The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  The effect of all this clumsy mucking is that Unruh, despite their assurances, only remembers bits and pieces of John Sung. For example, he remembers that such a man existed. He remembers that this man was dear to him. But what he looked like, his laugh, his touch—all of that is beyond Unruh’s recollecting.

  He cannot remember Sung’s face.

  His only memory is of the man in the hood, and of the fact that he cared about that man very much.

  The looming murderous figure being evoked breathlessly on cable news and during hastily adjourned congressional hearings—the ravenous bogeyman conjured from the rantings of the hysterical press—that man would have been all but unrecognizable to Unruh himself, muddled and murmuring alone in his containment cell.

  He never watched his own hearings.

  He was simply loaded on a school bus. With seven other similarly befuddled folk.

  There was a woman on the bus. To Unruh, she looked pregnant.

  There was a man, dressed as a sheriff.

  The eight of them were driven for hours over the Texan plains.

  Then he was interviewed, briefly, by that weary-looking sheriff in his crumpled brown uniform, who welcomed him, along with all the others, in a garishly lit and chilly trailer, to a new town with a strange name, where the sheriff promised all of them they would not only live, but flourish.

  He was given a new name.

  William Wayne.

  After a vice president and a movie star.

  The sheriff stamped a paper, which he then signed and filed away.

  “Welcome to Caesura,” he said.

  Wayne was assigned a modest cinder block bungalow in a very quiet part of town. There were so few of them living there back then.

  On his very first night in his new home, he sat down at the kitchen table with a piece of white paper and a pencil.

  He sat and stared at the paper for hours, pencil poised. Struggling to conjure, with great effort, the memory of a hooded figure in chains.

  Then he started with the pencil. A few scratches, at first.

  Hoping to draw a picture of the face of his friend John Sung.

  “John Sung is dead,” this woman says to him now.

  John’s daughter.

  So he had a daughter.

  Wayne shows her his drawing. Unfolds it on the coffee table. Smoothes it flat with a twisted hand.

  He’s worked on the drawing for eight years. It is remarkably detailed.

  Lifelike, even.

  “Tell me one thing,” Wayne asks her. “Did he look like this?”

  She studies the sketch. She strains to remember. Then she confesses, “I don’t know. I don’t remember him. That’s why I brought you the photo. I hoped that you would.”

  Wayne sets the photo, the one she slipped under the door, the one Wayne hung in the window as a sign to her, as a beacon—the photo of young John Sung, smiling—next to his own drawing.

  The likeness is remarkable.

  “That’s him,” she says.

  “Let me tell you what I do remember about him,” says Wayne.

  She starts to cry.

  They both cry.

  27.

  FRAN LINGERS in the bedroom doorway, watching Isaac play, one last time. He’s seated on the carpet of his bedroom with his race car, spinning it in noisy doughnuts, the car racing in circles to nowhere. Lost in his world. A child’s world. That’s all she ever wanted to build for him. Somewhere safe to get lost in.

  “Isaac, honey,” she says. “I need you to pack your things.”

  She says it as calmly as it is possible for her to say it in the context of this moment. She is mindful above all not to frighten him. “Just a few shirts and some pants. Quick, quick. Pick your favorites. I’ll get a bag for us. Then we have to go.”

  “Go where?” he says, the car clutched in his hand.

  “We’re going to ask Sheriff Cooper to take us for a drive.”

  “In his truck?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Walking briskly home from the library, a few torn-out articles stuffed in her pockets, she’d thought about going to find Cooper herself, but she wanted to be here, at home. So she flagged down Walt Robinson on the main street as he wandered away from the intake trailer, looking somewhat dazed, even for him, and asked Walt to deliver her message. “Find Cooper and tell him we’re ready,” she said. “Tell him we’ll be waiting at my house.”

  “Ready for what?” Robinson asked.

  “He’ll know,” she said.

  Now Isaac scrambles to his feet in his room. “What about my cards?” he says, hiking up the loose waist of his corduroy pants.

  “Which cards?”

  “From my treasure box.”

  She remembers his box, the one that was missing from under the dresser.

  “Where did you put it? I checked its usual spot, but it wasn’t there,” she says.

  “I took the box outside,” Isaac says. “I buried it. I dug a hole in the yard.”

  “Why did you do that?” she says.

  “I didn’t want to lose the cards.”

  “But why would you lose them?”

  “I didn’t want the man to take them away.”

  Fran’s stomach curdles.

  “What man?” she asks, as gingerly as she can manage.

  “The man who came to town. The man who gave the cards to me.”

  “Who did?”

  “The man in the suit. At the movie theater.”

  She crouches on her haunches, grabs his shoulders, pulls him closer. Don’t panic him, she thinks. Don’t panic him, even as she herself is on the edge of losing it. He’s already flinching, like he’s worried he’ll get in trouble, like she’s about to lash out, and there must be a reason he hasn’t told her any of this before.

  “Tell me about that man.”

  “He gave me the cards. For free. As a present. After the movie.”

  “No, honey,” she says. “You got those cards from the store. Remember? Spiro ordered them for you.”

  “Those were different ones. New ones,” says Isaac. “The man gave me the first pack. I put it in my box.”

  “You didn’t show me?”

  “I put it in my box and put it under my dresser,” says Isaac, his brown eyes brimming. He’s in trouble, he knows it, he doesn’t want to be in trouble.

  Fran collects herself, or tries. “Where was Sheriff Cooper? When this man gave you the cards?”

  “Someone was asking him something. A woman. He was distracted. The man gave me the cards and walked away.”

  “What did this man look like?”

  “Like he was going to a funeral.”

  “Like he was sad?”

  “No, like he was dressed up in a black suit. He didn’t look sad.”

  “And he gave you those trading cards?”

  “Yes. He cut my hair.”

  Fran squeezes his shoulders more tightly; she can’t help it. “He did what?”

  “He cut my hair. He said it was his job. Sheriff Cooper was distracted. It was crowded in the lobby.”

  “But, Isaac, your hair’s not cut. Mommy would have noticed.”

  “He cut a little piece of my hair.” Isaac grabs a clump of his brown curls in the back. “Right here.”

  Fran looks at it, fingering through the hair—there, she would barely have noticed, she didn’t notice, his hair’s so shaggy now, but there it is, a little chunk of his hair is gone, just a tiny snip.

  “Did you tell Sheriff Cooper?”

  “The man told me it was a secret.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No. I put the cards in the box.”

  “Isaac, that didn’t seem strange to you?”

  “I don’t know what goes on outside,” he says. That’s what he’s always called the rest of the world: outside.

  She considers her son. He’s absolutely right. He doesn’t know. How could he?

  “Get your things,” she says. “Let’s go
. We have to go right now.”

  “But my box—”

  “We have to go. We have to leave it buried.”

  We’ll get Cooper, she thinks, trying to calm herself. We’ll get to Cooper and we’ll get in the truck and we’ll just go. That’s what he’s always advocating. She hasn’t thought much further past that. But she knows if she asks him that he’ll take them.

  Isaac starts to cry now, fully. Softly at first, disbelieving, then he lapses into quiet hysterics. “I need those cards. I need them.” Isaac’s sputtering now, his face snot-streaked, his voice careening into the highest frequencies of childish urgency.

  “We can’t, Isaac—”

  “But the robots. The robots will protect us. They have rocket-arms and lasers. They’ll protect us and we can’t leave them behind.”

  She looks at her son. She tries once again, for the one millionth time, to climb inside the workings of a child’s mind. To know what’s best to do right now. She has no idea. Finally, she grabs his arm.

  A minute later, they’re both outside, on their knees, together, Fran glancing every few moments up and down the empty street. The two of them, scrabbling with their fingers at the dry Texas dirt, digging up their modest yard, unburying a treasure.

  Cooper stares at the door of the police trailer, crisscrossed with yellow SECURITY LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, and thinks, finally, Fuck it.

  He pulls out a jackknife and slices through the tape, clears it away, then tries the knob.

  At least they didn’t padlock it.

  The trailer’s dark inside, but otherwise more or less how he last left it. The bloodstained chair, Gerald Dean’s final resting place, still sits opposite his desk. He opens the desk drawer where he keeps the extra boxes of .38 rounds, but the boxes are gone, which he figured they would be, but he’s no less disappointed.

  He pulls his revolver out of his holster and flips the cylinder open.

  He fired two bullets at the coydogs, missing both times, shoulder barking.

  Dietrich fired two more bullets that hit.

  Then there was the bullet for Gerald Dean.

  Which leaves one bullet in his gun.

  Just one.

  Goddammit.

  He rummages around in the drawer again, sifting the contents, searching, but finds nothing.

  All right, then.

  One bullet.

  One bullet is worse than no bullets, he thinks, because at least with no bullets, you know you’re beat.

  One bullet can give you foolhardy ideas.

  He flips the cylinder shut and holsters the pistol.

  There’s no reason to think your story isn’t just as likely to hold up today as it was last night, he thinks. As long as Robinson and Dawes stick to the facts, we should be done with these agents by nightfall, tomorrow at the latest. Maybe we can even get rid of Dietrich in the bargain. This could all work out okay.

  Then you take Fran, and the boy, and the money, and go.

  Dawes appears in the doorway of the trailer behind him.

  “They’re ready for you,” she says.

  “Just give me a minute,” he says, still hunting for anything else useful in his desk.

  “Cal, they told me to send you right away.”

  Cooper looks up. “I believe that’s the first time in recorded history you’ve ever called me Cal. Now you’ve got me good and nervous.” She says nothing, so Cooper presses her. “Anything you’d like to share with me, Sid?”

  Dawes looks him over. She feels, in this moment, very sad. And more than a little scared. She expected to find opportunity in that trailer. Maybe to find a way out. A path to something better, even. She found something else instead. Dawes thought about this on the walk over here—what she would say to him, and how much. She thought about what she knows about him. And as he stands waiting for her to answer him, she thinks—and is sure that she is right—he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what I know. He’s like the rest of them. He doesn’t know.

  “I think they’re here to take the boy,” she says.

  “What?”

  “They asked me about Fran. Not Colfax. Not Gable. Not Dean. Just Fran.”

  “What about her?”

  “Where she is.”

  Cooper considers what Dawes is saying. He considers the truck. He considers the gun. He considers what it would take to find Fran and Isaac and go, now. He considers what he saw in the black cases in the intake trailer.

  “So what did you tell them?” he says.

  “I said I don’t know. But I don’t think that’s going to slow them down. They know she’s in the town. They just have to figure out which house.”

  There is no history between Dawes and Cooper now, no backstory, no hidden motives, no secrets, just the two of them, in the trailer, just this moment.

  Cooper asks her, not sure what he’ll do if she says no: “Are you with me? Or with them?”

  She nods. “With you.”

  She’d thought about this on the walk over, too.

  Cooper unholsters his pistol and holds it out to her grip-first.

  “You ever fired a gun before, Deputy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone that. Take this. Find her first. Start at her house. You know where it is. Go now and when you get there don’t let anyone else in. Not until I get there. I’ll come with my truck soon.”

  Dawes takes the gun. She’s never even held a gun before. It’s heavier than she expected.

  “There’s only one bullet in there,” says Cooper. “Don’t tell anyone that, either.”

  “And what about you?” she says.

  Cooper takes off his heavy gun belt and lays it coiled on the desk. It’s no use to him anymore. He thinks about taking his star off as well, but leaves it in place for now. “You said they want to see me, right? I guess I should go find out what they want.”

  28.

  WAITING, WAITING, WAITING, he hates waiting, Dietrich thinks. Back in his bungalow, he stands in front of the full-length mirror on the wall. Head shaved, shirt off, at rest and calm and ready. Fingers tingling. He jangles his arms in front of the mirror like a boxer before a fight, watching himself. This is something they never let you have in solitary, he thinks—a full-length mirror. To see yourself. If there was a mirror in solitary, then there would be two of you. A companion. He looks over all his tattoos, the portraits etched on his skin, their eyes turned up to him admiringly. At least I have all of you, he thinks, and the portraits listen to him intently.

  In solitary, all they give you is a concrete floor and concrete walls and a metal door and a hole to piss and shit in and two books to read and one hour a day to walk in circles in a cage outside. Otherwise, NO HUMAN CONTACT.

  It said so right on the door to his cell.

  He waited there, too. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Only his tattoos to keep him company.

  Until these people sprung him.

  Papers signed, deals made, favors swapped, money exchanged—whatever happened behind the scenes, he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that the door to his cell rolled back like a stone from a tomb.

  Later, they explained to him everything that would be required of him, but he barely listened because if the choice was do this or go back into a tomb, then that wasn’t really a choice at all. He remembers feeling . . . exhilarated, somehow, or heartened, maybe, sitting in the room in his jumpsuit, as they detailed their requirements, because finally someone had recognized a proper way to channel his, shall we say, enthusiasm. And all this after Dietrich had lasted less than a year in the military, even though the military had seemed like the perfect fit for him, everyone thought so. Lots of space and sand and emptiness and ammo and plenty of targets to choose from. They say they want you crazy, but they don’t really want you crazy. Not Dietrich crazy. Sure, they’ll overlook a certain amount of enthusiasm, but Dietrich doesn’t have a certain amount of anything, and he certainly doesn’t have a small amount of that.

  An
asshole lawyer—this was before the concrete closet and the piss hole and NO HUMAN CONTACT—once described him to a judge as dead-eyed and remorseless, and as he sat beside the lawyer in his borrowed suit, all his tattoos covered and muted, he thought, Well that is the most inaccurate statement I have ever heard. Remorseless, maybe, he’d grant the lawyer that, for how can a man truly know if he feels remorse? Having presumably never felt it?

  So remorseless, maybe. But dead-eyed? No, sir. That is demonstrably not accurate.

  Dietrich’s seen many things. He’s done many things. Through it all, his eyes have been very much alive.

  He should have asked that lawyer before he killed him, Tell me, do my eyes look dead to you? As it was, it took two days for Dietrich to get the reek of that lawyer’s cologne off his hands. It’s hard to strangle someone when you’re wearing handcuffs, but not impossible. If you’re enthusiastic.

  Kill your own lawyer and you’ll wind up in prison. Kill a guard and you’ll wind up in solitary.

  Do the kinds of things that Dietrich’s done and, apparently, you’ll wind up here. In a town like this.

  Waiting.

  Luckily, in prison, he had his tattoos to keep him company. All these prior recipients of his attention. Twenty-three, at last count, or a torso and two arms’ worth. The lawyer was number nineteen. The guard was number twenty. Each one of them, immortalized in ink and lovingly memorialized. Men, women, a few children, nearly two dozen faces, all smiling beatifically, their eyes turned up toward him, their likenesses etched over ribbons, flowers, dates. Some of them he knew for years, some he knew for a moment. But always the defining moment, he likes to think.

  His dead. They travel with him everywhere.

  He twists his torso before the mirror to inspect the latest additions, healing under the large white bandage on the small of his back. The flesh beneath still tender. He peels the bandage away. It was hard to find a virgin patch of skin to fit three new faces in.

  Three faces: the sheriff and his two deputies.