Parabiosis ~  Page 9

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In a larger mood she might not have left Mulder to his mad devices,
might have accompanied him overseas in search of unearthly crop
circles, but she felt tenuously balanced, watchful, inward. Your
pupils will contract when, eyes closed, you imagine looking up at the
sun, and she felt this retroaction, something opening and closing
inside her, experimental, an embryonic flexing of half-formed wings.
She must look up through the flinders in the lambent light, look into
the sapient face, be worthy of histories kept by holy men.

In the temple she sank to her knees. The Buddha had been waiting for
her, and she filled a space, a moment, like a puzzle piece only she
could fill for him, this lonely Buddha. The incense in the air was
thick as chloroform. The entire universe was a part of herself, and
she knew that her material surroundings were an illusion, that only
her internal world was real. She saw everyone she had ever known, she
saw the relativity of love, she saw the paper thickness of life, and
the fourth dimension of chi. She saw how much of it she ignored as she
raced through her days, stumbling the moments into meaningless heaps
with her passing. Here was the world, a world where one flew, one
tasted. Thick smoky flight off of Chinese peaks into morning fog, the
haloed golden chill of the sun above, the endlessness of time and
spirit, spice and pleasure, the sharpness of tears. The binding web of
family. Pain and learning. The smash of love.

She found that this knowledge had always been there, like an aquifer
below the bedrock, inimitable.

And she rose and woke.
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Scully conks out on him in her charming little narcoleptic way,
leaving him in a philosophical holding pattern, opening his
accumulated mail and brushing his teeth, rolling chance and fate
around in his mind. He sets the alarm and pulls off his shirt, moves
through his apartment turning off the lights.

"Hey," he says, beside the couch. Scully opens and closes her eyes.

"Are you coming to bed or do I have to carry you?"

"Was I asleep?" she asks, snapping awake.

He lies quietly in the dark while she undresses beside the bed,
stripping down to her panties. She curls up like a hedgehog against
his ribs and sighs deeply. England where the lanes are crammed with
tractors and sheep and even Stonehenge is fenced off now, and he rubs
a strand of her hair in his fingers until he is able to sleep.

In the deep night she rolls over and slides her leg across his hip.
She toes down the covers and he feels the chill spring night on his
skin, crisp leaves flickering in the open window, her sumptuous mouth
over his.

Tuesday morning she is gone, only her cup on the table, only her space
in the bed.
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He could set the jinniyah free, although he couldn't do the same for
Scully.

Scully spent twenty-four hours in love with another man, an invisible
man from Missouri. She was happy and perky and she couldn't wipe the
smile off her face. She was never so vivacious when she was in love
with Mulder. Mulder should have been jealous, but he knew that this
little yellow dead guy could never make the world a happier place the
way he did for Scully. Oh, Scully might be a fickle, fickle woman, but
she'd soon see the error of her ways.
__________________

Here in the Nevada high desert, night settles with cold assurance,
shadows anti-matter black and moon-edged.

Flares fall past the window, lanced from some invisible source. Their
landings are silent in the desert night. He watches over her shoulder,
watches the dark explode in time with Scully's harsh breaths. She
closes her eyes, clamps her teeth, above him beautiful with her hair
in her eyes, and the sulphurous pink and green flares plummet past the
silhouette of her naked shoulder. It will never be remotely like this
again, he thinks.

Scully came awake slowly, the car humming over the arrhythmic cracks
in the highway, and something nocturnal - a kangaroo rat, a jerboa -
crossed in the high beams. Across the valley a last cerise glister
burned out behind the rumpled ridges.

The road extended before them in a swoop of miles before rising into
the far hills. The valley below looked like a dry lake bed, perhaps it
was part of the mythical Groom Dry Lake. She summoned the place names
on which Mulder was inclined to harp - Freedom Ridge, White Sides,
Tikaboo Peak. The Extraterrestrial Highway.

Mulder was attempting to open a bag of sunflower seeds with his teeth
and one hand. She reached over and took it from him, and saw from his
glance that he hadn't realized she was awake. The top of the bag was
wet from his teeth. She handed him the opened bag and wiped her hand
on her leg, wishing for a cup of tea. It felt pleasant to wake up in
the car with Mulder, to hear his teeth cracking a seed and think about
the way he had been comforted by the sound of his father eating
sunflower seeds. To become part of the chain, the three of them linked
by this sound.

Mulder's grandfather, of whom he sometimes complained, may have had
the same propensity. On Mulder's maternal side, his Grandma Kuipers
used to call him Willy - she found Fox a ridiculous name. Scully was
charmed by Willy, almost as much as she was by Fox, but she called him
neither.

"Mulder, keep eating those, and someday you'll wake up and find you've
turned into a giant sunflower," she had said to him once. "Well, just
plant me in front of a TV," he'd answered.

She yawned, which made Mulder yawn. She wondered what his thoughts
were. Here they were again on Nevada Highway 375, hoping to meet with
some mysterious informant. She considered the conversation they'd had
on the last trip here, weighing the changes in their lives since then.
More marked than the fact that they were sleeping together was the
fact that they had made the decision to change - to stop alienating
themselves from their true natures. When she thought back to that
Mulder and Scully, she saw their clumsy self-conscious manner, the way
they held great pieces of themselves back lest the other refuse it.
They had managed to be incredibly apart together. They saw the glass
half full, but couldn't envision it fuller. According to the Air
Force, Area 51 didn't exist, but now Mulder and Scully had begun to
visibly exist, to let the secrets slip from their silent evening
deserts. It was an impractical move, but it had its benefits.

Mulder pulled into a dirt turnout and rolled up to a lone mailbox. He
fiddled with the power buttons, lowering the window on her side. Crisp
night air entered the rental car. She looked at him warily and he
twitched his shoulders, smiled like he had a secret, pointed past her
with his chin. He was enjoying this a little too much.

Scully suspected that this was THE black mailbox, although it was
painted white. It said STEVE MEDLIN on the side, and bore a skunk
sticker. The flag was up. The dust hanging in the air about the car
was tinted by the ruby brake lights.

Feeling distinctly criminal, Scully pulled it open. She got the taste
of french fries in the back of her throat when her sternum pressed the
door frame. Inside on the corrugated zinc-coated floor lay a pair of
wire cutters. She picked them up, the curved metal jaws cold, a piece
of tape gummed to the handle. A mile post number was inked on it.
Mulder looked as if he was about to be knighted as she laid them in
his hand.

It was the tried and true Area 51 welcome. They cut the fence at the
designated mile marker on the graveled Groom Lake Road, the clear yipe
of a coyote in the distance, nighthawks hunting overhead with their
little ghosty dopplered trills. They made it several miles
cross-country among the little prickly Joshua trees, warning signs and
spy cameras. Then they were descended upon, halogen lights circling
around them like predatory pairs of eyes, spurting up dust squalls:
Dream Police, Men in Black, CammoDudes, black-ops itching to burn off
a magazine. Scully, resigned, was frisked and handcuffed before she
could even reach for her badge; on the other side of the car she heard
Mulder put up a bit more of a fight. A black helicopter hovered,
spotlighting them, then landed, making communication impossible. Part
of her welcomed the noise; she'd had the discomfiting feeling that
Mulder was about to start yelling "Roswell! Roswell!" - which would
both embarrass her and detract from their legitimacy.

He turned towards her as she was led away to the helicopter, but they
were pulling at her and there was only a second of vital eye contact.
Someone pushed her head down as she passed beneath the drumming
rotors. Black gloves buckled her into a seat, headphones were jammed
over her ears. They swung up into the air, rocking like a toy, and she
looked out of the open door at the whirlpool of dust and flattened
vegetation, searching for one figure among all the others backing away
with their hands thrown to shield their eyes, his dark form
distinguishable only to the eye of love. It made her uneasy to be
separated, but mostly she was irked at herself for ever agreeing to
tag along.

She set herself to counting off the minutes in seconds, trying to
gauge the distance they were traveling, trying to guess the direction.
She couldn't get a clear look at the stars, and her vision was wobbly
in the thundering craft. They were only in the air three minutes
before they leaned into a curving descent and a gloved hand smelling
of WD-40 came over her eyes, turning her face from the door until the
skids settled to the ground. Christ, thought Scully, like I even care
about their hallowed 'secret' base.

The elevator inside the low building seemed to descend deep
underground, but the ride was fast. They passed through ever deeper
levels of security, past guarded gates entered by swipe card and pass
code. Scully was held on each side by an armed soldier in black, and
escorted by seven or eight men in suits.

In a small locker room they removed her handcuffs and she rubbed her
wrists with her fingers. "Where the hell's my partner?" she asked. She
was not sure who to address. A man in a white lab coat entered and one
of the suits handed him Scully's badge. All he seemed to establish was
that she looked like her ID photo before he closed the badge and
tossed it onto a bench that ran down the middle of the room.

Two more men entered the room in positive-pressure radiation suits.
Scully looked at them assessingly. She remembered Mulder saying that
among other things this was the nation's principle nuclear explosives
testing laboratory. Most of the testing was conducted underground, or
at least it was supposed to be. These men drew her away and down a
hallway to a small private room where she was given a suit of her own
and told to change.

Scully stood looking at the yellow suit  after she was left alone.
Then she hurried out of her clothes and into a scrub suit, then into
the radiation suit, hopelessly large and baggy. Scully looked back
wistfully at her folded clothes as she left the room, wondering if
she'd ever see them again. She had left her cross inside the pocket of
her jacket, along with her watch and earrings. Inside the suit,
circulating air roared in her ears.

She was completely unprepared for what she would see cooling on the
slab as they entered a large, brightly lit autopsy bay, and she
stopped dead and said "Oh my God," into her headset. Someone pushed
her forward.

It was the mummy. My God, Mulder was right - it was an honest to God
mummy, shriveled and dark, tufted with cottony bits of gauze still
glued into its skin, skinny arms splayed stiffly out like fire-snuffed
trees. Two men in radiation suits were clipping away the wrappings,
chipping off the hardened mastic. Scully approached, tilting her head
to read the face that had emerged, blackened and wilted. The mummy was
smiling like the Lizard King in his Paris bath. "Oh my god," she
whispered again, wishing Mulder was there. She touched the tufted
black scalp lock sticking up from the wrinkled skull, her thick glove
working stiffly. This is what Armyan Lillegard had done. He had
created this somehow, through his immorality.

Her eyes moved over the body, and suddenly she saw that one of the
hips had frayed through, the white femur protruding from a worn scrap
of pelvis, black leathery skin cracked open around it. She moved to
the foot of the table, weaving among milling faceless doctors. The
soles of the victim's feet were worn free of the wrappings, worn
through to the bones in places, but the leather looked stretched and
pliant as if from constant contact with moisture. It was as if the
creature had actually walked all the way Mulder said it had, all the
way from Seattle.

Scully seemed to be expected to perform the autopsy. 'Autopsy' means
'to see with one's own eyes'. She soon got over her initial surprise,
losing herself in the fascinating activity, silently accepting tools
and saws. She'd always loved the process of dissection coupled with
the detective work of forensics, and this was a once-in-a-lifetime
autopsy. All the occasion lacked was Mulder pacing around with his
hand over his coffee cup, getting in the way and talking too much. She
forgot the strange hampering of the radiation suit and the
uncomfortable sensation of sweating inside it, forgot that she was
underground in Dreamland, nearly forgot that she was apart from Mulder
and being detained against her will.

No one spoke to her and any questions she attempted were ignored.
Obviously the presence of radiation was suspected. Had the victim been
exposed during one of their nuclear tests? What was its dosimetry? How
had it got here? This wasn't on the route that Mulder had predicted on
his Mummy Map.

The abdomen contained, as she had seen on the video, cedar shavings
and natron. There were no organs, no brain. She did not know what
these men expected her to look for. She didn't take notes, as she
usually did during an autopsy. There was nothing to weigh or measure
except for the corpse itself. The eyeballs were gone, possibly removed
by birds or insects. She imagined the creature walking, pecked by
hovering crows, and wanted to shudder.

Two hours later she was back in her clothes and walking the endless
tunnels with her escort, smaller now, and no more communicative. She
was unhandcuffed this time, but held by the arms. They passed through
a door that looked no different than the rest, but led to a cellblock
of clear Plexiglas cells, and there was Mulder, rising from a bench.
His mouth opened as she went past, and she said, "I'm fine, Mulder," a
statement multi-interpretational in their lingua franca, but delivered
in a tone to put his concerns to rest.

Scully was deposited in the cell next to his, and the block emptied
out. They were the only ones in the cells and she stood in the middle
of hers, breathing out slowly. She looked at Mulder, who was standing
with his hand starburst against the glass and she knew he was thinking
of Kirk and Spock in that one where Spock dies. Under the caustic
lights his big ridiculous features remained mild, but he couldn't
disguise the uneasiness in his eyes. He loathed imprisonment. Nomads
will die, she recalled, if you lock them up.

Just to humor him she stepped over and matched her hand to his. They
looked at their hands for awhile, Scully's smaller but the one that
handled more knives.

"Well, this is another fine mess you've got us into," she said, and
they smiled faintly. Their hands left sweaty ghost-prints on the
Plexiglas.

"What's it all about?" he asked her.

"I take it you haven't seen any sign of your source."

He shook his head irritably. "I've been here the whole time."

"Well, Mulder, you aren't going to believe this, but the 'mummy' as
you call it, seems to have gotten a little off course."

He breathed in. "It's here? You saw it?"

"I saw it," she said, enjoying the excitement on his face. "I
autopsied it."

"Was it no longer animate?"

"It was no longer animate. It was very very dead, actually."

"What do you think stopped it?" he asked.

"I don't know what made it stop, but get this, Mulder, we were wearing
radiation suits."

Mulder turned away, processing this. He completed a circuit of his
cell. Something about his practiced circle told her that he had spent
much of his time in here pacing. "Why me?" she asked. "It's like this
whole thing was a setup to summon me here. They used you to get me out
here, and it was like the doctors were expecting me."

Mulder turned back. "I know why. Remember what I said once, that you
are the only person in your field - that you're the world's leading
paranatural cryptozoologist-pathologist? Well, it's true, and they
would be in a position to know about you. Think about it, Scully, all
the things you've seen, all the things you've examined: Eddie Van
Blundht senior; devil babies; a manitou; the Jersey Devil; Tooms;
those firemen in Dallas; Leonard Betts' head? That alien in Oregon!
Zombies! Victims of vampires, of spontaneous human combustion!" Mulder
was disposed to yell when he got wound up, and she tapped her
fingernail nervously on the partition, looking around for surveillance
cameras.

He looked at her admiringly. "Wow, Scully. Tell me all of your
findings before they execute the obligatory Area 51 mindwipe."

But there was to be no mindwipe. Within ten minutes they were in the
back of a black SUV, rattling through the desert. Only Mulder was
handcuffed for the journey, which Scully found mildly insulting. They
sat on bench seats surrounded by soldiers who ignored them, who swayed
against them. The van smelled new. The windows were tinted. Mulder's
foot was against hers. The road rose and fell, wandered down arroyos
and over bluffs, and Scully was beginning to feel sleepy by the time
they stopped.

She and Mulder stood side by side as his cuffs were removed. They were
in the middle of the desert and the moon was out now, a nearly-full
moon hanging over the hills. Everyone loaded up in the van again,
leaving them standing there. The last man in pointed behind them as he
swung the door shut, the vehicle already moving away. They stood
watching in silence as the taillights flickered and jounced away down
the trackless slope.

They looked at each other. The moon was very bright, and the quiet of
the place settled around them. They began to climb the rise, dodging a
few scruffy juniper trees. At the top of the incline there was nothing
visible but another hill, and the bisque landscape, moon-drenched,
knobby with green tumbleweed.

They could get lost out here, thousands of square miles of bomb range
and restricted air space. He imagined them wandering for weeks, living
off radioactive deer and cactus juice, making love beneath the chassis
of hypersonic black craft, watching mysteries swirl in the sky. The
sandstone bedrock would be their bath, their bed, their kitchen floor,
the universe their ceiling.

A wind caught them, fresh and smelling of sage. Mulder checked
abruptly and Scully pranced automatically into the lee of his body,
licking her lips.

He drank in her pale orchid of a face. She was with him through
everything, even the wonders of Area 51. "You know, Scully, if you
kiss me in Dreamland, my life will be fully realized."

She appeared to be sorting through a half-dozen flip rejoinders, but
in the end she simply stepped on his foot and tossed back her dark red
hair.

They hadn't been together in weeks and it was an honest, binding kiss,
there among the night scopes and scanners, the telemetry satellite
dishes, the crackling stars.

She felt very hot and cold and alive, her force field clashing with
his. She wrecked him a little, lingering a smile against his mouth.
"Mulder, if you take me somewhere with a hot shower, then MY life will
be fully realized."

He bent and picked up a chip of rock from the ground by her feet, put
it in his pocket. "If everyone did that there wouldn't be any
Dreamland left," she chided. Her fingers were cold in his, but
belonging. From the top of the next hill they saw the distant road,
and their car, bleached grey in the moonlight, pinned to the ground by
a shadow.
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