A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  I figured I needed to wash my brain clean if I hoped to sleep. Needed to forget that there were Glenda Deebles the world over or at least get them temporarily out of my skull and for that I would need an attractive distraction. Music was always my first choice but I liked it loud and the ear was in no mood. I had not nearly enough concentration left for reading so on went Television and its replay of the nightly news.

  Angus was right. Before an array of microphones in front of City Hall stood a lanky Toad. Toad was the mayor. New York City’s electoral populace had not elected a fly-eating amphibian to run the city but they had selected someone named Toad, pronounced toe-add, to stand behind microphones in situations such as this and he now did so gladly, a slight smirk maybe building across his face. Video Vigilantes was a good idea he was saying and a grinning fat guy in a green beret was shaking his hand. Citizens needed to help the police fight crime. Citizens had greater leeway and could, in some instances, be more effective since their conduct was not governed by that obstructive Bill of Rights. Videotaping life was a step in the right direction. Those who weren’t doing anything wrong had nothing to fear and those who were, well they would be exposed by the white light of the camera—a camera that incidentally never lied. The reporter then hit the streets to see what average Joe thought. There followed near-universal praise for the vigilantes and the Toad’s stamp of approval. Crime was on the run.

  But not completely because up next was the horrifying story of the Dutch woman whose New York vacation has turned into a nightmare that just won’t end, the face said this with a solemnity that veered towards glee. Then they sped to Cindylou or whatever who was at the scene with the full story: Thanks Chuck. A nightmare is exactly what Dutch tourist Lana Huber is experiencing. Behind me is the TGINMONDAY’S in midtown where the twenty-three-year-old single mother stopped in for what police believe was a decaffeinated beverage. Police say Ms. Huber left her ten-month-old daughter outside on the sidewalk in a stroller while she had her coffee. When she returned (dramatic pause) the baby was gone.

  Yes it appears that the female in question was in this establishment consuming a decaffeinated beverage while the child in question was left outside for a period of time. When the female returned to the scene the child in question was gone.

  Any leads?

  We’re not going to discuss a pending investigation.

  Reaction in the community was mixed.

  Serves her right! You can’t leave no baby out in the street like that. This is New York this ain’t Iowa!

  My heart goes out to her as a fellow mother. She may have made a mistake but nobody deserves to have her baby abducted in that manner. I certainly hope they can find the person who did this and I hope the baby’s safe.

  It just goes to show you that nobody’s safe not even a baby.

  Chuck, police are asking anyone who might have information on this missing baby to call 1-800-BAD BABY. The BAD is not meant as any kind of value judgment Chuck, its alliterative allure is simply designed to increase consumer awareness. From outside MONDAY’S in midtown this is Cindylou or whatever reporting.

  Thank you. In Harlem a brutal slaying has shocked . . .

  There followed grim descriptions of further mayhem and an almost heartfelt plea to stay tuned for a report on the record lows from their vaunted Weather-tis-Better-Center. I ignored this plea and flipped the channel to this hyper, ultra-white guy saying you could visit all sorts of calamities on your car but the Buffbuster would still clean it good as showroom new and I disliked this guy intensely but when I went to re-flip the bastard battery giving me remote control picked then to die and I was too spent to get up and exercise immediate control. But then the guy started engaging in these like spontaneousy demonstrations of the product in response to studio questioning and just like that I found I could tolerate him. Then he kept it up and now I felt bad for having judged him rashly because it seems all he wanted was for the autos of the world to be clean, which seemed admirable, and the studio audience must have agreed because their oohs and aahs increased until I almost reached for the phone and bought the damn device in what would have been, for me, three very difficult installments.

  I was fading fast . . . Television still spoke but now without sound . . . the clock ticked insistently . . . a three and a twenty-eight . . . four minutes past my original grand introduction.

  I was 24.

  chapter 3

  It is better for us both, therefore, to merge.

  I dreamt often those days and almost exclusively to ill effect.

  Okay class listen and observe closely First we trip the locus coerulus alarm to ensure unfettered exploration As you can see the top of the subject’s head has been sliced open in a perfect ellipsoid Note that by purposely failing to cut entirely through the dorsal portion we can use the flesh to a hinge effect, allowing us to peel back the top of his cranium and peer inside What you see is, of course, mechanistic, intricately so but so nonetheless, nothing else and nothing more, hard wiring all of it But it’s hard wiring we have to know cold if we are to succeed because success will most likely not arrive suddenly but rather gradually, and incidentally it had better arrive whatever the means for your pathetic sake Now some are easier than others but this one looks easiest of all Here’s the cerebral cortex which we purposely dim so that only day to day affairs are of concern and it is within this very banality that we thrive See his amygdala? What he most fears threaten him with, dangle it, not as mere possibility but as overwhelming probability, a proven technique with this sort of specimen Look at the hippocampus sloshing in acetylcholine courtesy of his basal forebrain This will almost be too easy Always remember that we are here not to cure but to sicken So while normally at this point we begin to suggest the toxic, break down the healthy, and foster disorder, here an entropic chaos is already spreading virtually unchecked seeking its own heat death and this despite the fact that our own procedures are completely adiabatic and therefore blameless So why tamper? To tamper would be to excuse in a sense Closing I’ve seen enough After all, there are rules We’re not savages.

  When I awoke I put my hands to my head. The pain there and in my ear was obscene but I at least felt relief to be alone on my bed and not on an icy slab of steel surrounded by questionable medical personnel. The woman in charge wore a ptosic eyelid that almost completely shut her left eye, she lifted her chin to compensate, and when my eyes began to shut again I feared I would return to her. I sat up quickly, inviting reality and looking for a toehold. I was concentrating, concretely thinking myself into the real as if exiting a theater into midday’s bright city.

  I felt disbelief at the clock’s assertion of 9:45. Impossible, I thought, because I hadn’t really slept. I had merely lowered my lids, been pried open at the skull, then raised them again. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes but those numbers claimed hours. The digital clock I stared at had an invisible seconds-hand that circled ceaselessly, accelerating. Next to it Goya’s postcard-sized Saturn had devoured the speaking part of his son, a bloody stump where the head once lay.

  I was in a bad way from the night before so I tried to convince myself I had options. I could call in a comp day and stay home. But a quick look at my book revealed I had two out cases on—another Terrens-Lake-type kid and an emaciated credit card misholder serving an ersatz death sentence—neither of which could really be dumped on even a willing colleague. There was also the matter of a meeting that afternoon to discuss the death penalty appeal I had volunteered to help write; my brilliant ideas never ceased. I had to go in.

  The radio came on and said the missing baby had a name. Everyone should keep an eye out for Baby Tula and all were beseeched to call the toll free number with any potential information on the bad baby.

  I was almost tragically late so I took my time showering and getting dressed. Turning twenty-four was no minor disappointment. At twenty one, Edward Van Halen erupted and placed all other similarly-engaged guitarists into a group called the rest. At nineteen,
Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter won her gothic bet decisively, giving birth in the process to a sentient seventy-thousand word monster that, more than two centuries later, still haunts readers. Then there was this kid named Wilfred. At seventeen, Wilfred Benitez embarrassed the great Colombian fighter Antonio “Pambele” Cervantes to become the scientifically gifted Junior Welterweight Champion of the World at a time when twelve different guys couldn’t simultaneously make the same claim. They and so many others mocked me.

  My response was to leave. I made sure to grab friendly Casper this time before moving down the two flights and out the door. It was angry cold again. Then from the second-floor window I heard Angus screaming down at me:

  “Call in sick dude! Ralph’s taking Alice roller skating, this is a great one.”

  “Thanks but I better not.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  “Come on Angus you can do it!” I heard Louie and Traci simultaneously exhort. “Don’t quit,” Louie added.

  Angus was nuts, true, but maybe it was my funeral. After all there I was walking all slow and solemn then in a box being gradually interred and when the box hit bottom there had gathered there that day a slew of people, who if not grieving sure didn’t look thrilled, to hear atonal dirges and accusatory liturgical phrases fill the air creating a quasi commerce that I walked through to stand on yellow bumps meant to warn of danger where man-made wind screeched into and past my face until I was in another box this one moving horizontally within which I breathed on many and was breathed on in return before the box spit us all out still under Earth’s crust but this time flowing from inside a mass towards stairs that led back to life.

  Each stair brighter yet colder than the one below it like the sun was daring you to see how little effect it was having.

  Two men above me at forty-five degrees and brooking no passage while speaking so that every nearby ear was forced to listen:

  “It’s too damn cold for this time of year, too early in the year for this shit. I’m telling you man when I get dressed in the morning before I leave the house I put a goddamn lambskin condom on my dick to keep it warm. Y’ever seen a lamb complain about the cold? Still, it don’t even work, I’m a start putting two of them on before I leave the house.”

  “Heard that.”

  “Now about this other thing, I’ll say this. The man has to be large and in charge. It’s like I tell my bitch. You my queen but I’m the King and that’s the way it has to be man. The man has gots to be the boss you ask anyone. It’s what you call the natural order of things and the woman have best understand that, dig?”

  The listening guy claimed that he indeed dug and more discussion ensued until the woman rising alongside me, sick of exhaling loudly and circling her eyeballs, started asking them questions. The various voices got louder and the woman did this great thing where after she made what she felt was a particularly pointed remark, but which in reality was shot through with meekness, she would move the hair away from her face with a lovely hand, which maneuver was quite yummy. At the end of the stairs, on top of the city, she went left to my right and I watched her shrink wishing I would one day see her again. But where I was you could never arrange that kind of sequel. You just never saw the person again was what happened.

  I walked through City Hall Park, past the iced fountain and through the gloved hands pushing flyers, to the lobby of the only building in the area that looked like it shouldn’t even contemplate generating revenue. There was a new sign between the newsstand and the elevators. It said the entity that signed my criminally feeble paychecks had floors four through nine and that its Complex One was on nine. It said the Attorney-in-Charge could also be found on that floor and that his name was Thomas Swathmore. I wondered if this last part hadn’t been better written in pencil.

  I grabbed the two tabs and started skimming them back to back in front of the elevators. Holding them that way you could almost feel the competition heating up between them. The Post was all over Tula with a picture of a rattle below a giant OH BABY! Inside was a description of the grim horror with quoted reaction all the way from Holland. There was a poll too. Thirty-three percent said the kid would turn up the very picture of health. Fifty-two percent said no way look into adoption and fifteen percent wanted the pollster to repeat the question; of those fifteen percent, seventy percent later admitted to having understood the question the first time. Meanwhile, sixty percent said it was wrong to do a poll on such a subject but participated anyway while forty percent thought it perfectly legitimate to do such a poll but wanted no part of it. The Daily News countered. Seems our mayor was the newly christened CAPTAIN VIDEO given his newfound interest in video-enhanced law enforcement. There was a map. The red areas were new smile-for-the-camera zones. The green areas would remain as before, i.e. patrolled solely by the naked eye. Lastly, the blue areas were in dire need of a video presence but the vigilantes were too afraid to be stationed there.

  I stepped off on nine to see Denise’s eyebrows rise and her mouth open slightly meaning I was precisely the person she was looking for but couldn’t yet address because of the phone at her ear. Afterwards she smiled hello and “Malkum Jenkins called, he’s in court waiting for you.”

  “Nice to know, that it?”

  “Tom’s looking for you.”

  “Great. Since?”

  “Maybe quarter to nine?”

  “Time is it now?”

  “Forty-two after ten.”

  “I see, not good. Listen Denise if you’ll be so kind as to keep this little conversation confidential, I will now rotate my body in the appropriate manner and return home.”

  “Sure.”

  “Already one of those days let me tell you.”

  “Sorry honey, he’s in his office.”

  “Thanks.”

  I walked until the brief hall ended then popped my head forward to spy Tom’s green door, three-quarters closed and adrift in a sea of varying browns. I listened and heard no speech that sounded as if it were being issued from behind clenched teeth then took exaggerated cat burglar steps to my office in the opposite corner. I was alone in there for a change although I saw it would be temporary. The furry jacket on the back of Leon’s chair, the kind with the leather ovals that tell old-timers like its owner where the elbows go, meant he would soon return and the white sneakers with pink touches on Julia’s desk meant she was nearby as well. I sat at my desk between theirs.

  I stared at the jacket and just like that wanted to be Leon Greene, Esq. I wanted those life moments of highest suspense and relevance to be in my immutable past. Wanted to have been at that desk for thirty-five years and not find the slightest thing wrong with that. And in those years I would not once have worn casual clothes to work even if I wasn’t going to court or meeting one of my clients, all of whom incidentally I would give the benefit of the doubt despite decades of empirical opposition, and in all that time I would never have raised my voice or used salty language at the office either. And I would bring that quiet dignity to the office every day without fail by the sharpest eight-thirty and would remove it no later than four-thirty, with the same forty-five minutes excluded for the lunch Helen would pack, and allow myself only one glass of wine a night with my light dinner at five-thirty and maybe trade some words about our kids and their kids and draw steadily increasing paychecks and save for retirement and talk about pensions and never produce any evidence of having noticed that every square inch of the third inhabitant of that square, one Julia Ellis, was skin-raisingly gorgeous and at precisely that moment I realized I no longer wanted to be Leon.

  Although Leon wouldn’t be essentially hiding in that office avoiding Tom either. No, if Tom were looking for him, Leon would report front and center. Even if he was Casi and so never got to the office before ten and that day was pushing eleven and had a separate lengthy list of transgressions each singly capable of producing supervisory ire. So I pretended to be Leon. I stood up and took purposeful strides to the door where I almost ran i
nto Dane.

  “Where you off to in such a rush, to snatch up a square?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figured.”

  “What? Square? What square?”

  “Right.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the pool, you do work here right?”

  “What pool?”

  “The macabre office pool your colleagues are running on Baby Tula’s fate? Dead or alive being the major demarcation with all sorts of ensuing possibilities. Five bucks a square.”

  “That’s what you came in here for? To see if I would attempt to exploit the disappearance of an infant for monetary gain?”

  “Not in the slightest. I’m here because you remember the case I told you about last night, the one you should work with me on? Well I just got the video, let’s eyeball it.”

  “Video?”

  “Whole thing’s on video, I told you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, to the video room Robin.”

  “Have to see Tom first, I’ll meet you in there.”

  I took a deep preparatory breath outside Tom’s then a woman who seemed to recognize me but for whom I could not reciprocate handed me some papers and said sign this before spotting someone else and rushing off in that direction.