oyster 13

There's a spider, a spider as big as a pickup truck, and it's skittering along the bottom of the pit chasing an Hispanic woman. The woman's face is paralyzed by fright, a look of perfect terror frozen on her features as she jogs along just a few feet ahead of the multi-legged monstrosity. For some reason, she's carrying a basket of laundry. Her breasts wobble painfully as she shuffles along in her best version of a running stride.
The spider catches her and sinks its fluorescent green fangs into her neck. The woman doesn't even scream. She turns towards Skinner and he can see that there is something horribly, sickeningly wrong with her. She is swollen and glossy. The spider is doing something. Something very, very bad. The woman begins to liquify on the carpeted floor of the pit. Just at the moment Skinner thinks he can never imagine seeing anything worse, he does see something worse. The spider raises its head and backs away, and it has a human mouth, and it vomits up something that was essential to that woman, something she can't even be buried without, something so intrinsic that now there is hardly enough left of her for a memory.
The picture flickers. It's not really happening. It's a scene from a movie, and Skinner twists his head around, squinting, and sees Mulder in the projection booth.
*****
They are so fragile, so breakable. Pick one up for examination and its head falls off.
Something in his life has happened to Mulder, something that hasn't happened to any of the others. It makes him different from them. It makes him…bigger. No, not bigger. LARGER. Mulder can come here and go there, and still be Mulder. One leg in, one leg out, still Mulder. But he can't translate, and even if he could, he still wouldn't understand.
Mulder, with his differently assembled brain. Mulder, with his different belief system. Mulder, who might be able to do what even I can't do: touch the soft sweet core of Scully, pierce the warrior's armor of Skinner. But I am counting on you, Mulder.
He doesn't understand but he doesn't lose his Mulderness here. Young John is a great waste. The prince, the heir, the child of America, is as empty as a paper bag, as useless as a photograph, fading away in a forgotten drawer. Apparently they are timed by their biology. That explains a great deal about their strange visions of past and future, ideas none of them could give up except Mulder. Too young and there's hardly anything in there. A little lump of sweetness and then a great gnawing emptiness. Too old and they are filled with so many convictions they burst like overripe melons when decompressed from the world into the HERE. And Tracy Buckland...once she remembered the dark man, what else was there for her to do but run from him? And she's still running. Ah, Tracy. A hardened heart has such a bitter taste.
You see, Benita? It didn't have to be that way at all. Is it my fault you watched "The Giant Spider" movie when you were six years old? Why couldn't you have just let it go? I understand these things no better than Mulder understands what is happening to him. If they can imagine anything, why does it always have to be the worst thing? Why do all their dreams sooner or later turn into nightmares?
Benita deaf. Scully blind. Skinner mute. I'm counting on you, though, Mulder.
John's parents mourn his loss with great grieving sounds, and Tracy's ex has damaged some of his organs by drinking to dull the pain of her not loving him. Benita's huge family weeps for her, and even Scully has sobbed on her pillow for Mulder. Really they are all only grieving for themselves. But Scully lies right there, right THERE, spirit encased in solid flesh, only a few feet away, and her loss is mourned by one whose flesh is as solid and trapped in time as hers.
Skinner is sleeping in the chair by Scully's bed as Scully slept in the chair by Mulder's. But Skinner is a bag of blood and bones, clear lymph and some hard white fat deposits, toenails, teeth, and coarse hairs around the soft sac of his testicles. A single flap of his arms twenty five years ago and he would have solved one of the greatest mysteries of all mankind, but no, no, he thinks too small of himself, thinks too stiffly of himself. Only now in the proximity of this redheaded woman does his hard thinking waver, letting the thing inside him enlarge, and although it is clear he couldn't withstand knowing the things Mulder knows at this moment, that Skinner-essence makes me bang against the walls and sing his name. It is the thing that makes him able to transcend the stars, and he locks it away, denies its existence.
If Scully said jump, he would jump. But if she said fly, would he only stand with his arms out from his sides in a cruciform of indecision? That's the question, isn't it?
A hard man is Walter Skinner, but not made of stone. Let him sleep, then.
****
Scully is at the cleaners, looking for her red sequined dress. All she has to do is find it and she can go. But the rack is spinning, clothes are flapping around wildly, a shirt raises its sleeve and gives her a jaunty salute. They are all white clothes, everything in the cleaners is snowy white, and smells of bleach. The machine goes around and around, and the hanging clothes jitter and dance in their dazzling whiteness, and the hydraulic lift hisses at her.
No, wait. That's a human hiss. And somehow familiar.
Pssssssssssst. "Scully! Over here!"
Scully looks at the rack really hard, and sees that through the whirling clothes, like a man in the eye of a hurricane, Mulder is standing facing her. He is naked, though she just sees scraps of him, flashes of light skin and dark shadow, through the wild merry-go-round of laundry.
"Mulder!" Her voice seems to have some kind of stadium echo, like she's shouting down into a hole. "Mulder? Where are you?"
"It's all about the oyster, Scully." "What?"
"Ask yourself--why the whale is white."
She reaches for him, cracks her elbow against the hard counter, and yelps in pain. When she opens her eyes she gives another yelp because Skinner is bending over her, inches away, his dark concerned gaze piercing her like a skewer and it's scarier even than the dream. They jerk back from each other.
"I'm sorry, Scully. You were having a nightmare."
She sits up on the bed, brain fuzzy, too much light in her eyes, needing desperately to go to the bathroom. "What are you doing here?"
"I fell asleep in the chair last night. I'm sorry. I-"
"No, no, it's all right." She wiggles a hand at him. "Really. I just had this really intense dream about Mulder." "So did I."
They look at each other, Scully sitting up on the bed clutching the hem of her jacket and Skinner on his knees on the carpet beside her.
"Mulder was having terrible dreams just before he disappeared," she says.
Another look, then of mutual accord they study the bedspread for awhile, each thinking. Skinner says, "I dreamed about that maid, what happened to her."
Scully looks at him sharply, all attention.
Skinner suddenly realizes the rest of what he was going to say is ridiculous, and his high cheekbones tinge with color. He gets up slowly, and God, the knee is on fire now from that awkward position, and he sits on the edge of the bed because even out of a sense of propriety, he won't subject his aching back to that chair again.
"What?" she prompts.
"I…no, it was just a dream," he says. "What did you dream?"
"Skinner…" She leans forward and lays a hand on his wrist, and he looks down at her fingers. "Tell me."
"It's ridiculous," he says gruffly. "A giant spider ate her. You know how they liquify their food and then suck it out of their victim? That's what I saw in the dream."
Scully takes her hand away and puts it over her mouth. "Oh, my God," she says softly. "That's exactly consistent with her necrotic state."
"Well, I assume we can rule out giant spiders as a cause of death, can't we?"
She shakes her head, though she means yes. "Of course, but enough venom from spider would have that effect. Well, maybe from a million spiders...But we didn't find any insect venom in her."
"Did you look for it?"
"Not specifically...but it would have showed up on the tests..." Her eyes are a little foggy; she is saying one thing and thinking something else. She says, just thinking out loud more than saying anything to him,"Dreams are symbols for things. Like a…what did Mulder call it? Like a forgotten language."
"I'm sorry?"
"In my dream, Mulder told me…well, he said something about an oyster, and I think he said...something about...he said that he knew why the whale was white."
"Scully…" his voice is as close to pleading as she's ever heard it. "I really am lost here."
"I'm sure the white whale refers to Moby Dick," she says. "It means something to me, because my father and I used to read it together when I was a little girl-" This evokes such a clear picture of a man holding a cute little redheaded girl in his lap that for a moment Skinner zones out on some of what she's saying. He picks it back up with, "-in college I equated it with the twin paradox theory. I've always loved that book."
Skinner has only vague memories of hundreds of pages of droning text and a movie with Gregory Peck that was all talk and no action.
He nods encouragingly anyway, and Scully speaks again. "Mulder used to talk about it. To him, the white whale represents reality. Or the hole in reality, depending on whose perspective the story is coming from. You can imagine Mulder and I had very different ideas about that book."
She moves around a little as if seeking a more comfortable position, but really it's an attempt to ground herself in the here and now and remember what Mulder told her that night when she was only half listening to him. "It's an interesting study of shifting points of view. See, think of the white whale as an anomaly that simply can't exist. So it defies reality just by being. Ahab couldn't stand that."
At least Skinner remembers who Ahab was. "You father thought that-"
"No, Ahab in the book. See...it's about...well, suppose you tear back a little corner of a picture on the wall, and what if there isn't any wall underneath? What if it was just the picture that was the reality, and behind that there's this terrifying nothingness? You poke a little hole anywhere in the world and you can just barely glimpse what's basically the opposite of reality. That's what Mulder thinks dreams are. The holes in reality we can peek through to see what's on the other side. And that's the big question, I guess. Whether what we'd see would be different, or if everyone would see the same thing." She stares into her own thoughts again. "He was talking about this just before he disappeared. At the time I didn't think I was even listening to him." She gives a sad little laugh. "I guess I was listening after all."
Skinner is very close to Scully in terms of physical proximity. Her voice makes occasional puffs of air that stir the hairs on his forearm. He can almost hear her heart beating, big soft thumps against her ribcage. He can smell the soap she washed her hands with at the hospital before they came back to the hotel. For all its sweet scent, he knows that it would taste a little bitter if he put her fingers in his mouth and licked them. "Scully." Her name is hard and round and sweet. She glances up at him again, a flash of sapphire, the way a rich woman might let a ring of immeasurable value glint from under the cuff of her mink.
She says, "I dreamed of a laundry, and white clothes, and Mulder saying something about an oyster."
Skinner draws back from her. "Tracy Buckland mentioned something about an oyster, too."
"You're kidding."
They sit thinking until it occurs to both of them at the same time that they are in bed together, however accidental the circumstance or fully dressed they are. Skinner gets up and goes for his shoes, which he kicked off before going to sleep in the chair. Scully gets up, too, and says, "I can't believe I fell asleep in my clothes. What time is it?"
"Nearly five."
"Oh, God. It's going to be a long day."
"No, go ahead and get some more sleep. I'll leave a message to postpone our first meeting. I need some rest myself."
"Sir." There is something magic in her voice, a warmth he hasn't heard before. Scully looks up at him, her eyes yearning and vulnerable, her lips slightly parted, a glow to her face that is so beautiful he pauses in the act of pulling down his shirt sleeve to button the cuff. She sways forward slightly and says in a voice rich with hope, "Do you think Mulder might still be alive?"

oyster 14