Richard Powers Read Free Page A

into the wildest of details: his acquaintance Kurt Gödel’s discovery of loopy timelike lines hiding in Einstein’s field equations. Or Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold’s hunch that new galaxies poured through the gaps between old ones, like weeds splitting the universe’s crumbling concrete. To the listening boys, the world was ripe with German-speaking refugees, safely abroad in their various democracies, busy overthrowing space and time.
    Delia shook her head at the nonsense that passed for conversation in her home. Little Ruth mimicked her giggle. But the preteen boys outdid each other with questions. Did the universe care which way time flowed? Did hours fall like water? Was there only one kind of time? Did it ever change speeds? If time made loops, could the future curl into the past? Their father was better than a science-crazed comic book, Astounding Stories , Forbidden Tales . He came from a stranger place, and the pictures he drew were even more fantastic.
    After dinner, they came together in tunes. Rossini while washing the dishes, W. C. Handy while drying.
    They crawled through loopy timelike holes in the evening, five lines braiding in space, each one curling back on the other, spinning in place. They’d do workhorse Bach chorales, taking their pitches from Jonah, the boy with the magic ear. Or they’d crowd around the spinet, tackling madrigals, poking the keyboard now and then to check an interval. Once, they divvied up parts and made it through a whole Gilbert and Sullivan in one evening. Evenings would never be so long again.
    On such nights, the children seemed almost designed for their parents’ express entertainment. Delia’s soprano lit across the upper register like lightning on a western sky. David’s bass made up with German musicality what it lacked in beauty. Husband anchored wife for any flight she cared to make. But each knew what the marriage needed, and together they used the boys shamelessly to hold down the inner lines. All the while, baby Ruth crawled among them, hitching melodic rides, standing on her toes to peek at the pages her family studied. In this way, a third child came to read music without anyone teaching her.
    Delia sang with her whole body. That’s how she’d learned, even in Philadelphia, from generations on generations of Carolina churchgoing mothers. Her chest swelled when she let loose, like the bellows of a glory-filled pump organ. A deaf man might have held his hands to her shoulders and felt each pitch resonating, singed into his fingers as if by a tuning fork. In the years since their marriage in 1940, David Strom had learned this freedom from his American wife. The secular German Jew bobbed to inner rhythms, davening as freely as his great-grandfather cantors once had.
    Song held the children enthralled, as tied to these musical evenings as their neighbors were to radios.
    Singing was their team sport, their Tiddlywinks, their Chutes and Ladders. To see their parents dance
    —driven by hidden forces like creatures in a folk ballad—was the first awful mystery of childhood. The Strom children joined in, swaying back and forth to Mozart’s “Ave verum corpus” the way they did to
    “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
    Surely the parents heard what was happening to music at that hour. They must have felt the manic pulse—half the world’s GNP, looking for its ruder theme song. Swing had long since played Carnegie, that brash razz already housebroken. Down in the blistering bebop clubs, Gillespie and Parker were nightly warping the space-time continuum. A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly-bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box-stepping public. No one alive then could have missed the changes, not even two people as willfully against the grain as that refugee physicist and the Philadelphian doctor’s daughter, his trained-voice wife. They raided the present,