The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “You just sitting down here in the dark,” Jabez said. “Doing what? All this stuff going on. The army’s in town now and you’re down here in darkness all sipping tea and looking at a map.”

  Jabez tried to get a peek at his map, but Rabbit folded it quickly away and into his bag, causing his friend’s face to pull back into its default state. His brow open, unfurled, his eyes brimming with the possibility of offense. He signed: “God, please don’t tell me this is more work for Beyer. You working for Beyer again?”

  Rabbit rolled his eyes and sat back himself. They’d been through this one before. Yes, he’d once done some work for Beyer. But no, the map wasn’t it.

  Jabez was dubious: “So why’d Beyer send one of his goons down looking for you?”

  Rabbit sat forward. “Beyer was looking?”

  “You scared?” Jabez asked. “Hiding out?”

  Rabbit forced himself to sit back. “I’m not hiding,” he said. “And I’m not scared.”

  “Why’s Beyer looking for you if you aren’t hiding?” Jabez pressed.

  And here came the speech about crew and family, which Jabez unrolled reproachfully from time to time. He, Jabez, was the founder of a crew. They called themselves the Poets. They worked together and lived together. They supported and protected one another. They were like family. Rabbit, on his arrival in the city, had been invited to join this crew, this family, and thus embed himself in the safety and love that they had to offer. Yes, love. Jabez used the word often, without irony or shaded meanings. He was a protester. He had ideals.

  So: love. And Rabbit had turned them down in favor of this thing. This what. This adequate image he was trying to make.

  “Adequate images,” Jabez said, repeating the phrase Rabbit had used so many times. “This idea comes to you after seeing some film.”

  Rabbit didn’t mind acknowledging the debt. It was a Werner Herzog film and he liked remembering it.

  “It’s called inspiration. The guy said, if we don’t find adequate images, we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.”

  Jabez looked at the ceiling. Rabbit had explained it before, but he didn’t think his friend wanted to understand. Still, he gave it another try. It meant breaking the cycle of images that they all ingested every day, on television and billboards, in every magazine and newspaper they read. The hypnotic cycle. Rabbit said to Jabez, “We have to take back control. Make those adequate images and save ourselves.”

  “As if the Poets’ images aren’t good enough.”

  Rabbit didn’t say anything. Jabez was a friend. He wouldn’t have continued reminding Rabbit about the Poets if his affection wasn’t real. And Jabez too, perhaps, sensed there was no point arguing. He went atypically still in the booth opposite Rabbit. Working towards some thought. And when he was finished, he produced it in the form of a question. Right to the heart of the matter.

  “So this new thing, your new type of image. What’s it called?”

  Rabbit now stood at the rim of the plaza remembering the question. Jabez had leaned forward across the table, his face a foot away. Rabbit’s balding, irritable friend. Warehouse sleeper, bin diver, street artist, devout believer in a revolutionary god. This Prince of the Grove. Rabbit kept his voice low, but shaped the syllables for lip-reading clarity.

  “The Blue Light Project.”

  Jabez breathed through open lips, his eyes going past Rabbit, through him, imagining, picturing what the name could mean. And with a rare smile too. Jabez, it seemed, was made a degree happier just thinking about the Blue Light Project, without even knowing what it was.

  And here in the plaza were all these other lights. The white halogens against the Meme complex, the flashing reds and yellows in the plaza. The whole machinery assembling itself, blinking into existence, some terror rousing itself in response to terror. Rabbit watched it for many minutes, during which time dozens more people, more vehicles, more cameras and lights arrived in the plaza. These were the old images, unfolding as always with such eager industry. Sadly and terribly familiar.

  Then Rabbit went to find Beyer.

  PEGG

  THOM PEGG’S PHONE, having rung twice already and been ignored, seemed committed to spoiling his evening. He was on the West Coast, where he lived. But this was Spratley calling from the East Coast, and right in the middle of Pegg’s dinner too. In the middle of a date, if that was the right word for whatever this was.

  “I say, you,” Pegg said to the woman opposite him, whose name splendidly enough was Chastity.

  “You say me what?”

  “I say . . . you sparkling rainbow of wit and beauty.”

  She leaned in against the small table. “Mmm?”

  Pegg made an apologetic face and cricked his neck downwards to indicate the ring tone coming from within the rolling folds of his suit. A Barry White groove. He said: “Would you mind terribly if I deal with this?”

  She lolled her head to one side, eyes wide. And here Pegg fished into his inner pockets to find the fibrillating deck of his phone. Hauled it out. Then stared at it irritably. Yes indeed, Spratley. Like you need to hear from your editor once, let alone three times in an evening. Maybe if you worked for the New York Times. Maybe if you still had that kind of career. Certainly not working for L:MN magazine.

  Finger to the Ignore key. Depress. Goodbye, Sprat-man.

  “Now, as I was saying . . .” he said to Chastity, who had just now speared up a quarter-pound prawn and was easing it between her lips.

  She said: “Uh-huh?” And as her teeth closed, a little cocktail sauce sprang to the corner of her mouth.

  Pegg began coughing. He said: “Oh my, blossom. I just went entirely screen saver there.”

  She chewed. And chewed. Then swallowed. Then licked her index finger and middle finger in considerately slow motion. She said: “Well, you know what to do when your screen saver comes on, don’t you?”

  He was killing here. He couldn’t believe how well it was going. Or no, check that. He could believe how well it was going. Because he was such an evil genius at this kind of thing. He’d asked her for her views on health care, the environment, the situation in the Middle East. She was simply paying back accounts now. That was the wonderfully brilliantly terrible accounting involved.

  He said to her: “No, darling, I don’t know. Tell me what to do when my screen saver comes on.”

  She leaned forward, her breasts settling on the tabletop, nosing the edge of her plate. She said: “Well, honey, you just jiggle your mouse.”

  Yes. Yes. Oh my goodness me. How nice was this? Very nice. She had virtually the best of everything Pegg had ever seen in the physical flesh. Yes indeed, this epitomatrix opposite was a model. A model. And more (more!), she’d been linked to one of those twat stars. It was a tabloid story, but still. The guy was what mattered. Some beardo with an ass about six inches across. Some guy with a lot of street, a lot of right now, a lot of meetings for all the agents he suddenly needed. Pegg knew how it worked. He wasn’t passingly familiar with the celebrity machinery. He was the machinery. And the machinery towered over these people.

  Towered, well. Just to be clear, Pegg wasn’t a big man. His game in these situations wasn’t stature-dependent. He himself was no epitome. Pegg in the steaming, inhospitable jungle of his recently divorced career-tanked mid-forties was 45 percentile for height and 75 for weight. Shaved head. Pale skin. Christ, this girl here was about six inches taller than him. Coming in earlier, he’d seen the man at the front do that eye-flick business. Up and down, up and down. Didn’t matter. L:MN, Senior Editor. Pegg had a certain warily acknowledged clout in this town. So he duked the guy a fifty and they got the booth. There were A-listers all around the place. And some of them looked. Oh sure they did. Have a look, fellas. Have a long look. Chas-titty.

  But no. Pegg didn’t flex muscles to get what he wanted. His was a guile play. All brain work and expertise. Much harder, Pegg knew, than it would have been if he were handsome or actually had any money. An actual movie st
ar closed the deal in ten minutes, five if he met Chastity in a hotel lobby and one of them was already a registered guest. Pegg? Well let’s be honest, Pegg didn’t engage the enemy on the open desert. It was black ops all the way. It was the deployment of every psychological tactic in his interviewing repertoire to get them there over the second course—truffle risotto being massaged to completion somewhere by a chef with his own cooking show who drove around in a titanium SUV—and he was still playing about a sixty, maybe seventy percent chance of getting the flop he needed.

  “You know what I was thinking?” he said.

  “About what?” She was on prawn number two.

  “Well, I was going to tell you.”

  “I have to pee.”

  “No, actually. That wasn’t it.”

  “I do, though,” she said, her words just a bit smudged around the edges.

  He intercepted the pained expression that was about to unscroll itself across his face. Like a judo move, you sort of had to move with whatever was coming at you. Irritability, then, became—with a deft adjustment of the eyebrows—a different expression. Like a thoughtful person with epigastric distress. A monk with colitis, he thought, seeing himself in the mirrored wall opposite. This business of having to shave his head certainly contributed to the effect.

  “Well off you go then, my juicy pomegranate, and I shall think of you every moment when you are gone.”

  And off she went, more than one or two sets of eyeballs swiveling in their sockets to watch her pass. Pegg imagined air molecules bowing their heads and parting to accommodate the swaying, feline length of her, and he found he disliked the air molecules for doing so.

  Around the corner. Out of sight. She disappeared and Pegg went into the side pocket of his jacket and palmed two airline vodka bottles out and over to his water glass where he poured them carefully into the ice. He wasn’t drinking tonight, he’d agreed with himself earlier that evening while stowing only six such bottles on his person (two more in each inside breast pocket) and one emergency flask of cognac down his pants (only for afterwards, if there were an afterwards). But having just picked up that his date might be encountering the world through her own preferred veil of intoxication, he wished briefly that he had more.

  NOVA SCOTIA. WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT? His pour complete, half of its slurry beneficence burning pleasantly down his hatch, the empties discreetly stowed down the crack in the seat cushions. He thought: Would you believe the father of this beauty actually fished lobsters out of the ocean? Not as a joke or for a television show, either. For a living. The week before, when Pegg had phoned a photographer friend to get Chastity’s number, he couldn’t believe that part when he heard it.

  “Say though, Pegg,” the photographer friend had said. “You’re not asking about her because you’re interested in buying lobster.”

  Well, no. He was interested in meeting this girl because next to the phrase dirty bomb in the dictionary, there was a picture of her. But also because it fell under the heading of things Pegg did on occasion just because his situation sometimes afforded the opportunity. There was a kind of payback in it. So you’re in an editorial meeting. Copies of the new July issue are all over the place. You notice the Herculean beauty on the cover. Nothing monumental here, yet. L:MN often ran fullpaged leggy reasons for teenage boys to throw themselves off a bridge. It was sort of how the magazine worked, how it bridged from straight gossip and industry chat to that coveted ignorant-spending-male demographic. Every now and again, there would be a cover with a woman licking a golf ball or lying naked in a bathtub full of chili con carne.

  He made some calls. Who is this girl? Chastity Something-or-other. Then he forgot all about it. Then he was in another editorial meeting and the cover of the last issue was on the wall, in a frame, larger than before. As if she had taken a step or two towards him, closing the distance. As if she were—yes, Pegg thought, that was it—as if she were laying down some sort of a challenge.

  Pegg was drinking quite a lot at the time. But that wasn’t the reason he took her up on it. That’s just the way it was with celebrity and Pegg, by that point in his life. He would be the first to admit it, if anybody asked. Although Pegg wasn’t asked much anymore. He knew his nickname in the L:MN art department, the one they used behind his back. They’d say: Pebialta. Like the name of a Mediterranean resort or an Italian scooter. He wondered about it for quite a while before learning it was an acronym. P-B-I-A-L-T-A. Pegg Briefly Important A Long Time Ago.

  All right, fine. It had been brief. There had been the syndicated column. There had even been TV appearances. There had been a time when questions had been asked of him about corruption and deception in our time, about the erosion of public ethics and private decency. They called Pegg “the Lie Detector.” But the generic term was muckraker, someone whose output was provocative even if their follow-the-victim ethic was suspect. And Pegg certainly made a business of victims in those days. He found them. He found their tormentors. And there was invariably a story at that intersection.

  People liked these stories. Pegg had an entertaining, flowing style. He had a way with stinging words. But the stories also satisfied the single common certainty of the day: that the social rot was advanced. People didn’t just enjoy Pegg’s writing. They were reassured by it, people who believed nothing more strongly than that they were being routinely lied to by authorities and institutions of every kind. And on the talk shows, Pegg had examples, cases, stories to tell that were much listened to and pondered and rehashed as evidence that a great darkness was stealing across the face of the deep, and that light was a thing sorely needed.

  The light of Thom Pegg.

  It was a career’s worth of recognition, even before the Pulitzer. How close Pegg had come to that senior accolade. He learned he was a finalist. He took the phone call telling him he’d won. He danced around the room, told his wife, drank champagne, then booked his flight to attend the awards luncheon at the Low Library on the Columbia campus. And then his whole life careened off the rails, almost immediately, upended by a prizewinning story about shameless lying that had a shameless lie at its very own heart.

  Maybe it was a tiny untruth compared to the whole, as Pegg at first believed. It was fatal, nonetheless. Were there widely publicized cases of innocent citizens whisked free of airport security and ending up in one of those special hells that had winked into existence all over the world? Black sites, they called them. The land of exception, supra-judicial, supra-jurisdictional. People tortured without charge, stooped in concrete rooms not high enough to stand. Ninety-six-hour interrogations, fake electrocution and drowning, dogs and excrement, bloody floors and three years gone, slipping away like consciousness. Were lives lost?

  Oh yes. There were names and stories that had made the papers, printed and online. And many more that didn’t. Young men, typically brown and bearded, faithful to the other God. But not always. The black sites could subsume anybody. And people knew them to exist. The toxicity of this awareness had leached into the public soil and people were sick with it, sick with knowing.

  But did Pegg technically have access to a civilian interrogation contractor who had participated, who had hurt people, who had ordered up the canine units and cold cells, slammed shut the steel doors? Did he have that man who had accumulated the secrets about foul doings and rank humiliations, even deaths, and then broke under their weight?

  Such men existed. Pegg knew it. Everybody knew it. They had to exist because humans were the creatures that they were: they changed their minds, they had regrets. Homo paenitentia.

  But no, technically, Pegg hadn’t actually found such a man, hadn’t found that story. So he listened to the winds of truth and wrote down what he heard sighing there. He made the man up.

  Who cared? Well, nobody and then, later, everybody. People loved the story. One victim caught in the machinery of an entire hemisphere gone wrong. It was the world illuminated as the world was understood to be. And that was the story’s undoing right th
ere, its dangerous proximity to the cliff of truth. Pegg was known. He was respected, admired even at this point in his career. He’d just won a Pulitzer.

  But here came that very different thing: Pegg briefly famous for reasons having to do with the opposite of truth. So he learned what that was really all about. What it means for others not to want what you know, or what you have, but to want your actual existence. There is hatred in the construction of celebrity fame: a love that is resented by all those it infects. Some really famous people handle it. Pegg was never a man for subtle ways, delicate handlings.

  So Pegg learned a harsh lesson. It was a violation of trust to make bogus election promises or harass whistleblowers, to pollute the environment or imprison people without reason or rhyme. But it was a crime of a higher order to be a journalist reporting such a sad story and citing a made-up source. As his story itself became the story, as his phone began to ring and ring, Pegg made a cascading series of bad choices, covering track after track with new sources, new victims. Composites, full-on fabrications. The lot.

  It blew open. It hurricaned onto shore. Pegg’s house crashed down and no one rushed to his aid. He had defiled the suffering of those he’d tried to help. He’d compromised the credibility of their story by telling it his way. He’d sacrificed them again, in effect, to the greater cause of getting his version out there and restoring order and sense to the world. And having polluted that sacrament, so too was Pegg laid on the altar in the name of order and good sense.

  At his peak Pegg’s column had run in 157 newspapers, from Bangkok to Baffin Island. It took a few weeks for that number to shrink all the way to zero, even less time for his Pulitzer to be withdrawn. Truly scandalous. The furor raged briefly online. Articles about his misdoings written by colleagues and even former friends. But then it died, all at once, as these things do. His phone quivering to a deathly silence.