Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Is your mom around?”

“You didn’t leave anything here, Zane,” I said. “I would have seen it.”

“What about—”

“My mother’s not feeling well.”

Zane turned around and looked across the street. “Fuck,” he said.

“Who’s it from?”

“What?”

“The letter. Who’s it from?”

“My boss.” Zane’s back was still to me, and I stared at his shirt: a T-shirt so filthy its fabric resembled the skin of an animal. The metal tops of disposable lighters had been clamped around the hem like scales.

“Your boss writes you letters?”

Zane didn’t respond.

“Is this the same guy who said that bit about art being a reaction to the environment?”

“An individual’s unique response to his own existence.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“Look.” Zane turned back around. “If you see it, please don’t throw it out, okay? I’ll be back next week to trade.” With that he leapt down the three porch steps and righted his bike. “Also, I didn’t come all the way across town,” he said defensively. The sun had reached its summit and was beating shadows back east where they began. Zane squinted. “I was just a few blocks away.”

After he rode off I sat on the couch where I’d found the letter the night before. The page lay face up, crumbs of pot gathered in its two crisp folds, and I blew it clean before reading.

It was written in an odd, slightly archaic register, and described some children playing marbles, or rather, playing with marbles, just sending them careening into one another. It described how these children at first treated every marble equally until they noticed minute differences in the glass balls’ behavior, in how they rolled or affected other objects. In how they felt. The children soon began ranking the marbles in an order based on their own observation. The letter then broke off abruptly and spoke of a walk the author had taken with a man named Dale Cooper — a name I was sure I’d heard before, though I couldn’t remember where — through a small stand of trees owned by his company, Weyerhaeuser. It went on to describe the beauty of cherry burl.

The letter seemed to me almost didactic in intent, but with its sudden shifts the message was entirely unclear. It was as though I’d stumbled across the encoded transmission of a country at war.

The last letter I could remember handling — aside from the state’s formal notice of evacuation — had been from a fan, a zealot who’d found some reflection of himself in a minor character and wrongly assumed my sympathy with some obscure xenophobic posture. I hadn’t even finished it. It wasn’t the first time a fan had disappointed me with wrongheaded presumptions about my spiritual, philosophical, or mental health. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered whether I was writing the wrong books.

My mother came in with a new bouquet. “Was that Zane?”

“He just stopped by to say hello.” I scanned the letter again, stopping at the name Dale Cooper. “Dale Cooper,” I said.

“What, dear?”

“Dale Cooper. Ring a bell?”

“Will you cut my hair? It’s too hot for this hair.”

I looked up to see her placing the flowers in the vase. In peak season, she’d sometimes change the bouquet two, three times a day, either too impatient for natural cycles or trying to squeeze more time from the little she had left. She slid the full vase to the center of the dining-room table, stood back.

“There,” she said.

“It’s beautiful, Mom.”

“I’ll get the scissors.”

I went back to my letter as she got ready. It was without question more interesting now that Zane had gone out of his way to retrieve it, but I wasn’t the target audience. Marbles? Burl?

My mother dragged a stool from the kitchen counter to the back porch. She’d removed her shirt for the haircut, and as she circled the stool, her one remaining breast lay flat against her ribcage as though unrolled, its nipple pointing to the earth. Her naked body no longer embarrassed me. In this familiar wilderness, bodies had become instruments for waiting.

Her hair was too fine, too silky for tangles, but the ritual of brushing it made her happy. She closed her eyes and the sun shone against her eyelids, turning them pink. She smelled like a garden. In the spring, she had taken me to a spot in the yard where her irises grew and instructed me to bury her there. “Iris,” she’d said, “the divine messenger!” There were yellow ones and blue ones, even green ones. I couldn’t help noticing how close the iris bed was to the vegetable garden, but I’d held my tongue. According to myth, Iris was also responsible for keeping the clouds stocked with water.

“Did you see it didn’t rain at all yesterday, anywhere?”

My mother sat entranced, her head tilted upward slightly, her closed eyes smiling.

“On the news,” I added.

“Anywhere in the world? That’s silly.”

I put the brush down and picked up the scissors. Nothing fancy, I was just going to take off length.

“Are you saying it’s silly that it didn’t rain,” I asked, “or are you saying you don’t believe the news?”

“I’m saying I knew bringing a TV into the house was a bad idea.”

I took a full hand of her hair, and as I brought the scissors to it and began to cut, the full meaning of my mother’s death filled me. It entered me as a knife might, suddenly making a space to leave empty. The truth was we were both preparing for it. That television upstairs was my first small, feeble act of preparation, and my mother — resigned but after all still human — knew it.

The lock of hair I cut lay almost weightless in my hand, and I held it out to the side, let it fall to the porch. The breeze had died down, but the silver strands swirled all the same, thinner than my skin. It was an unhappy yet unavoidable irony that here, at the end of the world and almost against my will, my mother and I had become closer than we’d ever been. And now she would die. She would die soon, not even last the summer maybe, and I would be alone in this house with my television, my journal filled with nothing.

I ran my hand across my mother’s shoulder, up the back of her neck, and took another lock. I pulled back gently, and her head swayed gently back, her muscles loose, relaxed. The scissors shone terribly in the sun.

ALICE EDELSTEIN STOOD AT my window, the moon bathing one side of her in cool blue light and the flickering candle we’d lit splashing warmth across the other. She absently traced the still-visible outline of my fingers where I’d grabbed her nearly an hour ago. She wasn’t mad, just contemplative, and I resisted the urge to reach up from the bed and pull her back down. I’d always had tender feelings for Alice, familial feelings, so I’d shocked myself a year ago when, the first time we made love, our coupling awoke a kind of violence I’d seldom experienced with Blake, or with anyone else for that matter. I’d wanted to dominate her, to consume her, and I’d been surprised by this, and also by her willingness to be dominated, her complicity and submission. Afterward we’d lain together silently for a long while, waiting for the other to acknowledge what had happened, to see if we’d been changed.

“You’ll bruise,” I said presently.

Alice nodded and opened the window to better hear my neighbor John Fairley playing his saw. The bent notes floated slowly through the black air, and I sat up against the wall to watch her without straining.

We’d since had sex almost everywhere. Empty houses, pitched roofs. Despite her ignorance of the reference, we’d even done it in the road. Since the only person I cared to hide the relationship from was my mother, none of this presented too much of a challenge, and happily the threat of punishment had all but vanished while the thrill of illicit behavior had been slower to disappear. Before Alice I’d never had an affair — a word that by now, while technically true, hardly seemed appropriate. And though it had begun soon after Blake had left the city, I’d never thought of it as revenge. I was plagued by a sense of growing old, but I didn’t think it was a youthful frolic. Alice had been only sixteen when Seattle changed, which meant she hadn’t really known anything else, at least not in an adult sense of knowing, of longing. My sense was that I needed to own that innocence, to possess it. To fuck it. To rejoice in it and to make it pay.