The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Amanda?”

  Amanda contemplated diving into a splotch of light on the tabletop. “In the first place, it’s your word against the manager’s. In the second place—I hate to say this, but I don’t think it’s an important enough story for the news.”

  Parker quickly changed the subject. “Here’s a test for your rebuttal skills,” he said to the class. “Who’d like to state the manager’s case. Does he have a case?”

  “His case goes something like this.” John Connor Murray folded his hands across his gut, inhaled, paused. “Die, bitch!’ ”

  Mrs. Slansky gave a startled yelp of a laugh.

  “I don’t know if I’d call that a case,” Parker said.

  “Doesn’t it seem to you, Parker, that too much gets written about the banality of evil? What about the wistfulness of evil? Most evil people are third-rate like the rest of us—big plans, but the ship sailed without ‘em. I see this theater manager as a potential Gacy, a Caligula, a Hitler, who never got his break. So he sits in that office nursing his regrets, and when an occasional Mrs. Slansky turns up…‘What thy hand findeth to do, do with all thy might,’ you see what I’m saying? All he did was cheat you out of a few dollars, madam, but it’s the closest he can get to making you dig your grave and jump in.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Mrs. Slansky beamed.

  Parker, the only one in the room with a genuine personal demon, found their sense of conviction galling.

  Feeling the need to hold out a shred of hope, he said, “Why don’t you write to the Better Business Bureau? They’ll make a permanent record of your complaint.”

  He wasn’t sure why that was a good thing, but Mrs. Slansky smiled, apparently relishing the thought that her complaint would outlive her.

  * * *

  —

  After class he pursued the leads from Dobbs’s visit with little enthusiasm. It occurred to him that he resented his new knowledge almost as much as the dirty tricks—that until Dobbs came along he’d adapted to his world as perfectly as any pale blind thing on the ocean floor.

  He was sneakily relieved, therefore, when no one at the Bismarck Register had anything on the shave-your-head caller, when Ziploc didn’t turn up at his usual hangouts, when the private investigators who’d quote fees over the phone were beyond his means, and when his calls to Dobbs (so eager to tug his sleeve the other day!) failed to get past the secretary. Resisting the impulse to let things slide, he called back and told her that he accepted Dobbs’s dinner invitation, and he’d be over at seven on the third. At the Legal Aid office on Dempster a kid in a blue bow tie told him he might speed up his Freedom of Information Act request by telling the FBI why they might have a file on him—which, if no file existed, might prompt the Bureau to start one. He left with a copy of “How to Use the Federal FOI Act” in his briefcase and boarded the Skokie Swift, having so far achieved perfect equilibrium between his duty to investigate and his dread of learning anything.

  His final lead of the day was the super in his building. Jim was never too busy to stand in his doorway chatting amiably; Parker was convinced the man hated him. The nearest thing to an outright display of hostility had come last month when, inspecting the latest damage to Parker’s apartment—the sudden appearance of a two-inch-wide crack across the ceiling and down two walls—he’d grinned slyly at Parker and observed that these things didn’t happen to other people.

  Parker liked him anyway and found their small-talk relaxing. Jim was a short squat man with a round face, a flattop crewcut, a faint Southern accent, and a habit of gazing into the distance for his next cliché. He polished his glasses with his shirttail and asked Parker if he thought the Bears could go all the way.

  Parker said the Bears looked good this year if McMahon stayed healthy blah blah blah, wondering if a bribe were necessary for information as it had lately been for repairs. He didn’t blame Jim a bit: While Parker had been oblivious to the conspiracy, the super must have felt like its victim.

  Parker decided to force the money on him up front. Otherwise Jim might feel obliged to say money wasn’t necessary and not feel obliged to be helpful.

  “Jim, I’d like to give you money for some information. Of course,” he said over Jim’s gesture of refusal, “you’d tell me anything you know for free. But, wait, this is strictly for my peace of mind. See, I really need this information, and if I go upstairs without it I don’t want to wonder if there was something I didn’t do to get it. Now you look insulted.”

  Actually Jim looked confused and suspicious. He knew he was being conned or made fun of but despaired of seeing how.

  “I’ll give you the money now.”

  Jim held out his palm. “You want to throw your money away, Jeff, put it right there.” He accepted the bill fatalistically.

  “I was wondering if you ever see strangers going in or out of my apartment.”

  “No.” Jim stared back self-righteously. “You want your money back?”

  “No, that’s all right,” Parker sighed. “Just keep an eye out.”

  Jim was closing the door. “Night, Jeff, I hope you—say, you don’t mean the repairmen?”

  “What?”

  “I was changing the bulb in your hallway maybe ten minutes ago when they came by. They said they were TV repairmen. They had a key so I figured—Hey! Your briefcase!”

  Parker was running up the steps. “Call the police!”

  “Don’t be stupid, wait for the police! Hey!”

  * * *

  —

  He rounded the corner of the apartment court, nearly broke his key in the entrance door, and skidded to a halt when he’d crossed the lobby. Not a sound at the bottom of the steps but the chipper murmurings of TVs. He sprinted the flight to his door, trusting his next move to momentum. He still had no plan when, half-hoping the door would stop on its chain, he turned the key and pushed; it banged open, just missing two men in grey-green coveralls coming out. He sidestepped the wide chest of the first—at eye level with “Bob” stitched in red over the breast pocket—then shoved the second back inside and following slammed the door. The man dropped his tool kit and charged him head down; Parker brought up a fist to the nose. Having nothing to guide him but the movies, he shook the dazed man by the front of his coveralls. “What do you people want?” The nose flung droplets of blood; the thin lips parted to emit a choking sound. The man was having some sort of fit; no, he was snickering. Goofing, he let himself droop in Parker’s grip. “What do you want!” Parker screamed into the sallow, pockmarked, moronic face. As Parker shook him the arms flailed like a puppet’s, a primary-yellow toupee worked loose from the skull and slid off. A few seconds of shaking dead weight and Parker was exhausted. He let the man drop; as Parker kneeled down—might as well try banging the guy’s head on the floor for a while!—the guy hit him in the forehead with a wrench. It didn’t hit full force but it doubled him up on his side, a high-pitched tone drilling his ears. He opened one eye; the toupee was nuzzled against his face.

  The lock turned and the big man stood in the doorway looking mildly impatient. “So?”

  “So nothin’,” said his partner. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, picked up his tool kit, snatched his toupee out of Parker’s face, and stepped out. The big man shrugged at Parker and followed.

  Gathering up his entire body and balancing it atop his feet, Parker made it out the door. He leaned woozily over the landing rail and called, “What do you people want?”

  The big man looked up. He had curly brown hair, pudgy avuncular features, and the build of an out-of-shape wrestler.

  “Your TV was working.”

  “I never called…what?”

  “I said it was working. You call if it’s not working, but you wouldn’t call us.”

  “Oh.” A drop of blood landed in Parker’s open mouth. He thought all that might sound perfectly rea
sonable if not for his skull compacting around his brain.

  “We adjusted the horizontal output transformer so the picture’ll go into a roll for ten seconds at twenty second intervals. Now it’s not working, see?”

  Despairmen. The notion seemed absurd, but maybe it was his head injury. He thought he vaguely recollected having heard of such a service on “All Things Considered.” It made sense, he supposed. If an appliance didn’t work you had it repaired; on the other hand, if it worked…no, wait.

  “What are you guys? Gremlins?”

  “Hey, Frank,” the big man called to his partner somewhere in the lobby, “he says we’re gremlins!” He turned back to Parker. “So? We’re gremlins.”

  “You people waste a lot of time and effort creating minor nuisances,” Parker said. “It’ll take more than a horizontal output transformer to get to me.” Big talk, he realized, from someone who had to look at his shoes to verify that he was standing up.

  * * *

  —

  “Ouch! That’s some goose egg you got!” Jim stared past the door chain and Parker’s shoulder into the apartment. “What happened?”

  Parker unlocked the door and returned the ice compress to his forehead. “I surprised two—two burglars. The police were here; I don’t understand why they tell you not to touch anything when they never take fingerprints. Etiquette?”

  “That bump looks nasty. You want, I could run you over to Edgewater Hospital.”

  “I don’t know. Give me a minute.”

  “You asked about people getting in here. I just remembered one guy—I figured you knew ’im cause he had a key, but after the TV guys…God damn! Jim halted in front of the television—Parker had succumbed to curiosity and turned it on just as he’d knocked—watching the picture rotate like clothes in a dryer. “Must be your horizontal output transformer.”

  Parker covered his eyes with the rag; a perky yellow blob in the darkness beat time to his migraine. “Would you mind shutting that off?” He peeped out. “What did he look like?”

  “ ’Bout your height, light-brown hair—like a professor.”

  “Briefcase? Pipe?”

  “Yeah. The kind professors smoke in the movies. It wasn’t lit.”

  “Just a minute.” Parker went to the desk and sketched several kinds of pipes on his legal pad. He didn’t draw people well enough to do the man on the train.

  He showed Jim the pipe lineup. “Which one?”

  Jim put a finger on the briar. “There.”

  “Say, Jim, can you draw?”

  “My niece in third grade draws better. I was good in machine shop, that’s it.”

  “What was the man wearing?”

  “Tweed jacket with those things on the elbows like professors wear.”

  “Patches.”

  “Yeah! Elbow patches.”

  “This is important. I don’t want to influence you. Just relax—that’s it, sit down—describe him again in your own words.”

  Running a hand over his crewcut, Jim slid down the couch. “ ’Bout forty, your height, light-brown hair, briar pipe, tweed jacket, elbow patches. Oh, he had blue eyes, creases around the eyes. Had those lines on his forehead. Like you guys get from thinking too much.” He chuckled to himself.

  “Weight?”

  “I dunno. Two-ten.”

  “What about dates? Times?”

  “I can’t say. Two, three times the past six months.” He stood up. “If you don’t want a ride to the hospital, I gotta get back.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be fine.”

  Parker let him out, changed the ice cubes in his compress, took three Extra Strength Excedrin, and dialed the receptionist at Skokie Valley Community College. “Barb, it’s Jeff. Maybe you can help me. I keep running into a guy on the faculty whose name I should know by now, and I’m too embarrassed to ask.”

  “Describe the nonentity, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Briar pipe, elbow patches, complete Oxford drag. Like an extra in Lucky Jim.”

  “Got it!” She lowered her voice. “At the desk we call him Ward Cleaver. His name’s Ken Fletcher. Need a number? Address?”

  “I’d say we’ve got his number. Just needed the name.” His finger stopped on the listing in the faculty directory. “Thanks a lot. Take care, Barb.”

  He brought the phone book and the Tribune classifieds to his desk and rolled a sheet into the typewriter.

  * * *

  —

  The fluorescent lights at the currency exchange pierced into his squint. The clerk had plenty to gawk at as she handed over the money order—the bump on Parker’s forehead, the face beneath it tugged between a grimace and a shit-eating grin.

  At the counter he sealed the money orders in two envelopes. The first contained a classified ad for the Tribune listing a two-year-old Corvette for $5,000, giving Fletcher’s name and address, and welcoming late calls and drop-ins. The second contained a classified for a fringe porn magazine (months ago he’d written down the address of the loathsome publication to try to put a stop to their unsolicited “complimentary copies”) in which “Fletcher” advertised the vilest predilection Parker could dream up with a headache. He’d tried to overestimate the ad rate.

  That would do for starters.

  He was humming as he crossed Granville to the mailbox. An Evanston Express slam-banged overhead, windows strobing. Suppose—he had the box open, the envelopes at his fingertips as he tried to separate Jim’s description from his own promptings—suppose this wasn’t the guy. Impossible. He let the envelopes fall and the box clank shut. Where Granville ended, a moon like an oncoming headlight streamed over the lake.

  Back in his apartment he mixed a gin-and-tonic and, singing the tune he’d been humming, dialed Fran.

  “Hello?”

  “O! Oklahoma! where the wind comes sweepin’ off the—”

  “I’m glad to hear you so ebullient, but I can’t talk. Can I call back?” Her someone-else-in-the-room tone.

  “Studying?”

  “Checking up on me?” Teasing, but with an edge of irritation.

  “Just showing an interest in your life, my darling. Sensitive, remember?” He pressed an ice cube to his forehead, then plunked it back in his drink.

  “You sound bummed. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine here. You sound bummed, if a woman so elegant—”

  “How would I sound if I had to get off and you were protracting the conversation?”

  “Ah!”

  “Can I call late?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “If I don’t call tonight I’ll call tomorrow. Bye!”

  He flicked the lemon into the wastebasket. Obviously she hadn’t gone the ten months of their breakup without seeing anyone, but her accounts of the period reminded him of a cropped photo: “I had dinner at Le Perroquet.” At any rate, he’d been reluctant to ask.

  He knew he was overinterpreting. That after scrutinizing everything the past few days, his judgment was having a little meltdown.

  Fortunately there was always the conspiracy to fall back on. Might as well get off another ad before Fletcher moved and changed his number. He carried his drink to the typewriter and inserted a sheet. He’d make this one a challenge: an ad for Popular Mechanics. Once he’d’ve spent the evening gnawing every nuance of Fran’s remarks. Nothing like a personal demon to put these trivialities in perspective. He typed: “Attention Geniuses! Venture capitalist wishes to back perpetual motion device….”

  * * *

  —

  John Connor Murray was reenacting the history of envy, betrayal, and academic politics that had plummeted him from the Ivy League through state universities, urban junior colleges, no-name community colleges and spottily accredited business colleges to the thud at the end of the fall, Skokie Valley Community
College. Always the plotters—Lionel Trilling, Harold Bloom, Mark Van Doren, et al—spoke with lisps and squeaky voices while the gaping mouth and huge bulging watery eyes of their victim mimed O!

  Parker barely noticed anymore when heads throughout the cafeteria turned toward his colleague’s bellowing. He used to assume that resentment expressed with such verve and theatricality couldn’t be entirely heartfelt, but Jack was an exuberant hater. Parker had hoped to get Jack’s unique perspective on his personal demon—hoped at least that Jack, if anyone, would accept his story without reservation (Fran’s acceptance seeming more like suspended disbelief). But he’d barely gotten started when Jack had yelled “Those bastards!” and without further transition launched into this umpteenth rave-out against Trilling and Co., as if the same cabal had put the itching powder in Parker’s talc.

  Parker, irritated that his conspiracy had been given short shrift, said, “I don’t suppose your troubles had anything to do with roughing up speakers at the MLA.” Everyone knew there’d been an incident at a Modern Language Association convention in the mid-Seventies, but the true story was as encrusted in legend as Beowulf’s. “I’ve never heard your version, Jack. What happened?”

  Interrupted in mid-rant, Jack looked a bit punch-drunk. He raised an eyebrow at the meatloaf on his fork as if at a sudden, unpleasant surprise, then returned his attention to Parker. “First of all, lad, it was one conference, one speaker. I can never remember his name—damn! French, one of the Jacques. Lacan? Derrida? Or was it Roland Barthes? Anyway, a practitioner of meta-something-or-other. You know the racket. He’d gone beyond something—language, intelligibility—that hamstrings ossified chumps like you and me. A meta-guy might say—for example!—that the world is cube-shaped. If you’re unfortunate enough to be on the same panel, what can you say? That the world is spherical, slightly pear-shaped, that it’s been photographed from space?” Jack made his voice quaver to demonstrate the ineffectuality of this response. “The audience will groan because the round-world view has been around for centuries, it’s hackneyed, and this meta-guy has gone beyond it. Well, it’s time for me to respond, and Jacques—damn! Who was that little faggot? White hair? Bow tie?—he’s grinning, all set to put me and the entire humanistic tradition in a historical context. So how do you stand up for the truth without seeming prissy or reactionary? I opted for the old Jacques-there’s-a-spot-on-your-tie ploy: Decked ’im, chair and all.”