The Blue Light Project (36 page)

He said: “Ever bought an art installation before?”

Eve shook her head. “Ever sold one?”

“Never.”

She waited for him to say whatever else was on his mind. But he was looking past her now, distracted. A man was standing on the far sidewalk swinging a mangled baseball bat against the iron grating on the front of a convenience store. People on the sidewalk nearby were standing back, watching. He hit the grate and the metal bars rang. He might have been doing it just to hear the sound. There were posters on the wall here, advertisements.
A masterpiece. The most. The last. The first. No joke. Unbeaten.

There was a practiced quality to the second swing. But then a man came out of the store with a gun and people scattered. He waved the weapon in the air, then lowered it and stood in a quivering stance. There were shouts from farther down the way. Blunted voices.

Rabbit turned to Eve, returning to his thought. “I don’t know why I need to tell you this.”

“Because you’ve never told anyone else,” Eve said.

“Maybe that’s it,” Rabbit said.

She waited.

Rabbit said: “About Oregon.”

 

SO NOW EVE ALONE KNEW WHAT HAPPENED to Rabbit in Oregon. It didn’t worry her to be in that position. It galvanized her interest in him. Eve now had different mental pictures to work with. Rabbit in a clean laboratory. Rabbit in conference rooms with team members. Rabbit waking up uncomfortably to how his ideas were actually going to be used.

“Nobody was dying as a result of my work, I realize that,” Rabbit told Eve. “There were jobs at Raytheon and Intel where I could have worked on control systems for cluster bombs and joint stand-off weapons. I was working on a phone. I was helping design the newest, latest, hottest version of a device most people use to order pizza, text their friends.”

But what a phone. What an idea. From a technical standpoint, it had been fun to work on. Naturally it was also an internet device and a video camera and a GPS and a music player. And yes, the prototype was also designed with an integrated biometric fingerprint and retina scanner, so the device was useless if it was stolen, and it could also log user medical information like blood pressure, blood type, pulse rates, et cetera. But the fact that it could do all those things was secondary to the phone’s chief innovation, which was a function that would ultimately be invisible to its users.

“And what was that?”

“It listened to you,” Rabbit said.

Eve thought about that one for a second or two. “Don’t all phones listen to you?”

“Not actively,” Rabbit said. “They just transmit. And even so, they generally don’t transmit unless you’re on a call.”

Eve was trying to work this through. “The phone was designed to eavesdrop?”

User intelligence, they called it. Or sometimes: behavioral fingerprinting. The phone was designed to sample the life of its user: ambient noises, television shows on in the background, music choices. The system then synched that data up with all the other information collected—downloads, GPS logs, voice traffic, medical data—and built a user profile that allowed the device to assemble phone books or web links, push ads and suggestions at you through the browser, even dial 911 and transmit medical data in the case of certain medical emergencies.

“Which was maybe a little more phone than some people would want,” Rabbit said. But what was a lot stranger, what really got into Rabbit’s head and wouldn’t come out, was the client-side request late in the project timetable for silent dial-out functions.

“Silent what?” Eve asked.

Dial-out. These capabilities enabled the phone to upload user profile data to pre-set third-party locations.

“As in, without people knowing,” Eve said.

Rabbit shrugged. Conceivably without them knowing, yes. The phone could have been designed to do that. He, personally, never got that far with it.

“Because you realized all this would be completely illegal?” Eve asked.

“It wasn’t illegal to test it,” Rabbit told her. “We were designing a prototype. A feasibility study.”

MADDAM, the client called it. Massively Distributable Data Acquisitions Module. Rabbit didn’t remember thinking once about what the device might represent if half the country or half the world owned one until that late client request that upload features be developed. And if there was any chance Rabbit was going to get his head
around that part, there was much less of a chance the following morning when a whole raft of new nondisclosure agreements were shipped over by the client’s lawyer to be signed immediately and returned. Rabbit signed. But why the paranoia? What exactly had they been working on?

“Maybe we really were just tossing around ideas for a super-smart phone,” Rabbit said. “But that morning I realized I just didn’t know. Maybe I was developing the most sophisticated low-maintenance wiretap the world had ever seen. Selling people stuff and surveillance have a big overlap, if you’re seeing my point here.”

“I am. And I’m scared to ask the next part,” Eve said.

Rabbit nodded. He knew where this all led if you thought about it.

“Who was the client?” Eve asked.

“Short answer?” Rabbit said. “Nobody I worked with had any idea. We used a code name in house. Blue 52.”

“Blue 52,” Eve said. “And who did you think that might be?”

Rabbit looked at Eve steadily. “I didn’t know. I would have been guessing, and looking at those agreements that morning it suddenly occurred to me I didn’t want to start guessing. I thought: Maybe there is no client. The phone was our only project. Maybe Blue 52 was my employer. You understand?”

Eve thought she did. She had different mental pictures for Rabbit now. Rabbit alone in the evening. Something troubling him, making him afraid. The idea that he may have been in place on a game board, playing a role quite different than the one he’d imagined. The idea that all along he had been playing as a mole.

“And here came the big epiphany,” Rabbit said. “It was a real if-then situation.”

“What’s that mean?”

“If A, then B. Meaning I understood the moment to be one of choosing.”

He went to a rep house called the Starlight Theater that same evening. He didn’t even know what was playing. But he’d been thinking about his parents, who’d been gone almost two years at that point. And he suddenly needed the anonymity of darkness. Turned out it was the Errol Morris film
Gates of Heaven
with a short first:
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Rabbit was preoccupied, hardly paying attention, his mind running back and forth between childhood memories and the things he’d just learned at work. He had a sense of being involved in something sophisticated, but also crude and primitive. Something that took the world backwards. Then Werner Herzog spoke off the screen, across thirty years, to Rabbit alone.

“I’ll never forget the words,” Rabbit told Eve. “Herzog said: ‘If you switch on television it’s just ridiculous and it’s destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television.’”

Holy war. Blue 52. Fewer than a dozen other people in the theater. Rabbit frozen with a handful of popcorn halfway to his mouth. There was something going on here. Some other business, vast and spreading and, Rabbit felt certain, highly toxic.

“Herzog said: ‘Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. I see it as a very dramatic situation.’”

“So what did you do?” Eve asked.

“I thought of my parents,” he said. “I just focused on that. Then I stopped showing up for work. It was the craziest conviction. Like I was at the very brink of doing something terrible and just had to bow out.”

“Weren’t people upset?”

“They were,” Rabbit said. “But I never returned any of the calls.
A couple weeks later I got a big severance check. I think they were worried.”

“So nobody came after you.”

“No,” Rabbit said. “Although I went and lived on the beach for about four months. Anybody coming after me would have concluded I’d wigged out. Probably because I had wigged out.”

Rabbit told Eve he drove out to the dunes for the first time that night he saw the film about Herzog. It was June. He lay down under a bank of sand crested over with long, soft grass that he could pull down over himself like a blanket. He lay there, hidden from the world. He slept and dreamed of high mountain fields, open views, places that reminded him of home but were not quite what he remembered from home. He woke when the moon came up, a radiant disk. Rabbit lying there in the sand, under the grass, washed in silver light. Stars exploding in their infinite patterns above. He was thinking of his parents.

If, then. Well, Rabbit thought. If I’ve been doing something I didn’t realize all along, if I’ve been contributing to some project the authors and objectives of which I don’t even know, then either I’m helpless and might as well go back to work, or it’s time to prove that I can choose, that I can act, that I create something of my own.

 

THE SKY RELEASED A THIN SHEET OF WATER and there were many memories in the sound of it, striking the metal hood of the truck and making the big tires sing. The sheen of the pavement and the slap of the wipers. The shape of them carving back and forth, endlessly countering one another. Eve had slept with these in her dreams, so many times. Her father at the wheel. Ali next to her at the side window, looking out.

Rabbit held Jabez’s instructions on his knee, but Eve knew the way. East Shore, the words sounding strange in her own mouth, in her thoughts. All that time and he was in East Shore.

Eve’s hands were opening and closing on the wheel.

“You all right?” Rabbit asked.

“This feels so abrupt. Everything so sudden. Finding him and going out to see him. But everything else too. My whole life in motion. I don’t know. Sorry, I’m nervous.”

“I’m nervous half the time,” Rabbit said. “It just means you’re up high somewhere. You might fall. But things are happening. Things you care about.” He looked over at her while she drove. “And you found your brother, so this is huge.”

“It’s huge,” Eve said. “Sure it is.”

“I’m excited for you.” He was still watching her drive, and Eve felt the gaze although it didn’t make her uncomfortable.

“I’m excited too,” she said. “Excited. Nervous. A little angry too, honestly, finding out he’s been living in East Shore all this time. He could have called.”

He smiled at her profile, then turned to look back out at the street. They were crossing a bridge, the water invisible far beneath. There was a police barricade blocking traffic returning to the city. Over the hump of the bridge Eve felt herself falling into it, the old routes and throughways. Old sight lines, a familiar unfamiliar. The long slope of the hill. The rock escarpments and twisted trees. The rain came and stopped, then started again. She slowed when passing the house where they’d lived as kids, picking out the window that had been hers, the tree that her father had planted now towering over the lawn.

On the radio they were airing a live interview with a spokesperson for the police department. Do not go to the Heights. Do not drive or walk. You will be turned back. Police would be asking people already in the plaza to leave. Safety, the man was saying. It was a safety precaution. He wouldn’t say any more. Safety from what, from whom? Rabbit reached over and turned the radio off.

Ali’s house was down a crescent with a hidden cul-de-sac. Other houses peered from within the trees here, familiar sixties bungalows, modest faces. A simple lawn and roofline, a carport. She watched the addresses, numbers on mailboxes and front doors. And when they came to the right house, Eve pulled the truck to the shoulder, the flank of it pressing up into the shrubbery. A house like the others, its light sifting through the evening trees. A dog barked. She could hear children’s voices and the sound of a television coming from one of the houses along the street. Lining the front walk of Ali’s house there were small lamps in holders, a steady warmth among the fronds and leaves. Then a young woman opened the door, and she stood bathed in that light, a smile on her face.

“I’m so glad you came,” the young woman said. And when she turned to call back into the house—
Ali, Ali. Your sister is here
—Eve could see that a large cross hung from the wall next to the front hall closet. A crucifix. A Christ.

Ali’s wife’s name was Kumi, late twenties, with a wide, unguarded face and long straight black hair. Sandals, skirt, pregnant and holding a toddler against her narrow hip. The boy’s name was Francis. He had a twin sister named Yuko. Kumi was due in eight weeks, she told Eve. All this while Eve stood in the wood-floored front hall, bent over Francis. A nephew and a niece and another one on the way. She was an aunt and hadn’t known that about herself.

Ali was in the room before Eve saw him. Rabbit touched her shoulder. She turned and there he was: Ali with Yuko on his lap, the little girl’s black hair a straight version of Ali’s dark curls, her dark skin against his pale forearm. Only Ali sat now in a low-slung wheelchair, canted solid wheels, aluminum dented from use. He rolled into the room and smiled up at Eve, swung open one arm. She leaned down into his shoulder and he squeezed her hard.

“I know, I know,” Ali said. “I break my spine and I don’t call.”

Eve had promised herself not to, but she cried. The tears came on their own and moistened the cotton of his shirt near his neck. “Why didn’t you?” she asked.

“Been away, you know.”

“What happened?”

On the wall behind Ali, prints of the Buddha, a string of Tibetan prayer flags.

He said: “Four years ago. I fell off the roof of a warehouse. Don’t do this if you can avoid it.” Then he just held on to her and said how nice, how nice, how nice it was to see her, and it was wonderful to hear him say this even if there was still anger sifting through the mix of things she was feeling. All this sudden information released as if it had never been withheld. As if he hadn’t abandoned her. But when Eve rolled her face away from him, tucking her chin down to hide her tears, Yuko was right there, very close. Up on her knees in Ali’s lap. She reached up and took Eve’s neck. She kissed Eve’s mouth and said: “Daddy’s auntie.”