Fathoms Five ~ Page 4
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He considered time a medium, a syrup of memory, the round and round gyre of the sea. Scully, of course, was profoundly Newtonian: time was invariant, chronic, untold.

Mulder liked to keep his options open. He imagined the lifespans of philosophies, one giving into the next, new enlightenment built on the old. You could go backward along the chain, see the archaeopteryx's stone feathers come back to life, because nothing really dies.

He bit his thumbnail and watched the three young people fan out across the marine terminal's vast loading dock, kicking a pebble between them. Mulder waited at the car while Scully took on the port authority. She could get through life without an FBI badge, her eyes deadlier than cyanosis, but Mulder was still missing his, twenty years on.

Everything dies. Who said that?

She was making straight for him now, wearing her sunglasses, everything under control. Mulder hated when he couldn't see her eyes.

He leaned against the car, blotting her out with his shoulder. Half-glimpsed, she wasn't quite substantial, her orange soda hair glinting blue, as if she masqueraded under opposite colors, like colors printed off-set in a comic book. Like the feeling of a small child drinking water from his hand, catching a half-certain glimpse of her made his stomach tingle.

She brushed something from his shoulder. William was jogging toward them.

"How did you get permission?" he asked.

"I'm a Navy brat," she said. "There's a password."

"Be like Dad - keep Mum," Mulder said, looping his binoculars around his neck.

"I'm a Navy brat, too," said Matthew, linking his arm through Scully's. They walked into a city of shipping containers.

"What am I, then?" asked William.

"You're an FBI squib, an X-Files sprog," Mulder said. They came out of an alley of cans and took a faceful of ocean air. A graceful bight of mooring cable curved up the side of an enormous ship.

"Is that it? Is that it?" William asked breathlessly. "It's huge!"

Scully caught up with him and rubbed his back to calm herself.

The ship rose above them, immense, tight and musical as a cathedral bell, the prow curling outward like a petal. Hundreds of feet above the main deck the great crosses of the radar towers supplicated above the sea. Mulder recalled the Norwegian Sea years ago, an absolute nightmare assuaged only by Scully's presence.

"It's a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser," Scully said. "Seven hundred feet long, ten thousand tons of displacement, and it used to pack some fairly serious warheads."

"You're not surprised by how big it is?" Mulder asked.

"I've been on it before," Scully said tightly. Captain Scully and his father-daughter issues and his monstrous warship would ever remain an enigma for Mulder. He'd never met the man. He really only knew him in terms of his aphorisms, which Scully brought forth from time to time.

Matthew said, "Dana," and turned her, arm around her, as Mulder held up the camera. Scully's mouth snapped shut. The blank alien eyes of her sunglasses returned nothing. He photographed the two of them in the shadow of the ship, although he knew the picture would never make it to the computer.

William was so excited he loped ahead. Mulder and Scully exchanged a look of amusement. Arable ran after him, and Matthew strolled along, pausing to spit in the harbor.

Mulder and Scully slowly climbed the cleated gangplank. "And you claimed I'd never take you on cruise," Mulder said, tugging on the back of her jacket. Just the thought of boarding a ship made him queasy. The water below them looked as thick and greasy as soup, and the ship sighed and heaved against the tires that padded the quay.

"What about the Bermuda Triangle?" Scully asked over her shoulder.

On deck, she folded her sunglasses and put them in her pocket. He stood examining her glorious teary eyes as she silently asked him for answers he didn't have. "Hey," he said, and stroked the place beneath her chin that made her eyes close and her lips get soft and when he had her just right he kissed her, but not as much as she wanted him to.

"Well, I'll be topside," he said, standing back and slapping his thigh with his newspaper.

She cleared her throat. "Do you have any idea what that means?" she asked.

Their smiles slid slowly forth. "Don't worry, you'll make a sailor of me yet, Scully," he said.

Up on the flight deck, he crossed the helipad and leaned on the rail. He was far above the water, wind at the back of his neck. Ballast water gouted from a valve in the side of the ship, likely laden with invasive seaweeds and foreign disease. They, too, had a right to exist. There were proper frameworks for existence, and things that denied the frame.

The oily black water was slack. If he leaned farther into the wind he could take a long slow half-gainer down into the drink. What was left of him would turn up in a few days, nibbled and pale and hard to identify, no longer with a care in the world. People would say it was a selfish act. Was it selfish to lose ones balance? Was it selfish to carelessly drown in the middle of writing a book? To experiment with handguns? To put ones head in the oven when you had a living child?

He found a capstan beyond the helipad where the flat anvil prow jutted over the water. He tried to read. The wind jerked at his newspaper and the light was too bright. A jet-propelled feeling hit him every time he thought of Europe. William and Scully had been packing for weeks, but Mulder hadn't even begun to think what he should take.

He slid a sunflower seed into his mouth and sucked the salt from the shell. He would need his writing notebook. Something to give Arable when they parted, so that she'd never forget him. His fossilized megalodon tooth, maybe. His sea monster key ring. He'd write her a note. She was quite a kid, shiningly smart, nervous and lonely. He'd been there; she'd be all right.

It wasn't that he didn't want to go to Europe. It was just that the timing was off. The spark plugs in the lawnmower would corrode. William's hillside mathematics, like a giant's equation, would be lost forever, the grass grown out and fading in the heat.

Nor did it seem right to leave the dog, who had given them his whole life and his whole heart without hesitation.

He needed a parting gift for William, too, to keep his spirits up. His two-volume Complete Far Side, maybe, except it would be awful to lug overseas. Just one Far Side cartoon, then, 'Mutants on the Bounty', or one of the scientist ones where they'd crossed out the name in the caption and written in 'Scully', laughing for ten minutes at Scully's expense.

He'd never had a better time than with William. He wanted the boy to break away, to have his own life, but he knew that wasn't the way it worked.

He thought he would make a study of all the things that watch us from above, satellites and birds and God and news helicopters. He would like to go over the earth like an albatross, until a crossbow brought him down.

Scully crossed the helipad clasping a small wooden box. He slid sideways on the broad capstan and she settled down against him and he wrapped his arms around her and tucked his face into her neck. She shivered. He rubbed her belly as her breathing slowed, and for the first time in days he felt her relax.

"Did the kids find Grandpa Scully's bunk?" he asked.

Scully smiled without opening her eyes. "They're up in the gun turret right now, fending off Kamikazes and submarines. And they were variously impressed with the mess decks and a Japanese vending machine. The barber chairs. The cinema. All those toilets in a row in the head."

Mulder kissed her hair, read a few paragraphs about problems with Afghanistan's Ring Road, then kissed her hair again. In the sunlight he could see freckles faint as toasted sugar on the bridge of her nose. She found the camera in his pocket, and sat with her hands cupped around the screen. Mulder heard clicking and the tiny buzz as she deleted every picture she was in, a practice he had to silently tolerate.

Mulder liked to think that he could forgive Scully anything, but that it was in her nature to put him to the test. He did not like to think in terms of love because love was an unavoidable fact of nature; once dyed into one's deep tissue there was nothing to be done about it. He did not love Scully so much as he could not eradicate her. He could no more exist without her than he could without his liver, or so he fondly imagined. He would never, ever tire of looking at her face.

His latest task was to remove himself from geocentrism. He was not the center of anything, nor was his planet. Nothing about his life mattered an iota, not even Scully. This enormous solid ship would be cut up for scrap. Mulder's body would get old. Inside he would feel exactly the same. Scully would look the same but not feel the same. Already, she did not feel the same inside.

"What's that you've got there?" he asked.

She opened the little teak box and revealed a dial that looked like a clock's face ringed in brass. "It's a marine chronometer. They insisted I have it."

Mulder stroked the small brass impulse roller. Surely it was too antique to have been used on a modern cruiser, every inch of which appeared to be thickly glopped with camouflage gray. "Do you think he used it?"

"I don't know," she breathed, teary. She closed the box and he kissed the rough edge of her hair at her cold temple. William shouted above them.

Mulder looked up, leaning backwards. William and Arable were hanging over a rail high above.

"Hey" William shouted.

"Ahoy there," called Mulder.

"Hey, Arab wants to know about you guys - was it love at first sight?"

"No," called Mulder.

"Emphatically no," Scully whispered.

"She thought I was crazy. We were just friends for a long, long, time," Mulder called.

William and Arable exchanged a veiled glance.

"A very long, long time," Scully murmured.

"That movie last night was weird," William called.

"Yeah, well, that wasn't a movie - that was real life," Mulder pointed out.

"Yeah, well, real life is weird."

"It is," Mulder agreed.

"I don't want to ruin your lives," Scully said.

Mulder sighed, and folded his paper.

"Look at me."

She turned under his arm and looked straight into his eyes.

"This is it, right now. Breathe in," he said. "Scully? Have you ever doubted me?"

Scully sounded like she was spitting out a sunflower shell.

He pressed his face into her hair and smiled too. "Let's rephrase that," he said. "Has there ever been a phenomenon we haven't prevailed over?"

"I'm not so sure we got the better of those mothmen," Scully said.

"Can I borrow those?" William asked, panting as he came up. He unlooped Mulder's binoculars from around his neck. Matthew strolled past, knuckling William's cheek, his deck shoes lashed with forest-green paint.

"Conquistadors," said Mulder. "We had to snuggle for warmth and you sang 'Froggie Went A-Courtin'."

"Mom sang?" William asked, nearby, binoculars to his eyes. "Were dogs howling for miles?"

"Oh, ha ha," Scully said coldly.

"The Dylan version or the old spiritual?"

"No, it wasn't 'Froggie Went A-Courtin'," Scully said. She snapped her fingers.

"Jeremiah Smith was a bullfrog, da da," Mulder sang. "That always makes me think of 'The Big Chill.'"

"That's Three Dog Night," said William.

"When it doesn't make me think of Scully's un-government-sanctioned snuggling of me in the woods," said Mulder.

"It's actually called 'Joy to the World'," said William.

"Let's just say that you get all your musical talent from me, me boy," Mulder said happily. He tightened his arms around Scully.

"What about the conquistadors?" William asked.

"Breathe in," Mulder murmured into Scully's hair. "This is it, right now."

She inhaled the wet salt air, ripe with rot and metal.

"Now, breathe out," he said, whispering against her neck. And as she exhaled he could feel the wave of time that continuously pedaling her away through the dark stars, and he clung to her. He opened his eyes to make it check, and sunlight stabbed into him.

"I think this boat is sinking," he commented. "This rusty bucket of bolts."

"It's just full of bilge. They're pumping it out."

"We'll sink right here in the harbor. It'd be the story of my life." Mulder saw the three of them lined up at the rail before him, so fresh and so beautiful in their temporary youth, all fallen into a daze at the sunlight fracturing on harbor water. Matthew rubbed his scratchy chin and yawned. Arable leaned into William, whispering. Mulder recognized the nonchalant lean, the casual whisper of determined just-friends; he knew the intense beauty of the person you dared not touch.

"The kids are starving, Mulder, let's go," Scully said, without opening her eyes.

He held up the camera, but it was hard to see the screen in the bright light, and he took it on faith that it would capture the wind and the three young people in the bow of the old ship.

"I know you think you're the only one going through this," he said to her.

She twitched argumentatively in his arms.

"You know as well as I do that the baby was a miracle," he said.

She nodded, after a moment.

"And miracles always happen for a reason," he said.

Scully looked down and opened the box again. Mulder could see his own reflection in the glass dial, his forehead wrinkling worriedly. He looked healthy enough, maybe he weighed a little more than he had ten years ago. He was aging. This seemed a touching thing to him: the process of aging as endearing proof of being alive. He was not such a bad guy, when you got to know him. I'll miss me when I'm gone, he thought.

He thought of time as a medium in which you could move, forwards or back. In various mythologies the standard of enlightenment meant learning that you had had the answer the whole time, that it was always right there in front of you. The answer was you, the answer was her. The answer was yes.

William looked at them over his shoulder, hair spiking in the wind. The swells rose up and the rusty ship shifted beneath them, and Mulder swallowed woozily and held onto Scully. William gripped the rail and gasped, his eyes on his parents. "Oh, Mom, I'm going across the ocean!"
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'Full fathom five thy father lies:

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.'

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest
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You would not even be reading this story were it not for Khyber, who blew the dust off, offered some very sensible suggestions, and encouraged me to post it. Jenn was a fantastic sounding board, and produced extensive, thought-provoking meta. Carol, too, was very helpful. JET swooped in at the eleventh hour with brilliant, scintillating beta and basically blessed the whole endeavor and saved my sorry behind in more ways than I care to enumerate.

None of these three let me off the hook for a second. They kept me honest. They made me a whole person. I owe them everything and they owe me nothing. You get the picture.

The title derives from a childhood mishearing of Shakespeare's phrase. A fathom equals six feet. In the old days anything dropped into five fathoms of water - thirty feet - was irretrievably lost. Rather appropriately, the phrase is also used to mean something like 'irretrievably sunken in despair'.

- Hey, I didn't say this was a happy story!

I do love all of you. Thanks for reading!
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