The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Rabbit put his fork down. He looked around the restaurant quickly. He looked at her. Did she really want to know this? Okay, fine. He was a validation engineer. Not so interesting in retrospect. Chip layout. Circuit design. Documenting specs. Building prototypes. Running tests. Preparing logic diagrams. “Meetings I was much less good at,” Rabbit told her. “I was twenty-two. I realized pretty quickly I’d made a mistake. My employer realized the same thing. It happens.”

  She was looking at him, a small smile coming to her face.

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said.

  “No, I do. I’ve had jobs I changed my mind about. More than one. Tell me about yours, though.”

  “Cell phones,” Rabbit said. “We were working up a new kind of cell phone architecture. Do you really find this interesting?”

  Eve did find this interesting. She found Rabbit interesting and could have asked him a lot of different questions about who he was and what he’d become. What he thought about the past and the future. But Oregon had a trace of mystery in it, so she let the conversation slide to other topics on which he spoke more freely. Childhood. Here Rabbit lost his restraint. Long before working out West. Long before his parents died. Long before everything that came afterwards, there had been a town up north. There were blackberry canes in this story, mountain plateaus, a piece of land and a cabin with an outhouse. There had been a vegetable garden and three-day hikes into the hills, sleeping under the stars with his mother and father. And now there was a notion, very much on his mind, that the time might be coming for a return to those same landscapes. A return to stay.

  “I want to grow my own food,” Rabbit said. “Don’t laugh, this is all very back-to-the-earth, I realize. But I want to work with my hands.”

  “Don’t you work with your hands already?”

  “Art is between worlds, for me. Or it’s a way from one world to another. I’ve started something here and I’m going to finish it. But after that, I need to be up north.”

  “Tell me about your parents,” Eve said.

  “They had me late. A last-minute change of heart about populating an overpopulated planet. They were hippies, off-gridders. We drank rainwater. Ate kale and beets and carrots from the garden. Raised our own chickens. I was homeschooled, which turned out to be something scholarship committees really liked. So off I went to a school we never could have afforded otherwise. They were good people. They were hard workers, independent, lovers of music and art, lovers of nature. Cancer got them both. My dad was stomach, my mother intestinal. In two years they were both gone. I was in university at the time. I really struggled with it, to be honest. Although a few months after it happened was the worst. I almost dropped out of school. I ended up graduating, but not easily.”

  Eve watched him while he recounted this and saw the remembered pain in the shape of his lips, a slight tension there. Those were a particular kind of tears she had shed herself, six months after her father was gone, at that terrible moment when she knew he’d never return.

  “Although,” Rabbit said, “after a couple of years I could think of them again without the grief. The memories do eventually become a source of strength, not pain.”

  “They do,” Eve said. Half a question, her throat tight.

  He looked at her gently. “Yeah, they do.”

  “Tell me more,” Eve said, wiping her eyes. “How do you think they most influenced you?”

  He thought about that for a while. Then he told her again about being outdoors. Views of the stars. Evenings during which hardly a word was spoken and in which their peace was complete.

  The table was narrow, their hands almost touching. Rabbit’s leg tremored lightly in place as he spoke. She only had to drop her palm to his knee, pressing down. And Rabbit’s heel leveled with the floor.

  He looked at her. “We’ll find your brother.”

  They were close. She could feel it.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing,” she said, conscious of the music all at once. The scene. They were in a dimly lit restaurant together. Violin music in the background. The waiter looked her over when she took the bill to pay. And outside, she gave Rabbit a hug and the movement felt familiar, as if her arms and hands already had the feel of it, the sweet habit. One hand to the waist, the other finding the flat spot at the base of his spine. He held her gently, on the cusp of tomorrow. And much later, in the truck, she could still feel the places where his arms had pressed against her body. Winding down through the quiet streets, the looping concentration as she entered the West Stretch. Down Angus Crescent to Nick’s house, which had been his parents’ house. Their long lawn, their hedge, their oaks and azaleas. Not her house.

  She parked in the driveway and turned off the truck, her watch ticking on up to midnight. She let herself in, heard Hassoman stir but not get up. Heard the house return to silence, to the serene rhythm of its programmatic sleep. Standing in the hall, still in her running clothes, she felt herself drift not just to the edge of this place, this nested series of routines, but out of its orbit entirely.

  She made her way down the corridor, past the television room to the broom closet. She found it there: just what was needed for that unexpected trip across town in complicated weather. Portable food, shelter, extra clothes. And with the green canvas duffel hoisted over one shoulder, she made her way quietly back outside to the truck.

  PEGG

  DARKNESS LIKE A PRISONER’S HOOD, like a thing strapped tight around the eyes and cinched at the neck. Darkness pressing him down like a low ceiling. It bent him over, this darkness. And Pegg looked but could not find his own body.

  The man had searched him, an efficient one-handed frisk. Fingers walking the creases of his sleeves and collar, a palm sliding flat down the small of his back and around his sides, thorough and well practiced. It knew the stations, this hand, and visited them without haste or hesitation. To the armpits, to the neck, around the chest for wires and into the crotch for hidden weapons, transmitters, sharpened spoons. Pegg’s tape recorder was extracted from his hip pocket and inspected, then returned. The whiskey too. And down each leg now, all the way to the ankle, where a single finger reamed each sock. Brutal intimacy. Here was an organism closer than any lover. Breath and vapors, body odor and deeper scents.

  “Thom Pegg,” the voice had said. And here Pegg was forced to consider for the second time an accent that defied situation. This one more placeless even than Haden’s. No mere pastiche of everywhere. It was a nowhere voice. The man came from nowhere. The words came out of the blackness itself, emerging from between the folds of its material, a fabric in which light had been absent so long that it was forgotten: its weave, its current, the breath of its composite colors.

  And Pegg finally had asked: “What’s your name?”

  “Call me Mov.”

  Pegg collected himself during these moments. Remembering things he was supposed to do. Rules and practices, conventions and plays. Were the children all right? And when Mov assured him they were, Pegg demanded that he be allowed to talk to them. Standard hostage-taking protocol, as per Haden’s instructions. The man agreed.

  Now Pegg groped and staggered. He called out in a low voice: “Anybody? Hello?”

  And he heard a voice come back. A boy. Coming to Pegg through the stench of the place. Outhouse smells and popcorn, stickiness underfoot. A sniffle here and a cough over there, a slow wail rising and tapering near the back. And then a beautiful voice, not part of the darkness at all, but suspended.

  “Over here.”

  Pegg blinked and squinted and wondered if his eyes were finally adjusting. Some granular shape was lifting from the black. A slow wash or current in the void. He realized he was seeing the slant of the theater itself, descending to the stage. He rotated his head, looked for patterns where he knew the seats would be. Any slow movement there.

  Pegg felt his way along the wall, along some seats. He paid attention to a steady ticking from the gut works of the building, shafts an
d ducts and cables. Pegg thought of secret passages, manholes and trapdoors. He imagined soldiers crawling into their places in the ceiling overhead, getting ready to drop down on black wires and begin their killing according to the plan they had laid. The thought agitated real fear in him, his mind stumbling across unhappy images. Save us from the gas, from flash bangs and stun grenades, from the prick of lasers against the darkness.

  Save us from the black hats, from those who might try to rescue us. Save us from those who think there is any way to help.

  “Over here?”

  “Here,” the boy said.

  Pegg woozy and sightless and nasally overwhelmed. But now there was a roughed-up texture in the air, the jostle of human molecules. Hello, he said. He was a journalist. Thom Pegg. Everybody all right? Nobody hurt?

  They were clustered in a ragged group near the center aisle and towards the back of the theater.

  “Are you here to get us out?” the boy said. “We want to get out of here.”

  Pegg said: “How many are you?”

  “Four plus me.” A teenaged voice. A certain defiance evident through the crack and strain. Heading towards their second day, the boy would have passed through fear to some other place beyond. There were five more kids near the back, the boy told him. They were separated and had been told not to move.

  Ten total, Pegg thought. Getting close. At some point, as Haden himself had said, the thing resolved itself for lack of material.

  “All the grown-ups are gone,” the boy said. “Why are we still here?”

  “How old are you?” Pegg asked.

  Thirteen. The boy groped a hand out, and Pegg took it awkwardly in both of his own. The boy’s name was Gerry. “Girard,” he said. “But no one calls me that. Have you talked to the man? Is he letting us go now?”

  “I’m sure he will,” Pegg said. “Where are you from?”

  Gerry was from the East Coast. He’d been in town visiting his sister and their father. She’d won three tickets and taken a friend. Their father insisted that he go along. No, she wasn’t still inside. He’d gotten her out of the theater in the first rush, then come back to find the friend, who was also gone. “She got out the same time, but I didn’t see her. I came back to find her because I didn’t see her.”

  Pegg coughed. Again at the belly, the grumble of daily activity, the reawakening pain. “Can you tell me how these releases have been working, Gerry?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see anything.”

  “Does he call out names?”

  “I don’t know why he’s doing anything. He just comes and people go with him. There’s a dead man’s body over there. A boy fell over it. I’ve told everyone not to touch it now.”

  It was someone from the TV show, Gerry told him. He’d come out and shouted. Then he’d been shot. Gerry saw it. Then there had been a woman who came into the theater later. They all saw the side door open and the light spilling in. Then the woman started yelling at them. “She was telling us to leave. Saying we should just go. I only came here because my dad wouldn’t let my sister go by herself. These four here are good, though. They’re being brave. We’re not crying anymore, right? We play memory games to pass the time. Like decimals of pi. And Star Wars. The name of Darth Vader’s super-star destroyer?”

  “The Executor.” A girl’s voice.

  “Jabba the Hut’s first lieutenant?”

  “Fortuna.” Another boy.

  “Any cell phones around?” Pegg asked.

  “He took them away. I don’t even live here. I don’t even watch TV. I play video games but only an hour a day. Everybody just wants to go home.”

  “You’re going home. You’re doing well, though. You’re all doing really well. What’s your sport?”

  “Chess and debate,” Gerry said. “I started karate but a kid broke my nose.”

  “Have you all eaten?”

  “He gave us some kind of cookie. We shared candy bars.”

  “And who else is here? Come on, all of you. Tell me who you are.” Pegg was sitting now, looking back into the blackness. But he could feel the small forms here, and feel them as they came close. A hand to his arm now. Another one finding his shoulder.

  Ashley, Isaac, Roshawn, Barker.

  Pegg touched their shoulders, or put his hands on their heads, communicating in that way possible only by touch. We’re all here. None of us are alone. There were no tears here now. Bravery indeed. Bravery and a strange silence. It didn’t make Pegg proud imagining himself in the same position. He’d have run with the voice coaches, he was sadly certain. Did anything in his life allow him to think otherwise? Would he have gone back for the missing best friend of his little sister, the sister living with the father from whom it sounded like Gerry had grown entirely distant?

  Gerry was telling him: “There were five or six men to start. They were actors, part of the show. Then there was a Kill. You know what that is?

  “I’ve heard about it, yes,” Pegg said.

  “She’s still up there in the other group, that girl. Her name is Hyacinth. I wish I hadn’t given her five stars. I could have given her four and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Because after the actors, the other guy came in and started shooting. The actors ran off and left him here. He has a briefcase. It’s a bomb, I think. Hyacinth is still here. Still over at the back.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Pegg said. “Tell me where the rest of you live.”

  Gerry was breathing through his mouth. Smart kid, holding some five-year-old stranger in his lap. Guilty in a way he had no reason to feel. But they talked about where they lived for a while. Streets and crescents were described. High-rise developments. Favorite rooms and toys and holidays.

  “Let’s do pi,” Gerry said.

  “Three point one four . . . one five . . .”

  “ . . . nine two six five . . .”

  “Roshawn, my man. Roshawn does what?”

  “I rock the house,” Roshawn said.

  “He’s a comic,” Gerry explained. “Do some, Roshawn.”

  “Grandmothers are really nuts though, don’t you find?” Roshawn said to Pegg, who felt himself become an audience, felt attention directed through this granular black towards him alone.

  “I like this one.”

  “Can I go on here?”

  “Go, Roshawn. Quiet, everyone.”

  “Like my own grandmother the other day, pushing me down the sidewalk. This other old lady stops. She’s saying, like, aw he’s so cute. He’s so sweet. My grandmother, she’s like: Oh, this is nothing. Wait’ll I show you his picture.”

  Gerry there in the darkness, unsmiling. Unable to escape all that he’d seen. When the man was shot in the center aisle and fell to the floor, his head had rolled over towards Gerry and their eyes had met. There was no escaping the gaze. And when the woman came into the theater later, standing in the side door that opened onto the lobby, ranting that they should just get up and leave, run out, don’t listen to this guy, she looked at Gerry too, he was sure of it. She was fourteen rows away, a black smudge of silhouette at the center of a blinding halo of light from the street outside. Gerry’s eyes were pinched shut. And still he felt sure she was talking directly to him. Telling him to move, to do something. And he just sat there until the theater came alight with a ragged burst of flame, the stage and front seats candled into brilliance by a ragged lick of white and orange. They all saw the man onstage then, with his night-vision goggles. He was blind in that instant he fired. The tables turned. But nobody moved. The long arc of flame bridged the air between the two figures. The ghost trace. Once, twice, three times. MAC-10 or mini-Uzi. She did not fly backwards and hit the wall like in the first-person shooter games Gerry had played. She just crumpled in place in the middle of her ranting and didn’t move again.

  PEGG CIRCLED AWAY FROM GERRY and around the room. He talked to the others. He counted and remembered names. Laisha, Reebo, Sam, Hyacinth, Metric. That made ten total.

  You’ll be okay. W
e’re going to be fine. Everybody all right? Anybody hurt? I’m going to try to help you get out of here. Tell me what you all do.

  Sam did beatbox and Reebo rapped. Laisha had memorized every dish in the most recent season of Iron Chef America and traveled with her own copper cookware from Villedieu-les-Poêles. Metric danced pop-lock. Hyacinth, who seemed to be sitting a couple seats away to one side, said she was a singer. Her voice kept low, as if wishing not to be heard. As if she were keeping her head down.

  “Come here, Hyacinth,” Pegg said to her, crouching low. And he heard the little girl get up from her seat and come towards the rest of them at the end of the row. “Tell us about where you live,” he asked her, reaching a hand out and finding her shoulder. He felt her hesitation. But now the others joined in, as if they too had been trying to make her speak, and failing so far. They said: Tell us, Hyacinth. Tell us, please. We want to hear. So she started, slowly, then went on to describe where she lived and how it had inspired her. That and Celine Dion, but mostly her home. The sound of birds in the distance. There was always a ripple of light in the trees, even at night. And if you were very still, around sunrise and dusk, the animals moved in the forests near you without fear. Elk, wolves, bears. Hyacinth was glad to have seen them, because she could think of them now. And the memories helped her.

  In the darkness, Pegg’s face was performing a dance of expressions, helpless to the cross-wired emotions below. KiddieFamers. Here in the darkness, they were held together by their ambitions, no matter where they learned them. The desire for fame may be long-term toxic, but was it toxic for young Hyacinth here, right at that moment? Didn’t it serve her well sitting in the darkness next to a ticking bomb? If a person didn’t crave living as the exception at such a moment, one might too easily accept death. And who the hell was Thom Pegg anyway to criticize?