A Naked Singularity: A Novel (72 page)

“He does
look
innocent.”

“Which probably means he’s guilty.”

“He says he’s guilty.”

“But that could be an innocent mistake.”

“What if you can’t reverse him?”

“I’ll feel guilty, full of guilt.”

“How guilty can Kingg be anyway in light of his mental apparatus?”

“And how innocent given same? And can he go from one to the other and even back again?”

“With your help, maybe.”

“And you at a fancy wedding where the game hens are Cornish and the liquid spirits flow without pause.”

And so later that night when I slept it felt more like a newly-invented process only slightly suggestive of sleep. And I arose later weighted down with two big questions: one on Kingg and one on Whale. But I decided I only had the energy to deal with one of them that morning; I would call Dane or Toomberg in that pre-airport interval not both. And in my skull each side argued vociferously on its behalf and I vacillated between the two, forth and back repeatedly until I resolved to abstain entirely.

And when I suddenly decided, really
knew
, which call to make, it surprised me a bit. Now the other option seemed laughably unviable and the proper course so nakedly visible. But when I eagerly picked up the phone I found that the infernal machine didn’t work and so called neither.

If you could live forever, would you and why?

I would not live forever because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever
.

—Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest

To judge from the sparse attendance on the plane no one wanted to go to Alabama that morning. I didn’t either but there I was, going. And those pills you take to combat expected nausea I suspected worked solely by making you so drug-addict needful of sleep that all other states of existence (i.e. nausea v. non-nausea) ceased to exist in any meaningful way. And so when one of the unburdened stewardesses, a decidedly matronly sort who in my compromised state I somehow managed to convert into an object of semi-sexual longing, came by to offer first cinematic headphones then a compartmentalized meal the most I could muster was a dismissive, narcotized wave of the hand, or like two fingers. Which gesture I later came to regret when, empty stomach grumbling and between bouts of deep but intermittent sleep, I became transfixed with the attractive happenings on the square screen before me. And instead of a nice miniature meal on the tray in front of me I had this like glossy packet insane Toomberg had put together and given me to read. The packet contained answers to everything you were afraid to ask concerning not only the particular judge who would decide our petition but really about Alabama as a whole, past and present. For some reason Toom felt that the greater my knowledge about this parcel, the greater our chance of success. So I read what he’d included there when I wasn’t looking at the screen. But now the sight of assorted beautiful people speaking without voice filled me with an ineffable sadness and so I found myself inventing and supplying dialogue for these representational humans. And also the captain was the loquacious type who would probably one day, in true frustrated-incorporeal-spirit form, continue talking from beyond the grave and thus he kept taking advantage of us, his captive audience, via the microphone they give those guys: On that square I saw a smallish girl sitting on the floor using her twin bed as backrest. Her lips moved without effect and in the direction of a freakish purple toy. We were meant, no doubt, to feel we were experiencing the inner life of a child.

This is Inda Cipherable, your Captain, speaking
.

My captain?

We were getting closer to the girl’s face, although it was happening slowly, and maybe imperceptibly if not for the greater concentration possible in the absence of sound, and I would have bet on the presence of swelling violins.

I’ve just turned off the seat belt sign, that was the slight ding you heard. You are free to walk around. We’ll be cruising at an altitude of about thirty-five-thousand feet
.

Now we were almost there, inches away, and I could see that the girl’s eyes were tearing, her lips moving slower.

We’ll be in the air several hours, long enough so you’ll feel as if the walls are closing in but not long enough that you can just go to sleep and get some real shut-eye
.

The girl wasn’t saying anything now, putting me on equal footing with my fellow headphone-clad passengers. She lifted the freakish toy, which I now saw was an elephant of some sort and not purple so much as black.

Yes, beautiful Alabama, and I have some good news for our passengers who may represent components of a potential interracial marriage. Because in the two thousandth year since the birth of our Lord, Alabama became the last state to overturn its anti-miscegenation law. That’s right folks, blacks may now legally marry whites in Alabama and whites may do the same, to blacks of course
.

Three more little girls entered the room carrying nothing and bringing the total to four.

I’m one of those pilots who likes to pepper his passengers with little interesting facts about their destination
.

The three new girls sat with the old one and they joined hands. Then they all stood and went towards the door and out; the camera slowly tracking in futile pursuit.

In 1963, in Birmingham, a bomb went off, note the use of the passive voice, in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The bomb, well the people behind it, killed eleven-year-old Denise McNair and three of her friends
.

In an unjustifiably immense three-walled kitchen, where not everything was in its place but only in a contrived orderly way, and where this kitchen was located in one of those semi-hermetic, uniformly-colored constructions meant to convey neither affluence nor abject poverty but rather the presence of a
working-class
, with the work referred to being precisely the type assiduously avoided by those in the classes above and below; in that kitchen stood a startlingly beautiful woman in the midst of a half-hearted attempt at looking not-beautiful. Also in that kitchen was an unmenacingly tall man patiently absorbing his enforced inactivity while the beauty-in-disguise was allowed to deliver what seemed to me like an at-least-somewhat-critical little speech in the shadow of the man’s back.

“Just tell me one thing Trevor,” she said. “Just answer me one thing after all these years, you owe me that. One damn thing.”

“What’s that?” he said, although all we continued to see of him was his back.

“Exactly what connection do we have to those four little girls just depicted in a different room in an obviously different house?”

“I don’t know and don’t call me Trevor.”

“Why not?”

“Because Trevor is one of those names given to Hollywood characters in meager attempt to depict the inanity of our world but is never actually the name given to such a character.”

“Fair enough but what about the girls?”

Trevor thought about the girls. It was impossible, at that point, to say with even the slightest certainty what connection, if any, he might have to those girls. This was so because the writer/director, in one of those either inspired or insipid moves that usually only first-time low-budgeters make, had refused to allow any of the thespian participants to see the entire script. Instead each actor was limited to his lines and those spoken in his or her presence. And the reasoning behind this was endearing enough given that such full scripts exist nowhere else in life—that is, you do not normally know what little girls, no matter how intimate the relationship you share with them, say or experience in your absence—and so, the thinking went, the lack of such a script-knowledge in that limited environment could only serve to enhance the projected apparent reality of the resulting depiction. Although, of course, it took no more than a couple seconds of thought to conclude that laser-beam-accurate depictions of reality might not be the ultimate goal of these two hour slices of images paired with chatter, as evidenced
inter alia
by the facts that: (1) all sorts of necessary activities that undeniably occur in reality and that in fact comprise a large percentage of that environment’s time, such as eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, and watching Television are almost never cinematically depicted at all, let alone in anything remotely resembling accurate time intervals; (2) there exists, in this cinematic world, an abundance of unexplained violations of the laws of physics, such as where an individual will pick up a ringing phone then respond verbally after one second in a manner that cannot possibly be justified by the quantum of information that can be conveyed in that second or when two people are practically screaming but cannot be heard by someone three feet away simply because the person is technically in a different room or the way bedrooms where lights have just been turned off never get entirely dark despite the absence of any visible light sources; and (3) the cinematic depictions feature an almost unfathomable incidence of heart-palpitatingly attractive women and the concomitant, almost complete, absence of the truly slovenly and unattractive.

And it took only a little more thought than that to wonder why anyone would so greatly value a high degree of verisimilitude in these situations in the first place since at least part of the idea in fictions like these was presumably to entertain on some level and yet so very few people seem enthralled by the quotidian happenings of Life itself, which of course represents the ultimate realism. But still, this and the fact that the film was shot entirely in strict sequence, another not-unheard-of-but-extremely-rare deal, certainly created, on the set anyway, the atleast-illusory notion that here was the unmitigated, unfiltered, and unadulterated procession of again Life itself and this somehow energized and pleased the cast in a way their non-set hours never did. All of which meant that when Trevor and Jackie (not coincidentally the true names of the actors as well as of the characters they portrayed) stood in that implausible kitchen they maybe weren’t so sure where exactly created artifice ceded to stark reality.

And maybe it was this indecision that was evident on Jackie’s face as she spoke. She pushed her fingers through her hair, which she tended to do in these situations, and turned away. Her eyes landed on a picture she had long ago placed on an uncrowded shelf. One she’d looked at countless times. A picture of her, alone. And though the picture had been there for years, as much a part of the room’s background as the wallpaper, she was able, as sometimes happens in these instances, to look at the picture as if for the first time. She saw that it was her in the picture but not really. She remembered why the picture was there. The picture was not taken with anything resembling a good camera or by anyone resembling a good photographer. But when she opened the Ste-D-Mart envelope that night, still dressed in whatever uniform was being imposed on her at the time, it positively jumped out at her and away from its neighbors. This was before everything this picture. It jumped because of the way she looked in it. She hadn’t kidded herself about its accuracy. She knew she was not an overly attractive woman although she certainly didn’t skew too far in the other direction either. But in the picture she was effortlessly beautiful in a Madison Avenue way. She explained this to herself, to the extent she did that sort of thing, by saying that in life there are angles and the picture just happened to capture a fortuitous one for her. And she respected that happenstance enough to put the picture up, giving it a prominent place and maybe two further thoughts since. Until that moment, when muffled language was being directed at her in futile attempt and her trembling hand was looking to stop on the kitchen’s center island. The face in the picture just seemed so much fresher, as if better lit. And though not immediately visible, he had been a part of that picture in the same way he’d somehow managed to be a part of everything about her for as long as she could remember.

And so even though he could see she was not looking at him, and could hear that she wasn’t saying anything, he was not prepared to make the leap to the conclusion that she wasn’t listening to a solitary word springing from his lips and certainly he had not the slightest clue regarding the import of the photograph she appeared to be staring at, that sort of thing generally being lost on him. But he’d also decided that today was the day they were going to discuss the Thing that happened. Today. And he had hoped to do it somewhere else. Because in there, the place he’d been forced to leave if only by chivalry, he always felt diminished by the memory.

“Are you listening to me?” he finally said. “Jack?”

“Yes. Fine, take it and go.”

“No, I think we need to discuss this.”

“What?”

“Because Donna says this isn’t healthy.”

“What?!”

“I know you don’t want to hear this but . . . about Petey.”

“No, stop.”

“We need—”

“Stop it Trevor, you promised. We agreed we would never talk about this again.”

“No you agreed.
You
agreed. I had no choice. You said you would leave and I’d never see you again at a time when I could not have dealt with that. You forced me into it Jackie, and I said okay but now I want to talk about it, we need to.”

“No I don’t
need
to do anything, get away.”

“Donna says it’s not healthy, that you need to talk about it. That human beings need to talk. It’s like the way you didn’t go to the cemetery that day.”

“Shut up will you? Will you please just shut up? Please? Maybe promises mean nothing to you but they mean something to me and you promised we would not talk about this.”

“I just want to know that you’re okay about this.”

“Okay? Yes, I’m okay. So okay that you should leave me alone. And fine I’ll go ahead and say what I’m supposed to say. Here it is: I’m happy for you and Donna okay? And, of course, yes, I particularly know how happy that moment will be for her and all that. Is that enough, are we done? Because there’s only so much I can take Tre.”