“Tell him the truth, so far as we know it,” Cooper says.
The truth being, he knows, that this is not going to be good for anyone, least of all for him. After eight years in the Blinds with little more than broken arms and bloody noses, this is the second violent death in the past two months. Granted, the first one was ruled a suicide, but it was suicide by firearm and, technically, firearms are prohibited in the Blinds. And now this. All of which is going to be an issue, he thinks, given there’s only forty-eight residents living in the Blinds, and there’s not supposed to be another human soul within a hundred miles of the town. And given that, theoretically at least, Cooper’s the only person in town in possession of a gun.
2.
THE SIX OF THEM SIT in the windowless room. They look ghostly, like corpses, lit only by the harsh overhead fluorescents. There’s two officers, Sheriff Cooper and Deputy Walter Robinson, along with the four new arrivals. A wall clock ticks off the minutes loudly. It’s nearly nine in the morning.
The four new arrivals sit hunched and silent at school desks, scattered around the room in exactly the random, equidistant pattern that strangers who are suspicious of one another will always arrange themselves in. The room, contained inside a large brown trailer set up on concrete blocks, is bare and dingy with whitish acoustic tiles on the ceiling and a floor covered with linoleum that’s shriveling at the corners. It looks like the kind of place you’d be sent to take a remedial driver’s course after a particularly bad accident that was entirely your fault. Which, in a way, it is.
Cooper sits at the back of the room. He’s still in the same wrinkled browns from several hours earlier. He hasn’t yet been to bed, or strayed within arm’s reach of a razor, and a person sitting close to him might smell evidence of a recent beverage not entirely appropriate to the early hour.
Walt Robinson sits on a metal folding chair at the front of the room. He wears the same brown uniform as Cooper. No badge, though. Just an arm patch that reads “Caesura” in a scripted arc over an embroidered crest of a river running through a scrubby plain. Robinson is giving the intake speech today. He’s officially the officer in charge of intake, having taken over this duty from Cooper. Over the years, Robinson’s gotten very good at the intake speech.
When the clock announces harshly with a loud jerk of the long hand that it’s finally nine on the nose, Robinson stands.
He turns his back to the class. On a large whiteboard behind him, which still bears the faint smears of dozens of previous lectures, he writes:
WELCOME TO CAESURA
Then he turns back around to face the four arrivals.
“Rhymes with tempura,” he says, then caps the marker.
Robinson is a fiftysomething African American man who’s long since come to pleasant terms with his expansive middle-aged belly. Having a belly, he’s realized, is the natural product of millions of years of evolution, a fat-storing reflex developed in the days when famine for humans was a constant concern. Robinson has come to accept himself as a creature programmed by nature to do what it takes to survive lean times. This is a good life philosophy in general, he suspects.
Robinson doesn’t yet know that Hubert Humphrey Gable is dead, or that the slender population of Caesura, about to officially increase by four, just recently decreased by one. Robinson lives in a bungalow on the farthest, quietest edge of town, by choice, and his sleep patterns verge notoriously close to hibernation. He was long divorced in his previous life, currently unmarried, and his prospects for future coupling in the Blinds are honestly not great. Not because Robinson’s not handsome. He’s actually aged into a soft and pliant but trustworthy face that’s surprisingly appealing and, if nothing else, he’s kept his hair, which he wears very short, so his pronounced widow’s peak looks like a bat taking wing on his forehead. Overall, he looks kind of debonair in a rumpled way, like someone who’s gallant but tired. Still, his prospects for future marriage remain unpromising, in part because he’s long since settled into his particular idiosyncratic patterns, and in part because getting romantically involved with a resident of the Blinds is an obviously bad idea, not to mention officially prohibited for staff. And, as stipulated in his original two-year contract that he’s now re-upped twice, he’s not allowed to leave the facility grounds, except under exceptional circumstances, which does not include blind dates. Which leaves Deputy Robinson with very few options. Deputy Dawes is his only potential onsite mate, but Robinson secretly suspects that Dawes is a closeted lesbian.
As for Cooper: Cooper’s always had a more laissez-faire attitude toward both official prohibitions and obviously bad ideas, so his record when it comes to illicit relations with the residents of the Blinds is not spotless. Admittedly, even as he’s aged into his mid-forties, huffing toward fifty like an aging slugger limping around third in a labored home-run trot, he benefits, in the Blinds, from an inherent lack of options among the citizenry. If you’re looking for an ill-considered affair, it’s not hard to find one, when there’s only a few dozen of you, stuck together and cut off from the outside world. So, no, he has not been monastically chaste during his eight-year tenure as sheriff but, he figures, he’s been good enough, and “good enough” is a standard he failed to achieve with such frequency in his life before the Blinds that it feels to him now like something akin to a moral triumph. Since his arrival here, he even once came perilously close to falling in love, but thankfully he managed to expertly fuck that up in the nick of time.
There are, in this room right now, he notes, four brand-new arrivals, two of whom are women and both of whom are attractive. The first one looks to be in her mid-forties, and she’s arresting in a way that suggests she comes from money in whatever life she’s just left behind. However, her carefully manicured nails and evident history of restorative skin peels suggest she might also find her new life among cinder block bungalows under the Texas sun to be an unwelcome adjustment. Given her obvious level of anxiety, as she mindlessly clacks said artfully manicured nails on her desktop, this new reality is likely dawning on her as well. The other woman is younger, possibly half-Asian, late twenties, with a tomboyish aspect, like someone who likes nothing more than taking a good early-morning hike. She has a pleasant, open, intelligent face, which suggests to Cooper that she’d stomach his particular brand of bullshit for about eight minutes. In any case, she’s likely young enough to be his daughter, a realization that causes Cooper, lurking as he is at the back of the room, a physical pang of unease. Cooper wonders if maybe she’s what they call “an innocent”—someone sent to the program because they witnessed some hideous crime, or imperiled their life by giving crucial testimony in some important trial, but who isn’t, themselves, a former criminal. You’re not supposed to speculate about things like that in the Blinds, but it’s hard not to do, understandably. Of course, in Cooper’s experience, everyone living here thinks they must be an innocent; they’re certain of it. Which means that probably none of them are.
The other two new arrivals are men, and definitely neither of them looks like an innocent. One is thickly muscular and looks, honestly, Cooper thinks, like a goombah: you know, pinkie rings and pomade and chest hair and attitude. Hey, Cooper didn’t invent this stereotype, he just encounters it very often. The other male is white and coiled and wiry and sits ramrod straight with a shaved head in a collarless white linen shirt. He has pale skin and the intense and bright-eyed and slightly shriveled look of someone who’s been recently fasting. He has tattoos of little faces covering his neck, inked up from below the collar of his shirt to his jawline, like some worsening rash.
At the front of the classroom, Robinson launches into his speech. “I know you have questions. Let me answer the most common ones.”
He turns and writes COMMON QUESTIONS on the whiteboard.
“We have three rules, and these three rules must always be respected.” Robinson writes THREE RULES on the whiteboard. Under that, he writes:
1. NO VISITORS
2. NO CONTAC
T
3. NO RETURN
He turns back to the four newcomers. “No visitors—that should be self-explanatory. Whoever you knew, or think you knew, or half-remember maybe knowing in your previous life, you will never see those people again. Fortunately, most of those people probably want to murder you.” No laugh from the crowd. That’s okay, Robinson thinks, that joke’s always hit or miss. He points to rule number two. “No contact. This means no letters, no emails, no phone calls, no telegrams, no carrier pigeons, no smoke-signals, no texts, no snaps, no pings, no whatever-the-latest-invention-is. No two-way communication with the outside world whatsoever. Period.” He points to the last rule. “No return. This may be the most important for you to understand today. Caesura is not a prison. You are not being held here against your will. This is a program that you’ve entered freely, and you are free to leave at any time. But please understand: These gates only open one way. So, if you leave, you can never come back. Is that understood?”
The four new arrivals all mumble assent, in a way that suggests obedience more than understanding, which, for now, is good enough for Robinson. He continues.
“Also understand that if you exit the grounds unauthorized, for any reason, your safety cannot be guaranteed. Not only that, but you will have jeopardized yourself and, just as importantly, you will have endangered your fellow residents. So, if you leave, your participation in the program will be terminated immediately, and you will be out there, on your own, in the outside world, which, as I’m sure you can imagine, can be an unforgiving place, especially for the type of people who end up here. That said, you are in this program voluntarily. So, welcome.”
At this prompt, the four people in the room eye each other, wondering how the other people came to be here.
Robinson goes on. “Beyond these three rules, we have a few other guidelines that I strongly suggest you take to heart. For starters, please respect your fellow residents. This is a community built on privacy and mutual trust. We don’t ask pointed questions of each other or try to speculate about other people’s pasts. We don’t try to pinpoint regional accents or ask about sports-team affiliations or the origin or meaning”—and here he nods conspicuously to the skinny shaved-headed ramrod—“of people’s tattoos. Whoever you were before, we are all now citizens of Caesura, located in Kettle County, in the great state of Texas, in the continental United States of America. Everything that happened to you before you got here has either been forgotten or is better off forgotten. Your new life starts today. Any questions?”
The young girl, the likely hiker, shoots up her hand. “Why Kettle County, Texas, of all places?”
“Kettle County is the third least populous county in the United States. The population of the entire county is, last I checked, about two hundred and sixty-eight, give or take a birth or death in the last twenty-four hours. That does not include the approximately forty-eight people, including yourselves, who live here in Caesura. Technically, we don’t exist. At least as far as the census is concerned.”
The hiker shoots up her hand again. “So why not situate us in the least populous county? Why third least?”
“Because the least populous county, which is also located in beautiful northwest Texas, seemed a little too obvious a choice, was the thinking, I believe.”
Hiker’s hand, again.
“What about the second least populous county?”
“The second least populous county in the United States is in Hawaii. Perception-wise, this was not deemed an acceptable location, since this is, after all, not a spa. And you are not here to work on your tans.”
Robinson lets the four people in the room contemplate the fact that they could, right now, in an alternate universe, be living in Hawaii, rather than here, in this universe, in a glorified trailer park fenced in under the hot Texas sun. He savors their disappointed faces. Then he continues.
“Let me stress that, despite the perimeter fence and the various rules, your residency here is not a punishment. You are not in jail. You are not in hell. You are in Texas.” He waits for a few dry chuckles; it’s a long shot, but the line sometimes gets a response. Today, no dice. Tough crowd. “Beyond the prohibitions I’ve outlined, every legal recreational activity is accommodated and even encouraged. Books, films, and television are all provided. We have a library. We have a gym. We even have a bar. We have a chapel, if you’re so inclined. We have a medical facility for onsite emergencies and treatments and a very good onsite nurse practitioner, Ava Breckinridge, who’s also available for therapeutic visits. There’s a well-stocked commissary that gets weekly shipments of goods, food, clothes, everything you might need. Though I’ll warn you, it’s not exactly Neiman Marcus.”
This gets a dutiful snort from the fortysomething woman. It’s something, at least.
“There is, however, no Internet access,” he continues. “There are no personal phone calls in or out, and no personal mail. You will not be in contact with anyone from your past under any circumstances. Because, simply put, if we have access to the outside world, that means the outside world has access to us. Which is exactly what we are striving to avoid.”
Now the goombah’s hand flutters up briefly from the desk in what Robinson decides is an acceptable concession toward hand-raising. He nods to him. “Yes?”
“Are we hidden?” the goombah asks, in a goombahish voice. Cooper, from the back of the room, determines upon further consideration that the goombah’s not Italian but from some more far-flung quadrant of Eastern Europe. His inflections, though, are pure American Gangster, probably picked up from a thousand Scorsese films. “You said we don’t exist,” the goombah continues. “Like, could people find this place on a map?”
“We’re as hidden as you can be in an age when every shopping mall employs facial recognition scanners and every citizen can call up satellite photos on their phone,” Robinson says. “But we’re not on any official maps and you need binoculars to even see this place from the nearest public road. And we’re a hundred miles from anything resembling civilization. As you may remember from your bus ride out here, we are smack dab in the middle of no-fucking-where, is the technical term, I believe.” A few more chuckles, from everyone save for the skinny tattooed one. “In eight years, we have not had a single incursion or breach of security.” That’s not technically true, thinks Cooper, but he gets the purpose of Robinson’s fib: Why scare the bejesus out of people on day number one, when they’ve barely had time to unpack?
“Now that we’ve got the rules out of the way,” says Robinson, “let’s talk about the more welcoming side of Caesura.” He turns to the whiteboard and uncaps the marker again. “Caesura is not just a new home but part of a holistic program designed to ensure both your security and your future well-being in a larger sense.”
He writes HOLISTIC on the whiteboard.
“As we like to say, we’re not a place to hide, we’re a place to flourish.”
He writes FLOURISH on the whiteboard.
He turns back to the classroom, then points to the badge on his upper arm. “You see this? It’s a river, in a desert. That’s how we like to think of Caesura. Like an oasis.”
The older woman pipes up now. No hand, which grates on Robinson.
“Has anyone ever left before?” she asks flatly.
“Yes. A few. Voluntarily.”
“And what happened to them?”
“Once you’re gone, you’re gone,” says Robinson. “You’re no longer our concern. But from what I understand: nothing good.”
The Tattooed Ramrod shoots an inked arm up, straight to the sky, like a parody of schoolboy obedience. As his arm rises, the sleeve of his loose shirt falls, revealing more tattoos of faces, from his wrist up his arm. “Excuse me, sir?”
“Yes?”
“What about pornography?”
Robinson stares at him flatly. Class clown. They show up occasionally. “What about it?”
“You said you have no Internet.”
“We make m
agazines available. I’m sure you remember what those are.” Robinson launches back into his spiel. “Does anyone here know what Caesura means? The word itself?” No one answers. “Caesura,” he continues, “means a pause. A break. And that’s what this is. You have entered this program voluntarily. This was not only to secure your cooperation and testimony, it was to ensure your protection and provide you with a break in your lives, a pause, a new start, which you have chosen freely to undertake. We encourage you to approach life here in that spirit. Now, if there are no more—”
Ramrod raises his hand again. “What about conjugal visits?”
Robinson sighs. “As I explained, there are no visitors.”
“Even prisoners get conjugal visits,” says Ramrod.
“You’re not a prisoner, and that’s not how this place works. If you were properly oriented before agreeing to enter this program, which I’m sure you were, then nothing I’m telling you should come as a surprise.”
Ramrod raises his hand again.
“Yes?”
Ramrod says brightly, “So who are we supposed to fuck? Each other?”
“Well, you’re fucking with me right now, aren’t you?” Robinson says. The group titters. Then he quiets them again. “If you’re unhappy with anything you’ve heard today, there are mechanisms by which you can withdraw and return to your former circumstance. Of course, there may be other repercussions for you to face. As I said: This gate only opens one way. So, before you leave, I’d encourage you to consider what kind of circumstances might have led you to agree to come to a facility like this in the first place.” He lets the line linger, then says: “Now, if there are no further questions, I’ll introduce Sheriff Calvin Cooper.”
Cooper rises slowly from his seat at the back of the room and takes his time walking to the front of the class. The four arrivals are visibly restless, swapping agitated glances as their reality sinks in: What exactly have we agreed to? Yes, it’s a new life, but a new life to be lived in a concrete bungalow with a lawn the size of a cemetery plot, in a town encircled by a fourteen-foot fence and surrounded by semi-arid plains for a hundred miles in all directions.
The Blinds Page 2
