"Mulder! I need your help!"

Mulder.

You never knew me. You never had the slightest clue. Your insights, Scully, didn’t take you far enough in. Your tools were adequate. Better than that. For all your limitations, you were capable of operations of great emotional delicacy. You surprised me. You came to me as a watcher, a doctor invited to analyze a particularly odd specimen. A forensic pathologist, you? I smiled, but then I saw you had the will and the discipline, and for a time under your gaze I felt to be no more than a pastiche of tissues, of adipose, bones, and glands. As this impression faded I came to know you. I watched you feel your way ahead as you left the cold, measurable kingdom of death and entered the field by my side. You had a gift for fieldwork and it went beyond the application of medical science to mysteries that you might have preferred to leave unsolved. If not for me, eh, Scully? If not for me.

But I was there and I watched you draw truths from stones, evidence from reluctant witnesses, and I watched you comfort the bereaved in your restrained way. A touch like a butterfly’s wing, and the stroke of wings sculling the air is like the sound of your name. . .Scully. Why am I thinking of butterflies, do you suppose. If this were a profile I would go with the flow, and note that in Christian iconography the butterfly is but the final form in a tricyclic metamorphosis of spirit, in which life, death, and rebirth play out--the conclusion to caterpillar and chrysalis, the embodiment of resurrection. But then again in the Gnostic tradition, the butterfly is just another flighty corpse, corrupt and perishable. . .I don't have to ask which school of symbolism you'd embrace. Other cultures hold that the butterfly is the separable soul of the body, which lends a whole new level of morbidity to exhibits of lepidoptera, and the pursuit of same, Nabokov's hobby of choice. The man had a thing for nymphs. Oh, listen, you won't believe what just snagged on the wrack of my mind from the river of memory; would you believe the time that Mizurrah sheriff kept calling you my little Starling. Scully, I didn't know you knew words like that. How was he to know you had a certain history with that nickname? My little starling. Birds too are representative of disembodied spirits, but I'll stick to butterflies. Butterflies, Doctor. The Maori believe that dead souls return to earth in such a form, and can't you just imagine those ghostly swarms drifting through the verdure in the color of tigers. . . .

The moth at my window must be a witch, or maybe a pale fan held in an invisible spirit hand that knocks against my glass.

Your hand. Your hands. Reaching out. Cradling a gun or drawn pointedly on a knife. Curling into your pockets. Tidying a thousand details. Fingers like ivory. . .the plaits of ivory fans, waving, knocking, folding, flirting. . .I think you were trying to get in. But I was your failure. Those scalpels and forceps you kept at hand for incising hearts and withdrawing the embedded shrapnel of wounded minds--these didn’t help you when it came to Fox Mulder. And now you’re gone and there’s more than I can say that I’ve left unsaid. . . .

Scully. I’m sitting in this room of mine, oh late at night. Late, late at night. I don’t sleep anymore. There’s so much more darkness in the world of late. I’m reduced to this--when not watching the blue flicker of my television I am working and when I’m not working I’m sitting here typing and drinking. What you’d think of me I can only imagine. The things I’ve done, Scully, you don’t even know. When it all crashed down and wasted the landscape I skipped right from two-beers-every-other-weekend and into Stoli-til-dawn. A crash course in self-abuse. There is something extraordinary about drinking vodka as the sun rises. I would share it with you, but you’re elsewhere. But, I will have you know, I haven’t slipped yet. I almost discharged my weapon at the pigeons yesterday morning, but that was a single aberrant impulse. I’m just contemplating old habits, old family habits, trying to decide if I can afford to resume them. Probably not. I’m just flirting, here, I think.

I have so much to tell you that I don’t know where to begin. If I ramble. . .I just imagined your impatient look, the one where you pull the blinds over your blue eyes and go to sleep while I talk on and on. I never had a lot of friends before you. I can tell you this now, though I tried to be nonchalant when I had you up close and personal. You know, after that first time when I spilled my guts to you, what little guts I had, about my sister--well, I spent the next year sprinting from any intimacy, afraid you’d press the advantage. I kept my distance. Too well. But, hey, Scully. You weren’t really interested, were you? Male ego on my part, to think you gave a shit about my fossilized traumas, my fucked-up sex life, the Addams family crypt I grew up in. I had my New England stoicism, you had your Catholic school girlhood. My Massachusetts mausoleum, your waxy nun-trodden linoleum. I was interested in you.

I was interested, Scully. You know, if the coin had flipped another way--no, what am I thinking. It wasn't randomness that arranged my life. The pattern of my particles is no accident, I fear. It just strikes me funny, the two of us. Who I might have been, what might have happened if I'd met you in another way. If I'd been a guy with a sister at Bennington, sis getting married to a nice lawyer, our old married parents wanting grandkids. Me with my top-drawer education, a Senator's intern cultivated to twist my way sinuously around the pillars of jurisprudence, all my dreams and impulses diffused into a trimmed landscape of wealth and power--can't you see me, a man working too hard at the proper things, and owning too many foibles and kinks and secrets. . .and then I'd meet you. We'd both be young; we'd click and spark and I'd woo you and you'd let me, and we'd move in together for one year and then our parents would begin making marriage plans and we'd get nervous looks on our faces because there'd be no way to explain to them that it was already all over before it ever started. We couldn't have made that work. I don't think.

Would you have been like a sister to me if I still had a sister? Do I really believe that's how I feel, or how you felt about me? No. We were friends. You had your boundaries well established. You had family. You didn't need another brother, an adopted punk, a basket case. Charity case. Handbasket.

You know, I wonder if I really believe the more outre Jungian paradigms any more. Do you believe that the most common form of anima manifestation is erotic fantasy? It would explain a lot, wouldn't it? I've always been far too in touch with my anima--as you once said. Prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, vague moods--you pegged me, Scully. The woman within has got me by the balls, and it feels soooooooo good. . . .

I think--I don't think--I should have another drink. But if I'm a rambling man, I've got reasons to let my mind roam. Two hundred and six bones in the human body, about twelve pounds for an average man. A skull in which my wet brain sits, synapses snapping out the same old song. I have deep grooves of memory. Time cuts and etches us into sentience like a river marking an interior landscape. When I think of the world that is hung up in my cranium like a blind sodden lump, trying to understand the world--like a cell trying to grasp the entire body or a rock meditating on outer space, I want to laugh. I am a handful of slag trapped in the earth's core and I see nothing. I wonder what it would have been like to see through your eyes. I should have asked. . .more of you.

I've stopped making sense. When did you start, Mulder. God, I can almost hear your voice.

A guillotined head may live on for twenty or thirty seconds. But twenty or thirty years--now there's a good trick.

Sorry, I was staring out the window for a while, watching the night. I keep the lights out, of course, as I sit here typing. Alexandria is mostly hidden behind layers of cloud and brick, but the city seems to have pooled darkly into this room. The night is a gray, permissive color. Close, too close. Distance is a relative thing.

It just goes on and on, at a snail's pace. Life. From secondhand, I've come to understand that for most people it's different, that the years fall away too quickly until only the bare ruined choirs are left, like the cathedral of bones in a dead man's body. The passage of time happens for others as a kind of windy blur, all that dishevelment and dismantling, the leaves stripped. Why then am I like this? I forget what I can, but I remember too much, and every day is endless. My chronological self is always ticking off the minutes; I am so attentive to immediate details, so focused, that the world beyond my magic circle often escapes me. But in fact I'm trying hard to escape it. You sometimes seemed as if you guessed this about me, but I don't really know if you could. How I would sit for an hour at my desk, eyes tracing the glyphic intelligence of a case file, of forensic reports, of internet data; and in me the seconds ticking away, each discrete and quantifiable. I could not lose myself. Cannot. I am a recording machine. An hour is almost never less than itself, its full reckoning. Even when I drink, time refuses to loosen its hold on me. It's unfair, don't you think? Especially for a man who can't sleep.

When I seemed most removed in thought, did you suspect I was still prodded and mocked by my own heartbeat? How could you.

I'm not an easy man to get to know, and now this seems a good thing. Or if not good. . .useful. I feel like one of those ferns--what are they called, Scully?--and if you touch me, I'll fold up, closing in on myself. I feel a fingertip running a bisection on my chest. A knife aimed at my heart. Is that you. . .no.

I've really fucked up.

I lost you and now I find myself more and more looking at my gun as if it has something to say to me. Will another twenty years pass in search of you, the measure I've spent in search of her? I'm sorry, Scully. I don't know if I'll be able to do it again. Only anger, rage, seething lust for vengeance, buoys me now. If I don't set this down I'm in danger of losing it, I think. I feel feverish, doctor. I feel mad. I am the monster to someone's Frankenstein. The gods that created me are small, cruel, tyrannical--but absent. Shrouded, removed, faceless. I am so fucking mad. I am so boiling with the stew of my anger that these words, their ease, their swift appearance on the screen, their impermanence, seems mocking. Words chiseled into a weightless tombstone. I etch you into my mind and burn my thoughts into my hard drive, but can't recreate even the smallest atom of you. Fragrance. Eyelash. A dusting of your skin. You've left me, and I'm alone. I mean, I'm alone. I, I, I. So that in its twisted way, it's all about me. I'm alone here making 'I's at myself. They could be little bones, these stand-ins for myself. A boring rune I cast, monotonous without you.

For the first time in years, I sit down to make words as if I can type them to life. I've typed death, I've typed to death. I've written profiles and case reports and crime scene analyses, but I've never tried to resurrect a soul from ashes. I used to write poetry, but it's been a long time. This is--even this is harder than I remember. My journal-keeping has grown more infrequent over the years. My drives have been rerouted into ruts, so that most of the time I don't need to establish a record of my meandering thoughts: they're the same thoughts I've had before. But this is. . .fresh. A fresh hell. I think I want to capture it, savor it, demarcate its rings. So that I can crystallize my passion for you, Scully. Make my vengeance a thing of substance. Reality.

Make it so. . .so pure that. . .I lost track of what I was thinking. Something about poisons. I feel that if I could bite someone now, rip into someone's throat, I could kill with my venom. Hey, Scully. I'd make a good vampire, I think. Dark Shadows time. Except for my nose. I don't think they'd take me seriously with this clown mug I've got plastered to my noggin.

I made myself stop writing, and I paced around my room and I worked my hair around and around on my scalp like a man trying to pull a vase into shape from a lump of clay, but nothing took shape and here I am again. I hope you know that if I'm facetious it means nothing. I try to set down absolute truth and get distracted thinking about my nose. I could erase the words, but wouldn't you rather have them, imperfect and irrational, each of my thoughts another nut in the fruitcake, the old fruitcake I call a brain. When I think of you, when I talk to you, I imagine you reading this and I want to make you laugh. I want to reach you, but it's all bunk and fallacy. Hey, look, Scully--me admitting to fallacies. You're my fallacy now. You are, if I believe I can communicate with you like this, through a medium of electrical impulses, as if I could establish this as a locus for conjuring your spirit. Locus spiritus in IBM.

There is a ghost in this machine, but it's just my own.

Okay, I think I was going to tell you a story. I think a narrative is called for because otherwise I'll just rant and babble, and you'd get fed up with me in short order. Since you can't interrupt, I'll have to watch myself. I can hear the storm of my thoughts but transcribing the furor is tricky. Alphabet soup. No, really. Did I ever tell you about Loren Fisk, the alphabet-soup killer? He shared with me, during one of those bonding moments, that he used to find his victims' names by rearranging the alpha-nominal noodles in his bowl. Messages from the gods, Scully. He was fixated on what he called 'manifestations of logos in the inanimate'. Words in the soup, in other words, but he also had an interesting conceptual construct for deciphering form from chaos--he envisioned white space--pages, computer screens--as a kind of cover-sheet laid over a vast darkness, and the words that wrote themselves there were the code from beyond. You see that this is like the old view of stars as pinpricks in a blanket of night. There's also a sense of writing as a kind of palimpsest, the tracery of meaning on meaning, layer on layer, and I won't bore you with the poststructuralist theory, but under different circumstances I think Fisk might have had a solid tenured future at Columbia. We had a nice chat about Freud’s 'Mystic Writing Pad', Derrida, and the 'infinite potentiality' of hypertext. He certainly defended the proposition that language speaks people, rather than people language. Of course, he also made soup bowls out of people's cranial vaults, so there you are. These are my coevals, Scully. It’s a scary thought.

Where was I.

Oh, yeah. Bedtime stories. I might well spend a thousand and one nights spinning my words out to keep you alive, or the semblance of you. There are worse things I could do, some of which I've done. Should I start with the phone call or with everything that went before? How can I even begin, how can I. . .it's a wall that I’ve run into head first. It's very hard to write the truth; to speak, to admit. I've always understood the relativity of belief. But when things get personal, I've liked to think I could peel away mundane deceits like rings from an onion, and reach a core truth. Not so.

I've been stalling, here. I want to be able to set this down in black and white, so that I could distinguish one from the other. Dark from light, good from evil. I want to focus on the the single horror of having you taken from me, and paint the facts of the matter without humor, distraction, or question. But you're at the heart of a tangled web, and I'm still trying to unknot the strands. Bear with me, Scully?

So there I was. . .um. God, very weird to be outing myself to you like this. It isn't how I pictured breaking the news. And yet I’ve felt out; we had that unspoken understanding, didn’t we? I dropped enough hints to let you know how the pendulum swung. Both ways, baby. And I've never lied if someone asked me the question. But you didn't ask, just gave me those hooded, speculative looks, those darting glances, those thoughtful gazes.

I'm stalling, stalling.

So there I was, pulling myself upright from Alex's bedsheets. The night in question. Dressing myself, leaving him. I don't know what I was thinking. I made some offhand remark about this being my social life, which was something you had said, though I'm not sure how much you were insinuating. You weren't perfect, Scully. You could be a needling bitch. Can you believe that I can type that and still feel so much a swell of anguish in my heart that I start leaking, that I.

. . . .I’m being a baby. You'd be much more together, if our positions were reversed, I'll bet. It’s just that this has brought it all back. I didn't expect this, and yet the route from point A to B now seems to have a terrible kind of inevitability. I carry fate with me and its touch corrupts. I marked you. I painted the target on your flesh, God help me, Scully.

I'm as crumpled inside as a bad auto accident, a train wreck, not unlike a collapsed accordion: the intervening years of my existence have been compressed so that now touches then, and I'm right back where I began, when I first came to consciousness of the disaster that would be the rest of my life. The terror, the guilt, the numbed contemplation of emptiness. Suicide is. . .well, I must be pretty sure you'll never read this, because I wouldn't expose myself so indecently otherwise. I know you wouldn't welcome that. But here I am, showing off my scars. (And I'm avoiding really beginning my story, because once I start I'll have to talk about him. Chickenshit that I am.)

There were times after Sam disappeared, when the family house had divided and fallen, when I would visit my dad--well, visit his new digs, at least--he was usually at the club. And while I was alone in the house I'd take his gun from the dresser and sit on the edge of his bed and very carefully unlock the safety and hold it to my temple and stare at myself in the mirror. I think there were times I held the gun there for twenty minutes or more, listening for the sound of his car, unsure if I was listening for rescue or interruption. My face was blank, but not through any spectacular Zen exercise in self-negation or control. I was not too with it. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen--I was in a bad way. They kept me around; my parents; I went to a local private academy as a day student, then talked them into letting me go to public school, which I wanted to attend so I could hang with the townies and their flower children sibs and the Vietnam vets, who always know how to get the good drugs. I inhaled and I dropped a lot of acid, too, and I'll bet you aren't too surprised, are you.

My favorite book was Catcher in the Rye. I can just see you smirking. Another twist or two in the garden path I was tripping down and I'd have been taking out co-eds from a watchtower before reaching my age of majority.

Memories from my adolescence have been returning to me lately, a tidal resurgence of angst steeped in testosterone, quasi-intellectual conundrums, and a rapport with my inner guitarist that I've never really recaptured. Maybe it has something to do with getting laid on a regular basis. Thinking with my dick. How many times can I skitter away from stating the facts flatly, from telling you in all the gory detail just what kind of emotional quagmire I've gotten myself into.

You didn't seem to like Alex. I don't know if that was intuitive, or if you recognized something in him that raised your Scully-hackles. You never said anything outright and I don't think I would have listened if you had. My primate was backseat-driving for a while there, sitting hunkered down in the old cerebellum, playing limbo with my limbic system and short circuiting the cerebral cortex. He didn't have to manipulate me; I did the job all by myself. The drum beats drowned out any murmurs of conscious suspicion. This was a time when my paranoia would have been perfectly rational, but I. . .I liked having a man in my life. Go figure. I liked having my partner go down on me. I liked rolling over for him and giving it up. Oh, I never entirely shed my caution, but the semblance of trust I offered him backfired on me. I did trust him--at least enough to fall on my ass when the rug was yanked out from under me.

I'm coming around slowly to the point again, Scully. Approaching the point of no return. I tilt my head and look at the clock on his bedside table--that's the first thing I remember after the fireworks stop. We'd been drifting; I was rambling, as I am wont to do. My head crooked into his arm, his fingers playing with my hair. Heartbeat to heartbeat, a couple of damp men--something about the salty weld of our skins, the heap of our bones--I can't entirely erase the feelings this stirs in me, even thinking about it now. I will dispassionately inform the computer of this and maybe say a Hail Mary in your honor.

The allure of wickedness; I think I felt it even before I fully knew what he was. We were together a lot; he was two-faced. This was something I recognized, but it didn't bother me, not as an indicator of some deeper schism: good versus evil, Jekyll and Hyde. It wasn't a sinister characteristic, as I saw it. Janus, the two-faced god, looks ahead to the future and back to the past, the gatekeeper of heaven, the source of beginnings and endings. . .what am I reaching for here? I looked at him and saw just another guy, conflicted, moving ahead but snagged by his past--which he never talked about, so we made a pretty good couple.

He had flaws. At one point I had written him off as a crypto-fascist closet case pissant, but I couldn’t leave it at that. I had to rewrite him. He didn’t make it easy for me. Alex Krycek.

I left him in his bed and returned and heard your call. How could he have had anything to do with it? I was with him, and besides, it was clear who had taken you. I had Barry's voice on my answering machine, taped evidence. You were talking about the implant I'd given you, about having scanned it, and then you suggested the idea of cataloging and I was just thinking that I'd finally done it, I'd infused you the spirit of conspiracy theory, you were even leapfrogging ahead of me, good girl, and then you were yelling for me. I'd say. . .screaming. But I should choose my words carefully. You never did like melodrama. You'd hate me for painting a lurid picture. If I indulged in revisionist history I could reinvent you as a paragon of virtues, my Dana Scully, and yet reduce you in one last brazen impression of voice to a shrieking damsel in distress, which you aren't. . .weren't. Other women may shriek, screech, wail, but you yell, no more than that. You yell from necessity, but you. . . .

I ran for you, tearing off without even stopping to check if there was another, later message on the machine, maybe you saying, Mulder, it's all right now, if you get this message, call me. But I knew there wasn't any other message. This was the one, the irrevocable one.

Coming back to this, sober now, I'm amazed and disgusted by how detached and unemotional my words appear, how little of relevance I've set down so far, though I'd intended to bring my dizzying melange of impressions into focus in this document. I have to filter my feelings through the act of writing, and the end result is dry as dust. But then all my life I've been told that I'm too cold. Unnatural, mechanical. Demanding and selfish. My voice, uninflected, a flat drone. Fox Mulder, a marble statue trying to breathe. I've actually loosened up a lot in the last few years; by the time you met me I'd relaxed some of the tense habits of two decades and could actually crack a joke without sounding like a robot or a talking doll. I'd practiced this. More obsessiveness in front of the mirror: I used to pull at my face, trying to find normal human expressions under a mask of rigid muscles. These days, I sometimes wonder if I'm in danger of becoming over-emotional. There's a lot more anger boiling to the surface.

I find that when I write I don't sound like myself. It must be true that the connections, the pathways, between brain and tongue are different than between brain and hand. No, I wasn't thinking what you were thinking.  . . .I come back to the words I've written and don't recognize them as my own. No wonder Skinner rips my case reports to shreds. I had no idea I could be so annoyingly discursive.

I miss you.

Once, I quoted Thoreau to you. You made me explain, and then seemed pleased, in your understated way. It takes two to speak the truth. Yeah, I know. I kept my aphorisms in readiness, veritas on tap, and sneakily subjected you to yet another profundity whenever the rare opportunity presented itself. But I meant something sincere then, at least once in my life. You knew that, didn't you? I meant you were a friend to me; the truth we made together was more than either of us would have made alone. You made me more critical, more scrupulous. You honed my edge. I'm not sure you wanted to, but it was good for me. I'm smiling, Scully, because I have to believe you understood. It's too late to second-guess, to doubt, to regret my flippancy and all the missed opportunities when I could have been earnest. You must have understood.

I'm going to try this from the top. From the top, then, I will tell you how I drove across town, calling you on my cell phone, getting no answer on yours, and none on your residential line. The thunderstorm that had accompanied me home faded as I drove, and by the time I reached your house was nowhere to be seen.

When I pulled up, I realized how much time must have passed before I heard your message. Time enough for the police to arrive and try to impose their authority on your mystery. I was sure you were dead. The process of investigation had begun; the barrier tape had been hung; the gawking neighborhood crowd had gathered. Even blindered and making a bee-line for the heart of the scene of darkness, expecting to walk in and find your corpse on the floor, I could feel the press of people drawn in by their curiosity--or, knowing you, their concern; and I wondered which of them had known you, and if they'd known you better than I had. Yes, I actually thought that. Did you think I was a good man?

Maybe I was in shock. If you had cut me open I would have been full of stones; they were heavy in my throat, making my level of anticipation rise with the taste of bile.

I showed my badge, they let me through. Just another badge, that's me. The very model of legal authority I was, still slick and unwashed under my suit, marked with my partner's love-bites. Did you know that a man can flash his badge and  begin his walk into a zone of absolute terror and still carry with him an awareness of his own well-fucked ass? No pleasure remained; it was driven out of me, and I was numb, but not numb enough. The world was an abstract thing but it was with me. A breeze carrying a spray of mist like the perfume of rain licked across my face. My skin was cold. How could it be August?

This isn't to say I was distracted, don't misunderstand, but for a moment, my foot resting to ascend your front steps, I was deeply aware of my life, that my blood still flowed, my heart beat. That's all.
 

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