weeping wound, but he knew what lay beneath, the treeless summits, the skeletal remains. He knew the score, as would the Russians, should his cover ever get blown, in which case it was hard to imagine them taking it well.
The haze had turned to a light mist by the time he left the bar for yet one more questionable destination. He supposed it not too late to phone, call the whole thing off. He held Carl’s folder containing his photographs flat against his leg in hopes of protecting it from the damp air. The evening seemed unusually charged, the citizenry agitated. It might have been him. Walking to a BART station near Powell Street, Chance was made witness to a homeless woman defecating in a phone booth. She was a woman of color and hopelessly obese. It was a booth of the old-fashioned sort that till that moment he might have thought extinct. This one seemed to have been restored, the gleaming artifact of an age gone by and yet absent the grotesque display he might well have passed without notice. As it was, the unfortunate woman filled it completely, her tremendous buttocks flattening upon the glass where they appeared to contend in the manner of bull seals or perhaps the phantoms of H. P. Lovecraft as she made to hike a crimson dress above ample hips. One could see what was coming. People averted their eyes, quickened their step. Some appeared to actually run. It was all too terrible. Chance was no exception. That , the exception, was to be found at the entrance to the station, propped against a tiled wall, a stick-thin man of indiscernible age, his scrawny arms tattooed like a sailor’s, if not homeless then surely the denizen of some Tenderloin flophouse, as in making for the underground Chance was brought close enough to see that till the moment when the man’s eyes met his they had been fixed with great interest on the horrid spectacle in the booth. Finding himself now eye to eye with Chance, the man favored him with the bright, sun-blasted grin of the long-haul drinker.
“Boy that’s rough,” the man said. He inclined toward the booth.
“History is coming for the empire,” Chance told him.
The man offered to high-five him but Chance went on by. Leprosy was not unheard of in the city, nor were the new, antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis, a product some said, in their most virulent form, of the Russian prison system.
For Chance, fearing earthquakes, the passage beneath the bay was unpleasant as always, made more so by some brief but irritating delay getting out of the Powell Street station. Lights flickered and went out then came on again. Passengers exchanged glances. A garbled announcement issued from the train’s sound system, impossible to understand. Chance, always a bit claustrophobic, reacted accordingly. The essential feature of a panic attack, as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is a discrete period of intense fear in the absence of real danger that is accompanied by at least four of thirteen somatic or cognitive symptoms. Given that the Bay Area was the meeting place of at least three major fault lines and dozens of minor ones and years past due for a seismic event of catastrophic proportions, Chance was willing to categorize the current episode as at least marginally situational, this accompanied by two somatic and one cognitive symptom for a total of three and therefore short of a clinically diagnosable event. He was nevertheless, by the time of his arrival in Rockridge, not feeling altogether well.
It was Chance’s inclination to believe in problems surrendering themselves to reason, if one could only come at them with a clear eye and open heart. It pained him to see a soul in torment. It pleased him to imagine that he’d found a way out. To be frank, it had pleased him to imagine himself Jaclyn Blackstone’s knight, though he was aware, as Janice Silver would have been quick to point out and in fact had, that this was dangerous
The haze had turned to a light mist by the time he left the bar for yet one more questionable destination. He supposed it not too late to phone, call the whole thing off. He held Carl’s folder containing his photographs flat against his leg in hopes of protecting it from the damp air. The evening seemed unusually charged, the citizenry agitated. It might have been him. Walking to a BART station near Powell Street, Chance was made witness to a homeless woman defecating in a phone booth. She was a woman of color and hopelessly obese. It was a booth of the old-fashioned sort that till that moment he might have thought extinct. This one seemed to have been restored, the gleaming artifact of an age gone by and yet absent the grotesque display he might well have passed without notice. As it was, the unfortunate woman filled it completely, her tremendous buttocks flattening upon the glass where they appeared to contend in the manner of bull seals or perhaps the phantoms of H. P. Lovecraft as she made to hike a crimson dress above ample hips. One could see what was coming. People averted their eyes, quickened their step. Some appeared to actually run. It was all too terrible. Chance was no exception. That , the exception, was to be found at the entrance to the station, propped against a tiled wall, a stick-thin man of indiscernible age, his scrawny arms tattooed like a sailor’s, if not homeless then surely the denizen of some Tenderloin flophouse, as in making for the underground Chance was brought close enough to see that till the moment when the man’s eyes met his they had been fixed with great interest on the horrid spectacle in the booth. Finding himself now eye to eye with Chance, the man favored him with the bright, sun-blasted grin of the long-haul drinker.
“Boy that’s rough,” the man said. He inclined toward the booth.
“History is coming for the empire,” Chance told him.
The man offered to high-five him but Chance went on by. Leprosy was not unheard of in the city, nor were the new, antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis, a product some said, in their most virulent form, of the Russian prison system.
For Chance, fearing earthquakes, the passage beneath the bay was unpleasant as always, made more so by some brief but irritating delay getting out of the Powell Street station. Lights flickered and went out then came on again. Passengers exchanged glances. A garbled announcement issued from the train’s sound system, impossible to understand. Chance, always a bit claustrophobic, reacted accordingly. The essential feature of a panic attack, as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is a discrete period of intense fear in the absence of real danger that is accompanied by at least four of thirteen somatic or cognitive symptoms. Given that the Bay Area was the meeting place of at least three major fault lines and dozens of minor ones and years past due for a seismic event of catastrophic proportions, Chance was willing to categorize the current episode as at least marginally situational, this accompanied by two somatic and one cognitive symptom for a total of three and therefore short of a clinically diagnosable event. He was nevertheless, by the time of his arrival in Rockridge, not feeling altogether well.
It was Chance’s inclination to believe in problems surrendering themselves to reason, if one could only come at them with a clear eye and open heart. It pained him to see a soul in torment. It pleased him to imagine that he’d found a way out. To be frank, it had pleased him to imagine himself Jaclyn Blackstone’s knight, though he was aware, as Janice Silver would have been quick to point out and in fact had, that this was dangerous
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