A Naked Singularity: A Novel by Sergio De La Pava Page A

have been at that desk for thirty-five years and not find the slightest thing wrong with that. And in those years I would not once have worn casual clothes to work even if I wasn’t going to court or meeting one of my clients, all of whom incidentally I would give the benefit of the doubt despite decades of empirical opposition, and in all that time I would never have raised my voice or used salty language at the office either. And I would bring that quiet dignity to the office every day without fail by the sharpest eight-thirty and would remove it no later than four-thirty, with the same forty-five minutes excluded for the lunch Helen would pack, and allow myself only one glass of wine a night with my light dinner at five-thirty and maybe trade some words about our kids and their kids and draw steadily increasing paychecks and save for retirement and talk about pensions and never produce any evidence of having noticed that every square inch of the third inhabitant of that square, one Julia Ellis, was skin-raisingly gorgeous and at precisely that moment I realized I no longer wanted to be Leon.
    Although Leon wouldn’t be essentially hiding in that office avoiding Tom either. No, if Tom were looking for him, Leon would report front and center. Even if he was Casi and so never got to the office before ten and that day was pushing eleven and had a separate lengthy list of transgressions each singly capable of producing supervisory ire. So I pretended to be Leon. I stood up and took purposeful strides to the door where I almost ran into Dane.
    “Where you off to in such a rush, to snatch up a square?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Figured.”
    “What? Square? What square?”
    “Right.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the pool, you do work here right?”
    “What pool?”
    “The macabre office pool your colleagues are running on Baby Tula’s fate? Dead or alive being the major demarcation with all sorts of ensuing possibilities. Five bucks a square.”
    “That’s what you came in here for? To see if I would attempt to exploit the disappearance of an infant for monetary gain?”
    “Not in the slightest. I’m here because you remember the case I told you about last night, the one you should work with me on? Well I just got the video, let’s eyeball it.”
    “Video?”
    “Whole thing’s on video, I told you.”
    “Oh.”
    “Come on, to the video room Robin.”
    “Have to see Tom first, I’ll meet you in there.”
    I took a deep preparatory breath outside Tom’s then a woman who seemed to recognize me but for whom I could not reciprocate handed me some papers and said
sign this
before spotting someone else and rushing off in that direction.
    I walked through the door and immediately into a knee-high cardboard box. Now I was face-first in more boxes and crawling on them to the chair in the corner from where I looked at their owner and said:
    “What the?”
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah, I meant to do that. What is all this?”
    “Moving offices man, eighteen years in those boxes.”
    His walls were bare with light rectangles and squares where frames had hung
    “You been in here that whole time?”
    “Been in here since I was you. Funny, people think it was some kind of symbolic gesture not moving to a better office when I kept getting bounced up but look at this shit, would you want to move it? Not that neatness—”
    No. Tom’s hair, it was as if he had managed to sleep on all sides of his head simultaneously. And the loop of his tie was always partially visible under his unbuttoned collar.
    “Guess it could be worse,” he said. “I could be packing involuntarily to leave for good, you know?” He grinned and put his feet on his desk.
    I looked at the papers in my hand. Their title was PETITION TO DEPOSE T. SWATHMORE and below a little statement of facts was a lot of signatures.
    “What do you got there?” he said.
    “You looking for me?”
    “Yeah, you know, if I