The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  He made his way to the men’s instead. Into a stall to figure out a way through all this. “Gravol,” he said. And he took a handful of those, but also downed his remaining pocket bottles and binned the empties. Then the little safety flask of cognac too. Then the rest of his Gravol to keep him from ralphing it all up again.

  Aboard the aircraft, minutes later, he was just processing the environment for the first time, escorted to a seat, given some papers to look over. The plane surged but nobody stopped talking, nobody stopped this rolling business of tearing him out of his life.

  She spoke. This one who had regarded him the most coolly of the bunch, whose nose seemed to twitch at the first scent of him, first whiff of Chastity’s lingering and incriminating odor. “Not entirely new to you, though, is it? This working in the hot zone. You’ve worked a few hard stories in your day.”

  That’s right. That’s right, Pegg answered. A few really big ones. But then he realized he wasn’t talking. He was only thinking and staring. He was hearing takeoff noises, his head bending over onto somebody’s shoulder.

  AFTER HIS FALL, AND STILL LATER, after his strange encounter with those photographers on the New York subway platform, Pegg had been forced to work on himself a bit. He was ruined. He was recovering. He wasn’t going to let a string of statistical anomalies ruin him again, even if life seemed to be throwing them up in a provocative way during those months. White vans parked across from his house seven mornings in a row at the same hour, flashing their lights as he stepped to the street. Wrong-number calls for a man named Rufus, through February, then again in April. And then an even stranger one. Unsettling, sure it was. There was a day in June, a very hot day, sticky, when seven people came up to him in the space of a single afternoon and asked if they could borrow his cell phone.

  What were the chances of that happening randomly? Or, the more important question: of what cause could that conceivably be the effect? Because things came into the world via causes and nothing irritated Pegg more than people who believed otherwise, except perhaps people who stated causes without proof. Such a position was a belief, an article of faith. Pegg didn’t have any. He militated against them. You didn’t trace the causal chain to sources outside of your own system, beyond proof and accountability. This way madness lay. He’d written much to that effect, weaving it into the narratives of his various victims. God wasn’t responsible. That company over there was. That government. That police department.

  Still, the matter was not sealed in his mind until the bit of street theater he seemed to have stumbled into in New York City. On Avenue of the Americas, as it happens. A kid—typical: hoodie, slouch, droopy drawers, tongue gavel, nose screw—stepped up to him at the curb and showed him a hundred-dollar bill. Just like that. Snapped it between his thumb and middle finger. Then tugged it taut between two hands.

  Pegg ignored him, as anyone would. Turned back to the flying street, buses, cars, taxis. The usual. Very busy. Very loud. Very comforting.

  And then the second one appeared. Minor variations on the theme: mixed martial arts T-shirt, sunglasses, white ball cap, one arm in a cast from the wrist to the top of the knuckles. And he said: “You want to know why my friend showed you the C-note?”

  Pegg looked for the pedestrians’ walk signal, but it did not hurry to help him. “No thanks.”

  The kid said: “But I think you should know.”

  “Well I don’t want to know, so could you please leave me alone?”

  To which the kid sucked his teeth and responded: “I think I’d better tell you now.”

  Pegg was struggling not to curse, not to lose his composure. “Well I guess I can’t stop you, can I?”

  And here he looked again for the walk signal, sure that he had been waiting long enough. But he did not get it. So he was able to hear clearly, just as a brilliantly chromed bus howled past, feet from his face, throwing up grit into his eyes, his teeth. He spun free with his eyes pinched shut, hand to his mouth. And he heard the words, unmistakably.

  “That was the hundred bones some dude in Washington Square gave us to push you in front of a bus.”

  Pegg staggered away from the curb. All the usual symptoms. Coughing, belly flaring. When he labored his eyes open both kids were long gone.

  Here was the Google search later: “threats” + “white vans” + “cell phone prank.” Three-quarters of the way down a bottle in his hotel room in his shorts, his situation briefly wobbling at the precipice of becoming much worse.

  The result on thirty-odd thousand hits: Gang Stalking. With capital letters. Pegg was apparently being Gang Stalked. Followed by some amorphous group that might include some of his friends, neighbors and colleagues, but (according to this literature) certainly did include elements of the government, the police and the fire department. Pegg was instructed to watch for vans with a single hubcap missing, which he then saw. Clicks on his phone, which he was in fact hearing. Cameras trained on him in public places, people approaching him with crazy questions, theatrical disruptions in the everyday. Check, check, check. They made themselves known, that was their point. They called their technique FACT, First Amendment Chaos and Tactics, a template for harassment apparently modified by the militia movement from an original set of techniques developed by the Ku Klux Klan. The phenomenon had history and experts. And they had a name for him, these thousands of people out there who were assiduously documenting their own harassment. Pegg was a Targeted Individual. Or just a TI for short because this conversation had been going on for so long now that it had adopted abbreviations, time-saving measures so that the truckloads of documents and pictures and videos and chat-room transcripts could be disseminated and processed.

  That cell phone trick, people coming out of the weeds to ask him for one? That was called anchoring. The mind-control technique where a word or action or object was milled through repetition into a psychological trigger. Repeat the gag twenty times and they’d be able to induce in Pegg anxiety and heart palpitations just by showing him a phone. Ditto the vans, ditto the day four different people called him Larry. Boilerplate Gang Stalking. It was all in the literature.

  Thom Pegg, TI.

  Did he believe any of it? That someone was working him over? Giving him the treatment? That forces shadowy and large had turned their attention on him? He might have. Pegg lost a good many months thinking that something, someone, was indeed closing in. Belief veered close, perhaps as close as it ever had for Pegg. But in the end, wasted again in his apartment with the blinds drawn, he walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and chose not to believe. It was pretty much as simple as that. From that moment forward, he did not believe. The phenomenon was nine parts psychiatric to one part real, he told himself. Which it had to be. Didn’t it? Of course it did. So bring on the phone-line clicks. The e-mails sent to himself that took seventy-two hours to loop through the local fiber and back. The world might be toxic in just this way—full of shadowy forces and hidden agendas—but it was beyond Pegg’s ability to prove. It would require faith. And victims, Pegg now knew better than perhaps any journalist alive, were always the ones who at first believed.

  Pegg, looking in the mirror, knew all at once the saving truth about himself. He did not believe. And a week later, two weeks later, either a hidden spook machinery or Pegg’s own tortured imagination granted him reprieve. Perhaps both. In any case, his tormentors disappeared.

  “WELL ALL RIGHT THEN. You good? Can we get going here?”

  When they came back into Pegg’s cabin and started taking their seats again, Pegg registered that the speaker was one who hadn’t been in the room before. Slightly different in frame and focus than the others. He was a little more boxy around the middle. Nicer suit. Better shoes. Quite nice shoes, in fact.

  Agency man, Pegg thought, waking hard. Vision shaky, organs a-chatter.

  “Brother, you look awful,” the guy said.

  “Yeah. Gravol kicked in hard.”

  The man laughed, pleasantly enough. “My
goodness, did it. I’d say you were allergic.”

  Which made them all laugh. A short, tapering convulsion, like a group of actors doing a first read-through and encountering the word “laugh” in the script.

  “Bruce,” the man said, hand extended. “Bruce Haden.”

  Pegg was decent with accents, but Haden’s went right by him. Distantly Caribbean, American Southern, trace of Asia and a good school. Maybe a slice of English on his mother’s side. A global hybrid in fancy clothes, Haden also wore an unusual pin in his left lapel: a sterling silver frog with gemstone eyes. Pegg wondered if this whimsical detail was designed to put people at ease, in which case Haden was suffering under a grave misapprehension as, for Pegg, nothing would at the moment.

  “Are you my handler?” Pegg asked him.

  “You could say that,” Haden said, still smiling.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Oklahoma originally,” Haden said. “You?”

  “Boring story. Is coffee possible?”

  Somebody produced coffee, which Pegg fussed with, then partly spilled, then sipped and burnt himself and dribbled on his shirt. Nobody spoke, so he did first. He said: “Well I’m sure you can all imagine that I’m wondering very much what the hell I’m doing here.”

  Haden nodded and stopped smiling. He considered the matter briefly while tapping a folder on the low table between them with his index finger. Then he took a slow breath and said: “I voted against getting you involved.”

  Pegg nodded, eyebrows raised. There had been no vote, he was sure. But he didn’t mind Haden saying it so casually, because that meant Pegg had at least one piece of vital information about the man opposite: he lied with ease and practice. He lied like a professional.

  “But it seems an interview with you has become the only thing we can give the hostage taker,” Haden went on, “because it’s the only thing he will tell us he wants.”

  “He being who exactly?” Pegg asked.

  A bit unclear, although this didn’t seem to concern Haden overly. They had a dark theater, people coming out reporting all kinds of different things.

  “So they’re letting people go?” Pegg said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Not always,” Haden said. Lunatics came loaded with lunatic logic, he said. And since this one probably wouldn’t have bothered getting kitted out for killing if he wasn’t planning on doing any, the pattern of releases only suggested he was whittling things down to some favorite pattern.

  “His favorite number,” Pegg said.

  “His favorite hour,” Haden said. “His favorite astrological pattern or numerological sequence.”

  Who knew what data stream he might be drawing on? They had people working on the pattern, how many released and when. It might suggest something, but Haden wasn’t holding his breath. The key detail was that they had someone in there. Someone who had discharged his weapon and killed at least one person. Someone who now still held forty-odd people hostage and who wanted to speak to Thom Pegg.

  “So, some logistical things you’ll need to know.” Another voice, this one behind him. Pegg didn’t look.

  “Hang on,” Pegg said. He was heating. Haden was good. Move on through the flattery. Don’t linger. But the coffee was working and Pegg had biological malfunction on his side, making him brave. He was deliciously hungover on almost no sleep. His organs alight with unknown acids. And the plane had just nosed down now to begin its descent. That long ramp down to the ground, to whatever was waiting there. As his ears popped he let himself go.

  “You realize what I do, right?” he said finally. “My regular day?”

  Haden was nodding, eyes closed. Yes, yes. We know.

  “Two hours’ access with a couple of publicists hovering. I sip a cup of tea near a pool then I bugger off and write something that flatters without fawning.”

  Haden’s eyes popped open. “Is that what you do, flatter? I thought you more liked to fuck with them a little. On occasion, even go for the jugular. Take someone down.”

  “However I do it, the fact is my job is generally senior-ranked among those things that the nutcase class hates most about us. I mean of course what they crave wholly and then blame us for making them crave.”

  “Showbiz, you mean. Hollywood,” said Haden.

  “The whole structure: red carpets, swimming pools, soundstages, publicity, fake tits.”

  “He may not be like other guys who’ve done it before.”

  “He has to be like them in at least one way,” Pegg said. “He thought of it. Which is why they call it terrorism, folks. Religious or political or psychotic. It’s just some color of hate. And I don’t care if it’s Aryan Nation or Army of Christ or the Brotherhood against the Infidels. Because approximately everybody in the world has a reason to hate us, and by us I mean you and me, and I assume by now you’ve checked online to see who’s boasting about this one. Somebody posting out of Idaho or Gaza, Afghanistan or the Kootenays.”

  The unintended effect of this run through the numbers was that they all laughed again. Only this time, it was a short nervous laugh. There and gone.

  Haden looked to his left and nodded. Someone spoke again from some intermediate distance over Pegg’s shoulder. He didn’t turn. There was no point. “Not terrorism, Mr. Pegg. It’s just not a word we’re using. It’s a hostage-taking.”

  Pegg felt a slight pressure in his head. All that knowledge swirling and adding mass in a container of decidedly fixed dimensions.

  Haden leaned in, elbows to his knees. Chin to folded hands, bridged index fingers to his nose. Frog lapel pin widening its gemstone eyes in the light.

  Haden said: “You hate your work.”

  “I don’t exactly.”

  “I know, it’s complicated. You hate your subjects.”

  “Whether I do or not––”

  “We’re eight, nine hours into a bad situation here, Mr. Pegg. Are we now wasting jet fuel? Nobody wants to force you. Nobody could force you.”

  Pegg let his eyes refocus on the unflappable Oakie Reggae Thai. There was more. He knew he was about to get the last part of the pitch. And he wanted to hear it too, since he knew already what it was. And he hoped very much that it was true.

  “You end up being part of the solution,” Haden said. “I didn’t see this at first, but there it is. You’re part of bringing people out. Kids without food or toilets, sitting in the dark. There’s a lot of crying going on in there, we hear. A lot of fear. Holding up very strong, but nine hours. Try to imagine hour forty-eight, hour seventy-two.”

  “But there won’t be any hour seventy-two,” Pegg said. “Will there?”

  “You don’t help people because you have perfect information, do you? Sometimes you step in to help people because you think it’s the right thing to do. We all remember this in theory, don’t we? Doing things because they’re the right thing. Sometimes doing more than we should do. All because of a conviction or a need.”

  Pegg and Haden made a short bridge of their stares. A Checkpoint Charlie at which they met and made the trade.

  So the briefing properly began, as the pressure rose against their eardrums, as they hit a spot of turbulence and shuddered through. And the only surprise to Pegg then was the kind of information Haden chose to share from his various folders, handed to him by the others, laid flat open on the table in front of him.

  First, the clothes. Yes, it seemed they’d gathered a lot of information about the perpetrator from the civilian clothes retrieved from one of the cars that had been set alight in the minutes before the whole thing began. A diversionary tactic was their best guess. But what was inside offered clues. Running shoes, jeans, khakis, college T-shirts, button-downs, hoodies, anoraks, a wool hat with a Green Bay Packers logo. No foreign brands. No foreign labels. And a short silence dropped as the air howled past outside. They were tunneling the freezing clouds towards a nightmare that could now be considered in this fresh light: a nightmare of us, dreaming of we, desperate to wake of ourselv
es.

  Next, theater layout. Seat sections and aisles, exits and service doors. Where people were sitting, or were thought to be sitting. And then the bomb, while Pegg struggled again to curb a flight response. Nowhere to go while the people around him discussed explosives, possible trip wires, trigger systems. They thought the man was carrying a single large charge. Big enough to take down the building, said the man next to Haden, leaning forward to plant his finger at the center of the seat map spread out in front of them. The God Charge.

  Pegg swallowed coffee. He coughed. His organs, he noted, were silent. He said: “I have this terrible feeling . . . that you might possibly think I’m going to enter the studio, actually go into that theater.”

  Pegg had imagined himself in a tent somewhere. In a parking lot around the corner from the theater. On a phone. With someone like Haden right there at his elbow, handing him his lines. He’d imagined all this taking place on a set.

  Now Pegg slid his coffee mug away, as if he had just tasted a dangerous flavor underlying the breakfast blend. He surveyed the non-faces around him. He spoke again, although now even he could hear that his voice lacked conviction, that it revealed him to be aware of a trap. “And if that’s the case, well then, you’d all be mad, wouldn’t you?”

  But they were all leaving the cabin now, gathering up their papers and filing out. Taking their seats up front. Pegg could hear the buckles snapping and the tray tables being stowed. He registered the placeless ding of the overheard light: fasten your seatbelts, we’re about to land. Although nobody came back to remind him or to check. And he didn’t do it either. He just leaned over to the window, let his face slide in close. Bare dawn over the rising city, the shape of it gradually making itself clear in the rosy murk. A shape in lights elbowed in around the black river, the downtown core, the bridges. He watched as they angled down into these lights, flickering in over the warehouses and the dusty residential neighborhoods that clustered near the airport. And noting something just in that last minute. A last thought before the wretched thump. Before the spill of something inside him, organic disputes renewed.