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He’s on the side of the interstate in the warm woven center of night, and Scully is not in his passenger seat. He’s thinking about a research paper he wrote as an undergraduate about suicide methods.
Once, in 1993, he asked her how she’d do it. It was 4am and winter and the diner’s large windows beamed yellow out into the dark, dark, dark. She was a sleepy slump over her sweet breakfast, turning a berry in bloody circles on her plate, thinking of binary strings and strobes. She’d answered, “Should I be concerned, Mulder?”
“Instinct says to put yourself to sleep. Carbon monoxide or pills. But those have very low success rates. It’s why more women attempt, but more men succeed. We tend to use firearms. Almost always gets the job done.”
She stared at him through coffee steam. She hadn’t yet poured in the five creamer shots that always make it room temperature. They had, essentially, just met.
“It’s just a thought experiment,” he said.
* * *
There was never a time in his life when he really thought he’d ever let himself live. The Mulder family tree has branches made of lithium.
He has a faint memory of his mother trying to explain the death of an aunt to him, the Hardy Boys singing on the television and “she just decided she didn’t want to be here anymore.” He had loved his aunt. She taught him how to tie his shoes. There was something about her he understood. She hung herself when he was nine. Once, he overheard his father asking his mother, “Doesn’t Fox remind you of your sister, sometimes?”
He doesn’t know when it became more normal to be with Scully than without her. Sometime before the cancer diagnosis, definitely. But time isn’t the same for him as it is for other people. He lives in a screaming overlap of everything, everything--not a linear progression. Everything about the stories of abductees makes sense to him, but maybe nothing makes more sense than the stopped watches.
Fox Mulder, unstuck in time. And not even any Tralfamadorians to give him sage advice. Tell me, he begs the night sky, about moments. Tell me about how every moment is permanent, always exists, already exists. How there is no such thing as past, present, and future. How nothing is ever truly gone.
A moment, for example, with Scully: one of their early cases together, waiting for a tow truck on the side of a Pacific Northwest road, her elbow resting on the center compartment, her throat car-radio green, her mouth arguing with him about the book he’d taken out to pass the time. She was not as big a Vonnegut fan as him, and she was annoyed by how unsurprising he found this. Regardless of the Melville, she's too much of a scientist and too much of a soldier to share his postmodern streak. Plus, as far as he knows, she isn’t an unwilling time traveler.
“It’s not,” she insisted, as ever unwilling to accept someone else telling her something about herself, “that I can’t appreciate it. His work just has this deep cynicism that I couldn’t connect with. And too much absurdism; it felt like a… a bombardment.”
“A bombardment of absurdism. Is that not just life?”
A darting side eye. “Not mine, Mulder.”
A sigh. “So it goes.”
That moment exists, still, as a place for him to go back to, which he knows, because he is back there right now. But this moment also exists forever, this moment in his car when she is not here and the last time he saw her was a few days ago in the hospital hallway, when she’d admitted to him that she saw those ghosts. Admitted to him that she was dying. Admitted that she was trying to hide it from him.
He leans forward and looks at the stars through his windshield. He thinks, almost calmly: I can’t do this. He thinks: I am a grim fucking reaper. Because it’s his work that is killing her, it’s him. He brings death everywhere he goes. He stains everything he touches with it.
Wouldn’t it be a worse disease if he did want to keep living? Wouldn’t it be sicker for him to enjoy waking up in a world that takes away sisters and aunts and best friends?
He remembers working on that research paper. He remembers the nasty indigo pleasure of writing out the words. Suffocation. Poisoning. Shooting. Jumping. Cutting. Starvation. Fire. Collision. It felt like a satisfying pinning and labeling of his lifelong undercurrent.
He said to Scully once, Sometimes the only sane response to an insane world is insanity.
His phone rings. On days he’s feeling particularly sappy or particularly mystical, he thinks he has some psychic power to make her call.
“Mulder,” he says in case it’s not her, even though he always knows. One of his magic tricks.
“Mulder, it’s me.” But it sounds so unlike her that he sits up straighter. She says, “I think I need help.”
He drives to her apartment at light speed and makes sure not to wrap himself around any trees. The front door is unlocked and when he lets himself in, it smells like sickness and mint. “Scully?”
He doesn’t get an answer, but he doesn’t need one; he finds her on her couch, her eyes closed, her expression concentrated, her breathing shallow. Her pajamas are not one of her usual coordinated sets but a tattered University of Maryland t-shirt, flannel pants.
“Scully?” Mulder whispers, kneeling on the floor in front of her. Her hair is sweat stuck to her face.
She opens her eyes and she should be too sick to feel ashamed but he can see she still does. “I feel like,” she tells him, “I’m going to die.”
* * *
Manic-depressive. He didn’t have words for what his aunt was until he read them in psychology textbooks, years later. Bipolar disorder, sometimes, depending on the modernity of the professor. He found them so surreal and vague and inadequate. There is nothing in here about her, he thought. Nothing in here about me. A bulleted list of symptoms of grief, like it was a curable disease.
Diagnosed with a dead sister. They sound, he thought, just as crazy as me. Chasing their tails through the DSM, trying to explain things with no explanation. How does abduction make less sense than this? How does anything?
It’s true he weaves his way high and low through life. Until he met Scully, he never exactly realized it wasn’t that way for everybody. Nobody had ever spent as much time with him as she did. And day in, day out, he got to observe her wonderful uproarious steadiness. In motel lobbies and operating rooms and neon drive-thrus, she was always more or less the same. She went to bed at the same time each night and she stayed asleep. She didn’t wake up some mornings wanting to die and others hysterically devoted to living. She was a constant, a compass. He thought she was, anyway, until she went to Philadelphia and came back with a tattoo.
* * *
He knew on some level that she’s been doing chemotherapy. But she’s so tidy with her weakness. She plans her treatment regimen around work and enough time to hide away during the worst of the effects.
He thought he had seen Scully sick before. He was dead wrong.
She’s so sick now that it frightens her, he can tell, something desperate in her eyes as he holds her hair back through a round of vomiting that seems like it’s never going to stop. It frightens him too, the way her body judders, tries to turn itself inside out, but he hardly needs to show her that right now. He says quiet untrue nonsense like it’s alright, like just breathe, like that’s it.
He empties the bucket when it finally stops and comes back to find her sitting up, her face bright, her shirt collar wet with spit and sweat, her fingertips resting lightly on the small red eyelashes left on the armrest of the couch.
“Should I call your doctor?” he asks her in the moment of lucidity.
She shakes her head. “These are all normal side effects of an exorcism.”
They’re awake all night while it comes in waves. An hour of vomiting and hyperventilating, a few moments of peace, some minutes of restless unsleep and hallucinations that make her mumble. He hands her numbing gel for her mouth sores. He hands her water she can’t keep down. He hands her blankets for her chills and pulls them off for her heat flashes. He respectfully looks away from the orange clumps of hair on her sofa and her rug.
The clock hits 4am and her nose is bleeding, of course. He watches her lean forward, pinching it closed. He can’t stand that the most useful thing he can do is let her take care of herself. Sometimes he thinks the only thing he has ever done in his entire life that’s worth anything is love her. And he can’t do it even close to right.
She says, voice nasal and squished, “I’m sorry I called you.”
Over and over he folds an empty Zofran packet smaller than small. If she doesn’t already know that all he wants is for her to call him, there’s nothing he can say.
“Those ghosts, Mulder…”
He waits for her to finish the thought. She doesn’t.
He can tell that she’s angry at him, that she’s been angry at him since he got here. Something in the angle of her shoulders, away from him. Something in the way she takes his offerings out of his hands.
So he says, “I’m not going to treat you like you’re dying.”
Her silence says: but.
“I won’t disrespect you like that, Scully. You would get angry with me. You know you would.” She has gotten angry with him for it, more than once. Any hint of coddling sends her snarling, which for Scully means a palpably sour silence that not even his best tricks can break. And he gets it, is the thing. He does. Because she is the first person in his life, too, to treat him like a living person still in the fight. The dissonance saved him. He has been functionally dead since childhood, acting out every possible method from his undergraduate essay in his dreams. People responded to him accordingly. People pitied him and let him sleep. Scully shot him square in the shoulder and said, Wake up. I’ve got questions.
She says, slowly, “I don’t know what I saw.”
He hears what she’s actually saying. He didn’t, at the hospital, but he hears it now: she cannot know that she saw ghosts in the same way she cannot know that she is dying. It’s just not a possible thing to know. He wants to weep. He wants to hold her face. He wants to hug her. He wants to say, Scully, we are both so wrong, and we will keep being so wrong until you are gone and there’s only one of us left to be wrong. But doing any of that would make it real, and so he folds, folds, folds.
And he goes elsewhere in time.
* * *
She came over once at 6am, to deliver his forgotten scarf on the way to work; found him on the floor, surrounded red-eyed by a tornado of papers.
She sat with him and asked what he was working on and she listened. She didn’t ask when the last time he’d slept was (three days ago), but she did put him in bed. When he woke up that night, 14 hours later, he didn’t understand what any of his notes meant, what he thought he’d been onto. It wasn’t the first time. But it was the first time he had a witness.
“I get carried away occasionally,” he told her on the phone, dreading the idea of her fear, of her spending the rest of their partnership always seeing him in her mind’s eye through the small rectangular window of a padded room. How many times, to how many people, has he pleaded I’m not crazy?
“You were speaking so fast,” she replied, “I could hardly understand you.”
He looks out the window and listens to ‘93 Scully alive Scully breathing on the other end of the phone, he looks at the psychiatrist, at the hypnotist, at the palm reader, at Skinner, at Samantha sitting in front of the television set just before she was taken, at now Scully dying Scully, and he tells them all, “Sometimes it’s hard for me to stay in one place.”
* * *
Scully’s kitchen is dawn flushed. Scully’s kitchen, soon, will not be Scully’s at all, but someone else’s. To make his grief less insurmountable, Mulder occupies himself with wondering what will happen to her spoons.
He hears a girl’s scream and he whips his head over a shoulder. Samantha's half moon face, peering at him around the doorway. No. Not a scream, just the kettle whistling. Not her long hair, just one of Scully’s plants.
He pours the water and does not look for patterns in the steam. Still, in the grain of the countertop, he sees the face of a psychologist asking him, “Fox, would you say you have trouble knowing what’s real?”
“Well, what defines real?”
This was, as always, the wrong answer. He is a multi-platinum Rorschach flunker.
He’s never been gifted at playing the system. Every time he ends up in a 72 hour involuntary hold, his compulsive honesty makes it seven days eventually. But he meant the question. This is the problem--you can’t play a system you don't understand. And he was not born with a natural understanding of “real.”
An early argument with Scully: they had just heard the testimony of yet another abductee, and with one of her flinty sympathetic looks she said, “Mulder, none of what that woman said is real. She’s suffering some kind of psychosis.” He had been so angry with her for saying that. Not because he did think it was real--he did--but because he didn’t think it mattered. Whether a person has truly been abducted or whether she’s merely having some kind of delusion, there is something she is feeling and trying to communicate. And that’s real. He’d answered quietly, hurt all over again by the realization of what she must think of him, “It’s real to her.”
She reaches up from the couch to take the mint tea she asked him for.
“Why,” she says, “am I doing this?”
“Doing…”
“I’m going to die whether I do this treatment or not. It makes me feel… every day now, I feel so sick. It’s turning my last few months on earth into hell and it’s not even going to work in the end. But I can’t let go. I just can’t let go of my delusional hope for a miracle.”
He offers his hand, and she takes it, holds it. He tries to picture what it will be like when she’s gone. The pain is delirious, transcendent. He likes to endure this pain, because he’s certain he deserves to endure it, and that’s some kind of pleasure. He thinks Scully is somewhat aware that she’s his greatest weapon against himself and he thinks she resents him for that. Which really also feels good, and true.
Miracles are the one thing he doesn't believe in. The only solace he can imagine is that this is all connected to the larger picture he’s always been chasing. This is no solace to her, which he cannot understand. But he will find the truth. He will find something. It is the best thing he can imagine doing for her. The only place in time that he cannot go is forward. “Hold on, Scully.”
He's never told anybody, least of all Scully, the reason why he doesn't actively try to kill himself anymore: he already did kill himself. He has never told anybody about the early attempts that succeeded in smothering almost every part of him. The only thing he left was a sliver, just enough of him to search for the truth. Just enough to find Samantha. Just enough to make up for everything he's done. He is not allowed to do anything else. The parts of him that would do anything else are dead in New England bathtubs and on bedroom floors.
She looks at him for a long moment, eyes bruised, mouth resolute. Then says, “I’ll try to sleep.”
He takes his cue to exit stage left.
“Mulder,” she says. Nothing but Lot’s wife, he turns.
“I don’t know if I’ll be in on Monday.”
“I’ll cover for you.”
She almost, almost smiles.
“Goodnight, Scully.”
“Good morning, more like.”
“Yeah.” He thinks: you’re my best friend. “Good morning, Scully.”
He’s glad, is the thing. He wouldn’t be able to bear it if she could be unhooked so easily from life. It would make him so sad. It would make him so sad, he would die.
* * *
“I don’t know how I would do it. I would never do it,” '93 Scully had answered in the diner. “I just wouldn’t.”
Mulder was amazed. “You’ve seriously never even considered it? The thought has never crossed your mind, even for a moment.”
She lifted her shoulders. “I always feel like I’m running out of time. There’s so much to learn. So much to do. And I have how many years to do it? Eighty, if I’m lucky. It doesn’t seem like enough at all. I hate the thought of dying. So much I try not to think about it most of the time.”
“If someone offered you immortality, then, you would take it?”
“I could keep myself busy until the sun runs into us, I’m sure.”
“Well, for me, I think drowning has its perks,” Mulder said. And he was joking, trying to diffuse the situation, but Scully still looked at him the way she did sometimes, like she was autopsying him and had found something anomalous. Like her Y-incision had revealed a body that was completely empty inside and she was wondering how that body had kept itself alive, considering. She was wondering whether to be afraid.
He did not tell her how many times he had tried and how many more he had tried without exactly trying. Instead, he said, “I just can’t believe you’ve never wanted out. Living is so hard.”
She smiled. Eternal messy eater, she’d somehow gotten a little red spot of raspberry juice just below her nose. “I don't like when things are easy.”