A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  “She thanked me already.”

  “Okay,” Marcela said, aware I was lying. She came into the living room and opened her mouth but nothing came out and it slowly closed. Then three little empty bubbles appeared above her head leading to a giant bubble within which Marcela resolved to change the subject.

  “Casi, did you ever call that doctor?”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yeah, did you call her?”

  “Her? Who?”

  “The doctor whose number I gave you. She’s single,” she sang this last word with the suggestion of manufactured intrigue. “She’s Bill’s cousin’s best friend, you’re supposed to call her for a date.”

  “That word’s still used?”

  “Of course, when are you going to call her?”

  “How hideous.”

  “Why?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a great matchmaker and I want to make this match.”

  “You know her?”

  “No.”

  “So how are your matchmaking skills implicated?”

  “I saw her picture.”

  “She has a picture?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “You have the picture?”

  “No but I saw it and you can take my word for it.”

  “You were impressed.”

  “And she’s a doctor what more do you want?”

  “You ask her out then.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “You mentioned, what does that mean?”

  “It means what everybody thinks it means.”

  “Well I don’t care for everybody or their beliefs.”

  “Casi, I went through the trouble of getting her number. Besides she knows I got the number and the reason I got it”

  “How does she know that?”

  “She’ll be expecting your call, her feelings.”

  “I’ll call.”

  “Yay! You never know maybe it’ll work out.”

  “Work out?”

  “The two of you might become a couple.”

  “Please, I’m calling, don’t make it worse.”

  “Don’t you want what everyone else wants? People are meant to be paired off you know, maybe that’s your problem.”

  “We better go before your mother has a heart attack.”

  “Oh my mother now?”

  So out the door and into the car to our grand mother’s house we went. In the car no one said anything. No one said that everything in every direction looked uniform, that the ubiquitous minivans were all a species of gray with the sliding door on the same side, that the harried twenty-year-olds in playgrounds with kid rope-gangs dutifully trailing behind all wore the same plastic expression. No one marveled that the birthday party for little Wendy Pennylipper was always at The Discovery Zone and always ended promptly at 4:00 and no one wondered about the absence of felonious Supermen or wiffleball games contested in subfreezing Citibank temperatures. Instead we just existed quietly until I looked in the rearview and saw that the two squirts were already moving toward REM before Marcela looked at me with question-mark eyes:

  “It’s going to be okay, I really believe that,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The not talking.”

  “I know.”

  “You think so too.”

  “Well I meant that I knew what you were talking about.”

  “So you’re worried.”

  “No.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “It’s not normal.”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Talking.”

  “Listen no kids her age talk.”

  “They all talk.”

  “No, not all of them. I bet some clam up.”

  “Sure, the few who can’t talk. She can and doesn’t. Who does that?”

  “Certain monks for one and there are others.”

  “So I shouldn’t?”

  “Worry?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. It’s just Mary. Little Silent Mary.”

  “You’re probably right,” she shut her eyes and breathed out audibly. “I hope Alana comes, think she will?”

  “Haven’t heard from her.”

  “Me either. But she’ll come, I bet, because of you. As for Mary I have faith in God.”

  In my head only I said I like you Marcela, I mean I love you but I also like you, I like you because you say things like faith in God and when I hear something like that it’s almost like I’m looking for subtitles, I like you because you wear an apron while you ask your kid if he finished his homework and I’m not built for that but I admire the hell out of it, best of all your eyes smile when your mouth does and have you ever noticed you passed that ultra-charming trait on to Mary? When I was a little twerp I got lost at one of those antiseptic malls that place specialized in. The truth is I didn’t get lost as much as I just decided to walk away from everyone I knew. The people I walked into kept getting bigger. They wore hairnets and nametags and kept crouching down to look me in the eye. All the lines you’re only peripherally aware of came into focus and sharpened dangerously. I was afraid they would cut me because that’s what sharp lines do. I wasn’t crying but I was upset and I was walking faster and faster, circling, trying desperately to return to my point of origin. Resigned misery I felt. I was staring at the floor and decided I was going to dive in and try to quantum tunnel right through to the under side. But when I bent my stubby legs in anticipation I found I could fly. I rose above everyone, the earthbound, and started spinning. Then Marcela put me down and smothered me with love. The nametagged interlopers receded and the globe again curved and softened. So I thought that whether her eyes smiled or not I would like her a lot. I reminded her of that incident.

  “You were always doing that, in fact, oh my God,” her hand went to her mouth. “I think we’re coming up on that overpass from Television. Did you hear about it? You didn’t? A kid fell off an overpass and was killed by an Intel truck. His friend was on the news and said that the kid was hanging from the side trying to remove some graffiti he had spray painted on there a couple years ago. Dom loves Sue or something was what he had written. They showed the overpass and I instantly recognized it from all the times I’ve driven by here. I even felt guilty because you know that momentary excitement you feel when a place you see all the time makes it on TV? Anyway I guess this girl Sue had broken up with him. The kid’s mother was on and said he hadn’t left his room in twelve days. Can you imagine? What do you do?”

  “Count apparently.”

  “It’s so sad. Timmy hasn’t stopped talking about it. He keeps asking me if Sue is responsible and if so is she going to be punished. Look there it is!”

  Sue 4ever !!

  “They’re going to sue the city because they never removed the graffiti,” Marcela added and all was again quiet as we neared our destination.

  To turn onto Gluonn Street required significant vehicular precision for on each side of the impossibly skinny street were identical corrugated open caverns, the result of a misguided and subsequently abandoned construction project that the town evidenced no inclination to remedy. The car remained silent as I steered it with surgical care between the twin depths and though I eyeballed them and judged that each contained only an expectant six feet, I still felt that even the slightest slip of the wheel would send us hurtling endlessly downward, past the earthen crust to splash into a pool of boiling magma. “Careful,” Marcela said lowly.

  Half a block later I began to make out cars clustered like metal shavings near the magnet that was my mother’s house. The house was the smallest on the block, probably in town, but it came armed with the loudest bark causing nearby houses and their inhabitants to recoil when it pulsated like it did now, illuminating the surrounding sky with the sounds of fortune. What sounded then was a family gathering loosely centered on my temporal cris
is. The cars told this story: A blue Ford Escort that seemed to sputter even when off, registered owner Tio Chino also owner/co-creator of three of my cousins their names being Joann, Cybill, and Andres and their aforementioned father being married to Tia Margarita and he being the youngest child of the two old-timers ultimately responsible for this mess and whom in a long-ago uninspired fit of invention someone, a small someone doubtless, had monikered Buela and Buelo; and Buelo’s green ’51 Chevy in the driveway since he lives in the house with my mother who came to this country essentially on a dare from his wife’s lips to the effect that you marry that man at the age of sixteen and well you can image the rest and her doing Buela one better and marrying that man—of whom nothing more will be said throughout but only out of deepest love and similar emotions even though the clarity of the image faded daily, like a photograph left under the sun—in a country where they were currently dropping like flies off highway overpasses and all this to the chagrin of the real head of the family and oldest sister Tia Miranda who decided to try and undo the geographically done and so boarded the next plane here to talk some sense to the newly wed, but little sister had decent powers of persuasion herself and before long Miranda was having apple pie and rooting for the home team at the ole ball game and subsequently birthing two more cousins with since-discarded male in the cigar-dispensing role and naming them Lorena and Vanessa and all this from an apartment located not more than ten feet from her sister’s. Well there followed a genuine exodus of Colombian tourists who overstayed their INS welcome, the first being older-but-not-oldest sister Nia who married only long enough to expel sole daughter and cousin Melinda who later joins forces with redheaded Patrick, his black Lexus now parked facing the wrong way, to create not-yet-one-year-old Jaren whose grandmother was followed by youngest daughter and final aunt Ariana who at least waited until she was eighteen years and one minute old to take to the skies and now drove a red sports car with SEXY license plates and was unencumbered by reproductions. So all five gone from a now empty house and Buela spends the next twenty-odd years convincing Buelo to join them until finally they do, so that on weekends they, and others like newly-arrived cousin Armando and his 70’s Volkswagen van costumed like a giant hot dog, make my mother’s house jump with salsa and merengue for your ears, chicharrón and arepas for your belly, and aguardiente for your soul.

  Such was the case that night as the house’s music crossed the street to where I pulled up behind the oversized frank, my front bumper coming to rest directly beneath the part where the little extra beef peeks out from inside the bun. Timmy woke up and immediately started singing:

  One two three . . . three two one

  Join with me and we’ll have fun

  Join with me

  We’ll have fun

  As th’Earth flies

  ’Round the sun

  Now I know my Alpha Beta C’s

  Next time I want some money

  Mary watched and listened but said nothing. Then she stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth like Charlie Brown, ran towards me and jumped into my arms. We walked into the house to find my mother frying. My mother didn’t cook, she fried. If you weren’t vigilant she’d fry your goddamn Lucky Charms in the morning.

  What she fried on this night were empanadas and these are an unqualified good. If you disbelieve me then get your hands on this:

  To serve as filling:

  2 tablespoons olive oil (cheap kind)

  1 cup peeled potatoes diced into 1/4-inch dice

  (Must get tiny yellow Colombian ones unless you can’t in which case abandon the entire project)

  2 cups sirloin steak similarly diced

  1/2 cup finely chopped white onions

  2 teaspoons ground cumin

  1 cup ripe tomatoes seeded and diced

  To create the dough that will surround the above:

  1/2 teaspoon salt (Diamond Crystal or the lass with the inexplicable umbrella)

  1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 teaspoon roasted garlic

  2 cups cornmeal (finely ground)

  1/2 tablespoon chopped parsley

  21/4 cups hot chicken stock

  To prepare:

  1 large egg you’ll beat lightly

  More vegetable oil than you’ve ever eyed at once for frying.

  And do this:

  Boil the potatoes in a small saucepan with cold salted water until just tender, maybe 5 minutes, then drain. Concurrently, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium-high heat in a large nonreactive skillet. Add the sirloin and cook until browned. Add the scallions and cook for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and cook for 1 minute. Add the potatoes and cumin and cook for 3 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and let cool.

  As to the dough, grab a large bowl and throw the dough ingredients in it. Mix them all until the dough is sticky but malleable. Refrigerate for 10 minutes to let the dough set. Cover your work surface with plastic wrap and slap the dough onto it. Cover with another sheet of plastic wrap and roll the dough flat with a rolling pin, using short strokes, until about 1/8 inch thick. Without removing the plastic wrap, and using a cup about 4 inches in diameter, cut out rounds of the dough.

  Peel off the top layer of plastic wrap then remove excess dough between the circles and reserve. Using a pastry brush, brush the edges of each round with the beaten egg. Place a teaspoon of the filling on the lower half of each disk. Working on one empanada at a time, use the plastic wrap to fold the dough over to create a half-moon shape. Pressing through the plastic wrap, use the edge of the cup to seal the empanada. Remove from the plastic wrap and place on a baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining empanadas, rerolling the scraps of dough until none remains. Heat many inches of oil in a heavy medium-size pot or in a deep fryer to about 365 degrees (to test use a bit of leftover dough, which should quickly puff and turn gold on contact). Fry four empanadas at a time until golden. Remove and drain on a wire rack. Repeat again and again then serve hot.

  Do that and you’ll have what we were having. Now please, make sure not to make the dough too thick or you’ll ruin the whole enterprise. Also resist the temptation to substitute healthier alternatives to either the ingredients or the frying process. Do it right. And eat them right too meaning get yourself some lime (never lemon) or maybe a little bottle of Tabasco sauce. Now bite off the corner and add your condiment into the newly formed opening. Repeat this process until you can’t.

  On my mother’s orange kitchen counter lay several dozen of the above. Bottles too and other assorted distractions. Now my mother was hugging both of Marcela’s kids simultaneously, calling Mary Maria and Timothy some concatenation of phonemes I can’t possibly hope to replicate.

  Then she was coming at me. Tiny and round and looking no older than Marcela she squeezed my head and—¡Ay mi amor, twenty-four jeers ago! You’re still my little boy. Here eat. I made it especial for you.

  Half an empanada sticking out of my face, I walked out of the kitchen and into near-hysterical humanity. The room was so loud that at first I looked for the fight that had erupted, but no, just the usual mayhem from everyone I mentioned before and more. The heavily-made-up women all wore indecent-exposure-short skirts and heels in the smack of winter and looked like they should be elegantly twirling their hands in the vicinity of A New Car. These were mostly my aunts. There was music. Loud enough to interfere with conversation but really discouraging no one and by simply changing the position of your head you could go from one multilogue to the next. A bottle of aguardiente the size of an equine thigh lay on the center table with a small bowl of limes.

  Everyone was grabbing at me all hugs and smiles—an independent observer would think I had just been released from a POW camp—confirming my age and handing me colorful boxes. Always with a card containing a handwritten message of devotional love. Alana was not there.

  There were new people and they were introduced in painfully informal manner. Included was the latest boyfriend for Lorena whose name she repeated
incessantly, surely motivated by fear that someone would mistakenly call this sap by a previous, now-defunct name. His name was undoubtedly Barry and he looked about as comfortable as a fourteen-year-old awaiting the result of a home pregnancy test. To my family he was a new toy with freckles that could be dragged from corner to corner and told bizarre stories in irreparably broken English and if things got too hairy and the words escaped, then in español and etiquette and viable communication be damned. When he wasn’t being spoken to directly he still served as backdrop.

  So there was constant yapping. Lots directed at me but precious little coming from my mouth:

  “Mommy, right some people don’t have a place to live?”

  —I almost died during the delivery Dios mío. The next day they asked me if I had the name yet. I said casi because we were getting close to deciding. I kept waiting for them to ask me again but that’s the name they put down.

  —¡No drink it fast like this! Forget the salt. All you need is la lima (never lemon) for right after.

  Television was showing a computer simulation of aggrieved Dom’s final flight. In it he holds on to the can of spray paint all the way down and when he lands he shatters like a hollow porcelain doll. Sponsored by Dell.

  —¡Nia says forget those antibiotics! Eso es un escam from the pharmacy companies. Just mix some shark cartilage with ginseng and drink it in three increasingly larger swallows.

  “Where’s Alana?”

  “Right that some people live on the street mommy?”

  Candles in front of a grainy portrait of the Virgin Mary. The blue and white liquefying into each other. And what’s with the Davincian smile in this version?

  —Pray to St. Anthony and you’ll find it right away.

  —I don’t know. They said it was a census or somesing. I lied.

  “Don’t you fear that we—the cousins—have been screwed up by all this confounded Catholic education with its sisters and fathers, even brothers . . . ghosts and hosts . . . virgins . . . trinities . . . chalices . . . wounds? I mean-they basically paid money they didn’t have so our brains could be washed in lies. Didn’t they?”

  —Fulana de tal says that the police wait outside in the nightclub’s parking lot. When you get in your car they immediately arrest you and take your car. ¿Can they do that?