Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“How do you do,” said Aya, and she gave me a polite curtsy as though being shown off in company.

I was still trying to accept what I’d heard: that this child was this man’s wife . But being a coward, I dared not ask for clarification lest I insult either or both of them. I thought my position too precarious for any overt judgment or sudden conversational moves, even if I’d been able to author them. And there was still the issue of Cooper. Where was he?

Feeling a little more myself, I took a brief circuit around the room, which was full of discarded projects involving a variety of media — torn paper, glue, shoelaces, small stones. It looked like nothing so much as a nursery school during recess. Surely, I thought, Dale Cooper had not just let this ragtag group run amok with some half-articulated goals of civil disobedience. Surely there was a master plan. I felt eager to hear it.

“So,” I said, playfully holding an unpainted papier-mâché mask before my face, “will Dale be joining us tonight, or…”

I lowered the mask to see neither Russell nor Aya was amused.

“Oh, come now,” Russell said. “You can dispense with the theatrics. I must say I admired you sticking to your guns during our interrogation — that’s the kind of caution we’ll need should you actually be questioned by Weyerhaeuser. But you’re among friends, truly you are.”

The energy of the night had changed. I thought of Dale’s process of attaining clarity, and I wondered if that’s what was happening. Perhaps this was being staged in order to open me further to the possibility of a truth I was not yet ready to understand. All these small tactics meant to careen me off course, to upset some natural equilibrium that on some level resists, has always resisted, would always otherwise resist an acknowledgment of my role, my duty.

And yet.

And yet Russell seemed entirely sincere. He seemed to be at once confirming and abdicating his association with Cooper’s Guild. It didn’t make sense. And the kidnapping. Doing so to determine whether or not I knew what was going on made sense, I supposed, but why then ask me whether I was Dale Cooper? Did they think I was insane? Aya, sitting in a Papasan chair, had gone back to reading her big yellow book, and between it and her orange dress she looked like a bowl of fruit. Ignoring us both, Russell shuffled around the room, kicking pathways through the detritus of ill-executed hobbies. I looked back and forth between them, and I looked around at the disarray of craft materials, and I thought about the room we’d walked through on the floor above and I thought about Dale Cooper, and when the question came to me I felt as though I’d been circling it ever since coming back down the hall. Where were the clocks?

The thought that Cooper wasn’t a part of what was going on here, that he’d never been, came to me slowly and without emotion. The fact that they didn’t even know who Cooper was, that they thought I’d invented the whole thing — the thought that they thought I’d invented Dale as a source for my journalism, that they now wanted me to reinvent him, not as a witness but as an active agent, as a freedom fighter — all this bloomed in my mind like mold, growing imperceptibly until it stank. I watched Russell’s reflection in the bay window until, with dawn on its way, it grew dim and it grew dimmer and it finally disappeared.

“Is there any more bourbon?” I asked.

Puget Sound was truly beautiful, even through my mask in the flat light of midday. It was made stark and lonesome, satisfying, by the absence of human activity, and it triggered a sense of haunted, soulful completion I associated only with water or great distances. Aya was napping inside, but Russell and I had gone the distance ourselves — whether out of obstinacy or true belief didn’t seem to matter at this point — and together we sat on the craggy shore and stared forward, stared at the depth as though at a wall, a painting with brushstrokes we’d leaned forward to admire. I liked him despite what he’d put me through, and despite my unwillingness to help him I found our exchange strangely encouraging. Our argument.

The basic disagreement was not over whether or not Dale Cooper was real — Russell very plainly thought not, and there was nothing I could do to convince him. At issue were the ethics, whether or not the man existed, of using his name in service of activities of which he may or may not have approved, and of using the fourth estate, moreover, to broadcast and enlarge those activities. My case was that this was unethical. That it was wrong . Russell’s view was more complicated.

“Truth,” he said with a straight face, “is a narrative.”

“Truth is truth,” I said.

“And I’m not concerned with that narrative. I don’t want that story anymore. I’m bored of that story. I’m bored of being trapped by it.”

“No.”

“It’s a means of control, is what it is. It’s how the conversation is controlled. You’re raised to respect the truth so you can be easily controlled, and soon enough you’re bound to this discourse you didn’t author, nor did you authorize, revolving around an arbitrary value with an inherited priority that leaves you helpless in the face of authoritarian rule.”

It had been like this for hours and both of us were drunk.

“So all this,” I waved my arms around, “all this is the result of my naïve assumptions about truth.”

“You’re thinking too narrowly. Don’t fall into another narrative without a plan, is what I’m saying.”

“That’s not what you’re saying.”

“Think about action. Once you’ve dispensed with truth, what you’re left with is an empty prohibition.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said. “I know you don’t believe me about Cooper. But just tell me, honestly, if he was real. I mean really real. If I knew him, okay?”

“If.”

“Yes, if. If he’d been real this whole time, and maybe he’s disappeared now. Maybe he’s dead! Say he’s dead. Wouldn’t it be better to honor his memory? Like a martyr! Every cause needs a martyr.”

“Every cause needs action. How it gets there is beside the point.”

“God damn it. Shit. What I should have done, you know what? I should have taken a picture of him. Simple as that! That’s what I should have done. I should have—”

Suddenly Aya was standing behind us. “What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.”

“That’s—” I said.

“That’s my girl,” said Russell. “Always with the bon mot .”

“No, but that’s…that’s someone.”

I collapsed backward and lay against the hot stone. I was terribly hot myself, sweating in my suit, dehydrated and exhausted, and it was all I could do to keep my simple argument straight, let alone field the mysterious parables of a child bride. I looked up at her gently rippling wrap, envying her fresh air, and for the first time thought of why it was possible. I raised my finger into the air, making a point.

“Aren’t you worried that the Lights inside you know what you’re doing? I mean, we don’t know whether they transmit stuff. I mean, my mother says we don’t know much about…you know what I mean?”

Russell looked up at Aya and nodded.

“Actually,” he said, “we’re quite certain they know what we’re doing.”

I laughed. “Oh, right, of course. Actually, let me guess, you’re working right alongside of them!”

I reached over and gave Russell a friendly pat. I felt we’d reached the stage of friendly pats. But Russell wasn’t laughing, or even smiling. Instead he flicked his eyes up at Aya in a motion that meant, Pay attention . I tilted my head back so that I was looking at her upside down, a bright orange wedge in a big blue pie. Her young face was still free from the careful sculpting of time that trims in the features and flaws that become true beauty. I suddenly had the thought of taking her away from this place, from this man. Of protecting her. Though she might not know it for lack of experience, surely there were other options she’d prefer. As I was envisioning my heroic duties toward this odd baby bird, she looked down at me quickly. Then her face contorted. Her eyelids fluttered and her eyes narrowed, her chin pulled back grotesquely and her mouth opened. My first thought was that she was having a seizure.