The same logic got him through the El ride home: It was no less appropriate to give your seat to an old woman, stand clear of the doors, and read the New York Times folded lengthwise than to charge into the crowd, briefcase flailing. The train car was the model that resembles a hospital waiting room—fluorescent panels, tan and salmon seats—and, like people expecting the worst, its passengers stared out the windows or deep into empty space. He realized that he did see some of these faces every day. Nothing sinister there—he always caught the train at this time. There’d be no way to tell if he was being followed until he reached his stop—short, that is, of shoving his way from car to car or ducking in and out of the doors. He doubted if he’d learn anything that way, and the people wedged against him looked aggravated enough already. Nonetheless he found himself returning the stares of people who were merely staring back. Should he be looking for people who stuck out, or who blended in? The sore thumb of the bunch—with real bruises—waved to him from the other end of the car. Ziploc, as he was known around Skokie Valley College, was a short, peppy man in his fifties with tortoiseshell glasses, broken teeth, and, regardless of the season, a dark-blue stocking cap and a brown jacket whose fake-fur collar seemed to have been ripped out in handfuls. As always he was carrying the “jumbo” Ziploc bag containing the “sandwich” Ziploc bags that housed his collection. In the course of five or six El rides, he’d given Parker the complete lecture series, pointing out the dead seahorse, the network of tiny brass rods, the piece of string dyed two colors, and the pale slushy substance Parker had taken for applesauce but which Ziploc referred to as “the unidentified gelatinous mass.” He seemed to read a good deal, dropping references to psychology, physics, and the Bible, but his ideas passed through something like the crusher in an auto graveyard and emerged indistinguishable and impenetrable. Still, there was something infectious about his scholarly enthusiasm. It wasn’t clear why he’d begun hanging around Skokie Valley College, but he’d achieved colorful character status there, invited to seders and Thanksgiving dinners and interviewed for the Bulletin, where his decimated smile flashed above the caption, “If you think about it, all modern physics is in the Five Books of Moses.”
But if anyone here qualified as a suspicious character, it was the man who looked too much like a professor. He was standing about twenty feet away—briefcase, slightly baggy flannel pants, patched tweed jacket, school tie, and summing it all up, an empty Dunhill briar pipe like the tag on a stuffed animal. His features came from the same warehouse of clichés: his face craggy, his jaw jutting, his nose Roman, his hair sandy, and of course his brow high. In short, he’d stepped out of a Norman Rockwell poster of the professions, leaving a slightly baggy void between the Butcher and the Baker. The get-up seemed intended not to make him look like a professor but to flaunt itself as a disguise—much like Hank Monroe, Jr.’s beard, shades, and trenchcoat. Or maybe the guy taught at Skokie Valley and needed a self-deprecating joke to cheer himself up. For pretty much the same reason Parker was wearing white spats (he’d stuffed the straw hat in his briefcase shortly after he put it on). But wasn’t it implausible that he’d see two such outlandish people every day in the same place? Yes. But if he connected all implausible events to each other and himself, where would that lead? To reading the National Enquirer like the Kabbalah. To viewing everything through a thicket of quotation marks.
He gripped a pole as the train lurched. 1) Buy a gun. If that was too scary, a Taser. It seemed the best way to go on with life as usual—just keep it handy in case he needed it. 2) Ask the super about people going in and out of the apartment, maybe pretending to be friends or repairmen and asking for a passkey. 3) Pressure Dobbs for more information. 4) Was it worth seeing a private detective? He’d be lucky to afford a day’s service. The phrase “private detective” intensified his sense of unreality. 5) See a legal-aid lawyer about using the Freedom of Information Act. The only person he knew who’d sent for his FBI file was his friend John Standell, and all he’d gotten for his trouble were fourteen pages of deletions and one extant sentence: “Like many of his generation, Mr. Standell believes in ‘doing his own thing.’ ” 6) Come to think of it, John would be in a position to help. He hadn’t seen John for over a year; they’d both grown uncomfortable with the etiquette that required John to diminish his achievements and Parker to magnify the glimmer of his distant prospects (more to avoid embarrassing his friend than himself). Like other friends who seemed genuinely pained by Parker’s failure, John had crossed streets and reversed direction to avoid him and therefore could be trusted.
He was already thinking that none of this activity would amount to more than beadwork for the nervous. But reduced to essentials it was a simple task. All he needed was an address. He reminded himself that if the story he’d heard was true, he’d been given the chance of his life: Whatever had been sitting on his chest all these years had taken a shape he could wrestle with. Maybe he was still numb, but Parker wasn’t out to kill anyone; he didn’t quite believe in the “potential” life his demon had ruined, and though he tried to imagine the “real” Parker—posed him under a tree on Harvard Common—the image blurred into its tweedy caricature at the other end of the car.
At the other end of the car the “professor” and Ziploc were talking quietly. The “professor” gestured tersely with his pipe, and Ziploc spoke with none of the usual enthusiasm that nearly picked him up and threw him. They’d stopped talking and were staring directly at Parker—but of course he’d been staring at them. He scrunched and excused himself forward, and just as he stepped into view, Ziploc turned the voltage back up, arms flailing, eyes, mouth and brows aboil. “Eh, Parker! How ya doin’!”
“Got something for you, Zip,” said Parker reaching into his briefcase. Ziploc’s real name was Jack Gretsky but, like a true celebrity who knew the common currency of fame, notoriety, and condescension, he preferred the nickname. He had two black eyes today, and the fluorescent light revealed further darkness beneath his stubble. Last month Parker had chased away some teenagers who’d surrounded Ziploc on the Howard El platform—doubly infuriated, apparently, by a didactic lunatic. From his briefcase Parker produced a sheet filled with bar graphs, vectors, asterisks, spirals, pie charts, and dotted lines—one of the mailbox stuffers with which Jan Cohen, his department chairman, kept the staff apprised of breakthroughs in the science of Composition. Parker had thrown them out until he’d begun saving them for Ziploc.
“Chomsky’ll wanna see this, yeah.” For the past few months Ziploc had been sending 9 × 14 envelopes bursting with his incoherent “researches” to the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky—put up to it, Parker was certain, by a smartass on the Skokie Valley faculty—and his one reply was displayed in the jumbo bag: “Have received your manuscript. N.C.”
While Ziploc studied the chart with a raptness that would have puzzled even Jan Cohen, Parker smiled blandly at the man who looked too much like a professor. “Haven’t I seen you at Skokie Valley?”
“…loosely affiliated…interdepartmental…the general, not the particular…the journals….” Most of the man’s words were lost behind train noise, the pipe in his teeth, and a voice both well-modulated and indistinct, like a radio heard in sleep. Parker wondered if the man was talking gibberish just to spook him. But when the train stopped at McCormick, he took out the pipe and said clearly and distinctly, “How do you stand it?”
Parker stared. The “professor” was around forty, his face lined to accommodate a bemused smile and raised or knitted brows. Having spent most of his life in classrooms, Parker was convinced that people who were actually thinking didn’t knit their brows. The man had made a career as some sort of fraud.
“I mean,” the professor said, “how do you stand teaching at Skokie Valley? I have more training than the average surgeon and make considerably less than the average grape-picker, which means I get less monetary return on my education than the average Trappist monk—with none of the spiri
tual compensations.”
So there was nothing sinister or mysterious about him after all. Just another Skokie Valley whiner. Whining was the faculty’s social glue, playing the same role as that filled at other institutions by bridge, racquetball, or gossip. Parker, who’d done his share, was always ashamed to hear how it sounded. When he’d started there four years ago, he and John Connor Murray were the only Ph.Ds in the department, most of the staff consisting of graduate students from other schools and middle-aged women returning to work. But these days the place was infested with snide, ironic Ph.Ds, nothing better to do with their excess brilliance than crack allusive jokes and stuff the mailboxes with charts—sometimes parodies of Jan Cohen’s—comparing their lot to that of Burger King fry cooks or streetcorner windshield polishers. Like most of the others, Parker used to have three or four other part-time jobs, but these had suddenly and mysteriously been withdrawn. His demon seemed content, though, to let him stay on at Skokie Valley.
Ziploc placed a hand on Parker’s shoulder. “Perfessor High Muck-a-Muck Parker here use to teach at Princeton.”
“Then what are we doing here?” asked Parker’s colleague.
Parker said, “You’re the victim of demographics, the new materialism, the decline of interest in the liberal arts, and the relaxation of mandatory faculty retirement. I’m the victim of a conspiracy.” They both laughed.
By now he was nearly certain he saw this man on both trains every day, regardless of which car he rode or how he changed his schedule. And the same face was coming into focus in bars, theater lobbies, ballparks, crowds in the street. Or was he mistaking the cliché’s familiarity for the man’s?
“Here’s where I get off,” said the professor, and with a minimalist Ivy League wave to Parker and Ziploc, he nudged his way out the doors.
Ziploc placed a finger in the center of Parker’s chest. “Three-point-seven! I can look at some somebody and tell what percent of their brain they’re usin’. That guy there, forty-seven-point-nine. See, you thought I was makin’ this up. That baby there, a hunerd percent. That’s right, babies have very intense brains.”
Parker searched the windows for anything familiar or reassuring. The sun was going down, splattering through the passing trees, and in the clearings he focused on power lines, golden arches, traffic, dead neon, the blue peaked roof of a Big Boy drive-in. This, he supposed, was what he meant by the real world: predictable, self-explanatory, mildly irritating, and, except in emergencies, conveniently ignored.
Ziploc was well into his monologue, setting forth his ideas with the gusto of a juggler tossing up more and more objects even as they crashed in a miscellaneous din. Wasn’t he an ideal recruit for a “Breather Program”?
He was telling the story of a man in Sauganash Park who walked around with an empty leash till in three days he’d produced a “hypothetical dog” through “dynamic optimism.”
The day’s absurdities were beating Parker down; as a charm to restore normalcy he yelled, “So, Zip, how about those Bears!”
Ziploc recoiled as if slapped and, as the train pulled into Skokie Boulevard, turned and shoved his way out. “Sorry, Zip,” Parker yelled as the doors closed. Applied to a real human being, Dobbs’s theory seemed pernicious, a demonology of victims.
His two most obvious suspects at large, Parker scanned the remaining faces. There was more to being observant, surely, than singling out weird people. The people encircling him—kids in Niles West jackets, a couple of men in three-piece suits, shoppers with bags from Old Orchard, a woman with a baby in a stroller—looked completely, but not suspiciously, plausible. Of course if the story he’d heard were true, he might be the world’s least qualified judge of plausibility. Come to think of it, what was he looking for? By the time he changed trains at Howard, he’d given up looking around, and he rode to Granville with the Times blurring in his face.
He walked out of the station ahead of the crowd, round-shouldered against the chill. The sunset and the orange streetlights seeped into the dingy buildings. He passed the Liquorama and some boarded stores and, glancing back, turned left on Winthrop. It didn’t look like he was being followed; how else would it look if he was? But the sense of danger was general and the hostility of passersby impartial. Broken glass flared the length of the sidewalk, and as always he’d no idea where it came from. He asked himself why he hadn’t moved after the burglaries, fires, floods of raw sewage, etc. and decided 1) he couldn’t afford to, 2) he’d been no “luckier” elsewhere, 3) since things had gone awry routinely for most of his adult life, he’d barely had a standard by which to judge himself unlucky—having no more sense of the norm than would, say, a crash-test dummy.
He passed through the entrance without stopping for his mail, clacked and reverberated through the lobby, took the steps two at a time, and, turning the key as quietly as he could, threw open the door and hit the lights. Everything precisely as he’d left it: bare bulbs, white walls, card-table and chairs, books, couch, stereo, the usual stains. He felt like a kid who turns the light on a second after the monsters have turned back to toys and furniture.
According to Dobbs, the last page was missing from all his books. Okay. He walked to the bookcase and removed The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner. He’d used a copy in the library a few days ago, same paperback edition, and recalled that there’d been no additional pages—flyleaves, notes on the author or the typeface—after the index. And the last entry in the index is…“Zukofsky, Louis!” He exhaled, equally relieved and ashamed to see it.
Parker didn’t consider himself gullible. Unobservant, maybe—but how had he come to this? He thought back to his session with Dobbs and tried to retrace the arc from irritation to fear to slack-jawed belief. It had little to do with Dobbs’s encyclopedic knowledge of his pains and humiliations, or the man’s flair for arranging inexplicable facts into consistent, coherent absurdities. But there was something reassuring in the notion of a personal demon: The next best thing to a savior, it absolved you of screwing up.
The book was still in his hand; he was about to reshelve it when he turned to the last page of text. The last sentence began
His mind on Carpaccio, on cats and stones, on butterflies (“gasping,” “milkweed the sustenance”), on the conversation
and dead-ended. The following page had been removed without a tatter.
The phone rang. He turned on the light in the bedroom and, now that he was observing, looked with new interest at the charred floorboards, the hole his last burglar had inexplicably punched in the wall, and the half-dozen russet blotches over the headboard of his bed which Helen Garrity in Biology assured him could not have been five-inch cockroaches. He picked up the receiver, then the cradle, and trailing the cord back into the living room croaked hello.
“Hiii!” Fran’s breezy small-town-folks tone.
“Oh, hi.” He set the cradle down and pulled out The Education of Henry Adams—yup!—tossed it on the floor and tried The Selected Poems of Louis Zukofsky—mm-hmm!
“Hello, Jeff? Is this a bad time?”
“No…uh, no. That’s okay.” Kneeling down, he reached into the crack between the case and the wall where books sometimes fell off the top and removed a dusty copy of The Blue Hammer by Ross MacDonald. “Actually,” he said, “someone’s razored the last page out of all my books.”
“You’re weird.”
He wondered how long it would take—how many people?—to meticulously remove one page each from 3,000 books. They’d’ve used garbage bags, probably still in the trash bin. Upstairs the nightly thuds were beginning. It had started about three months ago, a sound like a concrete block being dropped over and over, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to all night. For the first time he considered the possibility that someone was dropping a concrete block over and over. Maybe several people working in shifts. Parker had quickly grown used to the noise as he did to most irritations. If this was the Breather Pro
ject, what a chintzy, measly conspiracy—less a hell or purgatory than an extended fraternity hell week. As far as he knew, he’d never seen “R. Braff.” What if he went up there and knocked on the door?
He heard himself “mm-hmm, mm-hmm” during Fran’s pauses. She was saying, “The spice dealer has all these confused flour beetles in his saffron and he sues the shipper.” In the bathroom he pulled out The Inimitable Jeeves from behind the radiator. Right. In the bedroom again he took down the box his mother had sent over. Pez dispenser, fielder’s mitt, ray gun: The Boy Scout Handbook was missing its last page. Fran was saying, “I argued that the trucking company’s liable for the confused flour beetles.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘confused beetles’? How can they tell the difference between a confused beetle and one who’s got his shit together?”
“It’s a type of beetle. Though they do look confused. They stagger around in spirals, a fact not unrelated, I suspect, to their being two or three times as prolific as other beetles. Anyway, this is boring.”
“No, really I…”
“Do you want to go dancing, or what?”
Parker didn’t read much into this. She was hurt—well, surprised—that he hadn’t called. Frances Anne Girard was a politician’s daughter, and her instinct was to win people over. Once she’d done that, she had no idea what to do with them.
“It’s Monday night,” he said.
“I have a new system. I do everything I please, and then I can study without distraction.”
The Blindfold Test Page 4