The Blue Light Project Read online

  Why had they let her go? What did they say they wanted?

  She was tumbling down the staircase of symptoms, freezing and shaking, her ears full of white noise, her vision messed up as some density rose inside her, clamping closed the avenues of sense.

  “In Manila I was an ER nurse,” she told the young man. “I’m going into shock.”

  “Tell me what they wanted.”

  But that was the point right there, she wanted to say, as the man’s face came close enough for her to feel his breath, her own words failing in a storm of sensory overlap and overload. She wanted to say: The point was that it wasn’t they, it was he. And it seemed clear to her that he didn’t want anything.

  RABBIT

  AFTER HE BROKE THE UNIT he’d been trying to install on top of the Peavey Block and banged up his hand in the process, Rabbit paced and swore and stared at the sky briefly as if it might offer an explanation for his own stupidity. And it was this irritation more than anything else that inspired him to jump across the alley and onto the roof of the adjacent building. With a front flip, no less, which was insane on every level. Insane to risk being seen in the middle of the day. Insane . . . well, insane to risk dying.

  But he hadn’t been seen, he didn’t think. And he hadn’t died, clearly. So he ran home, loping along and cooling down. Rabbit was twenty-six. Lean and muscular without bulk. Gray eyes, solid chin, black hair and skin that tanned easily to bricky brown. He was handsome, but this derived less from his form than it did from his balance somehow. The way he ran: controlled strides with much reserved energy, like a jungle cat. He was stealthy, Rabbit. And when he reached his apartment building on Third Street down in Stofton, he climbed the fire escape without releasing a creak or a rattle, keyed the padlock and let himself in the window. There he slipped out of his clothes and into his sleeping bag, which lay on top of an old futon in the corner. He slept immediately and deeply for several hours. And when he woke up in the cool darkness with mercury lights bleeding in from the rail yards, a decision was already shaped in his mind before full consciousness: tonight, Rabbit would run the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel.

  Why just that moment? It was past eleven on a Wednesday night. Rabbit knew he should devote some time to replanning instead, given that the unit he’d broken that afternoon had been the last part of an installation he’d been working on for almost a year. The whole thing would have been ready to turn on, to release into the world, if he hadn’t stripped a damn mounting bolt and smashed a critical component made of glass and steel and electrical contacts. But all that would have to wait, because the tunnel was there in his mind on waking, and Rabbit responded to these instincts.

  Superstition, his friends would have said. Rabbit was thinking of Jabez and Beyer in particular, two very different people, who had no taste for one another yet somehow maintained a great interest in him. Jabez the born protester, and Beyer the born entrepreneur. But both men had separately observed Rabbit’s life to be thick with private routines and secret penances. These two warring would-be teachers who hovered and cajoled, who beckoned him towards their perfectly opposing views of the world.

  But superstition wasn’t quite right, anyway. Rabbit had arrived in the city eighteen months before, a bearded, long-haired stranger having last lived in Oregon. (Shaven, trimmed and smoothed, Rabbit was now, strangely, much harder to see at night.) But he’d never been the coastal bush mystic that they originally imagined him to be. What looked occult to them about Rabbit—general appearance, mumbled words, small repeated hand motions, running the tunnel—was in fact the product of a coder’s mental tic. If that, then this. Rabbit had left his old life behind, rigorously: all technology and its discontents. But even in his new, no-tech life—no e-mail, credit cards, driver’s license, nor any surviving official record of his university degree (MSc, Big 12 school)—he had yet been unable to shake that one: if-then. Rabbit did things according to mental patterns and apparently nothing was going to change that.

  So: if he had messed up the whole project right at the moment he thought it was finished, well, then clearly he had to do the one thing that had yielded calm insight to him in the past. That meant running the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel, two miles of near blackness, 100 feet below the eastern suburbs and deep in the city’s bedrock. Twenty minutes from end to end, the maximum time allowable inside given rail schedules, a time that had to include however long he stopped in the very center of the tunnel to pay his respects. And a chorus of sirens up the hillside seemed to herald Rabbit’s firmed-up commitment to do just that.

  Rabbit went to the window, wondering if he saw an unusual glow up the hillside or just the normal reflection of city light onto low cloud. Then he returned to the narrow kitchen of the studio apartment, where he stood at the counter and turned his attention to fueling up for his evening.

  Rabbit had changed the way he ate since arriving in the city. In school and then in Oregon, where he’d worked his one job until that imploded, fat, sodium, sugar and caffeine were the only food groups. So he’d lived on wasabi peas and pizza pockets, Toppo Japanese chocolate sticks and slender cans of NitroGlo, which combined the effect of six cups of coffee and about nine regular colas into a single aluminum sleeve. Now, living with a good deal less money, Rabbit ate what he thought of as bulk urban survival, which meant whatever he could get from the back of a supermarket warehouse where he’d gotten to know one of the forklift operators. Cash or weed, the latter of which Rabbit got in small bags for free or next to nothing from Beyer, who had a complex network of suppliers branching out in all directions around him: marijuana, but also booze, sushi-grade bluefin tuna and a myriad of other products and services his lifestyle demanded. So Beyer helped Rabbit out with a little weed from time to time. And Rabbit traded that for flats of multivitamins and fish oil capsules, plus the fixings for a dish he called ramen-oni, which you made by combining a box of Korean spicy ramen noodle soup and a box of macaroni and cheese dinner. Call it 1800 calories with a couple of eggs. Rabbit ate one of those a day and carried a plastic bag of trail mix for snacking. He drank tap water. He’d lost a bit of weight, but it wasn’t a diet he intended to maintain for years. Rabbit had a plan, and that plan didn’t involve living this way forever. That plan involved a garden with real vegetables, just like when he was a kid. It involved self-sufficiency and being many miles away from here. But he hadn’t reached that point in his plan quite yet.

  Now Rabbit checked his front-door locks, bolts and bars. Then he slipped out the fire-escape window and padlocked it behind him. When he climbed down to the alley, he did this in a way that would have startled anyone watching. Rabbit vaulted the top railing, six stories above the pavement, and grappled himself to the outside of the metal framework. Then he dropped, floor by floor, one fire-escape landing at a time, his feet and hands touching the rail and decking in unison, but with such lightning brevity that he looked, as he plummeted, like some kind of bouncing spider. Then the dismount, a spring and twist of the body, Rabbit sailing over a parked car and landing on the lid of a dumpster, where he rolled on his shoulder and flipped down to the pavement. Animal fluidity. One touch, balls of the feet, and off he went.

  Fifteen minutes to the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel. Rabbit had this run well clocked. East out of Stofton into the warehouse district, then across the boulevard to where the tunnel entered the hillside on the opposite side of the valley providing a connection to the coal shuttles that serviced the river terminals. Schedules long memorized, Rabbit knew he wouldn’t meet a train tonight if he kept up the twenty-minute pace once inside.

  In he went on those short cat-like steps, designed not for speed or distance, but for control and quick changes of course and speed, something Rabbit did frequently, monkey-vaulting a park bench up onto a wall and over into a hidden alley. Or carving off sharply down a side street by making unexpected use of the walls. These were Parkour moves, although Rabbit didn’t use that term. Freesteal was what people around Rabbit called what they did: a
combination of running, climbing, exploring places off-limits to the public, and leaving public art on the walls wherever they went. Freestealers were pacifists, craftier and less territorial than graffiti writers. Freestealers didn’t tag. And they didn’t steal either, unless you counted the wall space itself. The art was a gift to the cityscape so that the free eye might freely find it. And Rabbit, who wasn’t disposed to clubs or gangs or affiliations, still thought Freesteal came closer than anything else to defining how he wanted to fit into the world. Making his quiet way without confrontation, leaving his marks for those who would see.

  In the tunnel, Rabbit was keeping up a decent miler’s pace along the rails. He was in deep. Long past the graffiti that scored the entrance to the tunnel, then grew sparse as the air cooled and thinned, then vanished where the walls began to seep black, coated with the residue of diesel fumes from big turbine engines that came through at the head of the coal trains. Rabbit was now far past the point that any tagger was willing to go, into a place where the air supply seemed to tighten, where the lungs came alive with invisible motes and particles, diesel and clay, steel and creosote. Where the slick black mucus of the earth and the fungal heaviness of the soil became the actual substance of the air.

  There was no light here, natural or artificial. And Rabbit didn’t carry a flashlight either. But at forty yards in, the eye found resources it didn’t normally use and a surface glow could be detected on the rails. Rabbit followed these to the half-mile point, where a new glimmer appeared in the steel. A blue ghost cast out by a single blue light at the center of the tunnel. Here Rabbit picked up his pace and reached the middle of the tunnel in a few minutes.

  He stopped there, as he always did, staring up at the wall: not at the blue bulb itself, which was a railway safety installation, but at the magnificent thing that the light revealed. In iridescent greens and yellows, with licks of red, silver and gold, massive interlocking letters shaped a name. Graffiti pieces were not so interesting to Rabbit normally, but this one had him. It was as impressive as the greatest works of art Rabbit had ever seen, not for its strokes and lines, but for its location. That is: precisely where nobody would ever see it. This piece had obviously been painted with no intent on the part of the writer that they be known or admired for their effort. And that was a new kind of image, Rabbit thought. A lodestone of pure creative will, a suggestion of motives and meanings beyond the world itself.

  If-then. The writer of this hidden graffiti hadn’t been saying: if you are seeing this then I am truly alive. The statement here was radically different. Rabbit thought it was: if I am to be truly alive, then this is what I must do, whether you see it or not. And that idea enthralled Rabbit. It sped his heartbeat and fired his imagination.

  The name on the wall was Alto. And as he’d done before, Rabbit stood in front of the piece, a sense of bright certainty enveloping him. And he read that name to the blackness, his only witness, the tunnel echoing Alto back to him in long parabolic waves.

  AFTER RABBIT RAN OUT OF THE TUNNEL, he jogged across town to Joey’s Panda Grove, where he found a corner booth in the basement bar and turned his attention, at last, to the critical matter at hand. The big project, his installation. Rabbit unfolded a city map, which he smoothed onto the table in front of him. And there he sat for some time, hardly moving, tracing the map’s many lines and markings with one finger. He sat in the low light under the gaze of a dragon his friend Jabez had painted on the wall years before and which nobody dared paint over. That dragon, Rabbit had often thought, was an expression of Jabez’s righteous anger at the world’s injustice. And nobody had the nerve to create an image to rival it.

  Jabez, as he always did, sniffed from upstairs that Rabbit was there and came down to find him. Rabbit had occasions to wonder if his friend had the place tricked out with hidden cameras. Jabez seemed always to know so completely what was going on in the Grove. But then, the Grove was his. Impossible that he could own it, Rabbit had decided, since his friend never seemed to have any money. But he had somehow secured its use. He ran the illegal bar and the hall upstairs. Most important, Jabez ran the walls, which were postered and painted, over and over, with the work of a hundred street artists. And all of it administered by Jabez in accordance with some code of rivalry and usurpation—an algorithm based on the length of time a piece had been up and the original prestige of the artist who’d made it. Nobody messed with this Jabezian order, because to do so meant you’d never set foot in the Grove again. Which is why every graffiti writer and wheatpaster, every muralist and photofreak, lightboxer and landscape painter, all the sloganeers and wall journalizers, even the tagger kids who came in from the burbs to leave their plague of marks like dogs pissing on hydrants and unable to stop, all of them accepted the hovering authority of this local prince, whose office was up in one of the crudded-over spaces of the hotel overhead, who came and went by a private freight elevator, who stumped around, his signature stilt and list, gimp leg fluttering behind him like a broken wheel on a shopping cart. Signing constantly with his hands.

  Oh yes, Jabez was deaf, a source of yet deeper authority. To be pegged by a freight car in the yards while painting a grain hopper, to lose your left leg from the knee down in service of the craft, that conferred a certain status. But to be able to read lips at forty feet was a different kind of power altogether. Rabbit had many times seen people talking at the Panda Grove with their hands over their mouths. And the dumb-luck coincidence that Rabbit’s childhood best friend had also been deaf, and so Rabbit had picked up some rudimentary sign, this cemented his place in Jabez’s rigid affections.

  “The ID sniper is a rifle designed to shoot a traceable microchip into the human body so a person can be tracked,” someone was saying at the bar, where debates about conspiracy and subterfuge held never-dying allure. This rifle, the man went on to say, had recently appeared at a weapons trade show in Germany and it was understood that American and Canadian law enforcement agencies were very much interested.

  Rabbit kept his head down, poring over his map, its streets and avenues, squares and boulevards. The map was scored with marks and connections. Numbers and arrows, a hieroglyphic tangle to any eye but Rabbit’s. Almost twelve months of his life up on cedar shakes and asphalt shingles, gravel on tar, sheet metal. All over the city. In Angus Lake, the East Shore, the warehouse district. Downtown, River Park. And right there in Stofton too, the Slopes, up into the Heights. Rabbit knew the city from its roofs. And when his index finger had traced all those lines and still found itself bouncing on top of the Peavey Block, right there immediately south of the plaza, the solution to his troubles was plain. He simply couldn’t call the thing finished without that unit in place. So he’d just have to return to the site and reinstall the thing. Which meant building another one. Which meant, against all good sense, that he’d have to borrow more money. And it wouldn’t be from Jabez either, who had many things in abundance, none of them being money. It would be instead from the ever-liquid Beyer.

  “There is a system of tunnels and storage areas under the city,” somebody over at the bar was saying just that moment. Yelling really—there seemed to be a disagreement on this point. “It was built by federal authorities—”

  And then they stopped. Which Rabbit could easily interpret: that would be Jabez crashing into the room and causing every speaker to consider lines of sight and what exactly was being said. Across the floor he came now, directly towards Rabbit, hands already in frenzied motion, twisting and whirling. A cyclone of sign. And the message was clear. The world, as long predicted, was coming apart at the seams.

  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 h
ead. 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.