Parabiosis ~   Page 7
____________________

His sister is gone.

Just gone. The three of them are too stunned to speak. He finds his
mom with her face in Samantha's bed.

Nobody sleeps. His dad hugs him in the kitchen in the middle of the
night. His parents are no longer speaking, and he is caught in the
crossfire of silence.

It is silent for 27 years.

He becomes someone else.
__________________

Scully laid low for a long weekend.

She put her house plants in the shower, she day-tripped to Baltimore,
she shopped, she drank a rare latte with nothing to do but zone out a
cafe window, pseudo-meditating. No cases, no Mulder, nothing but her
own life. It was intimidating to examine the dearth of substance in
her own life, once work and Mulder were removed. But there was a quiet
in the eye of the storm that she recognized as her own quintessence.

She spent an afternoon in the Smithsonian's Freer Museum looking at
Far Eastern art, trying to ignore the buzz in her ear of an imaginary
Mulder-commentary. Mulder, it appeared, knew as much about art as he
did about everything else, at least in Scully's own mind. She shrugged
irritably, shrugged him away. She didn't want to miss him, she needed
time to think. Life was odd without Samantha between them. Without
Samantha, Mulder was simply a man chasing genetic-remnant monsters and
meteoric worms, and what did that make his partner?

Without Samantha, Mulder's focus would shift. His powers of
concentration were extensive, and she had a disquieting feeling that
they could be leveled at her.

Leaving him was no longer an option. She didn't need a man to make her
whole, the whole fish-without-a-bicycle thing, but she did need
Mulder. The prospect of entangling herself with him was so unnerving
precisely because of how much it meant.

But she needed to be acknowledged for more than just her achievements
at work. She was losing resonance like an unplayed violin, she was
sleeping badly, she was dreaming and craving and generally
dissastified with her life. Even greater was the terror of changing
the well-honed balance of their relationship. Climbing into the bath
with him had made her see how vulnerable involvement made them.

How awkward it was to fall in love with one's partner. And how risky,
how deviant, to act upon it.
__________________

She took her vitamins with orange juice, standing at the black kitchen
window.

There had been string across her doorsill. There were alternate lives
that she could be living, that perhaps she was living, string-theory
lives doubling back on themselves, or strung out, long and awkward as
her present life. She was not herself tonight, or maybe so much
herself that she was unrecognizable to the worn down purblind version
of herself usually aiming the sextant.

Out in the hallway came the elvish tinkle of a cat's bell, and she
crossed herself. She swallowed her dusty pills. She had forgotten to
take her vitamins that morning, something she never forgot. She had
been temporarily possessed by a remissful workaholic, but that wasn't
who she truly was, although sometimes she only remembered on evenings
like this.

She was a woman who always knew where the moon was, whose signature
scent was eau de corpse, who kept a carnation in the freezer like some
mummified prom remnant because he had given it to her with his
heartbreaking eyes when she had cancer eating between her eyes and he
still bravely cracked bad jokes and couldn't hold still and his eyes
told her everything she had once hoped for but too late now, too late.

In the inky glass her eyes were sunken, cadaveric, her aquiline nose
like a blade. She felt lunar as hell, psycho-bitch lunar, a
psychological pressure inside her like premonition. Her inner voice
was like Eve 6 or someone ranting on a subway platform. Mulder had
once noted as tactfully as possible that he thought the tribal
menstrual hut was actually a very civilized concept. She choked down
her vitamins, her hair reflective metal in the glass. One pill makes
you larger and one pill makes you small. The juice sank into her
stomach like a cold cup of poison.

She washed, the way witches wash before rites. She felt best, purest
in black, and so that was what she wore.

In the car she spilled the powdery grit from an empty packet of
Mulder's sunflower seeds. She couldn't remember when he'd been in her
car, but evidently he had. At a red light she dusted her fingers out
the window like an offering to the tribes whose land she crossed. She
sucked her fingers and navigated celestially, squinting upwards from
her rocketing car. Stars, like salt on the tongue, like reaching
flashpoint in sex. Hydrogen into helium, matter into pure energy, a
pressure in the ears, a sucking pull in the forebrain. She went as the
crow flies, as the lights in the sky upwarp and sheer. UFOs, according
to Mulder, generate gravity fields that distort space and time, making
non-linear travel possible. The image of his face as he spoke, his
gaze homed in on hers, his earnest gestures as he tried to press home
his point. The world according to Mulder, in countless
semi-alphabetized Skinner-confounding dossiers, with footnotes. She
tried to imagine how Mulder's face would look if she leaned over on
the couch and opened his button-fly with her teeth.

She had been avoiding him for days, like a bite from the wrong side of
the apple, so his apartment appearing before her was a simple accident
of reality. She might have been walking up the hallway on the ceiling,
Escher-like, to a door that was either large and distant or close at
hand and tiny. The door was wide open, vortical, and the place was
dark. She had read enough fairy tales to know that you always went in.
__________________

Mulder was sitting on his couch in the dark, the fish tank glowing
jade behind his apathetic head. His rusty voice came out of the
shadows, and hearing his voice after days without him made her feel
like sandstone under a chisel. "Hey...and here I thought you were
avoiding me."

She stopped in the middle of the room and eyed him sharply from an
angle. She continued on with her measured gate. She breathed out,
flicked her hair back, and dropped onto the couch. They exchanged a
look.

"You think I'm afraid," she said.

Mulder gave an unhappy chuff, as though she'd responded to an
internalized conversation he was having with himself. His voice was
deprecating, and he picked at the knee of his jeans. "You've never
been afraid of anything in your life. I, on the other hand..."

It occurred to Scully that she should have closed the door. The
hallway light fell through the open doorway in a pale blade. If she
leaned forward she could see the spot where X had scrawled on the
floor in his own blood. The rest of the building hadn't been as upset
by that as they had been by the CDC evacuation last year. Mulder was
not generally a popular tenant.

"Now you see why I've always been afraid to have a family." Mulder
gestured at an invisible lineup of tragedy and disaster. "It isn't a
recipe for happiness, in my admittedly singular experience."

Scully pictured, in rapid succession, a baby girl with Mulder's lips;
Samantha's handprint in cement; Mulder picking up his dead father; his
mother sealing the cracks in a doorframe with tape. His mother's hand
reached towards Scully and smoothed her hair from her forehead.
Samantha shook wordlessly as she was tied to a table, unable to see
the faces beyond the lights.

Scully drew herself together, her throat aching. "Well, they say you
never make your parents' mistakes."

"Yeah, you just come up with a new set of your own."

"I think it would be something you'd have to take one day at a time,"
she said quietly. She was trying not to imagine Mulder with another
woman, some lushly fertile woman, one that she already hated
intensely.

"Kind of like our lives right now, huh?" he said.

She looked at him, wide-eyed. "Mulder." She looked down at her hands.
She couldn't be having this conversation. Just on the way over she'd
been fantasizing about stealing a baby, like Baba Yaga in the night.
She'd found herself lusting for the feel and smell of a newborn's head
under her lips, and she was positive she would start to lactate, if
she could just get a baby. It was all too psychotic and insane to even
contemplate, but Mulder, of all people, brought it out in her, with
his big gentle hands, his babytalk to animals, his subliminal aura of
teeming testosterone.

"What, Scully?"

Her hands were shaking and she slid her hand into his. She closed her
eyes against a burning dryness. When she arose, their hands became a
weight pendulous between them. He looked up at her questioningly. She
pulled lightly, experimentally, and he came up at her and stood,
looming large in her vicinity. She guided him backwards out from
between the couch and the coffee table, his eyes never leaving hers.
Holding her hand tightly, he followed her into the bedroom.

____________________

The Lotus-Eaters...Honey For The Prince...Two Virgins...Dr X Will
Build A Creature...Dos Equis...Strange Bedfellows...Rumors Of
Fate...Where There's Foo There's Fire...Dragons Were Smoked...The
Lonely Buddha...Magic Carpet Ride...Flower Man...Have His
Carcass...My Life As The World's Leading Paranatural
Cryptozoologist-Pathologist...Swamp Thing...Thus Spake
Zarathustra...Love Of Fate
__________________

For years bedtime had been the loneliest time of Mulder's day, but
tonight he had Scully brushing her teeth alongside of him. She
straightened up from spitting in the sink and caught his eye in the
mirror, her Halloween hair sliding over one eye, a hooded gaze that
sent a chill of anticipation through him.

He stood with his arms around her for a long time, there in his
bathroom, wondering how he could have ever thought himself lonely in a
world she simultaneously inhabited. He put his chin on her head.
Generally a whiff of her reminisced of the gut bucket, disinfectant
and the balloon smell of latex gloves; she smelled sometimes of
gunpowder, and always, faintly, of bubble baths. He found the combined
result unfailingly provocative.

She lifted her face and sighed, and held the belt loops of his jeans
and sipped delicately at his mouth until the skin drums were pounding
and he broke out in a sweat, there under the light bulb in his lonely
bathroom.
__________________

Mulder went to lock the door, silent on his bare feet. Scully cast
herself onto his bed and lay waiting for him to return. He came in
with his shirt off. It felt good to be lying on a bed watching this
half-dressed man approach, with the shimmer of danger that always
edged his form and the seriousness of his gaze. She checked him out,
her eyes half closed. Mulder stopped uncertainly. He definitely walked
like a duck, but only in the most attractive sense.

He held out his wadded T-shirt, and she noticed that he was holding
something with it - a padded yellow shipping envelope, using the shirt
to keep from fingerprinting it. "Somebody left this in the doorway."

"What is it?" she asked, sitting up.

"It's a videotape." He sat down on the foot of the bed and slid the
tape halfway out without touching it. Scully crawled up behind him and
put her chin on his shoulder. According to the tape's label, it was
several years old and had been taped over endlessly.
__________________

Rosenbergs Doc
RL: Graduation '97
Space Seed/Tomorrow Is Yesterday/ST:5476.3-For The World is
Hollow & I Have Touched The Sky
Fro - Caprial SAVE (cacciatore)
Project Ozma
Leonard Peltier
Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death
Simpsons/Hydrotubes/Lisa's Sub/Reaching Broom/Whacking Day
RL - S&G Central Park '81
Legendary Pink Dots
Who-Tommy
SURV
__________________

Everything was crossed out except the last entry. Mulder held his nose
and said, "Stardate 5476.3."

"This belongs to the Gunmen," said Scully. "Do you think they were
just here?" While I was kissing you in the bathroom, she thought.

"What did Langly graduate from?" Mulder wondered. "You know what this
is, Scully, it's the surveillance tape your informant took during the
party." He slid it back into the envelope.

The real world encroaches, she thought. Of course. She closed her eyes
and smelled his neck.

"This guy is really starting to piss me off," Mulder muttered.

Scully concurred, her eyes still closed. Nothing smelled as good as a
male, particularly the one you were crazy about. She traced the
carotid in his neck with the tip of her nose. "Mind running me to the
latent prints lab? We should really get this checked out," she said,
while she still had the will power.

Mulder turned his head as far as he could and showed his suave
underbite. "Scully, I'd drive you to the Outer Pleiades if you asked
me. Just say the word."

She brushed the top of his head to make his hair stand up. "Maybe
sometime soon," she said.
__________________

They left Bureau headquarters in silence, promised prioritizing of
their fingerprints by a lab tech sporting a standard-issue
Scully-crush. Mulder felt a certain sympathy for the guy, borne of
having been there, but it was a rather smug sympathy when he recalled
his recent experiences with her wet and tender mouth. The laboratory
had the multi-colored glow of a psilocybin flashback. He looked across
at Scully, who stood with her arms folded beside a micro centrifuge. A
flunky held up a severed finger in a zip-lock bag.

They were quiet in the car. She drove.

"You wanna come back to my place?" Mulder asked finally. He hooked his
little finger through hers and sawed her arm in the air. He was
beginning to think she was about to bail on the evening. Her brow was
pursed with thought and she pulled her hand politely away from him.
The streets were icy, and she drove with care.

"You don't think we'll be giving them more leverage?" she asked.

"You mean by getting involved?" he asked shyly.

"Yeah." She breathed out tensely, looking across at him.

He shook his head uncertainly. "We've already proved how important we
are to each other; they have to realize that by now."

Scully pulled into a darkened back street and parallel-parked where he
indicated. She wrenched up the emergency brake.

"The way you came after me to Alaska, to the Bermuda Triangle, the
time I went to Antarctica," he continued. "Nothing says 'I love you'
like a trip to Antarctica," he tried to joke.

She nodded, looking straight ahead.

Mulder held the bridge of his nose. "Of course it's risky," he
admitted. "Everything we've ever done is. The question is, how much
are we going to let this job of ours govern our private lives?"

"What private lives?" Scully asked.

"Exactly."

Scully tried to force her shoulders down. It was not her place to be
the paranoid one, but her years with the X Files had brought a wary
alertness she couldn't shake. Ultimately she now trusted in no-one but
Mulder, and he had fallen hard on his sword of truth.

But where he would once have been disillusioned, he was now quietly
recouping. He was more flexible than he used to be, stronger. She
liked to think that he had confidence in her commitment to him. For
once in his life he deserved to know stability in love.

Moisture ran down the inside of the window. Mulder pried a seed husk
from his teeth. She reached over and thumbed the bristly edge of his
haircut, rubbed his temple. He bared his eye tooth in a remorseful
grin. "Receding, eh?"

"Oh, Mulder," she said, from somewhere deep and aching, drawing her
fingers back through the air, his face a shadowy backdrop. Eyes fixed
on each other, they both reached for their door handles, and scrambled
from the car with sudden impatience.
__________________

They approached his building via the murky back alley, "where you
winged me," he whispered. Mulder let them in through the laundry room
with a key he had, and they stood together in the door to the fire
stairs, listening. After the icy back street the laundry room was warm
and close, but a cold current came down the stairwell. Mulder looked
down at her. They had a look - it wasn't even a nod, that meant 'let's
go'. In mute accordance they ran up the first flight of stairs
together, the door sucking hollowly shut behind them.

Periodically when she examined their lives for some sort of through
line she noticed that continuity was most clearly manifested in an
ordered chaos. She and Mulder held their positions, point-conscious
observers in a muckle of disaster. Tonight she didn't want to look
outward; they were ever looking outward. As they ran upwards together,
arms brushing, she wanted to shut out the bedlam and concentrate on
him, make him feel everything there was to feel, make him forget
everything terrible he had ever known.

Later, when he touched the buttons down the front of her shirt as if
counting coins, she felt the keratin of his fingernail tap each
button, the button press into the fabric, the fabric's weave in turn
impressing her skin in tiny circles plotted down her front. The arches
and whorls and papillary ridges of his hands seemed engraved to map
her out in increments. And Mulder, with his usual savoir faire, turned
the whole thing around until it was Scully who forgot her name, her
way home, and everything bad that had ever come to pass.

The cement stairwell thrummed with their rising. Out of the blue she
remembered that she had configured Cassiopeia on his bedroom ceiling,
and couldn't think why that left her cold. On the third floor landing
they paused to catch their breath. The stairwell ceiling was a
dizzying distance above them. She felt the plunge of Hitchcock's
forward zoom/reverse tracking shot down the stairwell in 'Vertigo'.
She wrapped her arms around his waist and panted up at him. "If we eat
the lotus we'll forget our way home," he said. "I want to forget," she
said.

They met no-one in the hall. Inside his dark apartment he put his
hands against the door and listened. "I don't mean for this to seem
clandestine," he murmured. "I just don't think it's anyone's business
but ours." When he looked upwards the cascade from the transom fell in
a mask of light across his eyes. He turned towards her, his face going
dark.

Her hands found the dampness in his hair and rubbed it, her fingers
seeking the warmth of his skull. "This is lunacy, you realize," she
said.

His hands planed her shoulder blades. "Did you expect anything less?"
__________________

She kissed with the concentration she usually applied to their work,
as if there just had to be a scientific explanation for this X file
that was him. They both had a lot of control. Her tongue slipped
momentarily against his, as if by accident. Mulder waited a long
interval before reciprocating.

He was lying on his bed holding the willow basket of her ribs,
tonguing the sharp edges of her incisors, an ambulance siren going by,
and she pulled up her knee and kicked off her shoe, her teeth
delicately crimping his tongue. He found that her eyelashes were wet,
that somehow she knew how to kiss like a real grown-up woman. He could
hear the dripping of the bathroom tap, and he remembered pouring
gasoline over his head like an self-immolating Buddhist monk, the riff
of burn and chill along his skin, re-evoked by her understated
touches.

She sat up and took out her earrings while he rubbed her compactly
curvy hip. She did not seem quite human to him, and he knew that
taking off her clothes would only strengthen that point. She was a
messenger, a seer; panhuman or more than human, something falling
under generic terms: conduit. Angel. She summoned divinities with her
breath, and monsters with her beauty. She had clambered on the craft
that brought dead fish to life; exchanged her death for Fellig's; she
healed with remarkable speed, was immune to the alien virus, and bore
a techno acid test of a microchip. These were just a few of the
reasons he thought they had just cause to use a condom, and most of
the reasons he knew that they wouldn't.

The building was unusually silent, as if listening, the way menhirs
standing in a field seem to listen. They kissed quietly, trying not to
groan with the pleasure of it. He sought the two lines parallel across
her throat that he had admired for years, and read them by taste, and
they were everything he'd imagined.
__________________

Once, she opened her eyes and looked up at him, blissed out, and he
was augured deep in the trap of her bundled pelvic bones, a pillow
behind the head board, the bed a turmoil of coats and pillows, both
their watches, one of her shoes, and two books on globsters. She was
still wearing her bra. He knew she would refuse to stay the night with
him, and it made him fiercer, more desperate to stay entangled in the
nervanic machinery of her. He rubbed the flat of his thumb against her
front teeth. She fretted in her throat and left a thread of saliva
from his shoulder to his jaw. He watched his shadow flying over the
ground, like the shadow of an aircraft. He pulled her fingers up from
between them and sucked them, all four at once.
__________________

He petted her hair, seeped a kiss into her temple. "I love your hair,"
he whispered.

"And I love yours," she said, looking up. "It's so 'Eraserhead'."

"Gee, thanks!"

"Mulder," she said, "I can't help but feel that this marks the end of
everything that's ever mattered to you."

"The end and the beginning," he said.

She nodded, her head in the crook of his arm. After the second time
they had been nearly comatose, trembling with exhaustion. They lay
still stitched together, her leg thrown over his hip, and she lifted a
shaking hand to look at her watch, but her wrist was bare, and her
fingers were stiff and glued together. Beyond her hand the ceiling was
dim and wavering; she thought that perhaps the stars were hateful. She
checked the pulse under his jaw to make sure she hadn't killed him,
and he breathed a laugh into the pillow without opening his eyes.

Scully dared herself to give in to this life, to call this enough -
dire middle-of-the-nights with this unbelievable parabiosis arcing
between them, and the daytime eternities of pretending there was
nothing new.

And now when he wanted to lie with her, kissing and talking, she
thought of how they would act tomorrow, of the subsequent days until
they could be like this again, and she felt a certain level of
bitterness at the sham of her life, bitterness he dispelled with his
hands and mouth, and with his unspoken assurance that the only certain
thing we have is now.

She had disentangled herself and limped stiffly to the bathroom, where
she cleaned herself up and examined her face in the mirror.

Considering what she had just been through, she didn't look much
different. She dared herself to smile, and didn't.

Mulder stumbled in behind her, looking rumpled and wild. He paused as
though he'd never expected to see her standing naked in his bathroom.
"I think maybe you're bleeding a little," he said, indicating the
faint ring she'd left on him, like a high-water mark.

"I don't think it's anything," she said. "I think I just lost my
virginity again."

"Oh, me too," he said warmly, and they looked at each other in the
mirror. He came up behind her and squeezed her tight. Later, when she
left him, there was water in her eyes, but not to the extent that he
was supposed to comment. It was hard to leave him there with his
lovesick eyes and his hair a mess, the sheets and his skin painted
gold. She didn't dare kiss him. He held her hand in both of his and
she stroked his hair and tried to work up a smile. "Good night, sweet
prince," she said gruffly, drawing her finger down his nose, trying to
make him smile. He only blinked and opened her palm and pressed his
face into it, hoping to leave an imprint.
__________________

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