The Blue Light Project, by Timothy Taylor (@RandomHouseCa) #seenreadingTO
Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 9:33AM ;)
Westbound, King and Spadina
Caucasian male, mid 30s, with short blonde hair, wearing a green hooded jacket, brown leather shoes and deeply-creased black jeans.
The Blue Light Project, by Timothy Taylor (Doubleday Knopf)
Page 246:
Open planters and waterfalls. People everywhere: chanters and singers, placards angry and distraught. The seething tension of for and against. He saw people dancing in front of a boom box over to his left. We don’t need this fascist groove thang . . . And the idea came. Loftin was amazed that he hadn't seen it before: fault lines running through the crowd. The story was in the fault lines. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. Everyone was adrift. The encircling authorities, the cameras, the grip of the hostage drama itself. Everyone living in fear about the end. The ending was the thing. And Loftin felt it in a flash, his own story arriving. There was a great war going on here about control over the ending. Each breath of this common air fully vested.
When you least expect it, he's been told. Stop looking and when you least expect it. He stares out the window counting house numbers, a game he's played since youth. Pick a number and imagine yourself as the home's owner, this future journey to be made by friends who will visit for the housewarming and secretly judge his taste and financial resources. 458. 460. 462. The streetcar rolls past a house with a worn couch on the front porch, not the homey kind, and a stack of soaked boxes leaning in the corner. He picks another number far ahead, time more to consider the woman who sits two seats ahead reading a new paperback, something with a mustard cover. He'll look out for it, the book with the mustard cover. He peers out the window. 1236. The house appears, it's tidy front lawn dotted with trees. Is that a Japanese maple, he wonders. What does he know about trees? He traces a reflection back to the reader who pulls a stray hair behind her ear her finger hovering by her lobe as if she's forgotten to lower her arm. Yes, he thinks, the trees could be her job. And the kids can rake the leaves.
