Chance

Freud and Fliess

It was good, he would think later, that she had spoken as and when she had. For he knew just then it was not Jaclyn Blackstone in his arms at the door of his building. The stress of the evening, the coinciding of such bodies in space and time, in such ways as have been heretofore noted, the intensity of such repercussions as one might only imagine had very clearly served to call forth Jackie Black and my God was she something. Any man not wanting to fuck her blind should go hang himself. Chance fell to wrestling with her.

She was strong. Chance was drunk. She was intent on having his dick in her hand. In the almost certain knowledge this might prove his undoing, Chance fought to prevent it. He contended, like Jacob with the angel, though for opposite ends. Where the former had hoped to secure a blessing, Chance meant to avoid one. Their struggles carried them about the brick-lined entrance. Chance’s shoulder slammed against the building’s intercom system, no doubt ringing his downstairs neighbors. From here they twirled away as if in dance, across the sidewalk, stumbling with enough force into a plastic trash container to knock it over and into the street. It was the container filled with empty wine bottles from Chance’s apartment. Several tumbled from the sidewalk to the street and went skittering along the asphalt. One broke upon an iron grate leading to a storm drain. A light appeared in the window of the downstairs apartment fronting the street. A small dog began to bark.

Cumulatively, these distractions proved enough to break the witch’s spell. He felt the strength go out of her arms. She pulled back from the light to a corner of the entry where she sank to her haunches, circled her knees with her arms, and began to cry. Situated just so, she was once more the Jaclyn Blackstone of the Oakland hospital, alone in her bed, the bird with the broken wing.

Chance looked up to find one of his downstairs neighbors, a balding, potbellied computer programmer he had on more than one occasion heard either in heated argument or violent lovemaking with some live-in female partner Chance had yet to lay eyes on, standing at the doorway of his apartment.

The man, having opened the inside door, was still somewhat obscured by the heavy metal screened door that opened to the entry where Chance and Jackie Black had vied for Chance’s member. Chance supposed that the programmer had positioned himself just so in the assumption that the steel mesh of the door would provide at least some modicum of protection should things go badly in the street. “Everything all right?” the man asked, his voice pitched at a higher octave than any Chance had yet to hear him use.

“Yes,” Chance told him. “Sorry. Sorry for the disturbance.”

The man remained at the door.

“It’s all good,” Chance said.

The programmer peered for a moment longer into the dimly illuminated scene, the darkness beyond, no doubt hoping for a look at Chance’s invisible opponent, if only to make his story complete. Failing this, the man glanced once more at Chance, nodded, and went back inside.

Chance moved to where Jaclyn still cowered in the shadows. “I don’t know how I got here,” she said. “I don’t know what just happened.”

Chance bent to take her hands in his own. “Are you all right?” he asked. She appeared to be so.

Her eyes searched his face. “Was it Jackie?” she asked.

“She didn’t tell me her name, but yes, I believe it was.”

“That’s never happened,” she said. “Only with him.”

He let her use the apartment to make herself presentable while waiting for a cab. “This is where you live?” she asked. She had expected something on a grander scale. He told her about the divorce. She washed her face. He made coffee. He was curious as to how Jackie had gotten his address. “I guess you’ll have to ask her,” she told him.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t always remember. There are blank spots.” She saw his laptop in the kitchenette, open on the table. “You were still up,” she said.

“That little bit at the restaurant… sleep didn’t feel like an option. What happened after you left? What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He can be like that. He’s a control freak. He likes to keep people off balance. He likes suspense and high drama. I haven’t seen him since we left the restaurant. At least that’s how I remember it.” She touched a key and woke his computer. “The axiom of choice,” she said, and the shadow of a smile played across her face, half flirtatious, like she’d been that day in the bookstore. If only she had not been so alluring. It would all have been so much easier.

“Mathematically speaking,” Chance told her, “an axiom is a proposition that is assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow from it. You could say that’s how we live. Life presents us with choices. We’re defined by the choices we make yet we make them in uncertainty. In hindsight our choices will often seem arbitrary.”

She appeared to give this some thought. “I’m not sure what a mathematician would say,” she said, her face clouding. He had the feeling she was not altogether comfortable with his take on the matter. “I mean,” she went on, “they sometimes have different meanings for words; like arbitrary.” She seemed to be posing this as if it were a question.

“Certainly. There’s a language of mathematics and I am not conversant. Words are what I have and it’s the words as words that interest me.”

“It’s words as words I like to escape now and then,” Jaclyn Blackstone told him.

Chance could hear his neighbors in the apartment below. Gratefully, they were neither arguing nor making love. The voices were low and indistinct, probably, he thought, still talking about what had happened outside their door, and for a short time that was all he and Jaclyn had to listen to, the distant murmuring of other voices in unseen rooms.

“I didn’t know he was violent,” Jaclyn said. He assumed it was Raymond Blackstone they were about to discuss. She told him about the stalker, Raymond’s response to her call for help. That was how it had started. Eventually he’d asked her out. It was only after the marriage that she saw the violent streak. There was another time lag between her seeing it and his directing it at her. That had come one afternoon amid the rolling hills of West Marin. They’d gone for a drive in the country, out to the coast to see the lighthouse at Point Reyes. Coming back there had been a flat tire. They’d both gotten out of the car. He had set about exchanging the flat for the spare. It was true they’d both been tired, the sky darkening at the end of a long day. On the bluff overlooking the lighthouse they had shared a bottle of wine. He had lifted the car on the jack without first loosening the lug nuts, which meant only that he would have to lower it again in order to do so. It was a minor mistake, of little consequence. But she’d said something, a joke perhaps? It was lost to her now. He’d struck her in the face with the jack handle. Just like that. “Like being struck by lightning,” she said. “Out of nowhere on a cloudless day.” Later he’d apologized. He invented a story for the emergency room doctors, but afterward, driving her home from the hospital when it was clear that she was no longer responding to his words, he had pulled the car to the side of the road and he had let her know how it was, how it would be, if she ever told anyone, if she ever tried to leave. Incongruously, it had seemed to her at the time, he had wanted sex when they got home. He liked seeing her beaten up, she guessed. He’d gotten off on it. It was at some point in and around that time that Jackie Black had made her first appearance.

For some reason, and one could not rule out the elevated levels of alcohol in his bloodstream, he elected to disclose his plans for infiltrating the Oakland DA’s office, for making a friend in the department. Feeling himself on a roll, he went so far as to tell her about the Jollys.

She stared at him aghast. It was hardly the reaction he had anticipated.

“What?” Chance said.

The downstairs neighbors had ceased their murmurings. A hush had fallen over the apartment. Jaclyn had begun to pace. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said. It wouldn’t make any difference if he were in jail. They could put him away for the rest of his life…”

“Jaclyn… He’s not omnipotent. He’s not God. There are limits.”

“It won’t stop,” she told him. “Not till he’s dead, him or me.”

He just looked at her. “But I told you on the phone that I had come up with something that might work, with a plan… Why did you agree to hear it if that’s what you think?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said.

When it was clear she was not going to say more, Chance went on. “I am not willing to accept this as a problem that cannot be solved.” It was no more than a rehashing of the plan he’d already so much as abandoned, but then her presence did seem to warp things. She was possessed of her own gravitational field, he thought, like some stellar phenomenon, capable of bending the light. “Nor…” Chance rambled, rather like an empty boxcar on a downhill run, “do I think making a friend in the DA’s office is such a bad idea. This is a dirty cop we’re talking about. If he’s dirty in one way, he will be dirty in two. He doesn’t have to get caught for what he’s done to you. That’s the beauty of the thing.”

“Of your plan.”

“It’s like Al Capone,” he said. “They didn’t get him for all the people he murdered. They got him for tax evasion.”

“Umm.”

A car stopped in the street.

“Probably your ride,” Chance said. He went to the window.

A car from the East Bay Cab Company had indeed pulled up in front of the apartment. He turned to find that she had risen from her chair. “You can’t lose faith,” he said. He was overcome by the desire to tell her something. He wanted to take her in his arms is what he wanted to do. She was, in her own way, as seductive as Jackie, if not as dangerous. Or maybe she was. The conventional goal of therapy in treating dissociative disorders was to integrate the personalities into a unified whole, and he found himself, in his still somewhat inebriated state, giving way to a brief meditation on just what an integrated Jaclyn/Jackie might be like. “We will find a way,” he told her.

She nodded slightly.

“And what if there was a way for you to continue with Janice? It wouldn’t be in her office. We’d find a cover, someone you could visit as a math tutor. Janice could meet you there…”

“You’re my knight,” she said suddenly.

“That’s what she said,” Chance told her.

She was only momentarily put off.

“You should probably go down.”

“She was right then.” It took him a moment to realize she too was talking about Jackie Black. “You do know that… that you should think of all these things… that you stood up to him in the restaurant.”

“I hardly ‘stood up to him.’ ”

“Oh yes you did.” She let a moment pass. “And don’t think he didn’t notice. You’ll be on his radar now.”

His phone began to ring. “That’s got to be your cab,” he said. “Will you think about Janice?” He lifted the phone, told the driver they would be down shortly, and hung up without waiting for a reply. He looked once more at Jaclyn Blackstone.

“Are they really the Jollys?” she asked.

It was on her way out that she noticed the cabinet Chance kept stocked with perfume bottles. She paused to look. “My God,” she said. “What’s all this?” There was something playful in the way she’d said it, like when she’d asked about the Jollys, not quite Jackie Black but not quite the other one either, the huddled creature from the street.

“I’m interested in the connection between our sense of smell and our recollection of past events. It’s a little hobby of mine. At least it used to be.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “I was thinking that maybe I should check your closet before I leave.”

“Nothing there,” he assured her. “No evening gowns or spiked heels. I envisioned once a kind of olfactory Rorschach test that might be particularly useful in helping individuals with certain types of amnesia.”

“But you don’t anymore?” she asked, reaching for a vial.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I haven’t thought about it for a while, you want the truth. We really should go down,” he said, but she’d already dabbed a bit on the back of her hand and he looked to see what she had chosen, a male scent from France. “What do you think?” he asked.

“The desert, after a rain. It’s nice. Can I try one more?” She pointed to a particularly ornate bottle.

It was, he saw, another of the male scents. He took it from the cabinet. “Try it like this.” He took one of his smell strips from a drawer beneath the perfumes, dabbed it with the scent, and passed it to her.

She tried it then made a face and pushed it away. “Too much,” she said.

“Too much in what way?”

“It’s right on top of you.” She returned the stick, the fingers of one hand pressed to the hollow of her throat. “It’s like the funeral home, when they close the lid.”

He might have asked about funeral homes and past associations. He chose instead to talk about smell’s direct access to the limbic system. “All other pathways run through the thalamus. Cognition modulates sensation. Olfactory input has one less filter. Sensation influences cognition. Which is why visceral, emotional reactions to scent can be so immediate and powerful in ways that other forms of sensory input cannot. Most people in my business tend to ignore this.” He stopped and looked at her. “Boring?”

“Are you joking? For me you read about the axiom of choice.” She was holding his eyes with her own. In the dim light of his apartment he could feel her heat in the air between them. “Why?” she asked. “Why do they ignore it?”

“It all has to do with Freud’s relationship with a guy named Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who fucked with Freud’s nose somewhere in about 1895.”

“Oh come on, you can’t stop with that.”

“There is a car downstairs.”

“How long can it take?”

In fact, he thought, there was something kind of fun in this little game she had started. It felt safer than what had gone before. With a car waiting, how far could they really go?

“Well then…” he said at length. He was still just drunk enough to play along. “Okay. The salient points… In the 1880s, as Freud was formulating his thoughts on the role of sexual trauma, real and imagined, in the development of hysterical symptoms, he was for a time quite interested in the role of smell. He said that he had often suspected an organic element in repression involving the abandonment of what he called the ‘ancient sexual zones’ linked to the changed role of olfactory sensations, meaning that the importance of smell in shaping behavior changed when we began to walk around on two legs instead of four. Formerly interesting sensations emanating from the ground became repulsive. Those were his words. And he went further. Memory, he said, now gives off the same stench as an actual object. Just as we avert our sense organ from stinking objects, so the preconscious and our conscious apprehension turn away from painful or unpleasant memories. This is what we call repression. But, and this is where it gets interesting…”

“I think you’re interesting,” she told him. “I like it when you talk like a doctor.”

Christ, he thought, she really could get away with things. He reminded himself that she was about to go and carried on. “He never systematically explored the sense of smell in relationship to hysteria, the neuroses or the psychoses. And the reason for that… was Fliess, who for years lectured and wrote about what he considered to be a physiologic relationship between the nose and the female genitals. He conceptualized a number of somatic ailments as nasal reflex neuroses. To treat these neuroses Fliess either applied cocaine to, or cauterized, the nasal mucosa or surgically removed portions of the nasal turbinate bones.”

“My God. Talk about the Dark Ages.”

“Now Freud fell in with this guy. And he also, at the time, just happened to be suffering from recurrent nasal infections. Fliess prescribed cocaine and operated, on two separate occasions, on Freud’s nose. And finally, at Freud’s request, Fliess traveled to Vienna to operate on one of Freud’s patients, a woman suffering from certain ailments that Freud was willing to interpret as the kind of nasal reflex neuroses Fliess had imagined. Fliess operated and went home. The patient developed a severe postoperative infection and nearly died. It was later discovered Fliess had left packing gauze in her nose.”

“I hope she found him and cut his throat,” Jaclyn said. She seemed quite serious about it.

“Nothing so dramatic. But she did survive. Remarkably, Freud even came to view the woman’s postoperative hemorrhaging as an hysterical symptom.”

“Now you know why I like numbers.”

“I do, and one might speculate here on Freud’s own unconscious goals… The real point, however, in all of this, in my opinion, is that Freud’s interactions with Fliess traumatized him. He was burned both literally and figuratively, and as a result, the uncharted, intensely private and nonverbal sphere mediated by our olfactory organ was to remain off-limits to Freud’s followers for the next hundred years or so.”

It was at this moment that the driver from the East Bay Cab Company sounded his horn from the street below—a bit more fodder for the neighbor’s mill. Jaclyn seemed intent upon ignoring it. “That’s quite a story,” she told him. “Now let me try one more, please. You pick. Give me something nice to go out on. I don’t want to have to keep thinking about that woman and her poor nose.”

He picked one he was quite sure she would like. It was a woman’s scent from a boutique maker in the south of Italy and one of the most expensive he had. He dabbed some on a stick and passed it to her.

The change in her countenance was immediate and profound. The huddled creature from the street returned. The stick dropped from her hand. She said nothing but the look on her face was one of pure terror. No more jokes about the Jollys and no more games. No more anything. She turned and was gone.

Chance stood where she had left him, her footsteps upon the stairs. It was necessary to close the door behind her. From there he went once more to the window. She was just getting into the cab on the street below and he could see the yellow streetlights in her yellow hair, and she was there on the street and there beside him as well, a palpable presence. Any one of her might have had him. Jackie Black had come within a heartbeat and already he was wishing her back. He made the unsettling observation it was an impossible longing he now shared with Raymond Blackstone, and he noted for the first time the car parked opposite his apartment, the kind of gray, featureless Crown Victoria favored by the police. He could not see clearly enough to be sure but it appeared there was someone seated behind the wheel, no more from Chance’s vantage point than a shape in the darkness, and even though his apartment was still dimly lit he took an instinctive step back and away from the glass. In another moment this seemed a somewhat foolish if not cowardly precaution and he moved to the window once more, in time to see the unmarked car make a U-turn in the street and drive off in the same direction as the cab. The thing he was left to consider was whether or not the anonymous caller he’d so recently spoken to had in fact been the person he’d imagined it to be.