A Naked Singularity: A Novel (104 page)

Then I hit Centre and looked to the left to see the back of The Whale maybe half a block away. I felt a great fear then. It caught and strangled the breath in my throat and wouldn’t let go. I put my back to the building and watched The Whale walk away from me. And anyone who passed it coming toward me would invariably look back in horrified disbelief while others even crossed the street to avoid coming near it so that human traffic appeared to involuntarily part before the immense figure. I twirled the gold key in my pocket a couple of times just watching.

Then I let it go and followed The Whale.

I thought then that Alyona couldn’t be right because, while you would certainly expect to find someone like me in a world that had been quarantined from the healthy, there was no way someone like Marcela or Mary would be there with me. Along with a lot of other people I could think of.

Ballena made a left on Canal and I followed less than a block away. The paper that morning had a little feature called This Date in History and I thought of the first time Benitez had one of his fights go the distance. This was against Victor Mangual and it must have been the first time Wilfred began to grasp that he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted in the ring. That Life didn’t work that way. I wondered if he could even remember that day anymore and I guessed that Mangual probably felt pretty good when he recalled that day so there was that too. I thought how despite what Benitez and others look like today, people still slip in between ropes and into boxing rings. How every week, somewhere in the world, someone gets caught with a vicious left to the liver that steals their breath. How they grimace and drop and are then presented with a choice. How, unlike those who are barely conscious and obey their first instinct to try and rise, these fighters have a real choice to make. And they’re okay to the head so they know fully what’s happening and also often know they’re not going to be anything near the next Benitez so ultimately it doesn’t really matter if they get up or stay down. But they get up anyway. A lot of them stand up through the pain and get ready to absorb more if only because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do.

I quickened my pace and the distance between The Whale and I lessened a bit. I realized I never found out where in Florida Dane was from and where he would be returning to and I wondered if maybe he and Angus might not meet one day. Maybe Toomberg was in Boca Raton and they could all get together there.

Then I thought that if Dane was right then the person assigned to hang me had better hope I didn’t see him coming. And I was going to do something about that girl with the distended stomach too. I decided then that I would maybe keep practicing law. Yeah I’d lost my way a bit there but there was still time to get a cozy office in that area where I could wait for leggy women in black veiled hats to appear with cases that would involve me in all sorts of madcap adventures. I let the space to The Whale grow. I didn’t worry he would suddenly turn and spot me since I knew from experience that any such movement by him would announce itself in advance and with enough warning for me to duck out of sight.

The distance between us grew. The restorative sun that shines on sinner and saint alike warmed my face and I resolved to leave. Everywhere around me was in a still quiet. Then the slow soft strains of an actual violin filled the air. When I turned my head I saw a luminous girl no older than twelve standing behind an open violin case at her feet. She held the end of the bow with just three fingers and her perfect circle of a face seemed to comment on every note. The Missa Solemnis? Maybe. I stared at her as if from a spell and heard what I can only describe as Truth.

But when I looked back it was no ephemeron but rather The Whale, immense and eternal, staring directly at me. It displayed its version of a smile as surrounding people stopped what they were doing, looked grimly at the distorted scabrous face, then followed its eyesight-line to me. They looked at me as if with pity. Ballena stood perfectly still, waiting, I thought, to see which way I would run before pursuing. At first I moved nothing except my head and mouth and that only to tell the violinist to beat it, which she sort of did.

Then I took, on unsteady legs, tentative steps towards Ballena. The snarl smile on The Whale grew as it came forward to meet me. I kept walking and the beast continued to grow before me until even the slightest detail of its face could be discerned. The eyes didn’t line up, the chin seemed almost serrated, and the teeth were more like fangs. And the few people in the immediate area had no idea what they were about to see but seemed to shy away from us nonetheless. We were maybe eleven feet apart.

At that instant in Time, from that location in Space, I heard the beginnings of a menacing noise off to the margins of where we stood, like scores of cosmic locomotives loosed and gathering in the distance, a low rumble that swelled with the passing seconds but otherwise remained the same, and the sky managed to darken with the sun lit brighter than ever; I saw the horizons rise as if to merge directly above us while the ground beneath our feet began to sink; jagged swaths of earth along with the structures and people atop were disappearing concentrically as if into a drain and countless humans whistled by making sounds that were either pleas for mercy or yelps of celebration; I saw events and deeds displaced from their proper setting and from notions like past or future and I stared, through regret, at all the ill I’d wrought.

There I stood, rooted, waiting for the disordered wave to arrive.

The wave sped in approach and would either carry stellar material from the farthest reaches of the universe and bury it violently into our very bodies or else take what was already within us, that which was central to our core, and from it form new stars.