Free Beer Night at the Astrodome
Something in the air made me feel like posting this. Happy Thanksgiving to any N. Americanos who can still keep their eyes open...
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Even before she left, this summer had been a hard one; they'd spent most of it in culture shock, lobbed into the general workforce like islanders onto a mainland.
Mulder and Scully with their Martian invaders and their slow career suicide had long been too cool and culty for the mainstream FBI, and this sudden expulsion from their basement Eden was the chief topic of bullpen gossip for weeks.
People were all around them, watching them, and if Mulder shot an M&M at her with a rubber band or leaned over to play a high-speed game of Tic Tac Toe on her blotter it was like two points on the huge Are They or Aren't They? scoreboard hanging above their heads.
This had begun in May and went on week after week. They weren't traveling much and they were expected to produce at a frantic clip insane amounts of paperwork. Mulder actually had to type with more than two fingers.
At merciful junctures, they were sent up to southern Maine to look at a suspicious shipping container, and then to Sweet Home Alabama, as Mulder called it, to make sure someone wasn't stockpiling manure in the interest of fertilizer bombs. Then they were sent to Dallas.
These trips had brought immense relief. Being alone together again, having time to converse in the deep attentive way they talked while in transit, the ground moving beneath them like a reminder that everything, life, was going past but that they remained motionless, caught in each other's sphere. No one had ever listened to her quite the way Mulder did. He would thoughtfully ponder everything she said before he shot it down.
In his better moods Mulder had amused himself on these excursions by pretending they were the stars of a '70s TV series called Scut Patrol.
"Two shit-canned heroes on the road to nowhere,"he'd narrated tonelessly, glancing to see if he had Scully's attention. "Foregoing the American dream for a one-way ticket to hell." He grinned at Scully. "We could be on roller skates."
Scully had allowed herself a look of faint amusement, offering no comment. She liked that he'd said heroes.
They'd also enjoyed staying in motels together, watching TV until late and one or the other began to yawn, and then Scully would get up from the bed and pick her way through the soda cans and shoes and pizza boxes and pass Mulder slouched down in an armchair with his feet on the table and say "'Night, Mulder," and slip out into the hot dark and just four steps down the sidewalk open the door to her own room and lock it again and walking easily across the clear carpet, fling herself onto the slippery bed and rub her face into the pillow, clutch the blankets, and growl to herself that she was not going crazy with the horrible summer and the depressing job and the old girlfriends and the way she wanted Mulder like a hot, ticking time bomb packed with plastic explosives and rusty nails and the wretched fuse that just kept burning and burning and burning.
"Don't mess with Texas, Scully," Mulder had said as they were bumped onto the first flight to Dallas. They didn't have time to enjoy that particular junket before the manure bomb hit the giant FBI fan. Or, rather, the Astrolite bomb. Mulder couldn't go for a soda without getting her put on probation.
They'd come close to getting killed that day. In Dallas, Texas, like JFK. The Gunmen would have had a field day, linking up conspiracies.
What would the FBI have told her mother? That Scully was a hero? She'd been out of bounds, disobeying orders, playing cell phone tag with Mulder because in her experience bomb threats were usually bogus, and because Mulder had appealed to her rebellious penchant for hooky with that grin of his and the insinuation that he thought she was far cooler than the rest of the FBI drones. True, she and Mulder had saved a hell of a lot of people that day, but they'd also had a hell of a lot of explaining to do.
Mulder always managed to complicate any situation to an almost unbearable degree. There were times when she enjoyed his challenge, and times when he just wore her out. But despite terrible risk or personal awkwardness she had to find a way to remain friends with him. She needed Mulder's friendship on a level of intellect that had nothing to do with the vagaries of career or geography and more to do with muse, in an experimental sense that would never be concluded. He was wild Crick to her Watson, Coleridge to her Wordsworth, the apple that conked her on the head. He was the well she stepped into while stargazing, like Thales of Miletus.
He'd appeared on her doorstep, late at night, far from sober. She'd never seen him drunk before, and quickly guessed why, for this was a state of vulnerability for him if ever there was one. She knew he wanted to talk her out of leaving, and found it sort of touching that he didn't have the nerve to do it sober.
Around eleven-thirty that first night in her apartment the darkness came over Scully like a terrible spell and she tore back the covers and trampled the map and knelt among the boxes in the living room prying open the flaps and making stacks of books around herself on the floor. He had given her one of his books, loaned it actually, rather casually, not a big deal at the time, but now she could think of nothing but having this book in her hands. And here it was - the books of Charles Fort, bound together fifty years before into one heavy volume, a book like a paving stone, and she opened it in her hands, the words rushing up, and pressed her face deep into the gutter between the pages and inhaled as if she had not breathed all day, and the hurt, the hurt, the hurt.
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_________________
Even before she left, this summer had been a hard one; they'd spent most of it in culture shock, lobbed into the general workforce like islanders onto a mainland.
Mulder and Scully with their Martian invaders and their slow career suicide had long been too cool and culty for the mainstream FBI, and this sudden expulsion from their basement Eden was the chief topic of bullpen gossip for weeks.
People were all around them, watching them, and if Mulder shot an M&M at her with a rubber band or leaned over to play a high-speed game of Tic Tac Toe on her blotter it was like two points on the huge Are They or Aren't They? scoreboard hanging above their heads.
This had begun in May and went on week after week. They weren't traveling much and they were expected to produce at a frantic clip insane amounts of paperwork. Mulder actually had to type with more than two fingers.
At merciful junctures, they were sent up to southern Maine to look at a suspicious shipping container, and then to Sweet Home Alabama, as Mulder called it, to make sure someone wasn't stockpiling manure in the interest of fertilizer bombs. Then they were sent to Dallas.
These trips had brought immense relief. Being alone together again, having time to converse in the deep attentive way they talked while in transit, the ground moving beneath them like a reminder that everything, life, was going past but that they remained motionless, caught in each other's sphere. No one had ever listened to her quite the way Mulder did. He would thoughtfully ponder everything she said before he shot it down.
In his better moods Mulder had amused himself on these excursions by pretending they were the stars of a '70s TV series called Scut Patrol.
"Two shit-canned heroes on the road to nowhere,"he'd narrated tonelessly, glancing to see if he had Scully's attention. "Foregoing the American dream for a one-way ticket to hell." He grinned at Scully. "We could be on roller skates."
Scully had allowed herself a look of faint amusement, offering no comment. She liked that he'd said heroes.
They'd also enjoyed staying in motels together, watching TV until late and one or the other began to yawn, and then Scully would get up from the bed and pick her way through the soda cans and shoes and pizza boxes and pass Mulder slouched down in an armchair with his feet on the table and say "'Night, Mulder," and slip out into the hot dark and just four steps down the sidewalk open the door to her own room and lock it again and walking easily across the clear carpet, fling herself onto the slippery bed and rub her face into the pillow, clutch the blankets, and growl to herself that she was not going crazy with the horrible summer and the depressing job and the old girlfriends and the way she wanted Mulder like a hot, ticking time bomb packed with plastic explosives and rusty nails and the wretched fuse that just kept burning and burning and burning.
"Don't mess with Texas, Scully," Mulder had said as they were bumped onto the first flight to Dallas. They didn't have time to enjoy that particular junket before the manure bomb hit the giant FBI fan. Or, rather, the Astrolite bomb. Mulder couldn't go for a soda without getting her put on probation.
They'd come close to getting killed that day. In Dallas, Texas, like JFK. The Gunmen would have had a field day, linking up conspiracies.
What would the FBI have told her mother? That Scully was a hero? She'd been out of bounds, disobeying orders, playing cell phone tag with Mulder because in her experience bomb threats were usually bogus, and because Mulder had appealed to her rebellious penchant for hooky with that grin of his and the insinuation that he thought she was far cooler than the rest of the FBI drones. True, she and Mulder had saved a hell of a lot of people that day, but they'd also had a hell of a lot of explaining to do.
Mulder always managed to complicate any situation to an almost unbearable degree. There were times when she enjoyed his challenge, and times when he just wore her out. But despite terrible risk or personal awkwardness she had to find a way to remain friends with him. She needed Mulder's friendship on a level of intellect that had nothing to do with the vagaries of career or geography and more to do with muse, in an experimental sense that would never be concluded. He was wild Crick to her Watson, Coleridge to her Wordsworth, the apple that conked her on the head. He was the well she stepped into while stargazing, like Thales of Miletus.
He'd appeared on her doorstep, late at night, far from sober. She'd never seen him drunk before, and quickly guessed why, for this was a state of vulnerability for him if ever there was one. She knew he wanted to talk her out of leaving, and found it sort of touching that he didn't have the nerve to do it sober.
Around eleven-thirty that first night in her apartment the darkness came over Scully like a terrible spell and she tore back the covers and trampled the map and knelt among the boxes in the living room prying open the flaps and making stacks of books around herself on the floor. He had given her one of his books, loaned it actually, rather casually, not a big deal at the time, but now she could think of nothing but having this book in her hands. And here it was - the books of Charles Fort, bound together fifty years before into one heavy volume, a book like a paving stone, and she opened it in her hands, the words rushing up, and pressed her face deep into the gutter between the pages and inhaled as if she had not breathed all day, and the hurt, the hurt, the hurt.
____________________