A Naked Singularity: A Novel
Read A Naked Singularity: A Novel Online
Authors: Sergio De La Pava
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 Z
39.48-1992 (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
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
.
chapter 1—Psalm 14: 2, 3
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.