The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  The roof was empty. Nobody there to see him as he crossed over to the elevator housing and climbed to the top, as he set down his pack and removed his tools, then the unit. Quick movements, steady and sure. Re-drilling the pilot holes for the metal screws, re-fitting U-clamps over the base of the bracket and cinching these down. When the unit was mounted he slid the silicon sheet into place and sat back, only just that instant feeling the surge of completion. Pride, sure. Excitement, yes. Relief, definitely. And his feelings were importantly augmented by the view, that guttering symphony of city light. Downtown sparkling across the south branch of the river. Towers rising, bridges plugging in below. Traffic pulsing up the black boulevards, out of the western reaches of the delta, across the flats, then seeming to vault upwards to join the illuminated density of the urban core.

  On any clear night, Rabbit could see this surface as a patterned copy of the stars above, its galactic center swirling, tendril arms tapering into the absolute zero of suburban space and farmland beyond. The mechanical below a copy of the super-mechanical above, each light dancing in the matrix of law that brought it into being. His own work, now finished, was suspended between them, stretched taut as a drum skin. Waiting for the stroke that would give it voice. That would reveal it.

  BEYER HADN’T TRICKED RABBIT into accepting that original seven thousand dollars, that one long year prior. Rabbit thought about this, taking a moment’s breather on the top of the Peavey Block before descending. He knew he’d chosen the path a year before, and now he had to walk it. But he also thought how ironic it was that if he hadn’t accepted Beyer’s offer, Jabez would not have been provoked to take him through the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel. And if that hadn’t happened, Rabbit would never have discovered Alto. Since Alto was the inspiration for the Blue Light Project, Rabbit was forced to accept that no Beyer meant no discovery of Alto, which meant no Blue Light Project, which meant he wouldn’t even be up there in the deep blue of night, breathing the chill air over the city, his project finally complete except for activation. It was paradox certainly, but nonetheless true. Such, Rabbit supposed, was the black magic of the big idea involved as it was born a year ago.

  Rabbit had moved by then out of the Poets’ warehouse and was living even further down the socioeconomic ladder in Stofton, almost at the river. He remembered a sloping floor and intermittent plumbing. He slept curled up on a futon Angela donated. She gave him three shifts, all the barista time he could handle. He took home enough to pay his rent and eat. But when the power went out in his building in November and stayed out for forty-eight hours, he went up the hill and threw stones against the glass until Beyer came to the window, high over the alley, and called down: “You realize some people have buzzers?”

  Rabbit remembered vaulting up the fire escape while Beyer watched and shook his head.

  Beyer was in his kitchen making pasta by hand. There were eggs and flour and milk involved. He was white to the bottom of his Tahitian war paint and had an apron on, music pounding, hardcore. Angela was out. This was linguine, Beyer explained. It was going to become linguine vongole, which he would have ready for Angela when she got home. “A bottle of wine, a little pasta,” he said, slinging the dough into a sheet of cling wrap to cool in the fridge. “Life is good.”

  Beyer knew why Rabbit was there. Rabbit knew he knew. Something was poised in the moment, in the warp of things. Circumstances and meanings about to change. So Beyer cleaned up and, since Rabbit was still smoking then, they smoked together and Beyer exploded into a short arc of cosmic intensity, crackling, hissing, popping. He turned the music off so it would be just him. And he echoed in the loft, Beyer now working on the cork of a wine bottle clamped between his knees, hopping to keep his balance.

  He said: “You roll into town. You start hanging out with Jabez and the Poets, doing your pretty flowers. But you realize you’re sick of being broke all the time. Sick of doing work that gets torn down in a day.”

  Rabbit remembered feeling warmth, if not safety, as he listened, as Beyer circled the room, heat-seeking, homing in. Master of disaster.

  Beyer had continued: “We have archaic creative threads in our DNA, you and I. We’re the guys who would have been cave-painting, laying out rocks in lines, making circles in wheat fields. We’re creators, not destroyers, we reveal and don’t hide. We’re the people bringing the world those images it needs for survival.”

  Rabbit had been high, but he’d still been able to appreciate the craft there. Beyer folding Rabbit’s own words onto themselves. Beyer about to kill.

  “We’re surrounded by advertisements,” Beyer went on. “They assault and insult us with bad products. But then I’m contacted by someone who’s got this incredible thing to sell, this phone, man. It’s like that small. And biodegradable. Use and lose. Sixty minutes’ calling time anywhere in the world and you throw it into your compost. Minutes to a Better World. And I’m supposed to reject this opportunity because I’m an artist? No! I reject that thinking. I reject Jabez telling us we should continue being poor, misunderstood and looked down on. That we should continue suffering for some kind of cause. We’re not flipping to the dark side converting part of that daily storm of advertisement into something beautiful. Adequate images. Fucking right. We’re adding beauty where there is none, Rabbit. We’re turning the motherfucking dark side into light. Work with me, man. I got a feeling about you and me. A strong feeling.”

  Rabbit said: “WaferFone.” He was smiling. So Beyer said, “That’s the one. Shock Beauty. You know it’s a good idea.”

  And it was a good idea. It was a very fine idea, that little WaferFone. So Rabbit took the money, way up there in the gentrified Slopes, high on good weed and sipping wine. And all the way down the hill in the rotting streets of Stofton, in the basement of the Grove, Jabez apparently sensed the transaction instantly. As Rabbit remembered how these things unfolded, he could only explain it that way, that the second he folded his hand around Beyer’s check, the second he hit the street with that box of phones, credit card thin, a thousand units a box, Jabez knew. And he tracked Rabbit down.

  Rabbit remembered Jabez coming over to his apartment. They had to talk, he said. So down to the rail yards they went.

  “Here comes the speech about Beyer,” Rabbit had said.

  “Here’s what you need to understand about Beyer,” Jabez had said, “that he’s taking the walls away from us. Sell your art in a gallery. I’m down with that. People have to eat. But turn street art into advertising and every square foot of wall in this town is going to have market value. Street art is a criminal offense now, fine. Nobody cares. I get arrested. I get released. Turn street art into the theft of somebody’s profitable walls and trust me, lots of people with a lot more money and power than you and me will care very much.”

  “It’s one lousy campaign,” Rabbit had said. “One stupid phone.”

  “Maybe if you failed it wouldn’t matter. But you won’t,” Jabez had replied. “And there will be others. You do this thing with Beyer and succeed, sell a lot of phones, it’ll be over for everybody.”

  Jabez was less angry than Rabbit might have expected. Rabbit remembered him seeming only sad as he said those important words that came next: “I need to show you something. I don’t do this very often. Easter Valley. The railway tunnel.”

  Rabbit had never heard of it at that point, but he remembered thinking that it was exactly the kind of thing that Jabez would quietly know. He loved trains. He loved their arcane and secret ways and maybe nothing more than this tunnel which plunged down into the cool and hidden. So off he’d stumped, Rabbit in tow. Into that tightening air, his lungs laboring. Jabez floating in the blackness ahead as the tunnel bent away endlessly into the earth. And when they reached the middle, the blue light, the glorious thing by the mysterious Alto, where Rabbit had stood with his mouth open not even understanding then how enormous his discovery would become, Jabez had just kept on walking.

  Rabbit had run after him and grabbed him by t
he shoulder. Throwing his flashlight onto his own face, so his lips were clearly visible. Did you see that piece? Who is that?

  Jabez did the same, turning his own light up and onto his own face. They stood there like two jack-o’-lanterns. Rabbit mouthing words in his light. Jabez making compact one-handed signs in his. He said: “No idea. Some kid. Not the point. Will you follow me, please? We’re on a schedule here unless you’d like to get pegged by a coal hopper doing twenty miles an hour.”

  Rabbit remembered how they’d walked for another five or ten minutes through the damp and black, and how he couldn’t tear his thoughts away from what he’d seen. Alto. Why was it there? Why would anyone make the effort? Eyes down in the small pool of yellow light afforded by his flashlight. The only bit of the future that he could see.

  Jabez had arrived at a door in the wall ahead. Next to it, a keypad. He tapped in a security code and pushed open the door. They entered a passage that angled down towards a control room, dust covering everything. No graffiti. Jabez put his light on a shelf so he could sign with two hands.

  “Just the beginning,” he said. “There are tunnels dropping out through there and over there.” He cracked the door into one room and Rabbit saw a round hatch in the middle of the concrete floor. It had a circular screw lock, like you might find on a ship.

  Rabbit shone the light on his face and asked: “Why are you showing me this?”

  Jabez nodded. “Because it’s important. We’re not going down the tunnels, don’t worry. You’re not ready for that.”

  “I’ll never be ready for that,” Rabbit said.

  “But you have to know it’s here. You have to know that we’re standing at the beginning of a network of hidden passages and rooms that really do exist even though people don’t know about them. Long spaces in the rock below. Abandoned bunkers and storage vaults.”

  “Okay, so I know,” Rabbit said. “So what?”

  “Think,” Jabez had said. “Beyer is up there on the surface. He’s about what the eye can see and what his brain can understand. Money, cynicism. I’m about down here, Rabbit. I’m about mysteries and secrets, sacred objects in a hidden world.”

  And to cement this point—as Jabez had surely planned it—on their way out Rabbit remembered how they’d run into a train. How could he ever forget that? The tunnel bending away endlessly. In the darkness Rabbit’s thoughts had drifted. And then, quite suddenly, he’d sensed that another light was present. Not a flashlight, far too bright. The entire wall ahead starting to glisten, shining with its thousand rivulets of water, rising up to a glare out of the blackness, the tracks alive with light now too, shooting forward in parallel arcs towards him.

  Rabbit groped his way towards the wall as a thunderous sound rose. He was, for a moment, unsure where to go. Then Jabez had leaned out of an alcove and hauled him in. He had Rabbit in one arm, gripping him tightly, holding him in against his chest. Then he slid his other hand over Rabbit’s mouth, pressing there. Do this, the motion said.

  Rabbit did it. Leaning into the wall, rough-textured rock here, gripping his own mouth now against the rising fumes. His head immediately swirling with them, going dizzy with them. Jabez was braced against the two sides of the alcove and Rabbit did the same just in time to appreciate the reasoning. You began to fail in those minutes. The fumes began to kill you. He felt himself slip, the downward rush of asphyxiation. And then he could feel that the weight of the thing had passed. He’d hardly registered the passing of the sound itself: the battleship-sized rattling, the shifting of plates of steel, the screaming of bearings and joints, the slow slop of cables, the grind of the wheels. He felt only the blackness clear at the opening of the alcove. It cleared to a blacker blackness and Rabbit was gasping. But he’d been laughing too. What Jabez had told him would stay with Rabbit. But what Jabez had shown him, without even knowing it, that was the more important gift.

  Rabbit remembered breathing the word right there for the first time, feeling its possession. That name at the invisible heart of things. Citizen of the hidden world. It was all coming together.

  Rabbit had whispered: Alto.

  TIME TO CLIMB. Time to shimmy, time to rock. Rabbit blinked back to the present. He stole a last look at the stars, at the city. He then strapped his pack tightly to his chest again and leaned over for a final inspection of what he’d reinstalled there on the Peavey Block roof. His unit. Secure and patient. It would wait for the call.

  Then he jumped down from the elevator housing. A gentle thud to the gravel roof and a forward roll, then he was up and on his feet and heading for the top of the drainpipe. He planted his hands here and vaulted over soundlessly into the brick shaft and was already sliding down when he realized that the fenced-in yard behind the building was no longer empty. It was, in fact, milling with people.

  Rabbit froze instantly, feet and shoulders braced against the brick. What was this? But no heads swiveled upwards. None of the movement below stopped or changed in its patterns. Maybe twenty, twenty-five people. But then Rabbit, straining now, quivering in place, took in more details about these people that he wished he didn’t have to see. Black fatigues, knee pads, balaclavas, tight-fitting helmets with goggles and mounted cameras. They were performing a ritual pat-down, each checking a partner: harnesses, straps, snaps, firearms, ammunition. Pat to the shoulder, turn. Check, check. Pat. Roll. Thumbs-up.

  He couldn’t go down, and he couldn’t stay where he was, so Rabbit began to inch upwards again. Hand, foot, push. Gentle now. Hand, foot, push. He’d have to move quickly mounting the roof. He’d have to act without thinking or he knew he would fall. He counted off ten arbitrary seconds and then swung free, weight on his hands where he gripped the flashing. He was a black silhouette dangling over those other black silhouettes below. Back and forth, once, twice, building momentum. Then the kick up and the foot to the aluminum flashing and he was over. Down flat on the gravel, but hearing nothing. No sudden silence below. No hurried feet on the stairs.

  Rabbit sat with his back against the parapet and thought about options. Soldiers, obviously. But soldiers you weren’t supposed to see. These tight and lethal communities. Delta Force, Alpha Group, JTF2, SBS. The Black Hats.

  He crouched low, palm flat to the roof gravel, working it through. If they were in the yard, then they were clearly using this building. Which meant the building itself would be secure. Which meant that each floor would have been searched. Which meant . . .

  Rabbit’s heart loped up to a sprinting pace. Which meant they were going to search the roof. Not later, but immediately. Any second now.

  He swallowed and worked to govern his breathing. A sensation like this had taken him only once before, a brief but complete feeling of being out of control. He’d been at the top of an abandoned grain silo that time, out at one of the old river terminals. He’d crossed a narrow concrete beam over a hundred feet of blackness to reach a door that he understood would open to a catwalk on the far side. But he never found out if it did or not because, at the end of the beam, stones pinging downwards in the murk below, he found the door was locked. Turning and retracing his steps had not been in the plan. But after the heart-rate spike, the dawning awareness of what you had to do, you just did it. Your options whittled down to one, you took the last option with what remained of your confidence and all the care you could manage. Do it. Do it now. Don’t rush.

  So now Rabbit stood and moved quickly to the roof edge nearest the alley, where he’d been less than twelve hours before. Fifteen feet away and six feet down, the roof of the next building began. It was angled gently towards him and covered in gritty tarpaper, which had given him landing grip on his jump the previous afternoon. Although that had been in daylight, when he could actually see the surface approaching. He couldn’t see it at all now. He wondered if he might see it halfway across, three-quarters. Maybe not until the instant before impact. Or even then.

  Rabbit winced and looked around. He was aware of himself suddenly as if from an outside perspective
. Doing his own pat-down. Checking straps and shoelaces, smoothing his hands over his face and clothes as if to streamline himself further.

  He took one last long look at the hard roofline opposite, the pool of black beyond. Then he turned and paced off six long steps back from the parapet, where he stood with his hands dangling, shaking them, trying to loosen up, trying to breathe deeply. He reached down and took each ankle in turn, stretching his quads. He listened to the door opening behind him at the top of the elevator shaft, looking slowly back over his shoulder to see this for himself. No yellow light blooming. Only the darker shadow of the door intercepting street light. Charcoal on slate gray. Shapes coming clear too, moving in casual silence. One, two, three. Fanning towards the far roofline, nearest the square. Rabbit had time for a single thought: the reason why these soldiers were so effective had less to do with their being unafraid, and more to do with their having no anger. In their smooth movements and stable pace, Rabbit thought, they revealed themselves to be utterly calm about their relationship with death.

  Rabbit turned back, square to the alley. He knew he could do this with barely a sound until whatever muffled bang he might make at impact. No time to calculate the risk there.

  Six steps. Bip bip, bap bap, bam bam. Air.

  And no memory of it, particularly. Rabbit, afterwards, could recall only snips from the beginning and the end of his flight. The cold moment of contact between the ball of his foot and the concrete parapet. Then the approaching pool of black shadow, and in it a glint of metal. A shred of tin foil, a beer can, the tip of a hypodermic needle. Rabbit never determined what, exactly. But it winked at him, like a runway light through the fog. This bit of refuse that had found its way onto an anonymous rooftop. And Rabbit tucked his feet up, and hit the surface hard. Then rolled, sprawled, bled from the nose. Dragged himself into the black shadow of a wide brick chimney. And for several moments after that, not daring even to roll his head and look back the way he’d come, he lay completely still.