“Go on, kiddo, take a good look.”
Reluctantly Parker picked the thing up.
“Not very observant, are you?”
Parker had just noticed the tiny hole in the top of the barrel. “Oh, a lighter.”
“You see, Parker, the whole caper was redundant. As far as Genghis Cohen is concerned, the gun never left her desk. Hand it over, I want to show you something…. It’s a lighter, kiddo!”
Parker handed him the lighter.
“Except for the hole and the little flame regulator on the handle, it’s a perfect replica. Look, there’s even a safety. Banned in twenty states. You see, young Parker, even Philistines acknowledge the ineffable power of the image.”
“Either that or some kid got shot by the police while he waved around Dad’s lighter.”
Jack stepped around to Parker’s side of the desk. Holding the lighter behind his back, he seemed to be making an adjustment. “Stand up, I want to show you something.”
Parker rose to his feet and, anticipating what was coming, jumped back an instant before a foot-high yellow jet blazed up an inch, Parker estimated, in front of where his nose had just been. He snatched at the blind-cord, the slats fanning sideways before crashing shut.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Jack, that it might not require the existence of a black-listing academic cabal to explain why people act as if they find you annoying?”
Beneath his doe-eyed caricature of hurt feelings, Jack looked hurt.
“Just kidding,” Parker relented. “All right, I’m sorry. But you’re supposed to be this curmudgeonly humanist shoring up the Western tradition. Where do guns—oh, I get it. The Western tradition.”
Jack perked up. “I’m restoring the place of the cannon.” To illustrate he crouched over the open drawer and replaced the lighter under the file folders.
“Hold on! I want the real thing in there!”
The doorknob jiggled; springing up, Jack closed the drawer with the tip of his shoe. They’d just stepped round to the front of the desk when Jan’s key turned in the lock.
As usual she was dressed and groomed casually: bulky white turtleneck, denim skirt, pink-tinted glasses, longish gray hair worn loose. But the look she was giving them made Parker feel as if adult life were a dream he’d had during a never-ending visit to the principal’s office.
“Gird yourself, young Parker, she’s about to raise the glasses!”
Letting go of the frames, she brushed past them to the desk and sat down. She opened the drawer, felt around, and seemed surprised to find what she was looking for. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re the grievance committee,” Parker said—anything to preempt Jack.
“Oh, really?” she said in her Alice-in-Wonderland voice. “Dean Grover is the person to see about grievances, as I’m sure you know. Why was the door locked?”
“You saw that guy in my office. Locking doors has become a habit.” He shrugged apologetically and smiled, as if the lameness of his lies were a joke between them.
She smiled back sourly. “If you’ll excuse me—”
“And why were the blinds drawn?” Jack asked mischievously.
She glanced at Jack for the first time, then returned her gaze to Parker.
“Tell me, Jeffrey, do you have any qualms about being gun-buddies with a borderline personality?”
“I promise we’ll have that talk soon,” Parker said.
“Whatever.” She opened her top drawer, set a pile of student essays on the desk, and leaned over the top paper. “Play outside, boys,” she said without looking up.
Jan’s habit of mothering “her” faculty had always struck Parker as slightly comical, but her giving up on him added to his sense of drift. He looked down at the crooked part in her hair, thinking, Come on, Jan, say something common-sensical. Just one platitude and I’ll go.
She looked up, expressing exaggerated surprise that he was still there.
* * *
—
A few yards down the hallway Jack placed a hand on Parker’s shoulder and addressed him in a valedictory tone. “You are now armed and dangerous.”
“I don’t know about dangerous. The first two people I pointed it at sort of shrugged it off.”
For once Jack looked genuinely surprised. He removed his hand.
“It’s done nothing for my sense of security,” Parker went on, “let alone my actual safety, and it’ll probably just escalate the—”
“Ah, Chekhov’s third-act rule. If you introduce a gun in the first act, someone has to fire it in the last.”
“Not only can’t I get rid of the damn thing, it’s multiplying!”
“Would you like me to take it off your hands?”
“NO!” Smiling blandly at the heads turning in his direction, Parker lowered his voice. “Until a few days ago I didn’t see myself as the sort of guy who grabs people by the lapels and points guns. I mean, I was an antiwar activist. I hadn’t been in a fight since seventh grade. I was so quick to see other people’s points of view, they got confused. I don’t want to end up as some rage-filled old crank living off his old grudges. Oh.”
But Jack didn’t seem to take it personally. “Nothing wrong with hatred—there’s no such thing as a wrong emotion—but hate wisely. Don’t go around pointing that thing like a magic wand expecting your enemies to disappear. Come to think of it, young Parker, you might be the guilt-ridden sort who always hates badly. Maybe you’d better take Nixon’s advice. Remember? He said your enemies can’t destroy you unless they make you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. I always wondered if he knew he was talking about himself.”
Parker was wondering the same thing about Jack, so he changed the subject. “What about the flamethrower in Jan’s desk?”
“What about it?” Jack let his mouth hang open to indicate incomprehension.
“I don’t know. Lately I’ve had the feeling that the worst I can imagine is bound to happen.”
“ ‘No worst, there is none!’ Do you imagine a fireball in sensible shoes roaring out of the office?” From where they stood the office doorway disclosed a segment of white wall and the jaunty rattle of typing. “A pleasant thought, but she thinks it’s a gun—remember?—and I doubt if the occasion arises for Jan to shoot people in her office.”
“Still—”
“Let’s consider the matter actuarially,” said Jack, clearly relishing the experience of being the reasonable one.
Parker had just decided that tonight he’d drop the gun off the Pratt Avenue pier. Tomorrow he’d sneak back into the office and turn down the flame on the lighter. But already he was having second thoughts about the gun, having just recalled that according to Harry Krell he was in for a series of pleasant surprises.
“The odds are greater,” Jack was saying, the reasonable man to the hilt, “of her being struck by lightning in the next five minutes.”
Parker nodded and they stood there, two reasonable men, watching the office doorway.
* * *
—
The next morning Parker was stirring a batch of eggs, watching Oprah on the black-and-white portable he’d wheeled in from the bedroom, when he looked down. A white sphere about three-fifths the size of a golf ball floated in the eggs. It turned languidly with the swirling liquid, its smooth surface dribbling egg. He extended a hand to pluck it out, changed his mind and spooned it onto the drainboard, where it rolled to the middle and stopped. He was about to probe it with a fork when the phone rang.
A continuous high-pitched tone on the line nearly drowned out the voice of Harry Krell. “The new order,” he was saying, “will commence momentarily.”
“We have a bad connection,” Parker yelled. “Call me back.” Watching the thing glisten on the drainboard, he felt a sudden reluctance to touch it even with a fork.
“That
isn’t the line,” Krell said raising his voice. “It’s an anti-bugging tone. By the way, how annoying is it?”
“Do your research on your own time.”
Gingerly Parker prodded the thing with his fork tines. It shuddered. “Jesus Christ!”
“I suppose I could turn it down a bit,” Krell said. The noise screeched on at the same pitch and volume.
Rolling the thing around the drainboard with his fork (it seemed to have the consistency of a hardboiled egg), Parker assured himself that it hadn’t moved. He glanced up at the fluorescent tube flickering on the kitchenette ceiling.
“I want to prepare you for the new order,” Krell was saying.
“What’ll it be—party hats or armbands?”
“Good—that’s just the right note of skepticism and dread. Remember, we don’t want you looking too damn happy. We’ll have to satisfy the people watching us that any improvements we make in your life are just wallpaper for the rat cage. Well, Jeff, that’s all for now!”
“Wait! I feel like a sucker asking this, but…”
“Skepticism and and dread—that’s the ticket!”
“…what, specifically, is going to happen?”
“Oh, I wish I could be specific, but then your reactions would seem rehearsed. Suffice it to say that the good life will arrive on the sly. Be prepared for luck in small undetectable doses or with all the outward signs of bad luck. Or maybe your good luck will be so breathtaking and immediate, it’ll look fishy. Remember—it’s supposed to look fishy. We have to make those bastards think we’re diddling with your head.”
“If the point of this call is to diddle with my head…”
“That’s the ticket!”
“…your efforts seem laughably inept.”
“Bravo! Stay where you are, Jeff. The new order will begin any minute.”
Parker hung up the phone; it rang before he’d let go.
“Jeffrey Parker?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“This is Bill Hungerford. I’m Vice-Chair of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago…Circle Campus?” he added after a long pause.
“Yes.”
“I wonder,” Bill Hungerford said delicately, “if you’re still in the job market.”
“Yes I am.”
“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Huntley Crane died last week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Parker said warily and a moment later remembered that he’d met Huntley Crane two years earlier while interviewing for a job at Circle. Parker recalled a snappily dressed, moist-eyed, wispy man. He wasn’t senile, as Parker had first thought, just a slow talker, and the ends of his sentences had proved worth waiting for. Parker wondered if he should be reassured by the caller’s knowing that he’d applied to Circle two years ago and that he’d met Huntley Crane. Probably not.
“I suppose I should get to the point. If we followed the usual procedure we’d distribute Huntley’s course load among our current faculty and advertise for an opening in the fall. But…I don’t know if he told you this…Huntley was a great admirer of your work, and…”
“He willed me his job?”
The intake of breath at the other end made Parker wonder if he’d just blown a real job prospect. “Sorry,” he said, “a friend of mine likes to play practical jokes.”
“How can I convince you? Would you like to…ah…grill me?”
“No, please, I’m very sorry.”
“Truly, this is no joke. We’d like to talk to you about the position again. Look, I was on sabbatical when you applied. Perhaps you’ve heard of me through my book?”
“Oh, yes,” said Parker, clueless. “The…”
Hungerford let him squirm a while before bailing him out. “The Elizabethan Mind,” he said a trifle sullenly, perking up as he continued. “I was about to say that Huntley used to pass around your book, and as a result you’ve quite a few admirers in the department, myself included. I don’t think I’m revealing state secrets when I tell you that you came very close the last time you applied.”
Circle Campus had been Parker’s last interview before he gave up applying. His prospects there had followed the usual arc: interview, short-list, unofficial assurances, verbal offer, abrupt kiss-off, evasive explanation. “Toward the end I couldn’t get my phone calls returned. Maybe you people were holding me in awe.”
“There was a bit of a cloud. Nothing we couldn’t—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone, but…”
“No, I want to hear about this cloud.”
“I’m sure,” Hungerford soothed, “the committee will be eager to accept your explanation. Let’s focus on the present, shall we? Frankly, the department was weak in twentieth-century studies even before Huntley’s death, and a number of us think you’d fill the void nicely, possibly as early as spring quarter if it suits your plans. We’ll have to consider other people, obviously, but you’re the favorite.”
“I’m flattered.”
“I just had an idea. This is rather abrupt, but the search committee holds its weekly meeting tonight, and I wonder if you might be free to drop by for a chat? We meet at eight o’clock in the basement lounge in Stevenson Hall. Of course if you have plans…”
“No, I’m free.” Parker had never heard of a university department hiring in this fashion, but if the point was to lead him into some sort of—what?—setup?—wouldn’t it make more sense to have everything appear normal? And then there was the possibility that all possibilities were true: that Hungerford worked for Harry Krell and the Circle English department and—in accord with the new order—was trying to give Parker a job. At eight o’clock, Parker thought, the campus would be nearly deserted.
“As you know,” Hungerford was saying, “the applicant usually gives a paper, but since we have your last one on file, I think we can skip that step. Would you mind taking a few questions on your paper tonight?”
“Sure. I’ll look it over.”
“You sound guarded. Do you still think this might be a joke? Is there anything you’d like to ask me, just to satisfy yourself?’
“All right, what was Spenser’s wife’s name?”
Hungerford released a shrill skull-rattling laugh. “Spenser’s wife’s name! I should have braced myself for the Parker wit. See you tonight. Spenser’s wife—oh dear.”
“Good-bye, Bill.”
Hungerford was still on the line, chuckling. Confused about the etiquette of hanging up on him, Parker held the receiver a moment then replaced it, gently, on its cradle.
He looked up the Circle English department and was relieved to hear a dial-tone when he picked up the receiver. His call was answered by a woman’s recorded, rather nasal voice announcing that the twentieth floor was closed for repainting and that urgent messages should be left at the main switchboard. So much for verification!
He emptied the bowl of egg in the sink, used a spoon to nudge the thing into the garbage, stared at it among the coffee grounds and cartons, and closed the bag.
To distract his mind from its flying turns, he focused on the television; he liked to watch Oprah with the sound off, trying to guess the day’s topic. Today’s panel consisted of four women and a man—a fat guy with combed-back white hair, tinted aviator glasses, and a cheap suit whose shoulders settled slowly back into place when he shrugged. The women had big hair: polygamy, Parker guessed. He was about to open the bag and take a quick look at the thing when the phone rang.
“Yeah,” he answered.
The woman’s thick accent and his own difficulty concentrating kept him from grasping anything, at first, beyond the fact that he’d won.
“Won? Won what?” Was it possible that Harry Krell, with his huge funding and shadowy connections…?
It gradually penetrated that tha
t he was speaking to Sylvia Chen of the Broadway Bank and that he’d won a GE clock radio in their raffle.
He wondered if this was Harry Krell’s surprise and if the timing of the previous call was mere coincidence. Or if Krell had engineered both calls to make him wonder.
Thanking Ms. Chen, he hung up and stared at the phone. Well? It rang.
“Jeff! We’re going to press with your story and—”
“Steve?”
“Oh, sorry,” said Steve Dobbs, sounding even more agitated than Parker. “Hi! We’re going to press with your story and I thought I should warn you not to get your hopes up. It won’t be as detailed as we planned.”
“So they’ve been threatening you…Steve?”
“I feel like I let you down.”
It had been a morning of strange perceptions, and here was another one: He liked Dobbs. “You have to protect your family,” Parker said. “It would be immoral to put them in jeopardy just to keep these guys from…what?…interfering with my breakfast. So, how general is it going to be?”
“ ‘Midwest Man Beset by Vague Forces,’ ” Dobbs said sheepishly. “That sort of thing.”
Parker couldn’t stifle his laugh and Dobbs joined in with a brief rueful burst of his own.
“They get vaguer by the minute,” Parker said and described that morning’s calls.
“Of course you’re not going!”
“Actually, I am.”
“What is it? Some sorta man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do thing?”
“No, I’m imagining dinner with Fran at La Perroquet. She’s wearing something black and strapless, maybe those turquoise earrings with the cows.”
“What?”
“Anyway, I announce that I’ve just been offered a professorship at Circle and propose. She doesn’t care about the money, but I see now that proposing with no money and no prospects would’ve…”
“Look—there’s no job!”
“How do you know? I have a Ph.D. from Cornell, a book from Columbia University Press. Why shouldn’t there be a job?”
“That’s just the way they want you to think.”
The Blindfold Test Page 16