The Blue Light Project (6 page)

He was closely reading the label of the wine bottle. Soil densities. Organic practices. She told him about seeing the young man jump. Late twenties. Lean frame, muscular. But how shocked she’d been at his power. How he exploded right off the edge of the roof, across the alley, and then flipped at the top. “Which is crazy. Right over my head.”

Nick raised his eyebrows, twisting the bottle. “You’re not saying that was courage, I hope. That’s just daredeviling.”

“It’s called Parkour,” Eve said, who’d been looking for the word the entire afternoon, then got it just as she was pulling in the drive. Parkour: from a show she’d seen on Discovery Channel.

Nick shook his head. No, he had no idea about Parkour.

“It’s a sport. They jump off very high things. Run creatively.”

“They run creatively.”

“It’s French,” Eve said, but she knew there was no point. Nick had a particular expression, a holding expression. Like he knew he shouldn’t interrupt, but that he was already wholly occupied with the next thing he was going to say.

He said it now: “Let me just say this.”

Lights continued to flash on the television. Fire trucks. Police cars. Blue and red halos in the blackness. Orange flares and white headlights, familiar as Christmas. The camera just now bucking at some nearby shock or noise, the light sources spinning. Pinwheels. Sparklers. Someone was shooting, Eve realized, recognizing it in the shape and shift of the images. Here we had something going badly, somewhere, and it involved guns. One of those stories they had all become tragically used to seeing and hearing about. The man with a gun in his workplace. The kids in trench coats wandering into a school. Eve thought how utterly horrible it was that the news would be shaping up again around one of those stories.

“Let me just say that your father was never a daredevil,” Nick continued. “As a journalist he took more risks than most. But he was calculated. Still, of course . . .”

“Improvised roadside device,” Eve said. “You can say it. He was one of three journalists killed in three separate incidents on the same day.”

She ate the rest of the omelet in a flattened silence. She drank wine. Then tried again: “I don’t look at everything in me now and see my father. And I didn’t end my term with UNICEF because he died either.”

“What about the weather announcer gig. Why’d you quit that?”

“I didn’t mind doing the weather, actually. I liked going up in the helicopter.”

“But you were always conscious of the cliché.”

“The jock on TV,” Eve said. “Talking low pressure systems from a beach somewhere. You’re right. I mostly found it embarrassing.”

More shots, Eve guessed. The camera operator was seeking cover, his picture all skewed. And now something else appeared to have gone up. The camera operator was running, lens on the pavement. Then back up and shooting. In front of a high building, glinting metallic in the grainy light, another car lay spectacularly on its side, engulfed in rolling black smoke and licks of flame.

“Where’s Oats?” Eve asked.

Nick followed her eyes down the hall. “Watching online, no doubt. This looks vaguely CNN-able.”

“Where’s that look like?”

“Dunno.”

“Is it happening now?”

“I guess.”

Nick got up again. She expected him to go down the hall and find the remote control, toggle on the sound. Although at the same time she found herself hoping he wouldn’t. That he wouldn’t reveal whatever had suddenly gone bad in the world.

Nick moved the other way, back into the kitchen. He yelled back: “We could finally get married.”

She squinted. The building behind the burning car had banners fluttering down its front.

“Okay,” she said. “Wait.”

Above their heads, in their bedroom, Hassoman levered himself from the bed and thudded to the carpet. He did this when events on the main floor corresponded aurally to certain canine expectations: dishes going into the dishwasher, the front hall closet door opening in
advance of a walk. Nothing was signaling him now, but Eve could hear the dog move heavily on the floorboards into the hallway, over to the top of the stairs, where he stood and growled once.

“Good boy,” Nick called from the kitchen.

“Nick, that’s here,” Eve said. “That’s up in the Heights. I was there today.”

“Come on, boy.”

Eve was up and walking towards the living room now, arriving at the door just as Hassoman emerged at the bottom of the stairs, sniffing the air, then barking towards the front door. Once. Again.

Eve started looking for the remote.

More sound on the stairs. Otis coming down. Eve could see herself in a wide shot all at once, pulling up the cushions on Nick’s parents’ old couch while, for some unknown reason, a car burned in the plaza opposite Meme Media. While Otis stood in the doorway with an expression Eve had never seen on him before. All his teenaged confidence gone. His eyes wide, mouth seeming to work at some immobilized word. And here came the anchors again, the situationdesk expressions, the pre-fatigue of some event they both knew they’d be talking about for many further hours, through the night. An event that already perplexed and astounded. Eve watched a graphic roll on the blue screen. Familiar queues of children. Then the incident banner. It scrolled across the corner of the screen like a sash. It read:
The Meme Media Crisis.

Cut to the street, the reporter out of breath. Over his shoulder, three police trucks rolled out of Jeffers Avenue and into the square.

Otis was still working the words, lips opening and closing.

“Otis,” Eve said. “Are you all right?”

“Hey, what’s up?” Nick said, entering the hall. He was holding a small skillet and a towel. He put the pan down on a side table and picked up the remote from where it sat on one of the shelves of the
bookcase. But he didn’t key the volume just that moment, staring over at his son. “Okay. Come on.”

Otis got the word, finally. “Hostages.”

“Turn on the sound, Nick,” she said.

But Nick just stood there, remote dangling. “Hostages what?”

Eve was nodding at the screen, just as Otis’s mental logjam broke.

He said: “Hostages, Dad. In the TV building.” Then: “They say a guy took some of those
KiddieFame
kids for hostage in the building.”

And here Eve did something that she couldn’t explain to herself then, and which she knew she would remember as a strange impulse later. She ran into the kitchen to look at the clock hanging there, to note the time. As if it were clear that the most pressing priority were to mark the beginning of this thing.

The clock, innocent of all knowing, had ticked its way past 9:00 in the evening and was heading towards 9:01.

WEDNESDAY EVENING

OCTOBER 23

LIKE THEY WERE ACTING SOMETHING OUT. Like they were part of the show.

They escaped by the rear doors of the television studio. Mad crowds, crazed. Adults and children. They slammed into each other and bounced, they grabbed each other and held, or pushed away. The only law governing their movement was the impulse to escape. To get out, get free. In that they were inspired by one another. Pushing and pulling, helping and not helping. The concrete stairs echoed on the way down, feet stamping and skipping and slipping. Some people were on their cell phones already, but there really wasn’t anything to say. They didn’t know anything, nobody did. So close were the performance and the feared reality, so close the entertainment and the violence.

So they yelled into their phones:
A man with a gun!
But they also added other things, voices scrambling out the words:
As if he had been choreographed! Just like it were part of the show!
And they forwarded pictures and video clips too, out there in the rear alley and the side street, but these images didn’t reveal anything. Grainy figures in black, curtains of smoke. Terrible audio. They were dream sequences.

At first people thought it was a Kill that launched the terrible events, a Kill so early in the taping that it had been a complete surprise. Viewers generally had to invest a few hours before the factions began to form, the feudal hatreds, the necessary sacrifices. But not in this case. She was that good. A ten-year-old version of any number of top-level soul singers, but different too. Hyacinth was her name. Tall for her age, with skin toned the color of creamed coffee, gorgeous cheekbones and a high-beam smile. And as the studio audience learned in her preamble comments, she lived in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, a few hours on horseback from the Continental Divide. Her ancestors were the indigenous people of that area, having been there for over ten thousand years, and she had herself learned to sing by listening to thunderstorms and hail, the power of the wind in the towering forests near her home. That and Celine Dion, she said. But mostly nature. And with her mouth open full aperture, lungs in full release (“The Power of Love,” 1984), it became clear she was beyond the standard herself. By the time she’d climbed to the summit of that first chorus, people weren’t just swaying in their seats compelled by the rhythm. They were being pushed and pulled by the sheer pneumatic force of the kid’s pipes. She moved the air in the theater, in great tidal fluxes. And when she hit that apogean note—so many registers above them all, lordly in its duration and clarity—the crowd was at once buzzing, aware that a talent of religious proportions had been unveiled, a talent that would certainly destroy them all if it weren’t first destroyed.

The assembled competitors and coaches, invited guests of the studio and all those who’d won their tickets on radio call-in shows or had convenience store scratch-and-win tickets, simultaneously had the knowledge. She was too good. Her story was too good. Hyacinth had to go. So they floated to their remotes, before the voice had fully drained from the room. They keyed in their scores and they knew.

She killed. And they killed. Five stars came in from every voting
seat. And there it went. Flash pots exploded, the surround-sound speakers rumbled to life, a loop of helicopter rotor noise shook the building as if it were under attack. And on the massive flat-screen monitor at the front of the theater, where the contestants normally appeared in close-up, there were images of soldiers storming through the backstage area, heading towards the studio theater. Figures in black combat fatigues charging through corridors, shouting and brandishing their weapons. And seconds later, those same figures were storming into the theater itself. There were only six of them but they seemed to flood from everywhere at once, and as they scattered, waving their weapons, they swelled in the senses to become many more.

 

A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY, GERRY—full name Girard, rarely used—was sitting in 14G, watching this with a wry smile. He turned to his six-year-old sister and her best friend. “I’ve seen this before,” he told them. “They had it on CNN.” It would be many hours later before he would wonder what he’d meant by saying that, because he’d never seen a
KiddieFame
Kill on CNN. Only real soldiers.

But here they came, seeming to charge directly off the big flat screen at the front and out into the theater through its three sets of doors, one at the rear and two on either side of the stage. These men and the chaos of their soundtrack. So it was that happy delirium and pyrotechnic bedlam coexisted for a while, the audience cheering as the soldiers ran up and down the aisles and yelled back and forth and waved their assault rifles in the air. They looked quite real, these men and their weapons, as real as in the movies. Which was exactly how everybody knew that they were actors hired by the studio to carry out the Kill. People understood it, instinctively, Gerry included. These six men were part of the show.

It was only when the seventh man took the stage, not from any of the three sets of doors, but from the right stage wing, ambling rather
calmly across the boards and seeming to observe the action from a critical distance, that the first trace of unfamiliar scent began to taint the air.