sounded in his mind, we sat down with the Harmondial publicist. The girl was fresh from summer camp. “I’m so glad you two are brothers!”

  I flopped around like a fish on the dock. Jonah said, “We are, too.”

  “The brothers thing is good. People like brothers.” I thought she might ask, Have you always been brothers? How did you come to be brothers? She asked, instead, “How did you get interested in classical music?”

  We went mute. How did you learn how to breathe? It hit me. The story this girl already imagined would go into press releases and liner notes, unhindered by any data we gave her. Even if we told her about our evenings of family singing, she wouldn’t hear. Jonah left it to me to create some facsimile. “Our parents discovered our musical ability when we were young. They sent us to a private music school up in Boston.”

  “Private school?” The fact flustered our publicist.

  “A preconservatory boarding school. Yes.”

  “Did you … get scholarships?”

  “Partial ones,” Jonah said. “We washed dishes and made beds to pay the rest of our way. Everyone was very generous toward us.” I snorted. Jonah shot me an offended look, and the poor girl was lost.

  “Was the music you learned at school … a lot different from the music you grew up on?”

  Jonah couldn’t help himself. “Well, the tempi dragged at Boylston sometimes. It wasn’t the school’s fault. Some of those kids were coming from musically backward homes. Things got a little better once we were at Juilliard.”

  She scribbled into a canary yellow legal pad. We could have told her anything, and Jonah pretty much did. “Did you have any role models? I mean, as far as singing … classical music?”

  “Paul Robeson,” Jonah answered. The girl scribbled the name. “Not for his voice so much. His voice was … okay, I guess. We liked his politics.”

  She seemed surprised to hear that a famous singer could have politics. Mr. Weisman was right. This wasn’t RCA Victor. You only start once. I watched Jonah’s answers drop into the permanent record, where they would last as long as the sounds we’d just laid down.

  The girl asked for publicity photos. We gave her the portfolio, complete with clippings. “So many reviews!” She picked the photo I knew she would, the one emphasizing the novelty that Harmondial had just bought. Something to distinguish their catalog from all the other burgeoning record labels: a brother act, black but comely. She looked for just the right pose of comfort and assurance, the one that said, Not all Negroes want to trash everything you stand for. Some of them even serve as culture’s willing foot soldiers.

  In the car, heading to the hotel, Jonah sang, “I wish they all could be California girls.”

  “God only knows what she wishes we were.” We both knew, now, just which sentence in the Times had sealed this offer. The upstart record label wanted this up-and-coming Negro voice, the next untapped niche. Civil rights meant ever larger, integrated markets. The same thinking had just led Billboard to combine their R & B list with their rock and roll. Everyone would finally sing and listen to everything, and Harmondial would capitalize on the massive crossover.

  We finished recording on a Wednesday night, two days later. The producer wanted Dowland to be the record’s last track. I picked the studio’s backup piano, a rare combination of covered sound and stiff action that helped me fake the frets of a lute. Today, you’d never get away with piano anymore. A third of a century ago, authenticity was still anything you made it. Time stands still. But never the same way for long.

  Jonah’s first take felt flawless. But the engineer working the board was so entranced with his first-time taste of timelessness that he failed to see his meters clipping. Take two was leaden, Jonah’s revenge for the first’s destruction. The next five takes went belly-up. We’d reached the end of a difficult week. He asked for ten minutes. I stood up to take a walk down the hallway outside the recording booth, to give my brother a moment alone.

  “Joey,” he called. “Don’t leave me.” Like I was abandoning him to oblivion. He wanted me to sit but not say anything. He’d fallen into a panic at sending a message out beyond his own death. We sat in silence for five minutes, and five stretched to ten: the last year that we lived in that would leave us still for so long. The engineers returned, chattering about the recent Gemini flight. I sat down, Jonah opened his mouth, and out came the sound that predicted everything that would still happen to him.

  “Time stands still with gazing on her face.” As my brother sang, a few minutes’ drive from the studio, a white motorcycle policeman stopped a black driver—a man our sister’s age—and made him take a sobriety test. Avalon and 116th: a neighborhood of single-story houses and two-story apartment blocks. The night was hot, and the residents sat outdoors. While Jonah put stillness’s finish on that opening mi, re, do, a crowd gathered around the arrest. Fifty milling spectators swelled to three hundred as the policeman’s backup appeared on the scene.

  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.

  Jonah yelled over the deafening sirens. “Pure madness, Mule. Dancing in the streets!” His face shimmered, at last up close to whatever he’d been looking for. Two thousand rioters swept past. Four steps ahead of me, Jonah slowed to a walk. All I could think, with hell erupting all around, was, He’s too light to be here. He was a frail, vulnerable boy, listening wide-eyed to the Valkyries riding through our radio.

  Jonah hovered, turning to inspect the flames that shot up fifteen feet to his left. His hands cupped unconsciously, lifting from his sides, beckoning to the roving packs, cuing their entrances and attacks. He was conducting. Beating time, phrasing the chaos the same way he always did when listening to the music that most moved him. I came alongside him; he was humming. At his command, a drone rose up behind us, pitched but variable, matching his throb, a hybrid of rhythm and melody. The sound multiplied through the spreading human mass. I’ll remember that sound until I die.

  The police concentrated their power on making sure the violence didn’t spill over into white neighborhoods. The firemen were getting the worst of it. They gave up extinguishing the overturned cars and focused on containing the burning commercial buildings. The blast of hoses and the hissing crowd fused into a single chorus. Jonah watched, deep in some interpretation I couldn’t make out. The stress intoxicated him. Total collapse: lives ricocheting past us, handmade explosions going off, all the rules of reason worse than flaccid.

  He stopped in front of a pawnshop, where half a dozen children were slamming a mesh garbage can through the plate-glass door. They threw and ran back, walked up, threw, and ran back again. The entrance fell in a hail of shards. One by one, the looters disappeared into the cave. Jonah stood still, waiting for revelation. After a sickening moment, the excavators returned, carrying a television, a stereo, a brass floor lamp, new hats for all, and two handguns. Three centuries’ worth of reparations.

  I stuck to myself, two shops away. Jonah was out ahead of me, twenty feet from the door. He stood with his feet spread, leaning into the chaos. He watched the actors run out of the store, as if all history depended on their grabbing these denied goods, here at the denouement. From out of the synchronized dream, one of the newly armed boys saw my brother staring. He ran toward Jonah, waving his snub-nosed gun like a Ping-Pong paddle. My body turned worthless, fifty yards, a continent away. I tried to yell but couldn’t find my throat. The boy shouted as he ran. His words broke in the air into harsh, incoherent rivets. His scattering friends turned to meet the challenge. The other armed boy began waving his own gun at Jonah. It weighed down his arm, too heavy for him, a bad prop.

  “What you want here?” The first boy reached Jonah, who stood dead, his arms lifted from his sides. “Get the fuck out. Ain’t no place for white.” The boy waved the barrel side to side, charming a snake. His hands shook. Jonah just stood the way he did onstage, draped on the crook of an imaginary grand piano, ready to launch into a huge song cycle. Winterreise. He stood as though I was right behind him, at the keyboard.

  The second boy was on them in an instant. He fell out of orbit, slamming into Jonah’s flank and knocking him to the pavement. My brother crumpled in pain, then lay still on the concrete, his arm scraped open.

  “Motherfucker hurt you?” the se
cond boy shouted at the first. Both boys stood over him, aiming, shaking, jumping. “Back to the Hills, motherfucker. Back to Bel Air!” As if that were where even death would send this intruder.

  I found my voice. “He’s black. The man’s a black man.” I was too far away. They couldn’t hear me over the riot. My voice cracked and broke. I never did have much projection. “The man’s my brother.”

  The two armed boys stared up at me. One aimed his gun in my direction. “This? This ain’t no brother.”

  “The man’s a black man.”

  Jonah, picking his moment, as if the largest part of him really did want to die, relaxed his head onto the pavement. He looked up into the smoking sky. His lips began to work. He might have been pleading with them, praying. No sound came out of him but a weird monotone moan.

  I knew then that one of the shaking boys would shoot him. Murder here would be nothing: one more randomness at time’s end. Jonah worked his lips, moaning, preparing his finish. But that burst of monotone, coming from that body stretched out on the pavement, unnerved his assailants. The two teens backed away from the voodoo wail. Behind them, their friends with the television and stereo screamed for them to scatter. The Man was here, and shooting. The two gunmen looked over at me, down at Jonah, even up in the air at the stream of funereal smoke that my brother sung to. Still staring, they turned and ran.

  I fell to my knees on the pavement beside him, sobbing and pulling at his ripped shirt. He nodded. My relief flooded over into rage. “What the hell are we doing here? We gotta get out. Now.” It took all I had to keep from kicking Jonah in the ribs, where he lay.

  He looked up at me, in shock. “What?” Blood seeped up his sleeve and down his arm. The scraped-open skin filled with cinders. “What? Practice, Joey. Rehearsal.” He snickered, wincing.