“Jeez, I’m sorry. It’s just that the details were right. It’s, like, if you had said and done those things, it would’ve been exactly that way.”
“Don’t try to justify yourself on grounds of literary criticism. Whatever I’m charged with must be pretty despicable, judging by the look Peg gave me. I suppose everyone else hates me too?”
“Yup.”
“I thought they were avoiding me out of pity, too. What a relief. They just hate me.”
“You underestimated us……How do you suppose rumors like that get started?”
“I know how it got started.”
But John had already picked up the phone off the floor, set it on the coffee table, and begun dialing. “Let’s find out.”
“If you’re trying to avoid talking to me I could just leave.”
John hung up. “I believe in the Big Bang theory of jokes and rumors.
One instant nothing, then boom! it’s everyplace…Tell you what. Why don’t you just kill me and we’ll call it even? You could use that.” He pointed to the lump in Parker’s jacket pocket.
“Oh. I didn’t think it was that noticeable.” Parker handed him the gun and he took aim at a standing lamp across the room.
“You don’t seem surprised that I’m carrying a gun,” Parker said.
“Yeah, well, you’ve been talking to Dobbs.”
“Now are you ready to hear what he told me?”
John was ready once he’d brought out another six-pack and more junk food and retracted his features into a perfect deadpan. “I hate Dobbs’s stories. You feel stupid whether you believe him or not.”
“Dupery through hope or dupery through fear.”
“There ya go! I’ll just sit here and not react.”
John remained impassive throughout the story, though at one point (“he pays women to almost go to bed with me”) a handful of Cheetos froze in front of his open mouth. When Parker had finished, he asked John what he thought of Dobbs’s story.
“It’s like the stories in the magazine—it could be true, or half-true, or false but with a grain of truth. It could be completely made-up but symbolically or mythologically or—I don’t know—cryptographically true. I’d keep the gun handy.”
“Do you think Dobbs could be behind all this?”
“Nah. Too passive-aggressive…So, Parker, what’s your day like? Safes dropping from upper stories? Electric shocks from the toaster? Pets strangled on the doorstep? Guys in trenchcoats lunging out of alleys?”
“Yeah, basically. Just one guy in a trenchcoat and he didn’t quite lunge. Sabotage, yes. My car was in the shop forty-one times in a year before I gave up. Pets: Three dogs died on me in two years. Don’t smirk. If you don’t have any enemies that you know of and your dog gets run over, you don’t immediately wonder if there was a contract on ’im. It’s one of the conventions of sanity that you allow plenty of room for coincidence in your misfortunes.”
“What about room for plausibility?”
“Compared to what?”
“I see.”
“It’s supposed to be a sign of maturity that you don’t go around asking ‘why me’? I thought I was being an adult. Dobbs calls it ‘protective obtuseness.’ ”
John was working to remain expressionless.
Parker said, “Will you help me or not?”
“I’ll check your place for bugs. What else?”
“I’d like to catch the people who are breaking into my apartment.”
“No booby traps, they could sue us. Though I’ll tell you what. I’m testing a prototype that marks the intruder with an indelible stink. By indelible I mean, like, three days, but it’s overwhelming. We mount it on the ceiling like a sprinkler system. It won’t stink up your apartment; the smell comes with skin contact, like DMSO, the cancer drug? A recorded message tells him he can get the solvent—the antidote—at McDermott Security; they’re a rent-a-cop firm we work with. That way he won’t come after you. Just in case he manages to get rid of the smell on his own—a real good chemist might be able to figure it out—there’s a bonus. You think your intruder might be following you: You’ll be able to spot him in a crowd because he’ll get a bath of infrared-like dye. It’s invisible without a viewer. Same technique banks use to catch embezzlers. Wait a minute.” John went upstairs and returned wearing oversize sunglasses. “Just pop these on and spot the bad guys.”
Parker laughed appreciatively. “Rose-colored glasses! Nice touch. What about Hank Monroe, Junior? Did you ever run across that kind of psychotic practical joker?”
“I deal with thieves and corporate spies. I don’t think a lot of career criminals go into practical joking. You know, I don’t think I understand practical jokes. I’ve played a few, but I’m not sure I could tell you what the kick is.”
“Besides sadism? I think it’s aesthetic. Literary. In most practical jokes that go on for an extended time there’s something like a narrative structure—usually a basic progression. Loud-louder-loudest. Big-bigger-biggest, and so forth. Some theme pushed gradually to the point of absurdity. Will you take those things off?”
“Nervous, Parker?” John removed the glasses and set them on the coffee table.
“The high point of most practical jokes is the same as in tragedy—the recognition scene, when the victim sees he’s been had. For instance, when I was a teaching assistant at Cornell, some of the other TAs started moving a guy’s desk a few feet every day, just to see if he’d notice when he came in. I think he noticed but he wanted to deny them their recognition scene. One morning his desk and chair had reached the hallway; so he sat there in the hallway grading papers and keeping appointments with his students. There was some talk of continuing the joke, moving the desk a little farther every day till it left the building and eventually the campus, but he’d broken their spirit. The next day the desk was back in place. You know what? I think protective obtuseness was my strongest weapon.”
“For you, maybe. I’d carry something like this to its conclusion.” John stood up. “I’ll have to kick you out and go to bed…Think you were followed? Move over.” He leaned over the couch and pried up one of the blinds.
“I don’t think you’ll see the man in the trenchcoat leaning against a lamp post with his collar up, if that’s what you’re l looking for.”
“The man under the lamp post has glasses, a stocking cap, a cruddy brown jacket. He’s holding something. Looks like a Ziploc bag.”
* * *
—
When Ziploc saw them crossing the street, he went into his gesticulating dance. “Parker! How ya doin’!” He was theatrically ugly under the sodium vapor lamp, his bruises garish, his manic face seething with leaf shadows. He pointed at John. “This man has brain power! Mister, do you mind if I ask a personal question? Do you eat fish? Fish is brain food, as I’m sure you know.”
John placed an arm round his shoulder and asked him what he thought he was doing.
“Moving the exterior limbs in a dynamic fashion!” Ziploc shuffled from foot to foot, glancing sidelong at John’s rose-colored glasses and ambiguous grin.
Parker placed his arm round the other shoulder, crossing John’s arm, and they all stood facing the darkened white frame houses across the street. “C’mon, Zip. What are you doing?”
Ziploc continued staring across the street. “Thinkin’.”
“Thinking! What about?”
“You! I’m a consultant about you!”
A rectangle of light enclosed them; John turned and waved to an undershirted man squinting through his front-door pane; the light went out.
Parker said, “These days everyone’s a consultant. Can you be more specific?”
“Okay, say I have a dream. You’re fightin’ these giant turtles! Turtles, you know, are a big archetype. Think I’m kiddin’? Read Jung! So these turtles keep comin’, and you’re sockin’ ’em
! Then I write it down and people come and take away the notes. Sometimes they’re standing over the bed when I wake up.”
John pinched his cheek. “I see. You’ve decided you’re a character. Well it isn’t that easy. You don’t get to decide you’re a character—I’ll decide if you’re a character.”
“I think I get this.” Parker faced John over Ziploc’s head. “Dobbs said my demon wanted his jokes to look like random occurrences. Well, randomness is harder to fake than you might think. That makes Ziploc the perfect consultant. Whose thought processes are closer to blind chance? No offense, Zip.”
“It’s okay with me!”
“Socked any turtles lately?” John asked Parker.
“No, I guess the Breather people can’t use the material raw. It has to be edited, interpreted, explicated.”
John rubbed his chin. “Has anything happened that’s like turtles?”
“Well, no. But I have the feeling a lot of events in my life originated right here, under this stocking cap.” He patted Ziploc’s head. “Tell me, Zip. We’re friends, right?”
“You and me? Suuure!”
“Suppose I told you someone was using your ideas to hurt me.”
Ziploc tilted his head, widening and narrowing his eyes as if Parker had gone out of focus.
“What if I made some…some of my own suggestions? Could you put them in your reports?”
“Sure! Whattaya need?”
John said, “I don’t believe this, Parker. You’re making a wish. Oh, Jeez!”
“John—shut up.” Parker turned back to Ziploc. “Here’s what I want. I want this to stop.”
“This?” Ziploc’s gesture took in the houses, the parked cars, the streetlights, the leaves crackling above their heads. The contents of the Ziploc bag rattled and glimmered as he waved his hand.
“I mean, I want you to leave me alone.”
Ziploc shuffled his feet, opened and closed his mouth.
“No point hurting his feelings,” John said. “Go for what you can get—money, fame, power. How about world peace?”
“Can I actually make a wish?”
“That’s the point I’m tryin’ to stress!” Ziploc yelled. “Whattaya need?”
Parker was stumped. It had been years since he’d entertained the possibility that he might get something he wanted; he therefore had no idea what he wanted. “Wait—let me think.”
He wondered what his wish would look like by the time it passed through Ziploc’s mind, got edited, interpreted, and explicated, and came back at him.
John removed the sunglasses and stared at Parker. “Tell me you’re kidding.” He turned to Ziploc. “While we’re waiting, who do you work for and where can we find them?”
“There.”
A white Continental with blacked-out windows pulled up to the curb. Parker had his gun out. The electric window on the passenger side cracked open, and a knuckle rapped on the glass. “Bulletproof.” Parker recognized the voice of the big despairman.
“I’ll keep it out anyway, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem.” A gun barrel slid through the opening. “Just in case you’ve seen too many movies and you want to shoot out the tires.”
“Shut up!” Ziploc yelled. “He’s makin’ a wish!”
“Don’t tell,” said the despairman, “or it won’t come true.”
Ziploc opened the back door. “You think about that wish. I’ll get back to ya!”
FIVE
When Fletcher said “anomic stress formation,” he nearly sang. He didn’t break eye contact or pause a beat when a lunch tray hit the floor with a reverberant smash and clatter. “Directly, not inversely, see?” He leaned farther across the table toward Parker. “Everyone else had it backwards.”
Parker’s mind floated above his body. It skimmed the fluorescent lights and the ceiling tiles, surveyed the chunky earth-colored specials of the day, buzzed the tops of heads, and skated across the green and beige floor squares, skirting the crowd gathering where he’d heard the crash. It was attempting to follow a pair of tanned calves in a blue denim skirt beyond Parker’s line of sight, when he reminded himself that everything about one’s enemy is interesting—well, significant.
He found himself involuntarily wadding a napkin as the spoon poised near Fletcher’s mouth dribbled onto a tweed sleeve. Parker kept watching the spoon; every few seconds it made a run at the mouth and was shunted aside by a stampede of jargon.
If the man hadn’t been plotting to ruin his life, Parker would have thought he knew the type—a collection of academic quirks Parker ordinarily found touching. The brow-furrowing poses and Mr. Chips tweeds belonged to a man who, despite all honors, degrees, and appointments, feels like an impostor (no, wait. Fletcher was an impostor).
But when he spoke of…whatever it was he was talking about, Fletcher lost the manner. His face was molten with enthusiasm, as if he might force his thoughts through the eyes, brow, and nostrils. As always, Parker was touched by the social innocence and childlike zest of the truly hopeless bore.
The Tribune ad would run in three days, the others within a few weeks. How would Fletcher hold up?
Following Parker’s eyes, Fletcher paused in midsentence, contemplated his spoon, and swallowed his soup. “When I did that at home my wife used to quote the Japanese proverb: ‘Eat first, poetry later.’ The kids picked it up: ‘Eat, daddy! Poetry later!’ ”
Parker rearranged the crumbs on his plate. He didn’t kid himself that the ads were a prank—they were psychological warfare—but he’d seen no other way to break Fletcher down. Simple intimidation wouldn’t work; the people controlling Fletcher could surely be scarier than he could. But he hadn’t considered the possibility that he might also be attacking a wife and kids. Perhaps it had been convenient to assume that Fletcher was too self-absorbed to have a family.
“How old are your kids?”
“Greg’s twelve, Jennifer’s nine. They live with their mom.”
Trying not to show his relief, Parker said the first thing that came to mind. “Your ex-wife, she’s Japanese?”
Fletcher knitted his brow. “Why, no. What an odd question.”
“Japanese proverb?” Parker shrugged. “I’m babbling. A brain impulse got lost between synapses, is that what happens? You’ll have to tell me some other time; I’m late for a class.” He gripped his briefcase and stood up.
There was a second crash. “Hey, faggot! Kinda old for trick-or-treat!”
Throughout the cafeteria people rose from their chairs. The crowd was backing away as Parker approached the din. Through the opening a seated man, his face encrusted with purplish-black blisters, grinned at Parker: bald, trenchcoat, mirror lenses, the grin like a flare in the charred face. The man’s foot was extended into the aisle, where it had generated a collage of puddles, splatters, smashed plates and glass. From the amount of mess, he must have tripped more than one person. A kid in a green sweatshirt, apparently the most recent victim, crunched over shards as he backed into Parker; he was holding the man’s beard.
“Damn, it’s hard to get your attention, buddy.” (That inauthentic cowboy drawl had run through Parker’s head for days.) “Siddown!” Hank Monroe, Jr. pointed at the chair facing his. Three lunches, barely touched, sat abandoned on the table.
Reflected in the mirror shades, Parker closed his mouth. He’d just remembered the gun in his briefcase. The kid put the beard in his hand and backed farther off. Parker stepped up to the table, his reflections in the shades expanding as if he were diving in.
“Lose this?” he said. The beard was made of a wiry synthetic; having touched the adhesive, Parker had to shake the thing loose. He sat down, set his case on the table, and released the flap.
Leaving his beard on the table between them, Monroe, Jr. beamed at the crowd. “It ain’t trick-or-treat, folks. I’m ugly ’cause I s
erved my country. What’s your excuse?” He threw an arm across the back of his chair. “Ever hear the saying, judge a man by his enemies? Well I’m proud to have Jeff Parker here for my enemy. I threw the book at ’im—beatings, sores, pus, dead dogs—guy’s an iceman. I mean, he’s got this look he don’t even know it’s happening. What’s his secret?” A few people giggled.
Fletcher pushed up to the front of the crowd. “Shall I call the police?”
Parker’s hand found the gun in his briefcase. “No.” Leaving the gun inside, he rested his forearm on the case.
“His secret,” Monroe, Jr. orated, master of ceremonies at a celebrity roast, “—and I don’t want to hear you pissants laugh—secret’s that he’s pure of heart. I know, you’re thinkin’, pure of heart, sure, how many divisions does the pope have? I use to think that way myself and he whomped me. I’m a proud man but I gotta say it: He whomped me.”
Bob Linder, one of Parker’s Comp students, yelled, “Way to go, Jeff!”
Parker stood up. “Why don’t we discuss our business in my office?”
“Yeah, buddy, let’s you an me talk about old times.” Monroe, Jr. was Parker’s height and a good deal wider. “Always a pleasure talkin’ to young people,” he said to the crowd. “I hope you kids’ll let this be a lesson.”
They were given a wide berth through the hallway.
“Damn!” Monroe, Jr. halted. “I nearly forgot this previous engagement. But listen, buddy, we’ll have lunch. You take care now, I’ll—”
Finding no one else looking, Parker flashed the gun and stuffed it in his sport-coat pocket, pressing the barrel against the cloth. “Don’t move.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Jeff, but I think I know you, and that gun and fifty cents’ll get you a cup of coffee.”
Parker noted that he hadn’t moved.
A girl approaching them made a quick lateral. “Man thinks he’s ringmaster ’cause he got a gun!” Monroe, Jr. yelled after her. “Big fuckin’ deal! You want me to maybe…reach for the sky?” He put up his arms, rose up on tiptoe, and grinned hideously.
The Blindfold Test Page 9