A Naked Singularity: A Novel (84 page)

“I understand.”

“So what’s with the face?”

“No face.”

“Yes face. What is it? What are you thinking?”

“No just that, well I hate to say it but you know there’s no real proof in science either right?”

“What? Have you lost the little remaining sanity you possessed? Have you not heard of a little guy named Einstein? Well he
proved
that Newton was full of it when that apple fell on his head and shit. E = MC
²
and all that other crap was proof, simple as that.”

“Well what he did was propose a theory and all subsequent experiments and observations have conformed to the results one would expect to get if that theory was true.”

“Sounds suspiciously like proof to me.”

“Except the same was true of Newton’s work for many years and under your criteria he was allegedly proven wrong.”

“No you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

“More importantly we can never really
verify
any of science’s claims in the sense of proving them to be indubitably true. They just aren’t susceptible to that kind of an operation. Hume showed this, ask Alyona he can explain it. As for what makes something a science it’s not the fact that its statements can be verified, it’s that, unlike in Psychology, they can be falsified, that is, found to be untrue. Read your Popper on that.”

“My
popper
? The only Physics my dad cares about is the shortest possible path his beer can travel to his lips.”

“Not your popper, Karl Popper.”

“As for this Hume character, what does he know? When did he write? The fucking thirteen-hundreds? What did he write on? Fucking papyrus? Fuck him, he’s just bitter that science has completely co-opted his cheesy field. Let him keep speaking ill of science and I’ll shove my new terabyte iPod up his ass, see how he likes that.”

“All right, I’m going to get some food, you coming?”

No thanks, he said, and I left.

Outside there was a slight but palpable energy in the air. It was one of those moments when strangers talk to each other and speak principally of when they discovered the situation and its resemblance to entertainment. People, many of them wearing foreheads stained with dirt, were reduced to long-obsolete forms of communication. Those with battery operated radios would use them to intercept radio waves carrying a stray datum here or there and then relay it to others using their mouths. They did this with such force that even non-participants like me could, through mere presence, become informed. In this manner, I learned that because of the darkened traffic lights no cars would be allowed on the roads until power had been restored. I would not be going home. People were stuck on elevators, people in subway cars, in buildings with electronic doors. Police were everywhere. The diner wasn’t open but a person, probably the owner, was standing outside the door with a baseball bat looking everyone in the eye. A woman handed me a leaflet. It said that if the blackout affected my
thermal status
there was a place I could stay and it identified that place and it listed the symptoms of hypothermia and I wondered how they, the organization, managed to get the leaflet printed. I wandered about. Nothing was open. I had no idea where Alyona and Louie could have gone. A couple of blocks away I found an open store lit only by the sun. A lot of people gathered near the open door of this place as if cheered by the proprietor’s defiance. They spoke and planned and in general behaved like a community. I said nothing. I bought some things to eat then left.

My apartment didn’t feel as cold when I got back.

Then the sun left and it started getting colder.

I put gloves on.

It got dark.

I went under blankets.

I pulled the sofa away from the windows to the center of the room, the last place in the apartment it would fit. I sat on the middle of the sofa fully dressed with every blanket I owned on top of me. I curled up into a ball. My knees were to my chest and my arms around them, my chin was between my knees. I rocked back and forth under the blankets. The only noise was my breathing. I ducked my head under the blanket and breathed my own exhaust for a while. I started feeling sick so I popped my head out. I didn’t know what time it was but it was completely dark in there. I tried to burrow inside my own body to find the body heat I was told would be there but found nothing. I got a little scared.

I started to have strange doubts. I allowed myself to think that maybe I really was the only existing person in the world. After all, I could never truly
know
that anyone else existed, at least not the way I
knew
, at that very moment, that
I
existed and was shaking uncontrollably. Maybe I was just a brain in a vat with some alien clown going overboard while stimulating the area for unfathomably cold.

So that’s where I was; the quiet I had longed for for such a long time had finally come and I found that more than anything it caused me to doubt the very material world that had left me hugging only myself. I wondered where the survival pamphlet was. I wondered really . . . if maybe . . . well . . .

um . . . if it was actually possible to die just like that, in an apartment in historic Brooklyn Heights, with every blanket I owned draped all over me and no one there to witness or document it.

I hadn’t heard a noise in hours but I decided I would check downstairs on the slight chance they hadn’t gone to Alyona’s cousin’s after all. And I didn’t so much knock as I just allowed my body to fall against the door. I heard some movement inside and relaxed so much as a result that I almost slumped to the ground. The door opened. I moved closer to make out the face and saw Angus, looking considerably worse but managing a weak smile.

“What time is it?” I said.

“No idea but God it’s cold. It’s inside me, is it inside you yet?”

“Yeah, I can’t stop shaking. Where are the others?”

“Some cousin or something, with heat.”

“How’d they get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a place with heat. A pamphlet. Let’s go there.”

“A pamphlet with heat?”

“A pamphlet identifying heat.”

“Where exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s cold.”

“So cold.”

“Come in. Let’s burn something. In the sink or tub. Books. Let’s start with this Hume sonuvabitch.” I went in. “Alyona comes back before leaving. I ask him to tell me about Hume before he goes and he hands me this book. I read it and you may be fucking right and here’s the weird part: I’m sure, sure as I can fucking be, that if I had not read this Hume individual the power would have come back by now. God I miss power so much.”

“I miss warmth . . . but can’t burn books.”

I sat in a big chair and pressed into one of its corners. I needed to stop moving and losing the benefit of whatever heat I had managed to build up in a particular spot. The candle that provided what little light the room had was flickering towards its end. I heard Angus’s breathing on the sofa across from me but saw his features less and less. We didn’t burn anything.

“Look outside,” Angus said. “Yesterday wherever you looked was a star so bright you couldn’t believe it was real. Tonight we get nothing.” The candle went out and I lost his face along with everything else in the room. There was nothing to look at; all we had left was our voices and the words they caused. In that dark it was as if we could see those words; they were our only reality. “Which is fitting as I see it, this sudden lack of galactic light, because make no mistake but that we have been abandoned by the very universe that contains us.”

“And that you seek to understand to completion.”

“Yes.”

. . .

. . .

“See the thing about that Jetsons lyric is there’s no conceivable way that
eep op ork ah ah
can translate into I love you. First there’s the fact that the alien language uses four different words whereas the alleged English translation famously uses only three. Then there is the matter of the repeated ah at the end of the alien phrase which would seem to mandate that, at a minimum, an accurate translation would be something like I love you
you
making the correct lyric something along the lines of
eep op ork ah ah and that means I love you you
. Casi?”

“ . . .”

We sat in the dark and said nothing and it kept getting colder and it kept feeling darker and we didn’t know what time it was and there was no noise in the streets. I had stopped shaking, instead the room shook while I sat there, frozen still.

“Look we’re obviously going to die tonight.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So I guess the only thing left to determine is who the greatest man ever lived was. Because ultimately greatness is the only thing that matters, the only thing that endures”

“We’re not
all
going to die. Just you and me . . . freeze to death . . . us.”

“So what? Far as we’re concerned the world ends tonight. Mankind ends tonight because tonight we’re mankind. Tonight ends.”

It was hard to both think and speak well, you had to choose.

“Plato, how’s that for a start Casi?”

“Yes, okay.”

“I mean that stuff ’s bought untold entertainment to untold kids.”

“Huh?”

“Play-Doh, the dude who invented Play-Doh.”

“No, no.”

“What then? What inventor?”

“No, no inventor, no.”

“Scientist?”

“Maybe.”

“What else is there?”

“ . . .”

“Fine I’ll throw some names out to roll the ball getting . . . um . . . yeah roll the ball getting . . . I mean the get balling. I’ll see your Plato and raise you an Aristotle how’s that? Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Christopher Marlowe—”

“You mean Shakespeare.”

“—never heard of him. Newton, Einstein, the guy with the cat, the uncertainty dude. The guy . . . Richard . . . um.”

“Dawson.”

“Yes, Richard Dawson. No wait, he hosted Survey Says that’s true but I don’t even think he ever produced it so no, not greatest man ever, but maybe Chuck Barris who both hosted
and
produced The Gong Show along with other seminal programs. So Chuck Barris is in there . . . and Chuck Berry too since they sound so much alike that it seems unfair to leave one out. That pretty much covers it don’t you think? Good, now let’s review our list and make sure we didn’t miss anyone. We have Homer . . . um . . . Simpson, Virgil. Aeneid. Who else did we say? Milton . . . Bradley. Bach, all the three B’s in fact, Bach, Leonard Bernstein and the other B. Hume, Kant, all the guys in that book, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, anybody who
went
to Berkeley. In fact anybody who went to any institution named after a dead philosopher including naturally Georgetown and Stanford, which are of course named after Phyllis George and Stanford Marsalis respectively. Gutenberg who conducted the Gutenberg trial. Nureyev Rudolph. Rudolph Valentino. Engelbert Humperdink for that matter. The guy who invented the Gouldberg variations, T.S. Eliot Gould. Oppenheimer and Manhattan, you know, of the Oppenheimer project. Eric’s son Leif, meaning Leif Garrett, who discovered Earth but watched Columbo get all the credit and even though he played for the Vikings was too much of a pussy to do anything about it. Hannibal. American Vespucci. Verdi. Vendredi. Veni, Vidi, Vici, all three of them. The Marx brothers, Karl
and
Groucho. The guys they worked with, Engels and Harpo. Socrates and the guy who poisoned him then put him in a hemlock. Darwin and the first guy who coined the term Darwinian. Don Quixote and his sidekick . . . Tonto . . . Villa I think. The guy who discovered the nap. The guy who founded the Freudian slip. Pasteur, the inventor of milk. The guy who unearthed the tango, the guy who discovered cash. The guy who wrote Tango and Cash. Locke along with Stock . . . even Barrel. Angelo meaning Michael Angelo. Who else Casi?”

“ . . .”

“Well there you have it then, I think that’s everyone. Who do we pick?”

“ . . .”

“Then we’ll do the women.”

“ . . .”

“Bottom line is I’m going to keep talking because if I’m talking then I’m not dying. No dead man has ever talked so
cogito ergo some
one who is talking, in this case me, cannot die, at least not insofar as they are talking per se ad infinitum. Understand? Anyway I’m ready to vote and I vote for Gilligan Glass, father of Angus Glass and lover of beef. I’m sorry what I said before about the beer. It weren’t true father! He’s a good man, a real man. Not like I was. He woke up every morning and did something he didn’t want to do. Now as my life ebbs away I realize I did something I didn’t want to do about three percent of the time. The other ninety-three percent of the time I
watched
people do what I wanted them to do. What I accomplished the last couple of days was great, no question about that, and don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me that finally achieving this achievement has led to my imminent death by in effect giving me the green light to expire now that I’ve achieved greatness, but the truth remains that what I’ve done is essentially simulate my own life. And now it’s over. I guess the only consolation is that I will not experience death since death is by definition something that cannot be experienced. It’s coming though . . . I can’t keep talking . . . there’s simply nothing left to say. Goodbye.”

“Bye.”

“Although I certainly didn’t think it would end with this kind of feeble whimper that’s for sure,” he sighed and sank lower. “No I always thought it would be like the end of Scarface whereby a veritable army would be required to take me out. I thought I would be raging against death with all my final breath. I certainly didn’t think my final demise would come because Alyona’s uncle read in Landlord Magazine that he could save money by installing electric heat. I didn’t think
that
. . . father please . . . help me . . . Gilligan Glass . . . that’s who I vote for.”

Angus stopped talking. He was asleep. I knew this because his breathing changed. I was in the chair.

I stayed awake, diving further and further into the chair and always conscious of my eyes being peeled. So I know I was awake when I saw DeLeon come to me, from out of the darkness and into a new slight light, one without independent basis, to show me that his face had been shattered open, its skin barely clinging to the flesh it once covered; the lower cheeks swollen outward in a parody of a smile. I looked away but he wanted me to see. I called to Angus. DeLeon said his face hurt. He said it hurt more with every passing minute. That the hurt didn’t go away, that I should know it continued to exist even after everything else had ceased to. That it was true pain. That I could try to imagine what it was like and still not truly
know
and that wanting it to go away meant next to nothing because it was a given. He said all that, the bloody remnants of his lips moving up and down exaggeratedly, and I looked away from him and into the black frigidity knowing that Angus was right and I was going to die that night. I pushed DeLeon away and fell forward out of the chair.