A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  “Glad to see you’re doing well,” he said. “I see from this report that you only completed up to the ninth grade in school. Well, if you keep doing well with this program, they’re going to help you get your GED. Is that something you want to do?”

  “yeah, yes.”

  “You bet it is, you know it’s not too late for you son. You can still make something out of your life. I firmly believe that in this country everyone can make what they want of themselves provided they’re willing to work hard enough.” He was warming to his task now, convincing himself and maybe others, looking around while people nodded and Malkum looked downward. “What do you want to be?”

  “ . . .”

  “What are your interests?”

  “ . . .”

  “Answer me young man!”

  “i don’t . . . um,” Malkum was looking for me to maybe feed him a line. I put my hand on his shoulder because that always looked good then whispered in his ear. I explained that everything was going relatively well, fine, but in that courtroom he had a speaking part. He had to talk a little about the error of his ways and the value of appropriate intervention. Malkum looked at me like I’d just grown a second head. Silence filled the room for the first time that day.

  “Judge he wants to go to college,” who said that?

  I don’t know why I said it but the mere sound of something like that gives it at least some truth value, and a foundering-if-free Malkum was somehow worse than an incarcerated one. At any rate, Sizygy was pleased now and the courtroom exhaled. So what if almost always the dumb just got dumber and dumber until they altogether ceased to form images if we were now confronted with the exception?

  So that was settled more or less with the case adjourned two months for another update from the program. In the middle of all that a court officer had announced that we were the last case before lunch precipitating a palpably resentful exodus that left Malkum and me in a near-empty courtroom. And I didn’t want to walk out with him so I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor’s table which, in one of The System’s obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box. I played with the pitcher of water and its satellitic cups then at an officer’s urging took dilatory steps out into the hall where surely Malkum would no longer be.

  “why’d you tell the judge i was going to college?” he asked.

  “I said you wanted to, don’t you?”

  “shit no, i’ll be lucky if i can get my GED, that shit’s hard.”

  “But if I asked you right now if you want to go where rich, eighteen-year-old women congregate to drink heavily what would you say?”

  “course.”

  “Then I’m sticking by my statement that you want to go to college.”

  “yeah but why the judge all up in my grill and shit?”

  “He does that, don’t stress. You have my card, call if you need anything or if there’s a problem with the program.”

  “oh yeah, my moms wanted me to ask if i have a criminal record.”

  “Yes, you do, quite a one.”

  “why?”

  “Why? Man, how many times did we go over that before we took the plea? I told you, you have a record now and it stars a felony.”

  “oh, but what does that mean?”

  “It means you’re a fucking felon. All your future actions are felonious because taken by you. You can’t do certain things. You can’t vote, you can’t hold certain government jobs, can’t say you’re not a felon. Get it now?”

  “but that gets sealed after a while right? if i stay out of trouble?”

  “No it doesn’t, the only thing sealed is your fate. You’re a sixteen-year-old felon, for good. Well your age will I hope change.”

  “oh.”

  “What’s the face? You’re the same person you were before I told you that.”

  “can’t vote?”

  “Vote? What’s so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can’t later complain because you helped put him there. That’s why I never vote, so I can later complain. Besides who were you going to vote for? The guy who ignores you or the one promising to build more jails for you as we speak.”

  “ . . .”

  “And don’t even try using your record as an excuse either.”

  “i’m not i just didn’t know all that.”

  “Well you have to listen when I talk, it’s not all bullshit. We discussed all this to the point of nausea, mine, before you took the plea.”

  “nah i remember.”

  “Anything else?”

  “nah, you know you got my boy T-Dog.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “you’re his attorney, he was picked up wednesday.”

  “Let me guess, Terrens Lake.”

  “yeah that’s him, i toll him you was real good, he’s all happy now.”

  “Good, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

  “that’s a cool suit too.”

  “Okay.”

  “good looking out b.”

  “All right Malkum. Like I said, call if there are any problems. You know you can call even if there aren’t any, if you want to let me know how you’re doing or about anything else. You’re doing well.” That said I kind of tapped his shoulder and walked away making my way through the lobby.

  Truth was I had to get away from that moment and in a hurry. It was that kind of bullshit social worker aspect of the job that had me ready to end it. I guessed that for the first time Malkum could feel the noose tightening around his neck and I was more than just a witness; I felt like the goddamned hangman.

  Which reminded me of often being called on in school to be the Hangman. Which, as I viewed it, was a position completely bereft of any prestige. But Sister Whatever must have been keen on the way I drew the ill-fated stick-figure hangee. Or maybe the words I chose to have the other squirts guess at, every wrong answer bringing the poor stick soul closer to its demise. Until I figured out that the squirts would always call the same letters out first. And so if my word had those letters in sufficient number even they could correctly identify it before I could finish drawing the victim’s final limb. Making everyone happy.

  Just outside the courthouse was a group of food vendors. Hot dogs, Italian sausage, and an actual line. I was on this line when a noisy group of fellow defense attorneys came by. Now I don’t know anybody who is actually happy but I’m forever coming across clustered people roaring at some knee-slapping hilarity I must have just missed. Just to the left of the group was Dane, the only person I knew who appeared capable of laughing from under a seriously furrowed brow and who somehow seemed to be simultaneously with and apart from the group. What I had to do then was kind of slink off the line to avoid letting on that I had forgotten about lunch. He broke off from his fellow revelers and came right at me.

  “I just had the second best idea I’ve had since I made the mistake of becoming an attorney,” he said.

  “On Rane?”

  “No on lunch. Let’s go to Katz’s—easily the best deli in the free world.”

  “Agreed but that’s all the way on Houston.”

  “So what? We’ll jump in a cab.”

  “No way, I have to go back to court after this.”

  “So what do you propose?”

  “Let’s do Little Italy,” I said and we did. Once we decided on the particular restaurant not a word was exchanged on the way there. For one thing it was so apocalyptically cold I wasn’t sure words could survive if released. For another my ear was acting up again putting me in no mood for idle chat.

  What I did instead was make a mental list of the myriad diseases that could be responsible for that damn ear. It had to be Thrombocytopenia, that ticking time bomb I’d been waiting to feel detonate ever since I stole an adolescent glance at that fucking medical chart. My only inheritance. Oh yes, a brilliant piece of diagnostic reasoning I then thought. A blood disease with no possible connection to my ear. No, I would have to go
to the place where they hand out official verdicts on things like ears. Tests would be ordered, the kind you can’t study for or cheat on. Then the grim, white-haired doctor would come in with a false air of professionalism and distracted eyes. Further tests. The passive voice would be used. My options discussed. Doctors stripped to their true function, estimates of time and pain.

  As for any possible non-fatal causes I rejected them out of hand as I steeled myself for what would surely be an anticlimactic denouement. Then what? Then we arrived at the restaurant, a tiny, family-owned deal on Mulberry Street. Mobby cars parked bumper-to-bumper on both sides of Mulberry with disregard for the Italian-flag-colored hydrants. Eager waiters stood outside and tried to talk you into their restaurants with broken English while German tourists walked around with noses in their Fodor’s looking for the place that sells the best cannolis, filled right before their expectant eyeballs.

  Dane insisted we sit at a big table, something about nothing being worse than eating all cramped. Once seated we would need conversation.

  “So what then is the best idea you’ve had since you became an attorney?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you what it was,” laughing. “Never mind, I hate that war story, am-I-not-great bullshit.”

  “But I asked.”

  “True, so I’m trying some dead case down in Florida, a one witness i.d. case but dead. Cabdriver robbed by his passenger. The robber gets out and, get this, slowly walks away. Course the cabdriver follows him in his cab while calling the police on his cell, fucking technology. Well, he loses sight of him for all of twenty seconds before the police nab my guy. He i.d.’s him and eight months later this hump won’t take a plea and I’m stuck trying this piece of shit. Anyway the guy’s got a horrible sheet and’s a real pain in the ass. He’s being railroaded et cetera, the usual deal. You know, I’m working with the DA, you’re familiar.”

  “Move on.”

  “Fine. Now to this day I don’t know what ethnicity my client was but one of the things that made the case so bad was that he was a unique kind of maybe Hispanic, maybe Eastern-European looking guy. Well I’m picking this guy’s jury when I look at one of the prospective juror’s and I swear this chump looks exactly like my client. I’m talking to the point where when I first saw him I thought what the hell is my client doing in the jury box? So I’m questioning this guy and he’s like horrible for us. You know they’re all guilty, I love cops, really horrible answers. But I’m sitting there and I’m thinking that the fact that this guy looks like my client’s fucking doppelganger has got to be useful in some way. I don’t know, I was thinking maybe during summations I’d point out the resemblance to show the jurors how a mistake could have been made, whatever. The gist of it is I put this nut on the jury. Now the DA is like this three-hundred pound woman who is literally salivating as if she just saw a well-marinated pork chop at the prospect of this guy deliberating on my guy’s fate. Also my supervisor’s watching the trial and he’s like apoplectic when I put this guy on the jury. You’re a loose cannon Dane, I’ll have your attorney card! You know like the black police chief in those action movies. Anyway, the trial gets started. The DA puts some cops on and I’m getting buried as expected. Now she puts the complainant on and he’s laying it on thick. The guy’s driving a cab hundred hours a week to support thirteen kids who live in some grass hut overseas and subsist on twigs and my scumbag client’s got to rob him of his night’s take. Pretty emotional stuff. So she gets to the worst part for us. You know she asks him if the guy who did this horrible thing to him is in the courtroom and if so would he mind terribly pointing him out. Of course, I’m barely paying attention at this point because I’m all focused on my upcoming cross. But even I’m noticing that this guy’s not saying anything. So I look up and this guy’s standing up and looking all over the courtroom! Now I’m starting to get hope when he indicates that yes he sees the guy that robbed him. Well the DA takes her first breath in about thirty seconds and asks the guy to go ahead and point out the robber. Sure enough this sonuvabitch stands up, steps down from the witness stand, points to this poor sap, the look-alike juror, and says that’s him, that’s the guy who robbed me!”

  “Get out.”

  “Serious, course mayhem ensues with the DA asking for a brief recess and me objecting saying that the witness’s testimony speaks for itself and she shouldn’t be allowed to talk to him. Finally the judge tells the jury to leave the courtroom while we discuss legal issues. Would you believe this juror stays put. He thinks he’s about to be arrested for the robbery of this goddamn cabdriver! I mean he’s disconsolate and staring at the court officers waiting for them to come and cuff him.”

  “Did they?”

  “Did they?”

  “Kidding.”

  “Well they didn’t, but let me tell you the complainant was intractable. Even after being told that the guy he’d identified was a juror, he remained convinced it was some kind of trick and kept insisting that the juror was the robber.”

  “Good grief. So?”

  “So they make my guy some great offer that gets him out of jail and he takes it. I’m convinced that to this day the cabdriver believes our system of justice is corrupt because we allow the defendant to serve as one of the jurors.”

  “That’s great,” I said and started wondering if I was supposed to come up with a comparable story because just then I couldn’t and I was reasonably certain this deficiency wouldn’t disappear as more time elapsed. “Sounds nutty down there.”

  “Not down there man just the job, how long you been doing this?”

  “A little over two years.”

  “Oh man, you’re just a kid.”

  “Older today.”

  “Really? Congratulations, I suppose, then.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s the number?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Wow. Now how is that possible given that—”

  “My mother lied,” I said and we stopped talking because our food arrived. Dane took two bites, declared the food an unqualified success, then never returned to it. Instead he leaned back as if considering all that had come before and weighing several options.

  “A birthday is an odd thing despite being inherently senseless,” he finally said. “I’m referring to the way it looks you in the eye and demands retrospection whether you’re willing or not.”

  “Well I have a strong will.”

  “It won’t matter. I recently began my thirtieth ellipse around our sun, an anniversary that as you can imagine barks louder than the usual ones. Anyway it was a Sunday and one of those political news shows was on where they pretend to speak on important topics. They were talking about the President and his difficulties during his first year in office and one of the commentators said something like this really hurts him because those close to him say he is a man obsessed with his legacy. I thought about that statement a lot. What do you think about that statement?”

  “I think I have no way of knowing if it’s true or not.”

  “Course not but what do you think of this concept of a legacy? Because it totally intrigued me.”

  “What about it?”

  “Simply everything. The first thing that struck me is that it is perfectly legitimate, and not at all presumptuous, for a President to worry about such a thing. After all, this man has a job whereby, one hundred, two hundred years from now people will still be assessing his performance. Think about that. It seems to me that whatever the assessment is becomes secondary to the fact there is one at all.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning take someone at random as an example. I elect myself. As you might have guessed it wasn’t long before I started wondering what my legacy would be. How will history remember me? I’ll tell you. It won’t remember me at all. At all! As far as history is concerned I may as well not have existed. Now I know that to you that seems just about right.”

  “Well.”

  “But to me this fact is simply astoundin
g. I mean as far as I’m concerned I’m downright enthralling. Now understand what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that when I objectively assess myself I conclude that I’m an enthralling person, although I do. What I am saying is that everything about me is incredibly enthralling to me. For example, I can stand in front of a mirror for forty minutes trying to figure out the best way for me to wear my hair. On the other hand, if you tried to engage me in even a thirty-second discussion regarding your hair, I’d instantly tell you to shut up. So there’s this horrible dilemma whereby I think I’m the most important thing in the world and everyone else thinks I’m practically meaningless. But it’s even worse than that. At least now I exist and am in some sense meaningless. Someday, I hope not too soon, I won’t even exist and then I’ll give new meaning to the term meaningless.”

  “Meaning to meaningless?”

  “Go ahead, make fun, but this applies to you as well you know. We’re all in the same boat.”

  “Maybe so but you think everybody worries about what you just said?”

  “No, at least not in those terms. I understand that the overwhelming majority of people do not articulate this conflict or view it in quite this manner. This despite the fact that what I’ve said is particularly true of them. But while these people don’t put their finger on this feeling they do experience it and it does impact their lives.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look, people need to conform the external reality they face daily with this subjective feeling they likewise experience constantly. To do this they have two options. First, they can achieve what passes for great things. Now the external reality matches their feeling; they really are better than the rest and maybe they’ll even be remembered as such. These are the ambitious people, the overachievers. These are also, however, the people who go on these abominable talk shows where they can trade their psychoses for exposure on that box, modernity’s ultimate achievement. Note that this tact, being ambitious, is not the preferred course of action. The reason is it’s the equivalent of sticking your neck out which we all know is dangerous. Instead many act like they have no ambition whatsoever. Their necks come back in and they’re safe. Only problem is now they’re at everyone else’s level, which we’ve seen is untenable. The remedy of course is that everyone else needs to be sunk. This helps explain racism’s enduring popularity. If I myself don’t appear to be markedly superior to everyone else at least I’m part of the better race, country, religion et cetera. This in turn reflects well on my individual worth. There are other options of course. For example, you can constantly bemoan others’ lack of moral worth by extension elevating yourself. Think of the average person’s reaction to our clients. Do these people strike you as so truly righteous that they are viscerally pained by our clients’ misdeeds or are they similarly flawed people looking for anything to hang their hat on? The latter obviously, they’re vermin.”