“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.