Kem Nunn - Chance

But then he might just as well, with an equal or even greater clarity, remember other things too. He might, for instance, and in great detail, recall the bungalow with its horrid shades of yellows and browns, Formica beneath paisley prints, louvered blinds on rusted metal—the Blue Dolphin, after all, dating to the sixties, the decade of his birth. One might’ve thought they would have refurbished the place between then and now but that would have required some heave of the will it was clearly not theirs to command. The room smelled rather of stale cigarettes and Pine-Sol with its sorry set of house rules even now affixed to the inside of the door that disallowed smoking, loud music, and dancing but omitted outright murder. As with what he knew of those events in the parking lot, he could, and with very little effort, build it out from there…

He would have found her … seated on the bed… eyes round as a deer’s in the headlights and known right then that he was fucked, that Big D had been right, that the point in Blackstone’s inviting him to talk was no more than Chance dead in a tawdry motel and this old incriminating shit right there with him and what else would there ever be, but to think that someone was shaking him down, the skivvy doctor, and the thing gone sideways? As for what Blackstone had planned for her, it was more difficult to say. Would they have found her dead there as well, or in some other corner of the world, or not at all? It scarcely mattered now. Still… Raymond Blackstone must have felt himself at the very brink of pulling it off, of ridding himself of at least one if not both of them, close enough to taste it when the wrench lands in the gears… Big D blowing through the doors, perhaps… Or maybe it was him ? Maybe it was here that Chance had drawn his blade and if not, why else would he remember it so just now… right down to the last detail of the sorry blood-soaked room? What he can’t logic is how, in the aftermath of this horror, he also comes to be on the sand at Ocean Beach. Would it not be true that the beach and room are mutually exclusive propositions? On the other hand, and this is where it got really messy, if it was also true and he knew it to be, particularly in such cases as those described by him to Detective Newsome, that in certain instances involving both amnesia and post-traumatic stress, a patient’s most vivid, detailed congruent memories might also be complete fabrications and if every last part of it anyway, at both beach and motel was, in any configuration or even combination thereof, when judged by all previously acceptable standards, already so far beyond the pale as to be more the stuff of fever dream and confabulation than any heretofore recognizable reality… well then, at the end of the day, why not indulge oneself ? Why not mix and match, as if these shards of memory were no more than the bits of colored glass in a child’s kaleidoscope and thereby subject to rearrangement on a moment’s whim with a flick of the wrist?

Suffice it to say the head injury had brought him to a place that no longer felt like home. He was there and then he wasn’t. The only experience he could even remotely liken it to was that of being prepped for surgery—drugs run to the main line, counting backward into the void as the present vanished. But in that there was context. In this there was none. In its absence, his sense of the present had grown fragile as a robin’s egg. Perhaps he was only imagining that he could still move his fingers. Who could say that at any moment his present sense of space and time would not dissolve once more, admitting him to a different and even more terrible reality? The prospect was enough to induce sweats and palpitations, yet he indulged it tirelessly. The room and the beach were but two possibilities. How could there not be a version of things in which Blackstone or one of the Romanians had bested him? Perhaps he was dead and this was what it was like. Perhaps he was strapped to a bed in a psych ward in a county jail. He was not so far gone that he could not recall patients having described similar states or the sorry-ass justice he had done them in his endless and dreary reports…

Eldon Chance is a 49-year-old right-handed neuropsychiatrist who is now 36 hours post cerebral concussion suffered in a fall from a cliff at Ocean Beach in San Francisco in which he also sustained fractures of the T-3 and T-4 vertebrae as well as fractures of the 8th, 9th, and 10th ribs on his left side and two broken fingers on his left hand. He has no clear memory of the fall or of events immediately following or preceding it. He reports memories that are in fact mutually exclusive, but experiences them with the intensity of hallucinations. After an initial sensation of relief at finding himself alive, he admits to trouble in dealing with his current mental state, which he finds to be muddied and unstable. He believes that this is not who he is but is uncertain as to a more definite and recognizable identity. He worries that everything he has done with his life thus far has been little more than a banal series of empty and futile gestures. He recalls with clarity the people in his life but believes himself to have failed them on many fronts, as husband, father, and physician, and that in the days leading up to his accident he may have done bad things that have been pushed below the level of conscious thought and that he may be, in his own words, “some kind of asshole.” Uncertain as to the events in his most immediate past, he is also uncertain about his future. He feels that he has lost the ability to judge what he is or is not capable of and worries that he may in some way bring harm to himself or others. He is aware of certain disturbing urges in this regard and worries about his ability to hold them at bay. He is also fearful of a second loss of consciousness from which he will emerge into even more undesirable circumstances and of his learning of even more bad things that he has done. When pressed to reveal more about his “certain disturbing urges” he admits to having entertained the drinking of household cleaning products, of wishing to acquire a pet rat together with a handgun, and of a desire to begin reading all printed matter backward, that is from right to left across the page and from the bottom of the page to the top. He recognizes in these urges certain pathologies he has treated others for over the years but fears that in the absence of a more concrete and recognizable version of himself, he may be inclined to adopt these and as a consequence of which will, over time, be no more than a walking repository of the thousand and one mental illnesses he’s been forced to deal with throughout his twenty-odd years of medical practice, and that this may be only the beginning…

From time to time figures appeared. Chance took them as visitors, asking only that they treat him as he did them—players in a dream.

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Janice Silver told him. “What the hell anyway?”

“You knew my daughter was in the hospital?”

“I do now.”

“I had gone for a walk.”

“I’m so sorry. And how is your daughter?”

“She’s better,” Chance said. “I am too.”

“And you know about Blackstone.” She had already seen the paper on the little cart by his bed. “Guess we weren’t the only ones that didn’t like him.”

“It’s a dangerous gig even for the good cops,” Chance said, repeating what Big D had once said to him and taking some amount of pleasure in it.

“You were right there, for Christ’s sake.”

Chance said nothing.

“Have you said anything?”