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____________________

First of all, she had a presence that felt like home. She made his
office feel like a place, a pod for two seeds, her left brain and
his right. Everything worked when she was there - monitors
glowed, slides clicked into place. The skylight was cleared of
snow. She brought a coffee maker for the lab, all her scientist
stuff in there, chemicals and knives and her lunch in the fridge,
film in the fridge, coffee in the fridge, and one time in there they
took Polaroids of each other, wrestling over the camera, blocking
the shots like jaded celebrities.

The surfaces of the photographs took awhile to become clear, first
warping orange like burns or sunscald. They watched the pictures
take on milky shapes, then turn glossy and flat. "Look at you," he
said. "Look at you," she said. In the picture her hand was flung up
and she was smiling wider than she ever did in real life, a
misleading sliver of grin behind the cuff of her jacket.

They liked their surfaces. They faced forward together, driving
in the rain cage of the car. They understood logic and size, but
it was hard to see the whole picture this close up. And things
kept flickering past. What was that? Uri Geller? The Bermuda
Blob? He postulated. She typed it up. Muddy shoes by the door.
Office memos. She brought sandwiches, celery. A periodical
on deformities.

On this surface, there wasn't time for anything more. The car
careened forward, toward more trouble, more illusion, or worse,
illumination. She slung a human heart upon the scales, he
crumbled the friable coffin dust in his latexed hand, crouched
at a bodysnatched grave.

But anything magnified becomes huge in itself. Under magnification,
the surface is scored and etched and the cracks run deep and take
on new dimension. In this crack the corn pushes up and the sky looks
down, and they are lost in a corn maze in northern Kentucky.

We were never lost, she says.

Utterly, completely lost, he says.

Once more into the tangling straits of trance, the string bound
golden glowing round his hands.

Of all the turns he might have taken, blind turns leading
away from this. Strings that snap, hammers tripping,
trapdoors caving beneath his feet. The walls ooze amrith. The
operation is called 'paperclip', like that ocular image of twisting
silver, the way he feels the convoluted chambers and turnings
of his thumping heart, the way it all could end. And what the
end would mean - 'disaster' means 'evil star'; 'apocalypse'
means 'revelation' - the truth.

The Amazing Maze O' Maize was one of Mulder's impulsive roadside
stops, where the stubble stiffened and snapped beneath their city
shoes, and she calculated how long they'd been on the road by the
skein of bugs across the windshield. She remembered the sky bright
rental-car blue, the crinkling palimpsest fronds all around her like
bookcases, taller than her, taller even than Mulder. He had
sprung for the price of admittance, all of fifty cents.

"It's a classical Cretan design!" he says. This corn is no sinister
transgenic crop. The maze turns and arcs, and turns again. "This
design dates to twelve hundred BC," he says. "Note the seven
circuits, corresponding to the seven Hindu chakras." Later, he
will draw it for her, a loopy mad-scientist sketch on a diner
napkin.

Note the contained happiness in this man, his black coat whipping
her body as they cut around a corner, the enjoyment in his
impassive face perceptible only to her practiced eye.

"No minotaur," she says, as they gain the center.

"Looking for trouble, Scully?" he asks, with some intent. His soft
mouth quirks.

Labyrinths, Mulder explains, are convoluted journeys fraught with
dead ends and blind passages, and are solved by intuition and
creativity. "But a maze is a left-brained puzzle." He looks down at
her, eyes narrow and warm in the afternoon light. Not unlike you,
his eyes say.

Scully is almost convinced her eyes say nothing in return.

"There's an algorithm that will solve any maze," says Mulder. "If
you keep your right hand on the wall you can always find your way
out. It's called the Right Hand Rule."

His fingerprint is the twirl of an Anasazi sun calendar. There is,
of course, a fertility aspect to mazes. A Cretan maze, eyed
from a minor angle, resembles a goddess, her hair in a
clockwise and treacherous swirl, entangling.

In his unskillful hand, her fountain pen rips and catches on the
paper napkin. He draws wildly, freeform, like an artist in the grip
of free-association.

"The Cretan Paradox:" says Scully. "All Cretans are liars, said
the Cretan."

"My favorite is the Paradox of Buridan's Ass," Mulder says. He
pushes the napkin across the Formica at her, grinning.

She turns it and presses it flat with her fingers. It looks like
a slab of brain.
________________

"One for the money, two for the show, Scully," Mulder says on the
phone. "You wanna take in a flick?"

Scully switches the phone to her other ear. "Mulder, you hate the
movies," she says, rubbing lotion into the sole of her foot. No
room in the seats for his legs, and his runner's knees
were usually throbbing by the first car chase.

"Not the movies, Scully, the drive-in," he corrects. There is a
hollow, microsecond interval in the connection, as though
he's overseas instead of just a motel room away, sitting around
bored on a Saturday night.

The only thing worse than sitting in theater seats is sitting
in a car for a couple of hours. "I was under the impression
that drive-ins had gone the way of the aquatic plesiosaur,"
Scully says, temporizing. Movies are what normal people do
together. Or people on dates.

He breathes noisily into the phone."Not in this town,
apparently. Come on, think of it as a cultural experience."

"How do you figure? I hadn't considered that culture was to be had
in Northern Kentucky."

"Oh, ow, Scully," he squeaks. "Culture, as in the small town
drive-in experience. Americana, if you will. The end of an era."

For a second, drive-ins make her think of back seats, the cold sting
of beer in the throat, small-town Saturday nights.

"Scully?" he says, over the pumping of her heart. "It's
Saturday night."

"A unicursal maze, you said," Scully says, making conversation
in the car. It doesn't help that the movie's so bad the only
recourse is to talk through it.

"The Egyptians designed mazes inside the great tombs to foil grave
robbers. Mazes, dead ends, booby traps, false sarcophagi with
mummified animals in them. Herodotus describes an amazing Egyptian labyrinth. The Romans used mazes to improve their horsemanship. Ahhh. We deserve this," Mulder says, stretching out his legs and tipping back his seat like they're finally taking a
luxury cruise. "What a summer."

She is so subdued that he turns to look at her and is riven
momentarily spellbound by the sight of her chewing a piece
of ice. In the strobic movie light she turns to him, tearing her
eyes away from Godzilla. "What?" she asks gravely.

"Nothing...it's just that traditionally, nobody ever actually
watches the movie at the drive-in."

"I've never known you to be an adherent of tradition." She
continues to scrutinize him. "So, what did you have in mind?"
She chews sideways, like a tiny adorable goat. She rarely flirts
with him, and she seems entirely serious now. He wonders how
drunk he will have to get her just to see her smile.

Slowly, day by day, she is emerging from the wretched
waking dream he found her in at the South Pole, like
Han Solo frozen in carbonite. At least Princess Leia
had the presence of mind to kiss Han when she thawed
him out, and Princess Leia is even more crotchety than
Mulder. Movies are never like real life, Mulder thinks.

He rocks his knee nervously. "Oh, I don't know...I was thinking
about making a run to the snack bar."

She jerks the handle of her door. "I'll go with you."

Mulder finally, finally emerges from the convoluted cement passage
of the snack bar dugout bathrooms. "Did you forget the Right Hand
Rule?" she asks.

"There was a line," he says, with dignity. Scully has two waxy
cups of Coke plus sunflower seeds, licorice, and a bucket of
popcorn. She leans against the cement wall like a roller-skating
waitress on her cigarette break. Since her hands are full, she
licks up a piece of popcorn from the overflowing bucket.

"Scully, that's gross!" he complains. "Other people might want to
eat that, you know." As if swapping saliva with Scully is a
scenario that particularly plagues him, or at least not in any
hygienic sense. Perhaps it plagues him a little.

Scully looks at him evenly, almost cross-eyed by his nearness as he
relieves her of some of her burden. Neon flashes pink off her hair.
Scully proximate engenders a hitch of pother. There is a prickle
between them like heat lightning. He tries not to dwell on the fact
that he recently saw her naked.

"A little Coke with your rum?" he asks. They aren't exactly watching
the movie.

Her head falls back against the seat. "Mulder, I'm so wasted," she
complains.

"No you're not; that's just the liquor talking," he says.

"Funny thing is, I can never recall if Godzilla is a poorly realized
Tyrannosaur, or if he's just a monster, but imagining the
understandable Japanese abhorrence of nuclear fallout,
he's probably a victim of radiation mutation, like the Newark
case," Scully rattles desperately.

"Those were the days," Mulder says affably. Their front tires are
tipped up on a little grassy bank; Mulder with his seat tilted back
is lying nearly flat. He slides his hand up under his T-shirt,
slowly rubbing his stomach, his mouth working on a sunflower seed.
Oh, God, oh God, she thinks, dizzy. Behind her closed eyes she
thinks about complex numbers with their real parts and their
imaginary parts and their iterating clusters mapping out
spirals.

"You know, I'm finding...the nerve it takes to open oneself to these
things," she says, her eyes springing open. "I mean, water, Mulder -
water is either an unideal gas or an extremely faulty crystal. We're
not even sure. And the geometry of chaos does not compute."

"But it exists nevertheless," he says, easily following her line of
thought. "Sometimes I think how much science tells us about
ourselves, and how little about the world we live in, since we can
only perceive what we can conceive of."

"But we can conceive of more all the time," she says.

Mulder looks at her proudly, nodding for a minute.

If there's one thing she's learned from Mulder, it's that there is
always more to the story, more angles and backstories and points
of view - sometimes there are no right answers, and no wrong. At
times Scully and Mulder walk out of the edges of their story,
sometimes they cross chilly afternoons, breaking the ice on mud
puddles, cutting down an alley where they're completely unobserved.

And the maze surrounds them.

She gives him a challenging glance and he brushes past her. Corn
flicks against her cheek. They compete to choose the right path,
find the algorithm, bumping into each other in their haste. Then
the sky opens up around them and she has to run a few steps
to keep apace and they are free of the maze, his hand on her arm
as they burst into the shorn fields.

Sometimes they are both right, and sometimes they walk out into the
October light, and they are real.
__________________

Afterword:

The first time I saw The Movie was at the local drive-in, which is
out in the wheat fields behind Bi-Mart. There were crickets, there
were teenagers in sleeping bags on the hoods of cars and people
in deck chairs in the backs of trucks; there was that sweet
summertime smell of skunk. My sister and I had a pick-up truck,
half a cheese cake, a couple of forks and a fruit jar of wine. When
it finally got dark enough and all the horns were honking and the
black oil opening credits came up on the screen I was so excited
I could hardly breathe; it's a documented fact that I didn't breathe
through the whole Hallway Scene. But I was out of my mind in the
summer of 1998...