Free Richard Powers by The Time Of Our Singing

But he can’t erase more than a few dozen meters of his path when he hears that voice up inside his ears. Komm, süsser Tod. He stops on the sidewalk and listens. What’s the worst that oblivion might do to him? What better sound to bring on the end?
    He turns back toward this roiling crowd, using the terror in his chest the way a seasoned performer would. Breathing through his mouth, he slips into the churning surf. The fist in his chest relaxes into eddies of pleasure. No one stops him or asks for identification. No one knows he is foreign, German, Jewish.
    No one cares that he’s here at all. Ein Fremder unter lauter Fremden.
    Sunlight breaks free for a minute, to shine on earth’s most mutable country. David Strom wanders lost inside a social realist drawing, hemmed in by a crusade he can’t identify, waiting again, this year, for the myth to turn real. Where else in the world have so many for so long believed that so much good is so close to happening? But today, these New Worlders may be right. He shakes his head, working his way toward the makeshift stage. Prophecy may yet come true, if there’s anyone left to receive it. Already, Europe has slid back into the flames. Already, the smokestacks are hard at work. But that is tomorrow’s fire. Today has another glow altogether, and its heat and light draw Strom forward.
    He bobs in sync with the bodies around him, searching for a good sight line. Monuments hem this huge hall in—State Department, Federal Reserve—white lintels and pillars, the hallmarks of indifferent power.
    He is not the only one staring at them. It strikes Strom, in America only a year, that he might come to say my country more easily than half of those he passes, people who arrived here twelve generations ago, on someone else’s travel plan.
    A hundred thousand drifting feet batter the April ground into a cattle trail. He passes a preacher waving a pigskin-bound Bible, three small children standing on an orange crate, a squad of blue and brass police as dazed as the swarm they patrol, and three dark-suited, broad-shouldered men in felt hats, menacing gangsters compromised only by the beaten-up bicycles they push alongside them.
    A shout comes from the forward ranks. Strom’s head jerks up. But the crisis has passed by the time its wake reaches him. Sound travels so slowly, it might as well be stopped, compared to the now of light.
    Miss Anderson is on the platform, her Finnish accompanist beside her. The dignitaries packing the cobbled-up bleachers rise for her entrance. Half a dozen senators, scores of congressmen including one solitary Negro, three or four cabinet members, and a justice of the Supreme Court each applaud her, all for private reasons.
    The secretary of the interior addresses the brace of microphones. The crowd near Strom stirs with pride and impatience. “There are those”—the statesman’s voice bangs around the vast amphitheater, launching three or four copies of itself before dying—“too timid or too indifferent”—only the echo shows how immense a cathedral they stand in—“to lift up the light…that Jefferson and Lincoln carried aloft…”
    God in Heaven, let the woman sing.In the burst of idiom he heard on the train coming down, Clam up and take it on the lam. Where Strom comes from, the whole point of singing is to render human chatter irrelevant. But the secretary politicks on. Strom inches toward the Memorial, the wall of people in front of him solid yet somehow always leaving a little space to fill.
    Then Miss Anderson stands, a modest queen, her long fur coat protecting her against the April air. Her hair is a marvelous scallop shell, open against both cheeks. She’s more otherworldly than Strom remembers. She stands serene, already beyond life’s pull. Yet her serenity shivers. Strom makes it out, over the heads of these thousands. He has seen that wavering before, up near the pit of the Vienna Staatsoper, or through opera glasses, from the student