The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Bette sighs. “Contact Dr. Holliday. She knows all about this.”

  “No one in, no one out. That’s all I know.”

  “Okay, yes, but when are we leaving?”

  “I suggest you return to your home.”

  She stares at the agent. She stares at the closed trailer door. Neither is budging. Maybe someone inside—someone official—“Can I at least talk to whoever’s in charge?”

  “No one in, no one out.”

  She hefts her lone case and walks away, figuring she’ll have to identify whoever’s in charge later. She’ll be okay, she thinks, she’s got an open face. In the meantime, if nothing else, she wants that photo of her father back—let me at least have that as a souvenir of all this, she thinks. She decides to walk past Wayne’s house, one last time, just to see if the photo she left is still half-sticking out from under the door, so she can snatch it back. Which she’s sure it will be. She’s starting to wonder if William Wayne even exists. Or if maybe he died years ago, and there’s no one to notice, or care. Maybe he’s just a bogeyman, a legend languishing behind a locked door. As she trudges down his block and approaches his house, suitcase held in one hand, she must look like a traveling salesman, she thinks, with her bag of cheap inducements—and then she sees the photo. It’s not under the door anymore. It’s taped up inside the window, facing out to the street.

  Her father’s face.

  Left like a message. From William Wayne. To her.

  She walks up to the door and knocks.

  24.

  MARILYN ROOSEVELT LOOKS UP from her desk when she hears the bell ring over the door to the library. “May I help—” she starts, but something in Fran’s face halts her usual chipper greeting.

  “This week’s papers,” Fran says, tugging Isaac behind here. “Do you still have them?”

  “Sure, they’re all out on the rack.”

  “What about the last few months? Do you keep those, too?”

  “I’m supposed to recycle them, so I bundle them up every week. But no one ever comes to pick them up. If you want, you can find them all in the back room. Is there something specific you’re looking for?”

  “I just want to have a look through.” Fran steers Isaac off toward the YA section to flip through paperbacks.

  “But I’ve read all those—” Isaac starts to whine, but Fran gives him a look that cuts him short. He sulks over to the shelves and starts idly flipping. Fran gathers the stacks of inky papers on their long, stiff wooden spines from the rack and lays them with a clack out on a large table. They’re mostly local papers from the castaway towns within a few hundred miles, filled with coupons and news items about fires. The national news sections are thin collections of wire-service copy. Fran’s not even sure what she’s looking for. But something about those pages, in the journal with the quote, the way they came alive under her eyes, convinced her to keep looking; that maybe these papers would have more words that would trigger something in her.

  She sits, begins at page one, and starts flipping. She scans through each rippled newsprint page for a spark. Ink blackens her fingertips as she traces the headlines, hoping for—she doesn’t know, exactly. She avoids the local news, the sports, the entertainment—she scans only the national news. It’s like looking for a memorable quote in a book you once read. She’ll know it when she sees it, or she hopes she will.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  Who sent her that message, and why?

  Who left those numbers on her wrist before she even got here?

  More gray boxes. Small type, and all gibberish. Studies, protests, polls: the usual cacophony of inconsequence. She glances at the dates of the papers—they’re all out of order, and seem to be from random days. She calls to Marilyn: “These papers are old, and weeks apart.”

  “I just put out what comes on the truck,” says Marilyn.

  Fran turns back to her papers and keeps flipping. What’s common to all these papers? She looks for recurring articles, echoed headlines. Her fingers are so ink-stained now that she’s leaving her own fingerprints in the margins.

  She sniffs an inky finger, idly. It smells like gunpowder.

  No. Like ink. Right?

  Like gunpowder.

  She remembers smelling gunpowder. The acrid stink of it in the air. On her fingers. The acrid stink and a jarring, numbing shudder sent back up her right arm.

  A recoil.

  Her shoulder aches at the recollection of it.

  She’s remembering.

  She flips.

  More pages. More columns. More headlines.

  Wait.

  MIRACLE MOGUL MAKES SENATE RUN OFFICIAL

  A smiling photo. The same man she saw making speeches on the TV in the Laundromat.

  She grabs another paper’s national section and flips through it—there he is again. She rummages through the other editions she has piled on the table. Each one contains an article about him, charting his progress as he prepares to run for the Senate seat in California. Detailing his past as a billionaire tech titan, his political ambitions, and his long recovery from a gunshot wound to the head.

  She turns back to the first article. About the miracle mogul.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  She reads.

  If Fran looked up, she would see through the library’s front window the figure of Cooper, heading back to the police trailer, alone, right down the middle of the main street. As he walks, head down, the restless assemblage of a dozen or so townspeople that has been hovering at the edges of the thoroughfare, conspiring and speculating, converges around him. Buster Ford is the first to speak: “Calvin—”

  “It’s under control, Buster,” says Cooper tersely, not breaking stride. “These agents are from the Institute. They’re just here to wrap things up.”

  “How long are they staying?” shouts Lyndon Lancaster from the edge of the crowd. Cooper turns; he can tell Lancaster’s out of sorts, because he’s unshaven and looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and his usually impeccable, Brylcreemed hair flops in long strands over his face.

  “I can’t imagine it will be longer than a day or two,” Cooper says, though he’s starting to imagine it might be much longer than that.

  “So do they—do they know?” says Spiro Mitchum.

  “Know what, Spiro?”

  Mitchum clutches at his apron anxiously. He says quietly: “Who we are?” Cooper can’t tell from his voice if he’s fearful that they might know or hopeful that they do.

  “Of course not,” says Cooper. “No one has access to those files, not me, not them, not anyone. You know that.” He turns to walk away.

  “I have a question—” comes a reedy voice from the crowd, and Cooper knows it right away: fucking Dietrich. He turns and spots Dietrich lingering near the back of the group.

  “What is it, Dick?”

  “When whatever comes that’s coming, how do you plan to deal with it?”

  Cooper stares him down. “Dietrich, what are you asking me?”

  Dietrich repeats himself, as though presenting a delightful riddle he expects everyone will find enchanting. “When whatever comes that’s coming, how do you plan to deal with it, Sheriff?”

  “The same way I deal with everything in this town,” says Cooper. “Quickly, resolutely, and definitively.” Cooper’s about to walk away, to let it drop—he should, he knows—but instead he says: “What’s your game, Dietrich?”

  “I’m just biding my time, Sheriff. Just waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever’s coming to come. It’s almost here.”

  Cooper’s about to press this further, but he feels the anxious eyes of the crowd on him, nervous, combustible, so instead he turns and starts to walk again. He barks over his shoulder: “If anyone’s feeling uncomfortable, I suggest you stay in your bungalow until this blows over. As always, you can find me at the police trailer. Have a good day, everyone.”

  He strides
off, eager to shake the crowd, and annoyed at the pleading insistence of the townsfolk and the blatant insolence of Dietrich, not to mention this whole unannounced intrusion from the Institute. Dr. Holliday didn’t even warn him about this when they were sitting face-to-face a day ago? And six fucking agents? For what? No wonder Rigo’s got everyone in town shitting their drawers. This doesn’t look like an investigation; it looks like an invasion.

  Cooper’s already at a low boil as he approaches the police trailer—and what he encounters there stops him dead.

  One of the agents, a runty redhead, his brush cut the garish crimson of a dime-store lipstick, is standing by the entrance of the police trailer, crisscrossing the closed door with yellow tape that reads SECURITY LINE DO NOT CROSS.

  “Excuse me?” says Cooper.

  “This is an active crime scene,” says the agent.

  “I know. I’m the shooter, remember?” says Cooper.

  The agent doesn’t smile or even turn to look at Cooper, just keeps taping the doorway. With each tug of the roll, the tape screeches.

  “I have to get in there—” says Cooper. “I have personal effects—”

  “You’ll need clearance from Agent Rigo.”

  “To access my own office?”

  “You’ll need clearance from Agent Rigo.”

  “You work for the Fell Institute, right? Do you even have legal jurisdiction here?”

  The agent stops taping. “We both work for the Fell Institute, Sheriff. And this is a private facility on private land. If I were you, legal jurisdiction is the last thing I’d be worried about right now.”

  “And what is the first thing I should worry about?”

  The agent says nothing, just starts taping again.

  “Look,” says Cooper, “I’d love to get a sense of the parameters of your investigation. Since we’ll be working together—”

  “You’ll need clearance from Agent Rigo.”

  “I’m thinking of taking a shit later. Will I need clearance from Agent Rigo for that?”

  The agent keeps taping.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll ask him myself.” Cooper turns and heads right back toward the intake trailer he just came from. Nothing about any of this feels right. He does take some consolation as he walks in the fact that the most important piece of evidence from the agent’s active crime scene behind him is still safely in Cooper’s possession. He rests the heel of his hand on the grip of that evidence, his pistol, still nestled in his holster.

  Robinson shifts his admittedly ample ass in the uncomfortable plastic chair. He waits for this long-legged prick in the black suit to look up from the screen of the electronic tablet he’s so intently focused on. It’s not lost on Robinson that this is the exact position, in this exact building, in possibly even this exact chair, that new arrivals to Caesura sit and squirm while he, Walter Robinson, sits pretty much exactly where that long-legged, black-suited prick is sitting now, staring them down. Robinson’s never had to feel this way before—the way the new arrivals must feel on the other side of his desk. Asked to pick a new name. Asked to start from scratch. Feeling like you’re in a little rubber dinghy, and behind you rests your whole unremembered life, and Robinson sits before you holding a comically huge pair of scissors, and he’s about to cut the rope and let you drift.

  He doesn’t love the feeling, to be honest.

  But it’s not like he’s the one who goes in and scoops out all their memories—he’s just the one who welcomes them here after that’s done. So don’t blame him. He just answered an ad for a job. Sure, it’s true, he used to wonder about newcomers. He used to sit at the intake table and silently size people up, trying to guess, to speculate, even though you’re technically not supposed to. He’d think: Okay, what did you do, buddy? Where did you go wrong, lady? What brought your ass to the Blinds? But that phase only lasted maybe six months, tops. After that, he stopped wondering. What’s the point—you could never know, and they could never tell. So he decided just to take people as they come. And as had happened at many previous junctures in his life, Robinson ultimately came to understand that not asking questions is just a lot . . . easier. It’s even a kind of relief. Everything got simpler. Chase down noise complaints. Break up drunken fistfights. And at night, watch old movies on the TV they gave you, on the old VCR they let you have. Then go to sleep with earplugs and an eye mask, shut the world out, then wake up and do it all again.

  Simple.

  And Robinson’s been doing that for five years now, even though he never expected to stay that long. But when the first two-year contract was over he re-upped without a second thought, then re-upped again two years later. It’s quiet here. Peaceful. Not that he hasn’t had moments of boredom. He has a certain proficiency with small appliances, just hobbyist stuff, and, once, he took the back off his standard-issue walkie-talkie and tried fiddling with it to see if he could pick up a different signal—someone from the outside, some new person to talk to, some stray transmission from civilization drifting on the ether. But he abandoned that project pretty quick after he got worried that, if the Institute found out what he was doing, he’d be censured, fired, or worse. Maybe he’d even get wiped. Maybe they’d kick down his bungalow’s door in the night, shining flashlights, and take him away in leg irons and erase his memory, too. He’d considered the possibility. That they might erase someone’s memory without their consent. How would you even know if they had? Maybe it had already happened. It’s the kind of thing he used to read about a lot on the Internet, back in his other life. Black helicopters and chemtrails and secret government camps and all sorts of shit they never talk about. You don’t know the half of what’s going on in the world, is how he figures it. So why wouldn’t they wipe your memory, then wipe your memory of it being wiped? Who knows what the Institute is capable of?

  So he stopped fiddling with the walkie-talkie.

  Instead, he watches his VHS movies. Tapes worn so thin in certain parts that the screen just fills with fuzz.

  Maybe he’d even ask the Institute to do it one day, before he retires. Wipe his mind clear. Why not? You have nothing to lose but your past. For example, he’d sat out one humid night in his backyard in Baltimore and destroyed all the photos of his ex-wife with a Zippo lighter in a small trashcan, after he’d quit the force and been put on disability but before he’d packed up his apartment and moved all the way out here. Burning those photos—wasn’t that just a low-tech, homemade version of doing what the Institute does? He remembers the acrid smell of them. The emulsion catching fire. Her smile bubbling, curling. Then gone.

  She’d already left him, and took that smile with her, which, to be fair, had been underused of late. He burned her photos, and packed up his apartment, and answered an ad for a job, and here he is. He feels like most of his life is only half-remembered at this point anyway. He barely remembers her smile. He wishes he’d kept one of those photos. Saved it from the fire. All those years they’d spent together seemed like someone else’s years to him now, someone else’s life, someone else’s smile.

  There’s nothing special about this place, he thinks. We all forget. Then we forget what we forgot. And that’s how we survive.

  Rigo taps the tablet screen and finally looks up.

  “Tell me about Calvin Cooper,” he says.

  “What would you like to know?” Robinson says.

  “For starters, would you say he is a violent person?”

  “Define ‘violent,’” Robinson says.

  Fran sits at the library table, hunched over the articles, making her way through them, one by one. Isaac’s curled up in a corner of the kids’ section, lost in a YA novel.

  Fran reads the first article again.

  The story of the tech tycoon in California who was shot in the head by his wife.

  A domestic dispute, is how the article describes it. An argument that escalated. Crime of passion.

  She knows that’s not what it was.

  It’s very unusual to be shot point-b
lank in the head and survive.

  Unusual. But not impossible.

  A miracle, really. No other word for it. Nearly a year in a coma. He was written off, for sure. Then he came out of it. Then four years in rehabilitative therapy. Relearning to stand. Relearning to speak. Then three more years of—what? she thinks. Just waiting. Searching, maybe. Planning, perhaps.

  Shot, he survives. In a coma, he awakens. Bedridden, he rises. In a wheelchair, he walks again.

  Runs.

  Runs for office.

  Mark Vincent, tech titan, noted philanthropist, victim of a terrible tragedy and, armed with an inspiring backstory, soon to be the next senator from the great state of California.

  An American miracle.

  He was a well-known figure at the time of the incident, a billionaire in his early forties who’d made his fortune in predictive algorithms applied to political campaigns. Better than polling, was the promise, and better than polling was the result. His software could collect and collate consumer information, then tell you, with unnerving accuracy, how someone will vote.

  “I thought, I’ve spent my life perfecting a way to predict how people will vote,” he says, quoted in one of the stories. “Maybe I’ll try to win some of those votes for myself.” He was well on his way to laying the track for a Senate run eight years ago, when he was derailed by a senseless attack. A gunshot wound to the head. It nearly killed him.

  Nearly.

  Fran’s been too long out of touch with the news, after eight years of tuning out the chatter of the TV in the Laundromat, of ignoring the yellowing newspapers on wooden spines in the library. But from what she can gather scanning these pages, things in the outside world aren’t going too good right now. Economy is down. Violence is up. People are scared.

  Yet amid all that, there comes reason for hope.

  The American Miracle.

  That’s what they’re calling him now or, at least, that’s the slogan festooned across his podium when he speaks.

  “I think America can rise again as well,” he says. The medical miracle is promising a national miracle. It’s a narrative that can only end in the White House. It should have no problem lifting him to the Senate. And after that, who knows?