TITLE: oyster

AUTHOR: jordan

E-MAIL: jordan9215@aol.com

CATEGORY: That's a good question. Skinner, Scully, and Mulder. All
rolled into one juicy delicious shell.

RATING: No one under 18, I hope

SPOILERS: THIS FIC IS REQUIEM FREE.

SUMMARY: Scully gets laid, but it's actually integral to the plot.

THANKS: for Barbara D, Ambress, Jean Robinson for their beta. Also
to jadedcat for her consistent "encouragement" (bzzzt!) and mlb for
loaning me a name. And especially to Tracy E, for being so kind.

FEEDBACK: Cash prizes drawn each Friday for best feedback. Offer
not valid where prostitution is a criminal offense.

ARCHIVE: Okay for Gossamer, Spookies, Xemplary, Ephemeral.
Anywhere else, please let me know first.

DISCLAIMER: These characters all belong to Chris Carter, Ten
Thirteen, and Fox. Period. 

STORY CAN BE FOUND AT:
http://www.geocities.com/sandyjordan.geo

***
Prologue and oyster 1

But four young oysters hurried up, 
All eager for the treat: 
Theircoats were brushed, their faces washed, 
Their shoes were clean and neat -- 
And this was odd, because, you know, 
They hadn't any feet.
----Lewis Carroll



On a slender curve of beach with silvery pink sand, under a
far-flung sky as blue as the lips of a corpse, Mulder and Scully
are discussing Great Literature while they eat raw oysters with
little squirts from lemon wedges, the juice glistening in the half
shells.

"Now, take Proust," Mulder is saying, and Scully barely lifts her
drooping eyelids to indicate she's listening; "I really got into
Swan Lake."

"You mean, Swann's Way?"

"Whatever. The one where he can't sleep for the first thousand
pages or so. I could relate to that."

Beneath the shade of a brightly colored umbrella, they murmur
profound things back and forth, voices interwoven with the
whispering sound ofthe surf. The tang of lemon scents the warm
salty air; the oysters slide down their throats like wet caresses.

A shadow flickers overhead. A bird with black tipped wings, but
when Mulder looks up, he glimpses a man in a black coat so long
that it trails the sand, a big wide-brimmed black hat fluttering a
little in the wind. Startled, he looks back for Scully, only to see
that everything has greyed out and is gone except for the umbrella,
which has begun to turn slowly on its side, and is now accelerating
like a mechanized pinwheel, spiraling inwards.

The dark man reaches towards Mulder. He lifts his arm from fifteen
feet away, and Mulder knows that somehow that arm will reach him,
and trail those long cold white fingers over his bare skin...

"Mulder." Scully is shaking his arm gently.

He blinks up at her from some distant place and she frowns a little
at the look in his eyes.

"Are you okay?"

He sits up, shakes off the dream. "Mm. What time is it?"

"Where were you?"

"I don't know. It was just a dream."

"No, I mean where did you go just a few minutes ago?"

He rubs his face, looks up at her for an explanation, and sees that
she's looking at him for one. "I fell asleep," he says. "Sorry."

She starts to speak, but decides to let it go. "Come on. We have to
meet Sgt. Davila."

When Mulder gets up, he notices a newspaper on the seat of the
green vinyl chair where he was dozing. He must not have seen it
when he sat down. But there's no time for that now. Scully is
brushing him down with brisk little pats and he takes the cue and
straightens his tie and walks after her down the long ugly corridor
of the hospital. The empty hallway has a strange hollow roar like
the inside of a seashell. Mulder sticks his finger in his ear and
wiggles it vigorously until the noise goes away.

They walk past rooms and rooms of numbered doors, and on the
blotchy linoleum at their feet, behind them, behind Mulder, faint
damp shoe prints evaporate unnoticed in the antiseptic air.

*** 

oyster 2

Scully is angry, though but for the high flush of color in her
cheeks no one would know it. A little extra brightness in her eyes,
a tightening of her already tight-together lips. Nothing
ostentatious or visible except to those well schooled in her body
language. Mulder, however, knows, and tries to catch her eye
severaltimes, but she will not allow him to become a part of the
problem as he so dearly loves to do; this is hers alone. A little
thing, really; the autopsy she has just performed on Benita D'Orci
has made her nauseated. She almost threw up during the standard
process of disassembling a former human being, even with cotton
balls laced with menthol stuffed up her nose to block the smell,
and she is angry at herself for succumbing to such unprofessional
feelings. Now her punishment is to not let herself run into the
bathroom and relieve the queasiness. Four Hail Marys and swallow
back the bile.

It's not like she hasn't seen something like this before--and
worse--on an X File, so there's no excuse for this reaction. The
woman had been cleaning rooms in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las
Vegas on Friday, had spoken to her supervisor, had helped another
maid change a bed in a room that wasn't hers. Then on Saturday
morning she had been found in a janitor's closet, her body in such
an advanced state of decay that she might have been dragged into a
dumpster and left for the flies and the rats days ago. They'd had
to tear out the carpet; the corpse had liquefied into the fibers
and the smell had permeated the walls of the rooms on either side
of the closet. Scully still tastes it with every exhalation; she
can breathe in through her mentholated nose, but each time she
breathes out, there it is, a mouthful of foul gas.

How could such decomposition occur in less than twenty four hours?
The heat? Some kind of rapid acting bacteria? Scully is at a loss,
and frustrated because she could find no obvious cause of death, no
broken bones, no fractured skull, no trace elements in the residue
indicating toxicity. Nothing to suggest why a strong healthy female
of fifty would drop down and rot away on the floor of a frequently
used closet of one of the most well maintained and luxurious hotels
in the world.

More suits than she'd ever seen even at an FBI convention had shown
up, big Vegas muscle suits, like tuxedoed Rottweilers, and they had
explained very carefully that this was not a matter for the CDC,
should she entertain THAT thought in her pretty little head.

It hadn't been worth arguing over, though; she is fairly certain
this is no necrotic bacteria. She didn't point out the obvious to
them, but if it was a rapid necrotic meltdown, then why had decay
stabilized when she was doing the autopsy? No, whatever happened to
that woman happened in the past, and has stopped happening, or at
least the decay is progressing now at a normal rate of
decomposition.

Most annoying of all, however, is the fact that however unrelated,
however far out there this death was, Mulder will find a way to tie
it to the case, and in some strange way he will end up being right.
Unprovably, undeniably, inexplicably right.

Scully would love, too, to swim with dolphins in the pink sea foam,
to lie naked in the grass and count the stars. But when the world
is a nervously bobbling balloon floating high and aimless overhead,
someone must stand on the ground and hold the string. Someone who
brushes her teeth every morning and wears pajamas every night and
does her homework and knows which side the knife goes on when
setting the table. Someone named Dana, who has never had a
nickname, never skipped a period, someone who can be trusted to
hold that string however hard it tugs and burns her fingers.

In the hotel lobby, Sgt. Davila smiles at her. He is a thin, waxy
skinned man with a big head that looks like it has expanded beyond
his hair's ability to keep up with it, and even the comb-over has
come up a bit short. He shakes Mulder's hand, and like most people,
addresses Mulder in the assumption that he is the one in charge
here. "So you weren't able to find anything in the autopsy?"

Mulder glances at Scully. She says, "The body was in a pretty
advanced state of decomposition, sir. I've ordered further tests,
but the tissue samples I examined showed no immediate evidence of
contagious disease."

"I know this wasn't part of your investigation, but I really
appreciate your having a look. I understand you've seen things like
this before."

Mulder and Scully exchange a look. She says, "Not like this, no."

"Well, thanks for checking it out. I owe you one for that. So how's
the case coming?"

"We're following some leads now," Mulder says. Scully looks at the
wall, not wanting to participate in the lie. She knows it's coming
and she steels herself for it, the windup, the pitch, the intake of
breath: Mulder says, "I can't believe this was a random event. It
has to have some connection to the disappearances we're
investigating."

"That, or a hell of a coincidence," Davila says cheerfully. "Hey,
keep in touch, will you? I'll let you know if the lab guys come up
with anything, and you let me know if you find out what happened to
the gamblers."

"Deal," Mulder says, and the men shake hands again.

Scully moves on, drifting towards the door as if carried by some
invisible tide that swells and moves her on when no other power
will do it. She ignores Mulder, though she feels the physical
warmth of his proximity, senses him displacing air as he is dragged
along in her wake by the same force.

Twice he stops at gaming tables and stares at the tumbling dice as
if pondering some dark Einsteinian secret, his brooding face making
the gamblers nervous.

Scully sighs and moves on. The string these days seems very taut,
and the world pulls very hard.

*** 

oyster 3

In the three days since they've been here, Mulder has often prowled
the streets of Vegas and has sometimes stood at the edge of the
city, eyes fixed on the empty reaches beyond, his handsome head
lifted, nostrils flaring, as if the very proximity of Roswell
floods the air with some secret exotic scent that makes him tremble
with longing.

Once, Scully suspects, she had been the object of that terrible
longing as well, when she was missing, when she was one of the
whips he could use to scourge himself with. I was lost, she muses,
but now I'm found, and the demystified Scully is too close to the
earth for Mulder to notice again. Too real, too THERE, for him to
bend his neck a fraction of an inch so that she might slide again
into his peripheral vision, and bloom like a cactus in the hot
light of his smile.

The terrible beauty Scully finds in Vegas is not in its lights or
in its undercurrent of huge sums of wealth shifting around like
serpents under the surface of the ocean, but in its sand. Scully
can feel the sand of Vegas everywhere, gritty underfoot, crunching
faintly between her teeth, in the dryness of her clothes rubbing
against her skin. In the gallons of water she drinks without ever
truly quenching her thirst. Sand. She feels as if she is standing
in the bottom of an enormous, loosely packed pit, sinking, with all
the weight of eternity pulling at the city as slowly, as
inexorably, as the deserts that have swallowed the dimly remembered
cities of antiquity. The desert is the boundary between man and
nothingness, between that which blooms for a moment, and that which
sinks for all time into dust.

I feel this, too, she thinks, looking at Mulder's elegant features,
his large lost eyes, that mouth that makes all people forgive him
all things. Why does suffering ennoble you, she wonders, and lift
you up above the human race, while it only fixes me to it like Ahab
to the whale, inescapably bound to a shared doom? For Mulder is
larger now than when she first met him, his wings unfolding, his
self expanding, the very anguish in his soul demanding new ground,
a bigger room to contain it. Yet this same suffering, and more, has
pinched her mouth and kinked the corners of her spirit like a
wrapped taffy; it has made her shrink inside her clothes and dimmed
the light that once blazed so brightly in med school, and now she
sometimes feels she has to cling to Mulder to find her way through
the twilight of her own life.

When did all this happen? How did she not notice it, or at least
acknowledge it, until now?

*** 

oyster 4

In the makeshift boardroom, converted from a hotel meeting room,
all is in readiness. The long wooden table gleams with fresh wax,
and the maroon plush chairs sit waiting to be filled. Files lie
spaced at intervals like placemats, full of self importance,
prepared for scrutiny.

At the head of the table Skinner leans his weight forward onto his
long muscled arms, braced by the palms of his hands laid flat on
the mahogany surface. Mulder sits to his right, and Scully is on
the other side, fiddling with the top button of her blouse, which
for some reason keepscoming undone, exposing her skin to the
blazing sun whenever she leaves the building. This morning she had
a hundred freckles; now she has athousand. It's very annoying. She
should be thinking of other things. This meeting, for instance.
What to say to the police, the investigators looking for the people
who came here to gamble and won and then vanished. Even discounting
those who have simply used the money to absent themselves from
unhappy lives, there are now sixteen people gone, and the last
couple had been young, rich, and politically connected enough to
thicken this soup into a stew. Enough to bring the boss man down
himself. On the phone he'd asked so simply, so politely, "Do you
think it's an X-file, Scully?" and she had said, "Yes, sir, I
believe it is," and he'd flown down to appease the higher powers.
He believes in her the way she believes in Mulder. Now she wonders
why he never looks at her. It's something she's just noticed.
Skinner never looks at her unless they are directly addressing each
other. Has this always been the case, she wonders, or is this
something new?

She looks at his hand nearest her on the table, the big widespread
fingers, the flattened palm, leading up to the thick wrist where
the veins twist with snakelike power. Her father once showed her
how to feel the bones in a dog's front legs to tell if it was of
good solid stock. The breeding is in the bones, he'd said. Nothing
fragile or frail here; Skinner is definitely a purebred. The wrist
curves and swells upwards into his forearm, hairs all lying in the
same direction as if intimidated by his sheer self discipline, and
at the crook of his elbow his brown skin disappears into the crisp
folds of his rolled back shirt sleeve, where Scully's gaze breaks
off with something like regret.

Fascinated, Scully looks back at his hand. The short clipped nails,
the nervous energy inherent just under the skin, the muscle, the
bone. Something essentially Skinner she can stare at unashamed. He
had been shot once, and as she had run alongside his gurney into
surgery he had held her hand tight and she'd squeezed for
reassurance, hard, as if shouting to someone almost unconscious, as
if the loudness of her touch could reach him. Those fingers had
engulfed hers, and she'd felt the terrible strength there muted,
even in blind pain, so that he wouldn't crush her small bones in
his grasp. Men can't pretend that kind of gentleness; it's either
there or it isn't. There in his eyes, too, when he looks from
someone else to her. A softening, a respect.

Mulder is trying to catch her eye. She looks at him wearily. What
is it now, Mulder? But the men are coming in, and Mulder's
attention, so easily stolen, shifts to their faces, which he
studies in turn, in that disconcerting way that is one of the
things she has always liked best about him.

The meeting begins, papers shuffle, voices take quiet turns to
express their frustration and dismay. Scully takes notes.


******

In Vegas the wind is always hot, and smells of great spaces, of the
desert, of earth, of hills painted red by the sunset, of the
lizards and spiders and snakes just beginning to crawl out into the
open as the planet cools beneath their claws and fangs.

Night gathers around a house. A big room, a leather sofa, some
green corduroy chairs, deep carpet, gleaming paneled walls. Low
light from a single corner lamp, the rest of the room in shadows.
Several people, young men, teenaged boys, are in the room, watching
a video, some drinking beer, some drinking cokes, all laughing
occasionally at something they see on the screen. Some sit on the
floor, leaning back against the sofas. The sound is good, from
expensive wall speakers. The dark is sealed outside. There's a
smell of popcorn hanging in the room, strong as in a theater lobby.

The bodies of the boys are slim, hard, knees and elbows knobby with
future growth; they laugh with white teeth flashing. Their parents
are well monied, and outside, their yards bloom green by pools of
turquoise water that laps softly in the darkness. They are healthy
boys, young princes, all of them, sons of America. They know they
have inherited the universe, and they lie in wait for it, afraid of
nothing.

But if they knew I was here, watching Scully, watching Mulder,
watching the big bald man glaring down at the shining table as
other agents begin to filter into the room (because he is trying
not to glance over at the fingers of the redheaded woman when they
toy so deliciously at her blouse), oh, if they knew I was watching
them with their young faces awash in color and light from the
television screen, then they would be afraid. They would be very,
very afraid. And then it would not be so easy to pry their souls
out of the shells of their hard young bodies, not so easy to search
for pearls among these little oysters if they were too afraid to
sleep.

I hum my lullaby, soft, soft, soft, and the Bose speakers drown it
out, and the gruff voice of the bald man at the meeting drowns it
out, and the strange high pitched music inside the redheaded woman
drowns it out. But Mulder, sitting there looking at the speaking
man almost as if he is really listening, begins to tap his pencil
eraser on the table in the exact cadence of my melody. His head
nods, almost imperceptibly, to my song. Mulder hears. Mulder knows.

And finally, Mulder yawns.

*** 

oyster 5

Scully.  SCULLY!

A noise in the dark, and Scully is on her feet, stumbling across
the carpet to the door. Still half asleep, she responds to the cry
like a mother to her child, that familiar call reaching straight to
a place that doesn't think, just feels the irresistible pull of
need.

She pulls open the door between their rooms. Mulder isn't there,
though she hears the echoes of him groaning in his nightmare, a
strangely hollow, distant sound. She glances at the bed, the sheets
flat and empty, and she rubs her hand up and down the wall in
search of a light switch.

The light comes on, goes off, flickers like a strobe. And Scully's
gaze, searching the room, returns to the bed, where Mulder is
thrashing around, wrestling with the blanket.

The light stays on, calm, sane. Scully hurries to the bed and
shakes Mulder's arm until his eyes pop open wide and he sits up,
mouth open,  gasping, and dragging at the tail of the gasp is a
moan of pure fear.

"Jesus," he breathes, like he really means it. "Jesus Christ."

He gives her a look. That look. What can she do? She slides her
arms under his and holds him, and he bends his head to her
shoulder, his hot face against her ear, his hands flat on her back
but gripping just the same. She can feel the trembling of his skin,
the thumping of his heart, and compassion swells above all else as
she holds him tighter, rocking him a little, making nonsense sounds
of comfort.

"Scully." His husky voice is like a silk scarf pulled across her
breasts, and she gives a little shiver and draws back. Aware of it
and amused, or unaware of it and bumbling, Mulder has never openly
acknowledged his ability to physically arouse her, and for that
Scully has always been grateful.

She raises her eyes to the level of his Adam's apple, and he looks
down at her for a moment, his hands holding her arms. Then of
mutual consent she pulls back and kneels by the bed and he leans
back against the headboard, one last deep sigh replenishing his
oxygen supply to normal. He strokes the hairs on his naked chest
with his fingertips as if searching for a heartbeat.

"Bad dream?"

Mulder rolls his eyes to stare at the ceiling. "Scully, to say my
dreams have been bad lately is like saying Hitler bore the Jews a
mild but persistent grudge."

Her lips quirk and she gets up and goes into the bathroom and runs
the water in the sink to fill the small hotel glass. When she
returns he seems calmer, but he is still unusually pale. She gives
him the water and sits in the armchair by the writing table and
looks at him while he drinks, the water pulsing the strong column
of his throat until he has drained the glass.

"Want to talk about it?"

"I can't remember much about it," he says. He looks at her with his
hazel eyes sincere and boyish. "You were there, though. And your
little dog Queequeg. And there was a big tornado..."

She sighs and starts to get up, but he moves his hand and says,
"Wait. No, seriously. I do remember some of it. There was a kid. A
blond boy." He twirls his finger over the top of his head in some
semaphore signal she assumes she's supposed to understand. "And a
man in a big black hat. And a woman."

"Ah."

His eyes this time are Mulder's, and not those of one of his masks.
"Scully, there's something about these dreams I've been having.
They aren't like any other dreams I've ever had. And I've had some
DREAMS."

She settles back into the chair, drawing her knees up, watching his
face.

Mulder begins to speak, and in a few seconds the sound of his
voice, monotoned but somehow hypnotic, fills the room with the
smoky atmosphereof dreams remembered and stories told in the middle
of the night by a campfire.

She really should listen closely to what he has to say.

*** 

oyster 6

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, not with a
whimper, but with the groaning rush of the universe as it is sucked
into the vacuum behind the boy who from one second to the next is
turning in his sleep, then rolling out of bed, then pitching
forward into the bottomless beyond. It snaps shut instantly,
cutting off in mid gasp the lungsful of air he would have needed to
scream. And that is all there ever was, or ever will be.

********

"A dream is the place where words dissolve into symbols," Mulder
begins, "Where everything has its true meaning, spoken in some
forgotten language in a way we can't easily translate back later
when we're awake."

Prologue over, Scully thinks. Get on with why you woke me up in the
middle of the night, guaranteeing that tomorrow while your face
will look romantic and  haunted from lack of sleep, mine will only
show the haggard lines of wear.

It's a small mean thought, and of course she is instantly ashamed.
She concentrates harder on following his words despite her
sleepiness, which makes her even more irritable. A good punishment;
she is satisfied that she deserves it. Her resolve strengthens.
This cycle of shame and self castigation is well established; she's
aware of this but never thinks to question it. Scully is so tight
you cannot slip a finger in her from any direction.

And he is so damned handsome, one leg bent with the knee up, the
blanket lying across his thighs, his half erection a suggestive
bulge in his boxer shorts. A lock of brown hair falls across his
pale forehead. There is forever the impulse in her to smooth back
that spikey hair; she has done it under a hundred guises, and
sometimes he leans into her cool fingers, but more often he pulls
away like a sullen five year old.

"But this isn't really like that," he says, to some audience beyond
the fourth wall, his words not so much communication as a kind of
sleeptalking, as if he is forgetting Scully as he speaks,
outdistancing her somehow. "This is like...I can't say exactly what
it's like because it isn't like a dream at all.  I mean, it is,
because it's all in some kind of symbolic language, but it isn't,
because some of the symbols are so strange they can't be...can't be
symbols at all..."

Resolve be damned, Scully is dozing. His soft voice is doing it,
the rumble of words deep in his chest like the purr of a lion.

Mulder's head lolls drunkenly to look at her as he struggles to
stay awake, to keep talking. She has her elbow on the nightstand,
her cheek in her palm, the whole weight of her upper body leaning
on that elbow. Her lashes flutter a little and Mulder imagines he
can feel the tickle...

He goes on talking...she hears him...flickering in and out a bit,
but still, each of them is still there for the other...always.
Always.

Mulder wants to tell her but he's not sure of the language he needs
for this. The words are falling away, somehow, becoming smaller and
smaller. He has seen the architecture of insects in his dreams,
giant red mounds like termites might build, but the termites
themselves are like something he has never seen before, and has no
word for, and he knows that nothing like these things have ever
been seen by anyone and may have no names at all.

A quart mason jar, with a screw-on lid, and inside, something
buzzing  furiously with a tiny glowing rage so intense that the
outer glass of the jar is hot to the touch.

He kneels to look at the jar, which is set on the hard polished
ground of some alien landscape, the way he imagines the Salt Flats
would look close up. Somehow, he understands...the intensity of the
rage is like a collapsed star, weight beyond measure fallen in upon
itself...and so powerful that if somehow the rage could be
translated into physical mass, a grain of it would fall right
through the earth and out the other side.

The man in the black hat rises in  a dark shimmer of heat on the
horizon, in waves that blur the highway, taking shape and form. He
holds out that long arm, those long fingers. Mulder shrinks back.
The thing in the jar buzzes and burns.

And then...Mulder is looking at Scully in her chair, and it's like
looking at something not Scully, but at the same time,
quintessentially Scully. As if Scully could be reduced to a single
sentence, something short and poignant about a woman in blue
pajamas with the top button half undone, her skin pale as
milkglass, stained faintly pink just at the cheekbones, her lips
pursed a little as they must purse naturally when she sleeps,
pulled together that way by a drawstring he has created;  he can
SEE the imprint of himself in her face, every line he has etched
there, indelibly written with his name...

And for one explosive second Mulder understands something, and is
filled with the greatest wave of remorse and loss he has ever
known.

Then the dark man touches him and all the world of Scully flips and
flutters away like a balloon suddenly released, and the only thing
Mulder knows after that is the sound of the centuries swarming over
him and the groaning rush of time falling apart.

*** 

oyster 7

As she comes awake, Scully has a series of loosely connected
thoughts, linear, but too far apart to join into a single concept,
shadows of ideas, like light filtering through frosted glass.  The
thought comes as if asked of her in a classroom: what if time had
weight? That would mean it could be stretched and pulled out of
shape, which would offer scary potential for distortions, but it
would also mean that it could be proven to exist, that it isn't a
human construct. Not like consciousness. How can consciousness ever
be proven to exist, she wonders drowsily, if it has no weight?

Numbers flash and jitter in space as if on an old movie reel,
formulae she can't translate, physics that make perfect dream sense
but display increasingly elusive meanings as she nears the surface
of what she knows as reality. Then she's almost awake, and her
scientist's mind rebounds: well, time has no weight so the rest of
the argument is invalid. If it had weight...then it wouldn't always
be now. Or is "now" the human construct?

And now she is awake, and blinking, sitting erect in her chair,
heart  pounding, as she sees the sheets, the blanket, floating down
onto the bed. Or thinks she sees them move, but maybe not, maybe
they *were* moving but are not moving *now*...

"Mulder?" Her voice is husky; her mouth aches with dryness. She
swallows, licks her lips, swallows again; her throat is a hot
tunnel of sand. She sees the glass of water on the nightstand,
picks it up and drinks, first a swallow, a pause, and then she
drains it, gulping greedily. There is something disturbing about
the cool cylinder of glass in her fingers. Didn't Mulder drink from
this glass last night?  Didn't he drink it all? Maybe he refilled
it. But it tastes dusty, warmish. Something about this water tells
her something bad. It's visceral, no logic to it. She has to steel
herself against it, but her heartbeat, still pounding from whatever
disturbed her in the dream, doesn't seem to be slowing down. She
should understand, but something in her rebels against
understanding. A little louder: "Mulder?"

*******

Skinner is dreaming. He rolls over on his back and mumbles. Base
camp, everyone sleeping on the scratchy blankets. A sound wakes
them and they spring alive, every dead man on his feet. There is
gunfire. No, just a milk truck rattling over a railroad track. No,
just someone putting a glass full of water down on a table.

The sound comes again, tap tap tap tap, and this time it resolves
itself into a knock at the door.

Skinner opens his eyes. Hotel room. Las Vegas. Smell of fresh
laundry and sense of being surrounded by great empty spaces.

He throws the bedclothes back and swings his long legs over the
side of mattress, his feet meeting an unfamiliar carpet instead of
the bare floor of his own bedroom. He recognizes the urgency in the
quickness of the knocking, tap tap tap tap: that's Scully's anxious
little fist.

He takes his underwear from the chair by the bed and pulls it on
hurriedly; he has a massive morning erection and his head is still
full of cobwebs. There's an ache in his bad knee that wasn't there
yesterday. Stepping into his pants, he calls, "Just a minute."

"Sir, it's me, Scully."

The tension in her voice is all the more reason to assemble the
mantle of authority, to get his socks and shoes on, drag his tee
shirt over his head, find his glasses. A moment later he opens the
door and she strides into the room without being asked, an
unScullylike act that bodes no good news to come.

"Sir," she turns and looks up into his face, making his heartbeat
pause in an interesting way, her eyes dark with anxiety, faint blue
half moons under them as if she hasn't slept. "It's Mulder. He's
gone."

"Gone where?"

"Gone missing, as far as I can tell." Her voice is impatient, but
not with him; she's frightened because of the danger to her self
control, and he looks for a way to calm her down without
patronizing her. Her lips are parted; she's breathing through her
mouth. Her hair is falling forward, half across her eyes. She's
wearing a white shirt with small pearl buttons and black trousers,
and the bottom button of the shirt is undone.

Skinner starts to ask her to sit down, then suddenly what she is
telling him sinks in, and he snaps back into full administrative
mode. "Mulder is gone?" he asks. "You mean, gone, like the others?"

"I don't know," she says, but the way she says it means yes, just
like the others. "He was in his room last night and when I woke up
he was just not there. I've checked everywhere I could think of,
but he wouldn't have just disappeared without saying anything.
Without taking his clothes."

Skinner builds images based on her words, then the images collapse,
and he tries to rebuild them again, but he can't get past the fact
that she and Mulder were sleeping in the same room. Maybe he
misunderstood her. No, she knew he didn't take his clothes. He
pictures a naked Mulder, a vaguely flesh colored image, in bed
beside a far more detailed naked Scully.

He clears his throat, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips under
his glasses, and says, "Sit down, Agent Scully."

She ignores the order, and gazes up at him with an expression of
mute desperation. He's seen that look before a time or two. It's
the same look that has led him down dark alleys and into fist
fights and beyond boundaries he never dreamed he'd cross in this
lifetime.

When she was sick, when she lay so tiny, so diminished, so close to
death in that big cold hospital bed,  she never once looked at him
that way. Nor at anyone else, he suspects. This soul-rending,
beseeching look has always been on behalf of her partner. *Please
help me by helping Mulder.* She could have an arrow through her own
heart and those lips would clamp together against the pain, and her
eyes would go stubborn and brave, and she would never in a million
years ask him to pull it out of her. But for Mulder she would go
down on her knees and beg him to remove a splinter.

Skinner allows himself the brief intensity of pleasure and pain of
looking down at her. The truths he believes in, country, justice,
order, authority and obedience, melt away in the fire of the
greater truth that he sees in that look in Scully's eyes.

"All right," he says in a calming voice, "It's all right, Scully.
We'll find him."

And it doesn't matter if the promise he makes can be kept or not;
just the fact that he gives it now it is all either of them need.


*** 

oyster 8

<one leg in one leg out>

<Why are you so unhappy?  Why can't you understand?  When the
reddarkness comes you shrink and swell and push elastic against the
walls that are not there. You make them with your pushing. None of
the others understand but you're different. The others make
monsters, not what I wanted. But not you. You make walls. And keep
yourself unhappy pushing them. One leg in, one leg out, Mulder.>

<Sleep.  Sleep and I'll give you a dream.>

<Upside down inside out like a glove of skin peeling off a hand,
inside out, the reddarkbackwards. Look, Mulder. I want to show you
something.>

Mulder stands against a fierce blue sky, swaying a little in the
wind, a few miles from Las Vegas, Nevada. He is on a rock
outcropping and he can see the blurry outline of Vegas through the
smoking heat of the desert. The sun blazes on his skin, and a
little steam curls up where he is still damp.

A lizard pauses on a round stone a few yards away, one front leg
and the opposite back leg raised, and it rocks a little from side
to side. Mulder tries, tries, one leg in, one leg out, but all he
can think of when he looks at the lizard is parallax vision. The
lizard can only see things when they move. So it has to move
itself, swaying like Mulder, in order to see.

Mulder looks down at his hands as if amazed to see them there. He
stares at the city, his mouth open a little, giving away nothing in
his expression. He looks like someone who has been struck hard in
the head and can't decide whether or not to fall down.

Then very slowly, as the wind dies to perfect stillness, something
comes into his eyes, something that makes him turn slowly and look
behind him, and he sees the long curving pink beach, shaped like
the perfect arch of Scully's breast, and a fake looking seagull
hovering over the water, which seems painted, except that it's
moving, whitecaps bobbing in the infinite distance. Mulder's face
changes then; is he going to cry?

The man in the black hat hovers there too, about thirty yards away,
sunglasses glittering, his coat trailing the ground but his feet
inches above it.

Mulder whirls in a rush that leaves a whooshing sound in the still
air as he thrusts himself into time, into reality. He leaps down
the rocks, running in big moon jumps across the hard ground towards
Vegas. He glances down at himself, his naked body ghostly, but
real, REAL. The sand begins to burn his bare feet, and he welcomes
the blisters.  The wind of his motion whistles and slaps against
his skin as he displaces the air, forcing his molecules through it
in a swirl of fire.

He can feel the pull of gravity now in his aching calves, and the
rebound and drag make his stride more and more normal.  The
dimensional shift is coming into a sharper focus, colors growing
more intense. And far away on the twisting road he can see a car,
and in that car, faces. Faces pressed against the window of the
back seat, staring at him.  A little boy and his sister are there,
and the little boy sees him. Points. Mouth moving excitedly.

Mulder weeps as he runs, as the world begins to claim back every
year of his history, and he sees the faces of the adults in the
front seat turn to look towards him, bobbing as blindly as the
lizard's head. To them he looks like something shimmering over the
sand, not quite touching it, a heat wave, maybe, that suddenly
flashes out, insubstantial as the blinding flash of sun on the
mirrored chrome of the car.

The little boy shouts at his parents and jumps up and down in his
seat. They ignore him first, then say placating things, and finally
shout. No, there is nothing there.  How many times has he told them
to look at this, look at that, mommymommymommy look! and it's
nothing? And this one, just like all the others they have denied,
will undo itself as soon as he accepts the untruth of it. Soon he
will never see any of the untrue things again.

To his credit, Mulder almost understands this. But not quite.

You might think this dream would have made him feel better, but
you'd be surprised.

*** 

oyster 9


<one leg in one leg out>

Scully wakes from a strange dream where she is trying to put on a
pair of slacks, but she can't remember exactly how they go. She is
hopping around on one foot while she tries to fit the other leg
into some kind of odd shaped opening.

She raises her head, blinking. She's left the bedside lamp on and
the room seems full of looming shadows. The pillow is damp. Maybe
she was crying a little before she fell asleep. She wants to cry.
It is a sick heavy misery in her all the time. She wants to vomit
the feeling out but the stronger urge is to do something, take some
action that will make the situation better.

She will not let Mulder go. She will not face the feeling in her,
sharp and jagged as a hangnail that catches each time she thinks of
him. No, they'll find him. They just haven't looked in the right
place yet. But the truer part of her knows, and feels his absence
in her bones, knows that Mulder has gone out of the world, has been
subtracted from the air she breathes and the spaces she moves in.

Last night she came here to his room, ostensibly to inventory his
belongings to make absolutely sure that wherever he was (though she
knew even then he was not wherever, that wherever would have been a
relief) he had not taken any personal belongings. The more she went
through his things, his wallet, his toiletries, the more the
heaviness inside her had grown, until she sat on the bed with his
balled up socks and extra pair of jeans and two Oxford shirts and
her stomach convulsed, her ribs seemed squeezed together, in the
awful need to cry. But she wouldn't do it. Not enough tears in this
dehydrated land to spare, and besides, she wouldn't give Fate that
satisfaction. She fell asleep on his bed, exhausted with the effort
of trying not to think.

Now she feels so dry; her tongue is cotton, her eyes burn. She goes
into Mulder's bathroom and takes off her clothes and gets into the
shower. For a long time she stands under the pouring water, knowing
scientifically that the heat and external moisture will only
dehydrate her worse, but it seems like the only place she has been
since this disastrous journey where she has been able to breathe
without taking some kind of powdered glass into her lungs.

No tears come. The shower is a safe enough place to cry, the
running water, the mask of steam, the noise to drown out any
girlish wails of woe. But it doesn't happen. Each time she swallows
she feels the giant ball of pain inside her and tells it, "We'll
find him. It'll be all right."

She gets out of the shower only when she notices the skin on her
fingertips is shriveling. Naked, she realizes she'll have to get
back into the same stale clothes she wore when she came to the
room, and she hates that, hates especially putting on the same pair
of underwear twice without washing them. She steps onto the rug and
pulls the inadequate towel from the rack and rubs lifelessly at her
wet flesh, and then she sees one of Mulder's shirts, a white one,
hanging on the back of the door, not like the others, but still on
the hanger. The shirt Mulder was going to wear the next time he put
on a shirt. A thing that represents not Mulder's past, but his
future. She takes it down and puts it on, surprised at how big it
is, the tail coming almost to her knees. She comes out of the
bathroom in a breath of steam and bright light, and goes back to
the bed to sit on the edge and button the shirt.

Almost done, she pauses, and considers the overlong sleeves, and
then  suddenly lifts her arms and wraps them around herself,
hugging her body with the shirt like a floppy straitjacket, and
that's the click, the key, the nudge over the edge, that breaks her
down and enables her to cry.

Damn you, Mulder! Damn you!

Without taking her arms from around herself, she rolls back onto
the bed and lets her head fall to the pillow, and curled in a ball
Scully cries herself to sleep.

And she is sleeping like this on the blanket, nestled inside the
feeble comfort of Mulder's big white shirt, and wearing nothing
else at all, when the next morning Skinner uses his card to let
himself into the room.

*** 

oyster 10

Parallax:  the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent
direction of an object as seen from two different points

******

They ride together in silence, lumped together as passengers on an
unhappy journey, uncomfortable for separate reasons.

It would be easier if Skinner had not walked in on her like that
this morning. Better for him if he could just expunge the picture
of her lying on the hotel bed on top of the tousled sheets with her
bronze hair over her face, wearing that oversized white shirt, her
legs stretched out in gold curves; FAR better if he could not
recall in perfect irreverent detail every bone of her ankles, the
small scar on her left kneecap, the way her head lifted and her
heavy eyelids rose, how she sat up all together like someone
lifting a puppet by all its strings, and then looked at him,
neither of them speaking because she was trying to get her bearings
and he was trying not to lose his.

Now what can he do to "unsee" that? Perhaps if he stuck both thumbs
in his eyes and gouged them out...no, the pain might be
distracting, but the vision has been burned too deeply into his
brain...

********

A tiny car dribbles along a dental floss highway, a tear sliding
down the face of the vast world. The mouth of night yawns wide and
swallows it whole. Inside, the passengers are crushed into an
almost unbearable intimacy, windows up to accommodate the air
conditioning, doors locked, radio off, brains buzzing,

buzzing, buzzing,

the sticky darkness squeezing against them like the hot embrace of
a child.

Skinner is driving the car. It's the same as his personal vehicle,
a late model Crown Victoria, so he doesn't have to worry much about
familiarizing himself with new controls. His face is a study in
shadows, with all the expressiveness of a cat. Scully sits beside
him, a glowing green outline in the reflection of the dashboard
lights, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

The thing is-- He snaps at the thought like a dog at a fly. The
thing is

Snap!

"After we talk to the Van Dykes, let's call it a night," he says,
speaking in a normal voice that's not quite loud enough to drown
out his thoughts. "You must be tired."

She turns to him briefly; he doesn't have to look around to feel
it; it's like someone running a flashlight beam over the side of
his face. "I'm okay," she says. "I'm just sort of numb."

THE THING IS

if she'd drawn the sheet up over herself, if her eyes had gone soft
and startled, if her cheeks had flushed pink and she'd turned away,
then he'd have ducked his head and lowered his eyes and backed out
of the room, muttering, Sorry, sorry

--Instead of swinging her legs over the side of the bed and getting
up in the same motion, moving towards him with anxious eyes ruined
by crying, blazing blue green in the sunshine from the open door
behind him, her face a choir of light, her mouth swollen, moving
towards him and saying, "Have you heard anything?"

No. He hadn't heard anything. The sky might have fallen in the past
hour and he wouldn't have heard the shatter of breaking clouds
because he had been too busy calling her room over and over,
finally using his master key to get in, almost shaking English out
of the maid when he found out her bed hadn't been made up because
it hadn't been slept in, no, the maid hadn't seen her, no, the
cashier at the only place open for breakfast hadn't seen her, no,
the concierge hadn't seen her leaving the hotel--

Finally some Scully-homing device clicked on and he went to
Mulder's room and there she was, lost in the big white shirt, her
cross gleaming faintly at her throat, one button too many loose
there, the hem of the shirt pulling up when she took a step
forward, showing more employee thigh than any good employer ought
to witness.

He didn't hug her in his overwhelming relief to see her. He didn't
back out of the room, embarrassed. He stood like a rock and let the
wave of her break against him, felt his heart sway a little before
settling down, and said, "You'd better get dressed. Our first
meeting is in twenty minutes."

If he had never had a single sexual thought about her--and proudly,
he could admit to having that whole situation under control--then
how could the rest of the day not be filled with that image of her
waking up almost naked in Mulder's bed, looking up at him with all
that light in her face and in her eyes as she walked across the
room?

Not surprisingly, he had dozed off after dinner later in the day,
and dreamed of her. In the dream, she was giving him a big
heart-shaped box of Valentine's Day candy, and when he opened it,
he saw that his hand was moving oddly, slightly out of sequence,
and realized it wasn't his hand at all. The hand belonged to
Mulder, but -- was he Mulder, then? -- he felt himself moving the
fingers, opening the box, tearing away the paper. Inside he saw
dozens of luscious chocolates, all stamped with the same three
words: "Like A Brother."

Then he heard someone laughing, not sarcastically, but with genuine
amusement. Mulder?

"I see a light," Scully says.

Skinner sees it too, now that he's looking for it; a cluster of
land stars that symbolize a township in the suburbs. Surrounded by
an ocean of desert, how small, how faint they seem. Rich, rich,
rich, to live out here, to afford the basic luxury of water; all a
man's wealth always comes down to the simplest of human needs: air,
water, food, love.

The family greets them somberly. There is a tall blond athletic
father with silver at his temples, wearing a sports shirt and cargo
shorts and thongs that slap across the checkered tiles in the
foyer. There are the two sons and their two friends, and a small
girl who clings to the hem of her mother's shorts. The mother looks
to Skinner like Heidi grown up, round faced, freckly, her hair in
two ash blond braids. She is plump, and her chin is cleft, and all
three children are stamped with the cleft as well. The boys are
gangling around, standing respectfully so the adults can sit on the
sofa and chairs, boys of an awkward age, not sure where to put
their hands or feet, like people trying not to look posed before a
camera.

Scully gives the little girl a smile. The girl grins back and hides
her face against her mother's stomach. Those are the only smiles in
the room. This house is full of suffering; the air itself is
grieving for the loss of the golden child, for John Van Dyke,
beloved son, snatched from his own safe bed in the middle of the
night. The rooms are well lit, but darkness prevails, like a
brilliant afternoon in a well tended orchard, when despite the
human imposition of order, all the shadows under the trees are as
black as midnight and as full of ancient menace.

Skinner would like to watch Scully with the little girl. His eyes
linger too long on Scully's face, and she looks at him as they are
being seated in the living room, and he looks away quickly, his
eyes coming into full contact with the eyes of Brittany Van Dyke,
four years old and full of some secret wisdom all her own.

Surprisingly, it is difficult to look away.

Susan Van Dyke, who Skinner is desperately hoping he will not
accidentally call "Heidi," says in a voice rough with the
throatburn of recent wails, "We're convinced John is still alive."

"John went up there," Brittany announces. A chubby finger points
skyward.

Her mother, seated on the sofa now, pulls her backwards between her
knees and strokes the soft blonde baby hair back, brushing it with
her fingers.

"Hush, honey," she says tenderly.

The child twists around to look up at her in surprise. "John did go
up there, didn't he?"

Skinner is still watching the child, bemused. Scully says, "But no
note, no phone call?  Could the kidnapper have made a mistake?
Could he have taken John, thinking he was another of the other boys
here that night?"

The little girl pulls away from her mother as if to go to an open
coloring book on the coffee table, but veers around it instead and
approaches Skinner. She stops a few feet from him, looking up with
sober blue eyes. Skinner ignores her as best he can, pretends not
to notice the clucking and gesturing of the mother for the child to
return to her side.

"None of the other families were contacted," Mr. Van Dyke says.
"Jason and Todd were the only ones here that night, and their
parents would have notified us at once if someone had called them."

Scully says something. Skinner can't follow it because at the same
time, the little girl speaks to him. "There was that man and that
lady."

Skinner looks at her, trying not to look frightening, but well
aware that little children rarely approach him on their own. He's
too big, for one thing, and they seem to shrink away from his stern
demeanor, which is just fine with him.

"They all went up there," Brittany says, pointing at the ceiling
again. Skinner looks up before he can stop himself. Scully is
quiet; they are all quiet. Scully takes a breath to speak but the
little girl holds out her hand to Skinner. "They went --" It's more
like "dey wen" but he can understand her perfectly; "They went up
there."

Scully looks quickly at the mother. "Do you think your daughter
mighthave seen anyone that night, Mrs. Van Dyke?"

"She sees people all the time," Chris Van Dyke, one of the sons,
says, and the boys all laugh. Even the father lets a half smile
struggle to his pained mouth. "She's an imaginative child," he
admits.

Scully shoots Skinner a look but for some reason-and this surprises
him as much as anyone else--he actually reaches his hand out. The
child seizes it, and Skinner is startled and discomfited by the
smallness of the fist gripping two of his fingers.

"Brittany, get over here right now," the mother says, in an
I-mean-it voice, but the little girl holds on like grim death and
begins to tug. "They are TOO up there," she says.

The father's eyes change, reddening, though he doesn't actually
weep, nor does his voice break when he says, "We're a Christian
family, Mr. Skinner. Brittany thinks John is in heaven."

The boys, too masculine in their teens to hold hands, shift around
so that they are standing closer together. Mr. Van Dyke reaches out
and pats the leg of the son nearest him.

Skinner and the child are looking at each other. Her cheeks are
still rounded with the fat of sucking pads, and her nose wouldn't
show up at all in a caricature drawing. But her eyes say something
to him, her look tells him something. Skinner gets to his feet. If
asked, he wouldn't be able to say why, but he does, bending over so
that the contact with the little girl isn't lost.

Scully's eyelashes flutter in surprise, but she goes along as if
it's all part of procedure, rising and moving aside to let them
pass by. Skinner says to the child, "Can you show me?"

The mother and father start to protest, then of one accord the
family gets up, and follows dutifully as the little girl seems to
drag Skinner to the stairs and up them. Rich oak curved wood, plush
carpet that sinks under his weight. A hallway paneled in real wood,
too, with pictures of unnamed Swedes on the wall. The little girl's
room, a bright splash of color, bedspread in a crayon design, white
wicker headboard and canopy, pink and blue and yellow. A poster of
the Backstreet Boys over the bed, between posters displaying giant
pandas in brilliant green forests.

The girl stops in the center of the room and points at the ceiling.
"John went up there," she says.

Her mother kneels in front of her. "You didn't say anything about
this before, Brittany. Are you telling the truth?"

"It was that lady," the girl says. "John went there when she came
here."

"A lady came here?" Scully asks. "She came here for John?"

The child cranes her neck to look up at Skinner, her small face
contorting in an effort to imitate his expression. "That lady up
there," she says, pointing at the ceiling, but clearly tiring of
the gesture and of their adult stupidity.

Skinner feels a twist in his gut, a feeling he has never
experienced before, someone pushing him, something in his brain
shouting at him. If only he could hear this Other Voice, he'd know
what to do.

He looks down at the child with his fierce scowl mirrored on her
face and says to no one in particular, "Do you have a ladder that
will reach to your roof?"

The parents look at each other blankly, but Chris Van Dyke says,
"In the garage, sir. I'll get it."

Ten minutes later, Skinner is climbing the aluminum steps to the
pitchedand gabled roof. The lower part, over the living room, is
too steep to walk on, so he climbs to the front gable and straddles
it. His Magnum flashlight slices through the dark across the angles
and gutters and dips that seem to veer off into nothingness.
Something startles and flaps up into the night.

The beam of his flashlight pauses in mid arc. Something white is
sticking up from behind one of the gables that had to be directly
over the little girl's room. Skinner inches along, the tiles cold
against his inner thighs, and leans forward almost on his chest to
peer into the gloom.

The white thing flutters. No, it doesn't flutter. It...squirms.
Wriggles.

Alive.

What the--?

Skinner sits bolt upright. He sees it clearly now; it's a sock.
It's a--

"Shit!" he snaps, forgetting everything else, and somehow gets to
his feet, clambering hastily across the slippery tiles. "Scully!"
he shouts. "Call an ambulance!"

*** 

oyster 11

There is so much a man can tell you-- 
So much he can say-- 
You remain 
My power, my pleasure, my pain.

(A Kiss From A Rose; Seal)


Scully


Her name is Tracy Buckland. Dr. Buckland. She is thirty six years
old, an anthropologist from Acton, Ohio. Her fingerprints were
taken when she was eighteen years old, applying for a summer job as
a security guard in an amusement park, and she was easy enough to
trace. Four weeks ago, Dr. Buckland was reported missing from a dig
only a few miles outside the city limits.

She has pale blonde hair, a smooth, unlined face, and big blue eyes
that stare into space so intently that everyone who sees that gaze
feels compelled to look in its direction. She seems to see
something that, even if it isn't here now, must exist somewhere.
Something that no one would ever want to look at and then still go
on living in the same world with afterwards.

Someone, an ex husband, has come to identify her. Due to a
carelessly worded police dispatcher's message on his answering
machine, he thought she was dead or would be dead by the time he
arrived, and he comes in weeping, a big man in a plaid shirt and
loose jeans, his undershirt sticking out and his shoes untied. He
is handsome in an overdone way, too big, too loud, too too, Scully
thinks, as she eases out of the hospital room to let him come in.

"Tracy!" There is no attempt to hide the emotion; the break in his
voice is wrenching. "Oh, God, Tracy!"

The hospital door closes. Scully leans against the wall, her arms
crossed, and twists her hand up so that she can chew on a
thumbnail, a habit she broke in her first year of college when her
boyfriend teased her by saying how young it made her look. Skinner
is sitting in a folding chair against the opposite wall, his knees
a little too high, like a grownup sitting in a child's seat. He is
wearing a white shirt with very light blue pinstripes, the cuffs
rolled up, his tie loosened. He seems strangely vulnerable without
his jacket.  Looking at him, she flashes back to how he scrambled
across the roof, clattering on the tile like Santa's reindeer in a
stampede, and returned with the big pale thing over his shoulder in
a fireman's carry, how she helped steady the ladder as he came
down, the woman's arms loose and her head bumbling against his
back, and how surprised she had been to see that the woman was
wrapped in Skinner's jacket. Before he even picked her up, he must
have covered her nakedness against the cold and the indignity; it
was a tiny, touching act she wishes she could say something about,
acknowledge somehow. But she can't.

Sometimes when Skinner looks at her, his eyes are unreadable, with
no light to relieve whatever secret gloom she knows is there. He
looks that way now, his face haunted in a strangely familiar way.
He must feel the loss of Mulder, too. Something about that
miserable expression is so Mulderlike, she feels she needs to say
something.

"Sir?" Her voice is soft, out of place in the sharp cold atmosphere
of the hospital, a place of scalpels, beeping machines, the rush of
desperate air through plastic tubing.

He looks at her, frowning, and says, "I'm going to get some coffee.
Do you want some?" He blinks and adds apropos to nothing, "I hate
hospitals." His motions are stiff as he gets to his feet. "Let's
cut this short and-"

The door to Tracy's room opens and the ex-husband comes out. He is
white faced, a hand to his mouth. "Jesus. What happened to her?"

"We were hoping you would tell us that," Scully says. "Did she talk
to you?"

"She didn't say anything...that I could understand. I mean, her
words make sense...but they don't." He looks at Skinner, back to
Scully, unsure who his next question should be directed at. He
settles on staring at the floor. "Was she...has she been..."

Skinner looks at Scully to see if she knows what the hell the ex is
trying to say. She does and her voice is gentle. "There was no
evidence of sexual assault. We're not sure what happened to her,
Mr. Buckland. But we do need to find out."

"She keeps saying something about a man, and bugs, and kids, and
something in a jar. I mean...she's not on drugs yet, is she? Did
they give her something for the pain?"

"She's on a morphine drip," Scully says, "For the burns on her
hands and feet. We're not sure where they came from, but they're
not life threatening. Do you know if she's been taking any
medications?"

"How did she get burned?" The ex husband looks bewildered. "Did
someone kidnap her and torture her?"

This thought has occurred to Scully, but no sense can be made of
it. "The burns on her feet may be the result of walking on
something hot, perhaps she escaped by running across a hot parking
lot, or the desert itself. We're not sure at this point what
happened, sir."

Suddenly the ex husband turns, anger displacing his grief and pain,
and glares down at her. "Well, you better find out, hadn't you? I
mean, Tracy was a smart, happy woman, and there's nothing that
could do this to her. Nothing short of...of..." He put his hands to
his head dramatically. "I don't want to think about it!"

"Excuse me."

A voice startles them both and they see a nurse standing looking at
the ex husband, who is still clutching his head as if afraid it
might roll off. It is a ludicrous position to hold.

"Sir, if we could just get you to fill out these papers for the
insurance company..."

He follows her back to the desk like a big unhappy puppy. Scully
goes along, searching in her purse for her pad so she can take her
little notes.


MULDER


Swimming in an unlit aquarium... No...drowning in the dark recesses
of the ocean. Deeper than that. Deeper. He can see the splinters in
the world. One holds the reflection of Scully and two little
babies, all smiling at him from a framed picture on his desk. One
holds a hot globe of sand, and things that crawl up as worms and
then take flight, shrinking ultimately into the afterlife of
insects. One shows Scully standing facing him behind a seated
Skinner, her hands on Skinner's shoulders and her head over his
head, both staring at him with the grave expressions of old family
portraits.

One leg in. One leg out.

One leg in, because he is here, drowning in the dark, not in the
ocean, but in a womb, rich with the potential of all unborn things,
the mother of all things, a place of bright red and yellow sparks
like he used to see when he rubbed his eyes too hard and too long.

One leg out because he can remember her name. Because he knows she
is standing in the cold hospital hallway and her hands are shaking
just a little from the cold. He knows that her left foot is falling
asleep from putting all her weight on it because she refuses to sit
in the chair opposite Skinner, refuses to give into the weariness
that is leeching her bones, and that her breath smells faintly of
coffee.

One leg in because he can feel the buzzing all in his body, and
hear the howling of the boy somewhere, which fades now and again
into huh huh huh sounds, snuffling like a pig, and if that isn't
bad enough, there are echoes.

The thing he knows in and out, both sides, is what he cannot hope
to put into words to tell Scully, though she has to hear it. The
thing, the cluster of pronouns, he/she/it/you/us/them, lets Mulder
keep her name. He must be the messenger, she must hear the message.
But he has one leg in and one leg out and cannot move in either
direction. The best he can do is try and give her the image he
himself condenses the concept to, the buzzing, the screaming woman
in the desert, the boy who flew through the roof of his own house,
and the man in the black hat. He cannot say the word but he must
show her what it means:

oyster.


Skinner


He sees her hands shaking a little from the cold, and knows that
she won't sit in her chair opposite his because she's so tired
she'll fall asleep. She stands like a little soldier, her red head
glistening in the bitter fluorescent lights, and if that light is
unkind to her skin, then it's made up for in the way it makes her
eyes look, like the white fire of her soul burns visibly behind
them. He wishes there was something he could say to address that,
but there isn't. He has tried before, ended up grunting like an ox
and just being gruff or looking away or dismissing her abruptly.
He'd take a bullet for her the way she'd take one for Mulder, and
none of them would mention it afterwards, thinking it was duty that
moved them and not...and nothing else.

Mulder. Skinner rubs his eyes under his glasses with just his
fingertips, and it feels astonishingly good, like scratching an
intense itch. He rubs harder, until he sees sparks in the cushiony
black. Red and yellow sparks, and the sound of that damn machine
buzzing somewhere.  Then he sighs, waiting for Scully to finish her
field notes and comforting the ex husband, whose name is Larry,
because they weren't really prepared for this and she doesn't have
her tape recorder with her. He wants to take her back to the hotel.
He wants to wrap her small body in a blanket and hold her safely
through the night, buffer her somehow against the grief they are
both feeling, the pain that will wake them only a few hours after
they fall into an exhausted sleep. He will lie in the dark staring
up at the ceiling and hating himself for failing Mulder, for losing
him to the darkness, and Scully, well, whatever Scully feels for
Mulder is something a woman feels and he doesn't know what it must
be like for her.

Suddenly he wonders if she will sleep in Mulder's bed again, and he
feels a stab of some emotion he refuses to name. Let her, if it
comforts her. Fine, good for her, go for it.

A nurse comes to the desk and leans over to the nurse on the other
side. "The doctor said to go ahead and give her the Thorazine."

Skinner glances at the hospital room door where Tracy Buckland lies
writhing in her own psychic pain. Without saying anything to
Scully, he goes down the hall and pushes the door open to look in.
The blonde woman he found naked (oh but don't forget the socks) on
the roof is sitting up in her bed, her blue eyes staring at some
blind horror that makes the short hairs on his neck stand up.

Something changes as he stands there, while her gaze sweeps the
room. It comes to rest on him, and vaguely clears. It seems as
if...wait a minute...she IS looking at him.

He takes an uncertain step forward. "Dr. Buckland?"

Focus is agonizingly slow. It's like a cat standing with one leg in
and one leg out the door, trying to decide which way to go. "It's
the thing in the sky," she says. "The jar. The red clay jar. The
little bones, all the little bones that used to dance. It's the
bugs in the desert. They eat you alive, you know. The mosquitoes
and the spiders. The big spiders.  In the dark they eat you alive."

Skinner is mildly horrified to witness the indignity of this
obviously intelligent woman's display of madness.

"I'm Assistant Director Walter Skinner with the FBI, Dr. Buckland,"
he says, keeping his voice low and quiet for her. "We're
investigating your disappearance from the..." He can't remember the
name of the dig site, or what they were digging for. Indian
pottery?  Dinosaur bones? Shit. "...from the site," he ends weakly.
"Can you tell me what happened to you?  Can you tell me where
you've been?"

Tracy looks at the door suspiciously, and then leans forward,
beckoning him with a crooking forefinger. He comes closer, despite
a strong sense of danger. She speaks in a conspiratorial whisper.
"People do it to each other. Then they split apart. It's...they
have to. The man in the hat...and the thing in the jar. They have
to do it. But still. That poor little boy. That poor little boy."

Skinner doesn't want to hear this, but her eyes are bright and
locked on his and he knows that she's in there somewhere.

"What boy?" he asks.

She smiles, and he glimpses the beauty her ex husband must have
fallen in love with and found so hard to let go.

"It's the..." She struggles with the word, finally pursing her lips
deliberately to form the syllables. "Oy-ster."

*** 

oyster 12

Papers shuffle back and forth across the nurses' station. Tracy,
zoned out on Thorazine, mutters and frets a little when Skinner
tries to talk to her, and the ex husband settles in for the night.
Time seems to be slightly off-track; minutes pass wavering by, and
then hours. The police come and there's more talk, more papers,
badges flashed all around the room, and eye-rolling nurses who
finally tire of the whole thing and get on to their other patients.


Skinner leaves Tracy's room and goes down the hallway, passing the
nurse, nodding to the uniformed police officer sitting in the chair
he'd been sitting in earlier. The officer nods back, but it's more
of a gesture with his chin to indicate where Scully went, and
Skinner turns the corner to see her curled up on one of the cheap
blue vinyl bolster arrangements that pass as sofas. She is asleep
with her head braced between one of the bolsters and the wall, arms
folded, legs tucked under her. Skinner bends down and carefully,
with no more than a fingertip, lifts a strand of hair away from her
cheek. Then he squats beside her, his wrists on his knees, big
hands dangling. He just looks at her. She's asleep and it can't
hurt anything. So he just looks.

It's very late. The hospital is silent except for the intake and
outtake of breathing everywhere and the faint humming of some
underground machinery. The tiles are cold. The walls are cold. The
glass entrance doors are fogged from the outside heat pressing up
against it. The hospital pushes out the city, a big impassive
structure that keeps its screams to itself.

There's a movement in the hallway, and Skinner glances up just in
time to catch a glimpse of dark cloth fluttering: was that a man in
a long black coat slipping into Tracy Buckland's room?

He shoots up, thighs and calves screaming with surprise, and runs
down the hall, his hard soled shoes sliding a little on the wet
linoleum. He bursts into Tracy's room, banging the door against a
chair so hard that it snaps back and almost hits him in the face.

No one is in the room. Well, Tracy is there, and in a chair by her
bed, the ex husband, with his chin rising slowly from his chest,
his dark eyes stupid with sleep. "Hunhh...?" But no intruder.

Quick check. No one else in the room. Skinner looks at the ex and
says, "Did someone just come through here?"

"Don't," Tracy says. Skinner jumps as if she spit at him, though
her tone is low and even. "Don't follow the dark man," she warns.

Skinner opens his mouth to speak but the ex is bending over Tracy
and gently stroking her hair back from her head, the way a man
might pet a dog. "Honey, the dark man isn't here," he murmurs. "He
can't hurt you."

Skinner looks helplessly from side to side at the empty room.
"Who?"

The ex looks apologetic. "She's got like this personal boogeyman
thing. She saw that movie, 'Dark City,' and when something scares
her she always thinks of that.  I don't know why."

"I don't understand." Skinner wishes Scully were here. He's better
at talking to people than talking with them.

"It was a movie with these guys in long black coats and big black
hats.  It was pretty stupid, if you ask me. They floated around.
Big whoop. Like that's going to hurt you." He looks at Tracy, who
watches Skinner steadily. "Scared the shit out of her, though. Said
it was like something out of her nightmares when she was a kid.
She's been talking about it all night, even in her sleep."

Skinner takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. Tracy's gaze has
fixed on the ceiling, or something beyond that. He knows he's not
thinking clearly enough. Seeing things where there are no things,
like her. Mustn't make a mistake. Time to cash in their chips and
call it a night.

He goes into the hall, speaks softly to the guard, gets Scully
awake. She's as drowsy and balance-impaired as a drunk. He takes
her arm and steadies her as they go outside, into the belly of the
oven-like parking lot. Usually it cools off by now, but this night
can't seem to break its fever. There are insects buzzing in the
bushes, and a tour bus fills the still air with exhaust fumes.
Scully falls asleep as soon as he gets her into the car. Thank God
it isn't a long drive, and the streets are relatively empty at that
hour. For Vegas, anyway.

In the hotel there are the sounds of gaming, the constant
repetition of slot machine tunes, the click of chips, the rattling
whirl of cards being shuffled. Cartoonish voices chirp and bark and
cry out for attention from every corner.  And of course there are
no clocks.

Skinner and Scully cling to each other like drowning victims
dragging themselves to dry land. He takes her to her room, not
Mulder's room. Her own room, her own bed. She mutters something to
him and flops down on the big square chenille bedspread, her head
missing the pillow by a few inches. She makes a feeble attempt to
drag it down to her and then gives up. Too complicated. Maybe
later. Her breathing deepens into sleep within seconds.

Take off her shoes, Skinner thinks. But he knows better. The man
inside him says, no, don't you dare. So he sinks into a too-soft
chair and tries to think of what to do next. But all he knows is
what NOT to do. To make it all worse, Scully is singing in her
sleep. Humming some kind of soporific lullaby. At first it's just a
vibration of noise. But then in the quiet of the room it grows
louder. Siren song. So lovely, that sound. So dark and deep and
quiet and lovely.

Oh the rich, warm, sweet, red beating. Beating. Beating.

Skinner is not a man of metaphors. To him poetry has the stink of
cheap whorehouse perfume. Only the clean zero sums of math make
sense. Things you can touch and measure, dice that always fall
within a certain set of numbers, predictable and safe. Things you
can touch, and see...

Once upon a lifetime, when Skinner was twenty years old in a jungle
of lush green and bright red, he floated up above the carnage, and
if he had only flapped his arms one time, he would have found out
once and for all if a man can fly. But he didn't want to know then
and he doesn't want to know now.

This will not be an easy thing.

Accounts due, the rumor of that upcoming departmental audit, papers
piled on his desk, reports that all require great attention to
detail. Mustn't make a mistake.  Things to do he can't leave
undone. His office chairs are hot pink because while he was in
Vegas, Holly redecorated. Yes, now he remembers giving her
permission. There she is, on the phone, chewing gum and talking to
Scully. Scully is coming to see him about Mulder. Scully, Scully,
Scully. Disappearing around corners, half a smile in a mirror, a
flash of Irish red hair. And those eyes, big and serious, looking
up into his.

Skinner makes a sound like the breath of a swimmer breaking water,
and finds himself staring at the lamp by Scully's bed. She twitches
a little and makes a whimpering sound that breaks his heart because
he can't cross the ocean of carpet between them to comfort her. He
closes his eyes again and...

There's Tracy. She is standing in front of him, a finger over her
lips signaling him to be quiet. She reaches out and takes his hand,
her own fingers small and slim and gentle, a woman's touch. "Come
with me," she whispers. "I want to show you something."

He lets her lead him from the motel room into a brilliant square of
light that must be the front doors by dawn; the sun must be angling
directly down on those glass doors...

They step into a dreamscape made up of red earth, brown and grey
rocks. A little scrub vegetation. Holes here and there, dug into
the hard ground, and those who dig going up and down ladders.
College kids in Doc Martens and cargo shorts. Skinner recognizes
the scenario: it's an archeological site. Tracy lets go of his hand
and begins to climb backwards down a ladder into a hole. It is a
terrifically deep hole, maybe ten or twelve stories and pitch black
at the bottom. No way is he going down there.

It comes to him (as he is going down the ladder in a jump cut that
conveniently eliminates his dislike of heights) that it isn't
Scully humming, never was. It's harsher now, the sound all around
him, and it isn't humming at all: it's buzzing. And it's getting
louder. And then a scrabbling sound tells him they aren't alone in
the pit.

*** 

oyster 13

There's a spider, a spider as big as a pickup truck, and it's
skittering along the bottom of the pit chasing an Hispanic woman.
The woman's face is paralyzed by fright, a look of perfect terror
frozen on her features as she jogs along just a few feet ahead of
the multi-legged monstrosity. For some reason, she's carrying a
basket of laundry. Her breasts wobble painfully as she shuffles
along in her best version of a running stride.

The spider catches her and sinks its fluorescent green fangs into
her neck. The woman doesn't even scream. She turns towards Skinner
and he can see that there is something horribly, sickeningly wrong
with her. She is swollen and glossy. The spider is doing something.
Something very, very bad. The woman begins to liquify on the
carpeted floor of the pit. Just at the moment Skinner thinks he can
never imagine seeing anything worse, he does see something worse.
The spider raises its head and backs away, and it has a human
mouth, and it vomits up something that was essential to that woman,
something she can't even be buried without, something so intrinsic
that now there is hardly enough left of her for a memory.

The picture flickers. It's not really happening. It's a scene from
a movie, and Skinner twists his head around, squinting, and sees
Mulder in the projection booth.

***** 

They are so fragile, so breakable. Pick one up for
examination and its head falls off.

Something in his life has happened to Mulder, something that hasn't
happened to any of the others. It makes him different from them. It
makes him...bigger. No, not bigger. LARGER. Mulder can come here
and go there, and still be Mulder. One leg in, one leg out, still
Mulder. But he can't translate, and even if he could, he still
wouldn't understand.

Mulder, with his differently assembled brain. Mulder, with his
different belief system. Mulder, who might be able to do what even
I can't do: touch the soft sweet core of Scully, pierce the
warrior's armor of Skinner.  But I am counting on you, Mulder.

He doesn't understand but he doesn't lose his Mulderness here.
Young John is a great waste. The prince, the heir, the child of
America, is as empty as a paper bag, as useless as a photograph,
fading away in a forgotten drawer. Apparently they are timed by
their biology. That explains a great deal about their strange
visions of past and future, ideas none of them could give up except
Mulder. Too young and there's hardly anything in there. A little
lump of sweetness and then a great gnawing emptiness. Too old and
they are filled with so many convictions they burst like overripe
melons when decompressed from the world into the HERE. And Tracy
Buckland...once she remembered the dark man, what else was there
for her to do but run from him?  And she's still running. Ah,
Tracy. A hardened heart has such a bitter taste.

You see, Benita? It didn't have to be that way at all. Is it my
fault you watched "The Giant Spider" movie when you were six years
old? Why couldn't you have just let it go? I understand these
things no better than Mulder understands what is happening to him.
If they can imagine anything, why does it always have to be the
worst thing?  Why do all their dreams sooner or later turn into
nightmares?

Benita deaf. Scully blind. Skinner mute. I'm counting on you,
though, Mulder.

John's parents mourn his loss with great grieving sounds, and
Tracy's ex has damaged some of his organs by drinking to dull the
pain of her not loving him. Benita's huge family weeps for her, and
even Scully has sobbed on her pillow for Mulder.  Really they are
all only grieving for themselves. But Scully lies right there,
right THERE, spirit encased in solid flesh, only a few feet away,
and her loss is mourned by one whose flesh is as solid and trapped
in time as hers.

Skinner is sleeping in the chair by Scully's bed as Scully slept in
the chair by Mulder's. But Skinner is a bag of blood and bones,
clear lymph and some hard white fat deposits, toenails, teeth, and
coarse hairs around the soft sac of his testicles. A single flap of
his arms twenty five years ago and he would have solved one of the
greatest mysteries of all mankind, but no, no, he thinks too small
of himself, thinks too stiffly of himself. Only now in the
proximity of this redheaded woman does his hard thinking waver,
letting the thing inside him enlarge, and although it is clear he
couldn't withstand knowing the things Mulder knows at this moment,
that Skinner-essence makes me bang against the walls and sing his
name. It is the thing that makes him able to transcend the stars,
and he locks it away, denies its existence.

If Scully said jump, he would jump. But if she said fly, would he
only stand with his arms out from his sides in a cruciform of
indecision? That's the question, isn't it?

A hard man is Walter Skinner, but not made of stone. Let him sleep,
then.

****

Scully is at the cleaners, looking for her red sequined dress. All
she has to do is find it and she can go. But the rack is spinning,
clothes are flapping around wildly, a shirt raises its sleeve and
gives her a jaunty salute. They are all white clothes, everything
in the cleaners is snowy white, and smells of bleach. The machine
goes around and around, and the hanging clothes jitter and dance in
their dazzling whiteness, and the hydraulic lift hisses at her.

No, wait. That's a human hiss. And somehow familiar.

Pssssssssssst. "Scully! Over here!"

Scully looks at the rack really hard, and sees that through the
whirling clothes, like a man in the eye of a hurricane, Mulder is
standing facing her. He is naked, though she just sees scraps of
him, flashes of light skin and dark shadow, through the wild
merry-go-round of laundry.

"Mulder!" Her voice seems to have some kind of stadium echo, like
she's shouting down into a hole. "Mulder? Where are you?"

"It's all about the oyster, Scully."

"What?"

"Ask yourself--why the whale is white."

She reaches for him, cracks her elbow against the hard counter, and
yelps in pain. When she opens her eyes she gives another yelp
because Skinner is bending over her, inches away, his dark
concerned gaze piercing her like a skewer and it's scarier even
than the dream. They jerk back from each other.

"I'm sorry, Scully. You were having a nightmare."

She sits up on the bed, brain fuzzy, too much light in her eyes,
needing desperately to go to the bathroom. "What are you doing
here?"

"I fell asleep in the chair last night. I'm sorry. I-"

"No, no, it's all right." She wiggles a hand at him. "Really. I
just had this really intense dream about Mulder."

"So did I."

They look at each other, Scully sitting up on the bed clutching the
hem of her jacket and Skinner on his knees on the carpet beside
her.

"Mulder was having terrible dreams just before he disappeared," she
says.

Another look, then of mutual accord they study the bedspread for
awhile, each thinking. Skinner says, "I dreamed about that maid,
what happened to her."

Scully looks at him sharply, all attention.

Skinner suddenly realizes the rest of what he was going to say is
ridiculous, and his high cheekbones tinge with color. He gets up
slowly, and God, the knee is on fire now from that awkward
position, and he sits on the edge of the bed because even out of a
sense of propriety, he won't subject his aching back to that chair
again.

"What?" she prompts.

"I...no, it was just a dream," he says. "What did you dream?"

"Skinner..." She leans forward and lays a hand on his wrist, and he
looks down at her fingers. "Tell me."

"It's ridiculous," he says gruffly. "A giant spider ate her. You
know how they liquify their food and then suck it out of their
victim? That's what I saw in the dream."

Scully takes her hand away and puts it over her mouth. "Oh, my
God," she says softly. "That's exactly consistent with her necrotic
state."

"Well, I assume we can rule out giant spiders as a cause of death,
can't we?"

She shakes her head, though she means yes. "Of course, but enough
venom from spider would have that effect. Well, maybe from a
million spiders...But we didn't find any insect venom in her."

"Did you look for it?"

"Not specifically...but it would have showed up on the tests..."
Her eyes are a little foggy; she is saying one thing and thinking
something else. She says, just thinking out loud more than saying
anything to him,"Dreams are symbols for things. Like a...what did
Mulder call it? Like a forgotten language."

"I'm sorry?"

"In my dream, Mulder told me...well, he said something about an
oyster, and I think he said...something about...he said that he
knew why the whale was white."

"Scully..." his voice is as close to pleading as she's ever heard
it. "I really am lost here."

"I'm sure the white whale refers to Moby Dick," she says. "It means
something to me, because my father and I used to read it together
when I was a little girl-"

This evokes such a clear picture of a man holding a cute little
redheaded girl in his lap that for a moment Skinner zones out on
some of what she's saying. He picks it back up with, "-in college I
equated it with the twin paradox theory. I've always loved that
book."

Skinner has only vague memories of hundreds of pages of droning
text and a movie with Gregory Peck that was all talk and no action.

He nods encouragingly anyway, and Scully speaks again. "Mulder used
to talk about it. To him, the white whale represents reality. Or
the hole in reality, depending on whose perspective the story is
coming from. You can imagine Mulder and I had very different ideas
about that book."

She moves around a little as if seeking a more comfortable
position, but really it's an attempt to ground herself in the here
and now and remember what Mulder told her that night when she was
only half listening to him. "It's an interesting study of shifting
points of view. See, think of the white whale as an anomaly that
simply can't exist. So it defies reality just by being. Ahab
couldn't stand that."

At least Skinner remembers who Ahab was. "Your father thought
that-"

"No, Ahab in the book. See...it's about...well, suppose you tear
back a little corner of a picture on the wall, and what if there
isn't any wall underneath? What if it was just the picture that was
the reality, and behind that there's this terrifying nothingness?
You poke a little hole anywhere in the world and you can just
barely glimpse what's basically the opposite of reality. That's
what Mulder thinks dreams are. The holes in reality we can peek
through to see what's on the other side. And that's the big
question, I guess. Whether what we'd see would be different, or if
everyone would see the same thing." She stares into her own
thoughts again. "He was talking about this just before he
disappeared.  At the time I didn't think I was even listening to
him." She gives a sad little laugh. "I guess I was listening after
all."

Skinner is very close to Scully in terms of physical proximity. Her
voice makes occasional puffs of air that stir the hairs on his
forearm. He can almost hear her heart beating, big soft thumps
against her ribcage. He can smell the soap she washed her hands
with at the hospital before they came back to the hotel. For all
its sweet scent, he knows that it would taste a little bitter if he
put her fingers in his mouth and licked them.

"Scully." Her name is hard and round and sweet.

She glances up at him again, a flash of sapphire, the way a rich
woman might let a ring of immeasurable value glint from under the
cuff of her mink.

She says, "I dreamed of a laundry, and white clothes, and Mulder
saying something about an oyster."

Skinner draws back from her. "Tracy Buckland mentioned something
about an oyster, too."

"You're kidding."

They sit thinking until it occurs to both of them at the same time
that they are in bed together, however accidental the circumstance
or fully dressed they are. Skinner gets up and goes for his shoes,
which he kicked off before going to sleep in the chair. Scully gets
up, too, and says, "I can't believe I fell asleep in my clothes.
What time is it?"

"Nearly five."

"Oh, God. It's going to be a long day."

"No, go ahead and get some more sleep. I'll leave a message to
postpone our first meeting. I need some rest myself."

"Sir." There is something magic in her voice, a warmth he hasn't
heard before. Scully looks up at him, her eyes yearning and
vulnerable, her lips slightly parted, a glow to her face that is so
beautiful he pauses in the act of pulling down his shirt sleeve to
button the cuff. She sways forward slightly and says in a voice
rich with hope, "Do you think Mulder might still be alive?"

*** 

oyster 14

Scully wakes, cotton-mouthed, disoriented, in her hotel room, and
lies clutching her pillow to her chest, with all her clothes on.
Well, one shoe has come off and sprawls untidily on the floor. The
air conditioning is turned down to zero, and her sinuses burn even
before she opens her eyes. She sits up, groaning. Her head throbs
as if she'd been out drinking all night. She vaguely remembers
talking to Skinner in the small hours of the morning. He was in
that chair. Gone now. It makes her a little uncomfortable to think
that he might have been awake in here when she was asleep. Sleep is
such an intimate act. It's worse than when Mulder watched her
sleeping, and that was bad enough. She doesn't know Skinner that
well; she hates to think she might have been drooling or snoring in
front of her boss.

She goes to the bathroom, takes a shower, comes out and puts on
fresh clothes. Sweet welcome relief.  Her head is still muzzy and
it's time to do something, but now she feels like she can face the
world in clean underwear.

Eleven thirty. Don't they have a meeting? She calls down for
messages. There are none.

Disappointed, she sits back on her bed and lets thought sluice
through the lint ball that seems to have replaced her brain. Well,
what did she expect? Mulder is still gone. Gone, gone, gone. There
must be a song to express it. But there is no music in her head
this morning. Or rather, this afternoon.

A tap on the door. It must be Skinner.  Scully weighs the pressure
of knuckles against wood, measures the distance between the raps,
and knows it means he's going to be all business again.

She lets him in. He has a look that tells her nothing is going to
be any good today. He doesn't even come in right away. He leans
against the door frame, as if hesitant to drag the bad news behind
him when he comes to her. He's wearing a suit, and it's perfectly
pressed, but there's something about it that makes it look slept
in. There's something about HIM that doesn't seem like him at all,
a tiny blur like a smear in her vision.  But she blinks it away.

He's making her nervous. "Did I miss the meeting?"

"You didn't miss much," he says, "or you missed it all, depending
on how you look at it."

Scully looks up at him and waits, wishing he would hurry and tell
her because she hates anticipation.

"Agents Nelson and Franz - as one of the couples posing as big
winners at the Luxor--broke the case early this morning when they
were approached by a man in the casino. They made the bust within
an hour. It turns out a group of four to six people set up an
operation to fleece winners out of their money, but something went
wrong with the first couple they tried to scam, and then they found
out it was a lot easier to kill people than to go to all the
trouble of covering their tracks.  They actually said that, like it
was a defense: we didn't mean to kill them."

Scully stares at him while he goes through the details, scam
artists at their artistic best, posing as the IRS, as security
guards, as bankers, an elaborate setup designed to get victims'
cash electronically transferred into bank accounts quickly, then
use their credit cards to take it back out, leaving a bug behind in
the program to "fix" any computer-perceived glitches. Winnings that
had been sent to home banks and then immediately withdrawn again
had looked to the computers like glitches in the system and
"fixed," leaving the accounts with the same monthly balance as
before the victims had come to Vegas. Nothing would show up on the
end of the month printout as changed due to that perfectly balanced
transaction and a line or two of code telling the computer to
disregard any positive=negative events.  Until some very clever
agent had figured out that anyone coming to Vegas would withdraw a
substantial amount of money from their account, so she took a
closer look at why all the monthly balances weren't lower and found
the No Transactions Recorded bug.  Ingenious.  But no X-File.

All Scully can think is, They won't justify our staying here now.
I'll have to take a leave of absence to look for Mulder myself.

Skinner pauses in what he's saying, realizing she's not listening
to him. She blinks quickly, and focuses her eyes on his face again.

He says, "Only two bodies have been found, both buried in the
desert. Both were women. But we're pretty sure all the rest are
going to be found dead, too."

Scully wonders bleakly how many bodies have been buried in the
barren countryside around Vegas over the years. "They won't find
Mulder."

Skinner comes into the room and closes the door behind him. He
stands looking  down at her, his characteristic scowl in place.
"No, they won't," he says. "Because Mulder's not dead. How do we
know that?"

"Because he..."  No, that's not right.  "Because..."

"And they won't find the boy, because he and Tracy Buckland had
nothing to do with the casino killings. And neither did that maid.
But she IS dead." Skinner manages to sound convinced and skeptical
at the same time.  "Somehow those things are tied together."

A furrow appears between Scully's eyes above the bridge of her nose
and she frowns at a button on the front of Skinner's shirt. "I
know."

Scully only knows that it's a certainty in her, that Mulder isn't
HERE, but neither is he THERE. One leg in, one leg out. She can't
FEEL Mulder; in fact, she can feel his absence, the nonMulderness
of the world. It's like a vacuum left in his wake, but it makes her
all the more certain he isn't dead. And how she knows is...like
something she once heard and then forgot, like information she
can't access, but knows it exists, like trying to recall details
from a dream.

"Where do we go from here?" she asks.

The unspoken question hovers in the air between them: Are you with
me or not?

Skinner can choose whether or not to be a gentleman with her, and
he can choose to restrain himself from saying and doing certain
things that might endanger his professionalism. But there is no
choice to make in this. Whatever it means to her, whatever it means
to him, they are in this together.

"To the only person who might know anything about what happened to
Mulder," he says. "Tracy Buckland."

*** 

oyster 15

Make everything look normal, Dad thinks, as he pokes at a chicken
leg on the grill with a miniature pitchfork.  For the kids' sake,
for Susie's sake. Just go on like there isn't a big gaping bleeding
hole in the world where our youngest son used to be.  Make believe
he stands before Jesus in his golden youth, and will be an angel
hovering over us forever, until we're all reunited in that heavenly
white palace above the clouds.

And not some wizened blackening little skeleton rotting in an
unmarked grave for the wild dogs to dig up and gnaw on somewhere in
this Godforsaken shithole of a state.

A coal from the grill pops when the fat sizzles down on it, and it
blazes up and burns Dad's finger.

"SHIT!"

Little Brittany drops the plastic shovel she was using to scoop up
gravel from the garden and claps her hands over her mouth, big eyes
round above her fingers.  The boys by the pool look in Dad's
direction, but he hunches his back at them and keeps his head down,
glaring at the goddamn fucking hotdogs and hamburgers and chicken
legs that won't be eaten by his little tow headed boy today.

Or so he is thinking, when there is a sound like cloth tearing,
like a train whistle at highest pitch, a

yeeeeeeeeooooooOOOWWWWWWWWLLLLLLLLL

and a huge splash as John Van Dyke drops from the innocent blue sky
into the sparkling waters of the swimming pool with enough force to
backsplash everyone within twenty feet and completely put out the
flames of the family barbeque.

*** 

oyster 16

Tracy is making a cat's cradle with a string she's pulled from her
hospital blanket.  The ex has gone out for pizza, having exhausted
the selection from the machine down the hall, where he lost his
spare change to its slot game.

There's some kind of streamer tied to the air conditioning vent,
and it blows inwards with the chilled air,  fluttering like the
tail of a kite. Tracy looks at it now and again and smiles, her
face as bland and guileless as an infant's. She is doped to the
gills on major anti-psychotic drugs.  The walls of her mind run in
swirls of color like a fresh painting in the rain.  But somewhere
inside the psychedelic strobe lights and sixties sitar music,   Dr.
Tracy Buckland is still in there. That's a little  surprising,
considering the recent violent wrenching away of all she ever knew
or believed in. Wisps of smoke still curl occasionally from the
fried places in her brain. But she can reduce her vision enough now
to realize that she isn't alone in the room.

Scully sits in a chair, dwarfed by Skinner's dark blue suit jacket.
He's in a chair on the opposite side of Tracy's bed.  In the
hallway it was so cold Scully began to shiver a little and when he
saw the gooseflesh on her arms he took his jacket off and draped it
over her shoulders without saying anything. She didn't look at him,
kept her eyes away the way she does when she's embarrassed.  But
now she holds it together across her breasts and is as grateful for
the warmth of the gesture as she is for the jacket itself. It
smells like Skinner, very masculine, faintly soapish. What is that
scent?  Not cologne.  The thought almost makes her smile;  only her
cheek dimples a little. She can imagine what Skinner thinks each
Christmas when he gets all those little bottles of cologne as
obligatory staff gifts.  There's probably a cardboard box somewhere
in his apartment stuffed with those sorts of useless things.  Her
eye catches his now by accident, and he looks mildly surprised at
the twinkle she can't quite conceal.

"A woman is a vessel,"  Tracy says.

Skinner and Scully exchange a glance.The problem is not, as they
imagine, that Tracy's thinking is limited.  It's that her thinking
has actually outgrown her language, and she doesn't have words
anymore for what she needs to say.  She can no longer confine
herself to the symbols the sounds represent. What she just said, "a
woman is a vessel," is the absolute truth, and the thing they need
most desperately to hear, but they can't understand it.  I had
hoped Mulder would interpret, but Mulder is doing things on his
own.

He tries, I try, but these people need a thousand words for every
single picture;  they are too tedious to bear.  Still, what other
recourse do I have but to wait and see what they're going to do
next?

"A vessel,"  she repeats, and makes the string do a sine wave in
the air, maybe imitating a worm crawling, maybe demonstrating the
secret of the universe. "Oyster,"  she says, rather hopefully, but
she's talking to herself.

"We're wasting our time here,"  Skinner says.

Scully is not so sure.  She says, "Tracy, do you remember anything
about what happened on the night you were abducted?"

If Skinner winces on that last word, it's just a goose walking over
his grave.

That was quite a night, a night to remember, if Tracy could relive
it in the minutia of the first go-round, and unlearn what she's
learned about memories.

She'd been asleep in a tent by the dig that night.  They'd found
something just as it was getting dark and she didn't trust the
night lamps to show them enough so that excavating it wouldn't
cause damage.  All she knew then was that this wasn't going to be
like any other dig anywhere, ever. The whole camp sensed her
excitement, sensed the immensity of the discovery.  Everyone had
gone to bed quiet, a little scared.  No one had slept for a long
time.

What they'd found had been just a mound of earth.  That's all.
Fifteen feet down, under four layers of village strata made up of
debris mixed with fragments of metal that never came from this
world, and when Tracy stared at the mound and then knelt and put
her hands on it in wonder, she gave a startled cry of pain.

(It's a meteor! It's a space vessel!  It's the cairn above a
monster!)  Like a child finding a wrapped Christmas present in the
closet, she shook it around in her mind, and wondered over the
wrapping before deciding to wait and open it in the morning.

So she had been awake for a long time wondering what was down there
in that pit.  Just a few feet above me, she'd pondered the
repercussions of her find. I had felt her hands on the mound. I
knew her.  My rage and need were so strong that I could barely
contain myself.  But she wouldn't go to sleep.  So when a milk
truck rattled down the road, Benita's cousin Lupe giving her a ride
to the hotel on his way to work, I watched. Benita was dozing; she
was so tired then, but she knew that later she could slip off
somewhere at work and take a quick nap.   And there she would begin
to speak the forgotten language.

The same blind needs drove us, but they were so confusing to me.
They still are.

It was the burning that woke Tracy, and she opened her eyes and
looked down at her hands and saw them glowing in the dark, a faint
green phosphorescence. Everything decays here, even the elements.
They consider time as a measurement of that decay. It almost makes
sense, too, the way carts were moved in ancient Egypt without
wheels, or Newtonian physics made it all the way to Einstein.  If I
could explain to them how then they might understand.  But, "Oh,
God,"  she said, so softly no one could hear her.  And then she was
so afraid in her half sleep, half dreaming, that the Dark Man came
and smiled at her with his teeth, that lipless grin, and she tried
to scream, but it never reached the air.  All pulled apart, she
came undone.  It should have been obvious that she would have
trouble communicating, but I didn't know that just trying to wrap
her mind around concepts would damage it.

"A woman,"  Tracy says now, a little wearily, to answer the
question, "is a vessel."

"What were you looking for at the dig?"  Scully asks, trying again
to speak to Tracy on some common ground, on the belief that if she
can find something simple and familiar that Tracy can relate to,
she'll work her up to more complex thought.  But Scully, Tracy is
going from the general to the particular already, and the distance
between those two things has increased so dramatically that it's an
impossible leap for either of your minds to make.

What WAS she looking for at that dig?  Escape from boredom, and
fine shards of bone, and a way to use her education to make a
living, and a place to go to the bathroom that wouldn't violate the
site or her privacy?  Yes, yes, and yes.

Once Tracy might have answered with, "Dinosaur bones.  Pottery
remnants from older civilizations." Now she knows the word
"dinosaur" has to do with massive lizard-slithering-weight,
crushing teeth to the prey of the dinosaur, or the sweet juicy
whitish meat and the rich red blood to the predator of the
dinosaur, or the earth itself before it was shaped into pottery and
dinosaurs, yielding like a woman as it sucks existence inside
itself and then reshapes it and sends it back into the world, and
she would have pointed to the truck Lupe drove, where the ghosts of
the dinosaurs blew thick  from his exhaust in yet another
incarnation.

Now Tracy can hear the voice of every grain of sand, and knows that
she can't confine the concepts to syllables that her questioners
will ever be able to translate back correctly.   "Oyster" is the
best distillation she can come up with to deliver my message. But
it leaves them baffled and pushes my desperation to the limits, and
doesn't express her own interest in the concept of antiquity at
all.

She looks at Skinner, turns her head to look at Scully, then back
to Skinner, and this goes on for a few seconds, as if she's
watching a tennis match.   Then she says the one thing that should
explain it to anyone but does not:  "I was in the oyster."

"What does that mean?"  Scully asks.  "You found oyster shells?
Proof that this desert was once an ocean?  Are you talking about
someone named Oyster?  A town called Oyster?"

Skinner listens to her free association from a distance.  There's
something else he's thinking about but he's not sure what.  As
Scully talks to Tracy he feels a vague discomfort, like someone is
watching them.  Not cameras, but more like someone's eyes are on
them, actively observing. Seeing too much.  Seeing the way he looks
at Scully.  Seeing the pictures inside his head when he thinks of
her.  He rubs the back of his neck and glances around the room with
hooded eyes.

For no reason at all he remembers Scully   beside him in a car,
when they were on a stakeout.  She had fallen asleep, her chin
tucked down, and was snoring a little.  It was a soft sound, cute.
He had been thinking of ways to tease her about it later without
hurting her feelings. After that time when she had given him the
root beer, and had offered him her little loyalty oath, he had
never been able to bring himself to hurt her feelings.  She was
such a cute little thing, he forgot how smart she was until she did
an autopsy that--

Skinner sits bolt upright in his seat.  He has never been on a
stakeout with Scully except for the time in the van when they were
following Mulder.  And she certainly hadn't been sleeping then.

Skinner's heart thumps so loudly he can't imagine that Scully
doesn't hear it. He grips the seat of his chair with both hands as
if he's afraid he's going to fall out of it, and Tracy gives him a
benign smile, though Scully's eyes widen when she sees the color
drain from his face.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"Scully."  Her name in his throat frightens him like nothing in his
life ever has. Yes, it's his gruff voice, but it's not the
inflection he wants to put on her name.  She hears it too, and he
sees it kick something in her, sees her wince convulsively, her
pupils contract. She gets up, clutching the lapels of the coat to
pull it tightly around her.  Her face is equal parts fear and
concern.

"Sir,"  she says.  She comes around the bed and looks down at him,
sensing his panic and holding in her own.  "What's wrong?"

He tries to look away from her so she won't see the fear in his
eyes.  He can't bear that shame. He's supposed to protect her, take
care of her, not the other way around.  But he can't seem to look
away.  With enormous effort, he says, "I think I'd better get back
to the hotel."

Mulder might be amused to see that as they hurry to the car, they
pass paramedics carrying young John from the ambulance in the
emergency bay into the hospital, where his spleen will have to be
removed from the impact of his fall.


Mulder, who has lived before in the mouth of madness, seems to have
established some kind of sanctuary there. A calm inner place I
haven't found in anyone else.   Far from being made claustrophobic
by the confinement of his own awareness, he has claimed this space
for his own, hung paintings on the walls, arranged the furniture.

And there he is now,  putting together his own little puppet show,
and all I can do, really, is watch, and wonder, and consider that
he was well named Fox.

*** 

oyster 17

(Note: the conclusion to oyster is NC-17 and may be offensive to
those with a sensitivity to graphic sexual scenes and/or
shellfish.)

*****

They plunge from the steaming night, which is quiet but for the
rush of cars and the chirping of crickets, into the carnival
atmosphere of the Luxor hotel, where Skinner's room is on the
sixteenth floor. Scully clings to his arm-it's like holding onto an
arm made of wood, he's so rigid-and steers him through the
confusion of ringing, clanging, whistling machines, the cacophony
of tokens clattering down into the wells, and sirens going off, and
people shouting to each other and shrieking with laughter. The room
swirls around them but Scully finds her way.

Could it possibly BE any colder in this place? Scully half expects
to see her breath in the air, and still the gamers shouldering each
other at the tables are sweating freely. On the other hand, the air
on the ground floor, infused with pure oxygen to keep the players
from wearing out, clears her head in a few minutes. She is worried
about Skinner. Beyond that, she refuses to think of anything else.

He has not spoken a word since they left the hospital, just stared
straight ahead with that squinting glare, moving on autopilot, his
jaw clenched until she can see the muscles standing out under his
ears. In response to her anxious questions he only shakes his head,
and when a barmaid comes breast-first around a corner and cuts them
off, he almost runs over her.

A group of party-goers gets into the elevator with them. They laugh
and talk in loud voices, a little drunk; their brightly colored
clothes hurt Scully's eyes. It seems to take forever to get to the
right floor, get him to his room, card the door, and get safely
inside.

Once there, he only stands motionless, but she can tell there's
plenty going on behind those fiercely narrowed eyes. She knows from
experience how hard it is to get him to talk about his pain, so
she'll have to just play it by ear.

"Sir, maybe you should lie down for awhile," she suggests.

"Scully." He bites the word out of the air, and she jumps a little
at the unexpected sound of his voice. "Don't let me go to sleep."

She shakes her head. "No, sir, I won't."

He stretches out on the bed, loosening his tie, nudging off his
shoes so they fall with muted thumps to the carpet. He turns out
the bedside lamp and then there's only the light from the open door
of the bathroom, which is enough to illuminate the room fairly
well. He takes a deep breath and sighs it out again, staring at the
overhead light fixture.

Scully goes into the bathroom and gets him a tumbler of water. It
takes her approximately thirty seconds, because she rinses out the
glass first and wipes it down with toilet paper before she fills
it. When she comes back into the room, Skinner is gone.

********

The Dark Man rises up before Skinner in the hellish heat of the
alien desert and hangs over the waves of sand. Scully is there,
too, although almost translucent, like a painting on a silk screen
held up to a window. She stands looking down at an empty bed, and
there is something significant and elusive and terribly poignant
about that tableau. Colors flicker rapidly in and out, as if the
light itself is forming into the shape of a body there on the bed.
It's Mulder. But it isn't Mulder. Just a shimmering image. The Dark
Man floats on the heat waves like a great black crow, just beyond
him. Mulder is moving his mouth as if trying to tell Skinner
something, though there's no sound. He gestures at Scully. He
spreads his arms in the air. His lips are forming two words, over
and over, as clearly as he can, and Skinner can just barely make
them out:

Let go.

******

Scully hesitates, thinking he's just gotten up and gone somewhere
else in the room, and looks around, and then she hurries to the bed
and puts the glass down on the nightstand. It makes a sharp
clinking sound, and at that instant, Skinner is there again, in a
flash like sunlight off the edge of a knife, looking up at her.

With a frightened little cry, Scully jumps back, and he sits up
quickly, swinging his feet to the floor, and reaches out to catch
her wrist to keep her from falling.

And there they are. The big man on the bed holding onto the pretty,
red haired woman gaping down at him, the two of them connected by
that touch. And even if they can't see the molecules sparkling in
the air around them, they are there, physically impacting
everything, changing everything.

What's happening now? I have no idea. It's Mulder's puppet show,
and I am only his audience. He doesn't have much power, but that's
like saying he doesn't have much vision compared to someone totally
blind.

"Let go," Scully whispers, her voice a throaty little rush of air.

She can see his face clearly in the dim light, his shining eyes.
His strange, shining eyes.

Let go, Skinner. He sees her breathing a little too fast through
her parted lips, feels the slight pull of her muscles against his
and the rapid pulse under his fingertips. He knows that if he lets
go he will lose the world but gain entry into Paradise. All he has
to do now is release that which grounds him, and believe he can
fly.

Inside Scully all the math is running together into fluttering
notes of music. He loosens his grip, but only so he can run his
hands up her wrists to her forearms, all the way past the elbows to
her shoulders, in a sensual caress that can't be mistaken for
anything in the world other than a raw hunger to give and to take
pleasure from her body.

She must know, or at least suspect. She must know who it is. She
must realize it's not Skinner, though it is, and it isn't, and then
again, it is. Come on, Scully. Let go and see what's there in front
of you.

The parallax view. What is Skinner fighting? Mulder? Himself? He
doesn't care if he's only the vessel delivering to her what she
wants; that's what his love is about. He just wants the chance to
give her pleasure, the most intense pleasure of her life, and all
he has to do is quit struggling so damn hard and just

let

go.

*****

Scully stares at Skinner with such a look of utter consternation it
would be funny under any other circumstances. It's not like she
hasn't seen cadres of not-Mulders in her career as his partner.
It's not that difficult to accept him as someone else, but it is
astonishingly difficult to accept Skinner as anyone but the man
she's come to know these past few days, the man for whom she's
grown such slow deepening trust, a respect bordering on admiration.
To imagine him seeing her naked, feeling his hands pulling her
panties down to her knees, even to realize that in a few seconds
he's going to put his hard mouth against her soft one, and push his
hands under her shirt and feel her breasts, is too much for her.
She shivers all over and backs away, and he rises and moves with
her until she feels her shoulders touch the wall. He never takes
his hands from her arms, and she thinks she might cry with shame or
sorrow or helplessness to stop what's going to happen, wanting him
to, wanting him to stop, and afraid to look into his eyes again for
fear of seeing what she wants to see there. And the fact is, she
has never been so sexually excited in her entire life.

Her mind rabbits around in terrified circles. Did she shave her
legs last night or the night before? She meant to wash her hair
this morning but there wasn't time. She's got on the bra with the
safety-pinned strap. Actually, it's a little surprising that Scully
can think at all, considering that a good deal of the blood supply
to her brain has been shunted in other directions. Profound
biochemical changes are occurring in her as each moment passes. Her
body is altering in small secret ways that totally ignore the
chattering in her head.

Her skin flushes and changes subtly, takes on a musky scent; and
every time he breathes it in, his penis grows harder and his balls
tighter and his tenderness recedes in the roughness of increasing
desire. Her skin is hot where his hands touch her, and when his
mouth finally comes down on hers, all thinking stops. His tongue
forces her lips apart and there's no gentle coaxing, but she
doesn't seem to need it. She returns the kiss with a hunger that
matches his, and he holds her head in both hands and moves his body
into hers, his hips not touching her hips because he has to bend
his knees to reach her when they stand. That's easily fixed; he
takes her to the bed, and they lie down, still kissing feverishly.

This is how they make love: he begins to rub her breasts through
her blouse, and her nipples stiffen under his big hands, inviting
his mouth, and he has to uncover them layer by layer, and then when
he does, he sucks at them, and she moans and squeezes her eyes shut
with a look of pure agony; their facial expressions for unbearable
pleasure are the same as they are for unbearable pain. Really, I
don't know how they keep from killing each other. His hands are
under her skirt, sliding up and down between her closed legs, and
with each stroke her thigh muscles are loosening and then she lets
him do what he wants; it's just token resistance, but overcoming it
seems to be part of their arousal. He finds her clitoris through
the silky panties and she raises her hips up each time he moves his
fingers there. He puts his hand down the front of the satiny
material and then pushes them down so that they roll off neatly
when she arches up again, and then she really is exposed. He kisses
her all the way down her stomach and pushes her legs open and puts
his mouth on her sex and licks her, first like a warm, wet washrag,
and then faster and harder, and Scully grasps the cloth of his
shirt, which for some reason he has only unbuttoned and not
removed, and drags him up to her, and pushes it from his shoulders.
And fine shoulders they are, too. Then they are two naked people,
with a fine sheen of sweat making their bodies slippery and
perfectly contoured against together. And even naked like this, for
the first time in days, Scully isn't cold anymore.

There's not much foreplay beyond that; he wants to fuck her and she
wants to feel him inside her body. The first thrust is a little
rough and she tightens up; he's too big to be at all careless, and
he gets control and tries it a little easier the second time,
although it all happens so fast that in just a few seconds she can
accommodate his size and he is thrusting as hard and fast as he can
and then he doesn't seem too big at all, but perfect, absolutely
perfect, and Scully feels all the world rushing up to a single
focus of sensation, a moment when she cries out and puts her teeth
in the skin just over his collarbone, but doesn't bite down, just
tries to muffle her deep groan before she loses control altogether,
which she does, and she cries out Mulder! just once, and hears the
echo shudder all through his body. He feels her orgasm in every
place where he is flesh, in every place where he is spirit, and
both Skinner and Mulder know every aching second of being buried
inside her wet, pulsing flesh before the body human does what it
was created to do, in a white rush of life and a cry wrenched from
his heart. Their hearts. All of their hearts together.

Scully's climax lasts a long time, coming down from the height of
pleasure by slow degrees. Mulder is lucky to have lasted as long as
he did, and he slides out of her and slides out of Skinner and
slips away, wanting to hold on, but finding it impossible to
continue. At the very moment Mulder fades away, he hears a sound
that might be the flapping of wings.

Then it's just Skinner holding her, rolling her over and cuddling
her back against his chest, one hand around her body to reach
between her legs and sustain her pleasure as long as he possibly
can. Spooning her protectively, possessively, so she won't turn
around and look at him again. Fingering her, holding her, kissing
the smooth skin on the back of her neck and shoulders, feeling his
balls tingling where they have slapped against her so hard. His
battered old heart aches with love and loss and happiness and
sorrow all at the same time.

And at that moment, miles away, the earth moves.

*** 

oyster 18 and epilogue

Miles away, at Tracy Buckland's dig, the world is coming undone.
Bright yellow police tape flutters wildly where it cordons off the
section around the pit where the mound was discovered, the thin
stakes shuddering and working their way out of the ground.

In a routine investigation by the FBI, two bodies have turned up
within the perimeter of the site, victims of the gambler's scam,
and that part of the dig has been frozen until the Museum and the
police have negotiated some sort of agreement about how to proceed
with excavations. Dogs were brought in to search the area, but none
of them would get out of the truck, nor would they stop howling
until they were halfway back to town.

Now, under the infinite reach of the deep purple sky, splashed with
stars like a bucket of flung milk, the rocks begin to tremble so
violently that all the young students jump up and run around,
thinking it's an earthquake. It might well be. Tremors over the
millions of years have propelled me gradually towards the surface,
and now I, who have been here since the crust of the earth first
cooled, prepare at last to take flight.

The mound in the bottom of the pit arches up like a breaching
whale, and begins to split apart with a rumbling, buzzing sound, a
billion weedeaters, a billion model planes, a billion cicadas
shrilling loud enough to crack open the night. Rocks and dirt fall
inward as the surface breaks apart, and my vessel and I are
released into the physical moment. This will be mercifully brief; I
have to go through this plane to leave it.

I hear their shrieking, see them slapping themselves all over as if
covered with ants, and throwing their hands over their eyes,
refusing to admit to a vision they'll never be able to fully
remember or fully forget or describe in any detail. They are much
smaller than their minds would suggest.

I want to be gone, but I pause. There's still that one thing.

Mulder.

He wants to be released back into time and physicality. But he's
the one who's changed things, who has gone so far in that now he
can't find his way back. He'll just have to wait until they dream
him back into the world; he's got one leg in and one leg out, so
there's nothing I can do without destroying him. Sooner or later
he'll figure this out for himself, and then when Scully calls to
him again with her heart, she'll pull on that other leg, and he'll
make his sudden, dramatic appearance.

As will, ultimately, the tiny egg buried deep inside Scully, which
is meeting Skinner's sperm even now. This is the sad story of these
people: they understand how to split the atom to murder the world,
how to pierce physical existence and spill the warm dark flow of
human history onto the sorrowful fields of destruction, but they
also think that what they do here, this splitting of cells in order
to a replicate their bodies, will result in the creation of a new
human being.

How could I tell them in a way they'd understand? There is no way.
We are both like the oyster. We both are vessels of creation, and
not creators ourselves.

The pearl is not the oyster's child.

Later there will be arguments, and valid ones perhaps, that the
baby has Skinner's eyes, or Scully's nose, or a tendency to
sunburn; she got that from her mom, they'll say. Never dreaming
that Scully is only a vessel, or that in her vessel is the true
thing, the Scullyessence, a pearl that every year with Mulder has
irritated to growth until it shines like a star in the galaxies. Or
that now within the flesh of her body the seed of another pearl has
been placed, not reproduced, but created. They never seem to wonder
that where true life comes from, the animation in the eyes, the
tenderness in the heart, the goodness of the human spirit, even
though they endlessly pontificate about genes and morality. Skinner
has illustrated that they are all too horribly aware of the
dichotomy between flesh and spirit, which seems to exist in
everyone in near total opposition. It's that opposition, that
irritation, that creates the human soul. A very inefficient road to
evolution, but give them another million years or so and maybe
they'll have come up with something.

Mulder knows. He has seen the spark of divinity in mankind, and he
knows that if one magic exists, there must be others. When he finds
his way back, will he remember how to speak, how to tell them? If
he does, will anyone listen? Surely not without proof, without
"physical" evidence. Scully won't, except maybe at the instant she
holds that proof in her arms and looks down into its eyes for the
first time and recognizes, however briefly, that she has witnessed
a true miracle.

My journey continues, and the stars spread apart, the great open
spaces between galaxies enlarge; I am a roar of fire and a rush of
wind, and gone.

****

Epilogue

On a beach at dawn, Tracy Buckland and the Dark Man are having tea
under a big blue and yellow umbrella. Mulder sits listening to the
murmur of their conversation as they discuss Great Art. Tracy is
explaining the difference between Monet and Manet. Far away on the
rockier shores, a brontosaurus nibbles tender bits of algae from
the open palm of a smiling woman who speaks to him in Spanish, and
now and again the great arching back of a plesiosaur breaks the
smooth blue surface of distant waters. A blond boy runs up and down
the beach throwing rocks in its direction.

Mulder sits in the shade of the umbrella, watching the endless roll
of the ocean. No rush. He drinks his tea, serene and thoughtful,
waiting for the sound of human voices to call him home.

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown... 
Til human voices wake us, and we drown."

(T.S.Eliot, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock")

end