“Jonah. Listen to me. It’s okay. Are you at the hotel? Just stay inside. The army—”
“Inside? Inside? You never had a clue, did you? Fool!” I heard the nakedness. He’d thought me a fool all our shared life. And he was right. But he blasted forward, unable to wait for either of us. He was struggling to breathe. “I’ve been out in the middle of this since yesterday afternoon. I went in, Mule. Looking for what I was supposed to do. Did everything I know. I stood on a burning corner and tried to form a pickup chorus of ‘Got the whole world in his hands.’ You have to tell her that. She’s wrong. Wrong about me. Don’t let her think what she thinks.” His voice was huge with the performance of a lifetime. He was drawing on that ancient lesson his lover-teacher once gave him: If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out on stage.
“I’ll tell her, Jonah.” I had to repeat it before he calmed down enough to make sense.
He tittered as he spoke. “They canceled the concert. I guess the early music crowd was afraid to come out for a Last Judgment. The Europeans were freaking. Trapped in the country of their worst nightmares. They barricaded themselves in the hotel. I had to go back, Joey. It was you and me, the night of our first recording.” The curve of his life was calling for him to come trace it, somewhere out there in the burning streets.
He headed into the violence, toward the pitch of maximum distress, with nothing but his overtrained ears to lead him on. “What did you look like?” I asked.
“Look? Like me!” It took him a moment; he was still reeling. “Chino pants and a teal Vroom and Dreesmann dress shirt. I know: total suicide pact. Oh. A solid black T-shirt underneath that saysFEAR NO ART. The limo wouldn’t take me past the I-Ten. I must have gone the last two miles on foot. Can’t remember everything. Out of my gourd, Joey. That crowd. You remember. I no longer meant myself. I was walking back into the sea. Taking my first voice lesson. Dum, dum, dum. There was nothing. Nothing but fires. Götterdämmerung on a two-billion-dollar budget. Mule. I thought opera was someone else’s nightmare. I never knew that someone else was me.
“I just followed the smoke. Kept looking around for you. I wound up in some flaming retail strip. Every sheet of glass for blocks around was lying on the pavement, sparkling like rosin. Palm-sized hunks of concrete, whipping through the intersection. Couldn’t count the sides. Latinos, Koreans, blacks, white guys in uniform. I might have been singing. Standing in the middle of the cross fire. This piece of paving stone size of my shoe heel hits me in the side of the head. Ripped into my temple. I just stood there snapping my fingers, first on one side of my head, then the other. Deaf in my left ear. Me, Joey. Can’t hear a damn thing! Listen!” He fumbled to switch the phone to his other ear. “Hear that? Nothing!
“That’s when I find myself. I start running. Blood is streaming out of my ruined ear. They can’t hit me twice. I figure I’m safe, right? They can’t come after me. Who knows what color I am? I’m nobody. Safer than I’ve been since… Something’s pulling me, like Brahms. Like this is going on again, for eternity. I’m back here for a reason. Across the street, at the end of the next block, these kids are pouring out of a hardware store, arms full. You remember? Power drills. A workbench. An electric saw. They see me just standing there. Score something, you choosy motherfucker. One of them stops, and I think he’s going to dust me. Shoot me. He stops and hands me this can of paint and a handful of brushes. Like he’s God, and this is just for me. I’m trying to pay him. To pay the sacked store. He’s just screaming and laughing at me.
“Like it was my calling, Joey. Out of my mind! I started walking around, marking people. Started with myself. I thought I was the angel of the Lord, putting a safe marker on everyone I could find. Passover. Everybody was going to be medium brown. That was the plan anyway. Somebody didn’t want to be painted. Smashed me into a wall and spilled what was left all over me. Next thing I know, policeman’s got my neck pinned to the concrete with a riot stick. They throw me into an armored van and haul me off to a station, where they take my statement. I should have lied to them. Told them I was someone else. They wouldn’t even fucking book me. I couldn’t even get myself arrested. They’re holding thousands of people for curfew violation, and they toss me back. Too many real criminals. You sing what? You live where? And they believed me. Figure nobody could make up that scale of madness. They send me to the fucking hospital! Damn them to hell. I didn’t stay. I came right back here and called you.”
He made me promise again to tell Ruth, first thing in the morning. I told him to go to the hospital and have his ear looked at as soon as we hung up. And to call me when he’d spoken with a doctor.
“Doctor, Joey? They’re all tied up. Real things. Death and such. Not some foreigner’s hurt ear.” He gasped for air. From the far end of a bad connection, he went into a suffocation fit. The one that all his youthful panic attacks had been all along remembering.
I talked him down, as I had done so many earlier times. I walked him around his hotel room. And then he was calm again, wanting to talk on into the night. I kept telling him to call for help, but he didn’t want to hang up on me. “Tell her, Joey. Tell her I’ve been there. Tell her nobody’s done. Everyone’s going somewhere else. Next time. Next time.”
I got him off the phone at last. “A doctor, Jonah. Your ear.” I tried to sleep but couldn’t. In my waking dreams, the shells that held us encased cracked open like chrysalises, and the fluid that was us flowed out, like reverse rain, back up into the air.
Hans Lauscher found him the next morning, a little after ten o’clock, when Jonah failed to show up for breakfast. He was stretched along the bed, still dressed, on top of the bedspread. The stream of dried blood down one side of his pillow made Hans think he’d hemorrhaged. But my brother had simply stopped breathing. The television in his hotel room was on, tuned to the local news.
Requiem
We buried Jonah in Philadelphia, in the family cemetery. A month later, Ruth and I flew out to perform at his European memorial. The service was held in Brussels, in half a dozen languages, all of them sung. There was no eulogy, no remembrance but music. Dozens of people sang, people Jonah had performed with throughout the last years of his life. Our piece was the most recent, and surely the rockiest. Ruth sang “Bist du bei mir,” that little song of Bach’s that Bach never wrote:
If you are with me, I’ll go gladly
to my death and to my rest.
Ah, how pleasant will my end be,
with your dear hands pressing
Shut my faithful eyes!
We sounded as if we hadn’t made music since our mother’s funeral. Like we were music’s shaky discoverers, the first to have stumbled across the form. Like we might never make it back to tonic. Like tonic was going someplace else, always a moving do. Like everyone would have to own every song, before the end. Ruth sang as she remembered him, no part of us barred. And he was in her voice.
It was the first time my sister had ever been abroad. She stood at the top of the Kunstberg, the Mont des Arts, crying over how every curbside banality struck her with wonder. For a long time, she couldn’t place the feeling that gripped her. Then, in the middle of the Grande Place, we overheard a light-skinned, angular-featured black couple marveling over the guildhalls in Portuguese.
“Nobody here has the slightest idea where I come from. Nobody cares how I got here. They’re not even trying to guess. I could be anyone.” The utter freedom terrified her. “We have to get back to America, Joey.” Our hellish utopia, that dream of time. The thing the future was invented for, to break and remake.