Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“I wonder, Alyona, what you would say about a father who mercilessly tortured his children day after day then when confronted by law enforcement put forth the defense that he was torturing the kids for their own good so that years later when they had moved away, and were free of his torturing ways, they would better be able to appreciate the beauty that is life as a non-torturee. I think you would undoubtedly label such a person a lunatic and call for a severe jail sentence. Are we similarly at the whim of a lunatic?”

“I didn’t say, Angus, that our current hell is the only way to later appreciate heaven. I posited that it was the only way to access heaven.”

“The distinction eludes me. Besides, maybe I don’t want heaven regardless of the price. Maybe I have Ouranophobia and am consequently scared shitless by the very mention of heaven.”

“You can argue and joke all you want but the one thing you can’t do is deny that all of this nonsense fed to Casi, Traci, and the like might be true almost despite itself. You must acknowledge, if you’re being honest, that these concepts may offer an entirely accurate and true depiction of the world you live in. There may be a God who presides over literally everything. There may be a heaven of love and a hell of hate. Centuries of human attempts at using reason to resolve these questions have, without fail, been for naught. True, all philosophical attempts to prove that God exists, like the famous Cartesian attempt to prove that God’s existence is evident from the fact we even have such a notion, have failed miserably. But, conversely, where has someone disproved the existence of God? Where have legitimate attempts even been made? Isn’t that troubling? Where is the slightest proof, after those same centuries, that there is no God? And don’t say Nietzsche because I’m talking about proof here, valid premises leading to a logical conclusion.”

“Fine, if you define proof stringently enough, I suppose I can’t really prove that unicorns don’t exist, yet I think I’m perfectly reasonable in not believing in them. But all that is beside the point as it relates to our rat friend. Because whether God exists or not, there is still such a thing as justice. Justice exists, and this rat is getting what it deserves under its mandates. This rat is evil.”

“Evil?” I said.

“Yes, very aggressive.”

“He was,” said Louie. “It’s true.”

“He was very violent from what we observed,” said Alyona completing the consensus.

“Even assuming your observations were correct, that doesn’t necessarily make the rat evil right? How do you know that rat wasn’t doing its fucking rat best? Maybe that rat has the natural temperament of a serial killer rat. Maybe the rat does nothing to foster, or in any way supplement, this temperament. In fact, what if it does the opposite? What if that rat does everything it can to combat and diminish this temperament it was saddled with from day one through no fault of its own. Perhaps the rat is able, only through a tremendous exercise of rat will and sheer rat determination, to control those extreme impulses to the extent that they manifest themselves only as extraordinary combativeness. Such a rat should be commended and admired not tortured. Who are you all to judge? Do you know the rat’s inner state? You know only your own yet you’re loathe to judge yourselves.”

“Casi?” Angus said as I walked to the door.

“Let the rat go,” I said.

“Yeah I now think we should let the rat out too,” said Alyona.

“I don’t care,” said Angus. “Let him out.”

“No way, fuck that rat bastard,” said Louie. “If he doesn’t want to be shocked let him get his rat ass out of that box.”

“Goodbye,” I said. “Stop shocking that rat, you rat-torturing bastards. Not just that, let it out of that box too, that’s almost as bad. Oh and Louie?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m calling Traci.”

What was I supposed to do then I wondered. Was there even a supposed to for this kind of situation? A situation where when I looked at my receding past everything seemed retrospectively marked by an extreme order and predictability yet all moments since seemed to obey, and promised to continue obeying, their own set of stochastic, undisclosed, and undiscoverable laws. Where I was fully aware of the pitfalls and folly of a finely-tuned narcissism but still the known universe seemed to bend and bend inexorably inward and towards me where it awaited my next move, supremely ready to react accordingly. And how I knew that decisions I would soon make or defer would have near-Sophoclean import and yet nonetheless it all seemed oddly irrelevant.

I wondered then what the first true doubters must have felt. How simultaneously freeing and paralyzing to untether the moorings of the previously unquestioned Known. They must have emerged about the same time as the first knowers these doubters; their ability to frighten and unsettle commensurate with the plausibility of their particular doubt.

To acquire true certainty, one doubter thought, you first had to subject everything, all your lovingly-held beliefs no matter how basic, to the penetrating, white-light glare of true doubt. And I was game and had no problem going along with Descartes, those bygone days, as the physical world we held so dear melted away like the ball of wax in his hand by the fire. And when he said that dreams were often only identified as such once they’d been safely tucked away in the past by the awake dreamer, I inaudibly screamed my assent. And that meant of course that even right now could be nothing more than a mere dream, a chimerical illusion of a physical body in a physical world. Could you imagine? This not really happening? It was true visceral doubt I felt and I liked it so much, could feel myself bathing in it so thoroughly, that even after my guide had long discarded his doubt, and achieved his version of certainty, I still clung stubbornly to mine. I was unpersuaded by his return and could not be so easily talked back from the ledge. For days people would talk to me and I wouldn’t know what to make of it, how to respond to them, what level of reality to assign them or our whole exchange. The logical climb back into certainty never approached the allure of this illogical descent into doubt; the echoes of which I then felt stirring in me again.

But like this renowned doubter, I too had my first principles I embraced in order to keep from drowning whenever the mental seas got too choppy. I had to go to work, even if that building was the last place on the globe I wanted to enter. I had mouths to feed. Okay I had no kids so it was really mouth to feed. Mine. Maybe I had to put food on the table, even if there was no room in my apartment for a table and there was no expression for putting food directly into your stomach. What was needed was an expression for just going to work out of force of habit.

At least I knew better than to go underground in my condition. Nor did I want to be a pedestrian in that unremitting, percussive cold. I had newfound, temporary wealth because my check had gone in that morning so I drove in and parked in a nearby lot. I had left early to avoid traffic on the two mile trip and was so successful that I ended up looking for ways to kill time before entering the building I didn’t want to enter.

I sat down to coffee nearby, relentlessly spinning the post-recycled paper sleeve around the cup and drinking little. At the counter near the cash register was a selection of candy where two guys were arguing. “No way motherfucker,” the one said, “Almond Joy’s got the nuts, Mounds don’t!”