The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  He left home at an early age. He lived for two years on the streets in the closest city, with nearly nothing to his name but a fierce will to protect what little he had. The stain on his face had long since taught him not to anticipate human kindness as a rule. Cain, not Esau, struck him as his biblical precedent. And he quickly learned two lessons: to defend his personal possessions with a vigor that far exceeded their actual worth; and to counter his attacker’s violence with a savagery that far exceeded the original aggression. If they shove, you kick; if they punch, you puncture. Brutality that’s swiftly and almost inexplicably escalated can be a very effective deterrent, he found.

  A reputation can serve as a kind of armor.

  Then, at age fifteen, he returned home, finally succumbing to a persistent, nagging compulsion to intercede on his mother’s behalf. As it happened, on the night he returned unannounced to his homestead, he walked in on one of his father’s beatings, not that such beatings were rare events. His mother, bruised and cowering; his father looming over her with the posture of a prizefighter in training. Esau stopped it, first with his newly expert fists and then with the family shotgun. After he shot his father, his mother, unhinged, distraught beyond reason, and cursing him as the earthly manifestation of some unbound demon, came after him wielding a long kitchen knife. She had already cut herself many times with the blade in a rabid fervor, and blood trailed over her person like festive ribbons. Esau killed both his parents that night. He believed the trigger-pull, the sharp report, the echoing boom, represented a kind of spiritual release for her. He hoped it did.

  Then back to the city. What friends he’d made were of a type well versed in criminal enterprises, and they weren’t really his friends, and he understood this. They used him. They recognized in him an exploitable ferocity. He understood this, too. It didn’t bother him. The fact is, once you’ve killed your own parents, there’s no one in the world you can’t kill. This is a truth passed down from Bible times.

  As a young man, he became the type of nomad who trails fatalities. He never killed out of malice or anger, only from a plain recognition that death is as natural a feature on the landscape as the trees, the water, the earth itself. The human instinct to avoid death at all costs seemed to him the basest form of folly, a grand misunderstanding of our fleeting place in the cosmos. And, like many who come to a quiet peace about the inevitability of their own demise, he came ironically to avoid that fate almost as if by divine protection.

  He ventured south. Bound for the United States, a country where his skills and attitude attracted no end of eager suitors. As a professional, he developed a reputation for finality, once dispatched. He was efficient but he did not relish cruelty. The problem with many professional killers is that they themselves become problems: greedy, ambitious, sloppy, disloyal. He was none of these.

  He lived this way for many years. He never married. He had, on occasion, sexual relations with women but the act seemed unnatural to him. It was one he pursued mostly out of curiosity, until he abandoned the pursuit. With no desire to procreate, it struck him as pointless, even laughable, to go through the clumsy motions.

  He was aware of an emptiness inside himself but could not name it. Rather, his life drifted toward the monastic. This was not a choice he made but rather a return to what felt to him like a natural state.

  Over time the kind of men who’d once employed him came to fear him and, eventually, to avoid him. Most men who are drawn to a violent life are driven by an appetite for fear, a desire to generate sufficient fear in others that it might temporarily nullify the smallness and fear in themselves. Either way, fear is the currency of their world. For that kind of man, to encounter a person like Unruh, who had no appetite for instilling fear in others and no apparent occasion for fear in himself, can be almost existentially unnerving. Such a person is impossible to comprehend. So these fearful, violent men came to avoid him. Which bothered him not in the least.

  He retreated into further solitude. This seemed, to him, the natural path. He was nearing seventy. He settled in California. The coastal aspects of the state never suited him, but he found a pleasant refuge in the Inland Empire. Communications between himself and his sporadic employers were infrequent and uncluttered by niceties. All the vicious men he had known in his earlier days were, for the most part, now either dead or incarcerated, the natural conclusions for such lives. Still, someone of Unruh’s history and reputation will never fully be unemployed, as long as damaged and angry men have access to grudges and money.

  So, at a certain point, he was connected with a younger man of similar vocation and temperament. A killer by the name of John Sung, who was half-Hawaiian, half-Japanese. Sung’s ethnicity was unusual among the network of people who employed him, which was comprised almost entirely of white men of European heritage. In this sense, Sung seemed marked in a similar way to the marking of Esau Unruh’s wine stain: a man set apart, for reasons of happenstance. This endeared him to Unruh.

  Sung’s background, Unruh later learned, was tainted in similar ways to Unruh’s own. Sung had been brutalized from an early age by most everyone who came across him, from relatives to teachers to state guardians, the kind of child who draws the attention of predators, and who is therefore taught from the earliest age to believe that brutality is a natural force. That brutality exists in the world like gravity, or electricity, or magnetism, in the air, in the walls, flowing all around us, unseen, and that it’s simply waiting to be given direction, to be applied to one person or another. And that those who do not learn to apply it to others are thereby condemned to be its recipients.

  When they met, Unruh felt for the first time in his nearly seventy years of life the sense of encountering a kindred heart.

  Sung was similarly perplexed and amused, Unruh would also learn, by the incapacity of most people to imagine the world’s history in the awesome expanse of its entirety, rather than simply as an experience bracketed by the fleeting instant that you happen by random chance to be alive. And Sung’s vocation as a killer seemed to him no more immoral than the kind of ritual exploitation that constituted so much of so-called normal life. In fact, a life dedicated to the perpetuation of other people’s systematic misery—the life, say, of a politician who by corruption condemns whole towns to some toxic poisoning of their water supply, or of a business tycoon whose fortune is built on the labor of interred children in some faraway country—seemed to Sung far more immoral than a life spent enforcing the ultimate punishment of a widely understood code by which people had readily agreed to abide.

  Which is to say: the life of a professional killer.

  Which is to say: John Sung had never killed anyone who did not expect to be killed. This was the simple truth of his employment. Now, whether death was an appropriate punishment for betrayal, or overweening ambition, or chronic indebtedness, was a question that Sung, given his background, did not feel morally equipped to answer. But the fact remained that each person to whom this punishment was meted out was well aware of its eventuality as the ultimate consequence for their actions—and this seemed to Sung not immoral, or evil, but rather like one of the more rational and elegant manifestations of the free will that we collectively like to imagine we possess.

  For this reason and others, Unruh developed a further fondness for Sung.

  This fondness was not at all undermined—it was, in fact, amplified—by the realization that the reason their mutual employer had paired them was, in all likelihood, to instill in Sung a more valuable brand of ruthlessness. Esau Unruh was little understood by the men who employed him, but what the simplest minds among them could comprehend was Unruh’s remorselessness. They imagined it must be some sort of inoculation from human empathy, which he might be able to share with others—Sung, for one. As Unruh aged and withdrew monastically from life, they hoped to build or engineer another Unruh. So, his employers, in their lack of understanding, conspired to try to instill his most appealing characteristics in another, younger murderer. To
see, in effect, if what Unruh possessed would rub off on John Sung.

  The entirely unexpected result of Unruh’s pairing with, and tutelage of, John Sung was that he and Sung fell in love.

  This, at least, is how Unruh’s relationship with Sung would be characterized by third parties to him later, and he never took issue with it—though whether “love,” that storied word, was the proper description for his feelings, he did not feel qualified to say. Given that the first and fundamental example for him of what he understood to be “love” consisted of a hateful man who ritually beat and broke a haunted woman, he’d long abandoned the idea that “love” between two people was something he might understand, let alone encounter, let alone aspire to experience. He had dispatched those two “loving” people, his parents, from this earth himself. And he had dispatched many others after them. And he expected one day himself to be similarly dispatched, by man or God or time. Where “love” fit into that, he couldn’t say.

  But what Unruh did understand was that, in the person of young John Sung, he had, bewilderingly, and for the first time ever, collided with another living soul whose continued existence on this earth he valued more than his own.

  Was that love?

  If so, then yes, they were in love.

  Their physical relations also struck Unruh as materially different from those in his past, and not just because of the obvious fact that Sung was not a woman. Unruh didn’t imagine that their few brief naked explorations constituted anything similar to the kind of rhapsodic encounters he saw elaborately celebrated in movies or songs on the radio, all of which had struck him as an amusing collective anesthetic delusion cooked up to keep people in line. Sung, for his part, seemed incapable of conceiving of intimate physical contact that was not intended primarily to bring him pain. So their initial encounters were awkward, to say the least. But heartfelt, too. And Unruh, during these clumsy fumblings, came to believe that perhaps these interactions offered Sung a different framework in which to consider himself in relation to the world. As not an object of disdain or abuse. But as something better. That perhaps they offered him a different way to see himself. The way that Unruh saw him.

  As for Unruh, the essential lacking at his center was so familiar and profound that he not only never imagined it might be any different, but he accepted this lacking as intrinsic to his being. As, perhaps, the very essence of his being. The very thing that made him Esau Unruh.

  But what he found he was learning at this late improbable moment in the company of Sung was that the lacking was temporarily . . . forgettable.

  For a few moments.

  Just a few.

  And that, in this forgetting, he came to consider that maybe the lacking was not everything. Not all the time.

  It was not the whole of who he was.

  In any case, Unruh was always happy that their hapless physical encounters, bumbling and comical and fleetingly transcendent as they might be, happened in the sanctified privacy of their bedroom, outside the purview of anyone but themselves, and certainly of no concern to their mutual employers.

  Or so he believed, perhaps foolishly.

  After all, Unruh had for so long existed as someone the world saw as possessing a singular useful purpose—to negate—that the idea that any other aspect of his self would be of interest to anyone seemed ludicrous to him.

  So when an outraged employer—a man of great vanity and legendary stupidity, but also of high ranking within the criminal enterprise with which Unruh had long been embroiled—berated Unruh at length and with great righteousness over the telephone in sputtering, profane terms about this scandalous moral abomination to which he was privy, Unruh was simply surprised. There was nothing to take offense to, really, since the reaction seemed wholly irrational.

  Unruh would admit, however, that he did take something like pleasure in dispatching the two incompetent lackeys that the employer subsequently unleashed in an effort to wipe the moral stain of Unruh and Sung from this earth. Those two unruly, workaday thugs, armed with pistols, who were no doubt tickled to get the assignment to go off and ice some faggots, but who instead met their own end in a motel parking lot in an almost comically brief exchange of gunfire.

  Unruh further took some pleasure—a strange and prickly and alien sensation he might even recklessly classify as delight—at his subsequent visit, with John Sung in tow, to the obscenely decadent seaside home of that same profanity-prattling employer. A fortress where several overly muscled bodyguards wandered the grounds with facial expressions of great serious purpose. In all his years in this vocation, which now numbered over fifty, years that had seen his hair winter to silver white, Unruh had never understood the apparent instinctual connection drawn by criminals between beefiness and safety. Muscular men have evinced one skill in this world, Unruh thought: the ability to accumulate muscles. And muscles have never been bulletproof.

  A frontal assault with firearms was the simple and effective prescription here. The bodyguards proved, as bodyguards often do, to be primarily ornamental.

  After the bodyguards, once Esau and John were inside the house itself and had found the loudmouthed criminal and a few rash functionaries besides, the mansion became a notorious and fabled scene of dispassionate slaughter.

  Later, back at Unruh’s home, it was Sung who suggested the police.

  Fear was not part of the discussion. But Unruh understood the likelihood that death awaited them and, furthermore, that between now and death, they faced a lot of running. The nature of criminal enterprises is such that insubordination can never go unpunished. Also, Unruh and Sung imagined that between them they held enough valuable knowledge about the workings of several national criminal enterprises that they might bargain for some sort of clemency.

  Some new anonymous exile, together.

  Hawaii, maybe.

  That seemed like a noble goal.

  So they went to the police.

  Where, instead of clemency and exile, they were immediately separated, and Unruh never saw John Sung again, save once.

  As it turned out, perhaps not entirely surprisingly—a fact that Unruh should have foreseen, and for which he’s upbraided himself mercilessly in the long, muddied years since their separation that day—the federal agents they encountered, while flabbergasted to find two such infamous fugitives appearing unbidden at their doorstep, were not entirely sympathetic to the contingencies of their unlikely love story. These agents were, in their way, as aghast at this romance as were Unruh’s former employers. And they were certainly not inclined to proffer mercy.

  Unruh saw Sung one final time. Sung was hooded. Unruh glanced at him briefly, through bars. Sung was slumped, on a bench, his wrists in manacles, a white cloth hood over his head. Then Unruh was led away.

  Their collective testimony, being quite valuable, did earn them a deal of sorts. The deal was this: Sung was relocated alone to Hawaii, his identity changed, his record expunged, to live out the rest of his natural days at an undisclosed location with an ankle bracelet under permanent house arrest. The two of them may yet have been allowed to live out their days together, in exile, but for the intercession of an ambitious scientist in the midst of a new experiment, seeking criminals of extraordinary circumstance.

  Dr. Judy Holliday.

  A specialist in memory.

  Unruh was redirected to her care.

  It was later explained to him that, given his sordid past and quite legendary exploits, he’d been chosen for a pilot program. The program involved amnesty, of a sort. His memories of criminality would be erased, with one exception. It had been determined that his crimes were of such singular remorselessness and brutality that the only effective deterrent, should he be allowed into this new program, would be the promise of safety and continued freedom, such as it was, for his friend John Sung. That was the deal. He would remember Sung, barely, but never see him again. He would be allowed to remember that there is a John Sung. And if Unruh misbehaved, even slightly, his friend Sung wou
ld be executed. That was how the agents insisted on referring to Sung: as Unruh’s “friend.” Unruh never protested this—he said very little during his interviews, beyond revealing the identities and histories and crimes of everyone he’d ever worked for—but he could sense the agents’ barely modulated disgust, embedded in that euphemism “friend.”

  In order for this deterrent to be effective, the scientists assured Unruh that they would arrange for him to retain his memories of Sung. They’d erase his early life, his criminal exploits, all that would be gone, but he’d keep his memories of these last few years, the years blessed by something like happiness. The years with Sung.

  This promise was all he had ever hoped for in his incarceration, and when they explained this to him, Unruh cried.

  This decision—to indefinitely shelter two notorious killers in separate and relatively benign lodging, rather than lock them up forever in the isolation ward of a supermax facility or hang them both until dead—was not universally applauded among those few law enforcement officials who were privy to its arrangement. One such disgruntled official leaked news of it to the press. Unruh, who’d existed outside the public consciousness for the entire span of his career, suddenly became a kind of celebrity. His exploits were recounted in detail with outsized horror during nightly cable news debates. None of this he was aware of, locked up in solitary. Plus, he found the initial treatments at the hands of the memory specialists had left his mind a bit . . . muddied.

  As it happened, despite their blithe assurances, these scientists weren’t entirely confident they could erase most of his adult memories while leaving his attachment to Sung intact. So they mucked around in his mind for a while, engaged in some initial exploratory tinkering, tested a few pet theories, then closed it up and called it a day.