The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Does it work?”

  “No-o-o,” they groaned in unison, drawing the vowel out plaintively. “But I’m caught up anyway,” she added.

  In the living room he turned out the lights and sat on the floor next to the windows, catching a whiff from last month’s flood of raw sewage. His windows faced a sort of courtyard around the graveled lower roof; the neighbors’ shades were all down, most of the windows lit.

  She was waiting him out, her breathing punctuated by the thuds upstairs. This wasn’t the moment to realize he was still in love. It wouldn’t do him any more good than knowing he was insane. For hours he’d been turning over something Dobbs had said. Even if someone were trying to ruin his life, why keep him under surveillance? Suppose—he couldn’t rule out any premise on the grounds of mere absurdity—suppose they wanted to be sure he didn’t look too damn happy? Then living well is the best revenge!

  “What’s this ‘fun’ people keep raving about?” he asked.

  “Don’t ask me, I’m a law student.”

  He was just thinking his demon had been content to let them stay together for three years. “Meet me at that place near Rosemont at 8:30. We’re going to look into this matter of ‘fun.’ ”

  “Seems to me we never had much fun there….”

  “Then that’s where we’ll take our stand. We’re going to have fun if it kills us.”

  “Alright,” she said, “we’ll circle the wagons and have fun. See you there.”

  He wasn’t ready to go upstairs just yet, so he pushed the phone into one of the squares of light and dialed John Standell. Peggy answered and when she recognized his voice yelled, “John, guess who this is! Jeffrey Parker! John! Get off the damn couch! He’ll call you tomorrow,” she said to Parker. “So, how’ve you been?”

  “Oh, let’s stretch a bit and say fine. Still teaching?”

  “I’ll be on maternity leave in five weeks…Oh, John was supposed to call you….”

  “That’s terrific, Peg! Slap John on the back for me. Boy or a girl?”

  “We want to be surprised. Though if it’s a boy or a girl, how surprised could we be? So, Parker, why have you been avoiding us? We actually cleaned the house! You used to be the only one uncritical enough to invite over.”

  “Unobservant.”

  “I was being polite. Of course now that it’s clean, all that work would be wasted on you. Just kidding. Want to come over for dinner some time this week? Say, Thursday?”

  He was timing the thuds. They recurred at intervals of precisely five seconds.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Parker said, “but ask John to call me tomorrow. I need his professional advice.”

  “Let me guess. You think your phone’s tapped.”

  “That’s part of it, yeah.”

  “All of John’s friends get around to asking about their phones. It’s a status symbol to be bugged. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Jeff, but you’re not important enough for anyone to bother. Anyway, we like you. But John will ask if you hear strange noises on the line, you’ll say yes, and he’ll tell you a good tap doesn’t make any noise.”

  “Actually, I don’t hear any noises.”

  “Well, dear, that can mean one of two things.”

  “I’m impervious to sarcasm. Congratulations again, and see you Thursday. And when John comes to, ask him to call me. Oh, guess who I saw today? Steve Dobbs.”

  “John, he’s been talking to Steve Dobbs!…You must know Dobbs is crazy,” she said to Parker.

  “Crazy enough to razor the last page out of all my books?”

  She laughed. “No, and I don’t think he’d short-sheet your bed, either. It’s what he says, not what he does.”

  “Then if he came to me with some weird story, I should disregard it.”

  “Now that’s the problem with Steve: It’s probably true.”

  “Parker, ya knucklehead!” John had taken the phone. “Stay away from Dobbs!”

  “I’m fine, thank you. Congratulations, pal!”

  “Thanks. Listen, ya jerk. We used to have an answering machine on this phone just so we wouldn’t have to talk to Dobbs. Last time I saw Steve he was sitting here with his mouth full of lasagna saying, ‘Boy, I’d hate to be the Chilean military attaché; he’ll be dead by the end of the week’ ”—John’s imitation sounded more like Bugs Bunny—“and I’m thinkin’ ‘Jeez, I don’t want to know this stuff.’ You know what Dobbs and the magazine are? A cult. Ever read The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter?”

  “Thanks for letting me get a word in: No.”

  “Then remember the Twilight Zone episode about the napkin holder that tells your fortune? William Shatner keeps dropping in pennies because he’s addicted to bad news? All these people hang around Dobbs and send him money because they need their hit of bad news. Then they go through the made-up stories in the magazine and look for codes. Anyway, do what you want, but if you show up Thursday looking like a zombie, we won’t let ya in. Gotta go. Bye!”

  Parker stood and listened to the noise upstairs. The block, if that’s what it was, sounded hollow: One two three four, BLOINK! On a whim he walked to the kitchenette and from the cupboard took down a heavy Pyrex quart measure: It might put his neighbor off-balance to ask for a cup of sugar, and the measure could be used as a weapon.

  He stepped out the door into the haze of frying foods on the landing. One two three four, BLOINK! continued without variation above a dissonance of TVs and the vibrating bass of a stereo. He practiced grips on the cup as he climbed the brownish carpeted steps. Outside his neighbor’s door the noise sounded more than ever like a hollow concrete block. He reminded himself that everyone did things the neighbors found peculiar—one of his college roommates made noises like Curly during sex—and he’d read of a sculptor who, attempting to incorporate chance with choice, would carve an outline in stone and keep dropping the thing till the pattern more or less broke free. He knocked. Three four, BLOINK! He knocked again, louder. Four, BLOINK!

  “Hey!” Parker shouted, giving the door three sound kicks. He wondered if some of his other neighbors might come out, then recalled his eight burglaries. BLOINK! He gave the door eight rattling kicks, flinging up plaster, and just to be sure his point wasn’t lost for subtlety, added, “Hey, asshole! Shut the fuck up!

  The noise stopped.

  Parker knocked again, discreetly. “Hello? This is your neighbor from downstairs. I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

  No answer. He waited about a minute; not a peep.

  Funny, he thought, if that was all it took.

  * * *

  —

  Like most commercial property in Parker’s neighborhood, Ciao!, as it was called now, was frequently boarded up. The club’s new name acknowledged a history of bankrupt owners and defunct fads and was assembled in blue neon from previous names. The new owners had shown the good sense not to redecorate but simply to dim the lights. There was light enough at the bar, though, for Parker to clear a wide berth by reading the Exhibitionist. The tabloid was inducing a headache with its bludgeoning exclamation points and underexposed photos of treetop assassins, aerial configurations, the missing, the presumed dead.

  “Blazer…white duck pants…ohmygod, spats! Off to prep school, Jeff?” Fran’s hair brushed against his cheek as she leaned over his shoulder and turned up the front page. “Hmm!”

  Every time he noticed the spats, Parker winced. It was like discovering that the funny hat you’d worn at a party was still on your head days later. “You can wear anything to this place, and if you wait long enough, it—whoa!”

  She was modeling her ankle-length black dress—shoulder pads, dolman sleeves—and had turned on her heel and gathered up her hair to show off the plunging back.

  “The adequate compliments have been wasted elsewhere,” he said as
she took the next stool. “I’ll just gape stupidly if you don’t mind. What, there’s more?”

  She’d drawn back her hair to expose a flat turquoise earring in the shape of a cow, a smile line curving all the way up the side of its head. “Now that’s what I call a shit-eating grin,” he said fingering it. “Kind of a Cubist perspective.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the cows’ perspective. They’re content.”

  “One of my students told me about a new fad at rural colleges. Three or four students sneak up alongside a cow while their accomplice distracts it. ‘Hi Flossy, nice weather! Good for the clover!’ ” He knew he sounded like an idiot, but fear, confusion, and lust had coalesced into giddiness. “ ‘Say, Flossy, is that a new bell you’re wearing?’—then bam! the cow’s lying on its side, perplexed.”

  She was forming a moral objection—eyes narrowed, lips compressed—when she suddenly visualized the image. “That’s terrible!” she laughed. She flipped the tie out of his jacket. “Poor Parker! If I took you out to the country, you’d just think of the cows getting mugged. You’re going to be a tough customer for fun. Wait. Let’s see how observant you are tonight. What’s notable about the people here? Don’t look. Look at me.”

  “Pleasure.” He stared at the freckles around her nose, the tip of cleavage and the outline of her breasts, the green eyes rolled at the acoustic ceiling, the black pump wiggling at he end of her toe.

  She looked at him now with genuine concern. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “I just want to put you on notice that I hate this, but okay, I walked in. I opened my paper. I ordered a gin and tonic. That’s the trouble: First I was looking at my paper, now I’m looking at you. Let’s see. Demographics: The crowd is half Loyola students, half blacks and Hispanics from the neighborhood. All right, I give up.”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. Let me see your back.”

  “This is getting tedious,” he said. “What’s going on?” As she examined his back he watched their reflections behind the dimly glittering bottles, his eyes and cheeks scooped out by darkness, her pale neck and face afloat.

  “There’s a tear in your jacket. Oh. It goes all the way through your shirt.”

  He arched his spine as he felt her fingertip on his bare back.

  “Look.”

  He swiveled to face her. Her fingertip held a droplet of blood. “Just one drop of blood,” she said. “You’re lucky. Whatever it was just grazed you.”

  Suppressing a shudder he tried to look lucky. “I must’ve brushed against something.”

  His first impulse was to get the hell out, but would they be any safer outside? Might as well stick to the game plan, he thought—fun if it kills us!

  He turned to look around. A man in huge sunglasses was lurching toward them; Parker thought of the faceless man. The blindered man stumbled closer—white ice-cream suit, slicked-back black hair, arms extended like a sleepwalker’s or a zombie’s.

  The outstretched hands were about to touch Fran’s chest. “Whoa!” Parker yelled, grabbing the man’s wrist. The man raised his sunglasses with his free hand, nodded apologetically, and joined a crowd of similarly-attired men at the end of the bar. Except for Parker, all the men in the place wore white icecream suits and huge sunglasses. The women wore dark glasses, sack dresses, and beehive hairdos.

  Fran ordered a glass of rosé and asked what was up. The bartender, a business major from Loyola, looked disdainfully amused as he told them that this was the “Mondo” look, based on those Italian films of the ’50s and ’60s where everyone wore sunglasses and flouted bourgeoisie values and danced the Twist with abandon and smoked cigarettes and stepped into fountains with their clothes on; but mainly the dark glasses and the dim room were an excuse to grope strangers. From the sparseness of the crowd stumbling about the dance floor, it didn’t seem to be catching on.

  Fran was willing her drink not to spill.

  “I didn’t know the place had gotten this sleazy,” Parker said. “Should we go?”

  She set down her drink. “No, we’ll have plenty of room.” She was pulling him toward the dance floor. “Besides, I’m with Mad Dog Parker.”

  “Damn right,” he said. “In the land of the blind, the unobservant man is king.”

  The sound system was booming a sprightly Italian version of “Let’s Twist Again.” They found an isolated spot, and she clasped hands behind her head, swayed her hips, and pouted like Anita Ekberg—all very poised and ironic, but it was turning him on. His own dance, nonetheless, resembled the mime trapped in a phone booth. Occasionally other dancers came blundering over, but a touch on the shoulders steered them back on course. Now she was circling him backwards in a high-stepping folk dance. Parker knew two smart moves, the dip—he snatched her out of orbit and draped her over an arm—and the spin—he twirled her out, reeled her in—but he felt called upon for more, and next thing he knew he had her round his shoulders in an airplane spin. He was trying to remember how professional ice skaters keep from getting dizzy when the ruckus began. At first he thought it was derisive applause, but there was shoving at the door. He was pondering how to set her down without falling or dropping her, when the knot of people round the entrance broke, and a man came running toward them.

  It was Ziploc. The bartender and the bouncer hustled him out, and by the time Parker had set down Fran and shoved through the people coming back in, the street was empty except for two zonked teenagers on the hood of a car. He asked if they’d seen the guy who just came out; they ignored him and when the question was repeated made a sound between snickering and gagging.

  “Gone to a neutral corner, Jeff? It’s cold out here.” Fran pointed to her breath. “What’s that by your shoe?”

  He bent down and picked it up off the sidewalk, a gray plastic badge with a crude replica of the FBI seal. Ziploc must have been flashing it when they threw him out. No sane adult of normal intelligence would mistake it for anything but a toy—just the sort of thing the FBI might have handed out to its Breathers.

  * * *

  —

  Their first evening together they were having dinner at her apartment when she’d looked up from her plate, straightened her back, and held her head perfectly still. She’d sat that way for half a minute, and he’d been ready to employ the Heimlich maneuver. Sirens, she’d explained (he’d barely heard them); at home when you heard a siren someone you knew was in trouble.

  Now he recognized that expression as he turned on the lights in his apartment. Staring with her at the bare bulbs and walls, he realized the place looked considerably bleaker than when she’d seen it last, and he dreaded her asking how he’d come to this. But she recovered her poise and, turning on the lamp by the couch, said, “There’s too much glare. Do we need all those lights?”

  As he adjusted the lights, put on a record, and brought out a bottle and two glasses, he wondered if this was a good idea. Now that the enemy had more or less revealed himself, there’d be no further need for subtlety: the goons could just break down the door.

  “To your brilliant career,” he said when he’d filled their glasses. He glanced past the circumference of lamplight to where the door would be.

  “To”—she had to think a moment—“your next book.” They clinked glasses. “What do you mean, someone’s razored the last page out of all your books?”

  “If it were any more literal, I could drop it in your lap.” And before he thought better of it, he added, “Why don’t you pick out a book and see for yourself?”

  She looked over at the black slab of the bookcase, raised an eyebrow at Parker, and sipped her wine.

  “You’re determined not to be fooled,” he said. “William James said there are two ways to be fooled: dupery through hope—in other words, gullibility—and dupery through fear: refusing to believe the truth for fear of being duped.” He was still a bit unhinged; why was he talking like
this?

  “Let’s hear your story, Parker. After all this buildup, it better be good.”

  “I’m not trying to tease you, but I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t want to draw you into this. Look, it’s not so much a story as a hateful little theme you can’t get out of your head, like an irritating jingle or the image of everyone on the bus naked. It’s not even a new fact, just a highly unsettling way of looking at the things you already know, like the theory, say, that every object in the universe is expanding at the same rate, or, wait, is that true?”

  She was sitting with her back stiff, her head still, the glass poised on the way to her lips. “You say it’s not about facts, but if every book in your apartment is missing its last page, isn’t that a fact?” She was determined to discuss the matter reasonably. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Jeff, but I’m worried about you. Is this dupery through fear?”

  Parker desperately wanted to change the subject. A novelist he knew marveled that two people ever bridged the gulf between sitting in a room talking with all their clothes on and making love. With Parker and Fran the gulf was particularly awesome, a dump of hurt feelings and old grudges. He’d always thought she dumped him because she was ambitious and knew she could do better; she’d claimed it was because he was obtuse, unobservant, inattentive, barely there, and constantly missing…whatever it was he was missing. In addition to which, at this moment she probably thought he was nuts. Parker told her all this and suggested an abrupt transition.

  “You’re taking an awful lot for granted.” She was turning the stem of the glass between her fingers. “Though I guess I can’t claim I’m here for the artworks.” She gestured toward the obscurity where the blank walls would be. “What do you mean, grudges?”

  “There’s no way out of this,” he said, “but an abrupt transition.”

  “If that’s critical jargon for jumping me, I think not.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Ignore that.” He took the glass out of her hand and set it with his own next to the lamp. “No, what I had in mind is more like a badly edited movie, maybe with reels out of sequence: a bit of exposition, then cut to the middle of a slow, deep kiss. I say ‘the middle’ since right at the moment beginning seems out of the question. Imagine you went out for popcorn during the boring part.”