The Blue Light Project (42 page)

This spreading sense of owning nothing as the time ran out.

 

PEGG REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS in a sideways world, a bed up against a wall. Metal cabinetry under his head. He pieced together information—medical equipment, Red Cross symbols—and decided that he was in an ambulance that was lying on its side. Then, briefly pinching his eyes shut again, he got a bit more of it. He remembered the man screaming outside the ambulance. He remembered the van going over. He remembered a head coming through the door and yelling something at him. That would have been Haden. As for his present circumstances, Pegg knew nothing much more than that and the fact that he was somehow, miraculously, uninjured.

He crawled out onto the pavement. He saw people with boxes and stacks of clothes.

He saw a young man with a video camera following two women down the row of storefronts, all the glass gone, shattered everywhere. The women were loading each other up with belts and shoes, dropping as many as they grabbed. The young man was calling to them from behind the lens: “Wow, you guys are really great. Are you really incredibly proud of yourselves?”

The women were ignoring him, as if the trailing camera and the shouted questions, while they went about ransacking a shoe store, were just part of a world they’d gotten used to.

Pegg had a card in his wallet with the name and address of his hotel, and so he returned there through the shattered streets. Across the river, where the crowds thinned and there were fewer police, you could almost imagine that nothing had happened. Still, a shocked silence hovered. Pegg read the billboards, trying to place himself in the city.
Needs Met with Passion. Plan for a Better Future. Next Stop, Great Health.

In the lobby he was embraced by air conditioning, the sound of falling water, the smell of breakfast: waffles and strawberries. He slumped into an elevator under a video monitor with the loop of endlessly crashing waves. In his room he tormented himself with a long look in the bathroom mirror. Pain at the temples. Faint nausea. He realized that he had changed his clothes already, as if he were planning to go out. But he couldn’t remember making that decision. Things from the immediate past seemed to be slipping. Memory gone sketchy. He had certain details intact. Thom Pegg. Micah Swenson Pegg. Jenny. Spratley most certainly and the girl at dinner. Mov, definitely. He wouldn’t forget Mov. But the name of the kids in the theater, all of them were gone. And he regretted that. Pegg thought hard, his eyes staring into the reflection of his eyes, the reflection staring back into the original.

He left the bathroom and went to sit on the bed. He keyed on the television with the remote and thumbed through the channels.
Pictures of the city on every channel, national and local. Aerial shots, street-level shots, shots of crowds and police. Pegg said to himself: “All my life I’ve hated this city. I hated being raised here. What was that neighborhood called? The West Stretch. Wide lawns and narrow minds.” It was the same neighborhood Jennifer had come from. Where they had lived together until the end. He should have turned Spratley down cold and never have come back. But now he was here again, cranially damaged, driven by mysteries. Sitting in front of the rolling images—smoke and broken glass, burning cars, no escaping them channel after channel—as if this city had grown so large that it had consumed the entire world.

Room-service coffee arrived. Pegg drank two cups as quickly as he could, then pulled on a jacket and walked out into the city. He didn’t know where he was going. He just knew he had to move. So Pegg began a long walk that started at first light and stretched into the morning, punctuated by three notable episodes.

The first was a spectacular fish taco he bought from a street vendor somewhere towards the riverside lip of downtown, just at the edge of the escarpment on a boulevard that looked as if it were designed for much more traffic than was out today. Pegg was feeling a bit shaky. He deposited several tablespoons of hot sauce onto his shirtfront when trying to squirt it into the taco.

“You all right, man?”

“Splendid,” Pegg said, then realized he had no money. Not a cent. The man looked him over with his head to one side. You gotta be kidding me.

Then—strange times, strange air—the man said: “Forget it. Be careful. Crazy what’s going down over there. I’d stay on the north side if I were you.”

Pegg gave the man his cufflinks and knew he didn’t want to forget the exchange. Then, halfway to the river, thinking this was perhaps the
best food he’d eaten in six months, it occurred to him he couldn’t remember buying it and wondered about the fact that he’d somehow left his room without putting on cufflinks.

The second thing was the receipt of news. Pegg was distracted, but he would never have seen it coming. He’d been standing near the river, near the museum—a good one, Pegg recalled, he’d been there with Jennifer and Micah any number of times—and across the way the sky was smoky and heaving. Still lots of small aircraft and helicopters wheeling around. Pegg watched these and licked hot sauce off his fingers and hoped everything would be all right. He hoped that the looting had stopped by then. He knew there was some point from which you couldn’t pull back. That point was the lip of the downwardsloping and inward-turning spiral, a vortex towards eternal violence and oblivion. Maybe they were at the lip, but they were not over it. Pegg could sense that. And as his eyes were drawn up towards the Slopes, up to the Heights, he thought that something might be newly alive in the city up there. Some possibility that they could yet pull back from the brink.

He started walking with this thought, pulled by that sense of new life, new hope. It was across there somewhere, south across the river, across the falls. And he had to find it. Madness. But did he stop walking, realizing it was madness? No, he did not.

Sirens and racing police cars, still. No taxis anywhere. He crossed the bridge, pausing over the falls. Then he crunched up the sidewalks through Stofton and up into the Heights. Armored cars, troops with knee pads and throat mikes, helmet-mounted cameras. And here came the unexpected news. At the brow of the hill, Pegg crossed a boulevard and a man stopped his car and rolled down the window, beckoned him over. He said: “They’ve cleared the plaza, it’s empty now.” His eyebrows angled with concern. “I was in a restaurant up there. I went home and watched on television then came back down to the plaza
last night. People came because they cared. Looting is wrong but what the police did should never have happened.”

The man was wearing a suit, tie loose. He’d been up for many hours, Pegg thought. They’d all been up for too many hours.

“The infiltration,” the man said to him, squinting up past Pegg into the diffuse light. “That’s going to cause the long-term damage. There were men dressed like protesters talking to the police. The guy shot with the rubber bullet had a Special Forces tattoo. I couldn’t make that up. He was helo’d out in a medevac. Nobody else got helo’d out in a medevac. There are hundreds of people under arrest now. Could be a thousand. Detention centers on the east side, down by the tracks.”

“I missed all that,” Pegg said. “I wasn’t in the plaza.”

The man looked up at him with a kind of sorrow. There was too much that he couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t been there. Then he said: “And that journalist got killed too. You hear about that?”

Pegg stared at the man. “Got killed by whom?”

“Police, maybe. I don’t know. Who knows? Someone did it.”

Pegg, who assumed the man was talking about him, shook his head and smiled. “No, no,” he said. “The journalist didn’t die. I can assure you, the journalist is quite alive.”

But now the man was looking at Pegg in a sharper way, suspicions aroused. “You can’t assure me of anything,” the man spat. “You just said you weren’t there.”

“You don’t understand,” Pegg started, incredulous. How did these rumors come to life from nothing and then live with such ferocity?

“I do understand,” the man said, voice raised. “I saw it. Kicked to death, my friend. How’s that? You like that?”

Pegg watched him drive off and felt that news sink into him, news that he thought would take on darker and darker meaning as the day went by, as he learned more about the incident and who that journalist was. The one who had not been lucky. The one who had died. But then,
Pegg also wondered how much of the story he could believe. Maybe all of it. It would take no effort to believe it all. Toxic times. Cloned cattle and terminator seeds. A dead journalist. Pegg watched paper blow across the intersection. He felt the chill in the air, smelled the smoke. He felt these things inside himself. Then he walked on towards the plaza, towards the parked fire engines there, three firefighters working a hose, dousing the charred exoskeleton of a car, guts long consumed. Steam rose. Their faces were black.

And here came the third and most unexpected thing. Even in his present state, Pegg remembered enough about himself to be astonished at the feeling rising within. Rounding a corner now. Into a random street, the pavement sparkling with broken glass.

Look at her. She was something. Gold in Geneva.
Eve Latour.
And oh my, but she was lovely. As beautiful as the world knew how. Nothing of the business about her. Hair up in a rubber band. Freckles across a slightly upturned nose. Slender, long legs, all that. But unaware.

Fingernail to her cheek. Mill-town sky. That waterfall and its never-ending song in the background. She was the longing. Oh yes. The longing of our generations. The best we had. And by we, of course I mean me.

She looked up. She saw me.

ESSAY

PART III. Black out, blue light