Richard Powers (79 page)

I was his accompanist again, waiting out the caesura, holding on to its nothingness until his inhale started us up again.

“She apologized. In English, which her husband doesn’t speak. ‘You deserved a note.’ How old were we, Joey? Fourteen? The year Mama… The day Da…” Only a lifetime’s training kept his voice his.

“Real blacks die of gunshot wounds, right? Overdoses. Malnutrition. Lead poisoning. What do halfies die of, Joey? Nobody dies of numbness, do they?”

“What happens now? You going to do more opera?” Something in me had to keep track. Some part of me still had to tell Da.

“Mule?” He was traveling out beyond my reach, at a speed that collapsed all measure. “Opera is nothing to do with what we thought. Absolutely nothing. I had to see it down in Italy, the place it came from.

With the native speakers, the owners. Opera’s somebody else’s childhood. Somebody else’s nightmare.

I think I’ll head to Paris for a while.”

“France?”French was his worst singing language. He’d always mocked the place. “To do what? Go back to lieder?” I worked to keep my voice neutral. Like an ex-wife encouraging her husband to go out dating again.

“I’m tired of it, Joey. Tired of singing alone. Unless you… Where am I going to find another accompanist with telepathy?”

I couldn’t tell if he was asking or rejecting me. “What are you going to do, then?” I saw him singing Maurice Chevalier songs in the Metro, a felt hat catching the centimes.

“There has to be life beyond opera and lieder. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”

“What’s yours?” Each answer seemed more murderous than the last.

“Wish I knew. It has to be out there.” He fell silent again, ashamed of surviving. I felt him working up again to ask me to come out and join him. But I never got the chance to turn him down. When he spoke again, it was to more than me. “Joey? Have him a little memorial service. Just us? Play something good for him. Something from the old days.”

“We already did.”

I felt it go through him, the stab of freedom he’d gone after. “You sure you don’t want me to come back?”

“You don’t need to.” I gave him that much.

“Joey, forgive me.”

I gave him that, too.

It took me several days to grasp that I didn’t have to go in to the hospital anymore. There was nothing to do but close up Da’s house. I came up for air, browsed the papers, caught up on what had happened while I was away in death’s waiting room. The National Guard had killed some college students. The FBI was arresting priests for helping people burn their draft cards. Hoover issued a nationwide warning against “extremist all-Negro hate-type organizations.” He meant my sister and her husband, all the criminal elements that undermined my country.

I wanted out of Fort Lee as fast as possible. First, I had to go through the house and its contents. The few family keepsakes of value I put into rented storage. The man’s wardrobe, unchanged since 1955, I packed off to the Salvation Army. I sold the piano Da had bought for me, along with the few valuable pieces of furniture, and put the cash in a certificate of deposit for Ruth and Robert Rider.

I looked in my father’s jumbled files for an address for my mother’s family. I found one in his lists of contacts, that wad of three-by-five cards he kept bound with a thick rubber band. The card, in my father’s handwriting, was younger than it looked. It was thumbed-up, dog-eared, and smudged enough to be a faked antique. At the top, on the double red line, in caps, ran the name DALEY. Below it was a Philadelphia street address. There was no telephone number.

I pulled the card out of the rubber-banded pack and left it out on the kitchen counter. I looked at it a hundred times a day for three days. One call to directory assistance, and within two minutes, I could be talking to my unknown relatives. Hello, this is your grandson. This is your nephew. Your cousin. They’d ask me, And where do you live? What do you do? How come you sound like you do? Where could I go from there? I couldn’t use Da’s death as an excuse for making contact. Their own daughter had died, and that hadn’t brought us back together. Every time I looked at the address, I felt the distance compound down all the years of my life. The gap had widened so far, I couldn’t even find my side of it.

The rift was too big to do anything but preserve.

My father’s contact file had no card with the name STROM on the top. It had shocked me, while he was dying, to hear him even speak of his family. There was no one on his side to give this news. You can jump into the future, he often told us, all the while we were growing up. But you can’t send a message back into your own past. All I could do with Da’s death was file it away, a message to some later self who’d know what to do with it.

Toward the rest of the house’s goods, I was merciless. Nothing even made me flinch until I hit my father’s professional papers. I knew nothing about my father’s last work, aside from his needing to prove that the universe favored a direction of spin. After several days of poring over the toppling paper towers in his study, I knew I’d never be able to cope on my own. Unlike music, his physics had some real-world meaning, however abstract that meaning had become. He’d published nothing of consequence for years.

But I was terrified that the handwritten scrawl and the tables of figures scattered around his study might hide some scrap of worth.

I called Jens Erichson, Da’s closest friend at Columbia, a high-energy physicist who happened to be an amateur singer. He was Da’s rough contemporary, the colleague in the best position to appraise all my father’s piles of Greek scribbling from his final months. He greeted me warmly over the phone. “Mr.

Joseph! Yes, of course I remember you, from years ago, before your mother… I sometimes came up to your house, for musical evenings.” He was delighted to learn I’d become a musician. I spared him the messy details.

I couldn’t stop apologizing. “I shouldn’t saddle you with this. You have your own work.”

“Nonsense. If the will made no provisions for professional executor, it’s because David assumed I’d be there. This is nothing. Heaven knows, he solved enough problems for the rest of us over the years.”

We set up a time for him to come by. I took him into the study. An involuntary sigh escaped his lips when he saw what was waiting. He hadn’t imagined what he’d signed on for. We spent two days, like archaeologists, boxing up and labeling the papers. The work required gloves, a whisk broom, a field camera. Dr. Erichson took the boxes with him back to the university, over my conscience-stricken stream of gratitude. I put the house on the market and returned to Atlantic City.

I checked in with the Glimmer Room. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Mr. Silber no longer needed my services. He’d hired another piano player, a sandy blond guy from White Plains named Billy Land, who learned to play on a Hammond B3 and who could play all of Jim Morrison and the Doors in at least three different keys, sometimes all three at once. Everyone had what they needed. I was free at last. I thought about asking Teresa to see about getting me a job at the saltwater taffy plant.

Dr. Erichson called me after three weeks. “There are some portions of interest in the papers. With your permission, I’ll pass those along to the interested parties. The other ninety percent…” He struggled with how to lay it out for me. “Did your father ever mention to you the concept of preferred galactic rotation?”

“Many times.”

“He got this concept from Kurt Gödel, down in Princeton.” The fellow refugee my father had called the greatest logician since Aristotle. “The work goes back a quarter century. Gödel found equations compatible with Einstein’s General-Field Theory. I don’t know quite how to say this. They allow time to coil up upon itself.”

Something from my childhood pushed up above water. Old dinner-table conversations, from a prior life.

“Closed timelike loops.”

Dr. Erichson sounded both surprised and embarrassed. “He told you about them?”

“Years ago.”

“Well he came back to them, at the end. The mathematics is in place. It’s peculiar, but simple. Once the conditions are identified, the extraction of the looping solutions is straightforward. At the limits of gravitation, General Relativity permits at least the mathematical possibility of a violation in causality.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your father was exploring curves in time. On such a curve, events can move continuously into their own local future while turning back onto their own past.”

“Time travel.”

Dr. Erichson chuckled. “All travel is time travel. But yes. That seems to be what he was after.”

“Is this idea real? Or is it just numbers?”

“Your father believed that any equations permitted by physics are, in some sense of the word, real.”

All things that are possible must exist. He’d said so all his life. That was his creed, his freedom. It was the thing, alongside music, that most moved him. Perhaps it was music to him. Whatever the numbers permitted must happen, somewhen. I didn’t know how to ask. “These loops are real? Physics really allows them?”

“If any physics allows the violation of causality, that physics is wrong. Every scientist I know believes this.

It’s the law on which all others are based. Yet as far as General Relativity is concerned, these equations would indeed apply, given a universe where the galaxies had a favored rotation. If this is the case, General Relativity needs repairing.”

The star charts. The endless tables. “What did he find out? What did he…conclude?”

“Well. I can’t afford to put real time into this. At a glance, it seems he hadn’t yet detected any preference.”

Another direction of rotation everyplace you looked. “But if he had?”

“Well, the equations exist. Time would close back upon itself. We could live our lives always. Folding onto ourselves, forever.”

“If he didn’t find a preferred rotation, does it mean there is none?”

“That, I can’t answer. I haven’t the time for this problem that your father did. Forgive me.”

“But if you were a betting man?”

He thought slowly, about something we weren’t designed to wrap our thoughts around, at any speed.

“Even with a closed timelike loop…” He belonged to my father’s people: the people who needed to get things right. “Even then, you could travel back into a given past only if you’d been there already .”

I formed an image for his words, but it became something else even as I fondled it. My father had needed some way to get back to my mother, to send her a message, to deflect and correct all that had happened to us. But in Dr. Erichson’s universe, the future was as unfixable as the past was fixed.

“No time travel?”

“Not in any way that might help you.”

“What happens is forever?”

“This seems to be the case.”

“But it’s possible to change what hasn’t happened yet?”

He thought for a long time. Then: “I’m not even sure what such a question means.”

Autumn 1945

She turns to see her JoJo, the little one, standing in his doorway, holding his ice bag up to the incurable sprain. The slammed front door still shudders with her father. Delia Strom turns from it, reeling, and there is her little boy, crippled already by selflessness, watching the thing that will grind him underfoot. He just stands there, offering, terrified, ready to give away everything. Sacrificed to something bigger than family.

Something that trumps even blood.

She sweeps the boy into her arms, sobbing. It scares the child more than what has just happened. Now his brother’s up, too, tugging her leg and telling her everything will be okay. David, the equation solver, stands behind her, looking through the door’s glass for any moving shadow out on the street. She turns to him. He holds one hand on the knob, ready to chase down the street after her father. But he doesn’t move.

Neither boy asks where their Papap is. It could be tomorrow for them already. It could be next week.

Papap here; Papap gone. They are still trapped in the eternal now. But they see her crying. They’ve heard the hostility, even without understanding. Already she’s losing them to this larger thing, the invention that will take them. Already they’ve been identified. Already the split, the separate entrance, the splintering calculus.

“Nothing,” David says, looking through the pane. She doesn’t know what he means. Her father has left her with this man, this bleached man with the accent, who helped to build that final blinding-white weapon. “There is nothing. Come. We all go to bed. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Darüber können wir uns morgen noch Sorgen machen. ”

Hitler’s language. She never once thought that thought, all during the war. She stayed alongside him, singing lieder—German tunes, German words—for four long years, afraid of being heard and turned in by the neighbors. But still, she kept their part-song vigil, safeguarding that sound against its many mobilized uses. They both cheered this war: war against pedigreed supremacy, against the final nightmare of purity. Whatever the Allies killed in Berlin was to have died here, too. But nothing has died back home. Nothing but her willful ignorance. Her father has walked out on her. Walked out on her for forgetting a war one hundred times longer and more destructive, the piecemeal annihilation of a people.

Walked out on her for walking out. You’ve thrown in your lot. Chosen your side. But she has chosen nothing, nothing but a desire to be through with war and to live the peace she and hers have already paid for so many times over.

There is no peace. Troubles will wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow— tomorrow, already—they’re too ashamed even to look each other in the eye. David goes to work, and what exactly that work is, she can only guess. He leaves her alone with the boys, as her father has left her alone with the family she has made. Alone with two children, from whom she must hide all the doubt in creation. She reads to them from someone else’s books. She plays with them—die-metal trucks and dowel houses that come from someone else’s construction dreams. In the afternoon, they sing together, the boys outdoing each other in naming and making the notes. If her father is right, then all the wrongness of the world is right. If her father is right, she must begin to tell her children: This is not yours, nor this , nor this , nor this … She can’t sacrifice her boys to that preemptive lynching, not today or ever. But if her father is right, she must ready them. If he’s right, then all of history is right, permanent, inescapable.