Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“So,” I said, just drunk enough to get a bit belligerent, “you want a story.”

“The city is sick, Blake. Look around you. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do. Somewhere along the way she got lost, she became confused. It’s difficult to imagine now, but one day we will need to rebuild, and in order to rebuild Seattle more perfectly, we will need a more perfect example of the model Seattleite.”

“Which, of course! A character from a TV show.”

“Just admit you’re intrigued, and we can work out the details together.”

I SET OFF AROUND midday on my bicycle, and within minutes I was farther from home than I’d been in months. I was headed for the corner of 6th and Spring, where I’d promised I’d give Russell my final answer — still somewhere between “No” and “You’ve got to be kidding”—and let him show me around his self-described “commune.” I paused briefly in the middle of a street where my neighborhood bordered on the more industrial area below it. Three men were dragging taxidermy from a large dark house and stacking it onto a repurposed boat trailer. They brought out two mounted deer heads and a few small furry things I took to be either badgers or woodchucks, and then disappeared inside. A few moments later one of the picture windows shattered, and through it they slowly passed an enormous grandfather clock.

When it was first proposed that Seattle evacuate, the mayor — a man named Harry Wilder — protested he’d stay here until the day he died. He staged a photograph of himself chained to his front steps, his big smile undermining, I thought, the seriousness of his message. And he did stay, in fact. For six weeks he remained in his house on the top of Queen Anne, making a point of biking to an office downtown where his core group of devotees — mostly interns — holed up and tried desperately to maintain some degree of normalcy.

In the end, his wife came down with some vague medical condition that required more attention than the remaining volunteer clinics in town could provide, and with tears in his eyes he addressed the city, and the nation, saying that you could take the man out of Seattle, but he’d be back. He’d made the announcement from his office, and in the background one of those singing fish, on the fritz or running out of batteries, was stuck in a loop, turning toward the camera and singing “Take me to the river” over and over until Wilder angrily motioned for an aide to remove it. The event led to several “Harry’s washed up”—type slogans among the diehards, but I’d never blamed him for lying.

Even after years of visible overgrowth and decay, the industrial area south of Ballard seemed significantly less unnatural than the residential blocks around it — there’d never been many people around here to begin with, so it just looked like a weekend. To my right a large, container-like building boasted a big, hand-painted sign that read “Now Hiring,” and to my left the neighborhood’s power relay station, still nominally in operation, hummed softly.

I took a left on Leary and headed toward the Fremont Bridge. I’d ridden this stretch of road innumerable times as a teenager, bopping back and forth between my house and Gas Works Park, where I’d stood by the half-maintained, cartoonish tubing to do drugs and protest various wars. And to write.

I’d write long, overwrought, underfed essays about power and meaning and war and language, and I’d type them up and pass them around to my friends, thinking I’d surely become the next Foucault.

Though I’d now long outgrown the notion that I had anything to say, I had to admit that Russell’s offer had sparked in me nostalgia for that early work — for writing that actually did something. I had to admit I was “intrigued.” Wasn’t this what I was after with my journal-keeping, my would-be witness lit? Ahead of me, in the middle of the street, was an unrecognizable smoldering mound, and I gave it a wide berth. The work I wanted to do would matter to people in a way that fantasy could never approach, that was the antithesis of escape. That brought the reader closer to his predicament, to his life. Work that re-engineered the way he saw the world. But that’s where the similarity stopped. Russell’s interests clearly had no such purity of purpose. He was trying to manipulate, obfuscate, distract. He was trying to fictionalize the world.

As I grew close to Fremont, another bridge stood in the distance against the sky. The Aurora carried Route 99 high across the channel as it widened into Lake Union, and I’d heard bad things about it. Apparently, it had become a kind of gangland, a Beyond Thunderdome — like area of advanced illegality within a city of outlaws. I tried to make out the houses I’d heard had been built up there, but could see nothing.

By contrast, the Fremont Bridge, humbled by soft blue paint, appeared slowly, subtly from behind an office building to my right and seemed to welcome me aboard. A group of four men stood to one side of the near end of the drawbridge, but they were huddled together, intent on something happening below. I pedaled along the sidewalk to get a better view, and soon I could make out a man in some kind of face-off with a large dog. They circled each other, the man shouting, and what I thought was a machete caught the sun. But after stopping my bike, I saw that it wasn’t metal after all, but a large silver fish. The man had it by the tail, and the dog had its head, and there was no clear advantage.

One of the men snickered, said something I couldn’t understand, and I realized that they were Indians. Over a year ago, Muckleshoot had reclaimed the channel as part of the tribe’s Usual & Accustomed Area, and fished there for the now plentiful and still sacred salmon.

“Placing bets?” I asked.

One of the men looked me up and down and nudged one of the others — a tall, thin man in a black leather vest. The two of them took a step forward and folded their arms, the other two seeming to ignore our exchange.

“You want to cross this bridge, newcomer?”

“That was the plan,” I said. “Have things changed since the last time I came through here?”

The first man looked down at my feet and whispered something to Leather Vest. There was a pause before I got a response, and I wondered if what I’d said had sounded sarcastic. Or if it had been, in fact.

“You been working up at that Cooper house?”

“The what? You mean that birth house thing? Well, no, I…” I looked down at my shoes and saw they still bore the purple paint I’d stepped in. “I mean, yes?”

Leather Vest scowled. I’d clearly chosen the wrong answer.

“You need to offer something in exchange for using this bridge. You need to trade.” Without thinking, I glanced up at the Aurora Bridge, and Leather Vest snorted. “You don’t want to use Aurora.”

“Ballard’s no better,” offered the other.

There was a loud, abrupt shout, and I looked back at the tug-of-war to see the man sitting down and the dog trotting away from him, dragging the fish through the long grass. I had nothing to trade. I’d left my wallet at home, had nothing in my pockets, wasn’t even wearing sunglasses. I briefly considered trading the bike, but it would take me all afternoon to walk downtown, and then what?

“That ring would do,” said Leather Vest.

I held out my fingers and looked at my wedding band. Blake had been surprised when I’d agreed to wear a band, and I’d been surprised by her surprise. The truth was I liked the symbolic trappings of marriage more than I did the institution itself. I imagined her coming back to learn I’d traded my wedding ring to cross a bridge. I smiled and turned my bike around. My face began to sting with heat as I blushed, an anger rising inside me. I took a deep breath and then another as I rode away. The errand was not an essential one. I could easily pass my response along through Zane, or any of those gutter punks for that matter. I didn’t have to visit Russell just to demure — all I’d miss out on were the details of his scheme, and his home. And seeing Aya. But being flatly refused access to something I’d learned to take for granted was embarrassing. I got to the end of the bridge and was about to head back the way I’d come when a voice called out for me.