Part 2. Bad Radio

[penumbra23]

2. Bad Radio

They slipped among the dumpsters at the back of the building and into the empty quivering night, jaywalking the shadows up the hill streets, ringing the manhole covers. False planetary lights floated about in the foggy sky. Scully opened her fawn umbrella. Mulder glanced often behind them, his fingers pressed into the suspension muscles of her hard young back.

He liked to look at buildings reflected in puddles. The reflections seemed like truer representations of the buildings; fractured and brighter, impermanent, like a wicked witch in a crystal ball.

Only a few hours earlier he had tossed his apartment looking for the goddamned Boston University tape, which he used to love. But now this particular clanky videotape seemed the final seal upon his new conviction. Carl Sagan had bereft him, damned Sagan and his demon-haunted world, his science-truths; Sagan had been the first to dismiss it all and at the time Mulder had been too sun-blinded by the beauty of all that mystery to listen. He had once loved Sagan's eye for cosmic loveliness and his grasp of the unspeakable broadness of existence, felt the quickening of possibility in his words.

He had found the tape, and then he had looked around for his gun. Properly, he would have gone back up to Quonochontaug, but he was simply too worn out.

He had closed his eyes and recalled in a purely sensory manner Indian-running with Scully, back when she was healthy enough to run; Mulder forging into the wind and snow, blocking the weather for her, taking the sleet in his face. In the lung-burning struggle of running she sometimes stepped on his heel, and it was like she'd grabbed him and cried the world's first word in his ear. He wanted to carry with him into the bardo the feeling of Scully dogging his heel.

In some ways it was odd that she'd even been born a girl - Scully was tougher than either of her brothers, of that he was instinctively certain; she was the one who had gone off to war. A search of her name on the internet indicated that through the mists of time the Scullys were soldiers, wanderers and pikeman; grim Scullys had struggled against the Anglo-Normans, and there was a Scully at Antietam. Their stock was congenitally brave, and often died young.

Of late, Mulder was struck by the fact that even as the redoubtable world grew, the terrain he and Scully defended together had shrunk until they stood back to back on the last column as the dragons writhed up at them and carrion birds screamed down from above.

More and more with each passing day he consulted this accepted version of themselves. Each day he noticed a little more; they were revealed, line by line, like a hand sliding down a page. He thought that the answer was to carry around something inside that was unbeatable, even as they were beaten down.

"Mulder," Scully said as they climbed the little hill together.

"Yes, Scully," he said conspiratorially, close to her ear.

She tossed her damp hair from her eye, disguising a glance at his face. "Mulder, tomorrow I'm going back to American University to compare my blood chemistry to the hybrid cells in the ice sample."

"Scully, the whole thing is just a bad joke that doesn't deserve your scientific acknowledgement."

"But the paleoclimatologist I consulted said that the cells were chimerical - hybridized from some unclassifiable source."

"Cells in the ice?" Mulder asked doubtfully.

"I have to eliminate all doubt."

"Well, knock yourself out," he said unhappily.

"And where will you be?" she asked.

Mulder was living now at a painfully acute level; the intensity of the disaster had cracked the plastic from his frayed circuits. His haptic senses were so enhanced that for the first time he noticed the raised papillaries on the surfaces of dollar bills. He felt as rawly, wetly delineated as a gyotaku fish print, a fish inked and pressed on paper: this was him, this was his mark, this was how his eyes bulged, how his scales shone.

"Off to try the keys of Hades," he said wearily.

Now they were nearing the park, and they crossed the edge of a soccer field and threaded into a dark isthmus of trees.

"Don't tell me that's the Mystery Machine," Scully said, as lantern light rayed among the trees. They stepped down onto a paved road and Mulder thought he caught the clicky gallop of Heart doing 'Barracuda', fading into the grating of a station being tuned.

The Gunmen's microbus was parked in a turnaround, an orange extension cord dripping from a side window and wending off in a boustrophedon. A tarp tied to the aerial stretched over a picnic table, and Langly sat within the blue bubble of light, toasting a Converse hightop over a little Sterno stove. The sleeves of his Adidas jacket were pushed up and one leg of his jeans was wet to the shin. His face went from chilly complaint to blankness at the sight of Scully.

"What's cookin'?" Mulder asked, taking Scully's umbrella and shaking it out as he closed it.

Langly clapped a hand to his headset. "It's Boris and Natasha," he reported flatly.

Scully threw Mulder a look.

"Madame Fatale," Mulder teased, squeezing her shoulder. Scully winced as if his French pronunciation pained her.

"Hey, Mulder." Langly worked his damp shoe back onto his foot. "One of these things is not like the others: Mithril. Philosopher's Stone. Kryptonite. Carbonite. Adamantium. Upsidaisium."

Scully said that they were all fictional alloys, with a suspicious glance at Mulder. She looked like she smelled a rat, or maybe a squirrel. Mulder put on his innocent face.

"Except for one," said Langly, springing off the picnic table as a sliding door unzipped along the side of the van and Frohike's unshaven homunculous face peered from the dark interior.

"Mulder, you're not going to believe this!" Frohike caught sight of Scully and slowly doffed his pork pie hat, mushing it against his leather jacket. "Agent Scully, an unexpected delight," he said worriedly.

"Yeah, yeah, come on, it's late," said Mulder, anxious to get Scully home.

"Check it, Mulder. We've got audio of Skinwalker Ranch. The Sierra Bigfoot recordings. Nessie," Langly said, holding the extension cord out of Scully's way as she climbed into the front seat. "Pirate radio."

"The rest is noise," said Mulder.

Frohike puffed out his chest. "Langly, cut a perimeter."

"It's freezing out here!"

Mulder eased into the complicated mess in the back of the Volkswagen bus, schussing through a mulch of quarter pounder wrappers and newspapers and connector cables. Between stacked monitors and a crate of breadboards he found a cleared spot on the bench that barely fit his ass. Frohike tipped sideways in his aluminum deck chair and winged the door shut, frowning hard. His knees were nearly touching Mulder's.

"What happened to Langly?" Scully asked in the front.

"He fell in a ditch."

"If a clod be washed away by the sea," Mulder said. "Whatcha got for us?"

You know, man, it's pretty rock and roll to fake your own death," said Frohike.

Mulder shrugged and hunched forward, rubbing his hands together. The knees of Frohike's jeans were softening to white, and there were palm-like creases inside his motorcycle gloves. Mulder avoided his eyes. Frohike was 55, 56, born in Pontiac; he'd probably never known anyone like Scully. None of them had.

Mulder heard her soft voice in the front, and she turned sideways so she could glance back at him. She had trouble finding his face in the dark.

Mulder hated their collective helplessness, the fact that someone like Scully could be killed just to prove a point; the disturbing fact that Scully had suffered more in her four years with him than she had in the previous twenty-nine altogether.

"There's no place for you and me in the New World Order," Frohike was saying, leaning close. Something like a blood pact had passed between them in the last few months. Mulder felt it with Skinner too, a razored fixation on vengeance.

"What did you want to see me about?" Mulder asked.

"Byers, take it away," said Frohike.

"Agent Scully, your surveillance in Philadelphia affected a change in the business dealings of the Vorofskoi Mir," Byers said, from the driver's seat.

Scully's head swivelled slowly, and Mulder mentally photographed her profile against the streetlight mist, the way her lips turned up and her nose turned down. "How so?" she asked stiffly.

"Yeah, how so?" Mulder asked. He could imagine how much the Philadelphia reference pissed her off.

"The Department of Defense wanted those Karelian blueprints, and they started watching the X-Files after Scully got the Philadelphia P.D. involved in Little Russia," Frohike said. "Hence the surveillance of your pad."

"Spaceship parts dredged from the Sea of Barents, parts manufactured from a mineral that possesses antigravity properties," said Byers.

Mulder spoke up. "An alloy that's lighter than air."

Scully twisted around in her seat. "Mulder, it's pure fiction!"

"It's allegorical, I admit." Mulder said. "But it all goes back to what you said about Rocky & Bullwinkle, Scully."

"Yeah, nice parallel," Frohike said.

"But I was being facetious!" Scully snapped. "Our whole lives are allegory," she muttered under her breath.

"So, how did you guys even put these pieces together?" Mulder asked

Byers said, "Sevlov Pudovkin? Mulder's informant? He turned up in the Schuylkill with a Cossack kindjal under his ribs. It was made to look like a signature Russian mafia hit."

"Except that the mafia wouldn't leave a knife like that in the body," Scully said.

"Apparently your surveillance stirred up trouble for the Russians. The whole thing leaves some sticky tracks back to the Department of Defense."

"Ostelhoff, Scully. Have you asked yourself why they were watching me?" Mulder asked.

"If you're right, Mulder, why would they be surveiling you, when I was the one who went to Philadelphia?" she asked.

"My name was on the file. Plus, I was the one the informant contacted."

"Who else could have had access to that file?" she asked him.

"Anybody with clearance."

"Skinner," Scully said.

Mulder shook his head irritably. "Whoever Ostelhoff was calling at the FBI. Which I need you to ascertain tomorrow."

"Reverse-engineering, taking apart the finished product to see how it works. Our government will do anything to get their hands on those blueprints," said Byers.

"Look." Scully twisted around in her seat. "A solid can't be less dense than a universal gas of the same molecular weight! There are no metals that are lighter than air!"

Frohike's head swiveled slowly, an admiring look in his eyes, and he and Mulder stared at each other.

"Do we have any idea when that spaceship crashed?" Mulder asked.

Frohike shook his head.

"At any rate, the episode, or should I say the story arc of several episodes was mirroring the political zeitgeist of the early sixties," Mulder said. "The upsidaisium mine represented our collective desire to triumph over gravity. It's possible that the story the episode related was real. It was a very political, cold war show. No, no, listen to me: the silent explosions, the floating mine, the space race. Mission to the moon, Scully."

Scully turned a slow and baleful eye from the front seat. "Just whatever you do, don't let the facts get in the way."

"We've got quite a history of Russian contraband coming across our borders," Mulder insisted.

"Rocks," she conceded.

"Rocks, oil, weapons technology. Bad roulette. Unfiltered vodka. Really long novels," said Mulder.

"Kalashnikovs for the Middle East, loosely constructed so that the sand won't jam them," Byers contributed.

"Mulder, there beside you, sugar high surveillance kit, grab me a root beer," said Frohike. Mulder popped the clips on an old tin military ice chest with a toxic waste sticker on the lid. A flood of dry ice rose into his face. He produced his penlight and illuminated a bounty of soda cans and candy bars, a squeeze bottle of mustard, and half a watermelon in plastic wrap.

Langly appeared in Byers' half-open window, folding his arms on the dull edge of the tempered glass. "There's nobody out here but us space chickens," he reported.

"Langly, maintain ownership of the perimeter," Frohike said, root beer buzzing noisily on the rim of his soda can. "You know Mulder's on Big Brother's shit list."

"But I'm freezing my freakin' heineken off," Langly whined. "Plus I'm thirsty. And not to mention that it was my haxor skilz that got us into the DOD."

"I bet it was never like this on the Further Bus," Mulder cracked.

Frohike gave him a look. "A lot more women and a lot less grief." He leaned around the front seat. "We're almost done here, Langly."

"Root beer me, Mulder," Scully said under her breath, twisting around, her arm back between the seats.

He thought that iced tea would be funny, or at least sardonic, but couldn't find any with his light, so he slapped a frostbitten pop can into her hand and she passed it across Byers and into Langly's grippy white fingers.

A branch sowed raindrops across the roof and the van's exoskeleton shivered, and the glove box yawped open in Scully's lap, tossing up a wave of envelopes and wrenches, candy wrappers, gloves and Langly's asthma inhaler. Scully exchanged a wry look with Byers. Langly passed in front of the windshield, looking skyward, shoving his glasses into place on his nose. Scully crammed everything in and closed the lid, then brought her fingers together as though they felt tacky.

Byers hadn't taken his eyes off her. "Agent Scully, how's your treatment progressing?" he asked.

"It's not."

Mulder could just hear her voice. She had her eyes fixed on the cardboard handicapped parking tag on the mirror. Mulder held his breath, waiting for the truth to come out. He was watching Frohike's face as she spoke. "And now I am informed that the cancer is in the process of metastasizing to my bloodstream," she said.

Frohike's laptop snapped shut. He glared into Mulder's eyes.

"Oh, Agent Scully," Byers said.

Scully's answer was obscured as the van's sliding door grated open along its rusty track. She was out of Mulder's line of vision behind the headrest.

It took Mulder a minute to unwind his foot from a coaxial splice. He hopped down from the van. On the picnic table the lantern burned on with its muscular hiss, casting a wing of light into the canopy. Scully was sliding out of the passenger seat, threading aside the extension cord. She looked, disconcerted, after Frohike.

Frohike was trudging away across the ashy ground between the grills and picnic tables, chin tucked down into his jacket, hands shoved in his pockets. A lanyard clamored against a flagpole, high in the city glow above.

"Well, I'd say we've about worn out our welcome." Mulder stood watching the lantern light on her tarnished hair. She said nothing, her shoulder turned to block him from sight. Across the clearing Melvin Frohike faded into the heavy shadows of an immense row of trees.

He used to think that the risks were worth it, that he'd wager anything to find Samantha. But the truth and everything he believed in was being leached in the charge shadow of this great, consuming darkness coming down.

He grazed the tips of her fingers until she responded, fingertips hooked over his. She looked up, and within the tunnel of her oracular eye a dark mass of emotion contracted and expanded. She had lowered herself into the unimaginable just to meet him halfway, the constant threats doubling their claims upon each other, and each terrible moment legitimizing everything that came after.

He shook his head, appalled. "Nothing is worth this," he said.

For a moment she looked so deeply into him that he felt the jolt of being truly seen. "Everything is worth this," she said.

She turned away and he wheeled to follow her. They crossed the sunken road, fingertips catching surreptitiously between them, their strides unmatched. She secured her grip on his hand as they entered the trees, although the standard window for reassurance was past, and there were probably Gunmen lurking in the trees.

"I couldn't even admit it to myself, Mulder, let alone you," she said.

He pulled out his flashlight and fluttered the beam across the cones of a deodar cedar, a wodge of cement from which the paper had long ago dissolved; meth users' bottle caps and crushed soda can pipes.

"You shut me out, Scully," he said mildly, squeezing her hand. It was tremendously pleasant to walk together with something like existential terror glueing their hands together. Pleasantly awkward.

"You shut me out all the time, Mulder," she pointed out. The watery beam picked up an asphalt path, and they turned toward it. "There are some serious fire doors between you and the rest of the third dimension."

Mulder shook his head in argument, swinging her hand. He was homesick for her and the rather neglected park they passed through, as if he looked in on it from another point in time. He felt hopelessly drawn to her. He was yearning over her like a timber beast in love, bolstered by the tender, confusing desire to slice a button from her coat or cast a handful of flowers at her feet.

"But if I am in turn honest with myself, Mulder, more than anything I was afraid you'd give up on me, that you'd stop fighting the fight."

"Oh, Scully, how could you think that?" he asked, speaking upward, into the tree-gloam.

They approached a tiny municipal rill, water clashing in a culvert beneath the path, pumped from some stony heart. He felt the chug of it between his eyes, and he imagined the feeling of epistaxis, everything liquid in her draining away, down gutters and grates, the suck and suck of drains.

When Scully was diagnosed, he couldn't go on believing that the truth was anything noble. It was simply something that would get them killed. And in that acceptance he grew nostalgically fond of the world. Sometimes he stared at himself in the mirror, his face half-shaven, blankly dwelling on his chipmunk jaw or the slightly wandery cast in his right eye. He was sadly charmed by the tiny pointless details that made up a life, the absolutely manifold inconsequences. The front door's brass knob left an oniony residue on his hand like the taste of sucked pennies. What would it matter, a hundred years from now, that he'd ever known the door of number forty-two, or that either he or the door had once existed?

Their path paralleled the park's wall, and they heard the bell of a channel buoy, lifted high above the trees by some trick of the wind.

He was shocked by the possibility that they had a finite number of conversations left. If these were some of the last things he'd ever say to her, why couldn't he come up with something really profound, something she could carry with her, in the neuron that fades into different form? Why couldn't part of him go with her?

The stone wall of the park broke up into gate posts and a heavy nautical chain, which they stepped across. A foghorn boomed among the collonnades and Mansard roofs, and Mulder half-expected to find the harbor rippling under pale fumes, like a match dropped in brandy, their internal apocalypse manifesting in the world without.

They lost their forward momentum at the sound of the foghorn, and stopped in the lee of the gates, wet black ivy hackling over the wall above them. The hour was dolorous and the stones smelled of dog urine. His cherishing fingers found a writing callus on her third finger, and the two small healing slashes left by Nurse Innes.

The unshadowed half of Scully's irises glowed silver with too much liquid or light. Looking into her eyes and moving his thumb against her skin made his head swim agreeably. He shrugged, smiling foolishly, and one of her eyelids lapsed a fraction. She blinked rather sarcastically and looked away.

Their view of the marina was mitred by the chain link fence across the street, the distant waters rolling milkily with fog, spangled with festal yachts. The wind rang around them like cloud chamber bowls, lifting the sea air into their faces, prompting a rush of ungainly courage inside him.

"Here's a revolutionary concept, Scully," he said, drawing in a chestful of damp air, only vaguely aware that he was speaking, a shivery patch between his shoulder blades.

"Mulder, all your concepts are revolutionary," Scully said faintly, after an uneven pause. She pulled in a jerky breath.

He nipped the felty shoulder of her coat, and she looked up into his face, her eyes like the edge of a cliff. He felt that they were sinking together, ripples rising above them to the surface of the real world. He had the angry flash of succumbing to a vice he'd resisted at great effort and cost. She exhaled hotly against his mouth, the flavor of her breath flooding his taste buds. And then the first mindless slow grind of their mouths together, all the things that had happened to them turning slowly against the blue sky of his brain.

Her mouth tasted as sex should taste, and she kissed with a quiet reciprocity unlike anything he'd ever felt, the narrow shelly bones of her face between his hands. There was a pattery clock in the breast of her overcoat. The reel of his mind turned to the moment, and he had the panicky sense of not getting enough, of wanting to bite into her, or walk right through her and out the other side.

They broke apart, and it seemed that there had been some great noise, an afterclap which left the air solidly plangent with shockwaves. Glass crunched under one of his shoes. There were two separate worlds: the chemical glare of everyday life, and that foggy secret forest that came down around them while her face was close to his.

Scully turned away, pale and uneasy, surreptitiously pressing the backs of her fingers to her nose. He stood beside her flexing his empty hands. He saw now that it was all as big and terrible as a mote in the eye of heaven.

"So much for maintaining our personal subterfuge," he said, when he was certain her nose wasn't bleeding. He leaned over, trying to see her face.

"We haven't been hiding anything," she said softly.

"Are you kidding - we hide everything. We're on a cognomen basis, and we never discuss our feelings. Not to mention that we're misfits in everyone's eyes but each other's." The trouble was that they made sense to each other, and consequently the rest of the world was less understandable.

"Yes, but Mulder, we both knew," she said.

He ceded, tipping his head and rolling an eyebrow at her, and collected her hand in his. They crossed the empty street and the wind rang the chain-link fence, spattering them with raindrops. For the first time he remembered the umbrella, which, for his sins, he must have left in the Gunmen's van.

He felt sick, and elated, and monstrous. They started down the hill toward Scully's neighborhood, down the slippery streets coursing with light. He was earnestly tempted to disappear and show up in a few days pretending that nothing had happened. After all, he was on the run with an extra handful of .38 shells in the pocket of his jacket and the government after him; wanted dead or alive, but mostly dead.

He tried to grasp at the skidding tread of time, always impossible to catch long enough to examine. Her cell phone was ringing, and Scully felt at her coat pocket with the wrong hand, reaching across. A soggy nimbostratus padded the air in a halo about the richness of her head, and she was the only color in the dull light. As he watched she became so bright that even the black of her coat was a color, a crisp color, even though white is actually all the colors, and black is nothing at all.
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Part 3. The Floating Hill