Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be glib. It’s just that, obviously, this is news to me. I mean…” I pointed out the window, suggesting the disparity. We were entering Belltown, driving down what had once been a one-way street. “Can you give me any more information?”

“Honestly, I’d probably get yelled at for telling you at all. But since you’re best friends with Russell all of a sudden, I’m hoping it’s okay. Can you do me a favor and maybe find a way of bringing it up with Russell, or asking him about it? Maybe say you’d heard a rumor or whatever? Maybe in a way that doesn’t get me in trouble?”

“Look, Zane, I don’t want to…” But I didn’t know what I didn’t want to do. “My presence must be kind of jarring,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. You’re all right.”

We drove a couple blocks in silence. Zane was genuinely trying to accept me, and I didn’t want to belittle or reject his olive branch. I began thinking about my planned meeting with Russell. Standing before the birth house the day before as the crowd slowly dispersed, he’d actually used the word “brainstorm.” As in, brainstorming some innovative solutions. He’d been inspecting the graffiti that had all but sabotaged his big reveal, and had seemed, to my eyes, almost impressed by it.

“Try to think of some iconic things Cooper could have done,” he’d said.

Twenty-four hours later, I hadn’t thought of anything iconic. My plan was to ask him more questions about our goal. My plan was to get him talking.

We were entering the business district, the empty, cold heart of downtown. Seattle had never successfully made downtown anything more than a stand of swaying towers, a board meeting of glassy-eyed stakeholders with nothing to say. And though by day it had been dense with working stiffs, by night it had looked much like it did now.

“Do you know of anyone in the Guild who wears suits?”

“There’s a girl who wears a cat suit about half the time,” Zane said. “Trixie? No, Tracy.”

“I was thinking something more formal. You know, a businessman kind of guy.”

“In the Guild? Doubt it.”

We took a left at Spring and began chugging up the hill toward the library.

“Thought I saw someone dressed to the nines yesterday at the birth house.”

“Yeah,” Zane said, “no.”

He hooked into a parking garage and we curled up two flights of empty platforms until arriving at one nearly full of cars. BMWs, Cadillacs, and Porsches lined the walls. A bright orange Lamborghini sat alone near the stairwell, an exotic orchid. We parked in a long row of trucks.

“Nice Lamborghini,” I said.

“No one touches the Lambo.”

“That’s a shame. It looks like it wants to be touched.”

We headed across the street.

The library was full of life: people scaling the metal lattice exoskeleton, cleaning glass with no safety equipment that I could see, and just inside, on the 5th Avenue floor, some sort of aerobics class was being taught. Twenty or thirty men and women in their underwear were gathered before a tall, thin woman with an afro as she barked out instructions to bend, bounce, bend, bounce. She waved to us and we paused to let two boys no older than ten pass by, pulling bright red Radio Flyers filled with canned food. Zane picked up a rectangular blue can, frowned. It was Spam.

“They didn’t have their filter on,” I said.

Zane scoffed. We were beginning to understand each other.

He led me to a stairwell and told me to go all the way to the top. I shook his hand, thanking him for taking me on his route, and a flash of color caught my eye, an orange summer dress. It was Aya, momentarily visible before disappearing behind a bookshelf. I had an urge to go after her, but Zane stood his ground, held the door.

The stairwell was narrow and the staircase switched back and forth every seventh step because of the building’s staggered floors, making the ascent both easier, for all the platform pauses, and seemingly interminable. I began to giggle, looking down to see if I’d made any progress and up to see if I’d neared my goal. I felt like an inverse Alice, who in order to enter another dimension doesn’t simply fall but has to work at it. Finally a small door at the top opened up to a lawn. On the lawn was a large, white, open-sided tent. Under the tent was a kind of living room made up of wicker furniture. On one of the wicker chairs sat Russell. He waved me over without looking to see who it was.

I stared out over the Sound and, beyond that, the Olympic Mountains, behind which the sunken sun had left a rosy glow that looked something like a welt. Seagulls swam through the still, muggy sea air, calling to one another with full mouths. The roof was empty except for Russell, me, and a young woman named Dahlia he’d summoned to provide background music. After an uncomfortably slow start, we’d indeed begun to volley ideas back and forth, but it hadn’t been going very well. What had Dale Cooper done to make him such an essential figure in the history of Seattle, of the Northwest, of America? To my surprise, Russell had no interest in representing even remotely realistic events. He wanted Cooper to make contact with aliens. He wanted Cooper to invent a technique for breathing underwater. He wanted Cooper to communicate nonverbally with animals. This was not Dale Cooper a historical figure. This was Dale Cooper a superhero. I’d attempted to lead him away from such ideas gently, but the tension between us grew nonetheless. Dahlia had been strumming the guitar for a couple hours, and her languid playing, though not very good, had added a kind of boozy quality to the evening that emboldened me. I’d twice called Russell’s ideas “ridiculous.” After being at first taken aback — clearly Russell had different expectations of my opinions — he had, it seemed, begun to appreciate my candor.

“I’ve got one,” he said. A sailboat had set off from Bainbridge, and I watched its white sail move, impossibly slow, against the green island. “Cooper gets into a fracas defending the spotted owl. He chains himself to a tree about to be bulldozed, and—”

“Do they bulldoze trees?”

“Or cut down, you know. Fell?”

“I like where you’re going, but I think you’re overcompensating. Being chained to a tree is a bit too pedestrian. What if he discovers that Weyerhaeuser’s CEO has some kind of secret deal with the Yakuza and is involved in female slave trafficking?”

“Hmm. Now who’s breaking believability?”

“See, it’s outrageous without being absurd,” I explained. “Plus, you’d have the beautiful woman angle, too. He could fall in love with one of the slaves.”

“The problem is I already have Weyerhaeuser cast in a different light. It’s a tree-growing company. Cooper takes nature walks with the CEO. They’re good guys.”

We hadn’t agreed on one single thing so far. Given my position, why wasn’t he just charging me with writing something specific? Why involve me in the decision-making process at all? I considered backing off, but at the last moment redoubled my efforts.

“That doesn’t mean that something couldn’t come between them, later on. People have duplicitous natures — the guy could have the appearance of a tree-hugging hippy and be hiding his dark, slave-raping side from even his closest friends.”

The guitar stopped. Dahlia had fallen asleep. Her limp body hung over the instrument like she was cradling a baby.

“I’ll think about it.”

I considered Russell in the growing darkness, his soft white uniform blurring at the edges. If I didn’t blow it, I’d be spending a lot of time with this man in the coming month or so. With the direction Russell had adopted from the start of our conversation, I had no trouble believing that he’d spread a stupid, reckless rumor about the tsunami. Or lack thereof. And in the presence of his unstable charisma and amiable bravado, it was impossible for me to believe he’d acknowledge the danger in doing so. It was this tenuous and naïve relationship between the real, material world and the stories he wanted to tell about it that interested me — that and the near-passive acceptance of this vision among his acolytes. Was it possible that people were, like me, simply going along with him in order to earn his favor? Perhaps no one believed in Cooper. Perhaps people innately understood the slippery path he was leading them down.