Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Leave me alone,” said a man’s voice. “I’m making my own coffee like some sort of homeless person.”

A woman’s face emerged from the doorway to the kitchen. It was large and oval, of indeterminate age, with bright brown eyes that seemed to inspect me with a hint of polite condescension.

“It stirs,” she said, not to me.

“Ask if it drinks coffee,” said the man.

“Well?” she said, and smiled.

“It loves coffee,” I confirmed.

These were Megan and Chad, friends of Mitch whom he’d spoken of after we’d pulled off the highway, the change of speed having woken me. She was, if I recalled, some kind of computer programmer with socialist tendencies, and he was a painter. Or vice versa? Megan disappeared again and more banging ensued.

I stripped the sheets off the bed and replaced the pillows it apparently wore by day. In the kitchen, the two were literally arguing about the price of tea in China.

“It’s totally reasonable, dummy,” Megan was saying. “If all currency were edible, it could only devalue to a point.”

Chad grunted, and presently there was a high-pitched squeal, after which Megan came running out of the kitchen, twisted her dishtowel into a whip, and edged back in. This was clearly the kind of fundamentally happy couple whose bickering was essentially an off-gassing of hearts overburdened by love. I looked out the window. We were on a lake. I couldn’t remember the name, or maybe I hadn’t been told. Someone far off on the south bank was zipping around on a Jet Ski.

“Be careful, it’s strong.”

Chad held out an espresso-sized cup toward me. Chad was in his mid-forties, maybe older. His face was alert, but his skin was blotchy, a drinker’s face.

“Thanks,” I said.

He spun around and quickly navigated through the difficult room to a computer desk in the corner, where he sat, booted up, and loudly slurped his espresso. He was a large, solid man, but the way he moved was agile, athletic, as though he were somewhere deep within his own body, operating it by remote. He eyed me, and the room seemed to expand with silence.

“Quick,” he said finally. “Say something funny.”

I tried to cobble together something about the old table of elements — I happened to know it contained no noble gasses — but before I could vocalize anything he reached over, touched his mouse, and the room flooded with the warm, avuncular sounds of NPR.

We listened and drank our coffee. A guest on All Things Considered was explaining that more divorces have their origin in Home Depot than in any other single space.

“What department?” the host wanted to know.

“We’re still mining the data.”

I asked Chad where Mitch was.

“He was on the phone with his dad, arguing it sounded like, and then he took off heading north.”

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“They’re always arguing. They basically hate each other.”

“Really? Wow. I didn’t get that at all.”

“Well, he doesn’t volunteer it.” Chad seemed irritated. “Anyway, if you’re getting along with your parents, you’re not doing something right.”

“So, conflict is king.”

“Conflict, discord, disruption, disunity, and probably most important: competition.”

“I’m in competition with my mother?”

“For the very air you breathe. Children basically want to kill their parents.”

Megan entered the room and stood with a large bowl, stirring. She shook her head.

“Don’t let him fuck with you,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s interesting, because my mother’s actually dying of cancer right now and I’ve been putting off returning her call.”

I hadn’t planned on saying it, but now that it was out I was happy I had. I let the statement stand, looked out at the lake, and imagined Megan glaring at her husband, him shrugging back at her as if to say, How could I have known? It gave me the upper hand.

“So if you’re right,” I said, “then maybe I’m just trying to distance myself from the unhealthy part of my family, my gene pool. Maybe it’s pure animal instinct.”

The person I’d seen zipping around across the lake earlier was gone, and the water was a glassy, cloudless sky. The radio cut out, buffering, and in the silence we heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway. Mitch had returned. He banged through the door to the kitchen and came to stand beside Megan. I heard him wait for something to happen.

“What did I miss?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, turning. “We were just joking around.”

“I knew it!” Chad said, and dove underneath his desk to reboot the router.

Mitch moved on.

“I’ve found him,” he said. “He’s staying at the Hilton. Tonight we watch him gamble.”

WE CROSSED INTO CANADA close to midnight. That afternoon Chad and Megan had left for Brazil, where Megan was going to do a series of watercolors on the favelas in Sao Paulo. Mitch and I had been left to “fend for ourselves.” For Mitch that meant sitting at the computer and trying to dredge up more information to explain Cooper’s sudden move. For me it meant not calling my mother, watching La Jetée three and a half times, taking naps in the sunny window seat, and staring at the tiny waves that lapped ceaselessly against the close rocky shore.

While Mitch explained to the border guard that we’d been visiting friends in Buffalo and had not brought our passports, I kept thinking about the short film. In it a man must travel into the past and then the future in an attempt to save the world. Haunted by a vague childhood memory of seeing someone killed in an airport, the man eventually discovers that it is he who is to be killed, and that he has been remembering his own death. Not only was the story strange and beautiful, the film was not made of moving images. It was a series of stills. Why had the director chosen still imagery to tell a story about time? And why did it seem like the perfect choice?

The guard finally waved us through, but not without a warning. “You’re okay coming in,” he said, “but you might have more trouble getting back home.”

We accepted the risk.

The highway curved gently into the darkness, and in the distance to our right the hotels and casinos of Niagara Falls glowed purple and red. I had not been to the famous waterfall before and was surprised to hear what it had become.

“It’s like a miniature Vegas,” Mitch said. “Except the water feature is real.”

“So it’s no longer the honeymoon hotspot of yore?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s still full of honeymooners, it’s just that tastes have changed. The Falls aren’t enough anymore. You see them from your hotel room while ordering a room service T-bone after losing your wedding cash at craps. I don’t think anyone’s under the illusion that this is a romantic destination. It now serves a practical function. It’s a distraction.”

The place we came to couldn’t quite be described as a town. A red-light district, maybe. A three-block radius of brightly lit gift shops, hotels, and chain restaurants. We parked across the street from a place called Nightmares.

“Last time I was here,” Mitch said, nodding to the haunted house, “someone had to be carried out of there on a gurney.”

“Look.” I pointed to a grassy, undeveloped plot of land beside us. It was filled with fireflies. They slowly rose and fell, their light nearly invisible under the dazzling displays around us. It almost seemed as though they were trying to compete. Or protest. We kept moving. The streets were oddly vacant, which together with the bright signs left me feeling exposed. Mitch must have felt it too, because he led us off the street and through a lattice of parking lots that terminated at our first stop: Casino Niagara. We were let in a side entrance by a man dressed in a red jacket and pants who smelled like alcohol. He tried to smile as we passed but only managed to lift his wiry eyebrows. The casino floor was a level below us, red-carpeted stairs striped by smudgy brass banisters leading down to rows of shiny machines, and we stood for a while as Mitch scanned the room. The din of coins, jingles, and bells filled my ears, the individual sounds canceling one another out so that the result was not an amplification of noise but a muted quality, as though we were underwater, or wearing earplugs. People roamed from machine to machine in slow motion, their expressions slack and glazed, and as we descended into the scene I was reminded of a line from La Jetée that had struck me as truthful without being entirely clear: Time builds itself painlessly around them .