Blind Spots, page 6
She escorts them through a narrow hallway. The right half is all glass, affording them a view of a large research lab that stretches out below. Dozens of people work at computers, watch 3D projections, take notes on tablets. Serious money here.
At the end of the hall sits Dr. Leonard Pelzer’s office. The assistant leaves and Pelzer walks around his desk, shakes hands. Wears the serious expression of a man not used to dealing with police detectives. Thin, mid-fifties, frail but with watchful eyes. He invites Owens and Peterson to sit in what appear to be the finest office guest chairs money can buy.
“We’re all still in shock, honestly,” he says, after some basic questions.
Owens asks, “How would you describe the relationship between Drs. Jensen and Leila?”
“They’ve both been primary investigators here, which means they spearhead different projects. PIs can be competitive.”
“What was he working on?”
“We’re always looking for ways to enhance the orbital interface in the brain. Getting our cerebral cortex to better understand the information and stimuli that our vidder sends it.”
On the wall to Owens’s right is a black-and-white still of that Buñuel film, the eyeball slicing. Taken before the actual slicing, thank goodness. He assumes it’s a sick joke.
The window behind Pelzer offers a killer view of the city.
“EyeTech must pay most of the bills around here,” Owens observes. “You do most of your work for them, right?”
EyeTech, led by its young genius Kai Ballantine, was the first company to create vidders that fulfilled their promise. Even before The Blinding, back when blindness was something that afflicted “only” 40 million people worldwide (Owens, like everyone else, had looked up that startlingly high stat), techies had been working on various ways to cure blindness. Electrodes on tongues, implants behind ears, heat gauges beneath skin. Many failures, each one supposedly bringing them closer to a workable solution. Myriad studies of bats, whales, shellfish, sharks. Attempts to re-create echolocation in human form. Then The Blinding came, kicking that kind of research into overdrive. Governments and those businesses that could still function and had access to capital got in on the cause.
EyeTech made it happen, and, with its initial success, became the single most powerful company on earth.
It created the physical vidders and also ran the software and networks that sent signals to them, all while maintaining the vast worldwide infrastructure that supported everything. It had a potential customer base of the entire planet. There was plenty of room to grow, either through continual updates and improvements to its damn-near-essential product, or through the still vast numbers of people who didn’t have vidders. Last Owens heard, something like 5 percent of Americans were vidderless; many people, especially those who had already been blind before the disaster, chose to remain so (they all didn’t move to communes like Sarah’s; plenty lived the same lives they always had). But that still meant millions of Americans who wanted vidders were still suffering through life blind—and the numbers were even worse in most other countries.
Creation and distribution of the devices had been partly funded by the U.S. government, but eventually politicians tired of that largesse and pulled back. People who used to work the sorts of menial jobs that robots were gradually taking over found that they couldn’t afford vidders and that their fellow voters were tired of paying higher taxes to help the economically disadvantaged catch up.
EyeTech, meanwhile, would have been broken up as a monopoly years ago if not for the fact that the fate of civilization pretty much rested in its hands.
Regulators tend not to want to create another apocalypse.
“Well, yes, EyeTech as well as the government,” Pelzer explains. “That’s how it works in science. We receive government funding, but yes, EyeTech invests in a lot of our ventures—our moon shots, if you will—knowing that everything we create will only make their products better. In fact, EyeTech’s new vidder contains no fewer than twenty—”
“Yeah, we heard the informercial downstairs. I heard EyeTech’s got some big new product coming out, right? All the latest upgrades and whatnot. Was Jensen involved in that?”
“Researchers like Dr. Jensen wouldn’t work directly with EyeTech. That’s what our account people do, but our scientists keep their noses to the grindstone, so to speak. And many of them, honestly … It’s just a different skill set, the science part and the client-slash-government services part.”
This bores Owens. He cuts to the interesting part.
“I’d rather you kept this between us,” Owens says, “but Dr. Leila told us she couldn’t see the attacker—that he appeared as a black blur, no matter what angle she looked from. Have you ever heard of a malfunction like that?”
Pelzer fidgets in his seat.
“I mean, I’ve heard people blame their vidders when they do or see something they shouldn’t, sure. Who hasn’t?”
Exactly.
“But for the record,” Owens says, “and to put our minds at ease. You’re a scientist, you specialize in vidders, you understand how these things work as well as anyone. Is it really possible for a person to black themselves out to another person, as a way of committing a crime undetected?”
“No.” Headshake, sober look. “Of course not. They just don’t work that way.”
* * *
The two partners ride a glass elevator down to the ground floor. Glass elevators all the rage now, builders using more glass than ever before, everyone reveling in sight again. Owens had even heard of some fashion designer who held a runway show with nothing but transparent clothing, though it didn’t catch on, thank goodness.
“Kind of amazing, when you really step back and think about it,” Peterson says. “Who woulda thought we wouldn’t need eyes?”
“We’d be pretty ugly without ’em. You’d be uglier, I mean.”
Peterson lets that go. Then he admits, “I miss the way it was.”
“Jesus, who doesn’t?”
“No, I don’t just mean the sighted days. I mean … after The Blinding, when cops were the only ones with vidders. Y’know?”
They look at each other. Peterson is toeing dangerous ground. Wondering if his partner will step with him or pull him back.
Owens keeps his face noncommittal.
“We could keep order better then,” Peterson insists, sensing the need to explain himself. “We were in charge. These laws, this due-process bullshit … Like the Slade case, man. If we’d had X-ray all along, we coulda nailed them a lot sooner. I wouldn’t have gotten nearly shot in the face. That case would have been so much easier and less risky, for both of us. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Owens considers his reply carefully. The elevator seems to shrink. Peterson belatedly seems to realize he should have kept such thoughts to himself.
The elevator door opens.
“I don’t miss those days, Jimmy.”
* * *
From his office high above, Pelzer’s heart rate has returned to normal as he watches the two cops leave the building. He picks up his phone, autodials a number.
“We have to talk. You’re not going to believe it.”
CHAPTER 9
They’ve done Owens the courtesy of reserving a conference room rather than an interrogation room, but his deposition for the Truth Commission feels like a grilling nonetheless.
He is reminded of why he put this off so long. He sits beside Winslow, his union-appointed counselor, whom he barely knows. On the other side are two black suite–clad attorneys; a fresh-faced, white assistant prosecutor named Hollis; and the main inquisitor, Jeffrey Huntington. He’s an African American man whose shiny tie clip, perfect nails, and trim mustache suggest a painstaking attention to detail.
On the table between them is a small digital recorder.
Huntington enunciates for the mike. “This is Hearing 176–5-B regarding events that occurred during the week of June twelfth, seven years ago. Detective Owens, according to station logs, you were on foot patrol in southwestern beat 5 on June twelfth.”
He gives Owens a look suggesting that although that wasn’t a question, an answer is expected.
“That is correct.”
So it begins, the torturous rehashing of a horrific week. A horrific month, a horrific year.
He hates this. Even before The Blinding, Owens had never been one to agree with the notion that the best way to heal from trauma is to discuss it, examine it, put it under a microscope. Prod that fucking wound over and over until all the pus has magically, therapeutically seeped out. No thanks. Call him stoic, but that degree of self-analysis seems like someone just asking to stay trapped in a doom loop, a never-ending cycle of suffering and self-reproach.
The Blinding is over. Let’s just walk away.
Alas, that is not how the new President and his Truth Commission feel about it—or voters, apparently. Everyone wants to figure out what happened. Even though some things are clearly beyond figuring, beyond the limits of our comprehension.
What Owens really fears: they’re just looking for someone to blame.
And yes, bad things happened during The Blinding. In addition to, of course, the fact that no one could fucking see. Worse, so many people used that as the cover they’d needed to indulge their id. Like a permanent cloak wrapped around the shoulders of some very bad people. Rapes went through the roof. Burglaries too, even for items that weren’t much use to people who couldn’t see (computer monitors and TVs—why? What the fuck were people thinking?). Vehicle theft, insane thrill rides that ended very badly indeed. Even the cars that had e-drivers, thieves sometimes disabled them on purpose. Suicide by car, a thousandfold.
Never in history had there been so many homicides by strangulation. Guns couldn’t be trusted, and even knives were a risk. The tactile sensation of wrapping your fingers around someone’s neck, of compressing those arteries and collapsing the windpipe, was apparently too much to resist.
Fires everywhere. Whole neighborhoods gone. In some parts of the world, entire cities.
And this Huntington bastard wants Owens to talk about it?
Question after question. Time seems to stop. The Blinding had felt that way too, at first.
Owens tries to maintain a disinterested tone of voice but he gets progressively more annoyed.
“I’d like to talk about the evening of June fifteenth,” Huntington says maybe ninety minutes into the session, “in particular, the incident at Western Market.”
Goddamn it. He knew this was coming.
“I gave a report about this, a long time ago.”
“As you should understand, the Truth Commission is attempting to dig a little more deeply than some of those more … scattershot reports allow.”
A fair point, but Owens doesn’t like it. Reports at the time were all dictated, voice-activation software creating transcripts for posterity. A while ago, Owens had gone back and reviewed a few, the flashbacks hitting hard. Cops could barely talk in complete sentences at that time, it was all fragments and expletives. Half those reports sound like the person was unhinged, as in literally mentally ill.
They were. Everyone was. Reality had been torn apart and everyone was falling through the cracks, falling, falling.
Owens takes a breath. “What exactly would you like to know?”
“Why don’t you just take me back there, starting at the moment you arrived at the Market.”
Another breath. “Our orders were to protect the workers who were unloading the shipments and to contain the crowd and prevent them from stealing anything. Which was made difficult by our deteriorating vision. This is all just…” He shakes his head.
“‘Contain the crowd.’ So the crowd had already gathered before you were sent there? That isn’t clear in your report.”
“‘Isn’t clear.’ Excellent choice of words. Nothing was goddamn clear, if you’ll recall.”
“Owens,” Winslow says gently.
Huntington lets a tense few seconds pass. On the mistaken assumption that things will miraculously become less tense after a pause.
“Please answer the question.”
“Yes. My partner at the time, Officer Morales, and I had been sent by Captain Fox, who passed away a few days later.” Suicide, his police-issued revolver. One of dozens in this state alone. “A shipment of food and drinking water was being sent from the airport to the Market. It was supposed to be a secret, and the appropriate agencies were going to disperse it to the community through the appropriate channels, but word got out. I think one of the foremen at the airport warehouse admitted he couldn’t see, so they needed to find another guy to handle it, and during that delay, I don’t know, word spread.”
The night in question was six weeks after The Blinding had reached their city, and Owens was one of several officers who had severely impaired vision at that point. Few had anything approaching normal sight.
Huntington asks, “So Western Market was … Was it surrounded? Where exactly were people gathered?”
Again, Owens wants to ask Why. Why why why. Bad things happened. People were starving. Terrified. They came because they’d heard there would be food. Such scenes had occurred the world over during various wars and disasters, and they often went badly. Now add blindness, or at least major visual impairments for most everyone at that point, and how can you sit at that desk and criticize us for making mistakes, being stressed, having flaws?
“Look, you’re asking me about something that took place years ago—”
“Your other reports have always displayed impeccable memory.”
“—during The Blinding, for God’s sake. Do I have to remind you that details are hard to recall from that time?”
Memories, thoughts, facts. It was amazing how they all seemed to escape, once torn from any tether to visuals. Life had become a surreal dream. The people you loved weren’t people anymore, they were voices, ghosts. Your home was nothing but hard surfaces that struck you at unexpected times. The sky vanished. Depth was an almost incomprehensible abstraction. You were reduced to your body, which itself had been reduced.
Also no screens, no text, unless you were fortunate enough to already know braille. No video. For years people had been worried about the effect of all those screens in our lives, and now they were gone. It was like everyone had lost not one sense, but two.
He would sit with Jeanie in his apartment and they would ask what the other had done all day and they’d both have the hardest time remembering. And that was in the beginning.
Some people got laryngitis from talking so much, everyone working the vocal cords overtime, as if all that aural stimuli might make up for a lost sense. Narrating their lives for each other, in hopes that made their lives more real.
That night went badly, he wants to say but doesn’t dare. It went very, very badly and I dream about it every night and even when I’m awake.
I feel those hands on me, always.
It’s when Huntington starts questioning him about the exact number of bodies that Owens says he needs a break.
* * *
After ten minutes in the men’s room and pacing the hallway and conferring with Winslow, who doesn’t appear to be doing much to earn the paycheck provided by Owens’s union dues, they’re back in their assigned seats.
The young assistant is missing, but Owens doesn’t care.
“Let’s just get this over with,” he says.
“I’d like to move on to a separate incident. Two years ago, August twelfth, the death of Jeanette MacArthur.”
A switch is thrown inside Owens. “Excuse me?”
Winslow says, “Whoa, Jeffrey, there was nothing about this in any of our correspondence.”
“I’m sorry, but I only recently came upon something.”
Owens asks him, “Can I ask about your wife, asshole?”
Winslow puts a hand on Owens’s arm. “Let me handle this.”
Owens shakes him off as Huntington says, “Again, I’m sorry if this didn’t make it into my memos, but I have the right to ask anything, and a suspicious death involving an officer’s—”
“‘Suspicious’?” Owens burning.
If he could have looked at himself he would have seen a deranged smile, as if this were almost comical and he was trying to make sense of it. His expression seems to give Huntington pause, just for a moment.
“Yes, suspicious. And I don’t know why it—”
Owens bolts from his seat. He steps around the table and Huntington rises in anticipation. Which only makes it easier for Owens to grab him by the collar and pin him against the wall.
Winslow shouting, “Owens, stand down!”
Huntington grasps at Owens’s hands. Trying to pry them off. Scared. What he doesn’t realize is that this flurry of motion and sudden violence is actually Owens holding himself back.
“What exactly do you want to ask about my wife?” Owens’s voice strangely slow, even to himself. “Do you want to know what it was like to see her body hanging there? Would you like to know how cold her skin felt?”
Winslow again, “Detective Owens, stand down. Now.”
Owens releases Huntington. Smells the man’s sweat, his own. Huntington holds out a finger. Wanting the last word. Then deciding maybe that’s a tremendously bad idea.
Owens brushes past Winslow on his way out. “Write whatever the hell ‘truth’ you want, but leave Jeanie out of it. You need me to sign any forms about the Market riot, leave them in my fucking box.”
Memories are indeed sharper now, impaled against our vision like tiny butterflies. He already knows he’ll remember this moment for a long time.
CHAPTER 10
Hours after being released, Dr. Leila paces in her living room. At first she had assumed they were holding her for her own protection, as the murderer must still be out there somewhere. Then the detectives asked the wrong sorts of questions, and life became like a car headed off a cliff she couldn’t steer away from.
