Fathoms Five 2/2
____________________
It was one more beautiful day. Scully untwisted the sheet from her
ankle and padded into the bathroom. Mulder stood at the sink in his
boxer shorts anointing his armpit, a toothbrush protruding from the
corner of his mouth. He turned on the faucet for cover noise so she
could pee. Scully picked up her panties with her toes and overhanded
them into the hamper, ran her hand down Mulder's silky back as she
turned on the shower. He muttered something around his toothbrush.
She stood under the lukewarm water and looked at the little sky blue
window lined with shampoo bottles, and felt the small shift in water
pressure as he rinsed his toothbrush. Mulder pulled open the shower
curtain and leaned in for a kiss, eyes wandering downward. "Breakfast
in twenty."
Scully smiled, idly washing.
Mulder took her chin and looked at her hard, and kissed her again,
making it stick. The curtain snapped closed and a draft swirled over
her, and the bathroom door was shut.
_________________
They brushed a few fallen grape leaves aside and sat around the low
table in the arbor. Scully lifted a cobalt glass of orange juice,
letting the sunlight drip into it. Mulder doled out scrambled eggs,
toasted buttered bagels, sliced strawberries and kiwi.
William put down Robinson Crusoe and picked up the paper and rumpled
it around. "Mom, say you're on a desert island."
"Hmm?" Scully asked.
"... You can only take three books."
"Does the encyclopedia count as one book?" Mulder asked.
"I don't want to be on a desert island," Scully said.
"If you're stuck on one with me you won't be needing any books,"
Mulder said, working his eyebrow.
"Three books, Mom," William pressed.
Scully's eyes moved back and forth between them. "The OED," she said.
"That's one."
"Could she have thirty years of The New England Journal of Medicine
bound together in one volume?" Mulder asked. "Would that count?"
"You couldn't lift it," said William.
"Maybe you could start a signal fire."
"You could use it for a raft," said William. "You could brush up on
bursitis while drifting toward the shipping lanes."
"I don't want to be on a desert island," said Scully.
"Mom, what was Dad like when you met him?" William asked, hunched over
his plate.
"He was - " Scully stopped, because it was impossible to think of that
time without remembering the excitement of discovery. She met Mulder's
eyes. "In VICAP they had said that his intuition was scary. He would
be talking about absolutely ridiculous things, and at the same time
giving the impression of being one of the most forthright people you
had ever met in your life. And he lived in this rattly little
apartment, where he slept on the couch like a vampire."
"Vampires don't sleep on the couch," Mulder said curtly, biting into a
bagel.
"You know what I mean." Scully crossed her arms in an X over her
chest. "He was always typing and thinking, and most people annoyed
him, but he would talk to me, and I loved that about him. He would
talk to me like it was important to him that I understood."
"And my apartment wasn't all that rattly," Mulder said. "It was a
stylin' pad."
"It was this dark, musty little stylin' pad," Scully told William,
"down in Old Town Alexandria, with a view of the alley and a bullet
hole in the wall."
Mulder stood up and picked up his plate. "I thought you liked that
apartment. You told me it meant 'me' to you."
"Oh, I did love that apartment," Scully said genuinely.
"Anyway, it doesn't exist anymore."
"What?" Scully asked, half rising.
"They knocked it down," Mulder said lightly, turning through the
French doors.
Scully followed him into the kitchen. "What? How do you know? When?"
Her eyes weren't adjusting to the dark interior.
"Last time I was in D.C., when I stopped to catch up with Skinner. It
was a couple of years ago. I drove by the ol' stomping grounds, and
the building had been demolished."
Scully turned and left the kitchen and went down the steps into the
yard. Halfway down the hillside a bench sat sideways, facing the
neighbor's bitten llama field. Alpacas. Whatever. Scully idled along
the gravel path, plucking at the heads of the tarweed, and settled on
the bench with her arms around one knee. The coastal mist hanging in
the sunlight made her feel dislocated and oddly safe, as if the
outside world had gone away and she had nothing further to worry
about.
It was the thought of that space still existing, hanging on its own in
the air, the swirl of microbes where they had spent so much time
together, a space that meant 'Mulder' to her. How could it be gone?
William might have been conceived there.
William came down the path, barefoot, in shorts, tanned, hung over,
Scully's beautiful son, so fresh in his youth, so mortal and precious.
He sank down beside her, sighing, and rubbed his face.
"Did you feed the ducks?" Scully asked.
"Yes, I fed the ducks." He hunched over, elbows on his thighs, staring
at nothing, and she put her hand on his back.
Scully's old dog came down the path, padding and guilty, one ear
turned inside out.
"What's he have?" The dog had a bit of plastic bag stuck on his tooth.
William freed it. "Has he been into the garbage?" Scully asked, of no
one, and of the universe.
William pulled the dog's lips up into a ferocious curl, growling as he
did it. Old Tash's tail wagged doggedly on. He blinked milkily in the
sunlight. "Scully, Scully, why don't you love me?" William made the
dog say in a high voice.
"I don't want to let myself love you, Tash," Scully said to the dog,
quite seriously, ignoring William. "And I don't ever want to have a
dog again."
Mulder came down the path with two cups of coffee. William threw
himself back and rubbed his face and lay draped backwards over the
bench staring so riveted at the sky that Scully looked up, but there
was nothing there. Mulder sat down on the other side of Scully and put
his arm around her.
"Did you feed those ducks of yours?" Mulder asked over Scully's head.
"Yes, I fed the damn ducks," William said.
"In your bare feet?" Scully asked. "Do you need me to show you a
work-up on hookworm? On avian flu?"
William snorted lazily. Scully was starting to feel the sun, but she
had ceased to seriously sunburn. She leaned back in Mulder's arm. The
ducks came up the path, Indian Runner ducks narrow and upright, with
their dour beaks, two fawn, two blue, peeping as they walked. The fawn
drake had a roguish bandit mask across his eyes, and he faced William,
quacking loudly.
"These ducks don't look fed," said Scully.
"I swear they're fed."
The ducks stood out of reach, commenting among themselves. Tash's tail
thumped and his eyes rolled guiltily at Scully.
"I guess I forgot to tell you about my apartment," Mulder said.
Scully swallowed hard. "I'm sorry, it just - hurts. I mean, Hegal
Place." She sniffed against his neck, chuckled and rubbed her teary
eyes against him.
"So, there's this guy?" Mulder said. "I think he was Russian. He
survived without ill effect a horrific 10,000-volt electric shock
which naturally caused him to arrive at the obvious conclusion that he
was immortal." Mulder paused, and sipped his coffee. "So. He's in his
early forties, he's got years ahead of him, right? Either way. So,
this guy invites the media to watch him drink a litre of anti-freeze."
"So, what happened?" asked William.
Mulder twitched irritably. "What do you think happened? He fell into a
coma and died. Do I need to show you a blood work-up on anti-freeze?"
He glanced at Scully, but all the fight seemed to have gone out of
him. The ducks turned in a squadron and hurried down the hill. William
leapt up and pitched a rock hard across the field.
Mulder got up too, and stood with his hands on his hips. "I'm going to
re-mow it."
William shook his head evasively, standing on one leg and plucking at
the weeds with his curled toes, hands in the pockets of his shorts.
"Why not?" Mulder asked him.
"Don't badger me, Dad. Let it go. It's my portal recipe, not yours."
Mulder grabbed William's arm and put him in a hammerlock. "Yeah, but
it's on my property," he pointed out. William blinked peacefully,
Mulder's arms around him. Mulder put his chin on William's shoulder
and smiled at Scully. "Look, Scully, this kid is going to be bigger
than either of us!"
____________________
"Dad! Dad!" William was yelling, his voice squeaking like Mulder's.
Mulder came to the French doors, his train of thought disrupted,
finger marking the place in a book.
"There's some dogs down by the pond!"
"Well, run 'em off!" Mulder said testily. Scully leaned on the rail.
She could hear the ducks getting upset. Growling angrily, Tash
catapulted past her and shot down the hill, bristled out like a fur
badger, William after him. Mulder perked up, watching, and faded into
the house for a .22 pistol they kept in the porch.
Scully stayed unmoving at the rail. The afternoon had reached that
moment when the day seems endless, the sky white, when boredom sucked
at one's skull like a starfish and people took siestas just to keep
from going mad. She forgot herself, staring out at the expanse, hoping
for a waft of chilly sea air. She still remembered her father's voice,
but the things he had said to her were slipping away. He'd prepared
her for a lot, but nothing like this. He was dead and burned to ashes,
and the ship he sailed would be stripped and hacked up and melted
down, and then only Scully and the ocean would remain.
Mulder sat on the edge of the deck, stripping the pistol's barrel. The
gun was rusting in the sea air. The ducks had settled down. William
came slowly up the hill, swinging a stick at the weeds. Tash came up
the hill very slowly, eyes glazed, panting so hard that his tongue
scrolled. He went into the kitchen with his hind end trembling.
Scully followed him in and dropped a few ice cubes into his water
bowl. "You overdid it, show off. Nobody gets to chase those ducks but
you," she said. The vulnerable back of the dog's head made a tight
fist of love inside her; still, she refused to cut him any slack.
Back out on the deck she leaned on the rail. Mulder had disappeared.
William came up the deck stairs, looking into Scully's eyes. He leaned
beside her on the broad wooden rail. He made a face like Mulder, and
spat into the yard. "It's hard for me to leave him," he said.
"Don't spit," Scully said. "He'll be fine. You have to go out into the
world. That's what he wants for you."
"You won't let him climb on the roof, or get in a gunfight, or - "
William dropped his forehead onto his arms and hunched his shoulders.
Once when William was a child and they were still in Massachusetts,
Mulder was trying to drag a cat off the ridge pole of their precarious
seaside house. William had famously called up, "Why don't you let Mom
do that?"
"I've got him this far," Scully said, rubbing between William's
shoulder blades. His back was vibrant, like horseflesh. He shivered,
and she cupped his neck.
"Remember when he self-prescribed the ducks' Terramycin for his cold?
And I've seen him jump over this railing, onto the lawn, when he was
like, fifty!" William said, smacking the rail. "After a stupid
frisbee."
"He's impetuous," Scully admitted. "He's slowing down a little."
"He hasn't slowed down at all!"
"We'll be in France for his birthday," Scully said dreamily, sliding
her fingers through the ducktails in William's hair. Near the end of
their trip she and Mulder would be house-sitting for several weeks
near Arles, in a villa belonging to Mulder's agent's mother, and they
were both looking forward to it tremendously. They weren't going to do
anything, Mulder had said, but read and write and make love. Maybe a
little cooking. Lots of wonderful walks.
She thought that Mulder wrote like Van Gogh painted, lots of chunky
words that looked like a mess but actually made beautiful sense.
"Because my savoire faire is ooh la la," Mulder said, behind them.
"Because we're relying on Mulder's high school French," said Scully.
There was a rosy strip of sunburn across William's long nose. Scully
licked the flat of her thumb and rubbed at a smudge on his cheek. "You
know, I have to go up in the attic and find my skis," he said, just
barely tolerating her hand on his face.
"You're going to take skis on an airplane?" Mulder asked wearily.
"I think the ski club's going to Chamonix after Michaelmas."
"While you're up there, can you look for a box that says 'raincoats'?"
Scully asked.
____________________
Mulder trailed after him into the dark hallway, steering by the flash
of William's Hawaiian shorts. The terracotta felt damp as peeled
cucumber under his toes. Sun-blind, he opened Scully's old pine
armoire and groped through the tennis rackets and diving gear for a
flashlight. "Hey, while you're up there, see if you can find a little
leather journal. It's about this big," Mulder said, smacking the
flashlight against the heel of his hand. A stream of light wheeled up
the wall and landed on William's face. "Into the perilous unknown,"
Mulder said, and tossed the flashlight up the stairs at him. William's
hands clapped around it. He smiled and turned and leapt upward, his
hand squeaking on the doorframe as he swung around the corner.
Mulder ignored the feet thundering over his head and went quickly into
his study while he had a moment of peace. If he ever had more than two
minutes to write it would be amazing what he'd accomplish.
His third book was a memoir, a grimoire, a survival handbook. It was
roughly disguised reportage of their dark years, in which he referred
to Scully as 'my colleague', when he mentioned her at all, so that she
seemed, in these pages, an articulate shadow calling from the morgue.
Their near-escapes were glossed over in favor of data. Measurements of
skulls and primitive wings, elephant uteruses, x-rays of teeth,
transcribed testimonies, bloated steers, lab readings showing
preposterous spikes. This book would be huge in the underground.
Sometimes it seemed to Mulder that all true intellect belonged to the
underground, to those who ignored mass sentiment.
The X-Files were still classified. He could not publish the book, at
least not now. It would be a live thing in a box, living in limbo,
unread. But at least it would not die with him.
"What is this?" William asked, appearing in the doorway sometime
later, dusty and sweaty.
"Oh, whoa," Mulder said, laying his glasses on the desk. He took the
video tape, which said 'Dana - Cops' on it, in Tara Scully's
handwriting. He weighed it in his hand. "This is a real find, William.
This is perfect. It's exactly what we needed!"
________________
Mulder and William were up to something. Scully heard the jingle of
Mulder's car keys and he came up behind her and slung his arm around
her and pressed up against her so that she felt the soft delicious
weight of him against her lower back. His kiss rang on her ear, and he
was gone.
They were back in an hour, carrying an obsolete television as heavy as
a bale of hay. They shut Scully out of the study. William emerged on
quests for pliers and extension cords. He phoned Arable. He asked
Scully if there was popcorn.
She hardboiled some eggs and made egg salad, and washed some coffee
cups. If Mulder saw her doing the dishes he would say, "Oh, the
wretched scullion in the scullery," and rub her bottom and kiss her
neck while she was trying to work.
Mulder, however, was otherwise engaged. She put the egg salad in the
fridge and opened one of Matthew's beers with a bottle opener, and
went outside. It was twilight. The grape vines were thick around
Mulder's study window, and the light flooded out. She looked down at
the glowing lawn and the shaggy geometric mark on the hill. The ship
would be past by now, beyond her latitude. She tilted back the cold
bottle, her eyes too full of tears to see the stars.
___________________
Mulder was making a huge production out of adapting a glassy-faced TV
to a late '90s VCR he'd found in an L.A. salvage store. He was versed
in the archaic ancestral art of VCR operation, the last surviving
member of his tribe.
"What's going on with her?" William asked from the depths of the old
leather couch. William was watching him with Mulder's own perceptive
eyes, so that Mulder sometimes felt that he was watching himself.
"The ship must be going by. It's got her hypnotized. Hey, could you
find your poor old dad an extension cord?"
"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" William asked, as he got
up.
"What, are you taking notes or something?" Mulder asked.
"No, I'm just wondering about you," William said softly.
"Well, I guess taking you back from the Van de Kamps was about the
meanest thing I've ever done to anyone, and I'm saying this despite
the fact that I've taken lives. I've killed people, creatures - "
Mulder took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"Remember in 'Maus'?" he asked, when William reappeared, trailing a
knotted orange extension cord. "Remember the aunt who poisons the
children so they won't be taken to Auschwitz? How did that make you
feel?"
"Well, children were automatically selected at Auschwitz," William
said.
"Yes, but she presumed - " Mulder said. "Didn't you feel angry at
her?"
"What is your point, Dad?" William asked.
"Oh, I don't know, I don't know, never mind." Mulder had his forehead
in his hands.
"You know I'll be back at Christmas," William said.
Mulder nodded, his face in his hands.
"Then brave, brave Sir Mulder, he bravely ran away," William sang
softly, trying to make Mulder laugh.
"It was just that that little boy never had a chance," Mulder said.
"Can you imagine what it's like to live with that?"
"What if I never see Tash again?" William asked, a little
aggressively.
"He's not going to die before Christmas," Mulder said firmly. "He's
only thirteen."
"We've had him since I was five."
"We've had him since I was forty-five," Mulder said. "Believe me, it
never gets easier."
"If I'm not here, I want you to bury him by the bench."
"That's what I was thinking," said Mulder.
"Bury him by the snake."
Mulder nodded. "It's a nice spot. I'd like to be buried there by the
dog and the snake, with a nice view of the sky. It'd certainly
confound the archaeologists, like the Neanderthals buried with
wildflowers."
"Grandpa Scully was buried at sea," said William.
"Just his ashes," said Mulder. "And ten minutes after his funeral your
mom got on a plane to North Carolina to interview a psychopath on
death row. She didn't even change her clothes."
William nodded and lay with his arms folded, looking up at the window.
Mulder turned on the television and set it on channel three. The VCR
head drums began to accelerate. "I don't even know why we're bothering
to do this," he said. "This is almost without doubt heat-damaged or
demagnetized."
"That's the spirit," William said distantly.
"Hey, let's re-mow the spiral," Mulder said, snapping the STOP button.
William shook his head.
"I don't want to lose it," Mulder insisted. The grass was growing up
thickly in the brush cutter's paths.
"It makes Mom feel strange." William's hair drifted across one of his
eyes. "She feels like it's a signal to outer space or something."
"Did she tell you that?"
William shook his head, avoiding his father's eyes.
If there was one thing Scully cherished above all else, it was her
privacy and her anonymity. Mulder remembered her face when they saw
the aerial footage on TV, and knew William was right.
"She's being weird about me continuing to take guitar lessons."
"Take what you want, it's your life," Mulder said.
"It's your money," said William.
"It's my dad's blood money," said Mulder. "The first William Mulder.
Maybe it'll finally be used for something worthwhile."
_____________________
They made popcorn and conglomerated in Mulder's study that evening
after Scully had walked the dog and William had loaded the dishwasher.
"Are you sure you want to watch this?" he asked Scully, as she settled
demurely into the black leather couch.
"No, I'm not sure at all," Scully said, calmly eating popcorn. She
chuckled a little, almost giddy. William and Arable sat on the Indian
rug at her feet. Mulder put on his glasses to look at the remote,
pushed them on top of his head and hit 'play'. The tape crackled and
then ran smoothly. Mulder was standing around in the way, fiddling
with the tracking. "Mulder, sit down!" she said.
Mulder paused the tape. "Just to put this in context, this was in our
seventh year together on the X-Files. The year is two thousand. Ought
ought. February, I think. We flew out to L.A. on the night of the full
moon, against, it shall be noted, Scully's better judgment. But, as
you'll see, my concerns weren't completely unfounded, although nothing
conclusive came of the case."
"And, for the record, it was never officially honored under the aegis
of the FBI," added Scully, "so it was never a case."
"Well, it was an X-File," Mulder argued.
"Just play the tape, Mulder," Scully said.
"This is a bastardized Bob Marley song," Mulder said, sitting down
beside Scully. "Would you like me to crack open the Chateau Blanc?" he
asked her. "Or how about some coffee?"
"Oh, my god, oh, my god," Scully said, staring at the TV. "Watch this,
William. Here it comes... here it comes...there we are!"
William and Arable screamed with laughter.
"What? What's so funny?" Scully asked.
"They're just excited," said Mulder.
"Wow, Mulder," Arable said, glancing back at him.
"What," Mulder said grouchily.
"You were really handsome, Dad," said William.
"He's handsome now," Scully stated, "if you were implying that he's
not." She rubbed Mulder's leg.
"Thank you, Scully," said Mulder.
"I mean, but whoa, Dad," William said. "You guys were, like, cops!"
"But cooler," said Mulder. "FBI." He pretended to hold up a badge.
"Oh! The camera adds ten pounds," Scully said sadly.
"To you or to me?" Mulder asked. "Scully, I hate to burst your little
bubble of insecurity, but you look incredible on TV."
Arable turned around. "So, were you guys like going out at this
point?"
"'Going out'?" Scully pronounced coldly.
"Well, um, I mean, William was born not long after this, wasn't he?"
Arable asked nervously, poking William deeply in the shoulder as she
forced her eyes meet Scully's.
"We were partners in the FBI," Scully said stiffly. "We had a
professional working relationship."
Mulder snorted.
Scully looked at him.
"Well, Arable's obviously done the math," he said. "Scully, could be
you've got some 'splainin' to do."
"I'm not explaining anything to anybody," Scully said. The little
Mulder and Scully on the screen were arguing in the street.
By the time Mulder kicked open the door they were all sagging
sleepily. "Look at that, it took me ten minutes to kick down that
door. What was wrong with me?" Mulder complained.
"You were just tired," Scully said, rubbing his leg. "It was also the
night you saw a topless woman and flushed a toilet on national
television." She leaned her head against the back of the couch and
they contemplated each other.
"What's tomorrow, " Mulder asked dreamily. "The Waccamaw?"
"Your job was just amazing - " Arable said, struck. "This is what you
should put in your book!"
"It's still classified," Mulder said, playing with Scully's necklace.
"What was it like, being in the FBI?" William asked.
"It was a very difficult time," Scully said, trying to explain. She
patted Mulder's thigh in emphasis. "It was probably the hardest time
of our lives. We lost family members, friends - it was very dangerous.
But," she said, warming, "the work was so incredible, so amazing, as
terrifying as it could be sometimes, that - "
"It was a very happy time, too," said Mulder. "Because we were
together - "
"Yes," said Scully, looking into his eyes. "It was dangerous and it
was happy. But we had found each other, and we were together..."
"No matter what," said Mulder.
"Yes," said Scully, forgetting herself. Mulder nuzzled her softly.
Arable looked quickly away. William rolled onto his side and pulled
the dog into his arms and gazed into his eyes.
"You know, I picked that dog out for William, singled him out of a
whole box of puppies, but he still loves Scully the best," Mulder
said.
"If by picking out a puppy you mean looking into the eyes of the one
puppy who's standing there looking at you, and then reaching out and
picking him up and walking away. No examination of his gums or the
toe-pinch test."
"Because I didn't care about his gums or his stoicism," Mulder said.
"He was Sir Prince Tashtego Mangelwurzel Mulder, or whatever William
named him. He was the one for us."
"You always know how to humble me, don't you?" Scully said.
"I don't mean to. It's just that we all have our own puppy-picking
methods."
"When I think of Jesus, I picture Mulder," Arable said suddenly, and
put her head down on her knees when they all looked at her.
"Well, that's delightfully sacrilegious," Mulder said.
"You mean the feeling he gives you," William said to Arable.
"Yeah."
"Any guy who can turn water into wine can't be all bad," Mulder said
agreeably, still wrapped up in Scully.
____________________
At dawn, William's car putted away down the hill. The old dog stood at
the top of the drive and howled into the void.
Ten minutes later Mulder and Scully broke apart and lay getting their
breath back, staring into the dusty sunlight that fell across the bed.
He stroked her body and she caught his hand and gripped it, a wordless
sex-communique.
Mulder was right-handed; he needed to be on the other side of her, so
they rolled lazily into position. Her eyes were closed, and he cradled
her in the crook of his left arm, kissing her temple, and let the
friction of his fingers take over. He curled his long finger inside
her.
By the time she pressed her hand over his Mulder was breathing as hard
as she was. She turned quickly and pressed her mouth to his, tongues
slipping against each other, and she cried out into his mouth. They
kissed and kissed. This multiple-orgasm thing was a sure sign she was
stressed and upset.
They heard the ducks quacking and Mulder sucked his fingers and dried
them on the sheet.
"We're going to have to move again," she said. Her face contorted and
she turned away.
"It's a good time for it, anyway," he said gently.
"I might go back to school, Mulder," she said, rallying, and wiping
her eyes on the sheet.
"Just like Rodney Dangerfield?" Mulder asked, rubbing her belly.
"I want to do some more advanced research into a couple of things. I
need to keep up with William's work."
"We'll go wherever you need to." He leaned down and kissed her pale
fluttery skin, chilly as a cloud. "What's this about you discouraging
William's musical interests?"
"I haven't discouraged him; it's just that the point of Oxford is to
concentrate on one subject without distractions. Total immersion."
"He can also tell you the lineup at Monterey Pop in '69; it's not like
he's limited to one avenue," Mulder argued. "He's got other interests
than physics. I don't think he should just be shut off like that."
"I guess I keep coming back to something Mrs. Peacock said to me. She
said that I wouldn't understand what love was until I had a son who
would do anything for me."
"Scully, I think Mrs. Peacock was hinting darkly at something far
oogier than you can imagine."
"All the same, Mulder, in many ways she was right. Do you think that's
why we had him? To save me?"
"You can't think that way," Mulder said. "William's got his own life
to live. He needs to get away from us. He's us, but he's not us. You
can't help it that he's such a good kid, and that he's going to help
you, but it's not the reason he was born. I don't want you feeling any
guilt over William. Was I born just to search for Samantha? You know
there's more to it than that."
Scully rolled over against him and put her arm around his neck, her
breathy mouth against the side of his face, wet patch of hair against
his belly. "I want to do it again."
"No, you don't." Mulder pressed her onto her back, and put his fingers
on her breastbone, holding her still. Scully's wet, wild eyes stared
up at him. The panic slid out of her slowly. He brushed her hair out
of her eyes. "No, you don't," he whispered.
_____________________
"You know what I feel like? An Orange Crush. Do they still make that?"
asked Mulder, on the freeway. "Remember it endlessly circulating in
those plastic box-things?"
"I suppose it still exists," said Scully. Mulder was on an orange
kick. He picked out orange-scented dish soap and he squeezed halved
oranges over salsa, over salads, or into his beer. He claimed that
orange oil repelled termites. He had plans to rub essential orange oil
into Scully's labia as a sexual stimulant, although they hadn't gotten
around to it yet.
"It's so weird when they stop making stuff," said William.
"Yeah. Remember Cherry Coke?"
"Yeah. Remember Pepsi One?"
"Remember Tab?" Mulder asked. "Remember A&W root beer?" he asked
Scully. "Remember Nehi?"
"Jeez, you're ancient," said Arable. "'Remember sarsaparilla? Remember
the Model T?'"
There was a silence. Scully looked over her shoulder and Arable
blushed, jiggling her shoe against the console between the seats.
William was impenetrable behind a pair of movie star sunglasses, a
piece of licorice stuck in his lips. Even slumped in the backseat he
had a quietly efficient air.
"So, tell me again how they scrap a ship," said Matthew. It occurred
to her that William's shaggy haircut exactly mirrored Matthew's hair.
"Well, they cut it up with blow torches. This is superior steel, and
they'll melt it down," Scully said, craning around, her hand on the
back of Mulder's seat.
"They're taking it through the Panama Canal, because we don't have a
salvage yard on the West Coast," William said. "It's going to Texas."
"This is breaking my Dad's heart," Matthew commented.
"Oh, I know," Scully said sadly. She looked over at Mulder. "I
remember A&W root beer." She reached over and stroked his hand. The
kids watched from the back seat.
"Hey, baby, I'd like to get you in my Model T," said Mulder.
William was struck. "God, imagine, like, being married," he whispered.
"Oh, I know," said Arable.
"Imagine having a baby."
"Oh, my God!" said Arable, appalled.
Matthew spoke up. "Hey, isn't this the freeway in America most
commonly frequented by serial killers?"
Scully said, "Maybe," looking out her window.
Getting permission to board the ship in San Diego had been a reflexive
action she really regretted. Her brother had called her from Scotland
when the ship was struck from the Navy list, and Scully went into high
gear because the USS Waccamaw was venerable, a veteran of the Cuban
Blockade, and she wanted William to see it. On the base at Miramar she
had waited with the other children for the ship to appear after months
of absence, its fog whistle reaching across the water, calling out to
them.
It was going to be hard to bear seeing the rusty, outdated beast,
riding on its moorings and awaiting its fate. It would be dry-docked
and torn apart at the joints, it would become bridges and slag.
"You know that old Indian rug in my Dad's office?" William said.
"There's bloodstains on it."
"I had that rug cleaned," said Mulder.
"Will, nobody uses the term 'Indian' any more," Scully said.
"Except the Indians," said Mulder.
"Human blood," William said.
"Jesus, William, where are you getting this?" Mulder snapped. "That
rug is clean."
"The stains are visible under fluoroscene enhancement. Mom showed me."
Mulder looked at Scully. "I was showing him how the equipment worked,"
she said apologetically.
"You know, my dad helped catch Monty Props back in the '80s. And he
caught a serial killer called John Lee Roche. He caught a guy who ate
people's livers."
"My God, who does that?" hissed Arable.
"William," said Mulder from the front seat. "The violent deaths of
innocent people are not a matter of entertainment."
"Yeah. I know, sorry," said William.
"I mean, we can learn from these events. It's acceptable to be
curious."
Scully swiveled around and peered into the back seat. "The thing to
remember is that modern society creates people who are not really
human. They're out there walking around, but there's something
essential missing in them. You can't usually tell - I mean, they look
like you or me."
Mulder stretched his legs a little, glancing at her fondly. "Well,
they don't usually look like you, Scully."
She felt strange. She always felt a little off; perpetually she felt
the psychic unease of deja vu. She seemed to walk around in a
protracted off day. Her reflexes had become like lightning in her late
thirties, after William was born. If something fell from a shelf her
hand shot out and caught it before she knew what was happening.
During that gray tunnel of time when they did not have William she had
felt the ghostly let-down of milk in her breasts every time she
thought of him, and the irrevocable love strong as anger, like a
sexual pull. She wanted her hands on him and his skin against hers,
she reached for him in her sleep; she wanted to smell him and watch
for Mulder in his face. She madly loved his froggy legs and his little
penis and the back of his baby neck. She wanted to look into his eyes
and see again that someone knew her on her truest level.
Scully looked between the back seats, her hand on Mulder's headrest.
How children changed! They were like different people at different
ages. William narrowed his rainy day eyes and transferred his gaze to
the prism sparkle of broken glass packed along the freeway dividers.
He hadn't told Scully he'd miss her, although he'd been saying as much
to Mulder for weeks. Mulder was the one they all loved. Scully was
always the toughest parent, poring over report cards for half an hour,
standing over dentists. She would be around forever. Mulder was the
one you wrestled with in the tall grass, Mulder was the one you would
miss.
Normally they would stop in San Diego and see Grandma Scully, who was
in a care facility. Scully stopped to visit when she could, just for
the joy of getting into a niggly fight over nothing with someone who
knew her so well.
Mulder had his hand on her thigh, his eyes on the road. They'd taken
so many trips this way, Mulder's hand in hers, their miracle baby
bored in the back. Scully would fall into a dream, something close to
sleep, Mulder's thumb tracing the lines inside her hand, like a secret
map he must frequently consult, William slurping at ice with a soft
drink straw until one of them requested he not.
Holding hands with Mulder was still the best feeling in the world,
just as nice as it had felt back in the stone age days when they'd
pretended that holding hands might be something FBI agents did to
comfort each other.
She remembered those distant years when they'd traveled together,
dressed to the nines, carrying on formal discussions, turning to stare
into each other's eyes. They hadn't really known each other then, she
liked to think, but the truth was, they'd always known each other.
Even during her first few days on the job she'd felt a strong
attachment to him, as if he were the character in a novel she'd just
read.
They'd driven together and slept in separate rooms, stared at
identical ceilings. They'd gone all over the country thus, and to
Siberia and Antarctica and Africa, their only real contact a little
polite CPR. Her cancer took a turn for the worse, and he briefly
gripped her hand. He'd kissed her hand, gazed profoundly into her
eyes, and she'd thought: Of all the times to be dying, Dana.
After the Bureau they'd thrown themselves into their present life as
if it were a mission, a case. William was their eighteen-year X-File.
As ever, it was a joint effort. Scully recorded his inoculations in
her journal, and Mulder somehow came up with two hundred popsicle
sticks at eight o'clock on a school night.
Upon their move to California, Mulder had encountered Marty Glenn on a
shimmery L.A. sidewalk three thousand miles from the place they'd last
seen each other. Marty ran a down-at-heel cinema on Broadway, showing
mostly Antonioni and Fellini, films Scully couldn't imagine actually
paying money to watch.
Marty'd had a crush on Mulder the first time, too, and Scully could
just imagine how he'd talked to her, his voice getting softer as he
drew her gently into his trap. She was well aware of Mulder's ability
to charm. Scully had chaperoned him the second time, braced for a
black-and-white film about French children or Werner Herzog Eats His
Shoe.
Naturally, she and Marty Glenn had nothing to say to each other, but
Scully was strangely liberated by each encounter, her freakish youth
gone unrecognized. The invisibility felt good, and she went back with
Mulder and William to watch This Island Earth, (1955). Marty sat in
the ticket booth, pushing the speaker button when it was her turn to
talk. She looked over Mulder's shoulder and smiled with joy, her toes
wiggling in the yellow coat of an overweight seeing eye dog whose
training was slipping.
Scully really couldn't blame women who got crushes on Mulder. Scully
had allowed her own crush on Mulder to completely control her life
from day one, and so on unto infinity. Resistance is futile, Earth
Woman.
Scully didn't want to feel invisible. When Mulder was looking down at
her, incredibly tender, fingertips slow against her skin, she would
begin to feel that he couldn't really see her, that he was touching a
glass surface inches away. She had practically chewed him up a few
times, sideways across the bed, wanting to feel him, to feel real, to
come back to life.
She imagined this was the way the layers had begun to build up, why
Fellig had always felt a mile away when she talked to him. Fellig, her
curiosity over Fellig: another instance of her undoing. She'd always
known the thing with Mulder would go too far, end in dark distortion;
she just hadn't imagined this.
With Marty it was as if the layers had always been there, and were
easily compensated for by a superior sense of personality. Scully
didn't feel any different to Marty, because nothing, truly had
changed. She was the same old Scully inside.
____________________
He considered time a medium, a syrup of memory, the round and round
gyre of the sea. Scully, of course, was profoundly Newtonian: time was
invariant, chronic, untold.
Mulder liked to keep his options open. He imagined the lifespans of
philosophies, one giving into the next, new enlightenment built on the
old. You could go backward along the chain, see the archaeopteryx's
stone feathers come back to life, because nothing really dies.
He bit his thumbnail and watched the three young people fan out across
the marine terminal's vast loading dock, kicking a pebble between
them. Mulder waited at the car while Scully took on the port
authority. She could get through life without an FBI badge, her eyes
deadlier than cyanosis, but Mulder was still missing his, twenty years
on.
Everything dies. Who said that?
She was making straight for him now, wearing her sunglasses,
everything under control. Mulder hated when he couldn't see her eyes.
He leaned against the car, blotting her out with his shoulder.
Half-glimpsed, she wasn't quite substantial, her orange soda hair
glinting blue, as if she masqueraded under opposite colors, like
colors printed off-set in a comic book. Like the feeling of a small
child drinking water from his hand, catching a half-certain glimpse of
her made his stomach tingle.
She brushed something from his shoulder. William was jogging toward
them.
"How did you get permission?" he asked.
"I'm a Navy brat," she said. "There's a password."
"Be like Dad - keep Mum," Mulder said, looping his binoculars around
his neck.
"I'm a Navy brat, too," said Matthew, linking his arm through
Scully's. They walked into a city of shipping containers.
"What am I, then?" asked William.
"You're an FBI squib, an X-Files sprog," Mulder said. They came out of
an alley of cans and took a faceful of ocean air. A graceful bight of
mooring cable curved up the side of an enormous ship.
"Is that it? Is that it?" William asked breathlessly. "It's huge!"
Scully caught up with him and rubbed his back to calm herself.
The ship rose above them, immense, tight and musical as a cathedral
bell, the prow curling outward like a petal. Hundreds of feet above
the main deck the great crosses of the radar towers supplicated above
the sea. Mulder recalled the Norwegian Sea years ago, an absolute
nightmare assuaged only by Scully's presence.
"It's a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser," Scully said. "Seven
hundred feet long, ten thousand tons of displacement, and it used to
pack some fairly serious warheads."
"You're not surprised by how big it is?" Mulder asked.
"I've been on it before," Scully said tightly. Captain Scully and his
father-daughter issues and his monstrous warship would ever remain an
enigma for Mulder. He'd never met the man. He really only knew him in
terms of his aphorisms, which Scully brought forth from time to time.
Matthew said, "Dana," and turned her, arm around her, as Mulder held
up the camera. Scully's mouth snapped shut. The blank alien eyes of
her sunglasses returned nothing. He photographed the two of them in
the shadow of the ship, although he knew the picture would never make
it to the computer.
William was so excited he loped ahead. Mulder and Scully exchanged a
look of amusement. Arable ran after him, and Matthew strolled along,
pausing to spit in the harbor.
Mulder and Scully slowly climbed the cleated gangplank. "And you
claimed I'd never take you on cruise," Mulder said, tugging on the
back of her jacket. Just the thought of boarding a ship made him
queasy. The water below them looked as thick and greasy as soup, and
the ship sighed and heaved against the tires that padded the quay.
"What about the Bermuda Triangle?" Scully asked over her shoulder.
On deck, she folded her sunglasses and put them in her pocket. He
stood examining her glorious teary eyes as she silently asked him for
answers he didn't have. "Hey," he said, and stroked the place beneath
her chin that made her eyes close and her lips get soft and when he
had her just right he kissed her, but not as much as she wanted him
to.
"Well, I'll be topside," he said, standing back and slapping his thigh
with his newspaper.
She cleared her throat. "Do you have any idea what that means?" she
asked.
Their smiles slid slowly forth. "Don't worry, you'll make a sailor of
me yet, Scully," he said.
Up on the flight deck, he crossed the helipad and leaned on the rail.
He was far above the water, wind at the back of his neck. Ballast
water gouted from a valve in the side of the ship, likely laden with
invasive seaweeds and foreign disease. They, too, had a right to
exist. There were proper frameworks for existence, and things that
denied the frame.
The oily black water was slack. If he leaned farther into the wind he
could take a long slow half-gainer down into the drink. What was left
of him would turn up in a few days, nibbled and pale and hard to
identify, no longer with a care in the world. People would say it was
a selfish act. Was it selfish to lose ones balance? Was it selfish to
carelessly drown in the middle of writing a book? To experiment with
handguns? To put ones head in the oven when you had a living child?
He found a capstan beyond the helipad where the flat anvil prow jutted
over the water. He tried to read. The wind jerked at his newspaper and
the light was too bright. A jet-propelled feeling hit him every time
he thought of Europe. William and Scully had been packing for weeks,
but Mulder hadn't even begun to think what he should take.
He slid a sunflower seed into his mouth and sucked the salt from the
shell. He would need his writing notebook. Something to give Arable
when they parted, so that she'd never forget him. His fossilized
megalodon tooth, maybe. His sea monster key ring. He'd write her a
note. She was quite a kid, shiningly smart, nervous and lonely. He'd
been there; she'd be all right.
It wasn't that he didn't want to go to Europe. It was just that the
timing was off. The spark plugs in the lawnmower would corrode.
William's hillside mathematics, like a giant's equation, would be lost
forever, the grass grown out and fading in the heat.
Nor did it seem right to leave the dog, who had given them his whole
life and his whole heart without hesitation.
He needed a parting gift for William, too, to keep his spirits up. His
two-volume Complete Far Side, maybe, except it would be awful to lug
overseas. Just one Far Side cartoon, then, 'Mutants on the Bounty', or
one of the scientist ones where they'd crossed out the name in the
caption and written in 'Scully', laughing for ten minutes at Scully's
expense.
He'd never had a better time than with William. He wanted the boy to
break away, to have his own life, but he knew that wasn't the way it
worked.
He thought he would make a study of all the things that watch us from
above, satellites and birds and God and news helicopters. He would
like to go over the earth like an albatross, until a crossbow brought
him down.
Scully crossed the helipad clasping a small wooden box. He slid
sideways on the broad capstan and she settled down against him and he
wrapped his arms around her and tucked his face into her neck. She
shivered. He rubbed her belly as her breathing slowed, and for the
first time in days he felt her relax.
"Did the kids find Grandpa Scully's bunk?" he asked.
Scully smiled without opening her eyes. "They're up in the gun turret
right now, fending off Kamikazes and submarines. And they were
variously impressed with the mess decks and a Japanese vending
machine. The barber chairs. The cinema. All those toilets in a row in
the head."
Mulder kissed her hair, read a few paragraphs about problems with
Afghanistan's Ring Road, then kissed her hair again. In the sunlight
he could see freckles faint as toasted sugar on the bridge of her
nose. She found the camera in his pocket, and sat with her hands
cupped around the screen. Mulder heard clicking and the tiny buzz as
she deleted every picture she was in, a practice he had to silently
tolerate.
Mulder liked to think that he could forgive Scully anything, but that
it was in her nature to put him to the test. He did not like to think
in terms of love because love was an unavoidable fact of nature; once
dyed into one's deep tissue there was nothing to be done about it. He
did not love Scully so much as he could not eradicate her. He could no
more exist without her than he could without his liver, or so he
fondly imagined. He would never, ever tire of looking at her face.
His latest task was to remove himself from geocentrism. He was not the
center of anything, nor was his planet. Nothing about his life
mattered an iota, not even Scully. This enormous solid ship would be
cut up for scrap. Mulder's body would get old. Inside he would feel
exactly the same. Scully would look the same but not feel the same.
Already, she did not feel the same inside.
"What's that you've got there?" he asked.
She opened the little teak box and revealed a dial that looked like a
clock's face ringed in brass. "It's a marine chronometer. They
insisted I have it."
Mulder stroked the small brass impulse roller. Surely it was too
antique to have been used on a modern cruiser, every inch of which
appeared to be thickly glopped with camouflage gray. "Do you think he
used it?"
"I don't know," she breathed, teary. She closed the box and he kissed
the rough edge of her hair at her cold temple. William shouted above
them.
Mulder looked up, leaning backwards. William and Arable were hanging
over a rail high above.
"Hey" William shouted.
"Ahoy there," called Mulder.
"Hey, Arab wants to know about you guys - was it love at first sight?"
"No," called Mulder.
"Emphatically no," Scully whispered.
"She thought I was crazy. We were just friends for a long, long,
time," Mulder called.
William and Arable exchanged a veiled glance.
"A very long, long time," Scully murmured.
"That movie last night was weird," William called.
"Yeah, well, that wasn't a movie - that was real life," Mulder pointed
out.
"Yeah, well, real life is weird."
"It is," Mulder agreed.
"I don't want to ruin your lives," Scully said.
Mulder sighed, and folded his paper.
"Look at me."
She turned under his arm and looked straight into his eyes.
"This is it, right now. Breathe in," he said. "Scully? Have you ever
doubted me?"
Scully sounded like she was spitting out a sunflower shell.
He pressed his face into her hair and smiled too. "Let's rephrase
that," he said. "Has there ever been a phenomenon we haven't prevailed
over?"
"I'm not so sure we got the better of those mothmen," Scully said.
"Can I borrow those?" William asked, panting as he came up. He
unlooped Mulder's binoculars from around his neck. Matthew strolled
past, knuckling William's cheek, his deck shoes lashed with
forest-green paint.
"Conquistadors," said Mulder. "We had to snuggle for warmth and you
sang 'Froggie Went A-Courtin'."
"Mom sang?" William asked, nearby, binoculars to his eyes. "Were dogs
howling for miles?"
"Oh, ha ha," Scully said coldly.
"The Dylan version or the old spiritual?"
"No, it wasn't 'Froggie Went A-Courtin'," Scully said. She snapped her
fingers.
"Jeremiah Smith was a bullfrog, da da," Mulder sang. "That always
makes me think of 'The Big Chill.'"
"That's Three Dog Night," said William.
"When it doesn't make me think of Scully's un-government-sanctioned
snuggling of me in the woods," said Mulder.
"It's actually called 'Joy to the World'," said William.
"Let's just say that you get all your musical talent from me, me boy,"
Mulder said happily. He tightened his arms around Scully.
"What about the conquistadors?" William asked.
"Breathe in," Mulder murmured into Scully's hair. "This is it, right
now."
She inhaled the wet salt air, ripe with rot and metal.
"Now, breathe out," he said, whispering against her neck. And as she
exhaled he could feel the wave of time that continuously pedaling her
away through the dark stars, and he clung to her. He opened his eyes
to make it check, and sunlight stabbed into him.
"I think this boat is sinking," he commented. "This rusty bucket of
bolts."
"It's just full of bilge. They're pumping it out."
"We'll sink right here in the harbor. It'd be the story of my life."
Mulder saw the three of them lined up at the rail before him, so fresh
and so beautiful in their temporary youth, all fallen into a daze at
the sunlight fracturing on harbor water. Matthew rubbed his scratchy
chin and yawned. Arable leaned into William, whispering. Mulder
recognized the nonchalant lean, the casual whisper of determined
just-friends; he knew the intense beauty of the person you dared not
touch.
"The kids are starving, Mulder, let's go," Scully said, without
opening her eyes.
He held up the camera, but it was hard to see the screen in the bright
light, and he took it on faith that it would capture the wind and the
three young people in the bow of the old ship.
"I know you think you're the only one going through this," he said to
her.
She twitched argumentatively in his arms.
"You know as well as I do that the baby was a miracle," he said.
She nodded, after a moment.
"And miracles always happen for a reason," he said.
Scully looked down and opened the box again. Mulder could see his own
reflection in the glass dial, his forehead wrinkling worriedly. He
looked healthy enough, maybe he weighed a little more than he had ten
years ago. He was aging. This seemed a touching thing to him: the
process of aging as endearing proof of being alive. He was not such a
bad guy, when you got to know him. I'll miss me when I'm gone, he
thought.
He thought of time as a medium in which you could move, forwards or
back. In various mythologies the standard of enlightenment meant
learning that you had had the answer the whole time, that it was
always right there in front of you. The answer was you, the answer was
her. The answer was yes.
William looked at them over his shoulder, hair spiking in the wind.
The swells rose up and the rusty ship shifted beneath them, and Mulder
swallowed woozily and held onto Scully. William gripped the rail and
gasped, his eyes on his parents. "Oh, Mom, I'm going across the
ocean!"
____________________
'Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.'
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest
________________
You would not even be reading this story were it not for Khyber, who
blew the dust off, offered some very sensible suggestions, and
encouraged me to post it. Jenn was a fantastic sounding board, and
produced extensive, thought-provoking meta. JET swooped in at the
eleventh hour with brilliant, scintillating beta and basically blessed
the whole endeavor and saved my sorry behind in more ways than I care
to enumerate.
None of these three let me off the hook for a second. They kept me
honest. They made me a whole person. I owe them everything and they
owe me nothing. You get the picture.
The title derives from a childhood mishearing of Shakespeare's phrase.
A fathom equals six feet. In the old days anything dropped into five
fathoms of water - thirty feet - was irretrievably lost. Rather
appropriately, the phrase is also used to mean something like
'irretrievably sunken in despair'.
- Hey, I didn't say this was a happy story!
I do love all of you. Thanks for reading!