Title: Memento Modell and At the End of the Fox Hunt (Two Poems)
Author: Aurora Fox
School: Department of Poetry
Date Archived: January 30, 1999



Memento Modell

He turns to me, and I can see the fear reflected in cold, black metal
A drop of salt falls, falling
Forgotten, splashing on the cold unfeeling tile
Pairs of horrified eyes stare into each other's depths
As always, like never before
His resolve shreds, each fibre fraying slowly
A nervous jerk of the hand could bring his world to a crashing halt
The tortured voice whispers, murmuring my name
Urging me away from harm
His voice warns me, but his eyes are pleading
Begging me to save him
I always have, always will
He wakes, startled by an ear-splitting shriek
His vanquished fear lies bleeding on the floor.

~Aurora Fox
1-4-99


This is what I call a poetic description of the stand-off scene in
"Pusher," and it begins just as Mulder swings the gun around and points it at
Scully. The title, "Memento Modell," kind of defines the memory of this
scene as it exists in Mulder's and Scully's minds. The memory of that moment
is, indeed, a reminder of Modell (memento is Latin for reminder of). It was
also meant to echo the episode title "Memento Mori" because in both episodes
Mulder experiences a wrenching fear for Scully's life and believes the danger
to be his own fault.

I will now do a line-by-line interpretation of the poem.

"He turns to me, and I can see the fear reflected in the cold, black metal"
This is the instant when Mulder turns and points the gun at Scully.
The cold, black metal is that of the gun; the fear could be Scully's fear or
both of theirs, and it is "reflected" in the gun because it is the source of
that fright.

"A drop of salt falls, falling
Forgotten, splashing on the cold unfeeling tile"
The drop of salt is the tear that falls from Scully's cheek as she's
pleading with Mulder to fight Modell. It falls, seemly unnoticed by those in
the room, onto the hospital floor, represented by "the cold unfeeling tile."

"Pairs of horrified eyes stare into each other's depths
As always, like never before"
The partners stare, fear evident in their eyes, and [this is one
place where the point of view switches to Scully] Scully realizes that she
has stared into those eyes before, countless times, but never before in a
situation like this, when he is being mentally forced into shooting her.
They are the same eyes, but there's an element of raw fear for her safety
that is a little alien to her. This is speculation on my part about Scully's
thoughts.

"His resolve shreds, each fibre fraying slowly
A nervous jerk of the hand could bring his world to a crashing halt"
His finger inches onto the trigger as his defense against Modell's
power weakens. [Switching to Mulder's point of view] When his finger rests
on the trigger, it occurs to him that, with the slightest involuntary twitch,
his beloved Scully is dead and his life is over.

"The tortured voice whispers, murmuring my name
Urging me away from harm"
[Back to Scully's thoughts] Mulder exclaims, "Scully, RUN!" and
then proceeds to murmur her name under his breath, almost like a mantra. He
is telling her to run away, to save herself and leave him behind.

"His voice warns me, but his eyes are pleading
Begging me to save him"
While his voice is telling her to go, to run, she recognizes
something else in his eyes. It's that familiar desperation, the little-boy
fear; he wants her to help him, to save him, and to take the gun out of his
hand and tell him everything is all right. He wants her to save both of them
from himself because he can't do it alone.

"I always have, I always will"
She realizes she has to do something; after all they've been through
together, she can't just leave him there with Modell. She's saved his ass
too many times to let him down now.

"He wakes, startled by an ear-splitting shriek"
She turns and pulls the fire-alarm, causing a loud alarm that
"awakens" Mulder, pulling him from Modell's grasp.

"His vanquished fear lies bleeding on the floor."
Unbelievably pissed off for what Modell nearly made him do, Mulder
turns to Modell and shoots him, pulling the trigger repeatedly even though
there was only one bullet in the chamber. "His vanquished fear" is a
metaphor for two things; the first is Modell, who actually is lying bleeding
on the floor. The other is a more abstract entity. During the entire scene,
nobody had been entirely sure whether the one bullet would have been there
if Mulder had pulled the trigger; when he turned to Modell and shot him, it
turned out that it definitely would have been. His "vanquished fear" of
Scully's death lies wounded, but not dead, on the floor; it's not dead
because the thought of what he nearly did will haunt Mulder forever, as
a Memento Modell.

The basic elements that went into this poem came from my own
imagination. I thought about everything that happened during this scene, and
all of the unspoken things that passed between Mulder and Scully during those
few short minutes. I wanted to capture the raw emotions, the love and the
fear that I saw racing across the screen the first time I watched "Pusher."
I tried using words that I hoped would capture the essence of the moment
without any further explanation; words like "cold," "black," and "fear"
usually carry a dark, hopeless connotation. They always invoke a sense of
emptyness in my own mind when they are used together as in this poem. These
are the emotions that I absorbed from the scene as a viewer, and I tried to
convey all of that so the poem would bring out these same feelings in a
reader who has never seen "Pusher." I didn't use a specific form or
structure, simply because I was describing an experience. The structure had
to mimic that of the scene in order to capture the essence of it, and so the
lines are there in random length and rhythm. I used a metaphor in the last
line in order to describe more than one thing, and the repetition of the word
"fall" in line 2 was meant to draw out that moment, to kind of freeze
everything else as the mind's eye watches that one tear fall to the
impersonal hospital floor.




-----------------------------------------------------------------------------




At the End of the Fox Hunt

Puzzled confusion, why is she here?
Where is my prey?
Horrifying, watching her succumb to my quarry
The hunted becomes the hunter
Words fly from somewhere deep within, powerless to stop the madness
It's like a nightmare, so surreal
I watch the dark, black metal seek the copper flame, seek to destroy
Again, my world is nearly over
Like that forgotten white-washed memory
Only this time-this time--I-----NO
Please oh god please no oh god this is impossible please no......
My thoughts race on, repeating the same plea
Screaming to God as if my mind had a mind of its own
As nearly becomes forever
I cradle the fallen head in my lap
Powerless, futile, a failure ahead of my time
I whirl, dying to shoot
Destroy! says my heart, there's a fiend before you
It pleads with the face of evil, but the words....
Oh, the words
Could it be?
No, it's trying to trick me....but...
One more shot, and it's done
I turn, and see the mirror image lying still behind me
My gun falls of its own accord, I look again
My crumbled world stands once more.
"Mulder?"
~Aurora Fox
1-8-99



This is a sort of companion poem to "Memento Modell;" it is my idea
of a representation of Mulder's thought processes during the scene in
"Kitsunegari" when he watches "Scully" shoot herself. "Kitsunegari" is a
Japanese ideogram meaning "fox hunt," and so I entitled this poem "At the End
of the Fox Hunt." The reason it serves as a companion to my previous poem is
simply that "Pusher" and "Kitsunegari" both involve Robert Modell, while the
latter centers more around his fraternal twin, Linda Bowman, who has the same
unique ability to bend people to her will. She is the "prey" this poem
refers to; when Mulder goes to the old warehouse where the scene takes place,
he is looking for Linda. Instead, inside he encounters Scully--at least,
that's what he thinks.


"Puzzled confusion, why is she here?
Where is my prey?"
What Mulder is thinking when he sees Scully standing in the
warehouse; why is Scully in here, and where is Linda?

"Horrifying, watching her succumb to my quarry
The hunted becomes the hunter"
He watches, horrified as Scully seems to do everything Linda is
making her do; Linda is his "quarry," and she becomes the hunter as she
"attacks" Scully.

"Words fly from somewhere deep within, powerless to stop the madness"
He says her name, tries to stop her with his words, but they have no
effect on Scully's actions.

"It's like a nightmare, so surreal"
He's seeing this as though in a dream. It doesn't seem possible, him
standing there, unable to stop Scully from hurting herself. His mind doesn't
want to absorb it.

"I watch the dark, black metal seek the copper flame, seek to destroy"
He sees Scully raise the gun to her head, "copper flame" representing
her hair. In that instant, he sees the gun as threatening her, trying to
destroy her.

"Again my world is nearly over
Like that forgotten white-washed memory"
In a brief flash of memory, he remembers the ordeal with Modell, when
Scully's life was threatened by Linda's twin. The memory is "forgotten"
because Mulder had tried so many times to put it out of his mind; "white-
washed" refers to the bleak white look of the hospital room where the scene
took place.

"Only this time-this time--I-----NO
Please oh god please no oh god this is impossible please no......"
Unlike the first time, the gun actually goes off, and in a flash of
horror Mulder watches Scully fall to the floor. He panics, a hundred pleas
and laments race through his thoughts. He is barely aware of anything except
for what he just saw.

"My thoughts race on, repeating the same plea
Screaming to God as if my mind had a mind of its own"
He is not consciously saying these things in his mind. They come
automatically, begging God to give her back to him. His thoughts shriek
unbidden, almost as if some separate part of his brain had "decided" to
petition God on its own.

"As nearly becomes forever"
For Mulder, the line above, "my world is nearly over," becomes "my
world is forever over."

"I cradle the fallen head in my lap
Powerless, futile, a failure ahead of my time"
He holds her head as he desperately wishes he could help her. He
knows he can't bring her back; he is powerless, everything he does is futile.
He feels as though he's made a flawless career of failing her, and this is
his final proof.

"I whirl, dying to shoot
Destroy! says my heart, there's a fiend before you"
Mulder turns and sees what looks like Linda Bowman standing in front
of him. His first impulse is to shoot her, to destroy this woman who has
taken everything from him.

"It pleads with the face of evil, but the words...
Oh, the words
Could it be?
No, it's trying to trick me....but..."
Mulder is certain that the woman is Linda, but then she begins trying
to convince him that she's Scully. Her words begin sounding very honest as
she names his family members, and his resolve wavers. Before he makes up
his mind.....

"One more shot, and it's done"
"Linda" shoots someone behind him.

"I turn and see the mirror image lying still behind me
My gun falls of its own accord, I look again"
He looks behind him and sees the real Linda lying there, shot by the
woman in front of him. He realizes his gun hangs at his side, in his hand,
and he turns again to look at the woman he thought was Linda.

"My crumbled world stands once more"
Scully, his beloved, beautiful Scully, his entire-world-wrapped-up
-into-one-person Scully, is standing there in front of him. She's alive, and
his life is no longer over.

" 'Mulder?' "
The first tentative thing she says after he sees her standing there,
and his final proof that it really IS her. Who else could just stand there
and say his name after that kind of ordeal?


This poem was different from the first in several ways. Obviously
this one was written entirely from inside Mulder's thoughts, instead of
switching from third person to Scully's point of view to Mulder's and back
again like "Memento." I also wanted to give the whole thing an extrememly
surreal quality, as I imagine it might have seemed in Mulder's mind. Again,
I use "black" and "dark" metal to describe the gun, simply because that's
how it looked to me on the screen. In order to convey more sheer emotion, I
used what I consider to be very poetic phrases, such as "crumbled world
stands once more" and "my mind had a mind of its own." The first was a
metaphor for the real Scully, and the second was a phrase I just happened to
think of. I call them poetic phrases because they aren't statements I would
use in prose writing, unless it was very eloquent prose. I'm not entirely
sure why, exactly, except that they seem to hold more power and emotion than
everyday language.

Although this scene moved much faster than the one I described from
"Pusher," it held just as much emotion and feeling. I hope I captured enough
of this feeling to give the reader a taste of the end of "Fox Hunt."