Read Online The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Timothy Taylor
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damn mounting bolt and smashed a critical component made of glass and steel and electrical contacts. But all that would have to wait, because the tunnel was there in his mind on waking, and Rabbit responded to these instincts.
Superstition, his friends would have said. Rabbit was thinking of Jabez and Beyer in particular, two very different people, who had no taste for one another yet somehow maintained a great interest in him. Jabez the born protester, and Beyer the born entrepreneur. But both men had separately observed Rabbit’s life to be thick with private routines and secret penances. These two warring would-be teachers who hovered and cajoled, who beckoned him towards their perfectly opposing views of the world.
But superstition wasn’t quite right, anyway. Rabbit had arrived in the city eighteen months before, a bearded, long-haired stranger having last lived in Oregon. (Shaven, trimmed and smoothed, Rabbit was now, strangely, much harder to see at night.) But he’d never been the coastal bush mystic that they originally imagined him to be. What looked occult to them about Rabbit—general appearance, mumbled words, small repeated hand motions, running the tunnel—was in fact the product of a coder’s mental tic. If that, then this. Rabbit had left his old life behind, rigorously: all technology and its discontents. But even
in his new, no-tech life—no e-mail, credit cards, driver’s license, nor any surviving official record of his university degree (MSc, Big 12 school)—he had yet been unable to shake that one: if-then. Rabbit did things according to mental patterns and apparently nothing was going to change that.
So: if he had messed up the whole project right at the moment he thought it was finished, well, then clearly he had to do the one thing that had yielded calm insight to him in the past. That meant running the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel, two miles of near blackness, 100 feet below the eastern suburbs and deep in the city’s bedrock. Twenty minutes from end to end, the maximum time allowable inside given rail schedules, a time that had to include however long he stopped in the very center of the tunnel to pay his respects. And a chorus of sirens up the hillside seemed to herald Rabbit’s firmed-up commitment to do just that.
Rabbit went to the window, wondering if he saw an unusual glow up the hillside or just the normal reflection of city light onto low cloud. Then he returned to the narrow kitchen of the studio apartment, where he stood at the counter and turned his attention to fueling up for his evening.
Rabbit had changed the way he ate since arriving in the city. In school and then in Oregon, where he’d worked his one job until that imploded, fat, sodium, sugar and caffeine were the only food groups. So he’d lived on wasabi peas and pizza pockets, Toppo Japanese chocolate sticks and slender cans of NitroGlo, which combined the effect of six cups of coffee and about nine regular colas into a single aluminum sleeve. Now, living with a good deal less money, Rabbit ate what he thought of as bulk urban survival, which meant whatever he could get from the back of a supermarket warehouse where he’d gotten to know one of the forklift operators. Cash or weed, the latter of which Rabbit got in small bags for free or next to nothing from Beyer, who
had a complex network of suppliers branching out in all directions around him: marijuana, but also booze, sushi-grade bluefin tuna and a myriad of other products and services his lifestyle demanded. So Beyer helped Rabbit out with a little weed from time to time. And Rabbit traded that for flats of multivitamins and fish oil capsules, plus the fixings for a dish he called ramen-oni, which you made by combining a box of Korean spicy ramen noodle soup and a box of macaroni and cheese dinner. Call it 1800 calories with a couple of eggs. Rabbit ate one of those a day and carried a plastic bag of trail mix for snacking. He drank tap water. He’d lost
Superstition, his friends would have said. Rabbit was thinking of Jabez and Beyer in particular, two very different people, who had no taste for one another yet somehow maintained a great interest in him. Jabez the born protester, and Beyer the born entrepreneur. But both men had separately observed Rabbit’s life to be thick with private routines and secret penances. These two warring would-be teachers who hovered and cajoled, who beckoned him towards their perfectly opposing views of the world.
But superstition wasn’t quite right, anyway. Rabbit had arrived in the city eighteen months before, a bearded, long-haired stranger having last lived in Oregon. (Shaven, trimmed and smoothed, Rabbit was now, strangely, much harder to see at night.) But he’d never been the coastal bush mystic that they originally imagined him to be. What looked occult to them about Rabbit—general appearance, mumbled words, small repeated hand motions, running the tunnel—was in fact the product of a coder’s mental tic. If that, then this. Rabbit had left his old life behind, rigorously: all technology and its discontents. But even
in his new, no-tech life—no e-mail, credit cards, driver’s license, nor any surviving official record of his university degree (MSc, Big 12 school)—he had yet been unable to shake that one: if-then. Rabbit did things according to mental patterns and apparently nothing was going to change that.
So: if he had messed up the whole project right at the moment he thought it was finished, well, then clearly he had to do the one thing that had yielded calm insight to him in the past. That meant running the Easter Valley Railway Tunnel, two miles of near blackness, 100 feet below the eastern suburbs and deep in the city’s bedrock. Twenty minutes from end to end, the maximum time allowable inside given rail schedules, a time that had to include however long he stopped in the very center of the tunnel to pay his respects. And a chorus of sirens up the hillside seemed to herald Rabbit’s firmed-up commitment to do just that.
Rabbit went to the window, wondering if he saw an unusual glow up the hillside or just the normal reflection of city light onto low cloud. Then he returned to the narrow kitchen of the studio apartment, where he stood at the counter and turned his attention to fueling up for his evening.
Rabbit had changed the way he ate since arriving in the city. In school and then in Oregon, where he’d worked his one job until that imploded, fat, sodium, sugar and caffeine were the only food groups. So he’d lived on wasabi peas and pizza pockets, Toppo Japanese chocolate sticks and slender cans of NitroGlo, which combined the effect of six cups of coffee and about nine regular colas into a single aluminum sleeve. Now, living with a good deal less money, Rabbit ate what he thought of as bulk urban survival, which meant whatever he could get from the back of a supermarket warehouse where he’d gotten to know one of the forklift operators. Cash or weed, the latter of which Rabbit got in small bags for free or next to nothing from Beyer, who
had a complex network of suppliers branching out in all directions around him: marijuana, but also booze, sushi-grade bluefin tuna and a myriad of other products and services his lifestyle demanded. So Beyer helped Rabbit out with a little weed from time to time. And Rabbit traded that for flats of multivitamins and fish oil capsules, plus the fixings for a dish he called ramen-oni, which you made by combining a box of Korean spicy ramen noodle soup and a box of macaroni and cheese dinner. Call it 1800 calories with a couple of eggs. Rabbit ate one of those a day and carried a plastic bag of trail mix for snacking. He drank tap water. He’d lost
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