A Naked Singularity: A Novel Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  Copyright © 2008 by Sergio De La Pava

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in a limited edition by the author in 2008

  University of Chicago Press edition 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14179-4 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-14179-9 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14180-0 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pava, Sergio de la.

  A naked singularity : a novel / by Sergio de la Pava.

  —University of Chicago Press edition.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14179-4 (paperback: alkaline paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-14179-9 (paperback: alkaline paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.A9545N35 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  a naked singularity

  SERGIO DE LA PAVA

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO AND LONDON

  praise for de la pava and a naked singularity

  “One of the best and most original novels of the decade. . . . If you like The Wire, if you like rewarding, difficult fiction, if you like literary, high quality artistic and hilarious yet moving novels that are difficult to put down, I can’t recommend A Naked Singularity enough.”

  SCOTT BRYAN WILSON, The Quarterly Conversation

  “A Naked Singularity is at its heart a simple crime noir, the kind of intelligent caper story that simply breeds such basic narrative needs as conflict and drama, in order to make it an intriguing tale to begin with. . . . The very definition of a hidden gem, it is just the thing for those who enjoy taking chances in the arts every so often.”

  CHICAGO CENTER FOR LITERATURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

  “A major book, capable of standing up against works by other postmodern writers such as William Gaddis and Robert Coover. Indeed, I’d argue that if Doestoevsky was alive today and set out to write Crime and Punishment while taking into account the contemporary world, what he might end up with is something like A Naked Singularity.”

  BRIAN EVENSON, author of Fugue State

  “A masterpiece. . . . Propels the reader into a literary maelstrom worthy of Pynchon and Gaddis. . . . A book of . . . unsettling oddness and power.”

  STEVE DONOGHUE, managing editor, Open Letters Monthly

  “[A Naked Singularity] hits the Moby-Dick Trifecta—a novel of ideas grounded in extensive shopfloor knowingness and given form by a smart use of the Lego pieces of genre—and that’s no small accomplishment. It’s weird, it puts the emphasis in the wrong place, there aren’t enough commas; it knows its own mind, so to speak, and that’s valuable in and of itself. It’s a formidable book.”

  CARLO ROTELLA

  “The voice here is what’s astonishing: informed but colloquial, flippant but engaged. . . . The world is often exaggerated in this book—as it well might be when described through a first-person narration—but the world described is always recognizably our own, with all of its horrific flaws.”

  with hidden noise

  “One of the best and most original novels of the decade. . . . Both an innovative novel of ideas and a plot-driven thriller. . . . Full of clever, punning prose. De La Pava seems able to master every genre and every possible register of prose. [This novel] announces the presence of one of the most interesting and important voices in contemporary American literature.”

  EMMETT STINSON, Triple R Radio in Melbourne, Australia

  “A Naked Singularity is one of those books so large, so ambitious and so bonkers that it makes the task of writing a review almost impossible.”

  WILLIAM RYCROFT, The Blurb

  . . . for you, Beauty

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Three

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  part one

  The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any that act wisely, that seek after God.

  They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one.

  —Psalm 14: 2, 3

  chapter 1

  Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?

  —epigraph above entrance to Criminal Court.

  —noise background,

  My getting out or what?!

  Eleven hours and Thirty-Three minutes since meridian said the clock perched high atop a ledge on the wall and positioned to look down on us all meaning we were well into hour seven of this particular battle between Good and Evil and, oh yeah, that was Good taking a terrific beating with the poultry-shaped ref looking intently at its eyes and asking if it wanted to continue. We were what passed for Good there: the three of us and anyone we stood beside when we rose to speak for the mute in that decaying room (100 Centre Street’s AR-3); and in that place, at that moment, Evil had us surrounded.

  The puppetmaster pulling strings from behind the bench was a bloated pink one on loan from the Bronx. The nameplate directly before him announced J. MANOS in calligraphic gold. Its owner and referent had decided no one would taste freedom that arctic night and had been slowly apprising us of that decision for the aforementioned seven-plus hours. And all that while he fostered this ugly habit of echoing the end of his sentences, but only after the kind of delay that fooled you into thinking you were in the clear, as in bail is set in the amount of ten thousand dollars . . . ten thousand dollars and often all emphatic(!) too.

  The DA was essentially bony but with a slightly bulbous face beneath a mushroom hairdo that rose and expanded from dark root stem to bottle-blond cap. She displayed no discernible personality or affect as she uttered (through an inconsistent lip-distorting-yet-thankfully-dry lisp) the customary declarations of mock moral outrage like this defendant hath warranted on every one of his twenty three cathes, this defendant itha four-time predicate felon and this defendant hath used twelve different aliathes. Unsurprisingly, these words—when spoken in those or similar combinations and to that audience—were more than sufficiently persuasive and as such invariably caused high numbers with commas to emerge from
behind the nameplate. The numbers then attached to a body, one that by then had traversed the entirety of a creaking assembly line, and as a result the body stayed in.

  [bod-y (bŏd´ē) n., pl.—ies. 9. CJS. Inarguably odious term used by N.Y.C. Department of Correction and other court personnel to denote incarcerated criminal defendants: There are three hundred bodies in the system so we should be busy. He’s bringing the next batch of bodies down now, I’ll let you know if your guy’s one of them.]

  And this was before anything even remotely insane had happened when I still occasionally thought about things like how it was that people were reduced to bodies, meaning the process. How you needed cops to do it and how their master, The System, needed to be constantly fed former people in order to properly function so that in a year typical to the city where the following took place about half a million bodies were forcibly conscripted. And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wished, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate’s degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers’ need for overtime.

  None of which tells you the exact process by which someone, let’s say You, becomes a body, which account I sort of impliedly semi-promised, so imagine you are on the street, then in an incident, then a stranger’s hand is on your melon making sure it doesn’t bang the half-blue/half white American-only car with the colorful bar across the top. Imagine that, easy if you try. Now the police have twenty-four hours to get you in front of a judge for your criminal court arraignment but if you’re the perceptive sort you will monitor Time’s ceaseless consumption of this period yet rightly detect no corresponding increase in ambient urgency.

  Your first stop is the appropriate precinct where the arresting officer or A/O stands you before another cop known as the Desk Sergeant. He tells him the tale of your alleged sin and the two, speaker and audience, join their heads to decide what section(s) of the New York Penal Law to charge you with. Now you’ve been informally charged and with that out of the way you may be asked to remove all your clothes (the propriety of this being debated at the time) and kindly spread open your ass. This strip search is one of several ways that additional charges can still arise so while you may have been arrested for a triviality like displaying an open bottle of Heineken to the public—a prosecution normally conducted in a decidedly minor key and resolved right at arraignments—your glove clad searcher may now discover what you most sought to conceal, that you are currently holding one of the area’s surfeit of readily-available-yet-technically-illicit anesthetics in amounts ranging anywhere from the ghostly residue of celebrations past to multiple powder bricks and in locations as presumably inviolable as within your underwear or even up your ass or maybe you possess one of the other less popular forms of the all-inclusive law enforcement term contraband. In that way can minor breaches be converted into major faults and this happens often, not occasionally. The police know this and are therefore unlikely to ignore even nonsense like the above Consumption of Alcohol in a Public Place (AC §10.125). People like you know this as well yet permit it to alter their conduct not in the slightest, ensuring in the process that the number of bodies will always remain fairly constant.

  Another way you have to be careful not to pick up more charges is by resisting capture, even if only verbally, because such conduct can incite some of your lesser blue pacifists into a bit of retributory violence, with said violence then necessitating that you be charged with Resisting Arrest (PL §205.30) if only by way of explaining your injuries; which injuries better be minor lest they result in the added felony charge of Assault in the Second Degree (PL §120.05[3]), a more extensive explanation whereby a misdemeanor assault becomes a felony one by virtue of involving a police officer.

  Still at the precinct, you are printed, each of your fingers rolled in black ink then onto vestal white paper. The resulting bar code is sent to Albany for the purpose of producing a rap sheet, an accordiony collection of onion paper that means everything where you are. It means everything because sentencing like Physics and other sciences builds on what came before so that the worse your past was, the worse your present will be, and no sane person doubts the rap sheet’s depiction of the past since it’s based on unalterable fingerprints and not relative ephemera like names or social security numbers. I say no sane person because when once confronted by an individual who steadfastly claimed not to recall in the slightest what I deemed to be a highly memorable conviction on his sheet and one that substantially increased his exposure, I asked him if he planned to launch a Lockean defense whereby he could not be held responsible for something he didn’t remember as such act was not properly attributable to his personal identity at which point he gave me the blankest of stares in response then started saying increasingly odd things in rapid succession until I realized that he not only sort of knew what I was talking about, which was weird enough, but that he was undeniably insane and my ill-advised Locke reference was like the thing coming after the final straw to tip him over the Axis-II-Cluster-A edge, as it were, so that I thenceforth stopped doing things like that.

  Now there’s all this paperwork the A/O has to fill out and he’ll stick you in the precinct’s cell while he fills. But first, if the case has any seriousness whatsoever, he and his friends want to accumulate evidence against you and since the best evidence is quite often the very words you emit, they mostly want you to make a statement, and trust me when I tell you that by the time they’re through with you you’ll probably want you to make a statement as well. Because while the police operated under something called the forty-eight hour rule which stated that an officer charged with any kind of official misconduct cannot be questioned about it for forty-eight hours—giving him time to, among other things, retain a criminal defense attorney—you are currently operating under a different forty-eight hour rule. This one says the police can harass, intimidate, lie, cheat, steal, cajole, make false promises, and delay your arraignment (where you would be assigned an attorney who would most assuredly not allow you to speak to the police) for forty-eight hours if that’s what it takes to extract your statement. And it is following all that, not at the very instant you’re arrested as mass entertainment would have you believe, that they will advise you of your Miranda rights so your ensuing statement will be admissible.

  And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

  Digression begins. So Ernesto Miranda is the Miranda of the warnings and the same year a famous shooter(s) would later scatter John Fitzgerald all over Jackie he was twenty-three and creating smaller-scale mayhem. A high school dropout with the mental development of an eighth-grader, Miranda had already served one year on an attempted rape conviction. In a perpendicular universe, an eighteen-year-old Phoenix girl who I’m going to say strove to dress like the glossy girls she saw in magazines and to listen to the same records as her more desirable classmates indisputably acted as attendant to some movie theater’s candy counter, the true home of such an operation’s profits incidentally. She sold synthetic butter and liquid Real Things and when done tried to go home. Enter Miranda who interrupted her trip home. He grabbed her, dragged her into his car, and drove her out into the Red, Brown, and Purple of the Painted Desert where he raped her.

  Fast forward one week when the girl briefly saw what she thought was the car driven by her assailant, a 1953 Packard. She reported this belief to the police, telling them the license plate of the car was DFL312. That plate turned out to
be registered to an Oldsmobile but the police discovered that DFL317 was registered to a Packard—a Packard owned by Twila N. Hoffman, Ernesto Miranda’s girlfriend. Off to 2525 West Mariposa (Oeste Butterfly) Street where Miranda was found to fit the description given by the girl. He was arrested and placed in a line-up. The girl said he most resembled the rapist but failed to make an unequivocally positive identification.

  Detectives took Miranda into Interrogation Room Two where he was told he had been identified as the rapist and asked if he wanted to make a statement. He did, a signed written confession that took two hours to elicit following his initial denial of guilt and that included a section saying he understood his rights. Miranda was charged and assigned an attorney. The attorney, Alvin Moore, had plenty on his neck, however, and for a well-spent $100 he objected that the confession had been illegally obtained because no one told Ernesto, prior to his statement, that he had the right to an attorney. The trial judge said no way to that and after the jury consequently heard the confession, and was surely impressed by it, he got to prescribe twenty to thirty years in special housing as a remedy. Ernesto wondered if he could appeal and he could.

  The ACLU grabbed the case and 976 days later they were in front of the court that never gets overruled with John Flynn saying, and this is a direct quote (no it isn’t): “look dudes, and I refer to you thusly because this is way pre-O’Connor/Ginsberg, your Fifth Amendment deal is only protecting the rich and powerful: those who are brainy enough to know what their rights are or who have the dough to rent a lawyer.” The Warren Supremes actually agreed and, in the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy, held that before future police could torment some illiterate sap who nobody cares about into confessing his sins, real or imagined, they would have to inform him of certain rights not covered in your average eighth-grade Social Studies class. As is customary in these all-too-rare instances, Miranda’s conviction was reversed and his case set down for retrial—a trial to be conducted without his now tainted confession, without any physical evidence of a struggle, and with a dubious identification. In a stroke of all-too-common prosecutorial serendipity, however, Miranda’s common-law wife, the previously mentioned Twila, emerged to testify that Miranda had admitted the rape to her. The fact that she and Miranda were then involved in a bitter custody dispute—are these ever otherwise described?—was conveniently ignored and the new jury said something to the effect of where are your Supremes now because we agree with the first jury. Miranda was eventually paroled then, the same year his country celebrated its two hundredth birthday party, stabbed and killed in a Phoenix bar fight. As the police arrested one of his assailants they took care to read him his Miranda rights in English and Spanish. Digression ends.