Holliday laughs, a laugh like chimes. “No, of course not. I would have preferred for the boy to stay, simply to observe him further. But once they learned you had a son—well, given the timing, Vincent’s paternity seemed plausible. Still, they needed to be sure.”
“The man. At the mall. Who cut my son’s hair,” Fran says.
“Just to test it. Just to be certain. Vincent was fully recovered at that point and very interested in the boy’s provenance. To his credit, a long-lost child now only complicates his political fortunes. But he seems genuinely . . . attached.” Holliday reaches across the table and lays a comforting hand on Fran’s arm, like a counselor. “At some point, I would love to talk to you about that moment of realization. When it all came back to you. In a sense, that’s what this”—she gestures here at the house, the labs elsewhere, the distant town, the Institute—“was always all about.” Holliday turns to Cooper. “So what’s next, Sheriff? I’m guessing my liaisons were not successful in their objective, or we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“What’s next is we go home,” says Cooper. “To the town. And you stop. Like you said, the experiment’s over.”
“I do intend to shut down the facility, if that’s what you mean. As for the residents—”
“There aren’t many left alive. Maybe half,” says Cooper.
“—the residents will be free to relocate wherever they like.”
“They have nowhere to go.”
“The world is a big place. They’ll find somewhere.”
“No,” Cooper says. “That town is ours. We live there. And we’re going to stay. And you’re going to leave us alone.”
Holliday recoils, bemused. “That’s ludicrous, Calvin. You can’t survive without outside assistance. The weekly shipment of supplies, for starters, all of which is funded by the Institute—”
“Oh, you’re going to keep funding it,” Cooper says, leaning forward, calmly, and placing his large hands flat on the stone slab. “The Institute will keep it open, and fund it, but it becomes a line item on your budget, nothing more. Otherwise, you bury it. And you install Eleanor Sung as the new liaison between the Institute and the town.”
“Why her?” asks Holliday.
“Because I trust her,” says Cooper. “And she feels a certain loyalty to the town now. She’ll live out here in the world and work for you, but you don’t interfere with her at all or even contact her unless absolutely necessary. And then you never give our town another thought.”
“Calvin, there is no more Caesura, you need to accept that,” Holliday says, impatient. “It’s over.” Her face clouds noticeably, like she’s lost interest in his pointless meanderings.
“As far as you’re concerned, that’s true,” Cooper says. “Also, I want the files. All of them. On everyone.”
“I gave the files to those agents.”
“You gave copies to those agents. So make more copies. I want them all.”
“To do what with?” She seems genuinely curious.
“To keep them. And to show them to whoever wants to know. People have that right. To know. Or not. But it will be their choice.”
Cooper stands.
“And one last thing,” he says. “You tell Mark Vincent that we wish him the best of luck in his upcoming race. And you tell him that if he ever comes to our town again, or sends a proxy, or a proxy’s proxy, we’re going to kill those fuckers, too, and mail them back to him in pieces, and then Fran and I will get in a car and tell the world everything we know. About him, about you, all of it. So you tell him, we’re very sorry, but he needs to forget about his son.”
She laughs. “Forget a child? That’s not an easy thing to do,” says Holliday. “As you well know, John.”
“Well, maybe you can help him with that,” says Cooper. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”
Cooper turns to Fran, who’s still seated. Once again, Cooper wishes for a hat. This would be the perfect moment to put on a hat. Instead, he says simply, “Come on, Fran. We’re done here.”
But Fran lingers a moment longer, regarding Holliday. As though assessing some new species of creature she never imagined existed. A creature whose capacity for cruelty is so vast that it alters Fran’s conception of what’s possible. Of what you might one day have to deal with. This revelation doesn’t dishearten her, though, or paralyze her, or cripple her. Rather, like all revelations, it nourishes Fran, it strengthens her, because it further feeds her understanding of the world.
“Leave us alone,” she says finally to Holliday. “That’s all. But that’s everything. Do you understand? Leave us alone.”
She stands to join Cooper.
“And what about all this carnage you’ve caused?” says Holliday, from her seat, in her jewels, with her implacable smile.
Fran leans toward her.
“Just forget it,” she says.
And only then, in the ensuing quiet, do the three of them hear the first crisp whispers of the fire.
They look up from the patio to see Spiro and Hannibal, each holding an empty gas can, their faces sweaty and their hands and clothes dirty and stinking of splashed petrol. The fire rages higher behind them, flames pawing and slurping at the house. While Cooper, Fran, and Holliday talked, whiling away the evening hour, Spiro and Hannibal circled the compound, dousing the garden, soaking the foliage. The fire’s rising now. The vast garden cowers and withers under the heat. Fragile flowers bow humbly. Palm leaves clench like fists.
“You’ll see Eleanor Sung in a few days,” says Cooper to Holliday, over the sound of the fire’s snapping. “Until then, we’re headed back to see a friend in the hospital. So I can offer you a ride to Amarillo, if you like. Or you can stay here and watch this place burn to the ground.”
Holliday seems amused at the extent of this vast tantrum. She gestures toward the compound. “You know this is nothing, right? This is not even a fraction of our research and everything is backed up in any case. This is merely one of my many homes. This isn’t even where my work is stored. You can’t touch my work. And it will continue, no matter what. So all this accomplishes nothing. Except warming your childish faces, here for a moment, like children at a bonfire, telling stories. Like spoiled children, acting out.”
“That may be so, but either way, your ride’s about to leave,” Cooper says. “And I don’t suspect you’ll want to sleep out here tonight.”
The five of them head back to civilization. Cooper and Fran in the front, and fuel-soaked Spiro and Hannibal sitting in back, stinking, with Holliday wedged in the middle, her white linen top stained with smoke. They drive with the windows cracked to disperse the fumes of the gas. The miles pass silently between them. Like they’re a broken family fleeing a catastrophe.
It’s not long before the raging fire is hardly a flicker in the rearview, as they drive a hundred miles in the opposite direction, and leave the roaring plains to reclaim its ceded ground.
41.
IN THE MIDDLE OF TOWN, another fire is burning.
This is what greets the four of them when they return.
The blood-soaked files have been gathered up and swept into a pile and set aflame. The people have ransacked the intake trailer and collected all the agents’ armaments, pistols and ammo and a few assault rifles. The town has the look of a war camp. A few townsfolk now stand with rifles over their shoulders, like sentries, watching the fire. Others wear guns stuck in their belts. They stand ready, for whatever new siege might be coming. All the while, the bonfire burns. It dispenses its secrets to heaven in the form of sparks, which flutter and mingle above with the innumerable stars.
Cooper watches. There are graves yet to be dug. They’ll bury the bodies themselves. It’s long past time that Caesura had a cemetery, he thinks. No headstones for anyone, though. No official markers. Let each of the dead decide in the next life what name they choose to go by.
As for the town, he imagines they’ll survive. As a goal, survival seems like more than enough, at least
for now, at least for tonight. Dawes will be the new sheriff, if she wants it, Cooper’s already decided that. They checked in on her at the hospital after leaving Holliday, and the prognosis was better. Hopeful, even.
She’ll come back, and she’ll be sheriff, and they’ll also open the gates. Maybe even take down the fences, and the residents will come and go as they please. If anyone cares to venture out beyond the town, to encounter whatever’s waiting for them, whoever’s looking for them, that will be their choice. They’ll always be welcome back.
As for Cooper, he’ll move in with Fran, if she’ll have him. He hasn’t proposed it yet. There’s no need to decide it tonight, or to decide what happens after that. All he knows is that he’ll go about it slowly, the whole project, not just with her, but with the whole town, and with himself, he understands this. With no forced urgency, but a humble process of determining who in the town can forgive him. Whether any trust yet remains. Perhaps there isn’t any, and if not, he’ll deal with that, too. But everyone here has their own pasts to grapple with. He won’t rush them or force them to grapple too quickly with his. He has his own grappling to do.
The fax machine will be dispatched, of course, that is the next order of business. In fact, he has half a mind to lug it out from the police trailer right now and toss it onto the flames. He trusts Eleanor Sung to run things from afar, and if she needs to reach them, she can drive out and visit face-to-face. For his part, he doesn’t intend to bother her. They’ll need some emergency lifeline, he guesses, though he’s increasingly inclined to believe that whatever the town needs, it will find within its borders or not at all. They should be able to puzzle out the problem of survival together. For starters, they’ve got $200,000. The money’s still there, still accessible, he double-checked from a pay phone during the trip into town. It could all disappear tomorrow, he knows that, too, but he suspects it won’t. Call it a bribe, or hush money, for services rendered and secrets kept. Those funds should suffice for a while. After that, they only face the same challenges of every new hopeful settlement that’s ever been established in human history. Which is a fact that Cooper finds heartening, perhaps foolishly so.
Frankly, he’s less concerned with how they’ll survive than with who will come next to challenge them. Not just Rigo, not just Vincent, but all the accumulated enemies of the town who still harbor festering vendettas. Given there’s no one in the outside world to shield their secrets or their whereabouts.
Then again, he thinks, we’re a town of notorious cutthroats and criminals and killers, who only now have an inkling of who we are and what we’ve done. And what we’re capable of.
So let them come.
As for the files, all the files, they’ll go in a box, he thinks, into his drawer, in his office, with a lock, and he’ll hold the key. It will be his last and only responsibility to the town. Given the riot today, some people here already know all there is to know about themselves. Some know half. Some know nothing. But those who ask will always have access.
That will be his rule. The only rule of the Blinds.
Fran holds Isaac hefted in her arms like a much younger child and together they stand next to Cooper. He hasn’t asked if she’ll have him, or even if she plans to stay, and tonight’s not the night to ask.
Instead, they watch the bonfire.
“It kind of feels like a holiday,” she says.
“Bonfire Day,” says Cooper. “We should mark it on the calendar.”
“We could celebrate it every year.”
“But what are we going to burn?” Cooper asks her.
“Whatever needs burning,” she says.
Hours later, as the fire fades, there is no further revel to speak of, though a few townspeople linger as though at a festival. It’s deep into the early morning before the last one heads to bed. And even though there’s no one among them, not Cooper, not Fran, nor any of those who remain, who doesn’t still fear some coming intrusion, some enemy galloping toward them from the past, for the first time in the town’s history, they sleep with the gates wide open.
Cooper buries the padlock in the ground himself. At dawn, in the desert, just beyond the fence. He digs a shallow hole, and before he covers it over, he tosses in his sheriff’s star besides.
Let Dawes earn her own star, he thinks, not this tarnished hand-me-down.
He pats the dirt with the toe of his boot. Then he plants a homemade sign above the hole. A sign he made an hour ago in Orson’s workshop, with some old timber and black paint. He pounds the sign into the ground with Orson’s dented hammer. Then he pockets the hammer, turns, and heads back toward the town.
He leaves the sign out front of the open gates to greet anyone who cares to call.
As a welcome, or a warning, or both.
The sign, hand-lettered, simply reads:
WELCOME TO THE BLINDS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere gratitude to the invaluable people who helped shepherd this book into the world: My agent, David McCormick. My editor, Zachary Wagman. Miriam Parker, Sonya Cheuse, Emma Janaskie, Meghan Deans, Martin Wilson, Sara Wood, Michelle Crowe, Suet Chong, and Daniel Halpern at Ecco. Howard Sanders and Katrina Escudero at UTA. Boris Kachka and Michael Idov, for the brief and necessary Russian lesson. The good folks at the Ditmas Workspace in Brooklyn, who provided constant encouragement and endured my invasions at irregular hours. My friend and reader Howard Akler. My RC. And, of course, as ever, my wife, Julia May Jonas, the notorious, indispensable, perpetually inspiring JMJ.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM STERNBERGH is New York magazine’s culture editor, as well as the author of the Edgar Award–nominated novels Shovel Ready and Near Enemy. He lives in Brooklyn.
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ALSO BY ADAM STERNBERGH
Shovel Ready
Near Enemy
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY SARA WOOD
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS : © KEITH KAPPLE / AGE FOTOSTOCK (GAS STATION ) ; © FOTOSUTRA / SHUTTERSTOCK (SKY)
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BLINDS. Copyright © 2017 by Adam Sternbergh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Map illustration by Michael Chen
EPub Edition August 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-266136-4
Print ISBN 978-0-06-266134-0
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