It wasn’t till Monroe, Jr. extended his gun arm, held the muzzle a foot from Parker’s head, and snarled, “Please—share!” that he realized he’d been laughing. Parker chocked it back, and it burst from his nose and clenched teeth. “It’s not you. No, really.” He coughed, shrugged, turned up his palms.
“You ain’t gonna go batshit on me, are you, Ace?”
“Not a chance.” The truth was, he was feeling pretty good, his hope and terror having negotiated a sort of euphoria. He believed that only a gun at his head prevented him from running up the wall and and back-flipping onto his feet.
“Gas.” Monroe, Jr. appeared to be thinking out loud. “First sign of gas I’ll shoot you, I don’t care if the building goes up.”
“You have twenty seconds.”
“If you’re nervous,” Parker said solicitously, “we could wait outside.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Ten. Nine…”
One way or another, the life he hated was counting down. He smiled back at his goofball smile in the mirror lenses: See you on the other side.
Monroe, Jr. was right-handed. He was holding the gun with the left; his right hand, maybe the entire arm, was useless. The gun was a foot away. Soon as all hell breaks loose, go for it with both hands.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”
Nothing happened.
It went on happening. The gun was still a foot from his head. The two men went on facing each other, sneaking glances to the left and right. The seconds went on arriving, each with its freight of nothing.
Indicating all that nothing with a wave of his gun, Monroe, Jr. observed, “Your cavalry has arrived, such as it is.”
There might have been a trace of compassion in Monroe, Jr.’s needling as he said, “Okay, hope didn’t work. Settle for truth. And a chair, maybe—no kiddin’, better get your ass secured.”
Parker remained standing just to spite him. “Skip the drumroll.” He glanced ruefully at his reflection: Here we are, still.
“My high school English teacher use to say, ‘Man is the creature who asks “why?” ’ Ever wonder—”
There was a crackling noise, then elevator music, heavy on the strings, began piping from the speakers.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Monroe, Jr. sighed. “What now! And where do you think you’re goin’?”
* * *
—
The babies! Parker was heading for the place where the installer had been working, the old fuse box near the back door. He had to get there to save the babies.
In one part of his mind he knew that this business with the babies was subliminal trickery—its purpose beyond him—and that if he kept walking he was likely to get shot. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because…because of the babies! He had to save the babies!
He was halfway down the hall when Monroe, Jr. shouted, “Forget the story, I’ll kill you now!”
The part of his mind that thought it knew what was going on saw two choices: He was dead either way. Either face the truth and get shot, or turn your back on it and get shot in the back. He stopped, turned to face his enemy. He was ready for his recognition scene.
“This better be good,” he said. He didn’t know if he could stand there another second; things were looking bad for the babies. “What’s the point!” Situation with the babies: critical.
Monroe, Jr. tilted his head to the left, then slowly cocked it to the right. “Not now!” he screamed. “Save the goddamn babies!”
Let us run! Let us run downtown and save the babies! He skidded into the back door and turned to the old fuse box on his right. Lift the latch and save the babies. From some old, irrelevant universe Hank Monroe, Jr. was calling, “If your hand comes outta there with any kinda weapon…”
He released the latch. Most of what followed came too fast, too bunched together for comprehension. At the time he was aware only of something hurtling toward him out of the dark; of Monroe, Jr. screaming “No!” and managing to shove him partly out of its way. It wasn’t till long afterward that he could recall the moment clearly. In dreams, in random turns of thought, he’d see the thing coming in inexorable slo-mo, frame-by-frame, as if it had been heading for him his whole life.
* * *
—
A weighted slap of water shocked him awake. The eyewash of Parker’s vision gave Hank Monroe, Jr., standing over him with the mop bucket, the gleam of a welcoming angel. He gagged up water and thought he tasted blood in the mix.
He closed his eyes; Monroe, Jr. poked his ribs with his shoe. “How—?” Parker exhaled. He’d been thinking “What?” and “Why?” but this was the easiest syllable to form, not much more than a sigh or a moan. He heard the hiss of water seeping into his clothes. It smelled like the Y.
“How long? Not long.” Monroe, Jr.’s shoes squished when he shifted position. “You been out round a minute.”
The sound Parker had been trying to place was his teeth chattering. “How—?”
“How’d you get knocked out? Don’t you know?” Monroe, Jr. set down the bucket and loomed back into Parker’s vision. By way of an answer, he jerked his thumb to Parker’s right.
The slight turn of the neck required to look set off his pain. The blast of it threatened to push out the sides of his head; it left no room to take in the sight above him, a giant boxing glove at the end of a thick stiff spring.
Monroe, Jr. held the glove down and released it; with a muted Boing! it commenced bouncing up and down. “It’s heavy. You’d be out colder than a tater if I didn’t push you. Can’t say I get the setup, Ace.”
Parker refused to believe that the world’s ultimate security system was nothing but a sadistic prank by his best friend. But whatever it was supposed to do, it clearly had failed. Unless it had worked and Parker was just too groggy to see how. Maybe things were going splendidly. No, he was fairly certain they were not.
Monroe, Jr. leaned against the wall opposite the glove. “So, anyway, man is the creature who asks ‘Why?’ Joe says the meaning of life is to work out your karma, Jane says it’s to do God’s will, and there’s always the guy who says it’s all in your head. Who knows, huh? ’Cept in your case. In your case we know. In a minute you might be the first guy who knows what his life means. Say, I bet that’s the deal with the glove. You knew this was comin’, you can’t take it.”
Suddenly Parker knew what it was. He released his breath, already thinking big deal.
“In 1970, J. Edgar Hoover had to pick the first target for the Breather Program. You know why he picked you?” Monroe, Jr. leaned close to watch his reaction. “He didn’t like your face. That’s right. He didn’t like your face.”
* * *
—
“So?”
“I knew you’d fight it, amigo, but the truth’s gonna get in there. Nothin’ can keep it out. Oh, you’re gonna feel it. I won’t think you’re less of a man if you wanna cry.”
“Actually,” Parker was having trouble with his “l”s, “I’ve heard this before.”
Monroe, Jr. sputtered, “Yeah but—”
“SO?”
Flustered, Monroe, Jr. went on trying to make the sale. “Most folks have days when they think their life’s absurd.” He faltered a bit on “absurd,” uncertain, it appeared, whether Hank Monroe, Jr. would say that. “But they cheer themselves up by thinkin’, ‘There must be a good reason why my life’s shit—’ ”
“Your life’s shit?”
Before replying Monroe, Jr. gave Parker a good half-minute to contemplate his speck-size reflections. “They think,” he amended, “there must be a good reason why their life’s shit, even if they’ll never know what it is. But you—”
“Yeah, sure, the despair.”
The mirrors were trembling; Parker wished he’d let the guy have his moment.
“Okay, philoso
phy ain’t your mode. Tell you what. I’ll crack your goddamn pinhead.”
He was dangling his heel above Parker’s face when the doorbell rang. There was a splash as he set his foot back on the floor. “Now who do you suppose that is?” As if picturing what was about to happen he smiled into the distance, his sunglasses catching the light.
“The police,” Parker answered.
“Nice try. It ain’t a real party till the women show up. And I bet you thought you were stallin’ me!” As he stepped over, Parker rolled onto his stomach and grabbed the man’s ankle. Monroe, Jr. laughed, dragging him. Parker slid along the floorboards in his wet clothes.
They’d stopped moving. “You know, Ace, sometimes it’s just more dignified to do nothing.”
Parker slid the sock down, locked his arms round the shin, turned his head sideways and bit into the Achilles tendon. The real guy tasted of sweat, dirt, ash, dirty socks, old shoes, a scab or maybe a patch of psoriasis, and, at last, blood. Monroe, Jr. didn’t scream; he might have been on painkillers. He was trying to shake Parker off, but this was his injured side. He dragged his foot forward—Parker was still clamped on—kneeled, and placed the muzzle against the back of Parker’s head. Its cold spread down his neck and spine. The bell rang again.
Parker had decided he might as well die like those lizards that go on biting even with the head decapitated. His mouth was filling with blood—any second now he’d start choking—when the butt slammed the back of his head.
It hadn’t quite knocked him out. He was curled up on his side gagging blood; through his squint everything looked wet and smeared together, rippling with the pulse in his skull. His intentions, having no workable body to enact them, went charging off like ghosts—to tackle Monroe, Jr., to knock him out with the baseball bat in the coat closet, to stab him with a knife from the kitchenette, to yell down the steps for Fran to run away. Maybe she was downstairs impersonating a mummy; maybe he didn’t know the buzzer didn’t work. Maybe by the time they found each other, the police really would be there.
Monroe, Jr. walked past the buzzer at the end of the hall; he was heading for the front door.
No sound. Parker fought to keep his eyes open. Blood or water or sweat trickled under his collar and across his back.
Then Monroe, Jr.’s voice bubbled up from the bottom of the steps. “Why Grandma!”
Grandma?
“Why Grandma, what a big gun you have! Give it here…So what you gonna do with it, shoot me?” Hank Monroe, Jr. chose that moment to try out a new fake laugh. He enunciated, “Hee! hee! hee!”
They proved to be his last words.
EIGHT
He’d hoped to wrap up his case with a party. Warming up the guests with the classic “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all together,” he’d reach into the formless void of his case and pull out something like a sentence diagram.
By the end he’d have settled for a party at which the guests explained it all to him. He never gave a party, telling himself it was the practical difficulties of getting them all into a room: Fran hated Dobbs and wouldn’t speak to Ken Fletcher and still hadn’t forgiven John Standell for calling her “merely perfect”; John had told him that Todd Woolcurt, the bodyguard, thought Parker insufficiently grateful for his heroism the night of the convention, when atoning for past inaction he’d beaten up and rescued Hank Monroe, Jr.; Parker was reluctant to socialize with Mrs. Slansky, who’d shot and killed Monroe, Jr., true, but had probably come to shoot him; Harry Krell was unreachable, the offices of Tolerance Management having closed down, the phone been disconnected, the convention canceled after the first night; and Hank Monroe, Jr. was dead.
But the truth was, he was tired of his case. By now—it was early December—the topic of Jeffrey Parker seemed as used up as the light and the pulped leaves. He’d thought about little else since the day he learned he had a case, but lately he tried to focus on other people, leaning into conversation with a pouncing empathy that made them shrink back a bit.
At the moment his full attention had lit on Kathryn Ann Standell, who sat propped against her father’s chest staring back. She didn’t appear frightened by his swollen lips or the greenish shiners encircling his eyes like a superhero’s mask; she seemed confounded by him—as if everything else had made sense.
“Babies always look so surprised,” Parker observed. “What were you expecting?” he asked Kathryn. “Hmmm?”
Seated on the couch next to John, Peg leaned forward to study her daughter’s face. “She’s thinking about the old philosophical problem,” she said, rubbing a cloth over the wet spot on Kathryn’s Bugs Bunny T-shirt. “ ‘Why is everything out there instead of in my mouth?’ ”
Parker laughed. “What I’ve been pondering is, what’s the connection between security and getting punched in the face with a giant boxing glove? Sorry. I can’t help wondering.”
John looked down at Kathryn on his lap and tried to entertain her with his exaggerated sigh, going slack and deflated, but she was still watching Parker.
John’s display of weariness was a reminder that he’d already tried to explain the boxing glove when he visited Parker in the hospital (where Parker had been given stitches for his head wound, held a day for observation, and released when they found no brain damage). He’d been contrite about what happened, of course, wincing so fiercely the tendons bulged in his neck, but as soon as he began explaining the system he was carried away by its conceptual elegance and literal brute logic. It had mostly whizzed past Parker.
“Forgive me if I wasn’t more attentive in the hospital,” Parker said. “I’d been hit in the face with a giant boxing glove.”
“Yeah, well.” John’s sweep of the arm indicated life’s infinite variety and surprise. His happiness still bore the gloss of a lotto winner surprised by flashbulbs.
“Jeff?” Peg held up the bottle and he extended his glass across the coffee table.
“I keep thinking,” Parker said, “the whole point of the system…you were more interested in protecting me from the truth than from, ah, death?”
John did a fair imitation of Steve Dobbs’s “Exactly!”
Peg poured the wine and looked as baffled as Parker. “When,” he said as the wine reached the rim.
“Am I to understand that we’re marketing a new kind of home security?”
Peg wondered. “ ‘Die happy’? Comparatively happy in Jeff’s case. ‘Die with your illusions intact’?”
“Protecting Parker from the truth was cheaper and easier than protecting him from his enemy.”
Parker and Peg exchanged looks. “John’s tweaking us a little,” she said. “He hates having to repeat himself.”
“You said the guy had an unlimited expense account,” John began. He spoke with the terse grudging matter-of-factness of a man compelled to state the obvious. “Suppose we’d gone high-tech. He buys countersecurity, no way we can compete. Not with his resources.”
Parker leaned forward to sip the top off his wine. “I’d’ve settled for four or five off-duty cops hanging around.”
“Think so? You’ve heard the cliché ‘anyone can kill the president if he’s smart enough and willing to get killed himself’?” John made his daughter smile by lowering his face over hers and doing a loud wet Bronx cheer, then resumed, “You think a resourceful assassin can get past the Secret Service but not Todd Woolcurt’s knockoff Armani suit? Face it, the guy could buy more gadgets, he could hire more gunmen. If that’s your field of combat, you’re dead.”
“Speaking of Todd.”
“He was detained for questioning after the incident. And he figured your guy wouldn’t be in any shape to bother you that night.”
“You talk about Monroe, Junior’s resources. I don’t know how ‘resourceful’ the guy was. Maybe not even smart enough to get a gun past the security check. It was just him that night.”
“And of course the system was there to assure that in the event of a crisis my ignorance if nothing else would be preserved. Shouldn’t I have had a vote on what I got protected from?”
“You said you wished you could go on ignoring the guy. You said obtuseness was the only thing that worked against these people.” John kept talking as Parker opened his mouth. “Anyway, I didn’t really mean that I was going to let you get killed, ya numbskull. Protecting you from the truth was the only way we could save your life.”
Kathryn upstaged her father’s dramatic pause with a yawn that scrunched up her nose and eyes. He continued, “You said your enemy was putting on a show. You’re the star and the audience, and it was all leading up to whaddayacallit. The recognition scene. But if you were out cold…”
“I see, you were playing to my strengths.” Parker had intended mild sarcasm but couldn’t keep out a trace of self-pity. “Unconsciousness is my field of combat.”
“Don’t take it personally, buddy. I didn’t think he’d shoot you before he made his point. And if he couldn’t make his point,” John raised an eyebrow, “hmmm? Meanwhile the system alerted the police.”
“He did seem eager to make his point…. Why did we need the subliminal message? Why couldn’t…”
“Because you might’ve hesitated to walk away from a man with a gun. Or get in the way of a giant boxing glove.”
“I don’t know, John, there was so much that could go wrong. And did! The system was based on so many blithe assumptions.”
“Without the blithe assumptions, we had nothing but awful certainties.”
“For instance, we both heard the same subliminal message. What if he’d gotten to the panel and opened it before I did?”
“You’re not that lucky.”
“Oh…right.”
The Blindfold Test Page 30
