for the highway instead
travel backwards
2006
His second year in St. Louis, Mulder tapes his fingers together and ignores the pain in his shoulder. There is a vacant lot across the street from the new stadium, a mass grave for two-by-fours and chunked cinderblocks. He’s still learning how to pitch with so little foul ground, the margin for error carved down. It’s gotten to the point where Mulder isn’t even lying when he tells the press that he’s not playing hurt; he can barely feel it.
He sees his own name everywhere, newspapers, posterboard signs, scrolled across people’s backs. This is how it’s always been, but he has trouble connecting it for a few seconds, thinking that the signs refer to some other ballplayer, on some other team. He expects to meet this guy on the street sometime, shake his hand and ask him what he’s doing to get ahead in the count.
At his apartment, Mulder has four T-shirts that used to belong to Zito, two pairs of boxers and a broken watch. He has a steady stream of dates marked off on his calendar, and in the drawer of the nightstand, he has the Oakland A’s season schedule, worn and soft from being handled, tucked in his pocket during road trips.
Hudson says that the National League changes certain things about a person, falling awkwardly off the mound to chase bunts, creepy unfamiliar peace when there are two out and nobody on and the pitcher’s up. Hudson says that the National League has dulled his touch, bettered his eye, hardened the muscles in his sides. Mulder is eaten alive by mosquitoes when the Cardinals go to Atlanta, small red constellations on the backs of his hands.
In the sun-stroked living room of Hudson’s house, toys and colorful rips of construction paper on the floor, they’re drinking beer because neither of them is starting tonight, and Hudson says, “Let’s call the boys.”
Mulder shrugs, swiping his arm across his forehead. “Sure.”
It’s noon on the West Coast, and Mulder talks Hudson out of calling Zito, says he’s probably still in bed. They settle instead on Chavez, who sounds sleeplessly torn, mumbling at each of them in turn. Mulder catches something about Chavez’s arms already hurting, something about rain that won’t fucking stop, and then Hudson is pulling the phone away, laughing his old high-pitched laugh that makes Mulder’s chest ache.
Mulder gets another beer and rests his forehead on the refrigerator for a while, sweating through his shirt. Hudson’s infant son starts to bawl in the back bedroom, and Mulder goes back in, takes the phone from Hudson and watches him disappear down the hall.
“So,” Chavez says, moderately more awake now, clearing his throat.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve been throwing junk all week, you know.”
“You’ve been swinging at utter shit,” Mulder retorts lazily, hearing Chavez breathe out a shaky laugh. The phone lines are clear, pinpoint bright between here and there.
“Hudson always sounds exactly the same,” Chavez says after a minute. “Like we’re picking up a conversation from three years ago.”
Mulder yawns, more tired from southeastern travel than he ever was from flying cross-country. When he thinks back, all he ever remembers is flying three thousand miles, as if they never went to Texas, never saw Minnesota.
“Sticking with what works, I guess.”
Chavez snorts. “With the way his season’s starting? He should try something new.”
Mulder checks the hallway, cluttery baby noises. He doesn’t want to talk shit behind Hudson’s back, not when a guest in his house, this drowning city.
“He’ll be all right.”
“And what about you? Throwing all that junk. You planning to keep that up?”
Pressing his fingers into his eye, Mulder sighs. “I’m fine, Chavvy.”
Though Chavez is being irritating and combative, Mulder misses him dearly. Chavez has a newborn too, and he’s probably not getting much sleep. The marks under his eyes dig in so deep, visible on television, visible from space. Mulder still remembers Chavez best the way he was when he went insane, years ago.
“When are you coming to San Francisco?” Chavez asks abruptly.
Mulder blinks and thinks for a second. “Sometime in May, I think.”
“Well, great. I’ll just set aside the whole fucking month, then.”
“Excuse me for not having the schedule fucking memorized.”
But he knows what Chavez is trying to figure out and though he can’t tell him where the Cardinals will be, he knows that May goes like this for the A’s: angels-indians-devilrays-bluejays-yankees-mariners-giants-whitesox-royals-rangers. He knows this without even looking at the schedule in his pocket, a kind of terrible thing like every text message Zito’s sent him saved in his phone.
Chavez exhales heavily into the phone. “Anyway. I’ll see you when I see you. You’re gonna come hang out when you’re in town, right?”
Mulder squints one eye closed, fucking up his depth perception. “I don’t know, man, maybe.”
Last year, his first year gone, the Cardinals had gone to San Francisco once, in July, and Mulder wore a straight line between the ballpark and the hotel, ignoring the phone calls from his old teammates, shielded by the fog. A half a mile from Zito’s apartment building, Mulder had drunk himself asleep for three nights straight, doing his very best to stay in one place.
“You suck,” Chavez tells him mildly.
“You wish,” Mulder says back, and Chavez snorts again. They’re too far apart now for anything that happened four years ago to do them any damage. Mulder wonders sometimes if his life would be any different if he’d slept with Chavez back then.
“Whatever. Go back to hanging out with the enemy.”
“Huddy?”
“Enemy.”
Mulder kinda smiles, wishing he could be there to see Chavez’s clawed-out eyes, the stilted way he moves when he’s playing through pain, which is most of the time. Chavez never says anything, but Mulder can tell by the way his throws get to first on the bounce, the scuffed edge of his voice.
“You guys play tonight?” Mulder asks, already knowing the answer. Chavez makes an affirmative noise. “You should go back to sleep, then.”
“Can’t tell me what to do anymore, you’re not even here.”
Mulder rolls his eyes. “Like you ever listened to me when I was.”
“Ah, fuck you. Being in first place all the time has fucked you up something awful.”
“You think?”
Chavez’s jaw clicks as he yawns, the distance between shrinking down until Mulder would swear they’re in the same room. “Yeah. It’s not natural.”
Mulder remembers that, coming from behind every mid-summer. Like it meant something more that way, like they paid for it in blood. It’s one of the many things that he is surprised to find himself missing.
“Well,” he says, and then nothing else.
“Fine,” Chavez says. “Go’n and be in first place. I’ll see you in May, whether you want to or not. Quit throwing junk.”
“Quit swinging at it.”
“I’ll tell Zito you said hi,” and that’s a fantastically cruel thing to say, making Mulder think that maybe the distance between them is not as far as he figured.
Mulder bites the inside of his cheek. “You do that.”
Chavez laughs, hangs up without saying goodbye.
Mulder wastes some time staring at his hands, the mosquito bites and dirty black strings from pulled-off tape still circling his fingers. The windows are so clean that Mulder’s not certain they’re not open, and they face west, but they don’t show anything that he wants to see.
*
2004
In December, Zito holed up in Mulder’s house in Scottsdale and didn’t see the sun for days at a time.
It wasn’t like they had anything to do. Zito was asleep on the couch when Mulder got back from playing golf, his hair falling over his arm. Zito ate breakfast standing, crushed up soda cans with his hands, watched ESPN obsessively, and wanted to have sex with Mulder all the time.
Here in the off-season, it wasn’t hard to understand Zito, who lived in fear of being traded, still working for Mulder’s forgiveness after whatever had happened with Harden in the middle of the summer. Zito put his mouth to good use. Pinned Mulder to the door as soon as he came in. The knees of his jeans were worn out, the marks on his back still fresh when they were overlaid with new ones. Zito lost his gag reflex and Mulder couldn’t be in the same room with him without getting at least half-hard.
All things considered, Mulder didn’t bother telling Zito that he’d already been forgiven. Or, more to the point, that the transgression was better assumed to be so slight and inconsequential as to not even warrant absolution. In the grand scheme of things that Zito had done, letting Rich Harden fuck him was way, way down on the list. Mulder had decided that in a single moment, with Zito’s torn skin under his fingers and Harden’s cologne scented on his skin, and Mulder wasn’t the type of person who changed his opinions about things.
They heard over and over again how very likely it was that Zito would be traded this winter. How it was practically inevitable. Zito held onto him, his face against Mulder’s back. Every time his phone rang, he twitched so hard he broke water glasses. But it was never Billy Beane, and the days went by.
Mulder went out alone at night, meeting up with Chavez or someone else; half the major leagues lived in the Phoenix area in the off-season, and he had no shortage of friends. He accepted that Zito wouldn’t come with him, knowing it would be difficult to explain his presence down here, a killing dry stretch of desert away from his family and his house in Hollywood. The possibility of detection wasn’t the only thing that kept Zito so fully penned in by the walls, but it was a good enough excuse.
Over the course of the night, Mulder’s paper money migrated from his wallet to his front pocket, his coins into the crack of the car seat. He got back and Zito’s hands dug into his pants, tore soft ten-dollar bills, ruined money under them like the best dream when he fucked Zito on the couch.
Mulder couldn’t even tell him not to worry, alight with the memory of the last time he’d tried that. He took what he could get, tried not to wake Zito when he came in at three in the morning with his head already smeared by hangover.
They were on the couch, a Thursday, and Mulder asked him, “Are you going home for the holidays again?”
Zito shrugged, sitting back against the arm of the couch with his legs crossing Mulder’s like swords. Staying inside all the time had leeched him of color, sunk his eyes back. “Yeah, I guess.”
It was a dumb question. Zito always went home for the holidays, and he always came back after. Mulder was short of conversation, though, Zito’s eyes locked on the television, the long rumpled line of his body laid out for Mulder to see with diminishing perspective, like railroad tracks meeting on the horizon.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, surprising himself. Zito glanced at him, vague intrigue skating across the constant worry on his face.
“Shouldn’t go home?” Zito asked in confusion.
Mulder let one arm rest casually on Zito’s leg, cupping his kneecap. “What if something happens? I mean, over Christmas. You should be here if something happens.”
“It’s not gonna make a difference where I am when it happens,” Zito said flatly, his face still turned away from Mulder, the familiar red and burnt yellow of ESPN on his newly pale skin.
It took Mulder a second to realize that Zito had said when, not if.
“Hey.” He tightened his grip on Zito’s knee, feeling the cap shift and notch back into place. “I’m just saying, like, in the event of. It’s all real hypothetical.”
Zito half-smiled, one hand buried in his hair. “In the hypothetical event of me getting traded, you think you’ll be able to do something about it if I’m here?”
Mulder scowled at the television. “That is not what I said.”
“Well, clarify yourself, by all means.”
Impending doom made Zito snarky. Mulder considered shutting him up in the old-fashioned way, already regretting this conversation. Basketball players flickered and flew across the screen, but they weren’t watching the game, only the steady scroll at the bottom. Waiting for it to light up bright red with breaking news.
“If something happens, if you’re here, maybe it’ll be easier to deal with.”
Even while saying it, Mulder knew it was bullshit. Zito had been maintaining a very thin veneer of sanity for two years now. Mulder used to be a good counterweight, keeping Zito in one place, keeping him from getting too far inside his own mind, but he’d lost it somewhere along the way, in between Zito winning the Cy Young and Mulder not sleeping with Eric Chavez and Mulder getting hurt and Zito fucking Rich Harden. Nothing was the same as it had been when they were in their first year. Mulder couldn’t be responsible for this anymore.
Zito sat halfway up, leaning back on his elbows on the arm of the couch. He looked at Mulder, eyes dark as a forest fire. “I don’t think you get exactly how bad this is gonna be. It’s not gonna be an issue of dealing with it. It’s more like, how long can I stay above water. How long can I hide being totally fucking destroyed.”
Blinking at him, Mulder shook his head automatically, maybe lying as he answered, “It won’t be like that. You’ll be okay somewhere else. It’s still baseball.”
“Jesus, Mark, baseball’s got nothing to do with it.”
Mulder was gonna ask him what the fuck that meant, but Zito’s phone rang.
Zito’s leg tensed under Mulder’s hand, and Mulder tensed too, pressing hard on Zito’s kneecap and hearing Zito hiss between his teeth. They both stared for a second at Zito’s phone on the coffee table and Mulder had the wild urge to grab it before Zito could, four-seam it through the window. Take his five-iron to the television and deadbolt the doors, draw the curtains. If Zito was gone, Mulder didn’t want to know about it.
He held back. Zito picked up his phone and looked at the screen, his forehead clearing immediately and Mulder sighed. “It’s Huddy,” Zito said, rolling his eyes a little at their anxiety.
He stood up to take the call, and Mulder watched him as he moved, the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, here with Zito through another fearful winter, arguing against going home for Christmas because terrible things would happen if Mulder let him out of his sight, worse than a broken hip, worse than betrayal.
Zito’s voice rose. He said three times, “What?” and spun to stare at Mulder with huge windstruck eyes. Mulder felt adrenaline curl bitter and hot in his stomach, but then Zito said, “What the fuck do you mean, Atlanta?”
And something gave in Mulder’s chest.
It wasn’t Zito. It was Hudson the whole time.
He started to laugh, bending over his legs and holding his head in his hands. Zito thwapped him on the top of his head, brokenly comforting Hudson by saying, “Dude, dude,” and Mulder knew if he looked up, he’d see Zito’s fierce outraged gaze. Zito was gonna kill him for taking this lightly, for laughing, but Mulder didn’t care.
He could see then, for a moment, that losing Zito was not something he would have survived. In the clarity of released pressure, the sudden shock of their next season slamming into his mind, Mulder could see everything.
Lifting his head, his eyes wet from laughing too hard, Mulder found Zito at the window, his back to the room. With the sunlight behind him and the red ticker on the television bursting into life with Hudson’s name, Zito was form without depth, a solid black shadow, his watercolor reflection wavering in the glass.
Later, an hour or two, Zito decided to go see Hudson. “Somebody should be there,” Zito told Mulder, shoving shirts and jeans into a backpack.
“He’s got a wife,” Mulder pointed out, leaning in the doorframe, two years’ weight removed from his back. He wanted to laugh again, wanted to howl with it.
Zito glared at him. “Thank you. I’m still going. He’ll need someone to take him out drinking.” He looked at the shirt in his hand. “This isn’t mine.” He packed it anyway, and Mulder didn’t say anything, liking the idea of Zito driving across the country wearing Mulder’s shirt. Zito was driving because driving meant more.
“Just for a couple days, right?”
“Yeah.” Zito went into the bathroom and came back out with his toothbrush sticking out of his pocket. He shouldered his bag and came to Mulder, pressing him down and kissing him hard, Mulder’s head tocking back against the doorframe. Zito licked his way into Mulder’s mouth and pushed his knee between Mulder’s legs, and Mulder slipped a hand into Zito’s hair.
He broke with a gasp and rolled his forehead on Zito’s temple. Zito’s fingers were in his belt. Mulder could taste him bright as pennies, fractured and thinking that when Zito got back, they’d be able to take their time, abandon desperation at last. They both had two more years until free agency, and it opened him up, so much time still before them.
He kissed Zito’s cheek, feeling stupid and also blown away. “Thank God it wasn’t you,” he said.
Zito smiled at him, guilty relief crowding into his face. “Yeah.” He stepped away, pushing his hair back. It hurt to look at him, white-light young and at peace in an indefinable way, something that Mulder had not seen in him for years. “I’ll call you from the road.”
Then Mulder was watching his back again, and then Zito was gone.
*
By the time Mulder finally gets to San Francisco, the rain has stopped. People are beginning to lose their suspension of disbelief when he tells them he’s not hurt. The city comes at him like vengeance, same sidewalks and street corners and second-gear grades. The wind off the bay is strong enough to pull him into brick walls.
Mulder isn’t sure where Zito’s living this year, and for that he’s thankful. He doesn’t think he’d be okay if he had to stay a half a mile away again. He ends up wandering the business district when he can’t sleep, late late at night, black glass office buildings and accordion metal doors closing up the storefronts. It’s rained more in the past four months than anyone could have expected, and everyone is sick, surfaces slick and unforgiving.
It’s only because he starts tomorrow that he’s not drinking. Even that is hard to remember. He’d give anything-but he shakes his head, shakes that off.
They lose to the Giants the next day, but it’s not really his fault. Mulder ices his shoulder and there’s a message on his phone, Eric Chavez saying come over here or we’ll come get you.
Mulder knows them pretty well, knows that they will cross the water without hesitation, and he can imagine few things worse than seeing Chavez and Zito in front of his new team, his team that isn’t new anymore, second season. He is counting the days until the moment when he will have played for another team longer than he played for the A’s, the kind of thing that breaks a person.
He takes a cab over to the East Bay, meets Chavez in the parking lot of a bar. Chavez is talking on his phone, clasping Mulder’s hand briefly in greeting, pulling him close to bump chests, stupid half-hug.
Mulder stands there watching the streetlights fuzz like high pop-ups until Chavez stops being fucking rude and ends the call.
“Well,” Chavez says, studying him. Mulder nods, recognizing the bruise-colored night hills better than anything else he has seen all season, including San Francisco, including Eric Chavez. “You made it.”
“Apparently I didn’t have a choice,” Mulder answers. He searches Chavez for some evidence of the early year, the way Chavez has finally beaten his tendency to start slow, but there’s nothing there except the tight corners of Chavez’s eyes. “Are they inside?”
Chavez shakes his head. “Moved on. Went back to Walnut Creek.”
“What’s in Walnut Creek?”
“Shit.” Chavez’s expression contorts for a minute. “Keep forgetting you aren’t here. Anyway. Richie and Huston and Swisher and Joe. They’ve got a house.”
The living together is something that Mulder and Chavez started. Way the hell back in ’02, after Chavez got divorced and crashed on the couch and decided not to leave, no matter how skin-crawling awkward it was in the aftermath. Mulder wanted there to be noise when he got home, always wanted a rookie on hand to run his errands for him.
It never occurred to him to live with Zito during the season, because Zito wouldn’t leave the city and Mulder hated the fog. Though they spent most of every winter together, sometimes baseball took priority. Sometimes Mulder needed to be somewhere where Zito wasn’t, so he could catch his breath and figure out how to sleep alone again.
He turns his mind away from that.
“Okay, well,” he says, tipping his head to the side. Chavez unlocks the car and Mulder moves the seat all the way back, his knees still against the glove compartment. He lets them get five miles down the road before he asks:
“Who else is gonna be there?” trying his level best to sound casual.
Chavez darts a look at him, a red-white striped peppermint caught between his teeth as he smiles, looking vaguely demonic.
“Everyone.”
Mulder swallows, looking out the window. Twisted brush and yellow-eyed animals flash past. He hears Chavez rattling his hands on the wheel.
“I probably won’t stay very long,” Mulder hedges. “I mean, I pitched today, you know? I’m kinda tired.”
Chavez snorts. “Dude, he’s not, like, gonna do anything. You shoulda seen him when I said you were coming out tonight, fucking ghost-pale, man, like he got hit or something, and-”
“Eric,” Mulder says quietly. “Shut the fuck up.”
Chavez mostly does, muttering under his breath not loud enough for Mulder to hear. They go through the tunnel and Mulder watches the perfect arches of headlights streaming across the curved white tile walls. He wishes he’d stayed in San Francisco. He has three rules for getting through the day, and the first two involve not being within earshot of Barry Zito. The third involves not thinking about the first two.
But they’re here now, big rambling two-story house glowing gold and submerged in trees, a steep rise at its back, shiny-new black cars cluttering the driveway like toys. Mulder knew Swisher and Blanton for a month in his last season, but he never met Huston Street, only saw him pitch last year with his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth and his supernaturally pretty face.
He’s lost track of who’s come and gone from the team, knows only that everyone is waiting for Zito to be traded again. Mulder doesn’t believe it. After that terrible three-day stretch two Decembers ago, he is certain that Zito will never have to leave Oakland.
Chavez gets out of the car, but Mulder stays for a minute gathering his strength. Chavez comes over to his side and reaches into his inside coat pocket, sliding out a silver flask and passing it to Mulder through the open window.
Mulder gives him a pitifully grateful look and knocks back two quick shots. Courage blooms in his stomach.
Inside, there is light and motion and noise. Guys he knows and guys he doesn’t funnel through the hallway, laughing on their way to the kitchen or the living room. Mark Ellis shouts at the sight of him. Bobby Crosby tackles him into the wall, hugging him so tight Mulder sees stars. A beer magically appears in his hand.
They ask him how’s it going, and Mulder shrugs, smiling. They want stories about playing for the pennant and running away with the division. Mulder fakes his way through it, not remembering much about the past year and a half. He knows the numbers, but not what the old stadium looked like creaking and jammed to the rafters in October.
In the living room, he is surprised to find Noah Lowry, who will start the last game of the series for the Giants, sitting next to the man Mulder got traded for, tall black-haired kid with heavy eyebrows and his arm around Lowry’s shoulders. Nick Swisher is standing on a chair in the kitchen, holding court with salt scraped on his face, his wrist taped up. Street and Rich Harden are flicking bottle caps at each other across the counter, their faces whiskey-flushed.
It’s much like Mulder left it, like a million other nights in dozens of other houses. He drinks as fast as his stomach can stand, keeps his back to the wall, not wanting to be caught off-guard when Zito finally appears. He’s wicked with apprehension, digging his nails into the inside of his wrist.
An hour passes, or maybe two, and Mulder is more than a little drunk and more than a little relieved, because it would seem that Zito is smarter than him and decided not to show. Mulder thinks he needs to do what he can not to end the night passed out on the floor, needs to get out of the East Bay still intact.
He’s sitting on the carpeted stairs, shoeprints under his hand, watching the people flow and fade, uneven party tide. Half in darkness, he sees Zito for a second in the short gap between the kitchen and the living room. Thin and whitewashed, his hair longer than it has been since they were in Cape Cod. Mulder drops his head into his hands, scrubbing at his eyes. His luck is shit, always has been. And Zito’s an idiot, they both are, what were they thinking, being here at the same time?
He considers leaving, but Chavez would never let him hear the end of it. He considers in disgust that he is not nearly the man he once was, miles away from what he should be.
Zito emerges, his eyes darting nervously but not alighting on Mulder, halfway up the stairs and bisected by shadow. Mulder thinks, fuck it, and says hoarsely, “Hey.”
Zito jerks, his wide eyes flying to Mulder and his mouth is popped open a little and Mulder can’t look at him like that, memory like an endless deck of cards shuffling in his mind. Zito on his knees, Zito on his back, Zito on top of him with his knees against Mulder’s sides. His hands on Mulder’s shoulders, his wet-open mouth. Zito hanging half-off the couch with his hands braced on the floor, his face flushing and his teeth piercing his lower lip.
“How long have you been here?” Mulder asks him, wiping his mind clean. It’s not important. It isn’t worth the ragged inside of his cheek, the blood in his mouth.
Staring at the floor, Zito shrugs. “Not too long. I didn’t. I thought maybe you were already gone.”
They’re quiet for a minute, Mulder above Zito, the light parting them like a sea. Mulder wants to touch him very badly, but he hangs onto his knees, clears his throat.
“How’ve you been?” he asks.
Zito looks at him, black-eyed and seriously in pain, worse than Mulder’s shoulder, worse than six-run first innings and giving up five home runs. “How the fuck do you think I’ve been?”
Mulder closes his eyes, his hands on his face, fingers pressing hard into his temple. “Come up here for a second,” he whispers.
He doesn’t think Zito will. Zito wouldn’t return his calls last year, changed his email address so that everything Mulder tried to tell him bounced back. Zito has been twice-removed, stories about him filtering through Tim Hudson and Eric Chavez, just another opposing player, an American Leaguer who has no impact on Mulder’s day-to-day existence. It wasn’t until September that Mulder heard from him, on the night the Cardinals clinched the division, and by then Mulder was mostly ash, anyway.
But this is Zito’s fault, for once and for sure. He rises, sits next to Mulder on the stair. Their knees bump, Zito holding onto his elbows. His hair slices across his face. Mulder tries to remember how it used to be, the ease of it, Zito always just there.
“It’s good to see you again,” he says uselessly.
“Yeah. You too.”
“You’ve been pitching real well.”
“Yeah.”
Zito is silent, staring straight ahead. Mulder searches for something else to say, something normal about the party or Chavez lying drunk on the patio, something about the dead weather. It was okay for Zito to ignore him for so long, Mulder knows that. It was the only way they were going to get over it. They still don’t really talk.
“Listen-”
“This is stupid,” Zito says suddenly, cutting him off. He turns to Mulder with a look of stunned panic on his face. “I can’t, Mark, I can’t, like, be around you. I’m sorry.”
He stands too quick and loses his balance, he almost falls. Mulder moves by instinct, catching his belt and holding him steady. There’s a perfect moment then, with Mulder’s hand in Zito’s belt and Zito’s weight precariously balanced, tipping away from him. Mulder can feel two inches of skin, a smooth heated place that he remembers so well.
Zito steps down and Mulder lets go. At the bottom of the stairs, Zito looks back up at him with naked despair.
“It’ll get better,” Zito tells him helplessly. “It’s got to.”
He disappears, tangled wreck of hair over his back collar, his shoulders trembling.
It’s been a year and a half. If it was gonna get better, it would have already. Mulder drives his thumbs into his eyes, breathing shallowly and swearing that when he hunts down the vampire that did this to them, he’ll rip out its heart with his hands.
*
So Zito was gone, speeding east on empty highways. Mulder talked to the press and he talked to their teammates, brave new world. Everyone wanted to know what it would be like. Mulder knew they would go one-two when the season began again, Harden behind them and from there it wasn’t certain. But one-two, as they’d never been, Mulder could feel the potential of it strum like metal in his bloodstream.
He hid all of Zito’s stuff in the garage and had some friends over, thinking about Zito in the wasteland, red dust on his arms. Smiling without pain, Mulder played videogames like dancing, lifted his glass to the coming season. The other guys were ballplayers too, and they gave him askance looks, remarked that he seemed to be taking the Hudson news pretty fucking well.
Mulder shrugged, no sense dwelling on the past, no sense missing someone when you couldn’t get him back. Zito was a ghost in the corners, laughing when Mulder laughed, touching the back of his neck, turning the alarm clock off and mumbling, fuck it, back to sleep, with his cold face on Mulder’s chest.
He hadn’t realized, absorbed as he was by pitching and then by the strain of keeping Zito from going completely off the deep end, but there had been something strung tight in him for a very long time now, waiting for Zito to be traded, crossing his fingers when he turned on the television in the morning. It was like being cut free.
Zito called from West Texas, chattery wind behind his voice. Mulder could picture him, leaning on the bumper of his car with his hood up, the skin of his face bitten and chill. Nothing exciting happened on the road, Zito half-asleep and averaging ninety miles an hour.
Zito said, “I don’t want to talk to the press, dude.”
“Then don’t.” Mulder slumped down in the chair, one hand under his shirt.
“It’s like, what the fuck am I supposed to say? Oh, it’s such a goddamn shame, Huddy’s so fucking good, but hey, at least I don’t have to leave. You know? It’d be all, like, mixed messages.”
Mulder opened his belt, not really intending anything, just seemed like the thing to do. “If you don’t know what to say, don’t worry about it. Don’t answer the phone if you don’t know the number. Chavvy’s talking enough for the rest of us, anyway.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that? He’s acting like Billy did it specifically to piss him off.”
“You mean the world doesn’t actually revolve around Eric Chavez? Blasphemy.” Zito snickered, and Mulder pushed his hand into his jeans, closing his eyes. “Are you stopped for the night?”
“Think so. I, see. There’s fucking nothing out here.” Zito sounded amazed, and Mulder hummed, pushing up into his hand. He wanted Zito back, atom-bomb blast of light and a blown tire, anything that would put them in the same place again.
Zito was halfway there, though. They talked for a little while longer and Mulder didn’t let on that he was casually jerking off, kept his voice low. There was nothing for it.
Eventually, Zito yawned and said he was gonna go find someplace to sleep. Mulder said okay, not really paying that much attention, heat low in his stomach.
“You know something,” Zito said thoughtfully. “I kinda already miss you. That’s weird, right?”
Mulder sucked in a breath between his teeth, his hand moving faster. “Little bit. But it’s okay.”
Zito laughed. “Someday the world’s gonna end and you’re gonna tell me that it’s okay.”
Grinning hard against his will, Mulder bowed his head. They were so much better now, with injury and rumor far away, only physical space separating them. Mulder’s tendency to simplify and Zito’s tendency to overthink at last matched up perfectly. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.
Mulder awoke the next day on Zito’s side of the bed. The sun was noon-high, wet yellow light washing over his back. He spent some time getting Zito’s stuff out of the garage, replacing everything so that Zito would never even know it’d been moved. He cleaned the windows and changed his shirt, set his watch to East Coast time.
That night, he met up with some other team’s second baseman to go see a basketball game. Sometime in the third quarter, he got a call from Billy Beane.
Things slowed down at that point.
Mulder found himself back at his house, standing in the dark driveway. His phone hadn’t stopped ringing. His hands were shaking, the moon so heavy and white above him. He prayed for rain, anything that could wake him up out of this, affirm that it wasn’t real, he hadn’t been traded.
He’d been traded.
All he could think to do was fight through the reporters’ calls, ten-times greater disbelief and the rip down the heart of him. He forced his hands to work, narrowing his eyes at the green light of his phone. A signal flare, satellite cry, reaching east to wherever Zito was now, but Zito’s phone rang through to voicemail and Mulder didn’t even know if he’d heard yet.
Inside, he tripped over one of Zito’s sneakers, and broke. He fell to his knees, his mind sick-lit and astonished. It wasn’t possible. They’d only had two days, not nearly what they were promised, and Zito hadn’t even been there.
Mulder was still in the hallway fourteen hours later, when Zito got back.
Zito crashed in, splintering the door against the wall. Wild like that, deep gaping eyes and breathing so hard, jagged in the quiet. He could see in the dark, he skidded to a stop before Mulder and stared down at him. Mulder stared up, his mouth half-open. Fourteen hours and it hadn’t stopped being true. Mulder wasn’t sure if he’d slept.
Zito reached down and grabbed Mulder’s shirt, hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall. The horseshoe over the door for luck tumbled off its nail, cracked the floorboards.
“No,” Zito said, and pulled him up, slammed him back again. Mulder lost his breath, his head spinning. Zito’s hands so tight on his shoulders, knuckles gouging and Mulder had never seen him like this. Zito had always gone crazy with more style.
“No,” he said again, his voice breaking. Mulder shook his head, coughing to get his wind back. Zito wrenched Mulder’s shirt up and banged his forehead on Mulder’s chest. His hands spread wide on Mulder’s stomach. Mulder folded his fingers on the sides of Zito’s neck, feeling the dive of Zito’s heartbeat.
Zito kissed him or he kissed Zito and it didn’t matter. The force of it split Zito’s lip. Zito snarled with blood on his teeth and jerked Mulder’s belt open. Mulder’s hand twisted in his hair and pulled his head back, licking Zito’s throat and sucking hard like he could swallow Zito’s pulse and keep it from moving so fast.
Zito’s hand was in his shorts and Mulder buried his face in Zito’s shoulder, breathing in shudders and rags. When Zito roughly flipped him to face the wall, Mulder let him, tasting plaster and dirt and hearing Zito say against the back of his neck, over and over again, no.
Mulder pressed his forehead into the wall, couldn’t regain control. Zito had a fist clenched in his shirt, hiked up to above his shoulder blades. His mouth was metal-hot against Mulder’s back, his belt buckle cold as hell on Mulder’s bared hip.
They’d been experimenting with violence all winter, but nothing like this.
And Zito fucked him there in the hallway where Mulder had sat without moving for too long. Zito had seared through fourteen hundred miles to be here now. Slick-hard and painful at Mulder’s back, dragging him so close, until he was imprinted on the wall, gasping out pieces of his lungs. Until Zito was everything in and on and above, and nothing had changed.
They collapsed together onto the floor at the end of it, their faces shining. Zito’s elbow clocked into Mulder’s eye and it began to swell immediately. The ceiling swam overhead, Zito’s arms around him and Zito still saying no, shivering with no oxygen left inside him. He said it until his voice was gone, until Mulder covered Zito’s mouth with his hand and begged him to shut up.
*
In June, Mulder gives up and lets the team put him on the disabled list.
He’s certain he’s not actually hurt, but everyone wants a reason for why he’s pitching as badly as he is, and this seems to make them happy. The doctors fake their diagnosis. They smudge his X-rays with thumbprints and shoot him full of magnetic pulses, until coins stick to his fingers. In front of the press, they talk about his rotator cuff in dour terms, and Mulder sits exhausted behind them, staring into the flashbulbs.
They send him back to Arizona, a week to get prodded by orthopedic surgeons and Mulder comes home to sheet-covered furniture, phantom handprints on the wall in the front hallway. He sleeps for two days and it’s deeply weird to be down here in the middle of summer.
The pain in his shoulder is insubstantial and nothing that should have fucked up his delivery. He can’t come over three-quarters anymore, he gives everything away. The doctors are resolute in their opinion that he is damaged, and Mulder doesn’t even bother to argue.
This has happened once before, in the last half of his last season in Oakland, when he was an enrapt spectator watching Zito fragment, not noticing that he was in pieces himself until they sat him down and showed him the box scores. But this isn’t like that.
Television fills up his days and when he tries to lift a case of beer out of his car, his left arm buckles and the case crashes onto the driveway, silver-blue cans rolling down into the street.
Before the first week is out, he gets a call from Zito’s number.
Mulder is not expecting it. Zito is smarter than he is, dodging Mulder’s calls last year, running away from him on the stairs last month. Mulder keeps thinking that he’s tough enough to talk to Zito without revealing anything, claw all the way back to their brief Cape Cod friendship, nine years finished now.
He answers hesitantly, and it’s not Zito at all, it’s Eric Byrnes.
“Fuckin’ christ hell, Mark, what the fuck are you doing in Phoenix without fucking calling me?”
Mulder doesn’t say anything, stunned.
Zito’s voice rises from behind Byrnes’s. “Dude, who the fuck told you you could use my phone?”
Mulder flinches. He almost hangs up, but Byrnes is saying, “Reuniting, baby. It’s been too long.”
He’s not sure which of them Byrnes is talking to, but Zito asks, muffled and suddenly scared, “Who are you talking to?”
“Here,” Byrnes says, and there’s a shuffle as the phone is passed off. Zito’s fearful breath falls into Mulder’s ear, and he closes his eyes.
“Hey,” Mulder says low.
“Oh. I. I didn’t know he was calling you.”
“Yeah, well.” Mulder swallows, hating beyond all reason the circumstance, the bloody shred of years behind them. “I’m in Scottsdale, you know. For my arm.”
“I heard.” Zito’s throat clicks. “We’re here too. For interleague, you know? And Eric’s a little bitch.”
Byrnes cries out in offense, and there’s a tussle, rained curses and Mulder blinks at the TV without seeing it, only light twitching like muscles on the surface of his eyes. Byrnes regains the phone.
“Come out tonight,” he implores.
Mulder shakes his head. “Can’t.”
“Fuck that. Like you’ve got such a packed social life. Like you’re not fucking dying to see me.” Byrnes thwacks something, yelping. “Would you get your fucking hands off me, Barry, motherfuck.”
Mulder is thrown right back to six years ago, when they were all brand-new and Byrnes came up for ten games late in the season, amusing everyone with his ability to fit every sentence with at least one swear word. He remembers Zito laughing hard and pushing a bar of white hotel soap into Byrnes’s mouth while he slept.
“Put Zito back on, will you,” Mulder says, his throat dry.
Byrnes mutters and then Zito’s back, quietly saying hi.
“He wants me to come see you guys,” Mulder tells him.
“Yeah.” Zito sounds pretty wrecked, and if this is what he saved Mulder from hearing last year, then thank god.
“Is that a. A good idea?” Mulder crosses his fingers, although that particular talisman never did them any good, because maybe cabin fever has snuck into his mind and maybe it’s been a month since he’s seen Zito. Maybe they can get through this, just one night. Somewhere, they were once friends.
“Of course it isn’t, Mark,” Zito says, tattered edge of impatience. He pauses. “But you can. If you want.”
Mulder rubs his face, drained beyond tolerance. “Maybe I will then.”
But he knows he won’t go.
Zito says okay, names the bar where they’ll be, and then clicks off, and Mulder rubs his shoulder absentmindedly, dense heat behind his eyes and he didn’t promise anything. Neither of them ever said anything irrevocable, disregarding that one terrible day when they’d woken up battered into the new morning, no longer teammates, no longer anything that could be claimed. Mulder prefers to believe that nothing happened that bad day a half a week before Christmas, a year and a half ago. He prefers to believe that they’d just packed up Zito’s stuff and left each other painlessly, moving away in different directions across the desert.
He won’t go because he can’t do that to himself, he knows pretty well. And he didn’t lie, he never lied.
He passes the night like every night since he’s been down here, draining beers, the television muted so he can hear the buzz of crickets outside, paying no attention to his phone when it rings. He keeps thinking that all he needs is time, needs to stop seeing Zito crumpled in the front hallway with his lip bleeding.
Zito knocks on his window late, after Mulder has stopped watching the clock. Mulder is sure that he’s just vapor, staggering over and flipping the latch, the window squealing as it’s jerked up. Zito is swaying, looking appropriately ethereal, better-forgotten memory, all circled eyes and hollowed cheeks.
“You didn’t come,” Zito says, but not in accusation, more like how he’d say, the sky is blue. The weather is impossible. We are no longer on the same team.
“I only said maybe,” Mulder answers, wanting to reach through the window and touch Zito, confirm that he’s really there.
“You could have. I would have been okay.” Zito’s eyes alight on him and Mulder catches his breath.
“You would have been the only one. Come on.” Mulder offers his hand and Zito clasps it without a second thought, using it to pull himself through the window. Taking his weight, Mulder’s shoulder fires with pain and he sucks in air between his teeth, astonished by it.
“Fuck, your arm,” Zito says clumsily, letting him go at once. “I’m sorry, I forgot.”
Mulder shakes his head, gritting his teeth. “It doesn’t hurt. I’m not really. They’re making it all up.” He collapses, his knees hitting the carpet with an echoed thump. His arm feels like it’s been ripped out of the socket. Zito kneels beside him, worried hands on Mulder’s back and Mulder shuts his eyes tight, concentrating on that to the exclusion of all else.
“Jesus, Mark, be careful.” Zito’s hands curl around his shoulder, nice warmth there and the agony recedes slightly. Mulder can breathe again.
“Why are you here?” he asks, glancing at Zito and Zito’s very near to him, kneeling together on the floor.
Zito leans back on his heels, defensive with his shoulders drawn up. “You didn’t come,” he repeats, and Mulder hears the blur in his voice, the damp fingerprints on his collar. Zito’s drunk. They’re exactly like they always have been, someone always off-balance, someone always holding the other up. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
But Zito’s not telling the truth, his eyes flickering with doubt. Mulder puts his hand on Zito’s neck for a moment, sluggish drunken thud of his heartbeat, warm skin, two days stubble.
“I’ve known you for nine years,” he says, treacherous life that he’s leading. “Don’t you think I can tell when you’re lying?”
Zito’s eyes widen, and he closes his fingers on Mulder’s wrist. He shakes his head. “It hasn’t been nine years,” he whispers. “It’s just been broken up over time.”
And he lets Mulder’s hand fall, the distance returning full-force between them. Mulder is left in unbelievable pain, wondering if the reason he hasn’t had faith in his injury to this point is because it’s the least important thing that has gone wrong with him.
Zito’s throat moves as he swallows, looking away. “I don’t know why I came over here,” he says, distracted by the silent blue-chattering television. “I thought maybe you’d come out and maybe we could. I don’t know. I should go.”
He stands, Mulder on his knees and they’ve been here before. Mulder instinctively begins to reach for Zito’s belt, stopping himself forcefully. They’re going in circles. Tomorrow Mulder will wake up and be back on that raft in Cape Cod where Zito set them in motion, set them up to fall. Tomorrow he will mistake Zito from afar, not realizing that he already knows him.
“Hang on.” Mulder gets to his feet with some trouble, balancing with a hand on the wall. Zito is backed up against the window, skittish like a beaten animal. “We’ve got to, like. We can’t keep this up forever.”
Zito smiles, his face angled down. “Why not? We never see each other.”
That might be part of the problem, but Mulder might be drunk. It used to be so easy, and he can’t for the life of him get over that. He scrubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “Would you just. Stick around. Don’t leave, okay?”
Hates this, so much and with everything in him. Can’t fucking escape it.
Zito makes a low sound, pushing his fingers on the window glass so that it squeaks. Mulder looks at him and wants to pin him down, crack his vertebrae on the sill, see him with shards of glass in his hair.
But Zito’s taking off his watch and putting it into his pocket, brushing the hair out of his eyes, telling Mulder, “There’s nothing here to leave, man,” and climbing back out the window. Soft footsteps on the grass, long shadow from the streetlight. This has happened before and Zito is silk-shirted, white-slashed sneakers, retreating.
*
They awoke on the floor, looking for all the world like they’d been beaten up. Mulder’s eye was swollen almost shut. Zito’s mouth was bisected by a line so dark red it was black. Mulder’s jeans gaped open, Zito’s still pulled halfway down his thighs. Zito’s arms were slung around Mulder’s back, but he drew away when Mulder stirred.
Mulder pushed up and placed his hand on Zito’s chest. Looking down at him like that, static filmed over his eyes and his mind, Zito was slow and kinda dangerous, hands full of metal in a lightning storm.
“Coffee,” Mulder said. His voice broke. “Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
He stood, fixed his pants. There were tiny red indentations on the back of his hand-from Zito’s fingernails, he realized. “Fuck.”
Mulder covered his eyes for a second, puffy bruised skin under his fingertips. Zito’s hand tripped up his leg, Zito saying his name low, but Mulder kicked him away, went to the kitchen. He put on the coffee, put his forehead against the cabinet. Sore and stiff from sleeping on the floor, he thought over and over again that they weren’t even in the same fucking league anymore.
“Hey.” Zito, close behind him. Zito with road dust still in his hair, split lip and his belt gone missing, Zito made Mulder want to sleep for days, lose his voice, steam-burn his ears until he couldn’t be expected to hear or answer questions.
Mulder turned, leaning back against the counter. Zito was at the table, brown shadows under his eyes. Stringy, soft-unwashed, wearing Mulder’s shirt with spots of blood on the collar, he had foregone the jittery out-of-focus shear of when he’d gone crazy. It was strange to see Zito with something like resignation in his face.
“What’s going to happen?” Zito asked him.
Mulder tightened his grip on the counter. “I don’t know.”
“Are you. I don’t think this is something. Wait. Because I just, I can’t.”
Zito trailed off, stared at his hands. Mulder remembered being held down, once or twice, big hands on his chest, his back. Wanting to come more than he wanted to breathe, and that hadn’t even been anything special, just a fucking Tuesday night in his room with the window open.
“What are you trying to say, man?” Mulder asked. Zito shook his head, weaving his fingers together.
“I kept thinking you were gonna get sick of it,” Zito said.
“That was years ago.”
“No, fuck, it wasn’t. That was, like, three days ago.” Zito looked up, knifelike and fearsome. “You shouldn’t have let me leave.”
Mulder scoffed. “How’d I fucking know you’d turn this around until it was my fault?”
He turned, jerked cups out of the cabinet and rang them down on the counter. The clock on the microwave was blinking twelve o’clock, no sense of how long they’d slept, whether it was dawn or midday or evening, the gray light not letting them in on it.
“It’s not your fault,” Zito said. Mulder curled his hands into fists, watching the coffee drip. “But you still shouldn’t have let me leave.”
“What the fuck are we even talking about here?” Mulder faced him again, liking the anger than ran fast-red in his blood. “You’ve been waiting for me to get sick of it, fine, but I haven’t. And if I’d made you stay, I wouldn’t have gotten traded, right? And if I’d gotten a few more hours of sleep back in Cape Cod, I never would have thought I’d known you in the first place, and none of this would have ever happened.”
Zito’s eyes got big, his hands scratching at the tabletop. “I. You remember that?”
“Of course I fucking remember that. God.” Mulder dug his thumbnails into the heels of his hands. “Listen to me. We’ve been doing this for four goddamned years. I feel fucking ill when I don’t get to see you. It doesn’t make any difference how we got here, all that matters is what happens next.”
They were quiet. Mulder felt the house settling around them, creaks like moans and he was reminded of ghosts, the attic they never stayed in after dark. Zito was clenching his hands, pallored with his shoulders held tightly.
“I can’t do it if you’re not around,” Zito said eventually. He didn’t meet Mulder’s eyes. “All I ever had to go on was that you were still there. And you’re not anymore. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just bad luck, that’s all.”
Mulder wanted to hit him, make his mouth bleed again. Rewind years with each blow, until Zito was nineteen again and wet-haired, smiling at him in confusion. There was no such thing as time when the clocks are stopped. They could go back as far as they wanted.
But Zito lifted his head then and he’d already bitten his lip, bright red eking down his chin. Hard thing to see, bad wish come true, and Mulder winced. He turned his back on Zito and ran a washcloth under the faucet, stirring cold on his hands.
“Your lip, man.” He tossed Zito the cloth, slightly more at ease with Zito’s face partially obscured. Zito’s eyes cracked when they hit him, strengthened because Mulder couldn’t see his mouth.
“If we got through all the shit that’s happened,” Mulder said. “What makes you think we can’t get through this too?”
Speaking from behind the cloth, Zito answered, “I can’t spend the next fifteen years living for the off-season. And neither can you. It’s not supposed to work like that.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Mulder said, watching the blood seep through the wet cloth slowly, transfixed. Zito took it down, left it twisted on the table. His mouth was damp and that wasn’t fair.
He could remember thinking at one point that Zito would never let him go without a fight, scratch and claw and shred all the way down to their end. Zito had never wanted things to be simple, wanted marks that he could use as evidence forever, but that was a long time ago. Mulder didn’t want things to change, and Zito still didn’t know how to live like that.
“I don’t think it is.” Zito let his hair fall down in front of his eyes. He was shaking. He’d always shown more on the outside than Mulder did, asked stupid questions and woke them both up to watch the snow. Mulder could call him crazy, faithless maybe, unwilling to believe in that which he could not see, but he knew that Zito had a right. Mulder never would have believed it either, if it hadn’t come home to him with such force.
“Anyway,” Zito continued haltingly. “Every bad thing that has happened to us turned out okay in the end. So maybe this is for the best.”
Mulder breathed out carefully, turned off the coffee machine. He lined everything up in his mind, four long years come to nothing and Zito on that beach with pieces of flame in his hair, kicking at his heart.
“Get the fuck out of here if that’s what you think,” Mulder told him, quiet enough to hurt, staring at the tile floor.
He waited, fingerprints chopped to slivers by the rough underside of the counter. He heard Zito half-moan, and saw Zito’s formless shadow rise on the floor, move swiftly out of the room. Heard the front door slam and wondered numbly what the fuck he was supposed to do with all of Zito’s stuff.
The day deepened. Mulder stumbled into the living room and it was like he’d been through a war. He didn’t trust the corners or his own senses. He checked his arms for new scars.
When he turned on the television to drown out the noise in his head, he was confronted by his own face, photoshopped into a uniform the same color as Zito’s blood on the washcloth, grininng back at him.
*
And so Mulder kills time in Arizona. He’ll kill time for the rest of his life, disabled for a long time now, for real. He hears about the wind in St. Louis knocking out plastic windows at the new stadium, keeps track of every team he’s ever played for. There are phone calls that come and go like faces in a crowd, like a dream.
Still in the edges of things, he can taste salt water. He wakes up to Zito’s broken watch on the night-stand, the T-shirt of Mulder’s that Zito mailed back in January hung on the bedroom doorknob.
Waiting to be strong enough to pitch again, not trusting baseball to cure him of anything, Mulder crosses off each day, blue and black ink on his fingers. He experiences useless impulses to burn old calendars, one for every year that he spent in Oakland. Like if he breathes in that smoke, he’ll forget everything that has gone small in the rearview mirror, like it’ll work as some kind of redemption. But he knows that’s insane, and he knows that this is not something he should have allowed to happen.
When the A’s are in Boston, unnaturally in first place, Mulder heads north. He packs ice in a cooler and the skin of his shoulder turns grayish blue. The black fields of the Central Valley reduce him to elemental parts, vision and motion and this idiotic idea that some day he’ll wake up without feeling worse than he did when he went to sleep.
San Francisco is muddied, caught in the middle of an incongruous midwestern heat wave. The temperature makes the buildings shimmer and fold, glass warping. The city feels hollowed out with both local teams on road trips, the stadium lights banked and as dark as clock faces.
Mulder finds Zito’s apartment building and he doesn’t know which window is his. He’s never been here before. Zito’s on the other side of the country and so shall he remain.
Mulder, unexpected and unrecognized with his cap pulled down over his eyes, Mulder doesn’t know how to make sense of this, all-night drive aching in his back, shoulder slowly thawing in the weather. Mulder is lit by streetlamps, his face tilted up.
And he’s down on the sidewalk for hours, tracing the ranks of closed and curtained windows, waiting without hope for someone who is not here to show his face.
THE END
Endnotes: Somewhere around page sixty, Microsoft Word decided it was too long to continue highlighting grammar and spelling mistakes. Which makes no sense, because there have been longer stories (well, one longer story), and this has never come up before. So, excuse that if you catch any mistakes.
Also, totally messed with game data and Eric Chavez's marriage (again! some more!). Not quite like me.
Bothered by this story? Yes, always! Painted into a corner? Naturally. Over it? Give me a week.