A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  “A little strong no?”

  “I for one choose the first option, I need to elevate myself above all others. As for you, you’re one of the people who does view the dilemma in explicit terms and does worry about his legacy so the distinction is irrelevant as far as you’re concerned.”

  “This you know how? We essentially met yesterday.”

  “Please. I don’t see things? Hear things? You’re trying to outrace the same demons I am and every day running out of more time. Only the unimaginative fear death when it’s oblivion that cuts deepest. Next time you burrow into the subway picture the aerial view. Ants.”

  “Fine. For the sake of argument, let’s say your analysis was achingly accurate. Then what?”

  “Simple. You have to get yourself one of those legacies the guy was talking about. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. I’ve heard. Tons of trials, never lost a single one. I was the same way. But then you realize it’s not working. Outside of our little insular community, the impact’s simply not there.”

  “You take what you can get, most have far less.”

  “Yes, at first. But that’s the thing about more, you can always have it and you always want it. More in this case is more recognition for more time.”

  Dane stopped now. He was pleased with himself and staring at me.

  “You can’t be boiling this down to fame,” I said. “Do the famous strike you as happier than the rest because I don’t see it.”

  “Happiness? Who’s talking about happiness? For people like us I’m talking about trying to avoid abject misery.”

  “Speak for you Dane.”

  “I’m talking about the misery of suffering by comparison. For us, the whole thing takes place at a higher level. We’re not concerned with the average person so put that to the side. But don’t I have to explain, at least to myself, this disparity between the President who has a legacy and I who don’t? Don’t you?”

  “He’s accomplished more than I have.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never tried politics. I have no interest in it. He must have a special talent in this limited area. Remember Dane, this isn’t Alexander the Great conquering most of the known world or Napoleon cutting a swath through Europe for Chrissakes. This is a guy kissing untold quantities of ass to put himself in a position where a woefully underinformed electorate can deem him slightly less offensive than the other guy trying out for the job. Besides all that, he’s also been around quite a bit longer than me.”

  “No, no good. As for that last consolation, cling to it as long as you can because it will soon be gone. Moreover, it seems to me you have to admit that he and his kind are simply better than you are. Not better at one specific thing but just plain better. Are you prepared to do that?”

  “ . . .”

  “Your silence speaks volumes. This is a man who is arguably the most powerful man in the world and you’re not willing to admit he’s more talented than you. I won’t even mention lesser lights. What if I say it for you? These people are better than you! How does it make you feel when you hear those words? You want to say you’re in a different field? Well I can name twenty attorneys who are considered better than you, whether accurately or not. Just think about that. How does that make you feel? If those people were looking at you right now, they’d be thinking how much better than you they are. You have other interests you say? You’re not really a lawyer? Want to try something different? What are your interests? You like science? Are you Kepler, Newton, Galileo? Are you the one who realized that massive objects warp space-time? Philosophy? There’s a lot left to do, that’s true, but honestly the best you can hope for is to balance on the shoulders of Rene, David, Immanuel, and the like. And with both these fields you can only really even hope for that if you devote your whole life to its pursuit and it’s already too late for you to do that. Music? Are you Ludwig van? Johannes Sebastian? Are you Wolfgang composing operas in his preteens? Are you at least Bruce Lee giving a demonstration of his newly-minted Jeet Kune Doo at a 1964 martial arts tournament in Long Beach? If you were any of those people or their equivalent don’t you think you would know it by now? Are you Fyodor—”

  “I get the point.”

  “So you admit it then?”

  “No, fuck them.”

  “Good because this torments me and the time has come to do something about it.”

  “Let me know how that works out for you.”

  “What are you doing tonight? Maybe we could—”

  “I’m crossing the river to family.”

  “Family? Really? Your liar mother?”

  “Among others.”

  “Family,” he repeated as if I’d told him I had a werewolf butler. “I do have a fat cousin six or seven times removed in Austin with a disinterested wife and kids who are always barking at him. By the way, the fact that people continue to have kids in overwhelming numbers, despite the clear disadvantages, fits in nicely with my legacy theory vis-à-vis attempts to avoid death and/or oblivion.”

  “Are you incapable of light conversation? It’s fucking Friday.”

  “You’re right, what’s the deal with your officemate?”

  There was no way Dane was talking about Leon.

  “He’s a good guy,” I said. “His rather lengthy story is as follows—”

  “Not him, the other one, Julia Ellis. She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

  “You feel you’ve seen enough women to make that determination?”

  “Sure. Look I watch the MusicTeleVision et cetera. Those are the world’s most beautiful women, digitally and surgically engineered to make me want to buy something. Now I look at Julia Ellis and I see that she’s as beautiful if not more beautiful than any of those women and I know she’s not putting as much effort into it as they are so I conclude she must be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Follow?”

  “I’m not prepared to say you’re right but you may not be as wrong as you usually are.”

  “Does she have anything else going for her?”

  “Besides her astonishing appearance?”

  “Yes.”

  “She appears to have several other positive attributes.”

  “Really? That’s odd.”

  “How?”

  “Well I find extreme beauty fascinating.”

  “Is that so? How unique.”

  “No I mean beyond simply being attracted to it like everyone else. One of the things that seem true to me is that God doesn’t often give the extremely beautiful much else. Nor does he, for that matter, give the hyper-intelligent or super-athletic much else either. Think about that. You never hear that the gorgeous supermodel is also diligently searching Theoretical Physics for its Grand Unified Theory. And when they cut to that guy from MIT to explain the inexplicable doesn’t he always look like something a hairless cat coughed up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Leave the knowing to me.”

  Now I guess I can be incredibly unobservant at times. So it wasn’t until then, when there was a lull in the conversation and we were waiting for the check that I first realized what a bizarre portrait Dane’s was. He seemed almost inhuman, not really subhuman or superhuman though; more like metahuman. His build was paradigmatically average like the cardboard cutout in your doctor’s office. On it lay a skeletal face that seemed to disappear the longer you looked at it. From his skull straight ink-black hair and overseeing a sharp nose insane green-light eyes.

  When we were done we started to walk back. I was going back to court, this time 100 Centre Street. Dane was going home with another aborted invitation rebuffed. We separated. On the way I ran into Sam Gold, Tom’s cherubic underboss.

  About Sam Gold I had recently learned exactly two interesting facts that I was still trying to properly contextualize and reconcile, videlicet: 1.) in over a quarter of a century at the office he had taken zero days off and 2.) his father had been the Manhattan District Attorney. Gold never
handled an actual case or anything like that but his conciliatory skills were legendary and much in demand where I worked. He was glad he ran into me and could I do him a favor when I went back to court. Inside I said no with extreme prejudice but externally I agreed.

  After Gold left I saw Dane again. He didn’t explain or anything but instead just resumed as if there had been no interruption:

  “Saw this movie late last night when I got home,” he said. “It was atrocious of course and for a million different reasons I won’t go into but one thing even the movies can’t ruin is a good caper.”

  “Yes.”

  “A precise heist.”

  “Right.”

  “An impossible rescue.”

  “Correct.”

  “A desperate prison break.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Are we of like mind Casi?”

  “On this yes.”

  “On everything, you’ll see.”

  “Except they invariably screw it up because even when they depict a successful one it always involves at least one unexpected complication that must be overcome. The reason this is misguided is that the beauty of the caper and the other things you mention, what gives them their allure, is the notion that they can and will be pulled off seamlessly, with algebraic precision and exactly as planned.”

  “Interesting, constituting a triumph of what?” asked Dane.

  “Intelligence, what else?”

  “No, of will. Intelligence how?”

  “If the right person plans it properly it will work, you can plan it into success.”

  “But then you need the will Casi. The will to execute it the one chance you get. This is where the adrenaline comes from and this is the universal attraction. This is why people love crime, the singularity of will involved. And don’t tell me people don’t love crime to the point of near obsession. Just look at the newspapers, the visual news, and all other forms of popular entertainment, crime is their favorite process. The only question left is whether crime is inherently a perversion, meaning error is necessarily built into it, or whether some degree of perfection can be achieved in that area.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the commission of a truly perfect crime.”

  “Oh.”

  “Possible?”

  “Guess anything’s possible Dane.”

  “And everything.”

  “So get cracking on it, could be your legacy.”

  chapter 4

  My, people come and go so quickly here!

  —Dorothy in Oz

  So now imagine you are Raul Soldera meaning that although you are dying, as promised, you are not doing it fast enough so that wherever you turn people are upset by this and even you yourself end up not really knowing what to root for since every upturn in physical health leads to greater legal peril and so you spend time internally debating things like whether ’tis better to be strong and caged or infirm but free.

  And one of the literally handful of things you own is a weathered trumpet you use to play Salsa, your native Puerto Rico’s creation, at various nightclubs with various others but never without the assistance of one or more attractively controlled substances. And though you are a legitimate musician you are not an immensely talented one meaning your constant use of these substances achieves neither mystique nor cliché but rather is a lot like that proverby thing whereby first you take drugs then the drugs take drugs then the drugs take you but all this happening in like three days really not the years probably envisioned. So now stare at your owner, a seemingly innocuous amount of white powder that you convert to injectable fluid. A demanding owner that wants inside you at all times, that you serve meekly in everything you do whether it’s blowing into that trumpet or selling Him to other chattel just so you can be near Him. Until you sell to the wrong kind and one of the things the judge says when you take the inevitable plea is that if you commit another felony within the next ten years then you must be sentenced to State Prison and you say you understand and there will not be a next time. Which semi-vow you mean because you genuinely fear State Prison so imagine further that you in fact draw this demarcation into your life whereby in the ensuing eight years you continue to run afoul, as they say, of the law but only of misdemeanor incarnations of such. Meaning you will still sit behind a restaurant’s dumpster near used condoms and inject your foot with your owner then shake your companion’s chin to determine whether he continues among the living and in the absence of a final determination slowly peel his fingers from his needle to see if you might not be able to squeeze a few more drops for yourself but you will never again give to strangers for money, it being famously better to receive than to give in this context.

  Now you are forty and essentially homeless and one night you spot a forgotten purse outside the nightclub you just played. Only the thing about the purse is not much in it save for the credit card with the woman’s name in raised letters that you stick in your wallet to maybe feel a little important then forget about until its discovery months later by the latest A/O on your latest failed buy who raises it to your face and makes a what-have-we-here type declaration while smiling, the fuck. The next day your improbably smooth-faced lawyer tells you you’re charged with Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Fourth Degree and that this is an E felony with a minimum sentence of one and a half to three years in state prison but that he will likely get you out in five days, which he does. Then later he tells you the DA must be an idiot because you’re indicted but he will delay things as much as possible, which he also does. Until the day when further delay becomes impossible as the case is scheduled for trial and they want to start it like that instant. And you don’t want to take 1½ to 3 but you also don’t want to go to trial and get more.

  And you’re sick. You’re sick and your T-cell count is in like the teens and your mouth bleeds at inappropriate times and you didn’t know you were positive, although it wasn’t exactly a shock either, until those six days when your lawyer said something about medical attention then a doctor saw you and took blood and checked a lot of boxes for high-risk behavior then later told you it was bad, the blood. Now you are perceptibly wasting away with what look like white Rorschach inkblots on your face and have no stomach for a risky trial or prison sentence and instead just want the case to somehow disappear. Which it sort of does because after talking to the judge your lawyer tells you that because you are so sick you are being offered a special deal by the judge whereby you plead guilty and are promised the minimum sentence but your sentencing is deferred indefinitely while you provide intermittent updates on your medical condition until such time as . . . and then his voice kind of trails off as the two of you silently contemplate the obvious eventual ending of the litigation.

  But these still become something like good times. For one, without the Damoclean sword of a potential trial and consequent state bid hanging over your head you actually start to feel better. You feel better and you play better and you stop with the junk and your sister lets you live with her as long as you continue to stop with the junk. You even start to semi consistently play Jimmy’s of all places and even though drinks are free for the band you drink club sodas with lime all night. You tell your lawyer he should come and watch one night. Then things really get better when you get switched doctors and you get Dr. Weintraub who puts you on a cocktail, which you think is a funny name considering everything, and your T-cells go up like a lot and his letters to the court don’t seem so dire and Judge Hilton, like the hotel, still smiles when she sees you every couple months and everything just seems so much quieter now.

  But imagine that one day Judge Hilton is not there and she won’t be back and instead it is Judge Cymbeline who will now preside as they say. The medical reports don’t look so dire she says with slit-wrist serenity and adds that she disagrees with Judge Hilton. That she wouldn’t have given you such a big break. This Dr. Weintraub sounds almost optimistic she says. Why can’t you go to prison now that you’re feeli
ng better? After all hasn’t it been eight months since you took the plea and yet there’s your heart still pumping, your compromised blood still flowing. That was not the deal. Your improving health requires that you be incarcerated and she’s ready to do so. Imagine all that.

  I did and remembered that after we dodged that bullet on the previous court date I had informed Soldera and his counselor, with uncertain terms decidedly not present, that he should get sicker if he wished to avoid going to prison. Preferably, I strongly suggested, he would be in the hospital, his home away from home and the only place that offered true amnesty, the next time he was supposed to be in court. So I fully expected to be greeted by a duly-appointed representative who would give me the good news of Raul’s hospitalization along with a little supporting documentation. But instead there was Raul himself, in the audience and smiling.

  He stood and came to me. Raul was all eyes; they dominated his face as if his body had been reduced to its barest essential, seeing obstacles and getting out of their way.