A Naked Singularity: A Novel (15 page)

“Not down there man just the job, how long you been doing this?”

“A little over two years.”

“Oh man, you’re just a kid.”

“Older today.”

“Really? Congratulations, I suppose, then.”

“Okay.”

“What’s the number?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Wow. Now how is that possible given that—”

“My mother lied,” I said and we stopped talking because our food arrived. Dane took two bites, declared the food an unqualified success, then never returned to it. Instead he leaned back as if considering all that had come before and weighing several options.

“A birthday is an odd thing despite being inherently senseless,” he finally said. “I’m referring to the way it looks you in the eye and demands retrospection whether you’re willing or not.”

“Well I have a strong will.”

“It won’t matter. I recently began my thirtieth ellipse around our sun, an anniversary that as you can imagine barks louder than the usual ones. Anyway it was a Sunday and one of those political news shows was on where they pretend to speak on important topics. They were talking about the President and his difficulties during his first year in office and one of the commentators said something like
this really hurts him because those close to him say he is a man obsessed with his legacy
. I thought about that statement a lot. What do you think about that statement?”

“I think I have no way of knowing if it’s true or not.”

“Course not but what do you think of this concept of a legacy? Because it totally intrigued me.”

“What about it?”

“Simply everything. The first thing that struck me is that it is perfectly legitimate, and not at all presumptuous, for a President to worry about such a thing. After all, this man has a job whereby, one hundred, two hundred years from now people will still be assessing his performance. Think about that. It seems to me that whatever the assessment is becomes secondary to the fact there is one at all.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning take someone at random as an example. I elect myself. As you might have guessed it wasn’t long before I started wondering what my legacy would be. How will history remember me? I’ll tell you. It won’t remember me at all. At all! As far as history is concerned I may as well not have existed. Now I know that to you that seems just about right.”

“Well.”

“But to me this fact is simply astounding. I mean as far as I’m concerned I’m downright enthralling. Now understand what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that when I objectively assess myself I conclude that I’m an enthralling person, although I do. What I am saying is that everything about me is incredibly enthralling
to me
. For example, I can stand in front of a mirror for forty minutes trying to figure out the best way for me to wear my hair. On the other hand, if you tried to engage me in even a thirty-second discussion regarding your hair, I’d instantly tell you to shut up. So there’s this horrible dilemma whereby I think I’m the most important thing in the world and everyone else thinks I’m practically meaningless. But it’s even worse than that. At least now I exist and am in some sense meaningless. Someday, I hope not too soon, I won’t even exist and then I’ll give new meaning to the term meaningless.”

“Meaning to meaningless?”

“Go ahead, make fun, but this applies to you as well you know. We’re all in the same boat.”

“Maybe so but you think everybody worries about what you just said?”

“No, at least not in those terms. I understand that the overwhelming majority of people do not articulate this conflict or view it in quite this manner. This despite the fact that what I’ve said is particularly true of them. But while these people don’t put their finger on this feeling they do experience it and it does impact their lives.”

“Huh?”

“Look, people need to conform the external reality they face daily with this subjective feeling they likewise experience constantly. To do this they have two options. First, they can achieve what passes for great things. Now the external reality matches their feeling; they really are better than the rest and maybe they’ll even be remembered as such. These are the ambitious people, the overachievers. These are also, however, the people who go on these abominable talk shows where they can trade their psychoses for exposure on that box, modernity’s ultimate achievement. Note that this tact, being ambitious, is not the preferred course of action. The reason is it’s the equivalent of sticking your neck out which we all know is dangerous. Instead many act like they have no ambition whatsoever. Their necks come back in and they’re safe. Only problem is now they’re at everyone else’s level, which we’ve seen is untenable. The remedy of course is that everyone else needs to be sunk. This helps explain racism’s enduring popularity. If I myself don’t appear to be markedly superior to everyone else at least I’m part of the better race, country, religion et cetera. This in turn reflects well on my individual worth. There are other options of course. For example, you can constantly bemoan others’ lack of moral worth by extension elevating yourself. Think of the average person’s reaction to our clients. Do these people strike you as so truly righteous that they are viscerally pained by our clients’ misdeeds or are they similarly flawed people looking for anything to hang their hat on? The latter obviously, they’re vermin.”

“A little strong no?”

“I for one choose the first option, I need to elevate myself above all others. As for you, you’re one of the people who does view the dilemma in explicit terms and does worry about his legacy so the distinction is irrelevant as far as you’re concerned.”

“This you know how? We essentially met yesterday.”

“Please. I don’t see things? Hear things? You’re trying to outrace the same demons I am and every day running out of more time. Only the unimaginative fear death when it’s oblivion that cuts deepest. Next time you burrow into the subway picture the aerial view. Ants.”

“Fine. For the sake of argument, let’s say your analysis was achingly accurate. Then what?”

“Simple. You have to get yourself one of those legacies the guy was talking about. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. I’ve heard. Tons of trials, never lost a single one. I was the same way. But then you realize it’s not working. Outside of our little insular community, the impact’s simply not there.”

“You take what you can get, most have far less.”

“Yes, at first. But that’s the thing about
more
, you can always have it and you always want it. More in this case is more recognition for more time.”

Dane stopped now. He was pleased with himself and staring at me.

“You can’t be boiling this down to fame,” I said. “Do the famous strike you as happier than the rest because I don’t see it.”

“Happiness? Who’s talking about happiness? For people like us I’m talking about trying to avoid abject misery.”

“Speak for you Dane.”

“I’m talking about the misery of suffering by comparison. For us, the whole thing takes place at a higher level. We’re not concerned with the average person so put that to the side. But don’t I have to explain, at least to myself, this disparity between the President who has a legacy and I who don’t? Don’t you?”

“He’s accomplished more than I have.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never tried politics. I have no interest in it. He must have a special talent in this limited area. Remember Dane, this isn’t Alexander the Great conquering most of the known world or Napoleon cutting a swath through Europe for Chrissakes. This is a guy kissing untold quantities of ass to put himself in a position where a woefully underinformed electorate can deem him slightly less offensive than the other guy trying out for the job. Besides all that, he’s also been around quite a bit longer than me.”

“No, no good. As for that last consolation, cling to it as long as you can because it will soon be gone. Moreover, it seems to me you have to admit that he and his kind are simply better than you are. Not better at one specific thing but just plain better. Are you prepared to do that?”

“ . . .”

“Your silence speaks volumes. This is a man who is arguably the most powerful man in the world and you’re not willing to admit he’s more talented than you. I won’t even mention lesser lights. What if I say it for you? These people are better than you! How does it make you feel when you hear those words? You want to say you’re in a different field? Well I can name twenty attorneys who are considered better than you, whether accurately or not. Just think about that. How does that make you feel? If those people were looking at you right now, they’d be thinking how much better than you they are. You have other interests you say? You’re not
really
a lawyer? Want to try something different? What are your interests? You like science? Are you Kepler, Newton, Galileo? Are you the one who realized that massive objects warp space-time? Philosophy? There’s a lot left to do, that’s true, but honestly the best you can hope for is to balance on the shoulders of Rene, David, Immanuel, and the like. And with both these fields you can only really even hope for
that
if you devote your whole life to its pursuit and it’s already too late for you to do that. Music? Are you Ludwig van? Johannes Sebastian? Are you Wolfgang composing operas in his preteens? Are you at least Bruce Lee giving a demonstration of his newly-minted Jeet Kune Doo at a 1964 martial arts tournament in Long Beach? If you were any of those people or their equivalent don’t you think you would know it by now? Are you Fyodor—”

“I get the point.”

“So you admit it then?”

“No, fuck them.”

“Good because this torments me and the time has come to do something about it.”

“Let me know how that works out for you.”

“What are you doing tonight? Maybe we could—”

“I’m crossing the river to family.”

“Family? Really? Your liar mother?”

“Among others.”

“Family,” he repeated as if I’d told him I had a werewolf butler. “I do have a fat cousin six or seven times removed in Austin with a disinterested wife and kids who are always barking at him. By the way, the fact that people continue to have kids in overwhelming numbers, despite the clear disadvantages, fits in nicely with my legacy theory vis-à-vis attempts to avoid death and/or oblivion.”

“Are you incapable of light conversation? It’s fucking Friday.”

“You’re right, what’s the deal with your officemate?”

There was no way Dane was talking about Leon.

“He’s a good guy,” I said. “His rather lengthy story is as follows—”

“Not
him
, the other one, Julia Ellis. She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

“You feel you’ve seen enough women to make that determination?”

“Sure. Look I watch the MusicTeleVision et cetera. Those are the world’s most beautiful women, digitally and surgically engineered to make me want to buy something. Now I look at Julia Ellis and I see that she’s as beautiful if not more beautiful than any of those women and I know she’s not putting as much effort into it as they are so I conclude she must be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Follow?”

“I’m not prepared to say you’re right but you may not be as wrong as you usually are.”

“Does she have anything else going for her?”

“Besides her astonishing appearance?”

“Yes.”

“She appears to have several other positive attributes.”

“Really? That’s odd.”

“How?”

“Well I find extreme beauty fascinating.”

“Is that so? How unique.”

“No I mean beyond simply being attracted to it like everyone else. One of the things that seem true to me is that God doesn’t often give the extremely beautiful much else. Nor does he, for that matter, give the hyper-intelligent or super-athletic much else either. Think about that. You never hear that the gorgeous supermodel is also diligently searching Theoretical Physics for its Grand Unified Theory. And when they cut to that guy from MIT to explain the inexplicable doesn’t he always look like something a hairless cat coughed up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leave the knowing to me.”

Now I guess I can be incredibly unobservant at times. So it wasn’t until then, when there was a lull in the conversation and we were waiting for the check that I first realized what a bizarre portrait Dane’s was. He seemed almost inhuman, not really subhuman or superhuman though; more like metahuman. His build was paradigmatically average like the cardboard cutout in your doctor’s office. On it lay a skeletal face that seemed to disappear the longer you looked at it. From his skull straight ink-black hair and overseeing a sharp nose insane green-light eyes.

When we were done we started to walk back. I was going back to court, this time 100 Centre Street. Dane was going home with another aborted invitation rebuffed. We separated. On the way I ran into Sam Gold, Tom’s cherubic underboss.

About Sam Gold I had recently learned exactly two interesting facts that I was still trying to properly contextualize and reconcile, videlicet: 1.) in over a quarter of a century at the office he had taken zero days off and 2.) his father had been
the
Manhattan District Attorney. Gold never handled an actual case or anything like that but his conciliatory skills were legendary and much in demand where I worked. He was glad he ran into me and could I do him a favor when I went back to court. Inside I said no with extreme prejudice but externally I agreed.

After Gold left I saw Dane again. He didn’t explain or anything but instead just resumed as if there had been no interruption:

“Saw this movie late last night when I got home,” he said. “It was atrocious of course and for a million different reasons I won’t go into but one thing even the movies can’t ruin is a good caper.”

“Yes.”

“A precise heist.”

“Right.”

“An impossible rescue.”

“Correct.”

“A desperate prison break.”

“Definitely.”

“Are we of like mind Casi?”

“On this yes.”

“On everything, you’ll see.”

“Except they invariably screw it up because even when they depict a successful one it always involves at least one unexpected complication that must be overcome. The reason this is misguided is that the beauty of the caper and the other things you mention, what gives them their allure, is the notion that they can and will be pulled off seamlessly, with algebraic precision and exactly as planned.”