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Anything I say to him today falls into the void. Dusty sun streaks in through the windows of the car, glaring off the worn leather of my briefcase into my eyes. His are shaded by those silly skier sunglasses he picked up somewhere last summer, but I know he's not looking at me. I saw something in him yesterday I wasn't meant to see, and isolation is my punishment. I probably shouldn't have made that crack about the blind leading the blind.
*
Blinded by the glare, I look out the window at the dead landscape. Last night's downpour has already been absorbed by the thirsty fields, and still the greedy crops clamor for more. Some people are like that -- no matter how much water you give, they ask for more. I feel like I'm trying to drink from the air these days, desperate for what I see in other people. Love bloomed in Kroner last night, soaking the lucky with the water of life. I feel like I still haven't gotten my feet wet. I stride through the puddles on my towering heels, trying not to get muddy, and end up with loneliness for all my pains and care.
*
Careworn, time-sanded men flash by outside my window as we zoom onward. Men who work the soil, men who take the entirety of their precious lives and plant it in the ground and say "This is where I am." Men who let themselves be defined by a scrap of land, a wife, a lifetime of small achievements and personal quirks and family history. Men who wake up to food smells and fresh overalls and darkness and a day's hard labor ahead. I don't envy them the work, but I want their security. Land does not leave. Not like people do.
*
Doubts didn't used to plague me this way. Once I got past the awkwardness of childhood and college, I was confident. Stable. Competent. I used to take pride in myself and my accomplishments. I used to be happy. Now nothing satisfies me. At night I lie in the tangled sheets and stare at the ceiling and think until I'm dry-eyed and exhausted. I've tried it all -- deep breathing, muscle relaxing and chamomile tea. The darker it gets the more alert I am. Two nights ago I lay in the dark and listened to him breathe on the cot next to me, the wooden frame squeaking as he turned in his sleep, and envied him that restless oblivion, his capacity for faith in the darkness. The darkness in which I try so hard not to believe.
*
Evening will be welcome tonight, I think. I love dusk, twilight, half-light, the twenty minutes between daylight and electric light. I love the time when I can strain my eyes just a little longer and watch the room darken. Light makes me feel foolish for being unhappy. With the dark comes blurred vision, a way of seeing things that fits my frame of mind. I bought a goldfish last week and watched him bump his nose against the glass again and again, darting for food and returning to float aimlessly around his clear little prison. Two days later I found him belly-up, and buried him at sea in the guise of the pond at Dumbarton Oaks Park. I never named him. Sometimes I think I see him in Mulder's tank of woeful, undernourished prisoners, his golden fins dim under the shadow of a rock. I bought him to bring life into my life and found I could never be happy when another was not free.
*
Freeing myself from the depths of my mind, I look back at Mulder. He hasn't moved an inch. There are a hundred things I'd like to say to him, and words and time for none of them. It hurts to leave this town. I'd like to pretend I could be happy here, that magic could be purchased. I felt a little closer to him here, in a way I can't define. We're still in the dark about each other, but I think last night a little flicker appeared at the edge of my vision. I'm not sure he sees me anymore -- maybe I'm just something he's learned to see around, another blind spot for him. Whatever he saw in me once, I know it has been forgotten long ago.
*
God, I don't want to do this here.
*
Here I am, falling chest-deep into that old, faded memory again. Here I am, dwelling on sensations I can still call up after all these years, the touch of skin on skin and hands holding hands. Here I am, lost in a night that remains whole and perfect in my mind, a single fluid night of wonder that I'd give my world to relive.
*
I've kept a secret from Mulder for years now. Nothing big, nothing terrible, nothing special. Just one of those little things that pops up and now and then in my mind. We made love once. Did it hard and soft and then hard again on the first of many motel beds. Stripped each other with eyes and hands, the raw newness of it giving way to blissful familiarity. I took him in my mouth and body, caressed and kissed every inch of his muscled flesh. He covered me with himself, took the fear and worry out of the night, held me close and made my body hum with pleasure. We ordered a pizza, bared our souls, and a week later they wiped his memory at Ellens Air Base, along with any recollection of that night. I agonized for two days over how to remind him, then locked it in the attic of my memory. I never realized I'd left the door ajar.
*
Jarring potholes in the road drag me back to this sunny Kansas morning. Mulder slows the car, the briefcase bounces on the seat, and I immerse myself in the memory of his kiss.
*
Kissing. That's all it was with them. Just wet, slobbery, red-lipstick kissing. I've kissed a few strangers in my time. I can't imagine Mulder watching me kiss a stranger. I wonder what I look like when I'm kissing someone. I wonder if it's the same look as when I'm lonely.
*
Lying isn't lying if it's the sin of omission, I think. It's kinder, really. I'm sure I only dreamed that I saw a flicker of remembrance in his eyes last summer, as we gravitated to each other in that time of madness. And who's to say he'd want me if he knew? I can see him making love to the admiring, wide-eyed innocent I was six years ago. I don't see that same passion blooming between partners who have been aged and weathered by years of struggle and death, years of sharing airspace and fast food and CPR embraces. I am not the woman he once kissed. The young woman in scrubs who wielded her shiny, new-minted science like a beacon of truth is not me.
*
Meanings are many these days. A look has a thousand interpretations, a glance can be amorous or annoyed, a touch comforting or casual. Yet I ask myself who I am and get no reply. I feel drifting and aimless, numb and unnoticed. Sometimes I want to sleep forever. Sometimes I want to kick down the walls. When I was eight years old I rode my cousin's gelding, Silver Fox. Eighteen hands. Giant gray jumper. He bucked me off with one foot in the stirrups and I, in the fury of my childhood, kicked him good in the underbelly, stubbing my toe. He split my shin with a hoof and I ate dirt. I want someone who will kick back now.
*
Now is not the time I wish to be in. Now is what must be endured to get through tomorrow. Now is the extension of yesterday. Now is the time of waiting in the wings. Now is when I am no one.
*
One more bout of potholes and I'm back in the car. It's nearly noon and the sun is good and hot, captured by my black suit and drenching me in sweat. I pull at my sticky collar, trying to let a little air down my flushed neck. I'm going to pretend we're not in the same car right now. The tension is thick but I'm not in the mood for clearing it with small talk about the weather and the news. I'll think about the bath I want to take, the stir fry I want to cook, the book I left on my bedside table and the movies due back yesterday. I want the world where Mulder doesn't apply.
*
Plying me with drink used to be the best way to get a secret out of me. A margarita or two and I'd be spilling my life's most intimate details to anyone who shared bar space with me. I don't drink anymore, and the secrets I have are more important than the fact that my roommate Denise slept with her boyfriend and his brother on the same night. I keep secrets about the things I've seen, the dreams I have, and the fact that my partner once slid my robe from my shoulders and dropped to his knees in front of me, still holding a candle. Secrets about strange faces and dying children and the feel of Mulder's mouth on my neck. I don't have words for these secrets. My body is a vault of sensation without perception, things stored but not analyzed as I pound forward, breathless, on the path of the all-consuming quest.
*
Questioning myself and my life is never helpful, I think, bringing my gaze back into the present. The heat is oppressive. I can fall into these dark pools for hours, desperate and intent on imposing order on the jagged pieces of things. In the end, I just come back to the same truths again, the same hard dead ends I can't work around. I should make peace with my maze, accept that life is complex and little can be resolved. And I do, most days. I think I'm content. I survive. It's only times like now, when he won't look at me and something heavy sits in my stomach and we can't wait to get away from each other, that I remember his touch and the darkness of my life and things we'll never say to each other but will go on pushing down into the void. The things that rose to our throats last summer and spoke from our eyes before the fear came too and we turned and ran.
*
Random thought: if I reached over and kissed him now, would he kiss back? Or do I have to leave him first?
*
Stop this.
*
This is turning out to be one lovely morning. Of course, the past few days weren't really so bad. No one attacked me. No creeping, crawling thing rose from murky sewers. The bad guy was a shy Midwestern lover, the victim a corn-fed sweetheart, and the case ended happily in a gymnasium hung with balloons and crepe and tinfoil stars. I should be singing with joy. Yet somehow, seeing the happiness of others just intensifies that ache in my heart that never really goes away. If nothing else, saving the hapless public from monsters makes my own life so much sweeter in comparison. Yes, I have no friends, no lover, no children, and last week I used my vibrator to hammer a nail into the wall, but at least the government didn't drive me insane with high frequency aircraft and my yard isn't full of dead babies. And as long as I have no husband or vegetable garden or child of my own, I can believe in the future. I can pretend that my real life still hasn't begun.
*
Understanding myself doesn't make things better. I can sit on this sticky leather seat and squirm in the heat and know all the reasons I'm unhappy. The reason, singular, hiding over there behind a briefcase and dark lenses. I could write a novel of my misery and still lie awake at night wondering when my hair will turn gray and why I can't tell Mulder I love him. When the darkness will finally catch up and why I can't go backward or forward. When tomorrow will be real and why my love for him is so hard to hold, and so very vital.
*
Vitally important is a phrase I never understand. I have learned how very little human beings can exist upon. I know the world won't stop if I turn in field notes a day late or if Mulder blows off a pizza date to track down some arcane lead. I know how to survive instead of living. I know about the slow death of the soul. I know how to lose so quietly that everyone thinks that, if I really wanted to, I could win.
*
Winter in my heart and early summer on the fields. Kroner and love and simple joy behind us and a long trip ahead. My life -- my one life -- looming like a dark land of adventure. Long stretches of boredom punctuated by heart-stopping moments of wonder and terror. Near misses with love and days of longing and sublimation. A pirate map where both treasure and tragedy are marked with an X.
*
X-Files. What a stupid name. I've always wondered what fool was responsible for it. Someone who read too many grocery store sci-fi novels, maybe. Someone who thought "Tron" was a really cool movie, someone with the entire set of Star Trek novels. I've always hoped it wasn't Mulder. I haven't mustered the courage to ask him yet.
*
Yet my heart races and my stomach turns when I think of home, the small sanctuary I've built to rest in between swings of the pendulum. I can't leave him yet, can't admit that once again we've failed to connect and that my bed is empty in the darkness. Calm -- deep breaths and close my eyes and go somewhere quiet and Zen.
*
Zenith reached and the car skids over the top of a rise. The airstrip stretches before us, a flat beige burn through miles of prickly gold. We speed down the hill and my heart floods my throat and I gasp without thinking. He looks at me, concern in his eyes and nothing more, and squeezes my hand in his cool, dry one. I can't look at him. The rainfall has begun, and I wish for everything, anything.