The Blue Light Project (9 page)

Don’t joke about it, Jabez was saying, noting the suppressed amusement in Rabbit’s expression. This time, the terrible news was terribly true.

 

RABBIT WALKED TO THE RIM OF THE PLAZA. He stood at the south end, in the mouth of an alley, and looked down across the sunken space with its spreading trees and calling fountains. Scattered crowds already, a sense of early gathering. Rabbit could only shake his head. Soldiers, people gesturing, agitation. Rabbit wondered what reflected the times more: the fact that someone would be desperate enough about
anything
to take children hostage, or the fact that Jabez and his crew had so quickly found a passionate reason to turn this incident into an angry protest.

Back in the Grove, that was just what Rabbit had seen: real anger. Sure, people hated whatever lay at the root of these events. Whatever it was that made people shoot up a hotel, or call out the helicopter gunships, or take hostages. But people more recently, especially people like Jabez, splintered so quickly on where to finger the blame. That was the contemporary difference. Sitting in the basement of the Grove, Jabez had hardly finished telling Rabbit what he knew—theater, kids taken hostage, guy with a gun—and he was past those
details, on to what might lie behind. Shadowy forces. Hidden causes and secret triggers. Powers and authorities. Nobody used the word
conspiracy
anymore because it had become a self-defeating cliché. But suspicions turned quickly inward. Things were never believed to be as they seemed.

Rabbit thought about the kids. Five, six, seven years old. He’d watched
KiddieFame
maybe twice in his life, never liking the show even back when he’d been interested in television. But he knew that even those seeking the tackiest variety of renown did not deserve this. Standing where he was, Rabbit could see the full face of the Meme complex, and the shape of the Peavey Block just half a block down Jeffers to the south. He again considered skipping that last installation, sensing a high-strung, volatile tension in the air. It was a terrible time to be climbing roofs in the neighborhood. Snipers had probably been deployed. But Rabbit also knew he would not have finished what he’d started if he didn’t climb that roof. And that was true no matter what Jabez thought of the project.

“You just sitting down here in the dark,” Jabez said. “Doing what? All this stuff going on. The army’s in town now and you’re down here in darkness all sipping tea and looking at a map.”

Jabez tried to get a peek at his map, but Rabbit folded it quickly away and into his bag, causing his friend’s face to pull back into its default state. His brow open, unfurled, his eyes brimming with the possibility of offense. He signed: “God, please don’t tell me this is more work for Beyer. You working for Beyer again?”

Rabbit rolled his eyes and sat back himself. They’d been through this one before. Yes, he’d once done some work for Beyer. But no, the map wasn’t it.

Jabez was dubious: “So why’d Beyer send one of his goons down looking for you?”

Rabbit sat forward. “Beyer was looking?”

“You scared?” Jabez asked. “Hiding out?”

Rabbit forced himself to sit back. “I’m not hiding,” he said. “And I’m not scared.”

“Why’s Beyer looking for you if you aren’t hiding?” Jabez pressed.

And here came the speech about crew and family, which Jabez unrolled reproachfully from time to time. He, Jabez, was the founder of a crew. They called themselves the Poets. They worked together and lived together. They supported and protected one another. They were like family. Rabbit, on his arrival in the city, had been invited to join this crew, this family, and thus embed himself in the safety and love that they had to offer. Yes, love. Jabez used the word often, without irony or shaded meanings. He was a protester. He had ideals.

So: love. And Rabbit had turned them down in favor of this thing. This what. This adequate image he was trying to make.

“Adequate images,” Jabez said, repeating the phrase Rabbit had used so many times. “This idea comes to you after seeing some film.”

Rabbit didn’t mind acknowledging the debt. It was a Werner Herzog film and he liked remembering it.

“It’s called inspiration. The guy said, if we don’t find adequate images, we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.”

Jabez looked at the ceiling. Rabbit had explained it before, but he didn’t think his friend wanted to understand. Still, he gave it another try. It meant breaking the cycle of images that they all ingested every day, on television and billboards, in every magazine and newspaper they read. The hypnotic cycle. Rabbit said to Jabez, “We have to take back control. Make those adequate images and save ourselves.”

“As if the Poets’ images aren’t good enough.”

Rabbit didn’t say anything. Jabez was a friend. He wouldn’t have continued reminding Rabbit about the Poets if his affection wasn’t real. And Jabez too, perhaps, sensed there was no point arguing. He went atypically still in the booth opposite Rabbit. Working towards
some thought. And when he was finished, he produced it in the form of a question. Right to the heart of the matter.

“So this new thing, your new type of image. What’s it called?”

Rabbit now stood at the rim of the plaza remembering the question. Jabez had leaned forward across the table, his face a foot away. Rabbit’s balding, irritable friend. Warehouse sleeper, bin diver, street artist, devout believer in a revolutionary god. This Prince of the Grove. Rabbit kept his voice low, but shaped the syllables for lip-reading clarity.

“The Blue Light Project.”

Jabez breathed through open lips, his eyes going past Rabbit, through him, imagining, picturing what the name could mean. And with a rare smile too. Jabez, it seemed, was made a degree happier just thinking about the Blue Light Project, without even knowing what it was.

And here in the plaza were all these other lights. The white halogens against the Meme complex, the flashing reds and yellows in the plaza. The whole machinery assembling itself, blinking into existence, some terror rousing itself in response to terror. Rabbit watched it for many minutes, during which time dozens more people, more vehicles, more cameras and lights arrived in the plaza. These were the old images, unfolding as always with such eager industry. Sadly and terribly familiar.

Then Rabbit went to find Beyer.

THOM PEGG’S PHONE, having rung twice already and been ignored, seemed committed to spoiling his evening. He was on the West Coast, where he lived. But this was Spratley calling from the East Coast, and right in the middle of Pegg’s dinner too. In the middle of a date, if that was the right word for whatever this was.

“I say, you,” Pegg said to the woman opposite him, whose name splendidly enough was Chastity.

“You say me what?”

“I say . . . you sparkling rainbow of wit and beauty.”

She leaned in against the small table. “Mmm?”

Pegg made an apologetic face and cricked his neck downwards to indicate the ring tone coming from within the rolling folds of his suit. A Barry White groove. He said: “Would you mind terribly if I deal with this?”

She lolled her head to one side, eyes wide. And here Pegg fished into his inner pockets to find the fibrillating deck of his phone. Hauled it out. Then stared at it irritably. Yes indeed, Spratley. Like you need to hear from your editor once, let alone three times in an evening.
Maybe if you worked for the
New York Times.
Maybe if you still had that kind of career. Certainly not working for
L:MN
magazine.

Finger to the Ignore key. Depress. Goodbye, Sprat-man.

“Now, as I was saying . . .” he said to Chastity, who had just now speared up a quarter-pound prawn and was easing it between her lips.

She said: “Uh-huh?” And as her teeth closed, a little cocktail sauce sprang to the corner of her mouth.

Pegg began coughing. He said: “Oh my, blossom. I just went entirely screen saver there.”

She chewed. And chewed. Then swallowed. Then licked her index finger and middle finger in considerately slow motion. She said: “Well, you know what to do when your screen saver comes on, don’t you?”

He was killing here. He couldn’t believe how well it was going. Or no, check that. He could believe how well it was going. Because he was such an evil genius at this kind of thing. He’d asked her for her views on health care, the environment, the situation in the Middle East. She was simply paying back accounts now. That was the wonderfully brilliantly terrible accounting involved.

He said to her: “No, darling, I don’t know. Tell me what to do when my screen saver comes on.”

She leaned forward, her breasts settling on the tabletop, nosing the edge of her plate. She said: “Well, honey, you just jiggle your mouse.”

Yes. Yes. Oh my goodness me. How nice was this? Very nice. She had virtually the best of everything Pegg had ever seen in the physical flesh. Yes indeed, this epitomatrix opposite was a model. A model. And more (more!), she’d been linked to one of those twat stars. It was a tabloid story, but still. The guy was what mattered. Some beardo with an ass about six inches across. Some guy with a lot of street, a lot of
right now,
a lot of meetings for all the agents he suddenly needed. Pegg knew how it worked. He wasn’t passingly familiar with the celebrity
machinery. He
was
the machinery. And the machinery towered over these people.

Towered, well. Just to be clear, Pegg wasn’t a big man. His game in these situations wasn’t stature-dependent. He himself was no epitome. Pegg in the steaming, inhospitable jungle of his recently divorced career-tanked mid-forties was 45 percentile for height and 75 for weight. Shaved head. Pale skin. Christ, this girl here was about six inches taller than him. Coming in earlier, he’d seen the man at the front do that eye-flick business. Up and down, up and down. Didn’t matter.
L:MN,
Senior Editor. Pegg had a certain warily acknowledged clout in this town. So he duked the guy a fifty and they got the booth. There were A-listers all around the place. And some of them looked. Oh sure they did. Have a look, fellas. Have a long look. Chas-titty.

But no. Pegg didn’t flex muscles to get what he wanted. His was a guile play. All brain work and expertise. Much harder, Pegg knew, than it would have been if he were handsome or actually had any money. An actual movie star closed the deal in ten minutes, five if he met Chastity in a hotel lobby and one of them was already a registered guest. Pegg? Well let’s be honest, Pegg didn’t engage the enemy on the open desert. It was black ops all the way. It was the deployment of every psychological tactic in his interviewing repertoire to get them there over the second course—truffle risotto being massaged to completion somewhere by a chef with his own cooking show who drove around in a titanium SUV—and he was
still
playing about a sixty, maybe seventy percent chance of getting the flop he needed.

“You know what I was thinking?” he said.

“About what?” She was on prawn number two.

“Well, I was going to tell you.”

“I have to pee.”

“No, actually. That wasn’t it.”

“I do, though,” she said, her words just a bit smudged around the edges.

He intercepted the pained expression that was about to unscroll itself across his face. Like a judo move, you sort of had to move with whatever was coming at you. Irritability, then, became—with a deft adjustment of the eyebrows—a different expression. Like a thoughtful person with epigastric distress. A monk with colitis, he thought, seeing himself in the mirrored wall opposite. This business of having to shave his head certainly contributed to the effect.

“Well off you go then, my juicy pomegranate, and I shall think of you every moment when you are gone.”

And off she went, more than one or two sets of eyeballs swiveling in their sockets to watch her pass. Pegg imagined air molecules bowing their heads and parting to accommodate the swaying, feline length of her, and he found he disliked the air molecules for doing so.

Around the corner. Out of sight. She disappeared and Pegg went into the side pocket of his jacket and palmed two airline vodka bottles out and over to his water glass where he poured them carefully into the ice. He wasn’t
drinking
tonight, he’d agreed with himself earlier that evening while stowing only six such bottles on his person (two more in each inside breast pocket) and one emergency flask of cognac down his pants (only for afterwards, if there were an afterwards). But having just picked up that his date might be encountering the world through her own preferred veil of intoxication, he wished briefly that he had more.

 

NOVA SCOTIA. WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT? His pour complete, half of its slurry beneficence burning pleasantly down his hatch, the empties discreetly stowed down the crack in the seat cushions. He thought: Would you believe the father of this beauty actually fished lobsters out of the ocean? Not as a joke or for a television show, either. For a living. The week before, when Pegg had phoned a photographer friend to get Chastity’s number, he couldn’t believe that part when he heard it.