Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

Zane seemed almost to welcome the end of the chase; he offered no resistance, and together we lay like exhausted lovers. I wanted more than anything to pull off the hood of my suit, but instead I gulped down what air it let through, and hoped it wouldn’t take me more time to recover than it did Zane. As we lay there gasping I studied his face, and for the first time I read his tattoos not as signs of defiance or bravery but of cowardice. He hid behind those images like a mask, showing people his past so they wouldn’t see his future.

“Zane,” I began. “I need—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He seemed truly afraid. “It wasn’t my idea, I swear.”

Not his idea to sleep with Alice? This didn’t surprise me.

“I don’t care whose idea it was,” I said. “Anyway, that’s not what this is about.”

“Then what?”

“The Guild. I want to meet whoever wrote that letter.”

Zane nudged me, and I slowly crawled off him and stood. His knee was scraped up, bleeding, but he didn’t seem to mind. He brushed himself off, grinned at me, spat. “I wondered what happened to that.”

I dug in my pocket and pulled out the letter.

He began to reach for it but paused, pulled back his hand. “I don’t care,” he said. “Keep it. It’s all bullshit anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

He seemed almost sad, though between his exhaustion and tattoos I couldn’t be sure. I put the letter back in my pocket, and Zane picked up his bicycle. He looked it over, saw that the chain had come off the front sprocket, and squatted to replace it.

“Hold the bike,” he said.

I turned briefly and looked north through the trees. I didn’t often look this direction through Ballard, and I had the sensation that something had changed in what I saw rather than in my perspective. The mostly empty houses were larger and more undone by time; the sky was smaller. Several blocks away, a man stood on the peak of a roof and turned to look in all directions. Then he looked directly at me.

“Okay,” Zane said, “all set.”

“What?”

“You coming?”

He pointed to pegs on the rear axle before straddling the bike himself. I looked back for the man I’d seen and, not finding him, grabbed Zane’s shoulders and stepped up on the pegs.

We turned right on the far side of the bridge, down into the old fishermen’s terminal. It was an industrial part of town, and like most of them it looked least changed by the loss of people. Not much had grown in the polluted soil, so the buildings looked locked up rather than abandoned. We rode along slowly, hugging the waterline, but as the road was in disrepair we had to swerve and even stop to avoid potholes and fallen poles. We entered a residential neighborhood, and soon the street became narrow, became a dead end, and finally stopped before a modern gray house facing Puget Sound. I could see the water beyond a small lawn to the left, a wind kicking whitecaps up like cowlicks, and everywhere the Sound’s shush muted the call of gulls into a dull caw. It was fresh, bracing even in the heat, and I inhaled sharply through my mask, wishing desperately I could take it off.

Zane seemed to wait patiently for me, as though knowing my need, and I thought about what he’d said upon seeing the letter. It sounded like he’d lost faith in the resistance, if that’s what it was. I couldn’t say I blamed him. Our own country had abandoned us — what could a small group of locals accomplish? Still, it was disappointing. Though I lacked faith personally, I found it a comfort knowing the faithful were among us.

“Come on,” he said, and nodded toward the door.

Inside I counted over two dozen men and women Zane’s age or younger lolling around on filthy high-end furniture, napping and chatting and flirting and staring at one another with unreadable eyes. A fat older man was standing on a chair and playing a simple, sad melody on a ukulele, while at his feet four women played a game of Monopoly. They all had short-cropped hair and multiple piercings, and one rocked a sleeping child in her lap. As we passed by she leaned in excitedly and whisper-shouted, “Three and seven! Three and seven!” and the girl to her left moved the shoe and went to jail.

Zane looked at me and shrugged. “No dice.”

“But—”

He pulled me down a hallway that opened onto the second-floor balcony of a large, two-level room. The far wall was home to floor-to-ceiling windows, beyond which lay the Sound. Flooded with light, the room was much hotter than the last, and despite its size contained far fewer people. I was immediately drawn to a girl wrapped in bright orange muslin. She was curled up on a circular rattan chair, reading a large and unwieldy book with a broken spine. A section of it slid down toward her from the loose yellow cover.

“Aya,” called Zane.

The girl looked up and, seeing me, dropped the book altogether.

“Whoa, seriously? You bring him here now?”

Her face, though distorted in anger and astonishment, could not hide its ethereal beauty. She was young, much younger than Zane, but she was obviously in charge. How did she know who I was? I turned to Zane for an explanation, but he’d already begun heading back down the hall.

“Not my problem anymore,” he called over his shoulder. “He wants to see your father.”

Amazed, I stared at the girl. Could this be the daughter of Dale Cooper? He’d never mentioned having a daughter. Then an idea was born in my brain and spread out into my tingling body and limbs like ice: this was a child he’d had with Blake. I searched her expression for a flicker of Blake’s wit and wisdom. The girl looked up at me and frowned, but she wore her expression lightly, floating on the surface of her unfinished face, and it quickly changed to one of inquiry.

“Who,” she asked, “cleft the Devil’s foot?”

I thought I’d missed something until it became clear that I’d missed everything. “Is this a riddle?”

“It is what you want it to be.”

“Is that a riddle?”

Aya rolled her eyes and began to gather up her book. I walked down the steps.

“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t know anything about the history of religion. I mean, the obvious answer would have to be God, right? Didn’t God kick Satan out of Heaven? He was an angel, and he, you know…rebelled.”

A couple lay in each other’s arms on a mattress that had been pulled out of the sunlight to the back of the room, and when I got to the bottom of the stairs one of them sat up, a young man with long blond hair. He rubbed his eyes.

“This is the quiet room, dude.”

Aya nodded toward a sliding-glass door leading to the rocky waterline, and I followed her out. Her wrap, already bright inside, now fairly caught fire as it writhed and fluttered and flapped in the breeze. Outside Aya looked older — too old to be Blake’s — but still she couldn’t have been more than twelve. Her stick body moved to stand close to the edge of the water, where it seemed in danger of being blown up into the air. A feast for the raving gulls, I thought. She watched as I fidgeted, sweat running down my face inside the plastic hood. There was going to be no easy way, I realized, to answer the question burning in my mind other than to ask.

“Is your father Dale Cooper?”

Aya smiled. “My father is busy at the moment, but he’s been expecting you. You’ll need to stay here until he returns. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make your stay with us enjoyable.” And with that she walked back inside.

Expecting me?

I sat down to consider this statement. On all sides hilly land rose and curled around the Sound like an ear — it funneled the noise of waves and birds and the occasional punctuation of cracks toward me as though asking for interpretation, but I sat there dumbly, the sun setting dumbly, the night dumbly coming down. In the growing darkness across the water rose Sunset Hill, once a higher-income area west of Ballard and now home to a small enclave of Latter-Day Saints. Not many houses were still lit, and since only a few scattered streetlights remained, the impression was of a weak constellation, as though stars that had begun close together had drifted apart, losing interest. It brought to mind an exchange I’d had with Blake on one of our high school excursions into Discovery Park. It was nighttime, and we’d been there since the afternoon, long enough to have talked ourselves out. We were lying on our backs, stargazing. Blake began to weep. And because everything was always, in those days, precarious; because I expected to be told that something good would end, or something bad begin; because I was always, in short, prepared for the worst, I remember feeling that she was about to leave me. The tears were the kind just shy of resignation, when you’re at the far limit of tolerance and your body gives, the acceptance rushing through the ruptured spirit like air from a pressurized tank.