The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Would it work?” She made her eyes bulge.

  “Well, it violates the laws of time and space, but I think if I just interrupted myself in the middle of a sentence—,” and here they were in a great gulp of tongues, lips, and teeth, barely unclinching to stumble two-backed and four-legged to the darkened bedroom. The doorbell rang again as they fell onto the bed, and the conceit that they were about to be killed flung him into a snarl of zippers and straps. “What—what is it?” she gasped.

  “Ignore that man behind the curtain,” he whispered and, kissing her breasts and belly, permitted the conspiracy to grind on without him.

  * * *

  —

  “Here’s a hoot: The Exhibitionist has a health column.” Fran was wearing his blue work shirt, her highly aerobicized legs—propped on the card table and crossed at the ankles—supporting the magazine while she toweled her hair. She looked over her feet at Parker in the kitchenette. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  He was dicing up everything in sight for their omelet. “Those other law students scarfing down doughnuts’ll be no match for a first-rate legal mind with a hearty breakfast under its—what? belt?” He halved a green pepper and cut the seeds out over the sink. “So far we have onion, mushroom, cheddar, muenster, tomato, green pepper—find a sledgehammer and a bigger pan and I will add the kitchen sink.”

  “I think there’s plenty already.” She was looking down at the magazine. “Listen to this, from the ‘Healthbeat’ column. ‘Edie Kruger was fifty-five, happily married, a recent grandmother, and co-owner of a small art gallery in Evanston, Illinois; she had no history of mental illness at 10 p.m., January 28, 1983 when, driving home alone on Sheridan Road, she heard a voice say, “Edie Kruger Project. Testing, one, two, three”—a male tenor voice with the Western drawl and the bored, dispassionate tone of an airline pilot or a police dispatcher. The radio was off, the windows rolled up; she threw the car into park and, running into the street, hailed a passing driver. To Edie’s embarrassment, her car proved to be empty.’ ”

  “Summarize, condense.” He angled the cutting board over the bowl of egg and pushed the dicings with the flat of his knife.

  “ ‘The voice recurred with increasing frequency and volume, often drowning out all other voices.…seemed to be reading rather than speaking: joke books, labels on cans, lifetime Major League RBIs.’ Poor Edie doesn’t even know what RBIs are.”

  Maybe it was Fran or protective obtuseness, but Parker thought the worst was over. What if the “faceless man,” and the drop of blood, and the burning hair, and Ziploc’s appearance at the disco were the parting shot: His demon had got bored—or retired on his unlimited expense account—and had revealed his presence just to keep Parker flinching in his absence.

  “Yadda yadda yadda, ‘minister’…yadda yadda yadda, ‘therapy.’ ‘In the past, treatment for conditions like Edie’s included lobotomy, leucotomy, electric or insulin shock, tranquilizers, psychotropic drugs, and, these measures failing, as they usually did, long term “warehousing” in a mental institution. But, fortunately for Edie, Dr. Paul “Pinto” Cantrell had broken with what he called “the sham and shamanism of the past.” ’ ”

  Prying a spatula under the omelet, he flipped it over intact. Last year Parker had shared his apartment with a huge pinkish-white rat. An odd reverie for one of his happier mornings, but, anyway, for months he never saw the thing. He knew it by its teeth marks, the turds it left under the sink, and an occasional, peripheral pinkish-white blur. But one evening he was propped up in bed watching Magnum, P.I. when, big man on campus, it settled on its haunches three feet from Parker. It was the size of a terrier—bigger—the twitching of its whiskers, so cute in mice, convulsive and sickening at that scale. And now that he was getting it full blast, Parker had recognized the musty zoo smell that for months had insinuated itself into everything. There were no heavy objects within reach, and he wasn’t eager to set bare feet on the floor, so they’d stared at each other all through Magnum and on into Simon and Simon. Then, having made its statement, it got up and sauntered out of the room. He never saw it again. This morning Parker was inclined to believe that the faceless man, having made his point, whatever it was, would now go the way of the rat.

  “Yadda, yadda, yadda, ‘ex-Green Beret’…yadda, ‘Golden Gloves’…yadda yadda, ‘Chairman of Psychiatry, University of Chicago.’ Okay, this Doctor Cantrell practices ‘a tough, no-nonsense brand of humanistic interpersonal psychiatry.’ He doesn’t take his patients’ stories—‘their so-called delusions’—as symptoms, but as ‘propositions to be verified or disproved.’ ‘Other psychiatrists would have put Edie on Chlorpromazine.’ Not Doctor Cantrell. “ ‘Nothing else has worked. Let’s give Edie the benefit of the doubt.’ ” He moves into the Krugers’ home with ‘sensitive electronic equipment, including an omnidirectional frequency finder and a broadcast spectrum scanner.’ It’s three in the morning, he’s doing push-ups to stay awake, when Edie shows up at the door in her robe and curlers, ‘her face slick with tears.’ The voice is back. Okay, he picks up the signal on his equipment and now he’s got the Krugers, still in their bathrobes, packed into his ‘souped-up Ford Gran Torino.’ They’re doing ninety on Lake Shore Drive. He turns to the husband, Donald, ‘a paunchy Korea vet,’ says ‘the police can’t help us. We may have to kick ass.’ Yadda yadda yadda…‘apartment building over a nude dance bar on Rush Street.’ They’re ringing doorbells, banging on doors…they’ve found the apartment, they’ve kicked down the door…. ‘Two fiftyish men in their undershirts, badly in need of sleep and a shave’ at the kitchen table…. crumpled beer cans…cigarette butts…bare bulb on a cord. One of the guys is writing in a logbook, the other one’s reading Facts on File into a microphone….”

  Sneaking up, he pressed a hand between her thighs and grabbed the tabloid with the other. “No reading at the table.” In the kitchenette he stuffed the paper in the garbage and, picking up their plates, said, “If you’re devoted to that sort of journalism, we’re invited to dinner with the editor.” She was over at the bookcase. “Since you insist”—he set their plates on the table—“it’s the last page of the text.”

  When she came back her smile was straining to assimilate the joke. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  And so for the next ten minutes he told her.

  And here was that old four-alarm look. “One thing I’m sure of: You wouldn’t cut pages out of your books.”

  “Well, anyway,” he said through his last mouthful of toast and eggs, “I have the feeling it’s over. You really should try that omelet. I mean, sure, there’s danger, but that’s why you see the dentist once a year or get rid of those old newspapers in the basement or wear orange in moose season: You take sensible precautions and forget it. You think I have my head in the sand? I’d say I’m observing the sand. Hey, if I’m not worried, why should you be? If you’re not going to eat that omelet, I will.”

  FOUR

  John Connor Murray was darting his huge head in and out of the doorway of Parker’s classroom in a display of not wanting to attract attention. Word was out that Parker’s course, “Topics in Business Writing: The Letter of Complaint,” was the nearest thing on campus to a pep rally.

  “Come on in, Jack…. This is Professor Murray,” Parker told his class.

  With his white beard, washed-out eyes, and baby-pink skin, Jack resembled a soft-boiled John Huston. As always he was nattily dressed, though the white boutonniere in his navy-blue blazer seemed freakishly large. “Don’t let me cramp your style, Parker. Stun us with your eloquence. Go on—stun!” The slur in his speech was not altogether convincing, nor his stagger as he maneuvered round the crowded seminar table to a chair against the wall. Jack believed that his troubles in academia were due not to his drinking but to a reputation for inconsistency and unpredictability; therefore he cultivated a slightly blurred manner, maintainable drunk or
sober.

  Parker smiled at the woman across the table, her notes bunching up between crabbed fingers. “Whenever you’re ready, Mrs. Slansky.”

  The course had been fun the first two weeks, especially the free-form grumbling that generated material for the letters. The good humor of these sessions had depended on everyone recognizing at some level that self-pity is funny. But then Mrs. Slansky had shown up. Adele Slansky was an old friend of Parker’s mom. He saw her every three or four years and recalled her as barely changing over the decades from the bland, plump, pleasant presence of his childhood—the makeup just grew thicker and more pungent. But suddenly large pieces of her had fallen away; the vacated left side of her face dangled in folds.

  As she began to speak, Parker glared down embarrassed titters and condescending smiles. These weren’t mean people; it was just hard to keep a straight face while she trembled and bit her lip over the price of strawberries or people who say “Where is it at?” instead of “Where is it?” Today it was the movies.

  Parker’s mind strayed as she talked her way into a snit. He’d have loved to upstage her and the rest of these Job wannabes with the story of his personal demon. Skokie Valley was one of the rare places where he might be believed—believed, though, like a framed man in prison: “The same thing happened to us!”

  He didn’t confuse victims with heroes, but he couldn’t help feeling that having a personal demon was a sort of distinction. In a way, it redeemed his life. What had seemed like rounds of daydreaming, watching TV, and doodling in the margins of his stalled manuscript became a secret history of stoicism and resistance. And so he couldn’t help feeling…threatened? mocked? by the resemblance of his conspiracy to Mrs. Slansky’s. Her demons tended to resemble employees in the service industry. They smiled obsequiously and jotted on little pads while flaying her by the millimeter.

  He broke off his meditations and tried to catch up with her story. It went something like this:

  Sunday she’d gone to the matinee at the Oakton. Ten minutes or so into the movie the screen went nearly black. At first she thought it was a night scene, but there was the sun like a dead bulb. She squinted and tried to follow the story through the dialogue—it might as well have been recited by shapes on the ocean floor!—hoping the projectionist would wake up or that some braver person would complain. But the Oakton is a second- or third-run house, and by the time a movie gets there its audience has usually seen it, decided to wait for the video, or lost interest entirely. When she looked around, Mrs. Slansky discovered that she was alone except for a couple noisily inhaling each other in the back row. She went out to the candy counter and asked the girl to speak to the projectionist. The girl was sorry; only the manager could do that. Fine, where was the manager? The manager was busy and could not be disturbed. The girl went back to dusting the counter as if the agitated woman shifting from foot to foot in front of her were no more solid than the dim blobs on the screen. Mrs. Slansky spent most of her time writing letters of complaint because the two forces that governed her emotional life—lacerating, unfocused anger and fear of making a scene—canceled each other out. But now she walked to the manager’s office and pounded on the door and kept pounding till a chair squeaked and an eye appeared in the peephole. “Come in! Come in!” the manager beamed, pleased to be confronting someone who couldn’t beat him up. Would she sit down? He was never too busy for feedback from the public. She told him how the screen had gone dark, and at first she’d thought it was the movie or “just me,” but then she’d thought, well, in her opinion, maybe the problem was here in the theater. He sucked the smile back into his chubby face: What, exactly, did she mean by the problem? Well, she thought maybe—in her opinion?—the picture could be brighter? Ah! He nodded vigorously. The problem, of course, was the modern cinema. Bergman! Fellini! All that symbolism! He didn’t understand it himself, but they’d both have to try to be open-minded. The ridiculous things he was saying seemed a form of bullying: I don’t have to convince you, you’re powerless! Mrs. Slansky pointed out that this wasn’t Bergman or Fellini, it was James Bond, and surely—. He begged her pardon for mentioning it, but he couldn’t help noticing that she wore cataract glasses. Why didn’t she see her doctor about the latest advances in laser surgery? Mrs. Slansky’s pulse climbed up behind her eyes and ears as she forced herself to look at this man and tell him that she’d heard Roger Ebert on the Roy Leonard show, and he’d said that movie projectors have a whatchamacallit that controls the brightness, and since this thing costs thousands of dollars to replace, some cheapskate theater owners keep it turned down. He was standing over her now, one of those ugly men who take revenge by turning up their ugliness, honing it into an offensive weapon—his plaid jacket, aftershave, and bristling orange toupee a two-by-four to the senses. He told her that unless she left at once he’d call the police, his face expanding and contracting with her pulse as if something inside it were punching its way out. No, she wasn’t going anyplace till she got her money back, and if she were thrown out bodily she’d go kicking and screaming, and how would that look? He sat down, smiled. Hmm. Maybe that no-good projectionist was playing with the brightness. He’d send in an usher to be absolutely sure the picture was A-OK. A few minutes later Mrs. Slansky and the usher stood watching the screen as two segments of darkness grappled or embraced. The kid said it looked fine to him.

  From moment to moment Mrs. Slansky existed in delicate chemical, metabolic, and neurological balance: she took A for high blood pressure, B to counteract an allergic reaction to the A, C for her nerves, and D when the C made her sluggish; and the whole house of cards depended on her remaining calm. The doctors had taught her breathing exercises and transcendental meditation and progressive relaxation, but right at the moment, she informed the usher, her control systems were dribbling away. There was no telling what would happen in the next few minutes. A stroke? A fit? Maybe just one of those muscle spasms that made her curl up on the floor and scream. She felt nothing but scientific curiosity, she told the usher, and an eagerness to get it over with. Perhaps he’d like to stand there with her and wait. He said he’d talk to the projectionist right away.

  A few minutes later the screen brightened and James Bond, in black jumpsuit and red backpack, stood facing a vault-like door in the side of a mountain, while inside, men in green jumpsuits stared at control panels and TV monitors and marched on catwalks over cavernous spaces. Then the screen went blank, the lights came on, the lovers sat up stunned and disheveled. The manager stood grinning in the lobby. He asked Mrs. Slansky if she’d enjoyed the movie. She sat down on the lobby’s one chair and gripped the armrests, blue veins bulging in the backs of her hands. She wasn’t leaving till she got her money back. And what, he asked in nearly plausible bewilderment, was bothering her now? She felt foolish even answering, but she told him. Ah. Hmm. Well. Was she claiming that the movie had ended too soon? That could mean one of two things. 1) She was guessing how the movie should end on the basis of all the other Bond films. But shouldn’t we allow the filmmakers the freedom to try something new? Why waste the public’s time and the studio’s money—money that could back the work of sensitive young talents—on the thousand-first shootout in the cold vaults of technology? By fading out as it did, the movie left all that to our imagination. (Mrs. Slansky gripped the armrests, terrified and exhilarated at being completely out of control.) Or 2) that Mrs. Slansky knew the movie was longer because she’d already seen it—in which case wasn’t it selfish to force a near-bankrupt movie house to remain open and incur unnecessary expenses? His tone turned pleading (she wasn’t sure if this was just a new way of making fun of her). He pointed out that the Oakton was the last independent theater in the north suburbs; when it closed there’d be nothing left but those big impersonal chains. Did she think Mr. Cineplex would take the time to chat with his customers? Was there a Mr. Cineplex? Who knows! But he, Mr. —, was the last of the owner-managers, and he did everything he could to keep the place goin
g—bought stale candy from other theaters, got discounts on bad prints, turned down the whatchamacallit—but he couldn’t do it alone; he needed the cooperation of his patrons, and surely someone of her years must care about tradition! She was gripping the armrests, locking her feet round the chair legs, when it hit her. Something about the man’s appearance—something beyond his meanness and ugliness—had been making her nervous, and suddenly she knew what it was. His toupee was on backwards. By the time she recovered from her embarrassment and disorientation, the counter girl and the usher had escorted her out the door.

  * * *

  —

  She shuffled her notes, looked up, flinched.

  At first Parker had taken her complaints as substitutes for her real problems, but lately he’d come to see them as allegories in which a rude waitress or sales clerk embodied the annihilating force of the universe. Was this the sort of person a Breather Program might recruit? What story would they tell her? Would it sound like the one he believed?

  “Comments?”

  Chairs creaked, the tree in the window wriggled out of its leaves.

  “You certainly have a complaint here”—Parker avoided her magnified eyes—“but I’m not sure a letter would do any good. Where would you write?”

  “I thought maybe Walter Jacobson? I could tell him, you know, how strongly I feel about this. What do you think, dear?”

  Parker had only been teaching the class five weeks, but already it was clear that television news was a common element in revenge fantasies. The enemy clubbed by microphones, scalded by lights, head scrunched into his collar, hat pressed to his face.