The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “I quit smoke almost a year ago, you know that. My memory came back zing.”

  “Oh right, all super straight now. Parkour straight-edge superman. That’s our Rabbit.”

  “Not Parkour. Freesteal.”

  Beyer made a face of ultimate weariness. “Whatever,” he said. “You’re my crew until we’re square. Make it seventy-five hundred with interest. You work that off.”

  And even though Rabbit had not agreed, Beyer then chose not to press any further for a commitment. It was his way of persuasion, Rabbit knew, having watched Beyer play people like fish. Reel a bit, then let them run. Rabbit knew he was running now, while Beyer leaned back in his seat and drank down his drink, and then a second. Talking shit. Talking shop. Because they had a chance to really move this thing forward together, didn’t they? They were going to wrap street art back around on top of itself like a goddamn Möbius strip. And when it came time that Rabbit knew he had to be out of that room, Beyer begged him to stay a little longer.

  Have a drink. Come on. Get you in the zone. Tell me a bit about what it is you’re doing. Come on. Paint. Wheatpaste. What. Nothing at all?

  All right, later man. Give me a hug. Come on stand up and hug your brother Beyer because you are my brother and I mean that. No. I mean it sincerely. Jabez will never love you as I love you.

  Truth. Word.

  And then they were apart, Rabbit in familiar streets, down the far east side. Eighty dollars in his pocket. An hour walking, sirens all around, lights flashing past him going the other way. Police cars and vans. A truck painted green with soldiers inside. He felt the city contorting, a mood spiraling out of control.

  Alto, Alto. He thought of that name, painted in that hidden tunnel, his hand folded over Beyer’s bills. He made a general request for peace to the saint of this holy darkness, these Alto’s own streets, his own secret night. And it didn’t seem eccentric at all that he should make this request. Let Beyer and Jabez war. Let them commerce and revolution each other to death. Rabbit would quietly pay his respects to Alto. A new way.

  No traffic where he was just then. Upturned shopping carts, mattresses, dead tires, major appliances rusting through. Railway transformer twelve feet high that someone had freshly postered over entirely to look like an enormous clock. Dialed in to 9 p.m. The beginning of the night. This night. The final night. The inauguration of designated time.

  He was running now. All the way out to the hardware store at a steady sidewalk canter. All the way out to that big place the size of a bus station on a huge parking lot next to a huge furniture store next to a huge place that sold nothing but gas fireplaces. They called it 24/7 City, because it was always open. And there you could find the hardware store to end all hardware stores. Rabbit walked from the darkness into the brilliance of its parking lot lights, in through doors that sighed and parted, into air that was fridge cool. Rabbit walked between shelves the height of cathedral walls. That wood and fertilizer smell, the paint agitated into the atmosphere by a machine that wobbled at blinding speed.

  A whole section devoted to lights. Here, look at this. There was a banner hanging from the ceiling so high overhead it looked like sky writing and it stopped Rabbit every time.

  It read: Illuminate Your World.

  THURSDAY TO FIRST LIGHT

  OCTOBER 24

  EVE

  IN THE PLAZA EAST OF MEME MEDIA, the police laid down a cordon of concrete median dividers, about half a ton each. They arranged these in a long line, end to end, locked to one another with hook-and-eye loops made of rebar. Then they strung long spools of barbed wire over the top. They blocked the alley mouths too and began herding the gathering crowds down to the southeast corner of the plaza, down past the band riser and towards the fountains and waterfalls. The protesters in black resisted, chanting. Others who’d arrived since the story broke stayed in their quiet groups, perplexed and watching, as if they’d come there at someone else’s bidding and were now waiting for instructions.

  Someone yelled: “Information! What we want is honest information!”

  The police arrested a man who’d been seen tipping over a mailbox. A woman blowing soap bubbles nearby was also held but then released.

  A bulldozer roared and chattered and scraped. Men in combats stood on street corners. One of the bars on the side of the plaza had a lawn-bowling green on the rooftop patio, league games normally in progress at that hour under the lights. The police had shut it down and commandeered the greens as an assembly area. Men and women with pint glasses stood on the sidewalk outside a side door facing away from the plaza. They didn’t seem to have any idea what was happening.

  “Why have regular police SWAT units been replaced with military units?” asked a reporter from a local channel at the first news conference. But there was no answer, or no possible answer. There was an appeal for understanding instead.

  “Guys,” the police spokesperson said. She waved her hands. Her name was Pam Pavich. “Guys, there isn’t much to report here. The situation is very fluid. I’m being told that there’s been no contact with the hostage taker. So we’re all totally in the dark.”

  Pavich was local, raised out in the east end. Nice-looking lady in her fifties. Redhead. Maybe five foot three but not to mess with. By midnight she’d been replaced. The colonel who stepped in had to deal with everyone’s dismay that he wasn’t Pam Pavich, which is to say cute, gutsy, local and candid. He was dour and stammered and had hardly anything to say. Journalists took his presence as an indication that things were going poorly in some way hidden from them.

  “Sir, I wonder if you can tell us what rules of engagement have been given to the troops arriving, and what units these soldiers have been taken from.”

  No answer. Can’t answer. You have to understand the position here.

  All of this at the same moment a fistfight started between two men at the end of the square, although nobody could agree on anything except that the fight started without warning. The men were watching the front of the studio one moment, then swinging punches at each other the next. It was maybe a political disagreement, or one of them had been blocking the other’s view. Nobody jumped in to stop it, in any case, because right then there were shots from the top of the square and the world froze.

  A policeman brought on this incident. One of the remaining local cops at the barricades, thirty years in the force. Several cameras caught him as he did what he did. As he lumbered to his feet and put his gun down on the hood of a squad car. As he squared his shoulders with resolve and began to walk towards the front steps of the Meme complex with his hands held high and wide, palms open to show he was unarmed. At the top of the steps, he cupped a hand over his eyes and peered inside. Then he yelled: “Come on out and talk. Let’s just talk this whole thing through.”

  Thirty seconds passed. Maybe a minute. Then there was a quick movement behind the glass, far enough back into the darkness of the lobby that it barely registered on the broadcast footage later. A shifting shadow, then the crack of gunfire. A ragged flare of orange. And the whole sheet of glass in front of the officer exploded and he went onto his back and rolled down the steps. Two more shots came out over his head while he scrambled behind a barricade. Unhurt but shaken, although that was not the story told and retold afterwards. It was instead how in the silent seconds that followed, while the entire plaza, the entire watching city dropped a degree in temperature, broken glass in the front window, a ragged aperture, everything poised, a voice cut through clearly: “Don’t fire. Do not fire. Cease fire.”

  Many people heard the words. But nobody could sort out who had spoken, who had called off the storm of violence formed and ready there, sharp and immediate in those quivering seconds. Everything locked up with the words and in a double bind. To act or not to act. Knowing either way innocent people would die.

  Don’t fire. Do not fire. Cease fire.

  Everything locked up tight for seconds, for a minute, while the cameras moved to better positions and glossy-haire
d anchors spun in their chairs to face the lights, lips already moving around the lines they were about to say.

  Five, four, three (two, one). Action.

  Shots have been fired . . .

  A burst of gunfire has . . .

  Reports of rifle fire . . .

  More disturbing news from the Meme Media complex this hour as . . .

  The world listening, listening. Straining to understand.

  EVE STAYED UP, exactly what Nick told her not to do. She stayed up and stayed in front of the television. She phoned her mother and got herself exercised. Nick was asleep, motionless on his back. He slept like a computer battery recharging, very sensible, very like his family, who were all brains and chess and classical music and eight hours a night. Nick had winter tires, he had photocopies of all his credit cards and his passport in the top drawer of his desk. He had a natural disaster kit stored for each of them under the stairs, individualized duffel bags with sleeping gear, extra clothes, water and emergency rations. (For that unexpected trip across town during complicated weather, he once said, which was an oddly poetic construction for Nick.) He ate slow carbs, no piece of meat larger than a deck of cards. These were the deliberate patterns he’d learned from his parents.

  No such lessons possible from her own family. In Eve’s childhood, somebody was always up pacing in the living room in the middle of the night, worked up over something. An argument certainly, although never about staying out late or borrowing the car. The Latours addressed themselves to higher matters. Truth and liberalism, the fading of religion, the building of a better world. Eve had friends visit the house who showed no enthusiasm to return. She knew why. Because her father might demand an opinion on euthanasia or the death penalty.

  One world government, an evolved idea or oxymoronic? The guy locked in Henri Latour’s steel-blue gaze for that one was a nineteen-year-old jock at the local college, accomplished at being a running back and very good looking, Eve thought. After that evening the relationship sputtered. When they spoke, his eyes flickered around for safe places to alight.

  Such was the House of Latour, the house of ideas and queries, knowledge and endless dissatisfaction. Statues of the Buddha, framed Sanskrit verse. Enlightenment thinkers on the shelves of her father’s den. No refuge anywhere inside from the great quest for understanding, that sifting of causes and effects.

  For Ali, unlike Eve, there finally came a breakpoint. The blowing of a fuse. Her brother was in the fourth year of his undergraduate degree, English/philosophy with plans for a law degree out on the coast. He talked about doing work that challenged the status quo. Socially relevant work. All of which made their father proud, while it lasted. Then Ali quit, grandly, sweepingly. Not just school, but the whole family program of events. Dinners, disputes, the assorted agitations. He went proudly to live in derelict Stofton, where a completely unforeseen artistic career was to be born.

  Nobody in the family saw him much anymore, although Eve managed to keep contact alive for several years. Then, the year before Geneva, Ali began to fall away from her, no longer returning phone calls. Eve was training at a facility out West in the Rockies. Loping down the groomed tracks. Popping off the targets. She had a resting heart rate of forty-nine. She loved the feel of the rifle in her hands.

  The last time she saw Ali in person he was gaunt, skin gone ashy. He said he was working on artwork that could only be seen from the air. His hands fluttered unnaturally as he spoke, churning the space between them. Eve knew nothing about heroin addiction, only that Ali had lost a quality. Some shade having bled out of his skin and his voice. She remembered Ali on his rooftops, executing his pointless, perilous climbs. These were the things she loved most to remember about him, but she couldn’t see this person doing any of them.

  Eve went to Geneva, stayed away for less than a year. By the time she returned to the city, by the time Geneva and Reza and UNICEF were all over, Ali had vanished. And by that time, Eve thought now, she was the one who’d started to lose a quality. And it was the exact one she’d once seen in Ali and copied from him. What was it exactly? A willingness to act. To celebrate the momentum of her passions.

  On television now, Eve watched the camera pan to the top of the square, to the front doors of the Meme complex. The face of the building was flattened and frozen by spotlights set to either side. Dark spaces beyond the doors were visible through the broken front glass.

  Eve caught her own reflection in the gold-framed mirror near the fireplace, clutching herself and rocking in place. So Ali fled the house of dissatisfaction. But what could that have meant to their father, in the end? What did the memory of a Buddha in the backyard mean to a person whose body had just been blown free of a jeep? Fifty feet. Dying in the air. Dead in the air. Dead in the sand beyond. A man of so many thousands of words and no final ones himself.

  These were useless thoughts, and she knew it. She paced into the dining room, into the kitchen, back into the den. The images of the Meme complex were still there, and Eve felt faintly guilty for letting her mind wander from these events to family matters. But no sooner had she registered this guilt than her mind wandered again. Ali, Ali. He had stormed back into her life, hadn’t he? She remembered the moment. Sorting through old boxes that had belonged to her father. Files, correspondence, tax returns. Buried in there was a clippings file with all Eve’s press. Interviews, profiles, newspaper accounts of Geneva. Eve pulled out a set of stapled pages, recognized the photo from Kozel’s Deli. She remembered the journalist, a more likeable man than he wanted her to believe, disheveled, whiff of hangover, faintly posh accent possibly acquired later in life. But it was the pull quote that caught her, standing there in the half-light.

  The question: So where do you travel next?

  And her answer: Nowhere, I hope. I’m at the point I just want to stay home. I figure if I can’t find it here, I can learn to live without it.

  So glib, so over-confident. Ali came crashing back into the room of her conscience. She saw his face clearly. Remembered his voice from close. Whispered words of reassurance, high up a tower in the freezing wind. Don’t worry, E. Look at that. We’re above it all. Only Ali wasn’t to be found here. And what a terrible thing that she had learned to live without him.

  On television, the images already assuming a grainy, archival quality, even as Eve watched. They seemed to suggest in advance the number of times they would be pored over later. There were live shots of the gathering crowd now from various cameras around the plaza. Shapes moved against the mercury streetlights and voices echoed. A chant came from somewhere nearby and Eve thought how incredible it was that protesters would be there, growing in numbers, their agitation pooling and gathering in the granular light. There were soldiers in the plaza, barbed wire and concrete slabs. It was just like the movies, Eve thought involuntarily. Then wondering who wrote that people always compare traumatic moments to the movies because they cannot help comparing the real unreal to the unreal real. Some favorite of her father’s.

  Here it was not quite clear which they were watching. Real or unreal. She sat in the shabby gentility of a West Stretch living room, flat-screen television glowing from on top of the old cabinet hi-fi that had belonged to Nick’s parents. There was a cordon around a building. Riflemen in the shadows. Soldiers no doubt creeping through the sewers. Commanders and officers leaning over a table somewhere with a situation map. Those were the familiar images.

  Not a word from inside the theater, or none that was being acknowledged by authorities. And from the outside, a strange pattern prevailed. A large number of people had been released early on, so many that there was confusion over how many remained inside. People coming out of the theater couldn’t help much. They came out blinking and blinded and confused about what they had just experienced. Were there bombs inside? Somebody said that the floor was laced with wiring. Others disagreed. An expert said this was how memory worked under these circumstances. Robbed of details, it would cut and paste, mix and match. It would pain
t into place the specific threat that otherwise could only be felt.

  “The whole point of taking a hostage is to give yourself a shield to protect your life,” another expert said, “which generally suggests that hostage takers aren’t suicidal, as in the cases of gunmen opening fire in a public place.”

  “So we should feel safer knowing this?” asked the host, brow deeply furrowed, baritone full of doubt.

  “The situation is still dangerous. But it’s rare for the primary objective to be the death of the hostages, since it would necessarily mean the death of the hostage taker as well, who would no longer be protected by their shield.”

  Why no demands, then?

  “Well,” the expert said. “I’m speculating. But he could be waiting for attention to be brought to bear, for the media to gather.”

  They went to commercial and Eve muted the television, listening now to the interior of the house, the usual hums and creaks. The gentle breath of night, now failing to reassure. The expert saw a storm being called up, a dense pressure system, patiently awaited. This stillness then, Eve thought, was the eye of the storm.

  “Champ?”

  She jumped and turned and there he was.

  “Oats, hey. You still up?”

  Otis moved past Eve to sit in Nick’s reading chair near the bookshelf against the far wall. He settled into the leather.

  “Watching upstairs?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Deeply sickening.”

  “They’re going to end it soon, I bet.”

  “I don’t know,” Otis said. “Very risky.”

  “But what else?”

  “Negotiate?” Otis said. “What’s a million bucks, or fifty million?”

  “Unfortunately the guy hasn’t asked for anything.”

  “Everyone wants something. So this guy wants something. They just gotta figure out what it is.”