Chance

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Twenty-five hundred dollars bought for him the Austrian-made Swarovski EL 10x50 SwaroVision binoculars. A Japanese salesperson of no more than twenty assured him they were the best his money could buy and that he would never need another, alternately referring to them as either bucket list or lifetime binoculars, to Chance’s mind an unfortunate choice of words. He had presented himself as an avid bird-watcher and world traveler. Neither of course could have been further from the truth. The cash he placed upon the glass counter before him, a small portion of the ill-gotten gains from the recent sale of his furniture, was hardly his to keep as somewhere out there in the gloomy San Francisco morning an IRS agent was undoubtedly waiting, numbers in hand. And that was if things went well.

An hour later found him at the wheel of the Cutlass, parked in front of the Mongolian Grill at a long diagonal across a gutted parking lot from the European Massage Parlor where he had gone to case the joint. He was thinking of D’s concerns regarding surveillance equipment, this in concert with what Jaclyn had said about Blackstone saying he would handle things. What did this mean? What did the man know? What had he seen? Perhaps, with the high-powered glasses, Chance would see something that D had missed in the poor light with the naked eye. If nothing else, it was a place to start and the best he had, save of course seeing patients, filing reports, preparing for his coming court appearance on behalf of the Doc Billy estate, meeting with attorneys to further his divorce proceedings, or sitting with the IRS to hear their number. The thing about all of that… it was too sedentary is what it was. It was time… to ponder the mystery of Big D and every other fucked-up thing that had gotten him here, time to think about Jane and Jaclyn and Jackie and the things he had read in Blackstone’s files. And as of just now, he was running on empty, tapped dry by some weird type of information/sensory overload and sedentary was the last thing he needed. Movement was the thing, the engagement in something requiring his full attention, a high stakes distraction. It didn’t help that Jaclyn was unavailable for comment.

He had no idea what Lucy must be thinking. They had not spoken in days. And then there was the matter of Carla’s calls. Nicole was not doing well. She had missed another day of school then spent an entire weekend, in direct violation of Carla’s orders, in the company of the new boyfriend Chance had yet to meet somewhere in West Marin, or so it was believed.

Chance invariably learned of such transgressions after the fact, sometimes long after, Carla calling at odd hours, clearly in the midst of some internal stew, suddenly deciding it was time for Chance to do something, yet never clear about what exactly this might be while at the same time rejecting any and all advice he was inclined to offer. At least this was how it felt, the full extent of his current involvement in his daughter’s life.

In the beginning she had spent more time with him. Recent complications had served to make this less than desirable but that was about to change. He would find the place in Berkeley, a house perhaps where she might have her own room. He went so far as to envision the acquisition of a small pet. He would encourage her enrollment in the Berkeley school system. These things were not beyond the pale. It was within his power to make them happen and yet here he sat, with his expensive binoculars, looking for hidden surveillance cameras in the dredges of Oakland. He was racking focus on his new binoculars when Carla called for the second time in as many days.

“Where have you been?” she asked, the rancor evident in her voice.

Chance let the question go unanswered. Married, divorced, it was the same old song.

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“Errands I needed to attend to.”

“For two days?”

Chance brought the shabby building into sharp relief, the Austrian glasses turning stucco walls to a landscape of cracks and crevices, craters worthy of the moon. “Listen,” he said. “Clearly this is a person she needs to stop seeing.” He had taken to searching beneath the eaves.

“Good luck with that.”

“Carla…”

“I’m not going to go around with her chained to my foot.”

“There’s two kinds of pain in life,” Chance told her. “The pain of discipline and the pain of remorse.” He was quoting Big D but only half there, lost in speculation on the mysteries of the human heart. Why had Blackstone kept those few reports in the dated file and why not anything at all of what had most certainly followed? Perhaps, he thought, there were other files on other hard drives—readily assembled should the need ever arise.

“You need to talk to her,” Carla said.

“I have, but yes, you’re right, I will again. In the meantime you need to keep her close.”

“Have you heard anything I just said?”

“What I hear is this, you have a boyfriend and you don’t want to be bothered.” It was, he supposed, a mean thing to say and only half true.

“You’re an asshole,” she told him.

“Some one has to pay for it all,” Chance said.

“Right. And that’s what you’re doing, just now?”

Chance of course said nothing. He was thinking about being an asshole and looking for cameras, but the lengthy pause was enough to push yet one more of Carla’s many buttons. “You don’t want to hang up on me,” she said, apparently believing that he had hung up. “Don’t you even think about hanging up on me.”

Chance sighed, loudly enough for her to hear. He was about to speak. He was about to start in on his plans for the new place east of the bridge. He was about to sing the praises of the Berkeley public school system, the proximity of the UC campus, of lecture halls, of concerts beneath the trees, but then failed to do so, the words turning to ashes in his mouth. The problem was, having been here for not more than half an hour, he had just now spotted a woman with short dark hair but looking remarkably like Jaclyn Blackstone exiting the massage parlor in the company of what he could only imagine to be a john and a fair amount of oxygen had just been sucked from the air. “We’ll have to talk later,” Chance said, and ended the call.

The mystery woman’s back was to him. Still, there was something in the curve of her hip and the way she carried herself, leaning upon the arm of the man at her side, even before showing Chance her profile and the high plane of a cheekbone giving her away, the short dark hair notwithstanding. Chance’s heart strokes rattled in his ears. Music spilled from a passing car, a ghetto rumble above a baseline throb. She put the man into some sort of high-end, bloodred sports car parked before a liquor store at the far end of the lot and saw him off before starting back in the direction of the parlor.

Chance went to meet her, as if there were a choice in the matter, across pockmarked blacktop strewn with trash, the sun impossibly bright off such dead neon and stucco walls as bound them in on all sides, sorry storefronts in colors of the Mexican flag before flat asphalt roofs on which coolers the size of small foreign-built automobiles labored against the heat, the whole place smelling of car exhaust, garbage, and spice, ovens working overtime at the Mongolian Grill.

He came at her from an odd angle, quite certain he had not yet been made. She turned only when he called her name then stopped in her tracks, her mouth open, a series of expressions, or rather the possibilities of such, rippling across her features in the time it took to draw a breath. “Oh my God.” Her first words, then once more with feeling, “Oh… my… God…” as with the dawning recognition of some heretofore unimagined truth. At which point the curtain fell and she turned away as if nothing at all had just now passed between them. It was, in the shadowy realm of dissociative identity disorder, as remarkable a performance as one was likely to find. Her hair had been died to a blue black, cut short enough to suggest the androgynous and parted on the left. She was dressed in what he took to be the uniform of a Catholic schoolgirl.

Chance moved to block her passage. She squared off to face him. “I don’t know you, buddy,” is what she said. Her voice was loud and harsh and strange and very nearly put him off stride.

“I think you do,” he told her. He’d taken a position with regard to her affectations and was intent upon maintaining it.

“The fuck do you think you are?” she asked.

“I won’t play this game with you, Jaclyn.” He spoke to her as if to a recalcitrant patient, in his finest authoritarian tone. He might have been wrong but it seemed to him that something flickered in the depths of her eyes, that she wavered momentarily before steeling herself once more. “You need to leave,” she hissed. But the momentary hesitation had been enough. “Got you,” he said.

She turned without saying more and started back in the direction of the parlor. Chance fell in beside her. “I’ve no time for games,” he told her. “Things have happened…”

It was as far as he got for she’d stopped short once more, suddenly shaking her hands as if trying to rid them of some unpleasant and possibly toxic substance, her face crumbling. It was a strange gesture bordering on the hysteric yet it touched him all the same, his bird with the broken wing. “This isn’t happening,” she said.

At which point Chance saw that a burly, dark-haired man in jeans, a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt with a gold chain around his neck, had walked from the front of the massage parlor to stand before it lighting a cigarette. What he felt next was Jaclyn Blackstone’s hand on his wrist, a fearsome grip. “For Christ’s sake,” she said and pulled him into the doorway of the adult bookstore before which they had stopped, its interior all books, tapes, DVDs, and magazines, their lurid covers wrapped in plastic to discourage handling, shimmering in the fluorescent glare. “Tell me something,” she asked. “How insane are you?”

“I guess we know each other after all.”

“Listen,” she said. There was a heavyset Mexican man of perhaps fifty looking at them from behind the counter. When she gave him the finger he looked away. “I don’t know why you’re here and I don’t want to know. What I do know is this: You have to leave before someone sees you… they’re watching everything right now… my God…” She paused for breath. “What if he sees you?” He assumed her to be talking about the man in black who had exited the store and triggered this latest in what seemed a bottomless bag of tricks.

“And why would that matter?”

“Listen to me,” she said once more. “You’re a good person. I’m not.”

“Yes… you said something to that effect that night on the bridge.”

“What night was that?” she asked, but Chance wasn’t buying. “Something good has come into your life but you don’t feel worthy, or are unable to feel worthy…” To which she produced a look of pained exasperation. “Don’t even go there,” she said, her voice suddenly distant, shot through with sad reservations. “You don’t know shit.”

“You could try telling me.”

Through the open doorway by which they had entered it was possible to see that the man in the leather jacket had begun to walk in their general direction. She took him by the arm once more. “Pray he hasn’t seen us,” she said, then something quick in perfect Spanish to the man behind the counter, the one she had just flipped off. The man nodded toward the back where they moved in a rush, single file, her reaching back to lead him by the hand, down a hallway made narrow by stacked boxes and into the alley where D had broken into Blackstone’s car, where a man had died by way of a strange curved blade and broken neck, hooked through his ocular cavities. They hurried along behind the Dumpsters, hugging the walls of buildings then came up short near the mouth of the alley where it opened to the street, stopping just back in a small alcove formed by the walls of adjoining buildings where they paused to look back in the direction from which they had come, the alley empty as the moon.

“Who is he?” Chance asked.

Jaclyn shook her head.

“Talk to me, Jaclyn.” It seemed important to him to persevere in the use of her name, for both their sakes.

“You tell me something,” she said. “Did you do it for me?”

There was scarcely time to formulate a response, as she was suddenly right up on him, her thigh pressing between his, once more the creature he’d met that night at the entrance to his own apartment. Jackie Black. He may even have spoken it aloud.

“You are crazy,” she told him.

He might of course have said the same, especially in light of the sudden revelation that she was possessed of a familiar scent, quite possibly the very one she had tried in his apartment then recoiled from to flee down the stairs. But there would, at just this moment, be no inquiring into that or anything else so obvious and nothing more in heaven or earth than just these two, meaning him and her and the promise of naked thighs beneath schoolgirl plaid, a desire beyond reason to lose himself once more in her magic.

“I have a car,” Chance whispered.

“I’ll bet you do,” she answered.

He drove them to one of the many hotels that lined the highway in approach to the Oakland airport. He had always looked upon such establishments with disdain, corporate and soulless on the high end, heartbreak seedy on the low, buildings in whose sorry rooms one might expect to find cigarette burns in the bedding, condom dispensers in the bathrooms, a land meant for drug deals and cheap assignations.

Deep into this particular blazing afternoon however, they seemed to offer anonymity as well and so beckoned with a new light. Little time was spent in the selection of the one they arrived at. It featured a neon sign that included a sleepwalking raccoon in cap and nightgown. There were apparently live, nude girls at a club across the street, this according to the marquee-type signage that fronted the road leading almost directly to airport rental returns and long-term parking. The lobby was all in shades of blue and orange with potted rubber plants and large slabs of tinted plate glass. The room they at last retired to featured views of telephone poles and billboards with ads for cars and the racetrack at Golden Gate Fields, a skimpy balcony from which one might take in the Oakland airport while jet planes in traffic patterns thundered overhead by the score and where, as the sun failed and the darkness rose to take its place, a pale frosting might be seen to appear in the far west that Chance was willing to take for the lights of San Francisco. It was a room in which he would spend the better part of two days before finding a cigarette burn on one of the house blankets and where he found even less in the way of food or sleep.

He really did think he might fuck the truth out of her and that any such truth so arrived at would be his truth and not some other, that the woman he had walked with that night in the city and made love to in his apartment might be called forth once more, conjured of hot desire and bodily fluids. But where she had once been so present there were now only shades and variations and places he couldn’t reach. One of her was all about games with words. One wanted to try things, the cock ring in her leather bag… the loop of surgical tubing… a silver device hooked like a scimitar with attached ball and meant for the enhancement of male orgasm through stimulation of the prostate gland. One asked for permission to pee, inviting him to slap her. Another wept when he did so. One of their troubles, and the night and day that followed were filled with troubles, was that once she had gotten over on him with that routine in the alley… there was nowhere to go with it, not really, when all was said and done, and quite a lot really did get said and done.

They wore themselves out at it; he would give them that. Freud had famously said that he had come to regard any sexual act as one involving at least four people. Chance had no idea how many of them were there in the room, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, but between the two of them he imagined it was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate of the number listed on the back of the door as the room’s maximum occupancy.

“You see how it is,” she said during a break in the action. The truth of it was that he was in danger of losing sight, not only of how it was in the here and now, but of any larger picture in which the present might be contained or even made to give an accounting. It was not the first time he had traveled in such a land. He’d visited once before. It had ended in a psych ER in the town of Carefree, Arizona, where there had been a ride in an ambulance, hand restraints, and debilitating drugs, a suicide watch lasting the better part of a week.

“You should cop to everything,” Chance told her at one point. He was naked, standing at the foot of the bed, seemingly on his way to the bathroom when the thought occurred.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know,” he said. “Come clean, plead self-defense in concert with diminished capacity. He won’t survive that. You will. I’m a doctor who spends half his life in court and I see these kinds of things all the time and believe me you will do minimum time in either some minimum security prison or in a state hospital and yes that’s a drag but you’ll be free and I’ll be waiting.”

She gave it a beat or two, studying the curtains that covered the door leading to their balcony, if one could actually call it that. When she looked back at him her eyes seemed to him as empty as those of a corpse. He found it an alarming observation. “I’m not even going to ask what you’re talking about,” she said. “I just want to know if we’re done.”

Chance just stood there.

“Go to the bathroom,” she told him.

He had no idea what caused him to look finally at the screen of his phone. He had gone to stand above the toilet bowl before a marbled mirror that was beginning to come apart at the edges where water had gotten in between the glass and the drywall. He imagined he had come in hopes of taking a leak, in itself a dicey proposition given what confronted him in the sorry glass, the damage done to his unit not to mention his poor prostate. One could only hope that none of his injuries would prove lasting.

The phone was on the countertop near the sink where he could not remember having left it. The sound had been turned off but the screen now blinked to life signaling the arrival of a text. As this happened, as the little screen lit up before him, he could see that it was in fact filled with messages that had arrived sometime during the past twenty-four hours or so. He could see that, and he could see something else as well. He could see that they were all from his soon-to-be ex-wife. Later he would see that there were also a number from Lucy and would find them bearers of the same sad news. But mainly what he knew, what he was given to understand over and against all else and even before he had read the messages, was that he was once more in possession of that larger present that had so recently threatened to desert him and that it was coming for him… right here and right now, very much as the beast in the jungle will come for its prey.