Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

My phone let out a single, clear note to indicate a voicemail, and I stepped quickly behind a round table while dialing Mitch. When I looked back up the man was standing two tables away, the first man coming quickly to join him. Together, they moved toward me, splitting apart, and by the time Mitch answered they’d gotten to either side of my table and the first man reached forward and slapped the cell phone out of my hand. It skittered across the floor and, still on, weakly broadcast Mitch’s voice.

“Blake! Blake, what’s going on. Blake?”

“Help!” I called. “Look for the Wey—”

The redhead grabbed me and wrapped a big hand around my mouth. I struggled against his grip, pulling at his arm and kicking backward, but he held fast, engulfing me, and lifted me off the ground in a bear hug tight enough to push the air from my lungs. As quickly as he squeezed, though, he released, just enough to let me gasp, his hold now more like a swaddle.

My body went limp. The man smelled like women’s perfume, a sweet, bright smell that tingled my nose, and as he held me, the other man looked up at me and shook his head. I farted. Someone emerged from the shadows along the side of the room, mere feet from where I’d stood. He was still partially obscured by darkness, but I could see his silhouette against the illuminated wall behind him. It was Cooper, not a hair out of place.

“Did you know,” he said, “that New York City has a goose overpopulation problem? It’s true. And as they pose a threat to airlines operating out of the Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports — not to mention the smaller airfields in the area catering to private and other non-commercial aircraft — the Department of Agriculture has taken it upon itself to cull the population using a variety of tactics meant to make their preferred habitats inhospitable.”

Cooper’s voice was calm, dispassionate, but not cold. It was instead curious, alive with a sincerity that betrayed the seriousness of his interest in this anecdote, as though he were working something out for himself, and, though he was speaking to me, I was incidental to the process.

“These tactics include oiling the eggs, planting tall grasses, scaring the birds away with trained dogs, and a variety of other measures. But do you know what the primary tactic is? Don’t answer. The primary tactic is deception.”

With this, Cooper stepped forward, allowing me to see him clearly. For the first time since the Elk’s Club parking lot I felt a rush of recognition, an untethered emotional response that flooded my body in waves. It was more powerful than déjà vu, more urgent, as though I hadn’t had this experience before, but should have . As though the universe were somehow correcting itself, or at least correcting my position in it. Cooper’s tuxedo was tight and immaculate, painted on, and he signaled to the redhead, who let me down slowly, then released me. As my feet touched the floor I staggered, then felt hands on my shoulders. I tried to nod.

“Deception,” I said.

“Your friend Mitch is a good man.”

I felt my bones settle, saddled again with weight.

“He’s a good man, but he’s on the wrong path. To be fair, I’ve given him no reason to think otherwise — in fact, his pursuit of me has helped establish the credibility of my cover — but I simply failed to predict that you’d get involved, so for this, I apologize.”

At first, I was focused on the cover story. Which part was the cover? Could it be that the very same sham-FBI shenanigans and money troubles Mitch was documenting were only an illusion Cooper was using to…to what? But then I realized that another part of his speech was far more troubling.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You know me?”

I began to feel a tingling on the back of my neck. My face felt hot. I took a deep breath to calm myself but myself would not listen. Cooper motioned to the two men and they took their leave through the main entrance, the Weyerhaeuser banner still hanging askew above it.

We were alone now, and he drew closer and perched on the edge of a large round table. He asked me to sit.

“Blake,” he said, “you set this all in motion.”

“I did?”

I was holding onto nothing now. My fingers left the tabletop.

“You were the reason I went undercover in the first place. It was you who discovered what Weyerhaeuser was up to with our extraterrestrial visitors, and you whose first experience with transpositional epiphany led us to the discovery of Existencelastic Macrobial Foreshortening.”

As Cooper said these words I felt a tightness in my chest. I put my head down on the table, and its coolness on my forehead relieved me, for a moment, of the lightheadedness I felt. But it was a momentary distraction from an imminent impact. I was soon nearly swooning under the force of Cooper’s words as they sought purchase on something inside me that knew them to be true.

“Stay with me, Blake. Are you with me? I need you to take a deep breath.”

I tried to answer, but my sight began to go splotchy. I felt Cooper standing over me, his hand on my back.

“Blake,” he said, “Blake, you need to listen to me.”

His voice was in my ear, saying something I couldn’t understand as my consciousness began to follow my sight, to grow patchy and blank, and after some lapping, wavelike movement, to recede, to pull back deeper and deeper into a long, gradual, tidal undertow toward some sodden, sudden vanishing point in a picture-still sea of nothing coming.

IT was SUMMER, I was free, and I was stoned. Blake and I stood, not in front of the work itself, but before the plaque that explained how it should be seen. It reminded me of how our relationship had been — we’d been a couple for two years before I’d gone off to college — forever talking about “what we meant” and spending increasingly less time simply being in love. It struck me that perhaps all high school relationships were instances of a collaborative project delineating the archetypes around which we’d model the real relationships to come. I tried to think of a good way to share this observation with Blake as she stood back, looking hard at the lithograph, her dark hair curling in front of her face like a shy child’s.

“Orange,” she said, quoting the plaque, “is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.”

I joined her in considering the piece. Like a lot of Kandinsky’s work from this period, it looked like a disassembled clock. That or road kill, a too-curious bird flattened by a semi.

“Do you think that means he’s associating yellow with humanity,” I said, and then, flexing Chem 101, “or that yellow is just a reagent necessary for the transformation?”

Blake sighed — a habit she’d picked up since we last saw each other. I didn’t press it. I knew she harbored the slightly embarrassing grudge held by those who’ve been left behind. Besides, the nine months I’d been gone had been on the dry side, and I was hoping she’d suspend her grievances for some afternoon fucking.

After we’d exhausted the Seattle Art Museum, or at least exhausted ourselves, Blake and I wandered out into the spotty midday sun and ambled down 1st Avenue. I’d heard some things. Blake had been unhappy. Blake had had a breakdown. Blake had joined a cult. I did not bring these things up, wanting to let her find the right time to explain, but she’d caught me stealing concerned glances, as if a look could shatter the fragile lattice of a personality she’d built back up from scratch, and I knew that she knew that I knew. Frankly, however, she seemed anything but fragile, so I wasn’t sure what to believe.