Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“What?” I said.

“I fix pendulum clocks. It’s a hobby that helps me relax. Blake, a man needs a hobby to help him relax.”

I looked at Blake, and she swatted me gently on the arm.

“Would you two like any coffee?”

Blake said she would, I declined, and as he went to get Blake’s cup I walked over to the table home to Dale’s hobby. The clock’s casing was nowhere in sight, but the guts were splayed out on a white tablecloth, all the cogs separated and organized into a line, slender metal arms arranged beneath them, and a large spiral band of some kind off to the side. Dale came back with a cup for Blake and one for himself, and they sat together on a pale yellow sofa that flanked one side of the room.

“So what’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“The grasshopper escapement. It’s a tricky one, not often used. Most escapements are very simple, but this kind must actually push the gear back in order for it to move forward. There are several moving pieces, and each one has to play its part perfectly for the clock to keep time.”

I looked up from the table and noticed that there were yellow ribbons surrounding the front of the house. This place was condemned.

“So what was your dream?” asked Blake.

There were drab landscape paintings hung on the wall, and on the small end table close to me framed family portraits of people not Dale. Dale regarded me with his same maddeningly open expression and put down his cup.

“You’re uneasy,” he said to me.

“What is this place?”

I was thinking it was time to go, and my question sounded surly. Blake made a face.

“This place is a model home. Almost forty years ago, Weyerhaeuser tried to break into the business of manufactured homes. They owned the land, they owned the wood, and it seemed reasonable to simply build the houses too — something the industry refers to as vertical integration.”

I frowned.

“It didn’t work, perhaps due to mismanagement, but at any rate they kept the property — there are several houses like this throughout the city — and it was almost forgotten until recently. Now the houses are set to be demolished, though what Weyerhaeuser plans to do with the property is a closely guarded secret.”

Dale’s voice, though not unpleasant, was nearly robotic. It was even and formal and informational, without a hint of judgment. Either he had no opinion about the house or the fact that he was in it, I reasoned, or he was so guarded that his secrets must have been enormous.

“So you’re essentially squatting,” I said.

Blake choked on her coffee and went into a coughing fit; Dale reached across and took the cup that was jiggling at the end of her arm, and rubbed her back, saying, “Breathe, breathe.” Once she’d recovered, Dale turned back to me and slapped his hands against his knees. “Blake,” he said, “that’s exactly what I’m doing. You call it like you see it, and I like that.”

“But doesn’t the FBI put you up? I mean—”

“Part of the investigation. All part of the investigation.”

It felt as though he wanted me to ask, What investigation? So I didn’t. I was uneasy, as Dale had put it, and wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know any more than I already did. I felt indirectly exposed by him somehow.

The newscaster was now talking about a drought affecting large swaths of country throughout the Mid- and Southwest states, and she mispronounced dust bowl, “dust bowel.”

“Dust bowl,” she said after a pause.

Dale retrieved his coffee cup, and after taking a sip said, “Have you ever noticed, either of you, that once a radio host misspeaks, it’s very likely that they’ll make more mistakes before the end of their report?”

“I’ve totally noticed that!” Blake said.

“Have you ever thought about why that is?”

“They’re too focused on not messing up.”

Dale snapped his fingers and pointed at me with a grave look. “That’s precisely what’s happening. That’s precisely it. Well, but it’s not exactly that they’re trying not to mess up — they’re simply trying to speak clearly. They’re focusing on the language, the language of the text before them.”

“What should they be focusing on?” asked Blake.

“That’s the question, isn’t it. Unfortunately, there’s no single answer. Each person must determine his natural point of focus. For some, it may be a small tingle at the base of the spine. It could be a physical object in the room, a totem perhaps, or even something ordinary, such as, in the case of a radio host, the red blinking light signifying that she’s on air. Only when the body feels liberated of the mind’s tyranny of attention can it operate smoothly. The Eastern mystics have understood this for ages, but in our day of rabid intellect, it’s a lesson easily forgotten, or simply never learned.”

A car drove down the street, and Dale paused, holding his finger again in the air until it had passed. I had the impression he could have told us the vehicle’s make, model, year, and type of tire, but I realized this only meant that his act — it was obviously an act — had been successful, and I pushed the thought from my mind.

“Now,” he continued, “let’s try to apply that logic on a larger scale. What if our intention was not to read a printout over the air, but to compose a song? Or to make a big decision? Or to solve a mystery? In this case, a red light wouldn’t do. We’d need something more fully immersive, something entirely unrelated, or only tangentially related, to our goal. And it would, by necessity, be something demanding a longer amount of time, a greater degree of our mental facility.”

He looked back and forth between Blake and me. P and not-P, I was thinking. P and not-P.

“Your clocks!” Blake announced.

“You’re in top form today, Blake,” Dale said. He leaned over and playfully pinched her nose, giving it a wiggle. It occurred to me in that instant that there was no sexual dimension to their relationship at all.

“So you try to solve mysteries,” I asked, “by fixing clocks?”

“Precisely.”

“Does the FBI know about your tactics?”

“The Bureau understands that my approach is one guided in part by intuition, inspiration, and a fine-tuning of my relationship to the spirit world, if that’s what you’re asking. And there happen to be aspects of this case that indicate these characteristics may be of considerable use.”

Dale gave no hint as to whether he’d been put off by my question. His delivery was so matter-of-fact, so sincere, that he seemed perhaps even a little naïve.

“Which brings us to my dream.”

Blake sat up straight. “Oh, yes, tell us your dream.”

“In my dream, I am visited by a being made entirely of light. It comes into my room, hovers over my bed, and tells me, ‘To find the solution you seek, you must employ a novel idea.’ A novel idea. I must say this has me stumped. It’s both obvious — of course I need a novel idea — and completely broad. I have to say, my dreams are usually more helpful than this.”

Blake was completely enthralled, and had begun to enumerate different synonyms for the word novel. “It means different, right? But doesn’t it mean, like, strange? Strange means foreign, so maybe it’s an idea that comes from somewhere else. Somewhere alien, even! An alien idea. Maybe this is connected to the Seattle Lights!”

“That’s extremely interesting, Blake. I love the way your mind works.”

I was irritated by Blake’s enthusiasm. “A novel is also a book,” I said flatly. “Maybe you’re just supposed to write a book about it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

Blake began to say something in protest, but Dale stopped her. “There are no bad ideas here.”