A Naked Singularity: A Novel (102 page)

“Hey Angus wait up?”

“Yeah.”

“What you said about the singularity and stuff.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really believe in it?”

“Believe in it? Heck I seen it done!”

As soon as I got into my apartment I saw that the roof was leaking, in more than one spot and all over my sad pathetic stuff. In a manner of minutes every pot I owned was catching water but every time I started to relax a new leak sprouted. The water flowed in at a greater and greater rate until I realized I had no way to stop it or even catch it anymore; so that finally I just opened my door hoping that, pursuant to the rules of animation, it would take longer for the water to rise above my head, inch by inch, and drown me. Not that I expected to last that long. Whether or not Angus and Alyona agreed on an ending it was clear they expected theirs in maybe half a century whereas I expected mine in about half an hour. I thought about getting out of there and going back to the hotel but I had no money and my cards were all maxed. I was like a sitting duck, wading in actual water. This ending wasn’t going to be a happy one.

The way few in Boxing ever are for example. Marvelous Marvin Hagler, for one, never fought again after the Leonard fight—an altogether intelligent move to be sure but still meaning that his ending consisted of losing a highly-disputed decision to a man he hated with the knowledge that he gave away some early rounds and allowed Leonard to steal others with that lame tactic of using late-round, pitty-pat flurries.

Leonard himself fought in the nineties and the results weren’t pretty. After the third Duran fight a thirty-four-year-old Leonard was dominated by Terry Norris and dropped multiple times in losing a unanimous decision. He retired after the fight only to return six years later against Hector “Macho” Camacho. Leonard’s end would involve being viciously kayoed in the fifth round by the obnoxious and notoriously feather fisted Camacho and there was nothing sweet about that.

Hearns too fought on way past any sense. His name still drew crowds and he won the occasional title until at age forty-one he was knocked out in the second round in front of his native Detroit crowd by the awful Uriah Grant. It can be difficult to understand The Hitman when he talks now but if he’s talking into a microphone chances are good he’s talking about maybe fighting again.

The way Roberto Duran fought Hector Camacho when he was forty-five and again at fifty, competing well against the same fighter who had starched Leonard. In fact, despite fighting often at ridiculous ages like that, the only fighter to have ever truly iced Duran remains Hearns. Nevertheless, Duran’s record after the third Leonard fight was an ugly eighteen wins (only seven by knockout) and eight losses. Ultimately it took a very serious car accident to finally end his immense career.

Wilfred also regrettably fought in the nineties. After retiring in 1986, he must have started to think he was the only person in human history to physically improve with age because after almost four years of sitting around and wondering where the money went he launched a comeback on March 8, 1990, against someone named Ariel Conde. Conde was no great threat, having lost all ten of his fights to that point, but Wilfred had trouble with him anyway. Trouble, that is, until the seventh round when he suddenly smoked Conde with a rare one-punch kayo. It would be the most memorable fight of Conde’s twenty-nine fight career: a career that included one draw and twenty-eight losses, twenty of them by knockout.

Feeling good, Wilfred next took on Pat Lawlor two months later in Tucson. Lawlor was 13-1 at the time so he could fight at least a little, while the same could probably no longer be said for Wilfred, who dropped a ten-round decision. (Lawlor continued his non-calendar annus mirabilis in his next fight with a victory over Duran, giving him one of those accomplishments that looks great on paper as long as you don’t look too closely; of course, the victory over Duran was more a product of a shoulder injury as was established many years later when Duran won their rematch on his forty-ninth birthday [Lawlor was then stopped in five of his last six fights to finish with 23 wins and 16 losses].) Wilfred’s plan for a triumphant and lucrative return to the ring had clearly been derailed but still he wouldn’t quit.

Instead, on August 24, 1990, he returned to the ring and added the last victory he would ever earn by winning a ten-round decision against the execrable Sam Wilson. Wilfred heard the announcement of the scores and raised his fists for the last time. The referee came over to raise his right arm and Wilfred smiled that smile once again. People congratulated him and it didn’t feel all that different from Puerto Rico in say ’74 although sixteen years later it maybe did seem harder to do simple things like express a thought clearly or walk a perfectly straight line.

And when the end came it came in his next fight, held in Canada against someone named Scott Papsadora. On September 18, 1990, Wilfred lost a clear ten-round decision to Papsadora then retired for good with a record of 53-8-1. It was over.

Although there
was
one more nice day. In 1996 Wilfred became just the sixth fighter to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York in his first year of eligibility and although he had already started to have seizures by then he was still strong enough to raise his arms one more time in victory and call his induction
the best and most prestigious honor of my career
.

But then came the doctors. Later that year, Wilfred slipped into a coma while lying on his bed and was taken to a San Juan hospital. Doctors looked at Wilfred and ran tests on the contents of his skull. They used words like
pugilistic dementia
and
post-traumatic encephalitis
, terms that Wilfred, with his junior-high education, would’ve had trouble understanding even were he conscious. They could have just said too much Boxing really even though others had fought more, certainly been hit more, and remained relatively healthy. He could have easily died then, he spent days in critical condition, but he didn’t. Instead he recovered and was released.

Now he needed constant care but this Man, who had let his very blood to earn millions for himself and others, had no money left. Years later, immediately after attending a benefit dinner held in his honor at Tito Puente’s restaurant nightclub in the Bronx, near where he was born, Benitez suffered a stroke and ended up in the intensive care unit of nearby Jacobi Hospital. He again survived but this stroke led to some paralysis and greater speech difficulties.

Today Wilfred lives in Saint Just, Puerto Rico; the barrio where his boxing career began in that makeshift backyard ring. The father who in those days put his arm around his seven-year-old son and showed him what to do is now dead. The wife he had when he was one of the strongest men in the world has abandoned him. He has few friends and fewer fans and his name is rarely mentioned anymore outside his own house.

And in that house Wilfred trembles and shakes and can’t walk so great. His speech has deteriorated greatly and he sometimes can’t say the simplest words. His memory is severely damaged.

He cannot, if alone, find his way home.

He is not, however, alone. Clara Benitez is with him, feeding and cleaning her son, keeping him steady as he stands and whispering in his ear when needed, promising everything will be all right
mijo
like she did the days Wilfred was her baby and she a far stronger woman.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;

God said, Let Newton be! And all was light
.

—Alexander Pope

The morning the blackout lifted and the lights in Times Square were so bright you couldn’t properly see, the first person I saw after I climbed in through the window was my mother looking very tired and sufficiently aged that I quickly tried to mentally calculate her number but realized I lacked even a clue because she guarded that secret zealously. And my face was stinging because it wasn’t just warm inside it was
hot
with the fireplace blaring and the baseboard’s heat actually visible so that the room seemed almost foggy. I stood in the middle of that steam and looked at them silently until Alana saw me and spoke:

“Casi,” she said. “We assumed you were dead.”

My mother looked at me and smiled, said I was underdressed. She hugged me and I dropped just about all my weight into her as she laughed. Then she went into the kitchen to look for food because I looked
espantoso
.

I took off my jacket and fell on the sofa. Alana was asking me where I had been and I was rubbing my face and looking up when Mary came into the room and jumped on the sofa.

“Casi, Casi! I have a baby brother!” she said.

“I know baby.”

“And he’s cute and chubby but can’t open his eyes yet.” The sound of her voice after so long was strange but sweet. “Do you want to see him?”

“I do Mary.”

“Good because he’s coooming,” she sang and skipped away.

“The hell?” I said looking at Alana, meaning how did we go from stone silence to that.

“That’s not the half of it either,” she said and before I could ask what she meant Buela and Buelo were coming down the noisy stairs in the deliberate way they did everything. I stood up and walked over to meet them. I gave them hugs and kisses and didn’t want to let go of my grandmother. When they sat down I went to the floor. “Help Alana, I’m being roasted alive in my own juice,” I said and took off a shirt.

Buela had a list of things Buelo had to do to help my mother get the house ready for the baby. She said that the baby was
un regalo de Dios
and that it was a miracle that all three—the baby, Marcela, and my mother—were healthy. She gave Buelo more orders and said she
gave light
to all five of her children in her home in Colombia armed with just a midwife. She talked about how as a young girl she watched her mother do the same, how some lived and were entrusted to her in varying degrees and could be referred to as later adults and how others didn’t so couldn’t. She started crying a little and my mother came in with food that mostly I devoured.

That night Marcela lay on that same sofa, yellow-faced and too tired to move. Beneath her was a red yarn slipcover Buela had sewn by hand. The house was full of those kinds of things. Tons of knick knacks everywhere and all of them covered by or sitting atop hand-sewn, by my mother or Buela, pieces of frilly material. My mother in particular felt she could make
anything
that consisted of cloth-type material. She bought nothing in that area and so great was her confidence that we knew from experience to lie about the cost of any new clothing she asked us about else she gasp and declare she could’ve made the item for us at a tenth of that then chide us for being wasteful.

Three feet from Marcela, in the same modest bassinet Alana slept in two decades earlier, lay my new nephew. Alana knelt before the oval, absently running her fingers along its border then looking in and gurgling. She looked at Marcela.

“My God,” she said. “Three. You’re like a baby machine. I doubt seriously I could ever have even one. Did it hurt like crazy?”

“Not like Timmy my God. And less than Mary too. By now I guess I’m so loose down there that they just slip right out.”

“That’s far more detail than I need,” I said. “Or want. Or can bear”

“He’s gorgeous Marcela,” Alana said. “I don’t mean cute either like all babies. I mean he’s actually good-looking, like handsome. Who has a handsome infant?”

I went over to see for myself and it was true. The squirt had like this tiny chiseled jaw and everything. I leaned over, put my hand on the back of Marcela’s neck and kissed her on the forehead.

“What do you see when you look at him Marcela?” Alana asked. “What do you feel?”

“Love. I feel love.”

“Don’t give me that. What do you
feel
?”

“That’s what I feel, I’m sorry.”

“What is it though?”

“It’s Love. That thing that takes all these different forms. I feel it strongly when I look at him, the way your body feels cold.”

“Not now it doesn’t, it’s like a sauna in here.”

“Sorry, I made the mistake of telling ma that the baby needs a few days to adjust to the loss of the womb’s warmth.”

“Ah,” Alana said. “It all falls into place.”

“My fault.”

“
Love
you say, hmm.”

“What?” I said.

“Nothing, just that love is an inarguably good thing it seems.”

“And?”

“Well there didn’t have to be Love you know. Love didn’t have to exist, right Mar?”

“I don’t know if it had to exist or not but I’m not sure it’s all you’re cracking it up to be,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I know this is going to sound weird but this kind of love is almost too intense. It hurts a bit. It feels almost like loss.”

“Well you’ve lost me.”

“What’s so hard to understand Alana?” I said. “This little sucker came out of her very body. What’s Bill for example? Some fat guy she met in a bar?”

Marcela laughed but raised her palm and winced. It hurt to laugh she said and Alana wondered aloud what laughter was anyway.

“I’ve never been in a bar in my life by the way,” Marcela added when the pain had subsided. “And Bill’s not fat either. I mean it Casi, don’t say anything to him about his weight, he’s very sensitive about how fat he’s gotten.”

“Oh man,” said Alana. “I think I know what you mean about the tinge of loss in love and what’s worse I think I can explain it.” She waited for us to ask her to do so but we said nothing and she continued anyway. “It’s not
like
loss, it is loss. What you’re feeling, and this is neither the time nor place of course, is the actual loss that is the inevitable end of all love, barely discernible but nagging.”

“What? You mean like glimpsing the future?”

“I guess but what does that really mean,
the future
? What do you think Casi?”

“What do I know?” I said and just then we were interrupted by the gleeful screaming of Mary and Timmy in the other room. “And what’s up with that Marcela? Now she’s talking nonstop? What the hell?”