The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  “Where was I?” he says. “Oh yes, at age twenty-six, my baseball career long over, I started work as a prison guard, because why not? I figured maybe I would prosper surrounded by people worse than myself, and the only place I knew where such people were collected was in a prison. I was not well suited for the job, though, given I was weak and frightened and full of anger, and so, one year in, I got jumped and beaten badly by an inmate, who slammed my head in a door, repeatedly, which is how I got this scar right here.” Cooper gestures to his forehead and the jagged souvenir. “The inmate jumped me because he took drugs to make him strong, which also made him angry, and I had called him an unconscionable name because I was stupid and scared as shit, every single day. He jumped me, and beat me senseless, and probably would have killed me if not for the intercession of the other guards. And a month after that, I turned a blind eye when, in retaliation, my coworkers pummeled the living shit out of that man and beat him half to death.” He pauses here, remembering the broken face of the man. He remembers it so well. “Last I heard, that man can’t walk or talk or even get out of bed or feed himself. The settlement from the state covers his medical bills, and I was allowed to take an early retirement, without benefits or honor. I headed south and wound up here, and that man wound up drooling all over himself, kept alive by a machine. If anything in that story sounds to you like justice, you just let me know which part.”

  The sun throbs, the heat comes in waves, like water lapping a shore, and Cooper sweats, and though his eyes stay locked on Rigo, he recounts all this in a voice loud enough for the entire street, even those in the chapel, to hear. He knows Fran can hear him. He wants her to hear. He wants everyone to hear. “Let’s see, what else might it say in your file, Rigo?” he says.

  “You didn’t even get to the best part,” Rigo says, watching him, fascinated.

  “That’s right,” Cooper says. “The best part.”

  Inside the chapel, Dawes calls out weakly to Fran Adams, who’s standing, transfixed, at the window.

  Fran turns. She didn’t catch what Dawes said. “What’s that?”

  “Stop him,” says Dawes.

  Fran steps in, closer, responding as much to the labored urgency in Dawes’s voice as to what she’s saying. “What?”

  “He doesn’t know,” says Dawes.

  “He doesn’t know what? He doesn’t know his own past?”

  “No.” Dawes thinks back to the library, the search engine, the crime blotter, the cold, bright screen. “Not all of it,” she says.

  Cooper continues, emboldened now. He has complete command of the street. “After all that, I moved to Austin, where I took a cushy job as a security coordinator for a software firm, a job that was gifted to me out of pity by an old baseball teammate from community college. I spent the better part of the next decade doing nothing but staring at monitors, drinking, and fucking people over, not least myself.”

  “Sheriff Cooper, we’re not here to conduct a therapy session,” says Rigo, trying to wrest away control of the performance. “We’re here to discuss your crimes—”

  “Of course. My crimes. Well, you know what’s coming, Rigo. You, better than anyone.” Cooper continues, to the crowd: “At age thirty-seven, I took this job because I knew in ten years I could retire. That was the deal. And I knew I could hide out here in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of people who are inarguably worse than me. And that worked out okay for eight years or so, except I met some decent people in the Blinds. Some good people. Despite their pasts.” Cooper clears his throat, his voice catching. He starts up again: “Then, two months ago, I murdered Errol Colfax.”

  The crowd murmurs, shocked, it’s unmistakable.

  “I shot him in the head where he sat and then I lied about it and said it was a suicide,” says Cooper. “I did it because someone paid me to do it. A lot of money—fifty thousand dollars.” The crowd is chattering now, enlivened. “Until yesterday, I didn’t even know who that person was, or why they wanted Errol dead. But I did it because that person had told me all about the real Errol Colfax. Who he really was, and what he’d done in his past life. I used that as motivation, or as an excuse. I honestly don’t know which anymore.” As Cooper speaks, his recitation seems to draw the crowd in closer. His confession becomes an incantation that threatens to conjure something fearsome from the air.

  Orson, listening, exits his workshop’s doorway. Unthinking, he starts walking slowly toward the gathered crowd, hammer hanging heavy in his hand.

  The other residents inside the chapel cluster at the window around Fran and Robinson.

  The entire town is listening now.

  “Then, four days ago, I killed Hubert Gable,” says Cooper. “I shot him in the back of the head, at the bar, for the same reason as Colfax. Someone paid me to do it. I don’t regret killing him, not really, because I know what he’d done, too. And I shot Gerald Dean after that. It was not in self-defense. I was paid to do it, just like Colfax, just like Gable. Two hundred thousand dollars. Paid to me by this man, standing right here, right now—Paul Rigo.”

  A restless breeze stirs some refuse on the road but no one in the crowd moves or makes a noise or seems even to breathe. Cooper stares into Rigo’s sunglasses, standing close enough now to see his own tiny self, reflected back at him in the dark convex lenses, standing alone in the middle of the street.

  “Paul Rigo doesn’t work for the Institute, by the way, not directly,” says Cooper. “He works for a man named Mark Vincent. A very rich man who sent Rigo and his partners here to take a boy from our town. To take a boy who was born here, and has no prior life to speak of, and certainly no prior sins to hide. Paul Rigo and his accomplice, that woman, Santayana, and these other agents have come here to steal that boy away from his mother and from all of us. And to cover their tracks, they loosed that man, that killer, Dick Dietrich, among us. Like a virus, like fucking smallpox, to wipe us out, or at least keep us busy so they could take the boy and then have a reasonable excuse for having done it, should anyone back in the real world ever ask them what transpired here.” Cooper turns now to address the crowd. “They mean to take that boy, and leave this town, and burn it to the ground if they’re able. And maybe they’d be right to do so. Maybe that’s what we all deserve. It’s certainly what I deserve. But not the boy. Not the boy.” Cooper turns to Rigo, pointing straight at him, but says for the whole town to hear: “And make no mistake, no one in the outside world is coming. No one even knows what’s happening here. And those who do know don’t care, and they never did. Not about us.” He gestures to Rigo, Santayana, the agents. “And I helped these people, and I brought them here. Without knowing that I was doing it. They had me kill those men to bury their secrets, and the secrets of their boss. But I’m not going to help them anymore. So you tell me,” he says now to the crowd, “what do you think we should do?”

  Behind him, Rigo laughs. A genuine laugh, but showy, outsized, meant to get Cooper’s attention. Which it does.

  Cooper turns. “What’s so funny, Rigo?”

  Rigo looks him over, fascinated. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  Fran watches from the window. The entire chapel is silent behind her, unmoving. As though their fates are being determined right now, as though they’re awaiting a jury deliberating in another room, the verdict being decided just beyond this murky glass, beyond their ability to influence it or to further plead their case. So they just wait. All their diverse paths have led them here today. To this shared chapel. To some shared fate. The only thing between them and that fate now is a locked red door.

  Fran puts her hand on the lock, then listens.

  “Look around, Sheriff,” Rigo says, gesturing to the main thoroughfare. “This is your town. You built it.”

  Cooper just stares at him. He’s at a loss as to what is coming next. To what more is in that folder that Rigo brandishes like a holy book.

  “The only reason there is a Caesura,” Rigo continues, “is because Johann Fell was killed.
This place”—he swivels now, theatrical, arms thrown wide to the crowd, to the town, to its empty streets, its forlorn buildings—“was the brain child of Dr. Judy Holliday, Fell’s protégée. A place where criminals, the worst of the worst, could roam free, their sins wiped away, living here under her close supervision. Fell never wanted to see it realized. He thought it was a monstrous idea. He had other, purer intentions for his method. Refugees. Torture victims. Children escaping war crimes. People who’d been senselessly damaged—he thought he could save those people. That was his dream. Not killers, not”—Rigo nods to where they’ve dumped the bodies of Lancaster and Agnew—“rapists and baby murderers. Johann Fell had a different vision. But he was struck down violently. A frail but brilliant man, killed in a brutal, random act. In the streets of Austin, Texas. A hit-and-run. Life is funny that way. They never did catch the driver.”

  Rigo watches Cooper as he speaks, fascinated by Cooper’s face. The burgeoning realization. Rigo wishes Dr. Holliday could be here. He knows she wouldn’t want to miss this.

  Rigo continues: “The man who killed Dr. Fell was named John Barker. He was a drunk, a disgraced prison guard, basically a drifter at that point. He lived alone and worked as a security guard for a man who subcontracted some tiny, inconsequential part of the Institute’s operation, and his off-hours were taken up by barfights and blackouts. I’m sure he barely remembers those years himself. He ran down Johann Fell. He did it for five hundred dollars. He was selected precisely because he was the kind of man who’d take that kind of job. After he’d killed Fell, he crashed his car into a tree. Probably in hopes he’d kill himself. But he didn’t. He lived. The crash left a nasty scar across the back of his head. The local cops picked him up, he was well known to them, but then the Institute intervened. Dr. Holliday enlisted him in a brand-new program, which, thanks to Fell’s untimely death, she now had the liberty to pursue. He had his memory of the crash and the deal erased. It was easy, since it had happened so recently. Just a day or two—gone. Then she moved him here. He became Caesura’s very first resident. The difference with him was, they never told him how he’d ended up here. Instead, they gave him a tin star.” Rigo shakes his head, then reveals it: the final, damning point in the closing argument to the jury of the crowd. “His job was to watch over you. He failed even at that.” Rigo turns to Cooper. “Though you are different from everyone else here in one respect. They just live here. But without you, this place wouldn’t even exist.”

  Cooper listens. This all seems to be happening very far away. Rigo’s voice is clear and unrelenting and yet, somehow, the high sun seems to have flared again beyond its usual brilliance and illuminated the road between him and Rigo, opening it up like a chasm, and out of it pours bright light that disorients him. The whole scene now seems to be swallowed by this overwhelming light. He has no—this isn’t him. This isn’t him.

  “I don’t remember,” he says quietly.

  “Of course you don’t,” says Rigo. “All this time, you thought you were the sheriff. But you were just another resident. Another rat in the experiment. Frankly, you should thank me. Now you’re finally free to leave.”

  Cooper, untethered, falls to his knees. He stares at the dirt. The sun is so bright. He remembers the tree now. The crash. The frail man in his headlights.

  Behind him, the red chapel door swings open.

  Every eye in the town turns now toward the chapel, save for Cooper’s. Even Santayana, near giddy from this exhilarating turn of events, rises from her lawn chair to see who’s exiting the chapel.

  Fran closes the red door behind her.

  “Stop,” she says.

  Cooper turns now, too, hearing her voice, knowing it’s her, and when he sees her he knows she’s heard everything, and he knows it doesn’t matter anymore. He is reminded now that what matters, all that matters, is the life of the boy behind the door. Cooper understands this with a clarity so sharp and unfamiliar to him that it’s startling. A clarity that brings him back to his feet. A clarity that spurs him now to say, “Fran—”

  “Stop,” she says again.

  And Cooper’s not sure if she means for him to stop this confession, or for the agents to stop these proceedings, or whether her aim is to barter the boy or perhaps herself or simply to appeal to some higher human reason. And he never learns which of these is true because at that moment Rigo raises his gun and points it at Fran.

  Rigo says, “I think it’s time to end this. I think it’s best you bring that boy out to us right now.”

  And there’s a moment when Cooper looks at Rigo and thinks to lunge, to fight, he’s close enough, maybe, to reach Rigo and topple him, to go down fighting—he’ll die, of course, Cooper knows that, he deserves it, he will die, Rigo has the gun and there’s three more guns behind him, all ready to put Cooper down, but that doesn’t matter at all, he knows, because all that matters is Fran and the boy. And the only thing that stays Cooper’s hand in this moment is a lack of assurance that his actions would save them. He must know beyond a doubt that they’ll be saved.

  Rigo stays still, his arm steady, the gun pointed.

  “Bring the boy. Now,” he says.

  And Fran says, “You don’t raise your gun to me. You don’t even raise your voice to me. I fucked your boss, and I shot your boss, and I left him for dead, and you’re nothing but a functionary. You’re a letter from a dead man in the past that I choose to ignore. There is nothing you can do to hurt me. So you can put your gun away right now because you will never get what you came for, not ever. Don’t you see that? You either leave here without my son or you die here. Those are the only outcomes.” She steps forward. “Do you understand that now? You can shoot the sheriff dead, and you can shoot me dead, but this town will prevail. This town will swallow you whole. You want to read us files? You want to reveal our histories to us? The only thing those files should be telling you is that you are a fool to stay even a moment longer. You’re not shaming us, Rigo. You’re reminding us of who we are. And that doesn’t end well for you.”

  At her words, the crowd, previously cowed into retreat, seems in some barely perceptible way to stir.

  Rigo, his pistol raised, seems in the grip of a genuine confusion. “You want every person here to know what you did?”

  “I know what I did,” she says. “I know who I am. Tell anyone you want.”

  In the long moment that follows, the silent air seems almost to beg for a gunshot. The crowd is tensed for it. Even Fran seems to know that it’s coming. In a strange way, she doesn’t care, because she knows the boy will live now. Without Cooper, without her, if that’s what it takes, but she knows the town will triumph. She feels it, and understands it now, and for her, for the crowd, for Cooper, even for Rigo, for Santayana, the understanding is clear among all of them, like a newly signed treaty. A gunshot would be meaningless, extraneous. A gunshot would only signal the unloosing of the ferocity that now simmers potently among those gathered in the street.

  So the silence persists.

  And in the silence, absent the expected gunshot, the red door swings open again.

  It’s Robinson, in his rumpled brown uniform.

  “Enough of this,” he says, looking exhausted, as he closes the door behind him. He walks into the street, past Fran, toward Cooper and Rigo. “She’s right. Put that gun down,” he says to Rigo, calmly.

  “You’ll get your turn,” says Rigo, not even looking at Robinson.

  “My turn for what, exactly? My name is Walter Robinson, but my real name is Raymond Roebling. I’m fifty-two years old, I never murdered anyone in my life as best I know. I’ve never even struck a man in anger, though I have a feeling that’s about to change.” He walks calmly toward Rigo. “You’re not going to shoot this woman; you’re not going to take that boy. This is crazy, and you need to give it up.”

  Rigo swings the gun impotently toward Cooper. “Make him stop.”

  “It’s over,” Cooper says.

  Rigo swings his gun back tow
ard Robinson. “Don’t come any closer, I’m warning you—”

  Behind Rigo, Santayana watches. The agents behind her, framing Bette Burr, reach to place their hands on their holstered weapons.

  Robinson’s close enough now to Rigo, a dozen yards or so, that they could play a game of catch. And Cooper feels a sudden spark of dread and says, “Walt, don’t,” but Robinson waves him off and says to Rigo, “That’s it. It’s over. All of it.”

  Rigo swings the gun back toward Cooper, as though pleading with Cooper to intervene, as though they’re allies now, but Cooper does nothing, so Rigo swings the gun back toward Robinson, who’s now just a few feet away. Still calm. Still walking.

  “Rigo, please—” says Robinson, and then the shot, long anticipated, finally arrives.

  Rigo startles. The crowd recoils.

  “Oh no,” says Hannibal weakly, inside the chapel, at the window, watching.

  “What?” says Dawes, from the chair in which she’s resting.

  Robinson’s body has already fallen in the street, even as the sound of the killing shot dissipates over the crowd like a flock of birds dispersing.

  Santayana lowers her discharged pistol.

  Robinson having understood what Fran knew, what Cooper knew, what they all understood, that it would take a gunshot to end this.

  Or to begin it.

  “Fuck this,” Santayana says. “It’s too hot, and I’m too fucking tired, and while all of this is very entertaining, Cooper, you go get that boy right now or I will personally execute every last shit bag in this fucking town one by one until you—”

  But her last words are lost in a war cry, the whole town hears it, like a mournful keening, and those who turn to seek its source see Orson Calhoun striding purposefully, now jogging, now breaking into a run, his hammer held high, catching the sun, and in the few fleet seconds it takes for him to close the ground between the edge of his workshop’s yard and the woman with the gun, Orson enjoys a sudden surge of clarity. About all those hazy half-memories he holds, of all those days spent with his father, in the basement, learning about tools. Of what his father used them for. Of who he used them on. Of a thwack, a cry, a sobbing. Of the rusty smell of the rag he held for his father to wipe down the tools. The stiffness of the sodden rags. All the techniques of the trade, passed on in the flickering subterranean light from father to son. And it brings to Orson not understanding, exactly, but a sudden sort of dread and welcome peace, of who he is and why he’s here and how he came to be this way, a feeling of release that in some more wicked and honest era might be termed a reckoning.