Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“So he’d be a televangelist?” said Alyona.

“No, too limiting. Think more along the lines of a huge sitcom star. Bill Cosby at his peak et cetera.”

“I think you both better hope you’re right about this illusory fairy tale as you call it because otherwise it’s straight to hell for both of you,” said a head-shaking, laughing Traci. “As for a Second Coming, I haven’t known what to believe for a long time but I still say that it’s not the sort of thing that needs to be announced as I recall. It’s more like the kind of thing that will make you either very happy or very sorry that you equated Jesus with a sitcom star.”

“Interesting,” said Alyona. “What Traci raises reminds me of… I think Pascal’s Theorem ? Anyway, the argument is this: God either exists or she doesn’t. I either believe in her, and alter my life accordingly, or I don’t. If I buy into God and it turns out she doesn’t exist I’m at most inconvenienced and maybe disappointed. On the other hand, if I reject God and it turns out she does exist I could potentially be screwed. As a result I decide to hedge my bets and believe in God. What do you think? Shouldn’t we subscribe to this? Angus? Casi?”

“Presumably,” Angus said slowly, apparently thinking through the properly attributed but misnamed argument while responding, “an all knowing God would know our selfish motivation and as a result fail to credit us. Therefore, unless we truly and viscerally believe we should live it up as if God is dead since we’re not going to get credit for true faith anyway.”

“I truly have no belief,” said Alyona. “But now I can’t help thinking that maybe my desire to believe that the Second Coming has come and gone without fanfare stems from a fear that I might ultimately end up having been on the wrong team. Casi, assuming all this nonsense were true, couldn’t we still have missed it?”

I had counted and this was the third time I’d been directly addressed making further silence a probably prime example of luck-pushing, so:

“If true — an admittedly huge if,” I said. “Then I think that Traci is on to something when she says it’s not the sort of thing that could be missed. It won’t be a repeat of Jesus walking around in sandals giving people fish. What they want you to believe is that it’s essentially a cleanup operation. He comes in and basically separates the healthy from the sick then eternity takes it from there.”

“There it is,” Alyona said. “Typical Casi, says one thing and nails it.” Each word was louder than the one before but still contemplative and a smile grew on his face as he spoke.

“What are you talking about?” Angus said.

“Don’t you see? A separation of the healthy from the sick, the sinners from the sinned against and the virtuous from the vicious. Of course. That’s precisely what it is! I’m sold. No further inquiry is required.”

“So you retreat from your earlier position that this event has already occurred?” said Angus.

“Are you mental? I’m more convinced of it than ever. Listen, from what I hear God long ago stopped working in broad strokes. Even the most devout admit he no longer parts the skies and sets innocent bushes on fire. Rightfully so I might add. Only ambiguity can generate true faith. Any moron can accede to the painfully obvious. At any rate, why would this judgment day Casi refers to be any different? If God’s recent track record is any indication we can expect more ambiguity. The simplicity of it all is both beautiful and obvious. I think it’s clear that the healthy have already been separated from the sick. The problem is that all of us are the sick! Everyone here, everyone you see or hear, is the result of that separation. We’ve all been quarantined in this isolated world. It’s fundamental. You can’t let the diseased freely mingle with the robust and healthy. Somebody as bright as God definitely knows that and this world is the result of carrying that principle to its ultimate fruition. Life is hell after all.”

“Stop exaggerating Alyona,” said Traci. “The world’s not that bad.”

“Oh it isn’t? Infants kidnapped outside of TGINM, infants! Where do you think that baby is? You think it’s going to end up being good news Traci? Want to hear what the possibilities are? I won’t invent any of them either. I’ll draw only from previous occurrences right here on our charming quarantined isle. And that’s just this one limited area, I can go on. People baking in ovens—”

“So where are the healthy and robust living?” Angus asked.

“I don’t know,” Alyona said. “But you can’t get there from here.”

You couldn’t get there from here. We all quit yapping and mulled that over awhile.

“What I love about the angels,” Angus finally said gesturing to the screen with his chin, “and I refer of course to those owned by Charlie, is that they were never simply hired by a cuckolded husband to follow his wandering wife. No, their assignment was always the kind that required they go undercover as bikini models or high-priced call girls.”

“Oh please,” groaned Traci.

“A damn near perfect show I think,” said Angus.

‘Too obvious for my taste,” said Alyona.

“Obvious? Seems positively subtle by today’s standards.”

“True, but that’s just because sex was better back then.”

“You mean sex as depicted by Television?”

“No I mean actual sex, making love, intercourse. It was better, higher quality.”

“Hard to imagine fucking being any better than it is now,” said Traci smiling slightly but not looking at anyone in particular or at all.

Traci’s statement ground all conversation to a temporary halt, as any similar statement from a similar source to a similar audience invariably must. We all stopped and looked at her and I remember thinking I was seeing her for the first time. She wore tight, black, cotton, aerobicy pants with stretchy hooks around the heels of her feet. She sat on the sofa hugging the midpoint of her shins with her knees directly in front of her shoulders. Her legs tapered perfectly. Her rest was perfectly imperfect.

“What I’m saying,” said a recovering Alyona, “is that the overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you’d probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It’s part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don’t notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don’t get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you’re thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.”

“But aren’t you really just identifying a saturation?” asked Angus. “Clearly the average person today is exposed to more sexual content than the average person fifty years ago. You may be right that the ease and constancy of this exposure may diminish our enjoyment of the real thing but overall we’re still doing a better job of exploiting sex for our enjoyment. We just may not reach the peaks once possible. After all, the thirty-year-old is less impressed than the thirteen-year-old only because he’s been there and done that. Nonetheless, the thirty-year-old has quantitatively experienced a greater deal of sexual enjoyment than his pubescent counterpart and that’s what matters. Maybe visually and painstakingly inhaling the European supermodel does make it harder to get excited about Peggy Sue but isn’t it better than never having seen a woman that beautiful?”