A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  “No, sounds great though. Meaning do it, what do you need me for?”

  “Because people like us don’t stem from trees. I see it in you. The air encircling you is suffused with the same longing I animate daily, the same contempt that you orbit the sun and not the other way around, making you the perfect person for me to do this with.”

  “Wrong, because as I’ve iterated repeatedly I don’t believe perfection can be achieved. That pessimism alone should disqualify me. Find someone who agrees with you, seems that would increase your chances of success.”

  “You don’t think yourself capable of perfection? Search inside yourself for me. I’m talking about if you devoted every fiber of your being to its pursuit.”

  “Sorry, no. I don’t see perfection inside myself, potential or actual.”

  “You must hate what you see then.”

  “Not at all but I recognize its limitations. Have to know your limitations. I’m a firm believer in Boyle’s Second Law of Thermodynamics and that’s what I see when, at your request, I look inside. I see increasing entropy, there and everywhere else. I finish a summation and two minutes later five things jump into my head that would have made it better. In this case I’d have plenty of time to engage in that toxic activity while I sat in prison.”

  “First of all, forget Boyle. As you know his law is not one in a strict sense in that it does not demand a particular result but rather identifies a probability, albeit an admittedly overwhelming one. I readily acknowledge that perfection is highly unlikely, that’s what makes its achievement so damn attractive. Moreover he’s referring to closed systems, which the two of us and our plan are not. We would export all the necessary error or disorder out to the rest of the world while achieving perfection within our system. As far as prison goes, you’ve got to be kidding me. Remember, when I failed to achieve perfection it’s not like I missed by a mile and invited a total disaster. I didn’t lose the case for crying out loud! I wasn’t able to achieve what I wanted, true, but I still effectively guaranteed myself success from a conventional standpoint. In a worst case scenario the same thing would happen here.”

  “What if we got caught?”

  “Caught? By who?”

  “I suppose by those whose job it is to catch criminals who steal money, which is what we would be.”

  “Are you kidding? We know these people. They couldn’t catch a cold if they slept in a meat freezer wearing wet sponge pajamas. You’re not listening. When you fail to achieve perfection you don’t create disaster you achieve, at worst, flawed success. If you’re right and we just miss out on perfection we’re still walking out of there with thirty-five million dollars. Even you don’t think we would fail so miserably as to be apprehended by law enforcement in a situation where it’s highly unlikely they will ever even become involved, do you?”

  “They’re already involved.”

  “But they don’t know the truth. Believe me, the attempt at perfection is what makes this a no-lose situation. When I failed last time, all I could do was sit on my sofa in my underwear and space out. This time even failure would bring a nice consolation prize in the form of forty million dollars. Sure beats a year’s supply of fucking Turtle Wax.”

  “I can’t figure out if you’re serious or not.”

  “I am one hundred percent serious. You know what I did with that perfect case. Why would you think I’m joking? Just like then, the chance of error can be made infinitesimal. You would essentially be saying no to fifty million dollars for no good reason other than inertia.”

  “That and the fact that it’s wrong to steal ill-gotten drug money.”

  “What difference does it make where the money came from? If the State seizes it you think they’ll have a problem using it to pay for government nonsense?”

  “Yeah, they’ll use it to pay for schools, we’ll be shopping for Porsches.”

  “Not at all. They’ll use it to throw a parade for people who swing sticks at balls for a living, while you’ll use it to help people dear to you, whom you love and owe, and who look to you for protection. You’ll use the money as you see fit. You can say you’ll use it to rectify some of the horrible inequities of our society. You can pick hundreds of people at random, people this society ignores and shuns, and use the money to help them lift themselves out of the morass that binds them. Those people can, in turn, later do the same and as a result you can end up helping literally thousands of people with money that would otherwise be used to pick up confetti. You can help rebalance the scales. Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

  “The act itself would still be wrong.”

  “Would it? What vestigial notions of morality are you clinging to? In this dystopian cauldron? I worry about you Casi. You need to wake up. Your naiveté will get you slaughtered otherwise. You’re in a war zone and hesitant to jaywalk. You’re the driver at the Indianapolis 500 worried about getting a speeding ticket.”

  “What shape would we be in if everyone took that approach and acted accordingly?”

  “A Kantian objection? Are you kidding? Where would we be? You’re seeing it! This is what would happen. How much worse can it get? What were you just watching on Television?”

  “Whatever. Maybe you have a point, what do I know, but that doesn’t change the extremity of what you’re proposing.”

  “It’s only extreme because you’re comfortable in your numbness, but that very numbness will undo you if you don’t heed me. Let me ask you this. Imagine for a moment your sister was kidnapped while in Colombia visiting relatives. Not inconceivable by the way considering you have family there that she has visited and kidnappings are about as common there as assaults are here.”

  “I’m very tired.”

  “Just a minute, what would you do?”

  “Die.”

  “You would kill yourself?”

  “I wouldn’t have to. I think I would just wither and die when I heard the news.”

  “Then what would you do?”

  “I’d go get her.”

  “What do you mean? How would you possibly do that?”

  “I would do research. I would find out as much as I could about what happened. Then I would buy a ticket and fly to Colombia where I would do more research and I would go get her.”

  “You know who does kidnappings right?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t care I would still go get her. I would get a group of people together. Pay them.”

  “Would you kill someone if you had to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you pay a ransom if you had to?

  “Yes, but I’d rather kill them.”

  “Now, what if you were falsely arrested for a serious crime you didn’t commit and it went to trial? If the opportunity arose to pay off a juror, to ensure you avoid a conviction that would send you to jail for a minimum of ten years, would you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if the juror couldn’t be bought but could be intimidated. Would you do it?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. If it was a man, and he didn’t have kids or anything and he wasn’t going to be permanently harmed. I guess.”

  “What if all that failed, you were convicted and sent away for ten years? Would you participate in a plan to break out?

  “Fuck yeah, the cage hasn’t been built can hold me.”

  “Pretty extreme behavior you’re copping to don’t you think?”

  “I’m really tired.”

  “Why would you do those things?”

  “Those would be questions of survival. I’m not going to jail for ten years for something I didn’t do. I’m not letting some scumbags take Alana. I’m not going out looking for these situations but I’m also not the type to just sit back without a pulse and accept having hell imposed on me. My life would be at stake.”

  “Exactly. Well your life is at stake right now whether you concede it or not.”

  “I’m doing fine, thank you.”

  “You have no money. How is that fine?
”

  “I’m twenty-four!”

  “You’re dying. It should serve as not the slightest consolation that your disease is currently in a temporary remission if it has not yet been cured.”

  “What disease is that?”

  “Poverty is the medical term, also known as Slavery.”

  “Slavery now?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Because in this life, you either have money or else money has you, and we both know which category you fall into. I mean look at you, you are not vigorous and free, you’re diseased and captive. You’re a slave. A slave to gold, it calls and you come running, and if your master commands you to rise, your knees straighten reflexively,” he stood with a mock military rigidity that managed to exude subservience. He stared at me and I looked away. Then I absently tapped the spacebar on my keyboard as he walked towards me.

  “It’s not even that exalted actually since there’s nothing golden about it,” he continued. “No, you take orders from green paper, think about that sometime.” He sat back down only now he tried to look sad. “And this is your reaction to that state of affairs? What are you going to do, wait until you truly and desperately need your master, for example when you need to hire the group that’s going to get your sister? What if it’s too late then and it gives you the back of its hand? Do you think these opportunities at liberation come along every day?”

  My belt vibrated. I was being paged. “23” it said, meaning there was a note from the jury, probably a verdict.

  “I have to split Dane, that’s the part.”

  “If luck had anything to do with anything I would wish you the good variety.”

  “Thanks, I think, see you later.”

  “I have to go too, here’s my number.”

  “Yup,” I said going out the door as he handed me the number I would later use after waking from seventeen hours of the deepest of sleeps. Walking to court then I was happy. It would soon be over.

  Once there it all happened so fast. It was like a Marx brothers routine. In a foreign language. What I needed in retrospect was a standing eight count to get my bearings.

  It all started with the jury’s note asking for read-back of all testimony regarding commercial lettering on the van. This was quickly followed by the DA’s sheepish admission that he had discovered, over the break during a conversation with Bolo, that the van in question did not have any commercial lettering. I reminded Arronaugh that McSlappahan had relied extensively during his summation on the fact that the van had such lettering. The obvious remedy given the centrality this question had assumed was to inform the jury that no testimony need be read back since it had come to our attention that the van did not in fact have any commercial lettering. The jury would then be free to decide what weight to give this fact. Arronaugh did what stupid people do when they can’t understand. She got mad. The jury would not be so informed. The truth would be damned. Instead she ordered the false testimony read back to the jury. The testimony where Bolo said the van had our lettering. Fucking court reporter! My mistrial motion was denied. The hell was going on? The jury took all of two minutes after the read-back to return and say words I had never, in that context, heard before. They were thanked and dispatched. A now Guilty Hurtado turned to me with complete incomprehension.

  “You came in second,” I said.

  He had gone to trial with me because I was Hispanic he said. He knew that was a sign from God.

  There’s a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending. Once the verdict sank in, I began tossing out applications like a desperate quarterback in a two-minute drill. And as they were denied one by one I began to lose that lawyerly artifice and sounded more and more like the pissed off intense motherfucker I was:

  THE IDIOT: I don’t know why you feel you have to keep repeating the same arguments.

  ME: You should be grateful I keep giving you the opportunity to correct your ridiculous rulings.

  THE IDIOT: Well what you are saying at this point is going in one ear and out the other.

  ME: I don’t doubt it. What would prevent it?

  Two statements I would later especially regret when contempt proceedings got rolling in earnest.

  I don’t even know why I went back to the office. It was late and there didn’t seem to be anybody there. I had two voicemail messages: a disappearance and a reappearance. ADA Dacter wanted me to know that DeLeon had disappeared so he would be requesting a bench warrant from the judge on Monday. DeLeon was not returning calls, had missed the last two meetings and when police went to his house today his family said they hadn’t seen him in three days. As if in his stead, Raul Soldera was back. He was involuntarily returned on a warrant according to the clerk for Cymbeline’s part and I should go there on Monday for predictable further proceedings.

  As I was leaving, Liszt saw me and called out. I went into his office.

  “What happened Casi?”

  “We went down.”

  “Damn, sorry. Listen it was an impossible case, you did what you could.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hey look at it this way. You finally lost. Everyone has to lose eventually. You no longer have that burden. You’re just like the rest of us now. Win some, lose some.”

  “Wrong. I don’t win some, lose some. I win them all and lost one, and the one I lost is because some criminally stupid judge couldn’t get her head out of her ass long enough to do her job right. Fuck!” Then I did a stupid thing. I punched a hole in Liszt’s wall. I needed sleep. I got the hell out of there.

  They were gaining on me. The chimp-toting Uncle Sam was picking up speed. I would have to do something. I was almost off the bridge when I turned to face them. That’s when Uncle Sam came up to me and said:

  “I want you man! That’s right. I know you don’t look like Ward Cleaver but your Uncle wants you!”

  While he was saying this, I noticed the chimp was slowly swinging his left paw in an exaggerated bolo punch. I was listening to my Uncle who seemed to want a response but I had both eyes firmly planted on his hairy pal. Suddenly the chimp jumped up until our eyes almost met and took a swipe at me with his right chimp fist.

  I leaned my head back just in time and he missed, the hair on his paw barely scraping the tip of my chin.

  chapter 11

  Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.

  —James Russell Lowell

  “I need to forget all this. I need to feel a sense of accomplishment, of forward momentum. Need to feel that a discrete, meaningful segment is behind me. That this person who squeezes into the subway in the morning and waits for orders isn’t the real me. I’m in a hurry to feel this too,” and I was in this hurry sitting on the bare floor of my room, the side of my bed completing the makeshift chair.

  “Uh-huh,” the phone said.

  “So . . .” I didn’t want to impel things, just wanted them to happen.

  “So let’s do what I’ve proposed.”

  “Yes. Let us. Yes”

  “Excellent. I love witnessing, even just auditorily, moments like these.”

  I was alone there, in a spot near an echoing corner. “Moments like what?” I emitted and the waves bounded off selfsame corner and joined on their regress the still-faintly-existing Yes to envelop me in multilayered sound.

  “A moment like this, when you make this kind of decision, when you decide you will not simply accept what the world is trying to force down your throat, that you will instead forcibly take that which is rightfully yours no matter the means. This moment.”

  “Oh,” I said and began to hang up but then there was that thing where you hear the phone’s voice just before you bury it into its holder:

  . . . minds me the voice said so I stilled my hand and bent my head down to the receiver.

  “I say it reminds me.”

  “Heard yo
u, bye.”

  “Reminds me of the moment man ceased merely gazing skyward with sidereal awe and in its stead resolved to one day inherit those stars.”

  part two

  Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses.

  —George Santayana

  chapter 12

  Power is the first good.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  “You look different.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean no? You can’t just verbally negate a perception of mine. I’m looking at your fat face and I say it looks different.”

  “No. I look the same.”

  “Are you looking at a mirror right now and I’m somehow missing it? Because you should be watching the road the way you’re swerving.”

  “I don’t have to look at a mirror. I know I look the same because I refuse to look different. I refuse to accept change in any of its myriad forms and incarnations.”

  “What about what I see when I look at you?”

  “It’s wrong, a misperception.”

  “You look like you’re suffering from a lack of sleep.”

  “See what I mean? I slept seventeen hours straight last night.”

  “Exactly as I intuited. You overslept in the truest sense of the word. You overdosed on eye movement that’s rapid. What’d you dream?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Fine, don’t tell me. You old people are all the same.”