The Blue Light Project Read online

  And he got it all by handing out stickers.

  “Not stickers,” he’d say. “It was a phenomenological project.”

  Perhaps so. Four-inch-square cards on heavy waterproof stock with peel-off backs that allowed them to be adhered to virtually any surface. Beyer’s stickers went up and they were maniacally resistant to removal. So they gummed the side of lampposts and mailboxes. They fused to buildings, telephone boxes, train stations, buses, rail yards, churches. The image on these stickers was of Beyer himself, although artfully fiddled with in Photoshop so that what remained was a pixelated rendering not of any single lantern-headed punk in the middle of an openmouthed scream, but of all people frustrated everywhere. A lot of people saw their own face in the face that was Beyer’s face. Then they read the line below and they wondered about that.

  The line read: Faith Wall.

  What did that mean? Well, nothing actually. Or: nothing and everything. Nothing except for its everythingness, which had to do with the fact that Beyer had managed to distribute 6.4 million of these stickers over a three-year period across the Western world, entirely by word of mouth. Yes, he was keeping track: 6.4 million and counting. And at 6.4 million units and counting, anything meant something. For a while, early in the game, a lot of people wanted to know who Beyer was, hiding behind his anonymous e-mails and websites. After three million stickers Beyer was closer to a national emergency than most hurricanes. After five he was an out-of-control virus, he was contagious. Surf and skate sites, music tie-ins, online games. At six million, he was beyond phenomenal. Whatever the stickers meant to people was what the stickers were about. Beyer’s Faith Wall stickers spread to the backs of stop signs and the sides of convenience stores from Vancouver to Tampa, from Stockholm to Johannesburg. On the backs of cell phones, lunch boxes, school binders. On the sides of hopper cars crisscrossing North America. Blown up and plastered over billboards. Faith Wall. And then the fortuitous day when Beyer was in a SoHo gallery and overheard two art types talking about how powerful the whole Faith Wall campaign had become.

  Campaign. That was the turning point. If you’d pressed him when he first started with the stickers, Beyer would have told you he kept doing it for the pure pleasure of seeing his mark proliferate and spread. But at that moment—eavesdropping in a SoHo gallery—Beyer understood that he’d done something much bigger. He’d made something with no particular meaning that people would automatically fill with meaning of their own.

  And that’s right about the point Beyer transformed into a person with clients, people who wanted the wall and the faith that some were prepared to place in it. It was a coveted demographic, that one. Scooter manufacturers wanted it. Music labels. All manner of electronic consumables. Those sharpies who came up with that disposable biodegradable phone with prepaid minutes. The WaferFone. There was a mega-billion-dollar global company behind that one, but when they started thinking about street-level promotions, they didn’t hesitate. The Shock Beauty campaign, they called it. And to design that program and get the message out there, they wanted the Faith. They wanted the Wall. In short, they wanted Beyer. It had been about a year before, that one. Beyer’s biggest gig by far to that date. But also the assignment that resulted in his thinking about creative associates for the first time, a process that eventually led him to Rabbit, that strange young man who’d heaved himself up out of the oceans of the West and onto the shores of the city those months before. Beached with, the story went, no personal belongings whatsoever except a Thermos and some crazy-ass idea for alley-long posters of wildflowers and mountain fields.

  Rabbit’s landscape phase: innocent, bucolic, pure. When this first street art idea took its full shape, Rabbit was living in the Poets’ warehouse, having been befriended by Jabez only a few days after arriving in the city.

  Rescued more like, Jabez would have said, who liked to give Rabbit a hard time about it. “Guy was sleeping under a bridge. Only he’s so dumb about life on the street, he’s sleeping under a railway bridge, which is not so great when it rains.”

  Rabbit remembered sitting up sharply in his sleeping bag to find Jabez standing quite close, staring at him. “Who are you?” Jabez signed, index finger fluttering in front of his mouth, then pointing.

  Rabbit didn’t know Jabez read lips at that point. And he hadn’t used sign since the last time he’d seen his deaf friend back in junior high. So he self-consciously signed his name: one fist to each temple, hands opening flat twice to indicate the floppy ears.

  Jabez laughed until his eyes were running. Only later did Rabbit sort out that having made the sign with his palms facing forward, he’d actually been telling Jabez that his name was Donkey.

  Jabez liked or disliked people instantaneously, Rabbit would quickly learn. And the fact that Rabbit signed, even badly, put him in a special category of like. So Jabez invited him to move into the Poets’ warehouse, where Jabez himself lived, into a corner of one of the abandoned mezzanine offices, where Rabbit found a huge box of old-fashioned flat-bed printer paper. Everybody in the place was working on some kind of art or other, stencils or text banners. Rabbit looked at this paper, which interested nobody else, and he decided he’d begin to paint.

  “Paint what?” Jabez asked, for whom any painting that wasn’t graffiti was a rare street art form.

  “The before picture,” Rabbit answered. “Before the buildings and cars. Before the freeways and cell phone towers. Before you and me.”

  Since Rabbit couldn’t move the box of paper, he returned again and again to scroll off lengths. He boosted paints from an art supply store. Model paints, kids’ finger paints. Anything but spray paints, which were stolen so often by graffiti kids they were guarded by eye-in-the-sky surveillance bulbs. Anything else with pigment, Rabbit used. And for brushes, he worked with whatever came to hand. Rags and toothbrushes, a dish sponge, a box of tampons, his fingers.

  Did he know how to paint? Not technically. But this wasn’t a technical project. It was a gut inspiration. So he started putting colors down on paper, thinking of the wide fields and plateaus, the ridges and valleys that lay under the city: moss-green expanses against the powder blue of the sky, thousands of blades of grass painstakingly applied and spackled with bits of color that shaped themselves, in their hundredfold repetition, into flowers. Indian paintbrush, tiger lily, bluebell, daisy. Rabbit would post twenty- or thirty-foot lengths of these, gluing them to alley walls with a slurry mix of cellulose powder and water. They added a note of striking color when they were new, and dissolved attractively when it rained. Somebody wrote up the “flowering alleys of Stofton” in a local paper, tracked him down and quoted Rabbit saying: “If we don’t find adequate images, we’re all going the way of the dinosaurs.”

  Beyer hadn’t met Rabbit at this point. But the story interested him when he read it the morning it was published. Not the quotation particularly, but the fact of the press. Very unlike those Poet freaks, Beyer thought, with whom he understood this new young artist Rabbit to be bunking. Very unlike Jabez in particular, a name Beyer could not bring to mind now without a wince and a shudder.

  Still, Beyer wouldn’t have done anything about it if Rabbit hadn’t decided to move his postering up out of Stofton and into the Slopes right around that time, and ended up postering a twenty-foot length of brickwork in the alley behind the building where Beyer lived. Kids’ stuff, Beyer thought. Look at those lines, those amateurish clouds. He tore the thing down. Sure enough, Rabbit re-posted a bigger one just a few days later, fifty feet long. Beyer waited a week before buffing the whole thing off the wall again. Then, sometime that same night, while Beyer was sleeping a few floors above, Rabbit returned and did the whole alley, carefully posting over doors and utility boxes, across loading bays and trash cans. It was a massive thing. A vista view of what might have been seen if the city were not standing.

  Beyer took it in, down in the alley with his morning cup of coffee. Still kids’ stuff, but the idea had a stimulating effect on him. This imagi
ning of what might be visible if the whole city were razed to the ground. Beyer thought: The kid has ideas, but he also has a sense of scale. And to Beyer, scale was the thing.

  Over at the Poets’ warehouse, meanwhile, with the exception of Jabez, who had adopted Rabbit as his younger brother, to be schooled and guided, the rest of them kept their distance. They were a suspicious crew, all ex-something. Ex–juvenile detention. Ex–gas huffers. Ex–wards of the state. They tolerated Rabbit because Jabez had brought him in, but they didn’t think much of his landscapes. As a group, they were heading in a different direction from vistas, backwards glances, faint regrets. They disdained any approach to street art that made it suitable for positive media coverage, anything vaguely commercial. Beyer, good example. They had a dartboard with a picture of Beyer stapled to the middle. Fame and ambition for the Poets? Never.

  The Poets, instead, were into something like an updated Pichação graffiti attack, based on the work of São Paulo inner-city graffiti gangs. And as it was for their distant South American heroes, for the Poets there was no brotherhood without revolution. So they didn’t paint, they bombed. And not just walls and alleys, bridge stanchions and railcars. Their unit was the entire building, whole structures. And these bombings were completed with paint, but more importantly with words. Teams of a dozen in their climbing gear, toting ladders and ropes, armed with banners and stickers, braille dots and pictures of hand signs. Never their names, ever. And never poetry either. Always some text chosen by Jabez from the small library of philosophy books he hoarded and which were stacked all around the warehouse. Rabbit watched them hit a bank branch in the east suburbs. He watched them ladder up onto ledges and climb on each other’s shoulders. When they were finished you couldn’t make out the windows from the walls. The place looked like it had flown into a spider’s web of words and been wrapped up tight in loops and coils of text, enclosed and stored inside the writing: . . . since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible.

  Thousands and thousands of dollars in damage. Rabbit was incredulous. They knew what they were doing. They knew something destructive was let loose in the world by their own actions. But such was their texty agitation, the Poets. Their holy revolutionary fire.

  Afterwards, back at the warehouse, there was silence between Rabbit and Jabez, until Jabez finally put his right index finger to his forehead, then both index fingers touching and springing away. Think + opposite = disagree. You disagree.

  Rabbit made a sign in return. He could have spoken, but the hand motion was on occasion much stronger. Flat palm, fingers to his cheekbone and flicked away towards Jabez. The shrug. The mouth downturned, ambivalent. I don’t know.

  He went back to his landscapes. Working his alleys. And one Wednesday night, middling temperature, no stars, this mug in black warm-ups with a gold chain busts Rabbit mid-post. Coming in over Rabbit’s shoulder, voice deep with authority: “So I finally meet my neighborhood alpine wanderer.”

  Rabbit heard glass breaking in the middle distance, a dumpster slamming closed, the voice of an MC smacking on the night air. Beyer was drinking a beer. He leaned in very close to the wall as if checking the brushstrokes. He said: “If we don’t get adequate images we go the way of the dinosaurs. You believe that? Like, art doesn’t innovate, then art dies out?”

  “More like if art doesn’t innovate then we all die out,” Rabbit answered.

  Beyer invited him up. Converted loft building. Fancy. He was married. He had leather furniture and some kind of rare continental mastiff that ate three pounds of raw meat a day. Beyer had two fridges, he showed Rabbit. One for human food, the other just for dog food, beer and bags of pot. It took Rabbit a few minutes to process exactly into whose apartment he had been invited. Then he saw the room-sized rendering of the Faith Wall sticker. He stood and stared.

  “That would be me,” Beyer said, handing him a beer, which Rabbit still drank at that time.

  No, Rabbit wouldn’t have seen him down at the Grove. Beyer hated the Grove, made no bones about it. The Poets with their text-and-paint religion. Beyer was moving way past that. And he was doing this without superstition and tributes paid to dead gods. Jabez. He spit when he said the name. Were Poets looking for innovative images? Of course not. But Beyer was. That was the powerful thing that he and Rabbit had in common. And that’s why they were standing there on Beyer’s deck looking down over the city sipping an expensive north European lager.

  “You’re the guy who’s always tearing me down,” Rabbit said. “You hate my work. I hate your neighborhood. Actually, I don’t hate it. I just don’t like it.”

  “You hate this apartment?”

  “I must admit I like the fact you have hot water.”

  “I tore your shit down because it’s sentimental crap,” Beyer said. “Naive is not the innovation you’re looking for.”

  “And Faith Wall is?” Rabbit said. “I hate to break this to you but I’m not putting up stickers for you. Thanks for the beer . . .”

  No, no, no, Beyer had said, smiling. Not that. Just listen. Just hold still.

  BEYER TOOK RABBIT DOWN to the far end of the Lagoon, out of the sushi chef’s eavesdropping range. Then he went up to get himself a drink, vodka rocks. When he returned Rabbit was sitting with the strap of his bag over his shoulder, looking like he was ready to bolt, and Beyer said: “Don’t run, Rabbit. Not safe to be out there. Soldiers and angry crowds. Makes for trouble. They say the Meme studio is all wired up with bombs by now. Special Forces in town. But they arrived awfully quickly, didn’t they? Very strange.”

  “Jabez and the Poets are heading over to the plaza. Some kind of street art protest,” Rabbit said. “You might want to join them.”

  Beyer sipped and scowled, a crease of concentration falling between his eyes. Then he said: “You know what really grips my shit? A kid walks into a school and starts shooting. A guy opens up from a tower on a quad full of preppies. People are always crying, wondering why these things happen.”

  “Not you, though. You know why these things happen.”

  “I do know,” Beyer said. “They happen because people are angry. Most people are angry most of the time. You’re shaking your head.”

  “You should try leaving the mosh pit from time to time.”

  “Life is a mosh pit, Rabbit. You’ll learn. What the hell happened to your hand?”

  Rabbit told him the short version: socket wrench slipped, racked his hand.

  “Doing what is the question but don’t tell me. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”

  Rabbit reached across the table and took Beyer’s glass. He took a smell of it, then put it back down. “I used to drink this stuff. Copious amounts.”

  “Out there in Oregon, all messed up. Poor little Rabbit. What were you doing before you went nuts? Must have been good but I forget this part of the story.”

  Rabbit smiled. “I’ve never told you that part of the story.”

  “So here’s my guess,” Beyer said. “You’re not here today because I wanted to talk to you. You’re broke. You need money. And of course you can’t ask Comrade Jabez so you’re here to ask me, who you treat as if I weren’t a friend at all.”

  “I’m not broke,” Rabbit lied. “I have a job.”

  “I know you have a job because I got it for you by introducing you to my wife. So you have a job and you’re broke.” Beyer leaned into the table, hand working in the pocket of his thigh-length baggies. He produced a money clip, a big brass dollar sign, and rolled out four twenties onto the table. “A gift. Okay, my friend?”

  Rabbit stared at the money, then palmed the bills into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “I admit it. I’m short.”

  “Like I’m stupid,” Beyer said. “But the seven grand I advanced you a year ago on the WaferFone gig? Not a gift. Plus you took that whole box of phones. I still can’t believe you did that. Those are actually worth something.”


  “Beyer, listen.”

  “No, you listen, Rabbit. Seven grand isn’t chump change. After a year, it’s reputation money. I don’t get it back, my reputation suffers. I can’t have that. So here’s what I needed to tell you. You are going to pay me back. And I’m going to help you do that. As of next week, you’re not working for Angela, you’re working for me, full time.”

  “What?” Rabbit said. “Angela hasn’t said anything about this.”

  “Angela will do as I tell her,” Beyer said. “You stop by the Slopes location and there’ll be some severance money waiting for you. I’m being generous here, Rabbit. I’m making this easy for you. And I don’t have to.”

  “But Beyer, Jesus,” Rabbit said. “I’m working on something. It’s Shock Beauty.”

  “You think the client cares a year later?” Beyer said. Then he laughed loudly. “They’ve long gone and hired someone else. I paid them back their advance out of my own pocket, you dopehead. How do you remember where you live? How do you remember your middle name?”