A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  Not so with DeLeon and when it was over I watched him exhale a half hour’s breath then, after drinking in a little of the power those moments created, I said goodbye and split. Now DeLeon and I were about to reunite in the pens behind Part F and I knew I had to steel myself to hear all about the horror of his false arrest. An arrest, he would doubtless claim, borne from a desire on the part of law enforcement, as a general entity, to avenge its earlier ignominy.

  The way Part F worked was this. The part was a pit stop for wayward felonies. With some exceptions, felonies that had been arraigned in criminal court but not yet presented to a grand jury and indicted were placed on the Part F calendar. Consequently the part had a little suspense to it since essentially everybody—judge, defendant, defense counsel, curious onlooker—was there to hear whether the defendant had been indicted; his case morphing from a mere felony complaint housed in criminal court to an indictment voted by a grand jury and requiring that the case be transferred to Supreme Court. And because of New York Criminal Procedure Law 180.80, which required that a defendant charged with a felony be released without bail should “one hundred forty-four hours” elapse following his arrest without an indictment, this suspense was decidedly greater where the client was incarcerated and in the part waiting to hear his fate. Because if you made your living committing felony crime, being indicted on your 180.80 date (the date this period expired) was the norm and carried the extra sting of keeping you in jail on the last possible day you could be held on a felony complaint. Like everyone else, ADAs loved the last minute, so the 180.80 date was generally not only the day they announced the defendant had been indicted but also the day they did the actual indicting.

  Of course the defense attorney’s mission was to prevent this whole indictment business. This he attempted to do primarily through begging, begging the DA not to present the case and offer his guy a misdemeanor plea or better yet to reduce it to a misdemeanor outright. In addition to these cases, indictments were also avoided, at least temporarily, where the DA couldn’t get his act together in time, the complainant was uncooperative for example, and the defendant was released and given a court date to return. These latter cases leaned heavily towards eventual dismissal after six months and intermittent trips to the part.

  All of this was highly relevant because those cases that were indicted and subsequently transferred to Supreme Court were truly bad news for the indictee. The overwhelming majority of those cases ended in convictions. First, very few cases actually went to trial (one percent?) and even fewer were dismissed, for whatever reason, in Supreme Court. The result was that almost every case upstairs ended through plea bargaining: the DA or the judge offered the defendant a particular sentence in exchange for a plea of guilty and the defendant, leery of a higher number after trial, accepted the offer and pled guilty. So forget whatever revolving-door bullshit you’ve been fed up and until this upcoming lucid and edifying moment and remember this: almost every single serious, read indicted, case ended in this manner—with a plea of guilty, a conviction. And of the few cases that actually went to trial, well over fifty percent of those also ended in at least some level of conviction. So even armed with just elementary reasoning you can see that when a DA stood before a judge in F and announced that the person to your left had been indicted, she was not often signaling the beginning of a battle, she was more likely cueing you to cut your (pl.) losses.

  And all that hung over that courtroom: would you go upstairs with all that entailed or out the door to freedom?

  What I hated about the part was the waiting central to the whole process. When you walked in the first place you headed was the table supporting the approximately ten page calendar listing the hundred and twenty or so cases being heard that day. The cases were listed in ascending order based on their docket numbers. The docket number itself represented what number arrest the case was for that year in that respective borough, with 2000NY100000 meaning the hundred thousandth customer in New York County in the year 2000 and so on. Once you found your case on the list you had to ascertain what number that case was on the calendar. The case’s calendar number was listed on the far left. Now you needed to know whether your client had been produced, that is whether he had ridden the blue bus touting New York’s Boldest from Rikers Island to 100 Centre Street and the pens behind the courtroom. The quick way to do this was to check the list the court officers posted identifying by number those cases where the defendant had been produced. Your next stop was a visit to the DA clerks who had their own table set up in the well. In case you were not already aware of it they would tell you if the DA assigned to the case was making any offers, those coveted misdemeanor dispositions I mentioned earlier that prevented the case from ever being presented to a grand jury. If you served cross grand jury notice at arraignments, indicating your client wished to testify before the grand jury, they would ask if he still intended to testify so they could let the DA know and make the necessary arrangements. Apart from all that, what you really needed to know was whether they had word on the case. Their response took one of three forms. They might tell you the case had been indicted in which case you could have the case called and pick a date, usually exactly two weeks later, in Supreme Court for arraignment on the new indictment. Or they might tell you there would be no grand jury action which allowed you to go into the pens and tell your guy the good news that he was going home with a new court date that he would in all likelihood assiduously avoid. That case was as good as over. Finally, there was the dreaded no word yet. What that meant was that the DA intended to indict the case but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. The dread came from the fact that the case would not be called until either the 180.80 time was up or until the DA informed the clerk in the part of the case’s status. This fact plus the number of cases that had to be indicted every day made for a lot of waiting in F.

  So I waited a lot that day. And in between waiting some things occasionally happened. Robert Coomer, the chess-playing, sexually confused, unaided-human-flight-attempting bon vivant received the coveted, and expected by him, no grand jury action and was accordingly released on his own recognizance. Terrens Lakes’s big concern was whether or not he was getting credit towards his future sentence for the time he was currently spending in jail. He was, and his indictment meant he would be shipped upstairs to work out the particulars.

  Like Coomer, Darril Thorton exuded confidence when I first spoke to him in the pens. He was confident Valerie Grissom would not be coming to court and that he would consequently be released. And after I extracted a torturous admission from him that Grissom might appear to testify in the grand jury, as the DA was indicating she would, he reiterated his desire to testify before said grand jury, my feelings on which you’ll perhaps recall. Reeling, I asked him if it was not logical to deduce that if the expelled angel was powerful enough to compel Ms. Grissom to appear before the grand jury and spin a complete fabrication then he would similarly use that same power to ensure that the members of the grand jury would vote to indict him. Otherwise where was the sense right? He goes through the trouble of getting Grissom to lie in the grand jury, an admitted evil of the sort he was required to engender, yet he would then allow the grand jury to see through the lie and fail to indict an innocent man, a greater, more perfect evil? He stared at me all happy that I had finally discerned what the case was truly about then, conceding the power of my sally, indicated that if Grissom appeared to testify before the grand jury, as she later did, he would speedily read the wall’s handwriting and exercise his right to remain silent with respect to that process. He was indicted.

  Across the hall in Part N, which functioned like F but handled only certain drug cases, the Deeble case continued its slow desolate descent. For some clients, principally those in love with drugs but well past the idealization stage, six days in jail, with attendant meals and a presumed lack of drugs, actually seemed to benefit them. The new client often look cleansed with fresher mind and cushier carriage. Deeble bucked that trend
disadmirably. She was the color of urine. Green urine. The whites of her eyes were improperly called as they matched the color of her skin. And they were still. Even when her body would animate the eyes would lay dead. She seemed to inhale a disproportionate amount of the available oxygen as she spoke and I felt a corresponding urgency to accomplish.

  I wanted to put her in the grand jury. Not so much for what she would say as for what the grand jurors would see. No way was what she said to that thought and the DA echoed this sentiment when I repeatedly tried to get a misdemeanor offer. No was everywhere, slamming my inquiries of Deeble regarding whether or not she could make bail and crippling my appeals to the judge to reduce that bail. There was nobody in the audience for her. Nobody I should call. Nobody needed to know what was happening with her case. And when, after five o’clock, the DA announced she had been indicted it happened with such a dawnish quietude that the whole thing felt like a jealously shared secret between Glenda and me.

  But before I leave a false impression, those things and my reunion with DeLeon happened between long fits of nothing during which I did much of my day’s requirement of biologically-mandated daydreaming, the random thoughts inexplicably triggered to appear only to disappear as quickly as they came.

  One of those was Wilfred Benitez. Only it was weird because when I thought about Benitez that day I didn’t think of the Benitez who outpointed Cervantes at seventeen to become world champion or even any of the later Benitezes. Instead what I thought about, or more accurately what I imagined, was Benitez at like two or three years old in his Bronx apartment. I wondered if the seeds of physical genius began to sprout that early. Because what I kept imagining was his dad breathlessly calling Wilfred’s mother into the room. Look! Watch! ¡Mira! He would say. When I go to poke him in the nose he moves his head away or knocks my hand away before I can do it! Yes I see, pero be careful he’s just a baby. No I don’t think you understand. No matter how fast I try to do it he always moves his head in time. Uh-huh, so? Don’t you get it? His reflexes are incredible. Can’t you see? Well how do you know that not every kid does that? Are you crazy? Look. Again. See what I mean? It’s like he has radar or something.

  Of course that’s exactly what it was like for the man who later came to be called “El Radar.” But I wondered, was the radar always waiting to be used and ultimately mastered or was it constructed in a harsh gym where even the walls sweat? Did fellow playground toddlers learn the hard way not to make attempts on Wilfred’s toys? And what happened when they tried to hit him back? Did he slip their punches the way he would later, at age twenty-three, slip Roberto Duran’s right hand at a New York City press conference announcing their fight? Or did he block them like he would millions others, slightly raising his shoulder to deflect their brunt all the while keeping absurdly serene eye contact?

  I could, so did, mentally construct moments like that all day. Non gym moments where someone might have spotted something. Might have seen something that they, even though non-expert, instantly recognized as out of the ordinary. Special. Then they would transfer that spark they had viewed to its owner, the child Wilfred. They would look at him and maybe see more than just one of countless Bronx Boricuas.

  I’m sorry Mrs. Benitez but this is a nursery school. The kids here are three, four years old. We simply must take steps to ensure that incidents like these do not continue to occur. No, you’re right. He’s not the only one who fights, but with the others the results aren’t nearly as devastating. Well yes. I suppose it is our job to break these things up before they get too bad but how shall I put this? When Wilfred’s involved it all seems to happen so fast. Quite fast in fact. Almost like lightning I would say. Beautiful lightning actually. What I mean is that, well you’ve seen lightning Mrs. Benitez I won’t elaborate. And so on.

  And when Wilfred’s parents put the apartment’s only fan—the kind that used to make a big deal about its ability to oscillate—in their room, I bet Wilfred and his sibs would go out on the fire escape where the air would at least occasionally move, even if only by accident. I bet this because I remembered fire escapes. And people walking on the streets below or looking on from other escapes might have made a quick mental note of the fact that little Wilfred was out there. Most likely one or more of these people would feel compelled to comment that really it was negligence of the highest order to allow such a wee child out on the fire escape, and if the complainant was a non-Puerto Rican then that would quickly be identified as the root cause of such criminal negligence; and really something should be done but not involving the police who we can all agree should mind their own business when it comes to Hispanic child-rearing lunacy.

  But surely nothing approaching that much mind would’ve been paid to Wilfred Benitez. Unless of course we’re talking about a previous witness to his spark. Such a person’s eyes might gravitate foreverafter to Wilfred as he entered a room or did a fake escape from a fire or swung a broomstick at a tennis ball or whatever preschool physical geniuses do. And maybe one day that person would approach Mrs. Benitez and say that her son was not average. That there was something about him. And maybe just this once, futuristic money would not be mentioned. And with the mounting years the amount of people who would do this, who would talk about her son Wilfred in this way, would increase greatly so that by the time an eleven-year-old Wilfred was a gym regular she could expertly parry their well-intentioned words and emotions, taking care to absorb only what pleased her.

  And so like the more thought I gave to Mrs. Benitez, the more convinced I became that the oscillating fan in her room was not her idea at all but was like more or less forced on her by Mr. Benitez. He would say things like he works hard and the kids have their entire fan-buying future in front of them and she would grudgingly go along but when it got unbearably hot, truly so, she would exert her will and on those nights she would spread a sheet on the sofa and other smaller sheets on the floor of the living room so that every Benitez might share the one fan as it oscillated throughout the night, fro and to each appreciative member.

  And it was Good that this woman would later nod and swell as they talked about her son.

  But then after a while the voices I imagined weren’t about Benitez at all. They were about me. And the voices spoke to my mother. Never seen anything like it before they would say. Miles ahead of where so and so, yes him, was at this stage. And the people saying this weren’t chumps like you and me, they were the foremost experts in their respective fields and they exhibited genuine urgency too. Now the greatest beauty of it all was that my Talent, whatever it was, was so immensely profound that it wouldn’t require any of that annoying Hollywood-montage-best-song-on-the-soundtrack-type training/nurturing that is invariably led by a recovering alcoholic, formerly great, last-chance-at-redemption guru. Instead it, the Talent I mean, would simply squire me around. It would define me with its purpose and occlude the remaining universe of choice so that if someone asked me why I did what I did I could truthfully answer that I had no choice. Ah dreams.

  From maybe six on there was a piano in the house, brown and small (the piano). A minuet written by Mozart when he was three. The fingers move in a manner that’s technically correct yet somehow not fully right and if you want to come closer to the proper sounds and silences you need Alana to play it.

  As a young boy Einstein was taken to see a military parade. He saw the soldiers in strict formation, started crying inconsolably, and had to be taken home.

  When he was twelve, this would be like 1635, Blaise Pascal used a lump of coal to figure out Euclid’s proofs on his playroom floor. In addition to huge contributions to physics, nascent calculus, and the theory of probability, Pascal invented the first calculating machine. In his Pensées, he argued that we should wager that God exists since we have less to lose that way.

  Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner were tight. More than that really, in Dick’s music Freddy—who once said that without music life would be a mistake—saw a majestic synthesis of all art. I
n his essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth he urged the German people to treat the coming Wagner festival as they would a sacrament.