He showed me his new voice, exposing a tender wound. He was like someone who’d walked away from an accident, transfigured. He sang for only thirty seconds. His sound had pulled in so it might fit anywhere and never be denied. It defined itself, like a split in the side of the air. Everything that had happened to us, and everything that never would, returned to me, and I began to cry in recalling. This once, he didn’t mock me, but just stood, shoulders dropped, tilting his head toward where that sound had gone. “You’re next, Joey.”
“Never. Never.”
“Right. It’s never that we’re after.”
He broke me down, all that day and the next. We worked for hours before he let me even make a peep. He stripped me back to the root, reminding me. “Drop everything. You won’t know how much you’re carrying until you set it down. Let your skeleton hang from the base of your head. You knew how to do this, years ago. A baby holds himself with more grace than any adult. Don’t try,” he whispered from above the battlefield. “You’re being too much. Be nothing. Let it go. Lower yourself into your own frame.” He opened me from the core until I stood, a hollow tube. How much work it took to find the effortless. We went for days, until I couldn’t hear him, but only a voice inside me, repeating, Make me an instrument of your peace.
On the third day, he said, “Breathe a pitch.” I knew by then not to ask him which. He brought me up from a trance of repose into simple resonance. “God’s tuning fork!” He aimed only for solidity, sustain. He turned me into a solitary menhir, out in a green field, his fundament, his bass, the rock on which he could build perfect castles of air.
Everything I knew about singing was wrong. Fortunately, I knew nothing. Jonah didn’t insist that I forget everything I’d ever learned about music. Only everything I’d learned since leaving our home school.
He bid me open my mouth, and, to my amazement, the sound was there. I held the pitch for four andante beats, then eight, then sixteen. We sustained long, whole tones for one whole week, and then another, until I couldn’t say how long we’d been at it. We cycled out each other’s notes, blending. My job was to match my shaky color to his exact shade. He tracked me through my whole range. I felt each frequency coming out of me, focused and shaped, a force of nature. We held unison pitches all the way out to tomorrow. I’d forgotten what bliss was.
“Why are you surprised?” he said. “Of course you can do this. You used to do it every night, in another life.”
He banned me from the group’s rehearsals. He didn’t want me thinking about anything but pure held tones. When Celeste or the other Kampen disciples — a Flemish soprano named Marjoleine deGroot, Peter Chance, an astonishing Brit countertenor, or Hans Lauscher, from Aachen — gathered in the warehouse, trying out their sounds in various ensembles, I was sent back to my upper room to meditate on C below middle C.
Now and then, Jonah let me out for breaks. With a fold-up tourist map, I explored my new city. Jonah gave me a sheet of data he’d written out longhand, to hand to strangers if I got lost. “Careful. Don’t jog anywhere. Don’t say anything in Turkish. They’ll still beat you bloody, just like back home.”
A hundred steps from our front door, I could be in any year at all. I determined to take Flanders in, and Flemish, too, the way Jonah taught me to take in my own voice. I absorbed the streets at random, wandering through a place that had been going downhill since 1540. Shards of Ghent stuck out from the past’s sooty mass, gems that history forgot to spend before it died. I loitered along the guild houses on the Koornlei or roamed the torture museum of Castle ’Gravensteen. I wandered into St. Baafs Cathedral by accident and found myself standing in front of the greatest artwork ever painted. In the unfolded Mystic Lamb, three times longer than me, I saw the mythic silence that my brother wanted to sing.
Nothing about this place was my home. But neither was America anymore. I’d simply traded the discomfort of citizenship for the ease of a resident alien. I mimicked the native dress, ditched my tennis shoes, and never spoke an unsolicited word aloud. From the distance of four thousand miles and eight hundred years, I saw what I had looked like to my native land.
After two months, we tried a song. We did Abbess Hildegard: “O ignis spiritus paracliti, vita vite omnis creature”: “O fire of the comforting spirit, life of the life of all creation.” Jonah intoned the words, and I joined him in unison. We zeroed out the motionless chant. Then we set out on thousand-year-old canons. Jonah wanted to relive the birth of written music, to reach out for the extreme of what we weren’t, a thing we ought never, in a thousand years, have been able to identify. But we identified, idem et idem. He needed me to match his sound, to fuse our voices into a single source, to revive, in this foreign place, our old real-time telepathy. From years of touring, our minds could still meld without a word. We still turned as tightly as schooling fish, not me with him or him with me, but the two of us, fused.
At the keyboard, my fingers could generally do what my head wanted. My voice, so much closer to my brain, could rarely seize the prize. At times, Jonah sloughed me off like a kid flung from the end of a playground chain of Crack the Whip. But our calisthenics brought me up to speed, the speed of stillness, of Abbess Hildegard’s extraplanetary flight: vita vite omnis creature.
In this way, one day, years before any justice should have allowed it, I recovered a voice. The singer I’d begun life as came back from the dead. Jonah fished me out of myself, all but intact. “How did you know? How could you be sure I was still in there?”
“You used to sing. All the time. Under your breath. At the keyboard.”
“Me? Never. You lie.”
“I’m telling you, Joseph. I don’t lie anymore. I used to hear you.”
It didn’t matter how he knew, or what he thought he’d heard. I could sing. I’d do: a darker take on his genetic material, solid enough to carry the bass. When I was ready at last — the outward confirmation of his inner ear — Jonah added Celeste. For the first time since our school days, my brother and I made music with someone who wasn’t us.
I’d grown no closer to Celeste in Ghent than we’d been in the airport parking lot the day they picked me up. She and my brother had the rapport that exists only between two people incomprehensible to each other. They chattered all the time, but never about the same thing at once. When the three of us were together, the French blazed past my ability to split the elided syllables. Then Celeste would address me in an English so joyously makeshift, all I could do was nod and pray. At nights, in our ancient row house, I heard them doing each other, three stories below. They hummed to each other, like Penderecki’s threnody, like Reich, Glass, the new minimalists, the latest rage in stylish circles. Their voices ascended in slurred quarter tones, crested in held dissonant intervals, then cooled off by appoggiaturas. They were busy turning themselves into a new species, and for that, they needed a new courtship song.
So I’d heard Celeste Marin’s singing voice already, before we sang together. This daughter of Caribbean business elites — generations of mixed-race rum magnates — sang with antillais abandon. But I wasn’t prepared for our French fourteenth-century trios. When we three made our first attempt to harmonize, I stopped after eight notes. Her voice was Jonah’s, pitched up into soprano again, before his voice broke forever. Whatever her voice had sounded like in her days at the Paris Conservatory, before she met Jonah, it now sounded more like a female Jonah than Ruth or Mama ever had.