Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

I’d found this a strange way to put it, but I’d understood. And maybe stealing a TV wasn’t what he’d meant by being resourceful, but I had to say I felt pretty good climbing into that house.

It was dim and still, underground cool, the room tidy though unfinished. A water heater was set against the stairway, and along the exterior walls were shrouded, rectangular forms with metallic legs visible beneath their canvas shawls. I chose one at random and removed the cover, letting it fall to the floor. It was a pinball machine: Star Wars. The one beside it was Addams Family. Unelectrified, the mute machines seemed to amplify the silence of the room, so when I noticed a ball at rest in the start position I reached out and pulled the plunger, letting it spring back into place and make some noise. The metal ball curved up and out of sight behind the tangle of casings and slides and caromed through a series of round obstacles with only dull clinks to mark its passage. It then slid into the central playfield and, after being licked by an inactive paddle, was swallowed by Uncle Fester.

To squeeze the universe into a ball, I thought, looking for the stairs, and to roll it toward some overwhelming question. To say: where in this vacant house lies the boob tube? Where is the TV?

I climbed the stairs.

The small, stuffy house smelled like cigars; most of the curtains were drawn, and the walls looked like the inside of a smoker’s lung. The nearest wall was home to a series of slightly discolored rectangles no doubt once hidden behind photos. A glance around the room revealed several other discolorations. Tabletops too bore rings and squares of dust. Everything personal in the room had evaporated, and it made me feel uneasy, like I’d evaporate too if I stayed too long.

I quickly made my way through the house, looking first in an office, then in a guest room. In his kitchen at the back of the house I found the exploded remains of a government radio, shards of plastic littering the floor. Beside the mess was a broom propped against the wall. It seemed like a minor triumph for Fred: not having created the mess, but having left it. I finally found a small TV on the second floor, where it was perched on a dresser in the corner of the master bedroom.

“Oh,” I said, “do not ask, what is it!”

I felt even more anxious the moment I touched the set’s smudged flat glass, and as I went back downstairs I half-expected Fred to be around each corner, returning for something he forgot, or simply having changed his mind — he’d already changed it once. I pushed the TV slowly through the window and onto the clean-cut grass, exiting the same way I’d come instead of chancing the front door. Once out, I peered up and down the block and then scurried across the empty street like a thief.

Well, not like , of course. As .

I brought the TV to my writing room and set it down beside my near-blank notebook. Outside, a breeze shook the curled, blighted leaves on the apple tree behind the house and one high branch, taken over by tent caterpillars, drooped with their weight like a swollen fist. I examined my reflection in the TV’s dark glass. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find news if I’d really wanted it. There were still bars. Public spaces. A paper that still got delivered, though I’d heard its schedule was unpredictable. So why now? I considered this as I plugged the set in and turned it on. Why now.

The first channel was static. The set had no antenna, and for a moment I thought I might have to go back to Fred’s to find one, but the third channel came in clear enough. Unsurprisingly, it was news. A heavily painted Chinese woman stood before an animated map of the world.

“Yesterday was the first day on record,” she said, “on which no rain was reported to have fallen anywhere on earth.”

The image of the globe turned slowly behind her. I turned the channel. Something about Fred’s departure had rattled me, had made me feel more alone than the departure of my brother and his family, or even of my wife — though she’d promised to return. I’d clearly counted on Fred in some inchoate but significant way. Fred the sentinel. The angel. Perhaps it was exactly his emotional distance that made his influence real. He’d kept his distance, and I respected that, or envied it. Didn’t I, too, try to keep my distance? It was a writer’s prerogative. But if writing was the result of a successful gap, then judging by my output I’d failed miserably.

The next program consisted of two men staring straight ahead, having a discussion with one another. They were talking about traffic, or traffic jams, using some unfamiliar mathy vocab. The stairs creaked, and a moment later my mother appeared in the doorway.

“Solutions to the Payne-Whitham model,” one of the men said, “are close to those of the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model when Payne-Whitham is stable.”

“Yes,” the other screamed, “but traffic is generally observed in disequilibrium!”

After a few minutes of this we were finally shown footage of the traffic event in question, which involved a “phantom traffic jam” that had spontaneously un-jammed, all cars involved somehow spreading out and progressing at speed. It didn’t require an understanding of the math to appreciate the beauty, all those hard-packed scraps of metal and glass separating as if repelled by magnetism, as if of a single mind.

The show cut back to the two men shaking their heads in astonishment. On one point both specialists seemed to agree. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the calm one.

“Never!” said the other.

My mother left the room.

Flipping through a few more channels, it looked like the rainless day was the big story. The last big story I’d seen before trading our TV for a bicycle and a broken gun was about a lioness who’d escaped the zoo in San Diego, grabbed an infant right out of an unattended stroller, and run south. The beast had made it across the border by the time it was caught, but because of some political friction between Mexico and the U.S., the baby was given asylum and went up for adoption. The lioness, however, was returned to the zoo, where it was publically electrocuted in a televised event called “Cat Zap.” The coverage leading up to this event had been exhaustive and unavoidable, and when I began to feel acute pangs of sympathy for the animal, Blake suggested we get rid of the TV.

All the same, I’d snuck out and stolen down to Bad Albert’s for the actual electrocution. Men placing bets on various aspects of the process — odds on each second of current, odds on the success itself — crowded the bar, and in this room full of cheering, jeering spectators I’d broken down entirely, weeping as I watched the big cat’s eyes roll up and her tongue fall from her mouth.

There was a knock at the door, and a familiar voice called through the house.

“Mrs. Rose?”

It was Zane.

I turned off the TV and went downstairs.

“Did I leave a letter here?” Zane’s face was flushed and puffy. Over his shoulder, I could see his bike lying on its side in the walkway, front wheel still spinning.

“You came all the way out here to look for a letter?”

He lived in one of the abandoned buildings downtown — part of some collective I’d heard him talk about with my mother.

Zane ignored my question. “It was just a single page,” he said. “No envelope.” He held out his hands as if framing a scene. “About this big.”

“Eight and a half by eleven?”

“Whatever.”

“No,” I said. “Haven’t seen it.”

Zane looked me hard in the face. He seemed skeptical, but it could have been a kind of broad, aimless skepticism he applied to anyone without facial tattoos. What reason would I have for lying?