Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

It was in this state that I noticed the radio. On it was one of the four or five usual voices: a deep, calm but swift voice full of rubber and dirt. There was the slightest bit of static around the edges of certain words, which led me to believe that it might be a weak signal, that we might be slightly out of range. There was some Lights activity on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Seattle; people were advised to stay clear of the area between Myrtle and Othello until further notice. There was a mandatory watering of all rhododendrons on private property. There was a report made about the parade I’d witnessed downtown, just a simple statistical account—162 persons involved, two-thirds of whom were male — followed by a reminder that mere encounter with a Light was insufficient cause for Illumination. That the Light had to want to enter. Then another voice came on the air. It was female, and spoke sternly but not without a certain sympathy. It took me a moment to realize it was Blake.

“It has been decided,” she said, “that an expedition will be formed to assess the possibility of creating a temporary relief from the current drought — both local and elsewhere. The solution will entail the amputation and overseas transfer of a glacier. While many glaciers are under consideration, after preliminary studies, the Ross Ice Shelf — roughly the size of France — is currently the primary candidate.”

I thought of what Blake had told me at our meeting, that the Lights suspected us of having caused the drought that was threatening their food supply. I thought then of my mother, listening to the report at home, or perhaps just letting it drone on in the background. It seemed incredible to me that she’d sacrificed any aspect of her mission to help me reach Blake, especially after challenging the validity of my goal.

Blake continued on, outlining a research schedule, and explained that we couldn’t be sure exactly when the decision would be made, nor how long after that the glacier would be amputated. She kept using that word, amputated , and I wondered if it was a technical term, or a direct translation of something said by the Lights, or whether Blake, as a product of her interaction with the invasive species, had somehow become abstracted, askew, so that she was still recognizable to herself but appeared off-kilter to the rest of us.

My head pounded. I’d been unable to maintain that blissful middle ground, had slipped too far forward into a wakeful state, and the smell, once so rich with allusion and depth, was now just flatly dank, stale, impenetrable. I twisted my arms gently, testing the ropes that bound them, and this small resistance had the effect of making me more aware of my exposure, my vulnerability. My skin broke out in gooseflesh, and I became unusually aware of those parts of it not covered by clothes.

The pressure in the room changed — airflow, an open door — and I heard footsteps coming as though down a hall. There was a crisp, close echo, which folded fast upon itself, making it impossible to tell how many people had entered — certainly more than one — but they stopped all at once, not far from me but out of reach.

I struggled despite myself. “My suit,” I said finally.

“Your suit has been removed for your safety.”

The voice was distorted, a low, digital growl, disconnected beeps lined up into quickly shifting notes. Nonetheless, I felt certain I could hear the PI’s voice behind it.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

There was a low, inscrutable murmur.

“Are you the person called Dale Cooper?”

I’d heard the question clearly but it took me by surprise, so alien was the concept, and in the silence after it had been asked I tried in vain to retrieve it in my mind, and failed.

“Is Dale Cooper your name?” the voice said.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Answer the question.”

Why would Mitch be asking me this? Was it a performance for someone else listening in? I tried to feel my skin, to determine whether I was wearing a sensor — perhaps I’d been hooked to a polygraph — but if anything was taped to me I’d already normalized the pressure. The voice spoke again.

“Is Dale Cooper a real person?”

For the first time in years I thought about meeting Dale Cooper. The impression he’d given me had been far from normal, with his clocks and talk of personal focus. What had he said? That concentrating on something outside the present circumstance could bring clarity that direct attention never would. I tried to reach back out to the sounds, the smells of the room I’d used only moments before to attain a kind of transcendental euphoria, but my mind was scattered, my attention shifting too quickly, pushed and pulled by the small movements of my interrogators, by my clothing against my skin, by the silence I realized only presently indicated the radio had been turned off. Small things, I knew, were being asked of me, but I could not bring myself to the precipice of speech. I felt as though I were skittering across smooth water like a flat stone, and even as my forward motion slowed, the rate at which I hit the surface increased and gave me the thrill of speed, the intensity of action. Here I was, responsible for verifying the existence of Dale Cooper, and under the pressure of this simple directive losing the ability to account for my own.

“Do you know where Dale Cooper is?”

“No,” I said at last. “No!”

To say that I said this, however, is misleading. I don’t remember the word coming out of my mouth. I don’t remember my lips moving, my tongue on my pallet, my nose vibrating with sound. What I remember is the feeling of confession. And after my confession, of being lifted, chair and all, into the air.

After being taken outside and untied from the chair, I’d been pulled rather forcefully into the back of a van, where I was free to roll around, bumping against what I assumed were the feet and shins of men seated to either side. As the van drove I tried to divine our location from the pattern of turns and stops and long, straight shots, but time after time a turn would come where it couldn’t in my mind, or we’d get up to speed on a stretch of road that should have been short and slow. This went on for a time until it occurred to me that intuiting our route was impossible unless I knew where we’d begun. I must have been given a drug to relax me, I realized at last, for though part of me felt certain that I was at best headed for continued — and harsher — questioning, and at worst disposal, another part of me felt equally as certain that I was going to be safe. Happily, the latter part was in the position of informing the former, and I occupied myself for a while with listening in, hearing the soothing, knowing predictions work to mollify the stream of panicky outbursts and complaints. I was exterior to them both, disembodied inside my skin. Before long, however, I grew tired of this exchange and decided to poke around.

Behind me was a long corridor that terminated in a heavy-looking metal door, the kind I imagined finding on a ship or a submarine. The corridor was rounded in its top and bottom corners, and together with the gunmetal color, this confirmed my sense that I was underwater. There was a slow creaking and a series of taps coming from all around me, and though they didn’t seem overly threatening, they did inspire me to walk down the corridor. As I inched toward the door I looked more closely at the walls. They’d resembled metal at first, but their texture seemed too flat somehow, as though more lead-like than lead. I reached out with my index finger and, without the application of much pressure at all, it sank, upon contact, into the gray surface. I pulled back, alarmed, only to find that my fingerprint had been left in the warm, damp substance.