Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“It stirs!” he said.

“Where are we?”

“Cascades. Well, Rockies? No, Rockies are farther east. We’re still in Washington. Way north. We should be closing in on the border now. We drove through an actual town called Twisp not too long ago. Twisp! That’s not a town, it’s a candy bar. Anyway, place seemed a little overgrown, but from what I could tell it was a normal town. Normal people there, all that. Well, semi-normal. There was not one, but two antique trucks held twenty feet in the air by telephone poles. Some kind of billboard gimmick. Point is, and I say this to reassure you, mask-wise, we’re out of danger.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lights don’t travel far from their food source.”

Just having my mask off in a car was astounding; to have the windows open was revelatory. I poked my head out slantwise. It was still cool, and I gulped the moist morning air in mouthfuls, our speed making my eyes water.

“That must feel good!” called Mitch.

I pulled myself back inside and exhaled sharply. “You have no idea.”

He smiled, but the comment was probably unfair. We drove for a while in silence. The morning was clear, and though the sun wasn’t yet visible it cast a soft gray light that egged the trees, the shoulder, the smooth black road. Objectively, the man beside me had very likely saved my life, or at least saved me from being Lit, if I wasn’t already. He deserved my gratitude, not my gratuitous displays of selfish abandonment.

“I haven’t thanked you,” I said, somewhat sheepishly.

“No need. Had to be done.”

Did it? I considered this. What difference did one Lit person make, more or less?

“Anyway,” he said, “I need you!”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“I don’t actually know much about anything. I have no idea where Cooper is.”

“There’s a cathouse just across the border called One Eyed Jacks, and I have it on good authority that he’s been seen there within the month.”

“A brothel?”

“Could be nothing, of course, but I’m optimistic.”

Though my first reaction to this was disbelief, after what I’d been through I was open to the possibility that disbelief was just a habit.

“What do you need from me?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I think what I need from you is simply to be there with me. If we find him, you’re the one who knows him.”

“Mitch,” I said, “why are you looking for Dale Cooper?”

Mitch began to answer, but the car suddenly lurched, slowed violently, and came to a stop. My organs throbbed as they relaxed back into their appropriate places, and the seatbelt, having pulled my body back from oblivion, now eased. We’d merely braked, but I had the feeling that we’d somehow broken from where we’d been just moments before. Across the road was a diner tucked back into the trees. The sign above it, in neon, displayed an enormous white chicken roosting, then, in animated frames, leaping from its nest and letting fall an egg, which cracked in midair and landed in a frying pan.

“It’s a sign!” he said.

“Can’t argue with that.”

The diner had just opened, and the early morning customers — all loggers and laborers of one kind or another — were quiet but content, the spare clatter of silverware and swinging kitchen doors the only sounds save the waitress’s soft call and response. It was an old-fashioned place, with a counter in the center of the room and booths to all sides with red plastic seats and glittering white Formica tabletops. We took a booth by the window, and while we waited for our food I listened to Mitch’s story.

“I came to Seattle the minute I heard about the Lights,” he began. “I felt called. I’d been in between things for a long time, and when I saw it on the news I knew there was something there for me, that I could help. I didn’t really know how, and it wasn’t until recently that I figured it out. It just felt like the place I needed to be.”

“So you just drove out.”

“I just drove right out. I mean, I didn’t disappear or anything, but within a week I was heading through the Lincoln Tunnel. Anyway, when I got to Seattle I moved in with a few people who were staying behind — a couple photographers, a French journalist — in a house right at the inside edge of the utility zone, and just did my thing, talking to people, helping out where I could. I actually worked as a volunteer for your mother for a while early on. At least, I worked for someone who worked for your mother.”

He’d made friends with people all over the city, using his PI charm and genuine warmth to establish a respectable level of insight into the workings of the entire apparatus.

“There are obviously places and people I never got access to,” he admitted. But he’d proven himself gifted at knowing what to ask who, and how to frame these questions as unobtrusively as possible. Soon people were giving him tips on everything from where the Lights were likely to process next to how the City’s response was slowly shifting from an entirely triage role to one of containment and systematic early notification. It had been, throughout the first years, a wholly neutral endeavor, in which he gathered information from all sides with no particular purpose in mind other than creating a kind of archive, an inside portrait of the events underway.

“But then I got Lit, and that changed everything. I’d worn a suit, of course, but a Light snuck through a zipper I hadn’t fully closed. Right in front of my face! The little fucker was traveling along my arm toward my midsection — I was used to them sniffing about by then, since I spent a lot of time hanging around Weyerhaeuser vans en route — so I was just casually watching it go along, doing whatever it is they do, and then it suddenly vanished.”

I’d already eaten my meal at this point, but since Mitch had been doing all the talking he’d only taken a couple bites. His eggs, over easy, had begun to congeal, and his home fries, once slick with grill grease, had become matte with the drying fat. He pushed his plate away and stared out the window. The service and work trucks had been replaced by cars and SUVs, a different crowd with different jobs, no less hungry.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“At first I flipped out. I went dark. I stayed in my little room for months, doing basically nothing. My housemates brought me hardboiled eggs, and that was almost all I ate for the duration. But after a while my depression was replaced by anger. The anger is what finally got me out of the house.”

I asked whether he’d been called to serve.

“Not that I know of. But sometimes you don’t even know, you know? I mean, if your fingers aren’t bloody stumps and your boots aren’t muddy, who’s to say? But that’s not the point anyway. It’s the principle. I objected. Fundamentally.”

When he resumed his rounds, he did so with a new purpose. Though not letting on to anyone on either side, he began to store information in a more directed way, ask more pointed questions. Still, he wasn’t getting anywhere.

“And that’s when I heard about the initials.”

“DC.”

“Yeah. And when those started cropping up I pretty quickly realized that I’d discovered my purpose. That I’d finally figured out what I’d come here to do.”

“Which is find Cooper.”

“Which is help Dale Cooper lead a counteroffensive in whatever way possible! I have no idea how I’ll be able to help, exactly, but I’m assuming my connections, my inside knowledge—”

My expression must have given me away, though I tried to hide it. And strangely, it was not pity for his ignorance I felt, but true sadness, as though it were me, not Mitch, who had lost something dear.