There is so much a man can tell you--
So much he can say--
You remain
My power, my pleasure, my pain.
(A Kiss From A Rose;
Seal)
Scully
Her name is Tracy Buckland. Dr. Buckland. She is thirty six years old, an anthropologist from Acton, Ohio. Her fingerprints were taken when she was eighteen years old, applying for a summer job as a security guard in an amusement park, and she was easy enough to trace. Four weeks ago, Dr. Buckland was reported missing from a dig only a few miles outside the city limits.
She has pale blonde hair, a smooth, unlined face, and big blue eyes that stare into space so intently that everyone who sees that gaze feels compelled to look in its direction. She seems to see something that, even if it isn't here now, must exist somewhere. Something that no one would ever want to look at and then still go on living in the same world with afterwards.
Someone, an ex husband, has come to identify her. Due to a carelessly worded police dispatcher's message on his answering machine, he thought she was dead or would be dead by the time he arrived, and he comes in weeping, a big man in a plaid shirt and loose jeans, his undershirt sticking out and his shoes untied. He is handsome in an overdone way, too big, too loud, too too, Scully thinks, as she eases out of the hospital room to let him come in.
"Tracy!" There is no attempt to hide the emotion; the break in his voice is wrenching. "Oh, God, Tracy!"
The hospital door closes. Scully leans against the wall, her arms crossed, and twists her hand up so that she can chew on a thumbnail, a habit she broke in her first year of college when her boyfriend teased her by saying how young it made her look. Skinner is sitting in a folding chair against the opposite wall, his knees a little too high, like a grownup sitting in a child's seat. He is wearing a white shirt with very light blue pinstripes, the cuffs rolled up, his tie loosened. He seems strangely vulnerable without his jacket. Looking at him, she flashes back to how he scrambled across the roof, clattering on the tile like Santa's reindeer in a stampede, and returned with the big pale thing over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, how she helped steady the ladder as he came down, the woman's arms loose and her head bumbling against his back, and how surprised she had been to see that the woman was wrapped in Skinner's jacket. Before he even picked her up, he must have covered her nakedness against the cold and the indignity; it was a tiny, touching act she wishes she could say something about, acknowledge somehow. But she can't.
Sometimes when Skinner looks at her, his eyes are unreadable, with no light to relieve whatever secret gloom she knows is there. He looks that way now, his face haunted in a strangely familiar way. He must feel the loss of Mulder, too. Something about that miserable expression is so Mulderlike, she feels she needs to say something.
"Sir?" Her voice is soft, out of place in the sharp cold atmosphere of the hospital, a place of scalpels, beeping machines, the rush of desperate air through plastic tubing.
He looks at her, frowning, and says, "I'm going to get some coffee. Do you want some?" He blinks and adds apropos to nothing, "I hate hospitals." His motions are stiff as he gets to his feet. "Let's cut this short and-"
The door to Tracy's room opens and the ex-husband comes out. He is white faced, a hand to his mouth. "Jesus. What happened to her?"
"We were hoping you would tell us that," Scully says. "Did she talk to you?"
"She didn't say anything...that I could understand. I mean, her words make sense...but they don't." He looks at Skinner, back to Scully, unsure who his next question should be directed at. He settles on staring at the floor. "Was she...has she been..."
Skinner looks at Scully to see if she knows what the hell the ex is trying to say. She does and her voice is gentle. "There was no evidence of sexual assault. We're not sure what happened to her, Mr. Buckland. But we do need to find out."
"She keeps saying something about a man, and bugs, and kids, and something in a jar. I mean...she's not on drugs yet, is she? Did they give her something for the pain?"
"She's on a morphine drip," Scully says, "For the burns on her hands and feet. We're not sure where they came from, but they're not life threatening. Do you know if she's been taking any medications?"
"How did she get burned?" The ex husband looks bewildered. "Did someone kidnap her and torture her?"
This thought has occurred to Scully, but no sense can be made of it. "The burns on her feet may be the result of walking on something hot, perhaps she escaped by running across a hot parking lot, or the desert itself. We're not sure at this point what happened, sir."
Suddenly the ex husband turns, anger displacing his grief and pain, and glares down at her. "Well, you better find out, hadn't you? I mean, Tracy was a smart, happy woman, and there's nothing that could do this to her. Nothing short of...of..." He put his hands to his head dramatically. "I don't want to think about it!"
"Excuse me."
A voice startles them both and they see a nurse standing looking at the ex husband, who is still clutching his head as if afraid it might roll off. It is a ludicrous position to hold.
"Sir, if we could just get you to fill out these papers for the insurance company..."
He follows her back to the desk like a big unhappy puppy. Scully goes along, searching in her purse for her pad so she can take her little notes.
MULDER
Swimming in an unlit aquarium... No...drowning in the dark recesses of the ocean. Deeper than that. Deeper. He can see the splinters in the world. One holds the reflection of Scully and two little babies, all smiling at him from a framed picture on his desk. One holds a hot globe of sand, and things that crawl up as worms and then take flight, shrinking ultimately into the afterlife of insects. One shows Scully standing facing him behind a seated Skinner, her hands on Skinner's shoulders and her head over his head, both staring at him with the grave expressions of old family portraits.
One leg in. One leg out.
One leg in, because he is here, drowning in the dark, not in the ocean, but in a womb, rich with the potential of all unborn things, the mother of all things, a place of bright red and yellow sparks like he used to see when he rubbed his eyes too hard and too long.
One leg out because he can remember her name. Because he knows she is standing in the cold hospital hallway and her hands are shaking just a little from the cold. He knows that her left foot is falling asleep from putting all her weight on it because she refuses to sit in the chair opposite Skinner, refuses to give into the weariness that is leeching her bones, and that her breath smells faintly of coffee.
One leg in because he can feel the buzzing all in his body, and hear the howling of the boy somewhere, which fades now and again into huh huh huh sounds, snuffling like a pig, and if that isn't bad enough, there are echoes.
The thing he knows in and out, both sides, is what he cannot hope to put into words to tell Scully, though she has to hear it. The thing, the cluster of pronouns, he/she/it/you/us/them, lets Mulder keep her name. He must be the messenger, she must hear the message. But he has one leg in and one leg out and cannot move in either direction. The best he can do is try and give her the image he himself condenses the concept to, the buzzing, the screaming woman in the desert, the boy who flew through the roof of his own house, and the man in the black hat. He cannot say the word but he must show her what it means:
oyster.
Skinner
He sees her hands shaking a little from the cold, and knows that she won't sit in her chair opposite his because she's so tired she'll fall asleep. She stands like a little soldier, her red head glistening in the bitter fluorescent lights, and if that light is unkind to her skin, then it's made up for in the way it makes her eyes look, like the white fire of her soul burns visibly behind them. He wishes there was something he could say to address that, but there isn't. He has tried before, ended up grunting like an ox and just being gruff or looking away or dismissing her abruptly. He'd take a bullet for her the way she'd take one for Mulder, and none of them would mention it afterwards, thinking it was duty that moved them and not...and nothing else.
Mulder. Skinner rubs his eyes under his glasses with just his fingertips, and it feels astonishingly good, like scratching an intense itch. He rubs harder, until he sees sparks in the cushiony black. Red and yellow sparks, and the sound of that damn machine buzzing somewhere. Then he sighs, waiting for Scully to finish her field notes and comforting the ex husband, whose name is Larry, because they weren't really prepared for this and she doesn't have her tape recorder with her. He wants to take her back to the hotel. He wants to wrap her small body in a blanket and hold her safely through the night, buffer her somehow against the grief they are both feeling, the pain that will wake them only a few hours after they fall into an exhausted sleep. He will lie in the dark staring up at the ceiling and hating himself for failing Mulder, for losing him to the darkness, and Scully, well, whatever Scully feels for Mulder is something a woman feels and he doesn't know what it must be like for her.
Suddenly he wonders if she will sleep in Mulder's bed again, and he feels a stab of some emotion he refuses to name. Let her, if it comforts her. Fine, good for her, go for it.
A nurse comes to the desk and leans over to the nurse on the other side. "The doctor said to go ahead and give her the Thorazine."
Skinner glances at the hospital room door where Tracy Buckland lies writhing in her own psychic pain. Without saying anything to Scully, he goes down the hall and pushes the door open to look in. The blonde woman he found naked (oh but don't forget the socks) on the roof is sitting up in her bed, her blue eyes staring at some blind horror that makes the short hairs on his neck stand up.
Something changes as he stands there, while her gaze sweeps the room. It comes to rest on him, and vaguely clears. It seems as if...wait a minute...she IS looking at him.
He takes an uncertain step forward. "Dr. Buckland?"
Focus is agonizingly slow. It's like a cat standing with one leg in and one leg out the door, trying to decide which way to go. "It's the thing in the sky," she says. "The jar. The red clay jar. The little bones, all the little bones that used to dance. It's the bugs in the desert. They eat you alive, you know. The mosquitoes and the spiders. The big spiders. In the dark they eat you alive."
Skinner is mildly horrified to witness the indignity of this obviously intelligent woman's display of madness.
"I'm Assistant Director Walter Skinner with the FBI, Dr. Buckland," he says, keeping his voice low and quiet for her. "We're investigating your disappearance from the..." He can't remember the name of the dig site, or what they were digging for. Indian pottery? Dinosaur bones? Shit. "…..from the site," he ends weakly. "Can you tell me what happened to you? Can you tell me where you've been?"
Tracy looks at the door suspiciously, and then leans forward, beckoning him with a crooking forefinger. He comes closer, despite a strong sense of danger. She speaks in a conspiratorial whisper. "People do it to each other. Then they split apart. It's...they have to. The man in the hat...and the thing in the jar. They have to do it. But still. That poor little boy. That poor little boy."
Skinner doesn't want to hear this, but her eyes are bright and locked on his and he knows that she's in there somewhere.
"What boy?" he asks.
She smiles, and he glimpses the beauty her ex husband must have fallen in love with and found so hard to let go.
"It's the..." She struggles with the word, finally pursing her lips deliberately to form the syllables. "Oy-ster."
oyster 12
