Special Agent Dale Cooper, FBI

A delivery, at the apartment that is at least nominally Dale Cooper's, comes the day after the Tupperware party:

Blue irises in a cut-glass vase, with elegant lines and a simple pattern.

There's no note.

He'd suggested a game of chess.

Their cups -- tea and coffee -- sit by the pieces they've taken. Moiraine has more. Cooper's mind isn't really on the game.

Pete Martell was supposed to join them out on the Pearl Lakes for some fishing; Pete got taken down by laryngitis.

So it's Cooper and Harry in the boat. Cooper sits in the bottom on a life-vest; to the observant eye, it's clear Cooper is spending more time meditating than fishing.

Seven forty-five in the morning, when Moiraine Sedai comes to Twin Peaks, and the very first thing Dale Cooper does is drive her to the Bookhouse, funny sound in his engine be damned. Once she's safely asleep in the back room, under the guard of one of the boys, Cooper calls the sheriff's station and tells Lucy that they'll need to get somebody else to make the donut run, and he needs to see Harry, immediately.

Hours pass. Cooper conferences, explains what he knows, tells Harry and Hawk what they'll need.

The small bed is behind a wall dividing the back room into two sections. Cooper sits on the other side of that wall with a book and a cup of coffee to hand. He's begun to get his concentration back; he hasn't had to restart a chapter in several hours.

Summertime, and the living is easy. It's not bad, certainly. Cooper is commuting down the road from Twin Peaks to Colville a few days a week to assist in an ongoing drug operation -- a gift from Gordon Cole's interim replacement; apparently Gordon was able to leave a few notes in files and a few bugs in people's ears before going on administrative leave. It's enough to let Cooper stay in Twin Peaks; it's enough to keep Cooper happy.

He's started doing the daily donut runs for the sheriff's station as well, before heading south. He does them even on the mornings his presence isn't requested -- it's nice to have structure, and it's good to keep a finger on the pulse of the town.

That's in the mornings, though. Evenings are meditation, reading, research. He could use a hobby or two; in a few months, he tells himself. Tonight he's in the Bookhouse, sitting at the round table, with two things in front of him. One thing is a shoebox. It's filled with microcassettes; he's sorting them.

The other thing is a mostly untouched longneck, beaded with condensation; it's a poor pale ale that never did anybody any harm, and soon it's not going to be any good any more. Somewhere deep and unconscious Cooper figures it'll just prove his point that beer isn't any good anyway. He also figures that a beer seems required, considering recent events. It's like a wake. Sometimes mindfulness, loving kindness, detachment -- sometimes they come a little hard.

There's no glow around the door.

Cooper puts a hand on the knob, and turns: the door is wide open, and it's not that the wards know him, it's that they're not there.





Any character left to the room is in memory.





Delicately, with no sign that he's doing anything but being careful, taking care, Cooper lowers himself to the floor. He could sit up straight -- he does, he's good at that, he's always very careful about it -- but instead he sits with his back flat against the wall and his legs crossed.

His forearms rest on his knees, his palms turned up.

Cooper tilts his head back against the wall, brown eyes wide open, and stares at the crown molding on the other side of the room.





Harry will come find him, if there's an emergency.

Harry's good like that.

(I hope you know that Harry and I consider you not only a friend, but one of those rare few who shares our ideals.)

Harry doesn't know.

Cooper will tell him.





Later.

What's black and white and red all over?

The answer of answers:

Not the newspaper or the Communist panda. Not the FBI agent in a blender.

The Black Lodge.

***

The vertiginous pattern on the floor never stops -- the black and white stripes, with each stripe coming to a point and receding until it makes a point in the other direction, like so many tessellated and spooning lovers. The red curtains aren't heavy at all. They just hang.

The corridor is so long, and the statue at the end -- the one with the Greek lady, or maybe she's Roman, the one with the missing arms -- it's like the mountains on the horizon: she's not getting any closer.

They walk, Leland Palmer and Josie Packard and Harry S. Truman. They walk, and they walk, and then







His eyes are wrong. Cooper's eyes are wrong. He's stepped out of nowhere, somewhere out of the curtains, and he's got a rictus grin that says he knows everything about you and everything you don't know, and his eyes are wrong -- milky and murky and utterly without sanity.

He points a finger. "mOneY cAn'T bUy yOU LoVE."

Leland is the first one to turn away to where Cooper -- if it is Cooper -- points, and to part the curtains. What's beyond them is a room: black leather chairs, a black leather chaise longue, a floor lamp, another statue --

And the midget in red, and Laura Palmer.

Their eyes aren't wrong.

Glastonberry Grove is a circle of twelve sycamore trees out in the middle of the woods northeast of Twin Peaks. Ordinarily there's a pit in the ground -- a white-rimmed puddle of black.

Today, in the morning, where the birds sing (but there's no music in the air), the pit is full of sand.

Ordinarily Cooper would get there early. Any other rendezvous point, and he'd be the first one there.

Today Dale Cooper very purposefully arrives late, and alone, with a burlap-wrapped rectangle under his arm.