Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

This was probably true.

“I’m sorry. It’s just…it’s the book. I’m blocked, and it’s really frustrating. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, is basically what it is. Come here, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She slowly stepped forward, and I too stepped forward, and we embraced in the golden tea-steeped room. What I’d come to love about Alice was the way she danced along the edge of child, lover, and mother — someone unafraid to counsel me, yet fragile enough to need guidance. Her hair smelled like fruit. She felt small. I was not looking forward to seeing her called into service. Once in a while, as we lay together in the dark after making love, I’d stare hard into her skin, seeing if I could find the Light within her, looking for some glow, like a flashlight held up to a palm.

“So really,” I said, “where?”

“It was just folded up in the corner of the living room.”

“Show me.”

Downstairs, she pointed exactly where Zane had been with his bag. Alice sat on the couch and gazed out the window, and I stood where she’d found the note and read it over again, thinking of what Zane had said about the trees. Could Dale Cooper still be alive? Could he be leading an underground revolt? I tried to think of the last time I’d seen him — surely on one of the occasions he’d scooped me for a story on the Lights. I fell into a kind of reverie, thinking about the period just after my first encounter with the Lights in the Weyerhaeuser woods.

Still humming with the existential implications and rattled by the attack, Blake and my brother and I had driven back to Seattle in silence, unsure of what to do. We didn’t know what to say to one another, let alone anyone else, so we’d kept the event hidden for two days, half-assuming that someone else would release the information, half-expecting to read about it in the paper, see it on television, hear it on the radio. We huddled in my mother’s house and avoided her, unsure what was expected of us, what we expected of ourselves. But nothing came.

And on the third day, Blake left, saying she was going home, saying her parents would be worried.

And on the fourth day, she was on the news.

And on the fifth day, I began to write about what had happened.

After I sold the story to the Seattle Weekly , it was picked up by Time, which asked for an expanded version, and it wasn’t long before I became the go-to correspondent for all things Lights-related. Which is when Cooper got back in touch, and on the condition of anonymity became my source. He was the first to explain that, after entering you, the Lights lay dormant until awoken and called upon for some sort of coordinated movement — the first of innumerable insights he gave me over the next two years until, after being outed by Weyerhaeuser as a person of interest, he disappeared, and with him my supposed expertise.

There was no outcry, no debate; there was no mention of his disappearance at all. Still, I expected to be contacted by his office at the FBI. Surely, I thought, they knew of and condoned his actions. What of the paperwork I’d filled out? I’d never received the payment he’d promised, but that could easily have been caught up in red tape in the confusion following our mission. The fact is, I was never contacted at all, and it seemed to me he’d been ignored entirely by those responsible for his safety. He’d been written out of the story.

I considered Alice, staring out the window with the relaxed posture of someone fully at home in a crisis. I envied her ignorance of a world before the invasion, and while I didn’t quite understand her reasons for staying, I would never, I’d long since decided, challenge them.

“Have you heard of this before?” I asked, holding up the page. “The Guild of Saint Cooper?”

“I don’t even know what guild means.”

“What about the initials DC?”

“Washington.”

I cut the conversation short.

Much of the morning was spent trying to fuck and finding myself unable to perform. Although this had been happening with embarrassing regularity, today there was a perfectly good explanation, and I cleaved to it desperately. Had Zane, I wondered, left the letter on purpose for me to find? Was there truly an underground movement afoot? And the most important question: was Cooper still alive? I was far from knowing whether to believe it, but I could not deny that I wanted to.

I also wanted to talk to Blake.

It had been years since she’d vanished into the deep recesses of Weyerhaeuser’s publicity machine, and we hadn’t spoken in all that time. Our common history had by necessity become obscured so that I’d no longer have to think of it when I saw her face on television, read her name in the paper, heard her voice on the radio. Yet for all that, she was far more of a force in my life now than she’d been when we’d been in love, though much of the influence was invisible, or rather carried out by others, unconscious actors manipulating the landscape and the people around me in ways both subtle and overt while Blake arranged an official narrative of these events. I could only imagine that she’d come to the same conclusions others had if she were told of the initials carved in the fallen rhododendrons. She may have even seen this letter, or another like it. And if she’d not yet been involved in an attempt to find Dale, to shut down his operation, surely she would be soon.

“Blake,” said Alice. She was standing at the bedroom window, looking out across lower Ballard. “Earth calling Blake. Come in, Blake.”

“Mmm?” I looked at her.

“Blake, do you think they’ll ever leave?”

“Will who leave?”

“The Lights.”

I looked at her naked body in the window and felt nothing.

“What do you think would be the best way,” I said, “to get through to the Chief Publicity Officer of Weyerhaeuser?”

Alice scrunched up her face. It dawned on her who I meant. “OB?” she said.

“Don’t call her that. But, yeah. Blake.”

Alice promptly turned her back, facing out, and she stood very still. Then she marched quickly through the room, picking up her underwear, picking up her shorts, picking up her T-shirt, her socks, her bag, and with her arms full marching out the door and down the stairs.

“Alice,” I called out. “What are you doing?”

I sprang from the bed and went down to find her pulling clothing on forcefully, jabbing one pale, skinny leg into her pants and then another. Still naked, I stood back and covered myself.

“Alice, I’m sorry. I’m just thinking this DC thing through.”

“Fuck you, Blake.”

“Please, okay. I’ll drop it, I just…”

Her breasts danced as she pulled a sock on, hopping on one foot, knee raised. She looked down to my crotch, her face darkened, and she stopped struggling with her clothes, opened the door and disappeared. I ran to close it but saw that there were no Lights in the immediate area, and because I was surprised by the day’s small breeze on my skin — something I’d not felt in ages — I stood and watched her finish getting dressed.

“Please don’t go,” I said.

“You’re the most self-involved person I’ve ever known. Do you even realize that? You probably don’t, do you. You probably have no idea how self-involved you are.”

“See now, that’s a trap. Come on, Alice. I need you.”

“What you need is to grow up and get a fucking life.”

She glowered at me, but suddenly her face changed from anger to something else, and with a slow shake of her head she started walking away. I ran out to the sidewalk and stared at her in disbelief. It was somehow amazing to me that she was leaving, and it occurred to me that, quite possibly, she would not return. The sun shone down on my naked body, and though the day was hot I felt cool, or free. No walls, no plastic suit, nothing between me and the world.