In the three days since they've been here, Mulder has often prowled the streets of Vegas and has sometimes stood at the edge of the city, eyes fixed on the empty reaches beyond, his handsome head lifted, nostrils flaring, as if the very proximity of Roswell floods the air with some secret exotic scent that makes him tremble with longing.
Once, Scully suspects, she had been the object of that terrible longing as well, when she was missing, when she was one of the whips he could use to scourge himself with. I was lost, she muses, but now I'm found, and the demystified Scully is too close to the earth for Mulder to notice again. Too real, too THERE, for him to bend his neck a fraction of an inch so that she might slide again into his peripheral vision, and bloom like a cactus in the hot light of his smile.
The terrible beauty Scully finds in Vegas is not in its lights or in its undercurrent of huge sums of wealth shifting around like serpents under the surface of the ocean, but in its sand. Scully can feel the sand of Vegas everywhere, gritty underfoot, crunching faintly between her teeth, in the dryness of her clothes rubbing against her skin. In the gallons of water she drinks without ever truly quenching her thirst. Sand. She feels as if she is standing in the bottom of an enormous, loosely packed pit, sinking, with all the weight of eternity pulling at the city as slowly, as inexorably, as the deserts that have swallowed the dimly remembered cities of antiquity. The desert is the boundary between man and nothingness, between that which blooms for a moment, and that which sinks for all time into dust.
I feel this, too, she thinks, looking at Mulder's elegant features, his large lost eyes, that mouth that makes all people forgive him all things. Why does suffering ennoble you, she wonders, and lift you up above the human race, while it only fixes me to it like Ahab to the whale, inescapably bound to a shared doom? For Mulder is larger now than when she first met him, his wings unfolding, his self expanding, the very anguish in his soul demanding new ground, a bigger room to contain it. Yet this same suffering, and more, has pinched her mouth and kinked the corners of her spirit like a wrapped taffy; it has made her shrink inside her clothes and dimmed the light that once blazed so brightly in med school, and now she almost has to cling to Mulder to find her way through the twilight of her own life.
When did all this happen? How did she not notice it, or at least acknowledge it, until now?
oyster 4
