Kem Nunn - Chance

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…”