The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Rigo nods up the street. “Your medical center—how many people is it equipped to handle?”

  “We’ve got just the one nurse, Ava Breckinridge,” says Cooper. “The infirmary is really just a Band-Aid-and-aspirin shop. We’ve been asking for a medical doctor for just about eight years but, given the terms of employment—no contact with the world and such—the search has pretty much dried up. But Ava takes good care of us, and if anything really serious comes up, we contact the Institute and they arrange to pick up the person and transport them to a private hospital, under close watch. Whole thing is very hush-hush. Thankfully, we’ve rarely had to worry about anything more serious than the occasional busted nose or a bad bout of pneumonia. Until this past week, of course.”

  Rigo and Santayana look over the main street, saying nothing further, like two unimpressed buyers who’ve realized they’re house-hunting in the wrong part of town.

  “There are a couple of other facilities scattered here and there,” Cooper continues. “A repair yard, run by one of our locals, Orson Calhoun. A small playground just past that with a slide and a swing—”

  “That’s right—you have kids here,” says Rigo.

  “We have one,” says Cooper. He points up the cross street. “The rest of the bungalows up yonder on the cul-de-sacs are all private residences. We have seventy-two bungalows in total, thirty-six on either side of town, so our total capacity is roughly seventy residents, give or take, though we’re at just over half that now.”

  “Wow, they had big plans for this place once, didn’t they?” says Rigo.

  “I just mind the store,” says Cooper. “I don’t get much word from the outside world about plans.”

  “And you have Esau Unruh living here, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know who that is,” says Cooper.

  “What do they call him here?” Rigo snaps his fingers and grimaces. “Wayne something—?”

  “William Wayne?”

  “That’s right.” Rigo smiles. “I’ve been reading up. He was quite something in his day.”

  “Technically, I’m not allowed to know who is living here, or anything about their history. Though I do understand Mr. Wayne has quite a reputation.”

  “He did, once. Who knows what’s left of him.” Rigo points up the street to a small, single-story brick bunker, painted all-white and set off from the main road. “And what’s that building up there?”

  “That’s our interfaith chapel,” says Cooper. “Truth be told, it doesn’t get a lot of use these days.”

  “You see that?” Rigo says to Santayana. “That’s the chapel. You know, in case you want to say a prayer.” She nods distractedly, still taking in the town. Troubled citizens amble by silently on the sidewalk, stealing glances, then hurry off. The trio walks another block to the intake portable where Cooper mounts the steps and swings open the door. “And this here should serve you pretty well in terms of an HQ.”

  Rigo pokes his head through the doorway. “What’s this building usually used for?”

  “It’s where we do our orientation meetings for new arrivals.”

  “And who has access to it?”

  “Anyone, really,” says Cooper. “We’re not real big on locks in this town.”

  “We’ll need to install some locks. For starters,” says Rigo.

  “You planning on staying that long?”

  “As long as it takes,” Rigo says, then steps inside and inspects the trailer: the small school desks all pushed up against the walls, the stained acoustic tile on the drop ceiling, the fluttering fluorescent tubes, the peeling linoleum on the floor. He turns to Santayana, who’s now peering through the doorway. She nods.

  Rigo turns to Cooper. “This will do. Give us an hour to get set up, then send over Deputy Robinson. I’d like to start with him.”

  “Start with him—how, exactly?” asks Cooper.

  “Questioning,” Rigo says. “Oh, and, Sheriff—I understand you have two working vehicles on the premises. I’ll need the keys.”

  “What for?”

  “We can’t have anyone leaving.”

  “We’re a hundred miles from the closest town, Rigo. If someone runs, where are they going to run to?”

  “I’ll need the keys. Drop them by this afternoon. And send over Deputy Robinson.” Rigo gives Cooper a smile. “Don’t worry. You’ll get your turn.”

  Santayana slips past Rigo and Cooper and walks into the room, inspecting it like someone considering a new home. She walks to the whiteboard and runs three well-manicured fingertips over the leftover scrawl from Robinson’s intake speech. She leaves three swipe marks, like claw marks, through the word FLOURISH.

  She looks at the marker on her fingertips, rubs them, then turns to Cooper and Rigo. “We’ll take it!” she says, then laughs.

  Dawes watches the four agents as they unpack the luggage from their trucks and tote it into the bungalow. She’s curious about the unending stream of hardware. She’s curious, too, about how all this is going to go down. She’s been prepped, naturally, by Cooper, earlier this morning, before the agents arrived, on the events of the previous night: On how, spurred by Cooper’s faith in Dawes’s intuitive and quite ingenious suspicions, he’d called Dean into the police trailer for a late-night chat. How he’d explained to Dean that Dawes had pieced together a compelling trail of evidence that connected him to Gable and, before that, Colfax. And how Cooper then mentioned to Dean that Dawes had intercepted the box of 9 mm bullets addressed to his real name, Lester Vogel, in that very morning’s shipment of contraband mail. And how Dean, confronted with this evidence, had cracked and confessed to killing Gable and then, in a panic, pulled his 9 mm gun on Cooper, the same gun that had killed Gable and Colfax, Cooper was sure. And how, so confronted, Cooper had been forced to draw and fire first with his revolver, killing Dean.

  A remarkable feat of quick-draw survivalism, Dawes thinks, given what she knows about Cooper’s surgically reconstructed right shoulder.

  But that’s the official story, as relayed to her and Robinson by Cooper. As long as they all communicate this story clearly to these agents, Cooper explained, he was confident these agents would wrap up their business shortly and be gone quickly out of everyone’s lives. Everything would return to normal, or as close to normal as this town gets.

  It might even be the truth, Dawes thinks. Maybe that is how it went down.

  She’s certainly not about to mourn Lester Vogel, not after learning what she did at that library computer terminal about his copious and hideous crimes. She did not mention to Cooper, of course, that she’d been to a library in Abilene, or that she’d run a search on “Lester Vogel,” so she knew all about his past transgressions. She also didn’t mention that, as a result, she now finds herself peering at every person in the town, wondering what abominable sins they, too, might be hiding, forgotten, in their buried histories.

  People like Spiro Mitchum. Orson Calhoun. Marilyn Roosevelt. Fran Adams.

  People like Calvin Cooper.

  When she ran her search on “John Barker” and “Fell Institute,” she got a hint of his sins.

  She also didn’t mention that to Cooper.

  But that’s not what’s truly troubling Dawes this morning, as she watches the agents unpack.

  What’s truly troubling Dawes is this: She never told Cooper about the box of bullets in the morning’s contraband mail. So how did he know about it when he confronted Dean last night?

  As she watches, and wonders, she feels idly for the notebook she keeps tucked in her breast pocket, just to make sure it’s still there.

  23.

  BETTE BURR STARES into an empty suitcase and wonders if she should bother to pack it.

  She arrived with two suitcases, mostly for show, one of them full of bedsheets to give it heft, and the other with barely enough of her clothes in it to last for a week. She figured she’d be in Caesura for three days, tops—that’s what they told her—but now it’s already day number four. When the In
stitute contacted her about her father, she was very curious to meet him. She had spent her whole life trying to figure out just who exactly her father was. He was never spoken of by her mother, and when she finally got old enough to press, her mother would only say that Eleanor was the product of a very short and long-forgotten relationship. Possibly as short as one night. Possibly as short as an hour. Her mother would never elaborate.

  When she got to be a teenager, Eleanor found out a few things about her father on her own. For example, she knew that her father was a criminal. That he went to prison. Her mother let that slip once late at night after too many drinks. And after many more years of badgering, cajoling, and persistent coaxing, Eleanor even managed to convince her mother to tell her the man’s name.

  John Sung.

  But when Eleanor searched the public records for any trace of John Sung, there was no mention of any such man, living or dead, in the prison system. And that was pretty much it.

  Until she got a call one day.

  Eleanor was living in Palo Alto at the time, doing graduate work at Stanford, a promising student with the plan of becoming a clinical psychologist. (Something about her open face made people open up to her, it seemed.) She knew the work of Johann Fell and Judy Holliday vaguely—she’d studied their research in one of her seminars on radical alternate treatments for trauma survivors. Johann Fell, who’d worked closely all his career with damaged refugees and torture victims, pioneered a method by which you could chemically nullify traumatic memories in someone’s brain. It was crude, but it was a notorious breakthrough, and promised an entirely new tool in helping people move on from horrifying pasts. Since his death, however, his protégée, Dr. Holliday, had taken the research in a different direction.

  Eleanor hadn’t realized just how different until she sat one day across a table from Dr. Holliday in a large, empty boardroom on the Stanford campus. Dr. Holliday cut an impressive figure. She was well-spoken, elegant, and incandescently intelligent. She outlined to Eleanor the broad parameters of a project called Caesura—a small and privately funded element of the Fell Institute’s overall mission, but a crucial one, Holliday explained. Eleanor spent most of the early part of this interview wondering what exactly she was doing there. Then Dr. Holliday asked Eleanor what she knew about her father.

  I know his name, and that’s about it, Eleanor told her.

  There’s a man, Dr. Holliday explained, currently in the Caesura program whose backstory might shed some light on your history. His name is William Wayne. He’s been the beneficiary of a unique arrangement in Caesura, and that arrangement involves another man, who’s currently living under house arrest in Hawaii, and has been for eight years.

  A criminal by the name of John Sung.

  After that conversation, Eleanor traveled to Hawaii—to Kauai, specifically—where she was met at the airport by a police officer in a panama hat and a floral Hawaiian shirt, who took her on a two-hour drive in an open-topped Jeep through the lush and picturesque mountains, to a remote shack off an unpaved laneway, almost totally obscured by overgrown foliage, where she met her father and sat with him in a quiet living room, alongside the policeman who’d been her father’s minder and sole friend for the past eight years.

  She even has a Polaroid to prove it. Given to her later by Dr. Holliday. Which is helpful, because Eleanor remembers none of this.

  Her father was thin and feeble, and he wore shorts and no shirt and his chest was sallow and seemed to cave in on itself, and on one ankle he wore an electronic monitor, and he had an oxygen tube entwined around his face and in his nose, and next to him, like a loyal pet, sat an oxygen tank on a stand on wheels.

  She doesn’t remember any of that, either.

  The room was dark and smelled stale. There was a half-completed card game laid out on a small rattan table. Her father offered her a seat on a tattered wicker chair. He was dying, he explained. He coughed a lot.

  She doesn’t remember that, either.

  His story, insofar as it concerned Eleanor, was not that surprising, in the end. An hour turned out to be a generous estimate as to the length of her parents’ relationship. It was a drunken collision between strangers that yielded a child. As for the rest of his life, or at least the parts he was willing to hint at, it all seemed compelling in a sordid way, though he purposefully avoided going into details. He claimed he didn’t remember much, including anything at all about her mother. About his own childhood, his own origins, the reasons for his current circumstance, he revealed nothing. It’s better forgotten, he told her.

  She doesn’t remember any of this because, after she returned from the trip, Dr. Holliday arranged to have her memory of the trip erased. Fell’s technique, so crude at its inception, had been honed by Holliday to the point that specific memories could be targeted and nullified, especially very recent ones. They are the easiest to eliminate, Holliday explained to her later. Johann, she said, was concerned mainly with victims of unspeakable atrocities and had developed a way to erase whole decades from people’s memories. But Holliday had perfected the method such that it could erase a week, a day, even an hour.

  And it was Dr. Holliday who explained to Eleanor, in that same enormous boardroom on Stanford’s sun-slanted campus where they’d first met, that her trip to Hawaii had even happened at all. Eleanor had no memory of it. She sat there, befuddled, her mind feeling muddied and scrubbed. And it was Dr. Holliday who gave her the Polaroid of her and her father, as proof. Who explained to Eleanor that her father had requested to meet his daughter, just once, before he died, so he could give her a message to deliver—a message for a man named William Wayne. Dr. Holliday also explained that it was her father who had insisted, to both Dr. Holliday and Eleanor, on the lone condition of this meeting: That afterward, Eleanor would have all memory of the meeting erased. And that Eleanor had agreed to this beforehand. There was a signature sheet to prove it. Holliday slid it across the table. Eleanor looked it over. Sure enough.

  She looked up at Dr. Holliday. “But why did he want to do that?” she asked, feeling, in that shadowed boardroom, confused, disoriented, and betrayed, and suddenly aware of a dark and malignant blot in her mind, this absence, like an ink drop spreading in water.

  “Because your father did not want your only memory of him to be of an old, feeble man trapped in a shack,” Dr. Holliday said. “You have to understand—in his time, before his incarceration, John Sung was a very robust man. If you’re going to remember him, he wants you to remember him that way. As the man he once was. As the man William Wayne knew.”

  “But how can I possibly do that?”

  “By finding William Wayne. And delivering your father’s message to him.”

  “And what’s the message?” Eleanor asked.

  “That your father is dead.”

  “Is he?” Eleanor asked.

  “He is now,” Dr. Holliday said. “He was very sick. He knew what was coming. He died just a few days after your visit.”

  After that, Dr. Holliday arranged for Eleanor to visit Caesura, under the guise of a new arrival. She would have to pretend that she, like the other residents, had no memory of who she’d previously been. The employees in the town, the sheriff and his deputies, wouldn’t be informed that Eleanor—or Bette Burr—was any different from anyone else. Once inside the town, her job was to find Wayne, deliver her father’s message, and, in return, find out what, if anything, Wayne remembered about her father, John Sung. Then, after three days, the Institute would extract her. That was the arrangement.

  Eleanor had two more questions in that boardroom for Dr. Holliday, sitting at that long table, after Holliday had laid this all out to her.

  The first question: “Why me? Why not just deliver this news to Wayne yourselves?”

  “Because Wayne won’t believe it coming from anyone else. But he’ll believe you.”

  The second question: “Why would I do this?”

  “Because it’s your only chance to know who your father really
was.”

  Her only chance to know—yet here she is, thinks Bette Burr, four days in with no progress. And no desire, really, to stick it out for any longer, here in the middle of nowhere, struggling to deliver a message to a man she’s never met from a father she never knew.

  So, when Bette saw the two black SUVs roll into town this morning, while everyone else in the town chattered and wondered who these people were and what they were doing here, she figured, Okay, this must be my ticket out of here. I gave it my shot. I knocked. I knocked again. Now I just want to go home.

  As she looks now at the empty suitcase again, the one she toted in just for show, she thinks, Fuck it, forget the second suitcase, forget the whole masquerade, and she zippers the first one shut, with her few pieces of clothing in it, and her manila envelope, and her Polaroid, and she hefts that suitcase and heads over to where the agents seem to have gathered, across town, at the intake trailer.

  There’s a big one in a black suit standing guard at the door. She marches up to him, suitcase in hand.

  “Okay, I’m ready to go,” she says.

  “I’m sorry?” says the agent.

  “My name’s Bette Burr. I mean, Eleanor Sung. You’re here to take me home, right?”

  The agent resumes his disinterested stance. “No one in, no one out.”

  “I’m sorry—what’s your name?”

  “Agent Burly.”

  “Agent Burly, I understand you’ve got some other business in the town, but I’d like to go. Now. Maybe one of you can drive me out of here?”

  “I think you misunderstood me,” he says.