Kem Nunn - Chance

Chance did little more than lift his eyebrows. It seemed to him highly irregular that Haig should find the directing of anyone anywhere as anything other than a task beneath his station.

“She was in mine by mistake,” Haig told him. “I thought of keeping her, but what the hell. She wanted you.”

“Well… I guess I should thank you then,” Chance said.

“Or at least return the favor.” Haig inclined toward the demented woman Chance recognized as the work of the building’s chief parking attendant, Jean-Baptiste Marceau.

Formerly of Paris, France, Jean-Baptiste had once been a student of anthropology and medicine. A head injury at twenty-four with resultant scarring along the motor strip near the back portion of the frontal lobe had made of him an epileptic, subject to partial as well as complex or frontal lobe seizures in the manner of Saint Paul and in the wake of which he had abandoned his formal studies for paths less traveled. One of his interests was photography and he had, in the forty-odd years since the accident, amassed an impressive collection of prideful, demented individuals in various states of physical and mental decline and from which he occasionally sought to decorate the walls of the building.

“He’s at it again,” Haig said in reference to the picture. “I’m thinking this time… maybe you can talk to him.”

Of the artist’s work, Chance was of two minds. On the one hand, the stuff intrigued him for reasons he could not entirely fathom. On the other, it made him want to hang himself. Of Jean-Baptiste he was not at all conflicted but considered him one of the city’s hidden treasures, a kind of peripatetic holy man sworn to the pursuit of subjects not yet identified. He lived alone in the building’s tiny basement apartment, procured along with his job by way of some connection to the landlord, an ancient Chinese woman of immense wealth, that was not altogether clear, though Chance suspected some form of very beneath-the-boards type treatment/therapy as perhaps part of the equation given that Jean-Baptiste, while lacking in appropriate credentials, had been known to see people now and again as patients, especially in such cases as were inclined toward astro travel and talks with the dead. But whatever the arrangement, and clandestine therapy was pure conjecture on Chance’s part, attempts by certain of the building’s tenants to dislodge him had ended badly. The Frenchman was protected from on high.

But that was only part of it. The other thing about Jean-Baptiste was that when it came to parking cars he made no distinction between the late-model Porsches, Beamers, Mercedes, Range Rovers, and Audis that filled the underground lot and Chance’s 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass. (His wife in possession of the Lexus, he’d found the Olds on craigslist.) Where other attendants were almost uniformly inclined to hide the creaking wreck, Jean-Baptiste was given to placing it among the building’s most desirable spaces, an act of charity that had led some, Haig among them, to believe the two in some special alliance.

“He’s taken this Diane Arbus routine to new heights, or lows,” Haig went on. “We’ll have patients going out the windows.”

Chance studied the demented woman. While it was true that in the months since Jean-Baptiste’s arrival in the building’s basement, and particularly in the wake of his own divorce, Chance had come to rather enjoy the other’s exuberant disinhibition—to the point of imparting certain confidences he would not have shared with his more professional colleagues—it was also true that Jean-Baptiste was a thing unto himself, as subject to influence as the weather, but pleasures had been few of late and Chance would take them where he could. “I don’t know,” he said, his eyes on those of the woman. “I kind of like this one.”

Haig just looked at him.

“Something about those dollies. I mean, think about it.” He had started once more for his office.

“Fuck you then,” Haig called after him. “ She comes in here again… I’m keeping her for myself.”

Chance gave him a little wave. “Perhaps you should meet Big D,” he said, too distant to be heard but indulging his latest fantasy. “On a dark night in a dark alley. Oh, and bring your bat.”

He caught sight of her from the back, through one of the rectangular glass panels that flanked his door. She wore boots and jeans and a long gray sweater. She was staring out a window and he was taken, as he had been in the bookstore, by her length and line. Funny how well she’d hidden it on the occasion of her first visit, in the flat shoes and dowdy dress, the lackluster arrangement of her hair.

She turned as he entered, showing him her splint and bruises. As he started toward her, he became aware of Lucy, the young woman he’d hired to manage his office, giving him the evil eye from her place behind the counter. She was the perfect height for it at five feet even. Sometimes all you could see from across the room was the top of her head down to her eyes. She had red hair and the kind of horn-rimmed glasses once favored by Buddy Holly. Her skin was milk white, pure as the driven snow save for the full-sleeve tattoo decorating one arm, extreme perhaps but beautifully done, the work of some latter-day Dalí, all melting clocks and serpents in the garden. He didn’t know what else. The tattoos disappeared into her clothing but presumably went on from there. There was a small silver stud in her face just beneath her lower lip. She favored dresses from retro secondhand stores and Converse sneakers but she knew how to put it all together. Before reinventing herself as a psych major at UC–Berkeley she had studied art at Hunter College in New York City. She was really quite sexy in a druggy, artistic sort of way when you got right down to it. Probably why he hired her. Not that this was anything he would ever have acted upon. But he did like seeing her there, behind the big, curved counter, greeting patients, moving about the office. It was why people kept exotic birds. Her colors filled the room.

“The Jenkinses are waiting,” Lucy said. She affected a somewhat breathless delivery, one eye on the wounded Jaclyn. “I told Mrs. Blackstone she would have to make another appointment…”

“It’s all right,” Chance told her. “I’ll handle it.”

“The Jenkinses have been waiting for half an hour.”

“Please tell them that I will be with them momentarily.”

Lucy looked at him just long enough to punctuate her disapproval then did as she was asked.

Chance crossed to where Jaclyn stood waiting, blue circles beneath her yellow cat’s eyes. “I do have someone,” he said.

“Should I go?”

“It may be awhile, is what I’m saying.”

She looked to the window as if to master her emotions.

The Jenkinses were a married couple with two small children. Ralf Jenkins was thirty-nine years old. He was two years post a second craniotomy and following radiation therapy for a malignant brain tumor. Since the second surgery he’d been experiencing word-finding difficulty and fine-motor problems with his right hand. Chance had recommended both a speech pathologist with regard to his language problems and a psychotherapist for assistance with the psychological effects of his brain cancer. That had been at the first of the year. Last week they had scheduled a return visit for reasons he might anticipate but had yet to be certain of. He imagined the appointment would take anywhere from one to two hours. Since moving into private practice, Chance had always tried to make large allowances of time for the patients who came to see him. Their conditions were often grave. They were often confused, frightened, angry. The universe was already rushing them. They didn’t need it from him. “How much time do you have?” he asked of Jaclyn. He was aware of Lucy, watching from her post in the reception area.