Kem Nunn - Chance

“I guess we know each other after all.”

“Listen,” she said. There was a heavyset Mexican man of perhaps fifty looking at them from behind the counter. When she gave him the finger he looked away. “I don’t know why you’re here and I don’t want to know. What I do know is this: You have to leave before someone sees you… they’re watching everything right now… my God…” She paused for breath. “What if he sees you?” He assumed her to be talking about the man in black who had exited the store and triggered this latest in what seemed a bottomless bag of tricks.

“And why would that matter?”

“Listen to me,” she said once more. “You’re a good person. I’m not.”

“Yes… you said something to that effect that night on the bridge.”

“What night was that?” she asked, but Chance wasn’t buying. “Something good has come into your life but you don’t feel worthy, or are un able to feel worthy…” To which she produced a look of pained exasperation. “Don’t even go there,” she said, her voice suddenly distant, shot through with sad reservations. “You don’t know shit.”

“You could try telling me.”

Through the open doorway by which they had entered it was possible to see that the man in the leather jacket had begun to walk in their general direction. She took him by the arm once more. “Pray he hasn’t seen us,” she said, then something quick in perfect Spanish to the man behind the counter, the one she had just flipped off. The man nodded toward the back where they moved in a rush, single file, her reaching back to lead him by the hand, down a hallway made narrow by stacked boxes and into the alley where D had broken into Blackstone’s car, where a man had died by way of a strange curved blade and broken neck, hooked through his ocular cavities. They hurried along behind the Dumpsters, hugging the walls of buildings then came up short near the mouth of the alley where it opened to the street, stopping just back in a small alcove formed by the walls of adjoining buildings where they paused to look back in the direction from which they had come, the alley empty as the moon.

“Who is he?” Chance asked.

Jaclyn shook her head.

“Talk to me, Jaclyn.” It seemed important to him to persevere in the use of her name, for both their sakes.

“You tell me something,” she said. “Did you do it for me?”

There was scarcely time to formulate a response, as she was suddenly right up on him, her thigh pressing between his, once more the creature he’d met that night at the entrance to his own apartment. Jackie Black. He may even have spoken it aloud.

“You are crazy,” she told him.

He might of course have said the same, especially in light of the sudden revelation that she was possessed of a familiar scent, quite possibly the very one she had tried in his apartment then recoiled from to flee down the stairs. But there would, at just this moment, be no inquiring into that or anything else so obvious and nothing more in heaven or earth than just these two, meaning him and her and the promise of naked thighs beneath schoolgirl plaid, a desire beyond reason to lose himself once more in her magic.

“I have a car,” Chance whispered.

“I’ll bet you do,” she answered.

He drove them to one of the many hotels that lined the highway in approach to the Oakland airport. He had always looked upon such establishments with disdain, corporate and soulless on the high end, heartbreak seedy on the low, buildings in whose sorry rooms one might expect to find cigarette burns in the bedding, condom dispensers in the bathrooms, a land meant for drug deals and cheap assignations.

Deep into this particular blazing afternoon however, they seemed to offer anonymity as well and so beckoned with a new light. Little time was spent in the selection of the one they arrived at. It featured a neon sign that included a sleepwalking raccoon in cap and nightgown. There were apparently live, nude girls at a club across the street, this according to the marquee-type signage that fronted the road leading almost directly to airport rental returns and long-term parking. The lobby was all in shades of blue and orange with potted rubber plants and large slabs of tinted plate glass. The room they at last retired to featured views of telephone poles and billboards with ads for cars and the racetrack at Golden Gate Fields, a skimpy balcony from which one might take in the Oakland airport while jet planes in traffic patterns thundered overhead by the score and where, as the sun failed and the darkness rose to take its place, a pale frosting might be seen to appear in the far west that Chance was willing to take for the lights of San Francisco. It was a room in which he would spend the better part of two days before finding a cigarette burn on one of the house blankets and where he found even less in the way of food or sleep.

He really did think he might fuck the truth out of her and that any such truth so arrived at would be his truth and not some other, that the woman he had walked with that night in the city and made love to in his apartment might be called forth once more, conjured of hot desire and bodily fluids. But where she had once been so present there were now only shades and variations and places he couldn’t reach. One of her was all about games with words. One wanted to try things, the cock ring in her leather bag… the loop of surgical tubing… a silver device hooked like a scimitar with attached ball and meant for the enhancement of male orgasm through stimulation of the prostate gland. One asked for permission to pee, inviting him to slap her. Another wept when he did so. One of their troubles, and the night and day that followed were filled with troubles, was that once she had gotten over on him with that routine in the alley… there was nowhere to go with it, not really, when all was said and done, and quite a lot really did get said and done.

They wore themselves out at it; he would give them that. Freud had famously said that he had come to regard any sexual act as one involving at least four people. Chance had no idea how many of them were there in the room, coming and going at all hours of the day and night, but between the two of them he imagined it was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate of the number listed on the back of the door as the room’s maximum occupancy.

“You see how it is,” she said during a break in the action. The truth of it was that he was in danger of losing sight, not only of how it was in the here and now, but of any larger picture in which the present might be contained or even made to give an accounting. It was not the first time he had traveled in such a land. He’d visited once before. It had ended in a psych ER in the town of Carefree, Arizona, where there had been a ride in an ambulance, hand restraints, and debilitating drugs, a suicide watch lasting the better part of a week.

“You should cop to everything,” Chance told her at one point. He was naked, standing at the foot of the bed, seemingly on his way to the bathroom when the thought occurred.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think you know,” he said. “Come clean, plead self-defense in concert with diminished capacity. He won’t survive that. You will. I’m a doctor who spends half his life in court and I see these kinds of things all the time and believe me you will do minimum time in either some minimum security prison or in a state hospital and yes that’s a drag but you’ll be free and I’ll be waiting.”

She gave it a beat or two, studying the curtains that covered the door leading to their balcony, if one could actually call it that. When she looked back at him her eyes seemed to him as empty as those of a corpse. He found it an alarming observation. “I’m not even going to ask what you’re talking about,” she said. “I just want to know if we’re done.”