The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “Good?” she said.

  Thumbs-up. My breath in long, ragged pulls already. “Roger,” I said.

  “Then up we go.” And Eve turned to the bottom of the access stairs, crisscrossing upwards in their impossible length. Up into the lowering darkness. Wind high, clearing away the cloud cover as I watched. Stars just shimmering to life up there.

  I can’t tell you much about what I was thinking during this climb. I was scared primarily, moving each hand with exaggerated care from one hold to the next. Gripping a railing here or the edge of the stair above me. I suppose I was thinking of her, impossible not to when you’re following someone. As Eve rose above me I was comparing myself to her. I was rising up towards some vision, full of fear. Eve was bounding up the stairs ahead, step after step with unflagging commitment. She was eating up the altitude, consuming the moment at hand.

  Below us the land spiraled away, dropping into the shadows of evening that were already stretching, ribbing the landscape. Shadows a hundred yards long. Houses covering the block with the black of their silhouette. I saw the spread of the small airfield near the river, then the lights of the international airport out on the eastern fringe of the city. I saw the river as it broke into view, the shining back of it, slowly twisting through the city. The silver break of the waterfall. Its sharp contour bringing back childhood views, postcards, old memories.

  Up and up. High enough to see all of Stofton, River Park, the Heights. The grid of streets familiar here. I could see a church where I was taken as a child. I could see its bell tower. Our Lady of Lourdes. Hadn’t thought of it in thirty years. I could see a restaurant where Jennifer and I used to go for dinner. Cheap Italian joint. When Micah came along we took him too and there was a booth table they gave us where he could kick off his shoes and lie down after eating. Jennifer and me lingering over plates of lasagna and a half carafe of sharp red.

  The river arched its back below me and I could make out where the power was still out in swathes on the south side and across the East Shore below. It highlighted the scattered headlights of those few cars that were out and brought to mind the troubles, the curfew, the city still reeling.

  The wind was loud enough that Eve had to raise her voice to speak to me. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m scared silly,” I told her.

  “Hang in there,” Eve said, right up next to my ear now. “This is the last platform on the main stairs. The top deck is up a ladder.”

  Air currents and suspension. I felt a certain excitement I don’t remember ever feeling in an airplane. Always plain dread in those circumstances. The sad dread of the helpless. Here, I was host to a different fear. I felt the age of the structure. The whole thing buzzing and wobbling in its joints and rivets. I was looking over her shoulder at the spindle of ladder to which she had gestured, my own hand gripping the railing. Maybe this kind of fear was better. Not being strapped in a seat. Not being hurtled through the air by a machine.

  I looked at the ladder, my hands instinctively tightening on the rail. I was holding it as though Eve might try pulling me away. As though I might have to make a stand right there. She was smiling, rather sweetly for the horror of my dawning realization. Her head bobbing backwards to indicate that I should follow her. Eve was smiling as if she was enjoying this little thing we were sharing. And I must admit I was enjoying it too. For all my anxiety, my racing heart rate and thoughts, my self-doubt. It couldn’t be denied that it was just Eve Latour and me up that tower, and I took sudden, enormous pleasure from that idea. My organs—my chatty spleen, my gossipy, insinuating inner reaches—were completely silent. Completely still.

  The ladder disappeared from the middle of the platform up into a tube of lattice steel. The tube was designed to prevent you from falling outwards off the ladder, as you might if you caught even one glimpse of the ground, down there through the shredding steel below. The distance was the distance to death. That was how the normal brain worked, unwilling to suspend its faith in gravity. Its belief that gravity must ultimately win.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I mean seriously. Isn’t this high enough?”

  No, it wasn’t high enough. We could see the city perfectly well from this last of the inner platforms. But above us, even I could appreciate, was an experience of another order. Up there we would be past the structure and into the air that belonged to no one, that high and unsuspended place just short of the stars. The vantage point called for in the calculations she’d made just that afternoon as she cracked the code, the meaning of the map.

  Hunched over the table at Kozel’s. I was watching when Eve did it. She’d explained that the map had been left for her by a young man named Rabbit. That she knew it was for her to puzzle over, to solve. And then to use, somehow.

  Then she said: “And I’ve finally gotten it. I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier.”

  “See what?” I asked her.

  “These numbers here in the margin. They’re not coordinates or secret codes. Rabbit—of course. What was I thinking?”

  “What are they?”

  “Phone numbers.”

  Eve had been poring over that map. She’d run her fingers from Stofton up the Slopes, then along a series of red lines to the west. Back again. Rethinking. Retracing. Fingers to the margins to check numbers and coordinates. Then to the top of the hill, to the Heights. To one building there.

  Phone numbers. She hadn’t recognized them because of all the unusual exchanges. But now she put her finger on one of them, tapping in nervous excitement. New cell phones, she said. These were new cellular exchanges.

  “I should have guessed Rabbit was using cell phones, but I just didn’t put it together,” she said to me, eyes alight.

  We cored our way up that final length in fading light. And when I crawled free of the top of the ladder, gasping again for breath, I found myself on a platform less than ten feet square. Eve already at the rail, face outwards into the wind. Standing above her city, just short of the stars.

  I stayed on my knees at first, too breathless, too frightened to stand. Then I pulled myself up using the railing. The lowest rail, the middle one, the top. I stood there swaying like a toddler: ankles tentative, knees in question. And when I seemed to have steadied myself, she turned to me and I saw that she had her phone out and the map too, folded over into a tight square. She was holding these at the ready. About to make the call, throw the switch.

  She asked me, “Any reason you can think of why I shouldn’t do this?”

  “Panic in the street?” I tried. “More rioting? Martial law?”

  “Why would that happen?”

  “You met this Rabbit character, not me. What do you think he had in mind?”

  “Something new and without explanation,” she said. “Something so beautiful nobody could be afraid.”

  “You could phone him and ask,” I said. But I knew she couldn’t, because the author of this moment, this young Rabbit, this young man whose imagination had captivated her, was now long gone.

  “You don’t have to tell me any of this,” I said to her in Kozel’s when we got to this part of the story. “We two having just met and all. Or met again.”

  But she wanted to. Eve wanted to tell me about waking up in a lumpy, unfamiliar bed. Naked in the sheets. She wanted to tell me about her reflection in the little mirror over the sink in the kitchen. A cracked and wavering image. It had taken her five minutes before she noticed the obvious thing that he’d left for her. A wall mural in black felt pen. A sketch of a path chosen, a rail line north, the name of a town, the name of a lane with some landmarks noted: blackberry cane, broken gate, hidden key. And across the top of this diorama Rabbit had written in block letters, in a font and phrase she remembered immediately:

  You’ll Find It Where You Last Saw It.

  We looked down over the darkened cityscape. The guttering flames were still to be seen, the intricate dance of fire truck and police lights high on the facades of buildings as they passe
d, action now rising again as the evening approached. Looting. The big-box stores were surrounded by guards. Running skirmishes, chaos, flames.

  I looked at her. Green eyes momentarily held, checked. Her lips were a full line, her chin sharp to its tiny dimple. I saw her eyes behind the sights of a target rifle and imagined why they would be effective there. A certain coolness and a certainty about life. She was balanced now, our Evey. And from that balance came her last moment of hesitation. She put a finger to the corner of her lips, tracing it backwards to her cheekbone.

  Night was coming. It was conceivable we had climbed all this way for nothing. But Eve had an idea and I could only hope it was the right one. The idea that would throw back the cover. The idea that would reveal.

  Eve keyed in the number and held the phone between us. Leaning close, I could hear the nubby tremolo of ringing.

  And then, out there, far out over the expanse of the city, a prick of light. We both forgot all about where we were, let go of the railing, stood a bit straighter in the rising wind.

  A pulse of blue a split second off the sound of the ring tone in both our ears. The light pulsed and held, then faded. Then pulsed and held. Halogen blue. Intense and pure. A brilliant tone on the darkened cityscape, penetrating and singular, unlike anything else to be seen on the blackened grid below. To my eye, the light seemed to come from very near the plaza. From just beyond Meme Media.

  “The Peavey Block,” she said.

  It pulsed to life, a life waking, a brand-new idea. It came out of nowhere. Just at the crest of the hill, near the plaza. A blue beacon, fluttering. And bouncing now too, skipping somehow. The ring tone stuttered and shifted. And there was a new blink of light below. So close as to first appear that the original light had merely shifted. That it was bouncing back and forth. Then another, then another.

  Eve’s hand holding the phone dropped to her side as the call-forwarding sequence unfolded below. WaferFones. Phones calling phones calling other phones, calling back. The lights launching their rhythms across the city below, a slow spread, sweeping into the western neighborhoods. There was at first no pattern to it. The lights seemed only to sparkle and cycle. Organic action. They seemed to excite one another, blinking on in shapes and lines, forming into clusters and spreading, then bouncing back, then relighting, then falling silent and still as other areas of the city ignited. It was, at first, just a beautiful thing. The maddest kind of fireworks imaginable. The city itself alight with itself. And reflecting off the low cloud. The sky alight, shimmering like the northern lights. Down the hill. On the roofs of condo towers in the Slopes. At the tip of old water towers, across the tops of billboards. Opening now to the river, where they spread and spread, spooling blue across the West and East Flats and River Park.

  We stood speechless, swaying in place while the lights continued to rebound and refract. They blinked on through the blacked-out parts of the city, bridging the spaces below. The whole of the hill and the river neighborhoods pinwheeled now, an antic blue celebration at the roof level, aimed at the sky. Shooting north, east, west, south.

  To the bridges. Onto the bridges.

  “Look at that!”

  Eve held my arm as the lights touched one bridge and then another. Then jumped out over the black of the water and headed into the city center, where even in the lights of the financial district the flickering blue could still be seen. Arcing and dancing in the hive of downtown. Beautiful yes, but more. Perhaps I only really saw it in full when it reached this height, the whole city now jumping and sparking with blue lights, dancing lines and patterns from the north, the east, the west, the south, lights racing across the East Shore directly below us, jumping from a house here to another one over there. It seemed to come from no place that could be imagined. A spectacular and inexplicable mandala. It was the universe. The before picture. Before the city, its buildings and cars, freeways and cell phone towers. Before Eve. Before me. Celestial shapes and patterns, galactic swirls, planet birth and planet death. All the deities too. I could see them patterned there, even as the lights slowly extinguished themselves below us, withdrawing, winking out, throwing last flurries across the landscape. Last flourishes. Last runs.

  The final lights we saw were a single row that streaked up the hillside. A last sequencing of calls that started in Stofton and raced to the crest of the hill, to the plaza, where they seemed to launch off that originating building and disappear in a streak to the sky, which was itself now just firming up its display of stars. Winking to life as if in answer to the call.

  I had my arm around Eve. I don’t mind admitting that I was weeping. I had no idea why. Or I didn’t for several minutes until we both noticed the standstill below. The city seemed to have fallen absolutely silent. No sirens. No rotors. No grid of diesel trucks on the hills. There were buses stopped on the bridges. I could make out cars pulled over on the riverside boulevard, people standing next to open doors.

  Eve had her hand over her mouth. We both waited. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. And then the car horns started to blow. All across the city. Some new thing unleashed. Eve put her other hand to her face, one on either side now. I was smiling uncontrollably. Spectacular, I said. Amazing. Terrific. I have never seen anything like that. Can you hear them? People are yelling down there. People are honking their horns. Which I might have done myself, had I been at ground level and seen that flowering of light above.

  What had he done, Rabbit? What on earth had he done? He had lifted us. Suspended the laws of nature and made us weightless. And as we climbed down, even now, it’s impossible for me to explain the sensation I was experiencing except to say that the laws remained suspended. I was hearing voices. No hallucination. Actual voices. An actual choir of them coming right out of the wind and carrying me down. Madness, I know. But better than other madnesses I have known. There it was, three-dimensional and auditory and real. No particular melody that I remember, only the sense of many voices singing the same notes. The same simple lines. Trumpets, tubas. The shimmery dance of cymbals. A beautiful madness. A saving, restoring madness.

  We were laughing, reminding each other of what we’d seen. I wasn’t cold. I’d lost my vertigo. We were skipping down, back to earth. Last light was an intense rose hemisphere to the west. Down and down under that floral dome, now ringing us, haloing us. A bid from the dying west.

  I climbed down the lattice of the tower. I dropped to the ground and turned to help her but Eve jumped past me. She sprang down to the balls of her feet. And as she touched the ground, I remember how the earth shuddered through her. I can still see this, so clearly. The whole of it pushing up and touching her, rolling through her body. Eve rippled with the earth.

  We stood for a moment in the wonderful chaos of the memory. My voices were still there, faintly. My feet in the grass. The honking still carrying on below. People calling. Still no sirens, not one. No helicopter sound for the first time in days. We were at a great distance from the Heights. But I felt the pressure systems slackening. And as our shoulders touched and I put my arm around her again in the falling light, here’s what I imagined. I imagined that we were less helpless for the mystery of the thing we’d seen. That shimmering blue-light dance of hope.

  Maybe Eve felt the same. We were not quite strangers, but we still hung on to one another there. We held each other in the long shadow of the tower. In minutes it would be dark, the rose light gone. All shadows blended to a single one. Night.

  “Write about this,” Eve said to me. Just a trace of wet remaining at the corner of her eyes. Of course, what came next was going to be harder for her. I only had to stay for a while. I only had to make a phone call to Spratley, do whatever had to be done there. Then stay for a while. Write about it. Sure, that’s probably what I would do.

  I let her go, finally. I was gripping her and she was standing there gamely, looking at me. Nicely, I have to say. I remember the look. Off she went, across the grass towards the pickup truck. “No, no,” I said. “You go ahe
ad. I’ll make my own way back to the hotel.”

  Eve objected. “You’re way up the top of East Shore here.”

  “Go on. I’m fine. I like to walk. I’ll flag a taxi.”

  And I was fine. I knew a good East Shore intersection for the purpose of getting a cab. I remembered my hotel. Bit of a letdown getting your memory back, if you’re me. Seeing in all clarity the memories I’d seen fit to assemble. My life. My project. But that’s me, a lesser subject.

  There Eve goes. God, look at her. Off to face what she has to face, that harder thing. Blue lights sparking in both our minds. So much beauty and mystery dancing across the face of her city just at the moment she left it. Left us.

  Off north, naturally. Up that lane. To that spot in the blackberries where you turn in. To the mailbox with the hidden key. Would Rabbit be waiting there for her? Hard to say. I wasn’t sure it mattered. Here’s the thing I knew: that one of them would be there waiting for the other. One of them would get there first. One of them would get there and wait. I believed that. There was easily enough certainty in her stride, in her one long wave back out of the truck window as she drove away, that I could have faith in that. Eve and Rabbit had been set free. And their freedom was each other.

  As for me, I’d experienced a kind of liberation too. That is, I had no sense of wanting anything in particular. Life would continue for as long as it did. But I had all I needed for its duration, for any Mov in store.