Chance (14 page)

Jaclyn smiled a little once more, affecting the demeanor of a bright but shy child called upon in class. “It was on the Banach-Tarski paradox,” she said. “And don’t ask me to repeat it.” When no one said anything right away she sighed and went on. “It’s a counterintuitive theorem stating that a solid ball in three-dimensional space can be split into a finite number of nonoverlapping pieces, which can then be put back together so as to yield two identical copies of the original ball. And that’s all I’m going to say.”

“Fuck me,” Raymond said. He looked at Chance, a twinkle in his eye.

“The balls are theoretical,” Jaclyn added, her voice dropping. “An infinite scattering of points.”

If Chance had been party to a stranger conversation it had not been in a good long while. He was beginning to believe that he had entered a minefield without end, an infinite scattering of points, theoretical and otherwise. Well, he thought, it was what you got, crossing the big water on a fool’s errand. He heard Raymond ask Jaclyn if she was hungry.

“I came for takeout,” she said. “I need to get home and shower. There are papers I have to read for tomorrow.”

The jogging clothes were good then, Chance thought. They lent credence to her story and he found himself wondering if this might possibly have factored into her wearing them in the first place, the possibility of something just like this.

Raymond studied her for a moment or two in silence. “Well then,” he said. “Why don’t you go over and get your order in?” He looked to the cash register. “I’ll be there in a minute to pay.”

“That isn’t necessary,” she said.

“Forget about it,” he told her.

Jaclyn got to her feet. “It was nice to see you again,” she said, looking at Chance. They didn’t shake hands.

Raymond watched as she crossed the room. “We’ve been living separately,” he said. “But then you probably knew that.”

“I’m not a therapist. I saw Jaclyn to determine the extent of her
neurological injuries. Speaking of which, did they ever find the person responsible?”

Blackstone ignored the question. “Whatever you’re having here, I want to pick it up. My treat.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“Of course you can. You were kind enough to look in on my wife. And no, we have not yet found the person responsible. But we will. You can go to the bank on that.” Raymond Blackstone now slid from the booth and stood looking down on Chance. “Tell me, Doctor, are you a married man?”

“I’m divorcing,” Chance said, after a brief hesitation.

Blackstone nodded. “Children?”

“I have a daughter.”

Blackstone nodded once more. He gave it a moment, then . . . “I don’t envy you that.”

Chance just looked at him.

Blackstone took a business card from the inside pocket of his coat and placed it on the table. “It’s rough out there, is all I’m trying to say. We’re a predatory species, Doctor.” He smiled a little but it was not an altogether pleasant one. “Not what they teach in the hallowed halls across the way there I’m sure. And not, if you’re a cop, what you’d ever say to the press, not in
this
town. But that’s the truth. And that’s the world
I
deal with, every day.” The man was looking directly at him and it was, Chance thought, about as dark a look as he’d ever gotten from another human being. “Ever vigilant,” the detective said finally. “That’s all.” He turned as if to go, then stopped and turned back. “Enjoy your meal, Doc Chance. Next time . . . us coinciding like this . . . It’s on you, my man.” It was at just this point that he noticed the bright red bag from Market Hall, till now hidden on the seat at Chance’s side. “Look at you. French furniture. Market Hall. Must be nice.” He went so far as to lift the bag and look inside—a pure act of aggression Chance did nothing to stop but sat listening, his face on fire, as the detective read aloud the name of his chosen blend, “Conscientious Objector.”

This done, Blackstone returned the bag and looked once more at Chance. “There’s some shit you can’t make up,” he said.

Chance watched as Raymond stopped at the register where Jaclyn stood waiting for her food. The detective spoke to a hostess, who ran his card. When this was done he signed the receipt and left the building. He never looked back. Nor did Jaclyn. When she had her food, she was gone too and Chance was left to imagine what the evening might hold, for them all. He quit on the tea, drank three glasses of white wine, and left without eating, the detective’s card in his wallet.
The City of Oakland,
it read.
Raymond Blackstone. Detective. Homicide. Police.

It was still relatively early and he called his daughter upon reaching his apartment. “What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked. “Nothing,” he assured her. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” The declaration seemed to place her at a loss. “You should know I was in Oakland today,” he added. “Came home with a few of those breakfast buns for you and mom.” She said, “Cool.” Chance told her he loved her and said good night. In lieu of sleep, he opted for additional wine, Wikipedia, and Banach-Tarski.

The surprising and counterintuitive results of the paradox were not possible, Chance read, without recourse to the axiom of choice. While not mentioning this in the restaurant, it
was,
he recalled, the phrase she had used in inviting him to the lecture. He found it to be an axiom of set theory allowing for the construction of nonmeasurable sets, collections of points without volume in the ordinary sense. And yet why
should
they be, he thought suddenly. He was by now, in the continuing absence of food and well into the wine, more than a little drunk. Why should any fucking thing be ordinary? The very idea stopped him cold, stirring him to a mindless rage. It was more than one could bear. “It cannot be borne,” Chance intoned to an empty apartment lit only by the light of his computer and a small bulb above the stove.

Without the requisite mathematical understanding of what he read, it was for Chance the simple arrangement of words that held his attention, this and his desire to make sense of the day’s insults and inanities in some new and heretofore unexamined way and to that end the experiment was not without merit as there really was
some 
thing in all of this, as if in this little matrix of words the whole of the human condition
might indeed be found. We might well bleed upon Nietzsche’s secret sacrificial altars, but are we not also impaled upon the axiom of choice? The formulation pleased him as sufficient unto the day. Add to it the day’s other new concept, Big D’s theory of the frozen lake, and you were really getting someplace. His phone rang at two o’clock. “I’m downstairs,” she said.

The creature he found there, in the brick-lined entrance to his building, was as alive as any he had ever encountered and so purely sexual as to have emerged fully formed from depths both Freudian and fever driven. Her eyes were on fire with it. She pulled herself into him without hesitation, her body flush against his own, her face turned toward his. “You’re my knight,” she whispered, her voice just audible.

Under any set of circumstances more ordinary than the present this might have struck him as laughable but Chance was far from laughing. She wore the athletic gear she’d worn to the restaurant and he could feel the heat from her body through the sleek, tight-fitting fabric, her thigh moving between his. It was, for the love of Christ, an exceptionally bad time to be drunk. The thought occurred even as his hand rose to her ash-blond hair, stroking it from her face, cradling the back of her head in his palm. The light from the street was slanting in just so, across the bones of her cheeks, the white tips of her teeth between parted lips. “I want to make love to you with my mouth,” she said, more clearly this time and in a voice not entirely her own.

I
T WAS
good, he would think later, that she had spoken as and when she had. For he knew just then it was
not
Jaclyn Blackstone in his arms at the door of his building. The stress of the evening, the coinciding of such bodies in space and time, in such ways as have been heretofore noted, the intensity of such repercussions as one might only imagine had very clearly served to call forth Jackie Black and my God was she something. Any man not wanting to fuck her blind should go hang himself. Chance fell to wrestling with her.

She was strong. Chance was drunk. She was intent on having his dick in her hand. In the almost certain knowledge this might prove his undoing, Chance fought to prevent it. He
contended,
like Jacob with the angel, though for opposite ends. Where the former had hoped to secure a blessing, Chance meant to avoid one. Their struggles carried them about the brick-lined entrance. Chance’s shoulder slammed against the building’s intercom system, no doubt ringing his downstairs neighbors. From here they twirled away as if in dance, across the sidewalk, stumbling with enough force into a plastic trash container to knock it over and into the street. It was the container filled with empty wine bottles from Chance’s apartment. Several tumbled from the sidewalk to the street and went skittering along the asphalt. One
broke upon an iron grate leading to a storm drain. A light appeared in the window of the downstairs apartment fronting the street. A small dog began to bark.

Cumulatively, these distractions proved enough to break the witch’s spell. He felt the strength go out of her arms. She pulled back from the light to a corner of the entry where she sank to her haunches, circled her knees with her arms, and began to cry. Situated just so, she was once more the Jaclyn Blackstone of the Oakland hospital, alone in her bed, the bird with the broken wing.

Chance looked up to find one of his downstairs neighbors, a balding, potbellied computer programmer he had on more than one occasion heard either in heated argument or violent lovemaking with some live-in female partner Chance had yet to lay eyes on, standing at the doorway of his apartment.

The man, having opened the inside door, was still somewhat obscured by the heavy metal screened door that opened to the entry where Chance and Jackie Black had vied for Chance’s member. Chance supposed that the programmer had positioned himself just so in the assumption that the steel mesh of the door would provide at least some modicum of protection should things go badly in the street. “Everything all right?” the man asked, his voice pitched at a higher octave than any Chance had yet to hear him use.

“Yes,” Chance told him. “Sorry. Sorry for the disturbance.”

The man remained at the door.

“It’s all good,” Chance said.

The programmer peered for a moment longer into the dimly illuminated scene, the darkness beyond, no doubt hoping for a look at Chance’s invisible opponent, if only to make his story complete. Failing this, the man glanced once more at Chance, nodded, and went back inside.

Chance moved to where Jaclyn still cowered in the shadows. “I don’t know how I got here,” she said. “I don’t know what just happened.”

Chance bent to take her hands in his own. “Are you all right?” he asked. She appeared to be so.

Her eyes searched his face. “Was it Jackie?” she asked.

“She didn’t tell me her name, but yes, I believe it was.”

“That’s never happened,” she said. “Only with him.”