Richard Powers (78 page)

I touched his ravaged shoulder through his flimsy hospital gown. My palm said, You can stop. You don’t need to do this. Da felt the touch prodding him on.

“Your mother was silent. Watching everything break open. Her father and I were talking enough for all humanity. He…called me a member of the killer race. I…used my family. My parents and sister, in the ovens. I used them as proof. Of something. The hatred I took in, for being something I never was.”

“I understand, Da.” I would have said anything to close that box back up.

“When William left that night, he said we forced him. He said we didn’t want you two to know your Philadelphia family. ‘If they’re not going to be black, these boys, they can’t have their black family.’ This made your mother furious. She said unfortunate things. Everything her father had ever taught her, everything he believed… But this, we never said. We never said you would not be black. Only that you would be who you were: a process, first. More important than a thing. He called this idea ‘the lie of whiteness.’”

“A quarter of a century? You don’t cut off all contact because of a single night. Angry words. Every family has anger. Every family says things it wishes it hadn’t.”

“Your mother and I, the two of us, we knew what would come. Your future had already talked to us.

Your future made us! And made us choose. We thought we knew what things would come to you. But your Papap…” He darkened. Messages missing, disappearing, unopened, unsent. “Your Papap did not see these.”

There was a thing stronger than family, wilder than love, worse than reason. Big enough to shred them all and leave them for dead. All my life, that thing had pinned me. Its nurses wouldn’t let me into this hospital room, couldn’t accept I was this dying man’s son. And still I didn’t know what this thing wanted from us, or how it had grown so real. “So that’s it, Da? One night’s craziness caused a permanent break? For this one night, we—Mama never saw her own family again?”

“Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I didn’t see that night would be a break. Neither did William. For a long time, I thought he would come to us, that we were right and he would come to agree, in time. But he must have been waiting for us, too. Then, in that waiting, righteousness took us over.” He closed his eyes and thought. “And shame. It was ourselves we didn’t know how to find. Ourselves we didn’t have the heart to go meet again. This is the force of belonging. After that, after your mother died…” I put my hand on him again. But he’d already been convicted. “After your mother died, I couldn’t any longer. The last chance had closed up. I was too ashamed even to ask that big man’s forgiveness. I sent them the news, of course. But I thought… I was afraid she died because of me.”

I would have cried out, Impossible, except his own daughter had said as much. He looked at me, pleading. I could not exonerate or condemn. But there was something I might do. “Da? I could…find them. Now. Tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Then he heard what I was asking. His head went back into his pillow. Everything he knew about time made him believe that only perception divided the future from the past. His eyes flickered, as if our family were already here, in this green cinder-block room, all false world lines redrawn. Then his lips spasmed, his brows and cheeks collapsed on each other, and his face blanched, condemning itself. He shook his head. And with that shake, he slipped the last dragline with which life held him.

He went fast after that. He passed in and out of consciousness. We didn’t say much more to each other, beyond logistics. He called out two mornings later, in blinding pain: “Something is wrong. We have made a terrible mistake. We have chopped up our house for firewood.” His eyes still looked at me, but they sat so deep with animal incomprehension, they no longer knew me. Disease and the morphine drip split him between them. The maze of muscles around his eyes showed him hearing all sorts of sounds, the most glorious music. But he couldn’t get over the wall, where the sound came from. The eyes pleaded without focus, asking if I remembered. In his face was the horrified suspicion that he’d made it all up.

I remembered the day he took us to Washington Heights for the magic substance, Mandelbrot . The day he told us that every moving object in the universe had its own clock. One look at his face showed how uncoupled our clocks had become. In the five seconds I spent taking that glance, decades sheared off into his silent bay. In my few breaths, he had time to audition the entire available repertoire. Or maybe, as I raced, my clock buzzing around in front of him, his own had already stopped, stranding him on the upbeat of some permanent open-air concert on the mind’s Mall.

And then, one last time, time started up again. I was sitting by his bed flipping through a six-month-old copy of Health and Fitness that the hospital scattered around its rooms like warrants. I thought today might be the day. But I had thought that for the last three mornings running. It had been forever since Da had said anything. I talked to him as if he were still there, knowing my words had to sound like spinning galaxies. I sat with the magazine spread on the rolling meal table, reading about living with rosacea. I had one ear on him, waiting for any change in his breathing. It felt exactly like the years I’d spent accompanying Jonah, bent over my score, listening for the silent indicator that the piece was about to head off into uncharted waters.

Then it did. Da leaned forward off his canted bed and opened his eyes. He coughed up something that took me some seconds to identify. “Where’s my darling?” I waited, paralyzed. The shudder would wear him out, break him again. But then, harsher, more terrified, he burst out, “ Wo ist sie?Where is my treasure?”

I stood to calm him, lower him back to the pillow. “It’s okay, Da. Everything’s all right. I’m here. It’s Joseph.”

He flashed in anger. My father, who was never angry at me in his entire life. “Is she safe?” His voice belonged to someone else. “You must tell me.”

I stood at the crash of two lives, not knowing which to answer. “Da. She’s not here anymore.

She…died.” Even now, I couldn’t say burned .

“Died?” His voice suggested some misunderstanding, probably simple, he couldn’t puzzle out.

“Yes. It’s okay.”

“Died?” And then his whole body bucked in electroshock. “Died? My God, no! My God! It can’t be.

Everything—” He flailed at the IV tubes and made to swing his feet out of bed. I was around the bed faster than he could move, pinning him. He shouted, “She can’t be. Das ist unmöglich. When? How?”

I held his wasted one hundred pounds back against the bed. “In a fire. When our house burned. Fifteen years ago.”

“Oh!” He grabbed my arm. His whole body relaxed in gratitude. “Oh! God be thanked.” He settled back, satisfied.

“Jesus Christ. Da? What are you saying?”

He closed his eyes and a smile played on his lips. He clawed the air until his hand found mine. “I mean my Ruth.” He slipped back against the bed. “How is she?” The words exhausted him.

“She’s good, Da. I saw her not long ago.”

“Really?” Pleasure battled with irritation. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“She’s married. Her husband’s name is Robert. Robert Rider. He’s…” A big man. An enormous man.

“Grosszügig.”

Da nodded. “This much, I have already thought. Where is she now?”

“Da. I’m not sure.”

“She’s not in trouble?”

“Nothing serious.” My concert days were over, but I’d learned to improvise.

The morphine washed back over him. He drifted, and I thought he fell asleep. But after a moment, he said, “California. Maybe she is in California.”

“Maybe, Da. Maybe California.”

He nodded, calmed. “I’ve thought so.” When he opened his eyes again, they were salt. “She disowned me. She said her struggle is not mine.” Acid filled his face, as if what was coming might still destroy everything that had already been. He worked to breathe. I sat calming him, as I used to calm Jonah when his attacks were on him. “When you see her, you must tell her. Tell her…” He fought for clarity, waiting for that message from the past to catch up with him. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. “Tell her there is another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”

Three times, he made me promise to tell her. That night, without talking again, my father died. It was something like a hemiola, a change in meter. A sudden, unprepared cross into a new key. In every piece of music worth playing, some moment gathers, moving its chords forward, casting ahead for one quick tightening of the air around it to the endless organizing silence beyond the double bar.

Da died. There was no death rattle, no relaxing of the bowels. I told him he could go. Instead of taking that next small step into his local future, he doubled back and forever rejoined where he’d already been. I called the nurses. And then my own line bent on, away from his, into an unknown place.

I thought death would be different this time, knowing in advance. It was. It was steeper. Mama never had a chance to disappear, she was gone so instantly. But she didn’t really die for me until the man who chatted with her in the kitchen in the middle of the night fifteen years after her death joined her. Da was gone, taking with him all my connection to her, to us. When he stopped, so did my past. Everything was fixed now, beyond growing. The bird and the fish can fall in love, but their only working nest will be the grave.

I turned helpless in the face of the hundreds of tasks death requires. The hospital helped; they’d seen this before, apparently. Da had told me nothing of what he wanted. He’d made no preparations for the inevitable. Jonah and Ruth were nowhere. Cremation seemed simplest. It had done for Mama. That was the easiest of the choices. At the moment when I most needed to be out of this world, up in the star map, among the rotating galaxies, I was dragged back to make countless decisions about things I couldn’t care about. Everyone needed signatures: the university, the state, the federal government, the bank, the neighborhood—all those anxious poolings that Da had gotten through his life largely by ignoring.

Teresa held me together, phoning from Atlantic City. She came up for one long weekend. She seemed to grow surer and more capable as I fell apart. Everything she did was one more thing I didn’t have to.

“You’re doing fine, Joseph. All the right things.” She supplied a steady source of practical advice to the heir of a family that had always been practicality’s sworn enemy. She stayed alongside me for the million deaths by decision that surviving requires.

After I’d made all the most irreversible choices my father’s death demanded, Jonah called. His voice was full of buzz and echoing delay. “Joey. I just got your message. I’ve been away. I’m…not with that old management anymore.”

“Jesus, Jonah. Where the fuck have you been?”

“Don’t swear at me, Joey. I’m down in Italy. I’ve been singing at La Scala.”

The only news that could redeem Da’s death: My brother had followed through on the thing our parents raised us for. “La Scala. Serious? Singing what?”

“It…it doesn’t matter, Joey. Nothing. Tell me about Da.”

It hit me only then. Jonah didn’t know. I thought the news would be in him, like migration in a bird. He should have known the instant it happened. “He died. A week ago last Wednesday.”

For a long time, there was only breathing and transatlantic static. In silence as long as a funeral song, Jonah replayed the life. “Joey. Oh God. Forgive me.” As if his being away had made this happen.

I heard him over the line, his breath shortening, on the edge of a full-fledged choking attack. He was trying to figure out how to stop what had already happened. When he could talk again, he wanted details, all the nonevents of Da’s last days. He demanded to know everything our father had said. Anything Da might have left behind, something to send him. I had nothing. “He did…he made me promise to give Ruth a message.”

“What?”

“He said, ‘There’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.’”

“What the hell does that mean, Joey?”

“He…something he was working on, I think. He stayed busy. It helped a little.”

“Why Ruth? What possible interest…” She’d betrayed him again, by stealing Da’s last message from him.

“Jonah. I have no clue. Between the medications and the disease, he was gone a long while before he left.”

“Is Ruth there?”

I told him that I’d heard nothing from her since her surprise visit. He listened, saying nothing.

“What did you do with the body?” As if it were evidence I had to dispose of.

I told him all the decisions I’d made. Jonah said nothing. His silence rebuked me. “What did you want me to do? You turn your back on us. You leave me to go through this alone while you—”

“Joey. Joey. You did just fine. You did perfect.” Grief came out of him in staccato sobs. Almost laughs, really. Something had gotten away from him, an absence he’d regret forever. “You want me to come back?” His words slurred together. “You want me to?”

“No, Jonah.” I wanted him to, more than anything. But not because I asked.

“I could be there by next week.”

“No point. Everything’s done. Over.”

“You don’t need help with things? What will you do with the house?” The Jersey home Da thought we might, in some other universe, share.

“The will says that’s up to a majority of his children.”

He struggled with something. “What do you want to do?”

“Sell.”

“Of course. At any price.”

Da was huge between us. Our father wanted me to ask. Somewhere, he wanted to know. “What were you singing at La Scala?”

Silence flooded the line. He thought it too soon to come back to this life. But I was Jonah’s only link now. Me and Ruth, whom neither of us could reach.

“Joey? You’ll never believe this. I sang under Monera.”

The name came from so far away, I was sure it, too, had to be dead. “Jesus Christ. Did he know who you were?”

“Some dusky American tenor.”

“Did you ask him about…”

“I didn’t have to. I saw her. She came backstage opening night.” He paused, racing himself.

“She’s…old. Adult. And married. To a Tunisian businessman working out of Naples. He looks just like me. Only darker.”