The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “I suppose,” she said. And although the announcers were back on-screen, Eve didn’t key on the sound. So they continued to watch and discuss the silent images, comparing perplexed thoughts and hopes for resolution. And after several minutes, a silence came that Eve thought would end when Otis told her what was really on his mind.

  He sat nodding in the semidarkness of the room, as if agreeing with her decision to leave the television muted. Then he said: “About this man living in our hedge. You and my dad were arguing about it.”

  She turned to look at him. “What about him?”

  “My dad thinks he’s gotta go.”

  “It’s not decided. We’re discussing it,” Eve said. Otis didn’t take his eyes from the television, so Eve let her gaze drift back there too. The west end of the plaza, the face of Meme Media and the wide steps leading up to its smashed front doors all laid out in brilliant white and harsh shadow. Dark shapes moving in the foreground. The blackest possible sky overhead. The same starless sky that was over them. The same night hanging over this house.

  “And what do you think?” Eve asked.

  Otis shifted in the chair. “I think I see my dad’s point. One person comes. You let them stay. You end up with a campsite. There are a lot of these people out there.”

  Eve nodded, still watching the television. The anchors were back, making conversation out of the scant information available.

  “I mean,” Otis continued, “that there really is a limit to what we can do to help others, even in difficult times.”

  “All right,” Eve said. “And what are you suggesting?”

  Otis raised his hands, palm out. “I’m not. I’m trying to make a different point.”

  Eve thought the anchors betrayed uncertainty. There was an ad hoc quality to their movement. The cuts and cues not quite right. It was getting very late, people were obviously tired.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “My point being that I admire you for disagreeing with him. For resisting the obvious logic.”

  Eve turned back to the young man who sat opposite in his father’s favorite leather lounger, his knees squared and open in front of him, one hand hanging over the end of each chair arm, like a miniature Lincoln Memorial. It made her want to laugh. Not at Otis’s expense at all. But in just the way they would have laughed together if they’d seen someone else sitting that way and sounding so grave.

  “Well I don’t necessarily think the logic is that obvious,” Eve said finally. “But please, Oats. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind.”

  He sighed and rubbed his chin. If it weren’t so dark in the room, Eve was sure she would have seen the red rising in his cheeks. Otis blushing. “I guess I just think that acting on your gut, because you think something’s right . . .”

  “Yes?” Eve said.

  “I guess that’s what I think you’re really like. What you had to be like to win a gold medal. Kind of stubborn. Kind of irrational but, in the end . . . right.”

  He was standing already. He was walking past her, touching her shoulder briefly on his way to the door, to head upstairs, to return to his chat room, his MoleChess™, his CNN watching. Whatever it was that made up his nighttime routine.

  Just passing her, Otis said: “Which is something you don’t want to lose.”

  TWENTY-FIVE MORE PEOPLE RELEASED in the hour following midnight. They came out in twos and threes into the chill of the square. A person with a heart condition. A woman who’d fallen in the original moments of the incident and broken her wrist. All the show’s remaining technicians and producers. Not much pattern to it: men and women, black and brown and white. Locals and visitors. Some children too. Blinking out into the light, blinded. About fifty people were left in the theater, it was said. And even this took on an ominous cast. Fewer people than before, was that good? Or did that mean they were closer to some final number? Some hard-set bottom line.

  Eve took the phone outside to the back deck. Low concrete lines disappeared into the roll of the lawn that stretched down to the stream, to the lake beyond. No sign of movement, no wink of flashlight inside the tent. She thought of walking down, making a noise. He might wake up. She phoned her mother instead, out on the West Coast.

  “Your father?” her mother said. “Well, he’d probably be inside the theater by now, interviewing people, looking very serious and unafraid.”

  “Did you admire that he was like that?”

  “Oh, sure I did, Evey.”

  “Why did he take the last trip to Afghanistan?”

  “Same reason he took all the others,” she said. “Curiosity and indignation.” No, she hadn’t worried. It wasn’t her job to worry then. He’d gone to live with his girlfriend.

  “You still talked, though.”

  “We talked incessantly, that’s why we couldn’t stay together. I hope you and Nick don’t talk nearly so much, although I suppose you probably don’t because of the age difference.”

  “Did Dad feel like he was changing things, going over?”

  “Oh, Evey, it’s late there. Something horrible has happened. People worry it’s all coming to an end at times like this. It never is.”

  “I really want to know,” Eve said. “Like Dad felt he had to be involved, that it would be wrong to sit by quietly.”

  “Your father went places where there were wars, and reported what he saw. Change? I don’t know. But he always said, ‘I’m not a doctor. I’m not one of these heroes from Médecins Sans Frontières.’ Those were the people he admired.”

  Eve was nodding, listening. She caught herself biting her fingernail and slipped her hand into her pocket.

  “Of course he also admired you, Eve. He loved your athleticism. You ran like the wind. You skied and swam. And the fact you could shoot. We were pacifists, politically. We would never have sent you to that summer camp at all if we’d known they had guns. Then you come home with some kind of medal. And all these targets. He was horrified and he was delighted. That’s how it was with him and you, all the time.”

  “And Ali? He was athletic too.”

  “He admired Ali’s independence. But Ali wanted out. That makes fathers very defensive. They tend to forget their own desperation at the same age.”

  “Ali never measured up.”

  Eve’s mother sighed. “You should go to bed. What time is it there?”

  “Just one,” Eve said.

  “They’re releasing people. You see, this is good. But I’m watching here and it’s only eleven, which is reasonable. I hope you’re going to bed now.”

  Eve walked back inside and looked around the corner at the television. “A woman said they were sitting in utter darkness. Some guy with a gun up there, saying nothing.”

  “Well I hope the guy gets jailed for life.”

  “I hope they shoot him dead.”

  “Don’t say that, Eve! Nobody dies justly in these situations. Everybody is a victim.”

  Eve didn’t think she agreed, but didn’t argue the point. Time for her to say what was really on her mind. “I’ve been looking for Ali. Two months now.”

  Six more people were released from the front of the theater, and they came scrambling down the steps in a knot. Her mother said: “You see. Here come some more. They’ll let them all go. It’ll all be over.”

  But then silence, as Eve might have predicted. And it was possible for Eve to feel a distance close between them as their eyes rested on those same images, pulled quite tightly by them into a shared and troubled world.

  Her mother sighed. Then, finally: “Maybe you should forget Ali and concentrate on yourself.”

  Eve pulled the phone away from her ear sharply and held it in her lap, the wind taken out of her. Exactly the kind of comment her mother was capable of making, the kind that had reduced Eve to tears numerous times as a teenager. The unexpected revelation of her mother’s misgivings.

  Then Eve picked up the phone again and put it to her ear, gently, firmly. Sometimes you just had to be
stubborn. “Ali is still here,” she said.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Not exactly, but I sense it. And I’m going to find him. That’s what I’ve been trying to do and it’s what I’m going to keep on doing.”

  Her mother didn’t respond. Maybe she’d known for a long time that Eve needed her brother, to hear his voice, to be inspired by him as she had once been. The person she had so idolized through her youth.

  Or maybe her mother just didn’t know what to say. Eve heard her breathing in and out there at the end of the phone line. And when they resumed talking, it was as if they’d said all that needed saying on the matter. The vanished son and brother who condemned from a distance. The center of the silence that finally followed, even after their father’s death, after all those stories in the paper Ali could not possibly have missed. He was out there still, Eve knew. And he might not deserve her looking, but things tumbled to a point—here and everywhere, the world alight with countless brushfires, nothing extinguished without something starting new—when Eve no longer knew what to do, what to feel, without him. And when she’d said goodbye to her mother and promised that, yes, going to bed was probably a good idea, Eve went outside again to contemplate the blackness and her brother, and to remember times they had shared.

  Ali?

  Yeah, girl.

  Ali, I’m scared. Like I’m really scared here.

  It’s safe. It’s a ladder. Ladders are easy. Look.

  He stood smiling with his hand on one of those final rungs up to the top of the East Shore radio tower. She was freezing up, she could feel it. The wind didn’t help. It was bitterly cold at that height, at that hour. It contributed to the sense of being blown free of the city, wafted over it like a leaf. Everything lying far below, the city lights, the black shape of the river. And the tower seeming to sway too. She could feel the staircase moving under her. Not inches. Eve guessed it was feet either way. They were bending back and forth. Ali was smiling, looking up through this spindly tube in which the ladder was mounted. Twenty-five or thirty more steps to the very top, a final push that Ali was assuring her was worth the effort. They were above the city now. But up there, that one level further, they would be among the stars.

  She said: “I can’t.”

  And he didn’t go up without her. He had been many times before, but this trip had been for her and he didn’t leave her to gain the summit alone. He came over to where she stood at the rail. He slid his arm around her and said: Let’s just look from here, then. Don’t worry. We’ll stay here. I’ll stay with you.

  The platform was rocking under her. She didn’t take another step, just held the railing with both hands where she stood. As she stood now, for the final minutes of her evening, before going inside and pulling the door shut behind her. Before raising the remote control to have done with it. One push of the button. With a zap, a wrinkle of static, burning the scene right off the surface of consciousness, dissolving it into the air.

  RABBIT

  RABBIT ASSEMBLED A NEW UNIT to replace the one he’d broken. He worked in silence in his apartment, hunched over a table made from an empty cable spool. His hands moved quickly and precisely in worn patterns. The bead of solder, the frame bolts. He had a solar panel ripped out of one of those lawn lights you see lining people’s front walks out in the suburbs. He had a top-mounted halogen light wired into the works, snips and dabs, the solder silvering the joins, elements fusing into a whole. Effects to causes to causes and other causes.

  A WaferFone sat next to him on the table. Rabbit consulted a list, then marked down the numbers on the side of the map. He bleeped in coordinates, juicing the phone with its future tasks. He cracked open the back with a jeweler’s chisel and connected the trigger wire of cable with two more drops of solder. Then he rolled the phone in bubble wrap and creased it shut into a resealable sandwich bag, the cable trailing free. He slipped this package into the bottom of the housing, which he had cut with scissors out of a silicon baking sheet. Waterproof and heat resistant, it would sit and wait where it was installed, faithful to the end. One last check of the wires, the closures. Then into the knapsack with his gloves, clipboard, overalls, knee pads, bolt cutters, extra wire and batteries, aluminum sleeping foil in case he ended up camping out.

  He left through the window and dropped down the fire escape to the alley, with grips and swings, the balls of his feet to the railings. One twist and jump from the lowest landing, one bounce off the lid of a dumpster, and he was in the alley running. The engine of the city humming around him as he entered the street, trying not to think about technical mess-ups, wet batteries, dead light panels, bad solder. It would work. It had to work. And he thought of the mystery artist Alto again, as if to call on him for strength, for an example of commitment.

  The streets were amber with an alternating blue and red glow across the brickwork in the distance, helicopter rotors overhead. Rabbit worked around the hillside, staying below the plaza, zigzagging south and east. Finally gliding to a stop in a loose crowd that stood on the corner just outside the café where he worked part time. Angela’s. Beyer’s Angela.

  Ten or fifteen people, all staring up towards the brow of the hill where the light intensified. All distracted, talking. Voices on top of other voices. Many ideas loose among them. Militia arriving. Snipers on the rooftops. The Meme Media owners were Jordanian, apparently. Major sponsors of an area politician who’d lost by a hair. What did these things mean? People were running the numbers.

  Rabbit squeezed past a guy wearing a cell phone earbud, relaying the local news to someone far away. A lone perpetrator. Fifty-plus hostages, still. For sure they were storming the building that night, he was saying. They weren’t going to leave the nutcase in there to stew things over. And this business of releasing hostages. That wasn’t good news. Felt more like a cull before the killing. The man said into his phone: “Guy’s got a death wish, I’m telling you. They should just go go go. Of course I’m right.”

  Inside the café, voices were low. Rabbit heard: “Wait until tomorrow. They’re going to be showing us satellite pictures from Saudi Arabia or somewhere. They’ll find a cube van at the airport with a passport. We’ve heard this story before.”

  The man was talking to a woman who was staring down at the counter as though the tiled surface had failed her, gone blank and silent just when she needed it.

  He was listing facts: “They lie. They say anything. There’ll be an arrest somewhere nice and safe and foreign. Some poor sucker in Kuwait or wherever. They whisk him off to some black site where he’ll confess to everything.”

  Angela wasn’t in and she hadn’t left anything for him either. Rabbit wondered if she knew about Beyer’s plan yet. Either way, if he knew Beyer, which he thought he did, Angela would indeed fire him. Which meant Rabbit himself had a problem going forward. He tried to remember if he’d ever had a good plan for how to complete his project and pay Beyer back all in a year. He wasn’t sure he had, beyond blind faith in creativity and good intentions. He hoped that faith wasn’t a fatal flaw that would bring him down.

  Rabbit returned to the sidewalk and felt the increasing tension there. The upended, turned-out streets. People standing where traffic usually flowed. Clustered in intersections, under blinking yellow lights. Or standing out in front of restaurants and bars, looking up towards the plaza. There were street food carts out past their normal hour, and the smell of brats and onions hung in the air, the black edge of a carnival feeling. Scared people often laugh. And now people laughed in groups here and there, televisions hanging over their heads in the background, showing the skip and hurry of things unfolding. Rabbit didn’t want to know if some new thing had happened. A development, as the newscasters would say. He broke into a run again and made his way by alley to Jeffers Avenue, then cut north towards the plaza, stopping half a block short on the west side of Jeffers in front of the Peavey Block.

  He tied his shoe at the mouth of the alley that traced the southern wall of the bui
lding, glancing up and down, checking for security. But he couldn’t see anybody obvious. Nobody scanning the sidewalks, watching for specifics. Nobody looking his direction, then away quickly while flipping open a phone.

  Rabbit stood slowly, then slid into the protective shadow of the alley, his shoulder to the bricks as he considered his next move. During the day, Rabbit knew, the roof could be accessed through the Peavey Block itself using a set of service stairs. He’d done exactly that the day before. And since a language college was housed there, Rabbit had attracted no particular attention as he made his way through the crowded hallways with his knapsack.

  Different story at night, when the building was locked. Rabbit considered climbing options as he walked farther into the alley, tracing the south side of the building, slipping past dumpsters, ignoring the rusting fire escape, which was too exposed. At the rear of the building there was a chain-link fence that closed off the yard. Rabbit peered through it and saw that just inside was a drainpipe running six floors down from the roof in an open brick shaft about two and a half feet across.

  Rabbit reversed his pack, so that it was strapped to his front. Then he counted off thirty seconds, watching the yard and the alley for any movement he might not have noticed before. When he was sure he was alone, he vaulted to the top of the fence in a sudden unfurling of limbs: a flex of the legs, hands to the top of the fence, a rattle of chain link, a twist of the torso. And he was up, standing on the top of the fence with one hand to the brick wall. A brief pause. Then he fell forward, grabbing the drainpipe and swinging himself into the shaft. Feet to one wall, back to the other. And immediately in motion, spidering skyward. The grind of dust in his collar, the trickle of blood on a knuckle where the brick had rasped his skin, sweat and the delicious sense of space opening below. Then the parapet, and quick now. No hesitation. Two hands up here, a final surge and grip. Rabbit swinging free over the alley. Once, twice, and up to the flashing. Foot hold, slow flex of the shoulders and hips, and he was over. Sliding down to the gravel of the Peavey Block roof, where he rolled into a ready crouch.