The Blue Light Project (18 page)

It took her about thirty minutes. Across the old dockyards area, on into Stofton, then up the hill directly towards the plaza in the Heights. The morning air cycled through her, cooling and replenishing. She could smell the river, which since the death of the old industry along the southern waterfront—there had been mills and foundries, brick and cattle yards—had developed an urban water smell of its own.
Stony, minerally, grassy. Traces of petroleum too, like memories released to air by the old timbers of the wharves that remained undeveloped there.

She watched the walls, instinctively. The art swelled in waves as you exited the western stretches of the city, the walls growing busy. She ran by one of the long flowered fields, an old one, parts of it peeling away.

Eve was climbing now, enjoying the uptick in her body’s own industry. System temperature rising, a light sweat sheening her neck and face, a pleasant low burn in her calves as the grade steepened up through the loft apartments of the Slopes and the streets changed around her. The drug trade falling behind. The endless hand-to-hand exchanges, the near-silent mutterings of that inextinguishable market. Now there were furniture upholsterers and auto body shops, then bars and dollar stores. Cafés, restaurants. And on up towards the plaza, where Eve pulled up finally, hands to her hips, a new scent with each breath. Cologne, coffee, baked goods. Her breathing even and almost at resting pace by the time she reached the barricades, the police checkpoint where people were showing ID.

“Where’re you heading? You live around the plaza?”

“Work,” she said. “I’m starting early.” She told the cop she worked at Double Vision.

Early twenties. Probably his first year on the force. He turned her ID in his smooth hands, neat nails, no calluses. He looked at the picture again. “Take off your hat, please.”

Eve’s father had a family-famous sore spot with anybody in uniform, ever ready to make life difficult over a traffic ticket or a border crossing. This had to do with early-life war protest and what was left of his revolutionary tendencies. But as these things go, by midlife he no longer wore his prejudice as much as it wore him. So cops tended to quickly sniff on him the scent of resistance. They quietly firmed up, needed no further provocation. Once, after minor vandalism at the house,
which Eve’s mother had phoned in (a kid cut off a dozen of her mother’s peonies, probably to give to a girl), the squad car arrived and they climbed out with that insinuating slowness of the cop mid-routine. Her father hackled. He ended up in cuffs inside fifteen minutes.

“If you’ll just calm down, sir, I can take these off.”

Eve never shared her father’s angle on these matters. And he reversed his position entirely by the end of his life, particularly with respect to soldiers, writing many long and sympathetic dispatches from hot zones and bunking with twenty-year-old riflemen who took to his interest with fond regard. But she still couldn’t have anticipated how differently her own relationship would develop with the serve-and-protect classes. One gold medal, one parade through the center of town, and she was never forgotten. She smiled and agreed to have arms thrown around her shoulders, to have herself pulled a little close. They adored her for it.

Eve took off her hat. The young cop looked up at her, finally, making the eye contact that is reserved for just the moment required. Then he grinned. “I thought it was you, Evey. I just never knew your full name was Genevieve. Now put your hat back on. You’re going to want to take a left at the block there and skirt the square to the east, all right? To the west is trouble and the square itself is all blocked.”

She asked him about the crisis, assuming it to be his foremost concern. Out stopping citizens in the predawn blue. But he was still grinning and she realized she wasn’t being heard. He said: “Hey, Steve.”

And his partner came over, bobbing his head, boyish. She didn’t mind any of this particularly. It had become a habit to answer the questions the same way. She still ran and trained, sure. Yes to still skiing. No to shooting. And like a lot of people, in keeping with a pattern that still amazed her, this all slid reliably towards a single conversational moment when they would both remember for her exactly where they had been when she won. “When you crossed that line,” the partner
said, his cheeks flushed. “Ah, let me tell you. We were all cheering. My gosh, that was something.”

After which the conversation rolled to its second waypoint, people revealing with body language that they’d exhausted their polite curiosity and could think only of questions they didn’t necessarily want to ask. They shifted on their feet, sometimes turned away a fraction, unsure how to withdraw from the little pool of light cast by her celebrity.

Such that it was. Eve moved away from the checkpoint carrying a typical bemusement. She had never had a single hero other than Ali. Ali the smart, the brave, the fast. Ali of no fear. When he reached the platform near the top of that skeletal tower, he stood up and turned and beckoned to her. She was eclipsed with fear, gripping that railing. Everything in her wanted to follow. The wind surrounding them and making a sound like the inside of a seashell. Eve could remember his face so clearly now as she walked away from the barricades, the shades of first light rouging the eastern cloud. Ali in silhouette against a warning sky. And she was pulled by the image, lengthening her stride, but not breaking into a run. Pulled by it and towards the floodlights, the idling armored personnel carriers, the charged stillness, the tension of the waiting plaza.

PEGG JOGGED AWAKE IN THE WIDEST airline seat in which he’d ever had the pleasure to pass out. Not a government plane at all, in the end. While those had definitely been federals of one stripe or another sent along to escort him, and whose opaque scheming seemed to be driving the whole adventure, it was his own publisher who provided transportation. The owner of the magazine. Pegg was stunned. He’d only met the man once and then briefly, and didn’t recall much of the conversation, having had it towards the blurry tail end of whatever evening it had been. But he couldn’t previously have appreciated just how much of a plaything, an ornament, a trinket the magazine was to this man who had clearly made his money at altogether more serious gaming tables. Pegg’s last tether to solvency—this job, Spratley’s goodwill to retain him in it—was an oligarch’s toe-bauble.

He looked around, wiping crust from the corners of his eyes and mouth. He saw cream leather upholstery. He saw a long passageway connecting different cabins. A bar up front. Sleeping rooms to the rear. He thought: Bulk arms sales or private security services. But he didn’t
have any further opportunity to speculate along these lines, as a face came hovering in.

Or, a non-face. Pegg remembered that just before he had fallen asleep he’d started to think that none of them really sported faces in the conventional sense, these men and women sent along to shepherd him. They moved and shaped their features into various expressions, but not as faces did, which in Pegg’s experience was a process that you could observe to operate just beyond the owner’s control. You said something funny, normal people smiled. You spun a sad yarn, they shed a tear. Not these faces, which moved only in response to what was carefully authored within.

He was looking at the face now, the non-face. He was thinking: Passed out. Yes, that was it. These were brutal hangover symptoms after two hours’ sleep, the rapid calculation of how and who. After a good one out on the tank, he was usually numb throughout his core. Which he sadly wasn’t now. He was sore from his nipples to the roll of his waist. Stormy pressure systems roving up and down his right side, then sweeping around to his shoulder blades. Sprinklings of sensory rain. The pitter-patter of drops before who knew what deluge.

“Ah,” Pegg said, then coughed. Then coughed again.

The non-face said: “You’re awake then.”

“Up, yes,” Pegg answered. “Or rather. Yes, up.”

“We’ll be on the tarmac in forty minutes here. We have things to cover.”

“Right,” Pegg said. “All right, cover.”

The non-face withdrew, leaving Pegg to his computations. If he’d passed out, surely he had given them all the information they needed to have changed their minds about him by now. They would have phoned ahead and switched the teams to Plan B, or C or D or whatever they were down to by then. Released the gas or whatever non-lethal method had been dreamt up most recently for snatching
hostages from bad guys.
Forget the gossip jockey,
Pegg imagined someone important saying to somebody else important, tight lipped.
He’s no use to us. He was unconscious minutes after takeoff when we were in the middle of his briefing.

Pegg winced in shame and self-reproach, a finding of guilt by an inward-pointing judiciary he no longer trusted. He impulsively pressed with his fingers along his rib line, tracking the snake of pressure within. His internal organs chatting amongst themselves on that favorite topic of the worried and ailing everywhere: their worries and ailments.

He distracted himself from the disquieted murmur, as always, by listening to other voices. And there were plenty now babbling from within his cringing memory. He’d fled the restaurant and Chastity with dignity and composure more or less intact. But then at the airport, in the long white foyer outside the ramp, he’d seen them, those federal non-faces. And his heartbeat had sped and thinned, gone fluttery. Five white shirts at the end of the hall touching their ears and talking into their lapels. He felt clandestine airways jump, crosshairs on his scalp. He felt branched out and connected to problems around the world, through them, through these agency types with pistols tucked into their armpits. He didn’t like the feeling at all and had to fight the urge to turn and run. He had a real moment of calculation there. Insane arithmetic. He could be outside the terminal in fifteen, ten minutes to find a taxi. Safely into his second vodka-seven at Giggles around the corner from his apartment in forty-five minutes tops.

He made his way to the men’s instead. Into a stall to figure out a way through all this. “Gravol,” he said. And he took a handful of those, but also downed his remaining pocket bottles and binned the empties. Then the little safety flask of cognac too. Then the rest of his Gravol to keep him from ralphing it all up again.

Aboard the aircraft, minutes later, he was just processing the environment for the first time, escorted to a seat, given some papers to
look over. The plane surged but nobody stopped talking, nobody stopped this rolling business of tearing him out of his life.

She spoke. This one who had regarded him the most coolly of the bunch, whose nose seemed to twitch at the first scent of him, first whiff of Chastity’s lingering and incriminating odor. “Not entirely new to you, though, is it? This working in the hot zone. You’ve worked a few hard stories in your day.”

That’s right. That’s right, Pegg answered. A few really big ones. But then he realized he wasn’t talking. He was only thinking and staring. He was hearing takeoff noises, his head bending over onto somebody’s shoulder.

 

AFTER HIS FALL, AND STILL LATER, after his strange encounter with those photographers on the New York subway platform, Pegg had been forced to work on himself a bit. He was ruined. He was recovering. He wasn’t going to let a string of statistical anomalies ruin him again, even if life seemed to be throwing them up in a provocative way during those months. White vans parked across from his house seven mornings in a row at the same hour, flashing their lights as he stepped to the street. Wrong-number calls for a man named Rufus, through February, then again in April. And then an even stranger one. Unsettling, sure it was. There was a day in June, a very hot day, sticky, when seven people came up to him in the space of a single afternoon and asked if they could borrow his cell phone.

What were the chances of that happening randomly? Or, the more important question: of what cause could that conceivably be the effect? Because things came into the world via causes and nothing irritated Pegg more than people who believed otherwise, except perhaps people who stated causes without proof. Such a position was a belief, an article of faith. Pegg didn’t have any. He militated against them. You didn’t trace the causal chain to sources outside of your own system, beyond
proof and accountability. This way madness lay. He’d written much to that effect, weaving it into the narratives of his various victims. God wasn’t responsible. That company over there was. That government. That police department.

Still, the matter was not sealed in his mind until the bit of street theater he seemed to have stumbled into in New York City. On Avenue of the Americas, as it happens. A kid—typical: hoodie, slouch, droopy drawers, tongue gavel, nose screw—stepped up to him at the curb and showed him a hundred-dollar bill. Just like that. Snapped it between his thumb and middle finger. Then tugged it taut between two hands.