Kem Nunn - Chance

None of these treatments were implemented, however, as within days of his returning home, Darius ran away. He was at this time sixteen years of age. For the next three years Darius lived on the streets, first in Oakland, where he found that he was able to make money as a “street enforcer” for an Oakland crack dealer, and later in Palo Alto, where he was befriended by a number of returning military personnel. Many of these men were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some were themselves homeless. Others were in some way connected to the VA hospital in Palo Alto. A number of these men were addicted to drugs that Darius was able to procure through his connections with Oakland dealers.

It was during this period that Darius also began to use a wide variety of drugs, to the point that they, in his words, became a problem. He eventually attempted to find help from the VA hospital in San Francisco where, having managed to procure a fake military identification card, he was admitted by emergency services and was treated for chronic polysubstance abuse and intermittent psychotic ideation and behavior before the ruse was discovered. He was then turned over to the police, who contacted his family.

Darius was transferred once more to the state mental hospital in Napa and later to a privately owned institution in Marin County, where, according to Darius, his father moved to take complete control of his life. Exactly what is meant by this phrase is unclear. Darius was by now nineteen and therefore legally an adult. Darius states that he was kept in a drugged state and asked to sign many legal documents. Details relating to all of this are a bit sketchy and without knowing more it is impossible to say what was entailed. It may be that the elder Pringle was moving to excise his son from any type of inheritance. It may also be, as Darius has later speculated, that his father was attempting to get Darius to agree to some type of permanent conservatorship of person and estate, but this is speculative. Darius has said that he signed some documents while refusing others and that after a period of several weeks in this institution he was able one day to simply “walk out of the gate.” The particulars of this remain unknown. What is known is that Darius disappeared once more, eluding any and all attempts on the part of the family to locate him until his present arrival at the UCSF emergency room.

It was here that Chance broke from his assimilation of the report’s biggest hits, resting the stack of pages on the seat beside him. Was it his imagination, or did the fabric give beneath the terrible weight of the thing? He was still in the hospital parking structure and so able to watch an elderly couple attempting to extract a morbidly obese blind woman of no more than thirty from the rear of a badly oxidized Dodge minivan. Through an aperture created by a break between the great concrete platforms of which the structure was formed he was treated to a brilliant sliver of sky across which a number of frantic crows flew in pursuit of a lone red-tailed hawk as from somewhere in the building a car alarm began to sound. My God, thought Chance—and he was thinking now of one Darius Pringle, a.k.a. D, a.k.a. Big D, a.k.a. Heavy D—he’s one of my very own.

He was back at Allan’s Antiques within the hour, having done little more than follow the car’s hood ornament, the lumbering beast apparently knowing the way. All things considered, it was probably not the best of ideas. If one was looking for a level head in the midst of catastrophic decline, then Carl Allan was hardly your man. What the brief visit produced were complementary forms of paranoid ideation lapping up against one another like wavelets on a stony shore, each feeding off the intensity of the other.

“It’s like the Kennedys,” the old man kept saying. “They had that poor girl lobotomized.”

“Much more difficult to bring that off these days,” Chance assured him, the old practitioners having vanished into the mists of legend. He was thinking primarily of Walter J. Freeman, the last of the cowboy lobotomists. It was also true that a new crop of psychosurgeons many times more sophisticated were gathering in the wings but he kept this to himself.

It hardly mattered. Carl went right on as if Chance hadn’t spoken. “It was all because she liked to fuck black jazz musicians,” he said.

“I think we’re safe on that score.”

“Speak for yourself on that score,” Carl told him. “And you don’t know the family.”

“Right,” Chance said. “But I have seen his medical history. And I met some of them today, at the hospital.”

“Hovering like carrion fowl?”

“Hovering at least.” He was trying to imagine how best to articulate his impressions of Norma Pringle and her strange son. In the end, he gave up, stating rather simply that it was the mother and some kid.

“Some kid indeed. Happy to see you, were they?”

“Not the first word that comes to mind.”

“Listen,” Carl said. He put a hand on Chance’s arm. “They’ll try to pull something. They’ll have him put away. We’ll never see him again.” The old man’s eyes were tearing up, his grip tightening.

“They can’t,” Chance said. “He’s an adult.”

“What if they drug him, get him to sign something?”

“He can argue he was drugged.”

The old man appeared unconvinced. Chance sighed and tried again. “It is almost impossible,” he said, as deliberately as he was able, “in this day and age, to gain that kind of conservatorship over someone against his or her will…”

“You don’t know the father. He’s a wealthy and powerful man with friends in high places. And he hates his son.”

“That may be, but disinheriting him is one thing, putting him away is another.”

“You’re a gift from the Almighty,” Carl said suddenly, his voice filled with conviction.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Chance said.

“Nonsense. You’re a doctor. You know how the game is played. Imagine if it were just he and I.”

Chance was a moment in imagining it, Carl and D. Could it be they were actually a couple? Or was it simply that D was the son Carl never had and the reverse true for Heavy D? Could it possibly matter? Live and let live would be Chance’s position, though he remained for a moment or two in the grip of the situation’s seemingly limitless permutations, it being his experience that few things in the realm of human interaction ever qualified as simple.

“Hates him for what he did to him,” Carl said.

Chance took him as once more on the subject of D’s father. “Yes, or hates himself for having allowed it.”

“But takes it out on D either way.”

“Maybe, but I really don’t think the old man is what we have to worry about just now.”

Carl lifted a brow.

“It’s this business in Oakland,” Chance said. “He didn’t tell you?”

“He was out cold when I found him.”

“Right.”

“There was a hiccup, then, east of the bay?”

“One might say.” He proceeded to bring the old man up to speed on the exact nature and proportions of the hiccup in question. Carl received the news with a surprising measure of his old equanimity. “You’re worried that his being in some form of custody… he might be linked to events in the East Bay.”

“I’m worried the massage parlor may have surveillance cameras. I’m worried about digital images. There just aren’t that many that would fit the description, if you catch my drift.”

Carl did and they stood with that. On a nearby stoop an emaciated woman of indeterminate age was attempting unsuccessfully to right herself.