There's some kind of streamer tied to the air conditioning vent, and it blows inwards with the chilled air, fluttering like the tail of a kite. Tracy looks at it now and again and smiles, her face as bland and guileless as an infant's. She is doped to the gills on major anti-psychotic drugs. The walls of her mind run in swirls of color like a fresh painting in the rain. But somewhere inside the psychedelic strobe lights and sixties sitar music, Dr. Tracy Buckland is still in there. That's a little surprising, considering the recent violent wrenching away of all she ever knew or believed in. Wisps of smoke still curl occasionally from the fried places in her brain. But she can reduce her vision enough now to realize that she isn't alone in the room.
Scully sits in a chair, dwarfed by Skinner's dark blue suit jacket. He's in a chair on the opposite side of Tracy's bed. In the hallway it was so cold Scully began to shiver a little and when he saw the gooseflesh on her arms he took his jacket off and draped it over her shoulders without saying anything. She didn't look at him, kept her eyes away the way she does when she's embarrassed. But now she holds it together across her breasts and is as grateful for the warmth of the gesture as she is for the jacket itself. It smells like Skinner, very masculine, faintly soapish. What is that scent? Not cologne. The thought almost makes her smile; only her cheek dimples a little. She can imagine what Skinner thinks each Christmas when he gets all those little bottles of cologne as obligatory staff gifts. There's probably a cardboard box somewhere in his apartment stuffed with those sorts of useless things. Her eye catches his now by accident, and he looks mildly surprised at the twinkle she can't quite conceal.
"A woman is a vessel," Tracy says.
Skinner and Scully exchange a glance.The problem is not, as they imagine, that Tracy's thinking is limited. It's that her thinking has actually outgrown her language, and she doesn't have words anymore for what she needs to say. She can no longer confine herself to the symbols the sounds represent. What she just said, "a woman is a vessel," is the absolute truth, and the thing they need most desperately to hear, but they can't understand it. I had hoped Mulder would interpret, but Mulder is doing things on his own. He tries, I try, but these people need a thousand words for every single picture; they are too tedious to bear. Still, what other recourse do I have but to wait and see what they're going to do next?
"A vessel," she repeats, and makes the string do a sine wave in the air, maybe imitating a worm crawling, maybe demonstrating the secret of the universe. "Oyster," she says, rather hopefully, but she's talking to herself.
"We're wasting our time here," Skinner says.
Scully is not so sure. She says, "Tracy, do you remember anything about what happened on the night you were abducted?"
If Skinner winces on that last word, it's just a goose walking over his grave.
That was quite a night, a night to remember, if Tracy could relive it in the minutia of the first go-round, and unlearn what she's learned about memories.
She'd been asleep in a tent by the dig that night. They'd found something just as it was getting dark and she didn't trust the night lamps to show them enough so that excavating it wouldn't cause damage. All she knew then was that this wasn't going to be like any other dig anywhere, ever. The whole camp sensed her excitement, sensed the immensity of the discovery. Everyone had gone to bed quiet, a little scared. No one had slept for a long time.
What they'd found had been just a mound of earth. That's all. Fifteen feet down, under four layers of village strata made up of debris mixed with fragments of metal that never came from this world, and when Tracy stared at the mound and then knelt and put her hands on it in wonder, she gave a startled cry of pain.
(It's a meteor! It's a space vessel! It's the cairn above a monster!) Like a child finding a wrapped Christmas present in the closet, she shook it around in her mind, and wondered over the wrapping before deciding to wait and open it in the morning.
So she had been awake for a long time wondering what was down there in that pit. Just a few feet above me, she'd pondered the repercussions of her find. I had felt her hands on the mound. I knew her. My rage and need were so strong that I could barely contain myself. But she wouldn't go to sleep. So when a milk truck rattled down the road, Benita's cousin Lupe giving her a ride to the hotel on his way to work, I watched. Benita was dozing; she was so tired then, but she knew that later she could slip off somewhere at work and take a quick nap. And there she would begin to speak the forgotten language.
The same blind needs drove us, but they were so confusing to me. They still are.
It was the burning that woke Tracy, and she opened her eyes and looked down at her hands and saw them glowing in the dark, a faint green phosphorescence. Everything decays here, even the elements. They consider time as a measurement of that decay. It almost makes sense, too, the way carts were moved in ancient Egypt without wheels, or Newtonian physics made it all the way to Einstein. If I could explain to them how then they might understand. But, "Oh, God," she said, so softly no one could hear her. And then she was so afraid in her half sleep, half dreaming, that the Dark Man came and smiled at her with his teeth, that lipless grin, and she tried to scream, but it never reached the air. All pulled apart, she came undone. It should have been obvious that she would have trouble communicating, but I didn't know that just trying to wrap her mind around concepts would damage it.
"A woman," Tracy says now, a little wearily, to answer the question, "is a vessel."
"What were you looking for at the dig?" Scully asks, trying again to speak to Tracy on some common ground, on the belief that if she can find something simple and familiar that Tracy can relate to, she'll work her up to more complex thought. But Scully, Tracy is going from the general to the particular already, and the distance between those two things has increased so dramatically that it's an impossible leap for either of your minds to make.
What WAS she looking for at that dig? Escape from boredom, and fine shards of bone, and a way to use her education to make a living, and a place to go to the bathroom that wouldn't violate the site or her privacy? Yes, yes, and yes.
Once Tracy might have answered with, "Dinosaur bones. Pottery remnants from older civilizations." Now she knows the word "dinosaur" has to do with massive lizard-slithering-weight, crushing teeth to the prey of the dinosaur, or the sweet juicy whitish meat and the rich red blood to the predator of the dinosaur, or the earth itself before it was shaped into pottery and dinosaurs, yielding like a woman as it sucks existence inside itself and then reshapes it and sends it back into the world, and she would have pointed to the truck Lupe drove, where the ghosts of the dinosaurs blew thick from his exhaust in yet another incarnation.
Now Tracy can hear the voice of every grain of sand, and knows that she can't confine the concepts to syllables that her questioners will ever be able to translate back correctly. "Oyster" is the best distillation she can come up with to deliver my message. But it leaves them baffled and pushes my desperation to the limits, and doesn't express her own interest in the concept of antiquity at all.
She looks at Skinner, turns her head to look at Scully, then back to Skinner, and this goes on for a few seconds, as if she's watching a tennis match. Then she says the one thing that should explain it to anyone but does not: "I was in the oyster."
"What does that mean?" Scully asks. "You found oyster shells? Proof that this desert was once an ocean? Are you talking about someone named Oyster? A town called Oyster?"
Skinner listens to her free association from a distance. There's something else he's thinking about but he's not sure what. As Scully talks to Tracy he feels a vague discomfort, like someone is watching them. Not cameras, but more like someone's eyes are on them, actively observing. Seeing too much. Seeing the way he looks at Scully. Seeing the pictures inside his head when he thinks of her. He rubs the back of his neck and glances around the room with hooded eyes.
For no reason at all he remembers Scully beside him in a car, when they were on a stakeout. She had fallen asleep, her chin tucked down, and was snoring a little. It was a soft sound, cute. He had been thinking of ways to tease her about it later without hurting her feelings. After that time when she had given him the root beer, and had offered him her little loyalty oath, he had never been able to bring himself to hurt her feelings. She was such a cute little thing, he forgot how smart she was until she did an autopsy that--
Skinner sits bolt upright in his seat. He has never been on a stakeout with Scully except for the time in the van when they were following Mulder. And she certainly hadn't been sleeping then.
Skinner's heart thumps so loudly he can't imagine that Scully doesn't hear it. He grips the seat of his chair with both hands as if he's afraid he's going to fall out of it, and Tracy gives him a benign smile, though Scully's eyes widen when she sees the color drain from his face.
"Sir, are you all right?"
"Scully." Her name in his throat frightens him like nothing in his life ever has. Yes, it's his gruff voice, but it's not the inflection he wants to put on her name. She hears it too, and he sees it kick something in her, sees her wince convulsively, her pupils contract. She gets up, clutching the lapels of the coat to pull it tightly around her. Her face is equal parts fear and concern.
"Sir," she says. She comes around the bed and looks down at him, sensing his panic and holding in her own. "What's wrong?"
He tries to look away from her so she won't see the fear in his eyes. He can't bear that shame. He's supposed to protect her, take care of her, not the other way around. But he can't seem to look away. With enormous effort, he says, "I think I'd better get back to the hotel."
Mulder might be amused to see that as they hurry to the car, they pass paramedics carrying young John from the ambulance in the emergency bay into the hospital, where his spleen will have to be removed from the impact of his fall.
Mulder, who has lived before in the mouth of madness, seems to have established some kind of sanctuary there. A calm inner place I haven't found in anyone else. Far from being made claustrophobic by the confinement of his own awareness, he has claimed this space for his own, hung paintings on the walls, arranged the furniture. And there he is now, putting together his own little puppet show, and all I can do, really, is watch, and wonder, and consider that he was well named Fox.
