The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

By Fran’s standard, though, he was unambitious. She’d have her law degree from Chicago next year, and their friends agreed that some day she’d be practically a nuclear power. He was convinced she’d have stuck with him in a more palpable crisis. If he had cancer, she could have drawn on her resources for heroism, but she was unequipped to see him through mediocrity. “Have you tried A, B, and C?” she would ask. “Then what about D and E?” They’d broken up ten months ago, shortly after a party where Fran introduced him as “the former Parker” (intending, she claimed, Jeffrey Parker, author of Form and Responsibility).

  Two couples with spiky green hair and purple-ringed eyes stopped in the aisle next to Parker and stared. Perhaps it was a form of conceptual art: By simply outnumbering him, they made him the odd one.

  “Like, your hair’s on fire?” said the kid nearest Parker. Despite his effort to maintain his snide demeanor, he looked anxious and bewildered.

  “I’m hip,” Parker said.

  The kids traded exasperated looks till one of the girls rattled in her purse and handed Parker her mirror-compact. “Look!” she demanded.

  Even before he held it up he could smell singed hair. It wasn’t too bad—a tiny wisp of smoke, a few red pinpoints glowing at the ends of stray hairs. He slapped it out.

  Handing back the mirror he asked if they’d seen what happened. They shrugged, mumbled, backed off.

  “Did anyone see what happened?” Parker called out to the other passengers. But he was facing a wall of newsprint and eyeglaze.

  * * *

  —

  He lived in a dirty maroon court building near the Granville El; its window frames and ledges had recently been painted an unconvincingly jaunty green. There were two letters in his box. Someone wanted to interview him for The American Scholar, but judging by her tone, he suspected an academic “Where Are They Now?” The second, from the Soviet embassy, contained forms.

  Passing through the lobby, he remembered that Fran called it an Egyptian burial chamber: archways, echoes, and a huge stone table at the center. He’d come downstairs once and found her lying on the table with her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her chest.

  On the second floor he paused before turning the key. He had opened his door on other nights to find the apartment ransacked or flooded with raw sewage or—the result, apparently, of an electrical fire—reduced to the struts and wires behind a movie set. But the card-table furniture, cheap stereo, bare bulbs, and bald velveteen couch that made up his remaining living-room furnishings would hardly tempt crime or even bad luck.

  Discarding himself on the couch, he considered that most of his mental life these days was divided between dread and whimsy. His whimsies distracted him from his nameless fears and therefore increased proportionately. One consequence was the forms from the Soviets. Down Beat magazine ran a regular feature called “The Down Beat Blindfold Test”: A jazz musician would listen to unidentified albums and record his moment-by-moment responses. When Yuri Andropov became the leader of the Soviet Union, the press was filled with gossip about his Americanized tastes in literature, interior decoration, Scotch, and jazz. Parker had attached a memo to one of his Down Beat reviews suggesting that he or one of the regular staffers fly to Moscow and give Andropov the blindfold test. Everyone had something to gain, he’d argued: publicity for Down Beat; propaganda for the Soviets; and—considering that diplomatic breakthroughs are often achieved through anonymous go-betweens—a possible negotiating channel for the Reagan administration. Parker wasn’t terribly serious about any of this, but he was intrigued by how plausible a case could be made for it. When Art Lange at Down Beat laughed him off, he’d written to the embassy on his own. (“The name of the feature,” he’d reassured the Soviets, “is strictly figurative. At no time would the Chairman literally be blindfolded.”) He’d written three years and two Chairmen ago, and this was the first response.

  The envelope was postmarked on September 10th; today was October 25th. If he cared to, he could probably construct a conspiracy theory involving the delayed letter, the man in spy drag, Yuri Andropov, and the Down Beat Blindfold Test. But at the moment the only inference he could draw from their seeming connectedness was that he needed to go to bed.

  He was awakened by the doorbell. It had to be a junkie or a neighborhood gang, but he wondered if Fran was in the lobby impersonating a prim corpse. Not these days, and not—he turned the clock face-up—at 4:06. The intercom and the buzzer in his apartment didn’t work; there was nothing to gain from going downstairs but the novelty of being mugged in his pajamas. He drifted off thinking about his conspiracy theory. He couldn’t quite piece the facts together, but he beaded them in a row, and they resonated faintly like wind chimes.

  TWO

  Jim Gazeekas was slumped on a chair in Parker’s office. “Right,” Jim nodded as Parker explained the grade on his last assignment, “no thesis, mm-hmm.” There was something suave about Jim’s apathy—a gracious host nodding and murmuring at guests who never leave.

  The assignment—“Analyze a bad book, play, movie, or television program”—had produced some of the best writing this semester, confirming Parker’s observation that these kids were intimidated by excellence. His most popular assignment was “Rewrite the following paragraph as verbosely and redundantly as possible,” and he’d once proposed a Comp course based entirely on mandatory bad writing: “Write an essay in which no verb or pronoun agrees with its antecedent (since accidental agreements will be severely penalized, reread Chapter 3)”; “Write an essay with no discernible principle of organization (to avoid stray topic sentences and thesis statements, reread Chapter 1)”; “Write an essay using the phrase ‘in today’s society’ at least nine times. Each essay will be read aloud in class. Attendance required!”

  “So, what’s your point here, Jim?”

  Jim stared out the window over the parking lot as if his point gleamed off car-tops and hoods. It was the kind of October day when all the cars looked new, and Skokie seemed hoisted into the stratosphere. A day—Parker’s mind was wandering—that substantiated the nonexistent word he’d found in a student essay: opulescence. In honor of the morning’s opulescence, Parker had dressed in the navy-blue blazer, old-school tie, white duck pants, white spats, and straw boater he’d worn in a college production of The Importance of Being Earnest. The outfit’s nostalgia and goofiness cheered him up for the first hour; since then he’d done a double-take each time he realized he was still wearing it (except the hat). Wouldn’t it take less work to just be sad?

  “I thought that was my thesis,” said Jim, pointing.

  “A thesis is the controlling idea of your paper—not a two-sentence digression.”

  “Anyway, that’s what I meant.”

  “We’ve had this discussion before. You never manage to write what you mean.”

  Jim’s shrug implied “Sue me.” The doorway behind him framed a segment of the cream-colored hallway; a skinny man in a green corduroy jacket sat down on the bench against the wall.

  Parker said, “What if everyone used language that way, Jim? Suppose—you still work at Klein’s Men’s Store, right? Suppose someone walked up to you at the counter and said, ‘Your money or your life’? When he’s picked up by the police he claims to have meant ‘Let me see something in a double-breasted tweed.’ Shouldn’t we hold him responsible for what he actually said?”

  “If everyone used language that way,’ said the man on the bench, “we’d know exactly what he meant.”

  Parker thought he recognized that Brooklyn accent with its undertone of “Nyah! Nyah!” and the haze of red frizz floating above the head. Now, who always looked like he’d just been beaten up: clothes mussed, nose pushed slightly to the side, eyes still dithering from the impact? “Steve! Steve Dobbs!” Parker boomed, and even before the words were out he was disappointed. It was one of those moments when he was glad to see an old school friend before recalli
ng an instant later that they hadn’t been friends. During their freshman year at Northwestern, he and Dobbs had lived on the same floor of Foster House, known the same people, smoked dope in the same rooms, and exchanged a hundred words at most. He couldn’t even remember why they hadn’t been better friends. He remembered Dobbs mostly for his demeanor—abrupt bursts of mannerism alternating with clenched rigidity, like a squirrel on a tree trunk. About ten years ago he’d heard the astounding news that Dobbs—who seemed born, even bred to fail—was running a successful nightclub in Lincoln Park, and a few years later that the club was defunct and the natural order of things restored. Like many other failures, Parker wished to believe in the natural order of things.

  When Jim left the office Dobbs seated himself with his left ankle on his right knee and, hunching forward, clamped his hands tightly round the other knee. He maintained that posture of a Ronco utensil that wouldn’t quite open or retract as they discussed the careers, marriages, and metamorphoses of various friends. Why was he here?

  Dobbs was saying, “I ran into Henriquez a few weeks ago. Can’t believe that guy’s got enough brain cells left to be a commodities broker. He told me you were working here. I used to hear rumors you were teaching at Princeton.”

  Early in his career Parker had taught there for a semester. Despite superlative student evaluations and peer reviews, he was fired after his first semester. His lawyer from the union never got anywhere. The Dean of Faculty wouldn’t meet Parker’s eye—even his letters had read like shame-faced mumbling.

  “I’d’ve liked to stay,” he replied to Dobbs, “but Skokie Valley Community College made a better offer.”

  Dobbs reached back and shut the door. “I suppose you used to hear the rumors at Northwestern that I was a narc.”

  “Uh, no,” Parker said truthfully.

  “Well, anyway, I was a narc. More police Red Squad than Narcotics, really; and more a freelance operative/informant status than official Red Squad. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not what it seems.”

  “I don’t even know what it seems,” Parker said.

  “Look, Jeff, you must be wondering why I’m here. I have some news for you. I’d like to come right out with it, but I know from experience that without some groundwork people don’t even disbelieve it. It just dead-ends somewhere behind the eyes. Give me ten minutes.”

  Parker suspected that Dobbs had been “born again.” Still—he glanced at the pile of papers—this might be his best shot today at an interesting experience.

  Exchanging legs in the same convoluted posture, Dobbs said, “I started working with the Chicago Police Red Squad because I cut a deal after my second drug bust. But I figured the infiltration didn’t all have to be one way. Why shouldn’t one of us infiltrate them?”

  “Who are we?” Parker asked.

  “The Left,” said Dobbs, exasperated. “I keep forgetting the only conviction our generation still holds is hatred of polyester.”

  “I’m just trying to follow your story,” Parker said. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you used to carry around shopping bags full of—“

  “Yeah. ‘Abbie Hoffman: Activist or FBI Agent?’ The FBI wrote that stuff. They were always starting their own leftist splinter groups. Anyway, I was going to be a journalism major; why not write it all up for Ramparts: burglaries, illegal wiretaps, police provocateurs, the letters to employers and landlords, the right-wing paramilitary groups they encouraged to break up meetings and beat people up. The cops liked me, Jeff. They bragged about what they were doing. They were paternalistic because they saw me as a confused, fucked-up kid. I was a confused, fucked-up kid. A cover always works best when it’s your real identity.”

  “But then it’s not a cover, right?”

  Dobbs sighed. “I guess you can’t expect an outsider to grasp all the subtleties of covert operations. Anyway, there were personal problems and I had to leave school. Just personal problems, okay?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I worked at an ad agency for a while, and one day I got a call from one of my right-wing paramilitary acquaintances. He said I was a smart kid and all I needed was a break. Said he was looking for someone to manage a bar he was opening, with maybe a junior partnership in the future. Now personally he’s a nice guy, but politically he’s a troll. On the other hand, I’d already worked with him politically (though for what I considered perfectly valid reasons), so it would have been senseless and hypocritical to turn down a perfectly good business offer. Well, one thing led to another—did you hear about the nightclub?”

  “Yes, I was sorry to hear it closed. Listen, Steve, I hate to be rude but I have papers to grade. Let’s have a drink some day.”

  “I’m getting to my point. It took me a while but I became a journalist after all. I took my savings from the bar and started The Exhibitionist.”

  “You publish The Exhibitionist?” Parker laughed. “My compliments to the author of ‘Hitler’s Brain Found in Bus Station.’ ”

  “I’ll pass it on. There’s sort of a follow-up in this month’s issue: ‘Win Hitler’s Brain!’ The Federal Trade Commission’s giving us shit.”

  “Here I’ve been feeling sorry for you when you could probably buy this whole place including all the cars in the lot and our combined salaries. I guess it wasn’t too painful to give up serious journalism.”

  “I am a serious journalist.”

  “Right.”

  “No, I mean it,” Dobbs said with so little trace of levity that Parker replied, “Maybe I’m thinking of another magazine. You’re a paranoid-conspiratorial version of the tabloids I read in check-out lines, right?”

  “I’ll have you know,” said Dobbs, deadpan, “that beginning next month you’ll be able to read The Exhibitionist in checkout lines, too…I suppose you think all the stories are made up.”

  “No, Steve, I think they’re all true.”

  “In either case you’d be a fool. How’d they let you teach at Princeton if you can’t make essential distinctions?”

  “I dunno, I always erase the board after class,” Parker said. “You’re saying that some of the stories are true?”

  “About ten percent.”

  “Don’t the other ninety percent damage your, uh, journalistic credibility?”

  “I should hope so,” Dobbs enunciated in the tone of an adult instructing a slow child. “How else could I get away with publishing the truth in America?” He let the “k” sound catch in his throat.

  “I see. And where do you get these stories?”

  “Oh, my Sixties contacts and their contacts; disaffected intelligence agents; sometimes—what’s the opposite of disaffected?—affected agents.”

  “You mean, from the agencies themselves?”

  “Sure. They know that most serious journalists and anyone involved in Western or Soviet-bloc intelligence reads The Exhibitionist. Their stories are disinformation, of course, but all disinformation is based on a kernel of truth. The cognoscenti can pick it out. The mainstream press works pretty much the same way.”

  “Can you give me one example of a completely true story in The Exhibitionist?”

  “Matter of fact I’m here about a story we’re running in January. The other night you met a man who calls himself Hank Monroe, Junior….”

  It was as if Parker had walked smack into the man himself, the non-face with its mirror lenses filled with his own gaping. He gripped his Styrofoam cup with both hands and gulped the dregs of his coffee. “He told us there was something wrong with his face.”

  “He’s a quick thinker alright. The Charlie Parker of the lie. He just wanted to get your attention; didn’t think you’d have the balls to confront him. Your girlfriend, though…”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “You might say he works for the government—depending on how you define ‘works’ and ‘government’ and ‘the.�
� ”

  Parker threw open his top drawer, brushed away memos and paper clips, and dropped the envelope from the Soviets onto his desk. “Why do I have the feeling it’s somehow connected with this? It came Saturday.”

  Dobbs turned the envelope around. “Uh, the postmark is September 10, 1982.”

  “I didn’t notice the year. Naturally there was no reason to think—I, uh…”

  “Not very observant, are you? Don’t feel too stupid. It happens to a lot of the victims. They develop what I call a protective obtuseness.”

  Parker said, “Epistemology aside, do you know why this letter came three years late?”

  “I suppose Hank Monroe, Junior took it out of your box and kept it for three years.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “Speaking of protective obtuseness, do you think you’d notice if some person—or persons—had been following you for fourteen years? Suppose this person—or persons—unobtrusive, nondescript—were there on the El every morning; at restaurants; even other cities. Would you assume that you’re being followed, that coincidence in the English novel has a basis in reality, or just that you’ve seen a familiar face? Or would you be so wrapped up in what you’re thinking or think you’re seeing, you wouldn’t even notice?”

  “I’d assume,” Parker insisted with a trace of petulance, “that there’s no reason whatever for anyone to have been following me for fourteen years.”

  “You’d be absolutely right, of course. It’s thinking like that that makes their work so easy.”

  Parker stood up. “Well, Steve, don’t think it’s been edifying, but I have papers to grade.”

  Dobbs remained seated. Reaching into his inside pocket, he produced a brown leather notebook. “I think it’s time you heard The Exhibitionist’s lead story for January. You might not believe what I tell you, but keep it handy. Like a concealed weapon, which, incidentally, I’d also advise. But first, just so you don’t dismiss it out of hand—” He flipped several pages. “On April 4, 1982, you made your daily stop at the talking Coke machine outside the Granville El. Before it dropped your Coke, the machine said, clearly and distinctly, ‘Parker, you asshole, wake up!’ You didn’t skip a beat; just picked up your Coke and somnambulated away.”