ah jesus
and then there was 'undercurrent.' then there was 'undercurrent.' at the time, sometime 'round february of '04, it was the longest thing i'd written since i was twelve, and since i don't count anything written before i was fourteen and started getting really good at it, it was the longest thing i'd ever written. and, occasionally the best thing i've ever written too. a lot of it actually happened. it might end up being the one thing i want people to read the most, not because it's necessarily better than all the others, but just because i wrote the hell out of the thing. took about a week, swear to god. no tv or internet in my london room, man. couldn't sleep for awhile. so.
as with many of the earlier stories, this is riddled with factual inaccuracies. which bugs me, now, but what can i say.
it was not posted in parts, originally, but, well, it's really long.
Undercurrent
By Candle Beck
Mulder doesn’t know this guy.
He doesn’t know this bar, because this is Kansas City and he doesn’t know too many bars in Kansas City. The one close to the hotel, the one in the airport. The one near the ballpark. He doesn’t know the names, he just knows where you can get two dollar shots and the place that stays open until four in the morning.
It’s all right, isn’t it, not to know this guy, because he doesn’t know this bar, he doesn’t know this town, either, and it seems like if he doesn’t know the most basic stuff of where he is, then it’s okay not to know this guy.
Mulder’s hands are hard and tight and wrapped up in the collar of a soft shirt, pulling, chafing against the skin, and the guy who he doesn’t know hisses low in the back of his throat, so he ducks his head and swipes his tongue across the red mark on the guy’s neck, soothing it away.
The guy tries to get a handhold in Mulder’s hair, but it is too short, there’s nothing to grip his fingers in, so the guy curls his hand around the back of Mulder’s neck and pulls his head up that way.
When they are face to face, the guy smiles and says, “You’re all right, hey?”
Mulder leans in and presses his mouth to the guy’s cheekbone, and mumbles, “What’s your name?”
The guy sneaks his hand around Mulder’s hip, inching up his shirt, his fingers cold on the bare skin, making Mulder jerk and shiver. Ducking his head around to kiss Mulder’s neck, the guy answers breathlessly, “Jacob,” and Mulder thinks that that name is too specific to be made up, he wouldn’t have believed this guy if he said John or Bill, but Jacob sounds real. Then Mulder remembers that the name he tells guys he doesn’t want to remember is Sandy (for Koufax), which is pretty specific too.
Mulder slides his hands down maybe-Jacob’s body, fitting his palms against the flat place below his ribs, and pushes him backwards, against the wall, his fingers stretched out so the tips brush against the plaster. He bites the man on the shoulder, through his shirt, and Jacob gasps, his hand on the back of Mulder’s neck holding him close.
Mulder says foggily, “I didn’t know this was that kind of a bar.”
Jacob laughs, his breath hitching, and replies with a tracing thread of sarcasm in his voice, “It isn’t, man, we don’t go in for this sort of thing in Kansas City.”
Mulder slips one hand into Jacob’s ragged brown hair and worms the other up under his shirt, icing his palm across Jacob’s stomach, and Jacob shakes hard for a second, but only a second, and Mulder says with his eyes closed, “Obviously.”
Jacob flicks open the first couple of buttons on Mulder’s shirt and noses his way down the revealed triangle of skin, his tongue marking out the line of Mulder’s sternum. His hands are linked at the small of Mulder’s back, under the shirt, and Mulder is trying to regain his balance, one hand braced on the wall beside Jacob’s head, the other hand clenching maybe too hard in Jacob’s hair, but Jacob doesn’t say anything about it, just asks in a simple, curious tone, “How come you picked me up, if you weren’t looking for this kind of a bar?”
Mulder’s already left his marks on this man, the rough evidence of this, so he tells him the truth. “You kind of look like my best friend.”
Which is more violent than he meant to be.
* * *
It’s okay, because Kansas City is in the middle of nowhere, and the Royals are the team people always forget when they’re trying to name all the major league teams, when they’ve listed twenty-nine and are scouring their minds for the last, thinking ‘I’ve got both the Canadian teams, both the Texas teams. I’ve got the Indians and the Reds. I even remembered the goddamned Brewers. What the fuck is the last one?’
It’s okay, because it’s Missouri, not Kansas.
It’s okay, because he’s not like this, not really.
It’s just something that happens sometimes, when he’s thousands of miles away from California but not homesick, because his home is wherever the team is, he doesn’t think about the Pacific Ocean when he’s a half a continent away from it, he doesn’t look at the Mississippi River and think about the Bay Bridge, he’s not unsettled by the flatness of the land, he’s not looking for hills on the endless horizon, he’s not any more out of place on the road than he is in Oakland.
It happens sometimes, on the road, because he doesn’t get recognized too often on the road, when he finds himself in that kind of bar without really seeking it out, when he finds himself in backrooms with men who have soft brown hair and hopeful eyes.
It happens sometimes.
He leaves marks on them but he knows that by the time the marks fade, he’ll have been long forgotten, so, okay. Good.
People always forget about Kansas City, no surprise that Kansas City should forget about him.
And as for all the times this has happened in Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City (which no one ever forgets), as for all those times, it’s okay, because his name is not Mark Mulder when this happens, because Mark Mulder isn’t really like this.
* * *
Walking down the street in San Francisco, they pass a broken window, a storefront smashed open, a jagged grin glinting in the streetlight.
Mulder’s feet crunch on the shards of glass that litter the sidewalk and he stops, looking in the shattered window. There’s brown shadows and dust in there; he can’t tell if the store has been robbed or abandoned.
The glass is hard, pressing through the soles of his shoes, and Zito turns back from where he’s outpaced Mulder. Maybe ten feet between them, but Mulder is standing on broken glass and Zito is standing on smooth unmarked cement, and this is not the only thing that separates them.
“Hey. Just up ahead,” Zito says, angling his head down the road, ticking his eyebrows at Mulder.
Mulder twists his heel slightly, hears the high screech of glass against stone. “Well, shouldn’t we . . . I mean, like, something’s happened here. Don’t we tell people about stuff like this? The cops?”
He’s uncertain, he doesn’t know what the protocol is. Like once when he saw a woman crumpled on the sidewalk, her face covered in blood, not screaming or asking for help, just sitting there with the heel of her hand pressed to her forehead, her lips thin and sharp with pain, and Mulder had no idea if he was supposed to offer her a hand, ask her if she needed an ambulance or what. He didn’t even know if he should help her get to her feet; this kind of thing is not taught in school.
Zito shakes his head, his eyes weirdly shadowed, his hands in his pockets. “It’s been like that for a couple of days now. I don’t even think anybody owns that place anymore. Shit like this happens a lot down here.”
It’s the Mission District, is what he means, where heroin is sold out loud on the corner of 16th and Valencia, and the teenage drug addicts from the suburbs come to feel at home. It’s beautiful down here, the murals scrawling vibrant colors on the cracked stone walls, half the signs in Spanish, the sweep of the road up towards the stilt-legged radio tower up on the hill, something elemental trying to break free from the metal and brick. Shit like this happens a lot down here.
Mulder looks one last time into the shrouded motionless interior of the store, then shrugs, catching up with Zito, the broken glass on the sidewalk flaring under the light of the moon, blinking like a thousand eyes.
Zito’s not taking him to that kind of a bar, just a regular bar. And they’ll drink and maybe sign some autographs and maybe play some pinball if they can’t get a game of pool. Zito’s better than him at pinball, his fingers quick, his eyes needle-sharp, but Mulder will still put money down on the game, because once he loses twenty bucks to the other man, Zito will buy his drinks for the rest of the night, and Mulder will end up ahead anyway.
* * *
He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t tell people much of anything.
Mulder can talk about baseball, sometimes that’s all he talks about for weeks on end. Splitters and sliders and two-seamers and fucking seventy-two miles an hour lollipop curves. Hitter’s counts and brushbacks and holding the runner on, backing up the plate on the throw to home, covering first on the drag bunt. He judges distances in increments of ninety feet, or sixty feet, six inches, he judges time in intervals of nine innings, he thinks ‘5-4-3,’ when he sees Chavez sitting next to Ellis sitting next to Hatteberg, he thinks ‘E-1’ when he sees Ted Lilly spill a bottle of Gatorade on the bus. He wakes up in the morning, and he thinks, ‘Two and a half games out,’ before he wonders what day of the week it is. He runs lineups in his head, each batter’s weaknesses, figuring how he would pitch every player in the game. He figures out how to pitch National Leaguers that he won’t see in interleague, too. Just in case.
But yeah, baseball. His first language. The only one he really needs. He doesn’t talk about much else.
A lot of people, they don’t think Mulder’s so bright. They think he’s just this jock, he can throw the ball ninety-five miles an hour but he couldn’t tell you who wrote ‘Great Expectations.’ They think he spent the years he should have been focused on getting an education focused on playing baseball. All right, he did focus on playing baseball, but he’s not an idiot.
He takes his time, he watches people, he doesn’t chatter away endlessly about every little thing, that doesn’t make him stupid. Just careful. Cautious. He doesn’t need to give his opinion on every topic under the sun; they have Chavez for that.
He’ll talk about baseball, because baseball can’t hurt you.
You don’t talk much, it’s harder for people to get to know you, harder for them to chisel their way into you, harder for them to become someone that you don’t ever want to leave behind.
This is something Mulder’s learned from experience.
* * *
There was a guy once, way the hell back in college, seems like a century ago, all the games and the miles and the years between then and now.
Once distances get far enough, you can’t figure them by ballpark measurements anymore. Once time stretches out long enough, nine innings means nothing, and the realization of that kills him, because he’s spent his life believing that nine innings can mean everything.
Anyway, this guy. Named Carlton, can you believe that? He was born a couple of years after Fisk waved that ball fair, and swore Game 6 had nothing to do with his parents naming him that, but still, it was the only thing Mulder could ever think of when he saw him, “Hey, Pudge, you hit any walk-offs lately?” You’d think Carlton would have gotten tired of that joke, or at least tired of being called Pudge, but he always just smiled.
They’d gotten to be friends, oddly enough, after they’d both stopped going to the one class they had together, a maddeningly boring econ seminar that took place at the ungodly hour of nine in the morning, three days a week, Mulder and Carlton running into each other on the quad one afternoon, both of them immediately asking, “Hey, did you get the notes for this week?” because that’s how you make friends in college, by not going to class, by sitting in hallways at four in the morning, keeping strange hours and never calling your parents.
Carlton was from Cincinnati, his hair as black as vinyl records and his eyes as green as spring, and he had the ironic grace of someone amused by everything, just here to watch the show, a calm thread of self-confidence in his easily-proportioned form, and Mulder liked the fuck-it glance in his eyes, the casual sneer of his mouth, the wiry recklessness like a kid leaping off a water tower into a river that was too shallow, the way he could almost tell, just by looking at the other man, that Carlton was going to die young, with the radio on, and everybody who knew him would still be telling the story years later.
Mulder was twenty and had never seen the ocean, and one night in the middle of a vast, punishing Michigan winter, he found himself in Carlton’s room, warmed through by Jaegermeister (fucking Jaeger will do you in every time), talking about how much he hated the off-season, when he had to think about something other than the game, when he had to see what life was like off the field.
He knew he was going up, he wasn’t thinking about graduate school or getting a job or even finishing his degree, he was thinking about the minors and how long it would be before he got to the Show. But in the off-season, in the blinding white of the winter, it was harder to keep this in mind.
Carlton cut him off after Mulder had rambled on for about two hours about what the Chicago Cubs were doing wrong this year, how you’d think after ninety years they’d get a freakin’ clue, Carlton asking mildly, “Hey, do you do anything but talk about baseball?”
Mulder was pretty well slammed, and anger washed through him. “Hey, fuck off, asshole, I’m not dumb.”
Carlton with his quick green eyes half-grinned. “Didn’t say you were.”
Mulder wrapped his hand around the blue plastic cup he was drinking out of (he would be twenty-five before he was drinking out of actual glasses on a regular basis), and pulled his shoulders up, scowling. “Well, fuck off anyway,” he muttered.
Carlton’s grin became full-bright, which pissed Mulder off, thinking Carlton was laughing at him, so he reached out and shoved him, hard, would have spilled Carlton’s Jaeger if Carlton hadn’t drunk it all already, Carlton falling back on the bed, skidding a little bit, messing up the covers.
See, understand, there’s nowhere to sit in college dorm rooms except the bed. Usually there’s one chair, flatly wooden or warped metal, everyone always twisting and grimacing, everyone’s back hurting from the hours hunched around the painful furniture. So when you’re hanging out, you hang out on the bed, just because that’s the most comfortable. That’s the only reason they were both on the bed that night.
Carlton propped himself up on his elbows and he was still grinning, and Mulder had always known that Carlton’s face tended to look mocking all the time, it wasn’t anything intentional, but he still couldn’t get it through his head that Carlton wasn’t making fun of him, so he killed the last of his Jaeger and tossed the cup onto the carpet, then punched Carlton on the knee, just because that was the closest thing to him.
“Hey, ow,” Carlton said, sitting up to rub at the injury, a knuckle-sized bruise already rising under his jeans. “Fucker.”
Mulder knew he was being drunk and stupid, but he wasn’t quite ready to let go of it yet, so he snapped, “Don’t fucking laugh at me, then.”
And then Carlton was moving, faster than Mulder had ever seen him move, his hands falling strong on Mulder’s shoulders, swinging his leg over Mulder’s, straddling him, pinning him to the wall. Carlton hovered there above him, looking dark and wicked, the yellow light of the bedside lamp streaming across his body but not his face, and Mulder could only look up at him, swallowing with an audible click.
“Wasn’t laughing at you,” Carlton said quietly, his palms pressing against Mulder’s collarbones.
Mulder was stronger than him, could have easily thrown him off, shoved him onto the floor, but he could feel the strumming heat of both their bodies, and he stared up at Carlton and said something he had a feeling wasn’t the truth, “I’m not fucking queer, man,” feeling halfway ridiculous, considering he had a guy basically on top of him at the moment.
Carlton’s mouth tugged upwards, and he nodded. “I know. You’re just looking for someone you haven’t found yet.”
Then Carlton had leaned down and kissed him, his mouth bright as his grin, as hot as the burn of Jaeger in Mulder’s chest, and yeah, okay, this was all right, and he decided it would be okay, because now he knew that he wasn’t queer, he was just looking for someone he hadn’t found yet.
* * *
Motherfucker, and this is what Mulder says when he can’t think of anything else to say.
Motherfucker when he is at a loss for words, when he is drunk or dragged down by jetlag, when he is pitching badly or shocked awake by his dreams.
Motherfucker when he knows that he shouldn’t be feeling this tired of everything.
* * *
On the plane to Boston, everyone else is asleep, winging unconscious through the night, and Mulder is playing the Gameboy he nicked from Chavez’s backpack, his face lit by the pale blue light of the screen.
When he was a kid, Gameboy had a dull green screen, it cast no light and you couldn’t play it in the dark. This is a new model, though, full-color, and it takes him a little while to get used to seeing Mario in his red suit. Things have changed.
His eyes are burning, and they are thirty thousand feet above Illinois, and he wonders if he looks out the window, will he be able to recognize the lights of his hometown, is South Holland down there amidst all the others? No, probably not, the only way he can even recognize Oakland is when they get low enough for him to spot the four bridges that slice across the bay, the Bay Bridge distinct linking San Francisco with the East Bay.
There is a rustling from behind him, and then Zito is sliding into the empty seat beside him.
Mulder angles a look at him, not really taking his attention away from the screen. Zito’s just a shadow next to him, vague and Zito-shaped.
“Yeah,” Zito says, and Mulder wonders if he’s picking up a conversation they have abandoned a long time ago, because Zito does that sometimes, hearkens back, sometimes it’s hard to place himself when Zito starts talking to him.
“Yeah,” Mulder replies agreeably.
“I’ma play after you, okay? Also we spend too much time on planes,” and this is two different conversations, but Zito does that sometimes too.
Mulder kills the level boss and lowers the Gameboy, his thumbs still on the controls. Zito is still vague beside him, a silhouette.
“You know what you signed up for. Better than a bus, yeah?”
Zito sighs, nods. “Yeah, yeah. Still. Feeling . . . unanchored.”
They are basically whispering, because everyone around them is asleep, which makes this feel like a secret, like something they’re hiding. Maybe they are.
Mulder walks his fingers across the leg of his jeans, not looking at the other man. “Sure. Because, yeah, sure. Unanchored. Me too.”
Zito tips his head slightly, and his eyes catch the light, strange because there is no light, but Zito’s eyes have match-flares of white in them, fluorescent. “Really?” he asks skeptically, because Zito is used to people not taking him seriously.
Mulder rubs his hand over his face, he is tired and should be trying to sleep, but Chavez wouldn’t let him play with the Gameboy all week, he had to wait until the third baseman was snoring a few rows back before he could filch it. That’s not the only reason, of course, but hey, it’s good enough.
He rests his head against the window, feeling the slight thrum of the plane’s motion, and answers, “Really, yeah. Not feeling too anchored, right now.”
Zito fiddles with the latch of the tray, but doesn’t pull it down, it’s just his deft fingers ticking on the plastic. He keeps his eyes on Mulder, looking sleepy and young. “Like, hard to say where we are right now. You know? Like, someone asks, where are you, you can usually answer, but right now, what do you say? In a plane, well, that could be anywhere. We could be anywhere right now.”
Zito’s got a tendency towards the philosophical. Mulder thinks maybe that’s why Zito’s such a good pitcher, so effortless, because Zito knows a lot of stuff Mulder doesn’t, about the phases of the moon and the stages you have to go through to reach nirvana and what it means to cut yourself adrift in search of something indefinable.
But then, Mulder knows a lot of stuff Zito doesn’t know, too.
Mulder taps at the window, a dull plastic sound. “You wanna know where we are?”
Zito’s eyes spark a bit. “Yeah,” he whispers.
Mulder reaches out, wrapping his hand around Zito’s arm, pulling him close, the armrest up between them, until Zito is close and warm, the lines of their bodies running together, their heads inches apart.
Zito just looks at him trustingly, and Mulder has to remind himself to breathe, and he turns back to the window, his arm around Zito’s shoulders, keeping him near. “See that?” he murmurs, Zito’s breath light on his cheek. “Down there, that’s where I grew up. That’s my hometown. Those lights. That’s my home.”
It isn’t, of course, or if it is that will be a remarkable coincidence, it’s just another of the sprawled patterns of lights that they’ve been flying over since they left the emptiness of the mountains and the desert behind.
Zito leans closer, his hand falling on Mulder’s leg as he tries to get a good view out the window. Mulder breathes out, long and low.
Zito shakes his head, his hair brushing Mulder’s face. “That’s not your home. Where you grew up, not the same as your home. Your home’s back there. Where my home is. But, yeah,” and he turns, smiling in the darkness, his nose maybe an inch away from Mulder’s, maybe closer. “Now I know where we are.”
And he holds there for a long moment, their faces so close, Mulder’s arm around his shoulders, Zito’s hand on his leg. Mulder cannot breathe, but, okay, that is to be expected.
Then Zito pulls away, settling back into his own seat, and he takes the Gameboy with him, hooking a grin at Mulder before he focuses on the game, and Mulder sits back, his hands trembling, and he stares out the window, down at Illinois and the place that is not his home anymore.
* * *
Mulder remembers a blizzard once, he remembers the east coast, Washington D.C., on a class trip when he was a senior in high school, sneaking out of the hotel one night with his friends, feeling young and invincible wandering the frozen city.
They ducked into a bar near the George Washington University campus, down by the monuments, Mulder going in first because he looked the oldest, he’d looked like a man since he’d been fifteen years old, his two friends trailing behind him, nervously clutching the fake IDs that ticked their ages up four years and made their home California, not Illinois.
They were in the bar for awhile, just totally thrilled to be here, this utterly forbidden place, trying to be cool, trying to look like they belonged there, drinking Foggy Bottom Ale and thinking about how awesome this was, thinking that, at this moment, they were completely free, far from home and the chaperones’ suspicious eyes, breaking the law and giddy with carelessness.
At some point, someone near the front of the bar called out, “Hey, the storm’s come!” Everybody craned around, tilted back in their chairs to catch a glimpse out the window. The snow was falling, flakes as big as the palm of a hand, coating the soaked black asphalt, blanketed heavy on the roofs of cars, dragging down the branches of trees.
There was an excited rise of conversation, grins sparking on every face, talking about how maybe the university would be shut down, maybe they wouldn’t have to go to class, and then someone yelled, “To natural disasters!” and everybody cheered and toasted to it.
Walking out into the storm a little while later, just past midnight, talking about how they would slip back into the hotel unnoticed, Mulder and his friends found themselves ankle deep in snow, a long undisturbed carpet of white spreading out around them.
The GW dorms were emptying, kids streaming out into the weather, throwing snowballs, rolling around, laughing, their voices echoing. The roads were deserted, no one out driving, just all these unlined faces, flushed with the cold, these high innocent voices, pulling on gloves and mittens and beanies over their frosted hair, running around until they were warm enough to unzip their coats and let the snowflakes slip under their collars, icy on their spines.
There were crowds of students heading down the shallow hill, south towards the river, and Mulder’s friend Paul wondered, “Where are they going?”
Ben, his carroty hair dusted with snow, darkening down into gleaming copper, grinned and said, “They’re going to the Mall.”
Mulder, a little woozy with a good humming drunk, asked, “There’s a mall open this late?”
Ben laughed, scooping up some snow to wing at Mulder, the cold exploding against his chest. “Not that kind of mall, dumbass. The National Mall, where all the monuments are. Haven’t you been listening to anything Mr. Jakes has been saying for the past two days?”
Mulder replied honestly, “No,” and then scrubbed a snow-filled hand across Ben’s head, Ben sputtering, snow in his ears and his eyes, grinning.
The three of them made a command decision to follow the crowd, tramping through the snow the few blocks down to the perfect rectangular lengths of the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial rising huge and stately at one end, the Washington Monument spearing into the sky at the other, the Capitol Building way far off, looking like a souvenir snow globe, small and beautiful.
There were packs of kids everywhere, somersaulting down hills, flopping down, spread-eagled for snow angels, building forts and snowmen, and the snow was still falling like a veil over everything, sticking to Mulder’s eyelashes, trembling when he blinked.
Ben and Paul and he immediately engaged themselves in an ongoing snowball fight, more properly an ongoing snowball war, complete with guerilla tactics and turncoats who betrayed one side by joining the other, pretty girls more valuable than the boys with the good arms, because the girls could smile and call out, “Hey, Mikey, come fight on our side for awhile!” while all the boys could do was grin dumbly and blush.
Mulder got separated from Ben and Paul at some point, thought they might have drifted onto the other team, Mulder quickly becoming a hero among these kids he didn’t know, because Mulder could peg a snowball farther and with more accuracy than anyone else, a sniper, sharpshooter.
Mulder was creeping around the edge of Constitution Lake, a small manmade pond with a hilled island in the middle, a short bridge leading out to it, carefully shaping a snowball, keeping his eyes out for the enemy, flurries of snow hanging thick around him, the wind whistling past, when he found himself on an unexpected sidewalk, having wandered off the Mall, out into no man’s land.
He looked around to get a sense of his location. He was out on Constitution Avenue, the road that ran along the Mall all the way down past the Smithsonian museums, cutting between the Washington Monument and the White House, until it funneled into Pennsylvania down by the Capitol.
Usually one of the busiest roads in the city, Constitution was deserted now, the snow so thick that he couldn’t tell the sidewalk from the street, just one smooth plane.
And out in the middle of the street, between the soft warm lights of the streetlamps, there was a boy and a girl, and they were dancing.
Mulder brushed his hand across his eyes, wiping away the damp, and when his gaze was clear he saw that it wasn’t a mistake, he had been right the first time.
They were dancing, as if they were in a marble ballroom, waltzing, sweeping through the snow, their hands linked, the boy’s arm around the girl’s waist, her hand on the back of his neck, they were dancing there in the middle of the street, the middle of a blizzard, looking sweet and perfect and young.
The boy spun the girl out, neither of them dressed for the weather, jeans and sweatshirts and torn mittens, scuffed sneakers, but they didn’t look cold, and the girl laughed as she followed the boy’s arm out, laughed as he pulled her back, the whole world around them empty, just the snow and the sky and the music that Mulder couldn’t hear, and Mulder watched them for a long time, standing in the shadows of the trees on the sidewalk, his hand numb curled around the forgotten snowball, Mulder watched them for a long time, dancing there in the middle of the street, the moon pasted up as silver as ice, a cold grin in the raffling night sky.
* * *
Sometime, four in the morning, Chavez comes out of his room to duck into the bathroom, then follows the blinking light into the living room, finding Mulder sitting there watching TV with his bare feet kicked up on the coffee table, his eyes glazed.
Chavez yawns, rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. “You ever gonna go to sleep?” he asks, his voice thick.
Mulder flaps his hand dismissively. “Sure, yeah. In a little bit.”
Chavez talks too much and gets overexcited about arcades and newly waxed cars, basically a six-year old caught in a grown man’s body, but he’s smarter than he looks.
He studies Mulder, says quietly, “So this has been happening a lot.”
Mulder doesn’t take his eyes off the screen, though it’s just some dumb movie on cable, all chopped up with commercials and the swear words replaced with ‘gosh darn it’ and ‘forget you’ and his own personal favorite, ‘you fairy godmother’ instead of ‘you fucking cocksucker,’ because really, could those two phrases be any further removed from each other?
He asks, “What’s been happening a lot?”
Chavez comes over and sits on the arm of the couch. “You not sleeping. You being up all night. That’s been happening a lot.”
Mulder half-shrugs, uncomfortable with this line of questioning. “I sleep.”
Chavez scrubs a hand through his hair, which is an ebony crash of bed-head. “You sleep when you fall down after having not slept for three days. You sleep when you’ve got no other options.”
Mulder doesn’t tell him that sometimes he doesn’t sleep for even longer than that, sometimes he stretches out the whirring insomnia for all five days that separate his starts, only collapsing the night before he pitches, sometimes knocked out for sixteen, eighteen hours, waking up an hour before he has to be at the park.
It’s okay, because he sleeps before he has to pitch. He’s still got his priorities straight.
He leans forward to scratch his ankle, replies without looking over at Chavez, “So you admit I sleep. So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know, man, why don’t you tell me?”
Chavez is the kind of friend everyone should have, quick and funny and easily panicked, widening his eyes in exaggeration every few minutes, always letting Mulder have a drink of his Coke, good at coming up with nicknames, his head a compendium of prank phone calls and dirty jokes, though he always ends up laughing whenever he tries to get through one, always trying to organize road trips, always throwing M&Ms at Mulder then blinking innocently, endearing. Chavez is surprised by almost everything, but he never lets anything happen to the people he cares about.
Right now, though, Mulder wishes Chavez wasn’t quite such a good friend, wishes Chavez didn’t care so much.
He tries to brush it off. “There’s no problem. I just wanted to watch this.”
Chavez looks over at the television. “What the hell is this, anyway?”
Mulder sighs, admitting, “I have no idea.”
Chavez’s voice falls serious. “Hey, man, what’s going on? How come you’re not okay?”
Mulder is used to people asking him if he’s okay, not asking him why he’s not okay. So Chavez’s question throws him off a little bit.
“I’m, um, hey, it’s nothing. Don’t, like . . . don’t worry, because it’s no big deal. Really.”
He sneaks a look over at Chavez, sees the third baseman perched there on the arm of the couch, his hands tangled between his knees, his face shadowed with concern. But it’s pretty dark in the room right now, with only the slideshow flicker of the television to illuminate them, so maybe that explains it.
Chavez sighs. “All right. I’m just . . . I’m gonna go back to bed, then.”
He stands, smoothing his hand down his T-shirt, and before he turns away, he says with boyish reassurance, “So you know where I am. If . . . well, if anything. You wanna talk, whatever. You know where I am.”
And just in case Mulder doesn’t know, Chavez points back down the hallway towards his bedroom. Mulder half-smiles at him and Chavez yawns again, his eyes all scrunched up, and heads back, leaving his door open a crack, just in case.
Mulder sits back and pulls his hand over his face, wishing he didn’t have such good friends.
* * *
One Sunday, Mulder goes to visit a friend of his in the hospital.
He doesn’t like hospitals. Hell, who likes hospitals? But, anyway, this is an old friend of his, a guy he went to high school with, before he became an All-Star pitcher and started looking for someone he hadn’t found yet. Someone he has found and now can’t have.
Old friends, the best kind.
Old friends in the hospital, possibly the worst kind.
He feels out of place in the waiting room, surrounded by people crying quietly in pain, clutching broken arms to their stomachs, makeshift bandages swaddled around their knees, smears of rust-colored blood ruining their clothes, hands pressed to chests, to heads, people breathing carefully and deep. He feels too healthy, too strong.
The woman at the admit desk has fire-red hair that he suspects is her natural color, because no one could create something like that on purpose.
“Um, hi,” he says, feeling stupid.
She slants a look at him, then turns back to her paperwork, scratching something in a quick hand. “Hello.”
Mulder hooks his thumbs on the lip of the desk and says, “I’m looking for . . . I’m here to see a patient. Sam. I mean, Samuel Peters. Is his name. Can you tell me where he . . . um, can you tell me where?”
The woman gives him a put-upon look and taps her computer keyboard. “Room 1147. Visiting hours are over at eight o’clock.”
It’s four o’clock. He wasn’t sure whether hospitals kept regular business hours, but of course they wouldn’t. People don’t stop getting hurt at five p.m.
He thanks the woman and walks down to the elevators, his hands balled up in the pockets of his coat, sidestepping wheelchairs and gurneys and people hobbling by on crutches, feeling too quick.
The hospital lights are white on white, fierce fluorescents gleaming off dangerously waxed pale tile, making his head ache, his eyes squinted against it.
He knocks on the door of room 1147, but there’s no answer, so he stands out there for a few minutes, not sure what to do. Doctors and nurses give him strange looks, just standing there in the hallway, so he gently turns the knob and pokes his head in.
“Sammy?”
His friend’s voice bounces back to him, “I’m only accepting visitors who bring me decent magazines. Be in possession of a Playboy or be gone.”
Mulder grins, Sam’s voice is as it ever is, rough and hard-edged, streaked with sarcasm.
He steps into the room, and Sam, catching sight of him, blinks in surprise, then says sardonically, a smile biting the corners of his mouth, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the famous Mark Mulder. I am totally honored.”
Mulder fakes a glare. “Good to see you too, jackass.”
Sam grins then, his dark eyes lighting up. “Hey, those ballplayers are a bad influence on you. Who taught you such filthy language?”
“You did,” Mulder retorts, pulling up a chair next to Sam’s bed.
He tries not to let his eyes linger too long on Sam’s form, tries not to let the shock show in his face or in his voice. Sam has been carved down, his arms wasted with trenches where his muscles used to be, the bones of his wrists pressing insistently through the skin, hard as the beads of a rosary. His chest is sunken, pigeon-thin, and the line of his jaw is stark, his cheekbones in high relief. His eyes are bright, but his face is hollowed out, and his fingers are as skinny as pencils.
Sam catches the look despite Mulder’s attempt to hide it, and cuts a self-deprecating smile. “I know I’m a good-looking guy, Mark, but no need to ogle.”
Mulder blushes, ducking his head down. “Sorry,” he mutters.
“Hey, no. It’s okay. I know. Not really the picture of health, right now.”
Sam jokes about everything. Always has. He takes nothing seriously. Why did Mulder think Sam getting cancer would change that?
Mulder keeps his gaze on Sam’s eyes, because Sam’s eyes are the same. “So, how’s it going?” he asks, then wants to bite back the words, because isn’t it pretty fucking obvious how it’s going?
Sam doesn’t seem to notice, though. “It’s cool. Emily just got a new job, so you know she’s psyched.”
Emily is Sam’s wife. He isn’t wearing his wedding ring, but Mulder knows without asking that the loop of gold doesn’t fit on his finger anymore, it probably kept slipping off until they put it someplace safe.
Emily and Sam’s wedding was beautiful, a cliff down in San Luis Obispo, where Emily is from, the wind sweet and strong, white rose petals swirling down into the ocean. That was two years ago, the first Sam and Mulder had seen each other in half a decade, and when Sam met him at the tiny, two-runway airport, he had bear-hugged Mulder, lifting all six feet, six inches of him off the ground, Mulder laughing and saying, “Fucking flirt, aren’t you getting married tomorrow?”
Strange to think this is the same Sam who was once strong enough to lift Mulder off the ground. Of course, Sam already had cancer two years ago, they just didn’t know it.
Mulder nods. “Good for her.” He looks down at his hands, not sure what he should say next. Usually he would talk about the team, or the concert he went to a couple of weeks ago, a band that Sam used to play incessantly in his car when they were teenagers back in Illinois. That stuff, though, doesn’t quite seem applicable right now.
He looks up to see Sam studying him. “Hey, Mark, not to be the pot calling the kettle black or anything, but you don’t look so good.”
Motherfucker. One of the oldest friends he has is dying, and he wants to talk about how Mulder doesn’t look so good.
How can anything that has gone wrong with Mulder compare to the fact that Sam’s own body has turned on itself? How can he say, ‘Yeah, Sammy, you’re right, I’m not doing so good, I’m doing pretty fucking terrible’? How can he say that to someone lying in a hospital bed?
Mulder shrugs uneasily. Sam’s hair is dark brown, but against his white-washed skin, it looks solid black. “I’m doing all right. Not been sleeping so well, I guess. That’s all.”
Sam cocks a disbelieving eyebrow. “Still a tough guy.”
Mulder tilts a grin. “Of course.”
Sam snorts a laugh, and Mulder gives him a questioning look. Sam flips his hand through the air, rustling the IV he’s attached to. “Oh, nothing, I was just thinking about that girl Katie from high school.”
Okay, yeah. Reminiscing. That’s a safe thing to talk about, something that’s not white blood cell counts or chemotherapy.
Mulder thumbs through his mind, then asks, “Which Katie?” because he seems to remember about thirty-seven girls named Katie that they went to high school with.
Sam answers, “The one who transferred from Woodson junior year. You hooked up with her after Spring Fling.”
Mulder lifts his eyebrows as a face attaches itself to the name, and says with a cocky grin, “Ah, yes, Katie from Woodson. I remember her well. Had quite a thing for me. Not that I can blame her.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Sure, mock the poor girl for the mistakes of her adolescence. Anyway, I was thinking about this time after you hooked up with her, and I was talking with her at this party, and she knew you and I were friends, and she was pretty drunk, I think, because she started going on about how everyone thought you only cared about baseball and there wasn’t anything else to you, and she said, she said,” Sam interrupts himself, snickering, then clears his throat, regaining composure. “She said how you were really this totally deep guy, with all this shit going on below the surface, and you just didn’t let anybody see it. Something about how you put up this wall or this moat or something. To keep people out.”
Mulder rubs at the back of his neck, saying doubtfully, “I put up a moat?”
Sam nods, rolling the paper-thin fabric of his hospital gown between his fingers. “I know, that’s what I thought. She was drunk, I guess is the excuse. Or maybe crazy. Which would explain why she hooked up with you in the first place.”
Mulder scowls, saying sarcastically, “God, I’m glad I came by to see you. You just put my spirits right through the roof, Sammy.”
Sam grins engagingly. “Hey, anytime, buddy.”
Making a come-on gesture with his hand, Mulder says, “Well, go ahead. Finish your hilarious story. What’d you tell her?”
Sam smirks. “Well, after I stopped laughing uncontrollably at the idea of you as a totally deep guy, I told her that the only thing going on below your surface was worrying about getting drafted by a National League team and actually having to take at-bats.”
Mulder leans back, crossing his arms over his chest, glaring good-naturedly at his friend. “I was wondering why she never called me back.”
“Well, now you know,” Sam says with a aren’t-I-just-the-best-friend smile.
There’s a moment of silence, in which Mulder can hear the beeps of Sam’s heart monitor, then Sam says, his voice still holding casual, “I mention it because . . . I know I make fun and all, but sometimes I don’t think she was so far off. There’s more to you than the game, Mark.”
Sam shrugs, and Mulder thinks that he should be uncomfortable with this near-display of emotion, but honesty fits him here in his hospital bed like it would fit him nowhere else, and Sam is easy as he continues, “I’m just saying, you know. You’re tough, we all know that. You can get through a lot without needing anybody else. But I’ve known you a long time, and . . . you look like hell, man. You look like you need somebody, this time. Whatever it is. So, just. Don’t be such a fucking tough guy, all right?”
There was a time when Sam would never have said that to Mulder, because Sam used to be tough, too, when they were kids they were hard and reckless and pretended they didn’t care about anything, they swore they would never need shit, no one would ever be able to make them ask for help. It was the worst thing their seventeen-year old hearts could imagine, having to ask for help.
The change in Sam, the reason Sam’s not tough anymore, it’s not the cancer. It happened before then. It was Emily that did it.
The things that made sense when they were seventeen don’t make much sense now. They stopped making sense for Sam years ago, when he met Emily, and now Mulder feels like he’s too old to still be thinking he doesn’t need anybody.
Mulder nods, keeping his eyes down, the tile black-smudged by the rubber wheels of the bed, the looping tangles of the wires that connect Sam to the beeping glare of the machines.
He hears Sam sigh above him, a loose rattling sound, and looks up, worried, but Sam only shifts him a tired smile and says, “All right, talk about baseball, I know you’re going nuts thinking you can’t.”
Yeah, Sam knows him pretty well.
* * *
He’s not gay.
He’s not in love with Zito.
He’s not living up to his potential.
He’s not doing okay.
He’s not going to feel like this forever.
It’s getting harder and harder to separate the lies from the truth in his mind, but this is nothing more than what he expected.
* * *
Mulder wakes up one day at six o’clock, and he doesn’t know whether it’s dawn or dusk.
The light out his bedroom window is soft and violet, like something out of an Impressionist painting, the sky streaked by long uneven stretches of clouds, looking like the scar on Mulder’s palm from when he was ten years old and he and his best friend had sliced open their hands with shards of glass, blood brothers, the small white thread pulling out as he grew, his palm growing broad, the scar breaking, this misplaced love line, this homemade piece of his fortune, nothing he has ever needed, nothing he has ever been able to give away.
It could be sunset or sunrise out there, his bedside clock is an old-fashioned analog with ticking hands painted glow-in-the-dark green, no way to tell a.m. or p.m., it could be the start of morning or the start of evening, because it’s the time of the year when you can’t really be sure.
Usually, he’d be able to tell what part of the day it is by how tired he is, because if it’s six in the morning, he’s only gotten maybe three hours of sleep, but if it’s six in the evening, he’ll have slept the whole day through. But he can’t tell, because he’s always tired when he wakes up these days, regardless of how much sleep he’s gotten.
Mulder stumbles out of his bed, tripping over the pillow he kicked onto the floor at some point, his mind wrapped up in something vague like cotton as he finds his way out into the hallway and staggers into the bathroom.
Flicking the switch, the light blinds him, white neon, and he squints, a raspy curse falling from him.
He brushes his teeth and splashes water on his face, washing his hands, because he feels three-days stale, stiff and aching, and it’s not until he’s heading back to bed, hoping that he’ll be able to fall back asleep, that he catches sight of himself in the mirror, realizing for the first time that he’s still wearing his jeans, though they are unbuttoned and slung low on his hips, his T-shirt from the night before hopelessly wrinkled, and he sees an inch-long scratch on his face, just below his right cheekbone, dark with dried blood, dull brown spots on the collar of his shirt.
He curiously raises his hand, touching the cut, wincing at the old pain. He tries to think of where this came from, when this happened, his dusty mind fumbling through the events of the previous night.
He remembers going over to Hatteberg’s house for dinner with a couple of the guys, the well-instilled manners of his childhood returning to him as he was faced for the first time in months with cloth napkins and utensils that weren’t plastic. It’s always a little strange, to see his teammates’ wives and families, their secure houses, their safe futures, the awareness that he’s in the middle of an aimless kind of existence, nothing certain enough to anchor him, not like his married friends who have something more than the game to live for, someone waiting for them at the end of every day.
He remembers that Ellis and Chavez had looked entirely out of place in their collared shirts, but Hudson had brought his good southern charm along with a bottle of Napa Valley wine, unfailingly polite, standing when Hatteberg’s wife stood, the rest of them following suit a second later, grinning self-consciously. Zito had fit in better than Mulder would have thought, the gleam off the silverware flashing in his hand, helping clear the table, messing around with Hatteberg’s small daughters, sitting on the floor of the living room with them while the rest of the adults dotted the furniture drinking coffee, rolling a baseball back and forth between the girls, the youngest one, with the same pale blond hair that had once sprawled like a crash of straw atop Hatteberg’s head, throwing her arms around Zito’s shoulders and begging for a piggy-back ride, Zito grinning and rising to his full height, the little girl’s laughter like bells, saying, “You’re taller than my daddy!” as she inspected the world from this new vantage point.
After they’d left Hatteberg’s, Mulder remembers going to a bar, maybe three or four bars, and that’s where it starts to get hazy. He either stopped checking or stopped registering the time after Ellis had said, “Hey, let’s go to that cookie place on Telegraph, they’re only open until one,” which was a half an hour away at that moment, and that is the last that Mulder remembers knowing what time it was.
He doesn’t remember when he might have gotten this scratch on his face, he has no idea, it must have taken place in the still black-out haze that encompassed hours of the night.
He goes back into his room, trying to determine whether it has gotten darker or lighter out there, but he still can’t tell, and he decides he doesn’t really care as he picks up the phone and taps in a number he’s had memorized for years.
“’Lo?” comes the sleepy reply after several rings, and Mulder thinks maybe that means it’s six in the morning, but then remembers that Zito always sounds pretty sleepy on the phone, like he’s just been pulled out of a dream.
“Hey,” Mulder says, sitting on the bed to better shimmy out of his jeans one-handed.
“Hey, man, ‘sup?” Zito says, sounding happy to hear from him.
Mulder kicks his jeans away, the thick rustle of denim, and asks, “What the hell happened last night?” running his thumb along the scratch, crusted rough.
Zito breathes out a laugh. “You know, Mulder, the first sign that you’re drinking too much is when you can’t remember drinking too much.”
Mulder rolls his eyes. “What are you, my AA sponsor now?”
Mulder can hear Zito’s grin. “No, just the guy you call when you don’t know what’s happened.”
The number of things that have happened that Mulder doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, is astronomical, and he wonders if Zito will be the one to explain it all to him after everything has come to an end.
“So, what happened? I remember dinner, and possibly . . . going to Berkeley for cookies?”
“Yeah, Ellis kept saying ‘snickerdoodle’ and then laughing hysterically, so we figured the only way to shut him up would be to get him a snickerdoodle.”
Mulder half-smiles, smoothing a hand over his head, looking for other injuries, trying to assess the damage. “That seems like a smart move on our part.”
“If only ‘cause you were about to kill him and then try to explain to Beane why we’re short a second baseman.”
Mulder has a déjà vu recollection of making such a threat, his soaked mind picking through his memory, trying to separate dreams and fantasies and what is true.
“What happened after that? I mean, I’ve got this cut on my face,” Mulder says, scrunching up his eye to feel the torn skin pull tight.
Zito sounds surprised. “You don’t remember that?”
Mulder sighs, leans back against the headboard, pulling his legs onto the bed, abstractly pleased that he’d at least managed to get rid of his shoes before passing out, no smears of dirt on the sheets.
“Would I be asking if I remembered?” he questions, looking out the window, thinking that maybe the light is a little paler, a little more watered-down. Or, wait, no, now it looks dimmer, darker, like it’s being swallowed up. Fuck, he can’t tell. He should stop trying.
Zito launches into the story. “Well, after the cookies, we went to that place on Shattuck, you know, the one that’s open late? But then Chavez did something to the jukebox . . . I’m not sure what . . . something about wooden nickels? And we got kicked out. You were pretty toasted by then, I guess. I was half-carrying you for like three blocks before you remembered how to walk, and let me take this opportunity to suggest that you either lose some weight or learn how to hold your liquor, because you are one heavy son of a bitch.”
Zito’s voice is light, tinged with laughter so that Mulder won’t be insulted, but Mulder’s capacity for offense is overwhelmed by his regret that he doesn’t remember Zito’s arms wrapped around him, keeping him upright for three blocks, he doesn’t remember any of it.
“Anyway,” Zito continues. “Someone got the bright idea to cut across the campus, trying to get to that cantina on the west side, you know? And we’re ducking through these bushes, I don’t even know where we are, it was dark as hell, and suddenly you’re swearing like you’ve just been lit on fire or something.”
It’s a strange metaphor, but Mulder knows it to be entirely accurate, his tendency towards profanity never so extreme as when he is surprised or in pain.
“So I kind of, you know, pull you out of the bushes, ‘cause you’re, like, punching them, right? And I get you out on the sidewalk, under the light, and you got this tough scratch right under your eye, bleeding all over your face, making you look like . . . I don’t know what. Like something bad.”
Mulder lifts his hand, touches the spots of blood on his collar. Zito’s voice is edging towards disturbed as he recounts the incident, and Mulder remembers seeing Zito pull off his jersey down in the trainer’s room after he’d left the game, revealing a ragged cut that stretched across his stomach, curling around his side, Mulder all at once stunned and terrified to see Zito bleeding, wanting to press his hands against the gash, wanting the power to heal. He wonders if that’s how Zito had been the night before, pulling Mulder into the light, seeing the blood on his face.
Zito regains some of his normal tone as he finishes, “Ellis, you know, he’s such a punk when it comes to blood, he couldn’t even look at you, but we got you cleaned up pretty well, Chavez said he’d make sure you put a Band-Aid on it today. Oh. Go put a Band-Aid on it, if you haven’t yet.”
Mulder grins. “Yes, mom.”
Zito rolls his eyes. Mulder can actually *hear* him roll his eyes, that’s how well he knows when Zito’s exasperated with him. “Whatever. See if I reconstruct any more nights for your ungrateful ass.” He pauses, then says, “That’s how it happened, though. Just cutting through some bushes. It’s not too bad, right?”
Mulder yawns, shaking his head. “Nah. It was just weird, to wake up with this thing on my face and not know how it got there.”
“Yeah, I imagine.” Zito still sounds sleepy, and warm. Mulder tries to picture him, slouched across his couch, sitting in his kitchen with one leg kicked up onto an empty chair, maybe still in bed, like Mulder is.
Mulder is about to let Zito go, the mystery solved, but then he remembers. “Oh, hey, Zito. What time is it?”
“Um . . .” He can hear Zito shift to get a glimpse of the clock. “Six fifteen.”
“Morning or evening?” Mulder asks.
There’s a long pause, then Zito answers, his voice slow, “You don’t know?”
A slight note of worry in Zito’s words, but Mulder doesn’t think much of it, because pretty much everybody is worried about him, these days.
“Once again, would I be asking if I knew?”
There’s another pause, then Zito says, still worried, “It’s six in the morning, dude. It’s sunrise.”
“Oh,” Mulder replies, seeing the light move across the wall, deciding that, yeah, Zito is right, it’s definitely getting brighter. “Cool. Now I can get some more sleep.”
“Mulder-” Zito begins, and Mulder hears the question that everyone has been asking him, if he’s okay, why isn’t he okay, so he cuts Zito off.
“Thanks for clearing that up for me. Sorry if I woke you.”
Zito takes his time, like he’s got to smother the questions he’d been about to ask, then sighs, saying, “It’s okay. I was just . . . you know, sleeping. But it’s okay.” Zito hesitates, before asking, “Hey, you wanna do something today? I mean, like, after we both wake up again?”
Mulder closes his eyes, slips down on the bed, tunneling against the increasing sun. “Sure,” he answers, his voice only a little hoarse. “I’ll call you, okay?”
Now he can see Zito, under that mess of blankets he has on his bed, burrowed, the low sound of their conversation the only thing in Zito’s dark bedroom world.
“All right. Sleep good, man,” Zito says easily, and Mulder has to bite the inside of his cheek, because it almost sounds like Zito is right there beside him, like it is perfectly natural that each other’s voices are the last thing they hear before they go to sleep.
“You too,” he manages, and hits the button to hang up, reaching out to clatter the phone back onto the hook, then pulls the covers up over his head, trying to imagine that it’s just because he doesn’t want the growing light to seep into his eyes, though in the part of his mind where he doesn’t lie to himself, he knows that what he really wants is somewhere quiet and shadowed where Zito’s voice can be more real in his memory than it is in his real life.
* * *
Mulder stopped getting into bar fights when he was in the minors.
It wasn’t, okay, it wasn’t some big thing. It wasn’t like he went out every weekend looking for someone to pound on, looking to get pounded. He didn’t need to wear his bruises like a badge of honor, he didn’t think the scars on his knuckles and the unevenly healed rift in his collarbone made him look cool or something.
It wasn’t like that.
It was just, he would be out at a bar, with some friends, and someone would start giving them shit, maybe for being college boys, maybe for being ballplayers, they could always find a reason. And he couldn’t back down, you know. What would that say about him, if he raised his hands in appeasement and said, “Hey, we’re not looking for any trouble. Let me get you guys a round”? What would it say about him if he just walked away?
So he fought, a soft haze around his mind, thinking distractedly that these punks must be as stupid as dirt, giving him shit. Couldn’t they *see* him? Didn’t they notice that the guy they were going up against was six and a half feet tall and on his way to being a professional athlete?
Hell, they were drunk. And Mulder had always looked like an asshole.
End enough nights bleeding on the asphalt, wake up enough mornings with one eye swollen shut, anyone would start to wonder if this is really the best way to spend his free time.
But he won, most of the time. And if he didn’t, he couldn’t really remember it the next day, because he would keep fighting long after he started getting beat. No one ever claimed he had the best judgment or self-preservation instincts.
Anyway, it wasn’t until he was in the minors, years of split lips and broken noses and cauliflowered ears in the muscle memories of his hands, that his manager called him into his office and sat him down.
His manager that year was a legendary hardass, his face stony, his eyes blank steely gray, his hands thick with calluses, and he had glared at Mulder, saying shortly, “I called you in here to tell you to stop being such a fucking idiot.”
Mulder blinked, raffled through his mind trying to figure out what he’d done. He couldn’t think of anything in particular, so he asked cautiously, “What do you mean, skip?”
His manager shot back, “I’ll tell you what I mean, rook. You got the chance to go all the way, all the fucking way, and you’re spending your time getting your ass beat up by drunken rednecks in two-bit dives. That’s fucking what I mean.”
Mulder tried to surreptitiously tuck his bruised left hand behind his back, but his manager was having none of it. “Perfect example, right fucking there. I saw your hand this morning, that’s your goddamned pitching hand. What the fuck were you thinking?”
Not giving Mulder a chance to answer, he continued, biting off the words, “You ever think what would happen if you get beat so bad you miss a start? Not even just that, you wouldn’t be the first guy in history to get blinded by some fucker fighting dirty. The club’s got a lot of money invested in you, Mulder, and no one’s going to take it too easy if they find out their future star is fucking worthless because he couldn’t hold his own against some random fucking brawler!”
Though he knew it was hopeless, Mulder tried to defend himself, saying weakly, “I can . . . I hold my own. I never get beat that bad. I never fight before I gotta pitch. I’m not stupid.”
His manager sneered. “Yeah, you are fucking stupid. You pitch every five days, that means every single night is before you pitch, do you fucking get that? You come in here with bruises one more time, you’re gonna get re-acquainted with the bus leagues, and I’m not fucking around.”
He paused, and Mulder tightened his jaw, trying not to glare back at him. Who the fuck did he think he was, thinking Mulder couldn’t hold his own against soused cowboys?
His manager continued, his voice still hard but with some of the anger dragged out, “Whatever the fuck you’re fighting, kid, don’t do it on my time. That’s what the off-season is for. Now get your ass out on the field.”
So Mulder stopped fighting. Not to say he totally agreed with his manager’s reasoning, but he really didn’t want to get sent back to the bus leagues.
The scars he still has, he tells people he used to go camping a lot when he was a kid. You get a lot of cuts and scrapes, camping. A lot of scars. He’s not ashamed that he used to fight, but he was never doing it so that he’d have badass scars to show off.
If people never see you fight, if they only see your scars, then they’ll think you lost a lot. They’ll think you weren’t very good at it. Mulder was really good at it.
Sometimes he misses it.
* * *
to be continued . . . right now!