Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

My apartment didn’t feel as cold when I got back.

Then the sun left and it started getting colder.

I put gloves on.

It got dark.

I went under blankets.

I pulled the sofa away from the windows to the center of the room, the last place in the apartment it would fit. I sat on the middle of the sofa fully dressed with every blanket I owned on top of me. I curled up into a ball. My knees were to my chest and my arms around them, my chin was between my knees. I rocked back and forth under the blankets. The only noise was my breathing. I ducked my head under the blanket and breathed my own exhaust for a while. I started feeling sick so I popped my head out. I didn’t know what time it was but it was completely dark in there. I tried to burrow inside my own body to find the body heat I was told would be there but found nothing. I got a little scared.

I started to have strange doubts. I allowed myself to think that maybe I really was the only existing person in the world. After all, I could never truly know that anyone else existed, at least not the way I knew , at that very moment, that I existed and was shaking uncontrollably. Maybe I was just a brain in a vat with some alien clown going overboard while stimulating the area for unfathomably cold.

So that’s where I was; the quiet I had longed for for such a long time had finally come and I found that more than anything it caused me to doubt the very material world that had left me hugging only myself. I wondered where the survival pamphlet was. I wondered really… if maybe… well…

um… if it was actually possible to die just like that, in an apartment in historic Brooklyn Heights, with every blanket I owned draped all over me and no one there to witness or document it.

I hadn’t heard a noise in hours but I decided I would check downstairs on the slight chance they hadn’t gone to Alyona’s cousin’s after all. And I didn’t so much knock as I just allowed my body to fall against the door. I heard some movement inside and relaxed so much as a result that I almost slumped to the ground. The door opened. I moved closer to make out the face and saw Angus, looking considerably worse but managing a weak smile.

“What time is it?” I said.

“No idea but God it’s cold. It’s inside me, is it inside you yet?”

“Yeah, I can’t stop shaking. Where are the others?”

“Some cousin or something, with heat.”

“How’d they get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a place with heat. A pamphlet. Let’s go there.”

“A pamphlet with heat?”

“A pamphlet identifying heat.”

“Where exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s cold.”

“So cold.”

“Come in. Let’s burn something. In the sink or tub. Books. Let’s start with this Hume sonuvabitch.” I went in. “Alyona comes back before leaving. I ask him to tell me about Hume before he goes and he hands me this book. I read it and you may be fucking right and here’s the weird part: I’m sure, sure as I can fucking be, that if I had not read this Hume individual the power would have come back by now. God I miss power so much.”

“I miss warmth… but can’t burn books.”

I sat in a big chair and pressed into one of its corners. I needed to stop moving and losing the benefit of whatever heat I had managed to build up in a particular spot. The candle that provided what little light the room had was flickering towards its end. I heard Angus’s breathing on the sofa across from me but saw his features less and less. We didn’t burn anything.

“Look outside,” Angus said. “Yesterday wherever you looked was a star so bright you couldn’t believe it was real. Tonight we get nothing.” The candle went out and I lost his face along with everything else in the room. There was nothing to look at; all we had left was our voices and the words they caused. In that dark it was as if we could see those words; they were our only reality. “Which is fitting as I see it, this sudden lack of galactic light, because make no mistake but that we have been abandoned by the very universe that contains us.”

“And that you seek to understand to completion.”

“Yes.”

…

…

“See the thing about that Jetsons lyric is there’s no conceivable way that eep op ork ah ah can translate into I love you. First there’s the fact that the alien language uses four different words whereas the alleged English translation famously uses only three. Then there is the matter of the repeated ah at the end of the alien phrase which would seem to mandate that, at a minimum, an accurate translation would be something like I love you you making the correct lyric something along the lines of eep op ork ah ah and that means I love you you . Casi?”

“…”

We sat in the dark and said nothing and it kept getting colder and it kept feeling darker and we didn’t know what time it was and there was no noise in the streets. I had stopped shaking, instead the room shook while I sat there, frozen still.

“Look we’re obviously going to die tonight.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I guess the only thing left to determine is who the greatest man ever lived was. Because ultimately greatness is the only thing that matters, the only thing that endures”

“We’re not all going to die. Just you and me… freeze to death… us.”

“So what? Far as we’re concerned the world ends tonight. Mankind ends tonight because tonight we’re mankind. Tonight ends.”

It was hard to both think and speak well, you had to choose.

“Plato, how’s that for a start Casi?”

“Yes, okay.”

“I mean that stuff ’s bought untold entertainment to untold kids.”

“Huh?”

“Play-Doh, the dude who invented Play-Doh.”

“No, no.”

“What then? What inventor?”

“No, no inventor, no.”

“Scientist?”

“Maybe.”

“What else is there?”

“…”

“Fine I’ll throw some names out to roll the ball getting… um… yeah roll the ball getting… I mean the get balling. I’ll see your Plato and raise you an Aristotle how’s that? Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Christopher Marlowe—”

“You mean Shakespeare.”

“—never heard of him. Newton, Einstein, the guy with the cat, the uncertainty dude. The guy… Richard… um.”

“Dawson.”

“Yes, Richard Dawson. No wait, he hosted Survey Says that’s true but I don’t even think he ever produced it so no, not greatest man ever, but maybe Chuck Barris who both hosted and produced The Gong Show along with other seminal programs. So Chuck Barris is in there… and Chuck Berry too since they sound so much alike that it seems unfair to leave one out. That pretty much covers it don’t you think? Good, now let’s review our list and make sure we didn’t miss anyone. We have Homer… um… Simpson, Virgil. Aeneid. Who else did we say? Milton… Bradley. Bach, all the three B’s in fact, Bach, Leonard Bernstein and the other B. Hume, Kant, all the guys in that book, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, anybody who went to Berkeley. In fact anybody who went to any institution named after a dead philosopher including naturally Georgetown and Stanford, which are of course named after Phyllis George and Stanford Marsalis respectively. Gutenberg who conducted the Gutenberg trial. Nureyev Rudolph. Rudolph Valentino. Engelbert Humperdink for that matter. The guy who invented the Gouldberg variations, T.S. Eliot Gould. Oppenheimer and Manhattan, you know, of the Oppenheimer project. Eric’s son Leif, meaning Leif Garrett, who discovered Earth but watched Columbo get all the credit and even though he played for the Vikings was too much of a pussy to do anything about it. Hannibal. American Vespucci. Verdi. Vendredi. Veni, Vidi, Vici, all three of them. The Marx brothers, Karl and Groucho. The guys they worked with, Engels and Harpo. Socrates and the guy who poisoned him then put him in a hemlock. Darwin and the first guy who coined the term Darwinian. Don Quixote and his sidekick… Tonto… Villa I think. The guy who discovered the nap. The guy who founded the Freudian slip. Pasteur, the inventor of milk. The guy who unearthed the tango, the guy who discovered cash. The guy who wrote Tango and Cash. Locke along with Stock… even Barrel. Angelo meaning Michael Angelo. Who else Casi?”