Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

Once there it all happened so fast. It was like a Marx brothers routine. In a foreign language. What I needed in retrospect was a standing eight count to get my bearings.

It all started with the jury’s note asking for read-back of all testimony regarding commercial lettering on the van. This was quickly followed by the DA’s sheepish admission that he had discovered, over the break during a conversation with Bolo, that the van in question did not have any commercial lettering. I reminded Arronaugh that McSlappahan had relied extensively during his summation on the fact that the van had such lettering. The obvious remedy given the centrality this question had assumed was to inform the jury that no testimony need be read back since it had come to our attention that the van did not in fact have any commercial lettering. The jury would then be free to decide what weight to give this fact. Arronaugh did what stupid people do when they can’t understand. She got mad. The jury would not be so informed. The truth would be damned. Instead she ordered the false testimony read back to the jury. The testimony where Bolo said the van had our lettering . Fucking court reporter! My mistrial motion was denied. The hell was going on? The jury took all of two minutes after the read-back to return and say words I had never, in that context, heard before. They were thanked and dispatched. A now Guilty Hurtado turned to me with complete incomprehension.

“You came in second,” I said.

He had gone to trial with me because I was Hispanic he said. He knew that was a sign from God.

There’s a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending. Once the verdict sank in, I began tossing out applications like a desperate quarterback in a two-minute drill. And as they were denied one by one I began to lose that lawyerly artifice and sounded more and more like the pissed off intense motherfucker I was:

THE IDIOT: I don’t know why you feel you have to keep repeating the same arguments.

ME: You should be grateful I keep giving you the opportunity to correct your ridiculous rulings.

THE IDIOT: Well what you are saying at this point is going in one ear and out the other.

ME: I don’t doubt it. What would prevent it?

Two statements I would later especially regret when contempt proceedings got rolling in earnest.

I don’t even know why I went back to the office. It was late and there didn’t seem to be anybody there. I had two voicemail messages: a disappearance and a reappearance. ADA Dacter wanted me to know that DeLeon had disappeared so he would be requesting a bench warrant from the judge on Monday. DeLeon was not returning calls, had missed the last two meetings and when police went to his house today his family said they hadn’t seen him in three days. As if in his stead, Raul Soldera was back. He was involuntarily returned on a warrant according to the clerk for Cymbeline’s part and I should go there on Monday for predictable further proceedings.

As I was leaving, Liszt saw me and called out. I went into his office.

“What happened Casi?”

“We went down.”

“Damn, sorry. Listen it was an impossible case, you did what you could.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey look at it this way. You finally lost. Everyone has to lose eventually. You no longer have that burden. You’re just like the rest of us now. Win some, lose some.”

“Wrong. I don’t win some, lose some. I win them all and lost one, and the one I lost is because some criminally stupid judge couldn’t get her head out of her ass long enough to do her job right. Fuck!” Then I did a stupid thing. I punched a hole in Liszt’s wall. I needed sleep. I got the hell out of there.

They were gaining on me. The chimp-toting Uncle Sam was picking up speed. I would have to do something. I was almost off the bridge when I turned to face them. That’s when Uncle Sam came up to me and said:

“I want you man! That’s right. I know you don’t look like Ward Cleaver but your Uncle wants you!”

While he was saying this, I noticed the chimp was slowly swinging his left paw in an exaggerated bolo punch. I was listening to my Uncle who seemed to want a response but I had both eyes firmly planted on his hairy pal. Suddenly the chimp jumped up until our eyes almost met and took a swipe at me with his right chimp fist.

I leaned my head back just in time and he missed, the hair on his paw barely scraping the tip of my chin.

“I need to forget all this. I need to feel a sense of accomplishment, of forward momentum. Need to feel that a discrete, meaningful segment is behind me. That this person who squeezes into the subway in the morning and waits for orders isn’t the real me. I’m in a hurry to feel this too,” and I was in this hurry sitting on the bare floor of my room, the side of my bed completing the makeshift chair.

“Uh-huh,” the phone said.

“So…” I didn’t want to impel things, just wanted them to happen.

“So let’s do what I’ve proposed.”

“Yes. Let us. Yes”

“Excellent. I love witnessing, even just auditorily, moments like these.”

I was alone there, in a spot near an echoing corner. “Moments like what?” I emitted and the waves bounded off selfsame corner and joined on their regress the still-faintly-existing Yes to envelop me in multilayered sound.

“A moment like this, when you make this kind of decision, when you decide you will not simply accept what the world is trying to force down your throat, that you will instead forcibly take that which is rightfully yours no matter the means. This moment.”

“Oh,” I said and began to hang up but then there was that thing where you hear the phone’s voice just before you bury it into its holder:

… minds me the voice said so I stilled my hand and bent my head down to the receiver.

“I say it reminds me.”

“Heard you, bye.”

“Reminds me of the moment man ceased merely gazing skyward with sidereal awe and in its stead resolved to one day inherit those stars.”

“You look different.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no? You can’t just verbally negate a perception of mine. I’m looking at your fat face and I say it looks different.”

“No. I look the same.”

“Are you looking at a mirror right now and I’m somehow missing it? Because you should be watching the road the way you’re swerving.”

“I don’t have to look at a mirror. I know I look the same because I refuse to look different. I refuse to accept change in any of its myriad forms and incarnations.”

“What about what I see when I look at you?”

“It’s wrong, a misperception.”

“You look like you’re suffering from a lack of sleep.”

“See what I mean? I slept seventeen hours straight last night.”

“Exactly as I intuited. You overslept in the truest sense of the word. You overdosed on eye movement that’s rapid. What’d you dream?”