Kem Nunn - Chance

“A cop?”

“Some kind of bouncer at this place where they were, a massage parlor in Oakland. I think Raymond may have an interest in it.”

“You know that, for a fact?”

“I don’t know anything for a fact when it comes to him. No one does. And I wouldn’t say that to anyone else. If he even thought I thought it, I would be in trouble.”

“But you do think it.”

“I hear things now and then.”

“What do the police know? Are there suspects?”

He was aware of being perhaps too eager and the question hung fire between them. “They won’t really tell me anything but I don’t think so.” Another moment passed. “Anyway, he says he’s got it.”

Chance was aware of some movement beneath him, the floor perhaps, tilting beneath his feet. “Has what?”

“The investigation, revenge… I have no idea. It was all he said. I was with him last night, and then again this morning, before work. At some point I need to go back. He says he’s going to handle everything himself, when he gets out.”

“Well…” he began but wasn’t sure where to go with it.

She found his hand with her own. “Come with me,” she whispered.

Chance hesitated.

Her grip tightened.

“Go to the café. Give me twenty minutes.”

Returning somewhat unsteadily to the confines of his office, he passed Lucy on her way out. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You sent her to the café.” He might have responded but she was already gone, waving at him over a shoulder with the tips of her fingers, nails of crimson.

Jean-Baptiste was adjusting the new photograph as Chance made his way back into the waiting room. Chance had not actually seen Jean-Baptiste in some time. He heard that his illness had taken a turn. Another man had been filling in, parking cars beneath the building. “What a remarkable woman,” was how Jean-Baptiste greeted him. “That one I was talking to just now. Is she a patient?”

Jean-Baptiste was scarcely more than five feet in height, nearly as big around as he was tall. In this respect one might say that he was perfectly proportioned. Chance guessed him to be no more than fifty, putting them at roughly the same age. The Frenchman wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and was possessed of an imposing head of black hair streaked with gray that he wore pulled back into a ponytail half as long as himself. It was his complexion Chance thought that gave him away, making him look older than his years—the papery quality of the skin, the faint yellowing one might associate with some form of ill health.

“Professionally speaking,” Chance said, “I saw her one time for an evaluation, then sent her to a therapist, Janice Silver.”

“One time is not so bad.”

“One time is still one time.”

Jean-Baptiste was a moment taking him in. “Is this me you’re talking to, or are you now speaking to yourself, one of your enemies from within, perhaps?” The question was followed by a little wink. Of Jean-Baptiste, it was said that he’d cut rather a wide swath with the ladies upon his arrival in the city by the bay.

“Both, would be my guess,” Chance told him. “I sent her to the café on the corner.”

“Good for you.”

“You’re hoping to see me disbarred?”

“Nonsense. A slap on the wrist, and that’s if someone complains. I’m assuming you didn’t make love to her on the floor of your office at the time of your lone evaluation.”

“Hardly.”

“Too bad. That’s one attractive woman. She is also smart and sexy. How crazy is she?”

“I don’t know. A history of memory lapses, at least one secondary personality…”

“Ah yes,” Jean-Baptiste said. He managed the tone of someone recalling with some fondness another age of the world.

Chance knew him to be a skeptic with regard to convention but he was not looking for a fight. Nor were his own views on the subject entirely clear, even to himself. “She remains caught in an extremely stressful and abusive relationship,” he said. “Very debilitating. If she could free herself from that…”

“This other might go away.”

Chance shrugged.

“Or not.”

“Or not,” Chance admitted.

“And you’re trying to help.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s like Orpheus and Persephone in the cool gray city. And who can blame you? I, for one, am all for it.”

“All for what?”

“Oh, come on. The woman is taken with you. It’s as plain as day. And you’re taken with her. How long since you’ve gotten laid?”

With Lucy gone, there were just the two of them there, them and Jean-Baptiste’s infamous subjects. The one in the photograph Jean-Baptiste was just now finishing with was a man probably no older than seventy, the apparent victim of Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. He was dressed in what appeared to be a large cloth diaper with a ribbon about his chest that read CAPTAIN AMERICA in bold letters. The man was standing on a plain wooden chair before a long, empty table as if preparing to hang himself in what looked to be some kind of communal dining room. What made the photograph especially arresting was the gleam in the man’s eye, at once unsound yet full of what one might only call a fierce, unyielding light.

“Knowing you’re about to die affords certain freedoms from convention,” Jean-Baptiste was saying. Chance remained fixed upon the man on the chair in the new photograph. “The thing about one’s last act… without recourse to an afterlife…”

“I was under the impression that you were not a believer in last acts,” Chance said, cutting him off. “I thought that was one of your things.”

“I’m giving it to you straight,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “Without further possibilities to become. There’s only what you are. You should think in terms of your Nietzsche, the eternal return.”

Chance managed to free his gaze from that of the demented man. “Janice Silver seems to think she may be borderline.”

“Yes, well… there is always that. And I’m sure she would know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not. Who ever does? But it’s not a bad out.”

Chance just looked at him.

“She is borderline, there’s nothing you can do, you or anybody else. She is what she is, the product of whatever tragic beginnings and fucked-up set of circumstances she had the great misfortune to be born into. What’s Beckett’s line? It’s a hell of a planet? My advice, make love to her while you still can. Make wild, passionate love and move on, onward and upward as they say, but tell me all about it, will you? Details, please.” When Chance said nothing, Jean-Baptiste continued with this latest train of thought. “You know how they say getting older means settling for less. It’s a good deal more dire than that, my friend, it’s staring the gray rat in the eye and refusing to blink.”

Chance looked once more to the man in the diaper, Captain America, aware of a fresh insight into his old friend’s work. “Is that what he’s doing?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.”

“It’s what you look for… in all of them…” His eye swept to Lucy’s favorite, the old lady in her Indian headdress.

“That certain spark, yes… the immediacy of it. Unflinching, I suppose would be another way of saying it.”

“And how do you differentiate unflinching from purely mad?”

“Ah…” Jean-Baptiste said, warming to the subject. “Therein resides the tale, my friend. But I let the viewer decide about all of that. Frankly that part doesn’t interest me all that much. It’s the light that I’m after, a moth to the fucking flame, that and a few vicarious forays into the land of the living. It’s what remains and I’m counting on you to deliver.”