The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  Loftin was still standing at the glass, his idea shaping. Of course. The story wasn’t inside the theater at all. To think he had briefly considered Thom Pegg to have been in on the angle. Thom Pegg might have been someone to reckon with once, but he was on the empty story here. The common story. The sensation. The razzle-dazzle. Good for him. Let Pegg have it. What mattered was down there. Out there with the cops and the military, the Black Bloc and the Call, the pro-lifers and the law-and-order buffs. Out there among the infected and the suspicious. On the barricades. Among the spectators. Woven into the grain of that agitated and fractious mob. That’s what would always distinguish Loftin from other journalists, and from Pegg too now in his degraded state: an understanding that the story was told through unexpected voices.

  And while he had these thoughts, up top of the plaza—outside Loftin’s field of view, beyond the adjacent buildings—the spotlights were shimmering in the angular facades of water and warping off the front of the Meme complex. The facade glared in the chaos of halogen, an angry sun, licks of hot light and harsh shadows. Everything that morning rested under a roving, searching gaze, suspicious and powerful. And in front of hundreds of people in the crowd at the south end of the square, right at that moment, Jabez and the Poets came in as if from nowhere and bombed out a statement in front of the world.

  They hit the plaza in a loose crowd. They came out of the alleys in teams of three. No hoodies, no skateboards, only jeans and sports jerseys. One knapsack per team. They moved like a flight of pigeons motivated by a single distributed will to leave a roof all at once. Faster than you could understand. Some of them skipping, as if there were a hidden joy in this whole theater.

  They swarmed the media circus and paint-bombed an entire row of broadcast vans before anyone watching had a clue what they were doing. It looked official. It looked like it was supposed to happen. Out of the alley and down into the street at the bottom of the plaza, just short of the trees. A beat cop just over by the hedge. A militia lieutenant on the far curb answered his cell phone (“Ride of the Valkyries” ring tone punching the air). Snipers on the roofline, the silhouettes next to chimneys, along the brickwork. A person might glance up and see them once, then glance back and they’d be gone.

  The Poets strung themselves out by the white news vans parked in a row. The fountains whiting out the sound. Down to their knees and out with the gear, like time-lapse undergrowth. Hand to hand went the cans of spray paint, the banners, the stickers, the braille strips, the glow sticks tied into translucent neon ideograms. A man crouched and marked the flanks of the van while another stood to do the upper sides, and still another climbed on top to do the roof. Dense, crabbed letters from the texts chosen late the night before, sentences laying over one another: All that was once directly lived has become mere spectacle. And: If someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.

  These were repeated and repeated until the specific ideas were lost in another effect, a kind of vanishing. Bodies and words swallowed the vans. They never reappeared. The jungle encased them, joining seamlessly with the trees at the top of the plaza stairs and the grass boulevard. The whole thing seemed to unroll in an instant and all that hardware was suddenly part of the foliage.

  The light came up in the east, still distant. The halogens cracked back from white heat to a cooler blue. The south end of the plaza now came fully alive to what had happened and crosscurrents ripped through the crowd. There were those who thought the Poets’ work was part of the overall threat. Those who thought it was the perfect response. And so part of the crowd pulled back in distaste and fear; and another part raised their fists and tied black bandanas tighter across their faces, their numbers swelling. Invisible faces behind a climbing, shadowed sea. The banners multiplied. In another interview a Black Bloc spokesperson endorsed the paint-bombing as if it had been his own idea. He then declared that celebrity was a social disease and that hostage-taking was its deformed offspring. The comment might not have parsed, but it quoted. It hit the airways and exploded into a million sound bites.

  The anchors rounded on the mood change, touching fingers to their ears to hear correspondents in the plaza where the noise had risen. One of the network vans had been overturned. There was no sense of official reaction to any of this, the police and militia keeping their distance away in the plaza, on their street corners and rooftops. And a quick suspicion took hold and spread among many people present: someone was letting it happen.

  The Call began to sing.

  We don’t want your idols, the Black Bloc spokesperson said to the interviewer, his mouth moving behind the cloth. The selling of them is a corporate activity, a contemporary indulgence. We don’t want your new church. And we don’t want your killing machine to uphold it. People are dying in the Middle East to protect billionaires in Las Vegas and Hollywood, in Jordan and Haifa. The War on Terror is a franchise sequel.

  The Call sang behind him. O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

  A network showed a close-up of a man in front of a shop holding a sign that read simply: Order. Another sign read: Not one more child.

  Another group started up a competing chorus: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord . . .

  The Call sang louder: O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

  The whole bank of elevators in Loftin’s hotel was jammed up with crews and executives, producers and gofers. Loftin paced for a minute waiting, then ran down thirty-nine flights of stairs and across two blocks into the plaza, panting, head spinning. There were ferns hanging here. Open planters and waterfalls. People everywhere: chanters and singers, placards angry and distraught. The seething tension of for and against.

  He saw people dancing in front of a boom box over to his left. We don’t need this fascist groove thang . . .

  And the idea came. Loftin was amazed that he hadn’t seen it before: fault lines running through the crowd. The story was in the fault lines.

  O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.

  Everyone was adrift. The encircling authorities, the cameras, the grip of the hostage drama itself. Everyone living in fear about the end. The ending was the thing. And Loftin felt it in a flash, his own story arriving. There was a great war going on here about control over the ending. Each breath of this common air fully vested.

  EVE

  EVE CAME UP INTO THE HEIGHTS THAT MORNING, her truck down in River Park with all her survival needs. Eve on the streets in her running gear, water bladder, self-sufficiency. She walked up into the plaza past the same checkpoint, only now they were turning back anybody who didn’t have work in the area. Different faces, sterner engagement.

  “You work early, Evey. I thought only we had to work this early.”

  She made the noises, said the words. Work was work.

  “You want coffee? We have hot coffee.”

  She thanked them, but said she had to get going.

  “Be careful up there. It’s all agitated. You’re watching the news, I hope.”

  As she was leaving, another cop standing separate from the group stopped her. He put a hand on her arm. “Jeffers is bad. Take Ash and use the boulevard. That’s what I’d recommend.”

  He didn’t release her arm. He stood with his lieutenant’s stripe and quiver at the jawline. “Maybe don’t talk to anyone until you get to work. We’re doing our best. But there’s tension.”

  She ran to the plaza and pushed through the crowd at the corner. People were standing so tightly that as she squeezed between the shoulders and elbows she found herself on the steps down before she saw them. She stumbled forward and sank briefly among the pressed bodies. Too much warmth. Too many legs and shoes. She felt a rising panic and pulled herself up, holding on to someone. She stumbled to the bottom of the steps and through the press line, where the man waved her through without asking for credentials. Inside the ba
rricade, Eve saw a pilot she knew from her television days. He owned a helicopter charter company they used for aerial weather reports. He came over, expression focused.

  “You all right?” he asked. And when Eve told him she was just trying to get through to Jeffers, he walked her across the plaza, cutting the crowd for her with his wide-shouldered bulk. As they left the enclosure she noticed the parents grouped there, near a tent providing chairs and phones, coffee and Danish pastries. It was the first time she’d seen them, they had been so protected from the press. And here the weak sunshine was cracking free over Meme and streaming into their eyes. They all looked the same direction, standing awkwardly apart, holding Styrofoam cups. They looked up to the top of the plaza, faces flat with unknowing in the orange light. A ladder truck pulled into the street just beyond the trees. Eve realized its siren had been crying and yelping for the past several minutes as it inched through the side street into the square. Onto clear pavement, the driver cut the sound high in its arc and parked with the intense red flank of the truck to take over sight lines, reddening the light all around them, laying a reflected bloodiness into the air. The firefighters climbed out of the cab and were into some sort of conference with a couple of plainclothes cops. One held two cell phones. There were ten children left, somebody said. Just ten left. Eve suddenly heard the words all around her, but they did not add up to a hopeful sound. And Eve felt dread rising there in the warning light, like this were sure to be a new kind of day.

  “What’s happened?” she asked the helicopter pilot. The man’s name was Connor, she remembered suddenly. Ex-forces. They said he had a bullet in his leg, although Eve had never asked him to confirm.

  His eyes were rounded sadly.

  “Has someone been hurt?” she asked him.

  “Not as far as I know,” Connor told her, his voice low and controlled. There was something he wanted to tell her. He wasn’t sure if he should.

  “Tell me.”

  “Negotiations have been ruled out,” the pilot said. “Off the table.”

  “Why would they do that?” Eve said. “There are still kids in there.”

  The pilot looked away, squinting into the rising light. “Maybe they know enough about the perp to know negotiations are pointless. Maybe something else.”

  Eve waited.

  “Maybe somebody doesn’t want him to surrender. Maybe knowing who he is, somebody wants him dead.”

  “They’re going in,” Eve said. “I cannot believe this.”

  Again the squint. “I’m not saying this morning. But they’re running out of time. And then, there is the issue of this crowd.”

  Over the pilot’s shoulder Eve could see the parents, still standing in those first red rays of the morning.

  “What about the crowd?” she asked.

  “You can probably assume they’re going to want people out of the plaza before they do anything,” the pilot said.

  “Like force them to leave.”

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “It’s tricky. But I wouldn’t stay down here. Take care of whatever business you have here, then clear the area.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You take care now, Eve.” And his words rode with her up the side steps and out of the plaza, clear to the top of Jeffers, then down two doors to Double Vision, where she used the card, conscious of producing it out of her wallet, this totem of privilege and position that she pressed to the black box on the glass. The card triggered a distant beep and shifted some tiny catch within. A light on the door handle went from red to green and the glass sighed inwards under her palm. She was in the quiet, where she let the coolness of the marble come up through her feet, her insides settling with the chill.

  THE BOARDROOM HAD ITS PICTURE-BOOK VIEW. She stood at the window and stared down Jeffers into the plaza, saw the shape and shift of the crowd. But she was thinking about Rabbit, Joey’s Panda Grove. These new people moving in her life. Nick was in her thoughts, a reproachful shadow. But she turned away from thinking of him directly. Eyes to the rooftops opposite where she’d seen Rabbit the day before. She was picturing the handstand again, looking at the spot where he’d been and imagining his hands spread on the metal flashing there. Sure hands.

  Marcus came into the room behind her. She smelled his clean leather smell. A fatherly safety he worked to project around him. “I was so pleased to hear you came down, Eve.” Although, as she turned with a smile, as warm as she could manage, she saw the slope-away of his eyebrows. The disturbed calm, the wavering certainty. She’d been invited. Given a key. But then she’d chosen this particular day. Marcus continued, as if to explain her choice: “We’ve had the news on since it began. I guess we’re all riveted. We can’t pull our eyes away.”

  Eve said: “I feel like it’s happening to my own friends, my own family.”

  “I find myself wondering what the man wants.”

  “Maybe he’s getting what he wants already.”

  She turned back to the glass. Far below in the plaza, there was a flat-screen monitor mounted outside the media tent, an endless channel-surf through the febrile here and now. At this distance it flickered, oversaturated, the screen hot with color.

  Marcus said he’d come back, told her to take all the time she needed. Feel free to come any time, any hour. But when the door was closed, she could picture him moving away into a place she would never know, deep into the cubicles and schemes, the data, the angles. Eve waited until she was sure he wouldn’t return, then quickly moved across the room to the telescope in the corner. It had a black-and-white authority, the promise of resolution, of telling details. It offered an answer, Eve hoped, to a critical question.

  She swung the lens over towards the Peavey Block, unscrewed the lens cover and let it fall to the end of its thin brass chain. She aimed the scope by hand, standing above it, wondering if she could find the object without leaning into the eyepiece. That bulge in the shadows there. That oblong attached to the metalwork. Then she bent to the viewfinder and found it immediately, fixed to the top of the highest point on the roof, a round ventilator shaft that emerged from the elevator housing.

  What have you done? She addressed this question to Rabbit, out there on his roofscape somewhere. Rabbit, Rabbit. Why are you here and what have you done?

  Eve sited the telescope, moving it gently, centering the object in her quivering field of view. She cracked the zoom up, one notch, then two. Full zoom. The object was black and roughly pyramidal in shape. The sloping flanks of the thing were oddly iridescent.

  Outside the restaurant, the night before, Eve had mentioned Oregon again. Why was she so curious? She wasn’t sure except that there seemed to be some important missing piece to the story. Rabbit conceded a little more. He’d been on the development team for a next-generation personal telecom device.

  “You mean like the WaferFone?” she had asked, which made him laugh.

  “The WaferFone is a toy,” Rabbit had told her. “Kids’ stuff.”

  She looked at him, quizzical. “And your phone wasn’t?”

  “Quite different. A more sophisticated bit of business, if I can put it that way.”

  And as Rabbit said that, his gaze drifted in from the high darkness over her shoulder where it had been restlessly hovering, and settled in her own eyes.

  More questions about that “sophisticated bit of business” were pressing to be asked. But Rabbit was now looking at her intently, nodding fractionally, acknowledging an impulse but for once unsure. And seeing his hesitation, Eve let go her questions and acted for both of them. She wanted this next part, the unsure part, the part with no answers. So she put a hand up to his cheek to bring him closer. And as she did, Rabbit’s hand came up to cover her own.

  He leaned in. She thought: We’re kissing. And she felt the undertow: shame, thrill.

  Now Eve stood in the Double Vision boardroom, remembering the moment and staring through the viewfinder, the black object poised, the movement of her blood translated into minute trem
ors. She held herself away from the eyepiece, and the field of view stabilized.

  The object was clad in some kind of metallic flexible material, seemingly both matte and gloss in its grain. She guessed Teflon or Gore-Tex. It had an aperture in the top with a reflective disk. Glass or hard plastic. And around one side, almost concealed from the angle she had, Eve could make out a small grid. Tiny filaments in a woven pattern, the surface giving off the silvered and blued hues of oil, of gasoline.

  She pulled back from the viewfinder. A panel of some kind, facing south. Positioned deliberately, she judged, wondering now what the position might have been intended to maximize. A view, a broadcast, a projection. Or was the object a receiver? Did the signals come from the south? From some ground source, from satellites orbiting?

  Eve leaned into the eyepiece and looked again. Rabbit, Rabbit. Please tell me.

  The panel glinted once as the sun rose, a wink involving reflected waves, refracting in through the layers of atmosphere overhead.

  Eve stood and breathed in sharply, her heartbeat suddenly elevated and prepared, her body tuning to the truth, knowing it before her mind. The grid was facing south to catch the sunshine, to maximize its receipt of light: rays, energy, power. And she felt a flood of relief, but of excitement too, a fresh and destabilizing kind.

  The thing was rigged to renew itself with solar power. Whatever he had built and installed over there, Eve realized, Rabbit had fixed it up with a solar panel. Not a battery, with its finite life. He intended, instead, for this thing to recharge.

  This thing he had built, Rabbit wanted it to last.

  PEGG

  PEGG ENTERED ANOTHER LAND. It built itself around him in an accretion of moments. Those first seconds of blackness, the hooded weight of it. The invasion of the one-handed search. The time spent talking with Gerry and the others, the shame he felt. The moment the night-vision went on and the silver-green images were surrendered to his eyes. These moments accumulated and he was pressed down to the floor with them. He was stripped away from this world and ushered down a long, cold corridor into another.