The Time of Our Singing

  A sober instructor of social studies came by to hush us up but then stayed on to sing. The woman who taught first grade math got everyone clapping. Kids pressed into the room until it was strictly SRO. Not one of them audience. The bigger the chorus grew, the faster it drew. Then our mountain of sound fell away for a measure, and not on my cue. I knew by the next upbeat what it had to be. I saw her in the doorway, even before I turned around: the school’s director.

  I can’t tell what Ruth heard. Her face showed nothing. But there were her singing kids, small for the last time, and there was her brother, singing for her for the first time since we were small. Every stacked sound stayed whole in the changing chord. Then there was one more obbligato line. Who knew where the tune came from? She made it up. Improvised. The words, though, were given her:

  But where will they build their nest?

  Ruth’s voice went through me like death. Refusal, lament: the only answer to his holdout hope. I felt as I had when I’d heard her sing back in Philadelphia. Infinitely bereft. Her voice was lovely enough, even in ruin, to prove how the dream of music was never more than that.

  One by one, I brought the lines back home. The cycles of rhythm came to rest, the pulse unwove, and the room erupted, applauding itself. Kids broke loose in all directions, a spontaneous uprising that declared the rest of the hour a national holiday. A ring formed around Jonah. “How’d you do that?” Judson grilled him. By way of answer, Jonah let loose with a bolt of Monteverdi.

  My family cowered in the celebrating room. Robert drifted to his mother’s side, guilty, caught in the act. She slunk toward me, as if I, of all people, offered safety. “Robert,” Ruth told the boy, in that same weary fear with which she sent the bird and the fish, homeless, away, “that’s your uncle.”

  “I know,” the boy scolded. He tried, in his excitement, to avoid the eyes of all adults. He pointed at me. “Your brother.”

  Then Jonah stood beside us. “You hear that? Did you hear?” He reached to hug his sister.

  Ruth stepped back. “Don’t! Too long. You can’t just …” She lost control of her voice. But she refused to cry.

  Robert clenched, ready to protect her. Jonah grazed Ruth’s arm, deniable free comfort. Then he turned to clap my shoulder. “You’re a genius. The van Karajan of music. Now that’s using the stick.” He looked down at the half-sized figure at his waist. Recognition knocked him back. “Neph,” he said, exploring his own awe.

  “What’s that?” Robert asked, a sucker for a puzzle. “Something like a nephew?”

  Jonah nodded soberly. “A lot like a nephew.” He looked up at Ruth. “Amazing. He’s beautiful.”

  “Why should that be amazing?” Cold as memory.

  “That’s not. My luck is.”

  Robert screwed his face up. “Your voice does funny things.”

  “My standing here at all. My seeing you.”

  Ruth snapped her head away. “You’re heavier,” she said. She looked back. Jonah held out his arms and looked down the length of his body. “I mean …” She traced her own throat.

  “Don’t say heavier. Say richer.”

  “Why are you here? Why did you come back?”

  The child chorus drifted reluctantly from the room to their next assignments. My students. Jonah raced to the door to slap their hands. It bought him time. He came back, talking to Robert, gazing around the room. “Look at this! I had no idea. So this is your school!”

  “My mama’s,” Robert said.

  “Yours,” Ruth told her child. Tears now. But the voice was hers.

  “Fantastic,” Jonah said. “I haven’t had so much fun with singing since …” He looked at Robert. “Since I was you. You heard what that sounded like? This is it. This is the next thing. People have never heard anything like this.”

  Ruth’s laugh was incredulous. “Maybe not your people.”

  “I’m serious. That was a sound. We could get there. Make this go. Play anywhere. I’m telling you. People need this.”

  Ruth was shaking her head, her mouth pulling at her ears. “People have had this forever.”

  “Not me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ruth. I’m here. I’m asking. You can’t leave me hanging.”

  “You left us.”

  “You have your work,” I said.

  He dismissed me. “We’ve been on autopilot for almost two years. It’s pretty much over, antiquity. Heaven has played. I need something closer.”

  “You?” I searched for irony, but he was grave. “You can’t quit. It’s a dying art. Who’s going to keep it alive if you quit?”

  “Never fear. Western concert music is in the able hands of millions of Koreans and Japanese.”

  Ruth felt it then, too. The bottomless well he’d fallen into. My sister held her son by the shoulders, armor in front of her. She reached out over Robert and cupped the back of Jonah’s neck. “Some folks die the way they were born.”

  “All folks,” I said.

  A smile ripped through Jonah. His sister was talking to him. Touching him. Didn’t matter what she was saying, how many barbs.

  “Neph?” Jonah looked down at Robert. The future’s court of appeals. “Sing with me?”

  “My mama says you’re a land unto yourself. You always make your own rules.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Ruth said. “I never in my life …”

  “You ever break the law?”

  Jonah regarded his flesh’s half-sized image. “All the time. Me and your uncle JoJo here? We trashed them all. Major-league transgressors. We broke laws you never even heard of.”

  Robert shot me a doubtful look. But his doubt floundered when he saw me remembering. “You ever go to jail?”

  Jonah shook his head. “They never caught us. We were in the papers a few times, leading suspects. But they never caught up with us.” And he made a sign, swearing the boy to secrecy.

  “You ever kill anyone?”

  Jonah thought. No more hiding. “A couple times. Pushed a woman in an oven once. I wasn’t much older than you.”

  The boy looked to his mother for help. Ruth pressed her hand to her shaking lip. Robert looked at me, sense’s last resort. I motioned toward the deserted room. “I need to straighten up here.”

  Ruth wrestled free of herself. “And I’ve got a school to run. And you, young man. Don’t you need to be somewhere? Mrs. Williams, for math? Hmm?”

  “Know what else you need?” I could hear it in Jonah’s voice. Desperate fishing. “An African name. Like your brother.”

  It stopped them both, mother and son. Ruth stared. “How do you know about African names?” How do you know about his brother?

  “Oh, please. I’ve been to Africa many times. On tour. Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire. They love us there. We’re more popular in Lagos than we are in Atlanta.” He took his nephew by the shoulders. “I’m going to call you Ode. Good Bini name. It means ‘Born along the road.’”

  The child checked his mother. Ruth cast up her hands. “If the man says so.”

  “What does Kwame mean?”

  “Haven’t a clue. Ode is the only one I know. That’s what they named me, last time I was there.”

  “Ode?” Robert asked, doubtful.

  His uncle said, “Roger.”

  “Ode,” Robert said, pointing at me. Got it?

  I showed him my palms. “Fine with me. From now on. Until you tell me to stop.”

  He dashed off to his last class, criminally late. The abandoned adults fell silent. Ruth and Jonah traded a few hostages, both trying hard to leap twenty years. She and I walked him out to the parking lot, where he grew eager all over again.

  “Come on. Bird and Fish, Incorporated. Why not? Make a new species? Old wine in new bottles. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Be great for the kids. Talk about education. This thing could be the best thing ever for your school.”

  “How would it do anything for this school?” Even Ruth’s suspicion sounded administrative. I looked at her throu
gh Jonah’s widening eyes.

  He stared at her across confusion too wide to bridge. “Come on. Classics meets the streets. Make your baby hipper and smarter. There’s a ready market. The country’s been waiting for it.”

  She hung her head and let it shake, awed by the distance. She couldn’t help snickering. “‘Waiting’? You really mean it, don’t you?” She tipped her face skyward. “Oh God. Where do I start?”

  He smiled back, desperate. “Start by picking your top kids and letting me find us a promoter.”

  “Where have you been living? Have you no eyes?”

  “The eyes are only mediocre. But the ears are extraordinary.”

  “Then listen, damn you. Listen, for once.”

  “I did. It’s good, Ruth. Better than either. Better than identity. Hybrid vigor.”

  She slumped in the face of his hopelessness. He wanted it to be capitulation. But he saw what it was. In an instant, he knew: This chorus was the thing he’d trained for his whole life. And somehow his life’s devotion —his uncompromising will, his wriggling free, always toward this unseen goal, untyped, note by note, perfecting his own line—was exactly what would keep this all-keys choir from ever being his.

  When he spoke, he was a child, broken and bare. “You think about it. No rush. I’ll put some ideas together. I’ll call you before we head to L.A.”

  Ruth might have killed him with the smallest-caliber monosyllable. But she didn’t. Jonah stood in front of her. “Twenty years. Why?” She bit her lip and shook her head—not at his question, but at him. He nodded. “Won’t be so long, next time.” She let him embrace her, and she held on, even as he pulled away. He didn’t embrace me; for us, it had been only three. Instead, he shoved into my hands an article he’d clipped from the previous day’s New York Times. April 24: “Scientists Report Profound Insight on How Time Began.”

  “You have to read this, Joey. Message from Da, from beyond the grave.”

  Jonah drove off. Ruth waved a little, after he was too far to see. She felt no need even to mention his scheme to me. We were our brother’s future. But he wasn’t ours.

  He didn’t call us before he went to L.A. The press of performing tied him up. The Berkeley Festival was a resplendent conquest, by all paid accounts. He and Voces Antiquae flew down to Los Angeles on the second-to-the-last day of April. Their plane was one of the last to land at LAX before the outbreak shut down all incoming flights.

  Ruth called first, that Wednesday night. She spoke so softly into the phone, I thought there was something wrong with the line. She kept saying, “Joey, Joey.” I was sure one of the boys was dead. “They let them all go. All four of them. Not guilty on every count. Beaten fifty-six times, on videotape, for the whole world to see, and it’s like nothing happened. It’s not possible. Not even here.”

  Jonah’s article from the Times had been the first piece of news I’d read for months. I’d given up on current events. News was nothing to me, a cruel tease. It was nothing but the delusion that things were still happening. I’d dismissed it. All my news came down to New Day School. I’d forgotten the King verdict was even due. As Ruth told me of the blanket acquittal, I’d already heard the outcome, word for word, a long time before.

  Now news took me in again. I flipped on my set while Ruth was still on the line. Aerial-reconnaissance video showed what I thought at first was King. But this was another man, the other color, pulled from his truck and stoned live for the cameras. “Are you seeing this?” I asked her. Something in me wanted her to hurt. To kill her self-possession as dead as mine. “You see where belonging gets us?”

  “It’s never ending,” my sister kept saying into the receiver. And it was.

  The staff of New Day kept a broadcast going in the teachers’ room all Thursday. Nobody was really teaching. We all kept slipping in to watch. Not even horrified. Just dulled, in that place that would forever return to claim us all. Plumes of fire streaked the skyline of the dying city, burning out of control. The police retreated, leaving the streets to looters of every persuasion. The National Guard assembled on their beachheads but couldn’t move out for want of ammunition. Shops went up in flames like shavings in a kiln. The body count climbed. One of the third-grade teachers turned on a set in a classroom, thinking it might be instructive. She turned it off again five minutes later, instruction outgrowing itself. The rout was total, and as darkness fell again the second day, hell spread so fast, it felt positively willed.

  Ruth wouldn’t go home alone. She demanded I have dinner with her. While we ate, all hope burned. “What are they doing?” my nephew asked. “What’s happening there? Are they having a war?” My sister stared at the news feed throughout dinner, biting her lip. I’d never before seen her refuse to answer Robert’s questions.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked. “Why the hell doesn’t he call us?” I didn’t say he was lying on the pavement in South Central, sight-singing the sky. I let Ruth’s question, too, go unanswered.

  He called, with answers, at 2:40 A.M. Friday. I must have been dreaming, because I was talking to him before I heard the phone ring. He sounded thrilled, on the verge of some huge insight. “Joey? Mule? I’m here. Again.” I had to wake up enough to hear he was in shock. “You see what this means? Right back dead in the middle of it. I heard the whole thing, at least until they got my ear. Every line. Tell her that. You have to tell her.”

  I pulled my head from out of sleep and tried to talk him down. “Jonah. Thank God you’re safe. It’s okay, now. They said on the news tonight. Things are returning to normal.”

  “Normal? This is normal, Joey.” Shrieking: “This.”

  “Jonah. Listen to me. It’s okay. Are you at the hotel? Just stay inside. The army—”

  “Inside? Inside? You never had a clue, did you? Fool!” I heard the nakedness. He’d thought me a fool all our shared life. And he was right. But he blasted forward, unable to wait for either of us. He was struggling to breathe. “I’ve been out in the middle of this since yesterday afternoon. I went in, Mule. Looking for what I was supposed to do. Did everything I know. I stood on a burning corner and tried to form a pickup chorus of ‘Got the whole world in his hands.’ You have to tell her that. She’s wrong. Wrong about me. Don’t let her think what she thinks.” His voice was huge with the performance of a lifetime. He was drawing on that ancient lesson his lover-teacher once gave him: If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out on stage.

  “I’ll tell her, Jonah.” I had to repeat it before he calmed down enough to make sense.

  He tittered as he spoke. “They canceled the concert. I guess the early music crowd was afraid to come out for a Last Judgment. The Europeans were freaking. Trapped in the country of their worst nightmares. They barricaded themselves in the hotel. I had to go back, Joey. It was you and me, the night of our first recording.” The curve of his life was calling for him to come trace it, somewhere out there in the burning streets.

  He headed into the violence, toward the pitch of maximum distress, with nothing but his overtrained ears to lead him on. “What did you look like?” I asked.

  “Look? Like me!” It took him a moment; he was still reeling. “Chino pants and a teal Vroom and Dreesmann dress shirt. I know: total suicide pact. Oh. A solid black T-shirt underneath that says FEAR NO ART. The limo wouldn’t take me past the I-Ten. I must have gone the last two miles on foot. Can’t remember everything. Out of my gourd, Joey. That crowd. You remember. I no longer meant myself. I was walking back into the sea. Taking my first voice lesson. Dum, dum, dum. There was nothing.

  Nothing but fires. Götterdämmerung on a two-billion-dollar budget. Mule. I thought opera was someone else’s nightmare. I never knew that someone else was me.

  “I just followed the smoke. Kept looking around for you. I wound up in some flaming retail strip. Every sheet of glass for blocks around was lying on the pavement, sparkling like rosin. Palm-sized hunks of concrete, whipping through the intersection. Coul
dn’t count the sides. Latinos, Koreans, blacks, white guys in uniform. I might have been singing. Standing in the middle of the cross fire. This piece of paving stone size of my shoe heel hits me in the side of the head. Ripped into my temple. I just stood there snapping my fingers, first on one side of my head, then the other. Deaf in my left ear. Me, Joey. Can’t hear a damn thing! Listen!” He fumbled to switch the phone to his other ear. “Hear that? Nothing!

  “That’s when I find myself. I start running. Blood is streaming out of my ruined ear. They can’t hit me twice. I figure I’m safe, right? They can’t come after me. Who knows what color I am? I’m nobody. Safer than I’ve been since … Something’s pulling me, like Brahms. Like this is going on again, for eternity. I’m back here for a reason. Across the street, at the end of the next block, these kids are pouring out of a hardware store, arms full. You remember? Power drills. A workbench. An electric saw. They see me just standing there. Score something, you choosy motherfucker. One of them stops, and I think he’s going to dust me. Shoot me. He stops and hands me this can of paint and a handful of brushes. Like he’s God, and this is just for me. I’m trying to pay him. To pay the sacked store. He’s just screaming and laughing at me.

  “Like it was my calling, Joey. Out of my mind! I started walking around, marking people. Started with myself. I thought I was the angel of the Lord, putting a safe marker on everyone I could find. Passover. Everybody was going to be medium brown. That was the plan anyway. Somebody didn’t want to be painted. Smashed me into a wall and spilled what was left all over me. Next thing I know, policeman’s got my neck pinned to the concrete with a riot stick. They throw me into an armored van and haul me off to a station, where they take my statement. I should have lied to them. Told them I was someone else. They wouldn’t even fucking book me. I couldn’t even get myself arrested. They’re holding thousands of people for curfew violation, and they toss me back. Too many real criminals. You sing what? You live where? And they believed me. Figure nobody could make up that scale of madness. They send me to the fucking hospital! Damn them to hell. I didn’t stay. I came right back here and called you.”