Parabiosis ~  Page 5
____________________

She called the next night and rousted him out of a comfy moment of
bachelor domesticity - he was cleaning his service weapon and
watching porn. He had soup on the stove and his gun was in pieces all
over the coffee table and the stitches in his arm were itching and she
wanted him to drop everything at ten thirty at night and come over
because she'd received an unsettling e-mail. The odd thing was, he
didn't mind.

She had been sent a photograph. It was taken at night with a flash
camera designed by the US Fish & Wildlife to be tripped by deer at a
mineral lick. Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah. Mulder stood over the
computer to the left of Scully's pine armoire and tried to puzzle out
the image. The flash glare picked out brush and trampled snow and a
ragged business bounding out of the upper left corner, a hind leg that
may or may not have been humanoid. It was a long extended leg,
encrusted or thatched with fur or perhaps cloth, the foot obscured in
a shadow.

"Wow, Scully," he said thoughtfully.

"Pretty inconclusive," she said, standing there with her arms folded.

"But what a piece of Forteana." Scully's white bathrobe made her look
like a tiny bird fluffed out against the cold. He edged towards the
door. Occasions like this made him feel immense and ungainly in his
boots and denim and leather, tracking snow like a caribou. He had felt
the contrast most acutely when she was terminally ill and he was
loping about bursting with health and adrenergic panic; and not a cell
of him any use to her as a cure. He had been ready to rip out his
heart for her if it meant she might live. As it was, he would have no
heart without her.

"Are you going already?" she asked.

"It's late. I don't want to keep you up."

"I just made a pot of tea."

"I'm snowy," he said, looking down at his feet.

"Sit down, Mulder. Like I give a damn," she said mildly, padding
towards the kitchen.

Mulder sank onto the end of the couch. A fire lay low in the grate,
hooks of flame oscillating across the ceiling. The heavily overcast
night was so warm that the window was open. The lamps were turned low.
Scully leaned over the back of the couch with a hand-thrown Chinese
cup, molten, ambrosial. He clasped it in his palms.

"You don't come over much," she commented, curling up at the far end
of the sofa.

"You need time to yourself," he explained. "Get away from me and the X
Files."

"You need time alone, too."

"I have more than enough time alone." He bared his teeth. "I sound
like a real loser, don't I?"

"Mulder, you've never struck me as a loser. And you aren't an
intrusion here, you know." Unlike the rest of the human race, she
might have said. Scully didn't have any friends, and maybe now and
then she did need someone to come over and shake things up, put CDs in
the wrong cases and rifle the fridge. Her fridge was clean, with
nothing dripped down into the bottom. Mulder would be happy to spill
and clutter a little in the name of friendship.

"You don't feel like anything out of the ordinary," she said. "I miss
having a dog," she said unexpectedly. He didn't quite follow her train
of thought. "You and he were the only ones I could wear my bathrobe
around, and not worry about fixing my hair."

He looked at her finally, and she ignored him, sipping her tea. He was
pleased that she didn't fix her hair for him. Of course it was hard to
tell; she looked as soigne as ever.

She narrowed her eyes, feeling his scrutiny. "Besides, Mulder, the X
Files aren't something I can just leave at the end of the day. They've
become a part of who I am, much as I sense they have for you."

He felt himself beginning to relax. It seemed that, all smooching
aside, Scully simply sought to reaffirm their friendship. "Funny you
should say that," he said. "When they took us off the X Files last
year I read this article about New Guinea tribesmen being assimilated
into modern culture, and it said: 'you can take the people out of the
forest, but can you take the forest out of the people?' and that's
exactly how I felt, you know...that they couldn't take the X Files out
of us."

Scully's cheek curved as she smiled. He began to feel good about
staying. "Are those the same people who can fell a tree by yelling at
it ceaselessly for three or four days?"

"South Pacific islanders. Remember that documentary I showed you?"

She was still smiling. "Yes, I remember," she said, amused that he
thought she might not remember every second of their time together.

His tea was cool enough to sip. Scully drank green tea to combat free
radicals. She was big on fighting things - traffic, and shower mold,
and malevolence in its many forms. She fought the aging process and
usage of the word 'irregardless'. Most of all she fought Mulder on
every issue known to man, and a few that weren't. Odd, at the end of
the day, how in accordance they still were.

"I don't usually enjoy winter, but this one feels so peaceful," she
said.

"How can you say that, after the zombies?" He instantly regretted any
allusion to New Year's Eve.

"I wasn't thinking of it in a work capacity."

Mulder grunted affirmatively into his cup. She was right, the evening
was still and breathless.

"Mulder, what is that thing?" She tilted her head back towards the
computer, where the dark image still hung on the screen. Mulder shook
his head.

"I e-mailed the Fish & Game and they didn't send it to me. Someone got
into their files and sent it. The tracking device - none of it makes
sense."

"It's that informant of yours." And Mulder brooded a little. "He's so
on top of this case that we should be following it backwards from him.
Get a composite of him drawn up tomorrow, and we'll try to figure out
who he is."

"Mulder, there's no way he's the killer - "

"No, but he seems to know who is. And next time he contacts you, we'll
bring him in."

Talk of the case broke their mood of contentment. Mulder got up and
set his cup in the kitchen sink. From the dark kitchen the living room
looked cave-like, and Scully yawned suddenly and let her head fall
back on the sofa. "You going?" she asked softly.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"Wait. How's your arm?" she asked.

"It's fine. It itches."

"Good. Drive safe."

She didn't expect him to kiss her, he saw with some relief, and some
regret.
__________________

"So, have you had your prostate checked yet?" she asked casually. She
was removing the stitches from his arm, pre-lunch.

"Scully - !" he said, horrified. She jerked suturing material from his
skin, unmoved. Nothing was sacred with her. She had okayed the removal
of every conceivable organ of his, in the event of his untimely
demise. She was always after him to give blood at the blood drives.
She didn't weigh enough, so apparently it was up to him to contribute
for both of them, as a sort of sanguinary emissary of the the
Mulder-Scullys. She'd say 'Look at you Mulder, you big lug, sitting
there just full of that nice O-neg; you're healthy as an ox and you
won't even feel it.' She'd thwack his arm and Mulder would sigh and
trudge upstairs where they'd give him a cookie and bleed him
light-headed like a bunch of government-funded vampires.

"I had an AIDS test in '94," he offered. It had seemed like a good
idea, post-Kristen. He eyed Scully sideways to see if he had managed
to put her off the scent. She frowned, obviously doing the math, and
set down her scissors. "It was negative," he added helpfully. Her eyes
flicked to his, and he saw her curiosity, but he wasn't about to
elaborate.

She rolled his sleeve down slowly, buttoning his cuff for him.
Apparently that was enough playing doctor for one day. "Let's get some
lunch," she said.
___________________

She slept badly, falling ten feet at a time, landing sprawled in an X
to clasp the earth.

Fear has a long memory.

She had never effaced the memory of plying Donnie Pfaster with a can
of Tub & Tile; nor, apparently, had he. For a moment though, it was
the sticky, bilious fingers of Eugene Tooms, his copious, raw-liver
breath; it was the trunk of Duane Barry's car; it was Leonard Betts
trying to carve a tumor from her face. It was the steel, smashing
hands of a man who looked like Mulder.

When the dark side came for her she threw herself into it alone, for
what are we, ultimately, but alone? Scully raged with abyssal reserves
of anger, feeling trapped in a swarm of locusts, a small part of her
impressed by her noise and destruction. All that mattered was getting
to her gun, shedding this anathema, putting a bullet in its squirming
brain.

For days she would feel her battered skeleton illumined like an X-ray
through her flesh, lay her cut hands upon her bones with a mixture of
wonder and fear. Pain was a sure sign she still walked the planet.

She went to confession and obliquely admitted her sin. She craved the
runoff of penance, to make her way through the rosary over and over,
her bruised knees aching, the lift of a burden shared. Blessed art
thou amongst women. She wanted to understand what she had confronted,
both in Pfaster and in herself. "Go back to hell!" she had screamed.
Mulder sterilized her bathtub for her, reclaiming it. The devil had
touched her and she washed and washed, a cruciform burn at her throat.

Mulder spoke to her gently of the toughness of warrior angels -
Gabriel, Raphael, Michael. He probably had an X file on it, biblical
vengeance. She wanted to be annoyed at his conciliatory tone, at his
willingness to lie for her, but she wasn't. Ultimately, he was what
she had fought for, for the broader scope of human goodness, for
things wider and worthier than her own narrow life.

She followed him to the city of angels.
____________________

The Museum Of Jurassic Technology...Mare's Nest...Righteous
Babe...Slaughterhouse...Disturbing Evidence...Suicide Is
Painless...Being And Time...Old Souls And Psychic Words...Albatross
Way...Beast Woman's Daughter...Hot Water...Drink Me
__________________

These are salad days, he suspects, days to luxuriate in their
counterpoised minds, days when they are always together, making haste
slowly. Scully surfaces like a kelpie in the motel pool, verdigris
eyes, black maillot. He feigns scowling absorption in the evening
paper.

"Mulder, I've just been thinking..."

Shouldn't have kissed her in that museum of oddities, bestirred by
dusty metaphysics and mad taxonomy. Not while on a case, at any rate.
Her breath, drawn quickly in.

"Pinchbeck," says Scully, her chin on the edge of the pool, leaf
shadows stroking her arms. "It means something counterfeit, a sham."

At home it's January, but here the illusory California heat wreaks
havoc with his sensibilities, instinct writ large. His heart would
have him believe it is spring.
__________________

The ant clung by its jaws to a leaf, fierce even in death, its skull
pierced by a virulent life form. The storefront museum was dark and
ticking, its front door open to the evening. Venice Boulevard smelled
like hot photocopier toner and onion rings. Somewhere, distant and
airy as panpipes, an accordionist played Bach.

Sequential dioramas illustrated the lecture. Mulder listened on a
receiver to the Sonnabend Model of Obliscence, which dealt with
memory, foreboding and deja vu, and explained, among other things,
'Spelean Ring Disparity' and 'The Cone of Confabulation'. He absorbed
it like warm water, his mind circling in astronomy, premonition, and
the way she looked at the Pacific, that Irish squint, her nose
abruptly freckled.

Scully drifted past a scold's bridle, past haunted bell jars and
antique surgical instruments, eyeing the horn of Mary Davis of
Saughall, Cheshire, mounted on the wall beneath a rack of moose
antlers. Mulder peered into a display cabinet that contained only a
placard - 'Specimen Temporarily Removed for Study'.

It was an eerie description of the way he felt when something
frightening happened to her. He was outside of himself, an ant driven
to the sky. The world stopped, and his heart was removed for perusal.

Scully didn't talk about Pfaster. She dealt with him and moved on.
There was this thing she was building with Mulder, which he sensed she
found as entrancing as he did. Their world continued, and Mulder
drummed up an intriguing decapitation case with which to woo her. In
West Los Angeles he dragged her on what could arguably be called a
date - bought her frozen yogurt, and lured her, against her better
judgment, into the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

"Mulder, what exactly is this place?" she muttered, as they examined a
mole skeleton displayed on velvet.

"It's 'the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper,'" he quoted
from the pamphlet. She smiled, as he had hoped, although she also
looked faintly exasperated. "It's 'unencumbered by scientific
purpose,'" he added.

"Well, that ought to appeal to you." She leaned over a case to examine
a tiny scale model of Noah's Ark, no longer than an inch.

"Hush, Scully," he whispered to her. "There's enchantment afoot in the
ether."

Smiling to themselves, they drifted among alcoves and baffles. There
were fruit stone carvings and improbable coincidences, stuffed birds
and the ringnot sloth. There were microminiature sculptures, each
carved into a single hair, the artisan working between heartbeats.

There was a Camaroonian stink ant which lived out its life in antish
fashion on the jungle floor, unless it had the ill luck to inhale the
floating spore of the Tomentella fungus dwelling high in the
rainforest above. With the spore lodged in its brainbox the ant went
mad, abandoning its terrestrial life for the canopy high above,
climbing endlessly upwards until, achieving the necessary altitude, it
clamped its mandibles upon a twig, folded up its legs, and died. The
fungus consumed its brain and liquidated its carapace. Thus nourished,
it then forced a mushroom spike through the ant's skull, which sent a
shower of spore down to the jungle floor, starting the cycle all over
again.
__________________

They feel the latent dread of possessive spores.

She knows each separate swish of her heart, like the Armenian sculptor
working through the microscope on a single hair. Mulder is right,
this place evokes a wary sense of wonder. He was right to bring her
here. They are the only people in the museum, and she can feel the
settling shadows, Mulder breathing, the immediacy of the solar system,
the flaunting roar of the sea.

Beside her, he sighs.

"Mulder, it says that this ant is so large that its cry is audible to
the human ear. Do you think that's possible?"

He turns, amused, and examines her unhurriedly. They have taken to
openly perusing each other. "I don't know, but you're pretty small,
and I never have any trouble hearing you."

She lets her head fall limply back. She favors him with a slitted eye.
"Mulder, you're just not willing to admit that that ant is you."

To her amusement, he grows testy, hands on his hips. "Just what
exactly are you saying? That my mind is not my own?"

"Of course not." She fixes on his blue shirt, watching him breathe.
Mulder is her own private miracle, and she is not proficient at taking
things on faith. It is hard to believe that he will always be there.
Often it seems that he has heard the call of something she's missed.
"...I just mean that you're off on your own course. It's like you've
inhaled a spore that most of us miss, and someday you'll climb away to
the top of the forest."

Mulder shakes his head, his gaze locked on hers. The look on his face
chokes her up. He reaches for her, rubbing her shoulders and down her
arms, uncertain and soft, shaking his head. "But you're down here," he
says.

She nods mutely. They stare at each other for a long, hesitant moment,
his hands tightening unconsciously. He stuns her with one quick kiss,
a burn of pressure across her lips. She has to remember how to
breathe.

She watches Mulder push the buttons on a display entitled 'Protective
Auditory Mimicry'. Still light-headed, it takes her a minute to
realize that no sound is coming out. The display is out of order. But
no it's not - it simply contrasts the warning cries of tiny,
iridescent beetles with similarly-sized pebbles 'while at rest'.

Mulder smiles, slowly, long. She touches his arm, indicating a sign on
the wall. 'We see the subtlest forces, obeying the most capricious
behests of the human mind.'

Her fingers stay on his arm. Only Mulder has ever shown her her place
in the scheme of things, and the scheme's place in her.
__________________

Fresh from his evening shower, Mulder stood on the cement steps in
front of his motel room in his untied running shoes. Beyond the
office, the isolated highway lay empty. The place was laid out with
the floor plan and rural charm of the Bates Motel, and, but for him
and Scully, was completely empty. Their rooms were down at the far end
under the trees, away from the proprietor and his cockatoo that walked
up and down the counter and kept biting at Scully's pen as she tried
to register. In his junketings Mulder had encountered his share of
eccentric motel owners; they all seemed to have corpulent pets and an
afflicted relative coughing to death before a TV somewhere in the
back.

Motels depressed him, but spring was afoot in Tennessee, and the
groaning black earth smelled rapturous. Down the hill a peacock meowed
raucously. A layer of liquid dusk hung in the poplars. Somewhere a
pond seethed, carved out by cows and roaring with frog music.

Mulder scratched his belly and prodded Scully telepathically, but her
door remained closed. So much for their close psychic bond. He walked
alone through the trees, down among a scattering of outbuildings, past
rolls of wire, a burn barrel, a board for cleaning fish. A susurrus
rumpled the leaves. Dim and reeking with wet, it felt like traveling
underwater, and he wasn't initially surprised to see jeweled bubbles
volplaning in the algae dusk.

She was here. He halted, making the quick adjustment from Scully in
her room to Scully here in this clearing, curled in an aluminum chair,
dunking a wand in a plastic bottle of soap bubbles. An emu glared at
her from a chicken wire run.

She tipped her head back, the ends of her fox-colored hair brushing
her shoulders. Soap dripped onto the front of her cropped white
T-shirt, bubbles spinning about her in opalized strings. It was
mesmerizing, completely unlike anything he had ever seen her do. He
blinked, drawing closer. "Snakey snakey snoo," he said, squeezing her
bare toes as he passed. He found another folding chair and pried it
open.

She twitched her shoulders at the mention of rattlesnakes, glancing at
him askant. He shrugged apologetically, feeling he'd interrupted her.
He tried to sit quietly, but his chair creaked, and his breathing
seemed annoying even to himself. A cool wet bubble exploded against
his arm and he thought about it containing her breath.

A half-dozen hummingbirds made last minute rushes at two feeders
hanging in the trees, like great bumblebees coming in at mach 4,
stalling, dropping, banking away. When they came too close he wanted
to brush at them like insects.

Scully stared into the sky. She had been formulating a prayer trance,
watching the prismic bubbles rising up through the leaves. She always
had so much to ask of God. Part of her lifted up through the trees,
buoyant, impermanent. She asked for peace.

Mulder shattered the moment. Her left foot burned and tingled from his
grip. It momentarily annoyed her that her skin opened to him as it did
to water. Metal screeched as he unfolded his chair. Her eyes were
still middle-distant when she sought him out; he was a blurry sprawl,
creaking, breathing. In an as yet half-formed concept, he sometimes
touched her thoroughly in the abstract half-sleep of dawn, sun like
hot bricks on her eyelids, her head roaring with sleep.

She looked away quickly, screwing the lid on her pink plastic bottle.

Mulder looked humbly down through the trees as though he realized he
had invaded her privacy. He was still treating her with extra
sensitivity, as though she were a wall the lightning man had walked
through, as though a touch would crumble her into a brittle
woman-shaped aperture. Somehow she didn't want him to know that
Pfaster had only made her harder.

A hummingbird landed on his head.

Mulder stopped breathing, eyes closed. The hummingbird appeared to be
collecting its thoughts. For several seconds she watched, entranced by
both of them, before the jeweled scrap flicked away into the night.
Mulder opened his eyes and looked directly at her. They let it wash
between them.

Looking at him, she realized that she'd almost failed to recognize a
direct communication from God. True faith was accepting benedictions
in all their dubious forms. For her this meant atheistic Mulder in his
sweatpants with a bird on his head, because of the utter truth of him,
and the undeniable peace he brought her.

"I'm still seeing snakes," she said, for something to say.

"Me too."

"Just a retinal afterimage," she said.

"You have nothing to fear if you're a righteous babe," he teased.

"Mulder, how do we know if something is truly evil?"

"We trust our instincts."

"Yes, but how can we be certain our instincts are right? There are
often such disparate viewpoints - look at these hugely conflicting
interpretations of the Bible."

"A merciful God or Hieronymus Bosch?"

She nodded, frowning.

"Scully, on the day I first met you I was struck by your abiding sense
of right. You have wonderful instincts, and I think you can trust
yourself to know good from evil."

"Then why did I do it, Mulder."

"You did what you knew had to be done. Don't go looking for evil in
yourself, because you're not going to find it."

"And you know this - what - instinctively?"

"Hey, you catch on fast."

She sighed sharply. "I want to believe you."

"All I know," he said, and all the frogs stopped suddenly to listen,
and Mulder listened too, wondering what he was about to say. He looked
at his hands, trying to piece together the myriad emotions she wrought
in him. "All I know is that I've come to recognize lately what a
fortunate life I lead. And that is entirely due to the fact that you
are in it."

"Mulder - " she said.

"It's true." He cut her off. "It's the one truth I am sure of."

"It's...mutual."

He smiled at her, heartened.

"Well," she said, flicking her hand at a hummingbird, "there was
eventually bound to be something we'd agree on."
__________________

Later, he lay under the AC's subarctic purl, an arm behind his head,
the door of his room open so he could hear the night. When he looked
at the floor every shadow and discarded garment became a timber
rattler, so he kept his eyes on the TV. He was watching Aeon Flux.
Scully went by with her ice bucket, a clomping shadow on the shadowy
sidewalk. On her return she put her head in the door to say goodnight.
It took him a second to tear his eyes away from the screen. "Good
night!" he said. Aeon was kicking some major ass. By the time he
glanced at the door Scully was back down the steps.

Mulder sat up guiltily, certain something was wrong. He loped to the
door and jumped off the steps. She startled as he landed behind her,
and she turned around, her face troubled.

"You all right?" he asked gently.

She set her ice bucket on the steps. She held up her manicured hands
as if she'd just scrubbed in for surgery, her polished nails flashing
under the porch light. He reached tentatively for her hands but she
pulled them back. "He was going to make me watch while he cut off my
fingers," she said in a tight little voice. She shook her hands as if
they were wet, her face drawn in disgust.

He nodded. She was probably right.

"He hated us both," she said tonelessly. "He wanted you to find me,
and know that I'd been alive through it."

He dragged her against him. He wanted to cut her and suck out the
poison that devilled them both. His hand slid down her straight little
back as she pressed up against him securely. He had never allowed
himself to picture her whacked like Marat in his bath, because that
would have been the end of him too, and it was not to be contemplated,
not while she was gripping his shirt and rubbing her cheek against his
chest. He was holding her so tight it was a wonder she could breathe.

A moth briskly barnstormed the porch light. In both their rooms the
TVs spewed the faint, frivolous emissions of another plane, a life
that never had much to do with him and Scully. They were of the world
but not in it, and only ghosts can live between two fires.

He kissed the top of her head. She kissed the side of his neck and ran
her hands up under his shirt, and his entire back went to goose flesh.
The top of his skull seemed to float away.

She pulled backwards, gripping his hands, and climbed up two steps.
Her pitchblende eyes locked into his as she drew him close, nails
grazing his prickling nape. "This is so strange," she said,
short-breathed, her voice awed.

"Unbelievable," he whispered, Scully in his arms.

She nipped at him nervously, without making contact. "How could anyone
be like you?" she asked.

With the humming pond and the winglike bones in her shoulders, it was
like kissing a water sprite. They broke out in fever-sweats, lost
their balance, and clung, inhaling each other, parched and trembling.
He experienced rushes of incredulity, her thumb stroking the curve of
his mouth even as she kissed him.

She laughed in a soundless gasp. "What are you thinking?" she breathed
against his lips.

"Banzai," he whispered, absorbing her touch. She drew back, and he
watched her ponder this. "Ten thousand years of happiness," he said
hazily, looking into her eyes at this unfamiliar close range.

"That's what this feels like."

"Yes." He stroked her soft cheek. "Good night, Scully."

"Good night."

Mulder walked backwards to his room, unwilling to let her out of his
sight. Standing on her steps, she smiled at how silly he looked.
"How's this going to look on your field report?" he inquired of her.

"Poor old Walter," she said. "He never stood a chance."
__________________


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