The destruction of one character’s workshop reveals just one of several fault lines that ultimately fracture the foundation of deceit on which the town’s uneasy and morally compromised idyll has been so strangely built. Memories themselves, too, prove harder to eradicate than the founders of the Caesura project had hoped, and they remain vulnerable to restoration through triggers – a face, a song, a line in a book. The residents call Caesura “The Blinds,” because, as the town’s sheriff explains, “we don’t see the outside world, and they don’t see us, not anymore.”īut while memories can be erased, the past itself lives intransigently on, including in the “blind files” containing all the suppressed truths of the residents’ pasts that, as Sheriff Cooper knows, are the real source of the town’s nickname. The town’s security depends on their total isolation: its three rules are no visitors, no contact, and no return. They are protected because they have forgotten – and because they are forgotten, lost altogether to the lives they once knew.

A futuristic version of a witness protection program, Caesura is populated by people whose current peace of mind is preserved by the absence of memories, which have been selectively edited to remove all knowledge of the horrific crimes they either committed or testified to. “The condemnation of memory”: that ominous phrase perfectly captures the nature of the threat that, first subtly and then with relentless malevolence, propels Caesura toward violent catastrophe.Īs its name indicates, the town itself offers a pause, a break from reality for its carefully selected residents. “ Damnatio Memorae,” reads graffiti sprayed across the walls of a trashed workshop in the remote Texas town of Caesura, the setting for Adam Sternbergh’s taut conceptual thriller, The Blinds.

The blinds by adam sternbergh