She laughs. “Now, Cal, you know I can’t do that.”
The blind files—that’s where the town really gets its nickname, Cooper knows, though he’s never shared that information with anyone. Every person living in the town is considered a blind file. Their cases are closed, their lives warehoused away, and their fates now in the able hands of Dr. Judy Holliday and the Fell Institute. She was the secondary researcher on the project that gave birth to Caesura a decade ago, along with her mentor, Dr. Fell. Cooper never met him—Fell was dead by the time Caesura opened and Cooper got his job. Killed in a random car accident, a hit-and-run, a real tragedy, given his stature in the world of science. By building on treatments pioneered to deal with traumatic memories, Fell had found a way to isolate specific memories in a subject’s brain, using MRI imaging, and then erase those specific memories completely. A memory is no more than a cluster of chemicals, a tiny clump of proteins, is how Dr. Holliday once explained it to Cooper. In the beginning, Fell’s technique was less like a scalpel and more like a scythe, cutting out huge swaths of people’s memories. Over time, it became more surgical.
After Fell’s death, Dr. Holliday proposed the idea of memory erasure to the Justice Department and the U.S. Marshals as an alternative to WITSEC, the traditional witness protection program. In WITSEC, you get a new identity and a new home, but you’re still fundamentally you—with all your criminal history, proclivities, predilections, and expertise—and you’re planted in an existing community full of unsuspecting innocent people. Over the years, this proved problematic for WITSEC—when, for example, ex-criminals got back into illegal trades, or used their new freedom and anonymity to go on murderous sprees. Caesura, Holliday argued, offers the ultimate alternative: Not even you know who you are or what you’ve done. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself—this was Caesura’s founding credo. A new you, a new life, a new start. WITSEC was attracted to the Caesura program as a way to deal with its most repugnant witnesses: the killers, the serial rapists, the child predators, the ones who had knowledge and leverage, who could trade their testimony for amnesty, but for whom it was most difficult, politically, to justify making a deal and then loosing that person back into the world. The notion of a voluntary memory wipe, followed by consensual internment in a secure and isolated government-monitored community, under the Institute’s watchful care, seemed both more palatable to the public and more humane to the witnesses—that’s what everyone told themselves anyway, on the day they cut the ribbon on Caesura.
And in among these criminals, Holliday proposed, they’d seed a sprinkling of true innocents: witnesses whose lives were forever in peril for whatever they’d seen or known, or victims of crimes so terrible that the best recourse was to wipe their memories clean and let them start fresh. In this way, Dr. Holliday envisioned a humanitarian aspect to Caesura: as a refuge for the most severely traumatized witnesses. Don’t force them to struggle through years of tedious therapy to learn to live with their trauma, she argued; instead, just erase it and let them start again. A new life under the Institute’s benevolent watch, in exchange for their testimony. Given the alternative—a life on the run, haunted by pain, and dwelling in perpetual fear—this option seemed not only appealing but merciful.
Holliday further insisted that the residents of Caesura could never be allowed to know for certain which one they were: an innocent witness or a flipped criminal. This is crucial, she argued; otherwise, the town would collapse into a caste system of the innocent and the guilty. So all of them, criminals and innocents alike, were classified as “blind files”—basically, wiped from the system. Only the Justice Department knows who they were and only the Institute knows who they’ve become. That’s how the Blinds got its name. When people outside of the town say “the Blinds,” they’re not talking about the town, they’re talking about the people who reside there: blind to their own pasts, their own sins, their own selves. And the world is blind to them.
The first eight cases, the original eight, were experimental and brutal. Some people, like Orson Calhoun, wound up with thirty-year memory gaps, just a ragged hole where their life used to be. Then there’s the man now known as William Wayne, whose case history leaked to the press, and who became so notorious that it nearly toppled the program before it even got started. Most of the original eight, like Fran Adams, remember almost nothing of their previous lives. A little bit of childhood, maybe, but that’s it. Cooper always thought Fran got the worst deal of anyone: She arrived with a kid in her belly, and no idea of who the person was who’d fathered him. Yet she raised him all these years. She deserves a better life, and so does her son.
The criminals and the innocents—even Cooper doesn’t know who’s who. That’s by design—it’s what he agreed to, way back at the start, and he’s never questioned it, until today.
But now he has to know. Which brings him here.
Because if Fran’s an innocent, she can just go free. He could open the gate for her tonight and send her and her son on their way. And if she isn’t, at least Cooper will know what exactly she needs to prepare for. Because he’s already decided that she has no choice but to leave, and he’s already decided that he’s the only one who can make that happen.
“So whose histories are you interested in, exactly?” asks Dr. Holliday.
“Four people,” says Cooper. “Errol Colfax, Hubert Gable, Gerald Dean, and Fran Adams.”
“Why those four?”
“Colfax is the one who committed suicide a couple months back. Gable just turned up dead this week. Dean is our main suspect. And my deputy, Dawes, thinks there might be some connection between the three of them, from the outside, before they arrived. Gable and Dean came in as part of the same cohort, about six months after the program started.”
“But that can’t matter,” says Holliday. “People don’t know who they used to be. So it’s hard to keep a grudge from your life before, let alone act on it.”
“Maybe someone reminded them. Maybe from the outside. Either way, I’d like to know for sure.”
“What about Fran Adams? How does she fit into this?”
“I just need to know if she’s an innocent or not. Just tell me that.”
“Why, Cal?”
“Because she needs to leave. She has the only remaining child born in the Blinds. He’s eight already. She can’t hide him from the world anymore—or the world from him. But if she’s going to leave, she needs to know what’s in store for her out there.”
Dr. Holliday considers this, then motions toward his untouched glass.