Title: Hieroglyphs of Memory
Author: Zuffy
Email:
zuffynuffy@yahoo.com
Rating: PG-13
Category: MSR, angst
Spoilers:
Story takes place after *This Is Not Happening, no spoilers beyond that. (I
don't read spoilers myself; they give me a stomach ache.)
Date: March
2001
Archive: Yes, but keep my name on it and let me know where it
is, please.
Synopsis: Mulder didn't forget his sister, Scully
knows whose baby it is, Maggie still cares about her daughter, and the brain
disease makes sense after all. This story is for anyone who has gnashed
their teeth at the inexplicable holes in Season 8.
Feedback: Yes!
Gratefully received.
Disclaimer: Mulder, Scully, Skinner, and Doggett
belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox, but the continuity is
mine, kids, all mine.
Thanks to Lone Gunwoman and Littljoe for
advice, encouragement, and the occasional well-placed warning. Special
thanks for LJ for her knowledge of the stars.
Time: November 2000
The
cardboard evidence box sits on the table between them, white with a number
written on the side: 5-00-DC9786-4. The end flaps are folded down and
secured with wires that have been sealed with an official crimp. There's a
wavy brown ring along the bottom edge as though the box had been abandoned
in a puddle; a small bit of black grit sticks to the watermark. Scully's
elbows rest on the table and she breathes through her hands. Skinner's
fingers make a tapping sound, then he stops and sighs.
"It's all I
could get for now. I don't know whether they're still working through the
others or they've destroyed them."
She nods. She hasn't said a word
since he ushered her into his office with a brief touch to her arm, a
little too much pressure for a simple welcome. His eyes warned her of a
time bomb. 5-00-DC9786-4. May 2000, Washington district, case number, box
number. Removed from the apartment right after his abduction when she was
lying in a hospital bed stunned by grief and joy and after seven years
still unable to protect his work. Five months and this is all the physical
evidence that's been recovered. Scully pulls her shoulders tight against
her body.
Skinner rises and steps over to the sideboard where he's
begun keeping a carafe of water and she's grateful for the kindness of
averted eyes. He fills a glass and hands it to her across the conference
table. "Agent Doggett know you're up here?"
She nods again.
Doggett's downstairs working on a case of purported witchcraft. He'd given
her the raised eyebrow when Skinner summoned her alone. Thanks to her new
partner, word of the UFO cult has spread in the Bureau and she pretends
not to hear the whispers, the intimations that it was Mulder's own fault.
Doggett's promise to bring someone to account for the torture has
apparently lapsed now that the bosses are certain that old Spooky's not
coming back to disrupt their lives with his crazy theories and threats of
exposure. Doggett doesn't ask about Mulder and she doesn't volunteer. It's
a piss poor way to shield his memory but it's all she's got.
"Just
the one?" she asks. If she were alone, she'd press the glass against her
forehead to cool the fever.
"Yeah. Just one." Skinner pours a
second glass of water and sits at the head of the table.
They've
been here before locked in silence, just the two of them, neither able to
see the road forward. This one poignant box is a bit of him, even if it
feels like failure wrapped in the trappings of success. Scully reaches out
and tests the substantiality of the cardboard, then withdraws her hand to
her lap.
"Look," Skinner says, "I didn't even know if I
should…"
"How, I mean where…"
"Buddy of a buddy spotted it
in a ATF warehouse in Alexandria when they were looking for some
'misplaced' weapons in a drug case. Case number was not their code so he
called me. Lucky break." Their attempts to get an official accounting had
met nothing but walls and professed ignorance. "God knows how it ended up
with the Treasury boys."
She shakes her head. "His computer?"
"Not a sign of it." The carton is too small for what she most
wants to recover and they both know it. She stands and starts to draw the
box toward her, but Skinner lays a hand on her arm again. "You're not
carrying this anywhere. You want this at your place or…"
"Yes. I've
moved some…" she stops. Skinner will understand, not look too hard at what
he sees.
"I'll bring it myself," he says.
The
box stands open on the floor next to her coffee table, its contents now
piled haphazardly around the room. Sports biographies, a history of the
Manhattan project, the John Mack interviews with abductees, a Merck Manual
of Diagnosis and Therapy, a State Department phone book dated 1959, two -
but only two - girlie magazines from 1995, and some old children's books
about planes and space travel that he must have saved from his mother's
condo. Crisp new road maps of Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island,
Pennsylvania, and Indiana lie on the couch next to her and she's only
started to pore over them looking for pencil jottings in his familiar
hand. Skinner has cleaned up the remains of a take-out dinner that gave
him an excuse to stay with her and now he's sitting at the dining table
with the photo albums. Some of the old black and whites had been creased
and cracked when the men pitched Mulder's possessions haphazardly into
cartons. Scully curses them under her breath for the desecration of these
small personal things, the markers of his troubled attachments and fervent
soul. Skinner looks up. She hadn't realized she was speaking aloud.
On the coffee table are Mulder's souvenir Knicks plate with dried
tomato sauce, a Nikon she's never seen before, the film compartment
snapped off, and his tv remote. She's picked out the sticky shards of two
broken glasses from the bottom of the box and wrapped them in a towel. In
her hand is a small leather book with a flap that locks the contents from
sibling eyes. She presses the small gold button next to the keyhole and it
pops open.
She'd gone over to his apartment about three weeks after
their return from April AFB and was surprised to see it sitting on a
yellow legal pad on his coffee table. Mulder was in the kitchen, opening
and closing cupboard doors. The sound of water running in the sink was
followed by his voice. "I'm out of beer, believe it or not. There's some
of this tea you gave me. You want that?" He'd walked into the room shaking
a box of decaf green like castanets. His voice softened when he spotted
her turning the book over in her hand. "It's ok, really."
"Her
diary, Mulder?" She was running her finger along the spine where the
journal was ridged and cracked. He'd cleaned off the mildew that had
marred the surface when he found it tucked behind the wall.
"Yeah,
yeah, I was going through it."
"I thought you said
you..."
"Yeah. I mean, I know she's gone, Scully, but there's more
to it than that. I think maybe she was on to something."
"On to
what?" She hadn't believed in starlight herself, but she wanted Mulder to
imagine his sister at peace in the northern sky.
"I think maybe
there's a way to find out what she went through and why. I think… I think
maybe I can understand my mother a little, too."
"Mulder. I think
it's important that you give yourself a break."
"I'm not blaming
myself for this."
"Mulder?"
"I think it's more important
that we know."
She'd touched his hand and he eased himself onto the
couch next to her, the old leather cushions creaking under his weight and
tipping her toward him. "Here, I've charted the dates of her entries. It
starts the year before she disappears. She seems to have no prior
memories, or none worth talking about. She's faithful, she writes every
day and then suddenly there's nothing for a week, two weeks…" His finger
tracked down the dates he'd listed in a column.
"That's normal. I
kept a diary at that age. Sometimes you just lose motivation."
"No,
I know, but look.' He flipped through the pages, ignoring the pressure of
her shoulder against his arm. "The first couple times, she doesn't say
anything about missing time. Then she starts to wonder what happened to
the days. She knows something must be going on."
"She was
tortured. The mind normally blocks out painful…"
"I know that,
Scully. Believe me. But here, see this. 'Elizabeth's birthday is today,
February 15th, but I remember that yesterday was January 20. I thought
they were all teasing me, but she showed me the calendar.' Scully, these
episodes get more and more frequent."
"What do they
prove?"
"Prove? I don't know. I think these might have been
excursions. In the ships."
"It probably just means that they wiped
her memory after some of the tests."
"Or, it could mean something
else entirely."
She wonders now how much more he already
knew.
It's nine o'clock when Skinner leaves, looking
sorry that his find didn't amount to more, sorry that Mulder himself
hadn't climbed out of the box joking that the whole abduction had been
some heartbreaking cosmic prank. She wishes she could hug her boss for his
lonely loyalty, but he simply cleans his glasses and tells her to lock up
after him and she promises to get to bed early. His last glance is not at
her, but over her shoulder at the fish tank bubbling in the
corner.
She closes the door and returns to the living room. She
picks up the Playboys and most of the books and nestles them in the box
before pushing it into a corner. Skinner had flattened the photos under
her dictionary and she stands by the table now to look at them: a family
picnic, two children digging in the sand at the beach, and a little boy
standing in a tree, one foot stepping forward into the air and a smile
full of mischief on his face. A little boy whose mother loved her children
too much and not enough. She holds her hand across her stomach, then
touches the boy's face and props the photo against her salt shaker so she
can see him again at breakfast.
Switching off the lights, she
carries the diary into her bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed.
Two-thirds of the way through the journal the writing stops, a cliff that
drops into nothing, so she turns to the last pages where Mulder has
pencilled in a list of names: Susan, Caroline, Lisa 1, Lisa 2, Rosemary,
Elizabeth. She flips back to the first entry, written in polite cursive:
September 7, 1977. "Dear Diary, I hope you'll be my good friend and not
think I'm silly. Maybe when I'm grown-up, I'll read about myself and
laugh, but for now you'll listen, won't you?"
Someone must have
given Samantha the book. Someone must have wanted her to be a real girl,
leading a real life. Someone must have cared. Her eyes grow damp and she
wonders who it was.
Mulder hadn't shown up for work the
Monday after she found him with the diary and she couldn't raise him on
the phone, so at eleven she drove over to his place. She was beginning to
work her key in the lock by the time he answered, not looking sleepy but
unshaven and uncombed and high on his own adrenaline. His eyes were
momentarily confused as if he'd just returned from someplace he couldn't
take her.
"Scully." It'd been part invitation, part invocation,
part acknowledgement and she'd wondered when he would have gotten around
to calling her. He left the door open and wandered back into the living
room, kicking his basketball out of the way. The heat didn't quite reach
his apartment, but he showed no sign of being chilled. He was barefoot,
wearing a plain white t-shirt and yellow cotton pajama pants so thin that
she could see his shape back-lit by the sunny window. He glanced over his
shoulder and smiled as though he could read her lapse from scientific
thoughts. She pulled her jacket tighter and pretended she hadn't
blushed.
"What are you working on?"
He was sitting on the
couch, his knees spread apart. He tapped the pages of the diary. "It's
starting to make sense, but I'm going to have to talk to some
people."
"Who, Mulder? Who's going to tell you the truth? Smokey?
The military?" She settled onto the couch next to him where she wouldn't
have to look at the hope on his face. His hands flipped through the pages
rapidly.
"No, there are some names here, some other girls she
talks about. If I can find them… Here." He was on his feet again, pulling
pages out of his printer. "I've been searching old police records starting
in '69 for missing girls -- unsolved kidnappings -- with these first
names. I started with the D.C. area, because a lot of the men my dad knew
seemed to work for State or the Pentagon."
"They may not even have
kept the same names."
"Samantha did. You saw it."
"Even so,
that was twenty years ago. The chances that they're still alive..." She
watched his hand move down the page checking some names, crossing off
others.
"I don't think they're dead, Scully. These were family
members and gruesome as the torture was, in a twisted way, they thought it
had a point."
"Then they probably died at the Air Force Base last
year, when…" she paused, looking for the right words. "when Cassandra
died."
"No. None of those identified had been reported missing at
any point in their lives. They were the regular family members of the
Consortium. The lucky ones who'd been spared. Like me."
There was
bitterness in his voice and she let it go; he didn't need to be reminded
of the trap he'd almost stepped into, eyes open. Or rather, heart open,
wishing only to save someone, even at the cost of his soul.
"Well,
then what do you think happened?" she said, picking up one of the police
reports. Cassandra had said that Samantha was "up there," but who knew if
that meant anything, much less whether Mulder still believed.
"My
guess is they were dumped back into society at some point."
"Surely
at least one of them would have come forward. It would show up in your
files."
"You were the one who suggested a memory wipe." He'd
affixed little colored tabs to some of the pages and was thumbing through
the diary a page at a time, too quickly to be reading. Nothing she could
say would compete with what was in that book.
"And how would they
make a life?"
"My point exactly."
"Mulder, this is just
going to reopen..."
"I *know* that. I saw her spirit. I know she's
dead." He slammed the diary shut and his hands clenched around it, veins
bulging blue against his skin. "But she didn't give up Scully. She hid the
book. There's still something she wants me to find out for
her."
"But Samantha didn't…" …Sam didn't remember you, not really,
were the words she couldn't say. She hated herself for not believing with
him.
Now she thinks she knows how he felt, because in her hands the
journal seems like a gift, a clue, a link, a way to go back and reclaim
what she's lost. She turns out the light.
The next
morning, she pauses before entering the basement office. The door's ajar
and the lights are on. She imagines it as the storage room it was before
Mulder carved his space, hung his name, changed her life, and disappeared.
His doorplate disappeared too, and she never asked for a replacement,
pulling his name into the silent recesses of her mind. Doggett's files and
pens are already spread across his desk and his suit jacket hangs over the
back of his chair. She walks around to Mulder's chair and puts her bag on
Mulder's desk, then turns and straightens one of Mulder's pictures on the
bulletin board. Back in a corner behind a basketball trophy, there's a
photo of the two of them, black-suited, taken by a man in a fish costume
on Santa Monica pier. Mulder's looking down at her in the middle of some
insane theory and she's trying not to laugh. His arm disappears behind
her; she can still feel the warmth of his hand taking the small liberty of
sliding down her back. Sometimes when she's alone, she props it next to
her computer and thinks about all their bad meals in greasy diners when
all it took was the look in his eyes to close out the rest of the world.
She wonders if Doggett's ever noticed the snapshot when he prowls around
in her absence.
"Hey." His voice comes up behind her. He's
carrying his morning coffee in the NATO mug he'd picked up at some
security conference. Setting it on the desk he wipes a drip off the side
and shakes the heat off his fingers.
"Morning," she says, typing
in her password, fixing her eyes on the screen. He inspects her every
morning, looking for signs of madness she supposes, and she's forced
herself to ignore the scrutiny. There seems to be no plan to transfer
him.
"You okay? I didn't know you were going to go home early
yesterday." He comes around to see what's on her screen.
She turns
to face him, driving him back a half step. He's wearing a white shirt and
a red-blue striped rep tie, still tightly knotted, and never seems to
deviate from the dress code. His hair stands straight up, as if the
X-Files were a charged field. For a second she wonders if he goes to the
same demented barber Mulder used to visit in his cheap moods. "I had a
doctor's appointment I'd forgotten about," she starts. "By the time I
remembered, I was already late and then I ended up sitting in the waiting
room for an hour." She finds she can stare him in the eye when she lies.
Her heart speeds up but her voice stays calm. She wonders if he believes
her or is adding the story to some mental tally of deceit. "I should have
called you."
"Baby okay?"
"Baby's fine."
"It's a
brave thing you're doing. Sticking to the job, I mean." His voice is low
and earnest and his eyes look the way they do before the suspect catches
on.
"Agent Doggett, there are millions of pregnant women holding
jobs at this very moment."
"You're not millions of pregnant women."
The ground shifts and for a second she feels caught in the light,
but she steadies herself with five fingers splayed against the desk. She
turns back to the cases he'd piled on her desk. "Anything urgent?" She can
do the same thing with her voice after all, that even, offhand, lull-you
tone.
"Pretty routine stuff. Anytime a police psychic screws up,
they think it's a case for us. I thought when Skinner called yesterday, he
might have…"
The ringing of a phone in her bag interrupts his
probe. She still has a cell programmed with Mulder's number and she digs
hastily between her papers to find it. It's been two weeks since the last
call and that was a wrong number. "Yes?" is all she says as though her
name might scare off the caller. Doggett moves away, settling on the edge
of his desk to sip his coffee and take in her conversation.
"Is
this… I'm sorry, I must have the wrong number." The voice is female,
breathy, half-whispered.
"Wait. I'm Agent Dana Scully,
FBI."
"I wanted to speak to Agent Mulder."
"I'm his
partner." She turns away from Doggett, wishing all that bitter coffee
would hit his bowels.
"This is the number he gave
me."
"He's not here. Could I help you?"
"Well, could he call
me back?"
"He's away for some time, I'm afraid."
There was
silence at the other end. "It's just that he asked me to call. I mean
…"
Scully waits. This is the way it always happens. The hesitant
voice, neither young nor old, apologetic, used to rejection. She imagines
a frayed woman on the other end whom Mulder lured from the security of
silence. Scully presses her fingers to her eyes.
"We worked
together a long time."
"But it's personal, not a crime. It's about
his sister."
"That's… I know about that, too."
"You don't
know when he'll be back?"
"I wish I could say."
The silence
is long on the other end and Scully wonders if the woman has disappeared.
"I'm at work. I gotta go…"
"Then give me your home number and I'll
…"
"I don't have a phone."
"Then if I called you at work and
said it was business?" She feels a lead slipping away, a small connection
to someone who could say his name with hope rather than
derision.
"I hadn't thought of that." She gives her name and number
and the line clicks.
"What was that?" Doggett speaks before she's
put the phone away.
"A woman. Acquaintance of Mulder's." She knows
without looking that Doggett's raised eyebrows have created bunkers across
his forehead.
"She calls *him* on your phone?"
"He must've
given her both numbers. He'd lose his phone sometimes."
The pause
is so long she thinks he's dropped the subject. His voice returns, slow
and cautious. "Really? Is it a case? Something we're still working
on?"
"A personal matter by all appearances."
Doggett walks
around to the other side of his desk and sits down, taking a slow sip of
his coffee. "You didn't tell her… Look, excuse me for reminding you, but
she has a right to know what happened to him."
She rises from her
chair, shuts down her computer, and snaps her bag shut. "I've got some
reports to finish in forensics."
"Agent Scully," he calls, louder
than he needs to. "Remember our agreement. You call me if you have a case.
Before you leave town. "
The drive from Fort Wayne is
flat and tedious but traffic is light once she gets west of the
Interstate. Route 30 cuts four lanes through the plowed up fields of
northern Indiana, black soil and withered stumps of corn stretching toward
stands of trees in the distance, windbreaks against the icy storms off
Lake Michigan. She finds she's driving with half a mind, thinking that
Mulder should be in the seat next to her holding forth on the space-time
continuum or Big Hoot, the prehistoric giant owl he claimed to have seen
in some old woods in Massachusetts. She misses Big Hoot. She wants
Mulder's warm hand kneading the muscles in her neck as she takes a turn
driving. She wants to glance across and blush at what she sees in his
eyes. She wants his heart to beat and his brain to race ahead and she'd
give anything to deal with his sarcastic comments and impatience and his
habit of ditching her when he gets a lead.
The car behind her honks
and she looks up to see the light has turned green. She can't honestly
believe that he found one of Samantha's friends and never told her. A
woman who had survived the tests and carried its marks. The MUFON women
had all died, expendable and forgettable. Forgotten. Was it Scully's own
fault that Mulder hadn't shared it? Now someone who's come back is magic
to her, too. A magnetic tug. A lead to the only mystery worth solving any
more. Another light ahead is red and as she slows, she glances at his X on
the map, thirty miles ahead. The same X that she's found in New Brunswick
and Charlottesville and, ironically, Chilmark near his childhood
home.
An hour on the road and Scully pulls up to the gate at Yogi
Bear's Jellystone Park. Fifty feet down the gravel there's a log cabin
with bricks on the tar paper roof, but otherwise the lot is filled with
dozens of campers, trailers, and RVs, no two alike. A statue of the old
cartoon bear, paint chipping off his pork pie hat, stands where the
driveway splits. Behind it is a chain-link fence guarding the splash pool.
A dirty blue Ford pickup with yellow snow plow is parked in front of the
cabin. On the gate a hand-painted sign announces boldly, "Bye for now!
Come see us in April." She tugs at the lock. "Hello," she shouts, feeling
foolish all at once.
The previous week's snow has melted leaving
only isolated piles of blackened ice along the road, but now flurries are
gusting across the churned up fields, specks of white ice that bite into
her face and swirl in eddies around her feet. She pulls her collar tighter
and retreats to the car, where the instructions lie on the dashboard.
Sitting sideways, she honks twice, quickly, and wonders whether she should
follow the frosted ground around the perimeter. The car clock says 4 pm;
the sun will set in another hour and the light's already dimming under low
gray clouds.
The tin can sound of a cheap screen door breaks the
silence. From just past the cabin hurries a woman clasping an oversized
red flannel shirt across her chest. Her jeans are faded at the knees and
her hiking boots are unlaced so she's running in a half shuffle. When she
reaches the fence, she stops and stares at Scully. Her face is full of
tiny lines as though the skin were exceptionally dry and tight. Except for
the flush on her cheeks, she's pale and wears no make up to cover the
darkish circles under her eyes. Her nose is small and fine, however, and
her hair, which looks like it had been cut into shaggy layers by a
well-meaning friend, is a beautiful shade of honey. Scully pulls her badge
from her pocket and holds it up to the chain links. "Rosemary?"
The
woman nods and motions Scully to a smaller gate with a large padlock
hanging open. The woman tugs the gate and rubs her hands together, waiting
for Scully. "This way." She trots back in the direction she came, her
boots slapping the ground.
Home is a blue-gray camper sheltered
under a large pine tree. A barbecue and picnic table sit to the side; the
grill is rusty and bird droppings dot the table. Empty plastic terracotta
flower boxes flank the door, a chip broken off one corner. Rosemary wipes
her feet on the bristle mat.
Inside, where the room smells of
disinfectant and burnt toast, the woman motions Scully to a banquette seat
alongside the built-in formica table. She pulls a thermos from the counter
next to a portable stove top and grabs two mugs from the dish drainer.
"Coffee?"
"Sure." The woman resembles so many people Mulder
managed to find, making do on the margins, pushed to the edge by secrets
that can't be contained or released. Somehow, they sensed the same
darkness in her partner. The coffee is hot, instant. The two women sip in
silence.
"This is cozy," Scully finally says.
"It suits me
all right. Place to eat and cook right here, I've got my tv, and the john.
Bed." She glances quickly up at the alcove that was designed to jut out
over the cabin of a truck.
"Are you alone?"
"Yeah. I mean
in here. My buddy Sheila lives in the cabin, takes care of ole Jellystone
in the winter." She takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her
shirt. "Mind if I smoke?"
"Go ahead."
Rosemary strikes a
match and lets it burn down to her fingertips after she's lit up, then
sucks on the sore spot. "You should of said no. I'm trying to quit. Can't
smoke at the nursing home, but the old folks smell it on me and beg me for
a ciggie. I don't want to be that way some day. Not that I'll make
it…"
She inhales deeply and lets out a slow white breath. "I'm not
really supposed to be here, the camp being closed and all, but Sheila lets
me stay." She bats away the smoke and holds her cigarette off to the side.
"You're Mr. Mulder's partner?"
"Yes. We worked together for seven
years."
"I never figured they'd put a man and woman
together."
"It's not uncommon, only there aren't a lot of female
agents."
"He married?" Rosemary turns away from Scully and grabs an
earthenware ashtray from the counter.
"No. No, he's not… actually,
he's…"
"Not the marrying kind?"
Scully looks off. "I don't
think that's true. There's just so much else that has always demanded his
attention." She stops, unable to confide what still seems like a secret, a
lie.
Rosemary shrugs. "I didn't mean to pry. He was just so nice to
me, I kind of wondered."
"You met him?"
"Yeah, a couple
months ago. I mean he found me, I don't how. He thought I knew his sister,
but I couldn't tell him anything… I felt kind of bad about that." Her
index fingers play a game spinning the mug in one direction, then the
other and the rising smoke makes tight spirals in the air. "He thought I'd
been in this place with her when we were kids, like a military base or
something."
"Did it ring a bell?"
"I don't remember much of
anything. Pretty stupid, huh?" The light through the window has dimmed and
Rosemary half rises from her seat to press the button of the small
fluorescent light mounted on the wall. "I don't have any memories of my
folks or being a kid or anything, and… I mean these old people are always
talking about stuff they did when they were young, like playing games and
having friends and going out and crazy pranks, you know. Stuff I would've
done before I got sick…" Scully recognizes the woman's defensive shrug, a
way of pretending that it doesn't matter, this thing that hurts so much.
"What sort of illness did you have?"
"The doctors said it
was schizophrenia. They put me in a hospital or lots of them."
"Do
you remember any of the hospitals where you were treated or…
facilities?"
"One place. Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That much I know
because in the spring the trees were amazing, like snow except soft and
warm and it smelled like heaven. I snuck outside and stood underneath and
shook the branches until I was covered in petals like a bride. Then they'd
come out and get me. It's like the one thing I never forgot." She runs her
finger along the table, red formica, burned in spots, some random, some
lined up as if part of a game, then puts out her cigarette.
"When
were you discharged?"
"About ten years ago. They gave me a little
money and some letters saying I was safe for society and put me into a
halfway house in Fort Wayne 'cause I was supposed to be from around here.
I mean that's what my files said." She pats the banquette. "I gave them to
Mr. Mulder. He said he'd give 'em back."
The discharge papers would
have told him names of hospitals and doctors and treatments, but who's to
say that any of it would have been true? All his notes had disappeared, in
any case. "Are you still being treated?"
"They send me drugs. A
guy used to come by and test my blood, but I haven't seen him in a while.
But, uh, Mr. Mulder, he said that the drugs were maybe making me worse. He
thought maybe I was never really sick, you know. Like they were doing some
tests on me that they shouldn't of. So I kind of stopped them."
Now she understands why Mulder didn't tell her about his visit. A
simple thing, remove the pills and then what? Who's testing now? Damn it,
Mulder. Come back so we can fight this out. Come back and justify
yourself. Come back here and… She presses her hands together, prayer-like
against her forehead. "You know, if you have schizophrenia, you can't just
stop taking your medication."
"Mr. Mulder thought I could start
remembering again."
Scully looks over Rosemary's face, as though
the illness might be diagnosed from her features, but all she sees is a
sallow, tired woman who might slip deeper into despair thanks to her
partner.
"What happened when you stopped the pills?"
"I was
okay for a while, but I started getting these nightmares, sometimes even
when I'm awake, so that's when Sheila got kind of angry and told me to
call him."
"This was yesterday?"
She unscrews the top of the
thermos and drains the rest of the coffee into her cup. "I didn't think it
would be scary, you know."
"What did you dream?"
"A lot of
shit." Her mouth turns up quickly and she looks out the window over
Scully's head. "Sorry. I see these people in white masks, some of them
have gray skin like they're dead only they're moving around. They're all
looking at me and I'm laying down and they're poking me and hurting, you
know? And sometimes I'm just alone in this dark place and I'm sweating and
I can't move like I'm completely tied down, and I can't even see my own
body."
Scully tips her coffee cup and feigns interest in the thin
brown liquid at the bottom. Her heart is racing and there's a shot of cold
from her body core out to the tips of her fingers. She quickly catalogs
the reasons for such hallucinations, starting with hints Mulder must've
dropped or a movie Rosemary had seen or even the effect of sleeping in a
tin-can alcove, rattled by the north wind. Not to mention withdrawal
symptoms or a resurgence of the illness.
"Maybe I could see some of
your medication. I'm a physician."
Rosemary stands and lifts the
padded red seat. She takes out some faded dish towels and puts them on the
table and then a box of corn flakes. Finally, she pulls up a handful of
brown vials and stands them in a row. "You're a doctor? So you think Mr.
Mulder's advice was wrong then?" She doesn't quite meet Scully's eyes and
her hands seem to quiver before she shoves them into the pockets of her
jeans.
The labels say Zyprexa and Haldol. The latest drugs, as if
someone was making sure she got good treatment. "My partner
had…has…tremendous intuition about things. Special, really special. But
I'm going to see about having someone evaluate you and I'll have these
medications checked. In the meantime, you should start taking the
prescribed dose…"
"Wait. I mean the thing is that I think I am
starting to remember real stuff." There's suddenly life in her eyes and
her cheeks flush. "Like it gets real dark around here at night and I was
outside last week and I started remembering the constellations, Orion and
the Big and Little Dippers. And I think that maybe when I was a kid,
somebody taught me that and told me the story about how Perseus saved
Andromeda from the sea monster. It was like I couldn't breathe, I was so
excited. It'd be ok to put up with scary dreams…"
Scully chews her
lip. It hurts so much when Mulder's promises can't come true. When he
finds that secret part of someone else who wants to believe so badly
despite all the harm they've suffered.
"And his sister. I
remembered a girl with dark hair like the one in his picture but I'm
pretty sure that she was older when I knew her. We were hiding someplace,
like hide and seek. That's what I wanted to tell him."
"He showed
you a photo?"
"Yeah. A couple. She was really cute, you know? And
he had her diary. He showed me where my name was."
Scully sighs.
"Do you remember where you were when you knew her? Was it Cherry
Hill?"
" I don't think so. I think it was before that. Other
places. Someplace hot maybe."
"Any names? April AFB, does that ring
a bell? Or…" she hesitates. "Or states? Do you remember what states you
were in?"
Rosemary looks out the window while she rubs the back of
her hand. Her skin is tight across the bones and the knuckles are red.
"I'm sorry," she sighs. "There's nothing that specific."
Scully
toys with the bottles, knocking one to the ground. It rolls toward the
door and she slides off the bench to chase it. As she stands up, her coat
falls open.
"You're pregnant." Rosemary's eyes fix on Scully's
stomach. "Do they let you be an agent if you're pregnant?"
"It's
between you and your boss."
"That's awfully brave. I'd be so afraid
that something bad might happen." She picks up the cups and stands to
rinse them in the sink. "Sometimes I think, that maybe I can live another
life sometime and have a husband, a really nice guy who loves me, you
know? And I'll get pregnant a couple times and have these really cute kids
and my folks will dote on them. Stupid isn't it?"
"It's not stupid
at all."
"It's stupid for me."
Mulder must have seen his
sister in Rosemary rather than this tired woman who's so eager to remember
what he needs because she has nothing else, no affiliation, and no one
else who ever cared. It's probably a dead end, a waste of time. She slips
the bottles into her purse. Outside the wind has driven away the clouds. A
bright white light shines over the gate, but she turns the other way and
looks for the Pleiades and the bright light of
Jupiter.
The last flight gets her into National as the
clean-up crews are swabbing down the floors and it's midnight by the time
the cab drops her off at her apartment. She sets her bag just inside the
door and removes Rosemary's medication, putting it next to her briefcase.
The light on her answering machine is blinking three times. She knows
better than to listen before trying to sleep, but she hits play just the
same and Doggett's voice comes on.
"Agent Scully. I just got a
break on the witchcraft case. Give me a ring when you get in."
The
tape whirrs and the same voice comes back. "Agent Scully…. You there for
God's sake?… I've been trying to get through all evening. It's…uh…11:30
now. Tell me you're not off chasing some lead on your own. I want you to
call me the instant you get in. I don't care how late."
The click
seems louder this time. Finally, a woman's voice, hesitant at first.
"Agent Scully? I guess I forgot it would take you a long time to get home.
I'm… I'm sorry for calling like this, I mean just leaving a message, but I
saw something after you left. Some of the older girls were pregnant. I
remember that they'd get real big and then they'd disappear and then they
came back like nothing happened. I just can't remember any babies. I just…
I guess seeing you made me think of it."
Scully flashes on images
of her own: a brightly lit room with shelves of specimen jars holding
wrinkled fetuses pickled in their deformities, and a long time ago the
panic of stealing a frozen gray fetus with unstaring black eyes. And a
perfect little girl with Melissa's smile.
She and
Mulder are in the car; he's driving. It's pitch black outside and the
headlights must be off because the only lights are random sparks at
indeterminate distance, but his face is plainly visible. Suddenly he
starts talking about the baby in a soft unmodulated voice that barely
contains his awe, and she's confused because she can't remember telling
him. She closes her eyes and still sees sparks and she feels his touch
even before his hand reaches her, a gentle caress across her middle. And
he's taking them to safety, her and the baby, and she looks down and her
lap is red.
Scully sits up with a start. The back of her neck is
damp and suddenly cool. The bedside light is on and she slaps the table
for her weapon before she spots the journal tumbled on the floor open and
face down. She breathes out in short puffs, looks around, lifts the
sheets, rubs between her legs and comes up dry. She picks up the book and
smoothes it closed then eases herself out of bed and cold foots first into
the bathroom to take care of her bladder, then around to check perimeter
defenses: the new locks on the front door, the phone connection, the metal
wedges to keep anyone from forcing up a window. The Gunmen had wanted her
to install motion detectors, remote camera, panic buttons, but she'd said
no, she was fine. Whoever took Mulder didn't want her. Back in the
bedroom, she pulls the curtains aside. The sky has clouded over, the
bright spot of the half moon behind high-speed back-lit clouds. A bird in
captivity might hurl itself against a clear plate window over and over
trying to reach the place it belongs. She thinks Mulder was like that and
now she is, too. What will she do if she ever forgets the sound of his
voice?
She wakes up late and tired and gets
caught in construction traffic on the drive in. No matter. Doggett always
arrives first, even though it means he must set out before dawn. She
pictures him falling into a tightly-made bed at 2130 sharp after reading a
chapter of Tom Clancy and doing a hundred chin-ups in the doorway. Amend
that; she hadn't seen a chin-up bar the few times she's entered his big,
empty, preternaturally neat house in the suburbs. Tidiness taught by the
Marines, no doubt, one of the few Marine secrets he hasn't shared with
her. She pauses outside the office door, not that it makes a difference.
If Doggett's inside, he's already heard her footsteps. She pushes the door
open and walks straight to Mulder's desk, anticipating that there will be
no preliminaries.
"I expected your call last night."
"It was
late."
"I said the time didn't matter. You're lucky I didn't camp
out over there."
"Do I have a curfew now?"
"You agreed not
to pursue cases without backup. *I* agreed to the same."
His stare
is hard, cold, but for a second his eyes relent and she glimpses a fear
that she hasn't seen before. "I was out with friends," she says. She walks
to Doggett's desk and turns his open file to face her. She reads the
synopsis and flips through the first few pages before meeting his eyes.
"Is this the witchcraft case?"
"I thought that woman didn't give
you her number."
"Not everything about Mulder has to do with his
disappearance."
"Who says, Agent?"
He stands abruptly and
leaves the office without another word. When his footsteps have faded,
Scully closes the door behind him. For a moment, while the turbulent air
settles, she leans her weight against it then returns to her desk. She
takes the medication out of her bag and stacks it next to the computer.
The diary she opens to the list of names in Mulder's handwriting. Every
one is female.
That evening her mom's eating supper
at her apartment. Maggie shows up once a week with a salad and a casserole
tucked into her big canvas tote. Sometimes she brings tiny pajamas wrapped
in tissue or a terrycloth bib or crib sheets which they pass back and
forth between them with gentle words of affection. Scully keeps them in a
dresser in the spare room and some nights, when she can't sleep, she
unfolds them and holds them up to the light and tries to picture a baby
with hazel eyes. They talk about her mother's activities at the church,
about Bill and Charlie and their families, about what was on the news.
They talk about the past, her dad and the places they used to live. They
talk about how she's feeling and what the doctor says. They don't talk
about how she's going to manage the baby on her own. Her mom says, "You
know, your dad was away most of the time I was pregnant with you and
Billy," but neither knows what to make of that fact.
Dinner tonight
is vegetable stew over rice, and Maggie has disappeared into the bathroom
to wash a spot of tomato sauce off her blouse. Scully pokes at a piece of
eggplant . Somewhere in her mother's house is her own childhood diary,
pink with gold fleur-de-lis on the cover. The smooth white pages preserved
her fights with Missy, her brothers' pranks and misdeeds, the way her
first period stained her favorite dress, birthday surprises and Christmas
presents, her love for the cutest guy in the eighth grade, her attempts to
puzzle out what eternity might mean, her first smoke, the kiss out on the
front porch with her dad embarrassingly behind the door, her desperation
at being too brainy to be popular, and the moment she started doubting her
mother's God. Bill had sneaked in once and pried the lock open, but her
Mom had taken him out back and read him the riot act. She didn't think
anyone ever snooped after that although Bill would sometimes utter the
name Davie under his breath when he wanted to annoy her. She thinks it's
hard to know which words might matter when you write them, which ones
contain the truth when you hope they all do, but you're just too close to
know.
Now she has followed Mulder in poring over his sister's
secrets, dissecting them, weighing each word, making lists and columns.
The tabbed pages allow her to find Rosemary or the other girls again or
the times Samantha hinted at what was done to her. "Terrible," "not so
bad," "I think I cried the whole time." God knows, Mulder had probably
scanned the pages into his computer and had them analyzed for code. The
actual Samantha is no more than a flickering fantasy with a face from an
old photo. A girl she imagines sitting cross-legged in bed wearing a long
white nightgown with lace across the bodice and hem. Maybe there were
flowers on the quilt or maybe it was a hand-me-down regimental olive wool
blanket. Maybe she wrote in the pink glow of dawn or with a flashlight
that she kept on the bookshelf. No, under the bed. It must have been a
secret because Smoky wouldn't have allowed privacy, wouldn't have allowed
the chance of a word leaking out. He wouldn't have allowed anyone memory
unless it served his purposes. Mute, like the child clone Mulder had told
her about, the one that he'd wanted to show his mother.
"Are you
well?" Her mother's voice breaks into her thoughts. "You seem more tired
than usual."
"Sorry. We've… There's… I got some of Mulder's things
back, the ones that were taken from his apartment."
"Oh, Dana." Her
mother's voice is soft, the same strained softness Scully's heard a
thousand times over the past months, the desire to comfort mixed with the
knowledge that comfort is an illusion. "Honey, there may not be an answer
to the question why."
Scully spears an eggplant cube and swabs it
around her plate. "When I was in the hospital after my abduction, you were
there, weren't you?"
"Missy or I, we tried to be there as much as
they'd allow. Fox… you know, they gave up trying to kick him
out…"
"Did I say anything about what happened? About what I
saw?"
"You'd been in a coma for a long time, the doctor said. You
were so sick." She put down her fork and covered Scully's hand with her
own. "The doctors said you'd remember nothing. It was a
mercy."
"But maybe I did, maybe there were still some things… Did
anyone ask me about what I'd seen, where I'd been?"
"Of course we
didn't quiz you, darling. I just wanted you to grow stronger. And what
would I have asked in any case?"
"Melissa, maybe she noticed
something. She would've been curious. Did she ever tell
you?"
"Honey, I didn't want to bring back bad memories. You were
back. That's all that mattered."
They eat in silence. Finally her
mother puts her fork down. "Why are you asking
now?"
Maggie leaves at 10 after packing the leftovers
in Scully's refrigerator. She gives her daughter a peck on the cheek and
squeezes her hand at the door. Her lips are pressed in a tight smile and
her eyes still hold her unanswered question. In the bedroom, a yellow
sleeper embroidered with a heart lies spread across her pillow. Scully
holds it to the light and folds it, and she wonders why her mother removed
it from the chest.
She's losing two days on a trip
to North Carolina to follow up the witchcraft case. It's thin, she
wouldn't count it as an X-File, but Doggett insisted that they drive down.
They've spent the day in the company of the local sheriff looking at
mutilated chickens and bad geometry smeared in blood and dung and now
they've taken refuge in Vern's Diner, the main eatery in Padgett's Falls.
Doggett wants to discount black magic without further investigation, which
mystifies her all the more, but she agrees with him. The rash of hexes
seems to point to an overzealous employee of the local agribusiness trying
to chase some small farmers off their lands. The local sheriff is in
cahoots most likely, though there's no hard evidence. Doggett's on a roll,
spelling out his analysis in detail as he saws a 12 ounce steak and
punctuates his comments with French fries. His glass of ice water has been
refilled twice and a plump young waitress hovers in the background with a
copper pitcher in her hand. Scully nods along silently and scrapes the
coating off her tepid fried chicken. Now he's using his salad fork to
trace pentagrams on the placemat but at least he hasn't said anything
about her trip to Indiana, and she thinks his restraint may be an attempt
to mend fences. So she tries to be congenial and sets up perfunctory
arguments that he can shoot down with a lopsided smile. She hopes he
doesn't order dessert.
Her left hand rests against her stomach
under the napkin. The movements of the baby are addictive. The child is no
longer an act of faith, an artifact of hormonal tests and submarine
imaging. Sometimes when it's been still for a few hours, she prods a
little, looking for a kick, touching base with reality. Were they scared,
the girls Rosemary saw? She wonders if Mulder knew about the pregnancies,
if he'd entertained the same possibility, if he'd pictured alien fetuses,
tanks, green blood. Doggett's foot bumps hers and the look on his face
says he's just told a joke. She tries to smile
appreciatively.
They get back to town late afternoon
and agree to stop by the office together. It's an extension of their
truce. She heads to the lab to intercept the test results on Rosemary's
medicines but Stockton tells her that they've already sent them
downstairs. By the time she rides down the elevator with the going-home
crowd, it's too late. Doggett gives her a moment to settle her things at
Mulder's desk, then walks across the room with an open envelope, marked
Confidential. "These came back. Some tests for that case you're not
working on."
Scully takes the folder and sits down. "Care to tell
me what the results say? Spare me the work of reading it."
"Sure.
Near as I can figure from all the pharmaceutical gobbledygook, your
surmise was right. Neither of the drugs tested conformed to the label on
the container. Neither was related to the treatment of schizophrenia. One
was a placebo and the other was… you'll have to look at the scientific
name. It suppresses the memory. Fairly heavy dose from what they say."
"And from this you surmise…?"
"Someone's fucking with your
victim's head."
"Thank you for your insight." She slides the lab
sheets back into the envelope and opens her bag.
"Now I'd like to
know what the hell's going on. You think you've got yourself a little
X-File and it's about time you shared it. Someone connected with Mulder is
having their memory wiped. You want to restore it because you think… you
think it'll change things."
His eyes are small and pointed and
color has started rising in his cheeks.
"You apparently think I
haven't been doing a rat's ass worth of work to find the people who killed
your partner."
"I don't believe I ever said that."
"You
don't have to say it. Every evasion tells me what's running through your
head."
"You know, it really annoys me that you think you can read
my mind."
"Yeah, well, it annoys me that mind-reading is the only
way to find out what's going on with you."
Doggett pulls another
file off his desk. "Well, here's another report that'll get your
attention. Like I told you before, Mulder traveled around a good bit in
the weeks before his disappearance. We haven't been able to track down the
identities of everyone he visited, but we managed to pin down two. Both
women. One we've got in custody. The other was shot dead with a Sig. The
ballistics say his Sig. We've also matched his gun to two recent unsolved
murders in places Mulder visited. All victims are women with histories of
mental illness, late twenties to late thirties."
"His gun would
have been taken from him. Mulder didn't kill women." She understands the
urgency of North Carolina now, getting her out of town while he ran this
other investigation on the side.
"No, no I didn't say he did. These
murders were too recent. But…"
"But what?"
"His prints are
at the crime scene."
"Damn it, you know how easy it would be for
someone to counterfeit his prints."
"They'd have to have
access."
"Yes. Yes, Agent Doggett, that's exactly the
point."
Doggett opens a file. The shuffle of pages turning is loud,
crackling, as if amplified by the wave movement of their anger. Finally,
he pulls a chair to the side of Scully's desk and sits, one elbow resting
next to the monitor, his hand covering his mouth.
"These people he
was with… they may be going after the women he fingered for I don't know
what reason."
"He wasn't 'with' them. What evidence do you need to
see that?"
"It went wrong, Scully. That's all. He followed what he
believed and it went wrong. We don't have any evidence that he was going
undercover with these people. Don't you think that'd be in the files.
Skinner or someone would have had to assign him."
No, it wouldn't
be in the files, she thinks. That's also the point.
"Look, he
continues. I didn't want to say this, but word's getting around that these
women had something on him. You can use your imagination
here."
"And that's what you think, too?"
"No. That's too
simple. Nothing about the man was simple." His eyes are serious without a
flicker of smile. She shifts in her chair, tugging her skirt free where
it's twisted under her. "How would you explain it?" he asks.
"I
don't know. Mulder may have learned something, something somebody thought
was hidden. Or forgotten. And now they're mopping up. They'd love to
discredit him because …" Her voice trails off. Because? Because someone
might still believe in him, she thinks.
"OK, say it's a frame. Why
would they use his fingerprints now, after everyone knows... I mean, why
confuse matters?"
"Maybe he's unleashed something he couldn't
control."
"These people who got him, they've killed a couple women
he apparently knew. That means that the woman you visited," Doggett picks
up the drug report, ignoring her silence. "The woman who's taking these
medications is in danger, too. It means you need to bring me into this
case."
"I'll put her into custody."
"Not you, Agent,
me."
"She doesn't know you."
"We're partners now, Scully. We
watch out for each other. Don't you understand your own
danger?"
Halfway down the hall, the elevator doors whir open and
the sound of large flat shoes approaches, slows, and continues past the
office. A moment later the stairway door clicks shut. The air pressure has
changed; it feels heavier, murky.
"No one believes you've got any
perspective." Doggett's voice is softer. "You're what? Six, seven months?
It's time to let go. Focus on yourself. Wouldn't he want
that?"
Scully looks away, wishing Doggett would go back to his
desk, leave her alone to puzzle it out. He's out of place in this haunted
room, with his earnest voice and one-thing-after-another way of talking
and keep-your-hands-in-plain-view attitude. His bullshit detector and
drinking buddies. And if she pushes up against his mind games -- the
probes and hints and provocations -- it doesn't bring her one step closer
to finding what she needs. She's in a box that someone's holding shut.
It's dark and close and it might collapse on her.
"'Hasn't got any
perspective,' is what people say when they're thinking 'Nuts, just like
Mulder.' Is that what you meant, Agent Doggett?"
"We both want
justice, right?" He doesn't wait for a response. "So I've got some leads
to track and I've arranged for you to do the autopsy. Call me when you're
ready to bring that woman in from the cold."
Her feet
hurt and she's got heartburn and feels more than a little apprehensive
that Doggett has stepped into the case and assigned her the autopsy of
Lisa Johnson, but the fact is it might be a gift. Scully pulls the
overhead light closer to the body on the steel table, focusing the bright
light on the pelvis. There's no recent damage here - unlike the head with
its gunshot wound and the tight red chafing around the wrists and ankles.
No fresh signs of abuse like the bruises and gashes they found on Gary or
Mulder. She clicks off the tape recorder to catch her breath, to let the
memories come because they can't be stopped, until a moment passes and the
images sink back into the bleak cold place.
Her hand runs across
the pale skin of Lisa's lower abdomen, smooth and unmarked except for the
thin mottled lines from side to side and a long scar low, across the top
of the pubic hair. The Smile, they'd called it in med school although it
seems cruel in the present circumstances. She traces a finger along the
cut. It had healed cleanly. She slices quickly through skin and muscle,
then angles a hand and gathers the uterus. She cuts it loose from its
mooring and holds it under the bright light. The organ shows signs of
stretching; the baby had grown large before it was born. The file said
nothing about children. Her landlady couldn't recall any family at all and
N/A had been penciled in for Next of Kin. One last step. She turns the
woman's shoulders to the side and adjusts the light. There's a fresh cut
at the back of her neck. A probing finger reveals nothing inside.
Scully strips off her latex gloves and holds a hand against her
own child. Which would be worse? Knowing your child had been taken or not
remembering that you'd ever felt the quickening movements of hands and
feet?
The diary is propped open on the kitchen
table as she finishes the leftover casserole. In Samantha's last weeks,
she started writing lists: state capitals and the major constellations,
breakfast cereals and street names, Nancy Drew titles, the numbers in
Spanish, the signs of the zodiac, and all the things that the letters in
Samantha could spell. Things she collected: stones in various colors and
local wildflowers and handprints of her friends. And when she reappeared
after several days of silence, she wrote a simple "It hurts," or only
slightly more informative, "my mouth hurts, my stomach hurts, my head
hurts." How far had they touched her, a fourteen-year old girl? What did
they steal from the body that they needed to erase from the mind? Did she
look at her scars under the flashlight? Did she hide them and swear that
she'd never reveal the embarrassment? Did she find fault in
herself?
Scully rises from the table and carries the dishes to the
sink. The water is cold at first, then warm and finally scalding hot, and
the steam rises, mist against her face. An automatic part of her brain,
the part she's trained to deny fear, directs a finger into the stream; the
pain pulls her out of her trance and she quickly adjusts the water. She
washes the plate and cup quickly, then scrubs her mother's pan, pushing
her anger against the baked on crusts. One of Samantha's last entries runs
through her mind: "I've been in the dark place again. I read the things I
wrote a few weeks ago and I don't remember them any more. If it weren't
for you, diary, how would I know anything?"
It had
surprised her that he brought Samantha's diary on their first trip to
Oregon last spring. She spotted it face down on the bed when she came into
his room feeling dizzy and breathless and he'd swept it up with the case
files. They'd agreed to sleep apart on field business, but she'd ended up
wrapped in his sheet with the blanket pulled up to her chin. Neither of
them had planned it, neither wanted it to stop.
He'd walked to the
window, leaning an arm against the frame. The moon was full and past his
naked torso the silver light was pooling in the darkness at the edge of
the woods.
"I think someone's watching us," he'd said.
"How
can you tell?"
"There's a car out there that wasn't there before. I
saw a light flash on for a second, but haven't heard a door
close."
"Probably the auditor." She felt giddy.
"Seeing if
the Bureau's getting full value?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, but
his face was in the shadows. "I heard once there was an office
pool…"
"What?"
"Never mind."
"The winner must have
claimed quite a prize."
He laughed and returned to bed, settling in
beside her and wrapping a warm arm around her shoulder. He whispered into
her ear. "He did. The best prize of all." He smelled of sweat and beer and
onions and her and there was still electricity on his skin.
He
kissed her on the temple. "I was thinking, Scully… Samantha called him her
father, Smoky I mean. Not with affection or pride, just plain. Father
ordered this, Father's away again. He told her she was sick, but I think
she stopped believing him. All those years she thought that someone who
loved her could do those things."
She placed a hand flat against
his chest and waited. He stroked her fingers one at a time.
"Tell
me about when you went with Spender. What did he sound like? How did he
talk to you so you'd go with him?"
"Mulder…" she groaned. "I've
told you this. I made a terrible…"
"Don't apologize, I'm not
angry." He smoothed her hair and pushed it back behind her ear. "I think
maybe he did the same thing to my Mom. I think he promised safety for
Samantha in exchange for silence. He had powers that my father didn't and
she knew that. That's why she could never tell anyone. Not even
me."
Scully shifted onto one hip and ran her hand down the side of
his face, pulling his eyes toward her. "He holds the things that people
want, Mulder, and then he dangles them beyond your reach. Isn't there a
definition of the devil like that?"
"Mom started calling me during
that case out in California, all of a sudden. She hadn't phoned me in
months. I think she'd had a precognitive sense of Samantha's death in '79,
just as the nurse did, and she lived with the fear all those years. And
Smoky must've been telling her the whole time that Samantha was alive,
grown-up, had a family, a nice suburban life. God knows what he said. That
time the clone showed up at our house… she, Mom, you wouldn't have
believed how radiant she was, just trembling with it. And when she saw the
news about Amber Lynn, she knew the truth. That's what I
think."
She wonders now if Smoky had ever been capable of loving
anyone, if he hated the emotion so much that he used it against his
victims.
Scully dries her hands and sits back at the
table, the diary still open. She turns several pages, smoothes the blank
white paper, and touches the tip of the pen to the paper twice before
finally starting. "Dear Mulder, I autopsied one of your contacts this
evening. Along her body were faded scars, short quick incisions, pin-point
punctures, pale marks where they inserted something under the skin and a
cut along the pubis where they removed her child. Some of the marks are
like the ones on my body, the ones I never showed you. I feared your
sympathy and understanding, I feared the pain in your eyes. I didn't want
you to force me to confront the memories recorded on my body, a catalog of
their deeds, a diary written on my flesh as it was on Lisa Johnson's and
on yours. We think of memory as the mind's duty. But sometimes it is the
body that bears witness when the mind has failed. If I had shown you, if
we had catalogued them together, might you have stayed with me instead of
chasing into the Oregon night?"
The faint sound of a phone
interrupts her thoughts and she hurries to the bedroom where Mulder's cell
is in the bag next to her bed. But when she flips it open, no one's on the
line. She returns to the table and the book is gone.
There's not much traffic on the bridge at 2 a.m. so
she pulls over, switches on her flashers and walks slowly to the railing.
The city lights overwhelm the stars but a full moon silvers the river. She
needs five minutes hanging over the water, listening to the night,
clearing out the paranoia. There's a rational explanation. She put Sam's
journal down in an odd place and her hormone-fogged mind can't see
straight. She'll find the book when she returns, sitting in some half-dark
corner where she didn't think to look. She rests her forehead on the
cement railing. The air smells damp, the old Potomac swamps with an
overlay of hydrocarbons, and it curls her hair and chills her hands down
to the bone. Traffic comes in small bursts, doppler sounds of other lives
and other missions. Only once does a passing driver honk at her back: she
pulls her good winter coat tighter across her grey sweats. She's about to
go back to her car when an approaching engine slows and she wraps her
fingers around the weapon in her pocket.
"Hey." The voice is
familiar. His hands are in his pockets as he approaches and stops next to
her looking over the river. "Nice moon."
"Yes, it
is."
"You're out late," he observes.
"So are you. "
Doggett folds his arms and leans on the railing, looking away from
her. He's exchanged his suit for a scuffed leather jacket, jeans, and work
boots and for a second she recalls that that's what Mulder wore the last
time she'd seen him alive, when she sat on his bed feeling queasy and he
promised to call when he arrived.
"This is about where that plane
crashed, isn't it?" he asks.
"What?"
"Maybe twenty years
ago. Do you remember? There was a winter storm. A plane, Air Florida I
think, sat at the gate a little too long and the wings iced up. Crashed
taking off, right into the river along here someplace. Went in clean, but
a few feet difference and it would've taken the bridge with it. It was
rush hour. The image stuck with me a long time."
"You were
there?"
"No. Fortunately not. I just always wondered what it would
feel like, trapped down there… You overlook some small detail in a hurry
and the next thing you know, it's pitch black, the screaming's stopped,
and your lungs are filling with ice water."
The concrete
balustrade has left a thin film of grit across the front of her coat. She
brushes it off slowly, trying to fight back the wave of cold welling up
from inside. "Hey," his hand brushes her sleeve quickly and his mouth
moves but a speeding Fed Ex truck drowns his voice. It's too late to
listen to insomniac fantasies. Hands in her pockets, she turns toward her
car.
"You reach that woman?" he asks when the silence
returns.
"How did you find me here?"
"I happened to be
driving by…"
"You really don't need to have me tailed, Agent
Doggett."
"Did you reach her?"
Her cell phone is tucked in
her bag on the floor of the car, left behind in a fit of inattention. "No.
I called her work number earlier but she's not on duty
tonight."
"No home number?"
"No. She lives
modestly."
He nods his head but whether it's in answer to her or
some internal dialog she doesn't know. He stands and works the kink out of
his shoulders with a couple of shrugs.
"I've asked Skinner to take
you off this case."
"It's not a matter that concerns you." She
wants to grab the front of his jacket and force him to look at
her.
"I'm sorry to have to do this. Right now it's just informal
between him and me. I can go official."
"On what
grounds?"
"Withholding a material witness to Mulder's activities.
Of course, you can give me your contact's name so I can bring her to
safety. There are cultists still out there."
It comes down to
this, after all the sidetracks they've followed, after four months of
nothing, he takes away the one thing she needs. The fatigue wells up from
inside. "I didn't even think her story made any sense when I heard it.
That you could call her a material witness…"
"What does she know,
Agent? What did the other women know? Every day you wait, you're risking
her. You can't guard her 24 hours yourself."
She's silent. His
voice drops, "Like I said before, you need to take your distance. When you
autopsied that woman, you excised her womb. Why? Then you asked for the
other victims to be checked for evidence of pregnancy. Why?"
"Are
you questioning my abilities as a pathologist?"
"None of these
women has children on record. So again, why?"
"I try to achieve a
complete picture."
"Just s.o.p.? Can't we get past the
evasions."
"It's late. And obviously I have my work cut out for me
tomorrow."
"Listen to you. Aren't you asking yourself what happened
to their children? Don't you think that any baby of yours and Mulder's
might…"
"You have no right to speculate about the
father..."
"My job is to investigate. I'm sorry that means invading
your privacy. I'm not judging you." She starts toward her car and he grabs
her arm. "Wait, damn it and let me finish."
"Agent Doggett, I need
to go now."
"It's a terrible thing to lose a child, Agent Scully."
He looks away from her, back down the river. "You can never replace a
child." With that he walks to his pick-up, starts the engine and drives
away.
She returns to her apartment and shrugs off her
heavy coat. Doggett's bitter words still churn in her mind and she feels
the aching sight of an empty coffin and the cold fingers of his own
unspoken tragedy. In all their months together, there's been one hint only
of his infinite loss, oblique, the words of a psychic and a flash of panic
across his face.
The diary lies face down on the floor, half under
the couch where it must have tumbled when she ran for the phone. She
smiles with relief, with confidence in her own fundamental sanity, and
picks it up. The words on the page aren't hers.
"All memory is
part truth and part falsehood, Scully, and it is our task to know which is
which. How many witnesses have we seen fill in the blanks and create
something that never existed? Samantha was more than a catalog of pains
and cuts and so are you."
It's Mulder's scrawl and she knows with
the two halves of her brain that the passage was and wasn't there before.
"Mulder?" she whispers.
"All Doggett has to
do is sign the complaint and it's official." Skinner is standing at the
window, eyes fixed on the office building across the street. His voice is
low and Scully leans forward in her chair to hear him. "He's requested a
complete physical and psychological consultation to back him
up."
"He can't do that. He has no authority over me."
"You
know how serious it is for one partner to question the other's judgment.
Doggett isn't anyone's golden boy right now, but they'll listen to him on
this. Kersh will seize on it." The blinds fall back into place with a
flutter and he waits a long minute before continuing. "I'm not sure how
much weight I can pull."
Skinner has been her true ally since
Mulder disappeared, or maybe she's been his. Only no one listens to the AD
these days, despite his spacious office, hardwood furniture and reserved
parking place. Sticking to the UFO story earned him the nickname Son of
Spooky, and his fervent belief doesn't make up for what he's lost. His
contacts - the ones who would tell him who was dealing with the aliens or
the military or whoever took Mulder - have dried up. A week after they
buried Mulder, Scully had started for work one morning only to find her
boss asleep in his car in front her apartment building, though she didn't
know whether he'd come out of grief or desire to protect. She never
brought it up.
"There's nothing wrong with my performance. I have
fulfilled every assignment. Agent Doggett and I have brought a number of
cases to completion. I am healthy. My pregnancy has not compromised the
work. That's really what this is about, isn't it."
"He's prepared
to claim on the record that you're hiding a material
witness."
"There's nothing to that… an old contact of Mulder's. She
has nothing to do with his abduction or… It's an excuse for whatever
agenda Doggett has with Kersh."
"But there is a connection to
Mulder."
"No. I mean, Mulder thought this woman might have known
his sister, but she's ill. Her memories… there's no way to tell if her
memories are true or fabricated."
"Doggett says he just wants her
in custody."
"She's fragile. She's suggestible. If she needs
protection I can arrange it."
"That will increase your own danger
which Doggett already considers to be unacceptably high." Skinner picks up
a file from his desk and carries it to the table. "Listen, I can arrange a
transfer, you tell me where. Pathology would love to have you. Quantico.
It's a lot easier to fix up before the OPR bureaucracy kicks in. No one
wants to judge you after everything that's happened. That you've stuck it
out at all…"
"What are you saying? I thought we were together on
this."
"Scully, look, what more is there that you can do? At some
point you're going to have to let go. Take your distance for your sake and
your baby's. Maybe get out of Washington, away from the pressures. The
talk."
"You want me to give up?"
"Give up what, Scully? I
want you safe and sane. I can't bring Mulder back for
you."
"They're still out there. Doesn't his death confirm it? Or
else why have you kept the X-Files open?"
"Doesn't his… doesn't
that just confirm there's not much we can do? I kept the files open
because I thought they might help you get your bearings. I didn't have
anything else to give."
"You and Doggett have it all worked out,
don't you? Are you buying into his UFO cargo cult theory as well?" Her
accusation hangs in the air like acrid smoke. Skinner winces, then turns
away. The phone rings and they both stare at it until the call bounces on
the fourth ring.
"Listen to me, Agent Scully. Listen to yourself.
Haven't we been through enough to extend a little trust?"
"Don't
cut me off from the X-Files, sir. There's still work to be done. We don't
know what Spender's doing or where Krycek disappeared to…"
"There
are risks. If he were here, Mulder wouldn't want you to risk your child."
"Mulder would know that only by my taking risks is this baby going
to have a future." She rises from her seat and braces both hands on the
table. "It's not Doggett's role to protect me…"
"He lost his son
because of a case. You're never going to convince him that he shouldn't
try to shield yours."
She fumbles with the keys as she
gets off the elevator, jiggling them in her hand until she finds the one
she wants. The fact that Skinner has ordered her to stay put doesn't make
it any easier. "I had no choice," isn't a comfortable phrase and repeating
it isn't going to make it any easier. Doggett's perfectly capable of
bringing Rosemary into custody; if anything, his protective instincts are
overdeveloped. But if Mulder was right about her, Doggett doesn't know
what he's up against. And more than anything, this is personal, this is
her tie to Mulder, this is about the things that drove him every day she
knew him; it's not some case that Doggett should take over.
There's a Post outside the door, and a couple of local restaurant
menus shoved underneath. She stoops against the hard roundness of her
stomach to scoop them up while she holds on to the doorknob for balance.
She'd told the landlord that she would move Mulder's things so the place
could be re-rented but she can't bear to spend more than an hour or two
folding linens or sorting through his clothes and she's ruled out anyone
else doing it, even the ever-helpful Frohike. So she keeps paying the rent
one month at a time. It's a foolish waste.
The street sounds have
died down and there's a faint hum and thump, thump, thump of the upstairs
neighbor who seems to have a treadmill. Ghosts live here among the odors
of disuse, the smell of dust and faintly crumbling plaster without the
cover of cooking smells and sweaty socks and laundry brought up from the
dank room in the basement.
Five or ten plain brown boxes, some
half-packed, are stacked alongside his dining table. She and her mom
cleaned out his kitchen first, pots and pans, mismatched dishes, glasses
from the local K-Mart, sharp knives and forks with bent tines. There are
enough good pieces - a two-quart Dutch oven from France, three "FWM"
monogrammed glasses, and a silver serving spoon apparently used for
stirring paint - that she wonders how he might have acquired them in his
life before they met. He told her once that he'd had no life before her,
but she chalked that up to a post-coital high.
Water's dripping in
the kitchen, a slow leak from the faucet. The room's been disturbed,
cupboard doors open where she's sure she closed them and a glass sitting
by the side of the sink. She tightens the tap, then bends to see if there
are visible prints on the glass. Probably the landlord checking on her
progress. Still, she fishes a dish towel from a box and wraps the glass
for testing. The first nameless agents who showed up after the abduction
swept whatever caught their fancy into evidence boxes. She suspects
another nameless sleuth has come to search for nonexistent clues, the same
ones she wants to find herself.
In the living room, Mulder's
Indian blanket lies on the floor in a heap, although she knows she folded
it the last time she was here. She picks it up and shakes it out. A
scattering of crumbs and sunflower shells fly loose, and she smiles at the
association, then frowns because she should have found them when she and
her mother were cleaning up. She pokes her hand behind the leather
cushions of his old couch and comes up with a half-full bag and puts them
on the table where the dust has recently been disturbed. She breathes
shallowly, testing the flavors of the air again for a hint of smoke or
perfume or any other disruption to the universe of decaying Mulder
smells.
The bedroom door is ajar. Ghosts live here, too, where Fate
brought them together against the power of their mutual denial. In the dim
light, she is herself one of the spirits. She settles on the edge of the
bed, but she can't sit on the naked mattress without shivering at the
memory of his hand running from her ankle up her thigh and around to
stroke her back until his fingers finally tangled in her hair. That first
night she'd walked into his room to take her leave with a gentle kiss. A
chaste kiss except she wet her lips without thinking and her breath warmed
his cheek in the instant before touching. And the scrape of his unshaven
jaw against her mouth felt dangerous as he turned his head toward her, so
she touched her tongue against the roughness, too lightly surely for him
to notice. Good night. He'd rubbed his finger along his jaw line. It's
time for me to go, she'd said. It's time, he answered, and he picked up
her hand and kissed the palm and wrist and his lips moved slowly up the
cool inside of her arm until his hair brushed her cheek and she pulled him
to her mouth. For seven years they had been coming and going in each
other's presence and it wasn't always clear which was which. She could ask
that now. Am I holding on or letting go? When were their partings not also
promises to return?
He'd made room in his closet for one of her
black suits and she bought him a set of new sheets.
She thought
she'd seen into his sorrows and understood the way that his own pain would
not stop him from the truth. His sister, the supposed illness, a tombstone
with his name and, she thinks bitterly, a predetermined end date. She
hadn't seen this. She hadn't seen him dying. She hadn't seen falsehood.
She hadn't understood the contagion of ghosts.
Days before he left
for Oregon, she'd awakened in this bed at 3 am to find him sitting up
against the pillows, a reading light trained on the diary. He'd kissed her
as if to apologize for the part of his soul that he could not tether to
her.
"Hey," she'd said.
"Hey, yourself. Didn't mean to wake
you."
"I thought you'd be out for the night.' Her finger stroked
the muscles of his chest and she almost lulled herself to sleep with the
pace of his breathing.
How was it that this man could possibly be
dangerous to her?
She opens the drawers of his night table, from
which he had produced a package of outdated condoms and a gasp of
frustration on their first night. There's a Nikon, face down, the door of
the film compartment held on with packing tape. She picks it loose to free
the roll of film inside.
She waits while the film is
developed at an all-night photoshop by a short man with a goatee and a
shaggy neck. It turns out to be half-shot, twelve pictures out of
twenty-four. One picture of a door numbered 312 and eleven shots of brains
in jars. The light is poor, the flash reflects off the glass, obscuring
some, but they are all the same, brains lined up along a shelf.
The Bureau's quiet at this hour. A few night-shift
technicians are down the hall in the coffee room, the buzz of their voices
now inaudible behind the closed laboratory door. The drinking glass, dusty
with fingerprint powder, sits on the table next to her. She'd expected any
one of a number of names to come up as a match. Krycek was a leading
candidate. Or Doggett looking for some undeniable proof of Mulder's
madness. Or even Skinner making a pilgrimage like hers. More likely an
unknown name or no match at all, an underground warrior from one of the
dark agencies. But not this. Mulder's id photo stares back from the
screen, mouth serious and eyes smiling with some contrarian thought as the
photographer snapped. She wets her lips and presses them together. Her
heart races and she clears the screen and asks the computer to run the
match a second time, just to be sure. While the "processing" sign flashes,
she quickly tallies the dubious possibilities: The fingerprints might date
from before he was taken, though otherwise the glass was clean. The
database itself might have been tampered with, subbing his records for
someone else. Or the prints might be a fabricated, like the ones Doggett
found where the women had been murdered. But it made no sense to set up
Mulder after his death, unless it was meant as a taunt. She leans back in
the chair to wait. The one thing they can't be is the one thing her heart
most desires. His face shows on the screen again and she allows herself
one quick touch before logging off. "Don't do this to me," she whispers.
She wraps up the glass and heads home.
Just one flash
on the answering machine, Doggett's voice as she anticipated.
"Hey,
I thought I might catch you before you went to bed. Bad news. There's no
sign of this Rosemary Morton. The woman in the cabin, Sheila, said she
hadn't seen her for several days. Her boss at the nursing home is upset
she left without notice. One of her co-workers reported that she'd gotten
into a car after work a couple days ago. The driver was a man they didn't
recognize, tall, dark hair, but no one got a good look at his face.
Generic car. Somebody said Taurus, somebody said Camry. No one caught the
plates. She seemed pleased to see him."
She hears road sounds in
the background.
"I hope we're not dealing with another body here."
There's a pause, a sound of a heavy truck changing gears. "Damned thing is
this guy must have been right on your tail, Scully."
She slouches
against the pillows in bed and props the journal against the baby. She's
tabbed the page with his writing and now turns one beyond. "Dear Mulder: I
thought I could watch over you, protecting your solitude, your need to
close even me out of those things that haunted you. I thought I was giving
you privacy to be yourself, but I also thought I knew that self. How did I
miss so much? Was it because I feared the words 'I need you'?"
She
leaves it open on the night table with a pen lying on the open
page.
Doggett turns off the radio, cutting short
the weather report. "Did he know before he disappeared? I mean about the
baby." He starts to gesture toward her stomach and abruptly rests his hand
on the gearshift. She turns the implications over in her mind before
answering.
"No. I had no idea myself. It wasn't a possibility."
"But if he had known…"
"It wouldn't have made any
difference to his abduction."
"But whatever he was looking for out
there…and the risks…"
Sunday traffic on the turnpike is light and
Doggett's driving five or ten miles over the limit. They've been on the
road for an hour, but haven't been able to sustain a topic of conversation
for more than thirty seconds. This one isn't going anywhere either. She
opens the glove compartment and pulls out a box of peppermints. She shakes
out two and passes one to him. The taste is sharp as her tongue presses it
against the roof of her mouth. Without the chatter coming from the radio,
the thump, thump, thump of tires rolling over the uneven seams in the road
fills the stale air inside the car. She leans against the headrest and
closes her eyes.
"Look, I know this is hard. I mean him not telling
you about his illness and all the time… I mean even if he didn't think
you'd get pregnant…"
The subject's off-limits and Doggett should
know it, so she continues her silence and hopes he'll get the message. A
low gray sky threatens cold rain or maybe sleet. The scenery on the
outskirts of Baltimore is mostly strip malls outfitted with giant plastic
wreaths and candy canes and bells, commercial cheer. Her own holiday
promises to be a somber affair at her mother's house with her brothers and
their wives tiptoeing around Mulder's death and the expected birth. She
rolls the window down a crack for fresh air, then reaches into her bag and
pulls out her notes from when she met with Rosemary. The increased speed
of the car presses her back into the seat while they pass a truck and
swing back into the center lane.
"Look at that." His voice
surprises her.
She raises her head.
"What?"
"That."
He points to the car ahead and speeds up slightly for a closer look. On
the back of a red Jeep Cherokee is a bumper sticker with Marine Corps seal
and the words: "When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed
overnight!"
"I can't believe he's in the Corps. Where do they get
that stuff?"
She thinks for a second that Mulder would have found
it funny, this mocking of authority. But then he wore other hearts on his
sleeve. "I wouldn't take it too personally," she says, turning back to her
notes.
"Well, I do. When did it become ok in this country to think
our mission is destruction? Everything's getting boiled down to this video
game view of the world. Blow it up, bigger, faster. You see your job that
way?"
"I'm a woman, Agent Doggett."
"Meaning what? Mulder
see himself that way?"
She shakes her head. "No. Of course not. I
didn't mean… it's only that those things are directed at males, mostly.
Bumper stickers, video games, violent movies."
"Yeah, well, as far
as I'm concerned, you never get used to it, things that are destroyed,
lives ruined." He pulls out into the left lane to pass and they both
glance across at a jowly woman with sunglasses and a leather jacket,
tapping an unheard tune on the steering wheel. "Yeah, women. Right," he
says.
"You never wanted to blow things up?" she asks.
"Not
since I learned what it meant. I believed the Corps was about stopping
destruction. So's this job. Stopping worse things from happening. Keeping
your own personal rage out of it."
She looks back at the file in
her lap, wondering where this is coming from, what's running through his
mind. All she says is, "I know."
"You never get used to the
pain."
She clips her pen to the papers in her lap, focussing on her
fingers, forcing them to move slowly, deliberately, without trembling. "A
man once told me that we bury the dead alive. We continue to seek meaning
for them… they… they haunt us." She'd told Mulder the same thing when he
met her at Melissa's grave, and now he has joined the other holes in her
life. It surprises her that her voice doesn't break.
Doggett is
silent and she wonders if he heard her or is lost in his own thoughts.
"Voltaire'll go him one better," he finally says. "'To the living we owe
respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.'"
She looks down at
her hands then out the window again. It's begun to mist and Doggett has
turned on the wipers. "Skinner told me about your son. I wanted to say I'm
sorry."
"Yeah." His hands are tight on the steering wheel, eleven
and one o'clock. "Thanks."
It's fifteen minutes before
either of them speaks again.
"What I was trying to say earlier was
that you're doing the right thing, dealing with this illness of his. I
mean, it would account for him getting involved with those people in
Oregon. I mean if he wasn't in his right mind."
"Actually, I still
don't believe the illness."
"The records are there,
Scully."
"You didn't know the man, Agent Doggett." She turns back
to her reading, but then relents. "It's not something he could have hidden
from me. The symptoms would have had physical manifestations:
disorientation, violence, disruption of language. He'd had… he had
problems - terrible problems - earlier in the year. It was like he was
tuned in to everyone's thoughts at once and the auditory overload caused
crushing physical pain. There was surgical intervention."
"You
ordered brain surgery?" Doggett glances at her quickly, eyebrows
raised.
"No. No, he… his mother was involved as next of kin. The
operation might have killed him, but she didn't know that." Smoky had
lured the poor woman with another of his impatient demands wrapped up to
look like salvation, then left Mulder to die. The memory of the hastily
sewn sutures across his scalp brings tightness to her throat. "In any
case, he couldn't have masked the symptoms if any remnant of the illness
persisted. And the way he behaved… It just doesn't fit."
"Still,
you admit that he was involved with some stuff without
you."
"Sometimes he'd start on a case without me." If she closes
her eyes she can imagine Mulder in the driver's seat taking them off to
chase one of the phantasms he offered her as small perfect gifts,
understanding better than she did how much she loved tangling with the
poetry in his mind. But then sometimes, too, he'd slip away to chase his
private ghosts, leaving the faintest trail for her to follow. "It wasn't
the first time."
"So you're saying somebody faked his records,
planted them in the file, had a tombstone engraved with his name, charged
it to his credit card, what else? And you think Dr. Johnson is the
nefarious mind behind this scheme." He scratches the back of his
neck.
"No, that's what I thought at first. Now I think Mulder did
it. I mean he set up the illness as a ruse."
"Why would he do
that?"
"It was a way for him to try to find out some things. His
brain anomalies, the residue of his illness, allowed him to convince the
doctors that he was still sick."
"So, if you say he wasn't ill,
what's the point of our trip?"
"To look at some brains. Brains that
he wanted me to see." The last words come out in a whisper. She presses
the knob to turn on the radio.
"I thought you said you
cleared this with the director." He jiggles the handle of the door to make
sure it won't lock them in.
"I don't believe I used those
words."
"But it's what you meant."
Scully'd waved some
papers and read out long strings of scientific terms to convince the guard
that she'd been granted access to the storerooms at the regional
neurological research facility. The man, short, thick, semi-shaven,
heavy-browed proof that the Neanderthals had never completely died out,
stood behind them as Scully dawdled over the specimens, checking each jar
against a long list of random numbers she'd generated from her computer.
The man kept tapping an unlit cigarette against the wall until he finally
twitched his shoulders and headed down the hall.
"Well, he's not
going to call anybody before he has his smoke. We get an extra five," says
Doggett as the door clicks into place.
Room 312 proved to be just
as in the photos. She's buoyed by the shelves of jars, the carefully
preserved specimens, pale grey in pale gold liquid, rippled, ridged,
lumpy, folded, looking like giant walnuts, nature's incredibly efficient
way of packing two miles of wiring into a compact space. Mulder wanted to
find some secret stored here and she would find it for him.
Doggett's nose wrinkles as he surveys the jars. "You going to tell
me what we're going to accomplish or you just bring me here to get a
reaction?"
"This seems to be the storage for research projects.
Most of these brains are from various mental facilities."
"This
doesn't creep you out?"
"Haven't you ever dissected a brain?" she
smiles at him quickly. "It's nothing to get queasy about. It's a
fascinating organ, extraordinarily complex and finely
tuned."
"Yeah, just go ahead and get this over with." His voice is
sarcastic, but he moves closer to the specimens and taps one jar with his
fingernail.
The brains are small, the size of a man's fist, and
her heart speeds up. She takes one off the shelf. "Can you lock the door
from inside?"
He does as he's told. "Hey, I mean we're not going
to…"
She pulls on a pair of latex gloves, then reaches into the jar
and lifts out the brain. It starts to separate into halves and she fumbles
slightly before setting on the metal table. She takes the tape measure
from her pocket and wraps it around the specimen, first side to side then
front to back.
Doggett pulls a pad of paper from his pocket and
notes what she dictates. "That seems small, doesn't it. You think they're
monkey brains or something?"
"No, they're human. You can tell by
the elaborate folding right in the front. Chimp brains aren't quite so
complex."
"Then they'd have to be..." He stops, his forehead
wrinkled and eyes troubled by what he's seeing. "How old were they
when…"
"Young," she answers, trying to keep her voice steady. "The
smallest ones are babies most likely. Newborns even." Twelve ounces on the
scale compared to the three-pounder of an adult. Her hand shakes as she
presses one spot then another. "Here, you should look at it. The brain
stem in back controls the basic automatic functions. It may be the only
part still functioning when someone persists in a vegetative state for
years, breathing continues, the heart beats, temperature is regulated,
pure mechanics. Then there's the prefrontal cortex where rational thought
occurs making us human, the occipital lobe back her for vision, down here
the temporal lobe for auditory input and some language processing…" The
pictures in the medical texts are bright with color in her
mind.
"Those women? The one you did the autopsy on. Are you
thinking what I'm thinking?"
She sighs and closes her eyes for a
moment. "It's possible. We'd have to test for DNA."
When she
glances at him again, his eyes are fixed on her stomach. She clears her
throat and continues. "See, someone has split the brain part way. Right
here, this is the corpus callosum, the part of the brain that allows
communication between the two hemispheres, right and left." She holds the
brain toward Doggett and he wrinkles his nose as he squints at the white
tissue her finger touches. Mulder would have wanted to touch it himself,
but she pushes the image of him aside. "And do you see how the tissue
appears frayed here, as though someone inserted something."
"Yeah.
So these were what, lobotomies? This isn't making sense to
me."
"The place where the probe ends is an area sometimes called
the God module because it seems to control superhuman powers that are
normally turned off in ordinary people."
"And they were trying to
turn them on? Clumsy way to go about it." He pulls back and she turns the
brain over in her hand. It's tiny but perfect. It should have seen the
blue sky and heard birdsong and felt its mother's love and imagined
magical creatures. She cradles it in her hands and slips it back into the
jar.
"Hey, I think the wrinkles are a little different on this
one." He pulls a jar off the shelf and sets it on the table in front of
her. She unscrews the lid and lifts the brain onto the table. It's about
the size of the other, but wider across the front with narrower, more
numerous folds and the gray cells have a blue-ish shimmer. Her finger
traces along the split between the hemispheres. Halfway back is a nodule,
an oval lump that sits between the two halves, as though it rose from the
inner brain. It's paler than the other issue. Her lips are dry, so she
wets them with her tongue.
"I think maybe this is what Mulder was
looking for. I think this is maybe what the experimenters were trying to
recreate. This area here, right between the hemispheres, growing right
where our God module is buried inside the brain. It's what would give them
their powers."
"Give who?"
"Them. The aliens. Or that's what
Mulder would say. It allows them to decipher the low-level
electro-magnetic signals emitted by the thinking brain."
"You mean
mind-reading?"
"I think they were trying to recreate this in
babies. Turn it on genetically, make it grow." She looks quickly around
the room trying to tally the number, dozens, maybe as many as a
hundred.
"So this mind-reading is what Mulder had? If it made him
so damn ill…"
"Yes, but if they were trying to engineer it, perfect
it. Like Gibson Praise."
"You can tell all that just by looking at
this thing?"
"Not for sure, we'd have to smuggle it out. Take it to
someone we could trust. But this brain too complex in the pre-frontal area
to be an animal. I don't know what else it could be."
"Well,
whatever. Wrap it to go while I look in here."
There's the sound of
a heavy latch opening and a wave of cold damp air swirls around her feet.
"Jesus." Doggett's opened the door to the walk-in cooler. "You gotta see
this."
"What is it?" She replaces the brain in the jar and wipes
her hands with a paper towel.
"Buckets. Lots of buckets. You got an
idea where you want to start?"
She comes around to the door to
where the wire shelves hold four or five dozen white pails with numbers
magic markered on the sides, like some techno-geek's lifetime supply of
ice cream. She points to one at random and Doggett carries it to the
table. He pries off the lid.
"Yeah, well. This Einstein or
somebody?"
The brain inside is large, adult. She lifts it and
gently tugs apart the folds of the wonderful object and for a second is
hit with a wave of nausea. What if this were Mulder's? What if they
emptied his head before returning him? But she hadn't seen a clean
incision in the midst of all the ragged cuts and bruises and scorchings.
It couldn't be him. It wasn't.
"Hey, you okay?"
"Yeah,
fine," she says but she knows her skin is pale and the chill of the
preserved brain has frozen her fingers. The skin under her nails is
turning blue and the she shivers inside her jacket. Turning the brain in
her hand, she checks the lower region, the part just above the palate, for
tell-tale damage. There's a small hole with burning along the edges, the
marks of a high-speed drill entering through the mouth. The sound of a
mechanical whine and a scream shuts out the hum of the refrigerator.
"Hey." Suddenly there's a hand under her elbow for support. "That
guard's going to come back in a minute. Can you hang on for a sec? I'll
get us out of here." His voice is low, sincere, and he's testing how much
she needs to lean. He takes the brain from her, gloveless, and slips it
back into the preservative then secures the lid and places it back on the
shelf.
"I didn't measure…"
"Well, we both saw it was big.
Do you need any more than that? C'mon. After he has that smoke, he's going
to find out we don't have permission after
all."
Someone unseen is following her through
the Bureau corridors, but she can only hear his footsteps. There are faces
in some of the office windows staring at her as she hurries by in a rush
for the elevator, the sound of her pursuer growing closer. She breaks into
a run and as she turns the corner she sees herself lying on the ground,
wearing a long black dress and lying in cold ashes and dust, hands
together across a flat abdomen, feet bare. The light is gray and comes
from nowhere. A quick pouf like an exhaled breath stirs the air and a few
stray ashes settle on her cheeks. At the sound of a closing door, her eyes
snap open, but she does not move. Mulder walks across the light toward
her. A shroud covers her body, a wisp of muslin that he pulls aside as he
kneels next to her. He lays his hands on her body, stroking her arms, her
legs, then kissing her on the forehead. Where he touches the blood pulses
under her white marble skin.
We have to escape, Scully. Her
stomach swells again with the child. She reaches up and runs her fingers
through his hair, palpating the scalp for wounds and scars.
How do I
know it's you? she asks. He smiles, steps backward and
disappears
She sits up, alone and in her own bed, her heavy
breathing the loudest sound in the room. She swings her legs to the floor
and stands shakily. A wave of nausea rises from her stomach and drives her
unsteadily into the bathroom. When she stands again to wash her mouth at
the sink she sees it: a ring on her fourth
finger.
She spots Skinner as soon as he walks
through the door. He pauses at the cashier's station and pulls the scarf
from around his neck as he surveys the room. He sees her, raises his chin
in acknowledgement and weaves past the tables and mismatched wooden
chairs. She's chosen to sit toward the back, away from the window and the
other customers seeking the mid-morning sun.
"Sorry I'm late. It
took me a while to find this place." He shrugs off his trench coat while
scanning the other customers. Force of habit, she thinks, just like her.
What sort of life must be navigated by unconscious habits of
fear?
"Nice place," he says.
He slides into the seat across
from her and follows her gaze to a waitress with pale skin and
henna-on-black hair, half pulled into a bun, half hanging in untidy
tendrils.
"Another tea, please." Scully pushes her cup to the edge
of the table.
"Just black coffee for me, please."
The woman
retreats toward the front of the shop stopping to scoop up some change
from a nearby table. Skinner brushes back his sparse hair with both hands.
He has his own panic face that she's learned to recognize since Mulder's
abduction, a quick shifting of the eyes and muscles straining a little too
hard against a twitchy smile. He exhales in a half whistle and she
remembers that that's part of it, too.
"You've heard, I suppose,
that Kersh has closed Agent Doggett's murder investigation," he says. "The
women."
"I haven't gone into the office today." She sweeps a
sprinkling of sugar off the edge of the table. "So he's closing down the
sham. On what grounds?"
"Officially, Kersh says he's got enough to
act against members of the so-called cult. In reality, he doesn't want
Doggett to stumble on the real killers. Finding Mulder's prints there has
raised too much curiosity."
Scully leans forward and starts in a
half-whisper. "What if it wasn't him?"
"Of course it wasn't,
Scully. The prints were a plant."
"No, I mean, what if… when we
found him in Montana… We've seen them before, sir, the ones who change
shape. What if they still have Mulder and that body was a
fake?"
Skinner seems to settle two inches as he lets out a heavy
breath and scrutinizes her face. Her eyes are hot and probably red, and
under his gaze she can feel the color rising in her cheeks.
"Dana,
you… you have to take a break. Get away."
"I'm serious. What if
he's still alive? What if he's trying to reach me."
Skinner fixes
his attention on one of the homemade quilts hanging on the wall. The
muscle in his jaw tenses into a knot.
"I had a dream last night,"
she continues. "I was dead and he came to me. He touched me. I was cold
and his hands were warm." She raises her own hands to the table and
spreads them. There's a square diamond in an old-fashioned gold setting on
her ring finger. "It's his mother's. I found it there when I woke
up."
He barely glances at it and seems repelled by the very sight.
He looks around the café again before leaning forward to speak in a low
tight voice. "If someone entered your apartment, you have to move out.
Today. I'll arrange a safe house."
"No, they couldn't have. The
inside locks were still set. The windows are secure. There are no vents of
any size. And the mutants we've seen," she tries to smile but knows it
isn't working, "never brought rings."
"Why do you think it's his
mother's?"
"He showed it to me when the undertaker gave it to him
at the funeral."
"It wasn't in his box of stuff?"
She shakes
her head and puts her hands back in her lap.
"Look, Dana, someone
must have grabbed the ring when they went through his place and now
they're using it to frighten you."
She chews her lip. "It's not the
first time. I've had other experiences." She raises her eyes toward the
approaching waitress. The woman pauses for a second, then slides the two
cups onto the table.
"Can I get you a muffin or anything, m'am?
I've got carrot, bran, sunshine…" The waitress glances at Skinner for
support, but the A.D. is stirring sweetener into his coffee.
Scully shakes her head and waits for the woman to leave before
withdrawing the diary from her bag. ""Here, this belonged to Samantha. It
was in that box." She flips through the pages. "After I autopsied that
woman, I started writing in it, and then, this appeared." She turns the
page. "And another time, here. It's his writing."
Skinner takes the
diary from her and flips from one page to the other. "Maybe he wrote in it
before his abduction."
"No."
"Well, then someone got hold
of the book when you weren't home."
"I've been keeping it with
me."
"So you're saying what? That the words magically
appeared."
"No, it's more complicated than that. The diary doesn't
stay where I put it."
"See. That's my point." He closes the book
and pushes it across the table. "Either someone's broken in or you've been
waking in the night and doing it yourself, then don't remember in the
morning. With the stress you're feeling…"
"No, I thought of that.
I'm sure that's not it."
"There must be some way into your place,
something we haven't thought of. A remote device of some sort. I'll get
someone to check it out. Now."
The men will come in and move her
furniture and touch her things and disturb the dust in the back corners as
they did just after the funeral. They'll smile at her with a cross between
sympathy and knowingness. She decides not to tell Skinner everything. Not
tell him about the fingerprinted glass or the sunflower seeds or the spot
on the table where someone had rested long legs.
"Dana, listen to
me. You examined the body."
"There was no autopsy."
"But you
ran tests. You didn't find anything to suggest it wasn't him. I wish I
could offer you some hope, but I can't. We buried him three months
ago."
"Before we found him, I had nightmares. He was being tortured
on some kind of rack and I saw the things they were doing to him." Her
eyes are starting to overflow and she wipes the back of her hand along her
cheek. "And when we found the body, the wounds corresponded to what I'd
dreamed."
"That's exactly it, Dana. These are dreams. You were
pulling up memories of things you've seen, other victims…"
"And
then, that night in the camp I saw him and he was fine and smiling. In my
new dreams he's fine."
"Where are you going with
this?"
"Mulder could explain it. Maybe he's held in some kind of
force field. Something that is physically extant, but we haven't learned
to describe it yet. We don't have the sensors. Our brain isn't structured
that way."
"Dana, listen to yourself. This isn't evidence. There's
no scientific basis for what you're saying."
"We know so little,
sir, of the deeper layers of existence. Other dimensions, parallel
universes, warped time, even quantum mechanics. Physicists are only
beginning to theorize how planes may intersect…"
"How many times
have you submitted reports, brilliantly reasoned, about dreams,
hallucinations, visions? Tricks of the mind. It happened to me. I know
how… how vivid it can be." His hand slips halfway across the table, but
she does not meet him.
"He's trying to reach me. I can't deny
it."
"Look. Someone may be trying to get to you, set you up. You're
emotionally vulnerable. All it might take is a hidden speaker in your
place. Ask yourself: who wants you to believe he's alive and
why?"
She shakes her head. "What if Jeremiah Smith had been able to
rescue Mulder after all? Mulder might have been trying to rescue the
murdered women and that's why his prints..."
"Have you told Agent
Doggett what you've told me?"
"No." She picks up the tea - now
lukewarm - in both hands and holds it to her lips. Skinner's face holds a
plea and the same aching guilt that she had seen so often in Mulder
himself.
"I swear, Dana, John and I will do everything in our power
to protect you and your child. Everything."
The
taxi drops her in front of Mulder's building and the driver offers to
carry her bag to the door. She shakes her head and tips him an extra five,
then turns her back on his grin to stand on the curb looking up at the
fourth floor. The trees are taller than the very first time she entered
his apartment, the time he went to Arecibo and her copy of his key still
had a dab of red nail polish for identification. It hadn't been his first
ditch, and she'd already learned how to find him, like a heat-seeking
missile. Learned how to read his private language of cause and effect. She
feels like a missile tonight.
His windows are dark. Others are lit
by a wavering blue glow or yellow incandescence or in one case a dim
flicker. She smiles at the thought of normal lives behind those curtains
and blinds, untroubled by the storm to come. The hallway will smell of
garlic and tomato, maybe fresh cookies for dessert, and muted sounds will
escape into the common space, Brahms or Beatles or Buffy or simple
laughter and a child crying. She hoists the strap of her overnight bag
onto her shoulder.
His apartment's quiet. She walks past the boxes
straight to the window, dropping her bag on the couch. The street lights
illuminate Hegel Place under the stripped November trees, but she can't
see the men who are surely tailing her, standing in the shadows or camped
out in their cars and it doesn't matter whether they are Skinner's or
Doggett's or Kersh's or Smoky's because they are allied now in their
determination to stop her. This is what had been fated from the beginning.
That Mulder should find his truth and she should be denied. That all her
science would not lead her to the end point, that only faith could make
the last leap. She hesitates a moment, wishing she'd brought a roll of
masking tape to put an X on the window for old time's sake, but she
doesn't need the help of dark men now. She lowers the blinds and twists
them shut.
In the bedroom, the new sheets are in his closet, white
by day but pale blue in the dim light filtering through the bedroom
window. The wind has picked up and there's a rattle and a draft of chill
air. She pulls the window down firmly and twists the latch. Her mother
taught her to make the bed in a diagonal fashion, so she fits the elastic
hem over the mattress corner next to the headboard on the right and walks
back and forth around the bed to finish at the left foot, lifting the
mattress slightly and pulling the sheet down with a firm tug. She shakes
out the top sheet and sends it sailing to settle back on the bed. She
smoothes the wrinkles, tucks in the foot, and makes square
corners.
Mulder had three pillows so he could sit up until dawn
with Mother Jones or baseball statistics or Ovid's Metamorphoses. And he
kept a fourth to tuck between his legs before he had her leg to hold in
warm embrace. She fetches four pillowcases, two that came with the sheets
and two old white linen cases with embroidered violets that he must have
taken from his mother's house.
Bed made and blanket retrieved from
the top shelf, she's glad that she hasn't abandoned the apartment, glad
for every cent she's paid to keep it his so he'll know that through the
worst, she hadn't lost hope in a miracle. Her baggy cotton nightshirt is
freshly laundered and she retrieves it and lays it across the bed, not
quite ready to undress.
Slipping off her shoes, she settles against
the pillows with Samantha's diary in her hand. She takes a flashlight from
her bag and tries to wedge it between her shoulder and her cheek, but it
tumbles to the floor. She tries holding it in her left hand while she
writes with her right. The book slips away and she thinks that Samantha
must have written lying on her stomach, stretched out, hair pulled back
with a rubber band, legs crossed at the ankles, ears alert to the stirring
of adults. Scully leans across the bed to turn on the lamp on his
side.
The words are the ones she's been rehearsing all day, but she
writes them slowly, relishing the feel of the pen tracking across the
page, surfacing things she's never said:
"There is so much we take
on faith about ourselves, each other, the world. The neurons firing in the
brain, the child in my womb, the forces that hold matter together, the
fixity of time. How dare we trust our feeble senses alone to tell us the
truth? What are we without our memory and our hope? I have never had the
courage to see what you see and to dream what you dream, but now I
understand that despair's only alternative is belief in miracles. To
create miracles out of my own faith."
She leaves it open on the
night table, turns off the light, and lies down to wait.
The bed
shifts and a breath warms her face. His hand slides down her arm until
their fingers intertwine. It's pitch black under a starless sky, like
night used to be before it lost its power. The rains have come and their
feet sink and slip in the mud. He's ahead of her and she feels his arm
rise as he steps up. His hand tugs her forward and she stumbles, but she
knows that if she loses her grip she will never find him again for they
have gone silent, the two of them, and all that remains is touch. She
thinks, all of a sudden, that she may be Samantha, but his arm comes
around her ample waist, his lips whisper "Scully" against her ear, and she
knows that destiny has brought them here.
Epilogue
Skinner opens the passenger side door and
slides in. "What's this about, Agent Doggett?"
"Thanks for coming,
sir. Probably nothing at all. But Scully missed work today, her cell's
off, and now she's gone up to his apartment with a bag."
"You've
been following her?"
"Only for the last week. Ever since she took
off looking for that woman in Indiana."
"That lady ever turn
up?"
"Not yet. Word is she got into a car with a guy answering
Mulder's description."
"You didn't tell Scully that, I
hope?"
"Yeah, I did. I was trying to help."
Skinner
whistles softly and leans forward to look out the windshield toward the
dark windows above. "I sent some men to check her place for bugs. Better
that she's sleeping someplace else."
"But here? I have a bad
feeling about this." Doggett opens the door. "You want to come
along?"
"She'll have your ass."
"So what else is
new?"
There's no answer to their knock, light at first and then
insistent, nor to her name. Doggett uses his key and flips the lights on
as soon as he walks in. Her name still brings no response, so Skinner taps
gently on the bedroom door before pushing it open. Light from the living
room reveals an empty bed.
"Apparently she was here."
"Gone
now," Doggett says, turning the bathroom light on then off.
"Maybe
she just went to the basement to do some laundry."
"Doubt
it."
They stand at the side of the bed looking at the slightly
rumpled sheets. Doggett takes out his phone and calls his men in the
street alerting them to watch for her. Skinner meanwhile picks up the open
journal and turns the pages forward then back. "This is a diary that used
to belong to Mulder's sister," he says, holding it up. "Scully showed it
to me this morning."
"There a note in it?"
He reads the
final entry. "No. At least not for us. It's in Mulder's handwriting."
"What?"
Skinner breathes in deeply and pauses as if he's
thought better of reading it aloud. The room they're standing in is plain,
ordinary, furnished with things that are serviceable rather than elegant.
Simple quarters for someone who was never contained by place. "It says,"
he begins, "' Memory is a code, a puzzle, and a refusal to be silent. But
what does it serve, this memory, without an animating spirit? We are what
we know and feel and become. We are what we give meaning to as we make our
way in an indifferent cosmos where, despite everything, we can take joy in
the earth and sky and endlessly repeated flood of morning
light.'"
End
Author's note: I hope you
enjoyed this little tale, my ending to TXF.
A special credit: "The
earth and sky and endlessly repeated flood of morning light" came from a
story by Annie Proulx that Mulder read shortly before his abduction. The
beauty of the phrase stuck with him.
zuffynuffy@yahoo.com
http://members.tripod.com/~Zuffy/index.html
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