triumphant returns
greetings and salutations, friends and foes, i am in phoenix. phoenix for spring training! even if the off-season did fly the fuck by (mainly because there was painful steroid news every freakin' day), it could only be a week long and i'd still get annoyed.
my computer is dying so quickly, man.
*
Okay, so here is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing perspective-shift remixes on a pair of old stories that originally had nothing to do with each other but now I’ve decided they are two parts of the same epic and ridiculous story. You’re excited now!
The first of them is ‘Back in the Day,' a story that is about ten pages, and its remix, which is below, is about twenty pages. This is okay by me, their respective lengths, I mean, as I have made peace with my tendency to ramble.
The trouble is, the second remix is already as long as its original story (which I will not tell you because it is a surprise!) and has only covered a third of its timeline. I am nowhere. Near. Done. It is good, but it is slow. Now, usually I don’t like to post things incomplete or in progress (I’ve always felt like WIPs are a jinx in a weird way), and certainly these two stories are meant to be read together, but I feel bad having a completely done version of the first part (which can semi-standalone just as a rewrite of ‘Back in the Day’ (though it shouldn’t)) and withholding it when god knows how long the second part will be. So! It is your lucky day.
Part One: In the Here and Now
By Candle Beck
Zito went to Cape Cod the summer of his nineteenth year, the start of his real life.
The plane landed in the middle of a storm, trapped in a jolting bottle with lightning that exploded and stabbed at them, missing by inches every time. Zito was terrified, his senses dulled and made undependable by the long flight and the three hot mouthfuls he’d taken from the flask inside his coat, staring at the mayhem of the sky, the flat fragile brace of the wing flashing and shining like a sword.
And then by the time Zito had gotten his bags, the weather had cleared almost completely, black-glass night sky showing between huge chunks of tattered clouds, and a fog of disconcertment crept over Zito, wondering if the storm had been a dream. He found the farthest dark corner on top of the parking garage, smoked a jay before calling to tell his foster folks he’d arrived.
He’d come to Cape Cod already on unstable ground-he’d been suffering an internal civil war ever since getting to college, trying to figure out what kind of man he was turning into and secretly hating the very idea of it. Running reckless and acting out weren’t new for him, no more than substance abuse and sleepless nights, but out here, as far away as he could get from his hometown while still in the lower forty-eight, out here everything was ten times as dangerous, because he had no obligations other than baseball. Out here he’d been freed.
Fresh compulsions afflicted him within a few weeks, kept him out all hours stoned half to death, and he couldn’t sleep without taking five or six Tylenol PM, couldn’t wake up without No-Doz and coffee. He could picture chemical residue accumulating on the walls of his blood vessels, slick muddy green clotting around his heart, spending morose hours resigned to a violently young demise.
Fear of the future partially explained his behavior, but there were gaps in the narrative and occasionally his life fell into the third person, out of body watching this fucked-up young man go through the motions of wunderkind pitcher while dismantling his legend in off hours, in every free moment and a hundred different ways. It was riveting sometimes, but in the morning his memory was already faded and suspect.
What stuck was the wild mercury-colored ocean before a storm, strange taste of wet electricity in the air all the time, an overriding impression of potential, and the blue-eyed boy from Chicago whose raincoat Zito had appropriated.
Years later, though, it would occur to Zito that the only reason Mulder ever stuck out was because Mulder was the only one who stuck around.
*
Jumping Mulder that first time in the equipment shed had been the kind of corrosive, ill-considered act of rebellion in which Zito had excelled that summer. It had been almost entirely a whim.
He’d known Mulder’s name because Mulder was tall and good-looking and Zito made it his business to be kept informed on people like that, but he didn’t really know anything else. He’d woken up in an unfamiliar hallway with a well-loved blue raincoat tucked around him like a child’s blanket, the sky reinvented by rain and his heart fractured, fracturing, by some dream that was already diminishing too quickly to be recovered.
The raincoat was his only clue, and he liked the way the sleeves fit over his hands, the give of the shoulders. There was a receipt in one of the pockets on the back of which was handdrawn a little map to the good batting cages. The coat was too big but Zito didn’t mind, dimly comforted by the illusion of being undersized once again.
He tracked Mulder down wanting to return the coat and say thanks, but he smoked a jay on the way to the ballpark and irretrievably lost his train of thought before he even got there. He thinks he might have made a fool of himself, at least initially, but Mulder was in the midst of what appeared to be some kind of existential haze, or perhaps a bad hangover, and their respective mental states complemented each other.
At the time, Zito didn’t think there was anything more to his attraction to baseball players than proximity. He was nineteen and amazingly senseless things got him worked up: a smear of dust on a teammate’s forearm, the nape of a waitress’s neck, the feel of wet grass in the morning. If he trended towards well-built young men with no outward signs of interest, it didn’t mean anything more than his preference for shaggy hair and blue eyes. It was an aesthetic thing; he was getting these boys at their very best.
Mulder, awkward and stunned in a way that Zito could taste, the same smell under his jaw that lived in the coat Zito was wearing, Mulder wasn’t quite what Zito was looking for, crazy long arms and legs lending a sense of being trapped, overmatched and powerless, that Zito didn’t normally have to contend with. But Mulder had quite evidently never done this before, bled panicked arousal and hung on Zito’s shoulders with his arms pressed down hard across Zito’s back, bending into him and following wherever Zito led.
It mostly evened out.
Zito got an extremely solid raincoat out of the encounter, which put him ahead on the day and it wasn’t even noon. Five hours later, he found a hickey on his neck, which also pleased him.
When the rain came back with presumption and winds near hurricane force, Zito wore Mulder’s raincoat everywhere and thought of him sometimes when he was all balled up against the weather, hands lost in the sleeves.
Heated place in the pit of his stomach that he could nurse like a match, remembering the muted confusion on Mark’s face when he saw how Zito was looking at him, the rise of color, the pretty shock when he had tripped and fallen, fallen everywhere with his legs sprawling open and his crystal blue eyes glowing in the dusty light.
Idle kinda thought, a way to keep warm.
*
He didn’t see Mulder anywhere for a couple weeks after that, then noticed him five times over the course of three days in different places, and began to wonder if there was something supernatural going on. Across a baseball field, far side of the parking lot, through chainlink, Mulder milled around with guys dressed the same as him and Zito stared for awhile, feeling like he was keeping an eye on Waldo.
There were four other guys in the Cape League that Zito had messed around with, two teammates (a bad idea even way the hell back when) and two others, and Mulder, who wasn’t particularly unique in and of himself, but had gifted Zito a tangible memory, something he was less inclined to lose.
Zito came to Mulder’s game a day or two later and watched him pitch for the first time, shaken in an oddly profound way when he saw that Mulder was left-handed. Movement on his slider like a machete cut, swift shallow hook that felt like an evisceration, followed by a curve that flipped Zito’s stomach, sneakier than his own, less obtrusive.
He was sitting in the top row of the bleachers, surrounded by other people, and he wasn’t sure how Mulder was able to spot him as he was coming in off the field, but he did and after he won the game he caught Zito’s eye and waved him down.
It was more than slightly awkward, but Zito liked it when people were off-balance, when he himself was. He appreciated unpredictable situations, open-ended conclusions, and Mulder wouldn’t quite meet his eyes, his ears bright red and his thumb hooked in a belt loop somewhat desperately.
He complimented Mulder’s game and Mulder tipped his head, ducked a bit, changed the subject to a guy they both knew who’d recently been kicked out of the league after being caught with a prostitute in his foster bedroom. Zito said that something like that would never happen to him, and Mulder laughed quickly, without thinking, before he stopped short, his expression cast sharply into uncertainty.
Zito grinned. “I mean, really, who actually pays for it?”
Mulder shrugged. “Desperate times.”
“Pathetic times. If you can’t get a girl when you’re twenty years old and a ballplayer, you probably shouldn’t even be in the game.”
“We can’t all have your charm.”
Zito stopped, looked over at Mulder who seemed faintly surprised at himself, a small vertical line pressed between his eyebrows. Zito grinned again, punched him on the arm and told him, “You do okay.”
They went for cokes after, just a half-hour sitting across from each other at the mutilated wooden picnic table, and the conversation kinda died out towards the end, replaced by the choked sound of straws pulling on ice, Mulder’s downcast eyes. They said see you later at the tree line and Zito cut through stinging brush to the sidewalk, walked home slowly, feeling out of sorts.
The next time Zito saw Mulder, they wound up in the backseat of some kid named Carl’s car, drinking beers for awhile (Zito’d been on his way back from the good store, there were guys waiting for him under the bleachers) and talking stiltedly with long pauses until Mulder kissed him suddenly, off-target but only for a second, and they necked for probably too long, freed of gravity as the sun set and the white stadium lights swept over the parking lot like a mist.
*
They ran into each other from time to time, was the best way to put it.
At parties Zito would be laughing at the kitchen table, his head bowed and his shoulders shaking, and when he raised his split grin and tearing eyes, Mulder would have materialized in the doorway, wavering and debilitated, dumbfounded with his eyes stuck on Zito all shuttered and hot.
Zito would find Mulder loitering in the gas station parking lot, his shadow twenty feet long and six inches wide slitting across the asphalt, and Mulder would kick at the curb, say, “Nothing, I’m just bored,” and Zito would be obliged to take him into an alley somewhere.
They were both at the Coastway Diner one night, different booths across the green-specked linoleum, under the slow narcotic turn of the ceiling fans, and Zito caught Mulder’s eye, feeling magnetic, untouchable when he crossed to the men’s and glanced back over his shoulder to see Mulder rising, white paper napkin clutched in his hand like Zito’s shirt a few seconds later.
Nothing predictable or planned, which suited Zito. He didn’t like thinking in the future tense beyond the ever-present pulse of major league baseball that existed in the back of his mind. It was better this way. He and Mulder just sorta collided sometimes, no different than anyone else who happened to him.
Zito was always weirdly careful, maybe because Mulder was very skinny and still growing into his height, fragile in the way you could feel his ribs, the way he shivered sometimes like he was cold. Everything they did was Mulder’s first time and he freaked out occasionally, covering badly, and Zito would keep him still, hold him down because Mulder never fought, saying it’s okay and don’t worry and c’mere. He would press Mulder against a wall and bring him off with one hand, his other cupped around the back of Mulder’s head so he wouldn’t slam it on the bricks.
It wasn’t anything special. Zito didn’t think about Mulder when he wasn’t around.
His last night on the Cape, Zito stayed out all night with the boys, wolf-calling across the beach and pitching empty bottles at the huge blind target of the moon. Real drunk by the end of it, he kept thinking the sun should be rising, it should be daylight already, and the clean salt scent in the air recalled for him the sickle-shaped dent of Mulder’s hip, hard taste there.
The next morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table shellshocked with his mouth gritty and his eyes feeling torn out, and his summer mother, making pancakes, said, “Oh, someone named Mark called for you last night. I told him you were sleeping at your friend’s, but he called again a couple hours later.”
Zito yawned and put his head down on the table. He was so tired, definitely too drunk. All he wanted was to eat his pancakes and then sleep until it was time to get on the plane and go home.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Taverson,” Zito said into the fold of his arms, a treacherous pressure growing behind his eyes. “That’s just this guy I know. He probably only wanted to say goodbye.”
So two months after the whole random thing began, it ended right along with the season.
*
Two years later, Mulder was drafted by the Oakland Athletics and a couple hours after that, Zito was too.
Zito didn’t register Mulder’s name when he heard it called with the second overall pick, but after he’d had time to celebrate his own draft and then sober up, he looked up some of his new teammates. A familiar face under a Michigan State ballcap, and Zito stared at the name for a long moment, knowing it was someone he’d fooled around with (what that plain-looking face looked like lit with a grin, the gray newsprint eyes that Zito knew immediately were actually blue) but where, when? He’d never played against Michigan State, and Mulder had never played anywhere else. They’d grown up whole time zones away from each other.
Suddenly: the raincoat. Slung on the back of the door, generally untouched considering that Zito lived in a desert, just in his eye-line and he remembered then. It was Mark, of course. An impression of steamed car windows, dust in his mouth, rattletrap of ribs under Zito’s cheek and a thundering heartbeat that filled his head like white noise. A memory of warmth, something vague like that.
Zito said to himself, interesting, and mostly forgot about it, got distracted by the ridiculous amount of money that the A’s were going to pay him. Then, really quickly, he was in Single-A.
Visalia, California, was like being transported to an alien planet, tens of million miles closer to the sun. He never took off his cap because the brightness was huge and demolishing; he could barely force his eyes open, convinced he’d be blinded in a single stroke.
He’d grown up in a series of one-story houses scattered across the desert, but the heat was worse here because the air was half dust and a quarter chaff, like breathing flour. When he swiped his hand across the back of his neck, it came away with smears of grime.
They practiced until the outside world disappeared, until they stopped sparing breath for unnecessary conversation, reduced to brief ciphers and codes: cover two, break on his hip, on the black motherfucker. Faceless guys with scruff on their faces and their eyes hidden under cap brims, and Zito found himself talking to noses, to mouths working on dip, feeling like he was in covert ops or something, identities secured.
He was staying in a teammate’s spare bedroom (spare, he learned later, because the teammate’s wife had taken their little girl and moved back to Louisiana a week prior), driving around in his brand-new car with the muscles in his back setting rigidly as the day wore down on him. He was restless at night, couldn’t stay asleep, which he attributed to the fact that he wasn’t smoking a whole bunch of weed anymore. After a week, he decided the same excuse applied to his lack of appetite and short temper. He was sure it was temporary, half-assed withdrawal from more than just the narcotic.
He’d given up the whole rest of the world. He was deeply committed to being good at this, not fucking up in his typical fashion, and for that first month he let it take him over. Baseball was all he thought about, the only dimension in which he could see.
Then his mom got sick.
*
I can’t pitch, was what he was thinking. Over and over again, distantly fascinated by how certain he was of it, a given fact of his body: I can’t fly and I can’t breathe underwater and I can’t pitch.
A hundred and six degrees in the shade of a gas station overhang, kids bought bite-sized chocolate bars from the five-cent jar and left them on the asphalt to liquefy and collect vast cherry-colored colonies of fire ants from the cracked earth at the edge of the parking lot. Zito was somewhere in the badlands north of the mountains.
He bought bottles of water and tower-like cans of Red Bull, a cheese sandwich wrapped in cellophane and a lottery ticket that he could not for the life of him figure out why he wanted, surprised to find it in his hand when he reached for his keys. The kids kept laughing in incredible registers, and Zito kept whipping his head over, thinking they were screaming with pain.
Everything seemed bizarre and vaguely ominous, making Zito feel shattery and weak as he came out of the little store, hunched into his shoulders and scratching at his neck. When he looked up, the angle of the sun whited out the windshield of his car completely, flat sheet of light like a swatch cut out of a movie screen. Zito stared into the glare for a moment, dumbstruck and clinging to consciousness.
He’d been awake for forty-two hours. There was no way he could pitch like this.
He got back into Visalia an hour late even though the last fifty miles went like two minutes, sustained desert blur of land and sky mesmerizing him. He chipped off the second baseman’s truck in the parking lot, leaving a shallow dent the size of an apple in the corner of his bumper. He wasn’t going to tell anyone about that.
The coaches shouted at him when he stumbled into the clubhouse all ramshackle and leering, and Zito could only nod like his head was on a string, agreeing with everything they said and waiting for the chance to let them know that there was absolutely no hope of him pitching that night.
Somebody brought him coffee and someone else gave him two little green pills, hiked him up over the wall of his exhaustion into a brighter light. He went six innings before becoming kinda delirious, sweating bullets and kneading the ball compulsively between his hands, talking shit about the officiating and the end of the world.
Easy to lose the calamity, or at least misplace it for a little while, because there were several hundred people watching him and the sky was black but everything Zito could see was fully illuminated, high noon, and the shortstop was hollering rat-a-tat chants behind him and every couple of minutes a siren corkscrewed huge and overwhelming above the crowd noise. Zito was tweaked so bad everything had a glowing outline, and he was pitching beautifully.
But later, after he got pulled and sent down, debriefed and deconstructed and taped up with an ice pack on his shoulder, after he got left alone in the trainer’s room with his heart still racing and his hands still damp, he couldn’t help it coming back.
Rolls of surgical tape and sand-colored bandages on the counter, medicine bottles and the full-sized plastic skeleton dangling on his stand, grinning under an Oaks cap, and Zito tried to control his breathing, tried to get his mind out of the hospital.
He didn’t know what to do. It made him feel sick, like a criminal, that he was here and not at Cedars-Sinai, and he wondered suddenly what the fuck was wrong with him that he had been able to pitch; his mom was dying and he’d struck out eight guys, as if it had actually made him better.
At fifty hours awake, Zito played ten dollars worth of pinball at the bar, held in thrall by the flash and red explosions, trills of electric music. His eyes felt like they’d been pried out, rolled in salt, and shoved back in. He wanted to go home but he couldn’t. His answering machine was at home and it was increasingly apparent that he wasn’t strong enough to face that.
He blacked out not long after, lived for five hours inside dreams where his skin turned parchment yellow and started flaking off, trails of blood eking from his ears and eyes, and his mom, his mom was there sometimes, pressing his hands together prayerfully between her own, saying tenderly, “Quit throwing curveballs when you should be throwing change-ups.”
When Zito came to, he was lying on a scratchy overgrown front lawn, four houses down from the one where he was staying. He’d lost a shoe at some point, and the rising sun culled the black dirt under his nails and the scratches on his forearms. His head felt staved in, his body insubstantial like someone had robbed him of his bone marrow.
He made it home in a dead-eyed haze, took a shower and erased the messages on his answering machine without listening to any of them. He made up some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, silent and alone in the dark kitchen, added peanut butter to the list on the refrigerator. Then, almost crying already, one hand wrenched tight around the strap of his backpack, he got in his car and drove back across California to his mother’s hospital room.
Highway driving flattened him, crushed his higher-level thinking. Too bright, white sun bouncing off the endless fields and all the identical miles between exits, until Zito felt like he was suffocating, quicksand panicking, losing every inch of his cool because even if his mom survived this, Zito was starting to think that he had no shot at all.
*
But nothing was ever like it seemed, the whole universe an ongoing practical joke, because right when Zito had pretty much given up on ever having another good day, there was some kind of miracle.
Somebody died somewhere, died unnaturally and young, and Zito’s dad said, “This is God’s way of saying He’s sorry.” Zito never met the family of the donor who gave his mom her new liver, and he didn’t think he ever wanted to. He didn’t want to thank them for having the grace to lose someone they loved, because that didn’t make any sense.
It was just in time, too, after his mom spent three weeks either unconscious or insensible, terrifying her children with hysteria and fits of battering sorrow, but then she woke up two days after the surgery to her only son, her angel boy, asleep on the floor, and she called him by name again.
Half the summer Zito lost to the highways of the southwest, four dozen cassettes littering the floor of the passenger side, speed from the company store burning in his veins and quieting the roar of suspicion in his mind that eventually he was going to have to pay in blood for his mother’s recovery. He’d prayed for it, after all. He’d promised anything.
But she kept getting better, and went home after a few weeks, by which point Zito was in Double-A, deep in the heart of Texas, buying long distance phone cards in gas stations and trying to keep all his new teammates straight. Every other guy was named Eric, and they all dressed the same both on and off the field.
Zito had picked up a slight dependency on uppers and the foundation for a real nice drinking problem, but he was still pitching extremely well. It was his only measure: as long as his game didn’t suffer, he was okay. Anyway, it was mostly a vicious cycle arising from not being able to sleep without passing out, and not being able to live the next day without a little pick-me-up.
There was a root cause to why he couldn’t sleep, a backbone to all of this, but Zito was trying not to deal with it just yet. He’d just lived through four months of a slow-motion plane crash, a season of profound trauma like nothing he’d ever known, and he had the right to self-medicate for awhile.
Watching the sun go down over land instead of water made Zito incredibly antsy for reasons that he couldn’t explain. The guys nicknamed him Mouth because he kept reeling off paragraphs of internal monologue and general narration, hating it when things were quiet.
Drunk one night, too hot to be inside, Zito walked down to the ballpark and hopped the fence, running the bases deliriously until his heartbeat rang in his ears. He slept in left-center, awoken by sprinklers and sunlight. Someone was calling his name, a shadow-man flickering in the glittering spray of water.
Zito got to his feet and squelched over to the dugout, completely soaked and feeling like he was shining through his skin, washed clean, and his manager said he was a crazy son of a bitch and thank god Zito wasn’t his problem anymore.
Four hours later Zito was on a flight to Vancouver.
*
The minor league season was almost over by the time he got there, the team recently routed for the benefit of the big club, and conversation in the clubhouse was subdued, everyone just playing out the string.
Zito didn’t see Mulder until just before the first game he spent in the dugout, somehow missed him in the weave of players, interchangeable faces that he’d given up trying to distinguish. At the spread, though, they both reached for the same cookie, and Zito looked up with his brow furrowed (Trip-A had noticeably better cookies).
Gnawingly familiar face, square-cut blue eyes and clean edges, and Zito was apparently more than that, because the kid looked kinda gobsmacked, breathed out, “You.”
Zito’s vision came into focus with the voice, and his face split with a helpless grin. “Mark. Fuck.”
“Yeah, jeez.” Mulder’s throat ducked, and he smiled weird and small. “I heard you were coming.”
“Did you? It took me by surprise.” Zito picked up the cookie and broke it in half, handed Mulder one. “How the hell have you been, man?”
“Oh, you know. Pretty good. You know.”
“Hmm. You paint a real vivid picture.”
Shoulders up in a slight shrug, Mulder said, “What? We’re in Canada, you know. It’s boring.”
“It’s foreign. Exotic.”
Mulder rolled his eyes, smirking, and Zito crammed the cookie segment in his mouth, an intentional lull in the conversation so he could size Mulder up once again-it’d been two years. Mulder was still handsome in a way that was almost but not quite irritating, set Zito’s teeth on edge and made everything they did feel immediate, necessary. He was wearing the same pair of shoes, beat-up black and gray sneakers from some random Chicago sports company that no one had ever heard of, and the same watch, which he kept fiddling with as he dodged opportunities to meet Zito’s eyes.
“Where are you staying, anyway?” Mulder asked eventually.
“Hotel near the airport, I don’t know. I wanna say a Marriott. It’s got dirty movies and everything.”
Mulder smiled as if in reflex, unwillingly, and Zito liked the look on his face so much, thinking about the red-gold summer he’d spent crashing into Mulder on bumper car trajectories. Everything had been more fun in Cape Cod, and Zito decided abruptly to do something about it.
He made as if he were caught off-guard suddenly, staring at Mulder’s mouth long enough that Mulder couldn’t help but notice, and then he darted his eyes up, gave Mulder his troublemaker smile, a blatant cruise. Mulder looked shocked again; it was like his default.
“Though, really, I’d be open to any other invitations,” Zito said, and Mulder opened his mouth but didn’t say anything and after a long moment he ripped his eyes away from Zito’s, stammered something and backed away.
Zito took another cookie, pretty amused by the whole thing.
During the game, Mulder sat down next to him at the end of the bench, attention locked on the field even as Zito glanced at him several times expectantly. Mulder rolled the leather tie of his glove between his fingers, pushing the back of his wrist across his mouth a few times.
After two batters, he said, still without looking at Zito, “I have a girlfriend now.”
Zito nodded, thinking, naturally. “That’s great. Very appropriate.”
Mulder pushed a sunflower seed into his mouth, scowling for no apparent reason. They watched a double drill down the left field line, their heads whipping in unison. Nobody said anything for a minute and Zito yawned, worn ragged and foggily under the mistaken impression that he was on the road, not recognizing his new home stadium.
He nudged Mulder’s knee with his own. “You gonna get me drunk tonight?”
Mulder glanced at him sharply, distrustful. “Well. Maybe.”
“No, you gotta,” Zito told him. “My first night here? Absolutely you gotta. It’s the only decent thing to do.”
Mulder spit a shell into the small grate on the dugout floor, arrow-straight, and said fast as if ashamed, “Okay but like I say: girlfriend.”
“Noted,” Zito said, and paused. “Jackass.”
Mulder jammed his elbow into Zito’s side, stony dig of pressure and an old warmth, just what Zito’d been going for.
They went to a bar in a bowling alley, which Mulder readily admitted was odd, but half-dollar happy hour did that to people. Canadian punks pushed for space with fifty year old workingmen built like barrels and the American college kids and ballplayers, all talking at different pitches and in subtly different languages.
No chance to get a lane anytime soon, so Mulder and Zito played arcade games, police cadet training and alien hunting, monopolizing the racecar game for an hour trading first and second place back and forth. First was a free race, and they were paying out of pocket, seeing who would go broke first.
Some little rat kid complained before Zito could polish Mulder off, and putting up a fight when they were asked to give up the game was probably not the wisest move, but they were three pitchers in and spoiling for it.
The door guy who rolled them was also built like a barrel, though he was at least six-ten, which was the rather more pertinent fact. He grabbed hold of Zito’s collar as Zito was clinging to the wheel and gaping over at Mulder about the ridiculously big guy who’d just shown up, and then Zito was pulled up and out by his scruff so quickly it was like teleportation; he blinked and he was standing, unable to breathe with his collar tight around his throat.
He bugged his eyes at Mulder, who scrambled out of his side of the game without further argument, grinning sheepishly. They were summarily removed, kicked to the curb and banned for a year; no real loss considering the season ended in a week.
“Wow, that guy?” Zito said, turning his collar right-side out, smoothing out the twists in his shirt. “Maybe the biggest guy I’ve ever seen.”
“He wasn’t so big.”
“Then your complete and spineless surrender was pretty fucking pitiful, dude.”
“Hey.” Mulder stopped walking, and Zito turned back, kept a distance of a few feet. “He had you held hostage. Everybody knows you give up when there’s a hostage.”
It struck Zito as a perfect logic, actually, but he flattened his hand over his heart and mugged, wide-eyed and swooning. “My hero.”
Mulder flinched, looked down and Zito noticed that the skin around his eyes was puffy and he wasn’t steady, ship-rocking. Drunk, reading too much into things. Not trusting Zito’s intentions at all, which wasn’t unjustified. Certainly nothing Mulder did was unjustified.
They got to Mulder’s car, and just kind of looked at it, both of them realizing at the same moment.
“Way too drunk to drive,” Mulder mumbled as Zito was saying, “Worst idea ever.”
Zito grinned at him. They were at the far end of the parking lot, more isolated than when they’d come in, the flow switched to egress rather than entrance a couple hours ago. Like every other bowling alley Zito had ever been to, it was in a fairly seedy part of town, warehouses and rundown industrial buildings, a tent city under the huge highway overpass like a village carved into a cliff, the traffic noise as ambiance.
Mulder’s throat moved as he swallowed, maybe not realizing that he was staring at Zito, briefly wetting his lips. “A cab is probably inevitable here.”
“Yes,” Zito nodded. He stepped up close to Mulder, heard his fast inhale, and twisted the keys from Mulder’s hand. He didn’t move back, tipped his chin up a little bit. No part of Mulder was moving, his eyes locked on Zito’s face. “Let’s do something while we wait for it.”
In Zito’s defense, that was all the invitation Mulder needed. Zito had planned out a bunch of reasons and rationalizations, evidence of how everything was connected, but Mulder just . . . gave.
“You’ve been in one backseat, you’ve been in them all,” Zito said as he climbed on top of Mulder, stripped off his shirt cleanly and hooked it around Mulder’s neck, pulling him in for a kiss.
Mulder moved just the same, opened his mouth right when Zito knew he would, angled his head and spread his hands out wide as he could on Zito’s back. Zito gasped, always his favorite part of the early going, the moment when Mulder’s hands were spanned and warm and felt like what having wings must feel like.
He was taken aback, remarkably so, by how much of this he suddenly remembered.
Mulder got worked up, holding Zito hard against him, closing his teeth on Zito’s lip just enough to keep him trembling and still. Turn of his hand in Zito’s hair and Zito knew Mulder had found a moment of lucidity and remembered, relearned maybe, that he’d specifically told Zito he couldn’t do this.
Zito immediately went on the offensive and kissed Mulder hard, wild and deep, pushed his head back onto the seat and skidded a hand down under his belt. Mulder hissed and bucked up, and Zito licked up his throat, bit his ear.
“I haven’t gotten off with anybody in six months,” he said, and laughed a little bit. “Jesus, six months.”
Mulder writhed faintly under him, sucking in breath. “What, um. Ah. How come?” He pressed down on Zito’s wrist, which meant harder. “You should really. Really be having a lot of sex.”
“Oh, I know. I’m a helluva catch.” Zito proved his point, taking his hand off Mulder long enough to get both their jeans open, work them together. Mulder hid his face in Zito’s throat, mumbling and out of his mind, liquid hot.
“And you’re something else, I can barely tell you.” Shaking his head, Zito left off talking for a second, let himself go on the rhythm of Mulder’s hips and the slick of his hand, the pure blissful drag down. Just for a second, reined himself back in and managed to say, “Couldn’t help myself, you can understand that.”
Mulder made a keening sound, which Zito took for assent. He let it go again, kissed Mulder as well as he could, stopped trying to think his way through it. Real close now, a white field growing behind his eyes and the sudden cohesion of a memory that doubled as imminently prescient: the way a moan would be ripped out of Mulder and he would tighten his arms until Zito’s sides ached, press his cheek to some unprotected stretch of Zito’s body and hold like that for the longest moment, the very best part.
*
Zito had a tendency to run his private life on impulse and whimsy, and he didn’t think anything untoward about Mulder’s recurrence therein, other than that it was crazy that he’d somehow let six months go by, even if he did have a valid excuse. Mulder was easy, the easiest possible option on his first night in a new town, and Zito wasn’t going to fuck it up with analysis when it was clearly a step in his recovery.
They left it awkwardly, both of them completely strung-out as Mulder drove Zito to his hotel, existing entirely within their own heads and not speaking once. Zito fought a tide, by turns taken with effortless bliss, which darkened into an odd sorrow that probably had more to do with the downward trend of the drunk, this late hour.
Mulder said, “Tomorrow,” when he stopped under the hotel’s long lit-up overhang, and Zito nodded, quieted by a yawn that popped his jaw.
He reached up, patted Mulder’s cheek and dragged the tips of his fingers down, left pale tracks in Mulder’s flush.
Zito didn’t bother trying to think of something pithy to say, all his attention on forcing his body into action for long enough to get upstairs. He passed out fully dressed on top of the covers, the key card flat to his cheek.
They didn’t get a chance to talk the next day, Zito being shanghaied by his catcher and taken out to a club that was his own personal nightmare, made of maddening electronic noise, people with sharp edges and unnatural-looking teeth. He was under an awful lot of peer pressure to seem interested in snatch, which was always uncomfortable, and apparently Red Bull and vodka was illegal in Vancouver, of all the idiotic twists.
And then Mulder was ignoring him or something, playing at avoidance and leaving the room when Zito entered. Mulder wore a constant discomfited expression, frightened and out of place, undercover in a country where he didn’t speak the language. He pressed himself close to baseball, the last vapor trails of the season.
Zito had learned young that everybody in the whole world was fucked up in one way or another, and so he left Mulder to it. He didn’t need to involve himself in any extra drama.
It wasn’t until their final game that Zito caught Mulder sneaking glances at him in the dugout. Jacked on uppers, Zito found himself feeling contrary, ten-point self-destructive, and the idea of a confrontation appealed to him now, a good fit for their last hour in uniform.
The fielders went back up and a seat opened up next to Mulder that Zito promptly occupied, half-full bag of seeds crumpled in his hand.
“Seed?” he asked, offering. Mulder shook his head shortly, not looking at Zito anymore. Zito tried again, “You going to Phoenix for instrux?”
Another headshake, his clean profile unreadable except for the muscle in Mulder’s jaw that twitched to show how much it was costing him. Zito spit a shell on a high arch, cleared the dugout steps and vanished in the trim grass.
“What’s that noise about? Special treatment bullshit, right there.” He pushed his elbow into Mulder’s side, felt Mulder flinch. “More special treatment bullshit, I should say. You really got them fooled.”
Mulder glanced at him sideways, a sorely wounded and impossibly suspicious look that Zito supposed he deserved. “I never asked for anything.”
“No, of course not. ‘Course you didn’t.”
Zito fell silent, thinking through his next method of attack. He wasn’t after anything in particular, just wanted to needle Mulder a little bit, get him worked up again. Zito was pretty much just bored.
“You’re mad at me, huh,” he said eventually, giving up on artifice to some extent.
Mulder took a moment, glaring at his spikes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re also a terrible liar, my god man.”
“Or maybe I’m not trying to have this conversation in fucking public, what do you think?”
Zito stopped, sat back. “That’s actually a good point.” He flicked a seed away thoughtfully. “You could just tell me yes or no. What can that hurt, just yes or no.”
Mulder looked over at him, twilight-colored wedges dark under his eyes, the corners of his mouth chapped and worn. “Yes, I’m mad at you. A million times yes.”
“Well okay then.” Zito nodded, feeling like he understood his place in the world once again. “Long as we’re on the same page.”
So after the game and the heartrending final message from their manager (“I hope to never see any of you motherfuckers again”), Zito got in Mulder’s car and they followed the taillights and blasting music of their teammates for a little while.
“Lemme see if I can guess,” Zito said, thumbing the seam of his jeans. “You’re mad at me because I came on after you told me not to.”
“Girlfriend,” Mulder said kinda woodenly. “I told you.’
“Yeah, you did. And then I completely disregarded it, it’s true.” Zito thought for a second, watching the dust-black and streetlight-yellow wash past. “What’s her name, anyway?”
There was a pause. “Rachel Paulson.”
Zito nodded, the name inchingly familiar and after a moment he got it. He looked at Mulder in surprise. “She sang the national anthem tonight. She was like forty.”
Mulder’s face colored like a shadow rising through the dim, and he didn’t answer. Zito stared at him for a long minute, and then started to laugh.
“Dude, dude,” he said, fighting it, laughter bubbling and heating him on the inside. “Dude, you’re totally lying again.”
When Mulder still didn’t answer, Zito cackled, banging on the glovebox. The whole thing was hilarious; they were both so fucked up. Mulder swore and jerked the wheel, pulling into a kwik-e-mart parking lot.
“Were you this fucking irritating on the Cape?” Mulder snapped, jamming the car into park.
“Naturally. You mighta been thinking with your dick, though.”
“Look.” Mulder stopped, staring at his hands. “Look,” he said again, softer. “It wasn’t a literal girlfriend. It was more like. The idea of a girlfriend.”
“An imaginary girlfriend? You don’t hear her talking to you or anything, right?”
“Would you shut your mouth please? I’m trying to tell you.” A moment passed, an intermittent flash of music dulled through the windows, Mulder gathering up his shoulders. “Since Cape Cod, I’ve decided I’m not really into that stuff. I’m much more girl-oriented, it turns out.”
Zito bit his lip to keep from smiling. “Really.”
“Yeah. And the other night, that was just ‘cause I was drunk, I’m pretty sure. ‘Cause I hadn’t seen you in a long time and you’re, you know. Easy.”
“I like to help a fella out, why’s that a crime?”
Mulder smirked with the edge of his mouth, his features shrunk and contained, indecipherable. “It isn’t, but it’s not for me.”
“Well.” Zito propped his knee on the dash, wedging his fingers into the bend of his leg. He reckoned that this was about ninety percent bullshit, but he had a bad feeling that Mulder was a true believer no matter how implausible his line. “I guess if you can go straight, you might as well. Certainly does make everything easier, doesn’t it?”
That was Zito baiting him, and Mulder clearly knew it, shooting him a hard-edged glance, one thumb hooked heavily in the lower curve of the steering wheel. The tendons in his wrist stood out in relief under the tension, and Zito couldn’t take his eyes off it. It looked like cables, the careful machinery under Mulder’s skin so close to snapping.
“You think calling me chicken’s gonna change my mind?” Mulder asked.
“It’s not cowardice, Mark, it’s lack of fucking heart, a fundamental weakness. You’re only kinda miserable now, still the right side of bearable, and you’re just gonna let that be the way it is.”
Mulder shook his head, his mouth contorting. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You’re always talking such shit, man, I can’t even listen to you.”
“I am talking,” Zito grabbed a thin fistful of Mulder’s shirt sleeve, caught his wide-eyed jerk, “about how this is the only part of my life that I can’t fucking stand. Everything should be perfect and instead nothing is, because nobody’s supposed to be fucking queer in this job.”
It wasn’t quite what he’d meant to say, but it was close enough, and Mulder angled his head slightly, looking at Zito in such a way that gold streetlight mixed with blue and kinda ruined Zito.
He let Mulder go, rubbed at his face brutally. He was spiraling downward, thinking of the watered-down green pills in his pocket, the guaranteed fix.
“It’s not right, not fixable either,” Mulder said, his voice quiet and wary. “Maybe you shouldn’t focus on ballplayers so much.”
A crooked half-laugh crammed Zito’s throat, hurt when he swallowed against it. “I got a type, what can I say.”
“That’s why you didn’t hook up for six months?”
“Oh, no. No. That was something different.” Zito watched the clerk inside the kwik-e-mart, headphones screwed into his ears, dancing with a mop. “My mom almost died. It was kinda. All-encompassing.”
“Oh,” Mulder said. His hand slid on the wheel as if he wanted to touch Zito, smooth down his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t infect her with liver disease,” Zito said automatically, saw Mulder blanch slightly and regretted it. “By the way, I tend to be an asshole when talking about this, fair warning.”
Mulder looked pained. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“Fine by me.” Zito kicked at the floor, already sick to his stomach. “You’ve really fucked up my night, you know.”
“You fucked up a solid year of my life, cocksucker.”
“Did I?” Zito sighed. “I wasn’t trying to do that.”
“It’s okay,” Mulder answered, but it sounded like a reflex, numbed and recorded. “I got over it awhile ago.”
“Yeah?”
“Mostly.”
“Sure.”
Leaning his head back, Zito laced his fingers and stretched palms out to make his knuckle joints go off like a daisy chain of fireworks, snap-and-pops on the sidewalk. He was in a valley, a low patch that drained his energy and made everything feel stupid, futile. He’d really hoped to get to fuck Mulder tonight, trying to get his mind off going home tomorrow, and now he had nothing to look forward to, no light ahead.
He considered Mulder, sharing a doubtful, expectant silence with him. Mulder had always been blend-in good-looking, but then tall enough that he was impossible to miss; every time Zito saw him in a crowd he thought, head and shoulders above. He was polite almost all the time but anxious under the surface, or maybe that was just how he was around Zito. At his core he was decent to a fault, but that rarely came through without interference.
All in all, Zito had to count this as a serious loss.
“I still have your raincoat, you know,” he said, watched Mulder’s mouth curl reluctantly.
“Have you grown into it yet?” Mulder asked, showing an innocently clean forehead, the corner of his lip sucked in.
“Ha ha. It looks better on me anyway.”
“Did you ever even see me wearing it?”
“I assume I did. I dunno.” Zito tried to remember, the rains had come to Cape Cod like a broken levee in the sky and they’d been over at that kid’s house (Carl? Chip?) and had he seen Mulder before he passed out in the hallway? Had Zito noticed him at all?
“It’s hard to remember sometimes,” Mulder said. “I keep thinking of it like a movie I saw when I was a kid, you know like when you can’t remember the plot, just random scenes, little pieces of dialogue that don’t match up. I can’t get the context right.”
Zito nodded, watching the clerk through the flared windows again, an eloquent spin on stained linoleum that pressed a small weight under his ribs. “That’s my whole life, basically.”
“It’s rough.” Mulder lifted a hand and his fingers fluttered over his eyes for a second, a shiver like leaves in wind. “I hate not being sure.”
“Well. You could ask me. We’re teammates now.”
Mulder’s chest hiccupped like a laugh, and he shook his head, amazed. “Somehow I never thought that would happen.”
“No, because you were supposed to play for the White Sox.”
“Doesn’t look much like the Padres organization either.”
Zito was caught unawares by a smile that felt forced only because he had no say in it, couldn’t stop. His eyes scrunched up and teared, terrifying him because a couple months ago he would break out weeping with all the predictability of an earthquake, in the hospital elevator and at the deli on the corner, trapped in a sidewalk square.
But this was something different, a lesser misery clouded with the memory of that one seamless frozen summer, Mulder nineteen years old and saying Zito’s name like it was the only word he knew. This was a more reasonable tragedy.
“Hey,” Mulder said, reaching out like he was going to touch Zito’s face, but then pulling back, an awkward look flashing across his features. “Are you okay?”
Zito shook his head but that wasn’t what he meant. He was still smiling, saying, “No, I’m fine, it’s okay. It just throws me sometimes.”
Mulder looked confused. “What?”
“I don’t know, it’s how my brain works. Freaks me out occasionally to keep my attention on the present, I think is what happens.” He tapped his forehead. “Crazy, you know.”
And Mulder’s mouth got small, bent downwards, the look he got after giving up a pair of doubles, and he told Zito, “You won’t be able to use that as an excuse forever. They’re gonna expect you to grow out of this shit.”
“I’m not so bad. I’m docilely insane.”
“You’re just a regular fucked-up person, don’t blow it out of proportion.”
That bothered Zito intensely, because he’d been through hell and he didn’t need to be marginalized by the golden boy. Maybe everybody in the world was fucked up, but Zito’s grief was his own, the only thing he’d taken with him everywhere he’d gone this summer.
“Okay, so what about you?” he said quick, a faint vicious bite in his voice. “You can’t just decide not to be gay, dude, not after fucking around with me for two months and also five fucking days ago. That’s called being in the closet, and it’s pathetic.”
Mulder’s eyes went huge, weld-spark white and blue that hit Zito low in the stomach because he’d always been partial to desire disguised as aggression.
“What the fuck,” Mulder almost screeched, and Zito compounded the damage by snorting a laugh and immediately mimicking him, squeaking rodent-style and riveted by the color rising on Mulder’s face. He’d push Mulder over the edge; he’d get Mulder back down here.
“You shut the fuck up,” Mulder said too loud for the closed windows, a bounced-back echo. “You don’t know anything about me. Two years is a long fucking time, and I told you, I said, I was drunk.”
“Drunk is the lamest excuse in history,” Zito shouted back, welcoming the fight with all his heart, wanting to break something off of Mulder, leave a permanent scar. “It’s not even an excuse so much as a total cliché and also: pathetic!”
Mulder lunged forward and Zito’s heart jammed into his throat, licking his lips swiftly and hoping that Mulder wouldn’t temper it, wouldn’t hold back. But Mulder just wrenched open Zito’s door, his teeth bared right near Zito’s shoulder, inches from Zito’s battering pulse, and he said on a terrible sneer:
“Get out of my car.”
Zito sat without moving, gaping at Mulder with his mind glass-clear and working madly, thinking that there was no way he’d misplayed this so badly. He cast about for the right thing to say, the thing that would bring the blue back into Mulder’s eyes, but nothing came to him. There was nothing for it, a universe of wordless remorse as Mulder coupled his full-strength shove with saying like it was torn bloodily out of his throat:
“Get out,” and Zito fell onto the asphalt, landed at the harshest angle.
He couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d been pushed out of a plane. Cool gritty black under his hands, he bit the inside of his lip hard enough to taste copper, trying to snap himself out of it.
“Mark, c’mon,” he said. Mulder was still leaning across the seat, pissed-off expression on his face, knotted forehead. “C’mon, what’re you doing?”
“I stopped messing around with guys because it fucked me up more than it got me off,” Mulder said. “And I’m done with you because you’re just the same. There’s much more bad in you than good, and I’m not fucking dealing with it anymore.”
Zito stared at him, feeling gutshot and newly worthless. He felt his face paling and wondered if he was breathing, desperately watching Mulder’s half-sneer, the duck of his head and the fall of a shard of light across his features.
Mulder pulled out with a jerk, the open door barely skimming past Zito’s head, and he stopped short at the end of the parking lot, letting the door slam shut like endline punctuation, an impossible emphasis, and then he was gone, Zito left by himself under the ill-making neon.
“I kinda wish you hadn’t said that,” he told nobody in an infinitesimal whisper, pressing his fingers to his chest and checking for blood.
*
(intermission!)
gently flashing lights in the lobby!
Also! Fun bonus game! Which story do you think has been rewritten to follow on from this one? There will be prizes if you get it! Of, you know. Another story. (It’s what I got, people.)
And finally! Since the second one is not done yet, I do not know every little thing that’s going to occur to me as I finish it, and if anything occurs that necessitates substantive alterations or additions to the first story, I will edit the first and let y’all know.
my computer is dying so quickly, man.
*
Okay, so here is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing perspective-shift remixes on a pair of old stories that originally had nothing to do with each other but now I’ve decided they are two parts of the same epic and ridiculous story. You’re excited now!
The first of them is ‘Back in the Day,' a story that is about ten pages, and its remix, which is below, is about twenty pages. This is okay by me, their respective lengths, I mean, as I have made peace with my tendency to ramble.
The trouble is, the second remix is already as long as its original story (which I will not tell you because it is a surprise!) and has only covered a third of its timeline. I am nowhere. Near. Done. It is good, but it is slow. Now, usually I don’t like to post things incomplete or in progress (I’ve always felt like WIPs are a jinx in a weird way), and certainly these two stories are meant to be read together, but I feel bad having a completely done version of the first part (which can semi-standalone just as a rewrite of ‘Back in the Day’ (though it shouldn’t)) and withholding it when god knows how long the second part will be. So! It is your lucky day.
Part One: In the Here and Now
By Candle Beck
Zito went to Cape Cod the summer of his nineteenth year, the start of his real life.
The plane landed in the middle of a storm, trapped in a jolting bottle with lightning that exploded and stabbed at them, missing by inches every time. Zito was terrified, his senses dulled and made undependable by the long flight and the three hot mouthfuls he’d taken from the flask inside his coat, staring at the mayhem of the sky, the flat fragile brace of the wing flashing and shining like a sword.
And then by the time Zito had gotten his bags, the weather had cleared almost completely, black-glass night sky showing between huge chunks of tattered clouds, and a fog of disconcertment crept over Zito, wondering if the storm had been a dream. He found the farthest dark corner on top of the parking garage, smoked a jay before calling to tell his foster folks he’d arrived.
He’d come to Cape Cod already on unstable ground-he’d been suffering an internal civil war ever since getting to college, trying to figure out what kind of man he was turning into and secretly hating the very idea of it. Running reckless and acting out weren’t new for him, no more than substance abuse and sleepless nights, but out here, as far away as he could get from his hometown while still in the lower forty-eight, out here everything was ten times as dangerous, because he had no obligations other than baseball. Out here he’d been freed.
Fresh compulsions afflicted him within a few weeks, kept him out all hours stoned half to death, and he couldn’t sleep without taking five or six Tylenol PM, couldn’t wake up without No-Doz and coffee. He could picture chemical residue accumulating on the walls of his blood vessels, slick muddy green clotting around his heart, spending morose hours resigned to a violently young demise.
Fear of the future partially explained his behavior, but there were gaps in the narrative and occasionally his life fell into the third person, out of body watching this fucked-up young man go through the motions of wunderkind pitcher while dismantling his legend in off hours, in every free moment and a hundred different ways. It was riveting sometimes, but in the morning his memory was already faded and suspect.
What stuck was the wild mercury-colored ocean before a storm, strange taste of wet electricity in the air all the time, an overriding impression of potential, and the blue-eyed boy from Chicago whose raincoat Zito had appropriated.
Years later, though, it would occur to Zito that the only reason Mulder ever stuck out was because Mulder was the only one who stuck around.
*
Jumping Mulder that first time in the equipment shed had been the kind of corrosive, ill-considered act of rebellion in which Zito had excelled that summer. It had been almost entirely a whim.
He’d known Mulder’s name because Mulder was tall and good-looking and Zito made it his business to be kept informed on people like that, but he didn’t really know anything else. He’d woken up in an unfamiliar hallway with a well-loved blue raincoat tucked around him like a child’s blanket, the sky reinvented by rain and his heart fractured, fracturing, by some dream that was already diminishing too quickly to be recovered.
The raincoat was his only clue, and he liked the way the sleeves fit over his hands, the give of the shoulders. There was a receipt in one of the pockets on the back of which was handdrawn a little map to the good batting cages. The coat was too big but Zito didn’t mind, dimly comforted by the illusion of being undersized once again.
He tracked Mulder down wanting to return the coat and say thanks, but he smoked a jay on the way to the ballpark and irretrievably lost his train of thought before he even got there. He thinks he might have made a fool of himself, at least initially, but Mulder was in the midst of what appeared to be some kind of existential haze, or perhaps a bad hangover, and their respective mental states complemented each other.
At the time, Zito didn’t think there was anything more to his attraction to baseball players than proximity. He was nineteen and amazingly senseless things got him worked up: a smear of dust on a teammate’s forearm, the nape of a waitress’s neck, the feel of wet grass in the morning. If he trended towards well-built young men with no outward signs of interest, it didn’t mean anything more than his preference for shaggy hair and blue eyes. It was an aesthetic thing; he was getting these boys at their very best.
Mulder, awkward and stunned in a way that Zito could taste, the same smell under his jaw that lived in the coat Zito was wearing, Mulder wasn’t quite what Zito was looking for, crazy long arms and legs lending a sense of being trapped, overmatched and powerless, that Zito didn’t normally have to contend with. But Mulder had quite evidently never done this before, bled panicked arousal and hung on Zito’s shoulders with his arms pressed down hard across Zito’s back, bending into him and following wherever Zito led.
It mostly evened out.
Zito got an extremely solid raincoat out of the encounter, which put him ahead on the day and it wasn’t even noon. Five hours later, he found a hickey on his neck, which also pleased him.
When the rain came back with presumption and winds near hurricane force, Zito wore Mulder’s raincoat everywhere and thought of him sometimes when he was all balled up against the weather, hands lost in the sleeves.
Heated place in the pit of his stomach that he could nurse like a match, remembering the muted confusion on Mark’s face when he saw how Zito was looking at him, the rise of color, the pretty shock when he had tripped and fallen, fallen everywhere with his legs sprawling open and his crystal blue eyes glowing in the dusty light.
Idle kinda thought, a way to keep warm.
*
He didn’t see Mulder anywhere for a couple weeks after that, then noticed him five times over the course of three days in different places, and began to wonder if there was something supernatural going on. Across a baseball field, far side of the parking lot, through chainlink, Mulder milled around with guys dressed the same as him and Zito stared for awhile, feeling like he was keeping an eye on Waldo.
There were four other guys in the Cape League that Zito had messed around with, two teammates (a bad idea even way the hell back when) and two others, and Mulder, who wasn’t particularly unique in and of himself, but had gifted Zito a tangible memory, something he was less inclined to lose.
Zito came to Mulder’s game a day or two later and watched him pitch for the first time, shaken in an oddly profound way when he saw that Mulder was left-handed. Movement on his slider like a machete cut, swift shallow hook that felt like an evisceration, followed by a curve that flipped Zito’s stomach, sneakier than his own, less obtrusive.
He was sitting in the top row of the bleachers, surrounded by other people, and he wasn’t sure how Mulder was able to spot him as he was coming in off the field, but he did and after he won the game he caught Zito’s eye and waved him down.
It was more than slightly awkward, but Zito liked it when people were off-balance, when he himself was. He appreciated unpredictable situations, open-ended conclusions, and Mulder wouldn’t quite meet his eyes, his ears bright red and his thumb hooked in a belt loop somewhat desperately.
He complimented Mulder’s game and Mulder tipped his head, ducked a bit, changed the subject to a guy they both knew who’d recently been kicked out of the league after being caught with a prostitute in his foster bedroom. Zito said that something like that would never happen to him, and Mulder laughed quickly, without thinking, before he stopped short, his expression cast sharply into uncertainty.
Zito grinned. “I mean, really, who actually pays for it?”
Mulder shrugged. “Desperate times.”
“Pathetic times. If you can’t get a girl when you’re twenty years old and a ballplayer, you probably shouldn’t even be in the game.”
“We can’t all have your charm.”
Zito stopped, looked over at Mulder who seemed faintly surprised at himself, a small vertical line pressed between his eyebrows. Zito grinned again, punched him on the arm and told him, “You do okay.”
They went for cokes after, just a half-hour sitting across from each other at the mutilated wooden picnic table, and the conversation kinda died out towards the end, replaced by the choked sound of straws pulling on ice, Mulder’s downcast eyes. They said see you later at the tree line and Zito cut through stinging brush to the sidewalk, walked home slowly, feeling out of sorts.
The next time Zito saw Mulder, they wound up in the backseat of some kid named Carl’s car, drinking beers for awhile (Zito’d been on his way back from the good store, there were guys waiting for him under the bleachers) and talking stiltedly with long pauses until Mulder kissed him suddenly, off-target but only for a second, and they necked for probably too long, freed of gravity as the sun set and the white stadium lights swept over the parking lot like a mist.
*
They ran into each other from time to time, was the best way to put it.
At parties Zito would be laughing at the kitchen table, his head bowed and his shoulders shaking, and when he raised his split grin and tearing eyes, Mulder would have materialized in the doorway, wavering and debilitated, dumbfounded with his eyes stuck on Zito all shuttered and hot.
Zito would find Mulder loitering in the gas station parking lot, his shadow twenty feet long and six inches wide slitting across the asphalt, and Mulder would kick at the curb, say, “Nothing, I’m just bored,” and Zito would be obliged to take him into an alley somewhere.
They were both at the Coastway Diner one night, different booths across the green-specked linoleum, under the slow narcotic turn of the ceiling fans, and Zito caught Mulder’s eye, feeling magnetic, untouchable when he crossed to the men’s and glanced back over his shoulder to see Mulder rising, white paper napkin clutched in his hand like Zito’s shirt a few seconds later.
Nothing predictable or planned, which suited Zito. He didn’t like thinking in the future tense beyond the ever-present pulse of major league baseball that existed in the back of his mind. It was better this way. He and Mulder just sorta collided sometimes, no different than anyone else who happened to him.
Zito was always weirdly careful, maybe because Mulder was very skinny and still growing into his height, fragile in the way you could feel his ribs, the way he shivered sometimes like he was cold. Everything they did was Mulder’s first time and he freaked out occasionally, covering badly, and Zito would keep him still, hold him down because Mulder never fought, saying it’s okay and don’t worry and c’mere. He would press Mulder against a wall and bring him off with one hand, his other cupped around the back of Mulder’s head so he wouldn’t slam it on the bricks.
It wasn’t anything special. Zito didn’t think about Mulder when he wasn’t around.
His last night on the Cape, Zito stayed out all night with the boys, wolf-calling across the beach and pitching empty bottles at the huge blind target of the moon. Real drunk by the end of it, he kept thinking the sun should be rising, it should be daylight already, and the clean salt scent in the air recalled for him the sickle-shaped dent of Mulder’s hip, hard taste there.
The next morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table shellshocked with his mouth gritty and his eyes feeling torn out, and his summer mother, making pancakes, said, “Oh, someone named Mark called for you last night. I told him you were sleeping at your friend’s, but he called again a couple hours later.”
Zito yawned and put his head down on the table. He was so tired, definitely too drunk. All he wanted was to eat his pancakes and then sleep until it was time to get on the plane and go home.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Taverson,” Zito said into the fold of his arms, a treacherous pressure growing behind his eyes. “That’s just this guy I know. He probably only wanted to say goodbye.”
So two months after the whole random thing began, it ended right along with the season.
*
Two years later, Mulder was drafted by the Oakland Athletics and a couple hours after that, Zito was too.
Zito didn’t register Mulder’s name when he heard it called with the second overall pick, but after he’d had time to celebrate his own draft and then sober up, he looked up some of his new teammates. A familiar face under a Michigan State ballcap, and Zito stared at the name for a long moment, knowing it was someone he’d fooled around with (what that plain-looking face looked like lit with a grin, the gray newsprint eyes that Zito knew immediately were actually blue) but where, when? He’d never played against Michigan State, and Mulder had never played anywhere else. They’d grown up whole time zones away from each other.
Suddenly: the raincoat. Slung on the back of the door, generally untouched considering that Zito lived in a desert, just in his eye-line and he remembered then. It was Mark, of course. An impression of steamed car windows, dust in his mouth, rattletrap of ribs under Zito’s cheek and a thundering heartbeat that filled his head like white noise. A memory of warmth, something vague like that.
Zito said to himself, interesting, and mostly forgot about it, got distracted by the ridiculous amount of money that the A’s were going to pay him. Then, really quickly, he was in Single-A.
Visalia, California, was like being transported to an alien planet, tens of million miles closer to the sun. He never took off his cap because the brightness was huge and demolishing; he could barely force his eyes open, convinced he’d be blinded in a single stroke.
He’d grown up in a series of one-story houses scattered across the desert, but the heat was worse here because the air was half dust and a quarter chaff, like breathing flour. When he swiped his hand across the back of his neck, it came away with smears of grime.
They practiced until the outside world disappeared, until they stopped sparing breath for unnecessary conversation, reduced to brief ciphers and codes: cover two, break on his hip, on the black motherfucker. Faceless guys with scruff on their faces and their eyes hidden under cap brims, and Zito found himself talking to noses, to mouths working on dip, feeling like he was in covert ops or something, identities secured.
He was staying in a teammate’s spare bedroom (spare, he learned later, because the teammate’s wife had taken their little girl and moved back to Louisiana a week prior), driving around in his brand-new car with the muscles in his back setting rigidly as the day wore down on him. He was restless at night, couldn’t stay asleep, which he attributed to the fact that he wasn’t smoking a whole bunch of weed anymore. After a week, he decided the same excuse applied to his lack of appetite and short temper. He was sure it was temporary, half-assed withdrawal from more than just the narcotic.
He’d given up the whole rest of the world. He was deeply committed to being good at this, not fucking up in his typical fashion, and for that first month he let it take him over. Baseball was all he thought about, the only dimension in which he could see.
Then his mom got sick.
*
I can’t pitch, was what he was thinking. Over and over again, distantly fascinated by how certain he was of it, a given fact of his body: I can’t fly and I can’t breathe underwater and I can’t pitch.
A hundred and six degrees in the shade of a gas station overhang, kids bought bite-sized chocolate bars from the five-cent jar and left them on the asphalt to liquefy and collect vast cherry-colored colonies of fire ants from the cracked earth at the edge of the parking lot. Zito was somewhere in the badlands north of the mountains.
He bought bottles of water and tower-like cans of Red Bull, a cheese sandwich wrapped in cellophane and a lottery ticket that he could not for the life of him figure out why he wanted, surprised to find it in his hand when he reached for his keys. The kids kept laughing in incredible registers, and Zito kept whipping his head over, thinking they were screaming with pain.
Everything seemed bizarre and vaguely ominous, making Zito feel shattery and weak as he came out of the little store, hunched into his shoulders and scratching at his neck. When he looked up, the angle of the sun whited out the windshield of his car completely, flat sheet of light like a swatch cut out of a movie screen. Zito stared into the glare for a moment, dumbstruck and clinging to consciousness.
He’d been awake for forty-two hours. There was no way he could pitch like this.
He got back into Visalia an hour late even though the last fifty miles went like two minutes, sustained desert blur of land and sky mesmerizing him. He chipped off the second baseman’s truck in the parking lot, leaving a shallow dent the size of an apple in the corner of his bumper. He wasn’t going to tell anyone about that.
The coaches shouted at him when he stumbled into the clubhouse all ramshackle and leering, and Zito could only nod like his head was on a string, agreeing with everything they said and waiting for the chance to let them know that there was absolutely no hope of him pitching that night.
Somebody brought him coffee and someone else gave him two little green pills, hiked him up over the wall of his exhaustion into a brighter light. He went six innings before becoming kinda delirious, sweating bullets and kneading the ball compulsively between his hands, talking shit about the officiating and the end of the world.
Easy to lose the calamity, or at least misplace it for a little while, because there were several hundred people watching him and the sky was black but everything Zito could see was fully illuminated, high noon, and the shortstop was hollering rat-a-tat chants behind him and every couple of minutes a siren corkscrewed huge and overwhelming above the crowd noise. Zito was tweaked so bad everything had a glowing outline, and he was pitching beautifully.
But later, after he got pulled and sent down, debriefed and deconstructed and taped up with an ice pack on his shoulder, after he got left alone in the trainer’s room with his heart still racing and his hands still damp, he couldn’t help it coming back.
Rolls of surgical tape and sand-colored bandages on the counter, medicine bottles and the full-sized plastic skeleton dangling on his stand, grinning under an Oaks cap, and Zito tried to control his breathing, tried to get his mind out of the hospital.
He didn’t know what to do. It made him feel sick, like a criminal, that he was here and not at Cedars-Sinai, and he wondered suddenly what the fuck was wrong with him that he had been able to pitch; his mom was dying and he’d struck out eight guys, as if it had actually made him better.
At fifty hours awake, Zito played ten dollars worth of pinball at the bar, held in thrall by the flash and red explosions, trills of electric music. His eyes felt like they’d been pried out, rolled in salt, and shoved back in. He wanted to go home but he couldn’t. His answering machine was at home and it was increasingly apparent that he wasn’t strong enough to face that.
He blacked out not long after, lived for five hours inside dreams where his skin turned parchment yellow and started flaking off, trails of blood eking from his ears and eyes, and his mom, his mom was there sometimes, pressing his hands together prayerfully between her own, saying tenderly, “Quit throwing curveballs when you should be throwing change-ups.”
When Zito came to, he was lying on a scratchy overgrown front lawn, four houses down from the one where he was staying. He’d lost a shoe at some point, and the rising sun culled the black dirt under his nails and the scratches on his forearms. His head felt staved in, his body insubstantial like someone had robbed him of his bone marrow.
He made it home in a dead-eyed haze, took a shower and erased the messages on his answering machine without listening to any of them. He made up some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, silent and alone in the dark kitchen, added peanut butter to the list on the refrigerator. Then, almost crying already, one hand wrenched tight around the strap of his backpack, he got in his car and drove back across California to his mother’s hospital room.
Highway driving flattened him, crushed his higher-level thinking. Too bright, white sun bouncing off the endless fields and all the identical miles between exits, until Zito felt like he was suffocating, quicksand panicking, losing every inch of his cool because even if his mom survived this, Zito was starting to think that he had no shot at all.
*
But nothing was ever like it seemed, the whole universe an ongoing practical joke, because right when Zito had pretty much given up on ever having another good day, there was some kind of miracle.
Somebody died somewhere, died unnaturally and young, and Zito’s dad said, “This is God’s way of saying He’s sorry.” Zito never met the family of the donor who gave his mom her new liver, and he didn’t think he ever wanted to. He didn’t want to thank them for having the grace to lose someone they loved, because that didn’t make any sense.
It was just in time, too, after his mom spent three weeks either unconscious or insensible, terrifying her children with hysteria and fits of battering sorrow, but then she woke up two days after the surgery to her only son, her angel boy, asleep on the floor, and she called him by name again.
Half the summer Zito lost to the highways of the southwest, four dozen cassettes littering the floor of the passenger side, speed from the company store burning in his veins and quieting the roar of suspicion in his mind that eventually he was going to have to pay in blood for his mother’s recovery. He’d prayed for it, after all. He’d promised anything.
But she kept getting better, and went home after a few weeks, by which point Zito was in Double-A, deep in the heart of Texas, buying long distance phone cards in gas stations and trying to keep all his new teammates straight. Every other guy was named Eric, and they all dressed the same both on and off the field.
Zito had picked up a slight dependency on uppers and the foundation for a real nice drinking problem, but he was still pitching extremely well. It was his only measure: as long as his game didn’t suffer, he was okay. Anyway, it was mostly a vicious cycle arising from not being able to sleep without passing out, and not being able to live the next day without a little pick-me-up.
There was a root cause to why he couldn’t sleep, a backbone to all of this, but Zito was trying not to deal with it just yet. He’d just lived through four months of a slow-motion plane crash, a season of profound trauma like nothing he’d ever known, and he had the right to self-medicate for awhile.
Watching the sun go down over land instead of water made Zito incredibly antsy for reasons that he couldn’t explain. The guys nicknamed him Mouth because he kept reeling off paragraphs of internal monologue and general narration, hating it when things were quiet.
Drunk one night, too hot to be inside, Zito walked down to the ballpark and hopped the fence, running the bases deliriously until his heartbeat rang in his ears. He slept in left-center, awoken by sprinklers and sunlight. Someone was calling his name, a shadow-man flickering in the glittering spray of water.
Zito got to his feet and squelched over to the dugout, completely soaked and feeling like he was shining through his skin, washed clean, and his manager said he was a crazy son of a bitch and thank god Zito wasn’t his problem anymore.
Four hours later Zito was on a flight to Vancouver.
*
The minor league season was almost over by the time he got there, the team recently routed for the benefit of the big club, and conversation in the clubhouse was subdued, everyone just playing out the string.
Zito didn’t see Mulder until just before the first game he spent in the dugout, somehow missed him in the weave of players, interchangeable faces that he’d given up trying to distinguish. At the spread, though, they both reached for the same cookie, and Zito looked up with his brow furrowed (Trip-A had noticeably better cookies).
Gnawingly familiar face, square-cut blue eyes and clean edges, and Zito was apparently more than that, because the kid looked kinda gobsmacked, breathed out, “You.”
Zito’s vision came into focus with the voice, and his face split with a helpless grin. “Mark. Fuck.”
“Yeah, jeez.” Mulder’s throat ducked, and he smiled weird and small. “I heard you were coming.”
“Did you? It took me by surprise.” Zito picked up the cookie and broke it in half, handed Mulder one. “How the hell have you been, man?”
“Oh, you know. Pretty good. You know.”
“Hmm. You paint a real vivid picture.”
Shoulders up in a slight shrug, Mulder said, “What? We’re in Canada, you know. It’s boring.”
“It’s foreign. Exotic.”
Mulder rolled his eyes, smirking, and Zito crammed the cookie segment in his mouth, an intentional lull in the conversation so he could size Mulder up once again-it’d been two years. Mulder was still handsome in a way that was almost but not quite irritating, set Zito’s teeth on edge and made everything they did feel immediate, necessary. He was wearing the same pair of shoes, beat-up black and gray sneakers from some random Chicago sports company that no one had ever heard of, and the same watch, which he kept fiddling with as he dodged opportunities to meet Zito’s eyes.
“Where are you staying, anyway?” Mulder asked eventually.
“Hotel near the airport, I don’t know. I wanna say a Marriott. It’s got dirty movies and everything.”
Mulder smiled as if in reflex, unwillingly, and Zito liked the look on his face so much, thinking about the red-gold summer he’d spent crashing into Mulder on bumper car trajectories. Everything had been more fun in Cape Cod, and Zito decided abruptly to do something about it.
He made as if he were caught off-guard suddenly, staring at Mulder’s mouth long enough that Mulder couldn’t help but notice, and then he darted his eyes up, gave Mulder his troublemaker smile, a blatant cruise. Mulder looked shocked again; it was like his default.
“Though, really, I’d be open to any other invitations,” Zito said, and Mulder opened his mouth but didn’t say anything and after a long moment he ripped his eyes away from Zito’s, stammered something and backed away.
Zito took another cookie, pretty amused by the whole thing.
During the game, Mulder sat down next to him at the end of the bench, attention locked on the field even as Zito glanced at him several times expectantly. Mulder rolled the leather tie of his glove between his fingers, pushing the back of his wrist across his mouth a few times.
After two batters, he said, still without looking at Zito, “I have a girlfriend now.”
Zito nodded, thinking, naturally. “That’s great. Very appropriate.”
Mulder pushed a sunflower seed into his mouth, scowling for no apparent reason. They watched a double drill down the left field line, their heads whipping in unison. Nobody said anything for a minute and Zito yawned, worn ragged and foggily under the mistaken impression that he was on the road, not recognizing his new home stadium.
He nudged Mulder’s knee with his own. “You gonna get me drunk tonight?”
Mulder glanced at him sharply, distrustful. “Well. Maybe.”
“No, you gotta,” Zito told him. “My first night here? Absolutely you gotta. It’s the only decent thing to do.”
Mulder spit a shell into the small grate on the dugout floor, arrow-straight, and said fast as if ashamed, “Okay but like I say: girlfriend.”
“Noted,” Zito said, and paused. “Jackass.”
Mulder jammed his elbow into Zito’s side, stony dig of pressure and an old warmth, just what Zito’d been going for.
They went to a bar in a bowling alley, which Mulder readily admitted was odd, but half-dollar happy hour did that to people. Canadian punks pushed for space with fifty year old workingmen built like barrels and the American college kids and ballplayers, all talking at different pitches and in subtly different languages.
No chance to get a lane anytime soon, so Mulder and Zito played arcade games, police cadet training and alien hunting, monopolizing the racecar game for an hour trading first and second place back and forth. First was a free race, and they were paying out of pocket, seeing who would go broke first.
Some little rat kid complained before Zito could polish Mulder off, and putting up a fight when they were asked to give up the game was probably not the wisest move, but they were three pitchers in and spoiling for it.
The door guy who rolled them was also built like a barrel, though he was at least six-ten, which was the rather more pertinent fact. He grabbed hold of Zito’s collar as Zito was clinging to the wheel and gaping over at Mulder about the ridiculously big guy who’d just shown up, and then Zito was pulled up and out by his scruff so quickly it was like teleportation; he blinked and he was standing, unable to breathe with his collar tight around his throat.
He bugged his eyes at Mulder, who scrambled out of his side of the game without further argument, grinning sheepishly. They were summarily removed, kicked to the curb and banned for a year; no real loss considering the season ended in a week.
“Wow, that guy?” Zito said, turning his collar right-side out, smoothing out the twists in his shirt. “Maybe the biggest guy I’ve ever seen.”
“He wasn’t so big.”
“Then your complete and spineless surrender was pretty fucking pitiful, dude.”
“Hey.” Mulder stopped walking, and Zito turned back, kept a distance of a few feet. “He had you held hostage. Everybody knows you give up when there’s a hostage.”
It struck Zito as a perfect logic, actually, but he flattened his hand over his heart and mugged, wide-eyed and swooning. “My hero.”
Mulder flinched, looked down and Zito noticed that the skin around his eyes was puffy and he wasn’t steady, ship-rocking. Drunk, reading too much into things. Not trusting Zito’s intentions at all, which wasn’t unjustified. Certainly nothing Mulder did was unjustified.
They got to Mulder’s car, and just kind of looked at it, both of them realizing at the same moment.
“Way too drunk to drive,” Mulder mumbled as Zito was saying, “Worst idea ever.”
Zito grinned at him. They were at the far end of the parking lot, more isolated than when they’d come in, the flow switched to egress rather than entrance a couple hours ago. Like every other bowling alley Zito had ever been to, it was in a fairly seedy part of town, warehouses and rundown industrial buildings, a tent city under the huge highway overpass like a village carved into a cliff, the traffic noise as ambiance.
Mulder’s throat moved as he swallowed, maybe not realizing that he was staring at Zito, briefly wetting his lips. “A cab is probably inevitable here.”
“Yes,” Zito nodded. He stepped up close to Mulder, heard his fast inhale, and twisted the keys from Mulder’s hand. He didn’t move back, tipped his chin up a little bit. No part of Mulder was moving, his eyes locked on Zito’s face. “Let’s do something while we wait for it.”
In Zito’s defense, that was all the invitation Mulder needed. Zito had planned out a bunch of reasons and rationalizations, evidence of how everything was connected, but Mulder just . . . gave.
“You’ve been in one backseat, you’ve been in them all,” Zito said as he climbed on top of Mulder, stripped off his shirt cleanly and hooked it around Mulder’s neck, pulling him in for a kiss.
Mulder moved just the same, opened his mouth right when Zito knew he would, angled his head and spread his hands out wide as he could on Zito’s back. Zito gasped, always his favorite part of the early going, the moment when Mulder’s hands were spanned and warm and felt like what having wings must feel like.
He was taken aback, remarkably so, by how much of this he suddenly remembered.
Mulder got worked up, holding Zito hard against him, closing his teeth on Zito’s lip just enough to keep him trembling and still. Turn of his hand in Zito’s hair and Zito knew Mulder had found a moment of lucidity and remembered, relearned maybe, that he’d specifically told Zito he couldn’t do this.
Zito immediately went on the offensive and kissed Mulder hard, wild and deep, pushed his head back onto the seat and skidded a hand down under his belt. Mulder hissed and bucked up, and Zito licked up his throat, bit his ear.
“I haven’t gotten off with anybody in six months,” he said, and laughed a little bit. “Jesus, six months.”
Mulder writhed faintly under him, sucking in breath. “What, um. Ah. How come?” He pressed down on Zito’s wrist, which meant harder. “You should really. Really be having a lot of sex.”
“Oh, I know. I’m a helluva catch.” Zito proved his point, taking his hand off Mulder long enough to get both their jeans open, work them together. Mulder hid his face in Zito’s throat, mumbling and out of his mind, liquid hot.
“And you’re something else, I can barely tell you.” Shaking his head, Zito left off talking for a second, let himself go on the rhythm of Mulder’s hips and the slick of his hand, the pure blissful drag down. Just for a second, reined himself back in and managed to say, “Couldn’t help myself, you can understand that.”
Mulder made a keening sound, which Zito took for assent. He let it go again, kissed Mulder as well as he could, stopped trying to think his way through it. Real close now, a white field growing behind his eyes and the sudden cohesion of a memory that doubled as imminently prescient: the way a moan would be ripped out of Mulder and he would tighten his arms until Zito’s sides ached, press his cheek to some unprotected stretch of Zito’s body and hold like that for the longest moment, the very best part.
*
Zito had a tendency to run his private life on impulse and whimsy, and he didn’t think anything untoward about Mulder’s recurrence therein, other than that it was crazy that he’d somehow let six months go by, even if he did have a valid excuse. Mulder was easy, the easiest possible option on his first night in a new town, and Zito wasn’t going to fuck it up with analysis when it was clearly a step in his recovery.
They left it awkwardly, both of them completely strung-out as Mulder drove Zito to his hotel, existing entirely within their own heads and not speaking once. Zito fought a tide, by turns taken with effortless bliss, which darkened into an odd sorrow that probably had more to do with the downward trend of the drunk, this late hour.
Mulder said, “Tomorrow,” when he stopped under the hotel’s long lit-up overhang, and Zito nodded, quieted by a yawn that popped his jaw.
He reached up, patted Mulder’s cheek and dragged the tips of his fingers down, left pale tracks in Mulder’s flush.
Zito didn’t bother trying to think of something pithy to say, all his attention on forcing his body into action for long enough to get upstairs. He passed out fully dressed on top of the covers, the key card flat to his cheek.
They didn’t get a chance to talk the next day, Zito being shanghaied by his catcher and taken out to a club that was his own personal nightmare, made of maddening electronic noise, people with sharp edges and unnatural-looking teeth. He was under an awful lot of peer pressure to seem interested in snatch, which was always uncomfortable, and apparently Red Bull and vodka was illegal in Vancouver, of all the idiotic twists.
And then Mulder was ignoring him or something, playing at avoidance and leaving the room when Zito entered. Mulder wore a constant discomfited expression, frightened and out of place, undercover in a country where he didn’t speak the language. He pressed himself close to baseball, the last vapor trails of the season.
Zito had learned young that everybody in the whole world was fucked up in one way or another, and so he left Mulder to it. He didn’t need to involve himself in any extra drama.
It wasn’t until their final game that Zito caught Mulder sneaking glances at him in the dugout. Jacked on uppers, Zito found himself feeling contrary, ten-point self-destructive, and the idea of a confrontation appealed to him now, a good fit for their last hour in uniform.
The fielders went back up and a seat opened up next to Mulder that Zito promptly occupied, half-full bag of seeds crumpled in his hand.
“Seed?” he asked, offering. Mulder shook his head shortly, not looking at Zito anymore. Zito tried again, “You going to Phoenix for instrux?”
Another headshake, his clean profile unreadable except for the muscle in Mulder’s jaw that twitched to show how much it was costing him. Zito spit a shell on a high arch, cleared the dugout steps and vanished in the trim grass.
“What’s that noise about? Special treatment bullshit, right there.” He pushed his elbow into Mulder’s side, felt Mulder flinch. “More special treatment bullshit, I should say. You really got them fooled.”
Mulder glanced at him sideways, a sorely wounded and impossibly suspicious look that Zito supposed he deserved. “I never asked for anything.”
“No, of course not. ‘Course you didn’t.”
Zito fell silent, thinking through his next method of attack. He wasn’t after anything in particular, just wanted to needle Mulder a little bit, get him worked up again. Zito was pretty much just bored.
“You’re mad at me, huh,” he said eventually, giving up on artifice to some extent.
Mulder took a moment, glaring at his spikes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re also a terrible liar, my god man.”
“Or maybe I’m not trying to have this conversation in fucking public, what do you think?”
Zito stopped, sat back. “That’s actually a good point.” He flicked a seed away thoughtfully. “You could just tell me yes or no. What can that hurt, just yes or no.”
Mulder looked over at him, twilight-colored wedges dark under his eyes, the corners of his mouth chapped and worn. “Yes, I’m mad at you. A million times yes.”
“Well okay then.” Zito nodded, feeling like he understood his place in the world once again. “Long as we’re on the same page.”
So after the game and the heartrending final message from their manager (“I hope to never see any of you motherfuckers again”), Zito got in Mulder’s car and they followed the taillights and blasting music of their teammates for a little while.
“Lemme see if I can guess,” Zito said, thumbing the seam of his jeans. “You’re mad at me because I came on after you told me not to.”
“Girlfriend,” Mulder said kinda woodenly. “I told you.’
“Yeah, you did. And then I completely disregarded it, it’s true.” Zito thought for a second, watching the dust-black and streetlight-yellow wash past. “What’s her name, anyway?”
There was a pause. “Rachel Paulson.”
Zito nodded, the name inchingly familiar and after a moment he got it. He looked at Mulder in surprise. “She sang the national anthem tonight. She was like forty.”
Mulder’s face colored like a shadow rising through the dim, and he didn’t answer. Zito stared at him for a long minute, and then started to laugh.
“Dude, dude,” he said, fighting it, laughter bubbling and heating him on the inside. “Dude, you’re totally lying again.”
When Mulder still didn’t answer, Zito cackled, banging on the glovebox. The whole thing was hilarious; they were both so fucked up. Mulder swore and jerked the wheel, pulling into a kwik-e-mart parking lot.
“Were you this fucking irritating on the Cape?” Mulder snapped, jamming the car into park.
“Naturally. You mighta been thinking with your dick, though.”
“Look.” Mulder stopped, staring at his hands. “Look,” he said again, softer. “It wasn’t a literal girlfriend. It was more like. The idea of a girlfriend.”
“An imaginary girlfriend? You don’t hear her talking to you or anything, right?”
“Would you shut your mouth please? I’m trying to tell you.” A moment passed, an intermittent flash of music dulled through the windows, Mulder gathering up his shoulders. “Since Cape Cod, I’ve decided I’m not really into that stuff. I’m much more girl-oriented, it turns out.”
Zito bit his lip to keep from smiling. “Really.”
“Yeah. And the other night, that was just ‘cause I was drunk, I’m pretty sure. ‘Cause I hadn’t seen you in a long time and you’re, you know. Easy.”
“I like to help a fella out, why’s that a crime?”
Mulder smirked with the edge of his mouth, his features shrunk and contained, indecipherable. “It isn’t, but it’s not for me.”
“Well.” Zito propped his knee on the dash, wedging his fingers into the bend of his leg. He reckoned that this was about ninety percent bullshit, but he had a bad feeling that Mulder was a true believer no matter how implausible his line. “I guess if you can go straight, you might as well. Certainly does make everything easier, doesn’t it?”
That was Zito baiting him, and Mulder clearly knew it, shooting him a hard-edged glance, one thumb hooked heavily in the lower curve of the steering wheel. The tendons in his wrist stood out in relief under the tension, and Zito couldn’t take his eyes off it. It looked like cables, the careful machinery under Mulder’s skin so close to snapping.
“You think calling me chicken’s gonna change my mind?” Mulder asked.
“It’s not cowardice, Mark, it’s lack of fucking heart, a fundamental weakness. You’re only kinda miserable now, still the right side of bearable, and you’re just gonna let that be the way it is.”
Mulder shook his head, his mouth contorting. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You’re always talking such shit, man, I can’t even listen to you.”
“I am talking,” Zito grabbed a thin fistful of Mulder’s shirt sleeve, caught his wide-eyed jerk, “about how this is the only part of my life that I can’t fucking stand. Everything should be perfect and instead nothing is, because nobody’s supposed to be fucking queer in this job.”
It wasn’t quite what he’d meant to say, but it was close enough, and Mulder angled his head slightly, looking at Zito in such a way that gold streetlight mixed with blue and kinda ruined Zito.
He let Mulder go, rubbed at his face brutally. He was spiraling downward, thinking of the watered-down green pills in his pocket, the guaranteed fix.
“It’s not right, not fixable either,” Mulder said, his voice quiet and wary. “Maybe you shouldn’t focus on ballplayers so much.”
A crooked half-laugh crammed Zito’s throat, hurt when he swallowed against it. “I got a type, what can I say.”
“That’s why you didn’t hook up for six months?”
“Oh, no. No. That was something different.” Zito watched the clerk inside the kwik-e-mart, headphones screwed into his ears, dancing with a mop. “My mom almost died. It was kinda. All-encompassing.”
“Oh,” Mulder said. His hand slid on the wheel as if he wanted to touch Zito, smooth down his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t infect her with liver disease,” Zito said automatically, saw Mulder blanch slightly and regretted it. “By the way, I tend to be an asshole when talking about this, fair warning.”
Mulder looked pained. “Let’s not talk about it.”
“Fine by me.” Zito kicked at the floor, already sick to his stomach. “You’ve really fucked up my night, you know.”
“You fucked up a solid year of my life, cocksucker.”
“Did I?” Zito sighed. “I wasn’t trying to do that.”
“It’s okay,” Mulder answered, but it sounded like a reflex, numbed and recorded. “I got over it awhile ago.”
“Yeah?”
“Mostly.”
“Sure.”
Leaning his head back, Zito laced his fingers and stretched palms out to make his knuckle joints go off like a daisy chain of fireworks, snap-and-pops on the sidewalk. He was in a valley, a low patch that drained his energy and made everything feel stupid, futile. He’d really hoped to get to fuck Mulder tonight, trying to get his mind off going home tomorrow, and now he had nothing to look forward to, no light ahead.
He considered Mulder, sharing a doubtful, expectant silence with him. Mulder had always been blend-in good-looking, but then tall enough that he was impossible to miss; every time Zito saw him in a crowd he thought, head and shoulders above. He was polite almost all the time but anxious under the surface, or maybe that was just how he was around Zito. At his core he was decent to a fault, but that rarely came through without interference.
All in all, Zito had to count this as a serious loss.
“I still have your raincoat, you know,” he said, watched Mulder’s mouth curl reluctantly.
“Have you grown into it yet?” Mulder asked, showing an innocently clean forehead, the corner of his lip sucked in.
“Ha ha. It looks better on me anyway.”
“Did you ever even see me wearing it?”
“I assume I did. I dunno.” Zito tried to remember, the rains had come to Cape Cod like a broken levee in the sky and they’d been over at that kid’s house (Carl? Chip?) and had he seen Mulder before he passed out in the hallway? Had Zito noticed him at all?
“It’s hard to remember sometimes,” Mulder said. “I keep thinking of it like a movie I saw when I was a kid, you know like when you can’t remember the plot, just random scenes, little pieces of dialogue that don’t match up. I can’t get the context right.”
Zito nodded, watching the clerk through the flared windows again, an eloquent spin on stained linoleum that pressed a small weight under his ribs. “That’s my whole life, basically.”
“It’s rough.” Mulder lifted a hand and his fingers fluttered over his eyes for a second, a shiver like leaves in wind. “I hate not being sure.”
“Well. You could ask me. We’re teammates now.”
Mulder’s chest hiccupped like a laugh, and he shook his head, amazed. “Somehow I never thought that would happen.”
“No, because you were supposed to play for the White Sox.”
“Doesn’t look much like the Padres organization either.”
Zito was caught unawares by a smile that felt forced only because he had no say in it, couldn’t stop. His eyes scrunched up and teared, terrifying him because a couple months ago he would break out weeping with all the predictability of an earthquake, in the hospital elevator and at the deli on the corner, trapped in a sidewalk square.
But this was something different, a lesser misery clouded with the memory of that one seamless frozen summer, Mulder nineteen years old and saying Zito’s name like it was the only word he knew. This was a more reasonable tragedy.
“Hey,” Mulder said, reaching out like he was going to touch Zito’s face, but then pulling back, an awkward look flashing across his features. “Are you okay?”
Zito shook his head but that wasn’t what he meant. He was still smiling, saying, “No, I’m fine, it’s okay. It just throws me sometimes.”
Mulder looked confused. “What?”
“I don’t know, it’s how my brain works. Freaks me out occasionally to keep my attention on the present, I think is what happens.” He tapped his forehead. “Crazy, you know.”
And Mulder’s mouth got small, bent downwards, the look he got after giving up a pair of doubles, and he told Zito, “You won’t be able to use that as an excuse forever. They’re gonna expect you to grow out of this shit.”
“I’m not so bad. I’m docilely insane.”
“You’re just a regular fucked-up person, don’t blow it out of proportion.”
That bothered Zito intensely, because he’d been through hell and he didn’t need to be marginalized by the golden boy. Maybe everybody in the world was fucked up, but Zito’s grief was his own, the only thing he’d taken with him everywhere he’d gone this summer.
“Okay, so what about you?” he said quick, a faint vicious bite in his voice. “You can’t just decide not to be gay, dude, not after fucking around with me for two months and also five fucking days ago. That’s called being in the closet, and it’s pathetic.”
Mulder’s eyes went huge, weld-spark white and blue that hit Zito low in the stomach because he’d always been partial to desire disguised as aggression.
“What the fuck,” Mulder almost screeched, and Zito compounded the damage by snorting a laugh and immediately mimicking him, squeaking rodent-style and riveted by the color rising on Mulder’s face. He’d push Mulder over the edge; he’d get Mulder back down here.
“You shut the fuck up,” Mulder said too loud for the closed windows, a bounced-back echo. “You don’t know anything about me. Two years is a long fucking time, and I told you, I said, I was drunk.”
“Drunk is the lamest excuse in history,” Zito shouted back, welcoming the fight with all his heart, wanting to break something off of Mulder, leave a permanent scar. “It’s not even an excuse so much as a total cliché and also: pathetic!”
Mulder lunged forward and Zito’s heart jammed into his throat, licking his lips swiftly and hoping that Mulder wouldn’t temper it, wouldn’t hold back. But Mulder just wrenched open Zito’s door, his teeth bared right near Zito’s shoulder, inches from Zito’s battering pulse, and he said on a terrible sneer:
“Get out of my car.”
Zito sat without moving, gaping at Mulder with his mind glass-clear and working madly, thinking that there was no way he’d misplayed this so badly. He cast about for the right thing to say, the thing that would bring the blue back into Mulder’s eyes, but nothing came to him. There was nothing for it, a universe of wordless remorse as Mulder coupled his full-strength shove with saying like it was torn bloodily out of his throat:
“Get out,” and Zito fell onto the asphalt, landed at the harshest angle.
He couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d been pushed out of a plane. Cool gritty black under his hands, he bit the inside of his lip hard enough to taste copper, trying to snap himself out of it.
“Mark, c’mon,” he said. Mulder was still leaning across the seat, pissed-off expression on his face, knotted forehead. “C’mon, what’re you doing?”
“I stopped messing around with guys because it fucked me up more than it got me off,” Mulder said. “And I’m done with you because you’re just the same. There’s much more bad in you than good, and I’m not fucking dealing with it anymore.”
Zito stared at him, feeling gutshot and newly worthless. He felt his face paling and wondered if he was breathing, desperately watching Mulder’s half-sneer, the duck of his head and the fall of a shard of light across his features.
Mulder pulled out with a jerk, the open door barely skimming past Zito’s head, and he stopped short at the end of the parking lot, letting the door slam shut like endline punctuation, an impossible emphasis, and then he was gone, Zito left by himself under the ill-making neon.
“I kinda wish you hadn’t said that,” he told nobody in an infinitesimal whisper, pressing his fingers to his chest and checking for blood.
*
(intermission!)
gently flashing lights in the lobby!
Also! Fun bonus game! Which story do you think has been rewritten to follow on from this one? There will be prizes if you get it! Of, you know. Another story. (It’s what I got, people.)
And finally! Since the second one is not done yet, I do not know every little thing that’s going to occur to me as I finish it, and if anything occurs that necessitates substantive alterations or additions to the first story, I will edit the first and let y’all know.