The Blue Light Project (32 page)

What have you done? She addressed this question to Rabbit, out there on his roofscape somewhere. Rabbit, Rabbit. Why are you here and what have you done?

Eve sited the telescope, moving it gently, centering the object in her quivering field of view. She cracked the zoom up, one notch, then two. Full zoom. The object was black and roughly pyramidal in shape. The sloping flanks of the thing were oddly iridescent.

Outside the restaurant, the night before, Eve had mentioned Oregon again. Why was she so curious? She wasn’t sure except that there seemed to be some important missing piece to the story. Rabbit conceded a little more. He’d been on the development team for a next-generation personal telecom device.

“You mean like the WaferFone?” she had asked, which made him laugh.

“The WaferFone is a toy,” Rabbit had told her. “Kids’ stuff.”

She looked at him, quizzical. “And your phone wasn’t?”

“Quite different. A more sophisticated bit of business, if I can put it that way.”

And as Rabbit said that, his gaze drifted in from the high darkness over her shoulder where it had been restlessly hovering, and settled in her own eyes.

More questions about that “sophisticated bit of business” were pressing to be asked. But Rabbit was now looking at her intently, nodding fractionally, acknowledging an impulse but for once unsure. And seeing his hesitation, Eve let go her questions and acted for both of them. She wanted this next part, the unsure part, the part with no answers. So she put a hand up to his cheek to bring him closer. And as she did, Rabbit’s hand came up to cover her own.

He leaned in. She thought: We’re kissing. And she felt the undertow: shame, thrill.

Now Eve stood in the Double Vision boardroom, remembering the moment and staring through the viewfinder, the black object poised, the movement of her blood translated into minute tremors. She held herself away from the eyepiece, and the field of view stabilized.

The object was clad in some kind of metallic flexible material, seemingly both matte and gloss in its grain. She guessed Teflon or Gore-Tex. It had an aperture in the top with a reflective disk. Glass or hard plastic. And around one side, almost concealed from the angle she had, Eve could make out a small grid. Tiny filaments in a woven pattern, the surface giving off the silvered and blued hues of oil, of gasoline.

She pulled back from the viewfinder. A panel of some kind, facing south. Positioned deliberately, she judged, wondering now what the position might have been intended to maximize. A view, a broadcast, a projection. Or was the object a receiver? Did the signals come from the south? From some ground source, from satellites orbiting?

Eve leaned into the eyepiece and looked again. Rabbit, Rabbit. Please tell me.

The panel glinted once as the sun rose, a wink involving reflected waves, refracting in through the layers of atmosphere overhead.

Eve stood and breathed in sharply, her heartbeat suddenly elevated and prepared, her body tuning to the truth, knowing it before her mind. The grid was facing south to catch the sunshine, to maximize its receipt of light: rays, energy, power. And she felt a flood of relief, but of excitement too, a fresh and destabilizing kind.

The thing was rigged to renew itself with solar power. Whatever he had built and installed over there, Eve realized, Rabbit had fixed it up with a solar panel. Not a battery, with its finite life. He intended, instead, for this thing to recharge.

This thing he had built, Rabbit wanted it to last.

PEGG ENTERED ANOTHER LAND. It built itself around him in an accretion of moments. Those first seconds of blackness, the hooded weight of it. The invasion of the one-handed search. The time spent talking with Gerry and the others, the shame he felt. The moment the night-vision went on and the silver-green images were surrendered to his eyes. These moments accumulated and he was pressed down to the floor with them. He was stripped away from this world and ushered down a long, cold corridor into another.

The land of exception, where everything mattered just as it did in the regular world, but none of the same rules and restrictions applied.

He didn’t sleep in this land. He was released into it as a drifting, sleepless ghost. He visited the children. He helped one of them pee, holding him by the shoulders and aiming him at the side of the chair at the end of row 12. He got them all to sit together, and Mov, watching always from the stage, did not object.

Pegg said their names, each time he addressed them, reminding them all that they were each still there in a small group, together. Still hunched in darkness. But not absorbed by it. Laisha, Reebo,
Sam, Hyacinth, Metric. Ashley, Isaac, Roshawn, Barker and Gerry.

With his night-vision goggles, Pegg could see that Gerry was a skinny kid with an honest face and, in a single bid to fashion, squarecut glasses with metal frames. Pegg didn’t tell Gerry that he could now see him. And he noticed that Gerry did not look for him when he spoke. His own eyes flatlined in the absolute zero of this darkness.

“This is Hyacinth,” Pegg said to Gerry, who took her hand and helped her sit in the seat next to him.

“
Star Wars?
” Gerry said to the group. And when there were assenting murmurs he suggested brightly: “Obi-Wan’s last words?”

And all of them knew the line. Pegg watched, incredulous. It had been over thirty years since he’d seen the film. But here came the famous passage: ten voices singsonging in the fetid air.

“You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Gerry and Hyacinth holding hands. The tough comedian kid Roshawn sitting with his arms around the two youngest, Sam and Barker. Pegg wiping his nose under the lenses of the goggles and looking away. Most of all, he thought, in the land of exception he was unable to speak. He could only listen and be amazed. By this crew here, certainly. But also by Mov.

Mov stood onstage in the grainy sub-light, a silver figure, ghosted green. He beckoned and Pegg went to him. They sat in chairs opposite one another as the story was hemming in, as Mov began to speak.

You had to imagine a medium-sized city and a medium-sized life, Mov told Pegg. You had to imagine varsity ball and driving up and down through the warehouse district looking for parties. You had to imagine sex for the first time in the basement of a friend’s house after the friend had dropped two tabs of blotter and disappeared into his bedroom. Chemical haze. Beer bottles clinking together. Van Halen on the stereo. Parents in Florida. And you had to imagine the friend’s
sister. College was coming, languages. It was like discovering that he could breathe underwater, that’s what languages had been like. His parents spoke several of their own, on either side. He’d never paid much attention to the fact that he could do this thing. And then the world unfolded before him and he plunged into it hungrily.

“I’m from here,” Mov said. “Went to Brookdale Elementary. Moffat College. I’m a kind of feel-good local story, Thom. East Flats Boy Made Good.”

He liked the work, Mov told him. Make no mistake. It was hard to understand in the light of day, but there had been a certain internal logic to it. The other contractors were married guys, single guys. People with kids and people without. The job seemed not to tell you much about a person, that was his conclusion. Much less than learning that a person was a bus driver or a doctor.

“Everyone has their own way to keep a secret. But all those techniques are the same in the end. The secret slips in behind some larger truth. It nests in a protective layer of stories about work, family and tribe. About God frequently. But always a reference point outside the person, outside the system. If you found that reference and broke the link, people let the secret go. It lost the quality that it had, whatever made it worth protecting. That was the job right there. Listening to people for the sound of links breaking within.”

There were places where this work was done. But they were all part of the same place in the end. An island in the Mediterranean belonged to the same place as a room in a hospital in Germany, which was itself connected as if by a single hallway to a shed out back of a listening post in the subarctic. These were places with separate coordinates. But in the trade, they were as contiguous as the anonymous chain hotels after which they were nicknamed. Hilton, HoJo, Best Western, Travelodge. All places where the rules didn’t apply. Mov thought you could feel it walking through the door.

He had a home by then. “East Coast. Wife. I had a child. This will get more familiar as we go along.”

He flew out to work, civilian. He had a credit card with a $25,000 limit. Flew night flights often, taking window seats, laid his head against the cool glass and slept until arrival. Rented a car. Went to work. He did interrogation prep, which was one of the jobs they contracted out. He didn’t envy the men who extracted the actual information. They had even higher security clearances. Cover stories, lives of deceit. They left each room they entered with new secrets they were obliged to keep. It was a life that accumulated misery, and he’d met more than a few of them who would gladly admit it.

Interrogation prep meant softening up the prisoners. Getting them used to the idea of endless suffering, with talking as the single mechanism for release. Not talking now, just talking later sometime. For this purpose Mov’s company hired language grads, psychology majors, guys who’d had collegiate sports careers interrupted by injury. They hired church people and heathens. It was understood by those on the inside that a trace of patriotism didn’t hurt, but that they had been selected for self-interest too.

Third interview, they asked Mov why he wanted the job. “You speak what, seven languages,” the guy said. “Why aren’t you on a campus somewhere? Campus life. Autumn days. Nice office. Pretty co-eds.”

He answered: “I’d like to help out. I believe in Western civilization. And sure, I see it facing certain threats.”

The man asked him: “But what? I hear a but in that.”

Then the man waited, a long pause. They were interviewing him in a bare room in an industrial park outside of a prairie city. He’d seen a grain elevator while driving in earlier, big letters across the side:
John 3:16.
Mov wasn’t a believer. Although having not yet been hired, having not yet seen inside the machine, he thought that if he did believe he’d surely turn around and head back to the airport having seen that sign.

Mov gave the man an answer. Something to do with occasionally stepping up to do a duty. But there were other things he wasn’t saying. He could see them hanging in the air, the other considerations. The man himself inspired something, the phantom machinery of which he was a part. There was a kind of person who wanted to be asked to do those things other people wouldn’t do. Mov knew it now, if he hadn’t fully then. There was a type who responded to the inner distinction of the clandestine. The hidden mark on the heart. Take this package to the man in the café. Drape a scarf out your window if you’re being followed. Those who were called didn’t know their full role in things, only that their role was full. In the ambiguity lay the reassurance. You were one step further inside, nearer the way things really worked. Nearer the reasons, the truths of the matter.

“It was like wanting fame, but not fame. The other related thing,” Mov told Pegg. “The one you couldn’t speak about. Anti-fame. I wanted that.”

Pegg forced himself to breathe. “Anti-fame?”

“Some people want to be widely known and celebrated. Others want concealment and secrecy. It’s gaming the system, either way. It’s a bid to separate yourself from all those wandering around outside the machinery, subject to it but blind to their enslavement.
The fan is always the mark. Celebrity is a con.
Who wrote that, having seen it for himself up close and personal? What smart man, Thom Pegg?
”

Pegg leaned back in his chair. He felt exhausted already but sensed that he’d barely been tested. “Go on,” he said.

“I didn’t like any of the weird stuff, any of the sexual play, the dogs,” Mov said. “I didn’t put panties on the guys’ heads or have them simulate blow jobs on each other. I didn’t like the whole approach of humiliation. There could be honor in it, even under the circumstances.”

He worked contrasts, mainly. These were time proven, he explained. Cold cells, hot cells. He kept them in darkness and then shone a bank
of quartz incandescent lights in their faces. He stood behind these lights, barely visible. Voice coming out of the blinding white. Rarely threats. Fear was a lever that worked in about one in ten cases. Middle-class secular guys caught up in the game without religious motive. But there weren’t many of those, no point denying it. And once you had a kid coming out of a God School in the Pakistani highlands, your fear, the one you brought to the table, well that was ranked and ordered against other fears that eclipsed the sun.