The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Though I’ll admit,” he added, “to fantasizing that my enemy has just walked through that door.” He seemed to be confiding in a friend, not needling an enemy, and Parker resisted the prudent impulse to back into the hallway.

  “Why don’t I take the gun,” he said.

  Fletcher picked it up by the barrel. “If it makes you feel better, why don’t you take charge of it while you visit? Oh, come on in!”

  Parker stepped up to the desk, gripped the gun by the handle, and sat down, releasing his breath.

  It looked identical to the small blue-black automatic he’d surrendered to Jan Cohen. “Where’d you get this?”

  Glancing over Parker’s shoulder, Fletcher said, “If we’re having a guns- and-ammo show, hadn’t we better…?”

  Parker slid the gun into his jacket pocket. “Oh, you mean the door.” He reached back and closed it.

  “I don’t suppose”—Fletcher arched an eyebrow—“you’re hoping I’ll forget about the gun?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “It’s a gift from my new friend,” Fletcher said. “I still don’t know his name, but two days ago he sat down across from me at lunch and in lieu of introductions sweepingly deplored the state of things in general.”

  Parker groaned. “John Connor Murray!”

  “Heavyset? White beard, dapper dresser?”

  “MM-hmm!”

  “Anyway, the standard curmudgeon act, but he does it well, and it’s rather infectious. Pretty soon he’s railing against Lionel Trilling, I’m cursing my enemy, and we’ve worked ourselves into a fine rage—‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em all!’ ” Fletcher swearing was nearly as startling as the gun. “He’s come back the past two days, and we’ve formed our own little lunchtime bile club. Today I was describing my enemy’s latest attack; he excused himself and a few minutes later he came back with the gun.”

  Parker’s stomach tightened. “Your enemy….”

  “He’s got my name circulating in the most esoteric reaches of the porno scene. I’m a psychologist, and I can’t figure out what the callers want or how they might react to not getting it.”

  Parker hadn’t been sure that the perversion he’d dreamed up existed. But even before there’d been time for the ad to appear, word of it was drumming through the underground.

  Fletcher was saying, “I changed my number to an unlisted one but they keep calling. They probably have connections in the phone company or the police. It’s the first time I’m grateful for the divorce—at least my kids won’t be put through this.”

  Parker couldn’t confess from a standing start. “Someone’s been playing dirty tricks on me, too.”

  “Then it is a student!” Fletcher set his briefcase on the desk. “I’ll show you my roster.”

  “It’s not a student.”

  Fletcher was shuffling through his briefcase. “Here it is.” He tried to hand Parker the printout.

  “I said neither of us is being harassed by a student.”

  Fletcher put the roster back in his case, set the case back on the floor, replaced his folded hands on the desk, and awaited whatever was coming.

  “I can’t think of a way to gradually lead up to this,” Parker said, “so here it is. I ran those ads.” He wanted to rush into the pause that followed, blurting explanations, rationalizations, abject apologies, but he found himself watching Fletcher’s reaction.

  His eyes on Parker, Fletcher reached into the flap pocket of his tweed jacket—the unlikely thought of a second weapon crossed Parker’s mind—and set his pipe on the desk. He reached in three more times, lining up a tobacco pouch, a tamper, and a lighter in a straight row next to the pipe. He continued to watch Parker while methodically loading and tamping and sucking in flame with a pa-pa-pa sound. He was looking at Parker with puzzled concentration, as if he couldn’t quite place the face. Not wanting to lose sight for an instant of the curiosity in front of him, he expelled smoke through the side of his mouth. “Why?”

  “I know how worthless it is to say I’m sorry, but—”

  “Yes, but I won’t know how worthless till I hear your story.”

  Beginning with the faceless man, Parker made an effort to point out that he knew how ridiculous it all sounded, and to stress how skeptical, how reasonable he’d been, accepting Dobbs’s explanations only when more plausible hypotheses proved untenable, and even then—. But Fletcher was tapping the flat end of his tamper on the desk, and Parker speeded up his narrative—the drop of blood, the burning hair, the talking Coke machine, the despairmen, the women paid to almost go to bed with him…

  The hand holding Fletcher’s pipe had frozen, the stem hovering just beyond his slightly parted lips.

  “I must have looked that way myself when I heard Dobbs’s story,” Parker said.

  “Let’s not pretend we’re both in this together, shall we?” Fletcher looked hurt. It occurred to Parker that during the time they’d seemingly pretended to be friendly, they’d actually become friends.

  He went on with his story—Ziploc, Mrs. Slansky, Tolerance Management, raw steaks in the hubcaps—his listener’s expression flickering from anger to incredulity to pity before hardening into clinical neutrality.

  Parker rubbed his palms on the armrests; Fletcher relit his pipe.

  “And how do I fit into the grand design?” Fletcher asked.

  “On three or four occasions my super saw you letting yourself in and out of my apartment.”

  “And you’re certain it was me?”

  “It was a detailed description. And let’s face it—anachronistic Oxbridge tweeds aren’t standard issue for break-ins.”

  Fletcher chuckled and cleared his throat. “This is some kind of record. You’ve known me over a week, and this is the first crack you’ve made about how I dress. My ex-wife bought the original tweeds at a secondhand store; we were celebrating my first university post. It was just a joke—and why does everyone assume that I don’t know they’re funny?—but she said they made me look handsome, so I searched the antique clothing stores and bought five more sets.” He lowered his eyes and minutely realigned the tamper, the pouch and the lighter. “After the divorce I thought of donating them all to Goodwill, but…” Looking up he seemed to have recalled that he wasn’t speaking to a friend. “So. Your burglar wore tweed and that was reason enough to ruin my life.”

  “As I said, it was a detailed description.”

  “Not detailed enough, apparently, because here you are trying to apologize.”

  “That’s right. But I’m trying to point out that I had reasons for what I believed.”

  “Any other reasons? Not that you don’t have an airtight case already!”

  “Well, I still might not have connected you with my intruder if I hadn’t been seeing you everywhere—bars, theater lobbies, Wrigley Field. And the El—for months I’d been seeing you on the train twice each day, regardless of how I changed my schedule or which car I rode.”

  “You’re sure it was twice every day? There couldn’t have been one day when you didn’t see me? Not one ride?”

  “Suppose you missed a day. What would that prove?”

  “Were you even looking for me before you heard your conspiracy story? Were you paying close attention? I’ll bet you didn’t give a second thought to whether I was on the El or not. Let’s grant that you saw me on the train regularly, even frequently—we do work at the same place. But once you started looking for patterns, you convinced yourself you’d been seeing me twice each day without fail. And then if you saw me in a theater lobby or at the ballpark, it was easy to believe you’d been seeing me ‘everywhere.’ ”

  Pat, but couldn’t it be true?

  “You live in Hyde Park, Ken. What were you doing at the Granville El every day? Excuse me—nearly every day?”

  “It’s none of your business, but I’m seeing a woman
in your neighborhood. Would you like to call her?”

  What would that prove? “That won’t be necessary.”

  “She teaches at Loyola; you can contact her through the sociology department. Babe C. Tuttle.”

  “That’s all right, I…. You call your girlfriend Babe C. Tuttle?”

  “To distinguish her from a colleague in the department.”

  “Babe A. Tuttle?”

  “Professor Barbara Tuttle,” Fletcher enunciated in a display of strained patience. “Known to her friends as ‘Babbs’ Tuttle.”

  “Why not?”

  “My phone’s in the drawer. Why don’t you call?”

  Parker couldn’t shake off the image of Fletcher shut up in his office, the blinds drawn, the phone in a drawer, a gun in both hands. “I believe you.”

  “Go on, ask her about her private life and laugh at her name while you’re at it.”

  “I said I believe you.”

  “You believe everything I’m saying.”

  “Yes. I do,” Parker said. And he supposed he did.

  “Positive? I wouldn’t want to find a bomb in my car because you awoke in the night with a nagging doubt.”

  Parker waited for him to get off it.

  “So I don’t seem demonic to you?” Fletcher took the pipe out of his mouth and leaned on his forearms.

  “No, Ken, you seem like a nice guy.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “On the other hand, I’m a nice guy and look what I’m doing.”

  Fletcher allowed the remark to hang there—as if for Parker’s inspection—while he knocked the pipe against the side of the wastebasket and pocketed his things.

  “Here are my conditions,” he said at last. “I’ll give you two weeks to get into therapy. Otherwise I’ll call the police.”

  “And what if I lie to the police?”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “No, but—look. You saw the guy in the trenchcoat and the fake beard.”

  “Let’s stipulate that there might be something to your conspiracy. Believe me, I’ve learned that having an enemy changes how you view the world, but—”

  “Even people with real enemies can be paranoid?”

  “Yesterday I walked out to the parking lot and saw that my car had a flat. There was a kid standing there with what I took to be a taunting little smile on his face. He said, ‘Looks like you got a flat tire, man.’ I read his license number aloud and told him I’d remember him. There was no real reason to suspect him, of course, and after we cleared up my misunderstanding he even helped me change the tire. Tell me, Jeff, what would you have done in my place? Torched his house? Oh, by the way—you wouldn’t know anything about that tire, would you?”

  “No,” Parker said truthfully.

  “No, of course not! Another thing: I can’t buy your scenario about Tolerance Management. I know those people; they’ve helped fund my research.”

  Parker all but slapped his forehead.

  Fletcher irritably gusted smoke and said, “I seem to have revived your suspicions. Would I be telling you this if I had something to hide?” Crowd noise swelled in the hallway; he glanced at his watch.

  “Tolerance Management is the largest private funder of research in the field of stress,” Fletcher added.

  “Okay.”

  “Nearly all the major work is undertaken with their backing.”

  “Well then. Okay.”

  Parker thought back to their first conversations—Fletcher droning jargon; himself nodding politely and gazing at the vicinity of Fletcher’s hairline. “Anomic stress formation,” “social shock absorbers”: He’d been talking about tolerance management! Then again, didn’t all social scientists talk about stress?

  Parker was back where he’d started: morally obligated to beg forgiveness for acts that were almost certainly justified. “I’m truly sorry,” he said rising from his chair and extending his hand.

  Fletcher stood up and shook it. A close-up view confirmed only that he hadn’t been sleeping. The redness mottling his face and rimming his eyes flared against his pallor.

  He was observing Parker with what might have been genuine concern. “I know you are. Get therapy!”

  Parker mumbled equivocally. As he turned, the gun in his jacket pocket bumped against his hip. He opened the door and pressed into the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  “Yes, Jack,” Parker told John Connor Murray, “that is a gun in my pocket, and yes I’m glad to see you because you’re going to help me put it back.” He didn’t stop to consider the prudence of this public announcement until well into the silence that followed it.

  The students who’d stayed behind after Jack’s class had joined their teacher in staring at Parker’s jacket pocket. Jack was doing his usual caricature of astonishment, even the huge white carnation in his navy blue blazer gaping.

  “I’m kidding, of course,” Parker told the students.

  Jack was breathing noisily through his open mouth; agitated bare branches in the window diced up the light.

  “I don’t really have a gun in there,” Parker went on gamely. “Would I announce it if I did?”

  Uncertain, they affected a smirky nonchalance.

  “It must be the gun,” Jack said, “because regrettably you don’t look glad to see me.” His students laughed.

  “Janet’s at lunch. Let’s go to her office and put the item back where you found it.”

  It was beginning to seem like a Guns of Navarone-size mission, and Parker wondered if his friend was actually drunk. He’d long ago realized that Jack thought it gave him an edge if no one could be sure—cover when he was, license when he wasn’t—so he consistently acted half-crocked. The flushed face—given high contrast by the white beard—and the slurred speech and watery eyes were chronic. He was grinning hugely and indiscriminately, but it could have meant anything.

  “What about our tweedy pal?” Jack wondered.

  “He was sitting in his office drawing a bead on anything that came through the door. I nearly made his day—thanks!” Parker tugged him by the arm to the doorway, where Jack turned to face his students, his grin brimming with some anecdote or aphorism.

  “It’ll keep!” Parker snapped.

  As they passed through the crowd in the hallway, Parker marveled, as he always did, at his friend’s ability to convey the breadth of human emotion with one basic expression: pop eyes and a dropped jaw. Fine-tuning it with twists of his lips and eyebrows, he was greeting passersby with leers, double-takes, stylized wonder, mock horror. All in all Parker preferred Jack’s usual barely suppressed rage to these “good” moods, which hummed along at far too many RPMs to be mistaken for ordinary happiness.

  Turning to watch a woman pass by, Jack did a head-snapping goggle-eyed double-take, as if the very concept of a woman in tight jeans had only just dawned on him. He turned to Parker. “I’m enjoying your little caper, young Parker, but it’s completely unnecessary.”

  “I know you think you’ve got nothing to lose, but if you think teaching here is humiliating, imagine getting fired.”

  “ ‘No worst, there is none!’ What I mean, kiddo, is that you’re in for a pleasant surprise.”

  Parker halted. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Then it will be even more of a surprise.”

  “Not that I don’t wish you the best, Jack, but seeing you this happy makes me very nervous.” They backed against a wall to let people by. “What’s up?”

  “Shall we scrub the mission, Cap?”

  Parker gave up. “No. Just…just don’t horse around.”

  A few yards from Jan’s office Parker lowered his voice. “All right, do whatever you’ve been doing to get in there.” The outer door was open, a typewriter clacking out of view beyond it.

 
“There’s no trick involved. All it takes is a kind word and a warm smile.” Jack strode into the outer office.

  Jan’s secretary Judy was a pale skinny redhead with round gold wire-rims and an oversize perm. Faced with the full expanse of Jack’s eyeballs and teeth, she snatched back her hands from the typewriter.

  “Ah, the numinous Judy!” he said breezing past her. “I’ll just go in there and consult the master syllabi.”

  “He’s not supposed to go in there,” she said hopelessly to Parker.

  “I’ll take the blame if there’s any trouble,” said Parker, validating all her anxieties. He shrugged commiseratingly. “I’d better go in there and keep an eye on him.”

  In Jan’s office Parker closed the door and locked it.

  With a panoramic sweep of the back of his hand, Jack slathered contempt on everything that represented Jan Cohen: the wallfull of books on the science of writing, the cluttered desk and bulletin board; even the green metal filing cabinet seemed to piss him off.

  “Where’d you find it?” Parker asked.

  “Same place she always puts it—bottom-right desk drawer, under the two file folders. The woman has no imagination.”

  Parker stepped behind the desk. Between the phone and a pile of mimeographed journal articles—“The Etiology of Pauses in Student Writing”—an old framed graduation photo showed her redheaded son squinting into the light. A static of crunched leaves drew Parker’s attention to the cracked-open window behind him, where thunderheads were stacking up over the parking lot. He decided against drawing the blinds; unless he waved the gun in the window he’d be visible but not noticeable to the crowd filing between the cars. He sat down and gripped the drawer handle. “What do we have here? Some sort of booby-trap?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just a pleasant surprise.”

  “The fear of surprises is a character flaw,” Jack observed, “especially in a critic.”

  Parker opened the drawer and, lifting the file folders, found a small blue-black automatic identical to the one in his pocket. “Not pleasant so far.”