The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  He’s even forgiven his wife, he says. Wherever she might be.

  He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he will if the press insists.

  He has no memory of the event itself—the incident—and really that’s for the best. Memories can hinder you. He’s all about moving forward. He believes there’s a larger plan for his life, and when you believe there’s a plan for your life, then everything in that plan becomes an instrument of that plan. Even a disloyal wife.

  Even a coma.

  Even a bullet.

  He wishes her only the best, he says. No, he hasn’t heard from her in years. Not since that night. When you spend nearly a year in a coma, he jokes, you tend to fall out of touch with people. [Laughter.] Imagine my email inbox, he jokes. [Laughter.]

  The press nods and jots down his remarks.

  His wife was a PhD student in English lit at UC Berkeley when they met, a good fifteen years younger than he was. Part of a group of top students he’d brought in to help make his algorithm more poetic. The kind of tech project you undertake when you have shareholders to dazzle and unlimited money to spend. Nothing came of the meetings, but the two of them fell in love. A real storybook romance, he says. [Laughter.] She was a bookworm, with a vast collection of volumes that arrived at his home in dozens of boxes after he finally convinced her to move in. He built her an incredible library. An entire room inlaid with built-in bookcases floor to ceiling, all her own, her vast collection of books shelved, ordered, tagged, archived, and neatly tucked away.

  They’re not married anymore, not legally, of course. She’s in prison, somewhere in solitary, receiving appropriate treatment for her mental illness, so he understands. Probably for life. He wishes her the best. He’d rather not say anything more about these personal matters. Let’s move on. Next question.

  In truth, it’s the kind of story that fades after a few months, after the bang, after the headlines, after the trial. She’s just the answer to a trivia question now. Of course, she told a different story at the time, but no one listened. And then she disappeared into the bowels of the penal system. And her memories of the whole event—of the man, of the night, of the shot, of the different story she once told—all that disappeared, too.

  She remembers a book she’d been reading at the time, after the bang, after the headlines, after the trial. A book she brought with her to prison. A collection of journals by a woman with a faraway look and a strident mind. What was she looking for in it: strength, wisdom, succor, something? But she read it every day. She remembers scribbling and highlighting and underlining each page, the book marked up like a treasure map that refuses to yield its treasure. As though every line contained some secret coded message just for her. She sat in her cell and read and scribbled all over it. She slept with that book under her pillow every night.

  It’s not even a process of remembering, she thinks. Memories are something you recall. You recollect them—you literally re-collect them. Dredge them up from some secret hollow where they’ve been lying in wait to be rediscovered.

  They took her to a room.

  Explained how it would go.

  You won’t remember any of this, they said, and she immediately thought of the book back in her cell.

  The clatter of prison. The tang of antiseptic. The sharp steely pain of the homemade needle in the skin of her arm.

  She looks down at her tattoo now. Rubs it.

  12500241214911

  Then keeps reading. The article continues:

  Vincent, having amazed his doctors and defied all expectations, would now run unopposed for his party’s nomination. His replacement stepped aside willingly. “Honestly, I was just keeping the seat warm,” he joked stiffly at the press conference. [Laughter.] After all, who stands in the way of this kind of story?

  The article continues:

  “If I learned one thing during my recovery, it’s the importance of taking life one step at a time,” Vincent said.

  The article continues:

  Vincent is newly engaged to be remarried. “My past is my past,” he said. “And that’s that. Some things are better left forgotten.”

  He has no children.

  The article ends.

  The night before they were to come and give her the procedure, she found someone in the prison, a heavyset woman with kind eyes, she remembers now, who knew how to do it. It took hours, and it was painful, she remembers.

  The woman said to her, You really want this whole thing? and she said to the woman, Yes, and the woman said, Right arm or left arm? and she looked down at her two bare arms and the flesh of her wrist and said, Left.

  The clatter of prison. The tang of antiseptic. She can smell it, in the library, right now.

  She remembers a circle of women formed around them in the cell to block what they were doing from the sight lines of the guards, and she remembers she turned the paperback book over in her hand and searched for numbers on the back and said, Here, and pointed out the numbers to the woman and the woman said, You sure? and she said, Yes, I’m sure.

  She remembers the pain of the needle. She feels it, right now, on her wrist, like an itch, like a burn, like the tattoo is re-etching itself.

  She remembers that she held out her pale left arm and, as the woman started to etch in the numbers painfully over her wrist, she said to the woman, Sinister, and the woman said, Sister what? and she said to the woman, No, sinister, that’s from the Latin word for “left,” and the woman nodded and got back to work with the needle. She remembers the ballpoint pen with a sewing needle taped to it, dipped rhythmically in an overturned cap filled with homemade ink. She remembers wondering halfway through the procedure if the ink would hurt the baby, but it was too late. The baby that no one knew about but her. The baby so young and her not even showing. She said nothing about it, and at some point she remembers the woman while she worked said, You’re new here aren’t you? like she was trying to distract her from the pain, and she answered, Yes, and the woman said, It’s painful but it will all be over soon, and she said, It’s okay, I won’t remember any of this, that’s what they told me, and the woman shrugged, and as she worked with the needle the woman said, Well, this you’ll have forever, like a keepsake of this place, like a souvenir, and she said to the woman, Do you know what “souvenir” means? and the woman shook her head and kept working and she said to the woman, “souvenir” is the French word for memory, it literally means “to remember,” and the woman nodded and said, Don’t worry, you’ll remember this, and got back to her work and to the pain until she finished.

  12500241214911

  On her left wrist.

  Her sinister souvenir.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  Something to remember him by.

  25.

  I WANT HIM GONE,” says Cooper.

  “Who gone?” says Rigo.

  “Dick Dietrich. I want him out of here.”

  “I have no idea who that is,” says Rigo, barely glancing up from his tablet’s screen. Behind him, the intake trailer is jittery with activity: two of the muscular, black-suited agents, Corey and Bigelow, sort through boxes full of files, all lifted from Cooper’s office. When Cooper entered the trailer, shouldering past Burly, the goon outside, the door opened and Walt Robinson exited, giving Cooper a funny look as he passed, Cooper’s sure of it. He might even interpret the look as a warning. Cooper watches now as one of the agents hoists the 9 mm pistol he confiscated from Gerald Dean and left in his desk drawer—it’s wrapped in an evidence bag. The agent tags it and tosses it in a box.

  “You can’t just barge in here, Sheriff,” says Rigo. “I know you’re used to having the run of this town, but we’re trying to conduct an investigation.” He keeps swiping at his tablet with a long white finger, like a tree branch scratching at a window. Cooper wonders how Rigo’s even getting a signal out here.

  Another agent hoists a long black case onto a desk, then with two sharp clicks opens it, and when he lifts the lid,
Cooper spots an AR-15 rifle nestled in egg-carton foam inside the case.

  “You expecting a war?” says Cooper.

  Rigo just smiles, distracted.

  “You do realize no one in this town has a gun, right?” says Cooper.

  “And yet people keep getting shot.”

  “Dietrich is the menace, I’m telling you. Do you know what he did to our pack of coydogs? He set them on fire.”

  “Wait—what’s a coydog?” says Rigo.

  “Dietrich’s unhinged.”

  “All due respect, Sheriff, my mandate here is to get answers, not settle old grudges.”

  “He’s a danger. To all of us.”

  Rigo glances around at the agents in the room, unpacking their weapons, then says to Cooper: “I think we can handle him. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got interviews to conduct.” He nods toward the doorway of the trailer, where Dawes is now standing and waiting. Cooper spies her, too: Sidney Dawes, watching the action in silence, avoiding his eyes, or so it seems to Cooper. Rigo waves her in, and she sits down at a school desk without so much as a word to Cooper.

  “We’ll be right with you, Deputy,” says Rigo. Then, to Cooper: “I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You understand.”

  “Dietrich’s the one you need to focus on,” says Cooper, sounding increasingly desperate, even to himself.

  “Sure. I’ll get right on that. In the meantime, don’t wander off too far.”

  Cooper shoots another glance at Dawes, hoping for—something. Some indication. But she stares straight ahead and ignores him. So he heads for the door and, before Cooper exits, he says to Rigo, “Where exactly am I going to go?”

  Once Cooper’s left the trailer, Dawes settles into her chair, her knees bumping up against the underside of the little school desk. She waits and watches as the agents unpack boxes and tack photos of Errol Colfax, Hubert Gable, and Gerald Dean to the whiteboard. She thinks back to the day just six weeks ago when she first arrived here—her own unofficial intake day—and all that had preceded that moment: how she fled Atlanta and that starter home and that abusive dead-end husband and how she thought, as she drove in her dented hatchback over those long stretches of look-alike highway, pointed southwest toward a friend in Austin and an uncertain future, that the best parts of her life were likely behind her and that they hadn’t even really been that good. She sat there in her car, on the highway, that idea filling her with dread. To be barely thirty and already feel like your life is irreparably off the rails. The evidence was piled up against her: from her decision to skip college, mostly to annoy her academic parents; to her failed and dispirited attempt to become an EMT; to her quick marriage and even quicker divorce; to her hasty exodus to Austin—all those choices had led her to apply for this job, in this place, and they could not reasonably be regarded as steering her toward some greater destiny. Yet here she is. And, every day, she irons her uniform. Every day, she updates her notebook. Every day, she asks questions, and waits patiently for improbable opportunity, even though she has no clue what opportunity might look like, especially one that might find her all the way out here.

  Well, maybe, she thinks, settling into the chair, tapping the notebook in her breast pocket, maybe this is what opportunity looks like. A trailer full of outsiders in suits with questions that she just might have the answers to. After a life spent too long on the wrong side of other people’s lies, it feels good to be on the side of the truth. And she’s pretty sure she knows the truth. She knows plenty, that’s for sure.

  I wait. I watch. I guard.

  John Barker, for example. She knows something about him. It’s certainly not part of the story he told her to tell these people. But that’s okay—she’s not telling anyone else’s stories today.

  The tall agent with the spiked white hair and the sunglasses, Rigo, is conferring with the female agent, Santayana. “I have to go and deal with this guy Dietrich,” he says to her. “Can you handle this?”

  Santayana glances at Dawes and nods.

  When Rigo exits, Santayana strides crisply over to Dawes, her heels tapping the linoleum floor. Imagine wearing heels out here, Dawes thinks, in all this dust and heat. She can’t tell if it makes you confident or obstinate. Agent Santayana pulls up a plastic chair. “My apologies. We’re just getting everything up and running.”

  “No problem,” says Dawes.

  Santayana sits. She offers Dawes a warm smile, like the smile you might get from the person at a crowded party who finally makes you feel welcome, like it wasn’t a huge mistake for you to come. Up close, the agent’s age is impossible to ascertain—she could be twenty-five or forty-five or anywhere in between. She’s quite well groomed, even in this Texas heat, and she smells pleasantly of summer orchards, Dawes notices, the scent drifting lazily toward her in the stale air of the windowless intake trailer.

  “Sidney—that’s an unusual name,” she says.

  “I prefer Sid.”

  “Okay, Sid. I prefer Iris. Nice to meet you.” She gestures back toward the commotion in the room, then turns to Dawes and mouths the word “men,” then laughs. “Am I right? They’re useless without us. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.” Then she picks up her deep black tablet and starts stroking the screen. A few moments pass. Dawes, anxious, decides to speak: “About the shootings—”

  “Yes, we’ll get to that.” Santayana keeps her eyes trained on the tablet.

  Dawes waits. Then says, “Do you know about John Barker?”

  “Hold that thought, Sid.” Santayana taps the tablet again, then holds it up and turns it toward Dawes. “Tell me, do you know this woman?”

  Dawes looks at the tablet. It’s a photo of Fran Adams, but not the version of Fran Adams that Dawes is familiar with. This version of Fran Adams is dolled up, laughing, her hair swept high for some fancy function. She’s smiling with an intensity and fervor that Dawes has never seen from her in here—or, really, from anyone in here. She wears glittering earrings that dangle. She looks like she knows the person taking the photo. She looks, honestly, like she’s in love.

  Dawes stares at the photo, confused, her throat constricting slightly for reasons she can’t quite pin down, then says finally, “Yes. I know her.”

  “Very good. You’re being very helpful. Second question, Sid.” Santayana’s smile is gone, she’s suddenly brusque now, all business. “Do you know where we can find her right now?”

  26.

  THE AIR IS IMMOBILE. Dust motes hover, indecisive, in the pale shafts of what little light penetrates the curtains. The bungalow smells of old man, moth balls, and wet wool, which is to be expected, Bette thinks.

  William Wayne offers her a seat.

  He’s unshaven. A white spray of whiskers spreads across his neck, chin, and cheeks, speaking to habitual neglect. The scruff seems coarser over the kidney-shaped port-wine stain that covers one side of his face. The splotch spreads, large and puffy and crimson, over his cheek and under his eye and crawls up the bridge of his nose. His eyes above the stain are small and hooded, like the eyes of a cave dweller, long ago adjusted to inadequate light.

  “What made you open the door for me?” Bette says.

  “It’s a door. That’s what it’s made for,” he says. “I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but I don’t have anything to offer.”

  “That’s okay,” Bette says.

  He has a wild crown of impressive ghost-white hair, swept up and back in a careless pompadour. He wears a black cowboy shirt with tarnished pearl snaps, and stained black corduroy trousers, and weathered leather boots. The knuckles of his gnarled hands are ballooned with age, like knots in an ancient tree trunk. Bette watches him. She’d imagined someone different. Someone gallant and strapping. Someone fearsome. Someone dangerous. Not this man. This cannot be him.

  The famous killer known as William Wayne.

  “How can I help you?” he says. His voice has a rasp to it, a wheeze, like a punctured accordion, gasping.

&
nbsp; “You knew John Sung,” she says. Despite herself, her voice ticks up at the end, as though she’s asking him a question, or asking for confirmation of her statement.

  Wayne winces, regarding her. Doesn’t answer. She continues.

  “I’m his daughter, Eleanor. I’m Eleanor Sung.”

  “Did I ever know you?” asks Wayne.

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think so,” she says. “I only just met my father. And I don’t remember him at all.”

  “Can you tell me how he is?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Wayne hears this, then sits silent for a very long moment.

  “Do you remember my father?” she asks finally.

  “In a sense,” says Wayne. “They don’t let me forget. That’s how they keep me here. Or at least that’s what they believe.”

  He points toward the kitchen with a finger so crooked that it’s no longer suited to the task of pointing. “I have a kettle. I can put some water on. I can offer you hot water.”

  “I’d like that,” she says.

  He stands. He’s so tall, she sees now. As he unfurls himself, like a flag, for the first time she sees perhaps what her father saw.

  This fearsome, gallant man.

  The famous killer, William Wayne.

  The love of her father’s life.

  William Wayne was born Esau Unruh and loosed in this world like a plague. As a boy, he knew nothing but whippings and darkness, these being the preferred punishments of his father—the strap or the closet, or both. One punishment would follow the other without reason or restraint. Exiled in a farmhouse on the coldest plains of Manitoba, Canada, he soon learned there was little point in crying out at his father’s hand. His mother, for her part, always screamed as his father beat her; as a young boy, bruised, Esau fell asleep nightly to the lullaby of his mother’s further wailings. She was a woman haunted, by visions and dread, and his father was convinced that fists, relentlessly applied, were the only remedy for her sickness. She rarely raised a hand to intervene or spare Esau from his own whippings. The fact that Esau was marked as a newborn by a wine stain like Cain only furthered his mother’s conviction that her son was tainted at birth by something corrupt and otherworldly. And she may have been right.