The Blue Light Project (3 page)

Nick and Otis ate in the sunroom together, side by side at the long table as they’d been doing since Otis’s mother left all those years before, when Otis was only five. Father and son behind their bowls, scraping and clattering and reading their separate screens or papers. Eve ate breakfast standing in the adjoining kitchen, not because Nick hadn’t encouraged her to sit down, only feeling like she should leave them to their long patterns. So she leaned on the sink looking down the acre of lawn to the creek where the hedge stopped, where someone half-hidden was washing a shirt in the cold stream there. Frompton Creek. It had once held trout, when Nick was a boy.

It was a homeless man camping there, Eve knew. His back bent over his washing. Bare from the waist up. Eve thought of how in Stofton, at that moment, people were waking in parks and stairwells, in parkades and on benches. So many of them. She hoped Ali wasn’t among them.

“They’re putting up these posters downtown,” Eve called over into the sunroom. “I saw them doing one last night. I’m trying to decide if they’re political or art or what.”

Nick sipped coffee. He looked into his bowl, then across at Eve. Then he started in again on his porridge.

Otis said: “Posters like of what?”

Eve came into the sunroom doorway. “Like these big black-and-white photos of toy soldiers and that kind of thing. With phrases underneath. Those famous newspeak phrases from the Orwell book.
1984.
Remember ‘War Is Peace’?”

“Like ‘Ignorance Is Strength,’” Otis said.

“In the book, what was the guy’s name?” Eve asked. “The girl was Julia.”

Nick’s face was pursed down around a mouthful of Irish steel-cut oats, cream, brown sugar, cut-up apples and pecans. Beside him, Otis
ate dry bran flakes by the spoonful, each moistened carefully with a sip of milk.

Nick finished and swallowed, his features settling back into their handsome symmetries. “Was the guy’s name Winchester?”

Otis said: “No, Winston.”

“Winston,” Eve said. “They were in love, Winston and Julia.”

“I don’t know about love,” Otis said, his mouth full again.

“They made love,” Eve said, “where no one could see them, although I guess the point was someone actually could see them.”

“I think the point,” Otis said, “was that given the circumstances, Winston and Julia were certain to betray one another. So their love, or whatever it was, certainly would not last.”

“The poster I saw last night,” Eve said to Otis, “was ‘Freedom Is Slavery.’ When it went up, people were cheering and dancing in the street. I’m not kidding.”

Which struck them both as absurd, as things often did, making Otis and Eve start giggling, something they would have carried on had Nick not spoken up.

“Eve, you’re going to meet those people today, right?”

Otis started eating again.

“Yes,” Eve said. “I’m going.” Moving back into the kitchen. Leaning again on the sink. Looking through her own reflection in the window, her face greened over by hedges and grass, laced across with branches of weeping willow.

Nick and Otis finished their breakfasts, their getting-ready routines, their goodbye routines. Otis gave her a point of the finger and the wink of one eye. He said: “Later, Champ.” Nick gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her hand. He told her to call him afterwards. Then he did something he’d started doing lately. He looked into her eyes in what Eve assumed he meant to be a warm but knowing way, a glance to the soul of the moment’s true meaning.

Nick said: “Feel good about this meeting. Don’t dread it. People love you.”

Eve tried to smile. Then, when they were gone, the sound of Nick’s car having purred away down the driveway and into the morning, she cleared away breakfast things, made a fried egg sandwich and took it out into the backyard, where she found Katja, Nick’s gardener, working the flower beds just off the main deck.

“For me?” Katja said, looking at the sandwich.

“I’ll make you one,” Eve said. “But this is for our visitor in the hedge.”

“Aww,” Katja said. “You’re so nice.”

Eve went down to the bottom of the yard, to the man camping there by the stream. He was fifty. Had been in the wars. Asia, the Middle East. He sat with his shirt off in the fall chill, his hands to the flame of a camp stove where his tea water was on the boil. His brown belly was an accordion of wrinkles. And when he thanked her for the sandwich, he spoke with the trace of an accent from far away.

Two days before, Nick had said to her: “He’s got to go, of course. He can’t live the rest of his life in our hedge. There are millions of people in need, homeless, unemployed. We can’t have them all living in our yard.” And Eve made Nick swear he wouldn’t force the man to go until they’d had a chance to really talk it through. But she was silently furious with him, a reaction she struggled to justify even to herself.

 

SHOWERING. STANDING IN THE HOT WATER. Agonizing pointlessly over what to wear, then pulling on the usual jeans, faded cableknit sweater, never fashionable, borrowed from her father years before and, now, never to be returned. Then out to the truck and eastward across the city. Up into the Heights, the ancient Heights. Time to face the music. Face the day. The meeting had been scheduled and canceled five times previously. Eve was out of excuses.

Double Vision: endorsements, promotions, campaigns, storytelling. “We’ve worked with many top former athletes,” a young partner named Ganesh told her on the phone. “And I can tell you there is always an appetite for the right sort of former athlete. It’s recession proof. It really is. It’s like a hunger that doesn’t go away. And your story

. . . Eve, let me tell you, it’s one in a million. It gives us tremendous material to work with.”

Nick called when she was almost there. He had a way of pressing Eve while at the same time suggesting there was no urgency. This had once been part of what she considered his grounded certainty about what came next, a seeming immunity to doubt and the influence of others. More recently, Eve had sensed these comments to be colored with a different quality. A certain urgency Nick wouldn’t have wanted to admit. So he’d tell her that it was good for her to work again. Good for her to be out and about, to move on now after what had it been, two years? The deceased Henri Latour, indefatigable to the moment of his death, would have agreed certainly that being busy was the key to being happy.

Those were Nick’s words.
Indefatigable. The key to being happy.
He was in the car himself, heading to a warehouse south of the city to meet with a big area wine broker. A guy who had access to cult wines, secret wines. “Just checking in,” Nick said, voice bright.

“I’m on my way,” Eve said. “Nick, I’m in the truck. I’m almost there, honest.”

Signs and messages all up the main drag through River Park and into the Heights. A show about cooks after-hours. A budget holiday destination. An ethical investment fund. A new cell phone, disposable, biodegradable. It was called the WaferFone:
Minutes to a Better World.
Up towards the crest of the hill, Eve noticed the renovation and improvement. New bike lanes and planters. A thicket of cranes on the ridgeline. It had been warehouses and tenements when she and Ali
were kids. Work yards, an abattoir, a field where they’d once watched other kids burning tires. They used to take three different buses from where the family was living in East Shore, which was a new suburb then: modern houses, clean schools, fathers who worked just across the river at the university, or in architecture or journalism. For Eve and Ali, the Heights had been a secret playground. They ate Ukrainian sausages at Kozel’s Deli. They trolled the alleys, looking at graffiti. They climbed the fire escapes of abandoned buildings, explored the hidden world of urban rooftops. Heard the pop of gunfire once in the street below.

Up to the top of the hill, utterly transformed. The dead buildings and weeded-out railway spurs of the Heights were now a nexus of impossible refinement, all glimmer and reflection. The tiny wedgeshaped galleries. The hanging coral glass sculpture in the restaurants. And at the heart of things, the resurrected plaza. No more wasting benches, dormant planters, dead fountains. No more daylight muggings or clusters of grim shapes, in-turned around needles and pipes.

Everything changed. Even sight lines in the main plaza seemed to have been radically upended. The old Unitarian Church was gone. And now the natural paths of the eye converged on the Meme Media complex at the western end of the plaza. Clad in silicon and titanium. Canted, billowing sheets. It coaxed the sun to life each morning and was a bier for its setting. The rest of the day, it was a city-scale funhouse mirror, reflecting the streets and buildings, the cafés and the people walking by, all in warped distortion. Meme Media was the home of
KiddieFame:
an idol show for the toddler to nine-year-old set. Naked yearning for status on the faces of parents and coaches. A show big enough to have its own protesters who dressed in black and gathered spontaneously, hoisting signs. Their objections to the show seemed to braid the rhetoric of the neo-anarchist anti-globalism movement with a moral denouncement of the show for being a kind of child
abuse. They seemed opposed to fame itself, or fame’s pursuit, a point on which Eve was sympathetic even if their critique was scattered. In recent months, the protesters had favored a banner and T-shirts that read
Celebranoia,
which Eve liked, thinking when she saw the word of how close she’d come once to marrying Reza, a French film director with three Palmes d’Or and at least twice as many girlfriends who’d once gone out onto the balcony of a hotel where they were staying in Avignon and aimed a rifle at photographers in the square. He’d been arrested and released, made all the papers and news channels, and later incorporated the scene into a movie. Any rational person who met Reza probably should be
celebranoid,
Eve thought
.
Although she thought better of buying the T-shirt when she saw it in the window of a rock shop.

Eve found parking on Jeffers Avenue, which ran due south from the square. Double Vision was in that first block south, on the east side of Jeffers in an old building that had been sleekly refurbished in the highmodern style. She rode the elevator to the eighth-floor lobby with its open expanse of glass looking north up Jeffers back into the plaza
.
As she looked, she remembered that when the protest groups became large enough, the media referred to them as “Black Blocs,” but the group gathered today didn’t look like it would earn the epithet.

The senior story manager came gliding out from behind a rice paper screen: choker, yoked shirt, wrists bedangled with awareness bracelets. A bearded twenty-five-year-old with an air of religiosity and the faint smell of hair product.

“Eve Latour,” he announced. “I am totally, entirely thrilled. I’ve watched Geneva. What a story. A sort of come-from-behind underdog with suffering and justice. We’re all enormous, enormous fans. Please feel no pressure, no pressure at all. My name is Ganesh. This is Marcus.”

And here came the founder of Double Vision in his leather car coat and his rumpled shirt, white hair, uneven shave. He toddled in towards
her, stood grandfatherly close. Eve smelled talc and cookie dough as he whispered: “I’m glad you’re here, Evey. Are you well since your father? A terrible loss. Henri was so important as a journalist and a man, I feel I can really say that for the city, the whole country. For anyone who knew his drive and engagement. His essential what. His essential Latour truthfulness. Courage, yes. You look like him.”

He took her hand in both of his without another word, only smiling softly. They weren’t shaking hands. Or at least not in a way she’d shaken hands before. He seemed to be working it to and fro, testing the joints up her arm and back into her spine. As if he were gauging her weight before a chiropractic manipulation. And Eve felt an inappropriate laugh rising within her. A laugh she could imagine sharing with Otis later, who would see the absurdity of the moment. The packaging of her life story for sale by a company called Double Vision. Only she thought of the great Henri just then. The drive, the engagement. The essential Latour truthfulness. And as the Double Vision founder straightened and let go of her hand, the comedy of the moment died.

 

NICK WAS A FORMER GERBER BABY. His face on a million bottles of pureed peas, tomatoes and rice, chicken and pasta. To forestall any discussion of “destiny” or “luck,” Nick would discuss this episode only in scientific terms: his infant head to body mass ratio, micronomically symmetrical ear and eye placement, and most important, the correct shape of mouth and lips. Nick, then and now, had a lovely smile. Eve would never have imagined herself with someone more than a decade older than she was, but the smile had certainly been part of it. From the first time she saw it—introduced by a friend whose husband played squash with Nick—Eve had read a graceful self-ease in that smile. Evidence of a man who didn’t steal glances at his own reflection or worry overly about shirt choices. A couple years post-Reza, who’d lived almost entirely as if guided by the impression he made on others, these
qualities in Nick, all captured in an easy, symmetrical smile, seemed to Eve most attractive.

Blind genetics, Nick would say, the program of cellular certainties. Nick was an atheist of the new school, which meant that he had moved past argument, finding anyone still harboring transcendental yearnings to be an acute embarrassment. So, while he courted Eve avidly, seeming always to anticipate her moods, to find the right idea for the moment—a quiet dinner or a day at the dog races—from their first discussion of it, he refused any suggestion of fate in his Gerber history. He’d been expertly selected, picked out of a stroller in a parking lot by an ad man whose signature was at the bottom of a contract Nick kept framed in his den. Berwick Chad, VP Talent Development. Nick went looking for him later in life and learned Chad had died of lung cancer some years before. Nick’s own family, for their part, never discussed the Gerber business after the fact. Going back, they were landowners and operated a number of flour mills along the river. Nick’s parents were astute with his small windfall, silently investing every penny, then passing away early. So they’d handed Nick his adult life in the form of a house and a tract of riverfront land where the mills had been, which became the first important area in the city for redevelopment. It all unfolded as if by plan. Build the condominiums. Sell them. Make the money. Retire to write the wine column. It read like self-creation, but Eve knew Nick occasionally experienced it as a mechanical given, something over which he’d had no control from the beginning. And that thought could make the days heavy, even for an atheist. Confining Nick to his den, deepening the frown lines and the silence.