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Chance

Contributed by Nicolas Papaconstantinou on 21/02/09

Chance sits at the slots, sliding coin after coin into the machine with tiny, clipped movements.

Chance likes Vegas.

That isn’t strictly true: Chance likes the casinos. Vegas she can take or leave. It’s a distinction that her husband struggles to grasp, but she realises that that isn’t his fault. She struggles to vocalise it, because it isn’t about casinos, or Vegas, really. It’s about the rest of the world.

He doesn’t mind not getting it. He likes Vegas just fine himself, so taking himself and his beautiful wife off to the curious made-up city a few times a year works out just fine for him.

When they got married, everybody told her that she was lucky. Some of them went as far as to torture a joke out of the fact, and the fact of her name.

Chance doesn’t understand luck. Or maybe she understands it better than most, and that’s the problem. Sometimes she wonders whether she’s preoccupied with it because of her name – as if she was destined to think too hard about the concept – or if the name itself was just a lapse in judgement on the part of her parents that ended up coincidentally pertinent to her outlook. With her parents gone, there was no way to ask them.

But the notion of coincidence is another one of those things that Chance struggles with. It makes her wrinkle her nose in annoyance at anyone who mentions it: “Oh, we went to the same school! What a coincidence!” or “Hey, I used to hang out at that club! What a small world!”

Our brains are pattern recognition machines, she thinks to herself, I shouldn’t be so hard on them.

But she can’t help but see these ideas as a salve for nervous minds – the concepts of luck, and coincidence, and chance itself, just frantic ways to avoid dealing with the little things that sneak through the layer of order that they place under their feet, that force us to notice the chaos of things spinning into other things spinning into places into other people.

Or under that, and worse, the fact that the chaos itself is just the best look we can get at a finer order, that exists at such a microscopic and ubiquitous level that it is beyond them. A scale that makes the human animal as irrelevant as it appears at the opposite end of the spectrum, where planets and stars live.

Chance shakes her head slightly. The slots always send her into a bit of a trance, if she plays them for too long.

She moves to the roulette table to ease her head. It’s in her routine, anyway – changing up the game every now and then makes it feel less like a coping behaviour, and it means the illusion is stronger, too. She never wins too much or too little, if she changes up the game.

She takes her place and picks a number.

Chance likes casinos because they are the opposite of chaos. They act as cathedrals to luck, offering randomness and the draw of the longshot to their customers, but the first time she went into one, she realised that it was a facade.

Outside a casino, “luck”, good and bad, was what people called the extraordinary or chaotic when it hit them, but Chance knew it for what it was…

On the day that her parents and her brother died in the fire, Chance was asleep in the spare room in the annex. People said she was lucky, but Chance knew there and then that it wasn’t luck – if her brother hadn’t spilled paint on her bed before bedtime, things would have turned out differently. But there was no meaning to it – it was just a sequence of events that happened in a particular way.

They’d told her she was lucky to be out sick on the day that her high-school sweetheart and two of his friends went into the dining hall at St Eligius and opened fire on their peers, but they looked at her funny when they said it.

And Chance didn’t really know how to process what was wrong with what they were saying, and how they were saying it. Spending forty-eight hours vomiting and on the verge of passing out at the foster home, and coming out of the flu-induced fug to find that everybody that you knew at school was dead or dying didn’t really seem lucky, whichever flavour of luck you picked.

Winning too much at the roulette table, Chance searches out some cards.

When Chance married Jack, everybody told her how lucky she was. Everybody who was still alive, anyway.

She loved Jack beyond reason, but she couldn’t see it as luck. Like the relationships of most of her friends, it had actually been a lot of hard work – both choosing a partner and loving him.

They seemed to see greater fortune in the fact that she had been through so much to get there, but on balance, Chance had to say she would have felt more lucky if her life hadn’t been such a nightmarish mess beforehand.

There was no such thing as luck, really – Chance knew this. Fire doesn’t pick which way to go, or which way to spread based on the whim of the fates – physics and chemistry where what had their way with fire. A flu bug didn’t propagate at God’s will – that was biology. Everything you needed to know to avoid growing up saturated in superstition was right there in the subjects that they taught you at school, but still we fell for it.

But casinos – nothing truly random or lucky ever happened in a casino. Not at a level that mattered – the places were built to avoid it. She’d read about it somewhere – that the breed of happenstance that existed inside a casino was managed to be well within mundane parameters. Though a person might feel as if the dice roll they were praying on was a matter of divine intervention, whichever way it rolled, the casino knew that it was just another dice roll, and there would be a thousand others before the end of the day, win or lose. When you looked at the turn of a card from the vantage point of a casino boss, you saw chance as an imaginary commodity, to be bought and sold.

They kept it that way deliberately – very little was purely random within these walls. Someone in the military had even given it a name – the known-unknown measured against the unknown-unknown.

Sometimes she would meet someone in the bar of one of these places that might make a joke about her name, or there would be a particularly exuberant member of staff cheerleading for luck, but nobody who ran a casino made jokes about chance.

Pattern recognition, that’s all it was. Chance told herself this as she moved to the dice.

People thought she led a charmed life, but that charm was a pattern that they projected onto her. And they were fickle about when they thought something was coincidence, and when they thought something was too much of a coincidence.

If they found Jack’s body stabbed to death in their hotel room, there would be an investigation.

If they found out that he was having an affair, or that earlier in the day he had been with a hooker, or that he often was when they were in town, it would not be looked at as a coincidence – eyes would be on her.

If, then, it came out that his will left a considerable amount to Chance, no-one would consider that this was a perfectly ordinary situation between two loving spouses.

She might be under suspicion for days before the medical examiner pinned down the time of death. Questioning might place her at the bar drinking cocktails when it happened. When a smitten barman confirmed her story and her alibi, then people might consider luck again – as if a barman remembering an attractive woman was some kind of random event.

Chance loses a hundred dollars on a roll, and carries on playing.

As far as she knows, Jack is just fine, up in the room watching pay-per-view and making a few business calls that can’t wait. As far as she knows, he has been faithful for their entire marriage.

But Chance knows how these things sometimes work out, and it has given her a quite vivid imagination for the ways that people look for meaning in events. Things happen, and people die, and it’s beyond the human condition for the survivors to just admit that the whys and hows are invisible to them.

She finds it all very confusing, if she’s honest with herself. But it doesn’t feel so bad when she’s playing at the pretend kind of luck that they have on the gambling floor.

Chance plays on.