The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  MADDAM, the client called it. Massively Distributable Data Acquisitions Module. Rabbit didn’t remember thinking once about what the device might represent if half the country or half the world owned one until that late client request that upload features be developed. And if there was any chance Rabbit was going to get his head around that part, there was much less of a chance the following morning when a whole raft of new nondisclosure agreements were shipped over by the client’s lawyer to be signed immediately and returned. Rabbit signed. But why the paranoia? What exactly had they been working on?

  “Maybe we really were just tossing around ideas for a super-smart phone,” Rabbit said. “But that morning I realized I just didn’t know. Maybe I was developing the most sophisticated low-maintenance wiretap the world had ever seen. Selling people stuff and surveillance have a big overlap, if you’re seeing my point here.”

  “I am. And I’m scared to ask the next part,” Eve said.

  Rabbit nodded. He knew where this all led if you thought about it.

  “Who was the client?” Eve asked.

  “Short answer?” Rabbit said. “Nobody I worked with had any idea. We used a code name in house. Blue 52.”

  “Blue 52,” Eve said. “And who did you think that might be?”

  Rabbit looked at Eve steadily. “I didn’t know. I would have been guessing, and looking at those agreements that morning it suddenly occurred to me I didn’t want to start guessing. I thought: Maybe there is no client. The phone was our only project. Maybe Blue 52 was my employer. You understand?”

  Eve thought she did. She had different mental pictures for Rabbit now. Rabbit alone in the evening. Something troubling him, making him afraid. The idea that he may have been in place on a game board, playing a role quite different than the one he’d imagined. The idea that all along he had been playing as a mole.

  “And here came the big epiphany,” Rabbit said. “It was a real if-then situation.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “If A, then B. Meaning I understood the moment to be one of choosing.”

  He went to a rep house called the Starlight Theater that same evening. He didn’t even know what was playing. But he’d been thinking about his parents, who’d been gone almost two years at that point. And he suddenly needed the anonymity of darkness. Turned out it was the Errol Morris film Gates of Heaven with a short first: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Rabbit was preoccupied, hardly paying attention, his mind running back and forth between childhood memories and the things he’d just learned at work. He had a sense of being involved in something sophisticated, but also crude and primitive. Something that took the world backwards. Then Werner Herzog spoke off the screen, across thirty years, to Rabbit alone.

  “I’ll never forget the words,” Rabbit told Eve. “Herzog said: ‘If you switch on television it’s just ridiculous and it’s destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television.’”

  Holy war. Blue 52. Fewer than a dozen other people in the theater. Rabbit frozen with a handful of popcorn halfway to his mouth. There was something going on here. Some other business, vast and spreading and, Rabbit felt certain, highly toxic.

  “Herzog said: ‘Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. I see it as a very dramatic situation.’”

  “So what did you do?” Eve asked.

  “I thought of my parents,” he said. “I just focused on that. Then I stopped showing up for work. It was the craziest conviction. Like I was at the very brink of doing something terrible and just had to bow out.”

  “Weren’t people upset?”

  “They were,” Rabbit said. “But I never returned any of the calls. A couple weeks later I got a big severance check. I think they were worried.”

  “So nobody came after you.”

  “No,” Rabbit said. “Although I went and lived on the beach for about four months. Anybody coming after me would have concluded I’d wigged out. Probably because I had wigged out.”

  Rabbit told Eve he drove out to the dunes for the first time that night he saw the film about Herzog. It was June. He lay down under a bank of sand crested over with long, soft grass that he could pull down over himself like a blanket. He lay there, hidden from the world. He slept and dreamed of high mountain fields, open views, places that reminded him of home but were not quite what he remembered from home. He woke when the moon came up, a radiant disk. Rabbit lying there in the sand, under the grass, washed in silver light. Stars exploding in their infinite patterns above. He was thinking of his parents.

  If, then. Well, Rabbit thought. If I’ve been doing something I didn’t realize all along, if I’ve been contributing to some project the authors and objectives of which I don’t even know, then either I’m helpless and might as well go back to work, or it’s time to prove that I can choose, that I can act, that I create something of my own.

  THE SKY RELEASED A THIN SHEET OF WATER and there were many memories in the sound of it, striking the metal hood of the truck and making the big tires sing. The sheen of the pavement and the slap of the wipers. The shape of them carving back and forth, endlessly countering one another. Eve had slept with these in her dreams, so many times. Her father at the wheel. Ali next to her at the side window, looking out.

  Rabbit held Jabez’s instructions on his knee, but Eve knew the way. East Shore, the words sounding strange in her own mouth, in her thoughts. All that time and he was in East Shore.

  Eve’s hands were opening and closing on the wheel.

  “You all right?” Rabbit asked.

  “This feels so abrupt. Everything so sudden. Finding him and going out to see him. But everything else too. My whole life in motion. I don’t know. Sorry, I’m nervous.”

  “I’m nervous half the time,” Rabbit said. “It just means you’re up high somewhere. You might fall. But things are happening. Things you care about.” He looked over at her while she drove. “And you found your brother, so this is huge.”

  “It’s huge,” Eve said. “Sure it is.”

  “I’m excited for you.” He was still watching her drive, and Eve felt the gaze although it didn’t make her uncomfortable.

  “I’m excited too,” she said. “Excited. Nervous. A little angry too, honestly, finding out he’s been living in East Shore all this time. He could have called.”

  He smiled at her profile, then turned to look back out at the street. They were crossing a bridge, the water invisible far beneath. There was a police barricade blocking traffic returning to the city. Over the hump of the bridge Eve felt herself falling into it, the old routes and throughways. Old sight lines, a familiar unfamiliar. The long slope of the hill. The rock escarpments and twisted trees. The rain came and stopped, then started again. She slowed when passing the house where they’d lived as kids, picking out the window that had been hers, the tree that her father had planted now towering over the lawn.

  On the radio they were airing a live interview with a spokesperson for the police department. Do not go to the Heights. Do not drive or walk. You will be turned back. Police would be asking people already in the plaza to leave. Safety, the man was saying. It was a safety precaution. He wouldn’t say any more. Safety from what, from whom? Rabbit reached over and turned the radio off.

  Ali’s house was down a crescent with a hidden cul-de-sac. Other houses peered from within the trees here, familiar sixties bungalows, modest faces. A simple lawn and roofline, a carport. She watched the addresses, numbers on mailboxes and front doors. And when they came to the right house, Eve pulled the truck to the shoulder, the flank of it pressing up into the shrubbery. A house like the others, its light sifting through the evening trees. A dog barked. She could hear children’s voices and the sound of a television coming from one
of the houses along the street. Lining the front walk of Ali’s house there were small lamps in holders, a steady warmth among the fronds and leaves. Then a young woman opened the door, and she stood bathed in that light, a smile on her face.

  “I’m so glad you came,” the young woman said. And when she turned to call back into the house—Ali, Ali. Your sister is here—Eve could see that a large cross hung from the wall next to the front hall closet. A crucifix. A Christ.

  Ali’s wife’s name was Kumi, late twenties, with a wide, unguarded face and long straight black hair. Sandals, skirt, pregnant and holding a toddler against her narrow hip. The boy’s name was Francis. He had a twin sister named Yuko. Kumi was due in eight weeks, she told Eve. All this while Eve stood in the wood-floored front hall, bent over Francis. A nephew and a niece and another one on the way. She was an aunt and hadn’t known that about herself.

  Ali was in the room before Eve saw him. Rabbit touched her shoulder. She turned and there he was: Ali with Yuko on his lap, the little girl’s black hair a straight version of Ali’s dark curls, her dark skin against his pale forearm. Only Ali sat now in a low-slung wheelchair, canted solid wheels, aluminum dented from use. He rolled into the room and smiled up at Eve, swung open one arm. She leaned down into his shoulder and he squeezed her hard.

  “I know, I know,” Ali said. “I break my spine and I don’t call.”

  Eve had promised herself not to, but she cried. The tears came on their own and moistened the cotton of his shirt near his neck. “Why didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Been away, you know.”

  “What happened?”

  On the wall behind Ali, prints of the Buddha, a string of Tibetan prayer flags.

  He said: “Four years ago. I fell off the roof of a warehouse. Don’t do this if you can avoid it.” Then he just held on to her and said how nice, how nice, how nice it was to see her, and it was wonderful to hear him say this even if there was still anger sifting through the mix of things she was feeling. All this sudden information released as if it had never been withheld. As if he hadn’t abandoned her. But when Eve rolled her face away from him, tucking her chin down to hide her tears, Yuko was right there, very close. Up on her knees in Ali’s lap. She reached up and took Eve’s neck. She kissed Eve’s mouth and said: “Daddy’s auntie.”

  “Your auntie, baby. I’m your daddy’s sister.”

  Rabbit stood back watching this with a half smile. He looked like he were trying to make himself small. But then Ali noticed him and extended a hand, and Kumi took his arm and pulled him towards the living room, down a hall lined with books. Eve walked past the colorful spines of hardcover volumes, names she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and Diderot. Books on art and archaeology. She stopped with her finger on the spine of a boxed set of Gibbon’s history of Rome.

  “Yeah, I know,” Ali said. “Like a copy of Dad’s library. Living around the block from our old house. The twists have been strange. The outcomes unexpected. Nobody is more surprised in all of this than me.”

  Eve didn’t press the point. They’d been in each other’s company for less than three minutes.

  She walked into the living room where Kumi had led them, and where she tried to preside over polite pre-dinner small talk. A useless exercise. Ali had become like their father in this respect too. He did not do the human pleasantries well. And so he sat with his hands folded while Rabbit talked to Kumi. Until it was finally time to eat.

  They went in to dinner. Kumi carried out a hotpot, rice and small plates. Eve saw back into the kitchen: the spice rack, the cupboards with the stainless pulls shaped like different vegetables, the food processor and the pots hanging on the far wall. Eve in turbulent, conflicted flow. She’d hoped to find him doing well, but all this domesticity threw her. She had no point of reference, no memory of him being like this before. And she knew she’d struggled herself with household routines at Nick’s place. But these observations were then quickly lost in another one as Ali bent his head to pray over the food. Eve found herself staring at that remarkable sight. Ali in a wheelchair, brought down from his high places. And this: the finger to the lips, to the heart. The medieval regimen. Ali with a God.

  They joined hands, awkwardly. Ali held Eve’s fingers tightly just as she held Rabbit’s. She couldn’t close her eyes. They were locked now on the table, on her bamboo placemat. On the blue ceramic salad bowl, the near edge of which just hemmed into the top of her view. A household moon. Her neck hurt, bent down like that while her brother—roof climber, graffiti writer, shit disturber, substance abuser—her brother interceded on behalf of the troubled world. Ali prayed: “ . . . that all those in the theater might be saved, the children and the hostage taker alike . . .”

  They said “Amen.” Kumi, Yuko, Francis, Ali last. The paternal punctuation. Rabbit sat still wearing his bemused half smile, fiddling his chopsticks in his hands. Eve put a hand on his leg under the table. He covered it with his own.

  Food was served. Eve thought she could hear all of their thoughts zipping and singing through the complexities of the moment. Who should go first and what they should say. What ground to cover. All while the little dishes went around. Spinach, salmon, rice.

  Then Ali began and Eve thought he had a new and unfamiliar voice. There was a certain gravity and calmness, a seeming dispassion. He had reached deep conclusions, Eve thought. Like someone to whom the world had been exposed by science. Although it wasn’t science in this case but the other thing, the other source of bottomless certainty. The one they’d been taught as children to treat with aesthetic appreciation and respect—a verse, a statue, a ring that had belonged to a great-uncle who was a priest—but never to absorb into the personal system.

  Ali was talking about the plaza, about Meme Media. They’d been mesmerized by the news for the past forty-eight hours, just like everybody else.

  “It plays like a kind of movie,” he said. “Which is probably because we all feel like we’ve seen something like it before.”

  He paused for Kumi to serve rice, his expression suspended.

  Rabbit said, “I heard someone say the police have known who the hostage taker was from the beginning.”

  “Like we should be reassured,” Ali said. “Some psychopath known to police. But I doubt it anyway.”

  He was taking spinach while he spoke, delicate chopsticks, quick sharp movements, the click of contact between wood and plate.

  “Why doubt it?” Eve asked him.

  He looked faintly uncomfortable, as if he’d now been trapped into saying something that he hadn’t been planning to say. “It’s just that show, KiddieFame,” he said, glancing up at her, then back to his plate. “Maybe we should have seen it coming that someone would target that particular show.”

  Eve ate some rice and frowned.

  “You disagree,” Ali said. “I know that expression, Evey.”

  “I just wouldn’t blame them for what happened,” Eve said.

  “I’m not blaming them. I’m blaming me,” Ali said. “I mean me in the sense of those of us who watch the show. Don’t you watch it?”

  He had addressed this question to Rabbit, who shook his head, but then stopped himself. “Not regularly. I have a couple of times down at the Grove bar.”

  “I hate the whole idea of it,” Ali said, wincing. “But if I’m clicking channels and I come across it, I can’t turn the thing off.”

  “So it’s a bad show,” Eve said. “That doesn’t mean kids deserve to be terrorized for being on it.”

  Eve got the feeling she’d awoken Ali somehow, saying so. His eyes were bright now as he formed ideas. He pointed his chopsticks at his sister. “What’s looming, though? What is the threat in this situation?”

  “That a child might get hurt, of course,” Eve said.

  “Exactly. But were we so angry when those same kids were getting lined up for one of these so-called Kills?

  “I don’t even watch the show,” Eve said. “But this Ki
ll thing they do is fake. In bad taste, maybe. But it’s not real.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ali said. “How alive are those kids outside of their competitive desire to be famous? How alive are we letting them be? Telling them fame is everything.”

  “You were a graffiti writer,” Eve said, putting down her chopsticks. “What’s not attention-seeking about that? I’m not criticizing. I enjoyed watching you be that person.”

  “Fair comment,” Ali said. “I have no right to lecture. But my point remains that the show is destructive and we seem to enjoy that about it.”

  “Guns don’t kill people,” Eve said. “Celebrity does.”

  “Eve Latour, gold medalist, being sarcastic with me,” Ali said. “Can’t walk down a street without someone wanting to touch her.”

  Rabbit shifted in his chair beside her. Kumi too seemed poised, as if trying to think of something to say that might smoothly change the subject.

  “Are we actually arguing?” Eve asked. “I haven’t seen you in years.”

  “We shouldn’t be,” Ali said. “That’s just my point, E. You’ve lived through all this yourself. You must have thought along these lines before.”

  She stared at her brother. Several seconds. Then she said: “Ali, where did you go? I needed you after Dad died and you were gone. That’s more the lines which I’ve been thinking along lately.”

  Ali stared at her intently, leaning forward. “E, you mad at me?”

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “I’m not laughing. I’m not seeing this as a big joke.”

  “It’s boring, though, Evey,” Ali said. “Addiction. Recovery. A bit of travel.”

  “Tell me about it, though. It’s been a long time. And I’ve come here to find out what happened to you. I heard you went to Asia. Tell me about that.”

  “Tokyo,” Ali said. “Which is where I heard about your gold medal, actually. You marrying the . . . what was he?”

  “We never got married. We were engaged. He was a film director. His name was Reza.”