The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  And he’d been so right, saying so. Back then, they had truly been above it all.

  EVE RAN AND RAN. Always alone, although never feeling alone. Where she last knew Ali had lived, in the oldest and poorest parts of the city, the streets kept you company. Eve would stop and show people the wrinkled photograph she carried. Her brother standing on a flat roof, hands on his hips, painted in orange streaks and blue shadows by the sunset off to the west. A man with the scent of boyhood still on him. So handsome. Eve loved the picture and showed it around with a trace of pride. “I’m looking for this good-looking guy who happens to be my brother. He’d be about ten years older now. Around thirty-six. Have you seen him?”

  She ran with a water bladder strapped between her shoulder blades. Six months back at the running program, after letting it go for several years, Eve was closing in on something she remembered, a feeling like she could run forever.

  “His name is Ali,” Eve would say. Some old guy smoking on the concrete steps out front of a corner store still open at midnight. Sitting right where he’d been sitting for years.

  “Ali as in Muhammad?”

  “He was named after Muhammad Ali, in fact,” Eve would say. “My father was a big fan.”

  “You Muslim?”

  “Secular humanist. How about you?”

  “I believe in God and Allah and all those. You sure you want to be running down here this hour?”

  Dark streets, shining alleys. Eve alone and yet in the company of the city, its wall art, the shifting energy of its sidewalks where crowds gathered after midnight around the neon hum of the convenience stores. There was crime in the riverside neighborhoods, Eve knew. Stofton especially. But she never felt afraid, even miles away from the neighborhood where she lived in the western reaches of the city. Miles from its quiet sleep and private security SUVs, its shingled roofs and motionactivated lights that blinked on nervously over the wide lawns.

  One night, just off Sixth Street in Stofton, not far from an intersection that served as an open-air market for drug dealers, Eve came across two young men putting up a poster on a plywood hoarding over an abandoned storefront. There was a crowd watching. Two dozen people standing in the low light, the wafting smells of the sewer and the riverfront. A bearded man sat on an overturned milk crate nearby. Somebody lay at his feet covered in a blanket, coughing and heaving in the chill. The poster was six feet wide and at least that high. It was made with dozens of single sheets of paper, each one a panel of the larger image, pasted up onto the plywood with a brush and a pot of glue. The final image only slowly made itself plain: a close-up photo of two plastic figurines blown to life size, gymnasts with their backs arched and hands extended in a flourish over their heads. There were large bold letters across the bottom of the poster. When the last panel went up, the young men stepped back and everyone could see that the words were Freedom Is Slavery. And the crowd began to cheer. The man with the beard yelled: “That is black and white!” Another man said: “Right on!” And a woman who had been standing nearby, tightly gripping two plastic bags full of clothes, put her things down and danced up the sidewalk, singing: “Keep up the good work! Keep up the good work, you beautiful, beautiful young artists!” Eve herself standing with a hand to her mouth now, a lump forming in her throat. The reaction rippled around her, so genuine and so passionate, that it infected Eve too. The woman twirling away up the street past a silent police car bathed in silver street light.

  Onward. West out of Stofton. West through River Park, the Flats, along the boulevards that funneled into the West Stretch. She increased her pace, not to hurry but to hear her body in its solitary rhythms and pulses. She shone with sweat, with pleasure, thinking again of the two young men and their poster. The woman and her dance and how her feet had scuffed the pavement in circles, again and again.

  Beautiful, beautiful. Down into the quieter winding streets, the looping concentration around West Slopes, then West Lake. Nick would be long snoring by now, lying on his back under his sleep-mask with his earplugs. Otis deep in the murmuring disquiet of his young man’s dreams. Oats, they called him, his boyhood nickname although he was seventeen already. Young man enough to be aware of Eve and his father together and to poorly conceal his bemusement at that.

  Down towards Angus Lake and towards the house, which had been Nick’s parents’ house, which is how Eve always read the lawns and the low expanse of building in those moments. She lived there. But it was his high square hedge. His family oaks and flower beds. Cored out by her run, dangerously emptied, with still no news of Ali, Eve felt now more alone for the effort of looking than she’d been when she started.

  It was never her house at the end of a long night run.

  THE REFRIGERATOR WOKE FIRST, the television on its aluminum face winking to life, a burble below. A long-familiar tune: war and financial turmoil. There were websites that could be consulted for maps and graphs, videos and the best advice of experts.

  Eve hummed “Satellite of Love” while she dressed.

  She knocked on the door of Nick’s bathroom to let him know she was up, fed the old Alsatian, Hassoman, with his creaking hips and unfixed glaucomic stare. A golden capsule of glucosamine with the organic kibble. Then she went into the big kitchen at the back of the house to find Otis at the table already, hunched in front of his netbook, expression rapt, features luminous with screen light in the half-dark, playing MoleChess™.

  Eve pulled up the blinds and flicked on the lights over the counter. “I hope at least you’re winning.”

  He said: “Morning, Champ. Do I lose?”

  “You want some breakfast?”

  “Gotta finish this one.”

  “Oats, you own the site,” Eve said. “You could adjust your score.”

  Molechess.com. The noble game bent to suit suspicious times. You owned a piece on your opponent’s side, activated for a single move of your choosing. So were games upended by black bishops slaughtering their own, knights rampant behind the lines, queens killing their own kings at the crucial turn. Was it more exciting with traitors?

  “Not traitors, Champ,” Otis once explained, with the deliberate patience of a smart teenager accustomed to adults falling behind. “Here we are dealing with something more like a system imperfection. Like a program flaw or a defect. Which people really seem to like.”

  They certainly seemed to. Thousands of people were paying members of the site. Eve was forced to reflect on occasion what it meant that Nick’s kid was well on his way to becoming independently wealthy, before university. He was, Eve supposed, enacting his family genes, moneywise at the level of their amino acids. In three generations of Nick’s family: a mill owner, a land developer turned wine writer, and now an online-gaming entrepreneur whose skin complexion had not yet cleared. Eve didn’t feel quite so competent being between careers herself, between phases somehow. Out of phase. She felt it in the morning especially, when the blinds first went up and the horizon presented itself. A person should be brimming with anticipation at that point in the day, possibility undiluted by fatigue or disappointment. Eve missed that feeling, having known it once. The morning pull of a purposeful heart.

  Nick and Otis ate in the sunroom together, side by side at the long table as they’d been doing since Otis’s mother left all those years before, when Otis was only five. Father and son behind their bowls, scraping and clattering and reading their separate screens or papers. Eve ate breakfast standing in the adjoining kitchen, not because Nick hadn’t encouraged her to sit down, only feeling like she should leave them to their long patterns. So she leaned on the sink looking down the acre of lawn to the creek where the hedge stopped, where someone half-hidden was washing a shirt in the cold stream there. Frompton Creek. It had once held trout, when Nick was a boy.

  It was a homeless man camping there, Eve knew. His back bent over his washing. Bare from the waist up. Eve thought of how in Stofton, at that moment, people were waking in parks and stairwells, in parkades and on benches. So many o
f them. She hoped Ali wasn’t among them.

  “They’re putting up these posters downtown,” Eve called over into the sunroom. “I saw them doing one last night. I’m trying to decide if they’re political or art or what.”

  Nick sipped coffee. He looked into his bowl, then across at Eve. Then he started in again on his porridge.

  Otis said: “Posters like of what?”

  Eve came into the sunroom doorway. “Like these big black-and-white photos of toy soldiers and that kind of thing. With phrases underneath. Those famous newspeak phrases from the Orwell book. 1984. Remember ‘War Is Peace’?”

  “Like ‘Ignorance Is Strength,’” Otis said.

  “In the book, what was the guy’s name?” Eve asked. “The girl was Julia.”

  Nick’s face was pursed down around a mouthful of Irish steel-cut oats, cream, brown sugar, cut-up apples and pecans. Beside him, Otis ate dry bran flakes by the spoonful, each moistened carefully with a sip of milk.

  Nick finished and swallowed, his features settling back into their handsome symmetries. “Was the guy’s name Winchester?”

  Otis said: “No, Winston.”

  “Winston,” Eve said. “They were in love, Winston and Julia.”

  “I don’t know about love,” Otis said, his mouth full again.

  “They made love,” Eve said, “where no one could see them, although I guess the point was someone actually could see them.”

  “I think the point,” Otis said, “was that given the circumstances, Winston and Julia were certain to betray one another. So their love, or whatever it was, certainly would not last.”

  “The poster I saw last night,” Eve said to Otis, “was ‘Freedom Is Slavery.’ When it went up, people were cheering and dancing in the street. I’m not kidding.”

  Which struck them both as absurd, as things often did, making Otis and Eve start giggling, something they would have carried on had Nick not spoken up.

  “Eve, you’re going to meet those people today, right?”

  Otis started eating again.

  “Yes,” Eve said. “I’m going.” Moving back into the kitchen. Leaning again on the sink. Looking through her own reflection in the window, her face greened over by hedges and grass, laced across with branches of weeping willow.

  Nick and Otis finished their breakfasts, their getting-ready routines, their goodbye routines. Otis gave her a point of the finger and the wink of one eye. He said: “Later, Champ.” Nick gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her hand. He told her to call him afterwards. Then he did something he’d started doing lately. He looked into her eyes in what Eve assumed he meant to be a warm but knowing way, a glance to the soul of the moment’s true meaning.

  Nick said: “Feel good about this meeting. Don’t dread it. People love you.”

  Eve tried to smile. Then, when they were gone, the sound of Nick’s car having purred away down the driveway and into the morning, she cleared away breakfast things, made a fried egg sandwich and took it out into the backyard, where she found Katja, Nick’s gardener, working the flower beds just off the main deck.

  “For me?” Katja said, looking at the sandwich.

  “I’ll make you one,” Eve said. “But this is for our visitor in the hedge.”

  “Aww,” Katja said. “You’re so nice.”

  Eve went down to the bottom of the yard, to the man camping there by the stream. He was fifty. Had been in the wars. Asia, the Middle East. He sat with his shirt off in the fall chill, his hands to the flame of a camp stove where his tea water was on the boil. His brown belly was an accordion of wrinkles. And when he thanked her for the sandwich, he spoke with the trace of an accent from far away.

  Two days before, Nick had said to her: “He’s got to go, of course. He can’t live the rest of his life in our hedge. There are millions of people in need, homeless, unemployed. We can’t have them all living in our yard.” And Eve made Nick swear he wouldn’t force the man to go until they’d had a chance to really talk it through. But she was silently furious with him, a reaction she struggled to justify even to herself.

  SHOWERING. STANDING IN THE HOT WATER. Agonizing pointlessly over what to wear, then pulling on the usual jeans, faded cableknit sweater, never fashionable, borrowed from her father years before and, now, never to be returned. Then out to the truck and eastward across the city. Up into the Heights, the ancient Heights. Time to face the music. Face the day. The meeting had been scheduled and canceled five times previously. Eve was out of excuses.

  Double Vision: endorsements, promotions, campaigns, storytelling. “We’ve worked with many top former athletes,” a young partner named Ganesh told her on the phone. “And I can tell you there is always an appetite for the right sort of former athlete. It’s recession proof. It really is. It’s like a hunger that doesn’t go away. And your story

  . . . Eve, let me tell you, it’s one in a million. It gives us tremendous material to work with.”

  Nick called when she was almost there. He had a way of pressing Eve while at the same time suggesting there was no urgency. This had once been part of what she considered his grounded certainty about what came next, a seeming immunity to doubt and the influence of others. More recently, Eve had sensed these comments to be colored with a different quality. A certain urgency Nick wouldn’t have wanted to admit. So he’d tell her that it was good for her to work again. Good for her to be out and about, to move on now after what had it been, two years? The deceased Henri Latour, indefatigable to the moment of his death, would have agreed certainly that being busy was the key to being happy.

  Those were Nick’s words. Indefatigable. The key to being happy. He was in the car himself, heading to a warehouse south of the city to meet with a big area wine broker. A guy who had access to cult wines, secret wines. “Just checking in,” Nick said, voice bright.

  “I’m on my way,” Eve said. “Nick, I’m in the truck. I’m almost there, honest.”

  Signs and messages all up the main drag through River Park and into the Heights. A show about cooks after-hours. A budget holiday destination. An ethical investment fund. A new cell phone, disposable, biodegradable. It was called the WaferFone: Minutes to a Better World. Up towards the crest of the hill, Eve noticed the renovation and improvement. New bike lanes and planters. A thicket of cranes on the ridgeline. It had been warehouses and tenements when she and Ali were kids. Work yards, an abattoir, a field where they’d once watched other kids burning tires. They used to take three different buses from where the family was living in East Shore, which was a new suburb then: modern houses, clean schools, fathers who worked just across the river at the university, or in architecture or journalism. For Eve and Ali, the Heights had been a secret playground. They ate Ukrainian sausages at Kozel’s Deli. They trolled the alleys, looking at graffiti. They climbed the fire escapes of abandoned buildings, explored the hidden world of urban rooftops. Heard the pop of gunfire once in the street below.

  Up to the top of the hill, utterly transformed. The dead buildings and weeded-out railway spurs of the Heights were now a nexus of impossible refinement, all glimmer and reflection. The tiny wedgeshaped galleries. The hanging coral glass sculpture in the restaurants. And at the heart of things, the resurrected plaza. No more wasting benches, dormant planters, dead fountains. No more daylight muggings or clusters of grim shapes, in-turned around needles and pipes.

  Everything changed. Even sight lines in the main plaza seemed to have been radically upended. The old Unitarian Church was gone. And now the natural paths of the eye converged on the Meme Media complex at the western end of the plaza. Clad in silicon and titanium. Canted, billowing sheets. It coaxed the sun to life each morning and was a bier for its setting. The rest of the day, it was a city-scale funhouse mirror, reflecting the streets and buildings, the cafés and the people walking by, all in warped distortion. Meme Media was the home of KiddieFame: an idol show for the toddler to nine-year-old set. Naked yearning for status on the faces of parents and coaches. A show
big enough to have its own protesters who dressed in black and gathered spontaneously, hoisting signs. Their objections to the show seemed to braid the rhetoric of the neo-anarchist anti-globalism movement with a moral denouncement of the show for being a kind of child abuse. They seemed opposed to fame itself, or fame’s pursuit, a point on which Eve was sympathetic even if their critique was scattered. In recent months, the protesters had favored a banner and T-shirts that read Celebranoia, which Eve liked, thinking when she saw the word of how close she’d come once to marrying Reza, a French film director with three Palmes d’Or and at least twice as many girlfriends who’d once gone out onto the balcony of a hotel where they were staying in Avignon and aimed a rifle at photographers in the square. He’d been arrested and released, made all the papers and news channels, and later incorporated the scene into a movie. Any rational person who met Reza probably should be celebranoid, Eve thought. Although she thought better of buying the T-shirt when she saw it in the window of a rock shop.

  Eve found parking on Jeffers Avenue, which ran due south from the square. Double Vision was in that first block south, on the east side of Jeffers in an old building that had been sleekly refurbished in the highmodern style. She rode the elevator to the eighth-floor lobby with its open expanse of glass looking north up Jeffers back into the plaza. As she looked, she remembered that when the protest groups became large enough, the media referred to them as “Black Blocs,” but the group gathered today didn’t look like it would earn the epithet.

  The senior story manager came gliding out from behind a rice paper screen: choker, yoked shirt, wrists bedangled with awareness bracelets. A bearded twenty-five-year-old with an air of religiosity and the faint smell of hair product.

  “Eve Latour,” he announced. “I am totally, entirely thrilled. I’ve watched Geneva. What a story. A sort of come-from-behind underdog with suffering and justice. We’re all enormous, enormous fans. Please feel no pressure, no pressure at all. My name is Ganesh. This is Marcus.”