oyster 4
oyster 4
by jordan
disclaimers in part 01
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In the makeshift boardroom, converted from a hotel meeting room, all is in readiness. The long wooden table gleams with fresh wax, and the maroon plush chairs sit waiting to be filled. Files lie spaced at intervals like placemats, full of self importance, prepared for scrutiny.
At the head of the table Skinner leans his weight forward onto his long muscled arms, braced by the palms of his hands laid flat on the mahogany surface. Mulder sits to his right, and Scully is on the other side, fiddling with the top button of her blouse, which for some reason keeps coming undone, exposing her skin to the blazing sun whenever she leaves the building. This morning she had a hundred freckles; now she has a thousand. It's very annoying. She should be thinking of other things. This meeting, for instance. What to say to the police, the investigators looking for the people who came here to gamble and won and then vanished. Even discounting those who have simply used the money to absent themselves from unhappy lives, there are now sixteen people gone, and the last couple had been young, rich, and politically connected enough to thicken this soup into a stew. Enough to bring the boss man down himself. On the phone he'd asked so simply, so politely, "Do you think it's an X-file, Scully?" and she had said, "Yes, sir, I believe it is," and he'd flown down to appease the higher powers. He believes in her the way she believes in Mulder. Now she wonders why he never looks at her. It's something she's just noticed. Skinner never looks at her unless they are directly addressing each other. Has this always been the case, she wonders, or is this something new?
She looks at his hand nearest her on the table, the big widespread fingers, the flattened palm, leading up to the thick wrist where the veins twist with snakelike power. Her father once showed her how to feel the bones in a dog's front legs to tell if it was of good solid stock. The breeding is in the bones, he'd said. Nothing fragile or frail here; Skinner is definitely a purebred. The wrist curves and swells upwards into his forearm, hairs all lying in the same direction as if intimidated by his sheer self discipline, and at the crook of his elbow his brown skin disappears into the crisp folds of his rolled back shirt sleeve, where Scully's gaze breaks off with something like regret.
Fascinated, Scully looks back at his hand. The short clipped nails, the nervous energy inherent just under the skin, the muscle, the bone. Something essentially Skinner she can stare at unashamed. He had been shot once, and as she had run alongside his gurney into surgery he had held her hand tight and she'd squeezed for reassurance, hard, as if shouting to someone almost unconscious, as if the loudness of her touch could reach him. Those fingers had engulfed hers, and she'd felt the terrible strength there muted, even in blind pain, so that he wouldn't crush her small bones in his grasp. Men can't pretend that kind of gentleness; it's either there or it isn't. There in his eyes, too, when he looks from someone else to her. A softening, a respect.
Mulder is trying to catch her eye. She looks at him wearily. What is it now, Mulder? But the men are coming in, and Mulder's attention, so easily stolen, shifts to their faces, which he studies in turn, in that disconcerting way that is one of the things she has always liked best about him.
The meeting begins, papers shuffle, voices take quiet turns to express their frustration and dismay. Scully takes notes.
******
In Vegas the wind is always hot, and smells of great spaces, of the desert, of earth, of hills painted red by the sunset, of the lizards and spiders and snakes just beginning to crawl out into the open as the planet cools beneath their claws and fangs.
Night gathers around a house. A big room, a leather sofa, some green corduroy chairs, deep carpet, gleaming paneled walls. Low light from a single corner lamp, the rest of the room in shadows. Several people, young men, teenaged boys, are in the room, watching a video, some drinking beer, some drinking cokes, all laughing occasionally at something they see on the screen. Some sit on the floor, leaning back against the sofas. The sound is good, from expensive wall speakers. The dark is sealed outside. There's a smell of popcorn hanging in the room, strong as in a theater lobby.
The bodies of the boys are slim, hard, knees and elbows knobby with future growth; they laugh with white teeth flashing. Their parents are well monied, and outside, their yards bloom green by pools of turquoise water that laps softly in the darkness. They are healthy boys, young princes, all of them, sons of America. They know they have inherited the universe, and they lie in wait for it, afraid of nothing.
But if they knew I was here, watching Scully, watching Mulder, watching the big bald man glaring down at the shining table as other agents begin to filter into the room (because he is trying not to glance over at the fingers of the redheaded woman when they toy so deliciously at her blouse), oh, if they knew I was watching them with their young faces awash in color and light from the television screen, then they would be afraid. They would be very, very afraid. And then it would not be so easy to pry their souls out of the shells of their hard young bodies, not so easy to search for pearls among these little oysters if they were too afraid to sleep.
I hum my lullaby, soft, soft, soft, and the Bose speakers drown it out, and the gruff voice of the bald man at the meeting drowns it out, and the strange high pitched music inside the redheaded woman drowns it out. But Mulder, sitting there looking at the speaking man almost as if he is really listening, begins to tap his pencil eraser on the table in the exact cadence of my melody. His head nods, almost imperceptibly, to my song. Mulder hears. Mulder knows.
And finally, Mulder yawns.
end part four
Five