Chance

The patient in question

There were victims for Christ’s sake. Chance had spent half his life in the same room with many of them. What was Bernard Jolly if not a victim, bereft of protectors, damaged beyond repair, mentally and physically, to the point that he now too was a predator, not yet old enough to buy a drink and already caught in the jaws of a gorged and lumbering bureaucracy, one more bit of human excrement on his way to the sea?

Perhaps, Chance thought, he was being too literal. It was equally possible his own ruminations on the subject, running to the obsessive in the wake of an evening with Big D, were, on the morning in question, exacerbated by his surroundings. He was, after all, seated between his wife and daughter on a leather couch, lined up like ducks in the proverbial shooting gallery in the principal’s office of the Havenwood Academy, and feeling every bit the receiver.

They were all there. Holly Stein, a male vice principal whose name kept escaping him, a favored teacher… The question before them was his daughter’s status. They’d been there for the better part of two hours. He supposed some progress, however painful, had been made. But life was short, and at just that point when it had been pretty much concluded that Nicole could stay, albeit on some probationary status, Chance elected to inform them that, in point of fact, she would be leaving. One might have heard a pin drop. What Chance heard was the great foghorn at the mouth of the bay.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Holly said when the foghorn had retreated once more into silence.

“What part don’t you understand?” Chance asked. He was thinking he might take a run at being the feeder.

“What are you doing?” Carla asked him.

“I’m explaining the thing,” Chance said.

Nicole, he noted, was not even looking at him. Nor, he thought, did she seem particularly interested in the proceedings, which he took as a bad sign. Her eyes were fixed on a window behind the principal’s desk by which the masts of boats in the marina might be seen glimmering in the morning light.

“It’s really very simple,” Chance told them. He was very pleased she would be able to finish out the semester. Beyond that, it was a question of money. Until the divorce was final and terms set, until the IRS was off his back, money was the deciding factor in his decision. His approach was, for him, uncommonly direct. When it was over he rose and left the room. He was aware of their faces, vacant as the moons of Jupiter, or any of those other planets having more than one, staring after him as he went out into the light.

Carla was livid but she was the easy one. It required little more to shut her up than Chance telling her she was welcome to keep Nicole at Havenwood. All she had to do was pick up the tab. “Maybe,” he suggested, “what’s-his-name would be able to help.”

Nicole was more difficult, having more in common with Bernard Jolly than the rest of them, a victim of her parents’ ineptitude and folly. They walked along a tree-lined strip of grass with views of Marin County, hills green as Ireland, crowned in fog beyond the rust red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, the city falling way at their backs. From this vantage it was all white light and shimmering surfaces, a sensory beauty. Fucking San Francisco. “I’m flying down to UCLA to deliver a paper,” Chance told her. “I get back, I’m going to find an apartment in Berkeley. The schools are better there.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I just thought of it, Nicole. It will take time but I will make it work. Trust me. In the meantime, I don’t want you walking home from school by yourself. Matter of fact, I don’t want you going anywhere by yourself. Are you with me on this?”

“Dad… I’m okay.”

He stopped and he made her stop too. He put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m serious about this, Nicky. We don’t know why this thing happened. It may have been random. It probably was, but we don’t know.”

“What else could it have been?” When he did not answer immediately she went on. “You still think it was my fault, that I was off somewhere… trying to buy dope?”

“No… I’ve taken you at your word on that.”

She appeared unconvinced. “So what then…”

“ ‘What then’ is just this… I want you to trust me. I want your word that you will make sure you are with people.”

She sighed with apparent resignation, pierced to the heart by the mere possibility of his doubt, or so she made it seem. She had taken of late to such theatrical displays. “For how long?” she asked.

“Till I say it’s okay.”

She shook her head and looked away.

“Do it for yourself, Nicole. If that’s not enough, then do it for me, but I want you to promise. I want your word.”

There had been an implied “Or what?” in his daughter’s look that she had not voiced and for which he was eternally grateful. He left the next day for Los Angeles, where they had him in a large hotel near a shopping mall and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It was an ugly part of the city though much of L.A. was ugly to his eye, the hills above Sunset Boulevard lost to the polluted air. As an apparent precaution against jumpers, the hotel’s builders had seen to it that all of the windows were hermetically sealed.

He spoke that night to several dozen people in one of the university’s many lecture halls with raked theater seating, where he delivered a PowerPoint presentation on what was intended as a fresh and rapid approach to the assessment of cognitive function. It was also intended as a kind of ad campaign for a method of testing in whose development Chance had played a part at what seemed just now to be some very faint point in a very distant past. His coworkers, a neurologist and neurosurgeon based in Seattle, had deemed the conference at UCLA a good place to revive interest in the project. As San Francisco was a good deal closer to L.A. than Seattle, it had fallen to Chance to make the trip and so he had, and so he was. Though in truth, he was coming to find in the exercise a welcome diversion—the return to a subject that had once interested him, enumerating for the benefit of a not unenthusiastic audience such factors as might contribute to confusional states over and above a true neurogenic dementia and thereby making the latter a good deal more difficult to diagnose than was commonly believed before retiring to his room and dosing himself with Ambien. He awoke hours later from an unsound sleep to find that a large manila envelope had been pushed beneath his door.

The thing had apparently followed him south, having been first delivered to his office on Polk Street. As the packet had been marked as urgent, Lucy had elected to forward it to his hotel. The envelope bore no return address. Chance sat with it, in T-shirt and boxers, still half asleep at the foot of his bed. Inside were copies of certain official documents, an arrest report together with a subsequent restraining order, both filed in the state of Arizona. In addition to these there was also a copy of an admissions report for psychiatric hospitalization, also in Arizona. The documents were years old. Chance had often been asked to look at such material as the starting point in his evaluation of a new patient. In this particular case, however, the patient in question was Eldon Chance, and his questions were all about the sender.

A phone call to Lucy revealed zip. The thing had come by way of messenger—some weirdo in a gray jumpsuit, she said. There had been nothing to sign and no receipt, no record anyone had been there save the package itself. There were, to the best of Chance’s knowledge, only two people in his current circle who knew of these things. One was Janice Silver. The other was Jean-Baptiste Marceau. He’d concealed it even from his wife. There was also a note asking him to check his computer, which is where he found the kiddie porn. Panic attacks followed, weathered with Valium and drink. It was, he supposed, upon reflection, just as well that the windows of his room had been sealed against jumpers.

It remained, while still in Los Angeles, to survive a final presentation of his material. The thing passed in a blur. The number of attendees together with their level of enthusiasm was immaterial and for that matter unknown, as any such lifting of the head from his notes for the purpose of making eye contact with his audience, a feat he had managed with ease the first time around, was on this night rendered impossible by the certain knowledge that everyone present had his number. There had been talk on the heels of his first presentation of a faculty dinner but that was moot as he fled the lecture hall, the campus, and in fact the city in a boozy sweat, arriving at San Francisco International Airport near midnight and from there making straight for Market Street and Allan’s Antiques. One might have thought this choice of destination, given the events stemming from his previous visit, to have been arrived at only after a good deal of soul searching and even then not without a good deal of trepidation, but this would not have taken into account the power of panic to override doubt, that and any other fucking thing.