Parabiosis ~  Page 3
____________________

Mulder invited her to a party.

"Am I to actually believe - Mulder - that you still know how to
party?" She tried for sardonicism, to cover her surprise.

"You never forget how to party. Come on, Scully, it'll be fun." He
wound the clicky teeth and sent them chattering across the desk
towards her.

"Witnessing the regression of grown men into troglodytes isn't exactly
my definition of 'fun', Mulder."

Mulder's eyes narrowed challengingly. His office weapon of choice was
the staple gun - Scully turned her head away and waited patiently as
he fired off a few rounds in her general direction. She preferred
staples to rubber bands. He pushed back with his foot against the edge
of the desk, tilting his head in appraisal. Scully began to feel
uncomfortable. She dropped her eyes and checked her watch.

"Don't be a square, Scully-O."

She felt piqued. "Oh, you're really one to talk, Mulder!"

He tilted his head the other way, switching tactics. "How often do we
get invited to parties? And how often does the world feel like this?"

"How does the world feel?"

He flicked a damp sunflower hull from his fingers, seeking out the
Ticonderogas in the ceiling tiles. "It feels...verging. Penultimate."

Scully exhaled in irritation. "Mulder, nothing is going to happen.
Even the Russian nuclear power plants are prepared. It's just
premillennial tension."

"Please," he said, looking at her directly. "The end of the world
wouldn't be the same without you."

She lifted her chin. It was hard to argue with that. "All right, I'll
go," she lied.
__________________

There are rental cars, hallways, rafts of paper. There are hollow
cement parkades and still-life motel rooms. There are gritty winds,
plane tickets, piles of bulldozed snow. Their apartments are
contrasting and separate. They don't even live in the same state. It
gets dark by four. The terricolous  office, where they discuss and
ponder, is garbed in a bewildering pastiche of carcasses, space ships
and basketball trophies.

Beyond the city the ground is slimy, and wicked things crawl.

She sleeps curled on her side, exhausted, holding the blankets close.
She remembers to switch sides so that the shape of her skull will be
even. Before the alarm goes off she thinks that he is a completion
that bides in reserve.
__________________

The Lone Gunmen threw a party. It was the night of the winter
solstice, and the moon was full, at perigee-syzygy maxima. It was
unsettling, the moon so close at hand, like a face in the window.

A party could entail any scenario from baked brie and Riesling to pork
rinds and a garbage can of jungle juice. Not that the distinction
mattered, since she wasn't going.
____________________

Pod Monster Suite...Venus Adrift...Drop Dead Red...Geek Goddess
Blues...Egyptian Princess...Vanishing Man...Moonshot...Kludges, Worms
And Active X Modules...The Pomptitous of Love...Dead Man's
Party...Heavy Magick...New Year's Day...Red Right Hand...Goats Go To
Hell
____________________

Mulder thought of creatures that slash with incisors and claws. The
British Columbian Reptile Man, Windigos, El Chupacabra, the Boqs of
Bella Coola legend. Lycanthropes, Matlose, the Flintville Monster; the
pupating aliens, all slime and teeth.

He felt contented, waiting for his sandwich and Scully, not
necessarily in that order. The pub was cozy with the rain outside and
the murmuring lunch crowd. He sprawled his leg out of the booth like
their private signal, a blazed tree on their road to damnation.

He thought of this creature that existed, that even now lurked
somewhere with bad intent, a rotten smell under its nails. You killed
it with a wooden stake, a silver bullet, garlic, an odious chant. You
didn't look it in the eye or hark to its singing.

He listened for the bell over the door amid the plate-clashing of the
kitchens. She took him by surprise, scattering beads of water across
the table as she tossed her wet umbrella into the booth.

When did Scully get so hip to the babeness factor? All tailored and
slouchy, black bras, polished hair, insane shoes, a clattery,
unbuttoned, hot-breathed little bundle of ticking clock and rampant
hormones. He remembered how he felt in his own sexual prime and
calculated that her comportment was nothing short of miraculous.

"Hey," she said seriously, facing him across the table.

"What ho, apothecary?

The holidays weighed on both of them like clever mediums of torture.
After Thanksgiving they were avoiding any mention of Christmas. He
knew Christmas was especially hard on her because of her dad and
Emily. Atmospherics were sobersided and laden with long-term entendre;
he seriously doubted she would be opening sleepy presents on his couch
at five a.m. this year.

"I just got a call," she said.

He nodded once. Her silky shirt was pretty tight, so in keeping with
their custom she would leave her coat on, probably all day, as though
that somehow cancelled out the fact that she wore a tight shirt, and
that she was self-conscious enough to only reveal glimpses of it to
Mulder.

"Hydrous sodium carbonate," she enunciated. "It's natron, a
preservative." She shook out her paper napkin as their hot sandwiches
arrived, and they considered the fingernail scrapings of a corpse.

"This mountaintop attacker was covered in natron?"

"It's curious," said Scully, over her sandwich. Mulder ate her Greek
olives. He liked the oscular challenge of unpitted olives. He tried to
calculate the benefits of having a shark-toothed skullpunch tongue. He
had a vague idea it could be used in the drywall trade.

He didn't like to think about the creature's last moments alive.

"Gauze and natron," he said.

"Go ahead and say it, Mulder," she said, swallowing her club soda.

"Say what?" he asked, surprised. She got feta on her lip and he gave
an exaggerated lick of his own lip to demonstrate where. They resisted
smiling at each other.

"The Egyptians used natron as a preservative in the embalming process.
Along with resin-soaked gauze."

"A mummy?" he asked, incredulous, delighted.
____________________

There was a luna moth on the Coleman lamp.

The ring of light intersected the table but did not clasp her in its
circle. Scully was motionless in her chair, her eyes hard and bright
as she watched the moth. There was a strange sensation in her palms,
perhaps emptiness.

She tried to be rational about it, tried to picture how he would look
closed off and still. Perhaps they would have had to shave him. Humans
are simply energy converters; they are merely vehicles for gene
reproduction; they are just molecules jumping. The cycle dips like a
water wheel, plumbs the medium of death.

(Mulder - )

She had stared blankly at the boy who came from the University to tell
her, a tall, tall boy in a faded shirt. He reached towards her in a
half-finished conciliatory gesture, and the palm of his hand was much
lighter than the back, like the belly of a springbok.

Scully had stepped back, even as she recalled that Americans are
considered one of the coldest societies on earth. Mulder, on the other
hand, had the sense of personal space of a Bedouin, a Brazilian, a
Greek. She looked at Dr. Ngebe as if for translation, although the boy
had spoken in English.

Venus was originally a part of Jupiter, snapped off like Eve from
Adam's rib, careening for a time adrift about the solar system. Mulder
would have said that this planetary havoc caused such phenomena as the
parting of the Red Sea.

"Mulder and Scully, FBI", he always said, getting out his badge, as if
they were a singular force. When he encircled her with his arms she'd
had the infinite sense of a mobius strip, as if they were palindromic
in their connection.

When she could breathe it was through clenched teeth, her fingers
trembling on the table. She went outside and threw up whiskey in the
cold sand, suddenly too weak to stay on her feet. The gibbous moon
came up large as she sat shivering.

Down in the wet sand she wrote his name by moonlight, his strange
Dutch name. The racket of the surf seemed to match that which was so
enormous inside her. This was the water of home, the Potomac, the
Chesapeake. The cold Atlantic rushed to meet her with its amniotic
slap, the water full of stinging sand.

Out past the first breakers, head tipped back to the sky, she made
winglike motions with her arms in the water. The sky was beautiful and
cold: perhaps he was there now.

She tried not to think of her mother.

The moon twisted at the ocean and the ocean tugged at her and there
was no longer anything under her feet, just void, thoughtless
suspension; she was flying in the moon-charged water, looking up
towards the surface, all alone.
__________________

Mulder leaned against the refrigerator beside Byers and fathomed the
moiling foam depths of his cup. He was surprisingly hurt that Scully
didn't show, although he should have expected it. This was hardly her
scene, a cellarful of plastered subversives.

Still, he had asked her nicely.

He had miscalculated their bond, supposing that, like him, she could
no longer enjoy the moments of her life without him to share them. She
remained independent while he foolishly and rather romantically
imagined that they were like whooping cranes or albatrosses, paired
for life. Two morose and skulking loners thrown together in a basement
- of course you would read things into it.

I washed this shirt special, he thought. He had wanted to see her face
here in these catacombs of tangled Christmas lights, among the slam
poets and the moshers, the students of Bauhaus and techgnosis and
Sufi. He wanted to hear her talk, the inner things that rise to the
surface under the muzzy addle of blackberry microbrew. And he wanted
her to listen to him in kind.
__________________

She reached for the six-fingered girl.

Byers tore up her twenty. She was shipwrecked in Georgia with Mulder.
They faced each other with wavering pistols. "Gatorade," said Scully.
"You need the electrolytes."

She wanted to absorb him like radiation, like poison, like light. He
cast his thoughts out at frequencies only she could intercept. Mulder
was an outrider, and she his gallowglass.

So much for turning off the phone and going to bed early, then waking
in the panic of Mulder lost, her hands in the bathroom trembling as
she rinsed the sleep from her face and underlined her eyes.

Even with a piece of celery clamped in her teeth, the black scooped
sweater was just too froufrou for a cyberpunk encounter. She liked the
white blouse for its adjustability. What worlds could be said with
buttons. Black bra under it, throw something over it, find her car
keys, one last grinch in the mirror - just let her lay eyes on Mulder,
assure herself the world still contained him, and then come home.

As Scully descended to the Gunmen's bunker, she was distressed to
identify the unmistakable cadence of AC/DC singing 'Back in Black'.
She trod in deliberate counterpoint. She wasn't sure what appalled her
more - the fact that the nature of the party was as she had feared, or
that she could actually name the song.

She stood ankle-deep in mountain bikes and rang the buzzer until she
realized that no one could hear it. She considered turning and leaving
but recalled that her cowardice would be captured on videotape. The
reinforced door moved when she pressed it, the noise behind it like a
force of nature pushing back.

Scully stood in the doorway and peered into the mill and sway of the
crowd, the luminosity of faces and teeth and hands. A blazonry of
Christmas lights garbled across the low ceiling like the work of some
demented psychedelic spider. A passing dog spared her a disinterested
glance. Scully stood on the cuspal edge of the rabbit hole, and
scanned for Mulder.

Frohike materialized as if from a TARDIS, wearing motorcycle pants and
his sheepskin vest, his glasses reflecting a strobing amber
construction light. "The sublime Spookette!" he profused. With
ceremony, he stamped her hand with the likeness of Daffy Duck.

Scully smiled uncertainly. "Looks like a great party," she yelled
politely. Mulder loved it that she actually looked down on Frohike.

Frohike scowled affectionately. He held up a stern finger. "The rules
are, beer-bonging only over the sink."

"I'll try to adhere to that," she said faintly, her eyes sweeping
desperately. Frohike pressed the door to and regarded her shrewdly. He
held out his hand. Take me to your Mulder, she thought, feeling small,
feeling nebbish.

It was strange to hold Frohike's hand, his small mitted paw. He led
her into the crush and it was very much like being led into Faerieland
by a benevolent troll. Frohike was surly to anyone who impeded their
progress. A good-looking slacker guy touched Scully's shoulder and
smiled at her and when she checked her stride Frohike whirled like a
pit bull. "Back off, jive turkey!" Scully could only smile
apologetically as she was pulled away.

As they were siphoned centripitally into the room she knew uneasily
that she would never find her way out. Time ground down to a
peripheral smear, whole minutes to take a step, to draw a breath, as
she overextended between two planes. Mulder was crowned with stitches
and ichor and she had failed him at the most desperate moment of his
life. Mulder looked over his shoulder with his puckish grin and it
took her a moment to realize that here he was, alive and whole,
regarding her with surprise and expectancy, with the anticipation of
one who was just now unfolding the map of his life.
_________________

By the end of the evening they will both be crumpled, sopped and
ash-flecked, smelling of sweat and incense and cigarettes, and Scully
will have laughed that surprisingly goofy laugh that she trots out
only rarely. Mulder will have knocked his head on a low beam and felt
the cold moon lay its hand over him on a rooftop and he will have
watched Scully laugh and wondered why sometimes happiness hurts.

For now they are hesitant and spotless, and sobered at the sight of
each other. Scully winches up a smile as fakey as the Piltdown Man.
Mulder realizes that even if he likes sports and has a cool haircut,
he's still just a geek like all these other geeks, just as preoccupied
and undatable, and what's more, this is undoubtedly obvious to Scully.
__________________

What comely wench is this with hair as bright as Prometheus' stolen
flame?

"Look who crashed the gate," said Frohike.

Scully's lips were aggravating and her hair was orange. Even garbed in
her quotidian Morticia black she struck him all over again with her
pleasing aesthetics. And it wasn't like he was expecting little Miss
S. in a minidress. She seemed more sharply in focus than anyone else,
like a building surrounded by streaking taillights in a time-lapse
photograph.

They eased closer, like water seeking its own level.

He grabbed her and pulled her into the bathroom. There, the music
muffled, they jostled each other getting the door locked. The bathroom
was tiny and wreathed with smoke that smelled like skunky hay. Scully
took the shallow breaths befitting a federal employee.

"So," he asked, "gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine?"

"I can't stay, Mulder. It's a week night," she said, backing into the
sink. Mulder handed her his Knicks cup and she took a sip, just to
cool off.

He batted at the smoke above his head, hitting the string hanging from
the lightbulb. Loops of shadow shot over the walls. "What you don't
realize is you're their resident goddess, Scully. You don't know what
your endorsement means to these guys."

Marvelous. She's a goddess for geeks.

The Gunmen's bathroom was papered with clippings, photographs,
cartoons and scribbled quotes. There was Sinead O'Connor ripping up
the Pope; Page with his twelve-string; Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.
Buddha, Bob Marley, Muhammad Ali. Frohike and Janis Joplin on
Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. Frohike's celebrated photograph of Monica
getting out of a cab. Nuke the gay whales for Jesus. Edward Abbey,
Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary. A recipe for a fertilizer bomb from
the Anarchist's Cookbook. (Nitrate and fuel oil.)

Mulder looked around himself happily, swinging his arms. "T. Rex,
Scully, wanna dance?" His concession to the evening was a black
T-shirt, reinforcing his image of a rebel with many a cause.

"To 'Get It On'?" she asked. "I think not."

He brightened further. "Scully, you know rock and roll?"

"Mulder," she reproved. The bathroom wasn't getting any roomier, and
it didn't help that he was standing so close, as if they were
conferring on a case. She took a tiny draft of beer, just to settle
her nerves. As usual, she was at eye level with his xiphisternum, or
his rather fine pectorals, if she cared to peruse.

Mulder borrowed his cup for a moment, then handed it back. He drew his
teeth over his succulent lip. "There's something I want to talk to you
about," he said, leaning forward, the bathroom crowding in around
them.

Clearly there was no room for argument.

In line at the keg Mulder shuffled closer behind her so he could speak
in her ear. The kitchen floor was muddy and wet, and a rubber chicken
hung by its feet from the ceiling.

"Did I tell you my mummy theory?" he asked.

The low timbre of his voice grated pleasantly through her. His chin
touched her shoulder. "You have a mummy theory? Why does this not come
as a surprise?" she asked him.

"Some say that a mummy sank the Titanic."

Scully turned around, folding her arms. "So much for the iceberg
theory?" she asked dryly. The floor thumped with bass and they were
forced apart by two people on a skateboard. How telling that she and
Mulder could lose themselves in contemplative discussion in the midst
of a primal gathering.

"No, no, the mummy's curse brought the iceberg," he said, as they
reconvened. "There was a mummy being transported aboard the Titanic,
and it was saved when the ship sank."

"That's just it, though, isn't it, Mulder? That's how mummies are
purported to kill - through a curse, not some gnashing and clawing
homicide. And they cursed tomb-raiders, not elk-hunting highschool
boys." Someone handed her a dripping cup.

"There's the rub," he admitted.
__________________

They were years-deep in the process of pair bonding. When the
conversations of others sidetracked them they stood back to back and
she felt him shifting slowly on his feet, as was his habit. As always,
they were subconciously aware of each other's proximity, or distance,
at every moment of the evening.

Mulder became entangled in a conversation about sports with a guy who
had acid lime hair and his shirt tied around his waist. They both
gestured big slam-dunking maneuvers with their arms. Mulder seemed to
be enjoying himself. He was hardly drunk, but he was loose and blithe,
big-footed. She had always admired the way he could connect with
people. She could only imagine what it would be like to dance with
him.
__________________

Mulder was sitting in an alcove on a swaybacked wine velour sofa,
listening dreamily as his friend Chuck Burke picked out 'Sugar
Magnolia' on a zithery-sounding sitar.

His face warmed to a smile when he looked up and saw her. "Doctor
Scully, I presume."

"Isn't that a line from 'The Planet of the Apes'?" she asked glibly.
Ancient history, that.

"Are you having a good time?" he asked softly, as she claimed the
other end of the sofa. Chuck sat hunched on a plastic milk crate,
stroking the sitar pleadingly.

"Bearing in mind that I didn't intend to come, yes, surprisingly."

"You wouldn't come to the last party in the world?"

"Mulder, the world is hardly ending, and if it were, do you think I
would be sitting in some hackers' basement swilling beer from a
plastic cup?" She felt a little buzzed, and pleasantly argumentative.

"I believe they prefer the term 'remote systems operator'. So...what
changed your mind?" he asked.

"Nothing - just a dream." She spoke stiffly, feeling invaded. Mulder
and his continuous little invasions slowly altering her, whittling
away at her resolve. Her past, which she could not acknowledge. All
the mistakes that she had once made with men but had avoided making
with Mulder, turning him into something untouchable.

"A dream?" asked Mulder.

"'The oxen is slow but the earth is patient'," remarked Chuck.

"You sucked a goof butt," said Mulder amiably. "'The road lengthens as
we continue to travel it'."

"'The questions are more important than the answers'," said Chuck.

"'The wise man listens to fools and says nothing'." Scully was
familiar with this game.

"'I'm just mad about Saffron'," said Mulder. She thought he was
looking at her when he said it.

Scully debated the validity of classic rock lyrics, but felt oddly
complacent for a moment, blinking against the floaters in her vision.

The room was separated from the main part of the basement by a tunnel
of wiring and vapor barrier plastic and half-framed walls. The
timeless party scene at the end was done in hopped-up mirrorball
fresco. Scully saw Langly go by on Rollerblades. She saw someone in a
gorilla mask. She saw three girls pause, and look in at her. They
stood and seemed to wait for her, giggling and smoking and dancing in
place.

There was something endearing about this thrift store chic nowadays,
girls dressed like old ladies in their cat's eye glasses and print
dresses and junk jewelry, like children playing dress up. Their shoes
were clunky and they laughed shyly and held each other's arms and they
yielded a manila envelope replete with a violent homicide.

Scully did not relate well to women. She was too close to the rawness
of their experience and she couldn't face it in herself half the time,
let alone in other people. But she was trying. She knew it was an
unnatural way to feel. She looked into each of their faces and tried
to feel their energy, their courage and force, not see their
vulnerabilities, the ways they could be hurt.

Mulder was drawn into it by this point, with his morbid taste for
bones. Scully's informant had approached the girls and described her
to them, and they had delivered the envelope, as instructed. As she
had suspected at the zoo, her source was indescribably plain. The
girls could not agree on the color of his clothes, let alone his
features.

Mulder and Byers checked the VCR for the security camera, but to their
surprise, it was empty.
__________________

"Oh man, it's wideband spectrum surveillance," said Frohike. The
experts had been called in.

Mulder looked around at them with the bemused, slightly reserved
expression he retained solely for them. "Shake it down, fellas," he
said.

"Scully's got a bumper beeper," Langly said nasally.

"I'm being tracked?" Scully squeaked.

"It's top-flight remote detection - an SwRI tracking beacon providing
signal analysis using developed algorithms and portable DF systems,"
said Byers hoarsely. He was the one who had thought to check Scully's
car. "Employing correlation processing triangulation from several low
earth orbit satellites, it can determine your position within thirty
meters."

"Who's this punkass shagging Scully?" Frohike asked, as if it was
Mulder's fault.

Langly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "You want us to
find him and pound him for ya?"

"I think Scully's sufficiently capable of kicking ass in her own
right," Mulder said reassuringly, but he was obviously distracted by
the discovery.
__________________

In the bathroom Mulder tapped out the police report and they looked at
the interior of an SUV roped and lashed with blood. The photograph was
taken from the back seat at night, the flash rebounding off the
windshield. Blood gummed the open CD tray. Scully wondered why the
body had been removed before the scene was photographed until she saw
the victim wedged down under the steering wheel in an attempt to hide,
the top of his head just visible to the left of the steering column,
ruined forearms congealed to the driver's seat. What was left of Kit
Remmerde, southern Idaho freeway, 11:14 pm.

"So, we go to Idaho tomorrow."

"Mulder, look at this." Scully had found a picture of them on the
bathroom wall. He moved up and looked over her shoulder, snorting in
amusement. It was taken years ago, the first time he introduced Scully
to the guys. He had thought that Frohike was taking pictures of her,
but the two of them were centered together in the frame, sitting on a
desk, Mulder on the right with his arms crossed, Scully in a black
trench coat, looking skeptical.

"Look how young we were."

"You look like a co-ed," he said. She had traipsed into his life and
blinded him with science.

"I thought the world was so much simpler then," she sighed. "I had
quite a crush on you at the time, if I recall."

Mulder smiled, surprised, turning his face to study her profile.

"Good thing I snapped out of it," she said, smiling at him.

"I'll say." His throat was dry. "Good thing."
____________________

"Mulder and Scully at a party. Look at them!" said Langly.

"They look the same as ever," noted Byers.

"My point exactly. Look at Mulder's hair! Looks like it was cut with a
tiny lawnmower," said Langly.

"This is your brain on drugs," said Frohike. "Any questions?"

They drew in around the table, eating hummus and corn chips.

Scully looked at them circled there and thought that she'd be lucky to
make it through the evening without hearing a recitation of the Dead
Parrot Sketch.
__________________

They went up to the roof of the building to look at the moon, thirty
people struck drunkenly awed by this reminder of their position in
nature, faces tilted to the clear citrus satellite. Scully felt lucky
to be here with these other considerate human beings, witnessing this
great rumbling miracle of a moon.

"Dude," someone said reverently.

"Dude." Heartfelt agreement.

People tried to light cigarettes in the wind.

"Did you know that's like called 'refraction'? That when you feel the
moonlight you're actually feeling sunlight?"

A Goth guy put his arms about his girlfriend.

The moon appeared to be leaning, peering. They looked up at it, and
the moon looked down. Refraction to the contrary, it seemed to be
glowing from within. It was cold up on the roof, and Scully found that
she was leaning back against warm unyielding Mulder. He didn't exactly
put his arms around her, but he did take her elbow surreptitiously in
his fingers. He squeezed her funny bone.

"It only lines up like this once every hundred and thirty-three
years," said Langly. The guys had an elaborate telescope that took
some time to set up. Scully tipped her head back until she was looking
at the bottom of Mulder's chin.

Their crowd waved at the people on another roof, feet coaxing creaking
sounds from the frozen tar. Dogs jingled past. Scully imagined a city
of people on rooftops, their faces turned spaceward, forgetting for a
moment their trammeled, earthbound lives. Mulder dipped his face and
looked down at her. They exchanged self-conscious smiles.

People began to let out fogged breath and turn around, looking at each
other with new appreciation.

"Man, it's cold!"

Scully shifted away from him and disappeared towards the telescope.

Mare Imbrium, Mare Frigoris, Tycho, Copernicus, the Sea of Serenity.

Langly scuffled joyously with some other hacker dude.

The roof emptied out suddenly, the door propped against a brick,
leaking honey light. Scully was abruptly apparent, like a rock at ebb
tide.

Her arms were folded and she held a lit cigarette half-hidden under
her elbow. She looked at Mulder defiantly and took a snappy drag.

They blinked and looked away from each other.

Scully sighed out the smoke. She shivered. He sidled a few steps
closer, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, edging in
sideways. They looked out over the city. He sculpted the loose angle
of her arm, and the cigarette changed hands without a glance between
them.
____________________


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