The Blinds

by Adam Sternbergh

  Santayana turns sharply, as per her training, toward the sound of the escalating scream, her pistol seeking a target, but it’s too late for her now, too late, as Orson buries the claw end of the hammer in the front of her skull, and Orson notes how the hammer’s teeth announce their arrival with a heavy wet thunk, and how the woman’s eyes roll back peacefully, before the weight of her body tugs at the smooth wooden handle in his hand and he releases it and she slumps almost gracefully to the ground.

  At a distance, Agent Burly sights Orson and puts three quick shots in Orson’s back, solid center. And though Orson turns, and flails like a struck beast, it’s over now, he’s done for, two more quick shots arrive with more certainty, one in the neck and one in the head, and these put Orson down for good. But someone has a shovel now, scavenged from the commissary. Someone has a pickax, similarly obtained. And as the two agents, Burly and Gains, swing their weapons in search of new targets, the crowd seems to collapse upon them, folding inward like a closing fist, until the street becomes a scene of loosed anarchy. The sounds alone are primitive, the thuds and grunts and crackings. The wielder of the shovel wallops Gains from behind and the pale redhead goes down, his wispy hair splashed a deeper red, and as he lays unconscious in the gravel, the shovel’s sharp blade finds him, again and again, as though someone’s driving a spade stubbornly into frozen soil. Three other men from the crowd have swarmed on Burly. The men are unarmed but attack the agent with some long-suppressed and brutal expertise. He’s no match for them and offers only a waning resistance before he crumples. Elsewhere, a posse has toppled the lawn chairs and descended on the file box. Hands tear at it, fingers riffle in a frenzy. The box is upended, files loosed into the air, pages fluttering over the road, before searching patiently for a place to land. Pages settle in widening pools of blood and absorb the blood and are thus obscured.

  Rigo watches all this wild-eyed. The folder on Cooper he holds in his hand is dropped and its contents scatter. Rigo fires blindly into the collapsing crowd and Cooper takes this opportunity to tackle him, and Rigo topples easily, as though he’s already conceded, and on the ground Cooper wrests his gun free with barely a struggle, then stands up over him and aims the gun at Rigo in the dirt. Rigo shrivels.

  There’s nothing to stop him, Cooper thinks. Certainly no sense that this is not who he is.

  This is who he is.

  He understands that now.

  But he doesn’t kill Rigo.

  Instead, he says, “Enough.”

  And then, just like that, it’s over.

  The street stills.

  The frenzy recedes.

  Cooper stands at the center of the wreckage, the bloodied sheriff, standing astride Rigo, still clutching the gun.

  In the quiet, he counts corpses.

  Orson Calhoun. Lyndon Lancaster and Doris Agnew. The five agents: Santayana, Burly and Gains, Corey and Bigelow. Plus whatever carnage Dick Dietrich left in the streets to be discovered. Plus Dietrich himself. Plus William Wayne.

  Plus Dean. Plus Gable. Plus Colfax.

  Plus Robinson.

  Poor Robinson.

  He and Dawes are the only true innocents.

  Save for the boy.

  The boy, still safe in the chapel.

  After a moment of accounting, Cooper reaches down and grabs Rigo and hoists him to his feet. Then Cooper turns to Fran and gives her a signal, and she turns and walks back to the red door. She knocks and it opens for her, and she enters the chapel, and moves past the rows of disarrayed chairs and the huddled crowd to find her son at the back of the room, and clutches him for a long moment.

  Then she stands and sounds the chapel bells, to signal all clear to the town.

  For a time, the only sound in the street is bells.

  40.

  THE SIX OF THEM take one truck together, so as not to arouse suspicion. They travel in one of the black SUVs left behind by the agents, a six-seater. Fran drives, with Cooper beside her, watching the plains pass. Spiro and Dawes sit behind in the middle seat, Dawes propped against Spiro’s shoulder, her breathing shallow. Her bleeding’s been stanched but none of them knows enough to know how bad her situation is. Behind them, in the last seat, sits Hannibal Cagney and Paul Rigo. Rigo is handcuffed, his head leaning on the window. The six of them drive together for two hours on an empty road without passing another car. Every so often, signs appear to promise them an eventual city.

  No one speaks. The tires hum on the road.

  Finally, Cooper says, “Here.”

  Fran pulls over to the shoulder, the truck rumbling to a halt. Cooper gets out and walks around to the side door where, aided by Hannibal’s prodding, he wrests Rigo from the backseat.

  Cooper stands Rigo up, straightens his suit, squares his shoulders, like he’s readying him for a prom date. The sun is just starting to decline in the distance, exhausted.

  “Not here,” says Rigo. “This is nowhere.”

  “We could drive another hour, it wouldn’t make a difference,” Cooper says.

  Rigo raises his manacled wrists. “You’re going to leave me like this, too?”

  Cooper turns his back and walks to the passenger side and gets back in the truck.

  “You’re stupid to do this,” Rigo calls out. “You think I won’t come after you?”

  “I hope you do,” says Cooper, through the open window, and then the truck pulls away.

  Later, as Fran drives, she asks, “What do you think he’ll tell Mark Vincent?”

  “I don’t think he’ll have a chance to tell him anything,” Cooper says.

  “But if he does, do you think they’ll come back again?”

  “It’s his son,” Cooper says. “Wouldn’t you come back?”

  They arrive two hours later at the emergency ward entrance of the first hospital they encounter, at the farthest outward edge of Amarillo. Cooper helps Dawes inside to the admitting desk. He doesn’t know Dawes’s real name so he just writes down Sidney Dawes on the forms. When pressed for details by the attending nurse, Cooper tells her it was a hunting accident: that they work security for a private corporation which operates a remote facility, and some hunters strayed too close to the grounds, so he and his fellow officer went out to ward them off and she got clipped by an errant round.

  Once she’s admitted, he stands at her bedside.

  “I’m sorry I let you down,” she says.

  “You saved Isaac,” Cooper says. “Without you, he’d be gone right now, no doubt. And Fran would be dead. You saved them both.”

  “I’ve never even held a gun before.”

  “May you never need to hold one again.”

  “Everything you said out there was true? What you said in the street? And what he said?”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Cooper says.

  “Are you going to turn yourself in?” she asks.

  “To who?”

  She doesn’t answer, then turns her head toward the painted wall. He waits.

  “I wanted to be change,” she says.

  “You are,” he says. “And you’re not finished.”

  He promises, over her protestations, to return and visit her again tonight. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, he says, once his one last errand is done. Then he leaves her to her bed and the ministrations of the staff.

  Now it’s just Cooper and Fran and Hannibal and Spiro in the truck, driving over empty road. Two gas cans splash and rattle in the back of the SUV. The empty cans, from Orson’s yard, filled up at a filling station just beyond the hospital.

  It’s nearly dusk. The sun, so bright and buoyant in the daytime, slides like a spent coin behind the horizon. The day’s last light blossoms pink and red and disperses in all directions, and it’s hard to tell, from behind the windshield, if this last light is fending off the darkness, or simply surrendering to it.

  They pull into Dr. Holliday’s driveway. Only Cooper and Fran disembark.

  Dr. Holliday greets them outside her front door with a smile.

>   “Calvin, I’ve been expecting you,” she says. “And you brought a guest.”

  “I’m Fran Adams,” she says.

  “Ah, yes,” says Holliday. “The source of all this trouble.” She gestures to the patio. “Care to join me? The sunset is spectacular from this vantage point.”

  There’s no offered drinks, no further niceties, just three people seated at the table. Flickering torches illuminate the patio.

  “Will they come back?” asks Cooper.

  “Not if I don’t let them,” says Holliday. “I’m the gatekeeper, Calvin. I always have been.”

  “So you let them come in the first place?” says Cooper.

  “I didn’t seek them out. They approached me. You have to understand, Mark Vincent has been a very generous benefactor to this program since its inception. He shared my vision, even when Johann did not.” Holliday wears a long, flowing white linen top, with a heavy pendular necklace made of large turquoise stones of obvious value. The torches cast shadows that flicker across her face. “Mark was obsessed with the idea that your worst memories might eventually be erased. That they might no longer be part of who you are. Given his”—she searches here—“proclivities, and his eventual ambitions, I suspect he saw the possibility of erasure as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. Or a stay-out-of-jail card, as it were.” She smiles at Fran. “He didn’t anticipate his wife’s more crude intervention.”

  “But who were the other ones?” says Cooper. “Who were Colfax, and Gable, and Dean?”

  “Colfax was just a common killer, you know his history,” Holliday says. “As for Gable and Dean—Vincent’s representatives contacted us six months or so after his incident, when it started to look like maybe he would survive after all. They offered us some further individuals whose knowledge of Vincent’s appetites might prove problematic. One of them was Lester Vogel, who was Vincent’s regular pipeline for his materials. The other was a bodyguard, Perry Garrett. Apparently, he and Vincent shared certain enthusiasms and had hit it off, and Garrett had acted as a kind of go-between. Both Vogel and Garrett were arrested and quickly funneled into our program. When we were done with them, neither of them had any clue who they’d been before, let alone that they’d ever known the other. But then Mark Vincent woke up.”

  “That was years ago,” says Cooper.

  “There was some question as to the viability of resuscitating his political ambitions,” says Holliday. “He had an extensive rehab, as you may know. Once a political comeback seemed possible, even inevitable, there was a new urgency to put the past to rest. Also, he became very interested in his former wife’s whereabouts. As you might expect.”

  “I’m right here,” says Fran. “You can talk to me directly.”

  “Yes, I guess you are—you finally are. In the sense of being the woman, Carla Milne, who came to us eight years ago. The bloodstained poet. You remember everything now, don’t you? My triggers worked exceptionally well.”

  “What triggers?” Fran asks.

  “The newscasts. The headlines in the papers. The book at the library. To be honest, I had no idea what it would take to reawaken your memory, or if it was even possible. We’ll have to discuss this in detail some other time, Ms. Milne. I’m very curious about your experience. What happens when you get yourself back in full, in all your . . . complexity.”

  Holliday turns back to Cooper. “And then there’s you, my dear Calvin. My first. You always remember the first.”

  “I was just another variable,” says Cooper. “For the experiment.”

  “You were much more than that. First, you helped me solve my dilemma with Johann. He simply ran out of vision at a certain point, and I ran out of patience. Then, once you’d done that for me, you were a chance to find out whether, stripped of your identity, you’d relapse to the capabilities you’d previously exhibited. I was the one, of course, who pointed Rigo toward you. They’d clumsily approached Ellis Gonzalez, after they’d learned he was running illicit mail into the town, but he refused. So I told Rigo to try you instead. I was so curious to see how you’d respond to his proposal.”

  Cooper watches Holliday talk, her elegant face framed against a backdrop of verdant foliage, the torches dancing, the curling leaves and tender flowers of the patio enveloping the three of them on all sides. This expansive garden is such a contrast to the arid plains around it, he thinks, it almost feels like an entirely different planet. Like they’re the only three people in some newborn world. Him, Fran, and Holliday, sitting here, in a virgin garden of Eden. Adam, Eve, and a third entity, regarding them. God, or the serpent, or both.

  “So if those men were stashed safely in the Blinds—” says Cooper.

  “Please don’t call it that,” says Holliday. “I’ve never liked that name, you know that.”

  “So if these men were stashed safely with us, without memories, why did Vincent’s agents come now?”

  “Because they found out about the boy,” Holliday says. “The murders in the town created a convenient pretext for them to intervene. A backstory for Vincent, to explain why he’d taken the boy from his mother. They came in to take the boy home to his father. In a certain light, it’s not an ignoble goal.”

  “And Dick Dietrich—”

  Holliday frowns. “That was their innovation. They felt a certain amount of discord in the town, precipitating their extrication, would benefit their efforts. I thought it was foolish.”

  “Is that what you call it? Discord?” says Cooper. “Loosing a fucking killer in the town?”

  “Loosing another killer. Let’s not mince words,” Holliday says. “The town had no shortage of killers.”

  “And you authorized all of this?”

  “Yes, as the last phase of the experiment. Ten years, that was the deal, remember? We just moved up the timetable slightly. Vincent was eager to retrieve his boy, and then there was the business with William Wayne. The strangest mind we ever encountered and, in a sense, the most interesting. Our leverage over him was about to expire, and I knew he was not to be contained otherwise. So I arranged to send in Eleanor Sung to deliver her father’s message to him. At that point, the whole experiment seemed to have run its course. What happened to Wayne, by the way?”

  “He’s dead,” says Cooper.

  “A shame. A mind like that. You see, that’s what Johann, for all his brilliance, never understood. The minds of the innocent are simple and so easily explained. The minds of the guilty, however—they are endlessly fascinating, once you really roll up your sleeves.”

  “So that’s what we are to you, Judy?” asks Cooper. “Guinea pigs? Lab rats?”

  “Variables. As I’ve explained. Each of you, in the original cohort of eight, posed a different challenge. For Wayne, the goal was to leave him with one memory, just one—the memory of a memory, really, and by that, to secure his compliance. We were not entirely successful, in that case. For you, Calvin, the goal was to erase only one memory, just a few hours, really, and thereby convince you that you’d lost no memories at all. With you, we succeeded admirably.”

  “And what was I?” asks Fran. “You erased my memory completely. So what was my variable?”

  “You were pregnant, of course.”

  Fran can’t keep her tears from betraying her. “You knew,” she says softly. “And you still sent me there.”

  “Of course we knew. You had a full physical before you entered the program. We just didn’t tell you we knew. What options did you have, really? Prison? Abortion? In any other scenario, you’d lose the child. You should thank me. I saved your son. I was fascinated to see what choices you would make, given the care of a child in that place.”

  “These people were entrusted to you,” says Cooper. “We all were.”

  “You were made available to us, there’s a difference,” Holliday says sharply. “The residents of Caesura are people the existing justice system did not ask for, did not want, and had no use for once they’d served their purpose. I wanted you, I asked for you, and
so I got you. And I gave you all a great gift. I gave you almost ten years to pretend that you aren’t who you know yourselves to be, and to live accordingly.” She turns to Fran. “You say you remember everything now?”

  “I do,” says Fran.

  “Yet the proteins in your brain where those memories were stored are literally gone. In a physical sense, they do not exist, as surely as if I cut off your arm right now. The memories are gone, and yet, they’re not, like a phantom limb that won’t stop itching. And there are certain stressors—like my triggers—that can bring everything back. Some of these stressors we knew about. Some of them we even planted. Some of them—well, some are just trial and error, I guess. That’s what those agents were. Trial and error.”

  “So you would have let them take my son?” asks Fran quietly.

  “The purpose of a laboratory is to observe,” says Holliday. “Not intervene.”

  Cooper seethes. “If you wanted to shut the experiment down—”

  “Not shut it down, Calvin. Conclude it. Take it to its natural end.”

  “—then why not just set us all free?”

  Holliday looks to Fran, then back to Cooper. She smiles. “Calvin, you were always free.”

  Fran sits silent for the moment. When she finally speaks, she says: “How did they know about my son? Did you tell them?”