Richard Powers (68 page)

“Come on, Joey. Salzburg. Bayreuth. Potsdam. Vienna. Wherever you want to go. We can head up to Leipzig. Make a pilgrimage to the Thomaskirche.”

He sounded desperate. I couldn’t figure out why. If he was so sure of Europe’s embrace, why did he need me? And what did he mean to do with me once the requests started pouring in for concert work, solos with orchestras, and even—the grand prize he’d set himself—opera? I held up my palm. “What does Da say?”

“Da?” His syllable came out a laugh. He hadn’t even thought to tell our father. Our father, the least political man who’d ever lived, a man who’d once lived a hundred kilometers from Magdeburg. Our Da, who vowed never to set foot in his native country again. I couldn’t go. Our father might need me. Our sister might want to get in touch. No one would be here to take care of things if I let my brother drag me away for months. Jonah had no plan, and he didn’t need one. He didn’t really need anything except, for reasons that escaped me, me.

I weighed how much he expected me to throw away. When I didn’t step forward with a ready yes, it seemed to confuse him. His look of friendly conscription rippled with panic, then narrowed to a single accusing question: “How about it?”

“Jonah.” Under the pressure of his gaze, I slipped out and looked down on the two of us. “Haven’t you jerked me around enough?”

For a second, he didn’t hear me. Then all he could hear was betrayal. “Sure, Mule. Suit yourself.” He grabbed his cap and corduroy jacket and left the apartment. I didn’t see him for two days. He came back just in time for our next gig. And three weeks after that, he was packed and ready to go.

He had his visa, and an open ticket. “When are you coming back?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We’ll see what comes down.” We never shook hands, and we didn’t now. “Watch your back, Mule. Keep away from the Chopin.” He didn’t add, Decide your own life. He’d do that for me, as always. All he said on that score was, “So long. Write if you get work.”

August 1945

Delia’s on the A when she sees the headline. Not by law a Jim Crow car, but the law’s just a tagalong.

Car color changes with the blocks above ground. Safety, comfort, ease—the cold comforts of neighborhood chosen and enforced. Choice and its opposite shade off, one into the other, so fluidly these last days of the war. She has come to know, close up, the blurred edge between the two—things forced upon her until they seem elected; things chosen so fiercely, they feel compelled.

Tuesday morning. David is home with the boys. She runs out, just for a minute, to buy an ice bag for the little one. He has fallen down the front steps and hurt his ankle. Not one cry from him after the first. But the ankle is a swollen dark stain, thicker now than her wrist, and the poor child needs the comfort only cold can bring.

She rides two stops, to the pharmacy she knows will serve her. They know her there—Mrs. Strom, mother of small boys. Two stops—five minutes. But she reads the headline in a flash, no time at all. Three fat lines run across the length of the page. They’re not as large as the headlines last May, declaring an end to Europe’s Armageddon. But they come off the page in a more silent burst.

A deep sable man sits next to her, poring over the words, shaking his head, willing them to change. The night has brought a “rain of ruin.” One bomb lands with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Two thousand B-29’s. She tries to imagine a ton of TNT. Two tons. Twenty—something like the weight of this subway car. Now ten times that. Then ten times, and ten times that again.

The gaze of the man next to her freezes on the headline. His eyes keep scanning back and forth, the lines of text forcing his head through a stiff, refusing no . He struggles, not with the words, but with the ideas they pretend to stand for. Words don’t exist yet for what these words brush up against. She reads in secret, looking over his shaking shoulders.NEW AGE USHERED . His gaze remains unchanged.

IMPENETRABLE CLOUD OF DUST HIDES CITY . Delia thinks: This city.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT

BLINDING FLASH .SECRECY ON WEAPON SO GREAT THAT NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW OF THEIR PRODUCT

.

They heard last night on the radio. Confirmation of what her household long ago knew. But the story goes real for her now, seeing the words in print, in this Negro subway car. TheDAY OF ATOMIC ENERGY

begins for this unchanged underground train. The jet-black man next to her shakes his head, mourning tens of thousands of dead brown skins, while for the rest of the car, life passes for what it had passed for the day before. A woman across from her in a red silk hat checks her lips in a compact mirror. The boy in a smashed fedora to her left studies his Racing Form . A little girl, ten, out of school for the summer vacation, skips up the aisle, finding a shiny dime some unfortunate has dropped.

She shouts at the whole car, in her skull. Don’t you see? It’s over. This means the war is over. But the war isn’t over, not for any of them. Never will be. Just one more story on a weary, turning page.JET

PLANE EXPLOSION KILLS MAJOR BONG .KYUSHU CITY RAZED .CHINESE WIN MORE OF “INVASION COAST

.” One more numbing war report, after a lifetime of war.

NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW. How do the reporters presume to know that, a day after the blast? She knew. She’s known for almost a month, since the secret desert testing.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT

BLINDING FLASH . She knows just how awed the scientists are, lit by the flash of the work they’ve done.

In the cloud enveloping her, Delia Strom almost misses her stop. She dashes through the train doors as they start to close. She wanders up to the surface, then into her familiar pharmacy. A moment ago, she was filled with purpose. But when the clerk asks her what she wants, she can’t remember. Something for her hurt child. The smallest imaginable hurt, and its even smaller comfort.

Something the shade of melted clay. Tough gray rubber and hard white cap. She grips it to her all the ride back. The bottle is a skinned lapdog, half as large as her little one, and twice as resilient. At home, she covers his wounded foot with it. The day is so hot already, they’ve made his invalid’s bed right inside the window casement, his little swollen foot practically hanging out the screens. Her Joey can’t understand why his mama wants to inflict him with freezing cold. But he suffers the torture with a smile meant to absolve her.

Her husband, the awestruck scientist, finds her in the kitchen, laying furiously into the bottom of the saucepan with copper cleaner. “Everything is good?”

She drops the scouring pad and grips the lip of the sink. She’s pregnant again, in her fifth month, past the early spells of bodily revolt. This is a different dizziness. “Everything,” she says, “is what it is.”

Two years ago, when Charlie was still alive, when it might have kept her flesh and blood from harm, she wanted this bomb. Now she only wants her husband back, the world she knows. Those hundred thousand brown bodies. How many of them children, as small or smaller than her JoJo? Hundreds of men involved: scientists, engineers, administrators. He can’t have contributed anything. Nothing the others wouldn’t have figured out on their own. He’s never told her just what part he worked on. Even now, she can’t ask.

At night, in bed, she wants to whisper, Did you know? Of course he knew. But what her David knows, she can only guess at. He’s never done anything but play with the world, that bright hypnotic bauble. Like Newton, he says: gathering pretty shells on the beach. His life’s work, chosen because it is more useless than philosophy. Avoiding trouble, evading detection, expelled anyway. Jews and politics do not mix.

She remembers his interview with that national academic honor society: “Are you a practicing Jew?”

How he almost lied, on principle, just to force them out of hiding. And how they rejected him anyway, claiming, “We don’t accept people who renounce their given faiths.”

She watches as he undresses, hanging his rumpled trousers on a chair, exposing his shocking whiteness, a strangeness even greater than she’d suspected before they married. Stranger, even, than the strangeness of men. This white, this man, this unpracticing Jew, this German shares her room with her. But the room they share is stranger than either of them.

He can’t have contributed much to this bomb. You can’t turn an atom into twenty thousand tons of TNT

on anything so imaginary as time. He’s explained it to her, his accidental expertise, his spin-off ability to imagine what goes on inside the smallest matter’s core. Still she can’t see his connection. His colleagues have kept him around—through Columbia, Chicago, New Mexico, all those epic train rides—as nothing but their puzzle-solving, happy mascot. The one who helps others find what they’re after.

Four months before, he became the least-published member of his department ever to make permanent faculty. His colleagues bent the rules, granting him tenure largely for the one paper he published while still in Europe, the one his friends say will keep his name around for years. She has tried to read it, slipping down its pages as down a glass mountain. Then, only two more papers since his arrival, and those got written only because he was bedridden with glandular fever. The American work simply never materialized. The stream of follow-on discoveries exists only in his mind.

Still, the department has given him security for life, if only for selfish reasons. Even those who believe David’s own lifework will forever come to nothing have never profited more from any other colleague.

First, there are the students. The shy ones, the ones with no English, even when it’s their native tongue.

The ones who go out in public as if climbing the scaffold. The ones who wear the same white short-sleeved shirts and cotton pants, even in the dead of winter. They adore the man and crowd his lectures. They’d lay down their lives for him. Already they land sterling jobs—Stanford, Michigan, Cornell—their work fueled by tricks of insight derived from their beloved teacher.

“What’s your secret?” she asked him once. She, with students of her own.

David shrugged. “The ones without talent can’t be taught. The ones with talent need not to be taught.”

The department might have kept him on for his teaching alone. But there’s more—far more. He wanders the halls of the building with a fountain pen and a pocket score of Solomon tucked under his arm, waiting for offices to open at the sound of his step and pull him in. Or he’ll sit in the coffee room, scanning his score, humming to himself until some stumped colleague slumps down next to him and bemoans the latest obstinate equation. Then, for the price of a cup of coffee, he leads them to answers, scribbling out the groundwork on a paper napkin. Not that he ever solves the problem. His mastery of any but his own small corner of time is dusty at best. He has no great skill at formulas, although he loves that game of estimation they all call “Fermi problems”: How far does one crow fly in the course of a lifetime? How long would it take to eat all the bowls of cereal made from a hundred-acre cornfield? How many notes did Beethoven write in his life? Whenever he pesters her with such questions, she replies: “Far.” “A heap of days.” “Just enough for us to listen to.”

But for the price of a cup of coffee, he gives them something invisible. They leave clutching the magic napkin, staring at the scribbles before they fade, sure that they could have seen the way forward themselves, given a little more time. But this way is faster, cleaner, lighter. No one can say exactly what David does. Nothing rigorous. He just displaces them. Moves them around the sealed space until they find the hidden door. He scribbles on the white napkin, relying more on pictures than equations. His colleagues complain that he doesn’t really use reason. They accuse him of jumping ahead in time to that point where the researcher has already solved his problem, then coming back with some rough description of solutions yet to come.

His pictures are the flattened traces he brings back from later worlds: imps climbing up and down staircases. Snaking queues of moviegoers waiting to enter a theater by two separate doors. Zigzag arrows with heads and tails hooking up in tangled skeins: the experimental, extended notation. Those whose work he helps dislodge must then pester him, needing to know how he always finds, in single lightning flashes, the angle that aligns.

“You must learn to listen,” he says. If particles, forces, and fields obey the curve that binds the flow of numbers, then they must sound like harmonies in time. “You think with your eyes; this is your problem.

No one can see four independent variables mapping out a surface in five or more dimensions. But the tuned ear can hear chords.”

His colleagues dismiss this talk as mere metaphor. They think he’s hiding something, storing up his secret method until it delivers the one blinding insight he’s after. Or perhaps he’s in it for the endless free cups of coffee.

Delia, though, believes him, and knows how it is. Her husband hears his way forward. Melodies, intervals, rhythms, durations: the music of the spheres. Others bring him their deadlocks—particles spinning backward, phantom apparitions in two places at once, gravities collapsing on themselves. Even as they describe the hopeless mysteries, her David hears the rich counterpoint coded in the composer’s score. This, she sees, lying in bed watching him undress, is how he helped them build their bomb. He did no real work except to free up the thoughts of men who made the design. All of them boys, caught up in pure performance. The permanent urge to find and catch.

Her husband undoes the collar of his shirt and struggles out of its sleeves. The flaps of fabric go slack onto their haphazard hanger. She will turn his closet right again after he leaves for school in the morning.

He moves across the room in T-shirt and boxers, this night’s peace in his eyes. The war is over, or it will be soon. Work can begin again, free from nuisance politics, the showdown of power, the assorted evils that he, a secular Jew in love with knowing, would never have chosen to mix in. Life can resume, safe at least, if never again the way it was before such safety. This is her husband, padding over the floorboards to their August bed, across a distance harder to guess than any Fermi problem.