The Blue Light Project (43 page)

“The Peavey Block,” she said.

It pulsed to life, a life waking, a brand-new idea. It came out of nowhere. Just at the crest of the hill, near the plaza. A blue beacon, fluttering. And bouncing now too, skipping somehow.
The ring tone stuttered and shifted. And there was a new blink of light below. So close as to first appear that the original light had merely shifted. That it was bouncing back and forth. Then another, then another.

Eve’s hand holding the phone dropped to her side as the call-forwarding sequence unfolded below. WaferFones. Phones calling phones calling other phones, calling back. The lights launching their rhythms across the city below, a slow spread, sweeping into the western neighborhoods. There was at first no pattern to it. The lights seemed only to sparkle and cycle. Organic action. They seemed to excite one another, blinking on in shapes and lines, forming into clusters and spreading, then bouncing back, then relighting, then falling silent and still as other areas of the city ignited. It was, at first, just a beautiful thing. The maddest kind of fireworks imaginable. The city itself alight with itself. And reflecting off the low cloud. The sky alight, shimmering like the northern lights. Down the hill. On the roofs of condo towers in the Slopes. At the tip of old water towers, across the tops of billboards. Opening now to the river, where they spread and spread, spooling blue across the West and East Flats and River Park.

We stood speechless, swaying in place while the lights continued to rebound and refract. They blinked on through the blacked-out parts of the city, bridging the spaces below. The whole of the hill and the river neighborhoods pinwheeled now, an antic blue celebration at the roof level, aimed at the sky. Shooting north, east, west, south.

To the bridges. Onto the bridges.

“Look at that!”

Eve held my arm as the lights touched one bridge and then another. Then jumped out over the black of the water and headed into the city center, where even in the lights of the financial district the flickering blue could still be seen. Arcing and dancing in the hive of downtown. Beautiful yes, but more. Perhaps I only really saw it in full when it reached this height,
the whole city now jumping and sparking with blue lights, dancing lines and patterns from the north, the east, the west, the south, lights racing across the East Shore directly below us, jumping from a house here to another one over there. It seemed to come from no place that could be imagined. A spectacular and inexplicable mandala. It was the universe. The before picture. Before the city, its buildings and cars, freeways and cell phone towers. Before Eve. Before me. Celestial shapes and patterns, galactic swirls, planet birth and planet death. All the deities too. I could see them patterned there, even as the lights slowly extinguished themselves below us, withdrawing, winking out, throwing last flurries across the landscape. Last flourishes. Last runs.

The final lights we saw were a single row that streaked up the hillside. A last sequencing of calls that started in Stofton and raced to the crest of the hill, to the plaza, where they seemed to launch off that originating building and disappear in a streak to the sky, which was itself now just firming up its display of stars. Winking to life as if in answer to the call.

I had my arm around Eve. I don’t mind admitting that I was weeping. I had no idea why. Or I didn’t for several minutes until we both noticed the standstill below. The city seemed to have fallen absolutely silent. No sirens. No rotors. No grid of diesel trucks on the hills. There were buses stopped on the bridges. I could make out cars pulled over on the riverside boulevard, people standing next to open doors.

Eve had her hand over her mouth. We both waited. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. And then the car horns started to blow. All across the city. Some new thing unleashed. Eve put her other hand to her face, one on either side now. I was smiling uncontrollably. Spectacular, I said. Amazing. Terrific. I have never seen anything like that. Can you hear them? People are yelling down there. People are honking their horns. Which I might have done myself, had I been at ground level and seen that flowering of light above.

What had he done, Rabbit? What on earth had he done? He had lifted us. Suspended the laws of nature and made us weightless. And as we climbed down, even now, it’s impossible for me to explain the sensation I was experiencing except to say that the laws remained suspended. I was hearing voices. No hallucination. Actual voices. An actual choir of them coming right out of the wind and carrying me down. Madness, I know. But better than other madnesses I have known. There it was, three-dimensional and auditory and real. No particular melody that I remember, only the sense of many voices singing the same notes. The same simple lines. Trumpets, tubas. The shimmery dance of cymbals. A beautiful madness. A saving, restoring madness.

We were laughing, reminding each other of what we’d seen. I wasn’t cold. I’d lost my vertigo. We were skipping down, back to earth. Last light was an intense rose hemisphere to the west. Down and down under that floral dome, now ringing us, haloing us. A bid from the dying west.

I climbed down the lattice of the tower. I dropped to the ground and turned to help her but Eve jumped past me. She sprang down to the balls of her feet. And as she touched the ground, I remember how the earth shuddered through her. I can still see this, so clearly. The whole of it pushing up and touching her, rolling through her body. Eve rippled with the earth.

We stood for a moment in the wonderful chaos of the memory. My voices were still there, faintly. My feet in the grass. The honking still carrying on below. People calling. Still no sirens, not one. No helicopter sound for the first time in days. We were at a great distance from the Heights. But I felt the pressure systems slackening. And as our shoulders touched and I put my arm around her again in the falling light, here’s what I imagined. I imagined that we were less helpless for the mystery of the thing we’d seen. That shimmering blue-light dance of hope.

Maybe Eve felt the same. We were not quite strangers, but we still hung on to one another there. We held each other in the
long shadow of the tower. In minutes it would be dark, the rose light gone. All shadows blended to a single one. Night.

“Write about this,” Eve said to me. Just a trace of wet remaining at the corner of her eyes. Of course, what came next was going to be harder for her. I only had to stay for a while. I only had to make a phone call to Spratley, do whatever had to be done there. Then stay for a while. Write about it. Sure, that’s probably what I would do.

I let her go, finally. I was gripping her and she was standing there gamely, looking at me. Nicely, I have to say. I remember the look. Off she went, across the grass towards the pickup truck. “No, no,” I said. “You go ahead. I’ll make my own way back to the hotel.”

Eve objected. “You’re way up the top of East Shore here.”

“Go on. I’m fine. I like to walk. I’ll flag a taxi.”

And I
was
fine. I knew a good East Shore intersection for the purpose of getting a cab. I remembered my hotel. Bit of a letdown getting your memory back, if you’re me. Seeing in all clarity the memories I’d seen fit to assemble. My life. My project. But that’s me, a lesser subject.

There Eve goes. God, look at her. Off to face what she has to face, that harder thing. Blue lights sparking in both our minds. So much beauty and mystery dancing across the face of her city just at the moment she left it. Left us.

Off north, naturally. Up that lane. To that spot in the blackberries where you turn in. To the mailbox with the hidden key. Would Rabbit be waiting there for her? Hard to say. I wasn’t sure it mattered. Here’s the thing I knew: that one of them would be there waiting for the other. One of them would get there first. One of them would get there and wait. I believed that. There was easily enough certainty in her stride, in her one long wave back out of the truck window as she drove away, that I could have faith in that. Eve and Rabbit had been set free. And their freedom was each other.

As for me, I’d experienced a kind of liberation too. That is,
I had no sense of wanting anything in particular. Life would continue for as long as it did. But I had all I needed for its duration, for any Mov in store.

In the meantime, just one item outstanding, and simple enough to see it through. All I had to do was cross the city sometime in the next day, or the next week. Find the playground. Some Sunday afternoon when families would be out. It wouldn’t be hard for me to have a stroll down the right avenue and look over and find him up on the climbing ropes. Swinging somewhere in the middle rungs of the thing. His mother watching. Looking a little heavier through the face. Heavier and softer, fuller through the belly. I was imagining Jennifer pregnant again. I can’t think why. Probably because I was imagining her happy again.

I wouldn’t wave or draw attention. I wouldn’t go in and try to talk. I wouldn’t need that now. I could just let it be. Let them be. The looking alone would be enough. The sending of peace. And asking for it too. That would be sufficient. That would be everything I could possibly desire.