Richard Powers (104 page)

“No shit?” His eyes glint, fishing for me. “Motherfucker makes a def sample.” He takes the phones back, slaps his thighs in a haunted, broken rhythm. The day’s panic is already just a memory. All notes are changing again. “Me and my crew, we got to get jumpin’.”

This, too, is forever true. “Mine, too,” I tell him. My piece is inside me, ready for writing down—the same piece that has long ago written me. My crew is inside me, jumping at last. And the first jump they make will be, as ever, back .

Little Robert sits in the window seat, his mother next to him. He fidgets from Ohio to Iowa, craning to see something out of the square of window. But the pane refuses to reveal anything but an opaque black wall.

“What you looking at, honey?”

He stops, ashamed at being caught.

“What is it? You see something up there?”

“Mama, how high are we?”

She can’t say.

“How far are we from Mars?”

She’s never thought to wonder.

“How long would it take…? Mama?”

More questions than he’s asked her since he was seven. She sees his old sandbox love of math trying to reenter him. A signal, beckoning. She braces for the next question, praying for her sake that she won’t miss them all.

“Mama, wavelength’s like color, right?”

She’s almost sure. She nods slowly, ready to improvise if need be.

“But pitch is wavelength, too?”

She nods more slowly now. But still yes.

“What wavelength do you think they are—on other planets?”

Her face contorts. The answer struggles up from where she’s held it so long. Words pour into my sister, words I’ve forgotten years ago. Words waiting for the past to reach them. She jerks upright, as if she’ll stop the plane, turn around, parachute out over the Mall. No time to lose. “Where on earth…? Who did you hear that…?”

She feels her son coil back into his armor, and she breaks. An injured laugh, an uncompleted tune.

Someone walking toward her who she thought was buried. Of course. The message was for him , her child. Not beyond color; into it. Not or; and . And new ands all the time. Continuous new frequencies.

Where else could such a boy live?

She bends over him and tries to say it. “More wavelengths than there are planets.” Her voice is everywhere but on pitch. “A different one everywhere you point your telescope.”

Thee

The boy is lost, cutting back and forth in the indifferent crowd, on the verge of howling. A colored boy, one of hers. He runs in one direction, stops, hopeless, then cuts back. The crowd is not hostile. Only elsewhere.

Her German man, this helpless foreigner she has just said good-bye to forever, calls out. “Something is wrong?” And the boy almost bolts from them, lost for good.

“That’s all right, now.” Something old in her speaks. “We ain’t gonna hurt you.”

And he comes to them. As if his mother never once warned him about the danger of strangers. He comes to them, struck by a thing so strange, he can’t help himself. She can’t imagine what puts such astonishment in his face. And then, of course, she can.

He asks where she comes from. “Not far,” she tells him, knowing what he really wants to ask.

“My brother’s lost.”

“I know he is, honey. But we’re gonna help you find him.”

He tells her his name. One she has never heard of. She tries to get the child to show them where he lost his brother. But the long, receding lines of Washington, the drift of the dispersing crowd, and the boy’s growing fear dislocate him. He drags them to a spot, refuses it, and drags them off again.

It saves her from her own displacement. She walks uncertainly, still under the spell of Miss Anderson’s otherworldly power. The threads of that sound still coat her, like a cobweb she sweeps at but can’t comb free. Something anxious between her and this man, some tie they shared a moment ago that she doesn’t even want to think of straying near. No link but a common love of the repertoire. No force but the voice they’ve just lived through. But something more: the way he heard her singing along, aloud to herself, and felt it as a gift, a given. The shock of it, to be taken just this once, not as another species, nor as the identical same. To be heard simply as someone who knows and can hit the notes. Who has the right and the reason to produce them.

She’s glad they have this boy. His closer crisis holds them together a little longer. They have already said good-bye. The continent of this German’s ignorance, the sweet land of liberty that denies him the slightest toehold of comprehension, spreads out, uncrossable, in front of them. She can’t be the one to explain it to him. To tell him what wars he has fled into, replacing the ones he just escaped. The list of what they can never know of each other is longer than infinite. Curiosity must die, as always, in the cradle. But for just these few moments, they share this lost boy.

The German fascinates this Ode. Something he can’t make out, that stops all figuring. “Where you from?”

he asks, and the man answers, deadpan, “New York.”

“My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?”

“I haven’t been there very long.”

The boy walks between them, a hand in each of theirs. Fear takes years off the child. Frightened, he seems no more than seven. He speaks with a mania that makes him impossible to understand.

“I would like very much to see you again,” David Strom says over the boy’s head.

What she has dreaded and known. Hoped against and held still for. “Forgive me,” she says, unable to do the same. “It’s impossible.” She wants to say, This is a law of matter, like the ones you study. Nothing to do with you or me. The physics of the world we belong to. The simplest is.

But the physicist makes no response. He points to the Memorial, where Miss Anderson’s words still ring.

“That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.”

Ode is shocked he doesn’t know Lincoln. Delia is shocked when the boy calls the Emancipator a racist.

David Strom is too baffled to be shocked by anything.

They make camp on the steps. Her job is to scout for a frantic Negro searching for his lost kin. His job is to comfort the boy. This he does with an ease that stuns her. For the boy’s entertainment is every bit the man’s. Within a minute, they’re talking about the stars and planets, frequencies and wavelengths, distances so great, no message can cross them and be read, matter so dense that space collapses into it, places where the rules of length and depth get bent double and flipped about in the Creator’s trick mirror. She hears the man tell the boy, “Every moving thing has its own clock.” Then she hears him go back on himself, say there is no time, that time is simply unchanging change, no less and no more.

This so hooks the boy that for a minute, he forgets he’s lost. He fills with the million questions of boyhood—the rule-break of rocket ships, the speed of light, the curve of space, the unfolding flow, frozen messages skipping free. How? Where? Who? She watches the two of them hatch travels to any dimension. She flashes on her own prejudice: What’s a black boy want, wasting time with this? But then: Do whites own the heavens, too, like they own “O mio Fernando”?

The boy grows wild with ideas. She hears the man answer, not with impossibles, but with the same suspended maybe with which he listened to the impossible contralto. The same way he listened to Delia herself: notes first, tune after. She frowns: Of course there is no time. Of course there’s nothing but standing change. Music knows that, every time out. Every time you lift your voice to sing.

He sits on the steps in his rumpled suit, just talking to the boy. The simplest thing in the world. The most natural. And the boy lights up, leveling challenge after challenge in wondrous attack. She sees him like this for years to come, boys at a table, questions and answers. And then she sees him never. Her heart tightens round itself, closing up with a death so practical, she cannot counter it.

The boy jerks up from his pleasure, alarmed. “How come you two together? Don’t you know about black and white?”

She knows. Over the Potomac, a few hundred yards from where they sit, love between a white man and black woman is a crime worse than theft, worse than assault, punishable as harshly as involuntary murder.

David Strom glances at Delia for explanation, the official adult line. She has none.

The boy shakes his head at her. She should know. “The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they gonna build their nest?”

Now the German jerks up, a shock beyond reflex. “Where have you heard this?” The boy cups his hands into his armpits, scared. “This is a Jewish saying. How have you learned this saying?”

The boy shrugs. “My mama sang it. My uncle.”

“Are you Jewish?”

The laugh rips out of Delia, before horror can stop it. This man’s eyes beg her for an explanation. She could end her own life now, easily.

The scientist can’t fathom it. “This is a Jewish saying. My grandmother used to say this. My mother. They meant people must never… They thought that time…”

But she knows what they thought. She knows this man’s people, without a word. All in his face: the end they have tried to stave off with this ban, and the ban that has come to end them anyway.

He’s undone by wonder. “How can you know this, unless… This is remarkable. You have this, too?”

All in his face, and hers: that danger so great that it forces this ban. There is no threat greater than extinction in closeness. The threat that drove the voice of a century out of doors. The threat of all singing.

We do not fear difference. We fear most being lost in likeness. The thing no race can abide.

She remembers everything, all that must come to them. The sound is everywhere in her. Now it’s right in her range: my country , thee , thee . She knows this boy. He’s fighting to bring himself into being, willing them the way on.

“The bird and the fish can make a bish. The fish and the bird can make a fird.” He chants the words, raps them, a cantering, desperate rhythm. A continent rising. Syncopated pitches in time. All he wants is to go on playing. All available combinations. Go on singing himself into existence, starting up my piece, my song.

That fierce, haunted beat shakes the white man loose. He, too, places the boy. Who else? What else?

The inevitable enters him with the full force of discovery. “The bird can make a nest on the water.”

My mother looks out on the long space spreading in front of them. “The fish can fly.” She drops her eyes and colors deeply.

“You are blushing,” my father exclaims. Already learning.

“Yes.” My mother nods. Agreeing, and worse. “Yes. We have this, too.”