The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  The land of exception, where everything mattered just as it did in the regular world, but none of the same rules and restrictions applied.

  He didn’t sleep in this land. He was released into it as a drifting, sleepless ghost. He visited the children. He helped one of them pee, holding him by the shoulders and aiming him at the side of the chair at the end of row 12. He got them all to sit together, and Mov, watching always from the stage, did not object.

  Pegg said their names, each time he addressed them, reminding them all that they were each still there in a small group, together. Still hunched in darkness. But not absorbed by it. Laisha, Reebo, Sam, Hyacinth, Metric. Ashley, Isaac, Roshawn, Barker and Gerry.

  With his night-vision goggles, Pegg could see that Gerry was a skinny kid with an honest face and, in a single bid to fashion, squarecut glasses with metal frames. Pegg didn’t tell Gerry that he could now see him. And he noticed that Gerry did not look for him when he spoke. His own eyes flatlined in the absolute zero of this darkness.

  “This is Hyacinth,” Pegg said to Gerry, who took her hand and helped her sit in the seat next to him.

  “Star Wars?” Gerry said to the group. And when there were assenting murmurs he suggested brightly: “Obi-Wan’s last words?”

  And all of them knew the line. Pegg watched, incredulous. It had been over thirty years since he’d seen the film. But here came the famous passage: ten voices singsonging in the fetid air.

  “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

  Gerry and Hyacinth holding hands. The tough comedian kid Roshawn sitting with his arms around the two youngest, Sam and Barker. Pegg wiping his nose under the lenses of the goggles and looking away. Most of all, he thought, in the land of exception he was unable to speak. He could only listen and be amazed. By this crew here, certainly. But also by Mov.

  Mov stood onstage in the grainy sub-light, a silver figure, ghosted green. He beckoned and Pegg went to him. They sat in chairs opposite one another as the story was hemming in, as Mov began to speak.

  You had to imagine a medium-sized city and a medium-sized life, Mov told Pegg. You had to imagine varsity ball and driving up and down through the warehouse district looking for parties. You had to imagine sex for the first time in the basement of a friend’s house after the friend had dropped two tabs of blotter and disappeared into his bedroom. Chemical haze. Beer bottles clinking together. Van Halen on the stereo. Parents in Florida. And you had to imagine the friend’s sister. College was coming, languages. It was like discovering that he could breathe underwater, that’s what languages had been like. His parents spoke several of their own, on either side. He’d never paid much attention to the fact that he could do this thing. And then the world unfolded before him and he plunged into it hungrily.

  “I’m from here,” Mov said. “Went to Brookdale Elementary. Moffat College. I’m a kind of feel-good local story, Thom. East Flats Boy Made Good.”

  He liked the work, Mov told him. Make no mistake. It was hard to understand in the light of day, but there had been a certain internal logic to it. The other contractors were married guys, single guys. People with kids and people without. The job seemed not to tell you much about a person, that was his conclusion. Much less than learning that a person was a bus driver or a doctor.

  “Everyone has their own way to keep a secret. But all those techniques are the same in the end. The secret slips in behind some larger truth. It nests in a protective layer of stories about work, family and tribe. About God frequently. But always a reference point outside the person, outside the system. If you found that reference and broke the link, people let the secret go. It lost the quality that it had, whatever made it worth protecting. That was the job right there. Listening to people for the sound of links breaking within.”

  There were places where this work was done. But they were all part of the same place in the end. An island in the Mediterranean belonged to the same place as a room in a hospital in Germany, which was itself connected as if by a single hallway to a shed out back of a listening post in the subarctic. These were places with separate coordinates. But in the trade, they were as contiguous as the anonymous chain hotels after which they were nicknamed. Hilton, HoJo, Best Western, Travelodge. All places where the rules didn’t apply. Mov thought you could feel it walking through the door.

  He had a home by then. “East Coast. Wife. I had a child. This will get more familiar as we go along.”

  He flew out to work, civilian. He had a credit card with a $25,000 limit. Flew night flights often, taking window seats, laid his head against the cool glass and slept until arrival. Rented a car. Went to work. He did interrogation prep, which was one of the jobs they contracted out. He didn’t envy the men who extracted the actual information. They had even higher security clearances. Cover stories, lives of deceit. They left each room they entered with new secrets they were obliged to keep. It was a life that accumulated misery, and he’d met more than a few of them who would gladly admit it.

  Interrogation prep meant softening up the prisoners. Getting them used to the idea of endless suffering, with talking as the single mechanism for release. Not talking now, just talking later sometime. For this purpose Mov’s company hired language grads, psychology majors, guys who’d had collegiate sports careers interrupted by injury. They hired church people and heathens. It was understood by those on the inside that a trace of patriotism didn’t hurt, but that they had been selected for self-interest too.

  Third interview, they asked Mov why he wanted the job. “You speak what, seven languages,” the guy said. “Why aren’t you on a campus somewhere? Campus life. Autumn days. Nice office. Pretty co-eds.”

  He answered: “I’d like to help out. I believe in Western civilization. And sure, I see it facing certain threats.”

  The man asked him: “But what? I hear a but in that.”

  Then the man waited, a long pause. They were interviewing him in a bare room in an industrial park outside of a prairie city. He’d seen a grain elevator while driving in earlier, big letters across the side: John 3:16. Mov wasn’t a believer. Although having not yet been hired, having not yet seen inside the machine, he thought that if he did believe he’d surely turn around and head back to the airport having seen that sign.

  Mov gave the man an answer. Something to do with occasionally stepping up to do a duty. But there were other things he wasn’t saying. He could see them hanging in the air, the other considerations. The man himself inspired something, the phantom machinery of which he was a part. There was a kind of person who wanted to be asked to do those things other people wouldn’t do. Mov knew it now, if he hadn’t fully then. There was a type who responded to the inner distinction of the clandestine. The hidden mark on the heart. Take this package to the man in the café. Drape a scarf out your window if you’re being followed. Those who were called didn’t know their full role in things, only that their role was full. In the ambiguity lay the reassurance. You were one step further inside, nearer the way things really worked. Nearer the reasons, the truths of the matter.

  “It was like wanting fame, but not fame. The other related thing,” Mov told Pegg. “The one you couldn’t speak about. Anti-fame. I wanted that.”

  Pegg forced himself to breathe. “Anti-fame?”

  “Some people want to be widely known and celebrated. Others want concealment and secrecy. It’s gaming the system, either way. It’s a bid to separate yourself from all those wandering around outside the machinery, subject to it but blind to their enslavement. The fan is always the mark. Celebrity is a con. Who wrote that, having seen it for himself up close and personal? What smart man, Thom Pegg?”

  Pegg leaned back in his chair. He felt exhausted already but sensed that he’d barely been tested. “Go on,” he said.

  “I didn’t like any of the weird stuff, any of the sexual play, the dogs,” Mov said. “I didn’t put panties on the guys’ heads or have them simu
late blow jobs on each other. I didn’t like the whole approach of humiliation. There could be honor in it, even under the circumstances.”

  He worked contrasts, mainly. These were time proven, he explained. Cold cells, hot cells. He kept them in darkness and then shone a bank of quartz incandescent lights in their faces. He stood behind these lights, barely visible. Voice coming out of the blinding white. Rarely threats. Fear was a lever that worked in about one in ten cases. Middle-class secular guys caught up in the game without religious motive. But there weren’t many of those, no point denying it. And once you had a kid coming out of a God School in the Pakistani highlands, your fear, the one you brought to the table, well that was ranked and ordered against other fears that eclipsed the sun.

  “But I would hood them with empty sandbags and stand them spread-eagled against the wall, hands high over their heads. You pulled their feet right back, made them support their weight against the wall with their fingertips.”

  Sometimes he did this to a group of people. A few hours standing with six or eight of their friends arrested at the same time. At first they took a lot of strength from the collective, which was exactly how you wanted it. Four or five hours in, they might have been questioning the return on their investment. They still had sandbags over their heads. They had no idea if the brothers were still there or if they were alone because they weren’t allowed to speak. The hood cut off a great deal of who they were as autonomous people.

  “So hour four you ask for a show of hands. Who’s ready to have a conversation? You say something like: whoa, whoa, one at a time. They have no idea who all has raised their hands. But you can see the pennies individually drop. The hands start going up.”

  He had compliments from the people in intelligence, spooks and wonks. Good prep, the guys would say, they’re talking. He was flying around more. The inquest was spreading and taking Mov with it across that land with no borders, defined simply by wherever he appeared. He didn’t mind admitting that he loved the feeling of being everywhere at once and virtually invisible. Anti-fame. Well, exactly. He once saw a famous movie producer waiting for a flight, hovered over by protective flight attendants who kept autograph hounds away and then whisked the man into a corner seat in business class.

  “Oscar winner,” Mov told Pegg. “You know the name although it doesn’t matter. The guy’s Gulfstream was probably in the shop.”

  Mov said he remembered the sense of satisfaction he felt as he took his own seat in the opposite corner of the cabin. Between him and the movie mogul—hunched over the Wall Street Journal in his sunglasses—a grid of businessmen making last calls before liftoff on their cell phone earpieces, pecking out last memos on their BlackBerrys. Tense with aspiration and thwarted desire. Every one of them packing an extra twenty or thirty pounds in their light blue shirts and tassel loafers. Every one of them sipping the complimentary champagne that only Mov and the producer had declined. Me and you, pal, Mov thought. We’re free. And he felt pity for the rest of them. Slaving away on the outside without a clue about how anything actually worked.

  “Gaming the system, he and I,” Mov said. “We were inside the machinery looking out.”

  “A feeling you enjoyed,” Pegg said.

  “You don’t enjoy it?” Mov said. “You don’t like it on the inside of your machine, Thom? You don’t secretly thrill to the work you’re doing now over the work you did before? A lot of serious journalists would have considered an interview with me to be a big opportunity. Tell me honestly: were you dying to come in here and meet me?”

  “Honestly, no,” Pegg said. His tongue dry and raspy. “Although I still don’t see where you and I . . .”

  “Oh, there’s a lot of me that’s a lot like you, Thom. Just listen,” Mov said. “We prepped a young guy in a back room at a civilian airport once. Nineteen years old.”

  And Pegg could hear that one crack in the air. He sat forward, then forced himself to relax. “Civilian airport?” he said. “Where was it?”

  Mov considered the question. “Eastern Europe. The United Kingdom. Canada.”

  Romania. Manitoba. The point was that no matter where the prisoner was physically, he was in all the places where he might conceivably have been. The other point was that the prisoner was more than a God School grad, more than an indoctrination case. What they had there was a prisoner who was genuinely religious.

  Pegg made to speak again. He inhaled to ask the question, Which God?

  But Mov’s hand went up. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. “The point is he had one,” Mov said. “Once you have a God, the only point worth making about it is that you have one.”

  Pegg nodded grimly. Point taken.

  And a closely held God, too. This was God in the very grain of the person. In the weave of all self-reflection. Nineteen, twenty years old. A bad age to encounter this kind of thing. There hadn’t been enough years lived for contrary evidence to accumulate: life’s ordinary disappointments and irregularities, all the superficial nicks and edges on which faith begins to snag and fray. He didn’t pray aloud or rock in place. Mov looked him over when he arrived and saw a depth there that worried him.

  “They needed him ready to talk inside three days. Ticking bomb scenario. He knows something event-specific. It involves a truck full of explosives or a bomb wired to a cell phone in a locker somewhere. Everyone involved in this case has a degree of urgency and the guy’s just sitting in the regular cell on a bench. We haven’t started to strip things away yet. I haven’t. First thing I do is tell him I’m Israeli. Of course I’m not, but I’d claim to be whatever worked. And for a lot of prisoners, at this point in history, Israeli is the one they don’t want to hear. It sets the stage. It says: between you and me it’s personal. And nobody cares that you’re here because of exactly that, because between you and me it’s personal.”

  Mov talks to him in his own language. He talks to him in a dialect from his region. He uses slang you’d know only if you were raised there, if you were thick with the locals. The guy listens, humming noteless rhythms under his breath.

  “Not too much early physical pressure. You can drive these types into an inner chamber. They have a consciousness with trapdoors. Something happens and the catch springs, they slide down a chute into the panic room of their soul. Then they’re well and truly gone. You might as well let them go.”

  Mov worked at subtracting things in layers. He corrects the guy’s pronunciation of a word in his own language. He tells him his father and brother have been arrested and are down the hall. He moves him to a cell with no furniture, no windows. On with the hood. On with the death-metal soundtrack. The cell is soundproof so Mov doesn’t have to listen to it, a scything avalanche of machine noises and guttural German screaming. The volume is randomly varied. They bring him military rations in the middle of the night. After twenty-four hours they make him stand on a box. The music hasn’t stopped. The guy moans. He falls and wakes himself up. He falls and wakes himself up again. Mov hasn’t even raised his voice. The guy is going through all this like he’s had practice. He asks to use a toilet and Mov leaves him to soil himself. He hasn’t seen the light or felt a trace of life’s regular heartbeat in twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours. He has been unmoored from sanity’s anchors, pattern and repeat, stable rhythm.

  “Then I turn the music off. Give the cell some heat. It was about five degrees centigrade in there. I take off his hood and sit him down. He’s swollen around the eyes from where he’s been banging his head against the wall, lacerations. But he’s still with me. I haven’t lost him yet.”

  Mov tells him some men want to talk to him. Just questions. The guy spits on the floor. “So it’s going to get a bit more physical now. You ready to hear this?”

  Pegg listened in the urgent gloom. His mind racing. He was thinking of Gerry, Hyacinth and the others just then, having heard a movement in the theater, in the cluster of shapes up there. A sniffle, a whimper. Pegg felt a surge inside him, not his guts, which were strangely silent. S
omething from the heart. He said: “I really, really need to suggest something.”

  HEROISM. TICKER-TAPE PARADE STUFF. Pegg had no business doing this kind of thing and he blamed the fact that both pocket bottles were now tragically empty. All that courage was inside him now and bleeding out. Better use it while it lasted.

  “I’d like to suggest we let them go. Finish up this conversation on our own. It’s brilliant, I mean. The story will be told.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, I do. Just let them go.”

  “Why not choose a couple?” Mov suggested. “That’s what I’ve been doing. Keeps things moving along. Gives the whole event directionality without bringing us to our conclusion all at once, too suddenly.”

  “I can’t choose.”

  “Sure you can. Pick two.”

  “No, no. I refuse.”

  “Make it three.”

  Pegg in a dream. Pegg in a terrible nightmare. He stumbled up to the end of the row where Gerry and the others were sitting.

  “Are we going?” Gerry asked. “I have a sick one here.”

  “Who’s sick?”

  “Isaac needs his inhaler. He dropped it somewhere.”

  “Take Isaac and another one,” Pegg said. “You’re going.”

  Gerry stood and then sat. Then stood again and said quite loudly, “By age. We do it by age. That’s Barker and Sam.”

  Pegg took the boy Barker and the little girl Sam, holding both their hands in one of his. Then Isaac. Then the next youngest one, Ashley.

  “I have four, Mov. There’s a sick one here.”

  Then he moved across the sloping floor towards the side doors opening onto the lobby, pausing there. Wondering at the logistics of it for the first time.