The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  They waved it off. They weren’t smiling. A heavy residual of cop doubt remained. But he was with her and that counted. So they clipped off their suspicions and let Eve make everybody’s life easier. They said to him: “Get going.”

  She took his arm and they walked away, north towards the plaza, bumping shoulders the way you might with a family member you hadn’t seen in a while, a family member with whom you’d once been close. And when they were half a block north, just passing the doors of Double Vision, Eve suddenly felt that she had to be out of the sight lines. She popped the key card and they stepped into the cool and neutral lobby. Here she paced away from the young man, looking at her reflection in the doors leading into a bank branch.

  When she turned back to him, the young man had gone to one knee on the marble floor. He had his pack open and was rearranging things inside. There was urgency in his motions, as if he needed to confirm that everything was still there. Then she watched as he withdrew a scored city map from his waistband, opening it and refolding it carefully before sliding it into the pack. It was marked with many numbers and lines, but she had only the briefest glimpse.

  He said: “Thank you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Do I know you?” he asked. “Because why . . . ?”

  She said: “Because I saw you jump yesterday.”

  He looked up at her sharply. Then he got to his feet. He said: “Where?”

  “From the Peavey Block and across the alley. To the next building.”

  He made a face, a minor wince of self-reproach. “Where were you?”

  “I was in the alley,” she told him. “You scared me.”

  He was looking at her with a new curiosity. He recognized her face but couldn’t place it. He said: “I should probably get out of here.”

  “No,” Eve said. “You walk with me a bit. I need to talk to you.”

  They skirted the plaza. They crossed an invisible perimeter that marked the press zone. White vans with satellite dishes cupped towards the lowered skies. Then another outer perimeter that seemed to mark the very eastern edge of the conflict area itself. Beyond that, in steadily more dirty streets, the city grew quieter, the Meme Crisis a disturbance still, but at one critical remove. They reached a small park, down into the east end. A stamp of muddy green. Eve had never been in the area before and noticed the sadly sloping houses and storefronts, nothing painted recently, every second building for sale. She asked: “Where are we going?”

  He stopped and gestured to a bench. “Here,” he said. “Let’s sit here for a bit.”

  They sat, just as a cop car pulled out of a side street and turned its flashers on, then sped off west towards the plaza.

  Rabbit ran fingers through his hair, watching. “It’s as if the city has been taken over.”

  “That’s because the city has been taken over.”

  “There are people waiting to do this kind of thing, always,” Rabbit said. “Roll out the threat. Roll out the response.”

  The bench where they sat was opposite a three-story parking garage with an open concrete stairwell that ran down the outside. Half a dozen young men were taking turns running the stairs from top to bottom. They were doing so with different flourishes and vaults. One running down the concrete rail. The next swinging over the side of a landing and dropping to the one below. At the bottom they challenged for the highest dismount, one guy sailing from ten feet, fifteen feet up the structure and onto the grass there. Tucking and rolling and walking free. Rabbit watched. Eve noted how there was no applause or high-fives when somebody nailed a move. This kid in the tuque here, swinging free of the top landing, hanging from the rail, then bouncing with his feet, creating a kick of momentum and flying across the entire flight of stairs below to the far landing where he hardly touched down, only catching the railing again and swinging back. Landing by landing. Spider-Man was never this agile. Then down to the grass and up on his feet. Nobody even smiled. And Eve understood that it was enough just to do it and keep on doing it. To jog up the concrete apron of sidewalk. To mount the stairs and take position at the back of the queue.

  She said: “Parkour. What you were doing.”

  Now half a dozen people dressed in black jogged down the street towards the plaza. Black handkerchiefs across their faces. Black Bloc, Eve thought, wondering at the magnetic pull this crisis was proving to have. A thought that came to her just as a police van pulled to the curb across the park and two men began unloading gear.

  Rabbit was squinting into the low light, watching these same crosscurrents. He answered her finally, saying: “Not Parkour. Or not just that. We call it Freesteal. Freedom of movement. Stealing time and views. It’s about getting in places. Getting out. Leaving a poster behind or some writing or whatever it is.”

  Eve looked over at Rabbit. “What about doing a handstand on the parapet of a building six stories above the alley? What’s that: free-suicidal?”

  Rabbit nodded and frowned. Then he slowly turned his head to meet her gaze. “All right, I’m curious. How’d you know I did that?”

  “Before I saw you jump across the alley, I was in the eighth-floor boardroom of the building across the street. How’d you hurt your hand?”

  Rabbit nodded and pursed his lips. Then he looked back towards the kids climbing the parking garage. “I just got it. UNICEF posters. You’re the skier. Goodwill ambassador to the world.”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” she said. “What were you doing on the roof? Do you have any clue why I might care to ask, having just bailed you out of being arrested?”

  Rabbit nodded and rubbed his eyes, but didn’t answer. Eve watched him in profile, estimating character from features and expression. No longer the cocky indifference he’d shown the cops, more observant now, reflective and removed. He was often alone, this young man, Eve guessed. He was often in a place just outside the general field of view, on tar and gravel, on parapets, looking out over the teeming plane of the world. She thought of her night runs. Her own peering in. Her own solo searching.

  She said: “I competed in biathlon.”

  He looked at her with a hint of a smile. “I remember now.”

  “And you? What do you do? What was that map all about?”

  “The thing on the roof is an installation.” Then he turned to her again, his expression migrating again. “Gold medal, Geneva. Your name is Von Kemper.”

  Eve had to laugh. “Von Kemper was the other one. Close.”

  He put up his hands. Sorry. But he was remembering details now. Psychopath with a slingshot. “You finished that race on a broken ankle.” It was all coming back.

  “Very good,” Eve told him. “What were you, like twelve at the time?”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked over at her. Then his eyes roved for an instant, a quick flicker of the gaze. Checking her out. Eve was surprised to find she didn’t mind.

  Rabbit said: “What were you, like sixteen?”

  “I was twenty-four.”

  “I was eighteen,” Rabbit said. “Tell me your name.”

  “Latour,” she said. “Eve Latour.”

  He smiled and said the name, still looking at her. His eyes weren’t gray-green, Eve decided, they were sea green, a mineral color. He said: “I’m Rabbit.”

  “So what about the hand, Rabbit?” she asked him.

  He held it up. “Flesh wound,” he said. “The important thing is that it’s finished. I’ve been working on this for almost a year now. Now it’s time to throw the switch.”

  Eve’s eyebrows went up. “It has a switch?”

  “It gets turned on. It gets activated.”

  “And I’m supposed to be very calm about that idea,” Eve said. “An installation that activates.”

  Down the street a van pulled up and parked, brown with windows tinted to black. A man climbed out through the side door. He had a camera with a long telephoto lens hanging from his neck. He looked into the park, then up one of the side streets. He saw the police van parked on
the corner there, the group standing. Then he walked off in the direction of the plaza.

  Rabbit looked at her and held her gaze. Neither of them was smiling. “I could lie. I could tell you I just work at a coffee shop,” he said. “But after what you did back there, I suppose I owe you the truth.”

  In a side street a bus pulled up and a dozen or more police climbed out wearing blue overalls. They began to rank up on the sidewalk, partly obscured by the jungle gym and the leaning trees. Some of the Freestealers stopped to watch as the men kitted up: shields, batons, heavy gloves, helmets.

  “I used to paint these landscapes,” Rabbit told her. “Alpine fields, high detail. All the flowers, bugs, whatever.”

  “Did you study painting?”

  He made a noise through his nose. “Not quite,” he said. “Engineering and physics. Then I had a different idea.”

  That different idea was to make art. He shook his head saying it, like it still surprised him. But there it was, a burning idea. He wanted to paint a picture of the city before the city was there. So he began with the landscapes, which he’d post in alleys, twenty or thirty feet at a time.

  “They actually wrote about those ones in the paper, the flowering alleys of Stofton. You see that?” he asked.

  Eve was staring at him. She said: “I’m still stuck on the engineering and physics part.”

  Rabbit shrugged and scratched his chin, then looked away. “Changed my mind.”

  “I run at night,” she told him. “I’ve seen your landscapes near the river in Stofton. Always one little bunny in the corner.”

  “My signature,” Rabbit said. “Your parents give you a hippie name, you roll with it.”

  “Not an Updike tribute, then.”

  Rabbit laughed. “Unlikely. But no big deal, I like bunnies.”

  “So why not call you Bunny?”

  He smiled. “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m not really,” she said. “I loved those landscapes. I wondered who made them.”

  The ranked policemen were moving in a choreographed pattern. One step forward and a tap of the baton to the plastic shield, the pace of a heartbeat. Rabbit’s expression was sloping towards concern.

  “So who is Ali?”

  “My brother,” Eve said. And she gave him the wrinkled snapshot, which he took in careful fingers. Ali had been a street artist too, she told him. And Rabbit bent to the photo with a fingernail on its surface, frowning and focusing. Ali in the land of rooftops, sunset off to the west. Rabbit’s finger traced a lip of tar and gravel just over Ali’s shoulder, the smudge of a white line visible near the edge of the roof.

  Eve told Rabbit that the photo had come seven years before, attached to an e-mail. It was just before Ali vanished.

  “Meaning he could be anywhere by now,” Rabbit said.

  “But he’s not,” Eve said. “He’s back here.”

  Rabbit thought about that for several seconds. Then he seemed to drift away, leaning back, shoulder blades hitting the back of the bench. She felt the length of his body lever the boards, which moved against her own back and under her thighs.

  The cops practiced their advance and retreat, thumping their shields. Then a man spoke on a bullhorn and the men all squatted down on their haunches or sat on the curb. The young guys on the parking garage continued to jump and swing throughout the police drills, but something had agitated their performance. They were hitting the landings harder now, trying for radical moments of air. Bare elbows and knees. Scrapes and blood and laughter. The whole energy of the ritual had changed. A guy spilled badly, turning over on his ankle and limping to a bench. Another fell dismounting the railing. He hit the stairs and sprawled down, chest to the concrete. Then he rolled on his shoulder and up onto his feet, holding something over his head in one hand. It was dripping with blood. A tooth.

  Rabbit moved suddenly. A breath in, a quick unfurling, as if readying himself to run. But he held his position for several seconds, hands on the boards to each side of his tensed legs. He said: “Eighteen months ago I was in Oregon working for a company that designed telecommunications equipment.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Okay.”

  “Now I’m here.” Rabbit’s eyes were focused on a very distant point, past the cops, past the kids climbing the parking garage. “It’s been a weird ride.”

  Eve smiled. “I know the feeling.”

  He turned and looked at her. Eve saw gray skies racing in from the east. They were poised there for a second or two. Then Rabbit was on his feet. Eve was up too, something coursing through them both, an energy similar to that of the first moments they’d met. The cops standing around. Everything undecided, but action spooled up surely between them, ready to roll.

  “Beyer,” Rabbit told her. “You want to find your brother, then the man you have to see is called Beyer.”

  THEY HAD TO STOP TO PICK UP HIS PAY at the café. Eve watched from a front table as Rabbit greeted the woman who owned the place. She was pretty. Lean and athletic. When they embraced, Eve thought the woman held on to Rabbit for a second or two longer than necessary, one hand on his waist and the other in the middle of his back, pressing. Now they stood together at a side counter talking. The woman had just given Rabbit an envelope. Eve couldn’t see his expression, but she wondered from the furrow in the woman’s brow if this was bad news of some kind. Although Eve then also noticed the intensity of her own watching and turned away.

  She pushed her eyes to the front window and watched the strange scene shaping on the streets outside. In addition to all the other groups, there were now hundreds of people standing silently on the sidewalks with their hands and eyes raised to heaven. Their lips moved but they made no sound. Eve assumed this was some kind of mass prayer, but she’d never seen anything like it in the city before.

  She turned back to look for Rabbit and he startled her by being right at her elbow. He’d come up so quietly. Eve saw the woman still standing at the counter. Their eyes met for an instant but they both looked away.

  BEYER WAS WAITING FOR THEM, sitting at a corner table in the Lagoon under a long fish tank with assorted tropical specimens and brilliantly colored anemones. The air smelled like air fresheners and cologne, upholstery and a distant hint of miso. He stood when Eve approached the table, took her hands by the fingertips, bent slightly at the waist. Then sat again.

  Movieland, Eve thought. Double Vision. Brands and messages. Promises and threats. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was having this reaction, but it suddenly seemed to her that Beyer was acting, showing chivalry like wise guys he’d seen in the movies.

  “Got your check?” he said to Rabbit, with a smirk.

  Rabbit nodded and patted his front pocket from which the envelope protruded. “Thanks,” he said.

  “I’m generous, I told you that.”

  “You’re an amazing person,” Rabbit said.

  He doesn’t trust this man, Eve thought. An opinion she was inclined to take seriously, despite having known Rabbit at that point for only a few hours.

  “And what can I do for you?” Beyer said, fixing Eve with a stare.

  Eve pulled out the photograph and put it on the table in front of Beyer. “This is my brother,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in quite a few years, but I’d like to find him. Rabbit said you might be able to help.”

  Beyer looked at the photo. “So you’re starting Monday?” he said to Rabbit, without looking up.

  “The picture was taken out by the airport,” Rabbit said. “Plus you can see the markings on the roof behind him. That looks like one of your Nazca line jobs, so I figured you would have known the guy.”

  “You figured that did you?” Beyer said. Then he glanced up at both of them. “Want something to eat? Sit down at least.”

  Eve pulled out a chair and sat. Rabbit went into the booth on the far side of the table, back to the wall. Beyer looked at the photo again.

  Rabbit said: “You can see a white line, right there. You can s
ee the river. It’s definitely near the airport.”

  Beyer took his time. Then he nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “I do remember him.”

  Eve sat forward. “When did you see him last?”

  “Oh God,” Beyer said. “I don’t know. Ages ago. But Rabbit’s right, the photo was taken by the airport and this would be one of the Nazca line installations. Maybe the lizard on the Staples store.”

  Beyer smiled and slid the photograph back across the table to Eve, but she didn’t pick it up.

  “Can you tell me anything else?” she said. “Did you work together?”

  “He was on the scene, yeah,” Beyer said, shrugging. “But we weren’t friends. What was his name?”

  Eve told him. Beyer squinted. “Ali. Rings a bell.”

  “Any idea where he might be now?”

  Beyer gave all appearances of racking his memory. “China? Korea? I vaguely recall hearing he went to Asia at some point.” He scratched his chin. He pulled the photo back over and stared down a second time. Then his head popped up to meet Eve’s gaze. “Named after Muhammad Ali. This is coming back. Your old man named your brother after some boxer who took so many punches to the head he can’t say his own name now. Sad story. You like boxing?”

  Eve sat back in her chair and didn’t respond.

  “Beyer,” Rabbit said. “Can you help her out? She has questions.”

  “Like do I know if he’s still alive?” Beyer suggested.

  Eve felt the question hit her chest, a short, sharp impact. She waited a few seconds before replying, watching the fish tank above and behind Beyer where a yellow fish was sailing silently from left to right. It didn’t move any fin at all. It seemed merely to will itself through the water.

  “All right,” Eve said. “Do you know if my brother is still alive?”

  “Honestly, no idea. But with junkies it’s tricky. Even alive, they’re not very alive.”

  “Could you excuse me for a moment?” Eve asked. And she got up and walked the length of the restaurant, all the way to the front door. But she didn’t leave. She stopped there, thinking. So there it was. Junkie. Had she suspected all along? Probably, but never dared use the word. Still, did that explain why this guy was being such a jerk about it? His resistance made no sense to Eve until she thought again of Rabbit. And with that, her heart slowed and her breathing steadied. A calm descended, just as she’d always felt when a bull’s-eye settled into place behind the crosshairs.