Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

Trying to come up with some way of gracefully accepting my fate, I reached out to my side and felt for her hand, and to my surprise she grabbed it, squeezed it.

“The universe is expanding,” she said through stifled sobs.

Wisely, I remained silent.

“The universe is expanding, and everything is moving away from everything else. Galaxies are moving away from other galaxies, the Milky Way is becoming diluted, and if we wait long enough we’ll only see part of what we’re seeing now, and then less, and then nothing at all. If the Earth lasts long enough without being swallowed by the Sun, and if we haven’t killed one another off yet, if we’re still here to see it, people will lie here where we’re lying and look up and there won’t be anything beyond our Solar System. It will be a night sky with no stars, and all the dreams and stories we have about traveling to other planets, other galaxies, or about not being alone, will be pure fantasy. Eventually we’ll forget that there was ever anything to see, or that we ever dreamed about what it meant. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that tragic? We won’t even know we’d ever known anything else.”

At which point she’d turned to me, putting me on the spot, and I said the first thing that came to mind, something I should not have said at that moment.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think we’ll be around that long.”

“I’m glad you’ve come.”

I started, sat up, and frantically felt my suit for openings. It was an automatic response. I didn’t have any reason to believe my suit had been punctured, and I immediately regretted the impression it must have made. Sure enough, the man standing over me saw my floundering and laughed in a deep, good-natured way.

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he said.

I wished I could rub my eyes. It was now well into the evening, and I felt distinctly as though I’d lost time. Cursing myself for having squandered the hours in reverie instead of poking around, I tried to compensate for my flummoxed state by looking this man over as though tasked with his approval. He was large and wore loose white clothing, his shirt open around a big white belly. His hair, too, was long and white, and he presently pulled it back into a ponytail and bound it with a rubber band from his wrist. This left his face round and red, like an overripe fruit.

“I was looking for Dale Cooper,” I said.

The man laughed again, not mean-spirited but insulting, as though no one could blame me for my ignorance. He turned then, toward the Sound, and in the relative silence I could hear water lick the big rocks along the shore.

“I always dreamed of owning waterfront property,” he said finally. “Especially on saltwater, somewhere with a tide. Somewhere with waves. There are plenty of handy metaphors for the cycle of life, aren’t there, but for my money not even our path around the sun does the thing justice like a tide. In and out and in and out, all that water…”

He turned around and smiled. “Come to think of it, it’s more like fucking, too, which always tips the scales for me, I suppose.”

With that, he held out a flask he’d been concealing in his waistband.

I took the flask, pulled my mask up over my head, and had a long pull of scotch. The fresh air felt good on my face and immediately improved my mood. I passed back the booze, and he took a drink, held it in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed. He held out his arms like Jesus on the cross, and in a deep, dramatic baritone offered, “I’m a sick man. I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.”

“And yet,” I said, “you don’t know a damn thing about your illness. You don’t even know what’s wrong with you!”

The big man beamed and held out his big, meaty paw.

“I’m Russell,” he said. “Russell Jonskin. And it is truly an honor to meet you. I followed your articles with great relish.”

I shook his sweaty hand. “Always nice to meet a fan of Fyodor.”

“Who?” he said. He looked at me in a way only someone who legitimately didn’t know what I was talking about would look at me. His face was a bass drum.

“Where did you live before?” I asked.

“All over! The city was my home. To say I was homeless would be a complete mischaracterization of my state, but there you are: I was without a fixed position. I had no mortgage. I paid no property taxes. Frankly, I was a bum. A liberated man, but a bum all the same. No ambition but to be a sponge of all things. I could be found most days in the public library, the downtown location, where I in fact made friends with a man whose position entailed cleaning the floors every night, and by knowing this man I was able, should I choose, to remain in the building all night. He went by the rather remarkable name of George Washington. It was George who—”

“I know George! He led us to the—”

“Indeed. The very same. I was the one who sent him there.”

Russell waved his arm in the direction of the house, and we went in, where he handed me the flask again and begged my pardon: he had something to attend to upstairs, but would promptly return. I watched his big body lumber up the stairs to street level, and then I finished the whiskey.

As I WAITED FOR Russell to return, I considered his quote. Had Russell truly forgotten that he’d read those lines in Notes from Underground? I’d read some time ago that Helen Keller had been accused of plagiarism, that certain descriptive passages in her memoirs had been lifted word for word from other books. She’d gone to the Grand Canyon, and, of course, instead of seeing the view for herself, she’d read someone else’s description of it in Braille. When it came time to recount her visit, the words she’d read had been internalized to the degree that she was unable to distinguish them from her own experience.

An argument had erupted in another part of the house, or at least a side of one. A young man — judging by his high voice — was expressing some dismay about being asked to fulfill a task, the description of which I hadn’t caught. Between his outbursts nothing could be heard. How long had it been since Russell left? It felt too long, like I’d been forgotten. I went to the bottom of the stairs and waited for a pause in the argument. Light spilled down the staircase and curled inward, against the back wall of the large, open room, and in the light I saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, a door not hidden but unannounced, built into the wall with a small depression in lieu of a handle or knob, just something to slip fingers into and pull. It opened easily.

Behind it was a long, dark hallway, nearly parallel to the one on the floor above, but longer it seemed. A light switch just inside turned on a series of bulbs running along the ceiling, and it became clear that the hall extended farther than the front of the house. It was not contained by a foundation, but more akin to a bunker, a structure in and of itself on which the house sat, connected but distinct. I stepped inside. The passage was entirely cement, with no doors but the one in which it terminated, and as I moved the sounds of my steps were amplified, loud and hollow howls of fabric and sole. I inched forward and the air grew closer and damp, as though victim of a long-standing leak. I reached out to touch the cement. It was hard, grainy, and cool, and it quickly sucked the heat from my hand.

The metal door at the end of the hall was not locked, and opened easily, silently, into a large, square, empty room, the far wall of which was not a wall at all but one side of an enormous bolder. As my brain adjusted to the sight of the room I realized it was not empty after all; in the middle of it stood a single chair facing the door, and in the silence its worn wooden slats called to me. I’d sat on that chair before.