The Blue Light Project Read online

  Yes, it was his own fault. That wasn’t the difficult part to accept. What hurt was his unconditional exile by even those who had thought his original project a humanitarian, even a noble thing. Noble Pegg.

  “These affairs cause great damage to journalism itself,” another journalist wrote on the editorial page of the Times, one of the final pronouncements on the affair that Pegg had the stomach to read. The man’s name was Loftin, and he was, as painful coincidence would have it, originally from Pegg’s hometown. “But we journalists must realize,” the man went on piously, “how even that pales in comparison to the damage Thom Pegg has done to the very victims his own column had ostensibly been written to aid and reinstate.”

  Ostensibly. So now even his original motives were impugned.

  Pegg went home. He shut the door behind them. He wondered what would happen next. He soon found out.

  “Careers are tidal, Peggy, they ebb and flow,” his then-wife Jennifer said, not weeks before she went slack tide on him and disappeared over the lip of the shining mudflats that had suddenly formed all around his person.

  How do these dramas unfold? Professional ruination, divorce, bankruptcy. The big house they shared, she could have it. But then, on account of his drinking, which had punched through epic to apocalyptic around this time, she took his boy too. She took his love and hid him away. And Pegg could still crack and spill like a soft-boiled egg thinking about that one. Micah Swenson Pegg. Micah, Micah. The first six years had been so good. He read to the boy aloud from the canon: Mencken, Perelman, Carlin, Hitchens. They went to cafés and winked at girls. All gone, it seemed to Pegg, in minutes. In seconds.

  Spratley was from school, and a timely sliver of fortune that was too. Knowing Pegg from so long before, when they had co-witnessed so many behaviors they wouldn’t really have wanted known outside their dorm clique, Spratley never mentioned the public shaming, the criminal suit (dropped), the civil suit (outstanding). But then Spratley had also carved a career in journalism out of less high-minded material—his first job was with Penthouse—so he was disinclined to judge. What Pegg himself never understood until he was on the job at L:MN magazine was that Spratley had offered him more than a financial lifeline. Pegg had been given a job that came with levers and buttons, a mechanism that could be worked to extract occasional compensation from fame itself, from the fact of its perplexing, poisonous appeal. Payback, yes indeed. Sometimes it involved publishing grotesque pictures of a famous person’s failed plastic surgery or writing a story about their meth addiction. Other times it just meant scamming a dinner with someone like Chastity and hoping for the best. Either way, it was payback. And Pegg had become an expert.

  There were only three rules for interviewing celebrities, Pegg quickly determined, having reverse engineered the techniques he’d used for previous subjects. Only three things you had to do to inspire the on-message famous person to open up, to search for truths that might impress you. One, start with an early question about something outside their area of expertise. Two, express interest in something irrelevant to beat them towards something better. And three, turn off the tape recorder before the interview was actually finished, while still taking mental notes. Flattery, manipulation and deceit. These worked.

  “All the best celebrity hacks hate stardom to their bones,” said Spratley, whose creviced features lent themselves to creviced pronouncements on the culture at large. He made this particular one holding a stingingly potent drink with an umbrella in it. Pegg was on his second.

  So, Chastity. A few e-mails and phone calls later, he had the damsel in his sights. The agency wrote: You’d like to shoot her again? To which Pegg responded that no, he didn’t want the girl for a photo shoot. He was looking for an interview.

  Rule Number One in action, right there: ask an early question outside their area of expertise. With actors that question was invariably about politics. How they loved to sound off on the workings of the world from which they wanted to scurry away, lurking in character or in trailers, angling with their agents and dealers, checking available reflections, and groping the makeup technicians.

  Models, to this cultural haute bourgeoisie, were like aristocracy. And just like peers, having inherited everything, they were vulnerable too. They didn’t create or absorb the culture in which they thrived. They were its purest reflection, defined entirely in the eyes of those who set the model in her coveted place. And at the moment this all occurred to Pegg—hungover at an editorial meeting, feeling a bit nasty—he saw the application of Rule Number One in the case of models as being a simple matter of asking them anything.

  “ALL RIGHT THEN?”

  And here she came, this vision, this perfection. Approaching his table just now, having peed. She had a nasty little smile of her own on too, as if she had made for the contents of her own pockets while out of sight, and now felt it all might be working out just the way she intended.

  She said: “I feel great.” Little slanting smile.

  “Do you . . . ?” Pegg started, but then the damn phone was going again. And this time, it was hard not to interpret the vibration against his ribs as a very special kind of bid. Spratley might as well have been telling him: your former fame against my possibly sexual relationship with our billionaire publisher. Bets to you.

  “Blast,” Pegg said.

  “To answer your question, though,” she said, making no move for that last prawn.

  “Which one was that?”

  “You asked: Do you . . . ?”

  “Right, well . . .”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Pegg started coughing, which invoked a certain pain under his right ribs that he’d been successfully ignoring so far that evening. Ouch. Wince. Out with the hanky. Out with the phone. He held one finger up for Chastity, then pressed a key.

  “Sprat-man,” he croaked. “I’m halfway through my appy here.”

  Spratley let the line run silent with rebuke and emphasis.

  “Oh all right,” Pegg said. “You’re up late. What is it, then? Something good, I hope.”

  And here it came. Something not so good, as it turned out. Something KiddieFame related. For a moment, hearing none of the details, Pegg was forced to consider what he had done in life that it might come down to him writing about that loathsome show, for what crimes did his punishment continue.

  He cut in, right on top of something Spratley was saying with an unusual, quiet insistency. Pegg caught Chastity’s glance and winked at her, pointed at the phone with a slight shake of his head. Then he said to Spratley: “God man, really. It’s just, you know.” And he was thinking: It’s just that I’d rather poke my eyes out with pencils than have to interview one of those brats trying to angle their way into the fame business at the age of five.

  But then Spratley, who was normally inclined to let Pegg have his tantrums whenever a story didn’t suit his mood, did not stop talking at all, only raised his voice. Spratley, the icy, sarcastic queen, was yelling.

  Orders. He was yelling orders. Pegg would zipper-in his plans for the evening. Pegg would extract his credit card and pay the damn bill. Peg would get himself out onto the sidewalk and into a taxi and over to the airport that goddamn instant.

  “Airport?”

  Private aircraft departure terminal. There was a plane waiting. Warmed up, ready to roll. Interesting detail, this one. The plane belonged to the feds. Seemed they had some kind of standoff. Bunch of people being held all cooped up in a television studio in a city in the middle of the country where people were generally a lot nicer than that. KiddieFame. Yes indeed. That show. Yes. Hostages.

  Pegg pressed his little finger deep into his free ear and closed his eyes. He said: “Hostages. Like when they want money?”

  Like when they want something, Spratley told him.

  “But why,” Pegg started. Then tried again: “Why would we be interested in a hostage story?”

  Spratley was one hundred percent preparation this evening, despite his fouled mood. �
�Well it’s really the hostage taker that we’re interested in here, Peggy.”

  And why was that? Pegg wondered.

  “Well because . . .” Spratley drew it out, deadpan incredulity. “Because the hostage taker seems to be quite interested in you.”

  Pegg squinted and winced and tried to focus again. He wouldn’t have been much to look at just at that moment, he was sure, in the middle of that room full of robotronic showbiz perfection. There he was, a short and frankly overweight gentleman about to field a massive stroke.

  Wanted to talk to him, yes, Spratley was saying. Won’t talk to anyone else.

  Coughing again. Ribs. Ouch. This was bad. It was like something was lodged in there. A wad of last night’s takeout burger mixed with shredded tinfoil.

  Interested in him? Thom Pegg? He flashed on an image with this unhappy news. A strange one, from the beginning of what had become decidedly the strangest part of his life. Not long after the Pulitzer was yanked from his fingers and the ensuing scandal had flared and fizzled, a few weeks after he’d been given the L:MN job. He’d been on a subway platform in a city out East, there on a story. He had finished the painful interview: some Canadian singer, new show, a little shrew, ninety pounds and pathologically self-involved. And as he stood there waiting for his train, thinking only of the spot he would shortly fill at the hotel bar, his situation seemed suddenly most exposed, his own sense of himself gone radically third-party perspective, out of body.

  As these things work, the reason for the fast-dawning sense of himself in place—an awareness of how he might appear to other people, holding certain anticipations and regrets inside, bad memories hovering still—came to him just at the moment he realized he was being photographed.

  He turned to find the lens. Not one but two. Odd detail, that, he would consider later, as he tried to force his mind to other things. Odd that two people would recognize his only very briefly, very moderately famous self, on the same platform at the same time, and think to lever up their long telephotos at once. Two oily black eyes peering at him around different pillars at the far end of the platform. The snick, snick, snick of the autowinders finding him through the sifting crowd, which then crosscurrented with the arriving train, bodies tumbling from the sliding doors, pushing him aside and away, around a corner. Burying the whole episode entirely.

  Spratley was still talking. They were on to details. But Pegg stayed in that other thought-stream instead, all the way out of the restaurant and to the curb, into the taxi and out onto the freeway. Some long-standing trickle of dread now accumulating into a more substantial flow.

  Interested in him. Pegg wasn’t sure there was a worse thing that could be said about a person.

  RABBIT

  FINDING BEYER WAS EASY ENOUGH IF HE WAS IN TOWN. He was generally at his apartment or over at the Lagoon Sushi Bar, blocks apart on Caledonia Street, a hip thoroughfare bisecting the most gentrified part of the Slopes. Designer boutiques, wine shops, doggy day cares, spas. Rabbit had put up artwork in the Slopes, but avoided the area otherwise. Everything was too expensive, of course. But it was also the kind of neighborhood that liked to pretend it was part of a bigger city, one that was photographed more frequently and featured in more movies and magazine shoots. The Slopes embarrassed Rabbit, the same way people did when they revealed their impossible yearnings.

  Beyer didn’t answer the buzzer at his apartment, so Rabbit headed over to the Lagoon, where Beyer also wasn’t, but one of his mooks was.

  The mooks were funny, with their low jeans and sleeveless undershirts and their hip-hop girlfriends. Rabbit didn’t know where they all came from, only that Beyer had apparently gotten so big that people were coming from all over to work for him. Beyer the business guru. And the mooks all treated Rabbit like he were fragile, one amusing aspect of the present situation, which was otherwise a little tense. They all thought Rabbit was on special assignment for Beyer, and for some reason Beyer wasn’t setting them straight. He wasn’t telling them that while he’d hired Rabbit on a project a year previously, and advanced him significant money doing so, Rabbit had never produced a damn thing.

  So this mook in the Lagoon spied Rabbit and immediately made for the door, doing that gawky rapper thing with his hands, saying: “Yo bra, I’ll go get Beyer.”

  And he was out the door. So Jabez probably hadn’t been exaggerating about Beyer sending someone down to the Grove looking for him. Beyer really did want to talk.

  Rabbit settled onto a stool at the end of the long glass bar with fish arranged on ice under it. Tuna, octopus. The sushi chef, who’d seen Rabbit around enough to know he didn’t drink, slid a mug of green tea in front of him, waving off payment, nodding to the overhead television where coverage of the Meme Crisis continued. The chef said: “You believe this is happening here?”

  “Terrible,” Rabbit agreed.

  “My uncle used to be a cop,” the sushi chef said. “He told me people might have set this up.”

  Rabbit’s eyebrows went up. “What people set what up?”

  “You ever see that documentary about that hostage-taking in Moscow?” the sushi chef said. “Done by these Chechen dudes. They took this theater full of people. Kids and adults. What was that, ten years ago?”

  “Eleven,” Rabbit said, doing the math. “That was terrible too.”

  “Yeah, but who all got killed in the end? Some of the leader dudes. Whole bunch of kids and people and such. But not the worst of the guys. The worst of the guys, some like super-Chechen badasses, their bodies were never shown out for the cameras. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Rabbit did understand what the sushi chef was saying. He was saying that the super-badass dudes weren’t shown on camera because they weren’t dead. And the reason they weren’t dead was that, according to this conspiracy theory, the Russians had hired them. Authorities in Moscow had arranged the hostage-taking so they could later look like heroes setting the hostages free, while at the same time demonizing the nation with whom they were just then fighting a costly war.

  “You really believe all that?” Rabbit asked.

  “Believe it? Man, I know it,” the sushi chef said. “It’s all like that now. Lies and deception and large amounts of money. Do you want me to make you something? I got beautiful toro today. Sweet stuff, man, you should eat.”

  “I’m okay. Not really hungry.”

  The sushi chef crossed his arms and looked at Rabbit. “So what’ve you been up to? What’re you working on?”

  “Difficult to say,” Rabbit told him.

  “Ah, right,” the guy said. And he smiled, but nervously, revealing a certain wariness, since he too believed Rabbit to be some kind of Oregonian backwoods mystic. John the Baptist of the western forests who came tripping into town with nothing but a Thermos for his tea. A man who’d apparently wigged out of his last job and ended up living rough in the Tillamook State Forest, or maybe it was the Oregon dunes with the mighty Pacific thundering in his dreams.

  “But I will tell you something,” Rabbit offered.

  The man grew serious, just a degree unsettled by the notion of having to hold in his brain anything that came out of Rabbit’s.

  “No big thing,” Rabbit said. “It’s just that after I’m finished this thing I’m working on, I’m going to leave the city.”

  “To go where?”

  “To the bush,” Rabbit said. “My parents died five years ago. They didn’t have much, but they left me a little property with a house out in the bush.”

  “Back out West in Oregon?”

  “Up north,” Rabbit said. “My family was originally from north of here. I was only out West for work. And near where I was raised, there is a little house on some land. And that’s where I’m heading.”

  The sushi chef had been concentrating hard during all this, almost to the breaking point. Now he glanced over Rabbit’s shoulder and back, a quick flicker of the eyes.

  “Anyway,” Rabbit said. “Nice place. Up this country road with blackb
erry canes. Just a cabin with an outhouse, basically. We used to go there when I was a kid. And now I’m going to go again, full time.”

  And here he thought of forests and arriving in darkness. He thought of the spot where the train slowed to navigate the switch. The grassgrown country lane, the place to turn in where no gate was visible. The hidden keys and no plan for after that.

  Was he saying all this for Beyer’s benefit? Beyer crossing the room now. Rabbit could see him in the mirror. But when Beyer’s hands went onto his shoulders, he pretended to startle. Hey, Beyer! And here it came, the basso profundo. Beyer in a steadily worsening mood. His first question, hands firming up, gripping Rabbit just a little too tightly.

  “So, drinking tea means you’re broke, right?”

  BEYER. BEYER.

  Beyer was what? The opposite of Jabez, who was all heart and feelings. Beyer was a machine, the whole illustrated flex of him. The artillery shell of his head. The lensed eyes, scanning the world. The sheath of ink-work that was his skin. Beyer had tribal half-sleeves, Celtic braids around his wrists and ankles, a full nelson of reptiles at his neck. His torso was stitched with crosses and names, phrases in Hebrew and Arabic. Iron pumper, ink absorber, financial news scanner. A guy who’d come out of the hardcore punk scene oddly primed for the business world, for the mosh-pit pursuit of relative wealth. Beyer was an anarcho-entrepreneur, Rabbit had decided. Although he was hardly in a position to feel morally superior given Beyer was also the single contact through which all Rabbit’s income had derived for almost a year at that point.

  Rabbit had to reflect from time to time on the income situation. He and Beyer had moved in exactly opposite directions this way over the eighteen months before and since they met. Rabbit on the West Coast was very much not broke. He remembered his pay stubs. Beyer at that same time, Rabbit had since learned, was a penniless street artist, part of an art crew putting up these huge Nazca line drawings on the gravel roofs of the big-box stores out near the airport. Inspired by the ancient ground drawings found high on the Nazca plateau in Andean Peru, this was art to be seen from the air, although not by the gods in this case but by people in commercial aircraft on final approach. That was their big idea and nobody paid them for it. A huge eye, a hand, a lizard. A hundred, a hundred and fifty feet long. Some of these were apparently still out there, having survived the elements, although Rabbit had never actually gone to look. But that art certainly wasn’t what made Beyer who he was now. All the while Rabbit was having his crisis, leaving it all behind, becoming a wild Oregon dune man, then going frankly nuts for a while before drifting back East, Beyer had been accumulating. And by the time Rabbit stumbled out of the prairies and into the city, Beyer was a man with treasure, land, vassals, women and spreading reputation.