The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Of course, my situation was the more common one. Everywhere, doubt was the new reality. On the television news it was all rumor and suspicion, versions and tales. Reports and counter-reports. Disagreements over everything from who had died to where and how and by whose hand. Had bodies been found deep in the earth, beneath the theater? In the tunnels? Bodies or a single body, or none at all? Rumors swirled. One body, somebody claimed. No, it was a homeless man locked in a closed-off storage cave, hidden between toxic bins. And here the story spun out in the other direction. And there could be no coherent outrage at any of this because doubt swirled immediately to snuff it out. No official calls for calm, because these would have been pointless. What did it mean that crowds were still sporadically looting at midday? What did it mean that a dozen people had been killed by small-arms fire in the day since all of this was supposed to have been over? Twelve people. That was a war zone number. Who was shooting whom? Even with all the names lined up, perpetrators and victims, I knew it wouldn’t be clear.

  We had walked together across the littered plaza and partway down the long hill. It had been late morning then, and we were deep into the cool afternoon now, shadows stretching. The sky was clear, but the wind was very high. Outside Kozel’s I saw pages of newspaper flying high, strung out along the power lines. And the smells of the city spun around us, smells of strain and distress. Sweat and gasoline, fumes as if the old mills and factories along the river had sprung up from the dead. As if the city were remembering itself with occluded weather, smog reinvoked and lying close, held in tight.

  Eve had returned to her sausage. She took a look up at me once in a while during my long loop away from her, into the morning and back.

  Finally, she said: “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I think so. I burnt my mouth on this.”

  “Had you forgotten it was hot?”

  “Completely.”

  “How is it?”

  “It’s good, it’s very good. This is called weisswurst. I kept saying bratwurst to myself, knowing it was wrong. Couldn’t get the other word.”

  “I meant how is that,” she nodded, eyes up on my forehead. “Your head.”

  “Is it obvious?” I asked her.

  “You seem a little spaced out, yeah.”

  “My memory has gone patchy, but it’s returning. When I woke up first, I lost my name. They asked me about a dozen times in the ambulance and I couldn’t answer. But it came back.”

  “You didn’t tell me any of this. The ambulance.”

  “It’s really only just coming clear.”

  “You don’t remember that we’ve met, either. Not today. Before,” she said.

  “Here in Kozel’s,” I said. “Sitting over there at the counter.”

  “In a booth. But yes.”

  “You were laughing,” I said. “I remember you laughing.”

  “You were telling stories. Pretty good stories.”

  “About what? I haven’t a clue.”

  “About your work,” Eve said. “About the celebrities you meet. About the celebrities you meet and you never like.”

  “I’m an entertainment journalist,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” Eve said. “You interview famous people and make fun of them.”

  “Do I really do that?”

  She said Mmm. Eating sausage again. Neatly, like a big cat.

  It was coming back. “Okay,” I said. “Right. They assigned me to write a profile of you.”

  She smiled, chewing.

  I looked at her. “I didn’t say anything horrible or spiteful, I hope. I’m afraid I’ve done that on occasion. Sometimes, in the mood, I’ve been known to take people apart. Take people down.”

  “To me, you were remarkably kind,” she said. “Although you quoted me saying something that surprised me later.”

  “So where do you travel next?” I said, remembering this all at once and with complete clarity.

  “That’s the one,” Eve said.

  “And you answered: Nowhere, I hope. You said: I’m just at the point where I want to be home. I figure if I can’t find it here, I can learn to live without it.”

  Eve was looking at me with a trace of sadness.

  “I loved that line. I’m sure you said it,” I told her.

  “Oh I probably did say it,” she said. “I just didn’t know yet that it wasn’t true.”

  I nodded. But I could take her point. I was sure that I wanted it to be true of her. But I was also sure that her view, from inside as it were, would always be more complicated.

  It was a city map. That was the one thing she’d been trying to ask me about. She had in her possession, it seemed, a rather unusual city map. And as a journalist and a former resident of the city, Eve wondered if I would look at that map to help her determine exactly what it meant.

  “What it means how?” I asked her.

  “Just look,” she said. And out it came. Unfolded from a side pocket of her coat and smoothed onto the tabletop. Unusual indeed. Scored with lines. Red marks and blue circles, with words and numbers in green down the margin. As I looked at it, my fingers lightly brushing the paper, I had a dream-like idea, a plausible imagining. The map was the plan for the city’s demolishment, for new zones, for new boulevards and public buildings. Sites circled and connected with lines. Scribbles and thoughts, and sequences of numbers. It was a vision of a future. A prediction. A premonition.

  “Where’d it come from?” I asked her.

  “A friend.”

  I looked across the table at her, an eyebrow raised. “A friend who won’t explain?”

  “This friend is a bit mysterious. Also . . .” she said, taking a small breath and seeming to test her next words for how they made her feel. “Also this friend has gone away.”

  She touched her hair and looked out into the street.

  I nodded and leaned in again over the hieroglyphic markings. “Had you ever seen it before?”

  “Not to look at closely.”

  “So he’d never shown it to you.”

  “I never said it was a he.”

  She’d done interviews before. She had certain skills. But that didn’t change the fact that we both knew it was a he.

  Eve closed her eyes for a second or two. Opened them. “He left it behind. He left it for me. I’m asking . . .”

  I smiled at her. “I’m yanking your chain.”

  “All right,” she said. “So what’s your best guess?”

  Eve shifted the map in front of me so she’d have a better angle to view it herself too. We stared down at the thing together for a few moments in silence. I traced lines that connected buildings. I traced lines that connected other lines to lists of numbers in the margin. The person who’d prepared this had worked on a blueprint or two in their day, I decided. They’d looked at the plans for elaborate objects yet to be built.

  “I think,” I told her, “that your man was planning to build something. Or perhaps it’s already built, which I must tell you, as this thing would appear to lie directly over this very city, I find a faintly unsettling idea.”

  I glanced up at her. Hoping to provoke. To drive some remembered detail out of her in keeping with the words I’d said. Unsettling. Something built.

  But before she could respond, Kozel was calling over again from the counter.

  “You lost?” he joked.

  “Course she’s not lost,” said the man at the next table. “Eve knows this city better than anyone.”

  “Everyone gets lost sometimes.”

  “She knows where she is.”

  “All right. Stop it now, you two,” she said, still staring at the table. But with new focus now. The index finger she’d been using to trace one long red line now tapping in place on a single central point, where a great many lines and swiggles intersected. She’d found something. I felt certain of it. She’d found the key. And I deeply wanted her to have it too.

  Let her have the key, I thought. Watching her. Waiting for her to speak
. Please, God—or whatever quantum particulate factor we are to accept must cover these sorts of moments—please, someone or something or whatever you are, please let her have the key.

  PART TWO

  “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

  Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: Episode IV

  THURSDAY

  OCTOBER 24

  RABBIT

  SOMETHING FLUTTERED ACROSS HIS EYELIDS, a moth, a bat, and Rabbit blinked awake among the roof ducts and ventilator shafts, gray silhouettes rising to a stained sky. He’d had a good fast sleep, which, considering he’d been forced to stay on a roof overnight, meant that he hadn’t been discovered or lost any of his gear. He checked inventory and everything was where it should be. Pack tucked tight under his head, foil wrapped around his shoulders. No face hovering, grooved with disdain, waiting for an explanation or worse.

  Only birdsong, high clouds. The weather had been threatening each morning, but had not yet broken.

  Rabbit rolled to his knees on the gravel and began to pack his things. He was under the overhang of a storage compartment built into the side of the service shaft, where he’d crawled after making his jump late the night before. Nothing broken, but he’d landed hard and the bridge of his nose had made solid contact with the corner of a duct housing. He’d stayed there in the shadows, bleeding and motionless, watching the roofline of the Peavey Block back across the alley in darkness behind him. He’d waited many minutes like that, holding a cramped position on his knees and palms until he was sure he hadn’t been heard.

  Nothing. No radio squelch, no silhouettes above the brickwork. So he was safe but trapped. Forget the alley-side fire escape. Forget going down through the interior of the building in the middle of the night. There was a software company in the top three floors, a temp agency below that. Both would be burglar-alarmed with monitored security. So he’d known immediately he had to sleep there and gone about finding a hidden spot, deeper darkness under a lip of cover. And there he’d made his nest. Foil, extra layers.

  Now, in the thin and still-grainy light of the morning after: fresh problems. How to get down? Going down through the building the day before had been a straightforward matter of what Freestealers sometimes referred to as “credibility engineering.” Software meant cubicles, disc towers, cables underfoot, people faced in to screens. It meant young staff and no dress code, so he wouldn’t look particularly out of place. He’d simply gone down the roof access and walked out into the main room. He crossed that space in view of dozens of people, moving quietly, as if he’d done this a hundred times, talking in a low voice into his phone and gesturing once with his free hand. Confidence, self-possession. Rabbit knew these qualities were among the most reflective, and that people who belonged in these spaces would reliably turn them around, matching and endorsing them, awarding him the legitimacy he had originally copied from them.

  So, the day before, he’d made it easily across the entire sixth floor to the elevators before he heard a word from anyone. He was still talking into the phone. Held up one finger, scanning available information, imagining the trade, the what for the what. The if-then statement. She was maybe twenty-three. Hardworking, going places. First year with the company. On her way from a meeting. Hurrying back to her workstation. Her question left a neat furrow in her brow, the place where patience temporarily alighted.

  “This is a restricted floor. Can I help you?”

  “Babes, can you wait a minute?” Rabbit had said into the phone, which was in fact turned off. Then holding it covered with one hand, he’d allowed an expression of deep embarrassment to cross his features, mouth sloping, a glance to the side and away. He looked back at the young woman and said: “Not unless you want to talk to my wife here and tell her that I didn’t get the job.”

  And off he went to the lobby and the welcoming street.

  Of course, Rabbit thought—shouldering his pack and looking around himself in the light of this new day—talking your way out of it was a game you could play to win, but not two days in a row in the same place.

  He checked his phone. It was just coming up to seven. Not many people would have started below. The elevators would still be quiet. He climbed out from under the overhang and made his way to the roof door. Inside and down one flight, there was a landing and another door into the elevator room. It was locked. But just as predictably there had to be a safety key nearby. Rabbit found it in less than a minute, fingertips surfing the top of the doorframe, the underside of the lintel. Then he noticed the electrical panel mounted low on the wall, popped the door and there it was.

  Rabbit let himself in, closing the door behind him, then toggled on his flashlight to assess. It was a two-car elevator system built in the mid-seventies. Both elevator pulleys were spooled in cable but weren’t moving, which was a good sign he’d beat the morning rush. Better still, at the top of each shaft, next to the pulleys, there was a small access door.

  Rabbit got onto his knees and inspected one of these. Padlocked. And this time there was unlikely to be a key nearby as the doors would rarely have been used. Elevator inspectors and repair people would normally access the shafts from inside the cars, through doors that opened in the top of each. Breaking one of the key rules of Freesteal then, Rabbit extracted bolt cutters from the leg of his pants and snipped one of the padlocks free.

  The door swung out towards Rabbit, releasing several decades’ worth of dust, which glinted in the air around him. Suppressing a cough, he rolled away from the opening, covering his mouth with one hand while fumbling in his side pocket for a dust mask with the other. He pulled it into place, snapping the elastics back and over his head, his breath suddenly alive in his ears, the heat of it against his face. He went back to the opening and stuck his head and shoulders through, shining the light down into the murk to find the cars below.

  The one in the shaft he’d chosen was just twenty or thirty feet below, waiting at the fifth-floor doors. This position high in the shaft was good news and bad news. Bad if someone decided to take the car up while Rabbit was in the shaft. He’d have no time to react and would be crushed when the car reached the top. But it was good news in the sense that he’d be exposed to that risk only for as long as it took him to get down to the car using the service ladder that ran down the wall of the elevator shaft. Once he was there, Rabbit knew, he could use the maintenance override panel on the top of the car to take control of it, freezing all the buttons inside the car.

  Rabbit pulled himself out of the doorway and checked his things a final time. He knelt, listening to the building, to ambient groans and creaks. Nothing regular like a footfall, like the murmur of conversation or a radio. No steady tones from the plumbing, flushes or running taps. Then he rolled into action. He swung his legs through the small door and shimmied back on his stomach, holding to the doorframes with both elbows and stretching his feet down into the blackness to find the rungs of the ladder.

  Once he had a toehold, he eased himself back, reaching down with one hand to find a rung. And when he was fully in the shaft he dropped down quickly rung by rung, flashlight bobbing, painting the walls and cables in streaks and loops as he descended to the car. The instant his foot hit the cold surface, he knelt and steadied the light. Control panel, here. Toggle main control from Operate to Inspect. Roll the red Inspector switch from off to on. And the car was his.

  Rabbit knelt in the dim light on top of the car, allowing his breathing to steady. With every shift of his weight, the car swayed on its cable, guide wheels knocking the vertical tracks and releasing a metallic wow that looped up the dusty shaft and back to him, then down to the bottom and back again. Rabbit’s light caught the rising particulate matter. Hardware encased in grease. Ducting. Sheathed cables. The busy, invisible workings, the inside of the machine. Much more beautiful than people imagined, Rabbit thought, these true interiors. The gut reaches of a building shared something with the deep interior str
etches of a natural landscape that way. In Oregon, Rabbit lived for months in places that were miles from the nearest footprint, deep among the trees, inside walls of vegetation. In the dunes, where at night the sand shelves leaned over with coarse grass, and a person could hide his body from his own eyes and look only outwards. Outwards across an immense plane. It wasn’t a sense of isolation that made him seek those moments and still enjoy them now. Rabbit thought that all places beyond the common path—beyond roads and trails, outside of the stairwells and between the floors, shared a similar potential: connection and trespass combined.

  Rabbit breathed in and out through his mask, felt the moisture of his own breath, from his own mysterious inner regions. He was aware of himself swinging gently, suspended at the center of a mechanism, condensation and dust all around. Clouded in fundamental particles.

  Time to move. He brought his attention back to the controls. Flashlight tucked under one arm, he pressed the Down and Run keys simultaneously, and the elevator whined to life, the car now dropping smoothly, the counterweight shooting past the other way, scything into the darkness that bloomed overhead.

  He counted floors. Five, four. He stopped on three. He could have tried riding to the lobby at that hour. Probably nobody waiting there. But a middle floor was safer, more likely to be quiet. So he released the switches, the car jerking to a stop, sounds reverberating through the shaft. He toggled the panel back to default settings, then popped the roof hatch and lowered himself into the car. Here, his light and mask stowed, a quick look at himself in the distorting brass plate around the floor buttons, he pressed and held both the Lobby and the Close Door buttons for five seconds to switch the elevator to express mode and off he went. Down to the empty lobby. To the front door. And out into the new light, pack swiveled around and onto his back. He was free.

  Walking clear. And in doing so, he thought of Alto again, as if that mysterious figure could give him wisdom. Walk calmly. Swing the arms just so, not too high, not too low. Strides about the length of a shoulder width. This was the geometry of innocence, or so it seemed to Rabbit. No edges or lips, no crevices or rough patches on which the glance might snag, over which a thread of curiosity or imagination might catch and pull. Alto would have walked this way instinctively, swinging the arms, loose and low. Stepping with the whole foot, not rising onto the toes or hitting the heels with any determination. Neither hurrying nor stalling. It was a gait for slipping through the world.