The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  And here came the founder of Double Vision in his leather car coat and his rumpled shirt, white hair, uneven shave. He toddled in towards her, stood grandfatherly close. Eve smelled talc and cookie dough as he whispered: “I’m glad you’re here, Evey. Are you well since your father? A terrible loss. Henri was so important as a journalist and a man, I feel I can really say that for the city, the whole country. For anyone who knew his drive and engagement. His essential what. His essential Latour truthfulness. Courage, yes. You look like him.”

  He took her hand in both of his without another word, only smiling softly. They weren’t shaking hands. Or at least not in a way she’d shaken hands before. He seemed to be working it to and fro, testing the joints up her arm and back into her spine. As if he were gauging her weight before a chiropractic manipulation. And Eve felt an inappropriate laugh rising within her. A laugh she could imagine sharing with Otis later, who would see the absurdity of the moment. The packaging of her life story for sale by a company called Double Vision. Only she thought of the great Henri just then. The drive, the engagement. The essential Latour truthfulness. And as the Double Vision founder straightened and let go of her hand, the comedy of the moment died.

  NICK WAS A FORMER GERBER BABY. His face on a million bottles of pureed peas, tomatoes and rice, chicken and pasta. To forestall any discussion of “destiny” or “luck,” Nick would discuss this episode only in scientific terms: his infant head to body mass ratio, micronomically symmetrical ear and eye placement, and most important, the correct shape of mouth and lips. Nick, then and now, had a lovely smile. Eve would never have imagined herself with someone more than a decade older than she was, but the smile had certainly been part of it. From the first time she saw it—introduced by a friend whose husband played squash with Nick—Eve had read a graceful self-ease in that smile. Evidence of a man who didn’t steal glances at his own reflection or worry overly about shirt choices. A couple years post-Reza, who’d lived almost entirely as if guided by the impression he made on others, these qualities in Nick, all captured in an easy, symmetrical smile, seemed to Eve most attractive.

  Blind genetics, Nick would say, the program of cellular certainties. Nick was an atheist of the new school, which meant that he had moved past argument, finding anyone still harboring transcendental yearnings to be an acute embarrassment. So, while he courted Eve avidly, seeming always to anticipate her moods, to find the right idea for the moment—a quiet dinner or a day at the dog races—from their first discussion of it, he refused any suggestion of fate in his Gerber history. He’d been expertly selected, picked out of a stroller in a parking lot by an ad man whose signature was at the bottom of a contract Nick kept framed in his den. Berwick Chad, VP Talent Development. Nick went looking for him later in life and learned Chad had died of lung cancer some years before. Nick’s own family, for their part, never discussed the Gerber business after the fact. Going back, they were landowners and operated a number of flour mills along the river. Nick’s parents were astute with his small windfall, silently investing every penny, then passing away early. So they’d handed Nick his adult life in the form of a house and a tract of riverfront land where the mills had been, which became the first important area in the city for redevelopment. It all unfolded as if by plan. Build the condominiums. Sell them. Make the money. Retire to write the wine column. It read like self-creation, but Eve knew Nick occasionally experienced it as a mechanical given, something over which he’d had no control from the beginning. And that thought could make the days heavy, even for an atheist. Confining Nick to his den, deepening the frown lines and the silence.

  Deep inside Double Vision, meanwhile—deep into a long montage of images and music that the story managers had put together about Eve’s gold-medal race in Geneva—Eve herself was struggling to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand. She squinted in the lowered light of the boardroom and tried to focus on the film, a jump-cut affair laid over a soundtrack of pulsing urgency and cultural import. Didgeridoos and beatboxes, bassoons and a Franco-Celtic fiddle coloring aural depths beneath the grainy images of her famous race. She wasn’t bored by the story or embarrassed to hear it again. She’d learned to live with its retelling because it happened a lot. But to have the visuals and audio ramped up to this degree made her distinctly anxious. The Double Vision folks didn’t appreciate perhaps that Eve had the psychological interior of this event stamped on her memory. So, despite the soaring music, she knew what paralyzing nerves had threatened to overcome her there at the start of the pursuit portion of the race, her breathing obviously far too fast, her glances back towards the waiting pack of opponents far too frequent. Chief among these opponents, Giselle Von Kemper standing cool in her skis, rifle snug between her shoulder blades. A slab-muscled woman from Innsbruck, incumbent gold-medal holder, savage media darling. And still the strong favorite, despite Eve’s having bested her in the sprint the day before. Eve at twenty-four was a wisp compared to her. She remembered thinking there in the tapering seconds before the starter’s pistol how her own thighs were approximately half the diameter of Von Kemper’s. And with that thought, the Austrian aimed a cool smile in her direction, said a word that Eve never caught, then turned her face back to the trail. Fatless, aerodynamic. A human bullet train.

  Eve’s eyes left the screen, again, seeking reprieve out the window that ran down the west side of the boardroom. There was a telescope standing at the window, a vintage touch in the modern boardroom. It stood on a tripod aimed out at the view, and Eve longed to get up and look through it at the roofs opposite, to look out over that same hidden world that she and Ali had once explored. And with that exact thought, something moved on the roof of the old Peavey Block directly across from Double Vision on the west side of Jeffers Avenue.

  Eve was alert, all at once. Wide awake, curiosity alight. The Peavey Block roof was lower than the eighth-floor boardroom where she sat, so it was laid out for her to examine. And that was definitely a person over there, half obscured at the shadow line. And then, as it turned, or adjusted position, she saw that it was a young man: lean frame, down on his knees on the gravel and moss. He was muscled in over some business, hidden from street-level viewing. Eve guessed he was applying pressure to something, flexing his body, his shoulders hunched, his narrow waist twisting. While around him the rooftops seemed to join in a single surface, stretching across the ridgeline, then disappearing over the lip of the hill towards downtown. Roof ducts and ventilator shafts, air-conditioning units, satellite dishes. Eve imagined herself down there with the young man, looking over his shoulder as she might have done with Ali in their day: rooftop running, floating from parapet to cornice, from brick to gravel, shingle to sky.

  In the boardroom, the on-screen music ramped and the Double Vision staffers hunched forward in their chairs. The visioning managers and plot leaders and product narrative specialists. All pulling for her, urging her on in the half-light. It was a miniature re-enactment of what had happened in the city those years before. Everyone had been paying attention to her training. She was the local girl. And the whole city had watched in amazement as she’d beaten Von Kemper in the qualifying sprints by five seconds, the rest of the pack another full twenty seconds behind them. A stunning, unexpected result. So now not only was the whole city watching, the whole world was watching as Eve was poised to start the pursuit. She would go first, followed five seconds later by Von Kemper, followed twenty seconds later by the rest of them in the order they’d finished the sprint. And in every watching mind—those rooting for and against Eve—it was a one-in-a-thousand shot she could hold them off. There were simply too many of them. And Von Kemper was too strong, too sure, too calm. So everyone leaned forward, tense and waiting, as the starter raised his arm. As the pistol cracked in the cold air.

  Nick had once told her the circumstances surrounding his own viewing of this material on television. He was at the offices of the real estate development firm he was then working with, and someone came into his office to say
the race was live on the television in the common room. Nick was game. He went down the hall. He remembered watching Eve’s breath making ghosts in the alpine air. But he remembered a particular feeling too. Not love at first sight, Nick said, as if he needed to assure her on that point. But a certainty that they were going to meet. And the deep irrationality of that thought so unsettled him, as it was just a superstition in the end, an ignorant hunch, that he excused himself to the men’s room before the race began, where he splashed cold water on his face and stared himself down in the mirror. Snap out of it, man. He returned just in time to see the race begin. In retrospect, he told Eve some months after they’d started dating, he also thought he might have had a touch of food poisoning.

  Now the archival footage rolled, Eve surging across the start line and heading down the trail. Von Kemper quickly in pursuit, her skis raising Valkyrian plumes of powder as she tried immediately to close the gap. In Double Vision, Eve watched and relived those straining first moments. And then the shock, as Eve seemed to stagger, to jolt in her boots, then tumble with agonizing slowness sideways and off the path. There was a glittering aura of snow crystals and camera flashes. The air humming instantly with alarm and reappraisal as the French announcer famously pronounced, in just those opening seconds: Eve Latour has fallen!

  Then the French announcer said it again. And as if to punctuate the epic seriousness of Eve’s failure—including the failure of judgment implied by being born to a French family that had immigrated to North America three generations previously—he rephrased and focused the thought using the full version of her name, fully inflected with the mother tongue: Genevieve Latour! Genevieve Latour will not win the biathlon gold!

  He said this because Von Kemper was hard on her now, storming past Eve in a mist of snow and heading down the trail towards the first targets. But even so, it was early for him to reach his conclusion. Like all those watching, live and on television, he didn’t know what had really just happened. Eve hadn’t stumbled because she was clumsy. She’d stumbled because something had hit her, just above the ankle of her left boot. Something small, hard and traveling at extremely high speed. Like a bullet, exactly. An instant curtain of pain fell over her. But as she lay on her side, gripping her ankle, she saw in the faces of the nearby officials that they hadn’t heard a thing. Not a bullet from a gun, then. What? On the trail, right in the track left by one of her skis, lay a steel ball bearing. And all around the point of impact on her ankle raged a wildfire across frantic nerve endings.

  Slingshot, it would later turn out. A rather serious-looking hunting slingshot made of aluminum and surgical tubing wielded by a crazy Belgian on a balcony with clear sight lines. Now here was a random piece of bad luck. A man obsessed with the beautiful Eve Latour, whose apartment was wallpapered with photographs of her. A crazy Belgian who decided a good way to get Eve’s attention would be to take her opponent out of the race. He’d been aiming for Von Kemper, he told police.

  But all that would take days to come out. Eve didn’t have days, a thought that shafted through her as she lay writhing on the snow. And if it didn’t quite ice the pain (bruised Achilles, hairline talus fracture), the thought did reorder the hierarchy of her senses. As Von Kemper blew by her, Eve’s pain was forced to take its place behind other concerns.

  And here it came. The heroics. Eve Latour skiing and shooting on what everybody would later understand was a broken ankle. Gutting it out into the history books. She followed Von Kemper around that course, closing, closing. Five times two and a half kilometers. She came magnificently from behind, her face a rictus of pain and concentration. And then the miraculous final sprint, passing Von Kemper on the down leg. The five-shot burst on the final targets, her breath ripping in and out of her. It was like shooting off the deck of a ship in a storm. But she knocked them down and sprinted for the finish line. Von Kemper dethroned yet somehow ecstatic, as if in relief. The Innsbruck Ibex scooped Eve up from where she lay crumpled in the snow on the far side of the finish line. Von Kemper hefted Eve as if she were a child. Kissed her neck, weeping, carried her around.

  Eve escaped briefly to the window again as the film drew to its longestablished close. Her eyes drifted out past the telescope to find the young man still bent over that same task, applying his strength to the same stubborn problem. Around him the littered evidence of human traffic. The empty drink containers and painted marks. The plastic lean-to abandoned in the elbow of a service shaft. The young man tremored, his back shifting and now, suddenly, unfurling as if something had given way. He might have been reefing on a stubborn lug nut, but whatever it was had surrendered, and the young man sprawled on his side in the gravel, then bolted to his feet, holding one hand, hunched over, grimacing. Then standing and staring straight up at the sky. Mouth open. Yelling out in exasperation, Eve thought, although she couldn’t hear it. Now standing straight again, pacing and shaking his hand. Eve could see him more clearly now. Black hair, lean and wiry. Darker skin and taller, but otherwise so strongly reminiscent of Ali.

  The film was done. The lights came up. There was a moment when a break for coffee was proposed, but Eve motioned for them to continue, her attention now hard split as the charts of personal data went up on the screen, the survey results, the storyboards of her life with turning points and moments of capsize. The way these meshed with the story requirements of existing Double Vision clients. A training shoe manufacturer, a climbing outfitter, a financial institution. The Chinese Winter Tourism Authority. Heathrow Airport. The list was preliminary. She could say no to anyone, they assured her. There would always be more.

  Eve listened and kept her eyes in motion, nodding and communicating her full attention, while stealing glances at the rooftop opposite. The young man was in his late twenties, she guessed. And he had either finished or abandoned what had brought him up there because he was packing his things now, loading them into a black nylon knapsack, a certain irritable haste in his movements. And then, something unexpected.

  He left the knapsack on the gravel and moved to the rear of the Peavey Block rooftop, to the very lip of the parapet, where he leaned over and planted his hands on the aluminum flashing. He gripped and regripped, as if testing the surface, then upended himself into a handstand, right at the edge of the rooftop, sixty-odd feet above a sheer drop to the pavement behind the building. His body rigid and quivering. His legs first straight, then spreading slowly into an open V. He held that position while all around Eve the air was filled with a discussion of her attribute catalog, known qualities and values. The number of hits generated when googling the phrase “I love Eve Latour,” 837,578 as of that morning.

  She was pulled back into the room, where Ganesh gave her two thumbs up. By the time she was able to check back out the window, the parapet was empty. And Eve’s heart was instantly racing. She heaved up halfway out of her chair, about to bolt to the window, thinking that he must have fallen. Then she noticed that the young man’s knapsack was also gone and she sank back into her chair.

  MARCUS WALKED HER TO THE ELEVATOR, then rode down with her. He said: “Take time. Talk to Nick.”

  “I’m a little unsure.”

  “We won’t push.”

  She finally let go the laugh. It cracked the air in the elevator. The Double Vision founding partner did not startle or wince. He laughed too. He was a natural.

  She said: “I guess I’m having a mixed reaction. Licensing. Buying the rights to a part of my life story, to copy and reproduce. To sell. Is it just me or is that weird?”

  She had words streaming through. Movieland. Brands. Messages. Promises. Values.

  Finally she said: “I find it weird.”

  “Weird or threatening?” Marcus asked her.

  Which was also insightful. At this point, Geneva was no longer a story she controlled, but the edited footage made it seem a thing over which she had never been in control. That, in turn, cast her future in a questionable light.

  “Threatening,” Eve said, relieved
to say it.

  “Think of magazines and newspapers. You give them interviews.”

  She nodded. Not so often anymore. But when they asked, she did.

  “So you let them have your story. It’s the same transaction that we’re proposing. Just a different medium.”

  She was watching the numbers click. Six, five, four. This calm voice from the space just to her right. “The journalist asks you: Evey, where were you born?”

  The elevator dinged arrival at the lobby. He held the door with a large white palm, then stepped out with her into the wide, shining room. Through high glass doors she saw the buses and traffic cones, the trenched-out sewer works of Jeffers Avenue which led up to the plaza.

  “You say: I was a kid from the East Shore. Right? But I’d come across town and troll the Heights with my brother, Ali. We’d take pictures with an old camera we found at a junk shop. Buy copies of True Crime and read them over at Kozel’s Delicatessen. Right? Maybe you say more. Maybe you tell them how you never told your parents where you were going. Or that Ali was your childhood hero.”

  Eve brought her attention back inside. “Did you talk to him?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know where he is either. Both Nick and your mother were eager to talk, though. They’re fans of yours.”

  “They’re not fans,” Eve said, voice sharpening.

  “Supporters. People who love you.”

  Trucks were passing, sides painted huge. Courier services, commercial bakeries, moving companies. The one that stopped just now had a frog on the side, huge red eyes locked on Eve alone. A cable company. Eve released a long breath, stabilizing herself. She didn’t show anger often, but Marcus had just pushed her very close.