OYSTER 8

one leg in one leg out

Why are you so unhappy? Why can't you understand? When the reddarkness comes you shrink and swell and push elastic against the walls that are not there. You make them with your pushing. None of the others understand but you're different. The others make monsters, not what I wanted. But not you. You make walls. And keep yourself unhappy pushing them. One leg in, one leg out, Mulder.

Sleep. Sleep and I'll give you a dream.

Upside down inside out like a glove of skin peeling off a hand, inside out, the reddarkbackwards. Look, Mulder. I want to show you something.

Mulder stands against a fierce blue sky, swaying a little in the wind, a few miles from Las Vegas, Nevada. He is on a rock outcropping and he can see the blurry outline of Vegas through the smoking heat of the desert. The sun blazes on his skin, and a little steam curls up where he is still damp.

A lizard pauses on a round stone a few yards away, one front leg and the opposite back leg raised, and it rocks a little from side to side. Mulder tries, tries, one leg in, one leg out, but all he can think of when he looks at the lizard is parallax vision. The lizard can only see things when they move. So it has to move itself, swaying like Mulder, in order to see.

Mulder looks down at his hands as if amazed to see them there. He stares at the city, his mouth open a little, giving away nothing in his expression. He looks like someone who has been struck hard in the head and can't decide whether or not to fall down.

Then very slowly, as the wind dies to perfect stillness, something comes into his eyes, something that makes him turn slowly and look behind him, and he sees the long curving pink beach, shaped like the perfect arch of Scully's breast, and a fake looking seagull hovering over the water, which seems painted, except that it's moving, whitecaps bobbing in the infinite distance. Mulder's face changes then; is he going to cry?

The man in the black hat hovers there too, about thirty yards away, sunglasses glittering, his coat trailing the ground but his feet inches above it.

Mulder whirls in a rush that leaves a whooshing sound in the still air as he thrusts himself into time, into reality. He leaps down the rocks, running in big moon jumps across the hard ground towards Vegas. He glances down at himself, his naked body ghostly, but real, REAL. The sand begins to burn his bare feet, and he welcomes the blisters. The wind of his motion whistles and slaps against his skin as he displaces the air, forcing his molecules through it in a swirl of fire.

He can feel the pull of gravity now in his aching calves, and the rebound and drag make his stride more and more normal. The dimensional shift is coming into a sharper focus, colors growing more intense. And far away on the twisting road he can see a car, and in that car, faces. Faces pressed against the window of the back seat, staring at him. A little boy and his sister are there, and the little boy sees him. Points. Mouth moving excitedly.

Mulder weeps as he runs, as the world begins to claim back every year of his history, and he sees the faces of the adults in the front seat turn to look towards him, bobbing as blindly as the lizard's head. To them he looks like something shimmering over the sand, not quite touching it, a heat wave, maybe, that suddenly flashes out, insubstantial as the blinding flash of sun on the mirrored chrome of the car.

The little boy shouts at his parents and jumps up and down in his seat. They ignore him first, then say placating things, and finally shout. No, there is nothing there. How many times has he told them to look at this, look at that, mommymommymommy look! and it's nothing? And this one, just like all the others they have denied, will undo itself as soon as he accepts the untruth of it. Soon he will never see any of the untrue things again.

To his credit, Mulder almost understands this. But not quite.

You might think this dream would have made him feel better, but you'd be surprised.

oyster 9