Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

She was propped up now on one elbow, shielding her eyes with her other hand like she was looking far out to sea, like she was looking right through me.

“Well?”

“Sorry,” I said again, and stepped out of the house. The only other chair was across the yard, so I sat down where I was and leaned up against the house. Alice lay back and closed her eyes.

“Can you tell me,” I asked, “about when you got Lit?”

“Will you promise to leave?”

“I promise.”

She sighed and then fell silent. A minute passed, then another. Had she fallen asleep? The wind picked up, changed direction, and the tall pine in a neighboring yard dropped a dry, dead branch.

“I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” she finally said.

“You were young, right?”

“It was really early, yeah. The evacuation was still going on. I was going from place to place, you know. Mostly abandoned houses. Looking for food, a nice bed. It was easy in the early days. Everything was left, really nice stuff. Like everyone had just gone to church. Anyway, I was in a huge house over by the water. I’d found it at night, so I hadn’t seen it all, really, just eaten some soup, opened a bottle of wine, and crawled into bed. But I wasn’t sleeping well, and I woke up and they were in the room, maybe a dozen of them. At first I thought it was a dream, and I just looked at them, half asleep. I even remember thinking, right before kind of waking up and realizing, you know, I remember thinking they were kind of cute, they were happy little guys.”

Her voice had softened. She was once again that adventurous child acting out, drinking wine, sleeping in big beds, but she was also that little girl realizing she was about to be entered by an alien force, and she tensed, nearly writhing with hatred and fear as she described it.

“It was rape,” she said. “They rape you is really what it is. You’re held down, not by physical force but by the fear of being touched, like being surrounded by an electric fence. The one that entered me came forward slowly over the top of the bed, straight at my face, and when it was two or three feet away shot at me, stopped one last time, and then disappeared around the side of my head. There’s a space I can’t remember, but afterward I jumped out of bed and ran through the house. What I hadn’t seen before was that an entire side of the house was missing — that there had been construction going on, and the plastic had fallen and one whole fucking side of the house was open. It was the most alone I’d ever felt, and I sat there looking out over the water until morning. I must have been stunned, because I have this memory of the sun coming up over the horizon, but this is facing west, right? There’s no way I would have seen the actual sunrise.”

She lay still, then, though her breathing had escalated, and I waited, wanting to give her some time. A piece of white paper swirled into the air just beyond the fence and hovered for a moment before disappearing out of sight.

“What did it feel like?” I finally asked.

“Feel like? I just told you.”

“No, I mean, did you feel any different? You didn’t see it enter you, it sounds like. How did you know it was inside?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? What do you mean I didn’t see it enter me?” Alice sat upright with such force that her wooden chair shook.

“I just mean you didn’t see it actually pass through your skin.” She seemed shocked.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not doubting what happened, I just—”

“It sure as fuck sounds like you are, Blake.”

“I’m just asking you about the sensation.”

“The sensation? It felt awesome! It felt great! It was like an orgasm!”

She stood up and roughly nudged me aside with her knees, then stomped into the house.

“Alice,” I said, “I might have been Lit.”

The stomping stopped.

“I didn’t see it happen, though, so I’m trying to figure out how else you can tell.”

Silence.

Footsteps.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I turned around. Her face had changed. Sympathy made her look older, and in the flat shade of the dark hall her silhouette against the far window seemed bent, as though she were carrying something just out of sight. I nodded.

She knelt down then, embraced me. My suit crinkled and slipped against her sweaty arms, and even through the suit I could smell the sweetly cooking smoke of her suntanned skin.

“Come inside,” she said quietly.

She brought me into the living room and pulled on some clothes she’d left in a pile on the bathroom floor. I thought about Zane coming here, about how they must have stories to share, to exchange but also to create together. I’d never been able to create a story with Alice, too busy creating my own to let her in, to let her navigate. Yet here she was, finally, at the helm.

The light had changed; it crept now across the floor and up the wall, where it caught fire in a horrid cut-crystal polyhedron hanging in a small window and brought to mind the “emblazoned zones and fiery poles” of the poem I’d heard in my dream. What had George Washington meant, I wondered, by being safe? And where had I been?

“Fear,” said Alice, entering the room. Her light clothes hung from her tiny frame like tissue paper.

“I’m sorry?”

“You realize the fear is gone.”

I looked down at my suit, my barrier.

“Not at first, really,” she explained. “At first it’s like you’ve been pushed off a cliff and you’re waiting to hit the ground.”

“What’s weird is—”

“But then it sets in, and you realize that everything you’ve been running from has already happened.”

“What’s weird is that I don’t feel anything.”

“The decision has been made, and though you’ll be called for service at some point, it’s beyond your control. At first you’re worried about what you might do, but after a while you realize that you feel free, freer than you’ve ever felt.”

“I don’t know what I feel.”

“You realize that freedom is freedom from fear.”

I considered this. It made freedom sound like something passive, and anyway, why were we suddenly talking about freedom when all I’d asked about were feelings? A moment ago she’d been seething with hatred and yet here she was, trying to communicate the finer points of faith from the far side of transcendence. Alice looked at me with what seemed to be an expression of challenge, even suspicion.

“You’d agree if you’d been Lit,” she said.

AFTER MY CONVERSATION WITH Alice I’d come to realize that I’d felt more or less the same my entire life. I’d felt the same growing up. I’d felt the same in high school. The same in college. I’d even felt the same after we discovered the Lights. The world had changed, but had I felt any different? As a person? Not that I remembered. Of course, who’s to say that what one remembers feeling isn’t just a projection of what one feels at the time of remembering? A person might, in a nostalgic mood, find humorous a statement he experienced originally as cutting. He might, feeling doubtful, find embarrassing an observation he’d made with a swell of pride. I gazed out across Ballard from my room. I’d been unable to forget what Blake had said about my journalism, decided to write a piece about my abduction, and so — after reading what little I’d gotten down, hating every word — had set aside my novel and begun summoning my memory of that strange event. I’d forgotten to turn off the radio downstairs, and its murmur spun moodily through the house. I wanted to pull the plug, but something kept me seated, stuck in my southward stare, and I hovered there on the verge of action, quite aware of my body though alien to it.