“No, he was a customer, wrong place, wrong time.” The kid makes crack-crack-crack gun sounds while pistoling the air with his fingers. “What the fuck do you care?”
She thinks of the brown uniform she’s wearing, with its unusual badge, and figures she’ll give it a shot. “I’m a police officer.”
“No, you’re not,” the kid in the cap says.
“Thanks for your help,” she says, and turns back to the locked door. Well, this is a fucking disaster, she thinks. It was nearly a three-hour drive just to get to this stupid town. Dumb, she thinks, to come all this way without a backup plan, or even a clue of what you’d find—so much for your vaunted deerstalker. You drive all this way in the heat and the emptiness, back to the fringes of the big, bad world, just to come up empty—
Wait. The big, bad world. And all that it has to offer.
She turns and asks the kid, “Where’s the nearest library?” and hopes to hell this Podunk town even has one, and that this little brat ever visited it.
It does, and he has, and it’s not too far, it turns out, and, thankfully, it’s still open when she arrives. It’s not much of a library, but that’s okay—all Dawes needs is one computer terminal. That, and the exact thing everyone in the outside world takes for granted every single day, but which she can’t ever access in the Blinds.
The big, beautiful, information-rich Internet.
She sits down at an open carrel. It’s a small local library branch, underpopulated, save for a few homeless guys napping and a couple of kids playing violent games on computers. The sound of electronic gunfire rattles in the background as she settles in and clicks open the Internet. She thinks how routine this all used to be—the process of connecting to every other computer in the world and thereby gaining instant access to virtually every piece of information you could ever want. What was it that Cooper said? My kingdom for a Google?
Well, look who’s got a Google now, she thinks, and types in “Ellis Gonzalez.”
A torrent of Facebook pages pop up, websites, blog posts, all the crisscrossing digital vapor trails of the identically named. She limits the search to “Abilene” and Recent News. There are a few local stories about the gas station robbery, in which he’s listed as an unfortunate bystander. Beyond that, nothing. No mention of his previous employment, or his reentry into the community. Only the end of his life has been documented, and even that in passing, a footnote to a footnote, buried in the depths of the fathomless Internet.
So Ellis Gonzalez is dead. She knew that already.
She’s about to close the browser when another thought occurs to her. She types in “Caesura.” Gets a bunch of results related to poetry. So she adds “Caesura” and “criminals.”
There’s not much to find, but there’s something. Conspiracy websites, mostly. Chatter of secret government camps and black helicopters, mind experiments and covert crackdowns. A few fan sites devoted to serial killers, speculating on their current whereabouts. There’s a Wikipedia page for the program, but when she opens it, the entry is short, and mostly full of dead-end speculation. And she finds a few sites dedicated to someone named Esau Unruh—some super killer, by the looks of it, with long paeans written to his supposed exploits. But among the pages there are so many divergent and contradictory accounts that it’s impossible to tell what, if any of it, is true.
She clicks back to the search engine. Slightly drunk with the heady power of unlimited information. She tries to think what else she can search for.
Types in “Damnatio Memorae.”
It turns out to be an ancient Roman practice, which literally means “the Condemnation of Memory.” When a Roman disgraced himself—a traitor, a tyrant, a failed conspirator—he would be cleansed from the official histories. His name chiseled out of monuments. His statues toppled and destroyed. His likeness scrubbed from coins. Erased from the historical record. As though he never existed. A permanent exile from history itself.
Whoever wrote that in the repair shop certainly knows their history, she thinks. Not a bad official motto for their town.
Damnatio Memorae.
What else? The search box waits, patiently.
Remembering the box of bullets sitting in her car, she types in “Lester Vogel.”
A new series of articles comes up. About a trial. And a conviction. She leans in to read the results.
Holy shit.
As she scans a few articles, her pulse begins to thump. After a few more, her stomach lurches.
Lester Vogel’s history is . . . unpleasant.
In this moment, she realizes exactly why they never let you know about the history of the people in the Blinds. She certainly knows she’ll never look at Gerald Dean in the same way again. She also realizes that if she ever gets caught doing this—searching for background information on the residents—she’ll get fired. Or worse.
Maybe end up like Ellis Gonzalez.
But she keeps reading. About Vogel’s history, before the Blinds.
When she’s had enough, she closes the browser. Stands unsteadily. Takes a moment to collect herself.
She’s about to leave when another thought occurs to her. This is her most ill-advised notion yet. And, naturally, the most irresistible.
Fuck it. She’s come this far.
She sits back down.
She hesitates, nearly talks herself out of it, then opens the search engine again. She’s about to type in “Calvin Cooper,” when she remembers that’s not his real name, any more than her real name is Sidney Dawes.
But she knows his real name.
She types in “John Barker.”
Hits Search.
Again, she gets a torrent of histories, the spilled ephemera of a thousand different John Barkers across the world.
So she types in “John Barker” and “Caesura.”
Nothing.
So she types in “John Barker” and “Fell Institute.”
A page of results unfurls.
Even before she starts to scroll through them, she knows she’s stepping through a door, one that can’t be unstepped through, and one that’s about to close behind her for good.
18.
BETTE BURR SITS on the porch of William Wayne’s house, her back resting on the railing, knuckles sore from pointless knocking. The manila envelope is balanced on her knees. It’s getting dark. The day’s nearly done. If knocking alone was going to work, it would have worked by now, she thinks. And she wants out of this place, badly, this town where no one knows who they are, what they’ve done, where they’ve been. This town where she has to pretend to be like them and live like an imposter. Unlike the rest of them, she knows who she is. She’s Eleanor Sung. Her father’s daughter. And she made her father a promise.
She slides the large portrait of her father from the envelope and considers his face for a moment longer. She had spent so much of her life wondering who this man might be. Then, once she finally found him, he made her erase the memory of meeting him.
She doesn’t remember meeting him at all.
So if she wants to rediscover him, she must deliver his message.
The message that he’s dead.
She says goodbye to the image of her father and slips the photo halfway under the door.