'Vespers'
by Penumbra (penumbra23@hotmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Category: S/R UST
______________________
"Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceship flying
in the yellow haze of the sun..."
--Neil Young
After the Goldrush
______________________
Here is an organic-looking carcass in New Mexico gypsum,
sucked dry by ants, shipwrecked and scorched. 1947. Here
is the CIA's SR-71 Blackbird drone, 65,000 pounds of
thrust, a ramjet like a bullet off the firing pin,
shatterer of windows. Here are sacrificed souls,
mindfucked, probed, their bovines mutilated, their lives
a wreck. Here are air bursts, bombheads, ten miles of
runway, and six kinds of rattlesnake. Thought Police.
Project Grudge, asshole stealthie joystickers, Plutonium
36, Black Yak, Teal Rain. Underground explosions through
acoustical bedrock. The robotic Aurora spyplane,
photographed over Australia, with its escort of F-111
Aardvarks. Here we have fallout, and verdant magnesium
flares. Heat-seekers. Hangar 18. MIG Ferrets.
Rotundums, mandalas, and the Eye in the Sky.
Ha, Scully would like this - Project 'Moby Dick' -
military spy balloons surfing as weather watchers.
'Pentagonia'.
Home Base, Paradise Ranch, Groom Lake, Watertown.
Area 51.
Whatever you call it, God, I want to go.
Dreamland.
Nope, Scully would definitely NOT like this. In fact,
Scully would have a mutilated bovine were I to mention
it. Her Moby Dick mentality - trapped for years on the
seas with a madman at the helm - that's me, I guess.
Psycho killer, qu'est que c'est? That awful little
cannibalistic dog. Wonder if she slept with it. Naw,
Scully's too clean. Did they lie around naked and watch
TV? Scully's never lain around naked in her life. Not
that I do much either, with spyholes, spooks, wiretaps
and laser surveillance hemming me in. Not to mention
Scully and that damned key. She'll barge in here one day
and catch me whacking it off.
My little Nefertiti with her nose in the air,
moon-skinned, hidebound and contrary. Aphoristic. She's
right, I'm right, we're both right and the other is
wrong. It's sibling rivalry in the sickest and safest
possible way.
Venus on the half-shell.
Eve, red-delicious and python-entwined.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey,
don't you know that I love you?
There's a noise in the hall, taptap, and I glance around
for my piece, even though I doubt if They were finally
coming to hose me They'd be polite enough to knock. But
it's the littlest billygoat gruff, and she triptraps in
when I yell that it's open.
Every particle has an anti-particle, and mine is about as
opposite of me as you can get.
She stands in the living room doorway, weary as a soldier
in her black coat, her marmalade hair a bronzy glint in
the depths of the room.
She smells like rain. She smells better than anyone I've
ever known in my life, and sometimes I wonder if that's
what makes me like her so much, a sort of olfactory bias,
but that theory's for crap because I've been stuffed up
with head colds and still loving her madly.
Scully always goes after a cold of mine with Gurkha
intent, making me choke down echinacea and garlic
capsules. Like a racehorse with a hay cough, I stand
while she prods the glands in my neck and pries open
my mouth to ogle my tonsils.
"So what's the predicament of the day?" she asks. Nice
of her not to inquire why she has found me sitting here
in the dark like a bleedin' nosferatu so many times.
Scully pries the least of any woman I've ever been
involved with, and not through lack of curiosity. I'm
beginning to grasp what a rarity this level of mutual
respect is.
"I got a call from an inside informant in Area 51," I
say calmly, as though my blood isn't astir with
excitement. "We're meeting him tomorrow night."
"Area 51."
"Yeah, Scully, the Shangri-La of UFOlogy! Level 5.
Black aircraft. Roswell technology. 4 million acres
of bomb range. You're gonna love it."
Scully looks unconvinced.
"Remember that little black and white movie I showed
you once?" I ask. "The saucer the military was trying
to fly back in the '50's. It was spinning around on
the ground. Remember that? That was in Dreamland."
"You've been running," she remarks, eyeing my sweaty
hair. She lets my flimflam slide and crosses to knock
back a shot from my glass of water. She doesn't mind my
germs. I don't mind hers. It's very intimate. It didn't
happen overnight, but the first time we started trading
a can of soda back and forth through a graveyard shift
in an unmarked car, I knew the infrastructure of our
partnership was something durable and fine.
Scully's eyeing the open files on the coffee table and
I move over on the couch so she'll sit down. I pull a
manila folder over the glossies of abductees and their
implant scars; not seeing any need to dredge that up.
"Have you booked a flight?" she asks, as I flick on a
lamp.
"Already called the airline." She's still cranky about
my Bermuda Triangle foray, she and Byers giving me CPR
on a cabin cruiser in the Sargasso Sea. I'm supposed to
be keeping a low profile, which is hard for someone
with a nose like mine. That's partially why I'm not
heading to Nevada solo, even though this isn't a case,
and Kersh will have me boiled in lead if he finds out.
Other reasons include Scully's feelings, and
semi-sincere promises I made while still tranked to the
gills in the hospital. There's also the fact that I
enjoy her company. She shoots sharp, and there's no
match for a good blaster at your side, or at least a
pathologist packing a 1056. Anyway, she's my story and
I'm sticking to her.
When the nuclear bomb goes off you can see everything
around you in the neon powderflash of elements dividing;
see right through your closed eyelids, through the
x-rayed radius and ulna in your upflung forearm. You see
clear and pure and later you don't speak of it. Scully
and I are like that, eyes closed, but still we see. We
catalogue, but never mention it. We are weathering the
explosion together, and it's one hell of a ride.
"I hear they tie down animals around the test sites, to
see how many neutrons they can take." Scully challenges.
I arise and stand at the window.
"You realize you're on your own with this, don't you?"
she asks, gesturing with a grainy picture of a
manta-shaped craft.
"Aw, come on, don't bail on me, Scully," I whine. "This
is one of the most crystalline moments of all our work
on the X Files. This is the mother of all cover-ups,
this is the answer to the ultimate conspiracy, this is
paradigm shifts and Tesla coils and crop circles in the
desert. This is even better than the South Carolina
Lizard Man!"
"And I didn't realize anything would ever top the
South Carolina Lizard Man," she says rather saucily.
I sink into myself, crossing my arms, exuding misery
like noxious radio isotopes.
"Mulder - after the Bermuda Triangle, after Crump,
after the Antarctic, you know we've got to try and
straighten up. Here's Kersh in with the Smoking Man,
and Skinner risking his job to help me find you. We
just can't afford any more trouble right now. Look - "
She holds out her hand, empty, but somehow offering
more things than I could ever name. "Look. If you go,
I don't want to know about it. Go, and come back, and
be safe about it. If I'm not implicated, it won't draw
so much attention."
I sit down and look at her, and we replay the same
argument silently, staring at each other. Her
Mediterranean gaze strafes me at a molecular level.
I suppose she is right, so I sigh in concession, and
shiver, chilled by my sweat.
"You're hungry," she says. There's that evening feeling
of suspension, deadlocked silver twilight sieved through
trees and smog and glass. There's the groundswell sense
of approaching a mirage, of crusaders in the breach, the
inkling that all this blood and sand and frankincense has
been for some purpose, to some end of knowledge. There's
Scully saying something about a sandwich, and the pewter
light subaqueous in her eyes.
I want to get out of these sweatpants and this sweaty
jock and rub heat into one of my knees but I go with
her because she's not through talking and I'll never
be through listening to her, even though her words
strike irksome chords that make me itch to take some
kind of unmeditated action.
We mooch into the elevator and eye each other from the
tilting corners of our partnership.
"It's this elevation of a military test site to
consecrated proportions that I don't understand, Mulder.
The fact that people believe the government is flying
UFOs around a dry lake bed in Nevada doesn't particularly
surprise me, but the fact that this compound is regarded
as the world's Mecca for extra-terrestrial technology is
too preposterous to contemplate. This misplaced Cold War
mentality, this premillennial tension, is simply a
mis-apportioning of blame. People have to blame someone
else for the state of the world so that they don't have
to take responsibility themselves. I mean, these are
people who believe that fluoride is put in the water as
a poison, that the earth is, indeed, flat, that the AIDS
virus is being developed as a means of warfare. Really,
if you think about it, it's no wonder that all this
neuroticism would find its zenith just two hours from
Las Vegas."
There's that tic that she gets in her left eye when
she's lying or speaking very earnestly, when the events
of her world defy her rationalizations, when she attempts
to drive them back with her logic.
"I mean, Mulder, this place has attained its mythological
status through hearsay, through convoluted systems of
misinformation, through the unbalanced prophecies of
doomsayers. These beliefs are the intellectual
cul-de-sacs of our times. It's 'crisis sociology'. A
cultural blindspot. And you, Mulder, are the
standard-bearer. You're the water boy for saucerheads,
the keeper of the faith. You're the Fisher King."
I close my eyes and groan deeply, stop dead on the
sidewalk. I try not to get pissed. "Scully, don't get
Arthurian on me when my blood sugar's down."
But she persists, looking up at me sharply. "What is
it with these people, with you Mulder? What are you
looking for? Why is this a way of life?"
"Maybe it's just something to love, Scully," I snap,
hungry, wound-up, and irritable. This shuts her up the
rest of the way to the corner.
Out of gloaming Alexandria we tramp into the deli like
a couple of pistoleros into a watering hole, jangling
the bell. There's something about a woman with a
concealed weapon, all the obvious penis connotations
aside, it adds an alertness to her aplomb. She cases
the joint so quickly you'd miss it if you blinked. I
lean against the counter and order a sub with turkey,
pastrami, pepperoni, dijon, extra sprouts, tomatoes,
cucumbers, three kinds of cheese, olives, onions,
pickles and roasted peppers. Scully stands there demurely,
she's heard it all before, and probably wasn't impressed
the first time. She presses a five dollar bill onto the
counter. We get a couple of liters of mineral water since
I suspect that she still doesn't trust the water in my
building, despite the intervention of the Board of Health.
She probably goes down and checks the filters every time
I'm actin' funny and she don't know why.
We navigate Hegal Street's effulgent sidewalks, bugs
scrumming in the streetlights. The river, off somewhere,
reeks of the sea.
"You think that I don't love anything, that I don't have
any true passions in my life," she says, her voice small
beside me.
"That is not at all what I think. I know that you love
trying to prove me wrong."
"You don't think it's our prerogative to alert them to
a security leak?"
"Scully, we have a chance to find out the truth! Do you
know how hard it is to get into Groom Lake?"
"You know what I love?" she asks suddenly.
"...Hamburger Wednesday?"
"What I love...is the fact that every atom that makes up
our beings has existed since the creation of the universe,
and that for this tiny flash of our lifetimes they are us,
they comprise us, they walk around this planet in our
guise, and then we die and disintegrate and they move on
and become part of something else. So, essentially we go
on, in a jillion different directions, and become as many
new things, and how can you really die, if that's what
happens?"
"You can't," I say quietly, in the elevator. I look into
her eyes. Atoms of Scully, atoms of me. My stomach growls
and something flickers inside her, oxytocin, the maternal
flame; she seems to restrain herself from patting my belly.
I unlock my door with my mouth full of filched pastrami,
my soul a little too large for its vessel.
We put our feet on the coffee table and chow down on
the sandwich, watch the end of M*A*S*H. My life feels
almost normal, if I don't glance down at the files
between my running shoes. Scully shucks off her coat and
keeps me company for a little while. I'm still on the
epinephrine headrush from my Dreamland phone call, and
even though four pavement miles with a headwind took the
edge off, my brain is askirl like the Mandelbrot Set.
"You won't be able to sleep," Scully notes calmly when
I start to jiggle my foot. "Mulder, look at you; you'd
think it was Christmas." She herself looks sleepy, and
I half-hope she'll conk out here on the couch, like a
leprechaun after a productively obnoxious day.
"It IS Christmas," I say, my voice cracking like an
8th-grader. I pick alfalfa sprouts off the front of
my T-shirt and start to lecture her. "This is like
being granted an interview with the Majestic 12!It's
anti-mass fields and Transient Luminous Objects! It's
titanium-alloy remotes and hypersonic flight and
stargates. Don't you see, Scully, the prodigious leaps
in technology we've made since the Roswell debris was
recovered - fiber optics, night vision, and the silicon
microchip, cloaking technology, all these huge
technological forward jolts in the second half of the
twentieth century, when our great-grandparents were
still riding horses forty years before. Doesn't it make
you curious, doesn't it make you wonder?"
"What I wonder is why it can't be attributed to human
ingenuity."
"Isn't that an oxymoron?"
She bares her little fangs and turns the channel. We
watch part of 'Nova', something about volcanoes on Venus,
comfortable in our oddly cross-purpose kinship. We're
united by our misfit status, our minds trothed in a
Celtic knot of cerebral pursuit, no beginning and never
an end.
_______
This happens sometimes. The stern and rigid Agent Scully
comes over after a long day and you get a little food in
her and all of a sudden she's in this drowsy female
tangle on the sofa. It would be dangerous, if I let
myself think about it for more than a microsecond. She's
leaning back against a cushion, her knees pulled up,
her bare feet having wandered into the no man's land in
the middle of the couch, and the koi crowd into the
corner of their tank to gaze down at the seductive lure
of her hair.
Even my fish are enchanted with her. I graze her toes
with a pencil, the way you draw your finger up a
keyboard. "This little pig went to Dreamland."
She smiles faintly in the direction of the TV, shaking
her head, her frosty black lashes drooping.
________
"Well, good hunting," she says, as she leaves, quoting
Kipling in the foyer while I hover, watching her
button her coat, trying to absorb enough of her to
tide me over in the interim. "I'll be back before you
miss me," I say reassuringly. I open the door and she
looks up at me slowly and blinks like a sphinx with a
riddle.
This may be one of those evenings when I sit at the table
and scratch out a few rusty lines of poetry, an ode, a
sentiment that fails to reveal my depths, unfinished
scraps of verse on the back of an envelope. And I'll
watch the gray weight of light in the glass turn to a
shiny black embossment of my own image as the sky is
sucked free of light.
I start to pick up the mess on the coffee table and find
her keys under a furling of sandwich wrapper. I weigh
them in my hand. They're as Scully as any opinions she
wears, as her clothing, as her moods. They're the
ingot-weight of entrance, the clicking sealers of secrets.
I battle the water-swollen sash on the window and the
panes shudder as the frame slowly yields. Scully in
the long fall twilight, her shadow limned
Halloween-black behind her on the pavement.
"Scully, your keys!"
She stands back so I can toss them down. She stands
way back. Scully may face death on a regular basis,
but she's not about to die getting beaned by a key
chain commemorating the first moonwalk. She was five
at the time and doesn't really remember. She doesn't
buy into the theory, however, that the whole thing was
staged here on Earth. There are some things Scully takes
on faith.
The keys chink onto the narrow strip of grass between
the building and the sidewalk, metallurgic elements
returning to earth. She retrieves them and waves up
at me.
I watch her small form drift away down the sidewalk,
black coat flapping. She turns suddenly and catches me
looking. I twitch sheepishly, still feeling the imprint
of her keys in my hand. They are now in hers,
gravity-patched between us. Perhaps they were still
warm from my touch. We didn't touch each other once
this evening.
She tips her head back, baring her throat; I recognize
by her posture that she is opening herself to me. The
wind comes up behind her and rattles her coat.
"Okay, I'll go!" she yells, spreading her hands.
I grin, then, and nod. "Atta girl!" I yell.
She smiles and turns around in a circle, looks up at me
again, then stuffs her hands in her pockets and walks
backwards. I can barely see her skyward face. She shakes
her head and turns to confront the wind.
She is more than just atoms, she has been to the stars;
she is everything I seek. Macropterous, unearthly, alar,
she travels in a dark and recondite margin, weighted by
conundrum and bosh. She strides straight-shouldered at
death, at life. And into the labyrinthian realms of
mystery, she walks with me.
_________________________
Filches/homages: Iron Butterfly, The Talking Heads, Jimi
Hendrix, Botticelli, The Brothers Grimm, Star Wars.
Lashings of apologies all round.
Editing suggestions from: Lynda Vanden Elzen, Tracy
Estabrook, and Khyber. Muchas thanks.
Thanks also to everyone who pointed out that a Pomeranian
can't be naked. That's why I love youse!
_________________________
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