Fathoms Five 1/2

[penumbra23]

Fathoms Five
by Penumbra
X-Files/MSR/Rated R

- Never is a very long time -
________________________________

'My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.'

~ Emily Dickinson, 'My Life Closed Twice'
________________

'... One can't believe impossible
things. But the White Queen has her
own principles.'

~ Alice, in 'Through
the Looking Glass'
________________

'Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.'

~  Tennyson, 'Tithonus'
________________________________
________________________________
________________________________

When Scully was 56 years old, her faith in the natural order drew its
rational conclusion.

She arrived very early in the morgue basement of the chief coroner's
facility, in the county of Los Angeles, bearing an old .38 Smith &
Wesson that normally resided in her car. It contained a single
wadcutter target bullet.

Somewhere off the coast of Washington State, the U.S.S. Waccamaw, late
of N.S. Miramar, moved south, unladen, decommissioned, propelled by
salvor tug.

Scully paused just inside the swinging doors. The long room was empty
and the refrigeration units hummed. The smell of coffee, a sweet note
above the stuffiness of formalin and decay, and the presence of a body
bag waiting on a gurney told her someone alive was about the premises.

She quickly chose a cold storage chamber at the back, turning on the
light as she shut the polished steel door. The cold made the skin
prickle over her shoulders. The bodies on the shelves in their black
bags were silently intent upon her. She sat down at the very back of
the chamber, her eyes on the drain in the floor. She had seen people
use garbage bags, tarps, thinking about what would come after, but
Scully was not prepared to think any further ahead.

It was the ship she kept thinking of, trying to keep herself detached.
It was the desolation of the miles and miles of ocean, and it was the
emptiness of the ship, the dying ship, unpiloted, plunging on dead
through the waters.

She'd lain awake with the experiment before her like an overdue
assignment, and despite her fear and her despair she also knew the old
burn of curiosity. Only terror was left now.

The .38 Super Police was room temperature and incredibly big and
shiny, far bigger than the job at hand required. The muzzle like a
black eye looked as big as a teacup.

Scully pressed her shoulder blades against the wall, getting dry
mouth. Do it fast. Naturally there was no window in the room. She
wanted a window to look at. She switched the gun to her left hand so
that she could cross herself with her right, and shut her eyes,
breathing so hard that the gun barrel rattled against her temple. She
considered the angle, seeing the coroner's diagram of entrance,
trajectory, exit. Often people missed, or lived to tell, nicked the
frontal lobe, lodged a bullet in the optic foramen.

At the last moment she jammed the pistol in her mouth, hands wrapped
around grip, both thumbs through the trigger guard.

She tasted machining oil. *Click* said the double-action as her thumbs
got the message.

The crash overtook her and through the endless ricochet of noise she
only saw darkness, with eyes open wide. She couldn't feel her body -
she was dead, head blown off. Nothing but death could be this far
beyond endurable. The loudness inside her head was a bell of agony.
The pain was so unbearable it was beyond pain. She was dead, brains on
the wall, she was a pulpy glob that had once contained life; she
quivered as the nerves played out, but the peace she had anticipated
didn't manifest.

She began to see colors, all sprayed and smeared, and then she could
see herself down below, lying folded over in the small well of a room,
blood circling around her head like the solid disc halos of medieval
angels. A muddy splatter on the wall. She could see the wear on the
bottom of this dead Scully's shoe, see the white hand limp beside the
bloody gun. A streak of smoke hung in the air above her. A mist of
atomized blood settled. Her body seemed a distant thing, and for a
time she gripped the hope that she was, indeed, dead.

All at once she was diving, and the cold concrete floor smacked her
cheek as if she had just landed hard inside her head. It was
devastating to admit this to herself. Where was her death? The terror
became more intense than her massive trauma. Terror and panic and her
inability to move.

She could only lay frozen, her head resonating in great outward
ripples, eyes unable to focus, blood warm in her mouth. Worst of all
was the percussion pain in her ears. Then the desire to breathe came
to her, overriding everything else. After a terrible struggle, she
suddenly opened her mouth and the blood poured out as she inhaled. She
could feel her shoulder and her hip, heavy as stones, her head still
pressed to the floor, cheek glued to the cement with cooling blood.

Worst of all, she was alive.

________________

Scully was so cold she didn't notice the traffic lights suspended in a
green swag before her until the cars began to honk. The noise was
terrifying, and it was as if she had been caught out, illuminated.
People on the sidewalk turned to stare. There was probably a law about
driving around with a gunshot wound to the head. California had a law
for everything. She plucked her foot from the brake and the car
hitched forward in the raft of commuter traffic.

People were only honking out of impatience, not because she was a
mangled freak of nature. She'd rinsed the blood from her hair and
finger-brushed her hair over the back of her head, pressed paper
towels to the squashy spot on her skull until it began to harden up.
It didn't hurt and yet it hurt in the manner of unbearable psychical
outrage, like being conscious during surgery.

She had an initially grave intra-oral wound, a neat hole in the
posterior oropharynx she could feel with her tongue. The explosion of
propellent gases in her mouth had ejected unpleasantly through her
nasal cavity, ripping along her sinuses. The tinny sound in her ears
came and went, and she was, she judged, in considerable shock, the
full complication of her situation still sinking in.

She nosed her car into the shade of a billboard, and sat steeped in
the heat that washed from the roof of a car dealership. Before her, a
small space between the weeds and a stucco wall yielded an
interminable gush of humans tramping a given bit of sidewalk. She
waited for the space at the top of her palate to occlude so that she
would be able to speak properly, fading in and out, sleeping deeply
through the numbness in her ears and waking with a jump, panting like
a rabbit run to ground.

It was not that she wanted to die, but she wanted to be rid of
herself, this part of herself that she could not shake. She wanted the
option of being rid of it. She had only herself to look forward to,
like a bug on her hand that she could not shake off. She had come to
hate this aspect of herself, the lack of choice, the endless wearying
prison of herself.

She hated this hot, false weather that belied mood or despair or the
sleaziness of life, the place of plastic perpetual youth they'd all
had to move to because of her. Mulder, a born Easterner, missed the
east coast the most, but Scully missed it too, the snows and rising
waters and clear delineation between the seasons. They missed their
Maine slate sink, and the Washington Post, the milky blur of salt on
the windshield, and the taste of Poland Springs.
______________________

In the early afternoon she drove up the long curve of the slumped
dusty hill with her car windows open. Their house was wedged into a
shoulder of the hill, camouflaged by madrone and low brush, forest
fire smoke and valley smog.

At the top of the driveway Scully jerked the door handle and hung out
of the idling car. Along the bottom of the lawn a bit of the retaining
wall had tumbled into the road, and William was sorting out the
stones, trying to fit them back into place.

"Oh!" Scully cried. The dog was watching her from the lawn, a wad of
black wool, panting, his eyes on hers like he knew what she'd done.

"I've almost got it," said William, straightening up and smiling at
her with his father's sly, sleepy eyes. "The car's okay," he added.

She turned off the ignition and stood in the road among the loose
chunks of andesite. William replaced the stones methodically, in no
hurry, making a puzzle out of it, placing shims to keep everything
even. Periodically he hummed a heavy riff that descended until his
head nodded sharply three times, marking time. His knees were grimy
and he was wearing a horrible pair of salt-rotted sneakers she thought
she had thrown away.

"It's just that your father built that wall," she said.

Her attention was caught by the view. Half of their property's value
stemmed from this view of the San Bernardino Mountains and this
immense valley, often obscured in smog or fog sprizted with sunlight
and caught, humming, in the circling-to-land area of a nearby
airfield, a skirl of the Santa Ana winds. It was a dry, dusty sight,
but the sense of expanse was gripping. She stood with her mouth open,
breathing to calm herself. The view was wonderful, when the atmosphere
cooperated.

The old dog's tail thumped against the ground beside her. He pushed
his head against her leg. William was copying her stance, she noted
with exasperation. William was too much like her - it was a difficult
way to be. He was scientific to a fault. As a small child he had
soothed himself by counting. He crossed his arms in a way that was
pure Scully. She had long passed it off as a phase. With him, she
thought of everything as a phase. Music was a phase, Arable was a
phase - even physics was probably a phase. Still, William had grown up
with his Scully-imitations intact, his serious grey eyes, and a
tendency to pronounce himself fine.

At first people overlooked William because of his quietness. His chest
was thick for someone nearly nineteen, and his legs were scratched
from racing through the chicory after basketballs. There was a fake
tattoo inked around his wrist, in Arable's writing.

_________________

Mulder came out of his study, barefoot, smiling, a pencil behind his
ear, and put his fingers under her chin and kissed her several times
on the mouth. "Hey, where've you been -- there's a mystery," he said.
The pencil landed with a cedary ring upon the Mexican tile.

Scully smiled wanly, and followed him into his study. It was her
favorite room in the house, everyone's favorite room, with its long
flange of sunlight and the wall of bookcases, the organic shape of the
adobe fireplace, swept out, and currently storing a box of plastic
binders. A cedar Klickitat canoe lay across the beams overhead, its
hull cracked and delicate as a husk.

"There is?" she asked.

"Yeah, L.A. County Morgue called - they have you on camera coming in
at 5:30 this morning, you didn't check in, and they have no record of
you leaving." Mulder leaned over a map on his desk, penciling rapid
marks that looked like football plays. Half of his concentration was
on South America, she was relieved to see. "What do you think it could
be?" he asked. He stuck a sunflower seed in his mouth, and she heard
the shell crack. In the middle of the room, a ping pong table held
stacks of books and folders and manuscript reams; Scully suspected
that the net down the center delegated a primitive sorting power.

In the last decade Mulder had published two modestly received books,
the second of which, Prosper Athena, had been reprinted in trade
paper. Scully had surmised that he was the first author to be
simultaneously reviewed in both The New York Times and Fortean Times.
From his X-Files days Mulder retained a small but devout cult
following. Nevertheless, the book found a larger audience than he had
expected, and he had done a signing at the Strand and received a small
grant from an obscure New Mexican literary fellowship which mainly
seemed to champion Guatemalan witchcraft.

He was Casteneda with a twist, he was Jung and Campbell and
Guirdjieff, and his books were incantatory, like Mulder's mind
condensed, like a Norse saga pouring out. Everything that she savored
about him was in these books. She had read each of them several times,
keeping it rather secret, because it made Mulder feel strange when he
saw her reading his book. They were magnificent, life-changing books,
and it saddened her that they weren't that widely received. William
thought they were okay, but he seemed to read them as he would an
assigned text, without real enjoyment. Scully knew someday he would
read them again, with terrible grief and anguish and wonderment, and
then she knew that Mulder's books were important beyond measure.

"That's strange - they have no sign of me leaving?" Scully set her
keys down by the answering machine. A tendril of grape vine had grown
in through the top of the open window, and was feeling for traction on
the wall. For a moment she considered the possibility that she
couldn't be captured on film, then recalled that she had departed
through a service entrance, stumbling to her car with a dampened towel
held to the back of her neck. She was no unreflective vampire or
ghost. She wasn't like Leonard Betts perambulating around decapitated.
"Are they sure it was me?"

"Yeah, well, like I said, it's a mystery. And I was thinkin' - maybe
it's like some kind of weird interference. But, where were you today,
Scully? They called about the problem with Arable's passport."

At least the morgue hadn't noticed the pock in the wall where she had
picked out the bullet. The flattened chunk of lead was still in her
coat pocket. She had shoved a steel gurney against the wall - they
probably hadn't moved it yet. She had not done the best clean up job.
At the time, she had been dealing with different repercussions. The
true aloneness she had always suspicioned in herself was now verified.

The need to keep a low profile had grown with every passing year, and
she'd learned to tone down her brightness. She had been groomed to be
exceptional. Hardly anything was as important as standing out, making
a name for herself in her selected field. But now as time awkwardly
continued to pass, the need to keep a low profile grew, and she
pursued this just as decisively. Scully could be low key; no longer a
true authority, there were others who easily outshone her. She had
learned to be mediocre.

Mulder had stopped what he was doing, and he had noticed the way the
heel of her hand pressed against her pocket.

Scully swallowed. "You know those hermits who talk to themselves, but
it's like there's two people inside them, two sides to the
conversation? Well, I'm starting to feel like there's this me, the me
that you know, who's out here in the world with you," she said,
staring hard at his face.

The light was going out of him.

"...And there's this other me who has stopped."

Mulder's bright black eyes had a terrifying stare. Scully had not
thought what the rest of the day would be like following her finger on
the trigger. She had known, deep inside, that she could not hope to
get away with putting one over on Mulder.

"Scully, what's happened?"

Her head hurt terribly. She brought her hand out of her pocket with
the flattened slug sitting in her palm. "I think you know what has
happened."

Mulder's hand came over hers, folding it shut. Something came up
inside him, a horror, a rage; she had a glimpse of his eyes as she
stepped out of his way. He was gone from the room, and she heard his
feet on the stairs. She put her hands on her hips and threw back her
head to keep her eyes from brimming over.

Driving in the dark that morning she had told herself it had little to
do with him and that she had to know - she had to know. But now at
home her actions seemed completely selfish. She had not kissed him
goodbye when she arose in the middle of the night. She dressed in the
downstairs bathroom, the old dog behind her drinking deeply from the
toilet bowl, something she would normally not allow. The thing driving
her had an intensity like panic. Kissing Mulder and William goodbye
would have been admitting to herself what she was about to do. It
would be admitting she didn't want to come back to them, because
coming back would mean the awful thing inside her was real.

She had looked at herself in the mirror, into the endless black horror
of her eyes. The dog with his head in the toilet bowl chugged on and
on.

She left the dog in the porch, turning off the light when he looked at
her sadly. She had refolded the rug in his basket and then she went
out into the night and coasted the car down the hill through the
dimming stars.

She stood in Mulder's study with the eight-foot blue whale fin bone
lying across the hearth and the cradleboard unraveling on the wall.
She stood against the couch with sunlight slicing in through her
retinas and enhancing her headache. She heard Mulder on the stairs and
after a few minutes saw him cut across the lawn and plunge off the low
wall, scuffling through the loose stones still scattered in the road.
He wore shorts, running shoes without socks, and a t-shirt of
William's that had been on the bathroom floor that morning. He had
forgotten his knee brace. He stopped and pointed the dog back toward
the house, and she thought that his eyes glanced across her window.

He ducked his head and set off down the dusty lane at a jolting trot.
He bogged for a moment in a shoal of loose gravel, trod in place, then
hit some hard caliche and began to move. White butterflies stirred up
around him and then he was obscured by weeds and dust and the tears in
her eyes. A great part of Scully went with him, breathing in the baked
air, rolling with the momentum of the hill.

William's hand slid down the door-post. "Where's Dad?"

"He went for a run." Scully didn't turn around.

"I would have gone with him."

"I think he needed to be on his own."

She waited for William to leave her alone, her knees pressed into the
old couch. Years ago she had sat on this couch and fallen in love with
Mulder. The leather was polished and thin with age. At the corners it
had cracked and the stuffing was beginning to protrude. Scully had
thought about having it patched, but that would have been admitting
that the sofa was getting old. When they moved it out to California,
Scully had realized the couch was actually a dark green, something
impossible to tell in Mulder's shadowy Alexandria apartment.
____________________

Mulder was back. He was out in the arbor; when she leaned forward over
the kitchen sink she could just see his feet propped on the marble
slab they used for an outdoor coffee table. They practically lived in
the whispering leafy green room, geckos gulping in the vines. On the
banquette opposite lay a paperback mystery; a tarp spread on the deck
displayed a mountain bike William had taken completely apart a week
before.

When Scully leaned closer to the screen and mouthed his name, the toe
of his shoe wiped irritably back and forth. He drew his knee up; in
the green underwater light she saw the long crossed muscles in his
damp bare leg.

"Mulder, I had to know," she insisted.

He was silent; his leg jiggled slightly. On the window sill before her
was a rusty square horseshoe nail someone had dug up in the flower
bed, a Band-aid still in the wrapper, two unripe tomatoes, and a
trilobite of the unlikely binomial nomenclature Paradoxes mulderii,
fossilized in limestone. Her eyes went immediately to Mulder's feet.

"Damn it, Scully," he said, distantly. "What if we never saw each
other again?"

"I think we both knew that wasn't going to happen, though, didn't we?"
Scully said coldly. William came into the kitchen behind her. He went
for the cookies on top of the refrigerator. Scully turned around and
they looked at each other.

"What are you staring at?" she asked.

"You tell me." William raised his Mulderish eyebrows, chewing. "You
left your car in the road. I put it away for you."

"Everything's fine. We'll talk about it later," Scully said. She felt
too exhausted to go on. She dispensed ice into a glass and poured
lemonade over the crackling cubes. "Could you take this out to Dad,
please?"

He took it from her hand, letting his warm fingers rest against hers,
as if he could tell more about her that way.

"You know, I know you don't think we understand what it's like for
you," he said. He put two cookies in his mouth at once.

"Will, please, not now," she said.

"But we're here, too, Mom," he said, chewing. "We're right here, right
along side you. Think about it."

Scully gave him a bitter smile. That was the hardest thing to think
about.

She turned and went upstairs. She wanted to die, but maybe now it was
just exhaustion. I want to give up, she thought. And even worse: I
can't. I can't. In the bedroom the bed was made. An open suitcase on a
chair contained a London guide book and a bottle of vitamins. The
dog's cedar chip bed was empty.

She went into the small, clean bathroom and opened the mirror over the
sink, poking through the cough syrup and hand lotion and hair
products, looking for painkillers. She plucked out a prescription
bottle containing the tiny microchip Mulder had stolen from the
Pentagon an age ago, back when they were young and crazy and so
desperate to go on.

Scully held up the plastic bottle and shook it ironically. She had
removed the chip from her neck a few years before, thinking of
Marjorie Butters, hoping its minute integrated circuits were somehow
responsible for her stasis. William had thought it a logical course of
action to take.

Mulder, however, panicked at the idea. Scully wanted to throw the
thing away, amusing herself imagining aliens tracking the chip through
its sojourn in the Puente Hills Landfill, but she conceded it should
be kept on hand. Just in case, Mulder said. As if, at this point,
there wouldn't be some relief in the natural event of cancer.

What about deactivating it? Mulder had asked.

Scully dropped the compressed slug in beside the microchip and
recapped the bottle.

A panic of her own went around and around inside her as she lay
staring up into the high dormer eave, her head thumping with each
compression of her heart, the day growing old around her. Worse than
William going away to Oxford was the first whisper of possibility that
she and Mulder might be forced apart.

As she lay listening to evening descend, she heard Matthew's awful old
car managing the hill. The car door slammed, then she heard the frog
that lived where the hose leaked at the side of the house. She heard
the neighbors over the hill, who shared their driveway, returning
home. The distant sounds of trucks on the grade and airplanes going
down the sky into the airfield. By now the rusting Waccamaw would be
nearing the coast of Oregon, making eight knots, perhaps, bound for
Brownsville, Texas via Panama, bound for scrap.

Down the canyon a weed-whacker sputtered on and on, and she heard the
evening crickets, thought about the possums coming down the hill for
dog food...

Dark came at her quick as a sneaker wave up the beach.

____________________

Mulder's books were destroying angels of intense matter dense as
anti-matter. They had taken his best ideas and philosophies and sieved
them like platelets from his blood, skirmished their way out of him as
he yawned, late at night, waiting for the muse to leave him so he
could go to bed. A book destroyed so much of him, but still there was
nothing for it but to write it down, like X-raying his shadow to the
wall.

Mulder was long lucky with near misses, and the luck itself bemused
him. He'd busted through doors at the last second, known eleventh hour
reprieves, gun in his hand and then the phone ringing, and maybe it
was her.

He could be alone again now, but he wasn't.

Things had only gotten weirder after they'd quit the X-Files,
contaminated as they were by some unnamable substance that dogged
after them like footsteps down a hall. None of it appeared to surprise
William, born adept at the family malediction.

In twenty years they'd learned to weft the ribbon of normalcy about
the warp of moldy wet forest that sprang up wherever they went.
William grew up on the California beaches and his mother worked
unblinking over her corpses and his father wrote fondly of doubtful
and unpronounceable things.

Mulder had sat down to write although he wasn't in the frame of mind
required to summon each well-wrung thought and connect it to the next.
Maybe he would never write again. He would tear away the keyboard and
up-end the monitor into the India hawthorne above the lane, forget
productivity and let the panicking seconds wedge themselves between
himself and Scully, allow her give up on him and turn away. She was
going to anyway, eventually, sunken into herself, forgetting him as
each second that had made him real and made her not became another
mote between them until the crystal flecks clouded into layers and
layers of glass through which could be dimly seen what might once have
been.

Mulder made his mind blank, idling in his carved chair with a bare
foot on the desk, book open in his lap, gaze lost in the shadows of
grape leaves on the ceiling.

In time he had grown to love the airy room that caught and held each
day's sunny ration in its wobbling bowl. Hills fell away outside,
hazy, bristling, smelling of forest fires; ice-flecked cirrus rode
high above. The adobe fireplace looked soft as a flannel sheet. The
redwood shelves bracketing it were stuffed with his favorite books and
curios. His best thing, his canoe, would go to the Anthropology Museum
of the University of California someday. He had once liked to think of
Ishi there, living in the museum, but now the thought of that wild
ingenuous life caught among the dry relics struck him as depressing.

Upon the move to California Mulder had thrown himself into the pursuit
of place, refusing to dismiss Los Angeles County on the grounds of
superficiality, although they'd forfeited the deep damp forests and
steamy windows for a place of plastic perpetual beauty.

Adaptable, he revisited Bukowski and Steinbeck, trying to get at the
heart of the feeling the area gave him. He reread The Day of the
Locust, dabbled in Boyle, and scrounged up a copy of The Hawkline
Monster. From Brautigan he divined the spirit of western
ridiculousness. From Muir, he got its peace.

The traditional rogue's gallery had layered up on the wall above
Mulder's desk like a spit-paper nest. Among the customary clippings
and tabloid fare were family pictures, mostly of William at various
ages: William and Mulder at Macchu Pichu, William on The Vineyard; and
the framed Strughold Mining Company photograph of his father and the
others, a picture both terribly powerful and at once faded and
delicate, and in which he also found William's face.

There was a color Polaroid with a strong potential for blackmail
Mulder had come into possession of while helping to move Scully's
mother, and which was so hilarious that even Scully snorted when she
saw it: pallid Dana Scully at sixteen, swathed in moire taffeta and
half a can of hairspray, self-possessed, lip-glossed, gracing the
nervous arm of her prom date.

Mulder pulled a sunflower shell from his tongue and flicked it out the
open window, for once taking no comfort in Scully's misspent pumper
truck youth.

The only pictures that had been taken of Scully in the last fifteen
years were by the DMV. Just out of nostalgia he'd put up a somber
picture of Mulder and Scully, FBI, all unsmiling, suited up, and
offering no hint of the life they would eventually live together,
combining checking accounts, picking out a puppy, watching TV in bed
with a feverish child sleeping between them.

The sight of the picture brought Mulder to his feet, and, drawing
himself together, he went up to check on Scully.

He needed more time, really, but time was not something he could bend
like hot iron into useful form. Time came at one like a sword, and was
past.

The bedroom was heavy with sunset and Scully lay gazing into the
light, a bundle of baskets and a Turkish salt-bag hanging in the
dormer above her. Her small bare foot just fit the length of his hand.

He remembered her face the first time they'd met, when she took his
hand and saw through his particular brand of scorn. He had watched
hurt fill her eyes when their newly-retrieved toddler looked at her
without recognition. And he remembered her face during those first,
delirious episodes when he'd wrenched the perfect suit from her body
and her composure had vanished, her expression shifting in unfamiliar
orgasmic dissolves.

She turned her head now and met his gaze profoundly with her
outer-space eyes. He watched her quick tabulation of his expression
through the deep black specks of her pupils, like holes into her
brain. Her arm was thrown out lazily, and her toes curled into his
hand. "Oh, Mulder," she said.

He stroked the bony top of her foot. Scully ultimately belonged to
Scully, and it had taken him twenty-seven long years to realize that,
even though he'd cautioned himself from the beginning.

The same could be said of himself, as Scully had pointed out more than
once.

"What are the kids doing?" she asked in her sleep-sweetened voice, the
damp pluck of her lips parting making her real again.

"Shouldn't you be in the hospital?"

She averted her eyes. "Not necessary." She gulped, looking limp but
not entirely beaten. She sat up, wincing. The only visible bits of
trauma were a glimpse of gauze at the back of her neck, the damp towel
across the pillow.

"The kids are making lasagna," he said, turning away. "Matthew showed
up with some bread and a bottle of wine and thou, beside me singing in
the wilderness. William's cooking."

He could feel Scully staring at him as he fiddled with the apothecary
scale on his dresser.

"What do I do about you?" she asked softly.

He turned his attention pointedly to her. "You mean, do you apologize?
Do you give me space? Do we act like nothing happened? I don't know,
Scully. How would you feel if I'd done that to you?"

"But you did do that to me," Scully said quickly.

Mulder was nodding thoughtfully. "You called me a bastard," he said.
"And that was about as far as it went."

"You can imagine how I felt," she said.

Mulder nodded again. "I can now." He found some change in the pocket
of his jeans and tossed it onto the scale. "I guess what this has made
me realize is that I depend on you too much." To be perfectly honest,
he had realized that he depended on her too much back in 1997 when
she'd nearly hemorrhaged to death in the ICU, if not long, long before
that. He'd realized it and hadn't done a damned thing about it.

"The vet called and said that Tash's hip X-rays look fine," Mulder
said dully. "And you'll never believe it, but a big piece of Black
Forest cake from that bakery you love has mysteriously materialized in
the fridge."

"Maybe it's the best day ever," Scully said in a choked voice.

"Maybe it is," Mulder said sadly.

___________________

Scully bathed quickly, the sky outside purpling with dusk. The hair at
the back of her skull was matted, and she soaked it and washed it
gently. When she dressed, looking full on into her own eyes in the
mirror, there were no visible signs of trauma, her hair combed down
wet, loose shirt buttoned to the gold cross that lay in the hollow of
her throat, cuffs folded back twice, everything as it should be.

She felt delicate, as though she had been ill, but the headache had
deserted her, leaving her head buzzing softly like a seashell. The nap
had rendered her dazed and soft.

Long ago Mulder had painted the sign for William's bedroom door that
said "Trespassers Will". More recently he'd left the note that said
"Clean up this mess before I notify the proper authorities".

The door stood half open and Scully frowned at the guitar laying
across the unmade bed. William was oddly distracted by music. Scully
had never been remotely musical. Mulder said that William showed
natural ability and that the mathematical applications of musical
theory probably advanced his thinking.

At the foot of the stairs she looked into the living room. The girl
Arable Lewental was on the couch with the L.A. Times. She looked over
the paper and gave Scully a tight smile with her V-shaped mouth. A
fatherless classmate of William's, she'd been a semi-permanent fixture
around the house since their middle school days, drawn to the Mulder
family's intellectual and low-key family life, William's goofy
sweetness, and Mulder.

Scully never quite knew what to say to her when she tripped over her
in one room or another, but she took an interest in Arable in the
abstract, and had ironed out a problem with her visa when she won an
undergraduate scholarship to Cambridge. Arable was going to Cambridge
to study trilobites. "Oh, Cambridge. I hear they have a great
trilobite program," Mulder had said. The summer she turned 16, Arable
discovered a new species of trilobite in the Burgess Shale. She named
it Paradoxes Mulderii, as a gift for Mulder on his birthday. There had
ensued a multitude of jokes comparing Mulder and fossils.

At the kitchen sink Scully was confronted by her nephew, who,
grinning, threw out his arms, then hugged her warmly, dripping wet
lettuce down her back. "Auntie Dane! You're alive! I heard you were
taking a nap."

"I never nap," said Scully, extricating herself. Some of his vigor had
rubbed off on her, and she felt slightly more awake.

Matthew shook a handful of wet lettuce over the sink. He wore shorts
that looked like Pollack had had a go at them, a washed-out rose
T-shirt, huaraches. "Look, we're about to eat. Tell me what you want
to drink. I got this great wine but just say if you'd rather have
water."

Scully leaned over Mulder in his chair, her arm around his neck, and
whispered, "Actually, it was Modell I was calling a bastard."

"Ah," said Mulder, caught off guard, and unconvinced, turning a bottle
of salad dressing around so he could read the label.

"I can't believe you thought that all these years."

Mulder shrugged nervously. She sat down, touching his cheek, stroking
his five-o'clock shadow. William was watching them across the table.
"Mulder," she said.

"Yeah." He reached across the table with the salad tongs, helping
himself to a chunk of garlic bread.

A piece of bread hit Scully's plate. Arable sat down beside William,
crunching a whisk of raw spaghetti. Her hair looked dyed goth-black
but wasn't, and her haircut closely resembled Mulder's. William's hair
had grown so shaggy that Scully found herself combing her fingers
through the ducktails every chance she got.

William had had a strange, tense summer. He was about to immerse
himself for seven years in physics, and he gave the impression of
holding his breath and focusing on one objective, no matter what he
was doing. He was going to Jesus College, one of just eight physics
students accepted for the year.

Scully was viscerally ashamed of the stress she would contribute to
his last week at home. She did not think she could eat.

"Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive
from thy bounty, amen," William said breathlessly.

He had to know, of course. They were both scientists, and scientists
could not obscure facts.

"Your glass. Your GLASS," Matthew was saying to Scully.

"The Rocinante," Arable said, laboriously reading Matthew's T-shirt as
he leapt up from his chair.

"Like it?"

"Um, Don Quixote's horse?" she asked.

"Steinbeck's pick-up," offered Mulder, emerging from his shell.

"It's a bar, actually. I did the design, and all I got was this lousy
T-shirt." Matthew was a sophomore at CalArts, majoring in graphic
design, stenciling surf boards on the side, cooking in a taqueria and
waiting out his parents' posting to a Naval base in Scotland.

Busy as he was, Matthew came often up the hill to their house, and he
threw himself into anything they were involved in, whether it was
painting the duck house or one of their noisy family arguments which
invariably resulted in the consulting of dictionaries or scientific
websites. He took his girlfriends to William's basketball games and
helped Scully with some of her office work, did the painting for the
cover of Mulder's second book, took the dog to the beach to play
frisbee. Tash invariably came home from the beach jaunts smelling of
coconut, a bandanna tied around his neck, a partied-out glaze in his
eye.

"What's your earliest memory of Grandpa?" Matthew was asking Scully.

"When I was a baby we were stationed in the port city of Nagoya, on
Honshu, and everyone used to swear that there was no way I could
remember this - but I remember watching him feeding seagulls."

Beneath the table Mulder's hand found Scully's leg.

Arable knelt on her chair, poking mesmerized at the contents of her
plate. Suddenly she squealed, and flicked something over at William.
"Idiots!"

The boys roared. "Oh, good," said William. "We weren't sure if it
would survive being baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes." He picked up
the black plastic spider and sucked it clean. "I can't believe she got
it," he said to Matthew. "I couldn't remember which corner it was in."

"That's not food grade plastic, William," Scully said. "Think of the
carcinogens."

"Yeah, William, the toxic fumes of a baked plastic spider," Matt
chastised.

"I'm thinking," said William, blinking his sleepy Mulder-eyes.

"Well, this is the best carcinogenic lasagna I've ever had," said
Mulder. "Salad, Matt?"

"Lasagna Arachnid, an old family recipe," said William.

Arable leaned over close to him, whispering something.

"No, you're a geek," William said happily.

"Math geek." Arable pointed her fork at him.

"Fossil geek."

"Art geek," they both said to Matthew.

There was a thoughtful silence.

"Science geek," said Mulder to Scully.

"UFO geek!" cried the table at large, pointing at Mulder. Arable
laughed so hard that she had to lay her head on the table. Mulder
smiled contentedly, and had a sip of wine.

"Now what exactly is a geek, again?" Scully asked.

"Geeks bite the heads off things," said Mulder. "Ozzy Osbourne was a
geek. His children, alas, are merely gaffs."

"I'm sorry I knocked down your wall, Mulder," Arable lisped sweetly.

"Ah, that was you."

"She drives like Batman," said William. "Like Cruella de Vil."

"It's just that the dog was in the way. I swerved."

"It always sounds weird when they call us the Mulders, doesn't it?"
asked William. Arable looked up, but said nothing.

"Yes, it sounds strange," said Scully. "It makes me think of a house
full of Mulders."

"There's a Mulder hosing down the basketball court, a Mulder in the
kitchen opening a can of dog food - "

"A Mulder reading a Bigfoot newsletter, a Mulder taking a nap
upstairs," Scully said.

"A Mulder in his den penning a bestselling mystery series," said
Mulder.

"A Mulder playing Scrabble with another Mulder," said Arable, who
loved to play Scrabble with Mulder.

"Ten Mulders finally getting the weeds cut down by the pond," said
Scully. "And one upstairs giving me a back rub." Mulder looked at her
with interest.

"Mulder," Arable said, as the boys cleared the table, "Want to see the
kilim I made? It took five months, I made it on a hand loom."

"Oh, Ar's rug," said William. "Terrible Arable and the Loom of Doom."

"Shut up."

"It's geometric," said Mulder, feeling it with his fingers.

"She knit her music thingy a sweater," said William. "She's like an
old lady, knitting and watching TV."

"Shut up. It's William Morris. This part is llama hair I got off the
fence."

"Alpaca," Mulder corrected, preoccupied. "What's the difference
between llamas and alpacas?" he quizzed, holding the plate of cake up
in the air, the dog begging at his feet. There was a hole in the knee
of his jeans, and Scully couldn't take her eyes off him.

"Alpacas are smaller; they have better fiber quality," William
supplied over his shoulder, rinsing plates.

"It's amazing, Arable," Mulder said of the rug, and probably meaning
it, if Scully knew him. Mulder had hung onto every plaster of Paris
handprint, every noodle macrame objet d'art William had ever brought
home from school. "I wish I had a kilim like that in my study," Mulder
said.

Arable looked distressed. "I'd like to give it to you, but I already
promised it to my mom."

"This is the last time," Scully said suddenly. They all looked at her.
"I mean, next week Matt will be in Big Sur, and then we're off to
Europe, so this is probably the last time we'll all eat together."

Arable looked distressed, folding up her rug and keeping her head
down. William was kicking his shoe against the sole of Matthew's foot.

Mulder might not have heard. He was looking into the dog's eyes and
smiling.

_________________

Mulder plucked a kelp-like lasagna noodle from the sink's trap and
shot a dash of Clorox down the drain, rasping out the stainless steel
basin with a pot scrubber, even though he'd have a bleach sore throat
the rest of the evening. He finished wiping the table, tossed the
sponge across the room into the sink and took a sip from an unclaimed
and tepid bottle of beer. He leaned against the counter, ankles
crossed, his legs still jellyish from running too hard in the heat,
his troublesome knee throbbing. The TV was on in the empty living
room, and the dishwasher paused and clicked, keeping time under its
breath.

He sighed, intently savoring the moment alone, his thoughts fanning
out and then circling back and homing in on himself, on the jangling
sensation in his chest.

He thought he heard music somewhere, but it was the cicadas doing a
loud fade-up. It was the Kitsunegari case that he'd had nudging in the
back of his mind, not Modell that time, but the moment when she'd -

Mulder closed his eyes.

He turned off the TV before he left the house. Lisa Simpson was in her
33rd year as a second-grader at Springfield Elementary. For a long
moment Mulder stood patting the doorpost and looking up the dark
stairs. Then he went outside.

It was a soft black night, the yard light just touching the flagstones
he'd laid along the side of the garage where Scully and William had
planted lavender and cosmos.

He walked around the side of the house in the dark, avoiding the
wheelbarrow and a wadded garden hose. The kids were lounging in one
end of the lap pool, sharing the tail end of the bottle of wine.
"Shit, it's the Feds," Matthew said.

William had his arms folded on the warm concrete, and he laid his
cheek down and looked sweetly up at Mulder. Arable wore a black
T-shirt over her swimsuit, and kept her arms folded across her chest.

Mulder had reached that happy age when he no longer cared if he
appeared incredibly dorky in the eyes of the young. Scully thought he
was cool, and that was all that mattered. The kids paid selective
attention to him. They were instantly bored by his lectures intending
to dispense the profusion of wisdom accumulated over a diverse lifetime,
yet they were always ready to hear about the time he escaped from a
Siberian gulag armed only with a filed-down butter knife. William
loved to feel Mulder's bicep and look at his gunshot wounds, count the
holes in his head; he loved the story of Tooms and the escalator.

Below his wooly hindquarters the dog's hind leg was wet to the hip,
his hock skinny and black. "Matthew tried to pull him in," said
William.

"If there's dog hair in the pool filter, your mother will have a fit,"
said Mulder, but he didn't know why he bothered. Half a dozen dog toys
floated on the narrow strip of water, and locust leaves eddied in the
corners. The dog was the only one who swam laps with any sort of New
Year's-type resolve. The novelty of owning a pool had quickly worn
off, although, to his credit, not long ago Mulder had fooled around
with Scully in this very spot, while William was away at Scuba camp.

Scully, very hungry and bitey and naked under the moon, her hair
slicked back, her wet breasts in the starlight -

Mulder cleared his throat, and in a burst of industry knelt on the
edge and grabbed at a baseball floating nearby, its horsehide gnawed
through to the string core. It slipped slimily from his fingers. He
leaned farther and the ball popped up out of the water, twirling into
the center of the pool; Mulder stretched farther, calling "Wilson!"
for levity.

The three of them watched him impassively. He had caught them, he
realized, in the middle of a discussion or group thought. Matthew
leaned back on his elbows, preoccupied, a shell choker around his
golden neck, a clove cigarette stuck to his lip. Mulder had happened
to be around when the kid was born, and had known him his whole life.
Matt was broadly sunny, easy to be around, and Mulder was grateful for
the closeness between the two cousins.

William was more down inside himself, always playing online chess,
reading foreign comic books, or making a spear from a flake of chert.
As a half-grown kid with braces, he'd had a sudden smile that hurt
Mulder's heart. Mulder had never really gotten over the astonishment
of producing William. It made him realize all the more what Emily
could have meant.

Matthew's clove was burned halfway down. "Gimme that," Mulder said
sternly. He tapped his bare foot on the tiled edge of the pool and
inhaled until the roach crackled, letting the cicadas come loud inside
his head. He wiggled his toes in the water.

"That's not the kind you hold in," Matthew said, grinning.

"I know," Mulder said, his voice squeaking amiably. "Were you the
slackers who painted 'Class of 2020' up on The Boulders?" he asked
William and Arable.

William smiled with one corner of his mouth. "We aren't the only kids
who graduated this year, Dad."

"My God," Arable sighed, looking up at the stars, "who has time for
vandalism?"

Along with William, she had spent part of the summer in a youth
program apprenticed to Public Works - Round-Upping dandelions and
painting over graffiti, quickly jaded by the prevalence of crushed
soft-drink cups, sun-cooked filth and syringes that seemed to fill the
world. England would be different for her, Mulder thought. Much
different. She would always be cold, for one thing.

Mulder, cheering up, sank down into a crouch. His eyes met William's.
He licked clove oil from his lip, feeling better, passing the
cigarillo back into Matthew's wet fingers. "If your mom smells this,
I'm history."

"To her, we're all history," William said quietly, and the cicadas
went dead for several seconds.

Mulder glared at him, hurt beyond words, and rose and stamped away
into the dark.

________________

The land fell away at the back of the house and beneath the deck there
was ample space for a defunct rototiller, a fiberglass kayak, a
rotting box of floor tiles. It was also the perfect place for an
eavesdropping child to sit and listen to the conversations above.

It was there, Mulder suspected, that William had first absorbed the
problem they had discussed, or refused to discuss - for years - "I
don't want to talk about it. There's nothing to talk about." At any
rate, William seemed utterly aware of Scully's problem from the first.

William and Mulder never really talked about it, but there were other
ways of communicating, notebooks left lying around, articles appearing
on Mulder's desk. Early in the summer William had borrowed the
neighbor's little brush tractor and carved a Golden Mean Spiral into
the weedy hillside below the house, carefully marking out its
geometric curl with stake and string.

Mulder could see the pale swathes fairly well when he climbed the
little peak above their property, but it wasn't until it was mistaken
for a crop circle and a local news station sent out a helicopter that
he realized William's intent. On the evening news the snail stood on
the hill, a pale curl moving inward, their family footpath a geometric
demarcation across it. It looked like a maze, like infinity, like a
gunshot wound to the head.

Mulder spent an afternoon in the library at UCLA. In the Sacred
Geometry school of thought, the Golden Mean Spiral was a valve binding
together the ethereal and material worlds. Aristotle called it the
middle between two extremes. It spiraled inward infinitesimally,
ultimately breaking the third dimension, a rogue Fibonacci sequence
playing forward, without end.

"It's the universal symbol for love," Scully said, out of nowhere,
while they were drinking tea in the arbor.

William groaned.

"Hey, don't knock it till you've tried it," Mulder said. A few days
later he and Scully killed a rattlesnake in the spiral while the kids
clambered nervously onto the bench with the dog.

The snake faced them in a sloppy wad, feinting with pale open mouth.
Scully calmly pinned it down with a stick, and Mulder leapt forward and
sliced off the triangular head with a shovel. The garlicky snake-smell
came up and the snake's body doubled upon itself. Mulder looked at
Scully and wondered if her heart rate had even increased. Fear had
left her and taken with it a whole dimension. Mulder sliced off the rattles
and tossed them aside.

He was out of breath now, just walking up the steps through the lawn,
and coming up below the deck to the back of the garage his chest felt
squeezed. It was back, the jangling panic, the anger at something he
couldn't confront and couldn't fight, could hardly name, and the
dismay that William, in the end, was the one who would be forced into
facing the problem.

He was angry at Scully for being perfect and frozen and impossible to
wholly love as an evolving woman over a lifespan, in the close comfort
of middle age and on into everything life brings, through everything,
the true, vital living Scully, whom he had somehow lost, and who had
been replaced by a Scully who was afraid and trapped, who took the
coward's way and couldn't admit what she was doing to the rest of
them.

He was afraid his heart would break when William left, William, who
was like himself and Scully synthesized, all brains and heart, so that
Mulder had twice as much to worry about as he once had, with William
out there walking around, doing the stupid things that kids do.

Mulder was afraid he himself had let the family down, by not being
brilliant enough, after all, when it counted.

He stared into the sparkling valley, his knees in the lavender, and
glancing around caught sight of a silvery wet shoulder.

His bare feet patting the warm flagstones, reflexively he took the
boy's face in his hands and kissed him on his flossy head, which was
nearly at the height of Mulder's. William's pheasant hair smelled of
memory, of suntan lotion and tomato sauce and a base note,
fundamental, of the salty sun-basted ledge rock from the beaches of
Mulder's own youth. The smell of him made Mulder loop-the-loop in
time.

"It's okay." Mulder's throat was tight. Water leached into the thigh
of his jeans from wet swimming trunks, all the world ending and
somehow the worst of it being the never-ending bits, which existed, he
saw now, in tiny pockets here and there: the Turritopsis nutricula
jellyfish and styrofoam and Bismuth-209 and atoms that have existed
since the Big Bang and still free-float, on and on into forever,
living their lives as larkspur and Greenlanders and stop signs. There
was Philospher's Stone and the Holy Grail, direct mind-computer
interface. There were fictional immortality precedents too: Hercules,
Nosferatu, Freddy Krueger, Satan.

William held onto him hard. "...Something happened?" he asked into
Mulder's T-shirt.

"Sometimes I'm just so troubled by a lot of things," Mulder tried to
explain, and evade.

"Me too." William's forehead balanced against his shoulder.

"I had a little sister," said Mulder, desperately trying to catch
sight of the stars in the dim smoggy void above. "I still miss her
so much." William's head nodded under Mulder's cupped hand. "Sometimes
it seems like my life stopped when she left, and then it started again
when I met Scully," Mulder confessed. "Sometimes it seems like it's
still stopped. And then there's you. But you're not her, you're not
Samantha. And it still doesn't make sense to me that I'll never see
her again."

"What happened, Dad?" William asked. He was not inquiring about the
past. Light flecked a crescent of wet eyeball as he blinked. A wind
curved through the patio and William's arms went to wet gooseflesh
under Mulder's hands. William was born tuned in, and he wasn't missing
anything now. "Has it happened?" he asked.

________________

Mulder stood in the kitchen with the dog watching him. He listened to
a car start up and roll out of the driveway. The dog's kibble had been
topped off. The kitchen was clean, the counters cleared and wiped, and
it was this ordinary functionality that seemed incredible to him.
Mulder's day had ceased to contain a mote of reality, and he couldn't
balance the disparate elements. The boy's mother put a gun to her
head, the boy shot some hoops and loaded the dishwasher. The dog slept
against the door, pedaling through a dream.

"Could someone just stop?" William had asked when he was eleven. It
wasn't the first time Mulder just got up and left the room, and it
wouldn't be the last. Scully thought Mulder's inability to discuss the
issue was more damaging than the actual discussion would be.
Mulder thought that it was just that - an inability. And not that
Scully was so great about discussing these things, either.

That was the year William started reading Einstein. That was the year
he became a physicist.

It hurt to watch William throwing himself into this puzzle as if he
were born to it. "He's turning into you," Scully said once, and she
did not mean it as a compliment.

Mulder put his hand on the rail and walked slowly up the stairs,
struggling against a great fatigue, and the aged dog labored after
him.

In the bedroom doorway he got his shoulder comfortable against the
jamb. William lay in bed with Scully, her hand clasped between both of
his, the look on his face as he lay looking at her fingers the same
expression he had when he watched a fire on the beach, a meditative
look.

Scully turned her head and when her eyes met Mulder's he saw that he
had already been shut out of the scientific part of it, anyway, and
here was the real problem: this problem of metaphysics had become a
matter of science.

The old dog went to Scully's side and rested his chin on the bed,
waiting for her to meet his eyes, focusing on her all the love he
could muster.

Mulder felt rather than heard the discussion resuming as he turned and
went downstairs.

___________________

Part Two