The Blue Light Project (10 page)

“Say though, Pegg,” the photographer friend had said. “You’re not asking about her because you’re interested in buying lobster.”

Well, no. He was interested in meeting this girl because next to the phrase
dirty bomb
in the dictionary, there was a picture of her. But also because it fell under the heading of
things Pegg did on occasion
just because his situation sometimes afforded the opportunity. There was a kind of payback in it. So you’re in an editorial meeting. Copies of the new July issue are all over the place. You notice the Herculean beauty on the cover. Nothing monumental here, yet.
L:MN
often ran fullpaged leggy reasons for teenage boys to throw themselves off a bridge. It was sort of how the magazine worked, how it bridged from straight gossip and industry chat to that coveted ignorant-spending-male demographic. Every now and again, there would be a cover with a woman licking a golf ball or lying naked in a bathtub full of chili con carne.

He made some calls.
Who is this girl?
Chastity Something-or-other. Then he forgot all about it. Then he was in another editorial meeting and the cover of the last issue was on the wall, in a frame, larger than before. As if she had taken a step or two towards him, closing the distance. As if she were—yes, Pegg thought, that was it—as if she were laying down some sort of a challenge.

Pegg was drinking quite a lot at the time. But that wasn’t the reason he took her up on it. That’s just the way it was with celebrity and Pegg, by that point in his life. He would be the first to admit it, if anybody asked. Although Pegg wasn’t asked much anymore. He knew his nickname in the
L:MN
art department, the one they used behind his back. They’d say: Pebialta. Like the name of a Mediterranean resort or an Italian scooter. He wondered about it for quite a while before learning it was an acronym. P-B-I-A-L-T-A. Pegg Briefly Important A Long Time Ago.

All right, fine. It had been brief. There had been the syndicated column. There had even been TV appearances. There had been a
time when questions had been asked of him about corruption and deception in our time, about the erosion of public ethics and private decency. They called Pegg “the Lie Detector.” But the generic term was
muckraker,
someone whose output was provocative even if their follow-the-victim ethic was suspect. And Pegg certainly made a business of victims in those days. He found them. He found their tormentors. And there was invariably a story at that intersection.

People liked these stories. Pegg had an entertaining, flowing style. He had a way with stinging words. But the stories also satisfied the single common certainty of the day: that the social rot was advanced. People didn’t just enjoy Pegg’s writing. They were reassured by it, people who believed nothing more strongly than that they were being routinely lied to by authorities and institutions of every kind. And on the talk shows, Pegg had examples, cases, stories to tell that were much listened to and pondered and rehashed as evidence that a great darkness was stealing across the face of the deep, and that light was a thing sorely needed.

The light of Thom Pegg.

It was a career’s worth of recognition, even before the Pulitzer. How close Pegg had come to that senior accolade. He learned he was a finalist. He took the phone call telling him he’d won. He danced around the room, told his wife, drank champagne, then booked his flight to attend the awards luncheon at the Low Library on the Columbia campus. And then his whole life careened off the rails, almost immediately, upended by a prizewinning story about shameless lying that had a shameless lie at its very own heart.

Maybe it was a tiny untruth compared to the whole, as Pegg at first believed. It was fatal, nonetheless. Were there widely publicized cases of innocent citizens whisked free of airport security and ending up in one of those special hells that had winked into existence all over the world? Black sites, they called them. The land of exception,
supra-judicial, supra-jurisdictional. People tortured without charge, stooped in concrete rooms not high enough to stand. Ninety-six-hour interrogations, fake electrocution and drowning, dogs and excrement, bloody floors and three years gone, slipping away like consciousness. Were lives lost?

Oh yes. There were names and stories that had made the papers, printed and online. And many more that didn’t. Young men, typically brown and bearded, faithful to the other God. But not always. The black sites could subsume anybody. And people knew them to exist. The toxicity of this awareness had leached into the public soil and people were sick with it, sick with knowing.

But did Pegg technically have access to a civilian interrogation contractor who had participated, who had hurt people, who had ordered up the canine units and cold cells, slammed shut the steel doors? Did he have that man who had accumulated the secrets about foul doings and rank humiliations, even deaths, and then broke under their weight?

Such men existed. Pegg knew it. Everybody knew it. They had to exist because humans were the creatures that they were: they changed their minds, they had regrets.
Homo paenitentia.

But no, technically, Pegg hadn’t actually found such a man, hadn’t found that story. So he listened to the winds of truth and wrote down what he heard sighing there. He made the man up.

Who cared? Well, nobody and then, later, everybody. People loved the story. One victim caught in the machinery of an entire hemisphere gone wrong. It was the world illuminated as the world was understood to be. And that was the story’s undoing right there, its dangerous proximity to the cliff of truth. Pegg was known. He was respected, admired even at this point in his career. He’d just won a Pulitzer.

But here came that very different thing: Pegg briefly famous for reasons having to do with the opposite of truth. So he learned what that was really all about. What it means for others not to want what you
know, or what you have, but to want your actual existence. There is hatred in the construction of celebrity fame: a love that is resented by all those it infects. Some really famous people handle it. Pegg was never a man for subtle ways, delicate handlings.

So Pegg learned a harsh lesson. It was a violation of trust to make bogus election promises or harass whistleblowers, to pollute the environment or imprison people without reason or rhyme. But it was a crime of a higher order to be a journalist reporting such a sad story and citing a made-up source. As his story itself became the story, as his phone began to ring and ring, Pegg made a cascading series of bad choices, covering track after track with new sources, new victims. Composites, full-on fabrications. The lot.

It blew open. It hurricaned onto shore. Pegg’s house crashed down and no one rushed to his aid. He had defiled the suffering of those he’d tried to help. He’d compromised the credibility of their story by telling it his way. He’d sacrificed them again, in effect, to the greater cause of getting his version out there and restoring order and sense to the world. And having polluted that sacrament, so too was Pegg laid on the altar in the name of order and good sense.

At his peak Pegg’s column had run in 157 newspapers, from Bangkok to Baffin Island. It took a few weeks for that number to shrink all the way to zero, even less time for his Pulitzer to be withdrawn. Truly scandalous. The furor raged briefly online. Articles about his misdoings written by colleagues and even former friends. But then it died, all at once, as these things do. His phone quivering to a deathly silence.

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.