The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Cut to the street, the reporter out of breath. Over his shoulder, three police trucks rolled out of Jeffers Avenue and into the square.

  Otis was still working the words, lips opening and closing.

  “Otis,” Eve said. “Are you all right?”

  “Hey, what’s up?” Nick said, entering the hall. He was holding a small skillet and a towel. He put the pan down on a side table and picked up the remote from where it sat on one of the shelves of the bookcase. But he didn’t key the volume just that moment, staring over at his son. “Okay. Come on.”

  Otis got the word, finally. “Hostages.”

  “Turn on the sound, Nick,” she said.

  But Nick just stood there, remote dangling. “Hostages what?”

  Eve was nodding at the screen, just as Otis’s mental logjam broke.

  He said: “Hostages, Dad. In the TV building.” Then: “They say a guy took some of those KiddieFame kids for hostage in the building.”

  And here Eve did something that she couldn’t explain to herself then, and which she knew she would remember as a strange impulse later. She ran into the kitchen to look at the clock hanging there, to note the time. As if it were clear that the most pressing priority were to mark the beginning of this thing.

  The clock, innocent of all knowing, had ticked its way past 9:00 in the evening and was heading towards 9:01.

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  OCTOBER 23

  GIRARD

  LIKE THEY WERE ACTING SOMETHING OUT. Like they were part of the show.

  They escaped by the rear doors of the television studio. Mad crowds, crazed. Adults and children. They slammed into each other and bounced, they grabbed each other and held, or pushed away. The only law governing their movement was the impulse to escape. To get out, get free. In that they were inspired by one another. Pushing and pulling, helping and not helping. The concrete stairs echoed on the way down, feet stamping and skipping and slipping. Some people were on their cell phones already, but there really wasn’t anything to say. They didn’t know anything, nobody did. So close were the performance and the feared reality, so close the entertainment and the violence.

  So they yelled into their phones: A man with a gun! But they also added other things, voices scrambling out the words: As if he had been choreographed! Just like it were part of the show! And they forwarded pictures and video clips too, out there in the rear alley and the side street, but these images didn’t reveal anything. Grainy figures in black, curtains of smoke. Terrible audio. They were dream sequences.

  At first people thought it was a Kill that launched the terrible events, a Kill so early in the taping that it had been a complete surprise. Viewers generally had to invest a few hours before the factions began to form, the feudal hatreds, the necessary sacrifices. But not in this case. She was that good. A ten-year-old version of any number of top-level soul singers, but different too. Hyacinth was her name. Tall for her age, with skin toned the color of creamed coffee, gorgeous cheekbones and a high-beam smile. And as the studio audience learned in her preamble comments, she lived in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, a few hours on horseback from the Continental Divide. Her ancestors were the indigenous people of that area, having been there for over ten thousand years, and she had herself learned to sing by listening to thunderstorms and hail, the power of the wind in the towering forests near her home. That and Celine Dion, she said. But mostly nature. And with her mouth open full aperture, lungs in full release (“The Power of Love,” 1984), it became clear she was beyond the standard herself. By the time she’d climbed to the summit of that first chorus, people weren’t just swaying in their seats compelled by the rhythm. They were being pushed and pulled by the sheer pneumatic force of the kid’s pipes. She moved the air in the theater, in great tidal fluxes. And when she hit that apogean note—so many registers above them all, lordly in its duration and clarity—the crowd was at once buzzing, aware that a talent of religious proportions had been unveiled, a talent that would certainly destroy them all if it weren’t first destroyed.

  The assembled competitors and coaches, invited guests of the studio and all those who’d won their tickets on radio call-in shows or had convenience store scratch-and-win tickets, simultaneously had the knowledge. She was too good. Her story was too good. Hyacinth had to go. So they floated to their remotes, before the voice had fully drained from the room. They keyed in their scores and they knew.

  She killed. And they killed. Five stars came in from every voting seat. And there it went. Flash pots exploded, the surround-sound speakers rumbled to life, a loop of helicopter rotor noise shook the building as if it were under attack. And on the massive flat-screen monitor at the front of the theater, where the contestants normally appeared in close-up, there were images of soldiers storming through the backstage area, heading towards the studio theater. Figures in black combat fatigues charging through corridors, shouting and brandishing their weapons. And seconds later, those same figures were storming into the theater itself. There were only six of them but they seemed to flood from everywhere at once, and as they scattered, waving their weapons, they swelled in the senses to become many more.

  A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY, GERRY—full name Girard, rarely used—was sitting in 14G, watching this with a wry smile. He turned to his six-year-old sister and her best friend. “I’ve seen this before,” he told them. “They had it on CNN.” It would be many hours later before he would wonder what he’d meant by saying that, because he’d never seen a KiddieFame Kill on CNN. Only real soldiers.

  But here they came, seeming to charge directly off the big flat screen at the front and out into the theater through its three sets of doors, one at the rear and two on either side of the stage. These men and the chaos of their soundtrack. So it was that happy delirium and pyrotechnic bedlam coexisted for a while, the audience cheering as the soldiers ran up and down the aisles and yelled back and forth and waved their assault rifles in the air. They looked quite real, these men and their weapons, as real as in the movies. Which was exactly how everybody knew that they were actors hired by the studio to carry out the Kill. People understood it, instinctively, Gerry included. These six men were part of the show.

  It was only when the seventh man took the stage, not from any of the three sets of doors, but from the right stage wing, ambling rather calmly across the boards and seeming to observe the action from a critical distance, that the first trace of unfamiliar scent began to taint the air.

  Gerry might have been the first to sense it. He watched that seventh man and immediately felt his smile fall away, his brow wrinkle with suspicion. Now here was a person who seemed to carry something in with him from the outside, a whiff of the real. Gerry arrived at this thought in a glancing way. He first thought of how he hadn’t wanted to be here in the first place, and how his father had insisted that he accompany his younger sister and her friend. Only then did he register a smell. A sweaty canvas smell, the fragrance of unusual oils. And having sensed that, all the other details began to cascade. The man onstage wore different clothes than the actors. He had on a rumpled suit with a balaclava pulled over his face. He didn’t just have a rifle snouted out casually over the audience; he also had an aluminum briefcase held tightly in his other hand.

  These were the wrong details, Gerry knew. Just as it was wrong that the singer Hyacinth and her entourage weren’t immediately rounded up to a corner of the stage and escorted out of the building, cameras swiveling and scuttling to catch every detail. In fact, the whole performance seemed now to veer in the wrong direction, the whole cycle of fake threat and artificial violence not wrapping up as it should, but seeming to deepen instead, yawning open suddenly to new and troubling possibilities as the man with the case and the gun pushed the girl Hyacinth back into the audience, into a random seat. And rather roughly too.

  That was a turning point, which Gerry felt even if nobody else did. There was still a lot of cheering going on at this point, delighted expressions, horror-show scr
eaming. But Gerry felt it like a draft, new information blowing through the room. The seventh man is not an actor. And he reached for his sister’s hand, something he may have done only once previously in his entire life, in the back seat of the car on that day a year before when it had been decided that she would go live with their father. He took her hand then, just as he did now, and pulled it to his lap. Holding it between both of his hands very tightly.

  There was a suspension in the air. The volume fell off sharply. Murmurs and questions swept the seats around Gerry. Regret, it sounded like. Guilt about triggering the Kill and now finding the victim still among them, smile extinguished, sobbing uncontrollably in her first-row seat, her face cupped in slender hands. But real uncertainty too. And that was made worse by the odd pattern that now played among the soldiers. When Hyacinth was pushed clear of the stage, pushed back into the audience and not removed, those six men registered the seventh man onstage for the first time, and all of them immediately stopped shouting and running about and acting like they had violence on their minds, just as an actor would if he were interrupted by a heckler or a technical mistake that raised the houselights in the middle of a performance. Now they were looking at each other, gesturing back towards the production booth. And all of that would have gone on for many minutes had the gunfire not started. Cold cracks in the agitated air, and not from the speakers either but from the man onstage, who was calmly triggering his weapon into the ceiling.

  Was this still the Kill? Clearly nobody thought so any longer as all visible action moved hard towards what people remembered, from movies and television, was supposed to happen when actual violence was under way. There was glass coming down. Bits of soundproofing. A lighting unit dropped from the ceiling and shattered in the aisle to Gerry’s right. And sometime in the previous minute or so, the camera operators around the theater had abandoned their viewfinders and stretched out on the floor. The producers in the production booth must have done the same because the flat screen at the front of the theater now showed only the ceiling where one of the cameras had been left to point: blank acoustic tiles punctured here and there by bullet holes, hanging cables, broken lights.

  Gerry thought that the blank screen was what did it for the rest of the audience. A switch was thrown. Suspension of disbelief collapsed. And there was a sudden release, a sudden unveiling. People burst into whatever action had been queued up in their systems waiting for the adrenal trigger. They ran to whatever set of doors was the closest, or they ducked for cover. Children were grabbed or they were not grabbed. There were bumps and shoves and entreaties and curses. All behaviors evident in the same moment as if from the same organism.

  It was a good thing (Gerry thought later) that he was holding his sister’s hand already or his legs might have carried him out the door without her. As it was, she was dragged behind him up the center aisle, bits of ceiling falling here and there, all the way back to the rear doors and into the crush of bodies there. Gerry pushed his sister into the mass of people, yelling at her to go down the stairs, to keep running. She was screaming, but with no words. Although everyone was screaming and no single voice could be heard. He pushed her again, physically driving her into the vortex of bodies and watching to make sure she was swept to the top of the stairs and pulled downwards with the flow. Then he ran back to their seats and began to look for his sister’s best friend. But she was gone.

  Shots again from the stage, lacing lower over the crowd. And now a tidal shift of motion swept the room. Most of the hundred and fifty people in the theater dropped to the floor, clutching their heads or pressing themselves down over smaller children. A few stood bolt upright, frozen in the thought of flight, or yelling, or trying to speak calmly to those around them. Others didn’t move at all, sitting placidly as if nothing had yet registered.

  Gerry was on his stomach, flat to the concrete floor at the end of his row with a good view up and down the aisle. Here he saw several of the original six actors crawl by on hands and knees, heading towards the rear door, one of them sobbing. He saw the producers and technicians come creeping out of the production booth at the back of the theater. And here an incident ignited that hurried things from chaos to their brutal order. The senior producer, creator of the show, and a man of significant fame for doing so, lumbered to the top of the center aisle, not far from the end of Gerry’s row, purple with rage and shouting. He demanded an explanation. And when no response came from the stage, no anger, no immediate move even to make him stop, he tipped catastrophically into his own fury, spit flying, wattles shaking, threats blazing. If this jackass up there, with no authorization to do what he’d done, if he didn’t, this second, this fucking instant . . .

  So the shots began again, with an almost lazy, painterly quality. A flourishing spray over their heads, chips flying, electrical complaints from the production booth. Gerry saw it all. A final spray of bullets that struck the senior producer in a cluster at the center of his chest and dropped him where he stood. A few more bullets pocked the floor around him, skipping and whining towards the rear where there was a final shattering of glass.

  And here the sound fell to near nothing. A terrible falling, a loss of hope. These were what some would later remember as the first moments of the affair. When the man fell and the sound failed. The first moment at which everybody understood new events to be in motion, launched in their uncertain, irreversible sequence.

  The producer continued to breathe while Gerry watched, tears and whimpers spreading through audience members around him. The producer breathed through holes in his chest, in shallower and shallower breaths until these stopped and Gerry understood that he was dead. He saw combat boots running rearward, the final actor exiting. And then the noise reduced to a shifting, seething mixture of repeated words. Some people repeated the word no. Others repeated the words oh God. Others the word please. Just breaths really, throat singing in the crumpled air. No. Oh God. Please.

  The seventh man came down from the stage and circled the theater, weapon loosely trained over the crowd as he worked his way to the rear. Gerry watched what he could see of him from the floor. At the rear doors, he set down his weapon but not the briefcase. And using his free hand, he locked the handles of the doors together with a black bike lock he removed from a pocket. Then, retrieving his weapon, he returned to the front of the theater and did the same to the door at the right of the stage, the one that led to the storage and technical areas. Leaving the final door unlocked, the one that led out into the side lobby and from there into the plaza, he remounted the stage and disappeared for a moment into the wings.

  Nobody moved. And when, seconds later, the houselights began to fade, every remaining child and adult wondered with the slow pixelation of light what new type of show had begun.

  The man re-emerged and set his weapon down again. Then he pulled his balaclava free and showed his face. It was by now in shadow, and the light was withdrawing fast from the room. But here he was briefly revealed, neither happy nor sad, not frightened or madly emboldened by what he’d done. He seemed merely placed in the moment, more or less content as he pulled on a pair of night-vision goggles. No evil genius in it. No accented arch-villain. No edge of insanity that could be seen.

  And that detail was the one remembered by the final person to escape the theater in those opening moments of the crisis. A woman in the very front row, in the seat all the way over and against the left wall nearest the exit that had remained unlocked. She was unconnected to any of the children, unconnected to the show in any way except that she was the maid of one of the line producers, and after she had cleaned up the mess following a party he’d thrown the week before, he’d given her tickets to the taping.

  “Bring your children,” he told her.

  “My children are in the Philippines, sir.” And with the rest of her life to think about it, she’d never be able to explain what made her get to her feet at that moment, as the light in the theater failed.

  Gilda was her name, and
she believed in enormous mysteries. Strength that rose from the deep, lurking energies of the soul. To be feared certainly, because while they rose from within, they did not belong to the person in whose depths they lived.

  Up to her feet, across the maroon carpet. She saw the man’s chin move an inch to square with her, saw him shift on his feet. But he didn’t make a move to stop her. Didn’t say a word. So when she reached the door, all that remained to be done was to grip the handle, push outwards, and pass on through to freedom.

  Out into the lobby. Through the glass doors and out onto the marble front steps of the Meme complex. Gilda was free. Although the first place she entered in her freedom, that wide public space in front of the television studio, didn’t seem to be the same one that she’d left. The plaza was full of lights now, reds and blues. The orange of a flare line. Two enormous bonfires in the street were belching black smoke. Not bonfires, cars. She squinted at them, unable to understand how this had happened. The broken windshield. The flames enveloping the interior. The details were slipping past her somehow, streaming away with the long blue shadows she was casting at the convergence of many hot white lights. There were bullhorn words winging in. And with a swoop, sudden and shuddering, a rush of shapes enclosed her, holding her arms as she collapsed sideways, carrying her. She was on a stretcher. She was in an ambulance, voices and faces all around her. A young man came closest, short hair, trimmed sideburns, nose like a blade on his face. Handsome in all the wrong ways. She found time to distrust him just as the questions began, as her own houselights began to fade.