Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Zane,” said Zane, smiling obsequiously. “And no, thank you. I must be on my way.”

“Zane, yes, I’m sorry. I knew that, didn’t I.”

“You must be on your way?” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t know where that came from. Anyway, gotta go. See you later. And nice to see you again, Mrs. Williams.”

He left out the back door, and my mother watched him disappear down the side steps from the back porch. She liked him, I could tell, though she barely knew him. Adventurous and progressive as she was, my mother enjoyed being treated with deference.

“I think you make him nervous,” I said.

“Maybe he just caught a glimpse of his reflection.”

“Those tattoos are episodes from his life.”

My mother finished her wine and poured herself another glass, and I felt a glaze of sweat slick the palm holding the pills. Passing her on the way to the bathroom, I noticed that her face was tired, the skin sagging around her eyes and mouth, and her color wasn’t good. She’d been working too much.

“Imagine,” she said, “a whole society…”

“I’m listening!” I said, closing the door.

“Imagine a whole society in which everyone wore their stories on their faces. You’d know where you stood at a glance.”

I shook out a Klonopin and popped it in my mouth, salivating as the pill touched my tongue. In the mirror, my face looked tired too, though I hadn’t been working. It looked tired and stressed and my eyes were bloodshot, bleary, like I’d just woken up or was about to fall asleep.

“Unless the images weren’t true,” I called.

The radio got louder and the air conditioner came to life. The house was now swimming in sound. Even through the closed bathroom door I could feel waves of information washing over me, through me, vibrating my bones. It was a minor annoyance — I was committed to keeping the experience this side of neurosis — but it did make me wonder if perhaps I was alone in feeling so overwhelmed. Did others simply handle it better, or was I more sensitive? I’d learned at some point about people so sensitive to chemicals that they simply couldn’t live anywhere normal. The entire landscape of gas stations and grocery stores and polyester clothes was like a field of landmines ready to blow them into enervated balls of elbows and knees. There must be an analog for information. I splashed water on my face and shuffled back into the kitchen.

An Imminent Action Warning was being announced, and my mother stood by the radio, leaning on the counter with a frown of concentration. Her fine, short white hair stood everywhere at attention, turning her head into a dandelion at seed. I came up beside her and blew on it.

“Quit it.”

The IAWs were the reason we’d been issued the radios — they helped us avoid accidental run-ins with the hive-minded people in service. The Lights had found a way to indicate to Weyerhaeuser the area to be affected by such service — it was rumored to be an enormous map of the city, which could be illuminated block by block — but could not or would not explain what the imminent action was to be. Some actions altered an entire block, perhaps even leveling it, while others made small adjustments like stripping a house of copper wire. In one case I’d read about, three zombied women had entered a store and opened a single window in the storeroom.

Presently it was announced that the IAW was to affect a short length of shoreline at Myrtle Edwards Park.

“Thank God,” my mother said, and took her bottle to the dining table.

As details were given about the number of people involved and the estimated duration of the service, my mother nursed her wine. This would, I knew, begin the evening’s routine, each of us with our poisons, slowly nodding toward an hour when we could safely and quietly put the day behind us, and with increasingly heavy limbs I walked to the window by the back door and stood beside the row of hanging protective masks, gazing expressionless from their hooks. Once the announcement had been made, the radio went back to normal news, or at least what passed for normal these days: a kind of lily had been engineered to last over three months after being cut. It would be a boon, said an expert, for the grief industry.

MY MOTHER HAD LEFT by the time Alice arrived, though it was still early in the morning. I wondered where Alice could be coming from. I was in bed. I’d taken another Klonopin before sleep and the world was still swimming in and out of focus, my heartbeat loud in my head. A hummingbird was coming and going from something just out of sight, and I watched it through the window by my bed, watched it hover and dodge and dart, its body sagging from its neck. I vaguely recalled sitting the night before in a stupor at the small table I used for writing, staring at the pad, willing words that might revive my aborted attempt to write a novel. Determined to break out of journalism, I’d shuttered myself up with my mother and the idea of writing a simple, sweet love story with an urgent faith in destiny. What I’d written instead was a scene about a young man who tongues a stranger in a noisy New York bar while her husband watches from a dark booth. The novel was already a triumph.

After announcing herself at the back door, Alice began moving through the house. I heard her in the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. She was mercifully silent on the topic of my living situation, and I was thankful for it. When she began to climb the stairs I leapt up to close my notebook, embarrassed by its mostly empty pages. I was naked, looking for clean underwear, when she entered my room, and she walked right over and took my flaccid penis in her hand.

“Sorry I didn’t make it yesterday,” she said.

Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, which gave her taut face an alertness that seemed almost innocent.

“You’re fired,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, your eyes are out of focus.”

Admitting defeat, I crossed the room after spotting a pair of boxers by the door. Disappointment from someone half your age has a special sort of intensity, but it’s also easier to dismiss. Boxers on, I made for the small bottle of pills by the bed, opened it, and popped one, swallowing dry. I grinned at Alice, but she wasn’t looking at me and hadn’t seen my performance; she was instead reading a piece of paper.

“Hey!” Leaping over a mess of dirty laundry, I grabbed it from her hands. “What did I tell you!”

“It’s not your damn book,” she said. “Fuck, Blake.”

I turned my back to her and inspected the page. Indeed, it wasn’t one of mine. It was a letter of some sort, addressed to The Guild of St. Cooper . The paper had been folded and refolded several times and had worn thin, two small tears beginning at its outer edges and running toward each other in the center fold.

Resistance is afoot , it began, and it went on to describe two small children playing with marbles. Because of their protective suits, they could not properly grip the glass balls. It then likened this scenario to the ability of people, living in the shadow of the Lights, to affect change in their environment. The suits were both actual and symbolic barricades to the will of the people, the note opined, and it ended with a vision of people once again able to walk free, naked to the world. I recognized the airy, free-associative nature of the thinking immediately, and as I skipped to the bottom of the page, confirmed my suspicion by finding the signature DC .

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

Alice’s face sagged. I reached out toward her in apology but she flinched.

“Alice,” I said, “come on. Have I ever hit you?”

“You’re being weird.”