A Naked Singularity: A Novel

by Sergio De La Pava

  His response was a crookedly pointy forefinger coming up glacially then out towards my shoulder. He was trying to grab me this old-timer and only then did I realize that he wore a bare chest drained of all blood and protected by only sporadic patches of salty hair. Then he was opening and closing his mouth desperately like a grounded aquatic. His mouth quickened and quickened but all he could manage to emit was this horrible wheezing and all I could do was stand pillar-of-salt still until his hand landed on my shoulder. He squeezed my shoulder the way you might a roller-coaster harness and I found myself looking around, somehow fearful that I could be accused of wrongdoing. But he wasn’t holding himself up, he was pulling me toward him. His other hand now rising, he was trying to hug me it seemed and I saw to my surprise that I was willing to be hugged. But then I thought better of it and kind of pulled away. It was then that the I’d-decided-centenarian showed an alacrity I had not previously thought possible. For after studying my eyes intently one last time, he wheeled away from me, jumped the four steps down to the sidewalk and ran away kicking his heels up. All this not slowly either. What the?

  Inside I made my way up the stairs with minimal noise to see from the slanted rectangle of light on the hall floor that Alyona’s door was open. The trick here was to get past that open door without being seen but to do so in a manner where if I was seen I could seamlessly enter the apartment as if I’d intended to do so all along. Also my face would have to portray that imaginary intent until and unless I was sure I had not been spied. So I probably looked a bit like a crab moving sideways into the doorway, where I saw Traci and walked right in to hear Alyona avoid availing himself of all available segues and say:

  “Casi this is perfect. You had all that dubious Catholic schooling, don’t you think the Second Coming of Christ has already occurred but nobody noticed it?”

  “Just so you know where we are,” Traci said. “I’ve had some of this useless schooling myself and I think that by definition the Second Coming is not something that people will be able to fail to notice.”

  “Why not?” said Angus who took care to keep his head perfectly still and focused on the screen. “I mean the whole thing’s a joke don’t get me wrong. It’s like, no offense, some elaborate fairy tale. But the question is whether within this illusory framework the Second Coming could be missed? After all many missed it the first time.”

  “You’re saying could be but Alyona’s saying it already happened and we missed it,” said Traci.

  “Nonsense,” Angus said. “We don’t miss anything anymore.”

  “I think we miss a lot,” said Alyona. “There’s too much noise out there and we can only take in like one thing at a time. I’m telling you, I think it happened and we were like watching the Academy Awards or maybe the preceding Barbara Walters special. It slipped through the cracks.”

  “No way,” said Angus almost anticipatorily. “Such an event would have to be announced. I’ve been listening and I haven’t heard any announcement.”

  “On the contrary,” said Alyona. “More than a few people have announced they were messiahs making a return visit. For example, a recent wacko claimed to represent the Second Coming, at least before he set himself and all his compound’s inhabitants ablaze. Might not he have been telling the truth?”

  “No,” said Angus his head still immobile. “You can tell from his announcement.”

  “What more of an announcement do you want?” said Alyona.

  “Television,” Angus said with unmistakable respect.

  “I don’t think Jesus would go on Television,” said Traci.

  “Wrong,” Angus said. “He absolutely would and the fact that none of these pretenders effectively exploited Television is incontrovertible proof that they were not the real deal. Remember, Jesus worked at a time that predated Guttenberg’s printing press. He found himself in the midst of an oral culture. So what did he do? Did he go around passing out written pamphlets detailing what he believed to a bunch of illiterates? Of course not, he told stories. He told stories because that was the way people acquired knowledge back then. He told really interesting stories too. Parables that were compelling despite the fact they did not often engage with the truth. Parables that were likely to be remembered by people who did not, by and large, write things down. Now if Jesus is God, as many believe, then you can assume he knew what he was doing and did things in such a way as to ensure that his methods would have their greatest possible effect. What would such a person do were he to return to our modern world? Surely such a person would instantly align himself with Television, easily the greatest communication tool of all time. He couldn’t write his message then and he couldn’t write it now—not to a world of illiterates. What’s he going to do? Tell some more of those nifty stories? Don’t make me laugh. Images comprise the only effective language left and God would want to be effective. Television and its various offshoots, that’s where you’d look for him if you thought he’d come back. Believe me, Jesus will speak Television.”

  “So he’d be a televangelist?” said Alyona.

  “No, too limiting. Think more along the lines of a huge sitcom star. Bill Cosby at his peak et cetera.”

  “I think you both better hope you’re right about this illusory fairy tale as you call it because otherwise it’s straight to hell for both of you,” said a head-shaking, laughing Traci. “As for a Second Coming, I haven’t known what to believe for a long time but I still say that it’s not the sort of thing that needs to be announced as I recall. It’s more like the kind of thing that will make you either very happy or very sorry that you equated Jesus with a sitcom star.”

  “Interesting,” said Alyona. “What Traci raises reminds me of . . . I think Pascal’s Theorem? Anyway, the argument is this: God either exists or she doesn’t. I either believe in her, and alter my life accordingly, or I don’t. If I buy into God and it turns out she doesn’t exist I’m at most inconvenienced and maybe disappointed. On the other hand, if I reject God and it turns out she does exist I could potentially be screwed. As a result I decide to hedge my bets and believe in God. What do you think? Shouldn’t we subscribe to this? Angus? Casi?”

  “Presumably,” Angus said slowly, apparently thinking through the properly attributed but misnamed argument while responding, “an all knowing God would know our selfish motivation and as a result fail to credit us. Therefore, unless we truly and viscerally believe we should live it up as if God is dead since we’re not going to get credit for true faith anyway.”

  “I truly have no belief,” said Alyona. “But now I can’t help thinking that maybe my desire to believe that the Second Coming has come and gone without fanfare stems from a fear that I might ultimately end up having been on the wrong team. Casi, assuming all this nonsense were true, couldn’t we still have missed it?”

  I had counted and this was the third time I’d been directly addressed making further silence a probably prime example of luck-pushing, so:

  “If true—an admittedly huge if,” I said. “Then I think that Traci is on to something when she says it’s not the sort of thing that could be missed. It won’t be a repeat of Jesus walking around in sandals giving people fish. What they want you to believe is that it’s essentially a cleanup operation. He comes in and basically separates the healthy from the sick then eternity takes it from there.”

  “There it is,” Alyona said. “Typical Casi, says one thing and nails it.” Each word was louder than the one before but still contemplative and a smile grew on his face as he spoke.

  “What are you talking about?” Angus said.

  “Don’t you see? A separation of the healthy from the sick, the sinners from the sinned against and the virtuous from the vicious. Of course. That’s precisely what it is! I’m sold. No further inquiry is required.”

  “So you retreat from your earlier position that this event has already occurred?” said Angus.

  “Are you mental? I’m more convinced of it than ever. Listen, from what I hear God long ag
o stopped working in broad strokes. Even the most devout admit he no longer parts the skies and sets innocent bushes on fire. Rightfully so I might add. Only ambiguity can generate true faith. Any moron can accede to the painfully obvious. At any rate, why would this judgment day Casi refers to be any different? If God’s recent track record is any indication we can expect more ambiguity. The simplicity of it all is both beautiful and obvious. I think it’s clear that the healthy have already been separated from the sick. The problem is that all of us are the sick! Everyone here, everyone you see or hear, is the result of that separation. We’ve all been quarantined in this isolated world. It’s fundamental. You can’t let the diseased freely mingle with the robust and healthy. Somebody as bright as God definitely knows that and this world is the result of carrying that principle to its ultimate fruition. Life is hell after all.”

  “Stop exaggerating Alyona,” said Traci. “The world’s not that bad.”

  “Oh it isn’t? Infants kidnapped outside of TGINM, infants! Where do you think that baby is? You think it’s going to end up being good news Traci? Want to hear what the possibilities are? I won’t invent any of them either. I’ll draw only from previous occurrences right here on our charming quarantined isle. And that’s just this one limited area, I can go on. People baking in ovens—”

  “So where are the healthy and robust living?” Angus asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alyona said. “But you can’t get there from here.”

  You couldn’t get there from here. We all quit yapping and mulled that over awhile.

  “What I love about the angels,” Angus finally said gesturing to the screen with his chin, “and I refer of course to those owned by Charlie, is that they were never simply hired by a cuckolded husband to follow his wandering wife. No, their assignment was always the kind that required they go undercover as bikini models or high-priced call girls.”

  “Oh please,” groaned Traci.

  “A damn near perfect show I think,” said Angus.

  ‘Too obvious for my taste,” said Alyona.

  “Obvious? Seems positively subtle by today’s standards.”

  “True, but that’s just because sex was better back then.”

  “You mean sex as depicted by Television?”

  “No I mean actual sex, making love, intercourse. It was better, higher quality.”

  “Hard to imagine fucking being any better than it is now,” said Traci smiling slightly but not looking at anyone in particular or at all.

  Traci’s statement ground all conversation to a temporary halt, as any similar statement from a similar source to a similar audience invariably must. We all stopped and looked at her and I remember thinking I was seeing her for the first time. She wore tight, black, cotton, aerobicy pants with stretchy hooks around the heels of her feet. She sat on the sofa hugging the midpoint of her shins with her knees directly in front of her shoulders. Her legs tapered perfectly. Her rest was perfectly imperfect.

  “What I’m saying,” said a recovering Alyona, “is that the overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you’d probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It’s part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don’t notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don’t get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you’re thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.”

  “But aren’t you really just identifying a saturation?” asked Angus. “Clearly the average person today is exposed to more sexual content than the average person fifty years ago. You may be right that the ease and constancy of this exposure may diminish our enjoyment of the real thing but overall we’re still doing a better job of exploiting sex for our enjoyment. We just may not reach the peaks once possible. After all, the thirty-year-old is less impressed than the thirteen-year-old only because he’s been there and done that. Nonetheless, the thirty-year-old has quantitatively experienced a greater deal of sexual enjoyment than his pubescent counterpart and that’s what matters. Maybe visually and painstakingly inhaling the European supermodel does make it harder to get excited about Peggy Sue but isn’t it better than never having seen a woman that beautiful?”

  “That’s all part of it, I agree, but I also think not the full story. I think that the prevalence of sexual content you refer to is more symptom than cause of the dulling of actual sex. We’re obsessed with what we’ve ruined. In a village that was starving to death you might be able to interest people in a magazine with a pot roast centerfold. Similarly, as the ever increasing ambient noise we endure continues to reduce the intensity of actual sex, we become more obsessed than ever with its simulations. Our obsession is a result of and an attempt to remedy the fact that we can’t consumer our way into true sex the way we can everything else. I know what you’re all going to say but put aside for the moment prostitution and similar conduct because I’m talking about real sex where both parties share a common motivation. That kind of sex cannot be purchased and this consumer impotence outstrips all others and leads to our current obsession. The problem is that unlike real sex, which has withstood the passage of time as our foremost attraction, this simulated and packaged version can have its attraction exhausted. When that happens, the stakes have to be raised. So whereas yesterday you were perfectly happy watching women in bikinis running on the beach on Channel 5, today you need to see completely naked women throwing chocolate pudding at each other on pay-per-view.”

  Television: Come and knock on our door . . .

  “Yes!” said a gleeful Angus.

  Television: . . . take a step that is new

  “How much you want to bet,” said Angus, “that during the course of this episode a misunderstanding will arise between the roommates, possibly involving Mr. Furley and/or one or all of the satellite characters, and it will be a misunderstanding which could be instantly cleared up if one of the characters would simply say wait, are we talking about the same thing here? yet this will not be done until only two minutes are left in the episode? Also here’s a critical question. The question is—and Traci you don’t have to answer this—but Alyona, Casi,” he paused as if giving a eulogy and mustering his last great recollection, “would you do Janet?”

  “Sure,” said Alyona.

  “Really? Chrissy’s so much hotter.”

  “Don’t get me wrong Angus. I’d pork Chrissy first but that wasn’t your question. What are you saying? You wouldn’t ball Janet?”

  “I guess I would, if I had to.”

  “What do you mean had to?”

  “Well if she wanted me to bone her then it seems I’d have a moral obligation to do so.”

  “Moral?”

  “Well maybe professional.”

  “Okay that’s my cue to leave,” said Traci as she uncoiled off the sofa and towards the door. “Goodbye gentlemen, to use the term loosely, it’s been a pleasure and tell Louis he needs to work on his timing. Bye Casi,” she added then did this thing where she clasped and unclasped her hand towards me and just like that she was out the door and gone taking the newly-birthed concupiscence with her.

  “Well that was the only thing keeping me here, so I’ll see you guys later,”
I said as I headed for the door.

  “Nice going man. You frigging insulted her,” Alyona said to Angus.

  “What are you talking about dude?”

  “What was all that would-you-do-Janet shit?”

  “She wasn’t insulted by that man. She’s the same person who was singing the praises of fucking five minutes prior!”

  “You crossed the line, simple as that,” Alyona said. “Besides it was a stupid question. What man wouldn’t give Janet the high hard one?”

  “Ralph,” Angus said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Ralph. Ralph wouldn’t do the horizontal horror with Janet. He’s a happily married man.”

  “Ralph? Who’s Ralph?”

  “Ralph Kramden man.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Did you forget about Angus’s grand experiment?” said Alyona.

  “Oh yeah, how’d that go?”

  “You mean how’s it going?” said Angus. “You happened to come in during a short break. I’m still watching them and have been continuously since Thursday night.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s working. It’s just going to take a little longer than I thought.”

  “What do you mean it’s working?”

  “Well I can’t say that Ralph has become fully human just yet but he’s definitely getting close. Actually right now I’m a little worried about him. His friend Norton’s big mouth has gotten him into a pickle and now he’s scheduled to participate in a boxing match with this huge guy named Harvey.”

  “What the?”