Free Richard Powers by The Time Of Our Singing Page B

while dressing for work, always the first line, endlessly caressing, never managing to get all the way to the phrase’s end.
    The size of the crowd, its gravity, splinters her measure’s first beat. Common time goes cut, allegro to andante to largo. Her racing brain subdivides the notes in her first number’s introduction, eighth note turns into quarter, quarter becomes half, half whole, and whole expands without limit. She hears herself inhale and the pickup spreads into standstill. As she forms the note’s forward envelope, time stops and pins her, motionless.
    The tune that the minuscule grand piano strikes up opens a hole in front of her. She can look through and see the coming years as if scanning a railroad timetable. Down this narrow strip of federal land she witnesses the long tour ahead. This day changes nothing. She’ll sit outside the Birmingham, Alabama, train station four years from now, waiting for her German refugee accompanist to bring her a sandwich, while German prisoners from North Africa occupy the waiting room she can’t enter. She’ll be given the keys to Atlantic City, where she’ll perform to sold-out houses but won’t be able to book a room in town.
    She’ll sing at the opening of Young Mr. Lincoln , in Springfield, Illinois, barred from the Lincoln Hotel.
    All coming humiliations are hers to know, now and always, hovering above this adoring, immeasurable crowd as the piano homes in on her cue.
    The Daughters will repent their error, but repentance will come too late. No later justice can erase this day. She must live through it for all time, standing out here in the open, singing in a coat, for free. Her voice will be linked to this monument. She’ll be forever an emblem, despite herself, and not for the music she has made her own.
    These faces—four score thousand of them—tilt up to seek hers out, Easter’s forgetting bulbs seeking the feeble sun. Those who until this afternoon were sunk in hopeless hope: too many of them, swarming the shores of Jordan, to get over in one go. Their ranks carry on swelling, even as she traces their farthest edge. In the convex mirror of 75,000 pairs of eyes she sees herself, dwarfed under monstrous columns, a small dark suppliant between the knees of a white stone giant. The frame is familiar, a destiny she remembers from before she lived it. A quarter century on, she’ll stand here again, singing her part in a gathering three times this size. And still the same hopeless hope will flood up to meet her, still the same wound that will not heal.
    Down one world line she sees herself crushed to death, twenty minutes from now, when the audience surges forward, 75,000 awakened lives trying to get a few steps closer to salvation. Those who’ve spent a life condemned to the balcony will push toward a stage that is now all theirs, release driving them toward themselves, toward a voice wholly free, until they trample her. She sees the concert veer toward catastrophe, the mass accident of need. Then, down another of this day’s branching paths, she watches Walter White stand and come forward to the microphones, where he pleads with the crowd for calm.
    His voice turns the mass back into its parts, until they are all just one plus one plus one, able to do no worse to her than love.
    Oceans past this crowd, larger ones gather. Six hours ahead, six zones east of her, night already falls. In the town squares, vegetable markets, and old theater quarters where she has performed, inside the Schauplatzen that wouldn’t engage her, voices build. She looks on the world’s only available future, and the coming certainty swallows her. She will not sing. She cannot. She’ll hang on the opening of this first pitch, undone. Her choices close down, one after the other, until the only path left is to turn and run. She casts a panicked look back, toward the Potomac bridge, across the river into Virginia, the only escape.
    But there’s no hiding place. No hiding place down