Chance (16 page)

“I hope she found him and cut his throat,” Jaclyn said. She seemed quite serious about it.

“Nothing so dramatic. But she did survive. Remarkably, Freud even came to view the woman’s postoperative hemorrhaging as an hysterical symptom.”

“Now you know why I like numbers.”

“I do, and one might speculate here on Freud’s own unconscious goals. . . . The real point, however, in all of this, in
my
opinion, is that Freud’s interactions with Fliess traumatized him. He was burned both literally and figuratively, and as a result, the uncharted, intensely private and nonverbal sphere mediated by our olfactory organ was to remain off-limits to Freud’s followers for the next hundred years or so.”

It was at this moment that the driver from the East Bay Cab Company sounded his horn from the street below—a bit more fodder for the neighbor’s mill. Jaclyn seemed intent upon ignoring it. “That’s quite
a story,” she told him. “Now let me try one more,
please
. You pick. Give me something nice to go out on. I don’t want to have to keep thinking about that woman and her poor nose.”

He picked one he was quite sure she would like. It was a woman’s scent from a boutique maker in the south of Italy and one of the most expensive he had. He dabbed some on a stick and passed it to her.

The change in her countenance was immediate and profound. The huddled creature from the street returned. The stick dropped from her hand. She said nothing but the look on her face was one of pure terror. No more jokes about the Jollys and no more games. No more anything. She turned and was gone.

Chance stood where she had left him, her footsteps upon the stairs. It was necessary to close the door behind her. From there he went once more to the window. She was just getting into the cab on the street below and he could see the yellow streetlights in her yellow hair, and she was there on the street and there beside him as well, a palpable presence. Any one of her might have had him. Jackie Black had come within a heartbeat and already he was wishing her back. He made the unsettling observation it was an impossible longing he now shared with Raymond Blackstone, and he noted for the first time the car parked opposite his apartment, the kind of gray, featureless Crown Victoria favored by the police. He could not see clearly enough to be sure but it appeared there was someone seated behind the wheel, no more from Chance’s vantage point than a shape in the darkness, and even though his apartment was still dimly lit he took an instinctive step back and away from the glass. In another moment this seemed a somewhat foolish if not cowardly precaution and he moved to the window once more, in time to see the unmarked car make a U-turn in the street and drive off in the same direction as the cab. The thing he was left to consider was whether or not the anonymous caller he’d so recently spoken to had in fact been the person he’d imagined it to be.

T
HERE WAS,
he found, no end to the considering of it. It was bottomless, like the axiom of choice or the book of Job. He rose late from a fitful sleep. What had passed in the night seemed at first light the stuff of dreams. There were no hanged cats at his door or unmarked cars waiting at the end of the block. He inspected the building’s entry for signs of the night’s struggle but there were none to be had. He had righted his trash can before retiring. The wooden and stucco houses with their muted colors, the treeless street and parked cars . . . it was all quite void of mystery, flat as a two-by-four in the morning’s tepid light.

As a general rule he avoided the city’s mass transit systems, but on the morning in question he hadn’t the energy for much else. Still, the bus was a mistake. He saw it at once. The thing was filled to capacity. The air was close. But this was only the half of it. Save for a handful of unruly teenagers carving graffiti into one of the plastic seats with a box cutter, or this at least was what they
appeared
to be doing—he was reluctant to look too closely lest he be beaten before breakfast—the
morning’s other riders might well have been on their way to his office for evaluation.

Chance took it as a great irony, and not a happy one, that if he’d spent the first half of his life trying to remember, stuffing his head with all manner of data and detail, he would surely spend the second and final half consumed by a desire to forget. With certain notable exceptions, Mariella Franko, Jaclyn Blackstone, Doc Billy . . . his patients and their afflictions were not the baggage he wished to carry. There were over nine hundred entries in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. In the time it took to traverse a city block, he was able to diagnose any number of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including tardive dyskinesia, Parkinsonian gait, one cervical dystonia together with an impressive display of what were no doubt substance-induced and quite possibly hallucinatory states of both agitation and elation, and that was just inside the bus. The list might have gone on but he fled several blocks before his intended stop, only to be greeted by a man hardly older than himself. The man was both legless and homeless, rather clearly in the final stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, positioned in a ratty wheelchair reinforced with plywood before the Wells Fargo bank at Van Ness and California, holding in his lap a battered piece of cardboard upon which he had printed in black ink the words
YOU ARE PERFECT!
The sign was framed in painted wood roughly assembled and rested on what Chance took to be a well-worn copy of Gideon’s Bible.

The man held his message aloft as the bus lurched from the curb, as though to spare it the roiling exhaust, or perhaps that it might be more clearly read by the very people with whom Chance had just shared the morning’s ride and who were certainly in need of some reassurance. He put a dollar bill in the can at the man’s side and hurried away. Walking east on California Street, he became aware that the man in the wheelchair had begun to read aloud from the Bible in his lap. At least he imagined it to be the man, without actually turning to look. The man was reading from the Revelation according to John in a loud and surprisingly mellifluous voice.

Lucy was at her post, eyes running to the clock on the wall as Chance entered. “Am I fired?” he asked. He was mildly perplexed by her powers of intimidation.

She watched as he fumbled for the key that would allow for the relative safety of his office. “Why should I care if you’re late?” she asked. “It’s that.” She was pointing at the wall where it appeared that Jean-Baptiste had taken the liberty of hanging yet one more of his disturbing photographs—one more elderly woman, this time stark naked save for what might be taken as the elaborate headgear of an American Indian. “Did you
say
he could do that?” Lucy asked.

Chance moved for a better viewing. “Not exactly. He asked. I didn’t exactly say that he couldn’t, either.”

“Think maybe you could say so now? Since I’m the one who has to look at it.”

Chance’s nod was noncommittal, Lucy’s stare not so much. “The Footes will be here in half an hour,” she told him. “You want their file?”

Chance was still looking at the picture. “This one is a bit extreme, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. Does that mean you’ll ask him to take it down?”

“He’s dying,” Chance said.

“Thaddeus Foote?”

“Jean-Baptiste. I’m not really supposed to tell anyone, but I’m telling you.”

“Are you sure?”

Upon reflection Chance supposed it true that Jean-Baptiste, a self-acknowledged confabulator, had been dying for quite some time now, but it was also true that he
had
been a patient in the bone clinic at the Stanford teaching hospital. “I spoke once to one of his doctors,” Chance told her. “It’s something rare, that no one’s been quite able to figure out.” The doctor had not said that Jean-Baptiste was dying exactly, but Chance had been willing to take it as implied.

“That puts a new slant on things, I guess. How do you suppose knowing what he knows relates to the photographs he takes?”

“Have you ever talked to him, about the photographs?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should sometime. He’s a smart guy, eccentric but smart. You can’t let on that I told you he was dying but you could ask why he takes the pictures. I’d be interested in what he tells you.”

“Have you ever asked him?”

“I haven’t. But I think it might be better . . . coming from you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I just do.”

“Well,” she said. “I knew he was smart . . . just seemed a little pushy . . . hanging those things everywhere . . .”

“They
are
an acquired taste.”

“I guess I should be nicer to him.”

“Be nicer,” Chance said. He turned once more toward his office.

“Thaddeus Foote. You want the file?”

“What I’d like you to do is cancel their appointment.”

She gave it a beat. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t think I am.”

They regarded one another from across the room.

“They’re probably on their way.”

“Then maybe you can catch them.”

“You’re serious.”

Thaddeus Foote was a tall, morbidly obese, schizophrenic young man of twenty-nine almost certain to be brought in by his mother. Taken together they formed about as dull and depressing a duo as one was likely to find. “Do you remember,” Chance asked, “how Mrs. Foote described her son’s condition on our questionnaire? One word,
psychological.
”

Lucy actually smiled at him. “They’re a little slow.”

“And life is a little short.”

She gave him a look. “Rough night?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Lucy nodded, in the manner of someone who’d had a few rough nights of her own. “What should I tell the Footes?” she asked. “About his meds? There’s no way she’s not going to ask.”

“Amitriptyline. Twenty-five milligrams twice a day.”

As Lucy reached for the phone, Chance made good his escape.

Psychological indeed. The youth so described had sustained a concussion, a basilar skull fracture, and an intracerebral bleed as the results of an automobile accident on the Shoreline Highway. The accident, his third in as many years, had resulted in the death of a twenty-three-year-old blind woman riding in the car Thaddeus had hit. Formerly the valedictorian of her senior class, she was a college student at the time of her death, home for the winter break, in the company of friends and headed for oysters on the Tomales Bay when struck by Thaddeus who, acting on instructions from his car’s radio, had driven the 1953 Buick Roadmaster belonging to his mother, an ungainly beast scarcely fit for the street, across the double yellow line on the Shoreline Highway and into oncoming traffic. The blind girl’s father, a landscape architect by trade who’d raised her as a single parent after her mother’s death, had since turned to drink and lost his business. Insurance companies had begun protracted wrangling over fault in light of the boy’s colorful past and questionable capacities. Assorted insurers, Mrs. Foote, and even the Department of Motor Vehicles had all been implicated. Chance could not, without consulting his records, remember exactly who among them was paying for Thaddeus’s visits, nor could he imagine that any amount of wrangling, however it all came out, would make much difference to the girl’s father.