Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“Oh my God look. He’s reaching for the remote control. How cue!”

And so it went. On and on without even hint of cessation until it somehow abruptly ended. First one or two left because look at the time then many followed suit and soon there was just the guest of honor in an empty living room. I had nodded affirmatively to too many liquid offerings and now the room had come off its moorings. It shook and tried to buck me off as I gingerly made my way to the sofa. I dropped onto it face down, remembering a trick I had learned and so keeping constant if tenuous limbic contact with the floor — like a silver screen couple in the code-of-conduct era — to combat the itinerant enclosure. I did this to find I wasn’t really sleepy, just tired and altered. And very both. Then the room was incandescent.

The coupled beams of light were like the previous snow. They appeared from the bottom of the front windows then rose until they were fully in the room. When a car door opens there’s that slight suction of air you hear which is soon followed by it’s opposite expulsion just before metal and rubber click and fasten as the same door closes. I fell asleep in the seconds following this noise and dreamt that someone was tapping on the window by the sofa and calling my name.

So I looked at this window and saw an apparition. The raindrop stained window created a second hologramic image of Alana. They stared at me as if all patience. I opened the window and dropped back into the sofa. Then I heard a familiar but now disembodied voice.

“So what of this twenty-fourth B-day? Happy or unhappy?”

“Huh?”

“You miss me?”

“Who are you?”

“You didn’t think I’d fail to show my mug on a day like this did you? More fraternal faith than that one hopes.”

“Whose lights?”

“Derek’s.”

“What’s a Derek?”

“I strongly suspect it will soon prove irrelevant so I won’t bother. But at least he was good enough to drop me here.”

“You staying?”

“No, he’s waiting. This is yours but don’t open it until tomorrow.”

“Is that ticking I hear?”

“So how was it?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? Don’t give me fine. C’mon do as if I were there .”

“No way kid I’m barely conscious, too much aguardiente.”

“Water that’s ardent?”

“Right and still coating my esophagus too. Who’s the fucker invented that shit?”

“Nonetheless, as if I were there please,” she cupped her hand to her ear, the picture of foregone conclusion, but I motioned that an invisible key was locking my lips. “Please,” she said, this time jutting her lower lip out when she was done.

As if I were there was a practice nearly as old as we were. Essentially it involved one of us recounting to the other a slice of space-time that person had missed and doing so to the extent that, in the end, the listener would in effect have missed nothing. A simulacrum of corporeal presence. Questions were generally held until the end. Now don’t underestimate the level of detail involved here. The raconteur must season the word-for-word account with plainly irrelevant bits of data like people’s position in the room, facial expressions, and vocal inflections in a way that far eclipses even what you’ve heard to this point. So, because of the jutting lip and despite my compromised state, I did this for Alana with decreasing B.A.C. and increasing lucidity and when I was done she said this:

“Wow. But what kind of hot dog did Armando come in? You didn’t say”

“Kind?”

“Sure there are different kinds. You’ve got everything from the watery, brown Sabretts of Midtown to the grilled, sheepskin-encased, red Nathan’s of Coney Island.”

“I don’t think the van had that kind of detail Alana.”

“You barely mentioned little Mary either. What does she have to say for herself?”

“The usual, nothing.”

“Still not yapping?”

“Correct.”

“I can picture the hysteria as we speak. So what? That’s what I say. Maybe she just doesn’t have anything to say at this point. You know when you first walk into a gathering? You don’t let loose with an immediate verbal hemorrhage do you? Of course not, everybody hates those maniacs. First you kind of soak things in. I say Mary’s still in her soaking phase and when she’s done soaking and dries off we’re in for some serious insights. Besides I was a little weird when I was a kid and I—”

“Was?”

“—turned out what passes for all right. On another topic I must admit I’m having trouble wrapping my cerebellum around this 24 thing. By that I mean you turning into this number. I mean if you’re that old then it won’t be that long—”

“Twenty-eight months.”

“—before I’m that old. What do you make of this? Five years ago if you pointed to someone and told me that person was twenty-four I would have kind of felt sorry for them. Soon I’ll be the person I once pitied!” While she was saying this, Alana was sort of climbing through the window and onto the sofa. Except now she looked stuck betwixt in and out with her body undulating like a seesaw and her belly and the windowsill serving as fulcrum. “No I’m actually liking this,” she said when I tried to pull her in and so stayed there teetering noisily with her black Gene Simmons platform shoes flailing all kinetic behind her.

“Less volumen babe,” I said maybe louder than any noise she was making. “You’ll wake the entire house including me.”

“Don’t tempt me, I’ll get this party started up again.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” because she could have.

“But fine I’ll whisper if you insist.”

“I didn’t.”

“I’ll whisper this,” and she did whisper the ensuing but it was a strange whisper with her lips staying ventriloquist still and her eyes transfixed on what? “It’s not a vanity thing you know?” she said.

“What isn’t?”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Know?”

“No.”

“You do?”

“Know?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“It’s not some lame corporate-feast-on-your-insecurities-fucking-Pepsi-generation-youth-is-better garbage,” Alana said, “that causes me to think about numbers. No, as I see it it’s about intensity. I have to laugh when I hear somebody refer to carefree youth or some such nonsense. Youth is everything but. Six, seven years ago I would stay up all night wondering if some guy liked me or not. More than that really, I could have deliberated that entire time on what a look or phrase had really meant. Now some guy could propose to me and I’d probably tell him to shoot me a follow-up e-mail so I won’t forget to get back to him. I get tired now. When I meet someone they always remind me of a previous someone in a way that makes any further investigation feel unnecessary,” I could tell from Alana’s intake of air that a lot more ramble was coming so I opened my ears a bit more and said nothing, the best course of action in those instances. “I read somewhere that the music I like now is the music I’ll like for the rest of my life. My fucking brain or something like that won’t find new kinds of music pleasurable from about this point on. What the hell is that? Good thing I like this music. C’mon youth wasn’t carefree it was intense and intense is good. It’s like this house. I never want to come here but when I do I end up liking it. Just to see everything through that prism again you know? A happy youth I must have had overall. Or was I miserable but with a poor memory? Oh whatever. Remember that old record player in the lime green case, the one with the detachable knobs? I saw it in the garage the other day. In the garage Casi! I put it on and it worked. I mean I didn’t have any records to really test it but it was spinning and that was amazing enough for me. I remember the oldsters would start in with the endless clave patterns and you and I would reach for that thing in protest. Then up to your room for a little Reader’s Digest Edition of the LVB piano sonatas, remember thinking RD was like good? And remember we would limit ourselves to the pre-Heiligenstadt Testament ones to exclude our runaway favorite, the cataclysmic Appasionata, with you being definitely partial to the Opus 28 Pastorale because it was supposedly after this one that he told Krumholz he would be taking a new path and me arguing that those kinds of ancillary matters were not fairly considerable and that sometimes, just occasionally, overwhelming popularity is warranted and that the second 27, The Moonlight, with its initial melancholia was the greater work? Remember that? Well if you listen to them now I bet you’ll be sent up to that room whether you’re willing or not. And if you listen the right way then you’re forced to actually be that person. Isn’t that just the height of weirdness? That’s what this house is, a giant green record player with detachable knobs, which is usually fine but can sometimes be the opposite. Sometimes it can be the realization that images seem blurrier now, sounds more muffled, and yet somehow we’re inappositely picking up speed. We’re picking up speed and you and I have been thrown out of the kitchen where we used to make ice cream floats, armed solely with ATM cards that have our pictures on them and a little bar graph in the corner that’s somehow linked to our fingerprints but only until they get the DNA coding capability fully functional and maybe your green record player does still technically work but not really and don’t pay it any mind regardless because I have a fifty disc CD player that positively compels neighbors to call the police and LVB sounds twenty times better but not as good so I kill the lights and blast it anyway so that when the opening movement of the C minor Symphony nears its close at allegro con brio tempo I swear Casi that the sky is going to literally open up and forget all of Ludwig’s later Ode to Joy crap because now it’s God — for want of a better word — surveying the broken to regretfully diagnose a violent remedy then reaching down and doing something about this mess, no longer content to just watch, and you were right about Lincoln Center that time because yes it was great and how could it fail to be but it does have to be louder, or more accurately we needed more money to get closer and make it louder, loud enough that the notes come straight from heaven, replace your bone marrow and you start to question yourself as a physical being and I think the more time passes the louder and louder it will have to get in order to be heard above the din… hear that? That’s the din.”