“Never mind Joyce, you’ve already got the job.” She squeezed his arm, snowflakes blinking in the riotous circuitry of her hair. “What else? What’s under all that?”
“The lights on the light posts are buzzing.”
“Good. And beneath that?”
“The snow. Poets call it a hiss, but it’s more like a flick. Phht. Something brushing past you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Stop trying to impress me—you’re missing the central thing. Don’t tell me you don’t hear it. Stop thinking.”
And immediately he heard it. “There’s this hum.” He stopped walking and listened. It was hard to believe he’d missed it, but he must have been hearing it all along: a deep electrical hum, such as a generator might make. George looked back and pointed to his wrist.
“Keep walking,” Esther said.
“The sound—what is it?”
“Who knows?”
“It’s like Paul Robeson holding the last baritone note of a lullaby,” said Parker. “Soothing…but it gets a little scary as it goes on.”
“I use it for meditation because you have to empty your mind of other things to hear it. It does get scary after a while, and then you have to think of something else. But it’s always there.” They’d stopped in front of a hive of cubbyholed girders and brown windows, identical to most of the other classroom buildings. “And you are here.”
“You look,” said Tom Grand, “like the guy who gets the white robe at the ritual sacrifice. It’s opening night, that’s all. You’ll feel better as soon as you realize your class isn’t going to rush the podium.”
“I’m sure I will.” Ritual sacrifice—the phrase had been running through Parker’s head since Steve Dobbs used it.
Tom shook his hand. “Professor Parker, I think you can take it from here.” He was looking sentimental, though his eyes were always misty. What if Parker “escaped”—how stupid would he feel when he got home?
Parker slowed his breathing and tried to quiet his thoughts, which just made him aware of the hum.
George pointed to his wrist again. “They’re waiting in there.”
That decided it. It came down to a matter of professionalism: “They” were waiting, and they might be students. Parker shook hands all around and headed for the entrance.
* * *
—
He walked straight to the board, determined not to obsess about whether they looked like students—or too much like students. They looked real enough In his one hasty glance before he turned to the board. He’d hoped to look away before that impression changed. But even while he faced the board and picked up the chalk, it was dawning on him that they’d looked too old—like the college students in ’50s movies, always played by overage actors. He reminded himself that this was an eight o’clock class, and night students tended to be older. All right, then: No problem!
“Let’s be sure we’re all in the right place.” He wrote down the course title and still facing the board said, “Does anyone know the section number?” Nothing. He didn’t recall hearing the usual murmurings when he walked in. Since he’d turned his back, he’d heard nothing but the clack of his chalk and the buzz of a fluorescent tube.
“Doesn’t anyone have a catalog?” Nothing.
“And my name,” he said as he wrote, “is Jeffrey Parker.” Nothing but a cough, but no answer was required.
A new possibility occurred to him. What if this was ordinary life? He’d been waiting to see how it ended, but there was one ending he hadn’t foreseen: the crane shot where the camera pulls back skyward and the top of our hero’s head merges into the crowd. It wasn’t the end of our hero, just a sign that from here on, nothing special would happen to him—the rest was ordinary life. Not a bad thing, he assured himself, it would just take some getting used to. He took a step back from his writing on the board. Jeffrey Parker: What an utterly unremarkable name.
He turned to face them.
Acknowledgments and Notes
Thanks to all those who read the novel in manuscript, offered criticism, or otherwise helped, or tried, to make it a good and published book: Charlie Bass, Barbara Eaton, Jeanne Farrar, Richard Friedman, Dennis Loy Johnson, Larry Kart, Mike Keller, Peter Kostakis, Mary Ellen McManus, Phyllis Moore, Darlene Pearlstein, Matthew Sharpe, Sharon Solwitz, Doris Stockwell, Elizabeth Stockwell, Jim Stockwell, Beth Svendsen, and Jianying Zha. Thanks above all to Lore Segal.
Paul Hoover helped me understand golf’s “free drop rule.” I use a few phrases from his e-mail on the subject. Any inaccuracies on the topic are mine.
Philistine that he is, the movie theater manager is nonetheless discerning enough to lift from America’s best and most under-utilized movie critic, Dave Kehr. The phrase “the cold vaults of technology” comes from Kehr’s old capsule review of a James Bond movie (I forget which) in the Chicago Reader.
“Situation with the babies: critical” comes from John Woo’s Hard Boiled. Parker could not have seen the movie in 1985.
The University of Illinois at Chicago has undergone a beautification program in the past decade or so and may not be recognizable from the earlier, brutalist image I present. No one recalls my description of klieg lights outside the El station there; I believe they were doing construction at the time.
COINTELPRO was a real FBI program that ran from sometime in the ’50s to 1971. As far as I know, the FBI did not try to extend the life of the program by farming out the work to freelance cranks.
Clarification
In Chapter Three the Skokie Swift makes local stops in Skokie. The Skokie Swift does not make local stops in Skokie; the novel takes place in a world where it does. I regret the confusion.
BARRY SCHECHTER is a life-long resident of Chicago. His fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Review. This is his first novel.
Author photo by Darlene Pearlstein
The Blindfold Test Page 33
