Kem Nunn - Chance

“To whom?”

“They’re asking people to come forward.”

“They’re asking for people with information to come forward and anyway they were already here.”

“And?”

“And nothing, Janice. I went for a walk. I fell.”

She gave him a long look then waited a bit before saying more. “And have we heard anything… from her?”

“We have not,” Chance answered.

When they’d sat with this one for a while and he had told her that he was sorry, that he needed to sleep, she leaned over to squeeze his arm. “All right,” she said. “This thing is over. You’re alive and thank God. If you ever want to talk, you know where to find me.”

Chance thanked her and he meant it.

There were more visitors. Carla came, as did his daughter.

“I don’t know what’s to become of you,” Carla said. It was after she had studied him for a good while before withdrawing to leave him alone with Nicole.

“I’m really sorry, Daddy,” his daughter’s first words. Without being entirely clear about what all she was sorry for, Chance said that he was sorry too. He assumed they were talking about everything. They held hands. She wept. He thought at first that it was over him and maybe it was, though what he came to learn in short order was that the bad boyfriend had broken her heart. It was her first foray into that bleak land and he hoped it would be her last. The boyfriend, an exchange student from Italy, studying for a degree in environmental law at UC–Berkeley and ten years her senior, had, on the very afternoon that he’d helped spring her from the hospital, been found in the company of another woman, in a compromising position.

Chance had no idea what to make of this or of how to place it in the secret history of things. He had, at just that moment, been busy doing battle with an intrusive memory, possibly false, of the blade in his hand, of Blackstone’s face and strangled cry, yet still doing his best to console and cajole. In the end she sighed and rested her head on his chest. A merciful silence descended. The intrusive memories, either real or imagined, came and went along with recurrent glimpses of the thing’s geometric shape… of which even this was perhaps a part. If he could only be more certain of what, precisely, the this was, by which he meant the here and now. But the thing kept running before him like a shadow: You’re not in it now… you’re not in it now… Perhaps, he thought, one need simply embrace the infamous axiom, that what in the end it all came down to was a matter of choice. After still more time had passed and his daughter had gone, Jean-Baptiste walked in.

“Thank God,” Chance said. “I’ve been at the end of my rope. They told me you were sick.”

Jean-Baptiste dismissed this with a wave of the hand and took a chair. “Talk to me,” he said.

Chance did. He confessed to everything. He wondered aloud for the first time to a discerning ear at how more had not been clear to him from the start… that he should have strayed so far from the path that it should have come to this. Jean-Baptiste, in his inimitable style, would only say that while there was no doubt he might have been a tad more prescient, his failure to stray so far from the path would certainly have made for a less interesting story. As far as its being the road to ruin, he was more inclined to find in it the Nietzschean path of going under to get over.

On the subject of what, exactly, Chance had gotten over to, his friend was less forthcoming but also unconcerned. “I wouldn’t worry about any of that,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “This funk you’re in is not at all uncommon in the wake of a serious concussion, as you well know. As to this other… Do not despair. You will find it.”

“You don’t think the whole idea is a reach?”

“Everything’s a reach, brother. You have no idea how this kind of thing lifts me up. And you, of all people.”

“You know,” Chance said, “now that it’s over… and I think about her… I think about the Laocoön.” He could guess that Jean-Baptiste would know the piece, the father and sons locked in doomed struggle with monsters from the depths. “And I think that must be what it’s like for her, that there’s this huge thing in the past she can’t get clear of… that keeps dragging her back…”

“Against which her strategy is to spin possibilities of escape in the form of new identities.”

“Did I tell you one of her was a Romanian hooker adept in the language?”

Jean-Baptiste stifled a laugh.

“You think that’s funny? Let me tell you, it was scary as shit is what it was. I had to turn on the lights to make sure it was her.”

“How’s the gland by the way?”

“They’ve given me an anti-inflammatory and antibiotics. You’ll never know what a relief it is to be pissing again.”

“Ah. But from what you’ve told me, these identities of hers have little in the way of duration.”

“That’s right. They break apart. The monster pulls her back.”

“Much as I admire the old Nietzsche I’ve always thought he was full of shit on the what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger routine.”

“Yes, Pollyanna-ish and glib.”

“There is maimed for life.”

“Chemical deviations…”

“Shit we’re not yet equipped to see.”

“Yet something heroic in the struggle.”

“And how might her struggle be defined, do you think? The predator hunting predators, finding one man to trap another…”

“Maybe even aiding and abetting the trapped man in to some type of predatory behavior, making him into the very thing she needs to destroy.”

“That’s dark.”

“Her special gift.”

“But always as part of this unconscious need to free herself… doing unto others what was done to her in some past life we know nothing of but at which we can guess? Is that her deal with the universe, the most authentic version of the self she can manage? Or… was it her believing that your daughter was in mortal danger that generated her play at the end, her crossing him and calling you? It wouldn’t mean that at certain points along the way she wasn’t playing you, only that we must also consider the possibility of the child in danger as the thing that in the end called forth her most authentic self.”

They sat with this.

“And wouldn’t it be fun to ask? Some final reckoning in the wake of everything, one last reading of the old ledger.”

“If ever there is such a thing.”

“Yes, well… there is that. Still… we don’t suppose that we will ever hear from her again?”

“I wouldn’t imagine it. The way it ended… I would imagine her long gone and nothing here to bring her back.”

A mechanical device at Chance’s side began to emit a soft humming sound. “You really did like her though,” Jean-Baptiste said, more or less out of the blue, “that one you found?” The idea seemed to please him.

“That would be one way of putting it.”

“And that is the saving grace in all of this,” he said. “Whether you know it or not. You’ve read your Kierkegaard: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing .”

This time it was Chance who laughed.

“Go ahead,” Jean-Baptiste told him. “But I’m telling you there is something in that, and that it is necessary to remind oneself almost constantly that many among us will die without ever knowing they were alive, save only in the most rudimentary ways, of course, but don’t get me started.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to do that.”

More time passed. The device ceased its humming. It had been delivering drugs, the old morphine drip among them. Jean-Baptiste got up to inspect the plastic bag on the rack at Chance’s bedside. He often did volunteer work at state hospitals and rest homes in search of his pictures and knew his way around a room. “You gotta get off the sauce,” he said. “It’ll fuck with your head. And stop rummaging in this grab bag of possibilities. It seems plain enough to me that you were never in that room. You were on the sidewalk and then you were on the beach and then you were here. Stop running.”