Kem Nunn - Chance

“I think you’re interesting,” she told him. “I like it when you talk like a doctor.”

Christ, he thought, she really could get away with things. He reminded himself that she was about to go and carried on. “He never systematically explored the sense of smell in relationship to hysteria, the neuroses or the psychoses. And the reason for that… was Fliess, who for years lectured and wrote about what he considered to be a physiologic relationship between the nose and the female genitals. He conceptualized a number of somatic ailments as nasal reflex neuroses. To treat these neuroses Fliess either applied cocaine to, or cauterized, the nasal mucosa or surgically removed portions of the nasal turbinate bones.”

“My God. Talk about the Dark Ages.”

“Now Freud fell in with this guy. And he also, at the time, just happened to be suffering from recurrent nasal infections. Fliess prescribed cocaine and operated, on two separate occasions, on Freud’s nose. And finally, at Freud’s request, Fliess traveled to Vienna to operate on one of Freud’s patients, a woman suffering from certain ailments that Freud was willing to interpret as the kind of nasal reflex neuroses Fliess had imagined. Fliess operated and went home. The patient developed a severe postoperative infection and nearly died. It was later discovered Fliess had left packing gauze in her nose.”

“I hope she found him and cut his throat,” Jaclyn said. She seemed quite serious about it.

“Nothing so dramatic. But she did survive. Remarkably, Freud even came to view the woman’s postoperative hemorrhaging as an hysterical symptom.”

“Now you know why I like numbers.”

“I do, and one might speculate here on Freud’s own unconscious goals… The real point, however, in all of this, in my opinion, is that Freud’s interactions with Fliess traumatized him. He was burned both literally and figuratively, and as a result, the uncharted, intensely private and nonverbal sphere mediated by our olfactory organ was to remain off-limits to Freud’s followers for the next hundred years or so.”

It was at this moment that the driver from the East Bay Cab Company sounded his horn from the street below—a bit more fodder for the neighbor’s mill. Jaclyn seemed intent upon ignoring it. “That’s quite a story,” she told him. “Now let me try one more, please . You pick. Give me something nice to go out on. I don’t want to have to keep thinking about that woman and her poor nose.”

He picked one he was quite sure she would like. It was a woman’s scent from a boutique maker in the south of Italy and one of the most expensive he had. He dabbed some on a stick and passed it to her.

The change in her countenance was immediate and profound. The huddled creature from the street returned. The stick dropped from her hand. She said nothing but the look on her face was one of pure terror. No more jokes about the Jollys and no more games. No more anything. She turned and was gone.

Chance stood where she had left him, her footsteps upon the stairs. It was necessary to close the door behind her. From there he went once more to the window. She was just getting into the cab on the street below and he could see the yellow streetlights in her yellow hair, and she was there on the street and there beside him as well, a palpable presence. Any one of her might have had him. Jackie Black had come within a heartbeat and already he was wishing her back. He made the unsettling observation it was an impossible longing he now shared with Raymond Blackstone, and he noted for the first time the car parked opposite his apartment, the kind of gray, featureless Crown Victoria favored by the police. He could not see clearly enough to be sure but it appeared there was someone seated behind the wheel, no more from Chance’s vantage point than a shape in the darkness, and even though his apartment was still dimly lit he took an instinctive step back and away from the glass. In another moment this seemed a somewhat foolish if not cowardly precaution and he moved to the window once more, in time to see the unmarked car make a U-turn in the street and drive off in the same direction as the cab. The thing he was left to consider was whether or not the anonymous caller he’d so recently spoken to had in fact been the person he’d imagined it to be.

There was, he found, no end to the considering of it. It was bottomless, like the axiom of choice or the book of Job. He rose late from a fitful sleep. What had passed in the night seemed at first light the stuff of dreams. There were no hanged cats at his door or unmarked cars waiting at the end of the block. He inspected the building’s entry for signs of the night’s struggle but there were none to be had. He had righted his trash can before retiring. The wooden and stucco houses with their muted colors, the treeless street and parked cars… it was all quite void of mystery, flat as a two-by-four in the morning’s tepid light.

As a general rule he avoided the city’s mass transit systems, but on the morning in question he hadn’t the energy for much else. Still, the bus was a mistake. He saw it at once. The thing was filled to capacity. The air was close. But this was only the half of it. Save for a handful of unruly teenagers carving graffiti into one of the plastic seats with a box cutter, or this at least was what they appeared to be doing—he was reluctant to look too closely lest he be beaten before breakfast—the morning’s other riders might well have been on their way to his office for evaluation.

Chance took it as a great irony, and not a happy one, that if he’d spent the first half of his life trying to remember, stuffing his head with all manner of data and detail, he would surely spend the second and final half consumed by a desire to forget. With certain notable exceptions, Mariella Franko, Jaclyn Blackstone, Doc Billy… his patients and their afflictions were not the baggage he wished to carry. There were over nine hundred entries in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . In the time it took to traverse a city block, he was able to diagnose any number of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including tardive dyskinesia, Parkinsonian gait, one cervical dystonia together with an impressive display of what were no doubt substance-induced and quite possibly hallucinatory states of both agitation and elation, and that was just inside the bus. The list might have gone on but he fled several blocks before his intended stop, only to be greeted by a man hardly older than himself. The man was both legless and homeless, rather clearly in the final stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, positioned in a ratty wheelchair reinforced with plywood before the Wells Fargo bank at Van Ness and California, holding in his lap a battered piece of cardboard upon which he had printed in black ink the words YOU ARE PERFECT! The sign was framed in painted wood roughly assembled and rested on what Chance took to be a well-worn copy of Gideon’s Bible.

The man held his message aloft as the bus lurched from the curb, as though to spare it the roiling exhaust, or perhaps that it might be more clearly read by the very people with whom Chance had just shared the morning’s ride and who were certainly in need of some reassurance. He put a dollar bill in the can at the man’s side and hurried away. Walking east on California Street, he became aware that the man in the wheelchair had begun to read aloud from the Bible in his lap. At least he imagined it to be the man, without actually turning to look. The man was reading from the Revelation according to John in a loud and surprisingly mellifluous voice.