The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  She walked back to the table. She sat down. “I don’t know you. And you don’t know me,” she said to Beyer. “But I’ve been looking for my brother on and off now for many years. This is important to me.”

  Beyer was looking at his fingernails. “How long have you known Rabbit?”

  Eve nodded slowly. “I understand.”

  “I doubt you do,” Beyer said, his voice deepening as he A-framed behind his hands and fixed them both with a glare. Eve smelled a bluff and prepared herself to play it.

  He was talking about business now. Some speech that could not be avoided in its full form. Here were some things she had to know about the business. Debts and obligations.

  “Beyer,” Rabbit interrupted, “I won’t work for you. If you want to take this money back, go ahead.”

  Rabbit pulled out the envelope and slid it onto the table.

  Beyer didn’t pick it up. His eyes closed briefly, as if he were calling on reservoirs of patience. Then they opened and he continued where he had left off, only with more intensity. And so Eve heard about WaferFones and contracts, lost clients and work to which Rabbit had agreed but never done. And while Beyer was talking, Eve watched the yellow fish trace his long way back from right to left and thought she was starting to like Rabbit more for each minute Beyer spoke, more for whatever mysterious thing he had gone and done with Beyer’s money. Rabbit had snubbed Beyer. He’d hurt his feelings. That was the gist of it even if whatever Rabbit had done was no doubt more than Beyer deserved, a better ending to the story than Beyer himself could have ever devised.

  Beyer was finally finished and sat breathing deeply, some punk sense of injustice greatly stirred. Eyes on Eve. Hurt blue eyes.

  Eve sat motionless, knowing that they were close to that moment of transfer when Beyer would release whatever final information he held. It was only up to Eve to make this happen, to say the right thing.

  “All right,” she said. “So you hired my friend Rabbit here to do something, and he went and did some art instead.”

  “I have no idea what he did,” Beyer said. “I just know it’s not what I paid him to do.”

  “And now you want him to work off the debt, but he’s not interested.”

  Beyer stared at her.

  “I could buy it from you,” she said.

  “What?” Rabbit said. “No, listen . . .”

  Beyer sat forward. “Come again.”

  “You don’t want whatever it is, so sell it.”

  Beyer’s eyebrows went up. He pulled on one earlobe.

  “I’ll pay. That puts you square with Rabbit. Then you tell me, plain language, where I go to find my brother.”

  Beyer’s face slowly relaxed, his hands spreading open on the table. “I like this woman.”

  “Cut the crap,” Eve said. “Price, please.”

  “Ten grand,” he said.

  Rabbit stood up. “Forget it,” he told Eve. “That’s ridiculous, way high. Besides––”

  “Including interest,” Beyer continued, voice raised, “my time and the value of a lost client relationship.”

  Ten grand was crazy. But then Eve knew she’d never been this close to Ali before. She suggested six thousand. Beyer countered at seven thousand five hundred. And Eve, who had no experience with negotiations and didn’t know she had the skills instinctively, heard something ring quite clearly in the air: Beyer finding middle ground closer to her original offer than to his asking price.

  She wrote a check. Seven thousand even. Fully aware how wasteful a thing she might be doing as she signed her name and handed it to Beyer, who took it without a word, folding it into a billfold and slipping it into his pocket. But then something did shift in the room, the balance between them was rearranged. Because Beyer pushed the envelope on the table back towards Rabbit. And he gave Eve the information. The name she needed.

  At which point, no reason remained for them to be there. So Eve put a hand on Rabbit’s arm and they both stood up. And as Beyer looked in the other direction, they both moved together through the Lagoon and out into the street.

  EVE AND RABBIT, sitting in her truck down in Stofton. Rabbit still absorbing the shock, still shaking his head. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said, finally.

  Eve couldn’t believe it either, really. It was still humming through her. The buzz of foolishness and daring. Seven thousand dollars. “It better be good, whatever it is,” she said.

  He looked at her. “It’s good.”

  “So Jabez.” She said the name that Beyer had given them.

  “And that part is also very strange,” Rabbit said. “Beyer sending us to Jabez. Those guys hate each other.”

  Eve was waiting for more on this point, but then her phone rang. And it was Nick, just as the afternoon shadows started to lengthen. If he hadn’t been paying much attention to anything other than getting her back to work recently, night approaching now signaled to him that things were more seriously out of whack. She’d been gone all day. She’d been gone over dinner time. There was a nervous warble in his voice.

  “We had pizza,” he told her. “Katja stayed because she was working late cleaning up the hedge. Now she’s gone home.”

  Archaic fears, these. Woman on the cusp of doing something terrible. Another couple hours, as the light fell and Nick’s circadian clock cycled around in its relentless grooves, she would no longer just be away from home. She’d be into some darker category of absence entirely.

  A man stood across the street looking in their direction. He had a camera with a telephoto lens around his neck. Eve wondered if he’d just been taking pictures.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Eve said. Then: “Cleaning up the hedge where, Nick? Katja, I mean.”

  Nick didn’t answer, so Eve pressed, the matter taking on importance. He finally told her: cleaning up the mess left by that man who’d been camping there.

  “Where did he go?” Eve asked.

  “I have no idea, only that he’s gone and I’m glad because he was a health hazard.”

  “You asked him to leave,” Eve said.

  “He was trespassing!”

  “Nick, why did you do that? We agreed to talk about it further before doing anything.”

  “Well, you’re not here to talk to, are you?” Nick said, his voice raised. Anger right there, closer to the surface than Eve had imagined.

  Rabbit touched her shoulder and gestured towards the truck door, indicating that he could wait outside, but Eve shook her head.

  “I know. And I’m sorry, Nick,” she said. “It’s just . . .”

  “Here’s a good sign that things aren’t going the way they should be,” Nick said, still sharp. “You find yourself apologizing all the time.”

  Eve felt intensely fatigued, all at once. She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. She steadied herself and opened her eyes. She tried to tell him what was going on. “Nick, I think I’ve found Ali. I’m really close.”

  Nick made a noise. Exasperation. Frustration. The desire to punch a wall. It was the sound of very alien emotions flushing through Nick.

  Eve kept going. “I showed that photo to someone . . .”

  But Nick really didn’t want to talk about that photo. He had a list of other things to say, and he let these go as if they’d been queued up and waiting to roll. Nothing he said was obviously wrong, either. It was indeed thoughtless of Eve not to be home. Not to have called. Perhaps she was also acting out the stress of the moment. Eve could even accept that she was still in one of the stages of grief over her father and that her timing couldn’t possibly have been worse. Only she couldn’t stand the tone developing in Nick’s voice as each minute went by. A rising desperation.

  “Where’s Otis?” she asked, to divert the conversation.

  “He’s in his room,” Nick said. “You’re worried about Otis?”

  “I’m not worried,” Eve said.

  “You should be worried about yourself,” Nick said.

  Eve inhaled
sharply and didn’t speak. She thought: I am worried about myself. That’s why I’m here.

  Sensing in her silence that he’d touched a nerve, Nick chose to plunge onward. “Do you have any idea what’s happening in the world? The city is under siege. The police are asking people to stay home. Don’t you think you have some obligation to act responsibly? You of all people. You’ve got a special place in this city. You’re a public person. You owe something to your public even if you don’t think you owe anything to me.” And his voice was again raised sharply by the end of this speech, more evidence of that new anger in him. Although much worse to Eve, evidence that Nick had become what she most feared: the very opposite of what his calm, symmetrical smile had once suggested to her. Not removed and assured. Agitated and fearful instead. Driven by desires and insecurities he couldn’t express, but which he looked to her to satisfy and resolve.

  Nick was still talking. He was on to the Call now. Thousands of fundamentalist crazies, Nick was saying, all praying at once, chanting and holding their hands to an imaginary heaven. He was trying to make fun of them. He was trying to get her to laugh with him at their foolishness. But Eve didn’t, knowing that the discussion between them was over. She didn’t need his support to do what came next any more than she was able to be the person that he wanted her to be. She would find Ali. She would end what had soured between them.

  “I’m sorry, Nick,” Eve said. “I’m really sorry.”

  With the phone clicked shut, she covered her face with her hands. And Rabbit watched her for a moment, watched her shoulders silently heave. Then he took one of her wrists and gently moved her hand away from her face.

  “Tell me something,” Rabbit said. “Why go looking for your brother now?”

  She let her gaze drift out the window again, thinking. She wouldn’t normally have answered that or any other personal question from a near stranger. But this one here, sitting in her truck, brought something out of her. It was impossible to really justify, but she wanted him to know. She said: “After Geneva I almost got married. He was a famous film director in France. Very good looking, very fun, very unfaithful. It didn’t work out at all. I stayed in Europe for a while, then came back here. Which I did for all the things that I expected to be familiar about this place. I wanted things nice and familiar. Safe, I suppose.”

  She was looking past Rabbit out the window. Scored walls. Drifting sidewalk traffic.

  “But it wasn’t that familiar at all, I discovered,” Eve said. “A lot had changed. My parents had split. My mother was on the coast. My father, a journalist, was back in Afghanistan. My brother vanished. No phone, nothing. His e-mail canceled. I talked to the police and they came back three weeks later and told me they were at least sure he didn’t die here.”

  “But you kept looking for him.”

  “Eventually I had to give it up,” Eve said. “I had to try living my own life again. So I got a job in television. I met someone. Nick. And he seemed to have this quality.”

  She laughed silently and shook her head. “Stop me. This is too much information.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “Go on.”

  “So I thought I was in love and I moved into his house. He asked me to marry him and I said yes. I mean . . . I wanted to when I said yes so I suppose I was in love. Anyway, I think back now and definitely see that I was trying to replant myself here.”

  The man on the sidewalk with the camera was now walking away from them. At the corner, Eve recognized the brown van with tinted windows from earlier in the day. The man stopped at the passenger side window of the van, seeming to talk to someone inside.

  “Then something happened,” Rabbit said.

  Eve nodded. Then she told Rabbit that about a year after getting together with Nick, and only a few months after she moved into his house, her father died in a roadside explosion near a small Afghan border town recently retaken by Canadian troops. She told Rabbit about the shock of it, the impossible reckoning. The strange stoicism of her mother. She told Rabbit about planning the funeral, about her brother not being there. She told him what it felt like to pick up the search for her brother again only to give it up a second time. To try that resumption of the normal against a growing background noise. A floating sensation. An unbearable sense of drift.

  “Like you’d lost track of what you cared about,” Rabbit said.

  Eve turned to look at him.

  He said, “Like the last time you could remember trusting your gut was when Ali was around.”

  Eve nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

  Over Rabbit’s shoulder, the man by the brown van was standing with his hand on the side door. He appeared ready to climb inside. But just at the moment his weight shifted, the moment the action seemed certain, he turned and presented the camera squarely. No mistake. No ambiguity. Eve saw the sequence unfold: the sunglasses, the dark sweater, the black jeans, the camera going up to conceal the face. She couldn’t hear the shutter but she felt it snatch at her. A sensation flushing to the surface of her skin.

  She wanted to be gone again. She knew exactly the feeling of wanting to be away. And Rabbit’s eyes followed her gaze, but the van had pulled away and around a corner, out of sight.

  “READY?” HE SAID. And she was. Eve was ready.

  Don’t be alarmed, he told her. And in they went. Into the Grove, but not the bar. Into the hidden spaces upstairs. In the hallway Eve stepped around stalagmites of pigeon guano and dodged drips of water from the stained ceiling overhead.

  Jabez occupied the most chaotic living space Eve had ever seen. Evidence of a creative process exploding inside its own container, again and again. Aging computer carcasses were stacked to the ceiling in the center of the room with only narrow corridors between them for movement. The walls were densely cross-hatched with drawings and writing, schematics and plans. There were several hundred photographs of women’s lips collaged onto the inside of the door. A low worktable was covered with beer bottles, a mounded ashtray, rolling papers, tobacco, Sharpie pens, X-Acto knives, protractors, condom packages. A blown-up picture of a human eye was papered over the front glass, as if a giant wearing lacquered mascara were peering in the window.

  Jabez shook her hand, then motioned to Rabbit that they needed to speak in private. He turned away from Eve but she could still see the signing as it began, the agitation plain. Jerks and stabs, scrapes and chops.

  “Just look at the photograph,” Rabbit finally said, breaking the oddly pixelated silence. But the signing continued and didn’t appear to change much in tone.

  Eve excused herself into the rest of the studio, squeezing between the gutted CPUs and the dozens of keyboards that had been stripped of their letter and number keys. “Wow,” she said aloud, leaning in close to examine a dense map and legend of what appeared to be a fictional subway system, ready to be pranked into a bus shelter somewhere. Then a wall of books, beat-up paperbacks, dime-store volumes about half of which appeared to be copies of 1984. She stopped to run her finger along their spines, struck with a sudden and pleasant sense of recognition. A single large poster filled the entire wall, floor to ceiling, just peeking from behind the bookshelf. It was mounted to stiff cardboard, so Eve was able to slide it out a few more inches, then a few more feet. Familiar lines and layout. A close-up photograph of a toy soldier magnified to almost human scale, all the chapped plastic edges visible, the craggy, dented face, this one distorted in a cartoon rictus of pain, one arm stretched and rigid, the rifle slipping from the fingers’ grasp. While with the other hand, the soldier clutched his gut over the bullet hole that had just appeared. Of all the soldiers in the set, the gunners and runners and officers, here was the one who bought it. The one at the moment of death. The one shortly to understand all that there was to understand, if indeed there was anything to understand. And under him, in the font of the political campaign poster, the letters suitable for a highway billboard: War Is Peace.

  Eve could hear the words, and she smiled with pleasure
thinking of it. Keep up the good work, you beautiful, beautiful young artists!

  She returned to where Rabbit and Jabez were standing. A stuttering flash of sign. A shrug. Silence. Rabbit had the photograph of Ali out again. He was holding it forward, but Eve knew from the body language that Jabez was silently rebuffing Rabbit’s offer to inspect the photo again.

  Jabez saw her and lifted his chin, readied himself for confrontation.

  Eve said: “So you know him. You’re still friends and you’re protecting him. I admire that. I really do.”

  Jabez signing. Rabbit talking. “He says yes he knows him. Yes, they’re still close friends. But he doesn’t know you.”

  Eve stood nodding. Jabez was signing further, but she interrupted. She waved her hands. Jabez turned to her. She had his full attention.

  Eve said: “I watched you putting up Freedom Is Slavery.”

  THEY CROSSED THE HILLSIDE AGAIN, jets overhead. They could hear a television playing from a high window, newscast tones. They were both hungry, so they went into a place with candlelight winking out between red curtains. She was still waiting. No actual news of Ali yet. No confirmation that Ali was actually to be seen somewhere, in the flesh.

  She said: “All these secrets and double checks. You guys are like the Masons.”

  “It’s strange, I admit,” Rabbit said. “I thought Beyer would have been the one to know your brother and it turns out to be Jabez.”

  Some Italian place down in the East Flats. Gino’s. Or Tino’s. She thought how hard it was to find these sorts of restaurants on the west side where high authenticity was the order of the day. Here it was redcheckered tablecloths, candles in Chianti bottles. Shakers of parmesan and hot pepper flakes on every table. Rabbit’s spaghetti smelled of garlic and basil. A real and rare curiosity was alive here, a need to know. So Eve asked the questions she thought she could ask. What about his work in Oregon?