Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

At first I thought it was a trick of the night, an optical illusion caused by darkness, the moon, my own exhaustion. But when it happened again it was seismic. A kind of wave rippled through the entire stand. It felt like the moment an earthquake strikes, and for a moment, as my mind tried to make sense of what I’d seen, I was swaying. It was as though the floor of the woods was vertical, or as though there wasn’t any distance between it and the trees themselves. It didn’t make any sense. I leaned forward.

“Touch it with your hand,” whispered Washington.

Touch it? What was it? But I reached out, putting my hand between two trees, and my fingers touched something. It was cold, or cool, and soft; it was something I wasn’t prepared for, and I yanked my hand back and made a noise. The ripple returned, spreading out from where my hand had been, and because I’d seen it once I could now see it , rather than focusing on my own response. The rest of the group reacted as I had the first time, gasping in disbelief and fright, but I was transfixed. It felt like a vertical surface of water. Fluid, but not chaotic. Composed — a network of infinitesimally small points strung by spider webs. It stuck to my fingers as I pulled back my hand, and I rubbed them together to see that they weren’t wet, or worse.

George told me to keep going. “Go slowly,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”

Extending my arm, I could feel the cool softness and now slight pressure around my fingers, like denser air. I pressed, kept pressing, and watched in shock as my fingers began to vanish. I pulled my hand back slightly, watched my skin reappear as I did, then pushed it back in. It was a mirage, I realized, only there was something there, a sheet of light, though dark, like a projected image. I plunged my arm in, and when nothing happened to me, I looked back at Kent, who grinned, at Blake, who looked stricken, and at George, who gave me a nod of encouragement. I closed my eyes and put my head through, holding my breath. I could feel the cool border run down my face and around my neck. My head was fully submersed, and I could not breathe, could not open my eyes. What I felt wasn’t fear, but the anxiety of placing an enormous bet. The imminent commitment of it. The sacrifice of control.

Finally, it was Blake who grabbed my hand and startled me into opening my eyes, gasping.

What I saw was a forest, though another kind of forest. Gone were the pines, replaced by gnarled, pedaled trees, enormous but somehow squat, like overgrown bush. And there were lights. At first, focused on the nearest tree, I saw a dozen, perhaps two dozen lights, tiny, illuminated pinpricks moving slowly around the tree’s large, shiny leaves — much like the leaf, I realized, from my dream. The forest extended well into the distance, and there were lights around each tree, two dozen lights multiplied by hundreds, thousands of trees, slowly moving, swaying in a lazy chaos, swirling like dust in a ray of black sun.

I let myself be pulled back out and turned to face Blake; she looked at me with eyes wide and mouth agape and she continued to squeeze my hand, pulling me into her, pulling me back from the veil. Washington explained that we could all pass through, that we didn’t need to file in between the same trees, but the group paid no attention — they were waiting for a description.

What was in there, they wanted to know. What did I see?

I opened my mouth to speak, but I quickly realized that a mere description was so insufficient as to be misleading. I didn’t see lights swirling around trees inside of a force field of illusion — I saw the basic assumptions of my life exploding, the world changing irrevocably, commitment to fact falling away and an irrepressible freedom taking its place. And though the experience had overwhelmed, postponed my emotional response, now that I looked back into the woods I’d been walking through toward some unknown destination, toward this very spot, trudging along with petty grievances after a man I presumed to be wasting my time, I was overcome by a kind of innocent gleefulness, an expansive, joyful optimism that rang through me like an alarm, waking me up, shaking me out of a near-morbid indolence. I reached out to Blake and wrapped my arms around her, and though I felt her body stiffen, I delighted in this strange instant of her unknowing. Soon enough she would see what I’d seen, and we’d be reunited on the far side of her skepticism and fear.

Kent looked at me, and Blake looked at me, and Washington was looking at me, smiling because he knew, and I looked at the darkened, expectant faces of the small group. What had I seen?

“I saw,” I said, “the leaping greenly spirits of trees.”

I stood aside and swept my left arm into the invisible darkness, beckoning the group. Kent stepped forward, along with another man, thin and fidgety, and they pushed their hands through the illusion to feel it on their skin, then walked in. A woman followed, and another, sisters, followed by an old woman with bright pink hair. Left were Blake and George Washington, and he nodded for Blake and me to enter. I held out my hand, and after Blake took it we walked slowly through with the old man right behind.

As I watched the transformation of emotions on Blake’s face, my ears filled with sounds of amazement from the others. They ooohed and aaahed as if at a fireworks display, but quickly went silent as the profound reality of the vision settled in. Blake’s eyes swelled with tears and she said the word beautiful before catching a sob in her throat and swallowing, preferring not to speak.

Together, we walked forward into the trees, one row in, two rows, and above our heads the lights slowly circled the leaves. People were spreading out, lost in their own worlds, seeing the same thing yet experiencing their own private apocalypses of scale, and just as I realized that I was more keen on witnessing their experiences than experiencing it for myself, just as I’d begun to condemn myself for being unable, even in the face of such magic, to face my own annihilation, Kent tapped me on the shoulder and asked what the big bush was in our front yard at home.

“The what?”

“In Ballard. The bush.”

“You mean the rhododendron?”

“Yes! That’s it. That’s what these are.”

I looked up. They were four, five times the size of any rhododendron I’d ever seen. But yes: the shiny, waxy leaves were the same, and the twisted apple-tree trunk.

“Is anything going to be the same?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Blake, suddenly between us, grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Look.”

A little farther ahead, the pink-haired woman slowly spun, her arms outstretched and her head back. Three of the lights had descended from the trees and were curling around her arms and head in a kind of ecstatic dance, a spontaneous communication of mutual curiosity. The woman began to laugh, and coo, and say, “I can feel them!” over and over. The sisters stepped forward, hesitantly raising their arms, not spinning, but walking out and looking up and making small waving motions with their hands, beckoning. Soon they too were surrounded by lights. One of them held her hand before her face, watching as the tiny lights spiraled around her arm, her mouth wide in awe.

“Okay, everyone,” George Washington said, “I think we should start heading back.”

No one listened. The twitchy man joined the others with the lights, raising his arms straight up as though preparing for a dive.

“Seriously, people — remember what I said about the place being guarded. I’ve seen guards on the perimeter before…”

He began to walk toward the strange ritual unfolding, but stopped short as the lights around the pink-haired woman suddenly rose — all but one. They rose up and hovered motionless as the one remaining light began to descend. It was difficult to tell whether she saw this or not, her face obscured by her hair, her eyes half closed, but her body kept spinning and her arms kept waving, and when, in a punctuating flip, she threw her head back to face the sky, the light shot down into her open mouth and she stopped suddenly, her arms dropping to her sides and her shoulders slumping.