Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“It’s just fantasy,” I said, nearly blushing.

Russell leaned across the table and refilled my glass. “Call it what you like, but its playfulness belies a dark, demented heart. And I like that. I mean, emotional transfer? Cars that run on denial? Okay, the metaphor is a little thin, but the message is devious.”

My novel, written years before the evacuation, took place in a future Seattle far wilder than the Seattle we actually saw come to pass, and revolved around a technology that turned negative human emotion into usable energy. I raised my glass, deciding to ignore the thin metaphor comment.

Russell continued. “I mean, here you have Seattle — well, the world, really, is the implication — in ruins because we’ve run out of fossil fuels. Everything comes to a halt. Most things, anyway. We’re just barely hanging on as a society. But then we have a second chance! The phoenix rises from the flames, powered by emotional energy! And yet, this emotional energy is actually a product of what? Denial. Lies. So what does that make the phoenix? A sham, at best. At worst, a complete illusion. It seems to me you’re calling into question the very notion of rebirth — a belief that has been essential to our Weltanschauung since Jesus emerged from his tomb. Where would we be without rebirth? What would our culture have done without this idea that we could recreate ourselves if everything goes south?”

In the silence that followed, my mother stood up and began to gather the plates. “I agree that the book is incredibly pessimistic,” she said.

My skin had become warm and dull from the scotch. I pinched myself and watched the red mark on my arm slowly vanish. “It was a love story,” I said. “Love is always tragic.”

My mother took an armful of dishes into the house, and Russell leaned back, his big, bare belly rising above the table like the back of a cresting whale.

“I once wrote a letter to a friend,” Russell said, “and in it I made a joke about killing myself. The joke itself doesn’t matter. What matters is that right after it left my pen, I wrote something about how I was joking. I went on writing, but came back to it. Something about the dismissal itself, I realized, made the joke look more like an authentic cry for help. So I began to erase the initial joke, until I realized that if my friend noticed the erasure, he would surely think I was trying to cover up an actual desire to end my life. The only alternative, then, was to throw away the letter and begin again. But as I took out another piece of paper I thought about how much effort I was going through to avoid telling a joke about suicide, and began to wonder, then, if there wasn’t something true to the desire after all. Why even joke about it unless it was on my mind?”

“What did you do?” I asked.

Inside, a loud crackle from the radio shot through the house, followed by a low hum that lasted five or six seconds.

“That’s not the point.” Russell peered inside. It was dusk now, and the hazy light left the house in shadows. “What was that?”

“Well, I have a story too,” I said. “I’ve got a story. I once saw a little girl crying, a little girl, and I laughed to myself because I considered it an expression of innocence. Whatever this child thought was important enough to cry over, I thought, was just, you know, wasn’t really important. But then I wondered whether adults only think their problems are more complicated than childhood problems — maybe we mask them behind sophisticated language but it all amounts to nothing more than ‘I want that and I can’t have it.’ Right? So, I thought, maybe it’s the child whose sorrow is purer, whose pain is more in line with the universal constants of need and satisfaction.”

Russell looked at me for a long time in silence. Slowly, a smile turned up the corners of his mouth, and he took a deep breath, as if he’d just made a tough decision.

“So what did you decide?” he asked.

I slammed my hand down on the table, too hard, and felt a shooting pain run up my forearm. “That either way I was a dick for laughing.”

Another crackle, this time louder, and it deepened the following silence. Aya, who’d been close to mute all evening, stood and lifted the large wooden salad bowl. It was now that I realized I was quite drunk. My body hung from me like ripe fruit. I let my arms fall to my sides, let them swing.

“It sounded like an emergency radio,” Aya said.

“Yep.” I nodded my heavy head. “Yep, yep, yep.”

“Wow,” Russell said. “I haven’t heard one of those in nearly a year.”

“I envy you!” my mother called from the kitchen.

“Why envy me? Just get rid of it!”

I sat up. “Oh, no you don’t, Mom. Russell, don’t give her any ideas. We’re not getting rid of our radio. We don’t have neighbors close enough to hear theirs, especially now with Fred gone.”

“Fred?”

I turned to see the two women navigating around each other in the kitchen. I heard soft laughter and was reminded of the months after my brother’s family had left, when it was just me, my mother, and Blake.

“May I ask,” Russell said in a low, conspiratorial tone, “if you’re working on anything new?”

I shook my head. There was a routine to those days after Kent left that I mistook at the time for stagnation, for an ailment that could be cured by alcohol.

“I’m keeping a diary,” I said. “I’ve been reduced to journaling.”

Why hadn’t Blake understood that I couldn’t simply abandon my mother? It seemed unreal somehow. A hoax. No one could demand such a sacrifice from a spouse. From anyone . I glanced back at Russell to find him eyeing the journal I’d left on the porch beside the chair where they’d found me. It was splayed open, face down. It looked like I felt.

“What if I told you I could really use your help with a project that will change history?”

Laughter erupted from the kitchen.

“They seem to be getting along,” I said.

“You seem surprised. Who wouldn’t get along with your mother?”

Blake loved my mother dearly, and my mother loved her. But I remembered watching them say goodbye, how I’d interpreted my wife’s tears as being for me. As though she couldn’t show me her true feelings so they were expressed in the safety of my mother’s arms. Even then I saw this as an indefensibly selfish interpretation, but I couldn’t shake it. Now the memory made me feel dark and hateful.

We watched a crow glide ungracefully overhead, curve around the side of the apple tree, and land with a flap of its wings on Earl’s shoulder. Clearly, we’d seen room for anthropomorphism where none existed. I took a deep breath and sat forward, trying to drive the drunk out of me by force.

“Tell me about this project,” I said.

“I want you to write about how Dale Cooper helped save Seattle.”

“So you want a story?”

“I want a history.”

“A fictional history?”

Russell leaned back in his chair and smiled. He might not have admitted to being crazy, but he knew how others saw him. I could already tell he was one of those you-may-laugh-now-but-just-you-wait kind of egomaniacs. I didn’t mind. I had a high tolerance for blowhards with good hooch.

“Do you know anything about Chief Sealth?” he asked. “Seattle’s namesake?”

“Duwamish chief, mid-nineteenth century?”

I sipped my whiskey. “He was an environmentalist?” I figured I knew as much about him as the next Seattleite.

“Exactly! Exactly. ‘ How can you buy or sell the sky — the warmth of the land? ’ We all learned it in grade school. But what they don’t tell you is that his speech, the speech he gave alongside Doc Maynard that smoothed everything out between the natives and us newcomers, was only put in writing thirty years after the supposed fact by one Dr. Henry A. Smith. Notably, the record displays all the hallmarks of Smith’s own reasoning, philosophy, and rhetorical flourishes. See what I’m getting at? Chief Sealth was no great environmentalist. Environmentalism was attributed to him as part of a growing romantic ideal regarding the attitudes and beliefs of tribes native to this area. And we learn it in school not because it’s true but because we want to believe it. Because in our better moments, it’s what we believe.”