A Naked Singularity: A Novel (8 page)

The driver was the very picture of energy, darkening at various times significant portions of the dividing screen with his seemingly limitless body while his bellow filled the rest of the cab in almost visible sound waves.

“You work in the courts huh chief?”

“Yup.”

“You one of them there DAs working night court son?”

“No.”

“Well you sure look like a lawyer. You know wearing that suit at one thirty in the a.m. and all, tell you that.”

Oh man. This was New York, you weren’t supposed to have to talk to anyone when all you wanted was to stand mute but this pause was going into labor and my interrogator had locked his eyes on the rear-view in predatory wait, so:

“Yeah I’m a lawyer but I’m with the bad guys.”

“What do you mean mac?”

“I’m a defender of the public.”

“Uh?”

“I defend the public from—”

“What?”

“I’m a public defender.”

“Really? Wow that must be something.” He mulled it over noisily. “A public defender in New York City. I mean this has got to be like the crime capital of the world right bub?”

“Well—”

“I read somewhere that someone is killed every hour in New York City.”

“That seems a bit—

“This is one violent city.”

—actually absurdly—

“Not for the weak.”

—high.”

“That’s great for you though right champ? I mean you get that experience.”

“I guess.”

“Cause you guys get paid shit right boss? I hear the trick is get that experience a few years then go into private practice, which is where the money is. Next thing you know, you’re charging five, six hundred dollars an hour, that’s real money,” this guy wasn’t even pausing for air, “take my brother-in-law for example, he’s a lawyer. Not a public defender, a real lawyer. Anyways, that’s a guy’s really got his act together. Married to my sister, the fuck. They got two kids. He’s like a what do you call
senior partner?
at one of those big Fifth Avenue firms. I think he does like trademark work you’ve probably heard of him his name’s Jack. Anyway this guy really knows how to live. Big house over in Jersey he’s got this seventy-inch Television with a perfectly flat screen that automatically turns on when your favorite shows are on so you don’t miss them, you know, by accident. Seventy inches!”

“Yeah those guys make money,” I said near tears. “Make your first left up there.”

“Oh you don’t know. We’ll go to a titty bar and this guy will drop two, three thousand dollars easy. They love him there. Love! Best of all, his wife can’t say shit. Not at the rate he’s bringing the cash in! You know what though kid?” Now he turned and looked me directly in the eye while I cursed myself for not having listened to goddamn Alex Reeger. “You look like you’re real young. If you work hard and make the right connections I bet you could end up just like him in a couple of years.”

“This is it,” I said trying to contain my exultation.

“Six bucks chief. Just remember what I said. You can be like my brother-in-law. You can be Jack.”

“Thanks.”

“I do have one question for you though before you go,” all gravity now.

“What’s that?”

“How can you represent someone you
know
is guilty?”

I took my four bucks change and returned half. I watched this guy take his dough but all I kept imagining was Jack’s suburban construction raptly coming to responsorial attention for the suddenly resurgent Monolith as it chanted the rhythmic, synchronized intro to Sajak’s
Rota . . . For . . . tunae!!
He asked again. I summoned the tattered vestiges of my concentration, looked him in the eye, and answered his question:

“Practice,” I said.

The Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker (environs Brooklyn) is distinguishable mainly by the fact it’s got a yella belly and is sucking sap!

—The Sanitation Worker’s Guide to Ornithological Species, Vol. XII.

It was marrow-petrifying, prayer-inducingly cold and I couldn’t find my goddamn keys. I was frantically patting myself all over and doing so in historic Brooklyn Heights, an
idyllically tree-lined
neighborhood immediately off and to the right of the Brooklyn Bridge. The architectural charisma of that ancient bridge, the clear view of Manhattan across the East River and, most importantly, the residential neighborhood’s proximity and transportational ease to nearby Wall $treet all conspired to spawn seven-figure brownstones and the people who could own them so that wherever you turned you saw what looked like gray-haired grandmothers but were in fact the actual mothers carrying their little blubber packages in chest-high kangaroo pouches on the Trinidadian nanny’s day off. Many longed to live in this land of the silver-haired kangaroo and as a result the exalted spectre of this neighborhood so hung over the surrounding areas that when looking at ads for apartments located in neighborhoods that were most decidedly not Brooklyn Heights you were nonetheless assured
Brooklyn Heights Vicinity
. Consequently, for an apartment roughly the size of a manila envelope I paid the kind of rent that could pull some countries out of a recession and at that moment, it occurred to me, I was paying it solely to provide shelter for Casper the Friendly Ghost who bound my keys and likely lay on the wobbly semicircle table near my front door.

I thought about Casper and wondered how someone with such soft edges could do this to me after so many years of one-sided friendship, thought about:
a two-year-old in my aunt’s apartment; yellow flowered bed sheets delineating rooms and trapping icy air-conditioning: ¿is it three yet? No. Casper comes when the little hand is on the three and the big hand on the twelve. okay. ¿which one is the three? : Do you love me? Yes. One to ten?
∞

I remembered all that, watched the figurative mercury plummet while my powers of reasoning suffered greatly, and somewhere in there I semi-concluded that maybe it was all meet and just that I should sleep on the street that night like the open-sored guy outside arraignments. So I curled into a ball there by the door to start slumbering only I started shivering so bad I couldn’t stop and the sound of my teeth like machine gun fire then a low guttural moan that I eventually realized was coming from me and those two competing sounds so disturbed me, so exacerbated the pain in my ear, that I decided I would make a more significant effort to sleep indoors that night.

Which was about the time I had an auditory hallucination informed by recent memory whereby a recondite voice said
hey being that we’re friends now we should perhaps have a copy of each other’s keys so we don’t get negligently locked out and so forth
which in turn spurred the instant storyteller into acting like a cinematic Lotharian suitor by throwing icy acorns at the second-story window of one Alyona Karn in place of ringing a doorbell that never worked. Alyona’s uncle was the proud owner of the general recipient of my acorn pelts and of my apartment contained within. In addition to being the sixty-year-old father of a preschooler he allowed Alyona to live there footloose and rent-free provided he would superintend. Alyona in turn, and unbeknownst to uncle, allowed two others, Angus Glass and Louis Sands, to live in the apartment without paying rent in exchange for their promise to pay all necessary bills and expenses; necessary meaning digital cable, satellite programming, broadband internet, phone, food, toothpaste, electricity, water et cetera. This pleased him to no end and more than once he bragged that
I have in essence extricated myself from our system of pay to play. Currency has no meaning to me. I am a twenty-eight-year-old who does not have a bank account yet my refrigerator is always full. Bills arrive in my name and get paid without me so much as opening the envelope. This
—
extreme nonconsumerism
—
is something that has come to be associated with illegality has it not?

Now several acorns had successfully flown their sorties, cutting through the frigid air to form interrupted parabolas, when I began to conceive the inconceivable. Could they all be asleep? Not home? Was there a difference if either meant sleeping on the street? The three of them were good customers of Columbia University. Alyona was purchasing a doctorate in Philosophy with an emphasis on either the eighteenth century British empiricists or else the work of Sextus Empiricus I could never recall. Angus was a twenty-six-year-old undergrad gravitating without the slightest volition towards a Bachelor’s in Psychology and Louie a graduate student trying to master business with both eyes towards his first and true love: Advertising. Alyona and Angus never left the house and, to my knowledge, the three of them never slept, certainly not while it was dark out, yet there I stood with diminishing acorns in raw gloveless hands and, to all appearances, vastly alone. And I was just beginning to reflect on how I came to be so alone when I heard the sweet, redemptive sound of a door opening followed by cognizable human words.

“What are you trying to do, break our windows at a time when their continued integrity is of the utmost importance?” The speaker allowed maybe a third of his face to appear from behind the door and I saw that it was Alyona. “Come on, you’re letting the red out and the blue in.”

I moved inside the door to hear it close behind me. “My hero,” I said and emitted that little shudder you get with the initial blast of heat. He was shaking his head no as if I’d been all prodigal or something.

“You know what the key to getting inside a locked building is?” he said.

“Funny.”

“So?”

“It’s relaxing in my apartment,” I said moving up the stairs to the promise of greater heat but careful not to outpace my rescuer as that would have been weird.

“Good thing you listened to me then huh? I’m starting to think I’m . . . um.”

“Prescient?”

“Negative.”

“Clairvoyant?”

“Maybe.”

“Were you sleeping?” puzzled look. “No because you have that hat on, I didn’t know those were worn anymore outside of comic strips.”

“They’re not. And no because we have a guest, courtesy of Louis.”

“Let me guess.”

“Gorgeous.”

I spent the time on the stairs wondering if I could wait in the hall while Alyona got my key’s identical twin then just run up to my third floor apartment. Would that be rude and if so did that necessarily mean I had to go in since I had no legal or contractual obligation to avoid being rude nor had I promised anyone I wouldn’t be rude and in fact rudeness must be a rather natural state of human being since time immemorial to have necessitated invention of the word
rude
right? And even if this one time I acted in this eminently common manner would that be sufficient, standing alone, to make me a rude person? Moreover, if I did go in how quickly could I split given that I had just worked about seventeen straight hours? I mean without being rude.

“Suit and tie at this hour,” Alyona said opening the door. “That’s got to be brutal.”

“Not fun.”

“Hope I can find them Casi, think they’re in my room somewhere.”

I went in with Alyona, almost instinctively, having never resolved my little internal debate. “Casi my good man,” said Louie. “Come in dude, join the party.”

“I am in,” I said.

“I mean
in
in,” he said. “This is Traci.”

“Hey Traci how are you?” (The Traci part of this was a new trick I had recently picked up from a dental waiting room Glamour published the requisite decade earlier, which trick called for people like me to
repeat the name immediately for better memory retention
and shortly after reading that the dentist told me his name but I immediately forgot it because I couldn’t repeat it with that little vacuum thing resting on my lower row of choppers.)

“Hello,” Traci said.

“Casi?”

“Angus.”

“Who’s cooler, the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot?”

“I don’t know.”

“C’mon which?”

“I have no preference.”

“If you had to choose, gun to your head.”

“I guess I would then say Loch Ness but I stress that a gun would have to be involved.”

“See?” said Angus pointing at Louis.

“Defend that choice because four out of five say Bigfoot,” said Louis.

“Just cooler I don’t know. I’m tired.”

“C’mon make something up. But like the kind of things we say.”

“The kind of things you say? Fine, how’s this? The thought of a guy who looks at vaginas for a living dropping some toy in a body of water and spurring decades of debate in a certain underdeveloped segment of society reassures and comforts me with the power of designer truth. Happy?”

“Wait, it was a hoax?” said Louis.

“I will say this on Bigfoot’s behalf however. There
was
a movie,” said Angus a look of careful reconsideration on his face.

“Movie?” groaned Traci.

“Yeah, movie-theatre and everything. So we’re all settled in ready for this movie to start when suddenly from a door near the screen comes this like huge eight-foot-tall guy bearing a striking resemblance to Bigfoot—the very same Bigfoot about to star in the feature we plunked down five bucks to see. Well for once this sort of thing works and of course there follows a rush of about fifty eight-to-ten-year-olds flooding into the aisle and running up the incline to the exit. Anyway goddamn Bigfoot gets the brilliant idea that he’s going to like pursue the kids for a while, you know ham it up. Well long story short he steps on a box of melted Raisinets, becomes involuntarily airborne and lands on like some seven-year-old girl who proceeds to have what theatre management termed
a brief respite in cardiactivity
. I think they banned those kind of promotional stunts at that theatre for like the next thirty-five years. You can’t do cool shit like that with Loch Nesses the way you can with Bigfeet. So basically I change my vote.”

“Me too,” said a resigned Louis. “I love hoaxes.”

“You love hoaxes?” said Alyona. “What do you think fucking Bigfoot was? Some clown named Ray Wallace photographing his wife in a Sasquatch suit!”