Kem Nunn - Chance

Lucy was at her post, eyes running to the clock on the wall as Chance entered. “Am I fired?” he asked. He was mildly perplexed by her powers of intimidation.

She watched as he fumbled for the key that would allow for the relative safety of his office. “Why should I care if you’re late?” she asked. “It’s that.” She was pointing at the wall where it appeared that Jean-Baptiste had taken the liberty of hanging yet one more of his disturbing photographs—one more elderly woman, this time stark naked save for what might be taken as the elaborate headgear of an American Indian. “Did you say he could do that?” Lucy asked.

Chance moved for a better viewing. “Not exactly. He asked. I didn’t exactly say that he couldn’t, either.”

“Think maybe you could say so now? Since I’m the one who has to look at it.”

Chance’s nod was noncommittal, Lucy’s stare not so much. “The Footes will be here in half an hour,” she told him. “You want their file?”

Chance was still looking at the picture. “This one is a bit extreme, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. Does that mean you’ll ask him to take it down?”

“He’s dying,” Chance said.

“Thaddeus Foote?”

“Jean-Baptiste. I’m not really supposed to tell anyone, but I’m telling you.”

“Are you sure?”

Upon reflection Chance supposed it true that Jean-Baptiste, a self-acknowledged confabulator, had been dying for quite some time now, but it was also true that he had been a patient in the bone clinic at the Stanford teaching hospital. “I spoke once to one of his doctors,” Chance told her. “It’s something rare, that no one’s been quite able to figure out.” The doctor had not said that Jean-Baptiste was dying exactly, but Chance had been willing to take it as implied.

“That puts a new slant on things, I guess. How do you suppose knowing what he knows relates to the photographs he takes?”

“Have you ever talked to him, about the photographs?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should sometime. He’s a smart guy, eccentric but smart. You can’t let on that I told you he was dying but you could ask why he takes the pictures. I’d be interested in what he tells you.”

“Have you ever asked him?”

“I haven’t. But I think it might be better… coming from you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I just do.”

“Well,” she said. “I knew he was smart… just seemed a little pushy… hanging those things everywhere…”

“They are an acquired taste.”

“I guess I should be nicer to him.”

“Be nicer,” Chance said. He turned once more toward his office.

“Thaddeus Foote. You want the file?”

“What I’d like you to do is cancel their appointment.”

She gave it a beat. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t think I am.”

They regarded one another from across the room.

“They’re probably on their way.”

“Then maybe you can catch them.”

“You’re serious.”

Thaddeus Foote was a tall, morbidly obese, schizophrenic young man of twenty-nine almost certain to be brought in by his mother. Taken together they formed about as dull and depressing a duo as one was likely to find. “Do you remember,” Chance asked, “how Mrs. Foote described her son’s condition on our questionnaire? One word, psychological. ”

Lucy actually smiled at him. “They’re a little slow.”

“And life is a little short.”

She gave him a look. “Rough night?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Lucy nodded, in the manner of someone who’d had a few rough nights of her own. “What should I tell the Footes?” she asked. “About his meds? There’s no way she’s not going to ask.”

“Amitriptyline. Twenty-five milligrams twice a day.”

As Lucy reached for the phone, Chance made good his escape.

Psychological indeed. The youth so described had sustained a concussion, a basilar skull fracture, and an intracerebral bleed as the results of an automobile accident on the Shoreline Highway. The accident, his third in as many years, had resulted in the death of a twenty-three-year-old blind woman riding in the car Thaddeus had hit. Formerly the valedictorian of her senior class, she was a college student at the time of her death, home for the winter break, in the company of friends and headed for oysters on the Tomales Bay when struck by Thaddeus who, acting on instructions from his car’s radio, had driven the 1953 Buick Roadmaster belonging to his mother, an ungainly beast scarcely fit for the street, across the double yellow line on the Shoreline Highway and into oncoming traffic. The blind girl’s father, a landscape architect by trade who’d raised her as a single parent after her mother’s death, had since turned to drink and lost his business. Insurance companies had begun protracted wrangling over fault in light of the boy’s colorful past and questionable capacities. Assorted insurers, Mrs. Foote, and even the Department of Motor Vehicles had all been implicated. Chance could not, without consulting his records, remember exactly who among them was paying for Thaddeus’s visits, nor could he imagine that any amount of wrangling, however it all came out, would make much difference to the girl’s father.

It was the primary concern of the chubby duo that Thaddeus not lose his license to operate a motor vehicle as his mother was counting on him, primarily for rides to and from the store where she liked to purchase her movie star magazines, newspapers, and cigarettes with food stamps provided by the state. As to any concerns the couple might have shared over future instructions from the car’s radio and their effect upon young Thaddeus, both were at pains to state, in a manner that might only have been taken for upbeat, that, in general, Thaddeus was quite able to say no to such suggestions.

Chance’s great and single contribution to this tale of woe had been, by way of a series of letters and phone calls, to keep the dim-witted fatass from regaining his place behind the wheel under threat of house arrest. Mind-boggling that no one had done this previously but there it was, your tax dollars at work. Needless to say this had not sat well with mother and son who now used every opportunity to lobby hard for the immediate reinstatement of Thaddeus’s privileges and would no doubt have continued to do so on the day in question had Chance consented to give them a hearing.

Lucy put her head in a short while later to say that she had pushed the appointment to the following week. “Excellent,” Chance told her. “And thank you. The day’s visit was not to be borne.”

She stood a moment longer in the doorway to his office. “Are you sure you’re all right?” She actually looked worried. Chance assured her that he was. She took a last long look around, as if expecting to find something he’d hidden there, Jaclyn Blackstone perhaps, and left him alone. Sometime after lunch, which he also skipped, he put in a call to Carl Allan of Allan’s Antiques but the old man was out. He left a long, possibly incoherent, message on the business’s answering machine and hung up.

There were a number of incoming calls throughout the remainder of the day but Chance declined to take them. Lucy came on two separate occasions to check in on him. He continued to assure her that everything was A-OK, finally sending her home early at just before three o’clock.

When she was gone he continued to sit at his desk, which, like the pieces so recently sold, was an antique of similar vintage but worth considerably less, housing at one of its corners the small bust of Nietzsche he had acquired as a student abroad, a trip undertaken as a break from the study of medicine, the latter being not so much the dictate of the heart as a thing that had been required of him by his father. Well, he thought now, watching the golden light and late wind play havoc with the clouds above the rooftops, he had been the good son, at least to a point. Twenty-odd years in the practice of medicine and it had gotten him here, to something very much resembling the oft-cited life of quiet desperation, unfulfilled in his work, divorced and indebted, half in love with an impossible woman, a potentially malignant blip on another man’s radar. If that wasn’t the shits he didn’t know what was.