Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

ON THE DRIVE DOWNTOWN I noticed we were being followed. It was a plain gray sedan, not new but spotless. I couldn’t make out the plates except to note that they weren’t from Washington. It had tailed us from Ballard to Interbay before I brought it up, but the driver dismissed it with a grunt I took to mean it was probably an added level of security assigned by Weyerhaeuser itself. I knew I should be at my best with Blake, but I’d slept fitfully, filled with anxiety about the meeting. What should I say to her? Should I try to appeal to a younger version of herself? Should I beg? Was I hoping for some kind of reunion? Friendship? Was I just going there to see her? My exhaustion left me scatterbrained.

Before we turned down 2nd Avenue into Belltown we passed a deer and fawn by the side of the road. They were eating from low-hanging branches and didn’t even look at us, though the car was no more than four feet away. The vehicle smelled slightly of clove cigarettes. What kind of person worked for Weyerhaeuser? Were they all already employees, or had the company actively recruited during the exodus? Blake had not been an employee, obviously. I tried to focus. People don’t change, I assured myself, just their circumstances. Blake would be Blake.

We parked before the high wooden walls surrounding the block once slated for the new public library. I’d heard Weyerhaeuser had taken over this property, and assumed it had built something. But no structure could be seen above the ten-foot blue particleboard. The holes I’d once looked through with Blake had been covered. The driver took me to a door at the top of a three-step ramp, pushed a buzzer, and looked up, nodding into a surveillance camera overhead while I watched our tail park a block away. I waved.

When the door buzzed, the driver pushed against it, and as he did so he turned slightly to me and said something that sounded like “Get ready.”

“Get ready?” I said, and then we were inside.

I was not ready.

There was not nothing behind the particleboard walls after all. There was something, and the something was enormous. It was glass and steel and strange and it rose above us like a broken shard, like an iceberg. Like nothing I’d ever seen before. Lights were moving into and out of it; they zoomed past the driver and me as we stood there — me looking up with my jaw fully and officially dropped, him patiently waiting. After I’d taken a few deep breaths I was able to answer to my satisfaction the basic ontological question, and armed with this conviction I overcame at least one layer of my disbelief.

“It’s a building,” I said.

The driver raised his eyebrows. “Good,” he said. “That’s good. Would you like to go inside of it?”

I took one last look up and behind me, over the wooden wall toward the street. From here I could see the slight shimmer of the mirage — the same kind that had hidden the secret forest years ago — and just as I was recovering from the first shock, another came crashing in like a wave: these could be everywhere. I thought of the partially deconstructed buildings throughout the industrial neighborhoods to the north. I thought of the hole I’d seen the day before. I nodded to the man, and he walked toward a glass door that opened as he reached it. I followed him inside.

There was very little furniture; the rooms themselves were large, like atria, though nothing was growing, and though the walls’ angles were unusual, the material was glass and concrete and steel and not some substance from another world. We traveled up through the open spaces on escalators bisecting the building, shooting through it at odd angles and avoiding some floors altogether. In a room with a ceiling that sloped down to a glassy point near the floor, the driver left me to sit at a white desk displaying the usual office accoutrements: a computer, a phone, a pad of paper. It also held some less usual items: a small glowing globe that hovered over a square blue stand, a ribbon that sparkled with streaming digits, and something that looked like a shriveled human ear. I heard the footsteps of several people come and go in neighboring rooms, but I didn’t see anyone else, nor did I see the Lights I’d noticed from the outside, which had seemed innumerable and everywhere at the time. I was unused to wearing a suit inside, and though it was not hot in the room, it was noticeably stuffy. I briefly pulled the mask away from my face and neck, rearranging myself inside.

“You don’t have to wear that in here.”

Blake waved off three or four Lights at shoulder level, which disappeared down the hall as she entered the room. It was impossible to ignore the disappearance of the easy, open gait she used to have, a kind of broad, roaming liquidity that had made it hard to guess her next move. She sliced forward now with precision and, having met my eyes at first, now completely avoided them until she’d taken a seat on the far side of the desk.

Besides being a robot, she looked as beautiful as ever. She hadn’t aged so much as refined. Part of me was terrified of this new Blake, but another part wanted to jump up and laugh and try to provoke some acknowledgement from her that everything was strange, delightfully strange. I looked hard into her eyes: nothing.

“May I see it?”

I knew what she meant, but I stared blankly in disbelief.

“The letter,” she said.

“Blake.”

“Please.”

I laid it on the desk between us, and that’s when I noticed the reflection of a Light in the glass wall behind her. Blake noticed, too, or rather she noticed the Light itself, and she froze, very briefly, almost imperceptibly, and then subtly nodded and put her hand over the hovering globe. The globe opened, the Light quickly flew by me and into it, and the globe closed. Blake looked up at me as if this were an entirely normal procedure: Of course the Light goes in the globe —it’s a Light globe .

She picked up the letter and scanned it, holding it close, examining the margins and folds. I’d prepared my response to what I thought would be her first question — Where did you get this? — but she didn’t ask. Instead, she asked if she could have it.

“Have it, as in I leave it here?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Then can I copy it?”

“Make a copy? Sure.”

Blake took the shriveled ear, placed it on the page, and I watched as it sprang to life. It unfolded and then inched quickly over the entire page. Once it was finished, Blake fed it a blank piece of paper torn from her notepad. The ear grew larger as if ingesting the pulp of the page. The next stage of the process was slower, and Blake picked up the silent, empty slack of the room when she saw me staring at the weird, fleshy thing reproducing my letter.

“There’s some new technology around,” she said.

“Blake,” I said, “what the fuck.”

“I understand you’ve been living with your mother. How is she?”

“Determined.”

For the first time, Blake smiled. “Yes, that’s true.”

“And busy trying to clean up messes made by your little friends here.”

The ear had now recreated roughly a third of the page — but it wasn’t merely a copy, it was exactly a copy. Not only was it duplicating the words on the page, it was doubling the page itself, the texture, the folds and rough edges. The color.

“Do you know,” Blake said, “that the Lights are growing suspicious of the lack of rain? They suspect that we, that humans, are intentionally withholding it.”

“I assume you’ve told them we can’t control the weather.”

“They claim we’ve changed the weather before.”

Blake’s hair was pulled back into a severe bun, and with her chin lifted in an attitude of investigation, her neck, already long, seemed like a boast. It was insane to me just then that I knew that neck, that I’d nuzzled up to it, caressed it with warm, love-stained lips.