The Blindfold Test

by Barry Schechter

  “Jeff!”

  A few yards ahead Steve Dobbs was getting out of his BMW. No sissy Thornhill & Thornhill for Steve; he wore a real trenchcoat, the funky kind Mike Hammer would surely get up from the gutter in after a beating. His two shiners from the brawl at Circle Campus were the same shade as Parker’s. He grinned as Parker came closer, touching the discoloration under one eye. “You and I could be a rock act.” The frizz on his head was strung with glittering drops.

  He nodded at Jack and Mrs. Slansky. Jack was too self-absorbed, apparently, to note the coincidence of the black eyes. But Mrs. Slansky looked cannily from Parker to Steve and back to Parker; she was onto his little tricks.

  “What are you doing here?” Parker didn’t wait for an answer. “I see you’re dressed for the convention. What do you know?”

  “I’m covering it for The Exhibitionist. That reminds me. I’m sorry the article…”

  “The convention, Steve?”

  “All I know about the convention is that they dress like your guy—so there must be a connection—and that people like these…” He searched for a phrase adequate to his contempt.

  “…give the paranoid community a bad name,” Parker said to get him off it.

  “Yeah. Anyway, I was visiting my dad and my stepmother and I thought I’d see how you’re doing—thought maybe you’d have some idea what’s going on. Don’t tell me you’re going? You couldn’t be that…”

  Parker led him by the arm down the row of cars and when they were out of earshot filled him in.

  “Well, let’s go!” Dobbs said without skipping a beat, propelled by all his hunched-up energy, and they were in the car—Mrs. Slansky in front, Jack and Parker in the back—before Parker thought to ask about the gun.

  As they pulled onto Oakton Dobbs held up his middle finger, parrying the horn-blast behind them. “Let’s see if we can get something on the convention.” He turned on the radio and stabbed buttons.

  Mrs. Slansky covered her ears at the detonations of music and speech. “Would you please?” she shouted.

  “Steve,” said Parker when Dobbs had turned down the news station, “remember that item I asked you to get rid of?”

  “Oh, shit. It’s still in the glove compartment. Guess I was a little slap-happy that night.”

  Parker thought it wise to say no more about it till Jack and Mrs. Slansky were out of the car.

  Mrs. Slansky turned in her seat and regarded him; he endured her stare till he felt compelled to speak.

  “Shouldn’t you have your belt on?”

  She said, “I was just remembering how you were as a little boy. I used to give him a quarter,” she told Jack, “for knowing all the state capitals. Your mother was always showing you off. She’d say, ‘Jeffrey, where’s Alaska? What’s an electron?’ Oh, and you’d look so serious answering. A real little man. Your mother was so proud. You know, I’ll bet that was the problem. She spoiled you.”

  Inhaling a compound of damp coats and makeup, he waited for her to commence bouncing off the roof. He couldn’t afford to squander energy on this.

  “My doctors told me what you did.” She pushed up her glasses to wipe away tears, her voice cracking. “Do you hate me that much?”

  “I don’t hate you, Adele.”

  “I keep trying to remember something I did. When you were little you couldn’t say ‘nuclear.’ I remember I corrected you and, boy, did you make a face at me.”

  “The doctors were lying. The rage clinic is run by a firm called Tolerance Management and…”

  “Oh, that’s right, everyone’s conspiring against you. The doctors are lying because Anne Parker’s little Jeffrey is so important.”

  “Parker’s a standup guy,” Jack said. “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. To the casual observer it might seem improbable that all those clerks have it in for you. Why, some people might even doubt that Lionel Trilling ruined my life.” It was tempting to hear irony and self-mockery in these remarks, but with Jack it was hard to be sure. “These matters call for something like professional courtesy. I believe you, you believe me, why shouldn’t we believe Parker? Without some solidarity the bastards win.”

  She looked uncertain. “But if you don’t believe your own doctors…isn’t that a sign you’re not getting better?”

  “To the uninformed,” said Dobbs facing the road, “it might seem hard to believe that the government’s testing space-based weapons on the homeless.”

  In the protracted silence that followed, Mrs. Slansky appeared to lose her train of thought; she turned back to the road.

  The streetlights came on. He watched Skokie pass by like a film loop—a reiteration of houses, franchises, powerlines, and scant scrawny trees—hoping the view might narcotize his fear.

  They were approaching the closest thing in Skokie to a landmark: In front of Besnick Ford a red Thunderbird, a new model every year, turned on a platform at the top of a thirty-foot pole, and he’d never heard a satisfactory explanation of how they got it up there. This year’s Thunderbird glistened above them. It was undermining his efforts not to panic, and he focused on his plan.

  If he was lucky, Todd Woolcurt would turn up when paged. Todd could follow discreetly—as discreetly as a 6’7” Michael Jordan lookalike could be—choose his moment, and do whatever it was he did. Or he might choose that moment not to exist.

  What about 911? Locate Fran (he hoped her hair was down!), clear the place out with a bomb threat or a fire alarm, grab her in the confusion.

  Was it too late to call the police? He’d have to simplify the story. No. There wasn’t time. What if he tried to involve some cops when he got there? The sight of uniforms dispersing among the crowd would certainly get her killed. Even disguised cops…

  How about this? It appeared that Hank Monroe, Jr. was hoping to use the hallfull of identically disguised men to his advantage. It could work the other way. Presumably there’d be uniformed ushers; bribe one and change into his uniform. Send Dobbs—in the ubiquitous beard, shades, and trenchcoat—to the rendezvous, and when Monroe, Jr. approached Dobbs, thinking him Parker, come up behind and get the drop on him. Well, couldn’t it work? Maybe, if the guy was really acting alone. But the enemy had the advantage of dictating where they’d meet, and he’d be expecting some kind of bonehead cowboys-and-Indians ploy. And Dobbs was short, red-headed, and practically bald. The most likely outcome was that Steve, or whoever Parker sent, would get killed.

  Which left him with his original plan—the least desirable, most workable: Get killed. If there was no other way to save her, he’d force them to kill him instead. He hoped she’d use the chaos to get away—hoped that once he was dead, his enemies would lose all interest in her. Well that was easy, he thought. Determined as he was to do it, he couldn’t quite picture it happening. But surely the reason people could throw themselves on hand grenades, say, was that they didn’t imagine it first.

  But what was he missing? He went back over his plans, all scenarios ending in shots, screams, trampling, a crush of beards and mirror images.

  By the time he found it necessary to crack open his window, the skyline was massed across the expressway, the Sears Tower silvered with the rain’s last light. Jack was speaking to the back of Dobbs’s head, his words lost in the uproar of clammy wind, his profile flickering as an El sparked past on the median.

  Parker closed the window; Dobbs was saying, “Exactly!”

  Jack leaned close to the back of Dobbs’s neck. “James Joyce once said, ‘I appreciate that there are two sides to this issue. But I cannot be on both sides at the same time.’ But you—.”

  “Hold on.” Dobbs turned up the radio.

  “…the most stringent security measures this town has seen since the infamous Sixty-eight Democratic Convention: Metal detectors at all entrances, emergency exits guarded, and no one, and I mean no one, admitted inside without s
ubmitting to a weapons search. After a half-hour delay for a bomb search, the doors…”

  So much for bomb threats. So much for the gun. So much for getting the drop.

  What was he missing?

  How could Hank Monroe, Jr.—working alone, if Fletcher was to be believed, and under scrutiny by the FBI—kidnap Fran, then smuggle his victim and a gun into a tightly guarded convention? Maybe he couldn’t!

  “Hear that?” Dobbs was saying. “Overturned sixteen-wheeler about a half- mile ahead. I’m gonna shoot over to Lake Shore Drive.”

  “Steve, let me have the phone.”

  Dobbs took it off its bracket and handed it over his shoulder; it looked like a TV remote with illuminated buttons. Parker dialed, hoping she’d at least left a new recording. But it was still the old one, Fran doing her tough-cookie impersonation: “This is Frances Anne. Don’t waste my time,” and he thought she’d better be that tough.

  If he truly believed she wasn’t there, it was time to bail out. But what was he missing? He made his mind a blank, then turned on the thing and seized it. Wait…

  Mrs. Slansky was staring at him again, her rouged face a non-color in the sodium vapor lights. “Did you know I could have been killed when that stuff sprayed on me? The doctor says I could have had another stroke. You didn’t want that, did you, dear?” She was trembling, perhaps with the effort to keep her voice down and her smile affixed.

  Whatever he thought he’d grasped was leaking away like a dream riddled with daylight. He let it go for now, alarmed at Mrs. Slansky’s trembling and rigidity. She winced from the exertion of her smile, and he wondered if all her mannerly passive-agressive wrath might kill her right here.

  “Do you really think I’d try to hurt you, Adele?” He was floundering. Perhaps she needed a little good-natured teasing to remind her he was still young Jeffrey Parker. “If I gave you a stroke, do you know how mad my mom would be?” He spread his arms palms up. “If I knew it was you I’d have set out candles and caviar.”

  She gripped the top of her seat. His attempt at a reassuring smile had gone badly wrong.

  He turned to John Connor Murray. “Help me out here, Jack.”

  Jack undid his seat belt and leaning in front of Parker placed a hand on her arm. “Adele and I have a surprise, don’t we, dear?” Hearing Parker’s intake of breath he added, “It’s a good surprise, isn’t it, dear?”

  She appeared to have no idea what he was talking about and after a moment returned her attention to Parker, the expressway lights rippling across her glasses and distorted wet eyes. “Did you know that when I get nervous I have spasms? Usually it’s my right leg. I’ll be at the grocery store or at one of my meetings or even out on the street and I’ll fall down and scream. Is that what you wanted?”

  “Adele and I bought disguises,” Jack persisted. “We picked up some beard-and-sunglasses kits at 7-Eleven. They’ll be handing out beards at the door, but Adele thought these would be more sanitary, and I agree. We bought extras in case anyone joined us. I have three in my case and you have two in your purse, dear.” He leaned back and picked up his case.

  Opening her purse and gazing inside, she seemed to come upon herself. “Oh. Yes.”

  “Shall we hand them out now?” Jack still wasn’t used to being the reasonable one and couldn’t help overplaying. His false reassurance and protuberant eyes were alarming: he looked like he was about to read the funnies out loud. “Oh, let’s!”

  Mrs. Slansky handed Parker his package; the glasses and beard were encased in molded plastic and mounted on cardboard. He held it up to the window. Just under the punch-hole and the 7-Eleven logo was a drawing of a man’s face wearing the disguise. The face—craggy and half-shadowed, white starbursts exploding off its mirror lenses—was centered against an American flag.

  Parker reached for his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”

  “It’s my treat, dear.” It looked like a real smile this time, nothing caged behind her teeth, and for the moment she seemed her old self.

  “Thank you…very much.” He set the package on his lap and tried to be still, worried that any sound or movement might shake her fragments into their mad configuration.

  Dreading eye contact, he slowly turned away. They’d just come off the ramp into stalled traffic on Lake Shore Drive, and ignoring her stare he looked up at glass-and-steel curtain walls and gapped rows of lights.

  He brought his mind back to the question of Fran and her kidnapper, and there it was. “Step on it!” he yelled, causing Mrs. Slansky to flinch and Dobbs to sweep a hand across the panorama of taillights frozen in the windshield.

  “If this was a monster truck I could drive over them,” Dobbs said, “but no can do. What’s up?”

  “All this time I’ve been thinking either Fran’s been kidnapped and she’s at the arena, or she hasn’t been kidnapped and she’s someplace else. And the more I think about it, the more I think he couldn’t get her in there. But what if she’s there and she hasn’t been kidnapped yet?”

  “So she’s…”

  “Say someone phoned the law school and a left message with the receptionist for her, supposedly from me: big emergency, life-and-death, meet me at the convention, I’ll page you when you get there. Something like that.”

  Dobbs scratched the back of his neck. “But what’s the point, as long as he can get you there?”

  “Before he kills me, I think he wants to kill her in front of me. The point is to make me despair. I know it sounds arty, but that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “She’s pretty smart. Wouldn’t she see through it?”

  “She’s smart, but she’s never gotten over growing up in Schuyler, Minnesota where people don’t lock their doors. It’s an anti-trauma. For example, she’s finally accepted the idea that there’s a conspiracy against me, but at the same time she finds the whole thing silly. She can’t help expecting the world to be sane, orderly, and decent. And I doubt she’ll even consider the possibility that one of my phone messages might really be from someone else.”

  Mrs. Slansky had fixed on him again. “Kidnapped? Killed?” The last word came out in a screech.

  “It’s nothing you have to worry about,” Parker said. “Steve, we can talk about this later.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Slansky said bitterly. “Better not talk about it. We don’t want to make the old lady nervous. Let’s everybody smile and smile and say stupid things because we have to humor the old lady.” Her grotesque smile was back, caricaturing an eternity of false cheer. “Why don’t you just say it’s the blabneeto? Everybody else says it’s the blabneeto.”

  Turning off Lake Shore Drive at Chicago Avenue, they were gridlocked among the clubs and singles bars. Usually on a Friday night the after-work crowd would be packing the entrances of O’Halloran’s, Rogue Moon, the Hardy Har, and Mr. Silky’s. Tonight Mr. Silky’s animated neon top hat tipped above an empty doorstep. The singles had either stayed away or were hiding indoors; he saw no one on foot but the huge crowds of disguised men heading west for the Arena, moving in a lightning of mirrored lights.

  He opened his window. The Cermak Arena was a mile away, but the rain had stopped, cars glittered, mirror lenses flashed, the wind carried the smell of the lake, and no one was waiting for the shuttle buses. Except for the darkness and disguises, it might have been opening day at the ball park.

  “The blabneeto, dear?” Jack said conversationally.

  “It started when I had that trouble with the strawberries at Dominick’s. I told you about the smart-aleck kid at the register who answered everything with, ‘It’s the blabneeto, ma’am.’ I thought, it’s got to be my hearing, he can’t really be saying, ‘it’s the blabneeto.’ ” Parker was glad to have her looking at someone else. Jack nodded, pop-eyed with empathy.

  “Well, I told you what happened then—knocking over the strawberries and getting arrested and ha
ving to go to therapy and so on. And I was never sure. Did the kid really say ‘blabneeto’? But two weeks ago I’m at Save-Rite. I hand the kid at the register a coupon—Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice, $2.75. He rings up 3.09! I say, excuse me, it’s 2.75, that’s what it says on the coupon! He says it’s 3.09…and then he lowers his voice and it’s hard to make out the rest, but it sounds like he’s saying, ‘because of the blabneeto’!” And I swear he looks over at the girl at the next register and smirks. And I ask him, what did you say? And he looks at the girl again and then at me. Needless to say, there’s a long line behind me, and people are making those asthma sounds they make when you’re holding up the line. The kid says, ‘It’s 3.09,’ and then he lowers his voice again, but I’m ready this time, and I lean in when he speaks, and I swear it sounds like he’s saying ‘it’s the blabneeto.’ And then he tells me if I don’t want to buy it, I should step aside! And I think, maybe I’ll just go berserk. But after the strawberries I knew better. Let me give you boys some advice. If you’re going to go berserk, do it while you’re young. If it happens when you’re old, you can’t break anything, and people think it’s funny. And the kid? Can’t hurt him. He’s big and he’s got a big greasy black ponytail and he looks like he lifts dumbbells. He is dumbbells.” She laughed; Jack chuckled warily. “And then I started thinking.”

  “You’re still in line?” Dobbs wondered.

  “I’m still in line, and the kid’s looking at the people behind me. He gives everyone a look, like, I know she’s an idiot, and I’ll have her out of the way in a second. Well that’s when I started thinking. Do all these smart-aleck clerks have some kind of club? Why would the kid at Dominick’s and the kid at Save-Rite both be saying ‘blabneeto?’ And why don’t they say ‘blabneeto’ to anyone else? And I thought, maybe I’m just crazy, and you know, it was a relief.”

  Parker wondered if Fran was being paged right now.

  “The only trouble was, I was sure he’d said, ‘blabneeto.’ So I said, ‘Young man, will you please write down what you said about why the price is 3.09?’ Well he looks right over me like I don’t exist: ‘Next!’ But I wouldn’t let the next person past me and I put my face right in front of that kid’s. He said he’d call the manager. I said, if you want me to have one of my spasms, fine, clear the floor, but all you have to do is write down one short sentence. Well, he says he doesn’t have a pen, but all the people in line are taking out pens and scraps of paper. So he writes it down. The writing is very tiny and it looks like it’s just scribble. I say, ‘I can’t read this,’ and that’s when the people in line started yelling at me. I tried to show it to the people behind me and they wouldn’t even look. So I told the kid I was going to take that scrap of paper and have it analyzed, and it better mean something. When I got home I turned on the lamp and found a magnifying glass, and I thought, At last the truth. I was hoping for the best. I thought maybe I’ll take a good look and it will say, ‘You had to buy two bottles to get the lower price.’ But I opened my purse and the paper was gone! I took everything out—it was definitely gone. I figured that kid must have palmed it, like a magician? Then I told myself, come on, Adele, you’re old, you don’t hear so good, and you lose things. Those kids in the stores don’t have a club where they decide to say ‘blabneeto.’ So you’re cracked, Adele. Big deal.”