A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  I walked through the door and immediately into a knee-high cardboard box. Now I was face-first in more boxes and crawling on them to the chair in the corner from where I looked at their owner and said:

  “What the?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I meant to do that. What is all this?”

  “Moving offices man, eighteen years in those boxes.”

  His walls were bare with light rectangles and squares where frames had hung

  “You been in here that whole time?”

  “Been in here since I was you. Funny, people think it was some kind of symbolic gesture not moving to a better office when I kept getting bounced up but look at this shit, would you want to move it? Not that neatness—”

  No. Tom’s hair, it was as if he had managed to sleep on all sides of his head simultaneously. And the loop of his tie was always partially visible under his unbuttoned collar.

  “Guess it could be worse,” he said. “I could be packing involuntarily to leave for good, you know?” He grinned and put his feet on his desk.

  I looked at the papers in my hand. Their title was PETITION TO DEPOSE T. SWATHMORE and below a little statement of facts was a lot of signatures.

  “What do you got there?” he said.

  “You looking for me?”

  “Yeah, you know, if I ever come in here again, check the computer and see that you arraigned seventeen felonies in an arraignment shift—”

  “Oh c’mon.”

  “You already have the highest caseload in the office.”

  “The cases kept coming in, what am I supposed to do? Brilliant Debi puts Linda in arraignments on her penultimate day.”

  Tom was talking and gesticulating and the rectangle at my feet with the center star of broken glass wanted it known that the trustees of Harvard College on recommendation of the faculty had conferred upon Thomas Swathmore the degree of Bachelor of Arts along with all the rights and privileges that thereunto appertained and I knew the law school felt similarly whereas the petition in my lap weighed down by signatures alleged a pattern of abuse and intimidation except with respect to favorites. I sensed silence and Tom looking at me.

  “Right,” I said.

  “What do you mean right? Right is not responsive.”

  “No I mean, what are you talking about?”

  “This mandatory you picked up.”

  “Right, what about him?”

  “I have to take it from you.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m all over it.”

  “It’s too much too soon.”

  “That’s crazy. I’m going out to the scene today it’s probably not even going to be indicted.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sex assault, they’re known to each other and there’s a delay in reporting. No medical attention either. Like I said, I’m all over it. Don’t worry so much.”

  “Okay but keep Debi and Conley posted on what’s happening. All right?”

  I turned the petition over, face down onto my lap.

  “If you were packing involuntarily, big deal, you know Kevin Miller?”

  “Sure.”

  “He says you’re the best trial attorney in the city. For now anyway.”

  “Oh for now huh? Who the fuck talks to me like this kid?” He was laughing and looking around for invisible support.

  “So it’s true?”

  “No, I doubt it’s true.”

  “Let me quote, something like the closest you can get to perfection in a complicated endeavor, about Rollins I think.”

  “Probably, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You see Fallon on the news last night, all fake-outraged about his client’s innocence, what a clown.”

  “Clown? No he’s damn good, we came in here together.”

  “Get out, I didn’t know that.”

  “Sure, in this very office.”

  “You were tight?”

  “Still are, I’ll tell him your feelings. No, we used to go on each other’s investigations. Ten, eleven at night we’re in neighborhoods you wouldn’t believe. Now this Alabama death penalty project, did I hear you were involved in that too?”

  “This picture, it looks like you’re throwing something, what is this, who’s this?”

  I showed him the picture of the smiling girl whom he identified as his daughter.

  “You yell at her?” I said.

  “Ah, that was dumb, but I told myself when I became head that I would not run an untrained office you know? People here six, nine months already looking at their watches, I don’t know what it is. So I lost it a bit there I guess. Speaking of, how exactly do you have time for a death penalty case?”

  “Please, that’s a group situation, three attorneys. We have a meeting this afternoon where we get the transcripts and all the discovery then each group does an appeal-type deal.”

  “That it?”

  “Pretty much, there’s this Murder Two.”

  “What?”

  “Not mine, just considering working on it with another attorney.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s not on our floor, new guy, lateral from Florida.”

  “Florida? Don’t know him, we get five new guys a day though.”

  “He’s good.”

  “What’s so good about him?”

  “He’s fearless, I hear, I think, what do I know?”

  “Or reckless.”

  “Well I don’t know,” I started to walk out. “If I’m in it I’ll make sure everything gets done and my guess is he can try a case.”

  “Look don’t get the impression that I don’t appreciate it because I do. I got about twenty attorneys going to their union reps and looking to file a grievance because their caseloads are too high. Then I got a handful like you who want to take on anything they can get their hands on and who are doing some truly great work. What I’m saying is you’ve been doing this two years not twenty and I know this will surprise you but you don’t know it all, acquittals notwithstanding. So slow down and be very thorough. That’s more important than being good in the way that you’re good. And who you align yourself with is important too. My feeling on some attorneys is that they can be naturals and great fun in a courtroom but that kind of thing is overrated. How many cases go to trial? Two, three percent at most? What kind of work do you do on those hundreds of cases that don’t go to trial? Isn’t that a better indication of the kind of attorney you are?”

  “What’s with the bike still?” I engaged and disengaged the brake. “It’s like two degrees out there.”

  “I love it. The air wakes you up and gets you going, ready to come in here and fight some more.”

  “All the way from the upper west?”

  “Every morning.”

  “It’s pretty beat up too, maybe a new one.”

  “Oh no, have to love my bike until it can’t reciprocate.”

  I said I had court but was glad I could help, that his concern was appreciated and his advice would be heeded although we knew it wouldn’t be because as long as they kept track of things like caseloads mine would always be the highest. Tom nodded and reiterated some things while I picked at the bike’s rear tire. Then I walked out and down the hall shaping the petition into a ball and calmly sinking an uncontested eight footer into the trash can just outside the video room.

  NOW SHOWING:

  On the screen is surprising quality—like decent public access; the angle is upper right-hand corner looking down. Looking down on the innards of a tiny bodega with two consumer aisles and one of those fridge/counters in front of the cash register located on the bottom right of the screen. There’s no life in there. Behind the counter sits, according to his tee shirt, Superdad, or a fiftyish Hispanic man with a close-cropped gray afro. The once-black shirt has faded to a dark grey that emerges intermittently from behind the yellow and red pentagon logo. The short sleeves barely contain the wearer’s carved arms and shoulders as he rocks back and forth on his wooden s
tool. He is alone and staring emptily.

  Now the chimed door announces work and he slowly uncoils to attention, leaning forward against the counter. To the back they go, one in each aisle followed by purposeful loitering and Superdad’s eyes on them all the while. More loitering. Marvyn Rane and Disangel Cruz are the two and they can’t decide and Superdad is losing patience maybe starting to worry. Now Rane signals to Cruz with his chin and they rhyme towards the counter, the cash register, and the near-future decedent. Cruz has a bag of chips that he drops on the counter. Rane looks out the door then points to the cash register. Repeatedly. Point. Point. From behind the counter, a dismissal in response, signaling to the door with annoyed lips. Except Rane has a gun.

  The gun does not come out and jut forward. The gun comes out and drives Rane backward, straightening his bony right arm with its electric current. It points at a stone face and Rane seems bigger now as Superdad shrinks. Cruz hops up and down like a fighter between rounds and Superdad moves to the cash register without looking away from Rane. It doesn’t open. Rane is a statue—hardening and unforgiving. More hopping. Won’t open. Gun moves closer to the counter with Rane following. Cruz wants out. He pulls at Rane’s left shoulder but the right one stays frozen. Still tapping, now pounding, the register. Refuses to open. Rane waves Cruz off. Open. (The tape should end here or shortly thereafter when the money enters Rane’s hand right?) Now Superdad has the bills so he’s armed too and he extends them to Rane, his mouth silently moving. But the money no longer exists to Rane. Cruz’s mouth moves. Rane’s doesn’t. His fist is full of the trite ending. He squeezes it. A white flash as if from a camera then the beginnings of a flame that’s quickly snuffed.

  Superdad’s neck is black from all the red.

  Hands wrapped tight around his neck to keep the red in. The universal sign for choking. Gargling and Thrashing. On the floor behind the counter, chin down and soaked shirt. Rane looking down, leaning over the counter and pointing again. Cruz part of the audience. Another squeeze and flash. Superdad’s middle looks like his neck. Now he’s on his side and crawling with Rane pointing again. But suddenly out the door they go—Cruz first.

  On the ground Supe crawls to the white then red cordless phone. His wet hand can’t properly grasp it. It falls and he looks at it. The mouth moves but slower. Hands on and chin down but it can’t work. Can’t keep liquid life in when it wants out and the thrashing is a dull imitation of earlier vigor. The rejected money has scattered around him. His breathing is insanely heavy now. A paroxysm of desire. Then less and less. Pianissimo. Wrists down . . . palms up . . . eyes open. No more forevermore. Inexpensive Surreality Television. THE END.

  Dane stared at me as if colorful chips were between us. “Something huh?” he said.

  “Everything’s some thing.”

  “Meaning it’s not often you’re confronted with your client’s irredeemable actions in such unassailable detail is it?” He looked back at the barren screen. “You’re an eyewitnesses in effect. It’s not just represent a guy who did this, which you’d probably say is never a problem, it’s squint your eyes and witness his interior darkness in all its glory. What are your options then? Do you embrace it, reject it, grudgingly accept it, and does it ultimately matter? Regardless, you’re in right?”

  “I’m pretty busy right now like I said last night.”

  “Perhaps there’s a slight failure of comprehension here,” he said. “You saw, did you not, the cash register finally open?”

  “I did.”

  “Saw the money offered to Rane?”

  “Yes.”

  “What you didn’t see, of course, was either genius take that money and leave.”

  “No.”

  “So naturally when I get a case like this what I want, and what I have thus far been denied by those annoying pro forma protestations of innocence, is a look inside the shell of this person. Understand? Unlike most, I don’t deny the attraction. What do you want?”

  “In general?”

  “From Rane.”

  “Nothing from Rane. Besides, he says it’s not him and that could be true. I mean it could be,” almost laughing.

  “This is his mug shot.”

  “Okay, so much for that. So he’ll take a plea.”

  “I suppose, but as I say that’s hardly the most relevant consideration here. Think of what I’m offering you.”

  “Whatever, I guess.”

  “Good, very good. Lunch later?”

  “Why not? If I’m not back by one meet me in front of one-eleven.”

  “Oh yeah, in the interest of full disclosure, Edwin Vega was the name of the bodega guy. I talked to the neighborhood. He was loved. He would give neighborhood kids jobs and he would coach in the peewee basketball league or whatever. He had kids too, ten-year-old girl and eight-year-old boy.”

  “Yeah the shirt.”

  “So you understand?”

  “That he had kids? Yeah I understand. That makes him a father, I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “Then you can come with me when I return to the neighborhood,” he chuckled. “What killed me last time was when this lady says to me I can’t believe this happened to him, he went to church every Sunday. Believe that? In this day and age? Lot of good it did him huh? I mean can’t you just picture it? Every Sunday this poor schlub packs his plump wife and two kids into their early-eighties Buick and off they go to the building with the pretty windows and the empty promises. Inside a guy in a colorful robe tells them everything is going to be all right because what happens here is essentially meaningless. Just bide your time you know? Then in walks this twerp who doesn’t shave yet and what good is all that shit? A little bullet to the neck and what good is it all? These funny distractions you people create for yourselves are powerless in the face of clinical truth. The Ranes of this world are that truth. There will always be Rane Casi.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean have you thought about this guy, every day in his little bodega just trying—”

  “Really don’t want to think about him.”

  “So what do you say to what I’m saying?”

  “I say I have to go to court.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t care about Vega right now.”

  “Have it your way then.”

  “I will. Later.”

  “One o’clock at one-eleven.”

  And just like that, poof, he was gone.

  In the elevator were two attorneys. I recognized one of them from the night before as one of the attorneys who’d come in for the lobster shift. He was a tall, square-jawed, game-show-host-looking guy. There was a Clarke and a Karl; he was one of them but I didn’t know which and he was talking to another attorney, Lee Graham, whose name I knew only because he had recently achieved mild notoriety by fainting in front of a judge.

  “How was the lobster yesterday?” asked Graham.

  “Not bad, we didn’t do many cases at all.”

  “It was slow?”

  “Well it was actually funny. They beat the shit out of some guy in the back real bad so we just sat around while they had all these EMS guys come in and take this poor sap away. Supposedly they shattered this guy’s jaw and everything.”

  “The cops?!”

  “No the other prisoners.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah don’t faint on me now. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “They charge anyone?”

  “Nah, no one would spill who done it.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Round three.”

  “Did you see the guy when they took him out?”

  “Oh yeah. A real mess, both eyes closed, broken teeth, dried blood, the whole deal. Somebody wasn’t happy with this dude.”

  “Wow. Who was it?”

  “Some Oriental.”

  “What?!” I said.

  “What what?” he said.

  “What did you say about Oriental?” I said.

  “Oh I
’m sorry Asian. Fucking political correctne—”

  “No, who was Asian?”

  “The guy who got fucked up haven’t you been listening?”

  “Well what the hell was his name?”

  “How do I know? He didn’t show me any I.D. man. Who is this guy?” to Graham.

  “Nobody said his name?”

  “Choo choo or something. What the hell do I know?” he was full of laughter too.

  “Chut? Ah Chut was that his fucking name?”

  “Sounds right. Why does he owe you money or something?”

  “Listen you worthless piece of shit, was his name Ah Chut or not?”

  “Hey screw you man. No reason to get insulting here.”

  “Fuck” I said under my breath as I walked through the lobby towards the door.

  “Who is that guy anyway Grammy?”

  Worst part was I couldn’t even remember what Chut looked like. Those arraignment faces always bled together like in an amateurish, speedy camera pan. You go home I remembered assuring him in that retarded way people talk to those who fall short of full comprehension of the language being used. I thought about it some and concluded I had messed up. I was supposed to get him home. No one else cared or was supposed to. I was responsible for getting him home without excuses but didn’t so now he was a mess to look at.

  Just then, at that very moment, I became sick of my job and wanted a different one. More specifically I was sick of that kind of shit always happening. Until I quit, I thought, I could make a pledge like the kind comic book superheroes are always making, you know where they like pledge that never again will injustice flourish in their presence and then this pledge brings a clarity and meaning to the superhero’s life that he or she could not have envisioned prior to the pledge. A Pledge. I decided to make one, a pledge, to myself really. And not an insignificant factor in this decision was the fact that the word pledge was really rather funny if you kept saying it repeatedly or in my case thinking it, so I felt a responsibility to somehow animate this word that had given me pleasure at a down time by actually making one. So anyway the pledge was that, in the mystical future, but the one that began like that instant, nothing detrimental or untoward would ever happen to a client of mine. I could make this pledge, I thought, because I would be physically present whenever such a deleterious event would threaten to occur. I would be there when somebody—judge, prosecutor, court officer, janitor—tried to make something bad happen and I would be there to stop it. I would simply stop it is what I would do. How I would do that would obviously depend on the situation. So no more errata I thought. No almosts or maybes. In the future I would always succeed; all regret and guilt would wither and die in the face of a crushing, compulsive efficiency.