A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  What are you doing? You were out the door.

  I was just expressing myself man, I have a Fifth Amendment right to do that right? I spent a day in jail for no reason just because the cop didn’t like my face or something.

  Whatever man. This is a battle you can’t win. What he wants is an apology, give it to him and I’ll get him to take back the contempt otherwise you’re going to stay in jail. Rory?

  Fine.

  Judge my client wishes to address you.

  Mr. Ludd?

  I want to apologize to your honors for cursing in the courtroom. Like my attorney said I was just frustrated by the situation.

  Well the situation was one of your own making young man. If you don’t break the law you don’t get arrested it’s as simple as that. I do not stand for that kind of language either. This is a goddamn courtroom not some corner hangout! I don’t care what you think those cops did or didn’t do to you out on the street; when you come into my courtroom you show me respect because I am a man of respect. I think your attorney will tell you that I am an exceedingly fair-minded individual. How do you think you become a judge other than by demonstrating an extreme, almost-criminal, degree of impartiality but I will not have my courtroom turned into a circus by the likes of you. When I am confronted with such a situation I will wield my considerable power swiftly and decisively . . . decisive swiftness. You are going to have to learn to respect authority. The officer who arrested you and myself we are authority, ask your attorney. Now, are you sorry?

  Yeah I’m sorry.

  Yes?

  Yes.

  Fair enough, he’s not a bad guy at that. Next time he’ll obey the signs.

  Fucking—

  That’s it! I find the defendant guilty of contempt of court and sentence him to fifteen days. Fifteen days to be served under the vilest conditions permitted by New York law. Get him out of here!

  Step in! P.D. take charge one going in.

  What were you thinking Rory?

  I didn’t think he could hear me. Can I take it back?

  Judge you have to permit him to make a statement in his defense before you can summarily find him guilty of contempt.

  He had his chance, I said get him out of here! We’re done! Step up counsel I want to talk to you . . . son I really think that you are a great attorney in the making, if not great then certainly tremendous. But you have to learn when to leave well enough alone. None of these people is worth your career and another less patient judge won’t stand for your little comments after every ruling you don’t agree with. And something like trying to do a case without an interpreter is just plain wrong and borders on the unethical. Now if you ask around you’ll hear I’m a fair judge. One of the best really. The best in fact and I say that despite being humble. I’m famous for that as well. I’m very proud of my humility and if I had to pick one quality of mine that has continually stood me in good stead and which has allowed me to achieve the status I have, I think I would point to that, my humility that is; either that or my intelligence. Now it’s not every judge who would take the time to talk to you like this and I hope you realize that. That’s another good quality that I have and which I try to fertilize as often as possible. So remember what I’ve just said here tonight . . . said here tonight. Good night.

  Morning.

  So how much is his bail?

  Twenty-five hundred.

  So ten percent of that and Terrens get out?

  No. Here, twenty-five hundred means you have to pay the full amount in cash. Can anybody pay that?

  No that’s a lot of money.

  I know but we’ll be back in court on Tuesday and maybe we’ll get lucky.

  If they don’t have an indictment on that day they have to release him.

  Where’s that?

  Part N, second floor of this building.

  I’ll be there.

  She turned and split making me the last night-court person in a courtroom duly filling with lobster-shift personnel. Now this shift ran from the a.m.’s one to its nine so many of the people milling about me then looked like warmed-over cadavers reanimated by some evil genius that they may haunt the living and they cast their vacant eyes on me amidst air still charged with the dim electricity of Transgression, the invisible contagion that permeated the room; all of which made me let’s-say eager to leave but when I did and stepped outside the immoral cold so set upon my flesh, forcing my shoulders to drop and squinch together, that I nearly beat an immediate retreat but didn’t because it was getting pretty late if I hoped to snag one of the cabs that lined up outside 100 Centre for the end of night court, especially after a voice from across the street stopped me in my tracks with: “You good man you! Good man, I call you tomorrow!” It was the guy who was convinced his wife wanted an irreversible divorce and whom I had sent to the precinct. Whatever they told him he sure seemed happy as he waved frantically while walking away and I realized I never even learned his name; some good man I made.

  I saw there was only one cab left but rather than run or even trot I just followed my geodesic towards it like a soulless galactic body. Floating forward in this manner the vast sidewalk below of lightning-shaped cracks and flat, adhered pebbles, receded, section by section, into my past; in the dim light the many black islands of spent gum, various in size and shape but consistent in frequency, seemed like so many portals to null space. And at the Ptolemaic center lay a steaming lump of rags that only suggested humanity. For out of that amorphous shape emerged two leg-like structures ending in dull orange Chuck Taylors, one of which had been purposely ripped open near the ankle to expose a gapingly open sore that wetly reflected streetlamp light. But wait, maybe his entire body was an open sore and the circle I was staring at the only healthy patch. I looked away. Just before the cab was a round, waist-high kid dressed from chubby head to toe in aggressive pink and testing the limits of acceptable distance from the only nearby woman emitting any maternal air. He stared back at me as if I owed him money and sang distractedly in a troubling falsetto. He sang: You’ve got to accen—tuate the positive, eli—minate the negative . . . and wasn’t it like one in the morning on a Thursday night? I dropped into the cab and made my request. Suddenly behind me came an aural explosion directly into my bad ear: Hi! This is Judd Hirsch! I know a thing or two about taxis, ha ha . . . ha, and I know that you should buckle up for safety. I immediately thought of Latka Gravas altering his lifestyle to fit the fast lane with predictably grim results. Ah Latka! Ah humanity!

  The driver was the very picture of energy, darkening at various times significant portions of the dividing screen with his seemingly limitless body while his bellow filled the rest of the cab in almost visible sound waves.

  “You work in the courts huh chief?”

  “Yup.”

  “You one of them there DAs working night court son?”

  “No.”

  “Well you sure look like a lawyer. You know wearing that suit at one thirty in the a.m. and all, tell you that.”

  Oh man. This was New York, you weren’t supposed to have to talk to anyone when all you wanted was to stand mute but this pause was going into labor and my interrogator had locked his eyes on the rear-view in predatory wait, so:

  “Yeah I’m a lawyer but I’m with the bad guys.”

  “What do you mean mac?”

  “I’m a defender of the public.”

  “Uh?”

  “I defend the public from—”

  “What?”

  “I’m a public defender.”

  “Really? Wow that must be something.” He mulled it over noisily. “A public defender in New York City. I mean this has got to be like the crime capital of the world right bub?”

  “Well—”

  “I read somewhere that someone is killed every hour in New York City.”

  “That seems a bit—

  “This is one violent city.”

  —actually absurdly—

  “Not for the weak.”

  —high.�
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  “That’s great for you though right champ? I mean you get that experience.”

  “I guess.”

  “Cause you guys get paid shit right boss? I hear the trick is get that experience a few years then go into private practice, which is where the money is. Next thing you know, you’re charging five, six hundred dollars an hour, that’s real money,” this guy wasn’t even pausing for air, “take my brother-in-law for example, he’s a lawyer. Not a public defender, a real lawyer. Anyways, that’s a guy’s really got his act together. Married to my sister, the fuck. They got two kids. He’s like a what do you call senior partner? at one of those big Fifth Avenue firms. I think he does like trademark work you’ve probably heard of him his name’s Jack. Anyway this guy really knows how to live. Big house over in Jersey he’s got this seventy-inch Television with a perfectly flat screen that automatically turns on when your favorite shows are on so you don’t miss them, you know, by accident. Seventy inches!”

  “Yeah those guys make money,” I said near tears. “Make your first left up there.”

  “Oh you don’t know. We’ll go to a titty bar and this guy will drop two, three thousand dollars easy. They love him there. Love! Best of all, his wife can’t say shit. Not at the rate he’s bringing the cash in! You know what though kid?” Now he turned and looked me directly in the eye while I cursed myself for not having listened to goddamn Alex Reeger. “You look like you’re real young. If you work hard and make the right connections I bet you could end up just like him in a couple of years.”

  “This is it,” I said trying to contain my exultation.

  “Six bucks chief. Just remember what I said. You can be like my brother-in-law. You can be Jack.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I do have one question for you though before you go,” all gravity now.

  “What’s that?”

  “How can you represent someone you know is guilty?”

  I took my four bucks change and returned half. I watched this guy take his dough but all I kept imagining was Jack’s suburban construction raptly coming to responsorial attention for the suddenly resurgent Monolith as it chanted the rhythmic, synchronized intro to Sajak’s Rota . . . For . . . tunae!! He asked again. I summoned the tattered vestiges of my concentration, looked him in the eye, and answered his question:

  “Practice,” I said.

  chapter 2

  The Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker (environs Brooklyn) is distinguishable mainly by the fact it’s got a yella belly and is sucking sap!

  —The Sanitation Worker’s Guide to Ornithological Species, Vol. XII.

  It was marrow-petrifying, prayer-inducingly cold and I couldn’t find my goddamn keys. I was frantically patting myself all over and doing so in historic Brooklyn Heights, an idyllically tree-lined neighborhood immediately off and to the right of the Brooklyn Bridge. The architectural charisma of that ancient bridge, the clear view of Manhattan across the East River and, most importantly, the residential neighborhood’s proximity and transportational ease to nearby Wall $treet all conspired to spawn seven-figure brownstones and the people who could own them so that wherever you turned you saw what looked like gray-haired grandmothers but were in fact the actual mothers carrying their little blubber packages in chest-high kangaroo pouches on the Trinidadian nanny’s day off. Many longed to live in this land of the silver-haired kangaroo and as a result the exalted spectre of this neighborhood so hung over the surrounding areas that when looking at ads for apartments located in neighborhoods that were most decidedly not Brooklyn Heights you were nonetheless assured Brooklyn Heights Vicinity. Consequently, for an apartment roughly the size of a manila envelope I paid the kind of rent that could pull some countries out of a recession and at that moment, it occurred to me, I was paying it solely to provide shelter for Casper the Friendly Ghost who bound my keys and likely lay on the wobbly semicircle table near my front door.

  I thought about Casper and wondered how someone with such soft edges could do this to me after so many years of one-sided friendship, thought about: a two-year-old in my aunt’s apartment; yellow flowered bed sheets delineating rooms and trapping icy air-conditioning: ¿is it three yet? No. Casper comes when the little hand is on the three and the big hand on the twelve. okay. ¿which one is the three? : Do you love me? Yes. One to ten? ∞

  I remembered all that, watched the figurative mercury plummet while my powers of reasoning suffered greatly, and somewhere in there I semi-concluded that maybe it was all meet and just that I should sleep on the street that night like the open-sored guy outside arraignments. So I curled into a ball there by the door to start slumbering only I started shivering so bad I couldn’t stop and the sound of my teeth like machine gun fire then a low guttural moan that I eventually realized was coming from me and those two competing sounds so disturbed me, so exacerbated the pain in my ear, that I decided I would make a more significant effort to sleep indoors that night.

  Which was about the time I had an auditory hallucination informed by recent memory whereby a recondite voice said hey being that we’re friends now we should perhaps have a copy of each other’s keys so we don’t get negligently locked out and so forth which in turn spurred the instant storyteller into acting like a cinematic Lotharian suitor by throwing icy acorns at the second-story window of one Alyona Karn in place of ringing a doorbell that never worked. Alyona’s uncle was the proud owner of the general recipient of my acorn pelts and of my apartment contained within. In addition to being the sixty-year-old father of a preschooler he allowed Alyona to live there footloose and rent-free provided he would superintend. Alyona in turn, and unbeknownst to uncle, allowed two others, Angus Glass and Louis Sands, to live in the apartment without paying rent in exchange for their promise to pay all necessary bills and expenses; necessary meaning digital cable, satellite programming, broadband internet, phone, food, toothpaste, electricity, water et cetera. This pleased him to no end and more than once he bragged that I have in essence extricated myself from our system of pay to play. Currency has no meaning to me. I am a twenty-eight-year-old who does not have a bank account yet my refrigerator is always full. Bills arrive in my name and get paid without me so much as opening the envelope. This—extreme nonconsumerism—is something that has come to be associated with illegality has it not?

  Now several acorns had successfully flown their sorties, cutting through the frigid air to form interrupted parabolas, when I began to conceive the inconceivable. Could they all be asleep? Not home? Was there a difference if either meant sleeping on the street? The three of them were good customers of Columbia University. Alyona was purchasing a doctorate in Philosophy with an emphasis on either the eighteenth century British empiricists or else the work of Sextus Empiricus I could never recall. Angus was a twenty-six-year-old undergrad gravitating without the slightest volition towards a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Louie a graduate student trying to master business with both eyes towards his first and true love: Advertising. Alyona and Angus never left the house and, to my knowledge, the three of them never slept, certainly not while it was dark out, yet there I stood with diminishing acorns in raw gloveless hands and, to all appearances, vastly alone. And I was just beginning to reflect on how I came to be so alone when I heard the sweet, redemptive sound of a door opening followed by cognizable human words.

  “What are you trying to do, break our windows at a time when their continued integrity is of the utmost importance?” The speaker allowed maybe a third of his face to appear from behind the door and I saw that it was Alyona. “Come on, you’re letting the red out and the blue in.”

  I moved inside the door to hear it close behind me. “My hero,” I said and emitted that little shudder you get with the initial blast of heat. He was shaking his head no as if I’d been all prodigal or something.

  “You know what the key to getting inside a locked building is?” he said.

  “Funny.”

  “So?”

  “It’s relaxing in my apartment,”
I said moving up the stairs to the promise of greater heat but careful not to outpace my rescuer as that would have been weird.

  “Good thing you listened to me then huh? I’m starting to think I’m . . . um.”

  “Prescient?”

  “Negative.”

  “Clairvoyant?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Were you sleeping?” puzzled look. “No because you have that hat on, I didn’t know those were worn anymore outside of comic strips.”

  “They’re not. And no because we have a guest, courtesy of Louis.”

  “Let me guess.”

  “Gorgeous.”

  I spent the time on the stairs wondering if I could wait in the hall while Alyona got my key’s identical twin then just run up to my third floor apartment. Would that be rude and if so did that necessarily mean I had to go in since I had no legal or contractual obligation to avoid being rude nor had I promised anyone I wouldn’t be rude and in fact rudeness must be a rather natural state of human being since time immemorial to have necessitated invention of the word rude right? And even if this one time I acted in this eminently common manner would that be sufficient, standing alone, to make me a rude person? Moreover, if I did go in how quickly could I split given that I had just worked about seventeen straight hours? I mean without being rude.

  “Suit and tie at this hour,” Alyona said opening the door. “That’s got to be brutal.”

  “Not fun.”

  “Hope I can find them Casi, think they’re in my room somewhere.”

  I went in with Alyona, almost instinctively, having never resolved my little internal debate. “Casi my good man,” said Louie. “Come in dude, join the party.”

  “I am in,” I said.

  “I mean in in,” he said. “This is Traci.”

  “Hey Traci how are you?” (The Traci part of this was a new trick I had recently picked up from a dental waiting room Glamour published the requisite decade earlier, which trick called for people like me to repeat the name immediately for better memory retention and shortly after reading that the dentist told me his name but I immediately forgot it because I couldn’t repeat it with that little vacuum thing resting on my lower row of choppers.)