Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Oh!” said the man. He began to trudge up through the muck.

Chains linked the tanks together, and the nearest one was tethered to a stone beneath the house. Each tank had one or two small circular windows in its side and an opening at the top, accessible by what looked like a salvaged manhole cover.

“Oh!” said the man again.

When he reached us he wasted no time in rummaging through the contents of the crates we’d brought, grunting approval and once in a while tossing a gasket into the mud. Besides being naked, he was actually quite presentable: he was recently shaven, his hair closely cropped. And despite having been climbing around on his tanks, he seemed oddly clean. Zane caught me inspecting the man and smiled, nodding slightly.

“This is Blake,” Zane said. “He wants to know what you’re building here.”

Sergeant George Washington looked up at me with sharp blue eyes. ”Building? Ha. Ha. No. Not building. Receiving, maybe. Hope so.”

He went back to the boxes at our feet.

“So you received these Bathyspheres?”

“Information for ’em, sure. Plans.”

Zane grinned again. I couldn’t tell whether he approved of these answers or he found them embarrassing.

“Where does the information come from?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, “that. Blake, is it?”

I said it was.

“We’re receiving information about the world all the time, Blake. From reality, from other people, but do you know where most of it comes from?”

I shrugged.

“Ourselves.”

“Ourselves?”

“You read poetry?”

“Some.”

“Hold on.”

He zipped inside, leaving Zane and me standing there in the sun. Seagulls circled overhead, and one dropped something onto a parking lot on the far side of the channel.

“Ramon Fernandez,” said Zane, grinning even wider now.

“Hey,” I said, “I know that name.”

Zane nodded.

Presently, George Washington emerged from his house with a piece of paper held above his head. He bounced down the rocks and slime, handed me the page, then closed his eyes, stiffened, and began to recite:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

He stopped, but kept his eyes sealed shut, savoring the words he’d spoken. I reread the lines until movement out by one of the tanks caught my attention. A woman and a child, both naked, were peeking out at us. They were behind a tank, not in it, but they may as well have been staring out from between iron bars. The woman was young, younger than me, but gaunt, her skin retreating against her bones as if in horror. The child was too young to read, but he mirrored his mother’s movements, flinching when she flinched at my stare, darting back before looking again in the tidal pull of curiosity. I looked at Zane and he mouthed the word family to me, as though that explained it all. The two disappeared behind the big metal ball, and with a sick feeling it dawned on me that, when the tsunami hit, these people would be inside death traps built from directions a man named George Washington found in a poem.

“That sure is inspiring,” said Zane. “Find what you needed?”

Awoken from his contemplation, the sergeant bent down and picked up a small brass elbow pipe. “Yep,” he said. “This ought to keep us dry.”

We drove back along the water, under the train bridge and past the boat yards, before turning toward downtown. In an effort to keep the engine cool Zane had turned on the heater, so in addition to the already terrible heat of the day, hot air blew against our legs. We passed an overgrown driving range where I’d worked in eighth grade, doing everything from cleaning toilets to fetching beers for the owner. My favorite part of the job had been driving the picker. A range picker is a caged golf cart with a rotating blade that retrieves golf balls from the grass, and it would have been cool enough to drive it around just for what it was, but because the range couldn’t cease operation every time the balls needed to be restocked, the picker would be deployed while people were still driving. This meant you got nailed with golf balls — and not just accidentally. Though the official policy was to avoid the picker, most members got a kick out of hearing the pang of a ball against the golf cart’s metal mesh, so from the time I’d start out until returning to the dock I’d be pelted with hard white balls. By the end of my shift I’d have a terrible headache, and I’d be jumpy, flinching at objects moving quickly in my periphery. Still, I loved it. It felt like wearing impenetrable armor in a warzone. It felt like being invincible.

I couldn’t stop picturing the faces of the woman and child we’d seen with George Washington. The woman’s slack expression, the child’s timidity, their brutally manifest acquiescence of spirit. It was appalling, and yet their victimhood was strangely unhidden, even overt, as though by standing on the sidelines they meant to be the center of attention. I fought against the feeling that they were complicit in that debased fate. Zane, who’d been quiet for the ride, finally looked over at me and asked what was wrong.

“Delusion is sad enough on its own,” I said, “but it’s infinitely worse when innocent people are implicated.”

We accelerated up a small rise. There were no other cars on the road, but a few people trudged along beside it wearing heavy weather gear.

“Sarge’s wife and kid,” said Zane, “you’re talking about.”

“He’s taking direction from a poem! Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Well, okay, I can see it from your perspective, and yeah, from there it looks pretty bad, I guess. But for one thing, I wouldn’t say he’s taking direction from a poem. Inspiration, maybe inspiration. But he’s a trained engineer. He’s not just gluing shit together with bubblegum.”

“Huh,” I said, unmoved. Crazy is crazy. “He told you this, I suppose.”

“Oh, come on. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Really? So you’d climb right into one of those Bathyspheres when the tsunami starts rolling into town?”

We swerved around a stalled semi that had been left in the middle of the road. The trailer had long since been looted, and its remaining contents were strewn across the road, stainless steel lids glittering like fallen stars.

“Well,” Zane was now speaking more seriously, his voice lowered, “that’s the other thing. I won’t have to. And neither will Sarge and his family.”

“Is Russell evacuating them?”

Zane shook his head.

“Are you going to put them out of their misery?”

Zane rolled his eyes.

“Then what?”

“The tsunami is a lie.”

There was a black cat clawing its way up Zane’s jaw, and I wondered what its story was. Some kind of attack? It didn’t look like a house cat, but it wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t Amund Dietzel’s crawling panther.

“Well,” I said, “that’s a relief.”

Zane gave me the same indecipherable grin he’d worn earlier. “Believe whatever you want.”

My first impulse was to find the quickest way out of this conversation, but almost as quickly it struck me that this was exactly the sort of thing I should know more about. I should be impassive, should be treating this as though I’m on safari. What do the natives believe? What is the worldview of this peculiar, painted man and his people? Look at his culture’s inevitable decay! Look at them press on as though there’s hope and create delusional, self-serving narratives to mask the imminent apocalypse! Look at the exotic seagulls!