The Time of Our Singing

  She handed over the letter, forcing her numbed fingers to release it. The receptionist scoured a massive file, all polite efficiency. “Would you mind taking a seat? I’ll be with you in a moment.” She disappeared, her high heels a cut-time clip, down the music-riddled corridors. She returned with a stocky, balding man in tortoise-rimmed glasses.

  “Miss Daley?” All grins. “I’m Lawrence Grosbeck, associate dean and a professor of voice.” He didn’t offer his hand. “Please forgive us. A letter should have gone out to you. All the positions in your range have already been offered. It looks, also, as if we’re probably about to lose one of our soprano faculty. You’re … You …”

  The flush started in her abdomen and spread in waves. The burning rushed up to her cheeks, her eyelids, the fluting of her ears. Futile good manners, pointless self-preservation fought down the urge to do violence to this violation. Down the hall, the soprano ahead of her struggled through her set piece. At the desk, the soprano after her handed over her papers. Delia kept beaming at this man, this squat, enormous, impenetrable power. She smiled, still trying to win him over, all the while tucking her head in shame.

  The dean, too, heard the evidence, teeming all around them. “You’re welcome, of course, to … to sing for us anyway. If you … like.”

  She bit down the urge to damn him and his kind for all time. “Yes. Yes. I’d like to sing. For you.”

  Her executioner led her down the corridor. She followed, stumbling and numb. She drew one covert finger along the paneled walls that she’d dreamed of. She would never touch them again in this life. Her ankles softened; she reached out to steady herself. She looked down on her body from above, her whole torso shaking. She lay in a deep snowbank under the January night, her body shivering, stupidly failing to realize she was already dead. Everything she’d worked for was lost. And she’d just agreed to give her destroyers one more chance to mock her.

  As they reached the room appointed for her pointless, rigged hearing, her shaking undid her. Four white faces stared at her from behind a long table cluttered with papers, faces like clocks, each a passive mask of polite confusion. The dean was saying something to her. She couldn’t hear him. Her sight shrank to a cloud no more than a foot across. She fumbled for the piece she’d prepared and couldn’t remember it.

  Then the sound came. Her voice faltered back to its first authority. Her singing stopped her auditioners, hushed their rustling. She slipped in pitch. She heard herself lose the consistent tone that had been hers in every rehearsal. Yet it tore out of her, her life’s performance. She sang beyond their power to disgrace, and forced recall upon her judges. This song; this one.

  The Verdi aria sounded, for once, like the indictment it was, the condemnation hiding under its crazed hymn to pleasure. When she finished, the judges answered with silence. They went through their charade, giving her an aria from Handel’s Acis and Galatea to sight-sing: “As When the Dove Laments Her Love.” Delia nailed it perfectly, still hoping to reverse reality, smiling through to the double bar.

  At last, Dean Grosbeck spoke. “Thank you, Miss Daley. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

  Emptied, she had no encore. “I’ve Been ’Buked” rose up into her mouth, but she bit down on it. No revenge but refusal. When she left the audition room, all the soprano positions still filled, she saw the eyes of one of her examiners, a frail white woman her mother’s age, spilling over, wet with music and shame.

  She stumbled back across town, home. Her father sat in his study, reading in his red Moroccan leather chair.

  “They turned me down before I even opened my mouth.”

  Across her father’s face, every impotent recourse moved like a crew of migrant field hands: the blocked petitions, the denied lawsuits, the humiliating retries—next year, the year after, killed by the same standing refrain. He rose from his chair and approached her. He took her shoulders and looked into her, the last lesson of childhood, fired to a hard finish in that old furnace they now shared.

  “You’re a singer. You build yourself up. You make yourself so damn good, they can’t help but hear you.”

  Delia had stood through the afternoon’s ordeal. Now in her father’s caring gaze, she fell. “How, Daddy? Where?” And she broke down in that finishing fire.

  He helped her find a music school that would hear her. One at least competent. He came to her admission audition and stood by, gripping the air, as she passed, with a scholarship. He staked her the balance of her tuition, although she kept her job, to pay for those extra lessons he couldn’t understand. He went to her every recital and was on his feet clapping before the last held tonic could decay. But both father and daughter knew, without ever admitting as much to each other, that she would never, now, be schooled at the upper level of her skills, let alone the lower reaches of her dreams.

  A TEMPO

  Clever Hänsel’s voice has broken and won’t ever be put back together. “Breaking,” Da tells him, “is the arrow of time. It is how we can know which way the melody is running. Breaking is what turns yesterday into tomorrow. Soprano before; tenor after. Deep physical principle!”

  This is our Da’s faith. All other things may change, but time remains the same. “Growing disorder: This is how we must tell time. Lunch is not only never free; it gets, every day, a little more expensive. This is the only sure rule in our cosmos. Every other fact, you will one day exchange. But bet against the Second Law, and you are doomed. The name isn’t strong enough. Not second anything. Not a law of nature. It is nature.”

  He raises us to believe this. “Things fall down and get more broken. More mixed. Mixing tells us which way we point in time. This is not a consequence of matter or space. It’s the thing that gives time and space their shape.” Who knows what the man means? He’s his own independent country. All we know is: No one breaks the Second Law and lives. Like don’t take candy from strangers. Like look both ways before you cross the street. Like loose lips sink ships, a law I will never quite get until long after all my ships have sailed.

  And yet our father’s unshakable faith is flawed. His science hides an embarrassment that absorbs him day and night, as if he’s God’s bookkeeper and can’t sleep until the columns balance. “At the heart of this beautiful system, a little heart attack. Eine Schande. Help me, my boychik!” But I can do nothing for him. The discrepancy drives him a little crazier every day. This scandal is his arrow, and shows him which way he runs.

  I catch him working on it one evening, when I’m home for Christmas. He’s in his cave, perched over a sheaf of paper marked off into a grid of blue squares. Drawings all over, like a comic book. “What are you working on?”

  “Working?” He always takes a moment to surface. “I’m not working on anything. This damn thing is working on me!” He likes to say that word, when Mama can’t hear. “You know what is the meaning of ‘paradox’? This is the biggest damn paradox human beings have ever built.” I feel guilty, responsible. “Mechanics, which I believe absolutely, says time can flow either way. But thermodynamics, which I believe even absolutlier …” He clucks his tongue and waves a finger in the air, a traffic cop. “Einstein wants to kill the clock. Quantum needs it. How can both these fine theories be right? Right now—whatever now means!—they don’t even mean the same thing by time. It looks bad, Yoseph. You can imagine. A big family fight in public. The dirty little secret of physics. Nobody talks about it, but everybody knows!”

  He hangs his head in shame, leaning over his blue graph paper. Clowning for me, but suffering all the same. The world is full of snares. The Russians have the bomb. We’re at war with China. Jews are executed as spies. Universities refuse my father as a conference speaker. His marriage makes him a criminal in two-thirds of the United States. But this is the crisis in my Da’s Zeitgeist: this flaw, this blot on the whole clan of scientists, on all of creation, whose housekeeping they do. It turns him around in time.

  Our family, too, is turned around. Jonah’s voice has fallen
an octave. It lies broken at the bottom of a well. Mine teeters on the verge of the same fall. We’re home again, on what must be my second summer recess. Da’s in a deep, jovial gloom. My little sister sits in his study with him, sharing his excited misery, his graph paper, his drawing tools, her hands stroking her chin, her face pretending to think. Mama teases him, which tears me up, given Da’s obvious distress. Something in his proofs has gone horribly wrong.

  “Why go on believing it if it upsets you?”

  “It’s mathematics,” he thunders. “Belief has nothing to do with the numbers.”

  “Fix the numbers, then. Make them listen to you.”

  Da heaves a breath. “This is exactly what they will not do.”

  I’m in hell. My parents aren’t even arguing. Worse. To argue, they’d have to understand each other. Our Da can understand nothing anymore. He’s come to the conclusion that there is no time.

  “No time for what?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, stricken. “For anything. At all.”

  “My, my.” Mama laughs, and Da flinches at the sound. “Where has the time gone? It was here just a minute ago.”

  It doesn’t exist, says Da. Nor, apparently, does motion. There is only more likely and less likely, things in their configurations, thousands, even millions of dimensions, hanging fixed and unmoving. We put them in order.

  “We feel a river. In reality, there is only ocean.” And my father is at the bottom of it. “There is no becoming. There is just is.”

  Mama waves him off and heads to the front room to clean. “Excuse me. Can’t keep my dirt waiting. Call me when you get the universe started up again.” She chuckles from the end of the hallway, a laugh lost under the roar of her upright vacuum.

  I’m alone with Da in his study, but I can give him no comfort. He shows me the undeniable calculations. Everything spelled out in meticulous detail, like a full pocket score of an inevitable symphony. He speaks less to this lecture room of one desperate student than to some hidden examiner. “In mechanics, the film can run in reverse. In thermodynamics, it cannot. You would know at once, by the feel of the current, if you were swimming against the stream of time. But Newton wouldn’t. Neither would Einstein!”

  “Don’t let them in the water,” I suggest.

  He points out a tiny solo equation buried in his notes’ cluttered orchestration. “This is the timeless wave function of Schrödinger.”

  He doesn’t mean timeless. Who knows what he means?

  “This is the only way we have. The only thing for tying the universe to subatomic pieces. The only one to satisfy the constraints of Mach. The function that must connect the too big with the too small.”

  It seems important to him that the thing move. But the universe’s wave function stands still. The score hangs in eternity, unable to progress from start to last except in imagined performance. The piece everywhere always already is. Our family’s musical nights have led him to this insight. Music, as his hero Leibniz says, is an exercise in occult mathematics by a soul that doesn’t even know it’s counting.

  “We are the ones who make a process. We remember the past and predict the future. We feel things breaking forward. Make an order for before and after. But in the other hand …”

  “On the other hand, Da.” Forever teaching him.

  “On the other hand, the numbers do not know …” He stops, baffled. But true to the sheets full of symbols, he rallies. “The laws of planetary motion say nothing about clockwise or counterclockwise. The year might be running summer, spring, winter, fall, and we wouldn’t be able to say! That bat driving the ball forward comes to the same thing as the ball driving the bat back. This is what we mean by a system being predictable. By a deterministic world. Time falls away, an unneeded variable. With Einstein, too. One set of reversible equations already fixes for us the whole series of unfolding time. Plug in a value for any moment of time, and you know the values for all other moments, before and after. We say that the present completely causes the future. But it’s a funny think?”

  “Thing, Da. A funny thing.”

  “That’s what I said! A funny think, as far as the mathematics? We can say also the present has determined the past. One path, whether you walk down it or up.” His right-hand fingers cut a swathe across his left palm. Then his hands reverse. “It’s not even that fate has already been decided. Even that idea is itself still too trapped in the notion of flow.”

  He still works on other, more movable things. He solves a thousand unsolved problems, important papers, where his name appears nowhere except in the acknowledgments. He keeps his colleagues publishing, long after his own flow stops. His colleagues marvel at him, so deep in his debt that they will never tunnel out. They say he doesn’t work forward from the problems they hand him. He jumps into the future, where he sees the answers. Then works his way back to the here and now.

  “You could make a fortune,” they tell him.

  “Ha! If I could take messages from the future, money would be the last thing I’d waste my time on!”

  Mama says he can only solve problems for his colleagues, not for himself. “Oh, my love! You can’t crack the ones you care about. Or maybe you only care about the ones not even you can wrap your head around?”

  He’s never once tried to wrap his head around what time is doing to us, to our family. He struggles, in his study, to do away with time. But the world will do away with all five of us before then, if it can. Da’s score of scribbles distresses him more than any slur ever leveled at him. He studies his pile of scrawl the way he reads those letters from Europe, the endless unanswering answers to the hanging questions he rewrites and resends, every year, to changing addresses abroad. He’s lost his family. His mother and father, his sister, Hannah, and her husband, who was not even a Jew. No one can tell Da that they’re still alive. But no one will tell him they’re dead.

  Mama says they would have found us by now. If the German officials that Da writes to can’t say where they are, then that says everything. But Da says, “We cannot speak about what we do not know.” And beyond that, he doesn’t.

  In Europe, he tells me, the horse races are run around the oval backward. I think: You give your winnings to the track, then wait until the race reaches its start to see how much you bet. I love the idea: Jonah and me, already with him, over in Europe, back before Da has even come to America to meet Mama. What a surprise we’ll be to her. I laugh at the idea of meeting all Da’s missing relatives, of them meeting us, before we’re even born, before they all go to the place Mama tells us they have almost certainly gone to.

  But for the answers he needs, there is no certainty. Da gets another letter, emptied of all content but bureaucracy. He shakes his head, then starts another hopeless letter back. “Birthplace of Heisenberg,” he says. “Of Schrödinger’s cat.” In his same study, after another year, he tells me, “We have no access to the past. All our past is contained in the present. We have nothing but records. Nothing but the next set of histories.”

  He holds his head while looking at the pictures he has drawn, the ones that kill time. He searches for the flaw in what he fears he’s just proved. He mutters about Poincaré’s recurrence, about any isolated system returning to its initial state an endless number of times. He speaks of Everett and Wheeler, of the entire universe budding off into copies of itself at every act of observation. Sometimes he forgets I’m there. He’s still at his desk half a decade later. I’m in college. Mama’s finished vacuuming for good, done with all cleaning. I stand behind Da, chopping his hunched shoulders. He hums with preoccupied gratitude, but in a minor key. Time may exist again, according to the numbers. He’s not sure. He’s even less sure if that would be cause for celebration.

  Increasingly—time’s arrow—he makes no distinction between absurd and profound. His universe has begun to contract for him, time running backward toward some youngest day’s Big Crunch. There are secrets buried in gravitational relativity that even its discoverer had not forese
en. Secrets others won’t uncover for years to come. And he’s foreseeing them. He draws a picture of what quantum gravity will have to look like. He counts up all the curled-up dimensions that we will need just to survive the four we are already lost in.

  Breaking is what gives the flow direction. Broken voices. Broken traces. Broken promises. Broken lives. Broken bonds. Whether it exists or not, time has been putting in overtime.

  He works a private system, trancelike, lost in some nowhen, plugging variables into a hedge spread whose complexities he no longer bothers to explain to me. “Augustine said he knew what time was so long as he didn’t think about it. But the minute he thought about it, he did not know.”

  He turns those thickening features on me, that cheerful look of mourning, the tunnel of those eyes hollowed out by every moment they have looked through. He gazes out at me from across the chasm of his intractable paradox. His four gnarled fingers on his right hand rise up to wipe his brow, tracing the same reflex path they’ve followed a hundred times every day of this life. His eyes gleam with the pleasure that each day’s impregnable strangeness gives them. If time, in fact, still exists, it must be a block, a resonance made by this standing wave’s equation. The lives he has yet to live through are already in him, as real as the ones he has so far led.

  “A curve in configuration space,” he says. I don’t know if he’s found one, lost one, or is riding one. “Time must be like chords. Not even a series of chords. An enormous polytonal cluster that has the whole horizontal tune stacked up inside it.”

  No time at all has passed—none to speak of. I look down at the man’s profile, the raised shield of a forehead, the prow of nose, the set chin as familiar to me as mine. The hair is mostly gone now, the eyes a sallow sag. But I can see the belief still lingering in the folds of his eyelids: The tenses are a stubborn illusion. The whole unholy trio of them have no mathematically distinct existence. Past and future both lay folded up in the misleading lead of the present. All three are just different cuts through the same deep map. Was and will be: All are fixed, discernible coordinates on the plane that holds all moving nows.