Kem Nunn - Chance

That the name could surprise should not, given every other thing, have really been all that surprising and yet Chance was surprised. “Darius?” he asked. He was standing once more at the door of the warehouse where Carl had come to see him off. “As in Darius the Mede?”

“As in,” Carl told him. “The old man was some sort of college professor. Still is as far as I know. Darius Pringle. God knows best what that asshole was thinking.”

Darius Pringle had indeed been taken to Moffitt hospital at the UCSF medical center high atop Parnassus Avenue, a place in which Dr. Eldon Chance was still listed as an associate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine. It was moreover a place in which he was still a respected member of the community and was greeted as such, admitted to staff parking even on the day in question where he donned the white lab coat with his name pinned to the breast, kept in the trunk of his car for just such moments, and where once inside he was greeted by several of the nurses and one young doctor in particular whose name he had long since forgotten but who had carried out a residency beneath his direction. He was greeted as Dr. Chance and it occurred to him that it had been some time since so many had done so in such an agreeable fashion. Patients were encouraged to use his first name in the hopes of putting them at ease. Attorneys addressed him as Doctor but often managed to make it sound somehow slightly derogatory. These folk actually seemed to like and respect him. He might have wandered the halls for hours basking in such warmth, searching perhaps for the young man of promise it pleased him to believe he once had been, as if such a thing were no more than a valued but misplaced object. Little of course did any of his well-wishers know about why he was here just now or from whence he had come, of his walking about in the world, his going to and fro.

Having learned by phone of D’s recent transfer from an ICU to a standard room, Chance went straightaway to the head nurse on the appropriate floor, a large-boned gray-haired woman of Irish descent with the unfortunate name of Gooley, who had worked at the hospital for many years, even before Chance’s arrival, and with whom he was still on a first-name basis.

“And who are we here to see today?” she asked, as if Chance at her station were a more or less daily occurrence, though in point of fact he had not been there in months. He gave her the name and was rewarded with a chart. He read it with Gooley looking over his shoulder. It was as he had surmised. It was also worse than he had surmised with diabetes type 2 mellitus in concert with obesity, obstructive sleep apnea (severe), diabetic peripheral neuropathy (mild), and a mitral valve prolapse. A brief history indicated the patient had sustained a traumatic head injury and coma as a child as well as a compound fracture of the right femur and two other surgeries, also as a child. Much more was to come but this was what Chance saw at a glance, on the face page of the report. Current medications included Cymbalta, Valium, Provigil, Metformin, and Nexium.

“Is the gentleman a patient?” Gooley asked.

“I’m intending to see that he becomes one,” Chance told her, still aghast by what he was reading but trying not to let it show, then later in response to her look. “The gentleman has done some work for me of late and I’ve come to think of him as a friend.”

“Well,” she said. “The story is in the history on that one.”

Chance just looked at her.

“Someone asked for his records. I got a look.”

“From where?”

“Fort Miley and Napa State, to name two.”

Fort Miley was home to the San Francisco VA Hospital. Napa State was an exclusively inpatient mental health facility for the often criminally insane and did not qualify as good news. Chance hoped once more to disguise a level of apprehension bordering on out and out panic with what he hoped might be taken for a knowing nod. “The patient was lucid then?” By which he meant to suggest that D had been responsive to questioning on the part of the ER doctors.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Gooley told him. “The man’s family has been in and out. It may have been them that asked for records to be forwarded. He’s apparently been out of touch for some time and the old man is some mucky-muck from across the bay… is what I have been told.”

“What kind of mucky-muck?” Chance asked.

“UC–Berkeley, Livermore Lab… I believe he’s a nuclear man, a physicist or something.”

“Ah,” Chance said. It was what he said when he couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say. He was saying it more of late and the habit was coming to irritate him. “I’d like to take a look at all of that,” he told her. “The medical history.” It was not strictly kosher, his asking to see records without first getting permission from either the attending physician or the patient himself but he and Gooley were close enough for him to ask and for her to deliver. “Stop back when you’re done,” she told him. “I’ll make you a copy. You just didn’t get it from me.”

“Of course not. And are they still here, Mr. Pringle’s family?”

“Oh I think so, some of them anyway. Like I said, there have been comings and goings. You should have seen it on day one. It was like Grand Central Station around here.”

“Well,” Chance told her, “you’re used to that.”

Gooley nodded. “You’ll want a look at those records,” she told him. “I’ve a feeling that’s a young man who could use someone good on his side.” And couldn’t we all, Chance thought, but remained silent on that score. For the day having scarcely begun was full already of such ominous tidings that in walking off down the long hallway with its disinfectant smells, polished floors, and open doorways he was certain beyond doubt that everything he had played at over the span of the past weeks was about to be found out on a grand scale, revealed for what it was and broken, a toy boat upon the rocks of an unyielding and pitiless reality.

And that was only the half of it. For the reality in question would surely prove so obvious, so absolutely visible even to the untrained eye, his missing it so far beyond the reach of reasonable explanation, that there would simply be no point in trying, and that the rest of his days, if not spent behind bars, would surely run their course in the engagement of some menial task, a meager salary garnered till time indefinite by some stern and unforgiving agent of a vast, impersonal, and criminally inept federal tax agency. So that finally it was the ghost of his own broken and long-suffering father who came in the end to provide company, if not succor, upon the occasion of his only son’s ascent to the gallows, walking with him along these dark and gleaming halls with their bright lights and fecund odors, their open doorways that were each a little window upon the varieties of such shit as the world was composed and the old man just as Chance remembered him, stoop shouldered and silver haired, his voice low in Chance’s ear. “You can see how it is,” the old man told him in a familiar and authoritative tone, equal parts sadness and scorn. “If He’d wanted you to fly He would have given you wings.”

He found the monster’s ball Carl Allan had predicted a sorry enough affair. The illustrious father, having been last seen in person during the wee hours to further consult with staff, doctors, and assorted hospital officials, had since withdrawn to some stronghold across the bay. In the great man’s absence, Chance was confronted by a faded beauty of indiscernible age, the obvious recipient of considerable surgical work. Her name was Norma Pringle and she lost no time in letting Chance know that the whale of a man now beached in the nearby bed was not of her loins but rather those of her husband, a fact in which she seemed to take such particular satisfaction Chance found it to border on the openly malicious.