The Blue Light Project (14 page)

No such lessons possible from her own family. In Eve’s childhood, somebody was always up pacing in the living room in the middle of the night, worked up over something. An argument certainly, although never about staying out late or borrowing the car. The Latours addressed themselves to higher matters. Truth and liberalism, the fading of religion, the building of a better world. Eve had friends visit the house who showed no enthusiasm to return. She knew why. Because her father might demand an opinion on euthanasia or the death penalty.

One world government, an evolved idea or oxymoronic? The guy locked in Henri Latour’s steel-blue gaze for that one was a nineteen-year-old jock at the local college, accomplished at being a running back and very good looking, Eve thought. After that evening the relationship sputtered. When they spoke, his eyes flickered around for safe places to alight.

Such was the House of Latour, the house of ideas and queries, knowledge and endless dissatisfaction. Statues of the Buddha, framed Sanskrit verse. Enlightenment thinkers on the shelves of her father’s den. No refuge anywhere inside from the great quest for understanding, that sifting of causes and effects.

For Ali, unlike Eve, there finally came a breakpoint. The blowing of a fuse. Her brother was in the fourth year of his undergraduate degree, English/philosophy with plans for a law degree out on the coast. He talked about doing work that challenged the status quo. Socially relevant work. All of which made their father proud, while it lasted. Then Ali quit, grandly, sweepingly. Not just school, but the whole family program of events. Dinners, disputes, the assorted agitations. He went proudly to live in derelict Stofton, where a completely unforeseen artistic career was to be born.

Nobody in the family saw him much anymore, although Eve managed to keep contact alive for several years. Then, the year before Geneva, Ali began to fall away from her, no longer returning phone calls. Eve was training at a facility out West in the Rockies. Loping down the groomed tracks. Popping off the targets. She had a resting heart rate of forty-nine. She loved the feel of the rifle in her hands.

The last time she saw Ali in person he was gaunt, skin gone ashy. He said he was working on artwork that could only be seen from the air. His hands fluttered unnaturally as he spoke, churning the space between them. Eve knew nothing about heroin addiction, only that Ali had lost a quality. Some shade having bled out of his skin and his voice.
She remembered Ali on his rooftops, executing his pointless, perilous climbs. These were the things she loved most to remember about him, but she couldn’t see this person doing any of them.

Eve went to Geneva, stayed away for less than a year. By the time she returned to the city, by the time Geneva and Reza and UNICEF were all over, Ali had vanished. And by that time, Eve thought now, she was the one who’d started to lose a quality. And it was the exact one she’d once seen in Ali and copied from him. What was it exactly? A willingness to act. To celebrate the momentum of her passions.

On television now, Eve watched the camera pan to the top of the square, to the front doors of the Meme complex. The face of the building was flattened and frozen by spotlights set to either side. Dark spaces beyond the doors were visible through the broken front glass.

Eve caught her own reflection in the gold-framed mirror near the fireplace, clutching herself and rocking in place. So Ali fled the house of dissatisfaction. But what could that have meant to their father, in the end? What did the memory of a Buddha in the backyard mean to a person whose body had just been blown free of a jeep? Fifty feet. Dying in the air. Dead in the air. Dead in the sand beyond. A man of so many thousands of words and no final ones himself.

These were useless thoughts, and she knew it. She paced into the dining room, into the kitchen, back into the den. The images of the Meme complex were still there, and Eve felt faintly guilty for letting her mind wander from these events to family matters. But no sooner had she registered this guilt than her mind wandered again. Ali, Ali. He had stormed back into her life, hadn’t he? She remembered the moment. Sorting through old boxes that had belonged to her father. Files, correspondence, tax returns. Buried in there was a clippings file with all Eve’s press. Interviews, profiles, newspaper accounts of Geneva. Eve pulled out a set of stapled pages, recognized the photo
from Kozel’s Deli. She remembered the journalist, a more likeable man than he wanted her to believe, disheveled, whiff of hangover, faintly posh accent possibly acquired later in life. But it was the pull quote that caught her, standing there in the half-light.

The question:
So where do you travel next?

And her answer:
Nowhere, I hope. I’m at the point I just want to stay home. I figure if I can’t find it here, I can learn to live without it.

So glib, so over-confident. Ali came crashing back into the room of her conscience. She saw his face clearly. Remembered his voice from close. Whispered words of reassurance, high up a tower in the freezing wind.
Don’t worry, E. Look at that. We’re above it all.
Only Ali wasn’t to be found here. And what a terrible thing that she had learned to live without him.

On television, the images already assuming a grainy, archival quality, even as Eve watched. They seemed to suggest in advance the number of times they would be pored over later. There were live shots of the gathering crowd now from various cameras around the plaza. Shapes moved against the mercury streetlights and voices echoed. A chant came from somewhere nearby and Eve thought how incredible it was that protesters would be there, growing in numbers, their agitation pooling and gathering in the granular light. There were soldiers in the plaza, barbed wire and concrete slabs. It was just like the movies, Eve thought involuntarily. Then wondering who wrote that people always compare traumatic moments to the movies because they cannot help comparing the
real unreal to the unreal real.
Some favorite of her father’s.

Here it was not quite clear which they were watching. Real or unreal. She sat in the shabby gentility of a West Stretch living room, flat-screen television glowing from on top of the old cabinet hi-fi that had belonged to Nick’s parents. There was a cordon around a building. Riflemen in the shadows. Soldiers no doubt creeping through the
sewers. Commanders and officers leaning over a table somewhere with a situation map. Those were the familiar images.

Not a word from inside the theater, or none that was being acknowledged by authorities. And from the outside, a strange pattern prevailed. A large number of people had been released early on, so many that there was confusion over how many remained inside. People coming out of the theater couldn’t help much. They came out blinking and blinded and confused about what they had just experienced. Were there bombs inside? Somebody said that the floor was laced with wiring. Others disagreed. An expert said this was how memory worked under these circumstances. Robbed of details, it would cut and paste, mix and match. It would paint into place the specific threat that otherwise could only be felt.

“The whole point of taking a hostage is to give yourself a shield to protect your life,” another expert said, “which generally suggests that hostage takers aren’t suicidal, as in the cases of gunmen opening fire in a public place.”

“So we should feel safer knowing this?” asked the host, brow deeply furrowed, baritone full of doubt.

“The situation is still dangerous. But it’s rare for the primary objective to be the death of the hostages, since it would necessarily mean the death of the hostage taker as well, who would no longer be protected by their shield.”

Why no demands, then?

“Well,” the expert said. “I’m speculating. But he could be waiting for attention to be brought to bear, for the media to gather.”

They went to commercial and Eve muted the television, listening now to the interior of the house, the usual hums and creaks. The gentle breath of night, now failing to reassure. The expert saw a storm being called up, a dense pressure system, patiently awaited. This stillness then, Eve thought, was the eye of the storm.

“Champ?”

She jumped and turned and there he was.

“Oats, hey. You still up?”

Otis moved past Eve to sit in Nick’s reading chair near the bookshelf against the far wall. He settled into the leather.

“Watching upstairs?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Deeply sickening.”

“They’re going to end it soon, I bet.”

“I don’t know,” Otis said. “Very risky.”

“But what else?”

“Negotiate?” Otis said. “What’s a million bucks, or fifty million?”

“Unfortunately the guy hasn’t asked for anything.”

“Everyone wants something. So this guy wants something. They just gotta figure out what it is.”

“I suppose,” she said. And although the announcers were back on-screen, Eve didn’t key on the sound. So they continued to watch and discuss the silent images, comparing perplexed thoughts and hopes for resolution. And after several minutes, a silence came that Eve thought would end when Otis told her what was really on his mind.

He sat nodding in the semidarkness of the room, as if agreeing with her decision to leave the television muted. Then he said: “About this man living in our hedge. You and my dad were arguing about it.”

She turned to look at him. “What about him?”

“My dad thinks he’s gotta go.”

“It’s not decided. We’re discussing it,” Eve said. Otis didn’t take his eyes from the television, so Eve let her gaze drift back there too. The west end of the plaza, the face of Meme Media and the wide steps leading up to its smashed front doors all laid out in brilliant white and harsh shadow. Dark shapes moving in the foreground. The blackest possible sky overhead. The same starless sky that was over them. The same night hanging over this house.

“And what do you think?” Eve asked.

Otis shifted in the chair. “I think I see my dad’s point. One person comes. You let them stay. You end up with a campsite. There are a lot of these people out there.”

Eve nodded, still watching the television. The anchors were back, making conversation out of the scant information available.

“I mean,” Otis continued, “that there really is a limit to what we can do to help others, even in difficult times.”

“All right,” Eve said. “And what are you suggesting?”

Otis raised his hands, palm out. “I’m not. I’m trying to make a different point.”

Eve thought the anchors betrayed uncertainty. There was an ad hoc quality to their movement. The cuts and cues not quite right. It was getting very late, people were obviously tired.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“My point being that I admire you for disagreeing with him. For resisting the obvious logic.”

Eve turned back to the young man who sat opposite in his father’s favorite leather lounger, his knees squared and open in front of him, one hand hanging over the end of each chair arm, like a miniature Lincoln Memorial. It made her want to laugh. Not at Otis’s expense at all. But in just the way they would have laughed together if they’d seen someone else sitting that way and sounding so grave.

“Well I don’t necessarily think the logic is that obvious,” Eve said finally. “But please, Oats. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind.”

He sighed and rubbed his chin. If it weren’t so dark in the room, Eve was sure she would have seen the red rising in his cheeks. Otis blushing. “I guess I just think that acting on your gut, because you think something’s right . . .”

“Yes?” Eve said.

“I guess that’s what I think you’re really like. What you had to be like to win a gold medal. Kind of stubborn. Kind of irrational but, in the end . . . right.”

He was standing already. He was walking past her, touching her shoulder briefly on his way to the door, to head upstairs, to return to his chat room, his MoleChess™, his CNN watching. Whatever it was that made up his nighttime routine.

Just passing her, Otis said: “Which is something you don’t want to lose.”

 

TWENTY-FIVE MORE PEOPLE RELEASED in the hour following midnight. They came out in twos and threes into the chill of the square. A person with a heart condition. A woman who’d fallen in the original moments of the incident and broken her wrist. All the show’s remaining technicians and producers. Not much pattern to it: men and women, black and brown and white. Locals and visitors. Some children too. Blinking out into the light, blinded. About fifty people were left in the theater, it was said. And even this took on an ominous cast. Fewer people than before, was that good? Or did that mean they were closer to some final number? Some hard-set bottom line.

Eve took the phone outside to the back deck. Low concrete lines disappeared into the roll of the lawn that stretched down to the stream, to the lake beyond. No sign of movement, no wink of flashlight inside the tent. She thought of walking down, making a noise. He might wake up. She phoned her mother instead, out on the West Coast.

“Your father?” her mother said. “Well, he’d probably be inside the theater by now, interviewing people, looking very serious and unafraid.”

“Did you admire that he was like that?”

“Oh, sure I did, Evey.”

“Why did he take the last trip to Afghanistan?”

“Same reason he took all the others,” she said. “Curiosity and indignation.” No, she hadn’t worried. It wasn’t her job to worry then. He’d gone to live with his girlfriend.

“You still talked, though.”

“We talked incessantly, that’s why we couldn’t stay together. I hope you and Nick don’t talk nearly so much, although I suppose you probably don’t because of the age difference.”

“Did Dad feel like he was changing things, going over?”

“Oh, Evey, it’s late there. Something horrible has happened. People worry it’s all coming to an end at times like this. It never is.”