Chance

Jackie black

“Well, well,” Detective Blackstone said. “Look at this.” He made a show of waving her over. She came without a word and sat next to her husband. Chance found her expression impossible to read.

“Look who I found,” Raymond said. He was at this point addressing Jaclyn. “Dr. Chance.”

“Hi,” she said. She was looking straight at Chance. It was kind of through him, really.

“Dr. Chance was just about to tell me who he was waiting for.”

“You must have misunderstood,” Chance told him. “I was just telling you I wasn’t waiting for anyone.”

“Ah, yes,” Raymond said. “So you were.”

Jaclyn moved to push back a strand of hair that had fallen to touch her eyebrow. She was dressed for jogging in black leggings and running shoes, a light, pale blue Windbreaker that had a sporty look to it. She was far and away, Chance thought, the prettiest woman in the room and that would include the ones half her age.

“A coincidence then,” Raymond went on. “You’d be amazed how many coincidences I hear about in my line of work. You’d be equally amazed at how often they turn out to not be coincidences at all. I’m getting to a point where I’m not even sure that I believe in such things.”

Jaclyn studied the tabletop before her. Some music began in the background. Chance took it for the recorded songs of whales. They were after all east of the bridge. He willed himself to meet Raymond Blackstone eye to eye. “A coincidence is simply the condition of coinciding,” he said. “Any number of people and or objects occupying the same space at the same point in time. I will give you an example. A workman installs a light fixture in the lobby of an upscale hotel. For some reason the job is improperly completed. Screws are left out of the assembly. Sometime later, a woman enters to join friends at the hotel bar. As she does, a large truck turns into the street approaching the hotel. To reach the bar, the woman must cross the lobby. The truck is now passing directly in front of the hotel. The lobby experiences some slight vibration, but it is enough to dislodge the fixture that falls at the exact instant she is passing beneath it, striking her on top of her head. In the case I have just described the blow led to a subarachnoid hemorrhage with a resulting global aphasia. The woman’s life has never been the same. But it is a horribly wonderful study in geometry. Short of recourse to some machination of the gods, it is a case of two objects meeting by pure chance in time and place, a pure coincidence. I see it all the time. I see lives changed, irrevocably. I sometimes imagine it is by such geometries that our lives are our lives, these random meetings in time and space.”

Detective Blackstone just looked at him, a long beat before turning to his wife. “And they call him Dr. Chance,” he said.

Jaclyn managed a smile.

“Not responsible for our actions then, is the point?” Raymond asked. “’Cause I’ve heard that one a few times too.”

“Yes, I imagine you have. Someone once asked William James if he believed in free will. He said, ‘Of course, what choice do I have?’ ”

“That’s good,” Raymond said. He looked at his wife. “He’s all right. How was your lecture?”

“It was good,” Jaclyn told him.

“That’s it?”

Jaclyn smiled a little once more, affecting the demeanor of a bright but shy child called upon in class. “It was on the Banach-Tarski paradox,” she said. “And don’t ask me to repeat it.” When no one said anything right away she sighed and went on. “It’s a counterintuitive theorem stating that a solid ball in three-dimensional space can be split into a finite number of nonoverlapping pieces, which can then be put back together so as to yield two identical copies of the original ball. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

“Fuck me,” Raymond said. He looked at Chance, a twinkle in his eye.

“The balls are theoretical,” Jaclyn added, her voice dropping. “An infinite scattering of points.”

If Chance had been party to a stranger conversation it had not been in a good long while. He was beginning to believe that he had entered a minefield without end, an infinite scattering of points, theoretical and otherwise. Well, he thought, it was what you got, crossing the big water on a fool’s errand. He heard Raymond ask Jaclyn if she was hungry.

“I came for takeout,” she said. “I need to get home and shower. There are papers I have to read for tomorrow.”

The jogging clothes were good then, Chance thought. They lent credence to her story and he found himself wondering if this might possibly have factored into her wearing them in the first place, the possibility of something just like this.

Raymond studied her for a moment or two in silence. “Well then,” he said. “Why don’t you go over and get your order in?” He looked to the cash register. “I’ll be there in a minute to pay.”

“That isn’t necessary,” she said.

“Forget about it,” he told her.

Jaclyn got to her feet. “It was nice to see you again,” she said, looking at Chance. They didn’t shake hands.

Raymond watched as she crossed the room. “We’ve been living separately,” he said. “But then you probably knew that.”

“I’m not a therapist. I saw Jaclyn to determine the extent of her neurological injuries. Speaking of which, did they ever find the person responsible?”

Blackstone ignored the question. “Whatever you’re having here, I want to pick it up. My treat.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“Of course you can. You were kind enough to look in on my wife. And no, we have not yet found the person responsible. But we will. You can go to the bank on that.” Raymond Blackstone now slid from the booth and stood looking down on Chance. “Tell me, Doctor, are you a married man?”

“I’m divorcing,” Chance said, after a brief hesitation.

Blackstone nodded. “Children?”

“I have a daughter.”

Blackstone nodded once more. He gave it a moment, then… “I don’t envy you that.”

Chance just looked at him.

Blackstone took a business card from the inside pocket of his coat and placed it on the table. “It’s rough out there, is all I’m trying to say. We’re a predatory species, Doctor.” He smiled a little but it was not an altogether pleasant one. “Not what they teach in the hallowed halls across the way there I’m sure. And not, if you’re a cop, what you’d ever say to the press, not in this town. But that’s the truth. And that’s the world I deal with, every day.” The man was looking directly at him and it was, Chance thought, about as dark a look as he’d ever gotten from another human being. “Ever vigilant,” the detective said finally. “That’s all.” He turned as if to go, then stopped and turned back. “Enjoy your meal, Doc Chance. Next time… us coinciding like this… It’s on you, my man.” It was at just this point that he noticed the bright red bag from Market Hall, till now hidden on the seat at Chance’s side. “Look at you. French furniture. Market Hall. Must be nice.” He went so far as to lift the bag and look inside—a pure act of aggression Chance did nothing to stop but sat listening, his face on fire, as the detective read aloud the name of his chosen blend, “Conscientious Objector.”

This done, Blackstone returned the bag and looked once more at Chance. “There’s some shit you can’t make up,” he said.

Chance watched as Raymond stopped at the register where Jaclyn stood waiting for her food. The detective spoke to a hostess, who ran his card. When this was done he signed the receipt and left the building. He never looked back. Nor did Jaclyn. When she had her food, she was gone too and Chance was left to imagine what the evening might hold, for them all. He quit on the tea, drank three glasses of white wine, and left without eating, the detective’s card in his wallet. The City of Oakland, it read. Raymond Blackstone. Detective. Homicide. Police.

It was still relatively early and he called his daughter upon reaching his apartment. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked. “Nothing,” he assured her. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” The declaration seemed to place her at a loss. “You should know I was in Oakland today,” he added. “Came home with a few of those breakfast buns for you and mom.” She said, “Cool.” Chance told her he loved her and said good night. In lieu of sleep, he opted for additional wine, Wikipedia, and Banach-Tarski.

The surprising and counterintuitive results of the paradox were not possible, Chance read, without recourse to the axiom of choice. While not mentioning this in the restaurant, it was, he recalled, the phrase she had used in inviting him to the lecture. He found it to be an axiom of set theory allowing for the construction of nonmeasurable sets, collections of points without volume in the ordinary sense. And yet why should they be, he thought suddenly. He was by now, in the continuing absence of food and well into the wine, more than a little drunk. Why should any fucking thing be ordinary? The very idea stopped him cold, stirring him to a mindless rage. It was more than one could bear. “It cannot be borne,” Chance intoned to an empty apartment lit only by the light of his computer and a small bulb above the stove.

Without the requisite mathematical understanding of what he read, it was for Chance the simple arrangement of words that held his attention, this and his desire to make sense of the day’s insults and inanities in some new and heretofore unexamined way and to that end the experiment was not without merit as there really was some thing in all of this, as if in this little matrix of words the whole of the human condition might indeed be found. We might well bleed upon Nietzsche’s secret sacrificial altars, but are we not also impaled upon the axiom of choice? The formulation pleased him as sufficient unto the day. Add to it the day’s other new concept, Big D’s theory of the frozen lake, and you were really getting someplace. His phone rang at two o’clock. “I’m downstairs,” she said.

The creature he found there, in the brick-lined entrance to his building, was as alive as any he had ever encountered and so purely sexual as to have emerged fully formed from depths both Freudian and fever driven. Her eyes were on fire with it. She pulled herself into him without hesitation, her body flush against his own, her face turned toward his. “You’re my knight,” she whispered, her voice just audible.

Under any set of circumstances more ordinary than the present this might have struck him as laughable but Chance was far from laughing. She wore the athletic gear she’d worn to the restaurant and he could feel the heat from her body through the sleek, tight-fitting fabric, her thigh moving between his. It was, for the love of Christ, an exceptionally bad time to be drunk. The thought occurred even as his hand rose to her ash-blond hair, stroking it from her face, cradling the back of her head in his palm. The light from the street was slanting in just so, across the bones of her cheeks, the white tips of her teeth between parted lips. “I want to make love to you with my mouth,” she said, more clearly this time and in a voice not entirely her own.