A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  “Forget that,” said Louie. “Look here’s a true classic from the middle ages! See that? First the problem has to be established. This poor dumb sap is wearing a shirt that has not been appropriately laundered and is therefore soiled in a visible area. Here comes the penalty. See how he’s being rightfully ostracized by those who would otherwise be dear friends? Now the problem has to be given a name, but not just any name, a name catchy enough to stick in the head of the human wallet that’s watching. There it is: Ring Around the Collar. You have to love it. It doesn’t get any more lyrical than that. Now comes the rescue. Back then, the rescuer was always another person but even so the rescue always came in the form of the true hero, the product. See? She’s telling his wife about Wisk. Now they show the product at work as a celestial voice, in this case the great Bob McFadden, takes over the narration. Finally, we get the closing shot of heaven. You see? Collars don’t come any cleaner than that. Look at the expression of joy on the wearer and the unconditional acceptance from his peers. Then a final shot of Wisk. Forty-five seconds tops. Beautiful seconds. That, my friends, is true art.”

  “What did you mean when you said it was an ad from the middle ages?”

  “Beautiful right Casi? Art right?”

  “Yeah beautiful, what did you mean?”

  “Huh?”

  “Middle ages?”

  “Yeah, that was an ad in the seventies.”

  “How’s that middle ages?”

  “Oh right. I should explain.”

  “No, not again. I’m actively begging,” said a seemingly pained Alyona.

  “I know you’ve heard it before but he hasn’t. He also deserves exposure to my wisdom does he not? It’s simple Casi. Television advertising can be broken down into three separate stages. The early years, which consisted of really straightforward stuff like Jack Paar saying he uses Right Guard or whatever and it’s good for such and such reasons, spans from the invention of Television to maybe the mid-sixties. Note that in this era it was still considered important to at least pay lip service to logic by, for example, listing positive features the product allegedly had. The middle ages, from which we just saw probably the classic example, takes us from there to the eighties and mostly features adherents to these mini-narratives. What we have now, of course, is nothing short of a golden age where man has achieved near-transcendental technique and skill that bypasses altogether the need to supply information. It may even seem, as some have argued, that there’s no more development to be had. But most are confident that a few pioneers will emerge to develop the field even further. I of course plan to be one of them.”

  “You plan to be one of the people who’s confident that pioneers will emerge?”

  “No, wiseguy, I plan to be one of the pioneers.”

  TELEVISION: . . . call 1-800-PLASTIC for a free consultation.

  “Hey I know her,” I said. “I went out to dinner with her about a week ago.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “She better be, she’s selling good looks,” said Angus.

  “Good point,” said Louie.

  “That’s a lot of noses,” said Angus

  “Sure is,” said Louie.

  “Some of these before-noses don’t look so bad. In fact, a lot of them seem perfectly fine,” said Angus.

  “Beautiful,” said Louie.

  “I don’t know that I would go so far as to say they’re beautiful but they do look fine.”

  “No, the noses aren’t beautiful. The advertising technique is beautiful. This is what I mean about how far we’ve come. Here is a commercial which is clearly a low-rent piece of crap not even worthy of being on this channel. Nonetheless, even this pedestrian effort obeys established advertising stratagems that would have seemed amazingly nuanced as little as ten years ago. Of course the before-noses look fine. If they didn’t, if they were obviously flawed, you the viewer might be able to distance yourself from the patients. Instead, the idea is that you, the viewer, will look at your nose differently after seeing this ad. In other words, you thought your nose was fine, never gave it a second thought, until you saw this ad and saw all these noses that look similar to yours, maybe even better, being labeled before-noses in need of repair. The advertising doesn’t address a need, it creates it. It is self-sustaining.”

  Zzzzt!

  “What the—”

  “You must have fallen in love with her, she’s gorgeous.”

  “No.”

  “She’s not?”

  “I didn’t fall in love with her. Didn’t even fall in like.”

  “You going to see her again?” asked Louie.

  “No. You’re free to call her, want her number?”

  “Funny.”

  “She’s famous now too,” added Angus.

  “Yes, among the literally hundreds of ADTV viewers.”

  “It’s something. Though nowhere near the level of fame I will soon achieve.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I say nowhere near the level of fame.”

  “I heard you,” I said.

  “I will soon achieve.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you want to know—

  “No.”

  —how?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “What, because of Kramden?”

  “No, in my chosen field of psychology.”

  “Fine, how?”

  “Should we tell him Louie?”

  “Sure go ahead, it’s Casi.”

  “Phobophobia.”

  “Phobiwhat?

  “Phobophobia, the fear of becoming phobic.”

  “No such thing right?”

  “That’s right not yet. That’s where I come in.”

  “You’re going to discover, diagnose, and categorize it?”

  “No, I’m not going to discover it. That involves far too many variables. I’m going to create or invent it. With Louie’s help of course. Louie here will hypnotize the subjects.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting good from studying Dullen.”

  “Anyway once hypnotized, the subjects, in their highly suggestible states, will be taught to fear, beyond all rationality, the prospect that they will become phobic. This will not be very difficult to do by the way because it turns out that there are about a million phobias. Take Triskadekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen or Sciophobia, the fear of shadows. Maybe our subject is pentheraphobic and irrationally fears his mother-in-law, or is hobophobic and therefore fears bums or beggars. Maybe he suffers from Ostraconophobia, the fear of shellfish. Or maybe he suffers from Enissophobia, the fear of having committed an unpardonable sin. You get the point right? By the time I finish cataloguing and detailing all the possible phobias to my subjects, they will fear that phobias are lurking around every corner ready to invade their system. I will foster this feeling, and augment their fear, to the extent that they will become phobic about this fear. They will be phobiphobic. Get it? Don’t you just love the irony?”

  “Love,” said Louie.

  “What’s the name for the fear of being drawn into bizarre and ultimately irrelevant conversations?” I wondered.

  “So they’ll be afraid of everything?” said Alyona.

  “No, not at all. They won’t be afraid of anything specific like snakes or the dark, instead the only thing they’ll fear is fear itself! Nothing specific will scare them but they’ll nonetheless be deathly afraid that something specific will irrationally scare them in the future. The sheer number of phobias out there will serve to convince the subjects that they will assuredly succumb to one of them in the near future. But they won’t, instead they’ll just create their own phobia. With my help of course.”

  “Where does the fame come in? Because I cannot name a single person who once classified even legitimate phobias.”

  “That’s the easy part. I’ll use the best results anecdotally, meet the bare requirements of my field, which are a joke, and turn the whole thing into a study for publication in the
prestigious Journal of Psychology. The study will become an emblem for our anxious times. The media, led by high-school-level newsweeklies, will jump all over the study and mindlessly trumpet my conclusion in lieu of analysis. The national gaze will finally be on me. Just like that. Fame. Finally.”

  “When are you going to do this?”

  “As soon as we get suitable subjects. We had one but he died.”

  “What?”

  “No, not because of anything we did. He died of hair cancer.”

  “What?”

  “Hair.”

  “Hair what?”

  “Hair cancer.”

  “The hell are you talking about? No such thing.”

  “And yet it killed him. Tragically.”

  “What killed him? And don’t say hair cancer because no such thing exists.”

  “Louie?”

  “Cancer of the hair dude, I got it firsthand.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Tell that to his mortician, man. Meanwhile the guy’s dead of hair cancer is all I know.”

  “How do you die from hair cancer exactly?”

  “I don’t know. They wanted to do a follectomy but he wouldn’t agree so he died.”

  Zzzzzt!

  “What the fuck is that noise? That’s like the third time I’ve heard it.”

  “Don’t ask, you don’t want to know,” said Alyona.

  “Don’t want to know what?”

  “You hate them man. Trust me, just let it go.”

  “Now I have to know, seems like it’s coming from behind the sofa.”

  “Okay man, take a look but just remember I warned you.”

  Behind the sofa was a plastic, transparent box. Inside the box a dark raccoon or something was trailed by an extensive tail. At one end of the box were two levers ending in round buttons, one green and one red. A tube extending from above and into the box contained blue pellets that I assumed constituted food. Even from where I was, and I was in no hurry to get any closer, I could see that the floor appeared to be electrified. A memory clicked in and these various elements started to fall into place.

  “Is that a—”

  “Rat,” said Angus.

  Zzzzt! The rat jumped I think hitting the top of the box with his head.

  “I thought so, what the hell are you guys doing?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Angus. “It’s sort of an experiment.”

  “I mean what are you doing?”

  “The idea behind the device.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What, it’s just a rat.”

  “Those shocks look vicious.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re responsible for them, you’re creating suffering. Alyona, you on board with this?”

  “What are you worried about?” said Angus. “You hate rats, it’s a fucking rat.”

  “You’re right I do hate them. That’s the biggest rat I’ve ever seen too.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “And it’s black.”

  “Practically, yeah.”

  “Where the hell did you get it?”

  “Fucker broke in,” Louie said. “We had to trap the bastard.”

  “In here?”

  “Yup.”

  “Where?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “What the fuck Alyona? Talk to your uncle, we can’t have this. Let’s get a fucking panther in here or something, my goddamn skin’s crawling.”

  Zzzzt!

  “Look man I hate rats fully, it’s true, but can’t you get that fucking box to stop shocking it like that?”

  “It’s all in the name of science dude. Besides aren’t you the same person who ripped that whole animal rights bullshit when we saw that clip of a celeb in fur being splashed with paint?”

  “You did rip it,” added Louie.

  “I believe your exact words were that if a chimp had to be tortured in order for mankind to figure out a way to make your gloves one degree warmer then let the torture begin.”

  “I said that?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember it generally but you sure I said chimp?”

  “Yup.”

  “And not monkey or some other animal?”

  “Chimp,” they said together.

  “Whatever, I wasn’t going to witness the chimp torture. Why are you shocking it?”

  “Angus?”

  “Well this is the last stage of the experiment, during which the rat is receiving random electrical shocks of random intensities. You see, initially the rat was in control of its environment. By pressing the green lever it could supply itself with food pellets. If it pressed the red lever it was shocked. Once the rat learned this setup, we switched the levers so that red became food and green the shocks. As I said, now the shocks are random and so is the food. We are essentially teaching the rat the inescapable truth that life is beyond his control. Reward and recrimination are distributed randomly and completely independent of his conduct. Do you know what the result should be on the rat?”

  “Learned helplessness or depression I would guess.”

  “Wrong, the rat will become depressed and engage in extreme inaction otherwise known as learned helplessness. Alyona and Louie will I’m sure attest that we can already see this happening with our rat friend here. A similar experiment was done with dogs and it worked.”

  “What do you mean it worked? Presumably the experiment, which I remember vaguely, was conducted in order to discover or learn something not to create something. The experimenters were curious to see what differences would emerge between the dogs that could terminate their shocks, those that couldn’t, and those that were never shocked. The key difference is the comparison component. This here is not an experiment, you know that Angus. There’s no control group here. You’re not trying to learn anything. You’re basically just torturing a rat. Like I said before, you’re needlessly creating suffering and that seems, no is wrong.”

  Zzzzt! The rat twitched violently and I saw maybe a little blood coming from its nose.

  “Creating suffering?” said Louie. “Talk about your proverbial drop in the bucket.”

  “Seriously,” said Angus without eyeshift. “Who’s the bastard in charge of our glass box? What about Siamese twins?”

  “Conjoined,” said Alyona.

  “That’s right Siamese fucking twins,” Angus continued. “You thought I forgot about them didn’t you? You’ve seen them right Casi? You come into the world all happy only to find that you’re permanently attached to your sibling. That must be real fun for the parents right? And probably one of them has to die for them to be separated. That’s good huh?”

  “Television has shown me babies born with two heads,” said Louie. “Two damn heads! What’s up with that? Somebody up there is taking a perverse pleasure in this shit.”

  “Much like Lucy Ricardo often did, God has some ’splaining to do Alyona,” said Angus. “What would he say? And don’t tell me about free will. I’m talking about babies born hideously disfigured solely for the purpose of experiencing extreme suffering prior to being extinguished for good. And don’t forget their parents, devoured from within by psychic Ichneumonidae as a result and don’t even get me started on that. Realize that this is clearly outside the scope of free will, since there is nothing any human being has conceivably done to cause the situation. This is a huge distinction so don’t forget it; I’m not asking how God could allow some dude to walk into McDonald’s and spray the place with bullets, since I’m sure you’ll say God has to give that dude autonomy for morality and even life to have any meaning. Fine. Bullshit but fine. What about the kid born with two heads though? Explain why God so loved the world he gave it twins of the Siamese variety that an infernal boiling agony should suffer unto their parents the length and breadth of their interminable days.”

  “Fine, I’ll play devil’s advocate if that’s the role you want to cast me in,” said Alyona. “God mig
ht say that suffering is a necessary component of life, at least the kind of life that’s desirable. Suffering tests people in ways nothing else can. By passing these tests people evolve and develop, they become better people. The alternative, a world free of suffering, is heaven and nobody ever said this was heaven. But there is a heaven don’t forget that. Maybe you think this right here is hell. Fine. But what if I told you that to get to heaven you need to pass through hell, that such a layover is the only way you can arrive at that glorious place? Would you still want to go? Would you endure the price? Would it be worth it?”

  “I wonder, Alyona, what you would say about a father who mercilessly tortured his children day after day then when confronted by law enforcement put forth the defense that he was torturing the kids for their own good so that years later when they had moved away, and were free of his torturing ways, they would better be able to appreciate the beauty that is life as a non-torturee. I think you would undoubtedly label such a person a lunatic and call for a severe jail sentence. Are we similarly at the whim of a lunatic?”

  “I didn’t say, Angus, that our current hell is the only way to later appreciate heaven. I posited that it was the only way to access heaven.”

  “The distinction eludes me. Besides, maybe I don’t want heaven regardless of the price. Maybe I have Ouranophobia and am consequently scared shitless by the very mention of heaven.”

  “You can argue and joke all you want but the one thing you can’t do is deny that all of this nonsense fed to Casi, Traci, and the like might be true almost despite itself. You must acknowledge, if you’re being honest, that these concepts may offer an entirely accurate and true depiction of the world you live in. There may be a God who presides over literally everything. There may be a heaven of love and a hell of hate. Centuries of human attempts at using reason to resolve these questions have, without fail, been for naught. True, all philosophical attempts to prove that God exists, like the famous Cartesian attempt to prove that God’s existence is evident from the fact we even have such a notion, have failed miserably. But, conversely, where has someone disproved the existence of God? Where have legitimate attempts even been made? Isn’t that troubling? Where is the slightest proof, after those same centuries, that there is no God? And don’t say Nietzsche because I’m talking about proof here, valid premises leading to a logical conclusion.”