Kem Nunn - Chance

When, over time, this failed to happen of its own accord, he set about trying to make it happen by force of will. The struggle seemed to go on for a good long while until finally, exhausted, he was forced to accept, as had so many before him, that however inexplicable, this was not a dream, that in some extremely opaque and fucked-up way the unacceptable had in fact occurred, certainly without his consent, without even his knowledge, until finally there was nothing for it but to humble himself as the others had humbled them  selves, to look up into the face of the young man with the scissors, admitting by dint of his own words to his utter helplessness and dependency upon the kindness of strangers and to ask as so many others had asked before him, “What happened and where am I?”

“You’re in an ambulance, Dr. Chance,” the young man said. “You’ve had quite a bad fall and we’re taking you to the hospital.”

He might have asked for more but he didn’t. He went straight for the pact with God. He knew the routine. It was common as dirt. He promised God that if he could move his fingers and toes he would never want for more. When that was done and he had waited for what seemed a respectable amount of time, he tried and found that he could indeed move his fingers and toes. God had come through. He guessed that he could live with the rest of it but then he guessed too that they’d probably by now shot him full of morphine and the fact was… now that his business with the universe was out of the way, he was not really feeling all that bad, all things considered.

The limit experience (generally imagined as an interrogation of limits by way of transgression) is a type of action or experience that approaches the edge of living in terms of its intensity and seeming impossibility, and is therefore capable, at least in theory, of breaking the subject from itself—and from which the subject may emerge transfigured, as from some mystical encounter.

He spent the night in a room in a hospital, the same in which he tried unsuccessfully to visit both Big D and his daughter. When they asked him if there was someone they should call, he gave them the name of his receptionist, Lucy Brown. From time to time a nurse came to ask him things. They were especially interested in knowing the month, the day, and the year. He knew the drill. At some point Nurse Gooley arrived. It was, as nearly as he could tell, sometime around dawn of the following day.

“You should just move in here,” she told him. “How’s your daughter?”

“At home, with her mother. Thanks for asking. And thank God you’re here. They keep asking me to name the president.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“I told them it didn’t matter. I told them history is coming for the empire.”

“I bet they liked that.”

“They told me on the way over that I’d had a fall.”

“You fell off a goddamn cliff.”

“Do you think,” Chance asked her, “that we could get them to add just a dash of the intravenous Valium?” He was looking at the spout in his arm.

“I don’t know why not. You’re the doctor.”

Chance had seen several doctors since his admission into the trauma center. He’d been scanned, x-rayed, pumped full of a radioactive dying agent proven to damage the thyroid, and scanned again. His pupils had remained somewhat dilated with no evidence of subarachnoid bleeding, intracerebral hematoma, or any shift to the right or left of brain content. Still, his concussion had been relatively severe. He was missing time, certainly an hour or more.

“How long do you have to be out,” Nurse Gooley wanted to know, “before they break down and call it a coma?” She was, as nearly as he could judge, only half kidding but picked it up again before he could decide on an answer. “You had this with you in the ambulance,” she said.

Chance saw that she was holding the satchel he’d carried to Lands End. It was still zipped tight and seemed little the worse for wear. “I thought it was something you might want, so I tucked it away when I heard the police were asking for your clothes.”

“The police?” Chance said. He was not so drugged up as to avoid the first stirrings of panic.

“Yes. There was apparently someone else hurt out there or something and they wanted your clothes. Don’t ask me why. They said it was routine.”

Was it his imagination or was she giving him a bit of a look? She placed the satchel on the rolling table at his bedside. “Did I do good?” she asked.

“Yes,” Chance said. “Yes, you did. I would very much prefer to have this with me, thank you.”

She patted him on the leg. “I imagine someone will be around.”

By someone, he assumed her to mean the police. He felt certain that she had winked at him on her way out and waited a full ten seconds to be sure she was not stepping back in before opening the case. It was all there, the old shit, that and a few grains of sand that had mysteriously found their way inside. When he had assured himself of its contents, he shoved it beneath the blankets and dozed with it there beside him, growing warm beneath the back of a thigh.

He woke hours later to the play of sunlight through the room’s single window to find that a man had appeared in his doorway. The man was probably no older than forty with a broad, suntanned face beneath short blond hair neatly trimmed. He wore a dark gray suit with a white shirt and burgundy tie, and Chance took him at once for what he was, the someone Nurse Gooley had predicted.

He introduced himself as Detective Newsome of the San Francisco Police Department and proved, if nothing else, a fountain of information. Chance it seems had managed to make contact with the pedestrian safety wall above Ocean Beach at just that point where the top portion had been removed as part of a general renovation. The sidewalk had been cordoned off with yellow tape but that was hardly enough to prevent Chance, distracted no doubt by the traffic accident that had occurred almost right on top of him, from stumbling into the site and over, some forty feet, to the sand below.

If not for the work, such a fall would have been all but impossible. It was equally true that on any other day the fall would, in all probability, have proven fatal. What saved him was the very work that had allowed for the accident’s possibility, which is to say the large mound of imported sand piled against the cliff face just below the wall as part of the city’s ongoing war with beach erosion. The sand had both shortened and cushioned his fall. There was also the day of the week to be considered. Chance had fallen on a Sunday. This had been revealed to him only at the hospital, for up until then, given the events of the past days and the run to Lands End, he had pretty much lost all sense of time. On any day of the week save Sunday, workers would have been present, preventing access to the site. And finally there was the hour. Chance had fallen on the lowest possible tide, a minus six feet, meaning that a good deal more of the beach was exposed than might normally be expected. Had he fallen on a higher tide, he might well have rolled off the temporary dune and into the water, where he almost certainly would have drowned before help could arrive.

“You see where I’m going with this,” Newsome told him. The man had a pleasant enough manner.

“I got lucky.”

“Yes, but only after you were unlucky.”

Chance could’ve made an entire meal out of that one but Detective Newsome was hardly the guy to share it with. “Tell me about the accident,” he said finally. “With the cars.”

“A very old man lost control of his very old Studebaker, ran head-on into a new Mercedes.”