Chance

A happy man in every crowd

From time to time figures appeared. Chance took them as visitors, asking only that they treat him as he did them—players in a dream.

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Janice Silver told him. “What the hell anyway?”

“You knew my daughter was in the hospital?”

“I do now.”

“I had gone for a walk.”

“I’m so sorry. And how is your daughter?”

“She’s better,” Chance said. “I am too.”

“And you know about Blackstone.” She had already seen the paper on the little cart by his bed. “Guess we weren’t the only ones that didn’t like him.”

“It’s a dangerous gig even for the good cops,” Chance said, repeating what Big D had once said to him and taking some amount of pleasure in it.

“You were right there, for Christ’s sake.”

Chance said nothing.

“Have you said anything?”

“To whom?”

“They’re asking people to come forward.”

“They’re asking for people with information to come forward and anyway they were already here.”

“And?”

“And nothing, Janice. I went for a walk. I fell.”

She gave him a long look then waited a bit before saying more. “And have we heard anything… from her?”

“We have not,” Chance answered.

When they’d sat with this one for a while and he had told her that he was sorry, that he needed to sleep, she leaned over to squeeze his arm. “All right,” she said. “This thing is over. You’re alive and thank God. If you ever want to talk, you know where to find me.”

Chance thanked her and he meant it.

There were more visitors. Carla came, as did his daughter.

“I don’t know what’s to become of you,” Carla said. It was after she had studied him for a good while before withdrawing to leave him alone with Nicole.

“I’m really sorry, Daddy,” his daughter’s first words. Without being entirely clear about what all she was sorry for, Chance said that he was sorry too. He assumed they were talking about everything. They held hands. She wept. He thought at first that it was over him and maybe it was, though what he came to learn in short order was that the bad boyfriend had broken her heart. It was her first foray into that bleak land and he hoped it would be her last. The boyfriend, an exchange student from Italy, studying for a degree in environmental law at UC–Berkeley and ten years her senior, had, on the very afternoon that he’d helped spring her from the hospital, been found in the company of another woman, in a compromising position.

Chance had no idea what to make of this or of how to place it in the secret history of things. He had, at just that moment, been busy doing battle with an intrusive memory, possibly false, of the blade in his hand, of Blackstone’s face and strangled cry, yet still doing his best to console and cajole. In the end she sighed and rested her head on his chest. A merciful silence descended. The intrusive memories, either real or imagined, came and went along with recurrent glimpses of the thing’s geometric shape… of which even this was perhaps a part. If he could only be more certain of what, precisely, the this was, by which he meant the here and now. But the thing kept running before him like a shadow: You’re not in it now… you’re not in it now… Perhaps, he thought, one need simply embrace the infamous axiom, that what in the end it all came down to was a matter of choice. After still more time had passed and his daughter had gone, Jean-Baptiste walked in.

“Thank God,” Chance said. “I’ve been at the end of my rope. They told me you were sick.”

Jean-Baptiste dismissed this with a wave of the hand and took a chair. “Talk to me,” he said.

Chance did. He confessed to everything. He wondered aloud for the first time to a discerning ear at how more had not been clear to him from the start… that he should have strayed so far from the path that it should have come to this. Jean-Baptiste, in his inimitable style, would only say that while there was no doubt he might have been a tad more prescient, his failure to stray so far from the path would certainly have made for a less interesting story. As far as its being the road to ruin, he was more inclined to find in it the Nietzschean path of going under to get over.

On the subject of what, exactly, Chance had gotten over to, his friend was less forthcoming but also unconcerned. “I wouldn’t worry about any of that,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “This funk you’re in is not at all uncommon in the wake of a serious concussion, as you well know. As to this other… Do not despair. You will find it.”

“You don’t think the whole idea is a reach?”

“Everything’s a reach, brother. You have no idea how this kind of thing lifts me up. And you, of all people.”

“You know,” Chance said, “now that it’s over… and I think about her… I think about the Laocoön.” He could guess that Jean-Baptiste would know the piece, the father and sons locked in doomed struggle with monsters from the depths. “And I think that must be what it’s like for her, that there’s this huge thing in the past she can’t get clear of… that keeps dragging her back…”

“Against which her strategy is to spin possibilities of escape in the form of new identities.”

“Did I tell you one of her was a Romanian hooker adept in the language?”

Jean-Baptiste stifled a laugh.

“You think that’s funny? Let me tell you, it was scary as shit is what it was. I had to turn on the lights to make sure it was her.”

“How’s the gland by the way?”

“They’ve given me an anti-inflammatory and antibiotics. You’ll never know what a relief it is to be pissing again.”

“Ah. But from what you’ve told me, these identities of hers have little in the way of duration.”

“That’s right. They break apart. The monster pulls her back.”

“Much as I admire the old Nietzsche I’ve always thought he was full of shit on the what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger routine.”

“Yes, Pollyanna-ish and glib.”

“There is maimed for life.”

“Chemical deviations…”

“Shit we’re not yet equipped to see.”

“Yet something heroic in the struggle.”

“And how might her struggle be defined, do you think? The predator hunting predators, finding one man to trap another…”

“Maybe even aiding and abetting the trapped man into some type of predatory behavior, making him into the very thing she needs to destroy.”

“That’s dark.”

“Her special gift.”

“But always as part of this unconscious need to free herself… doing unto others what was done to her in some past life we know nothing of but at which we can guess? Is that her deal with the universe, the most authentic version of the self she can manage? Or… was it her believing that your daughter was in mortal danger that generated her play at the end, her crossing him and calling you? It wouldn’t mean that at certain points along the way she wasn’t playing you, only that we must also consider the possibility of the child in danger as the thing that in the end called forth her most authentic self.”

They sat with this.

“And wouldn’t it be fun to ask? Some final reckoning in the wake of everything, one last reading of the old ledger.”

“If ever there is such a thing.”

“Yes, well… there is that. Still… we don’t suppose that we will ever hear from her again?”

“I wouldn’t imagine it. The way it ended… I would imagine her long gone and nothing here to bring her back.”

A mechanical device at Chance’s side began to emit a soft humming sound. “You really did like her though,” Jean-Baptiste said, more or less out of the blue, “that one you found?” The idea seemed to please him.

“That would be one way of putting it.”

“And that is the saving grace in all of this,” he said. “Whether you know it or not. You’ve read your Kierkegaard: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.”

This time it was Chance who laughed.

“Go ahead,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “But I’m telling you there is something in that, and that it is necessary to remind oneself almost constantly that many among us will die without ever knowing they were alive, save only in the most rudimentary ways, of course, but don’t get me started.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to do that.”

More time passed. The device ceased its humming. It had been delivering drugs, the old morphine drip among them. Jean-Baptiste got up to inspect the plastic bag on the rack at Chance’s bedside. He often did volunteer work at state hospitals and rest homes in search of his pictures and knew his way around a room. “You gotta get off the sauce,” he said. “It’ll fuck with your head. And stop rummaging in this grab bag of possibilities. It seems plain enough to me that you were never in that room. You were on the sidewalk and then you were on the beach and then you were here. Stop running.”

Chance said nothing but watched as Jean-Baptiste sat back down. He looked awfully tired, Chance thought, and was quite moved by the generosity of spirit with which his old friend had undertaken the journey to see him. Given Jean-Baptiste’s enthusiasm for things, the reach of his mind, you sometimes had to remind yourself that he was dying.

“And what about him?” Jean-Baptiste asked.

“Him?” Chance had been thinking about his friend.

“This Blackstone. Final thoughts?”

Chance gave it a moment. “I think he was like me,” he said finally. “I think he loved that whore.”

“I want you to have my photographs,” Jean-Baptiste told him.

“I’d like that,” Chance said. “I’d like that very much.”

It was only later that he would learn Jean-Baptiste had died on the very day Chance had fallen, that someone in the office had thought it best to withhold the information, perhaps until he was stronger. But he would never quite be able to believe that they had not by some means communicated or that Jean-Baptiste had not by some means beyond his reckoning been there with him in the room, so that when Lucy Brown finally did come in with the news, it was he who told her about having inherited the collection. “He was here, then?” she asked. “With you, in the room?”

“How else would I have known?”

Lucy said nothing for a good long while but advised him on her way out to journey safely among the spheres.

Of his last visitor there was less doubt as to his actual physicality but no relief from the surreal. The man was built like a spark plug, a personal injury attorney with the dress and manner of a strip club barker. Having read in the papers of Chance’s fall he had already been out to Lands End to visit the spot. “I want you to listen to me,” the guy told him. “I took a ride out there and I saw that sight. It’s a joke. Tape where there ought to have been some form of barricade… It was their job to protect people and they failed. You’re a doctor with a head injury. Your entire livelihood is at stake.” He went on to wonder if anyone from the city had perhaps been by, “looking to settle,” and was relieved to find that they had not. “That’s a good thing,” he said. “Fuzzy state you’re in, you might have signed something and then where would you be? Now on, anyone wants to talk to you, they talk to me instead.” As apropos of very little save his prowess to wrest great sums from large, impersonal institutions, he went on to tell of a former client who, while attempting to draw money from an ATM, had been struck by a drunken driver, losing both legs from the knees down. The bank had offered a million dollars. The attorney had gotten him ten. “You know what he does now?” the attorney asked.

“I can’t imagine,” Chance said.

“He pulls a rickshaw in Chinatown on prosthetic limbs, ten million in the bank. Go figure.”

Chance saw that the guy was not so different from himself, or for that matter from the late detective. They had all spent a good deal of time prowling among the ruins. In time he would learn that the man had offices on the Great Highway with a view of the beach. On each step of the stairway leading upward was an old surfboard. Inside there were photographs of the waves of Ocean Beach and Chance would find that he liked looking at them. “These fuckers are liable and they’re going to pay,” the surfing attorney told him before leaving the hospital. “I need two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Chance said. The guy just laughed, told him “the Big Guy” upstairs must’ve heard already and to start adding zeros. “And you should get in the water sometime,” he added, apropos of almost nothing. “It’s good for the head.” Chance, who had not yet been to the man’s offices or seen his pictures, had no idea what he was talking about but he was no longer paying much attention either. He was thinking about the big guy and not necessarily the one upstairs. He was thinking that between Jean-Baptiste, the cop, and the surfing attorney he was ready for yet one more go at the old kaleidoscope, one more turn of the wrist.

It would have begun, would had to have begun, with D and Carl trailing the Mercedes from the motel to the restaurant where D would have gotten out, eyes on the men, waiting for them to make their move, to come at Chance from behind and the whole thing set to play out more or less when and where and even how the big man had said it would. But Chance throwing the block into those gears with his dead phone and headless chicken act, that must have left them all guessing. Then Blackstone gets a visual and everybody is set to improvising… the Romanians coming by car now, but still slow enough for D to shadow in the failing light, and the big man seeing it like Chance had seen it, and calling in what might pass for air support in the person of Carl Allan and his Starlight coupe—the great diversion beneath which Chance makes his play… It was only everything else that continued to elude him. Blackstone stabbed by the beach but found in the room? And why no murder weapon? The best he could come up with was something like… D arriving at the scene to find Blackstone already dead, the knife still in his chest, and not only removing the blade but guessing it was Chance who’d gone over the wall, and calling it in, just in case, anonymously of course, as a man and his dog… and then goes even further and stuffs Blackstone into the Crown Vic (the keys would have been on Blackstone’s body) and drives him back to the Blue Dolphin, trying to make it look like it all happened there, and kills the Romanian who’d been left to guard her and the two of them walk out, him and her, and disappear… back into the cool gray city of love… Was that all too much, or was it like the old man thought, and Big D a kind of ongoing magic act? Maybe it had something to do with that book his grandmother had mentioned—Unlocking Your Hidden Powers. But when at last an opportunity presented itself and he’d limped with the aid of a walker to a pay phone in the lobby and gotten D on his burner and asked how he’d managed it, in truth that is, and had she mentioned his name? D would say no more than, “Managed what?” adding only that he was happy that Chance was happy… it all having worked out so well with his furniture and all, because when you got right down to it… these things were, in point of fact, never an exact science and happy endings a long way from written in the stars and there was little for it but for Chance to agree that yes, timing was indeed everything, and to return to his room where for the first time in a good long time, he actually stopped to consider the possibility of his being happy and of what that might look like, the war in his prostate notwithstanding.