Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“That’s great for you though right champ? I mean you get that experience.”

“I guess.”

“Cause you guys get paid shit right boss? I hear the trick is get that experience a few years then go into private practice, which is where the money is. Next thing you know, you’re charging five, six hundred dollars an hour, that’s real money,” this guy wasn’t even pausing for air, “take my brother-in-law for example, he’s a lawyer. Not a public defender, a real lawyer. Anyways, that’s a guy’s really got his act together. Married to my sister, the fuck. They got two kids. He’s like a what do you call senior partner? at one of those big Fifth Avenue firms. I think he does like trademark work you’ve probably heard of him his name’s Jack. Anyway this guy really knows how to live. Big house over in Jersey he’s got this seventy-inch Television with a perfectly flat screen that automatically turns on when your favorite shows are on so you don’t miss them, you know, by accident. Seventy inches!”

“Yeah those guys make money,” I said near tears. “Make your first left up there.”

“Oh you don’t know. We’ll go to a titty bar and this guy will drop two, three thousand dollars easy. They love him there. Love! Best of all, his wife can’t say shit. Not at the rate he’s bringing the cash in! You know what though kid?” Now he turned and looked me directly in the eye while I cursed myself for not having listened to goddamn Alex Reeger. “You look like you’re real young. If you work hard and make the right connections I bet you could end up just like him in a couple of years.”

“This is it,” I said trying to contain my exultation.

“Six bucks chief. Just remember what I said. You can be like my brother-in-law. You can be Jack.”

“Thanks.”

“I do have one question for you though before you go,” all gravity now.

“What’s that?”

“How can you represent someone you know is guilty?”

I took my four bucks change and returned half. I watched this guy take his dough but all I kept imagining was Jack’s suburban construction raptly coming to responsorial attention for the suddenly resurgent Monolith as it chanted the rhythmic, synchronized intro to Sajak’s Rota… For… tunae!! He asked again. I summoned the tattered vestiges of my concentration, looked him in the eye, and answered his question:

“Practice,” I said.

It was marrow-petrifying, prayer-inducingly cold and I couldn’t find my goddamn keys. I was frantically patting myself all over and doing so in historic Brooklyn Heights, an idyllically tree-lined neighborhood immediately off and to the right of the Brooklyn Bridge. The architectural charisma of that ancient bridge, the clear view of Manhattan across the East River and, most importantly, the residential neighborhood’s proximity and transportational ease to nearby Wall $treet all conspired to spawn seven-figure brownstones and the people who could own them so that wherever you turned you saw what looked like gray-haired grandmothers but were in fact the actual mothers carrying their little blubber packages in chest-high kangaroo pouches on the Trinidadian nanny’s day off. Many longed to live in this land of the silver-haired kangaroo and as a result the exalted spectre of this neighborhood so hung over the surrounding areas that when looking at ads for apartments located in neighborhoods that were most decidedly not Brooklyn Heights you were nonetheless assured Brooklyn Heights Vicinity . Consequently, for an apartment roughly the size of a manila envelope I paid the kind of rent that could pull some countries out of a recession and at that moment, it occurred to me, I was paying it solely to provide shelter for Casper the Friendly Ghost who bound my keys and likely lay on the wobbly semicircle table near my front door.

I thought about Casper and wondered how someone with such soft edges could do this to me after so many years of one-sided friendship, thought about: a two-year-old in my aunt’s apartment; yellow flowered bed sheets delineating rooms and trapping icy air-conditioning: ¿is it three yet? No. Casper comes when the little hand is on the three and the big hand on the twelve. okay. ¿which one is the three?: Do you love me? Yes. One to ten? ∞

I remembered all that, watched the figurative mercury plummet while my powers of reasoning suffered greatly, and somewhere in there I semi-concluded that maybe it was all meet and just that I should sleep on the street that night like the open-sored guy outside arraignments. So I curled into a ball there by the door to start slumbering only I started shivering so bad I couldn’t stop and the sound of my teeth like machine gun fire then a low guttural moan that I eventually realized was coming from me and those two competing sounds so disturbed me, so exacerbated the pain in my ear, that I decided I would make a more significant effort to sleep indoors that night.

Which was about the time I had an auditory hallucination informed by recent memory whereby a recondite voice said hey being that we’re friends now we should perhaps have a copy of each other’s keys so we don’t get negligently locked out and so forth which in turn spurred the instant storyteller into acting like a cinematic Lotharian suitor by throwing icy acorns at the second-story window of one Alyona Karn in place of ringing a doorbell that never worked. Alyona’s uncle was the proud owner of the general recipient of my acorn pelts and of my apartment contained within. In addition to being the sixty-year-old father of a preschooler he allowed Alyona to live there footloose and rent-free provided he would superintend. Alyona in turn, and unbeknownst to uncle, allowed two others, Angus Glass and Louis Sands, to live in the apartment without paying rent in exchange for their promise to pay all necessary bills and expenses; necessary meaning digital cable, satellite programming, broadband internet, phone, food, toothpaste, electricity, water et cetera. This pleased him to no end and more than once he bragged that I have in essence extricated myself from our system of pay to play. Currency has no meaning to me. I am a twenty-eight-year-old who does not have a bank account yet my refrigerator is always full. Bills arrive in my name and get paid without me so much as opening the envelope. This — extreme nonconsumerism — is something that has come to be associated with illegality has it not?

Now several acorns had successfully flown their sorties, cutting through the frigid air to form interrupted parabolas, when I began to conceive the inconceivable. Could they all be asleep? Not home? Was there a difference if either meant sleeping on the street? The three of them were good customers of Columbia University. Alyona was purchasing a doctorate in Philosophy with an emphasis on either the eighteenth century British empiricists or else the work of Sextus Empiricus I could never recall. Angus was a twenty-six-year-old undergrad gravitating without the slightest volition towards a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Louie a graduate student trying to master business with both eyes towards his first and true love: Advertising. Alyona and Angus never left the house and, to my knowledge, the three of them never slept, certainly not while it was dark out, yet there I stood with diminishing acorns in raw gloveless hands and, to all appearances, vastly alone. And I was just beginning to reflect on how I came to be so alone when I heard the sweet, redemptive sound of a door opening followed by cognizable human words.