The Blue Light Project (39 page)

“Bit of a mess up there, to tell you the truth. We have power out on the Slopes, down near the river too. Where you going tonight?”

“West Stretch. I have to get home.”

The cop told them where to park the truck in a service station. Then he let Eve pull out of the line of cars, turn around and head back down the bridge. When she’d parked and locked up, Rabbit and Eve returned to the barricade and the same police officer walked them through. There were others there—private security, police, militia. Some of them greeted Eve, but their minds were on other things.
Nobody spoke more than necessary, all the radios alive with incoming news. Updates from the troubled fronts of the city, while the river water surged in the darkness, far below.

When they were through, Rabbit could see where the bridge sloped off into River Park, and how beyond that the Slopes were patched with light. Uneven black squares along the hillside. At the top, somewhere over the crest, the plaza. And there were many flashing lights on the ground and in the sky. The low cloud flickered with them, pulsing in dark red tones.

“Want to run?” Rabbit said.

They were both in light clothes, so they ran together, gliding into an easy pace. Rabbit admiring her natural flow, efficient movements. She didn’t over-swing the arms or over-stride. She picked up the cadence and he ran right with her. Through the light rain, the night wind picking up. Down through River Park. Something rising in the air. Crowds at the big intersection at the bottom of the Slopes made Rabbit imagine the places of gathering all over the city. People finding their way to these spots, to these local corners. Sensing some common threat.

They reached Rabbit’s apartment in about twenty minutes. He showed her the place to climb the brick, fingers to the ironwork, then a long step across the rung of the ladder. She swung across like she’d done it dozens of times before, no hesitation, no second thoughts, following Rabbit up six flights as the distance to the pavement opened below. Up to the final platform. Smoke in the air. Sirens. The whole tangle of it spreading as they climbed. No television required to sense things just at the moment of combustion. Past tension, past waiting. Whatever had been about to happen was now happening, violence unfolding in the rotored air.

He climbed through the window and she followed. They entered the narrow room where he lived, empty but for a battered futon and a cable spool worktable, the far wall stacked with Rabbit’s boxed
macaroni and kimchi ramen. The train yards glowed mercury orange and the light came in. Ali may still have been present in both of their minds, but he was now there differently than before. Rabbit didn’t want or need to know more about the man who’d been the third corner of a triangle that closed to bring him and Eve together. That man, so pivotal, was a fiction to Rabbit now. A character they’d both fleshed into the invisible scheme.

And much better that way. Rabbit had this thought as Eve lay back in the chair, breathing deeply, something resolving in her too. Better to know at the moment a thing is finished, that the inspiration you thought you had did not truly exist. That no part of the thing you were making was caused by someone else. That what had come to mind was, indeed, entirely new. Entirely your own.

Eve lay back in bands of orange light, cut by angular shadows. What sounded like gunshots at the ridgeline, cold spikes of sound. But far, far away. And when he sat next to her, she took his hand and pressed his palm against her cheek. He did the same with hers. She reached up and he laced his fingers through hers and put her hand to the side of his face, her index finger resting near the corner of his eye, her thumb just to the final crease of his lips. He said her name
.
And she said his. And they both felt their names enter at the fingertips, then move down their arms and into the rest of them.

What did it add up to in those moments before midnight? Rabbit could inventory and catalog and wonder later without coming to a definite answer. Only that everything had changed. Jabez and Beyer, even Alto, were fading from view. And Rabbit knew that when he put his arm around her to bring her close, his lips on hers, that he was, right in that very instant, both disappearing into her and disappearing from view. Holding her, he was already gone, already heading north to his house in the woods, to his small field, to the things that would grow there. And afterwards, when Eve was asleep, he pulled himself out
from under the sheets and sat naked on the edge of the futon next to her, his hand gentle on the curve of her hip, and looked out over the yards, already calculating time. When he’d leave, when he’d be in the tunnel, wet cloth pressed to his face. When he’d pass Alto that final time. He owed no further tribute. But if there was to be a final observance of an old ritual, Rabbit wanted it to be in the earliest hours of the morning, when a new day was rising in the east. A new day that Eve had made possible.

Rabbit put clothes in his pack and cinched it tight to his chest, listening to the sounds of the city. Something happening up top of the hill now, the distant sound of a crowd raising its voice. Flickers of light up against the lowered cloud. He imagined the clash of great forces. He would leave the room the way he’d come, sliding out to the platform, pulling the window closed.

But not before leaving two gifts for her. For Eve alone.

The first, a map. Rabbit extracted this from his knapsack. He pulled it free of the various plastic bags with their wires and components. It was grimed with use, creased to the point of fraying. But he lay it gently on her clothes, crumpled on the floor next to the bed where they’d fallen.

Second: a fresh drawing for her to see on waking. A long composition on the blank wall of the apartment. Wide black strokes of felt pen. It cost him his damage deposit to leave her with a final crucial thought in lines and loops, arrows pointing north, directions and words. A diorama, a marked route, and an invitation.

Rabbit knew she’d recognize the words.

SATURDAY TO FIRST LIGHT

OCTOBER 26

EVENTS PATTERNED AROUND ONE ANOTHER in spirals, in coils. Beginnings reached out for endings. On this point, everyone in the plaza would have agreed.

Loftin was swimming in his story. He had mapped the crowd, its factions, splinters and blocs. What looked like chaos, he now knew, retained in fact an inner order. He wrote that in his notebook (his third one; there were two full of notes and a blank remaining in the side pockets of his cargo pants).
There is a fine but hidden order in this chaos. And that order is an ordering of all chaos.

Loftin stood on a park bench on the street that flanked the east end of the plaza. It was midnight and he’d been talking to people up and down the square for the past couple of hours. Doing so, Loftin had concluded that there were actually four distinct types of people in the crowd. They arranged themselves, in his mind, on a chart with two dimensions. The first was the personal tendency to either confront or conciliate in resolving the crisis. The second was the impulse, in advocating any given position, to invoke the authority of either the rational self or a source of wisdom beyond. Hawks and doves. Materialists and
mystics. The combination resulted in four distinct orientations, and Loftin had already named them: Hippies and the Black Bloc on the material side, the Call and the Crusaders on the side of mystery.

And there they all were, plain enough to see once you’d cracked the code. The Hippie kids over on the south stairs singing “Give Peace a Chance” and strumming guitars, appealing to the peace that was believed to lie organically within. The photogenic Black Bloc who’d taken over the planters and the fountains to the east, raising their fists, their
Celebranoia
and
Remember Genoa
banners, agitating for a revolution in the here and now while collecting stones and fragments of pavement in garbage cans. The stoic members of the Call held the central area around the band riser where they were gathered in circles with their heads bowed, holding candles, or standing by themselves with their hands raised to heaven, entreating a benevolent father somewhere overhead. And behind Loftin, milling in the street, the sullen and volatile Crusaders, for whom the force of the supernatural was justice, and justice now.

Everybody talked. Loftin’s interview guide was the simplest he’d ever used. Two questions. Who is the hostage taker, do you think? And: Why are you here? The answers were pressing hard against the inside of the ribs, they burst out of people. Loftin’s notes reflected that:

Nobody said they were there to confront or disagree with any other group. But every person had a hard reason why they couldn’t leave. And everybody was disturbed by the same rumors, about one new one per hour. Special military units were going in, or they had already gone in. Shots had been fired inside the theater. Or the worst rumor: executions had begun. Children were already dying. These kinds of thoughts agitated people, and Loftin observed much arguing and jostling. All the more surprising, he thought, given this factional venting, that the authorities would have been so careless about uniting people under a single complaint aimed not at the hostage taker but at the authorities themselves.

But that, in the end, is exactly what they did when they decided to bring in riot police to clear the plaza.

Loftin watched from his perch on the park bench, and was astonished. He could sense the unrest and hear the shouted arguments. He’d seen the odd rival banner torn down, even a few fights, scraps, pulled shirts. But there was no riot going on. Loftin felt the injustice. Yes, the police had tried persuading people to leave. He’d shown his own press card often enough to have accumulated a crust of resentment.

“You can’t do this,” he said to a young police officer who, having looked at Loftin’s card, had ordered him back to a newly established media green zone. “Are you declaring martial law? I’m entitled to be here.”

The cop shook his head and walked away. And when Loftin turned back to face the plaza, he could see the riot police forming a long single rank, just past the main body of Black Bloc protesters.

So this was how it was going to be. And instantly, things were alive in Loftin’s peripheral vision. People pulling out garbage cans loaded up with bits of pavement and stones. Objects going hand to hand. Loftin thought:
This is crazy.

He climbed off the bench and pushed his way forward to crouch behind a planter. What was the term the experts used? Instigating incident. The thing that pushed people over the edge. Here it came as a second rank of riot police jogged out of the side alley and squared up behind the first. People actually cheered. Loftin did too, he let out an ironic laugh to join the generalizing sound. Many, many voices now.

Loftin called out: “Oh for heaven’s sake. Leave us alone.”

The police were advancing, beating their plastic shields with their black batons while a voice spoke through a bullhorn from the rear.
Please leave. There will be no second chances.
And here it came. The first stones, bits of brick, pavement. A piece flashed directly over Loftin’s head in the darkness. He turned and another one came, very close. He saw it approaching, tumbling end over end. He ducked. Whoosh. It was a thrill. Loftin’s heart was racing.