A Naked Singularity: A Novel (87 page)

“Did you make her laugh?”

“What?”

“Did you make her laugh because she hates to laugh.”

“Don’t think so, but I
have
tried.”

“There you go.”

“No, that can’t be it.”

“Fine don’t benefit from my hard-earned wisdom.”

“When did Debi get all this juice anyway? Where the hell’s Tom?”

“Vacation.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“That’s classified.”

“Classified what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s it been classified, that’s what.”

“I miss your meaning.”

“Well you just said the information is classified, so classified what?

What classification has it been given?”

“No no no.
Classified
speaks for itself. It’s a
res ipsa
that
loquiturs
or I suppose more accurately a
res
that
ipsa loquiturs
. Bottom line is if something’s classified then no one can know it.”

“That’s silly. Someone has to know it otherwise how could the determination have been made that it should be classified? Aside from that, just saying that something has been classified without more is almost senseless or at least highly unhelpful. Now if you tell me that something has been classified top secret, for example, now you’ve told me something meaningful, namely that only those with clearance to disseminate top secret material can be provided the information. Is that what you’re telling me? That the date of Tom’s return has been classified top secret?”

“That’s classified as well.”

“Never mind.”

“Besides, what are you worried about that toothless committee for? What are they going to do to you regardless of Debi’s designs? Fire probably the best young attorney to come through here since me? The only part of your body you have to worry about is your wrist because that’s what’s going to get slapped. On the other wrist, what you
should
be concerned about is Cymbeline, since by all accounts her animus towards you is both personal
and
business and that’s the worst kind.”

“How’s it business?”

“How? You do know Cymbeline’s the administrative judge don’t you?”

“Of course, everybody knows that. But how does that make it business?”

“Poor Casi, don’t you know this thing stretches all the way to Albany?”

“Albany? Stretches? What are you talking about?”

“What Albany? Did I say Albany?”

“Look, truth is I don’t give a fuck about either committee or whatever you want to call them. All I care about is writing. Writing this Kingg thing and saving his life with it. That’s all. The rest is bullshit and meaningless.”

“Now you’re on to something unmitigatedly true. You’re right to peg all this stuff as meaningless and that includes by the way, and forgive me for saying this, your deposed king on death row.”

“Wrong.”

“Actually the only thing that matters at this moment in time is Dark Energy.”

“ . . .”

“Did you hear me? Dark Energy.”

“I heard you.”

“You heard me, sure, but do you know what it means?”

“What about the genome project? It no longer matters?”

“That matters too of course but in a slightly different realm of human activity. You know about Dark Energy right?”

“What about it?”

“You know how Einstein when he checked his relativity math saw that it described a universe that was expanding and since he firmly believed it was not actually expanding he then created and threw in his cosmological constant to make the equations work and the universe they describe stable? You know how when it was later confirmed, by Hubble and others, that the universe was in fact expanding Einstein called the cosmological constant his biggest blunder? Well I guess it’s the mark of some people’s genius that even when they think they’re wrong they’re actually right as we now have Dark Energy, which certainly appears to exist and which functions very much like the constant.”

“I know all this, now tell me why Dark Energy is the only thing that currently matters.”

“You see we now know that the universe is not only expanding but it’s expanding
at an accelerating rate
. Think about that for a moment. The old picture was of a Big Bang followed by expansion until, impelled by gravity, all of the matter in the universe begins to attract itself at a rate greater than the rate of expansion causing the universe to contract and contract until it ends in the Big Crunch. Of course when cosmologists looked at the universe and took out their calculators they saw that there had to be a lot more mass and matter than they could account for, meaning the universe was full of not only what we could see but also an invisible Dark Matter that fills over ninety percent of it.”

“I have to go Con.”

“Okay let’s stay with Dark Energy then. Perhaps I have not adequately conveyed the sheer enormity of the accelerating expansion. The acceleration suggests there’s not going to be any big crunch after all. The universe will continue to expand infinitely! The universe is basically immortal and it is so thanks to Dark Energy which overcomes the attractive force of gravity with its own repellent force that drives the universe’s expansion. Do you follow me?”

“You’re being followed but maybe you can accelerate
the story
a bit.”

“I’ll cut to the chase. Man has created these new wide-field telescopes. We are going to look through these, both from the ground and in space, and we are going to figure out once and for all what this Dark Energy shit is. We cannot be expected to master that which we do not fully comprehend so once we
know
, with the help of these scopes, what Dark Energy and Dark Matter truly are then we will be ready to master the universe. There’s no question this is going to happen, it’s just a question of when. Don’t you see? The universe is going to keep on expanding forever and expansion is just another word for progress. When a chain of stores expands for example that’s good, that’s progress. Like the universe, Man is expanding at an accelerating rate and he’s doing this through technology. Do you doubt this? Because no one of the slightest mental competence does. The growth of technology and knowledge has not recently been steady, it’s been exponential. If you magically transported a man from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. he would eventually adjust to the intervening changes. But take a man from as recent as 1800 and put him in our world with handheld computers and planes and particle accelerators and satellites and space exploration and ATMs and cell phones and nuclear power plants and he would lose his limited mind in about five hours! The same is true of us if we could travel into the future. After all the guy in 1800 didn’t think there was a lot left to invent and discover did he? He couldn’t have conceived of
this
right? So obviously things are going to happen in the next centuries that we cannot now even conceive of. The future world will be more unrecognizable to us than our present one would be to the 1800 guy. I used to say that in five hundred years we will not recognize human beings or society because of things like the Human Genome Project but now I see that it’s going to come a lot sooner than that. And that, my friend, is why Dark Energy is all that matters right now. Because we are going to solve the ultimate riddles of the universe and ensure that this remarkable force that ensures universal progress and immortality is bent to our will. Men and women don’t matter, only Man does. Man right now, armed with his technology, just feels like such an unstoppable force. Man is on the precipice of conquering the universe and at a time like that men like Kingg are sadly irrelevant.”

“Take it easy. Just two days ago Man, that near-deity that wields technology like an irresistible sword, forgot to pay the electric bill and the lights were turned off.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m taking this cab.”

“Take.”

. . .

“Brooklyn Heights. Columbia Heights and Orange.”

“I can leave you on Orange and Columbia Heights, is that okay?”

“Orange and Columbia Heights?”

“Right.”

“As opposed to Columbia Heights and Orange?”

“Indeed.”

“Fine.”

. . .

“Some blackout huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was here for the last one. Now that was a real blackout. Makes this one look like a brownout really. I even told my wife, this should’ve been classified a brownout. And I really saw no need for Times Square to have been placed on the TITS either. Not for nothing but it’s very hard to drive, let me tell you, when it’s that bright. It’s like drifting towards the sun or something. Like when a ship comes off its orbit in those science fiction movies, ha ha!”

“Yeah.”

. . .

“Here we go.”

“Thanks, keep the change.”

“Consider it kept pal.”

Humana, humana aya . . 
.

—Portly fellow standing outside Angus’s door.

Step on a crack break your mother’s back
. That is, if you step on a crack on the sidewalk, either the planned ones that result from those cement squares they create or the ones that stem from elemental corrosion, then your mother will, as a result, sustain that rather severe back injury. So not wanting that to happen I walked in the stilted manner required, my steps sometimes long, sometimes short, without pattern, and my head always down and looking; so that I was incidentally able to spot immediately the half-globe paperweight that contained a miniature Manhattan island, which island one could create snow on through mere inversion. The thing lay unattended on the sidewalk, which allowed me to invoke a further adage: the one that states that finders may keep while losers only weep. I snatched it up and continued walking home. Only I then decided that I should instead strive to step on every crack and the achievement of that slowed me down considerably.

The storm door to my apartment building had this compulsively effective spring that resisted with all its might any effort to open said door so when I absentmindedly let go of the knob while standing in the doorway the door came flying back to slam me in the shoulder, spinning me towards the street and freeing the globe of my hand’s grip that I may watch it land on the edge of the top step, triggering the globe’s sudden explosion, its protective dome of glass instantly dividing into countless dull diamonds that accelerated away from each other, the flakes of synthetic snow dropping without life onto the cement, the water expanding in thin waves to mark the step in astral-shaped black, and the now exposed plastic skyline limply descending the three steps aboard its solid base until hitting bottom. I didn’t clean up or anything, I just went in.

And although I heard nothing as I walked up the stairs to the second floor I distinctly felt that some one or thing was in the area. What I in fact saw on the second floor was, I gathered, a man. A portly fellow standing outside Angus’s door. He stayed in the shadow of the corner, a corner I would have to pass to go up to my apartment. He spoke:

“Hey pal,” he said in a way that made me think he knew me and I was supposed to know him, making more than a terse greeting expected. I said something in return and he took a step forward and out of the dark. He was big. He had short black hair and white clean-shaven skin. He passed his hand by his mouth and raised his cheek up and down with the corner of his mouth. He wore what looked like a uniform—dark gray or blue or even faded black, I couldn’t tell—with a white shirt and a dark tie held in by a zipper that ended chest high at two significant lapels. He was absolutely familiar and I’m using that word in its strict sense, meaning he was like family, but I also knew I had never seen him before. That or I had seen him so many times that the sight of him had lost all meaning. I struggled to speak, which I wouldn’t have even tried to do but for the fact that he seemed to expect me to.

“Do I? Do we know each other? I’m sorry.”

“C’mon pal, you know that I know that you know that we don’t know each other.”

“Oh.” I looked away and went to knock on the door.

“Never mind that,” he said. “Angus isn’t home. And I don’t know the names of those other two nuts but they ain’t home neither.”

“Oh, you know Angus?”

“Sure I know him. How else would he know me?”

“Makes sense.”

“Humana humana aya uh, would you do me a favor there pal?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you have a kern?”

“A what?”

“A kern. I understand you can make a phone call if you have a kern, I’m not from here.”

“Oh a coin? Where you from?”

“Bensonhoist, 328 Chauncey Street. Or 728 I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, Bensonhurst’s Brooklyn. Pretty much the same rules apply throughout here with regards to pay phones and the like.”

“I had a phone once but I got rid of it, you married kid?”

“No.”

“Good thinking, keep it that way ho! Now what about that kern? Don’t think of it as a loan, think of it as an investment in the corporation of me. I have big ideas.”

“I might have one,” I said. “Let me see.” I started digging into my many pockets but found nothing. I took my time and felt my fat companion losing patience until:

“Come on!!” he said shooting his open hands out from his body and bending his knees slightly.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I don’t have one.”

“Sorry,” he said and did that cheek thing.

“All right . . . but I have to go.” I started up the stairs then turned back. “I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“I didn’t throw it wo ho!”

I laughed.

“Just kidding,” he said.

“So?” I said surprised at my apprehension.

“Herbert. Herbert John.”

Thank God
I thought. “Well nice to meet you Herbert,” I said. “I’m Casi.”

“Oh you’re Casi huh? I have a message for you.”

“What is it?” I said.

“A detective came by looking for you.”

“I’m sorry, a what-tective?”

“A detective, NYPD I suppose. He said your name pal, wanted to talk to you.”

“Said my name? You sure?”

“Yup, said Casi, remember it clear as a bell.”