The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “What does that mean?”

  “What I’m trying to say,” she said, struggling to keep her voice down, “what I’m always trying to say is, you’re unobservant!”

  “Of course if Ken is unobservant, too—”

  “By comparison Ken is merely absent-minded. I can put up with that. What I can’t put up with is your conspiracy. That seems to be your name for the place you go to when you stop being here! At least Ken exists.”

  Suddenly—no, Parker thought, predictably, inevitably—a head popped up over her shoulder from the booth behind: a little face, mirror lenses, fake beard dangling half off.

  Get used to it! he told himself. If you live in a theme park, things are going to pop up. What was called for now was an act of will. If he looked one more instant Fran would turn around, it would be the “burnt face” incident all over again, and he might lose his last chance to win her back. If he even allowed his attention to wander from her for a second, it might be all over. He forced his eyes back on Fran; her chin was crinkling as it sometimes did when she was holding back tears. He took her hand, aware of movement behind her. Apparently the man was tilting his head from side to side.

  All right, he was unobservant. But was he unobservant enough? Could he, through an act of focused, intensive obtuseness, blot out the man’s existence? It was his only chance. Yes, he could do it.

  “Your hand is sweating,” she said. “You’re like a teenager, Parker; I suppose that’s part of your charm.”

  He smiled at her, trying not to think of the candle flames like pupils in the mirror lenses.

  He gripped her hand; exultantly he thought, I know how to do this! It was all very simple: an application of the mental processes he used when he walked through a dangerous neighborhood with his eyes straight ahead; turned on the TV because he didn’t like where his thoughts were heading; looked away from an old friend crossing the street to avoid him; gave money to the first two homeless people he saw and then had to pass three more; insisted so energetically to his parents that he was fine, he began to think maybe he was; awoke with the terrors and, just as he remembered why, rolled over and fell back to sleep.

  It was over; he knew he’d done it. What had happened, he believed, was that he’d rebuilt the world from the ground up with the annoying little face snipped out. He didn’t try to look directly at the spot the man had occupied. The prospect of what remained was too frightening: a nothing, a negative hallucination. He was thinking metaphorically, of course—of course! of course!—but he believed he’d found an inner power that made him impervious to the little face. Parker recalled Harry Krell’s snide comment that his obtuseness was a triumph of the human spirit and wondered if it might be true. He wondered if he was on the verge of some spiritual milestone or a run-of-the-mill breakdown.

  “You see what I mean?” she said, tearing her hand from his grip. “You don’t pay attention. I used to wonder how you could live with no hobbies, in an apartment with practically no furnishings and nothing on the walls. Then I realized: It doesn’t matter what your apartment looks like because you’re not there. You’re not here! You don’t exist.”

  Apparently his spiritual progress had a ways to go because now all he wanted to do was one-up her. “I’m unobservant? Tell me: You walked right past the booth behind us. Notice anything funny?” He pointed behind her at the man who wasn’t, after all, a silhouette carved out of the void, but still a squirrely little guy whose dangling beard swung pendulously as he tilted his head from side to side, gawking at Parker. The pianist was noodling a glissando-filled “How High the Moon?”

  To spite Parker Fran had taken her time turning around but now she emitted a brief shrieking laugh.

  “Didn’t I know you in high school?” the little man asked Parker. He’d lifted the frames and was squinting out beneath them. He took hold of his beard as if to pull it off, but whatever ritual he was enacting seemed to restrain him. “Lane Tech? Electric Shop? Mr. Krolowitz?”

  “ ‘Electric Shop,’ ” Parker quoted Mr. Krolowitz, “ ‘is like a game of football.’ ”

  “ ‘You’ve got to know the game—uh…’ ”

  “ ‘You’ve got to play the game before you know the rules?’ ”

  “Jeffrey Parker, right? Ted Stevens.”

  Parker said, “The facelessness is familiar, but—I supposedly knew this guy in high school,” he told Fran.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she replied with undeniable sincerity.

  Parker was trying to recall a Ted Stevens from high school but found himself distracted by the man’s dark, expensively layered hair: Why bother if you’re going to end up looking like a maniac anyway? The portion of the man’s face from which the beard had worked loose was pink and clean-shaven. Parker wondered if it was a Faceless Man custom to eat with one’s beard dangling out of the way.

  Fran’s sense of the absurd had overcome her squeamishness; she flashed her parade-float smile at the mirror lenses and in her brightest politician’s-daughter voice said, “Hiiii!”

  The greeting’s volume and sheer force of vivacity made Ted shrink back a bit. “This is Bob,” he said, moving aside to let Fran and Parker see the man rising from the seat behind him—expensively tailored, barrel-chested, mirror-lensed, his beard pointing rakishly to the left.

  Bob nodded and sat down.

  “I can’t help noticing—” Parker said.

  “No one can. That’s the point of the Legion of Faceless Men.”

  “Were you injured in Vietnam?” Parker regretted the question even before Fran flashed him an anxious glance.

  “No, those were the founders. But the Legion’s expanding. It’s for the little guy—every average guy who gets the shaft and you never hear about it. The disguise is because the elites in this country want us to shut up and stay invisible. They want us under wraps. We’ll show ’em under wraps! They don’t want to hear from the little guy.” Fran flashed Parker a look that he thought took note of the fact that Ted really was a little guy—his mouth just reaching the top of the booth.

  “It sounds kind of vague,” Fran said.

  “There’s nothing vague about it. Little guys like us work hard and pay taxes so welfare cheats can sit on their stoops. I have property in upper Michigan and I can’t chop down my own trees because some hoot owl might—”

  “So you wear beards and mirror sunglasses because you’re Republicans?”

  Fran marveled.

  Ted observed her studiedly deadpan expression to see if he was being made fun of. “Some of us are Republicans, some are Democrats. Some are conservatives like me, some are liberals like Bob. Some—”

  Parker hadn’t come here to be edified in dimwit populism. “Nice seeing you again, Ted,” he said tersely. He’d find out soon enough what these people had in mind: The convention started tomorrow.

  As far as one could make out, Ted Stevens appeared to be glowering. “You know, I didn’t like you in high school either.”

  “At least you remember who I am. You were saying,” Parker said to Fran.

  Her rounded eyes and mouth imitated a child who’d just been read a ghost story. Behind her Ted had turned back to his friend. For half a minute she leaned back against her seat, listening to the conversation behind her, eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “All right,” Parker whispered, giving in, “what are they talking about?”

  “Real estate,” she whispered. The waitress arrived with their plates; caught, Fran sprang forward and folded her hands at the edge of the table.

  When they were alone Parker said, “I don’t want to lose you. I’ll observe you so closely, so continuously, so unblinkingly, so adoringly, so exclusively I’ll bump into lampposts.” With exaggerated scrutiny he watched the salad fork rise to her mouth.

  “It’s better than walking me into lampposts,” she recalled, chewing. “
Can’t you observe me and the lamppost?”

  “It can’t be done.” He sliced his roast beef. “Every time you open a door you close one someplace else, is that the cliché I’m looking for?”

  The implication wasn’t lost on her; she turned her splendid profile to him while she thought, compressing her lips and crinkling her chin.

  He watched her Expressionist cheekbones flutter above the candle till she turned to face him, propped her chin on her hand, and said, “You’re a great guy.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Let me finish. Maybe I’m still in love with you, but…for instance, where did you go when I lost you a few minutes ago? Sometimes talking to you is like talking to a rain check.”

  Reluctantly Parker told her how for approximately ninety seconds he’d snipped Ted Stevens out of existence.

  “You’re weird!”

  “You haven’t asked,” he noted, “why heavily disguised men keep turning up, their beards askew.”

  He waited; she methodically cut up her salad.

  At last he said, “It’s too threatening, isn’t it? You’re dealing with it by protective obtuseness. You close a door to open one someplace else.”

  She playfully tapped his shin with her toe. “So you think you’ve discovered a higher level of obtuseness?” she asked with a gee-whiz expression.

  “Maybe what we call inattentiveness is just a weak, halfhearted version of something else. When a yogi walks on coals or lies on a bed of spikes without feeling pain, we don’t say he’s unobservant. We don’t say he’s in denial!”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re taking Attention Deficit Disorder to a higher plane.” She ran her hand along his cheek. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Yes, I’m joking, but I can’t help thinking there’s something to it. There’d better be. These people have something planned for me, and so far the only defense they can’t deal with is adamant rock-solid obliviousness. Maybe it’s not just a character flaw.” He took his first bite of the roast beef, whose gravy had begun to congeal. “I suspect, my darling, we’re discussing my powers of observation because you’re not going to make a decision today.”

  She set down her fork and leaned on her forearms. “No,” she said running a thumb over the back of a chafed hand. “I have to leave in five minutes for my interview.” She waited for him to say something. “If I leave a door open will one close someplace else? Don’t give up on me, Parker.”

  * * *

  —

  When the doorbell rang at nine that night he fleetingly entertained the thought that Fran had played the tape and was waiting downstairs to beg his forgiveness. Far more likely, he’d find the entrance teeming with disguised men and his hapless reflected image. The super still hadn’t fixed the intercom, and Parker hated giving his enemies the satisfaction of making him come down to look. He could buzz the caller in and question him through the door, but the buzzer usually didn’t work, either. He tried not to imagine Fran waiting for him on the stone table in the lobby, eyes closed, arms crossed, impersonating a mummy for old times’ sake. Fat chance!

  It seemed as good a time as any to abandon hope. He adjusted the neck of the fluorescent desk lamp and was about to return to the paper he’d been grading when the bell rang again. He cocked his head. The gun would have come in handy, but he’d put it in Dobbs’s glove compartment before they visited Fran, and afterward, deciding it created more problems than it solved, he’d asked Dobbs to get rid of it.

  Half a minute later his visitor rang again, but Parker forced his eyes back on the phrase, “Marriage is a valuable institution because it prepares children for the institution of marriage.” He rubbed his eyes and reread the sentence. The blear of blue and red ink threatened to flow off the page.

  When on a third reading the sentence still read “Marriage is a valuable institution because it prepares children for the institution of marriage,” and the bell rang again, he decided to answer the goddamn door. Anyway, the lock on the entrance door was broken, too, come to think of it, and the bad people could walk right up. Perhaps no one but Fran awaiting the chance to impersonate a mummy would ring so persistently.

  Unless someone was waiting for him to step out of his apartment. He inched open the door, found no one on the landing, and started down the steps. He met no one on the stairs, and though a distant stereo thrummed through his shoes he heard nothing but a repetitive squeak.

  When he reached the lobby he saw that he’d been half-right about his visitor and that his prayers had been answered imprecisely. Two women lay on the huge stone table, arms crossed over their white blouses and shoulder-padded power suits, fists tightened around their purse straps. The stout blonde next to Fran, whom Parker recognized as her high school friend, law school classmate and drinking buddy Marcy Voglemann, was tittering rhythmically—three squeals alternating with a pause. He guessed they’d been taking turns running to the bell and back to the table. Their heads were pillowed on their folded coats. He crept up; Fran opened one eye, then closed it, reassuming her mask of impassive glamour, inviting him to notice that even drunk as a skunk she had poise and posture and cheekbones enough to rule the dead.

  He sat down on the edge of the table between their heads, watching the rise and fall of Fran’s chest and the thin bow of her mouth, hearing Marcy giggle behind him like some hazardous untended machine, and tried to use the moment before they opened their eyes to figure out why they were here. All he knew was that Fran wouldn’t have brought Marcy if she’d played the tape. He assumed they’d met downtown for dinner after interviewing at law firms, and somewhere past the first drink they’d had a brainstorm. Whatever it was, it surely involved more than driving all the way up here for the pleasure of impersonating mummies. Still, it was cold in the lobby, and they’d gone to some trouble to make him laugh, so he laughed. Fran opened her eyes, and it seemed to Parker that in the next instant they completed a complex transaction—she searched his face for signs of resentment or hatred, he smiled and she relaxed, displaying her Queen of Egypt sneer.

  “When I saw the two of you lying there, I thought, there must be a caption for this.” He glanced over his shoulder to include Marcy, who’d sat up and was rubbing her lower back with both hands. The dampness of the lobby was unraveling her perm. With her round blue eyes and round face she reminded Parker of a gigantic Cabbage Patch Kid. He liked her but was always wary of her nervousness, her pained laugh, and her preemptive sarcasm.

  “When I was a kid,” he said turning back to Fran, “there was a guy who did a series of books—photographs with wacky captions. I can’t remember his name but he’s dead. I keep thinking everything would make sense if we had the wacky captions.”

  “I know,” she said lugubriously, reaching up and mussing his hair, “there ought to be Cliff Notes.” She sat up. “We have a surprise for you, Parker.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said cautiously.

  “Hellohhhh!” Marcy yelled, testing the reverb of the cavernous lobby, whose four archways led to stairwells. The expanse of stone tiles—dingy black-and-white—contributed to the bizarre acoustics, a dim subway roar in which no sound seemed to die. A fake chandelier missing half its glass and lights twinkled above them, and candelabra wall fixtures holding flame-shaped bulbs, most of which had been removed, threw splashes on the eggshell walls. It had been a while since he’d looked at this place—so awful it was cheering him up. And despite his disappointment at Marcy’s presence he was grateful for the company and any diversion.

  As the two women sat listening to the sourceless noise, he dreaded that Fran might give him her old pep talk, asking why he’d surrendered to his depression and sought out the most depressing place on earth. But aside from Marcy’s “I love what you’ve done with the place!” when they stepped into his apartment, and the glance the two women exchanged in reaction to the bare bulbs, bare walls, and stick furniture, the subject didn’
t come up. The subject of his face didn’t come up either, so evidently Marcy had been briefed.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  They shook their heads; Fran tossed her coat on the couch, plopped next to it, drew a deep breath and began. “So!” She drew the coat closer to make room for Marcy. “This evening we were having dinner at the Berghoff—”

  “How did your interviews go?” He sat down on the folding card-table chair he’d brought over from the “dining table.”

  “Parker! I’m telling a story! Well!” she continued breathlessly, making her eyes big. “When we left we saw a crowd of men dressed like those men we’ve been seeing—the no-face club?”

  Parker wasn’t surprised; he’d resigned himself to the omnipresence of faceless men. In the course of the day his fear of them had waned to anxiety and now (maybe it was just exhaustion) to boredom—he wished he could change the channel.

  “In disguise! Leafletting! They have megaphones! They’re having a convention! It starts tomorrow!” In hilarity Fran’s speech could turn songlike, a ringing mezzo-soprano that recalled her high school voice training. “Remember what you said, ‘A convention of faceless men, oh sure!’ So anyway—”

  “Faceless!” Marcy shrieked, struggling with her coat till Fran helped with the sleeves. “Faceless guys in disguise! Oh, and what’s their motto, ‘face us!’ They can’t face us—they’re faceless!” The two friends broke up with their ritual side-clutching and back-slapping.

  Feeling like a party poop, he took their coats to the bedroom and draped them on the bed.

  When he returned to his chair Marcy yelled, “Tell him about the badge!”

  “So I have that toy FBI badge we found on the sidewalk, remember, Parker?” She was referring to the plastic badge Ziploc had dropped outside the disco. “It was sweet,” she said to Marcy. “When I left the next morning Jeff pinned me with it.”

  “With something he found on the street? Frannie, you don’t know where it’s been!”