by jordan
disclaimers and such in Chapter One
Miles away, at Tracy Buckland's dig, the world is coming undone. Bright yellow police tape flutters wildly where it cordons off the section around the pit where the mound was discovered, the thin stakes shuddering and working their way out of the ground.
In a routine investigation by the FBI, two bodies have turned up within the perimeter of the site, victims of the gambler's scam, and that part of the dig has been frozen until the Museum and the police have negotiated some sort of agreement about how to proceed with excavations. Dogs were brought in to search the area, but none of them would get out of the truck, nor would they stop howling until they were halfway back to town.
Now, under the infinite reach of the deep purple sky, splashed with stars like a bucket of flung milk, the rocks begin to tremble so violently that all the young students jump up and run around, thinking it’s an earthquake. It might well be. Tremors over the millions of years have propelled me gradually towards the surface, and now I, who have been here since the crust of the earth first cooled, prepare at last to take flight.
The mound in the bottom of the pit arches up like a breaching whale, and begins to split apart with a rumbling, buzzing sound, a million weedeaters, a million model planes, a million cicadas shrilling loud enough to crack open the night. Rocks and dirt fall inward as the surface breaks apart, and my vessel and I are released into the physical moment. This will be mercifully brief; I have to go through this plane to leave it.
I hear their shrieking, see them slapping themselves all over as if covered with ants, and throwing their hands over their eyes, refusing to admit to a vision they’ll never be able to fully remember or fully forget or describe in any detail. They are much uglier than their minds would suggest.
I want to be gone, but I pause. There's still that one thing.
Mulder.
He wants to be released back into time and physicality. But he’s the one who’s changed things, who has gone so far in that now he can’t find his way back. He’ll just have to wait until they dream him back into the world; he’s got one leg in and one leg out, so there’s nothing I can do without destroying him. Sooner or later he’ll figure this out for himself, and then when Scully calls to him again with her heart, she’ll pull on that other leg, and he'll make his sudden, dramatic appearance.
As will, ultimately, the tiny egg buried deep inside Scully, which is meeting Skinner’s sperm even now. This is the sad story of these people: they understand how to split the atom to murder the world, how to pierce physical existence and spill the warm dark flow of human history onto the sorrowful fields of destruction, but they also think that what they do here, this splitting of cells in order to a replicate their bodies, will result in the creation of a new human being.
How could I tell them in a way they’d understand? There is no way. We are both like the oyster. We both are vessels of creation, and not creators ourselves.
The pearl is not the oyster’s child.
Later there will be arguments, and valid ones perhaps, that the baby has Skinner’s eyes, or Scully’s nose, or a tendency to sunburn; she got that from her mom, they’ll say. Never dreaming that Scully is only a vessel, or that in her vessel is the true thing, the Scullyessence, a pearl that every year with Mulder has irritated to growth until it shines like a star in the galaxies. Or that now within the flesh of her body the seed of another pearl has been placed, not reproduced, but created. They never seem to wonder that where true life comes from, the animation in the eyes, the tenderness in the heart, the goodness of the human spirit, even though they endlessly pontificate about genes and morality. Skinner has illustrated that they are all too horribly aware of the dichotomy between flesh and spirit, which seems to exist in everyone in near total opposition. It’s that opposition, that irritation, that creates the human soul. A very inefficient road to evolution, but give them another million years or so and maybe they’ll have come up with something.
Mulder knows. He has seen the spark of divinity in mankind, and he knows that if one magic exists, there must be others. When he finds his way back, will he remember how to speak, how to tell them? If he does, will anyone listen? Surely not without proof, without “physical” evidence. Scully won’t, except maybe at the instant she holds that proof in her arms and looks down into its eyes for the first time and recognizes, however briefly, that she has witnessed a true miracle.
My journey continues, and the stars spread apart, the great open spaces between galaxies enlarge; I am a roar of fire and a rush of wind, and gone.
****
Epilogue
On a beach at dawn, Tracy Buckland and the Dark Man are having tea under a big blue and yellow umbrella. Mulder sits listening to the murmur of their conversation as they discuss Great Art. Tracy is explaining the difference between Monet and Manet. Far away on the rockier shores, a brontosaurus nibbles tender bits of algae from the open palm of a smiling woman who speaks to him in Spanish, and now and again the great arching back of a plesiosaur breaks the smooth blue surface of distant waters. A blond boy runs up and down the beach throwing rocks in its direction.
Mulder sits in the shade of the umbrella, watching the endless roll of the ocean. No rush. He drinks his tea, serene and thoughtful, waiting for the sound of human voices to call him home.
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown...
Til human voices wake us, and we drown."
(T.S.Eliot, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock")
end