“You ever kill anyone?”
Jonah thought. No more hiding. “A couple times. Pushed a woman in an oven once. I wasn’t much older than you.”
The boy looked to his mother for help. Ruth pressed her hand to her shaking lip. Robert looked at me, sense’s last resort. I motioned toward the deserted room. “I need to straighten up here.”
Ruth wrestled free of herself. “And I’ve got a school to run. And you, young man. Don’t you need to be somewhere? Mrs. Williams, for math? Hmm?”
“Know what else you need?” I could hear it in Jonah’s voice. Desperate fishing. “An African name. Like your brother.”
It stopped them both, mother and son. Ruth stared. “How do you know about African names?” How do you know about his brother?
“Oh, please. I’ve been to Africa many times. On tour. Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire. They love us there. We’re more popular in Lagos than we are in Atlanta.” He took his nephew by the shoulders. “I’m going to call you Ode. Good Bini name. It means ‘Born along the road.’”
The child checked his mother. Ruth cast up her hands. “If the man says so.”
“What does Kwame mean?”
“Haven’t a clue. Ode is the only one I know. That’s what they named me, last time I was there.”
“Ode?” Robert asked, doubtful.
His uncle said, “Roger.”
“Ode,” Robert said, pointing at me. Got it?
I showed him my palms. “Fine with me. From now on. Until you tell me to stop.”
He dashed off to his last class, criminally late. The abandoned adults fell silent. Ruth and Jonah traded a few hostages, both trying hard to leap twenty years. She and I walked him out to the parking lot, where he grew eager all over again.
“Come on. Bird and Fish, Incorporated. Why not? Make a new species? Old wine in new bottles. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Be great for the kids. Talk about education. This thing could be the best thing ever for your school.”
“How would it do anything for this school?” Even Ruth’s suspicion sounded administrative. I looked at her through Jonah’s widening eyes.
He stared at her across confusion too wide to bridge. “Come on. Classics meets the streets. Make your baby hipper and smarter. There’s a ready market. The country’s been waiting for it.”
She hung her head and let it shake, awed by the distance. She couldn’t help snickering. “‘Waiting’? You really mean it, don’t you?” She tipped her face skyward. “Oh God. Where do I start?”
He smiled back, desperate. “Start by picking your top kids and letting me find us a promoter.”
“Where have you been living? Have you no eyes?”
“The eyes are only mediocre. But the ears are extraordinary.”
“Then listen, damn you. Listen, for once.”
“I did. It’s good, Ruth. Better than either. Better than identity. Hybrid vigor.”
She slumped in the face of his hopelessness. He wanted it to be capitulation. But he saw what it was. In an instant, he knew: This chorus was the thing he’d trained for his whole life. And somehow his life’s devotion — his uncompromising will, his wriggling free, always toward this unseen goal, untyped, note by note, perfecting his own line — was exactly what would keep this all-keys choir from ever being his.
When he spoke, he was a child, broken and bare. “You think about it. No rush. I’ll put some ideas together. I’ll call you before we head to L.A.”
Ruth might have killed him with the smallest-caliber monosyllable. But she didn’t. Jonah stood in front of her. “Twenty years. Why?” She bit her lip and shook her head — not at his question, but at him. He nodded. “Won’t be so long, next time.” She let him embrace her, and she held on, even as he pulled away. He didn’t embrace me; for us, it had been only three. Instead, he shoved into my hands an article he’d clipped from the previous day’s New York Times. April 24: “Scientists Report Profound Insight on How Time Began.”
“You have to read this, Joey. Message from Da, from beyond the grave.”
Jonah drove off. Ruth waved a little, after he was too far to see. She felt no need even to mention his scheme to me. We were our brother’s future. But he wasn’t ours.
He didn’t call us before he went to L.A. The press of performing tied him up. The Berkeley Festival was a resplendent conquest, by all paid accounts. He and Voces Antiquae flew down to Los Angeles on the second-to-the-last day of April. Their plane was one of the last to land at LAX before the outbreak shut down all incoming flights.
Ruth called first, that Wednesday night. She spoke so softly into the phone, I thought there was something wrong with the line. She kept saying, “Joey, Joey.” I was sure one of the boys was dead. “They let them all go. All four of them. Not guilty on every count. Beaten fifty-six times, on videotape, for the whole world to see, and it’s like nothing happened. It’s not possible. Not even here.”
Jonah’s article from the Times had been the first piece of news I’d read for months. I’d given up on current events. News was nothing to me, a cruel tease. It was nothing but the delusion that things were still happening. I’d dismissed it. All my news came down to New Day School. I’d forgotten the King verdict was even due. As Ruth told me of the blanket acquittal, I’d already heard the outcome, word for word, a long time before.
Now news took me in again. I flipped on my set while Ruth was still on the line. Aerial-reconnaissance video showed what I thought at first was King. But this was another man, the other color, pulled from his truck and stoned live for the cameras. “Are you seeing this?” I asked her. Something in me wanted her to hurt. To kill her self-possession as dead as mine. “You see where belonging gets us?”
“It’s never ending,” my sister kept saying into the receiver. And it was.
The staff of New Day kept a broadcast going in the teachers’ room all Thursday. Nobody was really teaching. We all kept slipping in to watch. Not even horrified. Just dulled, in that place that would forever return to claim us all. Plumes of fire streaked the skyline of the dying city, burning out of control. The police retreated, leaving the streets to looters of every persuasion. The National Guard assembled on their beachheads but couldn’t move out for want of ammunition. Shops went up in flames like shavings in a kiln. The body count climbed. One of the third-grade teachers turned on a set in a classroom, thinking it might be instructive. She turned it off again five minutes later, instruction outgrowing itself. The rout was total, and as darkness fell again the second day, hell spread so fast, it felt positively willed.
Ruth wouldn’t go home alone. She demanded I have dinner with her. While we ate, all hope burned. “What are they doing?” my nephew asked. “What’s happening there? Are they having a war?” My sister stared at the news feed throughout dinner, biting her lip. I’d never before seen her refuse to answer Robert’s questions.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked. “Why the hell doesn’t he call us?” I didn’t say he was lying on the pavement in South Central, sight-singing the sky. I let Ruth’s question, too, go unanswered.
He called, with answers, at 2:40A.M. Friday. I must have been dreaming, because I was talking to him before I heard the phone ring. He sounded thrilled, on the verge of some huge insight. “Joey? Mule? I’m here. Again.” I had to wake up enough to hear he was in shock. “You see what this means? Right back dead in the middle of it. I heard the whole thing, at least until they got my ear. Every line. Tell her that. You have to tell her.”
I pulled my head from out of sleep and tried to talk him down. “Jonah. Thank God you’re safe. It’s okay, now. They said on the news tonight. Things are returning to normal.”
“Normal? This is normal, Joey.” Shrieking: “This.”