The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Never mind who—yeah,” Parker said. “Who are you?”

  “We have a great deal to discuss. Why don’t you come down to the office? Would 4:30 Monday suit you?”

  “Four-thirty. Okay, uh—” Parker hung up. He’d just decided to propose to Fran. His first chance would be Sunday, after their evening with the Dobbses. They’d leave early; he’d have champagne waiting at his apartment; it wasn’t too late to put something on the walls. He wasn’t sure she’d accept, but there was dupery through hope or dupery through fear, right?

  In his new mood he imagined a time when he’d think back on Hank Monroe, Jr. as a ghastly but benign apparition who, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, had shocked him into wisdom: “You’re gonna die all alone in a room fulla soup cans!” Parker drummed the desktop, slapping a bass line to a new gust of rain. What was tolerance management?

  * * *

  —

  Nodding off, Fran put her head on his shoulder. He stroked her cheek and replaced his hand on the wheel. Even with the wipers on high, he could barely reconstruct Lake Shore Drive out of gleaming, seething dots.

  She mumbled something under the din.

  “What?”

  “It’s my fault,” she said through her hair.

  He was driving her car because she’d started putting away margaritas as dinner with the Dobbses turned ugly. “Don’t be ridiculous. Steve’s a nervous, prickly guy; the strain of trying to make friends finally got to him. Consider it a world record that you got him to relax for a couple of hours.”

  “Getting people to relax is my…my what?” she wondered.

  “Your forte? your lot in life? your fate?” A lightning-burst tripped flashbulbs on the pelted cars.

  “Calling. I’m a politician’s daughter.”

  “Do you kiss babies?”

  “No,” she murmured, her boozy breath warm in his ear, “but I hold babies. The babies play with my hair.” He let her drift off.

  The evening had started out well, despite his warnings that it was more likely to be interesting than pleasant. Their forebodings had caused them to have a laughing fit at the stone gargoyles over the entrance—the building was a Gold Coast landmark—and at the doorman, whose glower reminded them that in the real world Dobbs was the wealthy, respectable citizen and they the suspicious characters.

  But they’d begun to relax as Steve, his wife, Barbara, and their two-year-old, Courtney, guided them on a tour of the condo, Fran playing peek-a-boo with Courtney and nudging Parker to indicate cathedral ceilings, Persian carpets, a Ralph Lauren dining-room set, an Eckhart couch like a soft mauve UFO with legs. When it became apparent that Barb savored these displays of pleasure, they gawked brazenly. Sharp-witted, short, slight, and dimly blond, Barb worked as a loan officer at the Harris Bank. From the eager rapidity of her speech and gestures, Parker gathered that they didn’t get much company. He’d wondered how a wife might respond to Dobbs’s nuttier ideas—wide-eyed endorsement or eye-rolling stoicism. It was more like tolerant amusement. Passing a David Hockney lithograph, she quipped, “We speculate in paranoia and invest in Realism.” But Dobbs was a charming host for about two hours, cracking them up with bawdy, tenuously plausible political gossip, laughing in turn at Fran’s anecdotes about her father’s days in the Minnesota state senate, and teaching Courtney to make a troll face.

  After dinner Parker asked to speak to him alone. Steve led him down the hall to his study, closed the door, and, grim-faced, asked Parker if he’d swear to keep a secret. Parker braced himself: Okay. Dobbs told Parker that he hated his study. Before Parker could recover from his confusion and get out his questions, Dobbs launched into a preemptive monologue about how Barb had wanted to have the room refurnished for his surprise birthday present while they were away on a trip, but, having selected all their furniture, she’d little idea of his tastes. The decorator had nothing to go on except that Dobbs was some sort of writer, and he’d done up the room in its present Explorers’ Club Rococo—the sort of rattan-and-hide stuff a set designer might’ve placed around Gregory Peck for “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Barb must’ve hated it, but Steve had convinced her that he sort of liked it. Anyway, at least it was funny—he’d kept a papier-mâche cow head over the mantel till it scared Courtney—and at least the hides weren’t real, but all he really needed was a table and chair, maybe just a pad of paper, a pencil, and a clean floor, and besides—. Cutting him off, Parker asked what he knew about Tolerance Management. As if on cue, Courtney knocked at the door. She was a cute kid with blond hair, blue eyes, and the habit of standing practically on your toes and gaping straight up like a tourist. Steve picked her up and brandished her to deflect further questions. “Here’s Courtney’s joke,” he said. “Hey Courtney! Guess what!” “What!” she squealed, bug-eyed in anticipation. “That’s what!” he shot back, and they both laughed raucously. Then Parker had to tell her the joke; she enjoyed it so much he’d have felt like a cad if he didn’t oblige her by repeating it fifty or sixty times. That killed another five minutes, and Steve suggested that they rejoin the women.

  Parker reached over Dobbs’s shoulder and held the door shut. “Has someone been threatening you?”

  Dobbs asked Parker to suppose—hypothetically!—that someone was. Should he let someone maim Courtney—for example!—for the sake of Parker’s rather abstract, amorphous problem? “What exactly makes your life more awful than anyone else’s?” he asked Parker. “You don’t look so bad off to me. How ’bout it, Courtney? I don’t see a mark on ’im, do you? Oh, yeah, that teeny bump between the eyes. Parker thinks we should get maimed ’cause he got a boo-boo. Or because he hasn’t lived up to his income-earning potential, is that it? He’s funny!” “He funeeee!” Courtney beamed, and Parker followed them back to the living room.

  He’d have liked to leave, but Fran was talking animatedly to Barb and luxuriating in the Eckhart couch, her hair spread over the back. He sat down next to her, keeping clear of her expansive gestures. Dobbs brought in a tray of margaritas and perched on the armrest of Barbara’s chair, but despite this impersonation of a casual manner, he was starting to look as he had in Parker’s office—hunched and hemmed in.

  When Parker couldn’t bear to watch him squirm any longer, he said, “John tells me you’ve acquired a following.”

  “Like you ‘acquire’ lice, and just as hard to get rid of. I was never sure what they wanted: rumors, tips, secrets, inside dope—religion, but hipper. Just a bunch of rich Republican assholes looking for a philosophy incoherent enough to justify their lives.”

  “You admit to being incoherent?”

  “Of course! Like I told you, if you’re going to tell the truth in this country, you need cover. Anyway, I’d say, ‘You’re wasting your time!’ They’d say, ‘Of course!’ ”

  “Sounds like they were imitating the master.”

  “Exactly! But I hated being aped by dummies who didn’t get the point. I’d say ‘The magazine’s garbage! I’m a liar! I contradict myself!’ They’d say ‘That’s right.’ ”

  “But of course that was a lie. You think your contradictions are really paradoxes and your lies protect some esoteric core of truth, right?”

  “Exactly!”

  Getting into the spirit, Fran said, “The last thing you said—that was a lie, too?”

  “No,” said Dobbs, affronted, “that was true.”

  But he didn’t waste time sulking, still eager, Parker thought, to deliver his long-rehearsed anecdote to an audience.

  “Finally I had my following whittled down to three or four incredibly tenacious people. I’d throw drinks in their faces; they thought it was some kind of Zen-master thing. I told one guy, ‘Look, if you want genuine spiritual advice, go read Gurdjieff.’ A few weeks later he comes back, says Gurdjieff taught him that he’s been a self-centered, self-deceiving asshole. I say, good, now go away. But he won’t shut up. He says tha
t that morning he was about to give money to a homeless man—then he realized he’d only be doing it to aggrandize his self-image, so he didn’t. I said ‘You’re still a self-centered, self-deceiving asshole.’ He nods knowingly: ‘Of course!’ After that I decided that if they were going to pester me, I’d start asking for donations. Once a week I’d take their money and tell them to go away, until finally it occurred to them that they could go away for free.”

  Throughout this monologue Barb sagged in her chair, unable, Parker thought, to share Dobbs’ professed satisfaction in the loss of all their friends. It must have been for her sake that Dobbs hadn’t canceled the evening.

  Fran asked about the story she’d read in Parker’s Exhibitionist—“You know, the one about the woman who finds out her imaginary voices come from two guys in undershirts reading Facts on File into a microphone? How’d you dream that one up?”

  “Oh, that was true,” Dobbs said, folding his arms, impervious to the exertions of her brows and eyeballs to force his smile. Barb must have known from previous experience that the evening had entered its downward arc; Steve ignored her hand on his back, and, when she leaned forward to face him where he sat on her armrest, gazed over her head. He realized by then that Parker and Fran weren’t about to fill the void in his wife’s social life, and he was probably sick of behaving himself. “There’s nothing fantastic about it,” he said to Fran. “You’ve heard of people who pick up radio broadcasts with their fillings? Direct Neural Broadcasting applies the same principle. Of course you don’t believe me.”

  “Steve, if you told me there’s a law of gravity, I’d wear a ceiling protector on my head.” She said it mock-hautily, brandishing an imaginary cigarette-holder, in her usual faith that people were rooting for her to assert herself. But Dobbs stood up, about-faced, and walked out of the room.

  “Did I insult him?” Fran asked Barb. “Is he coming back?”

  “Documentation.” Barb was fussing with the barrette in Courtney’s hair. She looked up and, flashing her brights, added, “More margarita?”

  Dobbs returned with a journal-size publication and dropped it into Fran’s lap. His back to his wife’s glare, he stood over Fran while she found her place, scanned, and flipped pages.

  She looked up. “This is all technical jargon. I guess I’ll have to accept everything you say since I’m too stupid to understand your evidence, is that how it works?”

  “If the evidence sprouted horns and butted you, would you believe it then?”

  “Yes; in the meantime no.”

  “Look at Courtney!” Barb had covered her daughter’s entire head with a sombrero. The diversion produced a half-minute of bristling silence punctuated by Courtney’s muffled giggles.

  Dobbs was still standing over Fran. “It’s complaisance like yours that lets corporations and the military test DNB all over the world.”

  “If they’re doing it all over the world,” she said, “why doesn’t everyone hear voices?”

  “If everyone heard voices all the time,” he said, “it would be like living in a boiler factory. They wouldn’t know they’re hearing anything. Kinda like your life, aye, Jeff?”

  “So I’ve been told,” Parker said agreeably. Fran wouldn’t want him fighting her battles; the sooner the argument ran its course, the sooner they could leave Dobbs to his wife.

  “Let’s see what else you’re afraid to believe,” Dobbs said. “Three weeks ago Sam Markaris—male Caucasian, fifty years old, no fixed address—is standing in front of the Pacific Garden Mission talking to his buddies when he starts rubbing his scalp and complaining about a headache. A few seconds later he keels over dead, a plume of smoke spouting from a tiny hole in the top of his head.”

  “Did he whistle like a tea kettle?” Fran asked.

  “According to the guy who drives the meat wagon for the morgue, this past year they’ve brought in over a dozen homeless people with quarter-inch- diameter holes burned deep through the tops of their heads. Of course you won’t believe me when I tell you that the government’s testing space-based laser weapons on the homeless, but I have the documents.”

  The evening creaked on, each topic taking the same course—Dobbs asserting, Fran negating; Dobbs documenting, Fran debunking. The stakes of this contest were unclear to Parker. Dobbs, he supposed, won either way: You either fed his Inside Tipster conceit or his Prophet-Crying-in-the-Wilderness conceit.

  As for Fran—Parker wished she’d humor the guy. Whether or not Dobbs believed what he was saying, he was trying so hard to be interesting! But Fran had stopped joking; she looked angry and anxious. Eyes narrowed, lips compressed, she held her head up as if the pile of documents rising to meet it threatened to pull her under. Parker massaged her neck and shoulders, careful not to spill the last of the margaritas balanced on her pile of documents. He’d have to postpone the proposal. The only question he could ask her tonight was the same one he kept asking everybody: What was that all about?

  * * *

  —

  A thunderbolt jerked Fran awake. “Enough,” she mumbled into his neck.

  A line of yellow blinkers closed off the two rightmost lanes. The rain pulsed with turnlights, but nothing moved.

  He said, “What was all that about between you and Dobbs?”

  “I’m a politician’s daughter—okay?” The thought seemed to scald her wide awake. “That means I grew up thinking it’s good manners to smile and nod while some man lies.” She sat up, pushed back her hair, untwisted her shoulder harness. “My mom’s been smiling and nodding at my dad for thirty years, thinking he’s a lying sack of shit.” She put her head back on his shoulder. “These days I smile and nod—or not!—and tell the guy he’s a lying sack of shit. I could never have done that before I met—” Parker strained to hear the name as her voice trailed off.

  “Who?”

  Recalling her voice on the phone the other day when he thought there was someone else in the room, he pictured her making faces into the receiver to amuse her guest. Parker tried to laugh off the image. But lately the worst he could imagine kept proving true, as if his imagination were hemorrhaging into the world.

  “Fran?…You awake?”

  Her hair had closed over her face. He wanted to push it away and see what was going on in there, but traffic had started moving. Beyond the guardrail the lake blinked on and off.

  * * *

  —

  He muscled the car half-blind into a space across from his building; unfolded Fran out of her seat and stood her beneath his umbrella; maneuvered her round an overflowing gutter, across the street, and through the entrance; dissuaded her from lying down on the stone table in the lobby and doing her impersonation of a mummy; and supported her weight up the steps. He was so pleased with himself that he practically had the key in before noticing that the door was a crack ajar and the light on.

  Turning to Fran he put his finger to his lips and raised his palm. She held up her palm and scowled like a cigar store Indian.

  He uncovered her ear and whispered, “Don’t come in till I tell you it’s okay.”

  Through the opening he caught a faint vinegary smell. What he could see of the living room—couch, end table, lamp, a segment of white wall—disclosed nothing. Inching the door open, he reached into his coat pocket and recalled that he didn’t have Jack’s gun. He was reconsidering tactics when Fran walked into his back and bumped him inside.

  * * *

  —

  In order to keep her balance, control her articulation, maintain her dignity, and hold down her margaritas, Fran stood perfectly rigid in the center of the living room.

  Observing this no-net performance from the couch, Parker knew better than to offer his help. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “I intend to do that, yes.” She was squinting at the glare off the white walls. “Meanwhile I still don’t get it.”

  “Ok
ay, I have a new security system. One of John Standell’s people installed it this morning. While we were out tonight someone set it off. Need help with those buttons?”

  Her overcoat was still buttoned to the neck. She quickly undid it and smirked triumphantly. “Correct me if I’m missing something. Your burglar alarm doesn’t make noise and it doesn’t bring the police. It makes the burglar smell bad.”

  “The stuff sprays out of those nozzles on the ceiling. It smells vinegary—smell it?—unless it makes skin contact. Then it’s unbearable.”

  She batted a strand of hair out of her eyes. “What’s wrong with an ordinary burglar alarm?”

  “What I really need is information. When—”

  “Higher-ups, powers-behind-the-scenes, Mr. Big?”

  Ignoring her tone, Parker said yes. “When the system activates, John’s voice comes out of that speaker. He tells the intruder that if he wants to get rid of the smell, he’ll have to contact John’s people. When the burglar comes in, we offer to neutralize the smell in exchange for information. That was the number I just called. Nothing yet.”

  “Maybe a panicky burglar isn’t about to stand around taking down addresses or phone numbers.”

  “There may still be a few bugs in the system,” Parker conceded.

  Widening her squint to a childish gape, she whispered, “Oh, and tell me about the infrared dye and ooo! the magic glasses.”

  “I sense you’re trying to make a point, my darling.”

  She lurched a step forward, causing the open umbrella at her feet to roll a quarter-turn. “When you and Dobbs went off to have your chat, Barb said, ‘There they go! Off to the paranoid clubhouse!’ ”

  She was starting to look wobbly; he reached her in two strides and, grasping her by the waist, guided her to the couch. She suffered herself to be helped off with her coat and they sat down. Knowing she was about to collapse, he glumly watched her black mini ride up her thighs. Legs crossed, back, neck and chin prepared to balance books, she seemed amused by her own poise, as if she were imitating someone else. “Off to the paranoid clubhouse!”