The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  IT WAS SIX IN THE MORNING. It was seven in the morning. It was eight in the morning. The news was spreading. And the news was mixed. The kids were safe. Nobody knew where they were being held. No press conference this time. But a deep anxiety remained. Some feeling of darkness that would not be dispelled. Suspicions grew, in crystalline complexity. You could hear the sound of them. The chatter and chew of dark ideas as they copied themselves from mind to mind.

  The story about Loftin aired, but the body had been so badly beaten that he was not identified correctly at first.

  “Just who was the man speaking with the riot police?” said an anchor, replaying the tape. “This is something we’re trying to find out. One other man seriously hurt. And another beaten to death under strange circumstances. Three police officers injured. Chaos in the Heights.”

  The crowd in the plaza had been singing. The riot police were back.

  “Who was the hostage taker?” yelled a Black Bloc protester into the nearest camera. “Why can no one simply say who the guy was?”

  Behind him the bonfires had been fueled again with the contents of dumpsters and recycling bins, a steady wind stoking the plaza. And around the corner, in an action nobody seemed to have seen, no camera had recorded, the front glass of a coffee shop was smashed and the store was engulfed in flames.

  “We have fires in the Heights. At least two. This is very tragic.”

  The crowd was alive again, forming and re-forming. Where were the children? Nobody knew. Where was the hostage taker? Where had he been taken?

  The theater stood blankly at the top of the plaza. Fluid dynamics. Tidal rips and undertows. The riot police spread across the middle of the plaza now and began their familiar cadenced approach. The crowd formed in ranks. The rocks flew. Yet everywhere you stopped to look, at the corner of your eye, in some sparser, quieter quadrant of the plaza, someone would be standing alone watching and perplexed. As if they’d gotten off at the wrong stop and didn’t recognize this part of town. In a corner of the plaza a man was playing the guitar. Another man stood nearby with a burning banner. He held it slanting out in front of him like a standard. It was dripping long nylon shreds of flame to the sidewalk. A cop raced by on a quad and didn’t stop, didn’t look, just as a rubber bullet was fired and knocked a man off the top of a media van where he had been trying to twist free the satellite dish. He fell into the path of an ambulance creeping down the side of the plaza. The ambulance crushed his foot, and he lay screaming.

  “ . . . injured in what appears to have been an accident involving an ambulance. Twenty-four years of age.”

  The crowd began to rock the ambulance. There were rippling waves of cheers, of calls. Some corner was turned and possibilities became certainties. The ambulance went over. The driver climbed out and scrambled up into a planter while various people set to work prying off hubcaps and kicking free the muffler. The rear doors opened and a man emerged, hands up to show he was unarmed. There seemed to be someone else in the ambulance but the crowd now surged forward again and the scene was submerged.

  A press conference was canceled. The store next to the coffee shop was now burning too.

  “Things are very unclear at this point. We’re being told that the theater has been cleared. The hostage taker has been arrested.” The man winced into the camera in the downwash of helicopter rotors. He was crouched near a bus shelter, the glass smashed out. A single shot was fired behind him.

  The crowd moaned. Urrr. And what was poised, fell. The new organism lurched again to life, this larger beast. And stones crisscrossed the air in the plaza as militia units withdrew nervously to ring the theater, to distance themselves from this civilian chaos, as the helicopter lifted from the theater roof and sped away just feet from the rooftops. Storefronts were smashed. One after another. Rocks, fires, then this. The anger was still there. Nothing had happened yet to allow it to dissipate.

  The looting began at eight-thirty Saturday morning. It seemed like the end of a long formula. Wednesday plus Thursday plus Friday. At some point there was an equals sign. And as the sum of that equation, people started taking things. Then other people joined in, many of whom would have told you that they had no thought to do so previously. The idea was so contagious that a person would have had to leave the Heights to get away from it, to find safety.

  This spreading sense of owning nothing as the time ran out.

  PEGG REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS in a sideways world, a bed up against a wall. Metal cabinetry under his head. He pieced together information—medical equipment, Red Cross symbols—and decided that he was in an ambulance that was lying on its side. Then, briefly pinching his eyes shut again, he got a bit more of it. He remembered the man screaming outside the ambulance. He remembered the van going over. He remembered a head coming through the door and yelling something at him. That would have been Haden. As for his present circumstances, Pegg knew nothing much more than that and the fact that he was somehow, miraculously, uninjured.

  He crawled out onto the pavement. He saw people with boxes and stacks of clothes.

  He saw a young man with a video camera following two women down the row of storefronts, all the glass gone, shattered everywhere. The women were loading each other up with belts and shoes, dropping as many as they grabbed. The young man was calling to them from behind the lens: “Wow, you guys are really great. Are you really incredibly proud of yourselves?”

  The women were ignoring him, as if the trailing camera and the shouted questions, while they went about ransacking a shoe store, were just part of a world they’d gotten used to.

  Pegg had a card in his wallet with the name and address of his hotel, and so he returned there through the shattered streets. Across the river, where the crowds thinned and there were fewer police, you could almost imagine that nothing had happened. Still, a shocked silence hovered. Pegg read the billboards, trying to place himself in the city. Needs Met with Passion. Plan for a Better Future. Next Stop, Great Health.

  In the lobby he was embraced by air conditioning, the sound of falling water, the smell of breakfast: waffles and strawberries. He slumped into an elevator under a video monitor with the loop of endlessly crashing waves. In his room he tormented himself with a long look in the bathroom mirror. Pain at the temples. Faint nausea. He realized that he had changed his clothes already, as if he were planning to go out. But he couldn’t remember making that decision. Things from the immediate past seemed to be slipping. Memory gone sketchy. He had certain details intact. Thom Pegg. Micah Swenson Pegg. Jenny. Spratley most certainly and the girl at dinner. Mov, definitely. He wouldn’t forget Mov. But the name of the kids in the theater, all of them were gone. And he regretted that. Pegg thought hard, his eyes staring into the reflection of his eyes, the reflection staring back into the original.

  He left the bathroom and went to sit on the bed. He keyed on the television with the remote and thumbed through the channels. Pictures of the city on every channel, national and local. Aerial shots, street-level shots, shots of crowds and police. Pegg said to himself: “All my life I’ve hated this city. I hated being raised here. What was that neighborhood called? The West Stretch. Wide lawns and narrow minds.” It was the same neighborhood Jennifer had come from. Where they had lived together until the end. He should have turned Spratley down cold and never have come back. But now he was here again, cranially damaged, driven by mysteries. Sitting in front of the rolling images—smoke and broken glass, burning cars, no escaping them channel after channel—as if this city had grown so large that it had consumed the entire world.

  Room-service coffee arrived. Pegg drank two cups as quickly as he could, then pulled on a jacket and walked out into the city. He didn’t know where he was going. He just knew he had to move. So Pegg began a long walk that started at first light and stretched into the morning, punctuated by three notable episodes.

  The first was a spectacular fish taco he bought from a street vendor somewhere towards the riverside lip of downtown, just at the edg
e of the escarpment on a boulevard that looked as if it were designed for much more traffic than was out today. Pegg was feeling a bit shaky. He deposited several tablespoons of hot sauce onto his shirtfront when trying to squirt it into the taco.

  “You all right, man?”

  “Splendid,” Pegg said, then realized he had no money. Not a cent. The man looked him over with his head to one side. You gotta be kidding me.

  Then—strange times, strange air—the man said: “Forget it. Be careful. Crazy what’s going down over there. I’d stay on the north side if I were you.”

  Pegg gave the man his cufflinks and knew he didn’t want to forget the exchange. Then, halfway to the river, thinking this was perhaps the best food he’d eaten in six months, it occurred to him he couldn’t remember buying it and wondered about the fact that he’d somehow left his room without putting on cufflinks.

  The second thing was the receipt of news. Pegg was distracted, but he would never have seen it coming. He’d been standing near the river, near the museum—a good one, Pegg recalled, he’d been there with Jennifer and Micah any number of times—and across the way the sky was smoky and heaving. Still lots of small aircraft and helicopters wheeling around. Pegg watched these and licked hot sauce off his fingers and hoped everything would be all right. He hoped that the looting had stopped by then. He knew there was some point from which you couldn’t pull back. That point was the lip of the downwardsloping and inward-turning spiral, a vortex towards eternal violence and oblivion. Maybe they were at the lip, but they were not over it. Pegg could sense that. And as his eyes were drawn up towards the Slopes, up to the Heights, he thought that something might be newly alive in the city up there. Some possibility that they could yet pull back from the brink.

  He started walking with this thought, pulled by that sense of new life, new hope. It was across there somewhere, south across the river, across the falls. And he had to find it. Madness. But did he stop walking, realizing it was madness? No, he did not.

  Sirens and racing police cars, still. No taxis anywhere. He crossed the bridge, pausing over the falls. Then he crunched up the sidewalks through Stofton and up into the Heights. Armored cars, troops with knee pads and throat mikes, helmet-mounted cameras. And here came the unexpected news. At the brow of the hill, Pegg crossed a boulevard and a man stopped his car and rolled down the window, beckoned him over. He said: “They’ve cleared the plaza, it’s empty now.” His eyebrows angled with concern. “I was in a restaurant up there. I went home and watched on television then came back down to the plaza last night. People came because they cared. Looting is wrong but what the police did should never have happened.”

  The man was wearing a suit, tie loose. He’d been up for many hours, Pegg thought. They’d all been up for too many hours.

  “The infiltration,” the man said to him, squinting up past Pegg into the diffuse light. “That’s going to cause the long-term damage. There were men dressed like protesters talking to the police. The guy shot with the rubber bullet had a Special Forces tattoo. I couldn’t make that up. He was helo’d out in a medevac. Nobody else got helo’d out in a medevac. There are hundreds of people under arrest now. Could be a thousand. Detention centers on the east side, down by the tracks.”

  “I missed all that,” Pegg said. “I wasn’t in the plaza.”

  The man looked up at him with a kind of sorrow. There was too much that he couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t been there. Then he said: “And that journalist got killed too. You hear about that?”

  Pegg stared at the man. “Got killed by whom?”

  “Police, maybe. I don’t know. Who knows? Someone did it.”

  Pegg, who assumed the man was talking about him, shook his head and smiled. “No, no,” he said. “The journalist didn’t die. I can assure you, the journalist is quite alive.”

  But now the man was looking at Pegg in a sharper way, suspicions aroused. “You can’t assure me of anything,” the man spat. “You just said you weren’t there.”

  “You don’t understand,” Pegg started, incredulous. How did these rumors come to life from nothing and then live with such ferocity?

  “I do understand,” the man said, voice raised. “I saw it. Kicked to death, my friend. How’s that? You like that?”

  Pegg watched him drive off and felt that news sink into him, news that he thought would take on darker and darker meaning as the day went by, as he learned more about the incident and who that journalist was. The one who had not been lucky. The one who had died. But then, Pegg also wondered how much of the story he could believe. Maybe all of it. It would take no effort to believe it all. Toxic times. Cloned cattle and terminator seeds. A dead journalist. Pegg watched paper blow across the intersection. He felt the chill in the air, smelled the smoke. He felt these things inside himself. Then he walked on towards the plaza, towards the parked fire engines there, three firefighters working a hose, dousing the charred exoskeleton of a car, guts long consumed. Steam rose. Their faces were black.

  And here came the third and most unexpected thing. Even in his present state, Pegg remembered enough about himself to be astonished at the feeling rising within. Rounding a corner now. Into a random street, the pavement sparkling with broken glass.

  Look at her. She was something. Gold in Geneva. Eve Latour. And oh my, but she was lovely. As beautiful as the world knew how. Nothing of the business about her. Hair up in a rubber band. Freckles across a slightly upturned nose. Slender, long legs, all that. But unaware.

  Fingernail to her cheek. Mill-town sky. That waterfall and its never-ending song in the background. She was the longing. Oh yes. The longing of our generations. The best we had. And by we, of course I mean me.

  She looked up. She saw me.

  ESSAY

  THE BLUE LIGHT PROJECT

  PART III. Black out, blue light

  By Thom Pegg

  We worked our way skyward in tiny steps. And I was terrified, make no mistake about it. I’ve never had much in the way of physical confidence, myself. I know and accept it. And yet there I was, the ground dropping away, spiraling beneath me as we rounded the stairwells. More a ladder than stairs really, thin steel treads with open risers, radically steep, with tiny upturned spikes for traction under your shoes. I was gasping. I was panting. My shirtfront was soaked with icy sweat. I gripped the handrails on either side with hands cramped even though I was wearing a pair of gloves. I was bent against the chill wind. Bent against myself and my every weak tendency.

  When we pulled up in Eve’s truck, fifteen minutes before, I’d tared up at this spindly structure and laughed out loud. You’d have to be mad. The thing was weeded over at its base, sheathed around in a high chain-link fence. Barbed wire, check. No Trespassing signs, yes indeed. It towered over us, forbidden and iconic. A bank of warning diagrams itemized a comprehensive rebuke to those who would think to enter here. One diagram showed a man shot through by a single lightning bolt. Do not climb or you will be struck dead by a vengeful God.

  Thom Pegg is a Los Angeles–based journalist. This is the third of three excerpts from his book, Black Out, Blue Light, published this month. Pegg is working on his first novel.

  “What the hell is it?” I asked her, staring up. “You’re not suggesting.” This after a half hour’s drive. Out across one of the bridges to the East Shore, then winding up through the neighborhood to the ridgeline. Already from here, the city was laid out below, comprehensible in its pieces. Downtown and the river neighborhoods. The smoky flanks of the slope rising up to the Heights where the fires were winking still.

  “It’s an old radio tower,” Eve said. “All these warnings are overkill since the whole thing was powered down in the eighties.”

  “You do realize how old I am.”

  Eve was pacing the dry grass, expertly assessing the fence.

  “I used to live out there,” I told her, pointing out west across the city.

  “Yes, I knew that,” she said, still looking for something. �
�I did read about you, back in the day.”

  I wondered what day that might have been. A day now gone. A day now fading as ours was here. A day on which the sun was sinking in the west, making long shadows and agitating the sky with its tracer bullets of orange and red. A reflection of the city still burning below.

  “Radio tower,” I muttered to myself, just as she found the breech she was looking for and pulled up the wire fence. Then, in her other hand, I saw the wire cutters and realized she had made the opening herself. Evey Latour. The things you thought you knew about the famous.

  We passed into the courtyard of dead thistles and beige bramble that surrounded the feet of the tower. Four enormous steel legs, splayed, and looking to be firmly enough anchored, bolted to concrete slabs. But looking up, the eye rose through ever more whimsical layers of the structure as it thinned and thinned, Eiffelesque, waisting itself into a dainty thing up there in the sky. It loomed over us, ancient. And where it touched the sky and thin traces of cloud beyond, you could see it tottering in place, groaning and creaking in its joints.

  “Three hundred and fifty feet,” Eve said. “Built in 1957. It’s been replaced by the radio masts you see lined up on Route 45 West. But up top of this one you have your best views of the city. You think it’s good from the ridge, wait until you get up there. It’s like being in a helicopter.”

  I enunciated the words carefully for her: “You must be completely mad.”

  Eve smiled at me. “It’s worth it. Promise.”

  I believed her. And she was going to show me how to do it. I’ll be right there, she said. I’ll be just one step ahead of you.

  “Behind me might be better,” I said. “That way you can catch me if I fall.”

  You won’t fall, Eve told me. And following was indeed the far better choice. Thom Pegg the daredevil. Life, I thought, was surely upended. We crossed to the base of the tower and she showed me how the stairs down to the ground had long ago been hacksawed away. She dismissed this obstacle with a shrug, a roll of the eyes. The legs of the structure were made of wide steel lattice. She had gloves. This incredible woman had brought extra gloves for me, for just this purpose. I put them on and grabbed ahold of the steel, and up we went, one cautious step at a time to the bottom of the severed stairway. Up and on solid footing in a long walkway that squared around the inside of the tower’s four legs. I could see other platforms like this overhead: rectilinear concentrics rising like some kind of gun sight for aiming moon shots.