Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Nice bike,” it said.

The voice had come from a deck four or five feet up that was once part of a dumb bar called the Thirsty Girl and there, in the shade of tree branches that hung over its battered wooden planks, sat a man I knew. His shirt was open and torn at the shoulders. His head was shaved. He poked it from the shade and grinned.

“Echo!” I said. “Christ, it’s been forever.”

“I don’t go by that name anymore,” he said, his smile vanishing. “I’ve grown out of it.”

My bike’s frame felt hot between my legs. “What do you go by these days?”

Years ago, Echo had been my dealer until he’d spiraled down into a paranoid crystal freak-out and begun to haunt University Avenue with a big blue book called The Fifth Epochal Revelation .

“They call me the Source.”

“A logical evolution,” I said. “I’m assuming the definite article is dropped where appropriate.”

The Source grunted.

“So, what have you been doing?” I asked.

He walked out into the sun. Dark, leathery skin ran over his muscles like an oil spill. He had the wiry body of a man as active as he was underfed. He stretched and changed the subject. “Turned back by the Indians, eh?”

“How long has that been going on?”

“A month, maybe two. Who could blame them, though, right?”

I nodded, frowned. Indeed. Who was I to want to go downtown? “Notice that vest one of them wears?”

The Source gave me some wide eyes. It was his turn to nod. “Pretty nice,” he said.

“Have you read Class , by Paul Fussell? He says you can only use six things made out of black leather without causing class damage to yourself. It’s shoes, and belts, and…dog leashes, I think, and—”

“I knew a girl who wore a dog leash,” he said. “Carroll was her name. Or Carrie. Probably Carrie. Anyway, she absolutely refused to fuck on the grass, or on any sort of ground. It had to be somewhere elevated, as a matter of principle.”

The Source walked around to the stairs and came down to stand beside me. His face looked tired, but his eyes were bright and sharp. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and looked off toward the canal.

“I wonder what ever happened to Casey.”

“Carrie,” I said.

“Who?”

“Carroll?”

The Source scoffed and gave me a joking punch in the shoulder. “What the fuck were you headed downtown for anyway?”

The Source was circling around me to look at my bicycle. He knelt down and examined the front tire.

“What would you do,” I asked, “if you were given an opportunity to make a difference, but it was a difference you didn’t believe in?”

The Source’s knees popped as he stood up. He was probably six or seven years older than me, but he looked ancient. No one could say he hadn’t pursued something in his life, or taken risks. Though I didn’t envy his choices, I had a flash of respect for him just then as I recognized something like courage determining his course.

“I’ll tell you, Blake,” he said, “that as far as I can tell, this concept — hey, do you want a pull of something strong?”

He took a small flask out of his back pocket and handed it over, smiling. It would have been rude to refuse, so I had a drink. Infused vodka, but I couldn’t place the flavor. I nodded my thanks and handed back the flask, which he returned to his pocket without a sip.

“This concept you have,” he said, “called ‘making a difference’ is bullshit. Making a difference to who? To what? To Mars?” He pointed up in the general Marsish vicinity. “Is it something Mr. Mars up there in space is going to see and say, well, finally someone did that, now I can rest easy! Now Mrs. Mars will get off my back! I don’t think so. Mr. Mars doesn’t give a shit.”

I wondered which Mrs. Mars he was talking about. The guilty woman of the forest? I felt strangely lightheaded. “So you’re saying,” I said, “that I should go with my beliefs.”

“I’m saying that what you believe in is irrelevant, so live in the fucking moment!”

I turned to ask him whether that’s how he’d describe his own lifestyle, and from the corner of my eye I saw raised arms and swift movement, and my head jerked sideways into bright white light and shooting pain.

The house next door to the one I grew up in had stood unoccupied on and off for much of my early childhood. In my memory the paint was always peeling, the roof always covered in moss, and the monkey puzzle tree with sharp branches hanging over the whole front yard was chronically sick, so that the ground beneath it, littered with knifelike fallen leaves, killed whatever tried to grow there. Brock and Brenda moved in when I was nine.

I’d later understand that they were alcoholics, but at the time I thought they were simply animated. Brenda would shout her Joan Jett songs from the back porch and Brock would see how long he could burn rubber without leaving the driveway, his beat-up Corvette disappearing into big clouds of bittersweet smoke. One morning as I was waiting at the curb for the school bus he called my name, and I turned to find him splayed out on his front steps. He was wearing pajamas and looked disheveled, but he was smiling and seemed honestly happy to see me. His blunt face was sweaty and his blue eyes bloodshot, and he said he’d stayed up all night working on a project.

“What kind of project?” I said.

He stuck out his tongue.

“Tuthit,” he said.

“What?”

“Tuthmytum.” He pulled his tongue back inside his mouth, swallowed, then said, “Touch my tongue.”

I must have made a face, because he sighed and rolled onto his back.

“Forget it. It’s probably too radical for you anyway.”

“What is it?” I said, falling for his cheap maneuver.

“I ever show you my plants?”

I shook my head.

“Coca plants — my babies. Last night I chewed leaves.”

I stared down at him, not knowing what to say. I could hear my bus braking down the block but I couldn’t see it yet. I took a step back, tripped on a fallen branch and nearly fell. Brock sat up, as if waking up, as if remembering, suddenly, why he’d called me over, and thrust his tongue back out.

“Tuthmytum!”

I reached forward and swiped it with my finger.

“See? Smooth, right?”

I nodded. It was smooth and slimy, like raw, skinless chicken. I wiped my finger on my pants.

“All my tastebuds fell out,” he said. “Isn’t that fucked up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Say it. Say: man, that’s fucked up, Brock.”

I felt a little scared. “Man, that’s fucked up,” I said.

Mercifully, the school bus pulled up and I ran to it. As we pulled away, Brock yelled something drowned out in the roar of the big diesel engine, and a kid named Tim asked me who that was. I just shrugged. I knew right away I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about my exchange that morning, that although there’d been nothing truly wrong with it, it would not sound good. I shrugged, turned forward, and sank into the green plastic seat. It wasn’t until much later — in Abnormal Psychology — that I’d learned to consider this an awakening of sorts, part of my education about the relationship between what can be done and what can be told.

I replayed this event throughout the afternoon, throughout the evening, as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I’d obviously been drugged, but one of the effects of the drug was that I didn’t give a shit, so I lay there, splayed out. Perhaps, I thought, I was sympathizing with Brock. What would I do if someone passed by? Would I call them over? And say what?

Maybe the Source was right. Maybe it was all just storytelling.

I was in the shade of a birch tree, and its small leaves flickered in the breeze, letting dappled light animate the sidewalk and street until the sun disappeared behind Queen Anne Hill. I felt calm, empty, and though I knew I should try to get up, go home — my mother would be worried — I couldn’t quite bring myself to move. I’d been given a free pass, it seemed. A ticket to remain motionless, to do nothing. To stay as long as I wanted. And in a way, I felt protected. I listened to the murmur of Indians along the channel and smelled the salt air.