Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“BLAKE, ARE you DEAD? Blake. Blake.”

Zane stood over me, shining a flashlight in my face.

“Blake,” he said.

I squinted up and closed my eyes. My head throbbed. Gravel dug into my shoulder. My left foot had fallen asleep. I embraced these sensations, found solace in the feeling. In the limbo between stasis and movement a seemingly timeless expanse had opened, which, I felt certain, would swallow me if I let it. It was a space I could remember having tried to expand between hitting snooze and my alarm going off again, a half-conscious predilection for the void.

“Jesus, dude, you had people worried.”

I felt a hand on my elbow. Then Zane grabbed my arms and pulled me into a sitting position. I held the position, opened my eyes, and summoned my blankest look. The world is unbelievably cruel! The world stuns me with its heartlessness! I wanted sympathy, but Zane wasn’t biting.

“Get up,” he said. “Boss wants to see you.”

“I should let my mother know I’m okay.”

“Handled.”

I looked around to confirm my bike was missing. “I’ve gotta find the Source.”

“Don’t we all,” said Zane. “Come on.”

He picked up his own bicycle and straddled it, then dropped his hand to point at the bunny pegs screwed into the rear axle.

“Are you serious?”

I looked over his shoulder at a fire by the water. Dark shapes passed back and forth before it, and I could smell hot grease, cooked meat. It was entirely possible that Echo was part of Zane’s posse, that the whole thing had been staged — revenge for having used his pump without asking? A slap on the hand for some unintentional slight? Or perhaps, like Fred, I’d simply committed the sin of possessing something they wanted. I looked into Zane’s face for some sign of collusion, but could see only the kid’s big, bright eyes and innocent ink.

There was nothing preventing me from just lying back down, or getting up but walking in the other direction, back to Ballard, where my mother would be waiting up, stoned, eating snap peas and watching the news. I scrubbed my face roughly to wake myself, and only then did I notice my ring was gone.

“God damn it!”

I felt around in the darkness, grabbing at the surrounding sidewalk, gravel, grass, but I knew it had been stolen. The world was unbelievably cruel! It had taken me weeks to decide between platinum, silver, and gold, to select a diameter and finish, to choose whether the surface would be rounded or flat. It had taken me longer to land on a wedding band than it had for Blake to pick out her dress, and I’d had to defend my indecision against charges that it was a symptom of cold feet, of a reluctance to wear a ring at all. My brother had sat me down and poured me a shot. My mother had given me sad eyes. Blake had required reassurance. But it hadn’t been anything like that — it was a matter of my deep faith in symbols.

I stood and, feeling lightheaded, leaned against the tree for support. I brushed my fingers over the egg behind my right ear. It wasn’t bleeding but it was tender and big enough to scare me. I stifled a sob.

“You coming?”

My blank face returned, unbidden, but this time I turned it away from Zane. What use is an expression that nobody sees? I shuffled toward him, climbed onto the pegs, and grabbed his shoulders. The shock of having been hurt, having been robbed, the symbol of commitment snatched from my finger, had settled into a self-destructive resignation: not only did I want to take the easier path, but the wrong path presented itself as easier exactly because it was wrong .

Zane kicked the bike into motion, and moments later we were turning the corner back toward the bridge. The crew there had changed, but three new men watched us approach, their expressions in plain view, their feelings hidden. As we passed, Zane slowed to say something, to say they should get a good look at my face, that I should be allowed to cross the bridge whenever I wanted.

“If the Editor gets word of you stopping him again,” he said, “he’s not going to be happy.”

I gripped Zane’s shoulders more tightly as we turned down Westlake on the south side of the bridge, comforted by a kid I’d only ever condescended to, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

I hadn’t been downtown after dark in over a year. The moon was nearly full but the tall buildings to either side meant we remained mostly in shadow. We rode along beside the decrepit monorail tracks. It felt like entering a stranger’s closet and shutting the door behind you while the home’s owner wandered through the house. At any moment they’d stand before the door. At any moment we’d be caught.

We passed Pine and Pike, Union and University, and had just crossed Seneca when I remembered what building sat at 5th and Spring. Sure enough, we pulled into the intersection and saw it jutting up out of the street like a shard of glass.

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “He lives in the library?”

“We all do.”

The downtown Seattle Public Library could have been erected by a Saudi prince to remind him of a trip to Alaska. Its irregular glass and lattice frame zagged out of the pavement like a colossal glacier, and consensus was that, in operation, it had been good for everything but finding books. Zane steered us up a ramp and we passed two men smoking by the door to ride right into the building itself. We left the bike outside and passed through one of the library’s cavernous atria by the bookshop and a reading room, and at first, in the dim light cast by hidden bulbs, it didn’t seem all that different from the last time I’d seen it. The shelves seemed to be in order, though mostly bookless, and the reading desks stood silent and waiting. But as we trudged up the bright yellow, motionless escalator and walked through what had once been the computer room, the changes became more apparent. There were tents. All the desks and tables had been stacked along one wall, and in the clearing an entire village of tents had been assembled. Everyone seemed to be asleep, but even so the hushed space clicked and rustled with bodies turning and teeth grinding, and as we made for another escalator I took pains to avoid the arms and legs strewn in the path like the aftermath of some nerdy all-night number crunch. We climbed another escalator, and then another, and at the top found ourselves in another atrium. It too had been a reading area, and comprised the northwest corner of the building. The north wall itself was a large, jutting chamber that stretched out into the air above Spring Street like an ice cube jumping from a tumbler.

Zane led me south into an area empty except for a bed, a freestanding bookshelf, and two young boys feeding marshmallows to a small armadillo. He told me Russell would be in to see me soon and as he left I caught his wrist. His skin was cold, slightly damp, and I realized what an effort it had been to bike me all the way here. He stopped and looked at my hand on his arm, then up at me with raised eyebrows. “You need anything? Water? Coffee? Coke?”

“I just wanted to thank you for finding me,” I said, letting go.

After he left I went to have a look at what the kids were up to. The armadillo, it must be said, seemed rather unenthusiastic, though it didn’t refuse the small white snacks. One of the children, a boy with long blond hair, asked me if I wanted to feed it. He held up a marshmallow, dirty and wet from living inside his fist. I smiled and said I’d rather not.

“I’m allergic to armadillos,” I said.

The animal had begun to walk slowly away from them, and the other boy — black and nearly bald — pulled it back by the tail and blocked its passage with his skinny legs.