Fiddling with the picture had given him time to review his plan: Find the man in charge and beat him up. Check!
The door to the inner office was just to the right of where the picture had hung, an arm’s-length away. Of course a sudden move might also surprise Woolcurt and prevent the man from doing whatever it was he did. Behind the door a chair creaked.
Holding the picture against the back of the frame, he wrote: “To Joyce, with intense admiration, Parker.” He stepped back in front of the desk and handed her the portrait and the frame.
She laughed. “Everybody’ll think I wrote this myself. Is Parker your real name? The secretaries think you’re some kind of mascot. You know, like Mr. Clean?”
Woolcurt snorted. Since they’d walked in, he’d grown increasingly sullen, compact and alert. He kept his profile to the desk, eyes sweeping the glass doors they’d come through from the elevators, the empty corridor to the left of the desk, the inner office door to the right.
Parker assured Joyce that he was real. “Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Woolcurt and I are here on urgent business.”
She announced them over the intercom.
“Send in Mr. Parker.” It was the voice Parker had heard on the phone. “Mr. Woolcurt will have to take a seat out there.”
“Tell him that’s not acceptable,” Parker said.
Woolcurt put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s cool. I’ll just do my thing out here.”
Joyce smiled reassuringly. “I’m sure he’s been looking forward to meeting you. Oh, he’s a bit strange,” she whispered, “but we like him. He cracks us up.”
* * *
—
The door clicked shut behind him.
A bearded, burly man rose from behind the desk saying, “I suppose I ought to congratulate you on a triumph of the human spirit, hmm?” He cocked his head and a grin split his tangled black facial hair. The grin went on floating in the balding, beaked, horn-framed, tilted head—insisting, it seemed, that Parker was conspiring in the joke.
“Tolerance Management” conjured lab coats and clipboards, but, come to think of it, the personal-demon industry called for a more whimsical disposition. Refusing the hand extended across the desk—“Krell, Harry Krell”—Parker had a few seconds to take in the Mr. Potato Head perched on a heap of files; the yellow walls crammed with B-movie posters, spray-painted graffiti doodles, and more framed double-takes of himself; the wastebasket encircled by paper planes and crumpled near-misses; the diagonal-striped tie clashing calculatedly with the plaid flannel shirt. Together these symbols contrived to proclaim that here was the playpen of a very creative guy. Beneath that—Parker was certain—they asserted status and power: “You still have to take me seriously!”
Having withdrawn his hand and blotted his grin in his beard, Krell was absently fingering the drawstring of the ceiling-high purple curtains behind the desk.
“What now!” Parker blurted.
“What…oh.” Krell let go of the cord. “It’s just a window back there. Let’s get started. I’ll fill you in, and then let’s see what we can do about repairing the damage and getting your life back up to speed.” He sat down, waved the back of his hand at the chair next to Parker.
Parker continued to glare down at him.
Krell nodded. “I wouldn’t blame you a bit for punching me out, but we’ve a lot of ground to cover and you won’t have time. You do want to know what’s going on, don’t you? Sit down, you can always hit me later. Maybe I’ve got it coming.”
Parker sat down and scooped up one of the crumpled papers at his feet.
“So tell me, Jeff. What do you know about Tolerance Management?”
“Only that you’re trying to ruin my life.”
Krell used a thumb and forefinger to push up his glasses and rub his eyelids, then folded his hands at the edge of the crowded blotter. “That’s not how we think of what we’re doing, but considering all you’ve suffered it’s a valid point of view, and it makes me ashamed. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But look—here’s the sort of thing we think about at Tolerance Management. Notice something odd?”
“Compared to what?”
Krell chuckled appreciatively. “I see what you mean! But confine your observations to our chairs. Standing we’re the same height.”
At the back of his mind Parker had been aware that the desktop reached Krell’s upper chest. “Your chair’s too short for the desk. So?”
The scrawl on the crumpled sheet he’d opened read:
Swarm of flying ants!
Parker balled it up and dropped it back on the carpet.
Krell was saying, “It’s a bit of one-upmanship. Ordinarily I’d try to gain power in our transaction by making you feel shorter, but this way you feel a vague sense of unease and you’re not sure why.”
“You just told me why.”
“Yes! and here’s where it gets interesting. Why am I telling you?”
“This is infantile.” Parker wondered if he was stalling for reinforcements. Would Woolcurt standing by the door glowering do any good?
“Is my giving away the game part of some larger stratagem? Or—”
“I’m not interested.”
“—is my hinting at the existence of a larger stratagem just a ruse to—”
“I said I’m not interested. What exactly do you people do?”
“I’ve always admired your ability to transcend problems other people feel obliged to solve. There’s a faction here who think you’re plain stupid, but I call it a triumph of the human spirit.”
“Ever been in a headlock so painful you black out? Just wondering.”
“I apologize for the sarcasm, but you hurt my feelings. And I don’t think you’re stupid. Anyone who’s observed that wall of obliviousness as long as I have begins to suspect that you’re toying with us. What do we do?” He crossed his feet on the desk, found he couldn’t see Parker over his hightops, and set them back down. “I suppose the most famous example of our work is the New York bank study. This was back in the late seventies, you might have heard of it. We determined how long people were willing to wait in bank lines, then the banks cut back on staff so customers had to wait exactly that long. Sound familiar? That’s what we do.”
“You figure out how much crap people will take?”
“Succinctly put. Our clients have a vested interest in quantifying the tolerance boundaries. As I was saying, the bank study was a typical assignment—establishing just how crummy, useless, dangerous, loud and stupid things could get. You must be wondering why I’m telling you this.”
“We’re back to the chairs?”
“Forget the chairs. The point I’m trying to stress is that my cards are on the table. I hope to convince you that we’re really on the same side and we’d better trust each other. I anticipated that look—there’s one just like it on the wall behind you. Bear with me.
“The bank study leaked to the press, and needless to say they played up the mad-scientist angle. We were contributing to the ‘erosion of American life’! Conspiring with big institutions to hound people to their limits! But as I see it, we perform a valuable public service by setting those limits. By figuring out how much crap people will take, we force the client to adopt minimal standards of decency and civility.” He tilted his head. “How does that sound?
“I don’t buy it either,” he continued. “In the early days we practically recited it in chorus at staff meetings, but no one really believed it. Even if we did act as a brake on the rapaciousness of our clients, there’d still be the Rebound Effect. In other words—I’m simplifying, but the more Tolerance Management you use, the more you need. The more you fiddle with people’s sanity and patience, the less sane and patient they become, and the more Tolerance Management it requires to maintain equilibrium.” Pleased with this formulation, he cracked his knuckles.
Parker’s chair creaked as he forced himself out of a slouch. He reflected that despite his gun, his bodyguard, his home booby-trap, and his balled fists, he’d spent his “investigation” thumb-twiddling through a series of digressions. But he hesitated to interrupt, hearing something urgent beneath the snideness and mock candor: The man was striving to impress. It fit, Parker supposed, with the conspiratorial greeting, the garrulous manner, the snit at having his theory interrupted. For years these people had been staging a live spectacle for one man. They might not wish him well, but Parker was the audience—the only opinion that mattered. He decided to sit and wait for the truth to gush out with the rest.
Krell said, “Take your mother’s friend Mrs. Slansky. She has this constant feeling she’s being cheated, but most of the time she can’t attach it to anything concrete. That’s Tolerance Management at its best—the irritant widely dispersed, released gradually in discrete imperceptible doses. Everybody shares the burden, nobody suffers enough at any moment to notice. My Irish aunt used to say, ‘In a lifetime, everyone eats one peck of dirt.’ Not a bad way to organize things when you consider how other societies get things done—bread lines? dictatorships? all those Japanese workers dying of stress at forty? Just one peck of dirt! That was the dream of Tolerance Management. I know, I’m getting sappy.
“Now when Mrs. Slansky can reduce this feeling of being cheated to a specifiable complaint, it always comes down to a matter of pennies, and she always seems to be at the front of a long line, imagining the groans, the pointed watch-checking, all those people wishing her dead. And what if she made a mistake?
“It comes to a head over strawberries. ‘That’s not the price you advertised,’ she pipes up to the kid at the register. The kid says, ‘It’s the blabneeto, ma’am. It’s that price causa the blabneeto.’ Now she knows her hearing isn’t very good, so maybe the kid didn’t really say ‘blabneeto.’ But she thinks she hears snickering behind her, and she wonders if the kid’s mocking her to entertain the folks in line. She considers turning around and looking into their faces, but instead she puts down her money. ‘Oh, I see, thank you.’
“As she pulls into traffic she cranks up the Muzak station. She doesn’t want to hear that whiny voice sneering, ‘The blabneeto, ma’am. It’s the blabneeto.’ All this gets mixed up with the death of her husband, her stroke, the coldheartedness of her children, the withdrawal of her friends. A classic Rebound Effect. Then it hits her—she can’t hold this one down. If she tries, she’ll choke on the whole load. On Skokie Boulevard she makes a skidding U-turn across rush-hour traffic—doesn’t care if the whole world comes screeching and blaring down on her ’cause she’s gonna do something about those strawberries, goddamnit! You know the rest. Overturning strawberries, resisting arrest, confined for observation. I’m beginning to think that the next big upheaval won’t come from the underclass. It’ll be people who feel like they’re being—what’s the expression?—nibbled to death by minnows.”
Parker said, “What was she doing in my apartment? No, save that. What does any of this have to do with me?”
“Right. Let’s deal with you.” Krell reached under the desk and the lights went out.
Resisting the impulse to spring to his feet and flail at the darkness—the anticipated response, he thought—Parker called out, “Mr. Woolcurt! Could you come in here!”
The curtains slid back from a window-wall. “Relax,” Krell said, letting go of the cord. The dusk lit filaments in his beard and pooled in his bald spot. “It’s my end-of-the-day ritual.” He swiveled to face the engorged buildings, the Sears Tower beacon flickering at his ear. “As you can imagine, the bank study generated some carcinogenic PR for this firm. It got so bad I’d start my end-of-the-day ritual at two, one in the afternoon. One night everyone else had gone home and I was still here at the window trying to take the philosophical view that I’d gotten what I deserved. And just as I started thinking of all the murderers who get away with it and wondering why I had to get what I deserved—it hardly seemed fair!—just then someone cleared his throat behind me.”
Pausing for narrative effect, Krell snuck a peek over his shoulder. “And that’s how I met Hank Monroe, Junior,” he said, turning back to the window. “Makes quite a first impression, doesn’t he? That night he was wearing a black leisure suit, chosen, I’ll bet, to make his pallor more sickening. And I’m sure you’ve noticed the dullness of the eyes and that—he’s not fat, but that pudgy softness of the face. You’re in a pugnacious mood this evening so maybe you’ll appreciate my image: If you punched him in the face, you wouldn’t hit bone—he’d squish. I was about to ask him how he’d gotten into the office when he opened the suitcase on his lap. It was stuffed with fifties and hundreds, new bills, still in the bank bands. He told me, and I verified a few weeks later, that the case contained three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“He gave me the capsule vita—you’ve probably heard this much of it. The crank calls—how he’d impersonate a public health official and trick women into shaving their heads and leaving the hair in a bag on the doorstep? How the FBI recruited him to make your life unpleasant. By the way, I asked him once what he did with all that hair. He says he kept it. What do you suppose he does with it?
“You know, I don’t think he was always so decrepit-looking, but by 1979 he’d been on your case for nearly a decade, and it was already clear that you’d won. You’d squashed him, and your complete obliviousness to the contest, let alone the victory, was, I think, the greatest victory of all.
“He told me that even though the FBI had supposedly called off its dirty tricks, his checks—huge amounts!—kept coming. Maybe it was one of those legendary bureaucratic accounting errors—in which case he could’ve kept the money and done nothing—but he claimed to believe that if he didn’t keep it up, certain people…he was vague about it, but these people would come after him.
“Think about it from his point of view. What would it do to a sadist’s one pleasure if it became an eternal, inescapable duty? And if his victim hadn’t the least inkling that something out of the ordinary was going on? To protect the program, you understand, he was required to keep out of sight and make the gags look like random events. And to insure that the program continued in perpetuity, he was severely restricted in how much damage he could do.” Krell folded his hands behind his neck. “By the way, I have two theories of what this is all about. The first—you have this secret, self-perpetuating program tucked away in some dark nook of the federal budget, right? Suppose no one knows the program still exists except for a few middle-level bureaucrats skimming money off it. They keep sending our friend his checks to keep him quiet. Or maybe they keep sending him his checks because the scam has worked so well up to now, they’re superstitious about tinkering with it. I’ll save the other theory for later.
“Getting back to our friend—he kept hoping that as time passed you’d gradually piece together what was happening to you. Or better yet, that some day you’d be contemplating your latest pink slip or the ashes of your possessions or the death-rattle of your latest car, and the connectedness of everything would hit you all at once. But he hadn’t counted on your invincible stupidity. I call it stupidity, but is that the right word for a trait with such high survival value? What should we call it?”
“Protective obtuseness,” Parker said to keep him talking.
“Protective obtuseness!” Krell slapped the desk. “I like it! You’ve heard the saying, ‘Lord, give me the strength to change what I can, the patience to bear what I can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ Well, maybe ‘protective obtuseness’ is just another name for that wisdom…But as I say, think of it from Monroe, Junior’s point of view. I don’t think he cares about the money. As far as I can tell, he’s practically an ascetic—outside of his ‘job,’ he’s got nothing happening but junk food and late-night TV.”
“Then you know where he lives?” None of the addresses an
d phone numbers on Monroe, Jr.’s IDs had panned out.
“No. Sorry, just a professional guess. But imagine how he feels about his assignment, the crushing sense of futility, the sense that he’s Sisyphus endlessly rolling his boulder back up the hill.”
“You’re kidding.”
Krell swiveled to face him. “Now, there’s a proposition we could analyze all day.”
“Let’s not.”
“When you’ve been a professional prankster as long as I have, and—cards on the table?—I hardly have the right to go on calling myself a clinical psychologist; when you’ve been at it this long, your sense of irony becomes either completely coarsened or incredibly heightened, I’m never sure which. Am I kidding?”—he tilted his head and pressed his fingertips together in front of his beard—“I don’t know. But let’s not dwell on my little problems. Where was I? The suitcase with three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“Our friend had read about this firm when the scandal broke, and he thought he saw a way out of his problem. If he couldn’t escape his obligation, he’d subcontract it to us. I was incensed—no, really! I told him that while our work raised a need to clarify some of the ethical canons of the behavioral sciences, we weren’t just a bunch of thugs. You can smirk, but that night—August Eighth, 1979—I wasn’t just a thug yet. You should have seen me! I kicked him out of this office, I threatened to call the police. And this was after he told me that the three hundred and fifty thousand would be just a down payment.
“Then the calls started coming in. Important people in the social sciences—a member of a peer-review panel, a journal editor, someone from the President’s Council on Mental Health—all these people telling us that there was a good deal of interest ‘in the field’ in our accepting the ‘research grant’ we’d been offered. I don’t know if the interest was official or whether Monroe, Junior had bribed or coerced a few individuals. But anyway—some of us were hoping to return to academic life someday, and it was implied that if we accepted the offer, we wouldn’t be stigmatized by our recent notoriety. And by then we’d developed our own professional interest in you. For years we’d been studying the side effects of Tolerance Management—watching average people degenerate into seething, short-fused hotheads. Then along comes a guy who can take an infinite amount of crap and not even know it’s happening! You’ve found an inner calm the rest of us desperately need. Think of the good we could all do if we could share your secret with others. So we took the money.” He shrugged. “I know, I know.
The Blindfold Test Page 13
