The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  “Take off the vision,” Mov called.

  Right, right. Pegg stripped away the mask and blinked into darkness again. Then he pushed open the door, slowly, slowly. “Eyes shut,” he said to them. “It’s bright.” And then into the glass-walled lobby, which was lit from all the lights in the square outside. Into the whitest light he could remember having endured. It was painful. He took a step and waited, hoping he was seen. Another step, another long wait. They were on the marble now, broken glass underfoot. Pegg was humming to himself. He heard it suddenly, an intensely alien sound. A tune he didn’t know. An impulse he didn’t remember.

  “It’s me!” he called out. “It’s Thom Pegg!”

  Outside it was Friday afternoon. Indian summer with hovering storm. And in the air a thousand shivering notes at once, slips and cricks and jostles. The attention of the waiting square swiveling and locking in place. He heard the oiled movement of rifle parts and felt the crosshairs tickle his scalp. His sight was returning. People were screaming in the distance. Yells and catcalls, yelps and hollers. It sounded like sports crowd noises.

  “It’s me!” he called out again. “Thom Pegg.”

  On the steps there was now a flurry of movement, a terse economy of shapes low to the ground. Several people coming forward, scuttling up the stairs. Silent. When they were close Pegg could see that they were soldiers of the midnight black variety, everything about them oiled over and invisibilized, face paint, gloves. He released the children, who were now wailing, crying. They were scooped up and carried away. Gone instantly and over the barricades.

  “I need to speak to Bruce Haden,” he said to the one soldier remaining.

  “Don’t know him,” the man said. “Tell me how many.”

  “He’s federal, I think.”

  “Psychos and hostages, sir,” the soldier said, taking Pegg’s arm and persuading him with a single tug down to one knee. They knelt that way face to face, the man’s rifle sited past Pegg, through the broken glass and into the lobby. “Please tell me now, sir. I need the how manys.”

  Pegg told him. One hostage taker. Pegg himself plus six kids: Gerry, Roshawn, Laisha, Reebo, Hyacinth, Metric. And the man repeated what he said into a throat mike, his words clipping in behind Pegg’s. Seven total, roger that. The six kids were all together, rear placement.

  “The guy is calling himself Movsar Barayev,” Pegg said.

  “We know that. And what does he have, sir? Bomb, guns, what else?”

  Bomb, Pegg told him. Briefcase. Handle. Can’t be moved. The soldier nodded and held up a gloved hand. Stop there. He was listening intently now to someone talking at the other end. “Yes sir. GPS trigger.”

  He listened some more. “Roger that,” he said, then to Pegg: “Don’t ask for any more to be released. We’re going to let it flow from here.”

  “All right,” Pegg said. “But Haden. Get to Haden and tell him the man is wearing night-vision.”

  “Just keep him talking. Near the stage if possible. Try to keep some distance between you two and the hostages, yes?”

  Pegg nodded, bewildered. And the soldier leaned to his shoulder again, listening. He said: “Out.” Then clapped Pegg on the arm, spun on his knee and scuttled off down the steps and over the barricade. Entirely non-human in his movement and speed. Like a turbocharged crab.

  ON HIS WAY BACK INSIDE, after strapping back on the vision, Pegg was crushed with guilt. It just dropped on him, this emotion of which he was keenly aware, but only in the air around him. Not so well personally acquainted. Black guilt. He’d never even thought about the producer and the paramedic woman actually lying there. He’d sort of had them in a wing of the special effects trailer. Flash, bang, they’re dead and then they disappear. All very tidy.

  He looked for them and found them. She lay collapsed near the front wall, just inside the door. Pegg got to his knees next to the body and touched her throat. He had never touched a corpse before and was surprised that it seemed so familiar a feeling, as if the fingers come preloaded with the knowledge of what death is, its tactile emptiness, the flatness of it, the grain of the skin as the oils lose their temperature. His fingers touched where the pulse would have been and bounced away. She was rolled to one side, not much blood or mess. Dark stains only across the chest. Body twisted and rigid. The producer wasn’t far away, just up the aisle. But Pegg didn’t touch him.

  “And how’d that go?” Mov asked him when he approached the stage. “Out there.”

  Mov was sitting on the edge of the stage, legs swinging.

  “What do you want to have happen here?” Pegg asked.

  Mov patted the stage next to him but Pegg remained where he stood. He saw Mov’s shoulders round in resignation. “In the end, they come inside. Of course.”

  “In a big fireball, is that it? You want that.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “What do you want from me?” Pegg asked, voice cracking.

  Mov regarded him steadily. The slight tilt of the goggles might have reflected amusement. “There’s one person on earth who understands your life, a single person to whom you can really tell your story, to whom you can really confess. It’s never a priest. It’s a mirror individual, somewhere, sometime. You’re the one for me, Thom Pegg. It couldn’t be clearer. You’ve already written my story, lived my life.”

  “Then let the kids go,” Pegg said. “Let them go and you confess or do whatever it is you need to do.”

  “Just you and me?” Mov said. “Is the child all right? The sick one.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t . . .” And here Pegg was effusively sick himself into the front row of seats. It volcanoed out of him. A mercury flow of vomit. Booze puke, acid on the windpipe, scoring the throat and the back of the nose. He gagged extensively, breathed some of it back into his windpipe, exploded outwards again. Retching. Wretched. He wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve, then tore the jacket off and threw it into the seats.

  “Don’t hurt them!” Pegg yelled. “Just don’t hurt them!”

  Mov waited. Then continued as if Pegg hadn’t spoken. The prisoner. What to do next. Nudity and stress positions. Pegg collapsed to the carpet, sat in a heap.

  Well, the prisoner had spit on the floor. What you might call active resistance. So physical pain was introduced. Subtle, naturally. Guised under the suggestion that it was self-inflicted. To this end: cuff the detainee and put him in a stress position. Short shackling, for example, meaning you chain him by his neck to the floor with a chain too short to let him stand. The chain from his neck up to the eyelet in the wall didn’t allow him to lie down either.

  “Twelve hours in that position and you don’t hate the chain or the guy who fastened it there. You hate your own body. You go hostile with the envelope of your own flesh. You want it to die, and for you to continue living. A separation and a double bind. Interesting. Things that seemed like options start to go unconscious, they start to wink out.”

  Pegg was reviewing the possibility of being sick again, greatly facilitated in the process by the wafting aroma of his previous sick. He muttered, phlegmy: “Jesus Christ.”

  “Who, since you mention him, is a weak-ass wingman under these circumstances,” Mov said, rising from his seat on the edge of the stage and walking back towards the two chairs where they had been sitting. “Muhammad far better, in my experience. This guy did twelve hours and said nothing. Didn’t even open his eyes. And here, for the first time, I did really wonder if I’d done him. Driven him inside, down the chute to the panic room.”

  Pegg followed Mov and sat opposite him, his voice recorder on the table between them.

  There were a range of come-back-to-me type maneuvers, Mov explained. It’s not like this had never happened before. In the old days, this was the point when electricity was introduced. Now, more sensitive times meant more thoughtful escalations.

  Mov slapped the guy hard in the chest, grabbed his shirt and shook him. He let him rest a minute and repeated the move, sl
ap and shake. About the fourth time he saw the man’s eyes shock open. He didn’t want another one. So there they were, face to face, the world shaping itself as it had to be. Mov and the young man, no room for his God. And Mov, unlike any God he’d yet encountered, had plans and contingencies. He pulled the man’s shirt up and smacked him across the belly, palm flat. It made a sound like: pock, pock.

  “Like knocking on a coconut. Blows the breath out of him, keeps him wide awake, leaves no marks.”

  Pock, pock.

  The guy is staring at Mov. He can’t close his eyes now. Something critical has changed. And that was the sign Mov was waiting for. Out of the cell, away from the chains, the low ceiling, the chill, the buckets of water, the duct tape and cling wrap. And across the hall into a bigger room, straight chair, low lights, no pictures on the wall, no windows, no music. Time for a little Alice in Wonderland.

  “Three questions at the same time. Things he couldn’t possibly know. Then a single question over and over. Then silence. Changing my voice the entire time, talking falsetto, talking like Groucho Marx, talking like Elvis. There’s a degree to which you push this kind of thing and the walls of a sanity start to bend. People talk just to make you stop.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Just listen!” Mov yelled at him, lunging forward.

  Pegg jolted backwards in his chair, shocked to silence.

  “Of course it worked,” Mov said, smiling at the effect he had achieved. “People don’t like to be disoriented. You’d talk, and he did too. I held up one hand. I said: ‘Save it. I just need one more thing.’”

  Pegg waited. He was bruised with the story. He was beaten by it. He was in a stress position himself, chained to a wall and banging his head.

  “I told him: Tell me that your God isn’t here. Not that he doesn’t exist somewhere. Just that he’s not in this room. Not with you now. Tell me that we’re alone. Tell me that your God has taken a powder and left you here with me.”

  And he did. A confession that had nothing to do with secrets and locations and plans, codes and targets. Only belief. Mov cracked his faith and offered his denouncement back to him, that critical-system failure, as a viable way out.

  “He took it. And I left him sitting there with a cup of tea and went to make a phone call. Your man is prepped. They showed up in less than an hour. He lasted twenty-four, as best I can make out. Died during interrogation the next morning, hands shackled to a window frame behind him, doused with cold water. Some of them die when you do this, and he turned out to be one of them. I was at home, asleep.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well we didn’t get the ticking time bomb, did we? So presumably something exploded somewhere and people were killed. I never heard. There were too many of those events to keep track. I was left thinking about how the kid had renounced his God and then died.”

  Mov stood saying that, losing some of his calm and remove. And Pegg too felt a familiar failing within. Like losing everything. Sources exploding. Lies chasing each other around the room and out the door. It was the way the editorial director of one of the big papers told him on the phone: Well, I guess that’s the end of it then. But Pegg knew when hanging up that it wasn’t the end of anything. There was a surge, a splintering, a terrible suction as if water were rushing, oceanic distress. But that wasn’t the end. That was barely the beginning of the fall, barely the start of losing it all, alone over the abyss and the abyss rising fast.

  “Then you changed your mind about things,” Pegg said. “And things got worse.”

  Regret, remorse. Homo paenitentia. But Mov didn’t remember just becoming regretful. He remembered beginning to lose his mind. He remembered not holding it together for a week then dropping an assignment midway, after driving some old man into the panic room, never to be recovered. An important asset, that one. Mov fucked it up.

  “Tell me the rest,” Pegg said.

  Mov told all. He confessed his guilt to his own bosses. Oddly, it wasn’t the young man’s death that plagued him, Mov told them. It was the idea that he’d made things complicated between the young man and his God, right at the critical moment.

  “Imagine, confessing guilt to your boss about something like that,” Mov said. “Nothing comes of it. The confession does nothing to help you.”

  He was given time off. Then he was fired.

  “Ask your friend Haden about that if you like,” Mov said.

  “You worked for Bruce Haden.”

  “Haden or someone like Haden. The shadows are long and they’re full of Hadens.”

  Pegg had only met one Haden. But that was enough to convince him that Mov was right. The shadows teemed with Hadens. “Keep going.”

  After being fired, things began to unspool at home too. Suppressing violence became difficult, Mov told Pegg. Some monster, strong enough to handle the tensions of the moment, stole into him and filled out his every contour. One day while taking the dog around the block for a piss, he yanked on her leash so hard the old bitch ended up at the veterinary hospital. Eye hemorrhage. And there were other things: episodes, outbreaks, meltdowns, moments of genuine fear and madness. Some spore was loose in the house, he remembered distinctly thinking. But Mov was the only one breathing it in.

  She kicked him out. She kept the child.

  “Your boy,” Pegg said.

  And here came the settling of darker times just when it seemed impossible that things could get any darker. Strange currents. An inward turning.

  Mov went quiet. He said nothing for a full minute before Pegg reached down and touched the tape recorder sitting on the low table between them. Touched the key and turned the machine off.

  “Just you talking,” Pegg said. “Nobody listening but me.”

  Mov waited, then spoke. “Ever felt like you were being watched? Like you were no longer anonymous in crowds, no longer alone in your own home? Ever felt lifted out, selected and acquired, like you were a targeted individual?”

  Pegg’s guts rolled and flopped. His spleen bleated. His bladder did a spit-take. He felt the wet below.

  Men on foot in black ball caps. Men in cars, one fender dented, one hubcap missing, aerial bent at right angles. They had a routine revolving around Mov’s entering or leaving a building. When he entered they honked their horns, when he left they flicked their brights. They made themselves known.

  “Gang Stalking,” Pegg whispered. “They call it Gang Stalking.”

  “I wondered for a long time, then went online. Common symptoms, these.”

  Blocked off in parking lots, passed and re-passed by the same vehicles. A particular fire station seemed to be involved. Again and again he’d see the ladder truck, the chief’s SUV. They’d wink their sirens at him as they passed. Smirks and glances. They had him. He was targeted. They kept it up even after he moved, left his apartment because they’d moved into the one across the way.

  “Ever notice someone new in the hallway outside your apartment and then get the feeling they’d been waiting to see you? You leave and the man is just leaving his place. He stops with the door open and you can see past him to all the equipment, the stacked receivers and transmitters, the black gadgetry, the antennae and directional microphones. I’m describing madness, right?”

  Pegg didn’t answer.

  “Madness, of course. And yet not so terribly implausible. It’s not just me thinking we live in toxic times. Whom do you trust, Thom? Your doctor. Your drug company. Is the government corrupt? What about banks and billionaires? All aboveboard? Ask someone. Ask someone on the street who used to read Thom Pegg. Ask them if the system is still one that reflects who they are on the inside. Ask them if the anthems don’t ring a little flat, if the flags aren’t subtly but indelibly stained. Whom do they trust? You can bet the list is short and there’s not a powerful person on it. Our cattle are cloned. Our seeds are terminators. Our pipelines are full of blood.”

  He’d arrive home and all the lights would go on at once in the building across the str
eet. One morning, he started his truck and noticed a man in the side mirror, crouched down on the passenger side near his rear wheel. Mov got out and went around. The man had left a kitten under his tire.

  “This had a certain effect on my state of mind. I saw signs everywhere. Stickers at the bottom of rear windows, especially pickup trucks. Fuzzy dice, St. Christopher medals, motorcycle club paraphernalia, marijuana flags. I saw women with kids too close in age, like they were props. The kids would be left in the vehicles when the women got out to follow me on foot. But the vehicles, those were key.”

  “How so?” Pegg asked.

  License plate numbers, Mov told him. You could track those. They were real data.

  “You wrote down the license plate numbers of people who were following you.”

  He wrote them down, Mov said. He also memorized them. “4SYU671, 7B91708, 2PHX588, 1800711 (TAXI), 4YQT562, 4X94202. For example.”

  “You’ve memorized license plate numbers,” Pegg repeated.

  “Perpetrators, stalkers,” Mov said. “Just to give you an idea. 3DKA445, 16Z1021, 3STA138, 6L03811, 4LBG661, 4TEV602, DID4MEL, 2YLM477, 4GPA456, 22107, 4XAD002, 03183, 3PTR069, 2NZP651, 4BFL607, 4MVE232, 3LMC452, 3XMA297, 4CBJ974, 4EDT696, 4JLT436, 7F1850, 4JFK922, 2PLT526, LA DAD, 5CLC219, 4VLH756, 3XNC574, RRT 868 (OR), JK65587, 4VRE879, 3VAV141, 2VON186, 3VCT167, 3WNV662, P60KDK, 4WVG799.”

  “Okay,” said Pegg. “I get the picture.”

  But that didn’t stop the flow. Mov scrolled on through his list. Dozens of license plates. Dozens of dozens. An incomprehensible screed of letters and numbers until Pegg thought the sound of it had become a kind of torture in itself. 4MHW247, 5625511, 3NNY540, 4URH695, 5DIJ795, 2UTL078, 535TNF, 4S44767, 4ULW516, 4DUG492, 4PEB958, 5DTV565, ZEPOLL, 88A01, 4YJ4721, 3P42709, 4RGW962, 5BBE906—

  “Stop!” Pegg yelled over the rising din of it. “I get it!”

  “I believe you do,” Mov said. “I believe you’re beginning to see how it’s done. This whole business. Fame and anti-fame. They both grind down to some point. Some solving value when appeasement is required, a sacrifice. And then we feed someone into the machine. We tear someone down and discard them and things return to normal. We run the video of the politician caught with the transvestite prostitute or the tape of the actor delivering a drunken, racist rant. And we feel much better about ourselves, thank you very much. Those pictures of Abu Ghraib, same thing. We didn’t need to approve of torture to walk away from those images feeling more righteous than we had the moment before. Aren’t these things that you and I know better than most, Thom?”