Free The Blue Light Project by Timothy Taylor Page A

itself, which was a railway safety installation, but at the magnificent thing that the light revealed. In iridescent greens and yellows, with licks of red, silver and gold, massive interlocking letters shaped a name. Graffiti pieces were not so interesting to Rabbit normally, but this one had him. It was as impressive as the greatest works of art Rabbit had ever seen, not for its strokes and lines, but for its location. That is: precisely where nobody would ever see it. This piece had obviously been painted with no intent on the part of the writer that they be known or admired for their effort. And that was a new kind of image, Rabbit thought. A lodestone of pure creative will, a suggestion of motives and meanings beyond the world itself.
    If-then. The writer of this hidden graffiti hadn’t been saying: if you are seeing this then I am truly alive. The statement here was radically different. Rabbit thought it was: if I am to be truly alive, then this is what I must do, whether you see it or not. And that idea enthralled Rabbit. It sped his heartbeat and fired his imagination.
    The name on the wall was Alto . And as he’d done before, Rabbit stood in front of the piece, a sense of bright certainty enveloping him. And he read that name to the blackness, his only witness, the tunnel echoing Alto back to him in long parabolic waves.
     
    AFTER RABBIT RAN OUT OF THE TUNNEL, he jogged across town to Joey’s Panda Grove, where he found a corner booth in the basement
bar and turned his attention, at last, to the critical matter at hand. The big project, his installation. Rabbit unfolded a city map, which he smoothed onto the table in front of him. And there he sat for some time, hardly moving, tracing the map’s many lines and markings with one finger. He sat in the low light under the gaze of a dragon his friend Jabez had painted on the wall years before and which nobody dared paint over. That dragon, Rabbit had often thought, was an expression of Jabez’s righteous anger at the world’s injustice. And nobody had the nerve to create an image to rival it.
    Jabez, as he always did, sniffed from upstairs that Rabbit was there and came down to find him. Rabbit had occasions to wonder if his friend had the place tricked out with hidden cameras. Jabez seemed always to know so completely what was going on in the Grove. But then, the Grove was his. Impossible that he could own it, Rabbit had decided, since his friend never seemed to have any money. But he had somehow secured its use. He ran the illegal bar and the hall upstairs. Most important, Jabez ran the walls, which were postered and painted, over and over, with the work of a hundred street artists. And all of it administered by Jabez in accordance with some code of rivalry and usurpation—an algorithm based on the length of time a piece had been up and the original prestige of the artist who’d made it. Nobody messed with this Jabezian order, because to do so meant you’d never set foot in the Grove again. Which is why every graffiti writer and wheatpaster, every muralist and photofreak, lightboxer and landscape painter, all the sloganeers and wall journalizers, even the tagger kids who came in from the burbs to leave their plague of marks like dogs pissing on hydrants and unable to stop, all of them accepted the hovering authority of this local prince, whose office was up in one of the crudded-over spaces of the hotel overhead, who came and went by a private freight elevator, who stumped around, his signature stilt and list, gimp leg fluttering behind him like a broken wheel on a shopping cart. Signing constantly with his hands.

    Oh yes, Jabez was deaf, a source of yet deeper authority. To be pegged by a freight car in the yards while painting a grain hopper, to lose your left leg from the knee down in service of the craft, that conferred a certain status. But to be able to read lips at forty feet was a different kind of power altogether. Rabbit had many times seen people