The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  16.

  THE TORN BLACK GARBAGE BAGS taped by Orson over the smashed back windows of the car rattle frantically as Dawes speeds south on the highway. But the noise doesn’t bother her; it sounds like freedom to her.

  This is her first trip away from the Blinds in the six weeks since she started working there. Frankly, she’s surprised that Cooper agreed to let her take the furlough. She understood the deal when she took the job; you live onsite for the length of your contract, and leave only in case of emergency and only at Cooper’s discretion. He seemed to change his mind about her trip awfully quickly but then, as he likes to say, gift horse, mouth, and so on. She wonders as she drives how it’s going to feel to be back among strangers. Abilene isn’t exactly a raging metropolis, but, compared with the Blinds, it might as well be Times Square.

  The Aveo jitters whenever the needle brushes sixty, but she presses the gas all the same. This drive reminds her of the last time she was in a hatchback, fleeing from somewhere—driving away as fast as she could from Atlanta with her every worldly possession crammed in the back of her car, squeezed in under glass. What she couldn’t fit in the hatchback she left behind on the sidewalk because, fuck it, she wasn’t staying a moment longer. Not with him. Not with the stink of booze on his breath and the sting of his fist on her jaw. Not when the other bruises hadn’t even had a chance to heal yet. Not when her life became lies on top of lies, bruises on top of bruises, excuses on top of excuses, for him, for her, for how she looked, for how he acted, for how they lived. She’d always grown up hating liars, then she married one, then she became one. It’s hard not to lie when you’ve got new bruises all over your face all the time. And there are only so many believable excuses for being banged up. She got good at concocting them, but they do run out eventually. So she ran out. Eventually. In hindsight, she just considers herself lucky to have found a job where they let you change your name.

  She guns the Aveo to sixty-five.

  Caesura’s residents aren’t the only ones in hiding.

  Lindy.

  I wait.

  Lindy.

  I watch.

  Lindy.

  I guard.

  The job opening was a miracle, really, a way forward, and thankfully her résumé was strong enough to land an interview. And there wasn’t much competition—it turns out not many people want to up and relocate to a place where you forswear all contact with the outside world. But she did—she was glad to. She signed on for two years, with an option for more. For her, this town was a place to catch her breath and plot a way forward. And let’s see that fucking asshole find her in the middle of the Texas plains, working under a brand-new name, in a compound cut off by design from the outside world. She didn’t expect to play Junior Sherlock once she got there, and certainly not so soon, but now that she’s got the deerstalker cap on, as Cooper likes to call it, she finds she likes the way it fits.

  I wait. I watch. I guard.

  On this trip, her only cargo sits on the seat beside her, rattling lightly—the open Mallomar box full of mail and someone else’s bullets. Sent to Lester Vogel, aka Gerald Dean, who just happened to be the prime suspect in her personal murder investigation. She’d already decided, once she took this box from Greta, not to tell Cooper about it, not yet. She wants to contact Ellis Gonzalez first and find out what he knows. Then maybe corner Lester Vogel back in town and confront him with these bullets. She wants to gather enough evidence that, when she does tell Cooper, he can’t dismiss it, refute it, or, even worse, co-opt the whole theory and take credit for it and claim it as his own.

  Because this truth belongs to her. She uncovered it. Now she owns it.

  Gable drinks with Dean; Dean lives next to Colfax; Colfax winds up dead in his home and Gable dead at the bar. And Dean’s getting bullets sent to him in the mail. And Ellis Gonzalez was working in the Blinds when Colfax died, then he left in a real big hurry. He’s got to know something, she figures—and now she’s discovered that someone’s running mail to the residents, through a postbox in Abilene, which happens to be where Ellis Gonzalez likely now lives. She doesn’t have an address for him, but she’s got a pretty good hunch.

  She’s also considering whether she should stop somewhere in Abilene and purchase a firearm. There’s certainly plenty of places that won’t bother her about a wait period, though she doesn’t have much in the way of cash. Not to mention that she’s never held a gun before, though this seems to her like it might be a good time to start.

  Just in case she runs into trouble.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Lindy, she decides. There’s no situation that a gun doesn’t complicate. Besides, you’ve got the truth in a box beside you. And that should be enough, right?

  Just wait. Just watch. Just guard.

  The truth rattles as she tickles seventy.

  Cooper’s visited Dr. Holliday’s ranch before on a handful of occasions but, even so, the sight of her homestead never fails to amaze him. Driving for hours on endless ribbons of West Texas highway—the same sun-bleached land and wind-scrubbed grass looming flat around every bend—then suddenly, boom, there it is. Dr. Holliday’s oasis, rising from the rough plains like a hallucination, like some new Garden of Eden, an explosion of flora and flowers. Her home is a low-slung, very modern, very boxy poured-concrete affair, lined along the outside with dark-tinted glass, which makes no effort or concession to blend in with the surrounding Texas landscape. And then there’s the grounds: a sprawling garden that spreads out from the main house in a tangle of exotic foliage, palm trees and ferns and forsythia and Japanese maples and palmetto plants. As if a jungle fell straight from space and landed with a thump on this patch of arid plain. A large stone patio stretches out from the house, shaded by grapevines that dangle from an overhead trellis. This is where Dr. Holliday entertains her guests. This is as close to the main house as Cooper’s ever going to get.

  His pickup pulls into the roundabout driveway and Cooper quiets the engine. He’s practiced his pitch a dozen times on the long drive out here. This is it, he thinks: Do this, then do the other thing, and then it’s over. He taps the folded fax in his pocket, like he’s about to embark on a dangerous journey, and the fax is a relic he expects to keep him safe.

  Dr. Holliday is already out on the stone path in front of her door, waving, greeting him in a loose white blouse, light linen slacks that drape over leather biker boots, with some kind of expensive necklace, stones of high polish, hanging heavy on a loop across her chest. Her white hair is pulled back in an intricate braid. Cooper doesn’t have a clue how old she is, but he guesses she’s older than him, maybe in her sixties, though she could be even older than that; either way, she’s definitely more well-preserved than he is. Cooper’s lifelong inability to achieve her brand of effortless Zen-like self-presentation is one reason, he thinks, he’s always gravitated professionally toward uniforms. Including, today, this rumpled, sweaty, and now slightly truck-stale brown shirt he’s wearing. So much for first impressions, he thinks, then steps out of the truck and says hello.

  She motions him toward the patio, where a sweaty pitcher of pale juice sits waiting on a long stone table. She offers him a seat on a roughhewn wooden bench across from her. The table itself is made of some cool stone and looks like the kind of slab you might perform an autopsy on.

  “How have you been, Calvin?” she asks, then nods to the pitcher. “Can I offer you a glass of apple cider? It’s cold-pressed. I have it shipped in especially.”

  “At this point, I’m happy for anything wet,” says Cooper. He fills her glass from the pitcher, then pours a glass for himself. Their rapport has always been friendly, the few times they’ve met before; she’s his boss, technically, but more than that, she’s the den mother of Caesura. She runs it—she runs the whole Fell Institute now—and she helped create it, along with her ex-partner, the legendary Dr. Johann Fell. Cooper met her at his first job interview, just after Dr. Fell died.

  “I see you’re still wearing your
star,” Holliday says with a laugh. “I got you that as a gag gift, you know. To celebrate your first day on the job. I didn’t think you’d wear it.”

  “Feels too funny to take it off now,” Cooper says. “Thanks for answering my fax.”

  Holliday smiles. “People laugh when they see that old machine sitting in my office. But it’s the best way to keep your communications discreet, especially in this day and age. No satellite is going to eavesdrop on a fax machine.” She taps her fingers on her glass. “Speaking of discretion, I’d love an update on your recent incidents. I trust you have things under control in my town?”

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  “You met Agent Rigo, yes? He’s our new liaison. He’s a good man, Cal. I met him through our work with the Justice Department. He used to refer potential residents to us.”

  “Sure, he came by.”

  “Don’t hesitate to lean on him. He could be useful,” she says. “So what brings you out here today?”

  Might as well just come out with it, Cooper thinks. “I need to see a few of the files. The blind files.”

  She laughs. “Now, Cal, you know I can’t do that.”

  The blind files—that’s where the town really gets its nickname, Cooper knows, though he’s never shared that information with anyone. Every person living in the town is considered a blind file. Their cases are closed, their lives warehoused away, and their fates now in the able hands of Dr. Judy Holliday and the Fell Institute. She was the secondary researcher on the project that gave birth to Caesura a decade ago, along with her mentor, Dr. Fell. Cooper never met him—Fell was dead by the time Caesura opened and Cooper got his job. Killed in a random car accident, a hit-and-run, a real tragedy, given his stature in the world of science. By building on treatments pioneered to deal with traumatic memories, Fell had found a way to isolate specific memories in a subject’s brain, using MRI imaging, and then erase those specific memories completely. A memory is no more than a cluster of chemicals, a tiny clump of proteins, is how Dr. Holliday once explained it to Cooper. In the beginning, Fell’s technique was less like a scalpel and more like a scythe, cutting out huge swaths of people’s memories. Over time, it became more surgical.

  After Fell’s death, Dr. Holliday proposed the idea of memory erasure to the Justice Department and the U.S. Marshals as an alternative to WITSEC, the traditional witness protection program. In WITSEC, you get a new identity and a new home, but you’re still fundamentally you—with all your criminal history, proclivities, predilections, and expertise—and you’re planted in an existing community full of unsuspecting innocent people. Over the years, this proved problematic for WITSEC—when, for example, ex-criminals got back into illegal trades, or used their new freedom and anonymity to go on murderous sprees. Caesura, Holliday argued, offers the ultimate alternative: Not even you know who you are or what you’ve done. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself—this was Caesura’s founding credo. A new you, a new life, a new start. WITSEC was attracted to the Caesura program as a way to deal with its most repugnant witnesses: the killers, the serial rapists, the child predators, the ones who had knowledge and leverage, who could trade their testimony for amnesty, but for whom it was most difficult, politically, to justify making a deal and then loosing that person back into the world. The notion of a voluntary memory wipe, followed by consensual internment in a secure and isolated government-monitored community, under the Institute’s watchful care, seemed both more palatable to the public and more humane to the witnesses—that’s what everyone told themselves anyway, on the day they cut the ribbon on Caesura.

  And in among these criminals, Holliday proposed, they’d seed a sprinkling of true innocents: witnesses whose lives were forever in peril for whatever they’d seen or known, or victims of crimes so terrible that the best recourse was to wipe their memories clean and let them start fresh. In this way, Dr. Holliday envisioned a humanitarian aspect to Caesura: as a refuge for the most severely traumatized witnesses. Don’t force them to struggle through years of tedious therapy to learn to live with their trauma, she argued; instead, just erase it and let them start again. A new life under the Institute’s benevolent watch, in exchange for their testimony. Given the alternative—a life on the run, haunted by pain, and dwelling in perpetual fear—this option seemed not only appealing but merciful.

  Holliday further insisted that the residents of Caesura could never be allowed to know for certain which one they were: an innocent witness or a flipped criminal. This is crucial, she argued; otherwise, the town would collapse into a caste system of the innocent and the guilty. So all of them, criminals and innocents alike, were classified as “blind files”—basically, wiped from the system. Only the Justice Department knows who they were and only the Institute knows who they’ve become. That’s how the Blinds got its name. When people outside of the town say “the Blinds,” they’re not talking about the town, they’re talking about the people who reside there: blind to their own pasts, their own sins, their own selves. And the world is blind to them.

  The first eight cases, the original eight, were experimental and brutal. Some people, like Orson Calhoun, wound up with thirty-year memory gaps, just a ragged hole where their life used to be. Then there’s the man now known as William Wayne, whose case history leaked to the press, and who became so notorious that it nearly toppled the program before it even got started. Most of the original eight, like Fran Adams, remember almost nothing of their previous lives. A little bit of childhood, maybe, but that’s it. Cooper always thought Fran got the worst deal of anyone: She arrived with a kid in her belly, and no idea of who the person was who’d fathered him. Yet she raised him all these years. She deserves a better life, and so does her son.

  The criminals and the innocents—even Cooper doesn’t know who’s who. That’s by design—it’s what he agreed to, way back at the start, and he’s never questioned it, until today.

  But now he has to know. Which brings him here.

  Because if Fran’s an innocent, she can just go free. He could open the gate for her tonight and send her and her son on their way. And if she isn’t, at least Cooper will know what exactly she needs to prepare for. Because he’s already decided that she has no choice but to leave, and he’s already decided that he’s the only one who can make that happen.

  “So whose histories are you interested in, exactly?” asks Dr. Holliday.

  “Four people,” says Cooper. “Errol Colfax, Hubert Gable, Gerald Dean, and Fran Adams.”

  “Why those four?”

  “Colfax is the one who committed suicide a couple months back. Gable just turned up dead this week. Dean is our main suspect. And my deputy, Dawes, thinks there might be some connection between the three of them, from the outside, before they arrived. Gable and Dean came in as part of the same cohort, about six months after the program started.”

  “But that can’t matter,” says Holliday. “People don’t know who they used to be. So it’s hard to keep a grudge from your life before, let alone act on it.”

  “Maybe someone reminded them. Maybe from the outside. Either way, I’d like to know for sure.”

  “What about Fran Adams? How does she fit into this?”

  “I just need to know if she’s an innocent or not. Just tell me that.”

  “Why, Cal?”

  “Because she needs to leave. She has the only remaining child born in the Blinds. He’s eight already. She can’t hide him from the world anymore—or the world from him. But if she’s going to leave, she needs to know what’s in store for her out there.”

  Dr. Holliday considers this, then motions toward his untouched glass.

  “You haven’t touched your juice,” she says. “It really is excellent cider.”

  “With all due respect, I didn’t come for the refreshments and the pleasant conversation. I came to help these people and come back with some answers.”

  She nods. “The funny thing about Johann Fell,�
�� she says, “is that he never wanted any of this. He perfected the technology, but he resisted this application of it. So as much as I owe to him—an immeasurable debt, really—his death was, in some ways, the event that made all this possible. But Caesura was my idea—my baby, really. Do you know why he opposed it?”

  Cooper shakes his head and sips his juice.

  “He thought it was inhumane,” says Holliday. “Imagine that: inhumane to let people live again with no memories of their past. He worried that this hole in the mind, this abyss, would simply be filled with doubts and fears and questions about what exactly used to be there before. I disagreed, obviously. Do you know what that abyss looked like to me, Cal?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Freedom,” she says. “So the idea of seeding the Blinds with innocents—with letting people believe maybe they were simply witnesses to the unimaginable, shielded from their own traumas—that was my idea. My concession to Johann. After he died, I discarded it completely. There are no innocents in Caesura. But I allowed the fiction to persist.”

  “But why?” Cooper’s throat is drier now, tighter, despite the drink. He feels the hot tendrils of the day’s climbing sun snake through the shade of the vines overhead and find his neck and set him to sweating.

  “To give them hope,” she says. “It was the one flaw in Caesura, from the conception. If you leave the world and lose not only all contact but all knowledge of your previous life, what will keep you going every day? What gets you out of bed? The answer is simple: the same thing that keeps any of us going—hope. The hope that you’re different. That you’re special, somehow. That maybe, after all, you’re innocent.”

  “But Fran is not an innocent. None of them are. They’re all criminals.”

  “I’m afraid so,” says Holliday. “That’s the nature of the experiment.”

  “That’s an awfully harsh experiment to carry out on actual people.”