Chance

Darius the Mede

Chance was back outside and about to enter his car when the day’s most striking omission occurred to him. So accustomed had he become to thinking of D as D, or Big D, or on occasion as Heavy D, it had, till just now, never occurred to him that even after all they had been through together, he did not actually know Big D’s proper name, neither his first nor his last, salient information if he were to inquire after the big man’s health and whereabouts from what might only be thought of as the proper authorities, an outfit from whom he had, over the course of the past weeks, become increasingly distant.

That the name could surprise should not, given every other thing, have really been all that surprising and yet Chance was surprised. “Darius?” he asked. He was standing once more at the door of the warehouse where Carl had come to see him off. “As in Darius the Mede?”

“As in,” Carl told him. “The old man was some sort of college professor. Still is as far as I know. Darius Pringle. God knows best what that asshole was thinking.”

Darius Pringle had indeed been taken to Moffitt hospital at the UCSF medical center high atop Parnassus Avenue, a place in which Dr. Eldon Chance was still listed as an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine. It was moreover a place in which he was still a respected member of the community and was greeted as such, admitted to staff parking even on the day in question where he donned the white lab coat with his name pinned to the breast, kept in the trunk of his car for just such moments, and where once inside he was greeted by several of the nurses and one young doctor in particular whose name he had long since forgotten but who had carried out a residency beneath his direction. He was greeted as Dr. Chance and it occurred to him that it had been some time since so many had done so in such an agreeable fashion. Patients were encouraged to use his first name in the hopes of putting them at ease. Attorneys addressed him as Doctor but often managed to make it sound somehow slightly derogatory. These folk actually seemed to like and respect him. He might have wandered the halls for hours basking in such warmth, searching perhaps for the young man of promise it pleased him to believe he once had been, as if such a thing were no more than a valued but misplaced object. Little of course did any of his well-wishers know about why he was here just now or from whence he had come, of his walking about in the world, his going to and fro.

Having learned by phone of D’s recent transfer from an ICU to a standard room, Chance went straightaway to the head nurse on the appropriate floor, a large-boned gray-haired woman of Irish descent with the unfortunate name of Gooley, who had worked at the hospital for many years, even before Chance’s arrival, and with whom he was still on a first-name basis.

“And who are we here to see today?” she asked, as if Chance at her station were a more or less daily occurrence, though in point of fact he had not been there in months. He gave her the name and was rewarded with a chart. He read it with Gooley looking over his shoulder. It was as he had surmised. It was also worse than he had surmised with diabetes type 2 mellitus in concert with obesity, obstructive sleep apnea (severe), diabetic peripheral neuropathy (mild), and a mitral valve prolapse. A brief history indicated the patient had sustained a traumatic head injury and coma as a child as well as a compound fracture of the right femur and two other surgeries, also as a child. Much more was to come but this was what Chance saw at a glance, on the face page of the report. Current medications included Cymbalta, Valium, Provigil, Metformin, and Nexium.

“Is the gentleman a patient?” Gooley asked.

“I’m intending to see that he becomes one,” Chance told her, still aghast by what he was reading but trying not to let it show, then later in response to her look. “The gentleman has done some work for me of late and I’ve come to think of him as a friend.”

“Well,” she said. “The story is in the history on that one.”

Chance just looked at her.

“Someone asked for his records. I got a look.”

“From where?”

“Fort Miley and Napa State, to name two.”

Fort Miley was home to the San Francisco VA Hospital. Napa State was an exclusively inpatient mental health facility for the often criminally insane and did not qualify as good news. Chance hoped once more to disguise a level of apprehension bordering on out and out panic with what he hoped might be taken for a knowing nod. “The patient was lucid then?” By which he meant to suggest that D had been responsive to questioning on the part of the ER doctors.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Gooley told him. “The man’s family has been in and out. It may have been them that asked for records to be forwarded. He’s apparently been out of touch for some time and the old man is some mucky-muck from across the bay… is what I have been told.”

“What kind of mucky-muck?” Chance asked.

“UC–Berkeley, Livermore Lab… I believe he’s a nuclear man, a physicist or something.”

“Ah,” Chance said. It was what he said when he couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say. He was saying it more of late and the habit was coming to irritate him. “I’d like to take a look at all of that,” he told her. “The medical history.” It was not strictly kosher, his asking to see records without first getting permission from either the attending physician or the patient himself but he and Gooley were close enough for him to ask and for her to deliver. “Stop back when you’re done,” she told him. “I’ll make you a copy. You just didn’t get it from me.”

“Of course not. And are they still here, Mr. Pringle’s family?”

“Oh I think so, some of them anyway. Like I said, there have been comings and goings. You should have seen it on day one. It was like Grand Central Station around here.”

“Well,” Chance told her, “you’re used to that.”

Gooley nodded. “You’ll want a look at those records,” she told him. “I’ve a feeling that’s a young man who could use someone good on his side.” And couldn’t we all, Chance thought, but remained silent on that score. For the day having scarcely begun was full already of such ominous tidings that in walking off down the long hallway with its disinfectant smells, polished floors, and open doorways he was certain beyond doubt that everything he had played at over the span of the past weeks was about to be found out on a grand scale, revealed for what it was and broken, a toy boat upon the rocks of an unyielding and pitiless reality.

And that was only the half of it. For the reality in question would surely prove so obvious, so absolutely visible even to the untrained eye, his missing it so far beyond the reach of reasonable explanation, that there would simply be no point in trying, and that the rest of his days, if not spent behind bars, would surely run their course in the engagement of some menial task, a meager salary garnered till time indefinite by some stern and unforgiving agent of a vast, impersonal, and criminally inept federal tax agency. So that finally it was the ghost of his own broken and long-suffering father who came in the end to provide company, if not succor, upon the occasion of his only son’s ascent to the gallows, walking with him along these dark and gleaming halls with their bright lights and fecund odors, their open doorways that were each a little window upon the varieties of such shit as the world was composed and the old man just as Chance remembered him, stoop shouldered and silver haired, his voice low in Chance’s ear. “You can see how it is,” the old man told him in a familiar and authoritative tone, equal parts sadness and scorn. “If He’d wanted you to fly He would have given you wings.”

He found the monster’s ball Carl Allan had predicted a sorry enough affair. The illustrious father, having been last seen in person during the wee hours to further consult with staff, doctors, and assorted hospital officials, had since withdrawn to some stronghold across the bay. In the great man’s absence, Chance was confronted by a faded beauty of indiscernible age, the obvious recipient of considerable surgical work. Her name was Norma Pringle and she lost no time in letting Chance know that the whale of a man now beached in the nearby bed was not of her loins but rather those of her husband, a fact in which she seemed to take such particular satisfaction Chance found it to border on the openly malicious.

There was a second man in the room as well, a rather listless youth of perhaps twenty with a style of dress and hair Chance had come to associate with the Goth movement of years past but which he was later informed had morphed into something new, its current name forever eluding him. As to the young man’s identity, no mention was made. The youth did not rise to meet him or make any show of wishing to do so. Norma ignored him. Chance followed suit. There were no doctors present. Chance had hoped for a moment alone with D but saw rather quickly that this was not to be. It seemed to have something to do with the fact that, name badge and doctor’s coat notwithstanding, he had yet to be properly vetted by the absent father, who to all intents and purposes had apparently taken over the show and was now running it from somewhere in the vicinity of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory well east of the city.

“And you are?” was the question Norma seemed to have fixed upon with regard to Chance. It seemed to come at him from a variety of angles, sometimes prefaced by an overtly insincere and condescending apology for having already forgotten his previous answer to the same question. She couldn’t get past it. Nor could he. A friend of a friend, a business associate, a concerned acquaintance—he tried them all and in various combinations till he’d pretty much exhausted the mathematical possibilities. “But not one of his actual doctors?” was more or less the inevitable response. One might have thought the simple fact of his being both friend and an actual doctor would have been enough to tip the scales. It had been his experience that most people in the midst of crisis, the health of a loved one hanging in the balance, would have welcomed such personal and professional attention with open arms. Norma Pringle’s arms were closed to any such business.

As for the big man himself, D appeared to have passed into a profound, possibly drug-induced sleep. He remained during the length and breadth of Chance’s stay in his room inert and immobile on the bed, the recipient of an IV drip, attached to several monitoring devices including the black rubber mask covering much of his face for the purpose of forcing oxygen into his lungs, a countermeasure to the obstructive apnea Chance had noted upon the charts, and from which small lights would occasionally wink in the accompaniment of a faint mechanical whir and this the only sound in the room as Norma Pringle was an icy woman of few words and her gloomy companion one of even fewer, which pretty much meant none at all.

As to whether or not D’s unconscious state was authentic or feigned, Chance could never get close enough to say. The determined and not unimpressive Mrs. Pringle would not permit it. Chance was not on D’s list of approved doctors. Her husband could not be reached for comment and she was intent on following his orders. It was as simple and as simply fucked up as all of that. And while this might change in time it was clearly not going to be without a fight and not anytime soon, leaving Chance few options save the tactical retreat, in the midst of which he paused just long enough at Gooley’s nursing station to collect Big D’s medical records before exiting the building. To his great dismay, if not surprise, he found the document only slightly smaller than a city directory.

He had at it while still in the building’s underground parking lot, at times resting the pages against the car’s steering wheel if only to steady his hand. To have done the document justice were he being called upon to render an opinion would have required hours and he supposed that in time he might get there on his own. For the moment, however, he was willing to settle for what one might euphemistically term the highlights and which might be summarized as follows, in the manner to which he had become accustomed, which is to say in the manner of his own reports:

Darius Pringle is a 32-year-old left-handed white male. He was born the younger of two children, having a brother three years his senior. His father is a PhD theoretical physicist. His mother, now deceased, was a classical violinist who toured and recorded extensively in both Europe and the United States. At the age of eight, Darius, along with his mother and older brother, was struck by a drunk driver while walking in a crosswalk in downtown San Francisco. His mother and brother died instantly. Darius sustained a coma lasting twelve days along with a compound fracture of his right femur. CT scans performed at that time reported a right frontal subdural hematoma. The patient spent a total of four weeks at San Francisco General Hospital. Upon release from the hospital, Darius was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Ruth Morris, a retired English teacher, at that time, married to one James Morris, her third husband, a lay minister in the Church of the Infant Jesus. The reason for this living arrangement had to do with the devastating effect the loss of his wife and eldest son had on Sanford Pringle, Darius’s father, who, unable to cope, left the country with no clear plans for returning and felt himself either unable, or unwilling, to see his surviving son.

Mrs. Morris reports that from the time of Darius’s release from the hospital, it was as if she and her husband had to “raise him from infancy.” Specifically, he was unable to feed himself. His leg was in a cast. Poor balance made it necessary for him to wear a protective helmet. After several months with a cast, he began to walk with crutches and, very slowly, to recover a good deal of his memory and language function. It was around this time that James Morris brought two sons from a former marriage to live with their family in Oakland. It was shortly thereafter that Paul, the elder of James Morris’s two sons, began to torture and sexually abuse Darius. The abuse continued for a period of roughly five years, at which point Sanford Pringle returned from abroad in the company of his new wife, Norma, twenty years his junior. At that time Darius was brought back into his father’s home, though he continued to spend long stretches in the home of his grandmother whenever Sanford and Norma were out of town. During these stays, Darius stated, the abuse continued. He has further stated that his grandmother knew of the abuse but told Darius never to speak of it and would on occasion punish him by whipping and then binding him with electrical cords and locking him in a closet.

Darius reports that his father was kind to him on the rare occasions when they were together but was extremely preoccupied with both his career and his new family, Norma by now having given birth to a boy. On the single occasion when Darius tried to talk to his father about what happened it was “as if his father was simply looking through him and was unable to hear a word that was said.” Afterward, his father continued to leave Darius at the home of his mother whenever he was out of town, often in the company of Norma and their new son.

By the age of fifteen Darius had begun to exhibit periods of what appeared to be mood disturbance with intermittent psychotic behavior. He also became preoccupied with books on warfare, the study of martial arts, and in particular a book entitled Unlocking Your Hidden Powers. On several occasions, when left at his grandmother’s house he became violent, to the point that on two separate occasions Ruth felt threatened enough to make 911 calls to the police. This behavior culminated with the beating of James Morris. Mr. Morris was kept overnight in an Oakland hospital for observation in the wake of a concussion. He was also treated for a broken nose, four broken ribs, and a broken finger on his right hand. Darius was taken into custody by the Oakland Police and later transferred to the state mental hospital in Napa, where he remained for a period of three months, at the end of which he was released into his father’s custody with plans for anger management classes and psychiatric treatment.

None of these treatments were implemented, however, as within days of his returning home, Darius ran away. He was at this time sixteen years of age. For the next three years Darius lived on the streets, first in Oakland, where he found that he was able to make money as a “street enforcer” for an Oakland crack dealer, and later in Palo Alto, where he was befriended by a number of returning military personnel. Many of these men were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were themselves homeless. Others were in some way connected to the VA hospital in Palo Alto. A number of these men were addicted to drugs that Darius was able to procure through his connections with Oakland dealers.

It was during this period that Darius also began to use a wide variety of drugs, to the point that they, in his words, became a problem. He eventually attempted to find help from the VA hospital in San Francisco where, having managed to procure a fake military identification card, he was admitted by emergency services and was treated for chronic polysubstance abuse and intermittent psychotic ideation and behavior before the ruse was discovered. He was then turned over to the police, who contacted his family.

Darius was transferred once more to the state mental hospital in Napa and later to a privately owned institution in Marin County, where, according to Darius, his father moved to take complete control of his life. Exactly what is meant by this phrase is unclear. Darius was by now nineteen and therefore legally an adult. Darius states that he was kept in a drugged state and asked to sign many legal documents. Details relating to all of this are a bit sketchy and without knowing more it is impossible to say what was entailed. It may be that the elder Pringle was moving to excise his son from any type of inheritance. It may also be, as Darius has later speculated, that his father was attempting to get Darius to agree to some type of permanent conservatorship of person and estate, but this is speculative. Darius has said that he signed some documents while refusing others and that after a period of several weeks in this institution he was able one day to simply “walk out of the gate.” The particulars of this remain unknown. What is known is that Darius disappeared once more, eluding any and all attempts on the part of the family to locate him until his present arrival at the UCSF emergency room.

It was here that Chance broke from his assimilation of the report’s biggest hits, resting the stack of pages on the seat beside him. Was it his imagination, or did the fabric give beneath the terrible weight of the thing? He was still in the hospital parking structure and so able to watch an elderly couple attempting to extract a morbidly obese blind woman of no more than thirty from the rear of a badly oxidized Dodge minivan. Through an aperture created by a break between the great concrete platforms of which the structure was formed he was treated to a brilliant sliver of sky across which a number of frantic crows flew in pursuit of a lone red-tailed hawk as from somewhere in the building a car alarm began to sound. My God, thought Chance—and he was thinking now of one Darius Pringle, a.k.a. D, a.k.a. Big D, a.k.a. Heavy D—he’s one of my very own.