The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  “Remember, Cal, these people didn’t come to us with a whole lot of other options. For them, this program is an opportunity. Really, it’s a kind of gift. But what kind of gift, exactly? Answering that question—that’s what keeps me going every day.” Holliday takes another sip, her eyes on Cooper, watching him like a vivisectionist, her dissection now complete, she’s laid him out on that cold slab of a table and learned all she needs to know.

  “Either way, she needs to leave,” says Cooper, his mouth parched, the words whittled to a dry whisper.

  “She’s free to leave at any time,” says Holliday. “She just has to weigh the consequences.” She tents her long fingers in front of her face. She has an intelligent face. A kind face. A face that expertly camouflages the kind of mind that is well accustomed to twisting people into useful knots. “Go back to your town, Sheriff. Keep the peace. Don’t concern yourself with matters beyond your position.”

  “I want her file,” says Cooper, cornered, stubborn, with no cards left to play but not yet willing to rise from the table.

  “Trust me,” she says. “I’m tempted to show you. I’m a scientist. I like variables. But are you sure you want to know who she really is?”

  “I want her file. Don’t forget, Doctor, that I’ve been there, in your town, in the middle of your experiment, every day for eight years. So I know a few things, too. Things people might want to know.”

  Holliday folds her hands on the cold table. “Should I take that as a threat?”

  “Take it as a variable. For your experiment.”

  “I said I like variables, Cal, not tantrums.”

  “Someday you can explain the difference to me.” He stands. “I want her file. I want you to fax it to me by the end of the day. If you’re worried about whether it will compromise my ability to do my job, then you can consider this my resignation. You either send me those files and I’ll quit and keep quiet, or you don’t send me those files, and I’ll quit and start writing my memoirs.”

  She regards him like he’s a well-trained animal that’s disobeyed an order, and now she’s wondering if the fault lies in the animal, the training, or both. “Don’t forget—we’re on the same side, Cal,” she says finally. “I’ll consider your request and let you know what I decide. But I won’t endanger the fabric of this entire undertaking for one resident. I can’t do that.”

  “It’s two residents. And one’s a child. Who never asked to be here, and who’s innocent. Truly innocent.”

  “As I said, I’ll consider it.”

  And it might just be Cooper’s imagination, or some trick of the shadows from the strangulated sunlight streaming through the vines overhead, but as she rises from her bench, she seems not angry but almost impressed with him, even proud, in the manner of a researcher watching a favorite rat, after years of struggling, years of failing, finally nose its way out of a maze.

  Then again, Cooper thinks, as he starts his truck and pulls out of the driveway, if he’s come to understand anything in the last eight years of his life, it’s that the only reward for the triumphant rat is a bigger, trickier maze.

  17.

  DAWES PULLS INTO A PARKING LOT by a row of town houses in Abilene, then checks the address again.

  She already stopped at the shipping store that houses the P.O. Box, a rented box that was a month in arrears, so she easily convinced the teenaged manager to hand over Gonzalez’s information. Her hunch—that the postbox was rented out by one Ellis Gonzalez—turned out to be correct, which means Gonzalez was running the mail into Caesura. Now Dawes sits in the dented Aveo in the parking lot, looking at a slumping row of gray town houses. A few laundry lines crisscross the cramped lawns, which are separated by peeling wooden partitions.

  She gets out of the car and rings the bell of Gonzalez’s apartment. She’s not sure what she’ll ask him if he answers. Why he’s sending bullets to residents of the Blinds, for starters. But there’s no one home. Okay, now what, Lindy? She’s got only a few hours before she has to make the long drive back to the Blinds. She spots a kid on a low-slung BMX bike, turning circles in the parking lot. The kid’s maybe ten, eleven, dirty-faced and sullen, wearing a San Antonio Spurs ballcap with a brim so flat you could set a teacup on it.

  She waves him over. “Hey, do you know the gentleman who lives here? Do you know when he might be home?”

  The kid smirks. “I dunno—never?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Lady, that dude’s dead. He got shot in some gas station robbery like a week ago.”

  “He robbed a gas station?”

  “No, he was a customer, wrong place, wrong time.” The kid makes crack-crack-crack gun sounds while pistoling the air with his fingers. “What the fuck do you care?”

  She thinks of the brown uniform she’s wearing, with its unusual badge, and figures she’ll give it a shot. “I’m a police officer.”

  “No, you’re not,” the kid in the cap says.

  “Thanks for your help,” she says, and turns back to the locked door. Well, this is a fucking disaster, she thinks. It was nearly a three-hour drive just to get to this stupid town. Dumb, she thinks, to come all this way without a backup plan, or even a clue of what you’d find—so much for your vaunted deerstalker. You drive all this way in the heat and the emptiness, back to the fringes of the big, bad world, just to come up empty—

  Wait. The big, bad world. And all that it has to offer.

  She turns and asks the kid, “Where’s the nearest library?” and hopes to hell this Podunk town even has one, and that this little brat ever visited it.

  It does, and he has, and it’s not too far, it turns out, and, thankfully, it’s still open when she arrives. It’s not much of a library, but that’s okay—all Dawes needs is one computer terminal. That, and the exact thing everyone in the outside world takes for granted every single day, but which she can’t ever access in the Blinds.

  The big, beautiful, information-rich Internet.

  She sits down at an open carrel. It’s a small local library branch, underpopulated, save for a few homeless guys napping and a couple of kids playing violent games on computers. The sound of electronic gunfire rattles in the background as she settles in and clicks open the Internet. She thinks how routine this all used to be—the process of connecting to every other computer in the world and thereby gaining instant access to virtually every piece of information you could ever want. What was it that Cooper said? My kingdom for a Google?

  Well, look who’s got a Google now, she thinks, and types in “Ellis Gonzalez.”

  A torrent of Facebook pages pop up, websites, blog posts, all the crisscrossing digital vapor trails of the identically named. She limits the search to “Abilene” and Recent News. There are a few local stories about the gas station robbery, in which he’s listed as an unfortunate bystander. Beyond that, nothing. No mention of his previous employment, or his reentry into the community. Only the end of his life has been documented, and even that in passing, a footnote to a footnote, buried in the depths of the fathomless Internet.

  So Ellis Gonzalez is dead. She knew that already.

  She’s about to close the browser when another thought occurs to her. She types in “Caesura.” Gets a bunch of results related to poetry. So she adds “Caesura” and “criminals.”

  There’s not much to find, but there’s something. Conspiracy websites, mostly. Chatter of secret government camps and black helicopters, mind experiments and covert crackdowns. A few fan sites devoted to serial killers, speculating on their current whereabouts. There’s a Wikipedia page for the program, but when she opens it, the entry is short, and mostly full of dead-end speculation. And she finds a few sites dedicated to someone named Esau Unruh—some super killer, by the looks of it, with long paeans written to his supposed exploits. But among the pages there are so many divergent and contradictory accounts that it’s impossible to tell what, if any of it, is true.

  She clicks back to the search engine. Slightl
y drunk with the heady power of unlimited information. She tries to think what else she can search for.

  Types in “Damnatio Memorae.”

  It turns out to be an ancient Roman practice, which literally means “the Condemnation of Memory.” When a Roman disgraced himself—a traitor, a tyrant, a failed conspirator—he would be cleansed from the official histories. His name chiseled out of monuments. His statues toppled and destroyed. His likeness scrubbed from coins. Erased from the historical record. As though he never existed. A permanent exile from history itself.

  Whoever wrote that in the repair shop certainly knows their history, she thinks. Not a bad official motto for their town.

  Damnatio Memorae.

  What else? The search box waits, patiently.

  Remembering the box of bullets sitting in her car, she types in “Lester Vogel.”

  A new series of articles comes up. About a trial. And a conviction. She leans in to read the results.

  Holy shit.

  As she scans a few articles, her pulse begins to thump. After a few more, her stomach lurches.

  Lester Vogel’s history is . . . unpleasant.

  In this moment, she realizes exactly why they never let you know about the history of the people in the Blinds. She certainly knows she’ll never look at Gerald Dean in the same way again. She also realizes that if she ever gets caught doing this—searching for background information on the residents—she’ll get fired. Or worse.

  Maybe end up like Ellis Gonzalez.

  But she keeps reading. About Vogel’s history, before the Blinds.

  When she’s had enough, she closes the browser. Stands unsteadily. Takes a moment to collect herself.

  She’s about to leave when another thought occurs to her. This is her most ill-advised notion yet. And, naturally, the most irresistible.

  Fuck it. She’s come this far.

  She sits back down.

  She hesitates, nearly talks herself out of it, then opens the search engine again. She’s about to type in “Calvin Cooper,” when she remembers that’s not his real name, any more than her real name is Sidney Dawes.

  But she knows his real name.

  She types in “John Barker.”

  Hits Search.

  Again, she gets a torrent of histories, the spilled ephemera of a thousand different John Barkers across the world.

  So she types in “John Barker” and “Caesura.”

  Nothing.

  So she types in “John Barker” and “Fell Institute.”

  A page of results unfurls.

  Even before she starts to scroll through them, she knows she’s stepping through a door, one that can’t be unstepped through, and one that’s about to close behind her for good.

  18.

  BETTE BURR SITS on the porch of William Wayne’s house, her back resting on the railing, knuckles sore from pointless knocking. The manila envelope is balanced on her knees. It’s getting dark. The day’s nearly done. If knocking alone was going to work, it would have worked by now, she thinks. And she wants out of this place, badly, this town where no one knows who they are, what they’ve done, where they’ve been. This town where she has to pretend to be like them and live like an imposter. Unlike the rest of them, she knows who she is. She’s Eleanor Sung. Her father’s daughter. And she made her father a promise.

  She slides the large portrait of her father from the envelope and considers his face for a moment longer. She had spent so much of her life wondering who this man might be. Then, once she finally found him, he made her erase the memory of meeting him.

  She doesn’t remember meeting him at all.

  So if she wants to rediscover him, she must deliver his message.

  The message that he’s dead.

  She says goodbye to the image of her father and slips the photo halfway under the door.

  Fran sits on the sofa with the three books beside her. Isaac is finally asleep. She picks up the parenting book, Raising Icarus, and gives the cover a glance. Still weird, she thinks, that Calvin Cooper, of all people, is recommending parenting books. The mother and son who are pictured on the cover, smiling and confident, definitely do look happy. There’s even something of Cooper’s cockeyed smile on the boy’s beaming face—maybe that’s why Cooper likes this book; he sees something of his former self in this little kid. Or maybe Cooper pushed this book on her to show her an alternate life for her and Isaac. You could be like these two, Fran, smiling and confident.

  We’ll never be like them or anyone, she thinks. Not anyone normal.

  She puts that book aside.

  The cover of the second book with the lengthy title, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, features a photo of a severe-looking woman, a lone streak of gray in her black hair, smiling slightly, as though her mind’s elsewhere, on bigger, more substantial things. Fran wonders what connection she may have once had with this woman, this book, if any. The photo does look familiar, though she can’t say why, or from where.

  She turns the book over. Finds the ISBN on the back, above the barcode. Holds her own arm up to check, though she already knows.

  1-250-02412-1

  She feels a little thrilled and a little sick to find they match.

  Save for the last four numbers. The extra numbers on her arm.

  4911

  Can’t be a year. Not a page number, either—this book isn’t that long. Maybe a chapter?

  She flips through the book.

  It’s a collection of journals, fragments, stray thoughts.

  Fran turns to page 49.

  She counts down to line 11.

  She’s almost relieved to find it’s just some random reference to a movie, something called Marked Woman. It’s strangely appropriate, actually, and she could certainly try to find meaning in this if she really wanted to. But, out of context, the fragment means nothing to her and she can’t believe this is the message someone left for her to discover. Or that she left for herself.

  She flips through the book again.

  4911, she thinks.

  She riffles through pages all the way to the back.

  Finds page 491.

  She realizes now that this page does look familiar—or, at least, a different, past version of this page, from a different, past copy of this book. A copy that’s underlined. Dogeared. Highlighted. Circled. The book bent, folded, creased, read and re-read, she can remember it now, she can picture it, as though it’s the page right in front of her.

  She counts down one line from the top.

  Just one.

  Finds a lone sentence and reads it.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  She reads the line again. For the first time. For the millionth time. She feels its warm familiarity. The letters practically vibrate.

  This is the message from her past self, she knows it, cast like a letter in a bottle, to be opened on some other shore by her future, stranded self.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  Forgive who? And exonerate who? And for what?

  She looks up, and only then does she notice the title of the second book, the sequel, which she also took out from the library.

  Another volume of diaries written by the same woman, with a simpler title.

  Reborn

  The sky is just starting to consider darkness as Cooper steers his pickup home. He can see the bright dusk on the distant horizon, negotiating the handover from the day. As his truck hums over the two-lane highway, he hasn’t seen another car in at least an hour, and he doesn’t expect to see another one tonight.

  This is one benefit to the Blinds, Cooper’s learned—it offers you a cleansing kind of loneliness. It’s the blessing of exile and it’s something he never expected. Life out here on the great flat plains with barely a human whisper to be heard from the outside world. Just you, and the sky in all directions, and the barest scrap of land to hold it all up, to keep you from tumbling into the emptiness of space.

  The high
way lines zip by hypnotically as he drives. The tires of his truck serenade the road. No street lamps, no houses, no nothing. Just road.

  Cooper thinks about Fran, and Isaac, and the great, big world spreading out in all directions, and the dangers, known and unknown, that it harbors.

  About how having a kid makes you think constantly about all the ways the world might hurt him. And how tempting it is to hide from all that. At least until the hurtful world finds you.

  And it always finds you.

  Cooper taps his star.

  His finger feels the folded fax that’s tucked in his breast pocket.

  And he thinks about the one last thing he has to do tonight.

  19.

  GERALD DEAN KNOCKS at the door of the police trailer, which is already ajar.

  “You wanted to see me, Sheriff?”

  It’s late and the town is sleeping. Cooper welcomes him in. The night is cooler, finally, so the lack of air-conditioning in the trailer isn’t nearly so vexing. Robinson’s already home in bed and Dawes isn’t back from her daytrip yet. The two of them, Cooper and Dean, are alone in the trailer.

  Cooper pulls Robinson’s chair around to face his desk and offers Dean the seat, then sits down in his swivel chair.

  Dean’s always been a skittish sort, keeping mostly to himself. He and Cooper have never had any run-ins before. Dean’s squirrelly manner suggests not so much someone who’s guilty and worried about getting caught, but someone who’s worried about being wrongly blamed for something he didn’t do. As though that was a theme in his life prior to his arrival here, and it somehow seeped into his manner. A learned habit he never could shake.

  And one not entirely appropriate to the situation, Cooper thinks.

  Cooper’s revolver is sitting on his desktop. He picks it up, flips the barrel open, checks it.

  Four bullets.

  “Eight years, Gerald, and I never had to carry a loaded weapon,” he says. “Times are changing, and not for the better.”

  He flips the barrel shut and puts the gun back on his desk. Dean shifts in his chair uneasily.