Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“Call in sick dude! Ralph’s taking Alice roller skating, this is a great one.”

“Thanks but I better not.”

“It’s your funeral.”

“Come on Angus you can do it!” I heard Louie and Traci simultaneously exhort. “Don’t quit,” Louie added.

Angus was nuts, true, but maybe it was my funeral. After all there I was walking all slow and solemn then in a box being gradually interred and when the box hit bottom there had gathered there that day a slew of people, who if not grieving sure didn’t look thrilled, to hear atonal dirges and accusatory liturgical phrases fill the air creating a quasi commerce that I walked through to stand on yellow bumps meant to warn of danger where man-made wind screeched into and past my face until I was in another box this one moving horizontally within which I breathed on many and was breathed on in return before the box spit us all out still under Earth’s crust but this time flowing from inside a mass towards stairs that led back to life.

Each stair brighter yet colder than the one below it like the sun was daring you to see how little effect it was having.

Two men above me at forty-five degrees and brooking no passage while speaking so that every nearby ear was forced to listen:

“It’s too damn cold for this time of year, too early in the year for this shit. I’m telling you man when I get dressed in the morning before I leave the house I put a goddamn lambskin condom on my dick to keep it warm. Y’ever seen a lamb complain about the cold? Still, it don’t even work, I’m a start putting two of them on before I leave the house.”

“Heard that.”

“Now about this other thing, I’ll say this. The man has to be large and in charge. It’s like I tell my bitch. You my queen but I’m the King and that’s the way it has to be man. The man has gots to be the boss you ask anyone. It’s what you call the natural order of things and the woman have best understand that, dig?”

The listening guy claimed that he indeed dug and more discussion ensued until the woman rising alongside me, sick of exhaling loudly and circling her eyeballs, started asking them questions. The various voices got louder and the woman did this great thing where after she made what she felt was a particularly pointed remark, but which in reality was shot through with meekness, she would move the hair away from her face with a lovely hand, which maneuver was quite yummy. At the end of the stairs, on top of the city, she went left to my right and I watched her shrink wishing I would one day see her again. But where I was you could never arrange that kind of sequel. You just never saw the person again was what happened.

I walked through City Hall Park, past the iced fountain and through the gloved hands pushing flyers, to the lobby of the only building in the area that looked like it shouldn’t even contemplate generating revenue. There was a new sign between the newsstand and the elevators. It said the entity that signed my criminally feeble paychecks had floors four through nine and that its Complex One was on nine. It said the Attorney-in-Charge could also be found on that floor and that his name was Thomas Swathmore. I wondered if this last part hadn’t been better written in pencil.

I grabbed the two tabs and started skimming them back to back in front of the elevators. Holding them that way you could almost feel the competition heating up between them. The Post was all over Tula with a picture of a rattle below a giant OH BABY! Inside was a description of the grim horror with quoted reaction all the way from Holland. There was a poll too. Thirty-three percent said the kid would turn up the very picture of health. Fifty-two percent said no way look into adoption and fifteen percent wanted the pollster to repeat the question; of those fifteen percent, seventy percent later admitted to having understood the question the first time. Meanwhile, sixty percent said it was wrong to do a poll on such a subject but participated anyway while forty percent thought it perfectly legitimate to do such a poll but wanted no part of it. The Daily News countered. Seems our mayor was the newly christened CAPTAIN VIDEO given his newfound interest in video-enhanced law enforcement . There was a map. The red areas were new smile-for-the-camera zones. The green areas would remain as before, i.e. patrolled solely by the naked eye. Lastly, the blue areas were in dire need of a video presence but the vigilantes were too afraid to be stationed there.

I stepped off on nine to see Denise’s eyebrows rise and her mouth open slightly meaning I was precisely the person she was looking for but couldn’t yet address because of the phone at her ear. Afterwards she smiled hello and “Malkum Jenkins called, he’s in court waiting for you.”

“Nice to know, that it?”

“Tom’s looking for you.”

“Great. Since?”

“Maybe quarter to nine?”

“Time is it now?”

“Forty-two after ten.”

“I see, not good. Listen Denise if you’ll be so kind as to keep this little conversation confidential, I will now rotate my body in the appropriate manner and return home.”

“Sure.”

“Already one of those days let me tell you.”

“Sorry honey, he’s in his office.”

“Thanks.”

I walked until the brief hall ended then popped my head forward to spy Tom’s green door, three-quarters closed and adrift in a sea of varying browns. I listened and heard no speech that sounded as if it were being issued from behind clenched teeth then took exaggerated cat burglar steps to my office in the opposite corner. I was alone in there for a change although I saw it would be temporary. The furry jacket on the back of Leon’s chair, the kind with the leather ovals that tell old-timers like its owner where the elbows go, meant he would soon return and the white sneakers with pink touches on Julia’s desk meant she was nearby as well. I sat at my desk between theirs.

I stared at the jacket and just like that wanted to be Leon Greene, Esq. I wanted those life moments of highest suspense and relevance to be in my immutable past. Wanted to have been at that desk for thirty-five years and not find the slightest thing wrong with that. And in those years I would not once have worn casual clothes to work even if I wasn’t going to court or meeting one of my clients, all of whom incidentally I would give the benefit of the doubt despite decades of empirical opposition, and in all that time I would never have raised my voice or used salty language at the office either. And I would bring that quiet dignity to the office every day without fail by the sharpest eight-thirty and would remove it no later than four-thirty, with the same forty-five minutes excluded for the lunch Helen would pack, and allow myself only one glass of wine a night with my light dinner at five-thirty and maybe trade some words about our kids and their kids and draw steadily increasing paychecks and save for retirement and talk about pensions and never produce any evidence of having noticed that every square inch of the third inhabitant of that square, one Julia Ellis, was skin-raisingly gorgeous and at precisely that moment I realized I no longer wanted to be Leon.

Although Leon wouldn’t be essentially hiding in that office avoiding Tom either. No, if Tom were looking for him, Leon would report front and center. Even if he was Casi and so never got to the office before ten and that day was pushing eleven and had a separate lengthy list of transgressions each singly capable of producing supervisory ire. So I pretended to be Leon. I stood up and took purposeful strides to the door where I almost ran into Dane.

“Where you off to in such a rush, to snatch up a square?”

“Yeah.”

“Figured.”

“What? Square? What square?”