The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Getting them done already, before he even arrived here, was premature, he acknowledges that, and cocky, too, but we all need to be a little bit cocky sometimes. And it’s not like he expected there to be a tattoo parlor in this godforsaken outpost.

  The others he’ll just have to try to remember, once he’s done.

  When he’s finished here, he won’t have an inch of blank skin left to cover.

  There’s a knock at his door. Dietrich reattaches the bandage, pulls on his white linen shirt, then opens the door. It’s one of the agents. The spiky-haired one. He’s carrying a large black case. He’s wearing sunglasses and has a toothpick jostling around in his mouth like a fool. Dietrich recalls a time in the prison yard before solitary when they still let him mix with people, when he plucked a toothpick from a man’s mouth, then used it to put out both the man’s eyes.

  “About time,” Dietrich says.

  “Dick Dietrich? Is that what they’re calling you now?”

  “Let me ask you something, and be honest,” says Dietrich. “Does that sound like a Negroid name to you?”

  Rigo ignores the question and steps into the bungalow, toting his large black case, and Dietrich closes the door behind him. “I understand you’ve been causing some trouble, Dick, since you’ve arrived,” says Rigo. “The sheriff asked me to check in on you personally. He seems very worried about you. Oh, and I brought you a present.”

  He sets the black case on the coffee table and steps away from it. Dietrich opens it. Pulls out the AR-15 he finds inside. Hefts it to his shoulder. Sights it.

  “Is this it?” he asks.

  “You need more?”

  “God gave me two trigger fingers,” Dietrich says. “I don’t like to leave one idle.”

  Rigo hands him a 9 mm pistol from his waistband. “That’s mine, so take good care of it.” He looks around the modest bungalow. “You ever gone canned hunting, Dick? It’s a very popular activity out here in Texas. You go to someone’s ranch, some huge parcel of land somewhere that’s all fenced off, and then they loose a bunch of livestock for you to hunt down. Deer, elk, bears, whatever you request.”

  “That doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike,” says Dietrich.

  “No, but it has its appeal,” says Rigo. “By the way, that thing with the dogs—that was excessive, even for you.”

  “They weren’t dogs. They were coydogs.”

  Rigo sucks on his toothpick. “What’s the difference?”

  “You told me to sow chaos. I sowed chaos.”

  “I didn’t tell you to set animals on fire.”

  “The opportunity presented itself.”

  “And while we’re on the subject,” says Rigo, “when eight-year-old boys vandalize a place, they don’t typically write Damnatio Memorae on the wall. Were you just being cute, or were you trying to get caught?”

  “I don’t see how it matters either way,” says Dietrich. He’s focusing on that toothpick. He’s starting to feel annoyed. One benefit of solitary is that you don’t have to answer other people’s idiotic questions. “So when do we get this party started?”

  Rigo turns and looks this man over, with his shaved head and his cockeyed smile and his loony tattoos. He seems every bit as crazy as they had been promised. Or warned. Sometimes, it’s so hard to tell the difference.

  “The boy. And the sheriff. They’re off-limits,” Rigo says.

  “Fuck me. The sheriff, too?” says Dietrich. “He and I have a real rapport.”

  “He’s with us.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Not yet.”

  Dietrich nods. No need to openly question orders. Because accidents happen. Crossfire, and such. “Got it. The boy. And the sheriff.”

  Rigo walks back to the front door, then stops with his hand on the knob. He takes one more moment to indulge himself and contemplate how exactly he’ll put Dietrich down when the moment comes. Quick headshot, like a beloved dog, or something in the body, something low and painful, that leaves you to bleed out like a bitch? I’ll just go with the flow, he thinks. Do what feels right in the moment.

  Rigo picks the toothpick from his mouth and tosses it casually on the plush carpet, then says, “Twenty minutes. Not before. I need time to thank the good sheriff for all he’s done for us.”

  29.

  IT’S A SUNNY DAY and the late afternoon’s bright, but Fran’s got the curtains drawn tight, as she waits on the sofa in her living room under the light of a single lamp. Isaac’s curled up and reading his library novel beside her, his unearthed treasure box nestled on his lap. She’s so lost in the wreckage of her recollected memories that she doesn’t hear the knocking at first. Isaac prods her. “Mom, there’s someone at the door. Mom—”

  She listens. Sure enough. Fucking finally, she thinks, and jumps up from the sofa. Cooper’s here. She knew he would come. Lord knows, they’ve had their history. But that’s one thing she’s learned about him. He knows when he’s needed.

  “All right, Isaac, grab your things and let’s go,” she says. He grabs his backpack, all packed up. As for her, she didn’t pack anything. There’s nothing here she cares to take with her, except the book from the library. She’ll keep that.

  Another knock. More insistent.

  Okay, Cooper, we’re coming, she thinks.

  She motions Isaac over toward her, then gathers herself, and opens the door—ready to crack a joke to Cooper about how he certainly took his precious fucking time riding over on his big white horse.

  But it’s not Cooper. It’s that woman. The one in the black pantsuit. The agent. She’s got two other agents behind her, the redheaded one and the big one. Immediately Fran knows something terrible is about to happen.

  “Fran Adams?” says Santayana.

  “That’s right,” Fran says.

  “I have someone who wants to speak with you.” The agent holds out a flat electronic tablet. She swipes the screen, once, twice, before it pops brightly to life.

  “We’re good, sir,” Santayana says to someone, not Fran.

  Fran looks at the agent, then back at the screen. There’s a man sitting at a desk. He’s looking straight into the camera. Straight at her. Friendly face. He clears his throat. She knows this man. It’s the man from the TV in the Laundromat. The man from the article.

  Mark Vincent.

  The American Miracle.

  “Hi, Carla,” he says. “Long time no see.”

  “Calvin Cooper.”

  Cooper sits in a plastic chair. Rigo sits opposite him. The rest of the intake trailer is empty. The other agents are elsewhere, so it’s just the two of them, under the bright, buzzing fluorescents. Rigo’s sunglasses have been removed, folded, pocketed, so Cooper is free now to contemplate the strange and icy blankness of Rigo’s eyes. Rigo smiles, cordially, though his smile is lacking something, Cooper can’t place it, but whatever it is that’s missing is the very thing that usually animates a smile.

  Cooper asks: “So what do you want with me, Rigo?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Really? So why did you call me here?”

  “For your own protection.” Rigo crosses his legs, placing one ankle on the opposite knee. His limbs give him the angular aspect of a mantis. He checks his watch, then crosses his arms, as though to indicate that he’s said all he has to say.

  “That’s it?” says Cooper.

  “That’s it.”

  Cooper stands. “I appreciate the sentiment, but if you’ll excuse me, I have things to do.”

  “Be my guest. I just can’t vouch for your safety if you leave.”

  Cooper pauses. “What does that mean?”

  Rigo looks him over. “Tell me, Cooper, what are you planning to do with all that money?”

  “What money?”

  Rigo laughs. He wags a long finger at Cooper, like Rigo’s a pit boss dealing with a card shark who’s already been caught but is still trying to wriggle free. “Two hundred thousand dollars. That’s a hell of a retirement package.”


  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Cooper.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t care about the shootings,” Rigo says. He checks his watch again. “I mean, I care about them a little bit. I paid for them, after all.”

  30.

  FRAN WILL NEVER REMEMBER what he said after he said hello to her, and for the rest of her life, she’ll always wonder. That face, those eyes, that smile, and then he spoke, for what seemed like forever, but she doesn’t remember a word of it.

  Because in that moment, when he called her Carla, it came back to her. All of it.

  She was a student, a scholar. Imagine that. A poet. She loved books. Ideas. Criticism. Sontag, in particular. Young and mired for what seemed like an eternity in the weeds of a PhD. He had an air about him. There was the money, sure. But what the money also affords. A chance to look beyond the next moment. That was the luxury he represented.

  Great things awaited him, too, everyone could feel it. She felt it, like an electric charge. He was a natural politician. He courted her, like an electorate. He won her, like an election.

  They were inseparable at first. She was at his side, always. Her devotion to him became its own kind of endorsement as he sought to launch his political career. He had money, plenty of that, which, for many voters, was qualification enough. They were happy to lift him up onto their shoulders in hopes that a shimmer of his pixie dust might shower down on them.

  They married. In the hour before the ceremony, doing her makeup, alone, she had her first tremor of doubt. There was a part of him that was not accessible to her, she knew that, she couldn’t deny it. Maybe that’s what it is to be such a success, she thought. Everyone wants all of you, all the time, so you can never truly give everything to anyone. But he definitely had his own sequestered life. His own sequestered self. Kept his own hours. A locked office at home. She didn’t pry. She understood she wasn’t privy to those activities, nor should she be. She wondered about affairs, of course, but that didn’t seem at all like the man she knew. If anything, he seemed uninterested in those kinds of pursuits, in the bedroom, except when it came to talk of family.

  They would definitely have a family.

  They kept a gun in the house. For protection. You must. A public figure like that? She liked to practice with it at the firing range while he was away on business. Bang, bang. Blow off steam. When they fought, which became more and more frequent after the marriage but not so common as to become truly alarming, the firing range became her retreat. At the range, she discovered, you can imagine whomever you want to superimposed over that paper target. You wear earmuffs. No one bothers you. They just give you some bullets and leave you to your business.

  Bang, bang.

  A few years into the marriage, as he got serious about running for the Senate, she became more suspicious about affairs. How could she not? With him absent, so often? So many women around him with the exact same look in their eyes that she’d once had? How could she miss it? She owned that look. She invented it.

  She quelled her suspicions with more long hours at the firing range. She became friendly with the owner. He flirted, and not subtly, either. Adjusting her stance from behind. Her husband was busy gearing up for his Senate run. They had the money, they had the organization, they had the endorsements. An entire apparatus was being built up around him. He was never home, ever, and she wasn’t studying anymore or even pretending she’d go back and finish her degree, or doing much of anything, really, except shooting. The having-a-kid part was going nowhere, too, not that it would have helped. Her therapist called it depression, and gave her pills, then different pills. She checked his phone when he left it unsupervised, looking for texts, photos, anything. Finding nothing. Why was she so jealous? Maybe she was the one who wanted to stray.

  The shooting instructor started giving her rounds of ammo on the house.

  How did she find out in the end? It took some doing. The locked office. The passwords. He wasn’t one to get tripped up by some stray sext. She knew she had to get clever. There were unsavory characters hanging around all the time now, like that one bodyguard who was super-creepy, Perry Garrett, and that weird little toad of a man, Lester Vogel. Her husband long ago sold the analytics firm that had made him unimaginably rich and was now spending most of his time focused on his Senate bid and, if not that, on different boards. Different committees. Donating to some institute he’d lately become obsessed with. The Fell Institute. He swore its techniques would change history. But he kept everything else in his life well hidden. A black box she became obsessed with opening. After all, how can you be married to a black box?

  And no one else would have opened it, no one would have found out, not ever, no one could have, except for her. Except someone with that kind of time on their hands, and that kind of access, and that kind of motivation, and that kind of paranoia that keeps you obsessively prying. To everyone else, he seemed normal, admirable. Those who knew—they must have, that small circle—they were silenced by money, or the promise of power, or the shackles of similar sins.

  Maybe he even wanted her to know, to find out, in his arrogance, in his sickness. Maybe he half-suspected she would find out, and assumed that, if she did, she’d say nothing, and maybe he would have been right.

  Because if it had only been affairs, she probably would have stayed silent.

  The locked office. The late nights.

  She got access, finally. Cracked passwords. She found files. On his computer.

  Those videos. The children.

  She never knew he had those kinds of appetites.

  To be honest, she’d never let herself believe that anyone did.

  And she did say nothing, at first. It would ruin him, but it would ruin her, too, assuming anyone believed her. So she turned the interrogation on herself. How had this happened? How did she not know earlier? Maybe she saw something in him before and refused to acknowledge it. Or maybe she was rotten, too, somehow, to be attracted to him. To find herself in his orbit. After all, she fell in love with him. You are damaged, too, you must be, she thought.

  She said nothing to anyone else. How could she? What would she say? Who would believe her?

  And at the firing range, she began to imagine the paper target was herself.

  Bang, bang.

  And that started to feel like the only way out for her.

  God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.

  And, who knows, maybe that’s how it would have ended for her—with the tycoon’s increasingly distant and press-averse and pill-dependent wife finally taking her own life, a quiet, shocking suicide, in some tragic, unforeseen swoon. Cut to the sorrowful interviews during which he’d pause, and choke up, and struggle to compose himself. Start writing the redemptive feature stories about his loss, and moving on, and his selfless and well-intentioned warnings about how best to study your own loved ones for the tragic signs. He’d have been fine, and she’d have been free, so maybe that’s how it should have ended. Maybe that’s what would have happened.

  If the test hadn’t read positive.

  Because it was only when the blue indicator on the pregnancy test said positive that she dropped the stick in the toilet and flushed it and went to the bedroom and got the gun she’d practiced with for so many hours and walked up behind him as he sat in his office at his desk where she’d found all his secrets and shot him in the back of the head.

  She remembers now.

  The bang. The numb ache of the recoil. The smell of gunpowder.

  She must have missed him.

  A little bit.

  Even with all those hours of practice.

  She didn’t know she missed at the time. She was going to shoot them both, she remembers. Him and her. Him first.

  But the truth is, she hesitated, when it came to her. She had the time to do it. But she wavered.

  Thinking of that baby that only she knew she had inside her.

  And in that single moment of wavering, an aide had time
to intervene; he heard the shot, ran in, grabbed her wrist, yanked the gun away from her chin, where she’d finally planted it, so by the time she pulled the trigger again, it was too late, she was just shooting at the ceiling.

  Then the ambulance. Then the hospital. Then the prison.

  Then the deal.

  No memory of any of it. Until now.

  It never went to trial. The apparatus intervened. His aides brokered something different. They must have known he might survive. They must have seen it coming.

  Instead, she’d be warehoused away, her memory wiped clean, part of a new program, run by that institute her husband had donated so much money to, the one he’d been so obsessed with. Because the most important thing to them at that point was that she could never tell anyone. What she knew had to disappear. It didn’t matter how many years they sent her body away for. It was her memories they cared about. They had so much invested in him, and nothing invested in her. So it couldn’t go to court. What mattered was that she could never reveal, to lawyers or reporters or to anyone else, just why she did what she did. What she’d discovered about him. About his appetites.

  So a deal was engineered in lieu of a trial. After all, he was still alive, barely, on life support. But there was hope. She didn’t know that. Soon, she didn’t know anything.

  They arranged to have her mind erased, so she could never tell anyone what she knew.

  Trouble is, none of them knew about the baby.

  And the baby was born in the Blinds.

  “Carla, you look well,” he says to her now. That face. That smile. That voice. Bringing it all back.

  Then he says a little louder, to the agent holding the tablet: “Yes, that’s her. That’s definitely her.” Then he says: “And who’s this little man?”

  Santayana angles the tablet’s camera down toward Isaac, who cowers, clinging to his mother’s leg.

  “Hey there, you must be Isaac, right?” says the man on the tablet screen, warmly smiling as Santayana centers the tablet’s camera on the boy’s face. “Isaac, I’m so pleased to see you. I’m your father and I can’t wait to meet you in person. These people are here to bring you home.”