The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “Eve and Reza. You know the last time I saw you?” Ali said.

  Eve picked up her chopsticks again. “You better not tell me you saw me here in town and didn’t even say hello.”

  “Shibuya,” Ali said. “When I was in Tokyo, this is true, I saw your face on a huge news billboard in Shibuya.”

  “Well . . .” Eve said, and lost her words. She imagined her face up there above the traffic. Enormous and exposed. “Well, you should have called or e-mailed. Or texted. Meanwhile I return home and find you’re gone. All the police can tell me is you didn’t die here.”

  Ali raised his eyebrows. “You talked to the police?”

  “Of course I did. You were a missing person,” Eve said. “Why were you in Tokyo? Were you working there?”

  Ali was teaching English and doing his art. Still hanging in there. Still trying to make it work. “But I was a failure,” he said. “Bottom line.”

  “You weren’t,” Kumi said.

  “I was,” Ali repeated. “But fuck, I tried.”

  “Ali.” Kumi glared at him.

  He was making collages out of hentai. You could cut these pieces down small enough, he said, and any part of the human body could be used to make a flower, a forest. He was turning animated porn into formal Japanese flower arrangements. He never convinced a single gallery to touch the stuff.

  Eve looked at her brother and saw how he had aged. Strange not to have thought of this before. In their years apart, they’d passed through some moment after which his face no longer looked just as she remembered. A bit of her father, true. But he would age into his own face, as they all did.

  “Then you came back here,” Eve said.

  He looked across the corner of the table at her. Nodded.

  “You sneaked back into town.”

  “I didn’t sneak,” he said. “Things weren’t going so good for me, E. Ask Kumi. She was the one who kicked me out.”

  “I knew you were here,” Eve said. “When Dad died. I knew you were here. Mom was on the coast. After the funeral I was so sure of it I went to the police a second time. Still nothing. Why the hell didn’t you call? Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

  “I was using,” Ali said. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “Using,” Eve said. “I guess part of my problem was I never knew that. When I saw you the last time I knew things weren’t going well. But if I’d known about the using, Ali . . . I would have tried to help.”

  Eve threw her napkin down onto the table and pushed back her chair. “Sorry,” she said to Kumi, and she left the table, her throat tightening, her eyes threatening to release tears. But she pinched off all these symptoms, these ways to release, to vent. And when she was safely in the bathroom, the door closed quietly and locked behind her, she leaned on the counter, head down between her shoulders. Eyes closed. Shoulders silently heaving. She’d decided already that she wouldn’t cry for Nick. Now it was time to decide that she wouldn’t cry again for Ali either. When pushed close to tears, Eve thought, pressing her palms to her eyes, you simply had to learn something.

  She washed her face. She saw that a set of stones were set up in a ring around a miniature torii gate on the counter. Some tapered candles. A long lacquered box with matches next to it. A plaque of praying hands above the toilet. She looked at herself in the mirror, looked into her own eyes. Why was she here? Because of a memory. Wind in his hair, up some structure somewhere. Ali elevated and unafraid. That memory had been so crucial to her.

  You had to learn something.

  Eve went back into the dining room. Ali was eating, talking to Rabbit, who looked up at her with concern. Kumi was just about to get the kids ready for bath and bed. Yuko said to Eve: “I love you.”

  Eve leaned down and kissed her. “I love you too, honey. I really do.”

  “I used to live on Sixth Street,” Ali was telling Rabbit. “Bought my dope in that little park there.” He was eating. Chopsticks in motion, muscles rippling along his arm. He had tattoos Eve had never seen before. Sacred heart, Celtic cross, Star of David. He was taking bean sprouts from a small dish, dipping them one by one in a dark sauce and delivering these to his mouth. He did so with a loose-wristed ease, elbow to the wooden table. A worn motion.

  She sat down. “You know what I think about? I think about us climbing that radio tower. I think about how absolutely terrified I was.”

  Ali nodded. He said: “E, I really am sorry.” He chewed and worked through his next thought. “Let me ask you something. Did you get along with Dad?”

  Eve told him: “We kind of had a mutual agreement not to talk so much that we argued.”

  “He and I didn’t have that agreement.”

  “Do you miss him?” Eve asked.

  “I do,” Ali said. “Although I also wonder why he was such a bastard.”

  “He always knew what he was doing,” Eve said. “Why and to what end. It made him impatient.”

  Ali tapped his chopsticks on his plate. An unconscious, nervous movement.

  Eve said: “I always thought you were the same. But with a different spirit somehow. Happier than Dad. So much freer.”

  Ali frowned, his fingers twisting a teacup in place on the tablecloth. The tea itself long cold. And the next thing he said seemed at first disconnected from what had come before. He looked at her, tilting his head in resignation. He told her about buying this house. About how much moving back to the neighborhood meant to him. He’d surprised himself, wanting it so much. He told her about his work too. He was part-owner of a language school downtown. Kids came from all over the world. A lot of Koreans and Chileans at the moment, but the thing went in cycles. He had partners and they’d done well financially. They’d recently expanded the facility, even bought other properties. He still went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings but had found a way to enjoy them. And Eve understood him to be telling her that whatever she thought, he was not like their father in always knowing what he was doing. Not why. Not reliably to what end.

  “I didn’t call,” Ali said, “because I was ashamed. I was waiting for the time to be right. I’m glad you were more impatient. I’m glad you came looking. I’m lucky.”

  He put his hand over hers on the table. Then, after a moment, he took his hand back slowly and looked at Rabbit. “So what about you?” Ali said. “Why’d you quit the flowering alleys of Stofton? I liked those.”

  “I’m doing something new,” Rabbit said. Then, after a pause: “You and Jabez are friends?”

  Ali nodded.

  “And Beyer?”

  Ali smiled and nodded again. “At the beginning it was the three of us. You know that, right? Tight as thieves, Beyer and Jabez. Thinking the same thoughts and planning the same plans. That’s always how it starts with mortal enemies.”

  After Kumi returned from the kids’ room and they’d cleared the dishes, they all went into the living room to get the latest. The television sound on low. Lights shone on the front of Meme Media. The police were asking people to leave the plaza, but nobody seemed to be listening. There were thought to be as many as fifty thousand people in the area, cramming the side streets. You couldn’t see the fountains. You could hardly see the trees. When the crowd moved, it rippled through itself. It had leveled up, become the larger organism. The thing with twitchy movements, limbs, reach, quantum unpredictability.

  “I have to ask,” Eve said, staring at the television.

  Ali waited for her.

  “God,” she said. “Religion.”

  Kumi said: “We converted when I came over and we got married.”

  “Converted from what to what?”

  Ali said: “From epicureans living in the moment to God freaks living in the moment.”

  “We’re not God freaks, we’re believers,” Kumi said to Eve. Then to Ali: “And you weren’t epicurean either. The term for what you were is hedonist-nihilist.”

  On the television a picture of people in an alley. They were tearing up the pavement and break
ing it into pieces. They were loading these pieces into wheeled plastic garbage bins.

  “So I’m back here. Tokyo is done. I’m strung out, putting up these line drawings on the roofs of warehouses in the approach path to the airport. These big dioramas, hands and feet and faces and fuck knows what.”

  Kumi said: “Language, please.”

  Rabbit said: “You might be interested to know that Beyer claims those now.”

  Ali shrugged. “Beyer was always like that. You know how Faith Wall happened? We were sitting around drinking beer and decided to put up a piece with a random word from each of us. I said faith. Beyer said wall. Jabez said revolution. Beyer dropped Jabez’s word and there we were.”

  Rabbit laughed and shook his head. Eve watched him and knew that the revelation of beginnings did not always satisfy.

  Ali went on. Before he’d left for Tokyo, the group of them had done a few of the rooftop Nazca lines together. But when he came back it had stopped. “I decided to start doing them again. Do we still have those pictures?”

  Eve could hear rain on the roof, the trees sighing. A musical mobile playing in the room Yuko and Francis shared. These came in over the voices on the television, tuned low. A new condo development. A household cleaner. A line of cosmetics. Someone said: The simple life full of grace and luxury.

  Kumi brought back a handful of photographs, nicked and bent around the edges. Eve took in a breath seeing the first one. Ali, Ali. She felt as if she were meeting him again, this time the one she remembered. Wire thin, white T-shirt. Up on a rooftop. Eve could hear Rabbit breathing next to her, looking at the same image.

  Ali was looking over at the television, distracted. Armored cars. Plastic shields. Smoke billowing. “I was working on this big one, a man standing like he’d just been busted. Hands over his head. And I’d almost finished the thing. I remember I was working on the fingers of his hand. Walking backwards pouring down the powder we used, which is the same from football fields only mixed with this sparkling stuff we got from a kids’ art supply store. I guess I was a little wrapped up in the moment. I was also high. In any case, I walked right off the roof.”

  He fell thirty feet into a parking lot. Bent the top of a light pole going down, crushed in the roof of a limousine waiting for an airport fare. He woke up in a hospital bed. “This is the cliché, right? You find God lying in a hospital bed.” They contacted Kumi in Tokyo for him, and she flew over. She showed up with her duffel bag and a change of clothes. She was sitting in the chair next to Ali’s bed. And they were arguing about something.

  “About whether you were going to keep making art,” Kumi said. “You decided you weren’t.”

  “It was a T5 break. Very bad. I was frozen from the chest down. I’m doing better than I should be. They were telling me people just don’t recover. So we’re arguing. And then we finish arguing and I fall asleep. And then, sometime later, fifteen, twenty minutes, that thing happens when you half wake up.”

  Ali came up into the room, up under his own eyelids. He felt the room, heard the low hum of hospital machines and hallway traffic, the dry heat of the place, the cover smells, cleaning products, all just barely keeping the stench of sickness and fear at bay. And Kumi was sitting there just where she’d been when he fell asleep, but now her eyes were closed and he realized she was praying. He knew, watching her, that she was addressing her thoughts to some entity beyond. Some being they couldn’t know to exist. She was saying words that required belief.

  “And here comes the big epiphany,” Ali said.

  Rabbit moved in his chair, sharply. Eve wondered for a moment if he might leave the room. But the movement was followed by stillness.

  “It just burned right through me, this thought,” Ali said. “We’d been arguing about whether to keep going or to stop. A dispute over free choice, free will. We assumed freedom enough to even argue the choices. And yet where did it come from, that confidence that we could really choose? Everything that had happened to me could be explained by rational science. Inability to move legs because of nerve damage. Nerve damage because of T5 break. T5 break because of falling off a roof. This all happens because of this, which happens because of this, which stretches back through time, past me, past generations and history back to whenever it began, with whatever big explosion. Thermodynamics, quantum physics, whatever it is, it’s a rational unfolding. But if that were true, if my lying there really was fully explained in those terms, molecules jostling outwards in some inviolable quantum legal framework that started at the big bang, the irreducible particles in us just doing what they do in accordance with the fantastic numbers encoded within them, then what decisions were left for me to make? Do billiard balls make decisions after the break? Do they suspend geometric laws on occasion to find the pocket of their choosing? How would a billiard ball understand choice or desire, or the notion that by choice or desire something good or bad, or beautiful or ugly, might come about? What sense could a billiard ball make of hope and regret? And yet I suddenly understood how intensely I needed just those things. Choice, desire, hope, regret. I needed these not just to feel good, but to live. Kumi praying over there. I could see her lips move. I was thinking: I need choice, I need desire, I need hope and regret not to be proteins etched on the inner lining of my cells. I need to want art or not want it. I need to want Kumi or not want her. I need to want recovery or death, or happy spirits or sad ones, or to clean up or return to junk. Why junk without choice? Why smile? Why was I smiling, lying there in my hospital bed with a broken T5 vertebra? Well sure, because my cheek muscles contracted in response to endorphin flows. But in my experience of the moment, in my memory of its texture, it was because I was falling in love with Kumi. My love for her entered the universe coming from the same place that the art came from, a big eye on the top of a warehouse, my endless, useless work. It didn’t come from the network, from the phenomenal soup. It came from somewhere outside, some source beyond or before. And watching her lips move, I knew she was addressing that same source. Wherever and whatever it was. Whomever. I didn’t care about religion as an institution or a set of coded practices. I still don’t care about that. I care about choice. I need it. And without belief, without faith in something beyond sense, there can be no meaningful choice.”

  The wind was up. The trees were whipping back and forth in the yard. Rabbit, who had risen from his chair during Ali’s long speech, now slipped out of the room and into the hall. Conversation flagged, it softened and lost its shape. Eve’s eyes kept drifting to the window, to the trees moving there. Ali lived in a forest. The man of the rooftops having come down just far enough to nest among the branches. And even when Ali keyed up the television volume, Eve’s attention remained outside the news. She thought of what Ali had said. Without belief there was no choice.

  They were showing a steady shot of the plaza now, seething crowds. The camera seemed bewildered in its long, unwavering shot. No fast cuts, no slick production values. The camera stared open mouthed just as they all did. It took Eve several minutes to realize what she was watching, coasting between the images and her thoughts of Ali’s new conviction. The people in the shot had started a fire in a planter, the flames and sparks now rising up. A beautiful and terrifying sight. Eve and Ali and Kumi sat as if they were in front of a fire in a hearth.

  Rabbit came back into the room. He was holding a copy of 1984.

  Ali caught his glance. “It’s killing you, so ask.”

  Rabbit said: “The Poets.”

  Ali sighed. “All Jabez. All his. I have nothing to do with them anymore.”

  “The Grove.”

  “What about it?”

  “You own the building.”

  “Me and a group of people. Strictly business.”

  “Wow,” Rabbit said. “I’m finding this very bizarre. You seem to be at the root of a lot of things in my life.”

  Ali shrugged. “Don’t start thinking anything. I’m out. Millions of people have copies of 1984.”

  B
ut Rabbit was on to a new idea, and this was now coursing uncomfortably through him. “You ran the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel.”

  Ali looked at him in surprise. “We all ran the tunnel. Jabez wanted to live in the freaking tunnel. He found those rooms down there.”

  “Who’s Alto?”

  Ali’s expression changed. He was amused.

  “The name of an artist who failed,” Ali said. “Ali Latour. Alla never quite sat right. God complex and all that.”

  Rabbit took a step backwards and bumped the frame of the door. On the TV, the fire grew, front and center. The on-scene reporter was saying “ . . . several slightly injured . . .”

  Alto.

  And Rabbit was gone. Disappeared up and into the front hall. Eve could hear the front door clicking shut.

  SHE WAS GOING TO FOLLOW HIM. She didn’t need Ali to tell her to, although he did. He wheeled with her into the front hall and pulled her down to him again. No more tears from Eve even though he said he was sorry again, and she knew he was and that moved her. But she just held him. She inhaled his different smell, different soaps and routines, different pains and defenses. She wondered if they would now see each other occasionally or if they’d return to their separate lives. But either way, she was at peace with it. He was safe. He was still himself, still walking the path he chose. And by connecting, they had restored at least a part of what had existed between them.

  Then it was open, the door in front of her. Open by her hand. Her feet taking one step after another down the flagstone walk and onto the pavement of the drive, her eyes casting around, looking for Rabbit. Choice in every instant for her too. Maybe that was something Ali had returned to her. Something like a belief in her own ability to choose. Irrational, but vital.

  Rabbit was sitting in the truck, waiting. Eve climbed in herself. They sat in silence for a moment, Rabbit staring straight ahead, seemingly lost in thought. She started the truck. And when they were five or six blocks down the hill towards the river, she cracked a glance over at him. His strong profile against a blur of streetscape. Rabbit flying across the brick and glass, the mailboxes and utility poles.