Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“Okay.”

“Now I have to go soon and thank you for meeting with me but I do have one last question for you, which is what do you think about what I just said?”

“What I think? Well obviously I have no way of knowing whether or not yours is a good theory since I don’t really know any of the facts you’re basing it on.”

“True I guess. Tell you what. I’ll keep working this thing up, then we’ll talk some more. How’s that sound?”

“Annoying.”

“Maybe I’ll bring you some of the photos of DeLeon. You couldn’t see the face in the papers. As you probably know, he was shot in the face.”

“No, how would I know that?”

“Point blank range too. You can make out the face, that’s what people don’t get. Really half the face was almost unaffected. The other half of course looks like ground meat with occasional skin mixed in. His mother’s really counting on me to find the person who did this. His mother.”

“…”

“I’ll bring you the pictures. Know what I think when I look at them?”

“…”

“Do you know?”

“What?”

“I’m just grateful I had nothing to do with what happened to him or the other people inside that apartment you know? I’ll bring you the pictures of all of them. I think you should see them. What I mean by saying I’m grateful is this. For whatever reason I think we all carry around with us the results of our actions. They trail us like the train on a wedding dress. Trust me on this, I’m a lot older than you. I wouldn’t want that face, the one I saw in the pictures, following me is alls I’m saying.”

“…”

“Is there anything you want to tell me?”

“Yes I better.”

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks for the food.”

“…”

“I mean it thanks.”

“Okay, we’ll talk soon. I’ll be back, we’re not done yet Casi.”

He stood up but didn’t leave. There seemed to be no reason to say anything anymore, to keep up any appearances.

It was quiet. Then a waitress started laughing.

He looked at me some more. I looked down and after a while heard him walk away.

I was the only person left in the diner who didn’t work there. I drank more coffee then left, walking home as slow as possible and avoiding the sidewalk cracks.

Back in my apartment I couldn’t remember the reason I had gone out. The only person I wanted to talk to was Dane but my phone was still broken. Now I realized what was going to happen to me in the very near future so I knew I had to hurry.

I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands that were making the music when this decision was made simply disappeared and got real jobs, the ones that survived made different music that appealed to more people. The result was that when I listened to that music it felt a bit like traveling to the past or visiting ghosts, and this despite the undeniable fact that a very healthy portion of the music I listened to otherwise was created a far longer time ago, by people long-departed, yet produced no similar feelings.

I wrote all weekend. I never left the house. I ate whatever was in the fridge and slept on the sofa when I was tired. Monday I went in real late so I spent almost three full days in that condition.

I wrote about how preteens had fixed it so that Kingg would fall on his head. How they did this because he looked and acted differently than them. I wrote that he began to have seizures following this head injury then attached and referred to the meager medical records we had in support. I wrote how Kingg hadn’t been in the greatest mental shape even before that and attached those records as well.

I included information about Kingg’s home life. How you couldn’t find his father if you combed the earth. How his mother never stopped working for a minute but never made more than legislative minimums her whole life before dying in wait for a new kidney. I described where they lived and how, and reminded the court of the kind of schooling the young Kingg received. I told them about the various live-in boyfriends of Ms. Kingg and the impressions they chose to leave on Jalen.

I cited cases, all asserted as persuasive not binding authority, for the proposition that we should not execute someone like Kingg. Aside from that I reminded them of what Jalen’s attorney had done. How he had sat there like a constitutionally-ineffective potted plant. A plant that couldn’t be troubled to have Kingg examined or to present the slightest evidence of an impairment that should have been obvious and this during a phase of the trial that amounts to nothing more than an invitation for precisely that information. I just kept writing and watched the thing grow to absurd proportions.

The day I had to return to work I woke up early and started writing again. Only at that early hour, working on very little sleep, I kind of lost my mind a bit. I wrote that certain things were leaving me nauseated. I said that judges made me feel that way. Not most of them but all of them. I said that you for example, the judge I’m writing this to, made me feel nauseated. The nausea came from understanding that people produced by every conceivable advantage got to decide whether someone like Jalen lived or died and what was worse was they never fucking seemed to decide that the person should live, that a person’s life, any person, was more important than whether some fat fuck at a country club thought you were hard enough on crime or whether you continue to get sufficient reelection campaign contributions you worthless retarded piece of shit. Why should you be allowed to decide anything beyond what you have for lunch you mental infant?

Nausea-inducing things like that I put in the actual brief. My fingers moved and the words appeared in the document. I felt sick. My head hurt so much. The room spun. I knew everything was going badly for me but felt powerless to change anything. I tried to vomit but couldn’t because I hadn’t eaten in so long, instead my empty stomach would dryly convulse, tearing my eyes and leaving a painful burning reminder in my throat.

I walked into the nearest suit and stumbled out the door. I knew then why my ear had stopped hurting. Whatever had previously haunted it had obviously moved to my brain. There it surely lay, causing severe pain to the surrounding head and slowly spreading its dendritic margins until it would ultimately occlude the organ and my life entire. The steps I took down the stairs were wobbly and unsure and when I opened the door and stepped outside the cold made me feel sicker. At the bottom of the steps stood a man looking directly at my face. It was Detective Assado.

“Hello,” he said.

I walked down the steps and stood across from him.

“Are you all right?” he said. “You don’t look good at all.”

I looked at him but said nothing.

“I got those pictures you wanted to see.”

“I never said I wanted to see any pictures,” I said. “You were the one with the pictures.”

He started to take them out. I began retching again with nothing produced except more pain. Then I coughed a lot and when I spit out the results it looked like blood. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. I was bent over, my hands on my knees. I looked up at him, raising my head only slightly.

“Well I went through a lot of trouble to get these so I’m sure you won’t want to be rude.”

I stood up. Through the tears in my eyes he looked stroboscopic. He held the picture up for me to see the way limo drivers hold their signs up at airports. “What are those marks on your neck by the way? I meant to ask you last time.” When I ignored him he went on yapping like it was the most natural thing in the world to be so treated.