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1. Pick it up and put it in your pocket.
They carried no past with them, no mementos. They had each other and a collection of scars; their secret names whispered into open mouths in dark motel rooms. Lately, she’d begun a ritual. In every new town she pocketed some small item: a pebble, a leaf. Each one was a memory. She kept it until the next town, left it behind like a white stone, a breadcrumb.
“What’s this one?” he asked in the early morning hush, his chest pressed against her back.
She leaned into him for a moment, stroking the delicate shell. “This is the day we met.”
2. Your name here.
She misses him most when she’s driving. Night journeys are particularly marked by his absence. Tonight she sings along with the radio, her voice bouncing back to her in the empty space.
When the song ends, she switches off the sound and opens her window; speaks his name into the rush of dark and hears it swallowed.
Red giants are main sequence stars whose core hydrogen has been exhausted. They appear larger and more luminous even as they consume themselves.
She’s gnawed all the way through her own nucleus. Without surprise, she finds what remains is composed of his grace.
3. Hold a towel in your mouth and be reminded of his clean skin.
She leaves the lights off as darkness gathers. Everything that reminds her of him is gone. All afternoon she cleans, denying herself the luxury of tears. Her clothes are in the garbage. She has to stop herself from burning them.
In the shower she scrubs until her skin is red and stinging. Reaching for her towel, her hand encounters something too small, too soft. She brings it to her face and inhales, chokes.
Her breasts, swollen already and tender, begin to leak. Milk trickles down her body, useless now, wasted; washing away.
She cries for William, for Mulder, for herself.
4. Don’t let them shrivel on the vine.
“The nurse asked me if I was the husband,” he says. “And I had to say no.”
They are spooned, skin to skin, lit by streetlamp and the alarm clock’s glow. She refused to stay in the hospital one more night.
“But we just work together,” she mimics, laughing softly. He presses a kiss to her shoulder.
It’s infinitely sweet to be with him this way, even restricted to bed-rest and forbidden sex. Just him warm and breathing is enough.
So his whisper, full of longing, catches her off-guard. Softly, like the deepest secret.
“I want to be the husband.”
5. Forget it.
She is laughing as she takes him into her body. It is the last and only place he does not already inhabit. Her hands smooth up the furrow of his spine and grasp the budding wings of his scapula. She has forgotten everything but the parts of her that are him.
It feels impossible, like everything else she’s never believed in. The most ordinary things become extraordinary in his presence. Even the knobbed planes of his knees are fascinating.
She rises above him like a wave and knows that she has found her harbor, that he is her beloved country.
6. When you hear a mechanical instrument, think of a child shrieking.
He tells her about the Vermont case over dinner. In her mind the caws of ravens blend with the cries of Michelle Crittendon and Katy Adderly. The sound rises to a peak on the point of Mulder’s knife as it scrapes across his plate.
In this evening refuge, she lays to rest the child they’ll never have. She ceases picking over the wound like a carrion bird.
Placing her hand over his bandaged one, she says, “You can’t save everyone.”
What she means is: I don’t need you to save me. What she means is: maybe I can save you.
7. To all peaks carry water.
Slipping from their apogee she is all burn and ache. They descend in motion and light, remembered grief. Mulder’s arm stretches across the space between them and for a blink she is staring at his coffin, running a finger along his rib. When skin meets skin she is crying, salt water blurring her vision of him, of her through him.
Eyes closed, she shares his sight. His thoughts slip through her like fish wriggling in the ocean between her bones. He is an everywhere nearness, expanding; violent and tender as being born.
Centrifugal force whirls them. She doesn’t let go.
8. Clean the wound and take note of the metal.
The light through the blinds is golden.
Her mind wanders a drowsy landscape of sleep and medication. The chemical symbol for gold is Au, from the Latin ‘aurum’. Shining dawn. As a girl, chrysopoeia fascinated her; the transmutation of base metal into gold.
And gold shines like a sacrament, like a holy thing. The sullen dullness of lead becomes light.
One bullet had rippled through her, exposing her beating red life. Fellig said she didn’t want to be around when love was gone.
When she wakes Mulder holds her hand and her eyes. Solve et coagula: separate and join together.
9. Buy what you can.
It’s Saturday and she feels a little strange arriving at Mulder’s unannounced. He answers the door looking mildly surprised.
Inside, there’s a pile of folded laundry on the couch and the smell of something cooking.
“What’s that?” He gestures to the package in her hands. This is so much more awkward than it should be.
“Boots,” she explains once he’s pulled off the paper. “To replace the ones you ruined. I hope they fit.”
She stands mutely in the center of his living room as he laces them. What she cannot seem to say is, Thank you. For my life.
10. Don’t be afraid to be like her.
In the early afternoon, she takes a walk. The sunlight warms her face and she tilts up slightly, the way a plant grows. She thinks of nothing more than the lovely simplicity of Maxwell’s equations, of luminosity and electromagnetic waves. At certain times she misses the clean and structured paths of physics. The beauty of equations; the assuredness of an answer.
Her memory and Cassandra Spender are missing. What remains is the parallax of the truth.
She moves westward, against the rotation of the earth. She drives toward Mulder’s apartment with an idea: of reaching, of his holding her hand.
11. Learn to recognize the beauty of your own back.
She goes home after her doctor’s appointment and undresses in front of the mirror. Her body looks exactly as it did that morning.
In medical school she was taught that metastasis is the spread of malignant tumor cells through the circulatory system. The idea seems so removed from her own flesh.
Practiced fingers pluck at her nipples, slide down to strum her clit. Back arching, she makes herself come in a jumble of triumph and anguish. Eyes bright and skin flushed with the living hum of blood.
She will regard each day as a victory. She will not tell Mulder.
12. C’mon everyone, drink up.
The water in the sink is scalding and under the bubbles her hands burn as she washes the wine glasses. It’s not Mulder who wants to kiss her. She takes a deep breath in through her nose and lets it out of her mouth.
His mouth.
Behind her she hears the shuffle of shoes against carpet, the rasp of fabric shifting. He is still here.
“Scully?” comes his voice, muted. “Need any help in there?”
“No,” she says. She cannot possibly look at him now, have him look at her and know.
It’s not Mulder who wants to kiss her.
13. Run with whatever you can carry.
She is a maelstrom; she is the choking, savage sea.
His face hurts her. She wants to smash it, gouge out his gentle eyes, force his limp hands into fists. Nothing makes sense. Her gun is so heavy and she’s so heartsick, so tired of running.
“Put the gun down, Dana. Put it down.”
Her weapon is trained on her mother.
Bewildered, she cries, feels his presence like an exclamation behind her. He’s the enemy. She’s seen it, the evidence of his duplicity. And yet.
His hand rests warm on her back, its weight the still center of the world.
14. Remember that you bleed more easily.
”Everything okay?” he asks when she meets him at the gate.
“Fine,” she says, despite the ache of her red, raw heart.
So often she feels as though she’s the string holding him against the wind; the tether against which he strains. And now she’s freefalling and breathless as a kite, while he stands below. Pulling her back to the earth, tugging at the delicate strings of her faith.
Gravity; it’s a force she knows well. His pull captures her as surely as any star. Full circle, she thinks, orbits. Perhaps it’s really that they hold one another in place.
15. Don’t think of it as reasonable, think of it as terrifying.
“Do you love him?” Melissa asks. They’re slumped on the sofa doing nothing in particular. An old movie flickers on the television.
She doesn’t need to ask who “him” is. They’ve been talking about Mulder off and on all afternoon. “Of course I do,” she says. “We’re friends. Partners.”
Melissa rolls her head sideways and regards her solemnly. “That’s not what I meant, Dana.”
She picks at a loose thread, words fluttering in her throat like frightened birds. Melissa squeezes her hand.
They watch the movie wordlessly and all the while the wings in her chest are beating yes, yes.
16. When blinded, construct images around unknown sounds, and assume you are correct.
Her phone rings as she paces inside Franklin Community Hospital. “Scully.” She’s even taken to answering her home phone this way.
“Hello?” She waits. “Mulder, is that you?” The phone pressed hard to her ear, she can just make out a bird chirping over the faint wail of a siren.
“Mulder, where are you? Mulder?”
A sharp slide of panic pricks her. “Mulder, where are you?”
She remembers a deserted bridge, a gunshot, and Mulder tossed from the back of a van. His too-still body in Arecibo. She forgets to breathe.
Then his voice says, “I’m here, Scully. I’m here.”
17. Remember to surface.
The dream vanishes as soon as she opens her eyes. She breathes in deeply, her lungs compressed like a diver’s; the back of her neck sticky with sweat. Her own bed is reassuring after the hard, narrow mattresses of quarantine. But it’s difficult knowing she’s so alone. A month of Mulder’s twitching legs and variegated eyes has proven addictive. He argues with her, makes her laugh. Listens when she speaks.
He’d embraced her briefly in the hallway tonight, pressed her forehead hard against his collarbone and was gone. Now, eyes fixed wide open in the dark, she whispers, “Come back.”
18. Endeavor to dive.
They are laughing in the rain in a cemetery in the middle of the night. She is drowning in the wind and the water and her own belief. For once it feels good to let go the lines, the wheel. She’s no sailor.
The night’s stars are masked and offer no direction; the sky is dark as deep water. In the glow of the flashlight her partner’s eyes are the color of cool shallows. They shine with more than reflected light.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”
She thinks of the pole star, celestial navigation. She swims.