The Blue Light Project (21 page)

“T
here is one thing I’ve been wanting to ask you,” Eve Latour said to me.

We were in Kozel’s Deli. After I had first seen her by the newspaper box and been briefly but so intensely overwhelmed, this was where she’d led me, holding firmly to my arm.

Kozel’s. Brilliant idea. We walked in the door to the smell of schnitzels and goulash, smoked meats and strong fresh coffee. The presiding Kozel (grandson of the founder) came out and kissed Eve on both cheeks, holding her shoulders gently. Then he took me by the shoulder as well, less gently, and pointed us into a booth.

I was now trying to eat a bratwurst with sauerkraut, although I seemed to have lost the technique somehow. The cupping of the bun towards the face, the angling of it so you didn’t end up with mustard on your shirt. I levered it up and lost some kraut, then the sausage began to come loose. And as I grappled with it, mustard finally did work its way free of the other end, stippling my shirtfront.

“Damn. What did you want to ask me?”

But by then the room had already stolen her away, and she was wrapped up answering a question from the people at the next table.

 

W
e had walked to Kozel’s together, down over the shoulder of the hill from where we met in the Heights. I’d already learned a number of things about her. She attracted people, which is less obvious than it sounds. People didn’t like her just because they’d seen her face on billboards and in commercials. They liked that well enough. But when they met her, they liked her spontaneously, without encouragement, without mediation. Here, I think, is an important finding. Eve Latour emits something—without strategy, maybe beyond her power to control—and we are all subconsciously but forcefully grateful to receive it.

How this plays on the ground is that you can’t have an uninterrupted conversation with Eve Latour in public, ever. Try it. Walk down the street chatting with her, and people will appear with pressing things to say. On the street, yes. But here in her private haunt too, where the regulars call her out. Here at Kozel’s: the retired couple in the corner, the young woman at the counter, the man pushing the broom up and down the aisle between the booths. And to each of these people, Eve Latour will speak without self-consciousness. Never cracking once, never asking for a break with her eyes, with the shape of her shoulders. Never splitting to her own thoughts mid-sentence, eyes drifting for freedom in the clouded front glass.

All that, plus talking to me, plus carrying on another conversation with Kozel himself, which ran superscripted over all other communications despite the proprietor’s standing at the
very far end of the counter where he was punching totals into the push-button cash register, skewering the receipts down onto a silver spike.

“You’ve been keeping?” he called.

“I’m all right,” Eve said.

“Terrible business.”

She nodded.

“Anything?” He tossed back an imaginary swig of beer. They had a row of Russian bottles behind the counter.

Eve asked me if I wanted anything.

“What time is it?” I asked. It was darkening outside. Perfect time for a whiskey and soda. But my body had its other ideas.

“Pepsi,” I said.

“Pepsi,” she called over.

“Pepsi!” he yelled at the ceiling, as if the person responsible for drinks was in the apartment upstairs.

Eve circled in her thoughts. She took a dexterous bite of her smoked European wiener, extra-hot mustard, no kraut, no onions. We settled into an unlikely mutual comfort. I didn’t want our time together to end. But I was also ashamed to catch myself thinking such a thing, which only made me think further of life’s luck, of failure and of how miserable I had always been with beauty. I was hopeless.

“What was the one thing you wanted to ask me?” I asked her.

She nodded. Another bite of sausage, a sip of ginger ale. A finger to the cheek again, a nail to that depression beneath the cheekbone, to stroke back, to find her temple and rest.

“You used to live in this town,” she said. “You know it pretty well.”

“I did live here,” I said. “And I suppose I do know the place. Or I did once. At the moment . . .”

Eve looked at me slowly, gently. Waiting. And here’s what I thought in those moments, hunkered in again above my sausage. The kraut still letting loose its vinegary steam.

I thought how changed we were from before, but how differently we had been changed. Eve had cleared away recent doubts. She had been liberated, charged with certainty. I was more lost than ever.

Of course, my situation was the more common one. Everywhere, doubt was the new reality. On the television news it was all rumor and suspicion, versions and tales. Reports and counter-reports. Disagreements over everything from who had died to where and how and by whose hand. Had bodies been found deep in the earth, beneath the theater? In the tunnels? Bodies or a single body, or none at all? Rumors swirled. One body, somebody claimed. No, it was a homeless man locked in a closed-off storage cave, hidden between toxic bins. And here the story spun out in the other direction. And there could be no coherent outrage at any of this because doubt swirled immediately to snuff it out. No official calls for calm, because these would have been pointless. What did it mean that crowds were still sporadically looting at midday? What did it mean that a dozen people had been killed by small-arms fire in the day since all of this was supposed to have been over? Twelve people. That was a war zone number. Who was shooting whom? Even with all the names lined up, perpetrators and victims, I knew it wouldn’t be clear.

We had walked together across the littered plaza and partway down the long hill. It had been late morning then, and we were deep into the cool afternoon now, shadows stretching. The sky was clear, but the wind was very high. Outside Kozel’s I saw pages of newspaper flying high, strung out along the power lines. And the smells of the city spun around us, smells of strain and distress. Sweat and gasoline, fumes as if the old mills and factories along the river had sprung up from the dead. As if the city were remembering itself with occluded weather, smog reinvoked and lying close, held in tight.

 

E
ve had returned to her sausage. She took a look up at me once in a while during my long loop away from her, into the morning and back.

Finally, she said: “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so. I burnt my mouth on this.”

“Had you forgotten it was hot?”

“Completely.”

“How is it?”

“It’s good, it’s very good. This is called weisswurst. I kept saying bratwurst to myself, knowing it was wrong. Couldn’t get the other word.”

“I meant how is that,” she nodded, eyes up on my forehead. “Your head.”

“Is it obvious?” I asked her.

“You seem a little spaced out, yeah.”

“My memory has gone patchy, but it’s returning. When I woke up first, I lost my name. They asked me about a dozen times in the ambulance and I couldn’t answer. But it came back.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this. The ambulance.”

“It’s really only just coming clear.”

“You don’t remember that we’ve met, either. Not today. Before,” she said.

“Here in Kozel’s,” I said. “Sitting over there at the counter.”

“In a booth. But yes.”

“You were laughing,” I said. “I remember you laughing.”

“You were telling stories. Pretty good stories.”

“About what? I haven’t a clue.”

“About your work,” Eve said. “About the celebrities you meet. About the celebrities you meet and you never like.”

“I’m an entertainment journalist,” I said.

“Yes, you are,” Eve said. “You interview famous people and make fun of them.”

“Do I really do that?”

She said
Mmm.
Eating sausage again. Neatly, like a big cat.

It was coming back. “Okay,” I said. “Right. They assigned me to write a profile of you.”

She smiled, chewing.

I looked at her. “I didn’t say anything horrible or spiteful, I hope. I’m afraid I’ve done that on occasion. Sometimes, in the mood, I’ve been known to take people apart. Take people down.”

“To me, you were remarkably kind,” she said. “Although you quoted me saying something that surprised me later.”

“So where do you travel next?” I said, remembering this all at once and with complete clarity.

“That’s the one,” Eve said.

“And you answered: Nowhere, I hope. You said: I’m just at the point where I want to be home. I figure if I can’t find it here, I can learn to live without it.”

Eve was looking at me with a trace of sadness.

“I loved that line. I’m sure you said it,” I told her.

“Oh I probably did say it,” she said. “I just didn’t know yet that it wasn’t true.”

I nodded. But I could take her point. I was sure that I wanted it to be true of her. But I was also sure that her view, from inside as it were, would always be more complicated.

 

I
t was a city map. That was the one thing she’d been trying to ask me about. She had in her possession, it seemed, a rather unusual city map. And as a journalist and a former resident of the city, Eve wondered if I would look at that map to help her determine exactly what it meant.

“What it means how?” I asked her.

“Just look,” she said. And out it came. Unfolded from a side pocket of her coat and smoothed onto the tabletop. Unusual indeed. Scored with lines. Red marks and blue circles, with words and numbers in green down the margin. As I looked at it, my fingers lightly brushing the paper, I had a dream-like idea, a plausible imagining. The map was the plan for the city’s
demolishment, for new zones, for new boulevards and public buildings. Sites circled and connected with lines. Scribbles and thoughts, and sequences of numbers. It was a vision of a future. A prediction. A premonition.

“Where’d it come from?” I asked her.

“A friend.”

I looked across the table at her, an eyebrow raised. “A friend who won’t explain?”

“This friend is a bit mysterious. Also . . .” she said, taking a small breath and seeming to test her next words for how they made her feel. “Also this friend has gone away.”

She touched her hair and looked out into the street.

I nodded and leaned in again over the hieroglyphic markings. “Had you ever seen it before?”

“Not to look at closely.”

“So he’d never shown it to you.”

“I never said it was a he.”

She’d done interviews before. She had certain skills. But that didn’t change the fact that we both knew it was a he.

Eve closed her eyes for a second or two. Opened them. “He left it behind. He left it for me. I’m asking . . .”

I smiled at her. “I’m yanking your chain.”

“All right,” she said. “So what’s your best guess?”

Eve shifted the map in front of me so she’d have a better angle to view it herself too. We stared down at the thing together for a few moments in silence. I traced lines that connected buildings. I traced lines that connected other lines to lists of numbers in the margin. The person who’d prepared this had worked on a blueprint or two in their day, I decided. They’d looked at the plans for elaborate objects yet to be built.

“I think,” I told her, “that your man was planning to build something. Or perhaps it’s already built, which I must tell you, as this thing would appear to lie directly over this very city, I find a faintly unsettling idea.”

I glanced up at her. Hoping to provoke. To drive some
remembered detail out of her in keeping with the words I’d said. Unsettling. Something built.

But before she could respond, Kozel was calling over again from the counter.

“You lost?” he joked.

“Course she’s not lost,” said the man at the next table. “Eve knows this city better than anyone.”

“Everyone gets lost sometimes.”

“She knows where she is.”

“All right. Stop it now, you two,” she said, still staring at the table. But with new focus now. The index finger she’d been using to trace one long red line now tapping in place on a single central point, where a great many lines and swiggles intersected. She’d found something. I felt certain of it. She’d found the key. And I deeply wanted her to have it too.

Let her have the key, I thought. Watching her. Waiting for her to speak. Please, God—or whatever quantum particulate factor we are to accept must cover these sorts of moments—please, someone or something or whatever you are, please let her have the key.