The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “And what do you think will happen?”

  “For a while I’ve had a hunch those people are sick of you and they’re looking for some kind of wrapup.”

  “And?”

  “I’m thinking ritual sacrifice, theater of cruelty, that sort of thing.”

  “I hear the dental plan’s good,” Parker said.

  “Let me have the time and place—in case the police want your last known destination.”

  Parker gave him the details. “I have a gun. Should I take it?”

  “Yes!”

  That pretty much killed the conversation, but Parker was in no rush to get off and spend time thinking in his empty apartment. “I’m sorry you and Fran didn’t hit it off. I’m sure you two—”

  “My fault. We haven’t had company for a while. Guess I’m out of practice.”

  “Well, let’s try again soon—we might even have something to celebrate.”

  “Maybe we will,” Dobbs said doubtfully. “Good luck, Parker.”

  “Thanks. Bye.” Breaking the connection, Parker shut the receiver in the silverware drawer. He opened the bag, took a long look at the thing, and having satisfied himself that it wasn’t looking back, carried the bag to the garbage.

  * * *

  —

  Parker narrowed his eyes against a damp gritty wind. The dirt lot between the El station and Circle Campus was lit by banked white lights that made the surrounding darkness blacker and ran together wetly behind his squint. A woman approached and rushed past him, mouth set in the I’m-not-a-victim scowl, blown hair flaring in the lights.

  Waiting to cross Harrison, he gazed up at University Hall on the other side, which—wider at the upper stories, as if balanced on its head—perfectly expressed his disquiet. He hefted his briefcase and heard the gun clunk against his books and papers. He reached into his inside suit-coat pocket and switched on the voice-activated microcassette recorder he’d borrowed from John Standell, hoping the conspirators would adhere to their penchant for confessional monologues. And, just in case it was a real job interview, he adjusted his tie and smoothed down his hair.

  He crossed the street and followed in the band of shadow cast by the overhead walkway through the orange halogen lights. If the point was to raise his hopes, why lure him here? With its moon-colored pillars and walkways, its identical facades of opaque brown windows in cubbyholes of gray girders, and its desolate sunken stone amphitheater, Circle Campus resembled something the Aztecs might have built if they’d had pre-stressed concrete.

  The place was deserted; he nearly walked past the shadowed figure leaning against a pillar and facing Stevenson Hall. His back was turned to Parker, but there was no mistaking the hunched narrow shoulders and balding red frizz.

  “Steve?”

  The shoulders flinched and Dobbs spun round to face him. “I think they’re all in there,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Good question!”

  “I appreciate your worrying about me, but—”

  “Thought you might need backup.”

  “Okay, I’m glad you’re here. What do they look like?”

  “Like professors,” Dobbs said.

  “Maybe too much like professors?”

  “Too much?” Dobbs grinned. “I like the concept! I can’t answer that. You’ve taken precautionary measures?”

  Parker tapped the briefcase.

  “Me, too.” Dobbs unzipped his black leather jacket and disclosed the gun handle protruding from his waistband.

  Parker paced to keep warm as the wind rose. “Any last-minute advice?”

  “Let’s get outta here.”

  “And barring that?”

  Zipping up his jacket Dobbs said, “Figure your escape routes and your lines of fire as soon as you walk in. Keep the briefcase in reach and unlatched.”

  “And if it’s a real interview?”

  “I hear it’s bad form to bring up salary,” Dobbs said.

  * * *

  —

  The hum of fluorescent lights and vending machines resounded through the deserted ground floor. He was heading down a cinderblock hallway past rows of doors with darkened windows when a gravelly voice called his name.

  Parker turned. “Yes?” A man in a brown topcoat was coming up behind him—short, trim, sixtyish, curly brown hair, wind-reddened nose, round steel-frame glasses, cocky walk, mournful smile.

  “Tom Grand,” he said solemnly and shook Parker’s hand. The lugubrious sheen of his watery blue eyes gave a note of deadpan humor to anything he said. “I suppose you want to know what’s in store for you.”

  “Yes!” Parker said, so urgently he felt obliged to laugh.

  “Nothing to get rattled about, but you hurt Bill’s feelings. He thinks you insulted him on the phone—I know, I know.” He flicked away Parker’s effort to object. “It’s Bill. We’re all bulls in his china shop. You’ll like him when you get to know him.”

  “If I ever get the chance. Maybe I should take him aside and—”

  “I wouldn’t advise it. Let him give you crap for half an hour and he’ll come round. No one else is opposed but Marty Applebaum, who’s opposed on principle as always. He and Bill might form a tag-team for a while, but maintain your equanimity. I’m only telling you this so you don’t get discouraged if things seem a bit frosty at the outset. As for the rest of us,” he added mock-obsequiously, “we are gripped by Parkermania.” His misty eyes and the quaver in his gravelly voice made the line truly funny.

  “Relax!” he said, responding to Parker’s nervous laugh. “This isn’t your orals—think of it as a chat among colleagues.”

  “That’s what they said at my orals.”

  “And here you are, cock of the walk, leading candidate for a plum job at a fine state university. Of course you’ve done this before.”

  “Interviewing? Not for a while. I suppose it’s like falling off a bicycle. You never forget.”

  “At this level,” said Tom Grand as they started down the hallway, “we don’t even call it an interview. Just a get-acquainted session, a chat. You know how to chat, don’t you?”

  “I think I—”

  “Nice weather!”

  “Oh. Yeah. They’re predicting rain.”

  “There ya go!”

  At the head of the steps Parker heard cups and plates rattling. If they were speaking down there, they were whispering. “Of course,” he said, “with that cold front coming down from Canada—”

  “Don’t show off. We know you’re a smart guy!”

  * * *

  —

  Except for his uneasy sense that the people in the room had lurched into sound and motion the instant before he walked in, Parker was reassured by what he saw. They’d entered a large, blue-carpeted, brightly lit space with a couch, leather armchairs, a long walnut seminar table in the middle, and a buffet near the door. Reconnoitering, he counted seven people: three on the couch, two standing near the walnut table, one filling a plate at the buffet, and Tom Grand at Parker’s side. They looked like professors: faces that betrayed years of displaying attention and suppressing boredom. Okay, he was spinning his wheels about the faces, but anyway most of them looked harmless. Just one tweed suit in the room, too wormy to look like a prop.

  “I don’t recall meeting any of these people last time,” he said, trying to make it sound like a casual observation.

  “We’re all impostures,” said the man at the buffet. Parker recognized the voice as Bill Hungerford’s. “Or we’re the search committee—take your pick. Spenser’s wife’s name was Elizabeth.”

  Did you look it up? Parker nearly asked. But a close look at Bill persuaded him that he might as well save his teasing for a swarm of Africanized bees. With his short stature, tiny perfect features, wraparound glasses, tailored suit, and pe
rfectly trained brown hair, Bill ought to have looked elegant. He looked like a kid who’d been dressed up and forced to behave all day and who was gathering his energies for a tantrum.

  They exchanged tense pleasantries while Tom Grand, standing behind Bill, warned Parker off certain topics—sports, the Renaissance, the weather—gesturing like a flight-deck officer in choppy seas.

  “Why don’t you circulate and introduce yourself?” Tom said to Parker. “I’ll catch up after Bill and I talk business.”

  Circulating, Parker intercepted Esther, an athletic redhead in a calf-length charcoal suit, on her way to refill her wineglass. She looked down at the briefcase, then returned her eventful brown eyes to Parker. “You could set it by the coatrack if you like, or don’t you trust us?”

  “Oh. My notes are in there,” Parker said vaguely.

  “Well if you brought notes, I feel obliged to discuss something esoteric, but I was going to ask if you play racquetball. Do you need to check your notes?” She smoothed down her attractively chaotic perm and it sprang back up.

  “Hey, can’t a guy like his briefcase?”

  “What do you have in there? You’re literally clutching the handle. Have you considered handcuffs?”

  He was searching for a mildly flirtatious retort about handcuffs that wouldn’t offend a total stranger with a say in determining his future, when a man came up and introduced himself. He bore such a strong resemblance to the TV astronomer Carl Sagan that Parker had already forgotten his name. Judging by his grim expression and businesslike handshake, this had to be the second no vote—the man who according to Tom Grand was always opposed on principle.

  “I want you to know,” said Carl Sagan—his deep unctuous voice also recalled the tele-scientist—“that my opposition to you isn’t personal.” Behind him Esther did a Tallulah Bankhead eye-roll. “It’s a matter of principle,” Carl Sagan asserted, “of sticking to our own procedures. But I want you to remember that if you end up joining us—and I’m sure you will—I’m not your enemy.” He nodded to Esther and strode off.

  “I need that refill,” Esther said. “See you later.”

  Parker walked over to the couch, where a tiny woman with white bangs and big glasses was complaining about the rabbits in her garden. Parker introduced himself to the rabbit woman (he’d already given up trying to remember names) and her companions. The black-clad woman on her left, who claimed to be a graduate student, had a nervous habit of wiggling the fingers of her right hand and staring at the glints off her long black nails. The man to the right of the rabbit woman was a pinstripe-suited bruiser with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair and a neat mustache. He emanated a powerful aftershave and reminded Parker of those well-groomed movie gangsters who get shot in barber chairs. It was possible to see him as undermining the authenticity of the occasion or—Parker seized the second possibility—as someone no one trying to impersonate a professor would look like.

  “Jeff, have you met Delbert Zontar?” Tom Grand had brought over the man in the one tweed suit—a balding dewlapped man whose bulging eyes made Parker think of Graves’ disease and Warner Brothers cartoons. It occurred to Parker that his heightened concern with reality and unreality was lending everything the grotesqueness of Warner animation. Perhaps that accounted for his impression that Carl Sagan and Bill Hungerford, conferring in an isolated corner across the room, were staring at him while speaking from the sides of their mouths.

  The bug-eyed man was droning an anecdote having something to do with the elevators in University Hall, and Parker was trying to look interested without making his own eyes bug, when Bill called the meeting to order.

  “I trust you’ve all read the paper Jeff submitted for his previous interview. Shall we take our seats?” He placed a hand on the chair at the head of the table. “Jeff,” he said over the groans of his colleagues, “why don’t you sit here?”

  “That’s overly formal, isn’t it, Bill?” said Tom Grand from one of the leather armchairs, where he’d just settled with a plate of appetizers. “I thought this was more of a get-acquainted session.”

  “I told Jeff there’d be a few minutes of Q-and-A on his paper.”

  “Sure, but why turn it into colloquium? I just finished reassuring the poor guy that this isn’t going to be like his orals. Why the basso profundo big deal? Let’s just get comfortable and ask a few questions.”

  Carl Sagan had walked over to Bill’s side. “Normally Jeff would deliver his paper at the table and remain at the table for the Q-and-A.”

  “Well then. Q.E.D.,” Tom said sweetly.

  “I only meant,” said Bill, “that we ought to treat Jeff with the same seriousness—”

  Tom turned to Parker. “Jeff, Bill feels that the full seriousness to which you are due inheres in that table.”

  “I’ve no objection to tables,” Parker said.

  Esther rose from the armchair next to Tom’s. “Why don’t we sit at the table and each of us can be as serious or as casual as he or she likes. Tom, you can slouch in your chair.”

  Parker took his assigned place at the table—avoiding eye contact with Bill and Carl Sagan, who sat to his right and left—while the others took their sweet time gathering up purses, cigarettes, plates and cups.

  When they were settled in, Bill addressed Parker. “Before we get started, I have some concerns about your publications. There hasn’t been a second book?”

  “No. There were three articles in the PMLA.”

  “All published within three years of your dissertation. The work I’ve seen is all fine, but it seems to me you haven’t done much lately.”

  Parker was thinking that maybe he had a point. At moments he thought of the conspiracy as a necessary adjustment in the order of things to keep him from getting breaks he didn’t deserve. But Tom Grand came to his defense.

  “Is that fair, Bill? First time out of the box he writes one of the most cogent, original works of recent criticism, and you’re asking, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ You’ve all read Jeff’s book—is there anyone who’d deny it’s the work of a first-rank critical intelligence?”

  There were murmurs of agreement. “First-rank,” the bug-eyed man echoed, “and I’m grateful to see a young critic who doesn’t parrot the party line from Paris or Yale. Have you published at all lately?” he asked Parker.

  “In film journals and Down Beat. And I’ve nearly completed a collection of literary criticism for a second book manuscript.”

  The pinstripe man had begun to drum his fingers on the table.

  “Are any of those essays published?” Carl Sagan asked.

  The literary criticism journals had started giving him the cold shoulder at the same time as the English departments.

  “No,” Parker said, “but I’d be happy to send you a copy of the manuscript.”

  “Oh dear,” the rabbit woman mumbled under her breath.

  Bill tented his fingertips in front of his face and began kneading his lower lip with his forefingers. “Here’s our problem. You haven’t published any literary criticism for nearly a decade and you teach at Skokie Valley College. Why don’t you contact us when you’re further along in your career?”

  The group began stirring, preparatory, it seemed, to rising from the table, when Tom Grand intervened. “Now, wait a minute, Bill. You knew all this when you invited him here and and all but promised him a job. I’ll defend you against the inevitable charge that you’ve lost your mind, but how are you going to live this down?”

  “I’m willing to hear—”

  “He’s thirty-five, thirty-six? Plenty of people are just getting their Ph.Ds at his age. Jeff got his Ph.D. at twenty-five with a work that established his reputation. So what if he can’t repeat that trick every year or two? He’s regrouping, that’s all. It happens to a lot of people who have early successes.”

  “Why are you teaching at Skoki
e Valley?” Esther wondered.

  Carl Sagan seized the topic. “Esther is too polite to say so, but Skokie Valley has a reputation as a refuge for burn-outs.”

  “Is that a question?” Parker asked.

  “Do you know John Connor Murray?” Carl Sagan asked accusingly. “Several years ago he was with a group of us who went out to dinner after a session of the MLA. I made an innocuous remark about the late Lionel Trilling, and the man pulled a gun on me! He said—quote!—‘Maybe it’s time to air out the stuffed shirts.’ ”

  Good for you, Jack! Parker thought.

  At the mention of guns the nervous woman opened her purse and took out a revolver. She gave it a smart sideways flip to make the chamber fall open, checked the rounds, flipped it shut and replaced it. The others at the table reacted with bemusement or mild embarrassment, as if to a mere breach of etiquette. Parker had let his right hand dangle above the unlatched briefcase at his feet; he replaced his hand on the table.

  “Sorry if I scared you,” she said to Parker, leaning forward on her arms to see past her colleagues. “I have to walk to the parking lot. I had a problem there last year.” She retrieved her cigarette from the ashtray and, tapping it with a black nail, took a long noisy drag.

  Tom said, “I thought we were at the table for purposes of high seriousness, and here we are gossiping. Wouldn’t anyone like to ask Jeff a question about his paper?”

  “One minute, Tom.” Bill fidgeted with his cuff. “I agree with everything you said about Jeff’s work, and I must admit to letting personal resentments cloud my professional judgment.” He turned to Parker. “Jeff, I apologize, but you seemed to be baiting me on the phone this morning and I was insulted, frankly, by your seeming to doubt that I was a real professor.”

  “I apologize for giving you that impression. I do have an acquaintance who plays elaborate practical jokes.”

  “William James said there are two ways to be fooled,” Bill said. “Dupery through hope or dupery through fear.”

  Hearing his remark of the other day quoted back word for word, Parker gasped. John Standell’s people hadn’t found any bugging devices in his apartment, which only meant, they’d warned, that they hadn’t found any. Smiling blandly at the glitter off Bill’s glasses, he reminded himself that there was a sort of communal telepathy in academia: It was common for a lot of people to have the same thought at practically the same moment, and lately William James had been in the air—especially his passage on dupery.