“So, we stand here today at this historic moment.” The sound fans out, tiny and metallic, lost in the endless space it must fill. “We are standing in the place of those who couldn’t make it here today. We are standing on the blood of our ancestors.”
People on all sides of us call out names. Some massive church. My nephews know the drill anyway, by another path. “Robert Rider,” Kwame calls. His voice breaks, not because he remembers, but because he can’t. “Delia Daley,” he adds. He might go further back.
“We are standing on the blood of those who died in the Middle Passage…in the fratricidal conflict…”
Those around us name their dead, and because he feels me standing there, my nephew adds, “Jonah Strom.”
The notion’s so crazy I have to laugh. Transformed by death: my brother’s operatic debut at last. Then I hear little Robert bragging to his newfound friend, “My uncle died in the Los Angeles riot.” And I suppose, in some world, he did. His last performance on that long, self-singing vita.
“Toward a more perfect union.” The minister does not know whereof he speaks. Union will undo his every call to allegiance, if allegiance doesn’t do us all in first. I’m standing in this million-man mass, a billion miles away, grinning like the idiot my brother knew I was. An old German Jew proved it to me, lifetimes ago: Mixing shows us which way time runs. I have seen the future, and it is mongrel.
Kwame chooses that moment to whisper to me. “The man’s a chickenhead. Thing’s fuckin’ obvious to anyone who’s clocking. Only one place we can go. Everybody’s going to be a few drops everything. What the fuck? I say let’s just go do it and get it done with.”
I shake my head and ask him. “Where do you think you got that from?”
The minister is going for a record-breaker. But he has the crowd to help him. We wave our hands in the air. We give fistfuls of money. We embrace total strangers. We sing. Then the classically trained violinist tells us, “Go home. Go back home to work out this a-tone-ment… Go back home transformed.” We end like every other thwarted, glorious transformation in the past, and all the pasts to come. Home: the one place we have to go back to, when there’s no place left to go.
But our boy has other destinations, farther afield. The speeches break up and the crowd folds into itself, embracing. Kwame hugs me to him, an awkward promise. We part from the clinch embarrassed, and look around for Robert. But he’s vanished. We see the friend he was hanging with, but the boy has no idea where Robert has gone. Kwame shakes him, almost yelling, and the frightened child starts to cry.
My nephew descends into his worst recurrent nightmare. And mine. This is his doing. He’s brought his brother here, keeper-style, thinking to undo his own influence. He waved off all Ruth’s warnings. He promised her a thousand times: “Nothing can go wrong.” He’s kept the boy on the shortest of leashes, all through this mammoth crowd. And now, in the first dropped glance, we’ve lost the child, as if he were just waiting for the chance to break free.
Kwame is frantic. He runs in all directions at once, toward any half-sized figure, shoving men aside to get past. I try at first to keep up with him. But then I stop short, a sense of peace coming over me, so great that I think it will be fatal. I know where Robert has gone. I could tell Kwame. I have the whole piece, the whole song cycle there, intact, in front of my sight-singing eyes. The piece I’ve been writing, the one that’s been writing me since before my own beginning. The anthem for this country in me, fighting to be born.
I try to tell my nephew, but I can’t. “Don’t panic,” I say. “Let’s stay close by. He’s around here somewhere.” In fact, I know exactly how close the lost boy is. As close as a promise to a long-forgotten friend. As close as the trace of tune turning up in me at last, begging me to compose it.
“Shut the fuck up,” Kwame shouts. “I got to think.” My nephew can’t even hear himself. He runs through all the options that cloud his desperate brain. He plays out every scenario, sure that only the worst can ever happen, finally, to the likes of us. He’s lost his brother in a million dispersing men. This is his final punishment, for all he’s done and left undone.
And then his brother emerges from the underworld, there in front of us. He’s jogging toward us from up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He waves smartly, as if he’s only been away on a prearranged outing, no more than five minutes, max. In truth, it can’t have been much longer. For Kwame, it’s been another jail sentence. Life.
Relief spills over into rage. “Where the fuck have you been, Bean? What are you trying to do to me?” Strung out, fatherless. At the mercy of every past. He’d slap the boy if I weren’t there.
The look of bewildered adventure falls from Robert’s face. He stares out on the place he’s come back to. He shrugs and folds up his arms like shields in front of his chest. “Nowhere. Just out talking. Meeting people.” The question that was bursting in him dies unasked. Kwame, too, his head sunk down, hears all the promises he has just made mocking him, as vain as any music.
“Well?” Ruth greets us, ready for all the stories. “How do you feel? Was it amazing?”
All three of us keep silent, each boy for his own reasons.
“Come on. Tell me. What did they say? Was it everything you…?”
“Ruth,” I warn.
Her eldest puts his chin on the crown of his mother’s head and cries.
Not until that long flight back across the continent does Ode ask. And then, not us, but his mother. It’s dusk when we get to the airport, and night for the length of the flight. We rise up over the layer of cloud, nothing above us but darkness. Kwame, across the aisle from me, is writing a song about the march. He needs to redeem it. The song is all in his head, committed to memory. He hands me the phones for his disc player. “Ay yo trip. New L.A. crew. Check out the bomb bass line.”
I place it in two notes. “Gregorian cantus firmus.” A Credo already a millennium old by the time Bach used it.
“No shit?” His eyes glint, fishing for me. “Motherfucker makes a def sample.” He takes the phones back, slaps his thighs in a haunted, broken rhythm. The day’s panic is already just a memory. All notes are changing again. “Me and my crew, we got to get jumpin’.”
This, too, is forever true. “Mine, too,” I tell him. My piece is inside me, ready for writing down — the same piece that has long ago written me. My crew is inside me, jumping at last. And the first jump they make will be, as ever, back.
Little Robert sits in the window seat, his mother next to him. He fidgets from Ohio to Iowa, craning to see something out of the square of window. But the pane refuses to reveal anything but an opaque black wall.
“What you looking at, honey?”
He stops, ashamed at being caught.
“What is it? You see something up there?”
“Mama, how high are we?”
She can’t say.
“How far are we from Mars?”
She’s never thought to wonder.
“How long would it take…? Mama?”
More questions than he’s asked her since he was seven. She sees his old sandbox love of math trying to reenter him. A signal, beckoning. She braces for the next question, praying for her sake that she won’t miss them all.
“Mama, wavelength’s like color, right?”
She’s almost sure. She nods slowly, ready to improvise if need be.
“But pitch is wavelength, too?”
She nods more slowly now. But still yes.
“What wavelength do you think they are — on other planets?”
Her face contorts. The answer struggles up from where she’s held it so long. Words pour into my sister, words I’ve forgotten years ago. Words waiting for the past to reach them. She jerks upright, as if she’ll stop the plane, turn around, parachute out over the Mall. No time to lose. “Where on earth…? Who did you hear that…?”