The Blue Light Project Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought could make the days heavy, even for an atheist. Confining Nick to his den, deepening the frown lines and the silence.
    Deep inside Double Vision, meanwhile—deep into a long montage of images and music that the story managers had put together about Eve’s gold-medal race in Geneva—Eve herself was struggling to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand. She squinted in the lowered
light of the boardroom and tried to focus on the film, a jump-cut affair laid over a soundtrack of pulsing urgency and cultural import. Didgeridoos and beatboxes, bassoons and a Franco-Celtic fiddle coloring aural depths beneath the grainy images of her famous race. She wasn’t bored by the story or embarrassed to hear it again. She’d learned to live with its retelling because it happened a lot. But to have the visuals and audio ramped up to this degree made her distinctly anxious. The Double Vision folks didn’t appreciate perhaps that Eve had the psychological interior of this event stamped on her memory. So, despite the soaring music, she knew what paralyzing nerves had threatened to overcome her there at the start of the pursuit portion of the race, her breathing obviously far too fast, her glances back towards the waiting pack of opponents far too frequent. Chief among these opponents, Giselle Von Kemper standing cool in her skis, rifle snug between her shoulder blades. A slab-muscled woman from Innsbruck, incumbent gold-medal holder, savage media darling. And still the strong favorite, despite Eve’s having bested her in the sprint the day before. Eve at twenty-four was a wisp compared to her. She remembered thinking there in the tapering seconds before the starter’s pistol how her own thighs were approximately half the diameter of Von Kemper’s. And with that thought, the Austrian aimed a cool smile in her direction, said a word that Eve never caught, then turned her face back to the trail. Fatless, aerodynamic. A human bullet train.
    Eve’s eyes left the screen, again, seeking reprieve out the window that ran down the west side of the boardroom. There was a telescope standing at the window, a vintage touch in the modern boardroom. It stood on a tripod aimed out at the view, and Eve longed to get up and look through it at the roofs opposite, to look out over that same hidden world that she and Ali had once explored. And with that exact thought, something moved on the roof of the old Peavey Block directly across from Double Vision on the west side of Jeffers Avenue.

    Eve was alert, all at once. Wide awake, curiosity alight. The Peavey Block roof was lower than the eighth-floor boardroom where she sat, so it was laid out for her to examine. And that was definitely a person over there, half obscured at the shadow line. And then, as it turned, or adjusted position, she saw that it was a young man: lean frame, down on his knees on the gravel and moss. He was muscled in over some business, hidden from street-level viewing. Eve guessed he was applying pressure to something, flexing his body, his shoulders hunched, his narrow waist twisting. While around him the rooftops seemed to join in a single surface, stretching across the ridgeline, then disappearing over the lip of the hill towards downtown. Roof ducts and ventilator shafts, air-conditioning units, satellite dishes. Eve imagined herself down there with the young man, looking over his shoulder as she might have done with Ali in their day: rooftop running, floating from parapet to cornice, from brick to gravel, shingle to sky.
    In the boardroom, the on-screen music ramped and the Double Vision staffers hunched forward in their chairs. The visioning managers and plot leaders and product narrative specialists. All pulling for her, urging her on in the half-light. It was a miniature re-enactment of what had happened in the city those years before. Everyone had been paying attention to her training. She was the local girl. And the whole city had watched in amazement as she’d