Chance (100 page)

And then, finally, it appears that Blackstone has spotted him and has begun to walk uphill in Chance’s direction. And maybe this is all it took . . . the sight of Blackstone moving toward him like some inexorable moment of truth because very suddenly and out of nowhere the oddest thing happens and Chance loses his nerve. Just like that and it’s gone. In its place there’s a pain in his arm and sweat coming out his ass. He may not be able to feel his feet but of this he is not altogether certain. In accordance with plan A he was supposed to have stayed put. In accordance with plan B, which is his own, he was, at the appropriate moment, to have gone rogue, to have moved from his assigned location, to meet Blackstone in a place where
neither
would be ambushed, where the detective would see that he was for real and a meeting of the minds take place. By one plan he was to have trusted in D. By another he was to have trusted in himself and the great god of reason but it’s all starting to feel like trusting in transubstantiation or resurrection of the dead and Chance is losing his religion along with his nerve, not to mention the feeling in his lower extremities and he is suddenly moving away from the designated spot and
not
to meet Blackstone, but in the opposite direction, where he soon finds himself on a concrete stairway behind the restaurant lashed by the wind. It occurs to him that he is running away, but the insight does little to slacken his pace. He comes within sight of parking spaces on the north side of the restaurant where he sees that a black Mercedes sedan is parked in a no-parking zone very near the sidewalk. He assumes it to be the car from the motel although there can be no way of knowing this for certain. The car’s windows are heavily tinted. It sits at a distance in the poor light. He can’t see who’s inside. He can see some people walking up near the ruins maybe half a mile away but it is far too far and the Mercedes is blocking his path. If D is out there somewhere Chance can’t find him. The wind sings in his ears. The sky has darkened dramatically. He can see lights coming on inside the restaurant. He’s too low to see the people at their
tables but he knows they’re there. He thinks about joining them but does not quite see how to make that work. He ducks back behind the restaurant, back to the stairs, and takes out his cell phone only to discover the battery has run out of juice. It becomes clear that events are conspiring against him and that he has lost his way. He hears someone walking in approach to the stairwell from what he takes to be the parking lot. It is the sound of hard-soled shoes on concrete and he imagines they are coming for him. He does not wait to find out but flees from the restaurant altogether.

The absurdity of all this is not lost on him but there’s nothing in that to lift the spirits. He’s going south again now past parked cars at the edge of the street and is able to look back down the sidewalk he’s on and see that Blackstone has stopped at a point still south of the construction equipment, possibly because Chance had vanished, but when he sees Chance walking toward him he too begins to move, albeit slowly, and Chance is a little surprised by how far apart they are, at how much distance he has managed to cover in so short a time and wonders if in fact he had begun to run which would account for the dramatic amount of perspiration on his back and face. He’s headed downhill and still moving at a pretty good clip, past his car and the path to the Camera Obscura where they were supposed to have gone and Blackstone is just now coming up on the construction equipment so that it is really going to be just the two of them . . . out in the open as Chance had imagined it and there is something in this that he actually finds calming, so he goes with that and he begins to think it through, to reason it out . . . to say to himself . . . okay
 . . .
I really
do
have the stuff this guy asked for . . . we are
going
to talk
 . . .
this
might
actually work. And he can see Blackstone more clearly now and this helps too because Blackstone is really not looking all that great and certainly not all that ominous, thinner than Chance remembers, in slacks and a sports coat, a pale blue dress shirt with no tie worn open at the top in spite of the cold, his black hair looking wet and slicked back and the wind tugging at the cuffs of his slacks and in a weird way Chance almost feels sorry for him until he realizes there’s a car somewhere just in back of him and when he looks over his shoulder he sees that it’s the black Mercedes. It’s close enough now and the light
is hitting it at a different angle and he can see that there are two men in the front seat, and he knows it’s the same car he saw on the north side of the restaurant and he knows that it’s there for him. This certainty is reinforced by the fact that the car is neither accelerating into the street, nor is it parking, even though there are spaces available, but continues in the lot that skirts the sidewalk, that is little more than a broad shoulder of the road, clearly shadowing him as Blackstone approaches from the opposite direction and the thing lands on him like a brick. A blind man could see the future. The Mercedes is going to wait until he and Blackstone draw even, which is going to happen at their present pace on the north side of the construction equipment but very close to it, whereupon someone . . . Blackstone . . . a Romanian . . . perhaps several acting in concert, will force Chance into the car and further than that he does not care to think . . . only that D was right and that plan A was certainly the better of the two plans but Chance has already blown plan A six ways from Sunday and D is nowhere to be seen and maybe never will be again and the pain he felt earlier returns to his arm and the air grows thin. At which point, and out of this darkness, he sees something else . . . he sees a bright yellow Starlight coupe rounding a bend in the road, heading his way.

There is a moment that sometimes arrives on certain days in the city at this time of year and it has gotten to be that moment, the sun about to descend, finding some bit of space between cloud and sea and so able for just that moment, and it will only last for a very short period of time, to pierce even the fog and so manage these last long slivers of light as if the gates of heaven had come slightly ajar. The life expectancy of this beauty will be figured in seconds and with its passing it will be all but dark but it is the light by which he sees these things occurring. The coupe has got a good hundred yards to cover and it is unclear what will happen first. Chance throws a look back and can see that the Mercedes has already edged over, getting as close as it can get to where he walks. Blackstone is twenty feet away. So, he thinks, is the Mercedes. But the coupe is coming fast, gaining speed, until
finally the old man is visible through the windshield. He appears to be in there alone with that little hat he likes set well back on his head, his hands atop the wheel, closing at quite a clip, as very quickly, in less than a heartbeat, really, Chance can and with absolute clarity see how it will be and what will happen and when and where and why . . . like a chess master seeing the board and it’s the pure geometry of the thing that dazzles, the heretofore unimagined figure suddenly obvious as a sphere and just as elegant and he wonders only briefly that if by seeing it he has not already abandoned any such free will by which his own part in its completion might yet be withheld or that if by seeing it he has not already called forth its inevitability. And so it begins . . . the old man blowing past . . . the ensuing explosion of breaking glass and ruptured metal . . . what can only be the Starlight coupe taking the Mercedes head-on. There does not seem to be anyone else around but if there is . . .
this
is what he or she will see. Blackstone is
definitely
seeing it and Chance knows this because what he is seeing is Blackstone, or . . . to put an even finer point on it . . . the second button on the pale blue dress shirt that Blackstone wears open at the collar because Chance knows that the crash was for him and that for just this moment
he
is the still point in a turning world, all but hidden in a wrinkle of time, all but invisible, his right hand dipping to his pocket to draw the blade, lifting it to the psycho position, his balance shifting with his gait in accordance with his pyramid of power, his weight lending force to the blow . . .

Just as there is the occasional moment of magic light, there is also the sound a blade makes as it breaks through bone. The human heart, capable of pumping blood by way of a severed artery in excess of thirty feet, may lose the ability to do so in a matter of seconds if the blade has indeed carried enough cloth into the wound and if the aortic arch has indeed been pierced. That’s the end of days right there and he was certainly intent on making that happen and making the count and believed himself to have done so, but it was just here, in midstride, that the light seemed to fail and memory with it. He had come to envision
the fatal strike and his moving past it with such clarity, his escape into the park, that he was some time in accepting the slowly revealed truth of a new and heretofore unimaginable present, that in point of fact he was no longer in a parking lot nor anywhere near the Cliff House restaurant nor for that matter the Camera Obscura in which light was projected upon a metal plate to the delight of children, but rather in a kind of room that felt almost to be in motion—strapped to a board, his head in a metal cage.

He was far from alone. There were others with him. The person nearest him, a capable-looking young man in the uniform of a paramedic with a closely trimmed goatee and shorn head, was cutting away his sweater with a pair of scissors. He saw this well enough but was determined to reject it outright. He was determined to believe that he had struck with both force and precision and that in the aftermath Blackstone had tumbled to the sea and Chance had passed on, to the anonymity of the park and from there had found his way back to his apartment where he no doubt was just now . . . asleep in his own bed where at any moment he might expect to be treated to some disturbance on the part of his downstairs neighbors, fighting or fucking, it scarcely mattered, and that this state, this unpleasantness involving men in blue and the loss of a favored and valuable sweater, could be little more than some admittedly unusual stop along the road to a more full awakening.

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?”