The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “But it’s still your story being sold,” he continued. “To the magazines, the papers, then finally to the people who wanted it in the first place. The people who desire it. Key word desire, Evey. Desire is how your story achieves its highest natural value.”

  The frog was gone.

  He produced a key card and buzzed her out. Then in the open doorway, he held the card out towards her.

  “To come and go,” he said. “If you can begin to feel comfortable here, I think this is a process you can learn to enjoy.”

  Eve took the card to finish their business. She submitted to the cheek kiss, a cool damp touch, wiped when she was safely away from Double Vision, well down the street.

  OUT IN THE PLAZA there were flags fluttering and Eve had the sensation of having forgotten something, like where she’d parked. Or an errand she was supposed to run. But it wasn’t either of those things.

  Across the square, crowds had gathered outside the main doors to Meme Media, and she walked down through the sunken garden, past the empty band riser, the singing fountain and cubist waterfall until she was close enough to see the anxious queue, the show’s black-clad protesters cordoned off to one side. This was the final procession of contestants in for the filming of another episode of KiddieFame. And even bundled against the fall chill, Eve thought she could decipher plainly enough every ambition. The aspiring soul singers and rappers, the six-year-old actors and models, the stand-up comics and celebrity chefs in waiting.

  The kids moved and corralled, they hived off and re-gathered in front of tents and awnings, past the tables with the sign-up sheets and releases and waivers, onto the switchback ramp that led up the glimmering flanks of the building under the two-story banners that riffled overhead: KiddieFame. You Should Have these Problems. The words imposed over a picture of the cliché spoiled child star, pampered by staff, lounging poolside, tiles under the deck chair littered with twenties and fifties, spent candy wrappers and game controllers.

  They filed inside with their voice and dance coaches, their prompters and image consultants and stuffed animals. Never with their parents, who were craftily banned from tapings. Whose presence, producers had long ago decided, made contestants too sympathetic, too human. Parents who surrendered their children to the KiddieFame machinery weren’t even allowed to sit in the green room. They stayed shivering outside the building, smoking against a bank of outdoor toilets erected for their use.

  Eve watched these parents and imagined their anxieties. The humming cameras inside. The 93 million homes into which their children would soon be streaming. These things would be on their minds. But none more so than the possibility that their children might succumb to what was simply known as a “Kill.”

  KiddieFame had its elimination mechanism, that necessary algorithm of the fame game. You had to kick people off the show in order to find a winner. KiddieFame was unusual, however, for having two methods. A competitor could simply lose in the voting that followed a set of performances. But then, in the show’s signature moment, they could also be the target of a surprise Kill. These were rare because they followed not bad performances, of which there were many, but perfect ones: performances that received five stars from every voting remote in each of the six hundred seats in the theater.

  Why eliminate a candidate who’d been judged perfect? There were PhDs written about the KiddieFame Kill, including one that received some internet notoriety for asserting that the show was inspired by “archaic sacrificial religions, which always laid the best, most beautiful victims on their altars.” In any case, whether understanding it or not, the audience seemed to sense when a particular performer must go. And how harmonious the rounds immediately following a Kill then seemed to be, as if some sort of peace had been restored. While from the sacrificed, naturally, came snivels, and from their attendants muttered curses, knotted rage, the sense of the existential trapdoor having been sprung. The fall into invisibility begun.

  Eve turned to leave, returning a wave from a traffic cop standing nearby—a touch of a finger to the brim of his hat, a shy grin of recognition—then she crossed back over the plaza and down Jeffers towards her truck.

  She’d parked near the mouth of a narrow alley that ran down the side of the Peavey Block. She had her keys out, but she stepped into the alley, into the cold shadow, remembering the wet-paper smell, the floral ambiguity of the scent of garbage, the rust motes alive in the air, descending from the disintegrating fire escapes and window grates that spidered up the flanks of the building. Eve followed these with her eyes, up and up.

  And there he was. A tight package of balance and nerve, poised high on the parapet, halfway down the alley. He was wearing purposeful clothes, she could see, like those of a specialized kind of climber. The shoes looked thin soled but grippy. The cargo pants trim to the legs. The hoodie functional and black. She noted that one of his hands was gloved but that the other was now bandaged, and she remembered him shaking it out on the roof earlier. She could make out his face from where she stood, although he hadn’t seen her and was staring straight ahead as if the view down were of little interest. He had dark features and eyes that, though steady, seemed to fix in an expression of playfulness. Not much like Ali at all in that regard, who tended to be serious, except that the expression contained no fear. Even from that distance, Eve could see that the man was utterly certain about what came next. Certain and pleased at the same time. His feet parallel, the tips of his shoes lipped out a fraction over those six stories of brick below, six stories down to pavement where she stood. And she saw that he was bouncing slightly in place, completely at ease with his balance as if it were something that would never be questioned. He might have been contemplating a standing broad jump across the alley.

  She wanted to yell: “Don’t!” Or to shout up: “Stop!” But she didn’t, thinking she might startle him and actually cause him to fall. But perhaps more because he was clearly going to jump no matter what she would say. And exactly as she had that thought, the young man stepped back off the parapet and disappeared from view on the hidden rooftop. Eve imagined him flexing his legs, a quick hand down to each ankle to stretch the quads. Limbering up. Eyes front, locked on the far side.

  She made an involuntary noise, a choked and fearful squeak. But here he was again. He would have leaned forward a fraction before uncoiling. He would have taken about a six-step run-up. Bim bim. Bop bop. BAP. BAP. And bursting into view, into the open air. He made a long parabola against the gray and cooling sky directly above her. He filled the empty space, his arms spread for balance, his legs tucked. And then, impossibly, he rolled at the top of his arc. He flipped in midair, which brought about a microsecond of complete silence and stillness in her. The whole movement was completely dangerous and completely harmonious. And it pinned her to the spot.

  Gone. Across the alley, through space, over the parapet of the far building. Without a sound. Without a reason. No motive, nobody chasing him. No audience that he could have known of, since he hadn’t looked down to see that she was there.

  It was breathtaking. The most beautiful thing she’d seen in years.

  HOME LATE. Winding down the cedar-scented avenues. Nick came out from his den and made her an omelet and a salad, poured her a glass of wine, telling her about the grapes and the vintage as she took her first sip. Young vines, clay soil, surprising body. Fruit, acid, harvest times. A cold room lined with barrels of toasted oak. Nick journeyed the wine from its vineyard to her glass, then sat staring into the bookshelf over her shoulder, waiting for her to notice him. Waiting for her to speak.

  Eve said: “Sorry.”

  “I can’t make up your mind for you,” Nick told her.

  “I just have certain questions about the whole thing.”

  “Work is work.”

  “It’s not the money. You want me back out there.”

  “I think it’s healthy that you get back out there, yes.”

  “So I start peddling my former self.”

 
; “Former,” Nick said. “What, is that person gone?”

  “I mean all this business of my story.”

  “Not everybody gets asked to tell their story.”

  She chewed a mouthful of omelet. This little miracle of eggs and Gruyère on the plate in front of her. Golden yellow, flecked with green parsley, dotted with truffle oil. Nick was very good at this kind of thing. Every plate deliberately amazing. Every wine paired. Eve was good for making porridge. No Home Economics in her education. No box of recipes from her glacier-climbing, telemarking mama.

  “Well, they asked,” she said. “Marcus gave me a key card and said I should come and go.”

  “They respect and trust you. They want it to be mutual.”

  “But you don’t do this kind of thing out of being flattered,” Eve said.

  “Maybe you do it out of why the hell not. Go down. Sit in the boardroom. See how terrible it is. Or maybe you just do it because you’re proud of who you are.”

  Eve chewed and watched him go into the kitchen for the bottle and a second glass. There were certain thoughts about Nick that she realized she cut off, afraid of where they might lead her. Why did he want this for her so much? She hated to think Nick needed her out there so that by her recharged public image, something in him might be renewed and recharged, validated by her recognition.

  Nick returned with the bottle and topped her up, poured some for himself.

  She said: “I’m not not proud of who I am.”

  Nick sipped and looked into the wine. “After your father died, you started to pull out of everything. You started to brood.”

  “UNICEF was always understood to be a term thing. Two years.”

  “Everything else, though.”

  “I needed new ideas.”

  “All right. So Double Vision. A new set of ideas.”

  “They call it ‘personal story management,’ did you know that? I bet Stalin could have made good use of a phrase like ‘personal story management.’”

  “In the end, it’s just benign,” Nick said.

  “Your story is over, comrade. My condolences.”

  “They’re just about what everything is all about anyway.”

  “Everything? What does that mean?”

  “They’re . . . charisma brokers,” Nick said, pleased to have thought up the phrase. “So they find people who other people naturally like. Then they get those people linked up with companies and products that need access to some of the same goodwill.”

  Eve stared at her plate. It killed her appetite to hear Nick talk this way. It made her shrink inside. Charisma. Likeability. Did Nick think about these things more than she realized?

  “They weave a tale of great courage into the selling of some basketball shoes. Who’s hurt?”

  “Great courage.” Eve laughed.

  “Sure, great courage.”

  “That’s not what it was.”

  “You downgrade yourself constantly,” Nick said. “More so since your father died. Like you’re not happy with yourself in any setting. I really think you’re having some kind of self-esteem crisis, which I just don’t understand at all.”

  She put her fork down. She could challenge Nick on this point. If someone was having a self-esteem crisis, it wasn’t her. But she hated arguing, so she said instead: “I just don’t happen to see winning a gold medal as having anything to do with courage.”

  “No courage,” Nick said. “None at all. She gets winged by some psycho with a slingshot. Falls down. People think it’s over. Not just one person. Every single person watching. About a billion people think it’s over.”

  Eve picked up her fork again.

  “But not this young woman. So she gets up.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Eve said. “I was pissed off.”

  “No doubt. You had a broken ankle!”

  In the living room, down the passage, Eve could see the television flickering, sound off. Twenty-four-hour televised news because there was always news. And now, something, somewhere was burning. A car. A building. There was a certain comforting structure to the images, bad news in recent progress. Someone ran across the camera’s field of view, arms waving. It was possible to feel reassured. The world producing what the news needed, the news then delivering it back to the waiting world.

  “This Ganesh,” Eve said. “Have you met him?”

  “Talked to him on the phone.”

  “He described Geneva as suffering and justice.” She started laughing again.

  “May I finish?”

  She made her eyes wide. Yes.

  “You continued the race despite the fact that by any reasonable estimate you were done, finito, kaput.”

  “Finishing is just what you do. I imagine it takes more courage to quit.”

  “Okay. I give up. Zero courage.”

  The news broadcast was back inside the studio. Man anchor. Woman anchor. Serious expressions. Eve was glad the sound was off. Maybe she could sit out this news item and never have to know the details of where in the world things were going poorly at the moment.

  She looked over at Nick, voice and spirits suddenly brightening. “I saw the most incredible thing today.”

  He was closely reading the label of the wine bottle. Soil densities. Organic practices. She told him about seeing the young man jump. Late twenties. Lean frame, muscular. But how shocked she’d been at his power. How he exploded right off the edge of the roof, across the alley, and then flipped at the top. “Which is crazy. Right over my head.”

  Nick raised his eyebrows, twisting the bottle. “You’re not saying that was courage, I hope. That’s just daredeviling.”

  “It’s called Parkour,” Eve said, who’d been looking for the word the entire afternoon, then got it just as she was pulling in the drive. Parkour: from a show she’d seen on Discovery Channel.

  Nick shook his head. No, he had no idea about Parkour.

  “It’s a sport. They jump off very high things. Run creatively.”

  “They run creatively.”

  “It’s French,” Eve said, but she knew there was no point. Nick had a particular expression, a holding expression. Like he knew he shouldn’t interrupt, but that he was already wholly occupied with the next thing he was going to say.

  He said it now: “Let me just say this.”

  Lights continued to flash on the television. Fire trucks. Police cars. Blue and red halos in the blackness. Orange flares and white headlights, familiar as Christmas. The camera just now bucking at some nearby shock or noise, the light sources spinning. Pinwheels. Sparklers. Someone was shooting, Eve realized, recognizing it in the shape and shift of the images. Here we had something going badly, somewhere, and it involved guns. One of those stories they had all become tragically used to seeing and hearing about. The man with a gun in his workplace. The kids in trench coats wandering into a school. Eve thought how utterly horrible it was that the news would be shaping up again around one of those stories.

  “Let me just say that your father was never a daredevil,” Nick continued. “As a journalist he took more risks than most. But he was calculated. Still, of course . . .”

  “Improvised roadside device,” Eve said. “You can say it. He was one of three journalists killed in three separate incidents on the same day.”

  She ate the rest of the omelet in a flattened silence. She drank wine. Then tried again: “I don’t look at everything in me now and see my father. And I didn’t end my term with UNICEF because he died either.”

  “What about the weather announcer gig. Why’d you quit that?”

  “I didn’t mind doing the weather, actually. I liked going up in the helicopter.”

  “But you were always conscious of the cliché.”

  “The jock on TV,” Eve said. “Talking low pressure systems from a beach somewhere. You’re right. I mostly found it embarrassing.”

  More shots, Eve guessed. The camera operator was seeking cover, his picture all skewed. And now something else appeared
to have gone up. The camera operator was running, lens on the pavement. Then back up and shooting. In front of a high building, glinting metallic in the grainy light, another car lay spectacularly on its side, engulfed in rolling black smoke and licks of flame.

  “Where’s Oats?” Eve asked.

  Nick followed her eyes down the hall. “Watching online, no doubt. This looks vaguely CNN-able.”

  “Where’s that look like?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Is it happening now?”

  “I guess.”

  Nick got up again. She expected him to go down the hall and find the remote control, toggle on the sound. Although at the same time she found herself hoping he wouldn’t. That he wouldn’t reveal whatever had suddenly gone bad in the world.

  Nick moved the other way, back into the kitchen. He yelled back: “We could finally get married.”

  She squinted. The building behind the burning car had banners fluttering down its front.

  “Okay,” she said. “Wait.”

  Above their heads, in their bedroom, Hassoman levered himself from the bed and thudded to the carpet. He did this when events on the main floor corresponded aurally to certain canine expectations: dishes going into the dishwasher, the front hall closet door opening in advance of a walk. Nothing was signaling him now, but Eve could hear the dog move heavily on the floorboards into the hallway, over to the top of the stairs, where he stood and growled once.

  “Good boy,” Nick called from the kitchen.

  “Nick, that’s here,” Eve said. “That’s up in the Heights. I was there today.”

  “Come on, boy.”

  Eve was up and walking towards the living room now, arriving at the door just as Hassoman emerged at the bottom of the stairs, sniffing the air, then barking towards the front door. Once. Again.

  Eve started looking for the remote.

  More sound on the stairs. Otis coming down. Eve could see herself in a wide shot all at once, pulling up the cushions on Nick’s parents’ old couch while, for some unknown reason, a car burned in the plaza opposite Meme Media. While Otis stood in the doorway with an expression Eve had never seen on him before. All his teenaged confidence gone. His eyes wide, mouth seeming to work at some immobilized word. And here came the anchors again, the situationdesk expressions, the pre-fatigue of some event they both knew they’d be talking about for many further hours, through the night. An event that already perplexed and astounded. Eve watched a graphic roll on the blue screen. Familiar queues of children. Then the incident banner. It scrolled across the corner of the screen like a sash. It read: The Meme Media Crisis.