Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Fuck,” he said. “Crazy night.”

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Have you seen the news? Last night there were thirteen separate sightings. That’s more than the last two weeks combined.”

He was referring to the UFO sightings that had become Seattle’s cause célèbre since the beginning of June. First reported by two firemen on a routine inspection in Wallingford — they called it in, thinking they were seeing illegal flares of some kind — the Seattle Lights, as they’d been dubbed, had since been showing up all over the greater Seattle area with no apparent pattern or cause. Some described them as slowly falling flakes, something like radioactive snow. Others claimed they moved in tight circles, or zagged at head level between buildings and trees. No one had yet caught anything on tape, which gave the skeptics ammunition for all kinds of armchair explanations.

“Seems like you might have seen a thing or two yourself last night,” I said.

Kent took a long pull from his beer. “Some guy from the UW said it was probably a mass hallucination caused by anxiety about the future of the world. Like, everything’s going to shit, so here’s proof that we’re not alone.”

“Great, so just when we need a reality check, we’re having a collective escape fantasy.”

“He said it was hopeful.”

“You know what I did hear this morning,” said my mother. She was rearranging the bouquets, putting a vase of tall lilies in back. “There is a kind of tiny saltwater fish that was found to turn in the same direction all at once, everywhere in the world. One school of them will be in the Indian Ocean, say, and another in the South Pacific, and they’ll all be dodging around in unison.”

I looked at my brother, who smiled. “You can’t even tell what’s real anymore.”

“See, but that’s the beauty,” said my mother. “That means you have control.”

I grew quiet.

Kent belched.

The phone rang.

“How long have the lights been going on?” I asked.

“Twenty-three days,” my brother said.

The sculpture wasn’t very heavy, but it was delicate and awkward, and carrying it around to the back yard was a chore Kent and I could manage only slowly, afraid of contributing to its incipient collapse. My brother kept shaking his head and rolling his eyes, a wordless reiteration of his conclusion early on that I shouldn’t have torn the box open out front. The fact that we couldn’t have known what was inside didn’t seem to mitigate his opinion that I was to blame. But it didn’t matter. I enjoyed his jokey frustration, just as I enjoyed, at least in retrospect, Blake’s disappointment. These were safe, familiar things. These were things I could live with. We found a spot relatively clear of weeds and set the bird down. There was the question of a stand, but Kent suggested we pour a small concrete slab to mount it in. He kicked the ground with his foot, testing the density of the soil.

“I think we’re good,” he said.

“So you and Blake are pals now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Over the course of my freshman year it had begun to dawn on me that I might not be well-suited for college. All around me people had been positively blossoming in the relative cushiony, slack-jawed freedom that is college life, while my attempts to mimic their enthusiasm were so forced that classmates actually commented on my peculiar state. They could sense I was not truly enjoying myself but simply ingesting large dosages of drugs and alcohol and, once sufficiently high, overcompensating with a kind of reckless, spastic exuberance it was clear to anyone present I would regret, retreating into an even more obviously superficial pantomime of behaviors I took to be natural.

My brother and I worked in silence digging a small, square hole. He’d borrowed some quick-dry cement from Fred, and it sat in the growing heat, a light, weightless dust hovering above the open top. Once the hole was ready, Kent read the instructions on the side of the bag and went inside to fill a bucket of water. It struck me that, without him, I would never think to use cement. Intellectually, I recognized that it was doubtless a simple task, and the bag indeed bore clear instructions for its use. But there was something remarkable about my brother’s seemingly native expectation that such instructions would be perfectly suitable, would fill the gap between inexperience and effort. I had no such faith.

When he returned, the khaki mop bucket brimming but not spilling, I stood aside.

“Do you think Mom sheltered us too much?” I asked.

Kent put the bucket down and handed me a trowel.

“I mean, do you ever feel like you’re not equipped to deal with…” On the verge of saying it out loud, I realized how vulnerable finishing the sentence would make me sound.

“Blake, are you going to help or just stand there?”

“I wonder if Dad will even like this.”

“I wonder if he’ll even see it.”

“True.”

Kent carefully poured cement directly into the hole, trying to keep the dust level low, and then motioned for me to ready my tool. I knelt and stirred the clotting dust as Kent slowly poured in water. Dirt from the hole’s sides got tucked into the solution, but it didn’t seem to matter much, and we quickly filled it with a grainy fluid that reminded me of a thick gray milkshake. Next we set the sculpture’s feet into the cement and propped the thing up with a scrap of wood. We stood back and admired our work. It was growing hot, and sweat stood out on Kent’s forehead, which he wiped by bringing up the front of his t-shirt. It now bore a wet, upside-down version of his face.

“We hang out sometimes, I guess.”

“Okay, that’s perfectly fine.”

“Mostly we talk about Tidemark, but lately also about her…” Now it was my brother’s turn to trail off, and I suspected he too knew how his sentence was supposed to end.

“Her what?”

“No one, never mind.”

“So it’s a person, huh? Her boyfriend? Does she have a boyfriend? Come on, I’m going to find out soon anyway. We’re meeting up tomorrow. She said she had something to tell me.”

Given the circumstances, I didn’t feel like my lie was a breach of trust.

“I’ll let her tell you about him, then.”

“Huh.”

Kent reached out and gently shook the sculpture. In the sun, the metal glinted sharply where not covered in paint, and I squinted to avoid a silver sliver of sun.

“So, Tidemark is this cult she’s in.”

Kent waved his hands around his head to shoo away a wasp.

“Let me guess,” I said, “it’s not a cult.”

“Well, it’s not.”

“Does it have a charismatic leader?”

“Yes.”

“Does it have a set of behavior modification principles referred to as a ‘technology’?”

“Um.”

“Does it encourage its members to get other people to join?”

“Fuck off, Blake.”

“Oh my god, you haven’t joined too, have you?”

“No comment.”

“You have! Shit, Kent, are you fucking kidding me? You’re seventeen!”

“I didn’t join, okay? I went to a kind of introductory workshop thing.”

I shook my head in a way I hoped read grave disappointment. The wasp came back and Kent waved his hands again before giving up and heading around to the deck stairs. I followed slowly. Was I angry with Blake? Maybe. Ultimately, I was sure it was harmless, but as something I didn’t understand it made me wary. When I got up to the deck, Kent was sitting in our mother’s chair and sucking on the end of a small glass pipe. He held the smoke in, held the pipe out, and exhaled.

“They’re not dating, exactly,” he said. “He’s way older. And he’s in the FBI.”