Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“Oh nice to—”

“You’re like famous. I’ve heard really great things about you.”

“Oh.”

“The other day in arraignments I picked up one of your old clients.”

“Really, who?”

“Well normally I wouldn’t expect you to remember but he says you went to trial and won. Ramon DeLeon?”

“Sure, Ramon. Back to his old?”

“Yeah, another drug case.”

“He’s probably all emboldened and wants to go to trial again huh? Sorry.”

“What he really wants is you. He sure remembers you.”

“The acquittal he remembers.”

“He still has your card and he’s certain you’ll want to take his case over.”

“That’s funny.”

“So?”

“So?”

“So do you want to take his case?”

“Are you clinically insane? I’m serious, are you part of some sort of pilot program whereby the mentally ill are placed in public defender offices in major cities across this great nation and thereby made to feel useful?”

“I know but really the guy has no use for me and like worships you.”

“Look Darren.”

“Darryl.”

“One trial per customer is I think a good policy, so no.”

“Really? Because I would take one of your cases in return. Anything to avoid having to see this guy again. He’s so mean to me.”

“Mean? Listen Darryl.”

“Darren.”

“They’re all mean, haven’t you heard?”

“But this is like a no-win situation.”

“So lose.”

“Please Casi, I’m prepared to go beyond the lengths of appropriate behavior.”

“Jesus, believe this?” I said to no one. “Fine, leave it on my desk.”

“Well, it’s on today actually.”

“For what?”

“180.80 in F.”

“Great, I have a ton already. At least you didn’t wait until the last minute. You’re going to fit in beautifully here, give.”

“Really? Thanks so much! I mean it, give me any case you have. Pick the one you’ve been dying to get rid of.”

“Good, I have a guy who rhymes all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind, you owe me. And I know where you work.”

Persistent fuck. I hated getting cajoled into doing something I’d resisted, an all-too-frequent occurrence for me, and making all worse was the file this unknown chump handed me: an indecipherable abstraction that hemorrhaged red ink all over my innocent hands.

I was walking to court surprised at the ease with which I recalled DeLeon’s face, not normally a strength of mine. What I remembered was a round serious face that had trouble breathing as the jury entered to read their verdict. And as close to universal legal truth as you get is this: putting aside potential calamities that threaten to personally and intimately befall you, there is no greater anxiety than the quiet charged moments before the reading of the verdict in a case you’ve parented. And I want you to know this feeling and want, moreover, to be the reason you know it, hence the following:

First, a case that goes to trial is a hideously deformed corporal appendage that forces you to hunch down in deference to its weight. Always on your mind despite your best efforts but you don’t dare kill it for fear that you, the host, will join in its demise. Self-inflicted as well. The realization that this deformity is something you freely chose, something you once strove for and something the overwhelming majority of the population has no relationship with or any true conception of. A deformity you adopt every couple of months then cradle in your arms and measure your breath hoping to be an adequate parent. And everyone in the room hates it, wants to see it lopped off and discarded. But you have to put your arm around it, snuggle up to it and protect it from those that would do it harm. Or you can inhale some of the surrounding air that whispers we understand if you find it hard to kiss this oozing creature on the lips so instead just blow it a kiss from afar and when, in the end, it lays there gasping for life you can turn to us and say you did your best and the creature bought it upon itself at any rate . You can do that and be like everyone else because no one says you have to love deformities. Unless you need to.

But that’s the trial, which feels positively splendid compared to the verdict. Because there’s an undeniably legitimate response to observers who question a trial attorney’s particular decision or action during a trial. The response in distilled form is that things happen a lot faster in the well than they do for someone sitting on their fat ass in the audience. In those charged pre-verdict moments, however, the opposite is true. The note from the jury announcing it has reached a verdict instantly accelerates the well toward the speed of light with a resultant slowing of time for those within. In this slowed universe everyone not you seems to exist solely for your benefit or detriment, their realities not rising to the level of yours so that when, after much anticipatory ritual speech by the clerk, the foreperson of the jury plays with his piece of paper and announces his group’s creation you feel a strange dissociation. But even so you stand there and your organs seem to tighten from within and there’s an empathy so great you start to sense not much difference than if the case were named after you, the People of your State opposing You, and this ragtag body politic entering to announce their recent past and your lasting future. And now it feels less like a decision on a particular incident and more like a final judgment on your life, that collection of tenuously-related decisions made and deferred, yet what truly empowers these people, with their own tainted slates, to so decide?

With DeLeon I rose and lowered my head, tensing every muscle in my body, the pulsing transmissions ending in blood-deprived hands that gripped the table while their owner tried to convey nonchalance. What I was listening for was not really a declaration or even a word. It was a syllable. The coveted nuh or the devastating gih . I would hear one or the other and it would be over. Now I hadn’t slept or eaten in days, not the real kind of sleep with minimal synaptic firing and the sensation of actual temporal passage and not the real kind of eating where the victim doesn’t swell to twice its normal size as it approaches your esophagus, so when I heard the nuh it was unjustifiably a great surprise and felt like a bullet evaded. What I did then was what I always did when I heard those words. I got the hell out of there before they realized there was some sort of error, or the jury changed its mind, or some new evidence surfaced or you get the picture. I didn’t need to talk to the jury either. Once a trial was over I never wanted to see them again and I certainly didn’t care what they thought about the case. I didn’t care if they thought I was the best lawyer they’d ever seen or more likely the worst. I wasn’t interested in the often ridiculous leaps of logic that produced their verdict and conclusively displayed once and for all, to themselves, how intelligent they were in that they were able to go beyond the parameters of the courtroom’s four walls, if need be, to decide my client’s fate. Thankfully not guilty spoke for itself and allowed me to avoid all that maddening bullshit. Not Guilty also let me avoid ghosts. I remembered very little of the actual litigation of DeLeon’s trial. But had the verdict been different it would, like all traumatic events, have been permanently seared into the canvas of my brain, ready to be recalled and agonized over at the slightest provocation. Once recalled I would have mentally run over the strategic roads not taken and how they might have changed the result. This I would have done over and over, in every conceivable combination, with increasingly pained frustration but always with the same conclusion: I was faulty. The kind of unremitting chorus that can impel the wrong kind of person to the wrong kind of conduct.