The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor Read Free Book Online

story.”
    She chewed a mouthful of omelet. This little miracle of eggs and Gruyère on the plate in front of her. Golden yellow, flecked with green parsley, dotted with truffle oil. Nick was very good at this kind of thing. Every plate deliberately amazing. Every wine paired. Eve was good for
making porridge. No Home Economics in her education. No box of recipes from her glacier-climbing, telemarking mama.
    “Well, they asked,” she said. “Marcus gave me a key card and said I should come and go.”
    “They respect and trust you. They want it to be mutual.”
    “But you don’t do this kind of thing out of being flattered,” Eve said.
    “Maybe you do it out of why the hell not. Go down. Sit in the boardroom. See how terrible it is. Or maybe you just do it because you’re proud of who you are.”
    Eve chewed and watched him go into the kitchen for the bottle and a second glass. There were certain thoughts about Nick that she realized she cut off, afraid of where they might lead her. Why did he want this for her so much? She hated to think Nick needed her out there so that by her recharged public image, something in him might be renewed and recharged, validated by her recognition.
    Nick returned with the bottle and topped her up, poured some for himself.
    She said: “I’m not not proud of who I am.”
    Nick sipped and looked into the wine. “After your father died, you started to pull out of everything. You started to brood.”
    “UNICEF was always understood to be a term thing. Two years.”
    “Everything else, though.”
    “I needed new ideas.”
    “All right. So Double Vision. A new set of ideas.”
    “They call it ‘personal story management,’ did you know that? I bet Stalin could have made good use of a phrase like ‘personal story management.’”
    “In the end, it’s just benign,” Nick said.
    “Your story is over, comrade. My condolences.”
    “They’re just about what everything is all about anyway.”
    “Everything? What does that mean?”

    “They’re . . . charisma brokers,” Nick said, pleased to have thought up the phrase. “So they find people who other people naturally like. Then they get those people linked up with companies and products that need access to some of the same goodwill.”
    Eve stared at her plate. It killed her appetite to hear Nick talk this way. It made her shrink inside. Charisma. Likeability. Did Nick think about these things more than she realized?
    “They weave a tale of great courage into the selling of some basketball shoes. Who’s hurt?”
    “Great courage.” Eve laughed.
    “Sure, great courage.”
    “That’s not what it was.”
    “You downgrade yourself constantly,” Nick said. “More so since your father died. Like you’re not happy with yourself in any setting. I really think you’re having some kind of self-esteem crisis, which I just don’t understand at all.”
    She put her fork down. She could challenge Nick on this point. If someone was having a self-esteem crisis, it wasn’t her. But she hated arguing, so she said instead: “I just don’t happen to see winning a gold medal as having anything to do with courage.”
    “No courage,” Nick said. “None at all. She gets winged by some psycho with a slingshot. Falls down. People think it’s over. Not just one person. Every single person watching. About a billion people think it’s over.”
    Eve picked up her fork again.
    “But not this young woman. So she gets up.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing,” Eve said. “I was pissed off.”
    “No doubt. You had a broken ankle!”
    In the living room, down the passage, Eve could see the television flickering, sound off. Twenty-four-hour televised news because there was always news. And now, something, somewhere was burning. A car.
A building. There was a certain comforting structure to the images, bad news in recent progress. Someone ran across the camera’s field of view, arms waving. It was possible to feel reassured. The world