Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Why did you come here, Blake?”

“I came to…” I leaned in and lowered my voice. “I came because I figured you’d already know about the Guild—”

“Yes.”

“I also figured that you’d be engaged in locating Cooper, or at least in verifying his existence and involvement.”

That smile again.

“So I’ve come here to ask you to let it be.”

“Let it be.”

“Assuming there’s an it at all.”

When Blake sat back I realized she’d been leaning in too. Had this merely been an automatic response, or had she too wanted to mute the exchange? Over Blake’s shoulder I could see a group of people marching down 4th Avenue. They were chanting, or seemed to be — I could see their mouths moving but heard nothing. They were a ragged crew, with no suits, and they moved slowly but seemed energetic, hands raised, some dancing.

“Please,” I said.

The ear finished its duplication and shriveled back into its former dried apricot form. Blake picked up the page and held it in the light. She smelled it — the first sign I’d had since sitting down that there was something inside her I still recognized — and frowned.

“I understand you’ve stopped writing,” she said.

“Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve turned to fiction. I’m writing a love story.”

“That’s a shame. You were such a strong journalist.”

“Oh, please. Everything I wrote was handed to me on a—”

“That was then.”

“It’s good to see you,” I lied.

“Bullshit.”

Sign number two.

“I miss you.”

“Blake, is there anything else you can tell me about this letter?”

“Not really. But, you know, like I said.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

She was already standing before I realized the meeting was over. She came around the desk and offered me her hand. I reached out with plastic fingers and she took them graciously, shook them warmly, looked into my eyes.

Shooting down through the lighted chambers of the building, if that’s what it was, I began to process our conversation, if that’s what it had been, and to wonder what I’d accomplished, if indeed I’d accomplished anything at all. The sun had fallen behind the buildings across the street, and I felt a large and growing loss. I’d lost Blake. I’d lost her forever. Despite not having seen her in years, this came as a surprise. A shock. There must have been a mistake. There’d been a miscommunication between us, something lost in translation or simply unsaid — something hidden, even.

The driver lead me back outside to the roar of a crowd I’d seen from Blake’s office. And as we walked back to the wooden wall surrounding the building their chant became clear.

“Light us up,” they called. “Set us free.”

We slipped out and directly into the crowd. Many were amputees, some in wheelchairs. Others appeared to be physically whole but were profoundly filthy or otherwise obscured by facial hair, by strange helmets and masks, by the shopping carts and other wheeled objects they pushed. Some were naked. No one was wearing any protection.

They moved loudly but slowly, and some stopped altogether when we emerged from the door in the wall. A tall, angular man in short pants with bright pink feathers in his hair looked directly at me and said, “Free yourself from darkness.”

The car was surrounded, a wheelchair blocking the passenger door, and as I considered whether to ask a double amputee to move, someone called my name. I looked down the block into the oncoming march.

“I know who you’re looking for!” a man yelled.

It was the person who’d been following us. He was standing half in, half out of his car, and the people were thinning around him, just the stragglers and barely mobile. I looked back to my driver.

“Free yourself from darkness,” he said. “See if I care.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I pushed toward the gray sedan, trying to avoid touching too many people. I was nervous that my suit would be punctured, or even intentionally torn. I ricocheted between the ailing men and women like a pinball struggling back up the board, their plea ringing in my ears. The man held out his hand long before I could reach it, as though he were holding it out to a person swimming, a person drowning, and by the time I gripped it I felt this might have been true in a way.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Mitch Earl.”

“Private investigator,” I said.

“You’re quick.”

“Well, literate.”

“I’m assuming you were stonewalled up there.” He nodded past me, back at the library lot.

“You can see it?” I turned back, squinting.

“Let’s just say I’m familiar with the layout. You wanna get outta here?”

For the first time I noticed his accent. It came out in certain words, a looseness. I looked down at the license plate: New York.

“You know about Cooper?”

Mitch winked, and his youthful, rosy cheeks bunched upward. “A little. I was actually hoping you could fill in some gaps for me. Want to go for a drive?”

The crowd grew louder, more excited, as three or four Lights moved slowly over the tops of people’s heads. They were out of reach, but that didn’t stop people from heaving their broken bodies into the air in an effort to cross their path with a bare hand, a bare head. And that was when I realized that Mitch Earl wasn’t wearing any protection — something I must have seen but not noted in the confusion of so many unprotected men and women. Despite knowing that those who were Lit weren’t a threat unless in service, I couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical. I moved slowly back from the car, trying to think of an excuse to refuse his invitation, and bumped into a woman with wild eyes who held a soggy rag in her mouth. I stepped to the side to let her pass, and, turning, tripped over a seated man I hadn’t seen. A moment later I was out.

I CAME TO IN the dark. And then it wasn’t darkness at all, but a blindfold. I had a headache radiating from where I’d been hit, and the cool, smooth cotton on my eyelids gave me something to focus on, something soothing, almost. I could feel that my suit had been removed. I was seated, my feet bound and my hands tied behind my back. I did not panic. I did not struggle. I became slowly aware of the temperature and of the smell and sounds in the room, and my awareness of these things swept outward deliberately, carefully, settling on one sensation and becoming familiar with it before moving on. Was I in shock? Was I in denial? The blow I’d suffered had hollowed me out, and while the fight seemed to have been drained out of me, so too had the fear. I felt a calmness that stretched each second, reminding me of the moments that, as a child, I’d enjoyed between my mother waking me up the first and second times for school. After she’d left my room I’d lie there, on the brink of sleep, half-convinced that I could continue in that suspended state forever — a sensation that was among the most wonderful I’d ever felt — so long as I kept the balance between waking and blissful oblivion. The moment I fell back into sleep, my mother would have cause to return and wake me a second and final time. And if I became too fully alert, time would move as it usually did: too quickly. But until either of those states took hold I was free, free from the stuff of life and, most important, free from myself. Perhaps it was because of this fond memory and my woozy mind that I was able to sustain a kind of flaccid resignation as I groped about with all senses but sight.

There was a bright green, tangy smell, a scent somewhere between growth and decay that was sweet to inhale but syrupy, heavy and damp, and felt like a chore to breathe. I attributed this to being in a basement, to being underground, and it was oddly familiar, this aroma, but for some reason it made me feel vaguely embarrassed, as I might about smelling bad myself, or noticing someone else’s odor and feeling sorry for them. I drew the slow air further into my lungs, until I noticed a sharp trace of alcohol behind the floral mask. Now my sense of it switched. It was not the earthy smell causing my embarrassment, but the booze, or their combination. And just as I’d reached this awareness, I also realized that it wasn’t that I’d experienced this scent before — I’d written it. Behind my mask, I envisioned the scene: a boy reaching out and touching the naked, slimy tongue of his neighbor, breathing in the rich stench of tobacco and whiskey and half-masticated leaves. It had been the first story I’d written, my first taste of doing something other than reportage. I’d not shown it to anyone, and to be confronted by it now, or by a trace of it, a mirror, was unexpected. But I couldn’t say it was unpleasant. There was a hope in it, an optimism that, like the freedom gleaned from my morning ritual, lifted me into a strangely euphoric state.