Chance

Chance and the limit experience

The limit experience (generally imagined as an interrogation of limits by way of transgression) is a type of action or experience that approaches the edge of living in terms of its intensity and seeming impossibility, and is therefore capable, at least in theory, of breaking the subject from itself—and from which the subject may emerge transfigured, as from some mystical encounter.

He spent the night in a room in a hospital, the same in which he tried unsuccessfully to visit both Big D and his daughter. When they asked him if there was someone they should call, he gave them the name of his receptionist, Lucy Brown. From time to time a nurse came to ask him things. They were especially interested in knowing the month, the day, and the year. He knew the drill. At some point Nurse Gooley arrived. It was, as nearly as he could tell, sometime around dawn of the following day.

“You should just move in here,” she told him. “How’s your daughter?”

“At home, with her mother. Thanks for asking. And thank God you’re here. They keep asking me to name the president.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“I told them it didn’t matter. I told them history is coming for the empire.”

“I bet they liked that.”

“They told me on the way over that I’d had a fall.”

“You fell off a goddamn cliff.”

“Do you think,” Chance asked her, “that we could get them to add just a dash of the intravenous Valium?” He was looking at the spout in his arm.

“I don’t know why not. You’re the doctor.”

Chance had seen several doctors since his admission into the trauma center. He’d been scanned, x-rayed, pumped full of a radioactive dying agent proven to damage the thyroid, and scanned again. His pupils had remained somewhat dilated with no evidence of subarachnoid bleeding, intracerebral hematoma, or any shift to the right or left of brain content. Still, his concussion had been relatively severe. He was missing time, certainly an hour or more.

“How long do you have to be out,” Nurse Gooley wanted to know, “before they break down and call it a coma?” She was, as nearly as he could judge, only half kidding but picked it up again before he could decide on an answer. “You had this with you in the ambulance,” she said.

Chance saw that she was holding the satchel he’d carried to Lands End. It was still zipped tight and seemed little the worse for wear. “I thought it was something you might want, so I tucked it away when I heard the police were asking for your clothes.”

“The police?” Chance said. He was not so drugged up as to avoid the first stirrings of panic.

“Yes. There was apparently someone else hurt out there or something and they wanted your clothes. Don’t ask me why. They said it was routine.”

Was it his imagination or was she giving him a bit of a look? She placed the satchel on the rolling table at his bedside. “Did I do good?” she asked.

“Yes,” Chance said. “Yes, you did. I would very much prefer to have this with me, thank you.”

She patted him on the leg. “I imagine someone will be around.”

By someone, he assumed her to mean the police. He felt certain that she had winked at him on her way out and waited a full ten seconds to be sure she was not stepping back in before opening the case. It was all there, the old shit, that and a few grains of sand that had mysteriously found their way inside. When he had assured himself of its contents, he shoved it beneath the blankets and dozed with it there beside him, growing warm beneath the back of a thigh.

He woke hours later to the play of sunlight through the room’s single window to find that a man had appeared in his doorway. The man was probably no older than forty with a broad, suntanned face beneath short blond hair neatly trimmed. He wore a dark gray suit with a white shirt and burgundy tie, and Chance took him at once for what he was, the someone Nurse Gooley had predicted.

He introduced himself as Detective Newsome of the San Francisco Police Department and proved, if nothing else, a fountain of information. Chance it seems had managed to make contact with the pedestrian safety wall above Ocean Beach at just that point where the top portion had been removed as part of a general renovation. The sidewalk had been cordoned off with yellow tape but that was hardly enough to prevent Chance, distracted no doubt by the traffic accident that had occurred almost right on top of him, from stumbling into the site and over, some forty feet, to the sand below.

If not for the work, such a fall would have been all but impossible. It was equally true that on any other day the fall would, in all probability, have proven fatal. What saved him was the very work that had allowed for the accident’s possibility, which is to say the large mound of imported sand piled against the cliff face just below the wall as part of the city’s ongoing war with beach erosion. The sand had both shortened and cushioned his fall. There was also the day of the week to be considered. Chance had fallen on a Sunday. This had been revealed to him only at the hospital, for up until then, given the events of the past days and the run to Lands End, he had pretty much lost all sense of time. On any day of the week save Sunday, workers would have been present, preventing access to the site. And finally there was the hour. Chance had fallen on the lowest possible tide, a minus six feet, meaning that a good deal more of the beach was exposed than might normally be expected. Had he fallen on a higher tide, he might well have rolled off the temporary dune and into the water, where he almost certainly would have drowned before help could arrive.

“You see where I’m going with this,” Newsome told him. The man had a pleasant enough manner.

“I got lucky.”

“Yes, but only after you were unlucky.”

Chance could’ve made an entire meal out of that one but Detective Newsome was hardly the guy to share it with. “Tell me about the accident,” he said finally. “With the cars.”

“A very old man lost control of his very old Studebaker, ran head-on into a new Mercedes.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“There’s a whole story there,” Newsome said. “Guys in the Mercedes took off. Ran over a girl on a skateboard trying to get back on the road, then abandoned their car in Golden Gate Park, where contraband was found inside the vehicle.”

Chance didn’t ask about the contraband and Newsome didn’t say. He asked about the girl instead.

“Girl’s going to make it. But that’s only one piece of it. There was a homicide in progress with multiple victims at very nearly the same time and only blocks away. A dirty cop was involved so of course the media’s all over it. Front-page news as of today so I’m not telling you anything you won’t read in the papers.”

Chance was aware of certain physiological changes taking place, a distant, high-pitched ringing, a prickly sensation at his hairline. He wondered aloud about the men in the Mercedes.

“Still at large,” Newsome said. “But yeah… we’d love to find ’em. Witnesses made them as foreign looking. The dead cop had Romanian mob ties, but like I said, you can read all about it. Papers probably know more than I do at this point.”

Chance doubted it. He was beginning to doubt the detective’s conviviality as well. Surely, he thought, it was a trick on hoopleheads, a trap waiting to spring. He inquired after the old man.

“Nothing serious. Probably just too old to be driving… couple of onlookers said it was his fault.”

“How did they find me?”

“Some guy on the beach walking his dog. At least that’s what he said. He didn’t stick around. When we tried to trace the call, we hit a dead end. Phone was a burner. Do you know what those are?”

Chance said that he did.

“Doctors told me you weren’t remembering much about the incident. I’m wondering if you remember why you were there?”

“I enjoy the walk up to the old baths and I needed to clear my head,” Chance told him. “We’ve been having some trouble with my daughter…” This is how it begins, he thought, the cat and mouse of it.

“I understand there was a missing persons report filed but that now she’s back.”

“Still some things there we need to address, but yes, it was a great relief. The last thing I remember is getting out of my car, putting my keys in my pocket.”

“That would have been by the Cliff House.”

Chance nodded but he was thinking about his pockets and what else might be there… a little sheath with wires on it.

“You’re a doctor, they tell me.”

“Neuropsychiatry.”

“Interesting stuff,” Detective Newsome said. “Does the name Raymond Blackstone mean anything to you?”

Chance said that it did not, but pretended to deep reflection. “Of course, I’ve seen many patients over the years, but the name does not stand out.”

“Well,” Newsome told him. “He’s the cop I was telling you about, but he was also one of the victims. He was found nearby but witnesses have also placed him near the Cliff House. Do you recall seeing anyone else anywhere near you before you fell?”

“The answer to that is no. My amnesia for the event is quite complete. It’s my guess that I’m missing about an hour altogether.”

“Weird how that works, isn’t it? But then I’d guess you’d know more about it than most.”

“We are continually in the business of laying down memory,” Chance told him, only too happy for the opportunity. “With an injury… such as mine… that physiological process inside the brain gets interrupted. But as to exactly how or why the retrograde component can vary so wildly… why there are people whose memory loss may be a matter of minutes while others may lose months or even years…”

“And it’s not just the severity of the injury?”

“That’s of course a factor, but there may also be psychological factors… psychogenic amnesia… We tell ourselves stories to make sense of who we are. Certain types of highly charged, highly traumatic events are simply too terrible to fit into the narrative we have created. So we block them out. You find this in soldiers, others with post-traumatic stress…”

“Cops.” Newsome was smiling at him.

“Police officers are certainly in a position to have those kinds of experiences.” He supposed it was time to rein it in.

“And what are the chances that any of this comes back?”

“That too varies. Some people, over time, will remember everything. Others never do.”

Detective Newsome produced a card. “You get any of it back, call me.” He placed his card on the table at Chance’s side. “You’re an interesting guy. I’d enjoy talking some more, when you’re up to it.”

“The nurse said you’d taken my clothes.”

“Yeah, sorry. We want to look them over, see if maybe you and Blackstone came into contact or were victims of the same perp.”

“Really?”

Newsome shrugged. “We’re still trying to determine where exactly Blackstone was injured. Like I said, he was seen at Ocean Beach. Same location the guys in the Mercedes were trying to get away from, in a hurry. And here you are… a doctor. Maybe you saw something out there, tried to help. Lab may tell us more… fibers, hairs, blood… Let me put it like this. I’m not a big believer in coincidence. Goes with the job, is what my wife tells me.” He smiled once more.

With Newsome gone, Chance rang for additional morphine and a copy of the day’s paper.

The detective had been right of course. It was all there, the obvious stuff anyway. Raymond Blackstone had been found dead in a room at the Blue Dolphin Motel. Incriminating evidence had been found at the scene linking the former homicide detective to a prostitution and human trafficking ring with ties to a Romanian mob based in Oakland. As to whether or not the body had been moved, as Newsome had suggested, the papers weren’t saying. A second body had also been found in the motel, a Romanian male with ties to the same Oakland-based mob. Two more men, also believed to be Romanians, had been seen fleeing the scene of an accident at nearby Ocean Beach. These men were also wanted for a second hit-and-run incident involving a pedestrian and finally there was mention of the San Francisco–based doctor, name withheld, who had fallen from a cliff at very nearly the same time and place as the two hit and runs.

There was a good deal of speculation as to how all of these things had occurred in such close proximity to one another and what if any were the connections between them but little in the way of fact. Additional witnesses had yet to come forward and authorities were still looking for the men in the Mercedes. Anyone with information was being asked to contact the police.

Chance stayed where he was and willed himself to remember, to little avail. It occurred to him that Jean-Baptiste had for a time trafficked in hypnosis and was supposed to have been quite effective. A phone call to the building, however, informed him that Jean-Baptiste’s condition had worsened suddenly. He was in the building but had withdrawn to his apartment and was declining calls.

In the absence of verifiable fact there was little for it but to work with what he had. Certainly he and Blackstone had come within reach. The Starlight coupe had collided with the Mercedes. Horns had sounded, but here already he was into the realm of conjecture. Horns would have sounded. Metal would have screamed and given way. Glass would have broken. Anyone even remotely near the scene would have turned to look. Chance would have taken the opportunity to plunge his blade into Blackstone’s chest at a point more or less even with the second button of the pale blue dress shirt the detective had worn… And all of this seemed to have happened… the bloodred blossoming across another’s chest… the rhythms of a heart in cardiac arrest felt even by way of steel run to the aortic arch…

But then he might just as well, with an equal or even greater clarity, remember other things too. He might, for instance, and in great detail, recall the bungalow with its horrid shades of yellows and browns, Formica beneath paisley prints, louvered blinds on rusted metal—the Blue Dolphin, after all, dating to the sixties, the decade of his birth. One might’ve thought they would have refurbished the place between then and now but that would have required some heave of the will it was clearly not theirs to command. The room smelled rather of stale cigarettes and Pine-Sol with its sorry set of house rules even now affixed to the inside of the door that disallowed smoking, loud music, and dancing but omitted outright murder. As with what he knew of those events in the parking lot, he could, and with very little effort, build it out from there…

He would have found her … seated on the bed… eyes round as a deer’s in the headlights and known right then that he was fucked, that Big D had been right, that the point in Blackstone’s inviting him to talk was no more than Chance dead in a tawdry motel and this old incriminating shit right there with him and what else would there ever be, but to think that someone was shaking him down, the skivvy doctor, and the thing gone sideways? As for what Blackstone had planned for her, it was more difficult to say. Would they have found her dead there as well, or in some other corner of the world, or not at all? It scarcely mattered now. Still… Raymond Blackstone must have felt himself at the very brink of pulling it off, of ridding himself of at least one if not both of them, close enough to taste it when the wrench lands in the gears… Big D blowing through the doors, perhaps… Or maybe it was him? Maybe it was here that Chance had drawn his blade and if not, why else would he remember it so just now… right down to the last detail of the sorry blood-soaked room? What he can’t logic is how, in the aftermath of this horror, he also comes to be on the sand at Ocean Beach. Would it not be true that the beach and room are mutually exclusive propositions? On the other hand, and this is where it got really messy, if it was also true and he knew it to be, particularly in such cases as those described by him to Detective Newsome, that in certain instances involving both amnesia and post-traumatic stress, a patient’s most vivid, detailed congruent memories might also be complete fabrications and if every last part of it anyway, at both beach and motel was, in any configuration or even combination thereof, when judged by all previously acceptable standards, already so far beyond the pale as to be more the stuff of fever dream and confabulation than any heretofore recognizable reality… well then, at the end of the day, why not indulge oneself ? Why not mix and match, as if these shards of memory were no more than the bits of colored glass in a child’s kaleidoscope and thereby subject to rearrangement on a moment’s whim with a flick of the wrist?

Suffice it to say the head injury had brought him to a place that no longer felt like home. He was there and then he wasn’t. The only experience he could even remotely liken it to was that of being prepped for surgery—drugs run to the main line, counting backward into the void as the present vanished. But in that there was context. In this there was none. In its absence, his sense of the present had grown fragile as a robin’s egg. Perhaps he was only imagining that he could still move his fingers. Who could say that at any moment his present sense of space and time would not dissolve once more, admitting him to a different and even more terrible reality? The prospect was enough to induce sweats and palpitations, yet he indulged it tirelessly. The room and the beach were but two possibilities. How could there not be a version of things in which Blackstone or one of the Romanians had bested him? Perhaps he was dead and this was what it was like. Perhaps he was strapped to a bed in a psych ward in a county jail. He was not so far gone that he could not recall patients having described similar states or the sorry-ass justice he had done them in his endless and dreary reports…

Eldon Chance is a 49-year-old right-handed neuropsychiatrist who is now 36 hours post cerebral concussion suffered in a fall from a cliff at Ocean Beach in San Francisco in which he also sustained fractures of the T-3 and T-4 vertebrae as well as fractures of the 8th, 9th, and 10th ribs on his left side and two broken fingers on his left hand. He has no clear memory of the fall or of events immediately following or preceding it. He reports memories that are in fact mutually exclusive, but experiences them with the intensity of hallucinations. After an initial sensation of relief at finding himself alive, he admits to trouble in dealing with his current mental state, which he finds to be muddied and unstable. He believes that this is not who he is but is uncertain as to a more definite and recognizable identity. He worries that everything he has done with his life thus far has been little more than a banal series of empty and futile gestures. He recalls with clarity the people in his life but believes himself to have failed them on many fronts, as husband, father, and physician, and that in the days leading up to his accident he may have done bad things that have been pushed below the level of conscious thought and that he may be, in his own words, “some kind of asshole.” Uncertain as to the events in his most immediate past, he is also uncertain about his future. He feels that he has lost the ability to judge what he is or is not capable of and worries that he may in some way bring harm to himself or others. He is aware of certain disturbing urges in this regard and worries about his ability to hold them at bay. He is also fearful of a second loss of consciousness from which he will emerge into even more undesirable circumstances and of his learning of even more bad things that he has done. When pressed to reveal more about his “certain disturbing urges” he admits to having entertained the drinking of household cleaning products, of wishing to acquire a pet rat together with a handgun, and of a desire to begin reading all printed matter backward, that is from right to left across the page and from the bottom of the page to the top. He recognizes in these urges certain pathologies he has treated others for over the years but fears that in the absence of a more concrete and recognizable version of himself, he may be inclined to adopt these and as a consequence of which will, over time, be no more than a walking repository of the thousand and one mental illnesses he’s been forced to deal with throughout his twenty-odd years of medical practice, and that this may be only the beginning…