The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  EVE

  FIRST LIGHT, AND THE STREETS around the plaza were taking on a certain slow seething energy. The press had been arriving since late the previous night and another rush was expected when the first flights started coming in from both coasts and overseas that morning. Already the white vans were queued along the side streets, their satellite dishes telescoped high into the billowing gray sky. Already there were miles of cable underfoot and chairs set up under tents, cameras draped in plastic against the threatening drizzle. And everywhere, spots of white as updates and hourly briefings were completed, some bright-eyed person haloed in light, beaming back the troubling news to a waiting world.

  Eve picked her way through the crowd, noticing how people were showing up with different, often conflicting expectations. There were chanters and singers, vigil keepers. There were placards angry and distraught, but all tuned to some separate motivating wavelength that the Meme Media Crisis emitted. Scattered hundreds beginning to cluster and mix at the cordoned-off eastern fringe of the plaza, furthest from the theater, and at the barricades that blocked other streets. The air was pregnant with suspicion and fear. And in the cafés and on the street corners Eve could hear arguments and position taking.

  A man outside a convenience store was gesturing, face animated: “They simply have to go in. You cannot negotiate with these kinds of people.”

  “Well then the blood will be on your hands,” came the reply.

  At which point the first man brushed past the second one, jostling him as he did so. Careless or out of aggression, it hardly mattered. Now they were pushing and shoving. People were yelling. Friends pulling them apart. Eve was frozen, staring at this spectacle. Horrified. Disgusted to see civility stripped so quickly away. Both men were right, to a point. You couldn’t deal with people who took children as hostages. And if one mistake was made, then blood would indeed be on all their hands. But the implied stalemate had the effect of making Eve quietly angry.

  Nick would be asleep again by then. He did that well too. Resumed rest. No matter that the disagreement had been sharp and unresolved between them on her leaving. He counted up his investment in every dispute and knew when to stop his losses.

  The other thing Nick told her not to do: don’t sleep on the couch. You’ll wake up after four hours with that television still going. Same broadcast, same news, which Nick somehow felt was unhealthy.

  Eve did wake up on the couch, although the television was off. But then she turned it on immediately. And there were the same tired, concerned anchors. The same exterior shots of Meme. And this had an effect on her that suggested maybe Nick had a point. Maybe it was unhealthy to greet the day with images of a world still shaped around the tragedies and impasses of the day before.

  She woke Nick before leaving and he did something she’d never seen him do in the years she’d known him. With her first touch, he came instantly to consciousness and seeming lucidity. He pulled off the sleep mask. He sat up, night-tabled his earplugs, popped free his mouth guard and fixed her with a comprehensive stare. She had to wonder if he’d been awake the whole time, waiting for her to come upstairs. But then the sudden rush of words. And these didn’t come from the measured Nick, the careful and self-aware Nick. They came from the one still easing free of his dreams.

  He said: “Don’t go, Eve. Please don’t. I know you’re showing around pictures of your brother to people. I trust you of course. But Stofton. Eve. There are drugs and guns down there. And nothing we do changes that. What time is it?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him. Dimple in his chin. Every hair in place. “I fell asleep downstairs,” she told him. “I’m heading out early.”

  “What? Eve.”

  “I want to be there in the morning, first light. I want to see who else arrives. Who else wakes up needing to know what happens.”

  He was awake now. “You mean your brother. But why wouldn’t he watch it on TV like everybody else? Why do you need to see him so urgently?”

  She put her right hand on his where it lay on the sheets. Then she pulled her hand away: “I have a feeling.”

  “I have one too. It’s called anxiety. About you lately.”

  “When I last spoke to him, things weren’t going well for him. And I didn’t help him much.”

  “It’s history. What is it, five years ago?”

  “Seven. Almost eight. Far too long.”

  “But you can’t keep worrying about him. Or whatever it is you’re doing about him.”

  “He was so convinced it was all going wrong. Railing on about, I don’t know what. Agribusiness. Show business. All the businesses.”

  Nick rubbed his eyes. “I don’t understand what this has to do with anything.”

  “If he’s still here he’ll be drawn to this thing. To the crowd. The vigil or protest, or whatever it is. I’ll see him down there. I’ll run into him in the crowd.”

  “What’s the news anyway?”

  “Not much more,” Eve said. “But I feel charged by something.”

  “By what? By whom?” His voice was raised now. In the next room Otis stirred and muttered something. Not yet awake, but close enough to the surface to hear and reflect his father. Anxious, confused, agitated.

  “By an energy. I realize this sounds manic.”

  “You’ve never been depressive, I’ll give you that.”

  She got up off the bed, sharply. “How did you know I was showing his photograph around, Nick? I don’t recall mentioning it.”

  He blinked at her. Apparently this detail hadn’t risen with him from the gray zone of near sleep. He reached for the water. He held it in both hands on the sheets in front of him. “Katja’s husband. I asked him and he did me a favor. I was worried.”

  “You had our gardener’s husband follow me. Why not just ask me?”

  “For me, since your father . . .”

  She waited while he finally took the sip.

  “Since your father, for me, that period of time hasn’t been so good,” Nick finished.

  “You mean us not getting married.”

  “Of course I mean us not getting married. It was what we had planned. And while a six-month delay because of a death in the family is understandable, a two-and-a-half-year delay is harder to explain.”

  “Explain to whom? I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation.”

  “And that makes you feel better about things? Your hallmark of successful living: zero obligation to explain yourself to others.”

  She was at the stairs already. He was calling after her: “Eve, I’m sorry.”

  Still in bed, though. Still sitting in bed while he called the words.

  EVE DROVE EAST, the city alive in all the wrong ways. Traffic surges on the boulevards where there should have been nothing but the earliest of morning traffic. People trying to get close. People going the other way too. Eve worked these currents, cutting north to try a different artery, to no effect. The city was out of its ordinary rhythm. Traffic rips and whirls, freak waves. And up ahead along the road, she could see stop and go. She could hear honking and see the flashing lights already, police checks high on the hill.

  Eve had prepared for the possibility that she couldn’t get the truck close. So now she pulled down off the main road and into the maze of one-way streets in the West Flats, down towards the condo-town of River Park. Here you crossed the last major east–west street and headed down towards the river, and there was suddenly no traffic at all. Streets silent and gray, lined with parked cars. Glass towers sleeping, restaurants dark. The only sound came from the exhaust fans ventilating deep-buried parking garages, rumbling to life and fading away, low moans from beneath the surface of the earth.

  She found a parking spot in front of a condo called the Paradise and pulled in. Then she climbed between the seats and back under the truck’s low box canopy. She sat there in the close darkness and pulled on her running things: tracksuit and trainers, fleece gloves, wool cap. She popped the back hatch and cli
mbed down onto the cool pavement, jogging in place for a moment, eyes across the river to the downtown spires. Then she locked the truck and padded off up the street, parallel to the river.

  It took her about thirty minutes. Across the old dockyards area, on into Stofton, then up the hill directly towards the plaza in the Heights. The morning air cycled through her, cooling and replenishing. She could smell the river, which since the death of the old industry along the southern waterfront—there had been mills and foundries, brick and cattle yards—had developed an urban water smell of its own. Stony, minerally, grassy. Traces of petroleum too, like memories released to air by the old timbers of the wharves that remained undeveloped there.

  She watched the walls, instinctively. The art swelled in waves as you exited the western stretches of the city, the walls growing busy. She ran by one of the long flowered fields, an old one, parts of it peeling away.

  Eve was climbing now, enjoying the uptick in her body’s own industry. System temperature rising, a light sweat sheening her neck and face, a pleasant low burn in her calves as the grade steepened up through the loft apartments of the Slopes and the streets changed around her. The drug trade falling behind. The endless hand-to-hand exchanges, the near-silent mutterings of that inextinguishable market. Now there were furniture upholsterers and auto body shops, then bars and dollar stores. Cafés, restaurants. And on up towards the plaza, where Eve pulled up finally, hands to her hips, a new scent with each breath. Cologne, coffee, baked goods. Her breathing even and almost at resting pace by the time she reached the barricades, the police checkpoint where people were showing ID.

  “Where’re you heading? You live around the plaza?”

  “Work,” she said. “I’m starting early.” She told the cop she worked at Double Vision.

  Early twenties. Probably his first year on the force. He turned her ID in his smooth hands, neat nails, no calluses. He looked at the picture again. “Take off your hat, please.”

  Eve’s father had a family-famous sore spot with anybody in uniform, ever ready to make life difficult over a traffic ticket or a border crossing. This had to do with early-life war protest and what was left of his revolutionary tendencies. But as these things go, by midlife he no longer wore his prejudice as much as it wore him. So cops tended to quickly sniff on him the scent of resistance. They quietly firmed up, needed no further provocation. Once, after minor vandalism at the house, which Eve’s mother had phoned in (a kid cut off a dozen of her mother’s peonies, probably to give to a girl), the squad car arrived and they climbed out with that insinuating slowness of the cop mid-routine. Her father hackled. He ended up in cuffs inside fifteen minutes.

  “If you’ll just calm down, sir, I can take these off.”

  Eve never shared her father’s angle on these matters. And he reversed his position entirely by the end of his life, particularly with respect to soldiers, writing many long and sympathetic dispatches from hot zones and bunking with twenty-year-old riflemen who took to his interest with fond regard. But she still couldn’t have anticipated how differently her own relationship would develop with the serve-and-protect classes. One gold medal, one parade through the center of town, and she was never forgotten. She smiled and agreed to have arms thrown around her shoulders, to have herself pulled a little close. They adored her for it.

  Eve took off her hat. The young cop looked up at her, finally, making the eye contact that is reserved for just the moment required. Then he grinned. “I thought it was you, Evey. I just never knew your full name was Genevieve. Now put your hat back on. You’re going to want to take a left at the block there and skirt the square to the east, all right? To the west is trouble and the square itself is all blocked.”

  She asked him about the crisis, assuming it to be his foremost concern. Out stopping citizens in the predawn blue. But he was still grinning and she realized she wasn’t being heard. He said: “Hey, Steve.”

  And his partner came over, bobbing his head, boyish. She didn’t mind any of this particularly. It had become a habit to answer the questions the same way. She still ran and trained, sure. Yes to still skiing. No to shooting. And like a lot of people, in keeping with a pattern that still amazed her, this all slid reliably towards a single conversational moment when they would both remember for her exactly where they had been when she won. “When you crossed that line,” the partner said, his cheeks flushed. “Ah, let me tell you. We were all cheering. My gosh, that was something.”

  After which the conversation rolled to its second waypoint, people revealing with body language that they’d exhausted their polite curiosity and could think only of questions they didn’t necessarily want to ask. They shifted on their feet, sometimes turned away a fraction, unsure how to withdraw from the little pool of light cast by her celebrity.

  Such that it was. Eve moved away from the checkpoint carrying a typical bemusement. She had never had a single hero other than Ali. Ali the smart, the brave, the fast. Ali of no fear. When he reached the platform near the top of that skeletal tower, he stood up and turned and beckoned to her. She was eclipsed with fear, gripping that railing. Everything in her wanted to follow. The wind surrounding them and making a sound like the inside of a seashell. Eve could remember his face so clearly now as she walked away from the barricades, the shades of first light rouging the eastern cloud. Ali in silhouette against a warning sky. And she was pulled by the image, lengthening her stride, but not breaking into a run. Pulled by it and towards the floodlights, the idling armored personnel carriers, the charged stillness, the tension of the waiting plaza.

  PEGG

  PEGG JOGGED AWAKE IN THE WIDEST airline seat in which he’d ever had the pleasure to pass out. Not a government plane at all, in the end. While those had definitely been federals of one stripe or another sent along to escort him, and whose opaque scheming seemed to be driving the whole adventure, it was his own publisher who provided transportation. The owner of the magazine. Pegg was stunned. He’d only met the man once and then briefly, and didn’t recall much of the conversation, having had it towards the blurry tail end of whatever evening it had been. But he couldn’t previously have appreciated just how much of a plaything, an ornament, a trinket the magazine was to this man who had clearly made his money at altogether more serious gaming tables. Pegg’s last tether to solvency—this job, Spratley’s goodwill to retain him in it—was an oligarch’s toe-bauble.

  He looked around, wiping crust from the corners of his eyes and mouth. He saw cream leather upholstery. He saw a long passageway connecting different cabins. A bar up front. Sleeping rooms to the rear. He thought: Bulk arms sales or private security services. But he didn’t have any further opportunity to speculate along these lines, as a face came hovering in.

  Or, a non-face. Pegg remembered that just before he had fallen asleep he’d started to think that none of them really sported faces in the conventional sense, these men and women sent along to shepherd him. They moved and shaped their features into various expressions, but not as faces did, which in Pegg’s experience was a process that you could observe to operate just beyond the owner’s control. You said something funny, normal people smiled. You spun a sad yarn, they shed a tear. Not these faces, which moved only in response to what was carefully authored within.

  He was looking at the face now, the non-face. He was thinking: Passed out. Yes, that was it. These were brutal hangover symptoms after two hours’ sleep, the rapid calculation of how and who. After a good one out on the tank, he was usually numb throughout his core. Which he sadly wasn’t now. He was sore from his nipples to the roll of his waist. Stormy pressure systems roving up and down his right side, then sweeping around to his shoulder blades. Sprinklings of sensory rain. The pitter-patter of drops before who knew what deluge.

  “Ah,” Pegg said, then coughed. Then coughed again.

  The non-face said: “You’re awake then.”

  “Up, yes,” Pegg answered. “Or rather. Yes, up.”

  “We’ll be on the tar
mac in forty minutes here. We have things to cover.”

  “Right,” Pegg said. “All right, cover.”

  The non-face withdrew, leaving Pegg to his computations. If he’d passed out, surely he had given them all the information they needed to have changed their minds about him by now. They would have phoned ahead and switched the teams to Plan B, or C or D or whatever they were down to by then. Released the gas or whatever non-lethal method had been dreamt up most recently for snatching hostages from bad guys. Forget the gossip jockey, Pegg imagined someone important saying to somebody else important, tight lipped. He’s no use to us. He was unconscious minutes after takeoff when we were in the middle of his briefing.

  Pegg winced in shame and self-reproach, a finding of guilt by an inward-pointing judiciary he no longer trusted. He impulsively pressed with his fingers along his rib line, tracking the snake of pressure within. His internal organs chatting amongst themselves on that favorite topic of the worried and ailing everywhere: their worries and ailments.

  He distracted himself from the disquieted murmur, as always, by listening to other voices. And there were plenty now babbling from within his cringing memory. He’d fled the restaurant and Chastity with dignity and composure more or less intact. But then at the airport, in the long white foyer outside the ramp, he’d seen them, those federal non-faces. And his heartbeat had sped and thinned, gone fluttery. Five white shirts at the end of the hall touching their ears and talking into their lapels. He felt clandestine airways jump, crosshairs on his scalp. He felt branched out and connected to problems around the world, through them, through these agency types with pistols tucked into their armpits. He didn’t like the feeling at all and had to fight the urge to turn and run. He had a real moment of calculation there. Insane arithmetic. He could be outside the terminal in fifteen, ten minutes to find a taxi. Safely into his second vodka-seven at Giggles around the corner from his apartment in forty-five minutes tops.