Archive of Our Own

Tagline : TEMPUS FUCK IT

  I. Inflationary 

In this dream time is inflationary: composed of worlds that expand and collapse and form new worlds. New universes.

“It’s--” he says, and then someone’s phone drops the call - the ansible of their connection unexpectedly cut.

Scully stands from the desk and stretches. Cell service in the basement has been fickle since the remodel and Mulder has a dozen conspiracy theories as to why.

There’s a sliver of painter's tape on the baseboard and she kneels and scrapes at it and considers the keratin pry bar of her own fingernail. She toys with the idea of the body as an amalgamation of simple tools: the stop-hinge of a knuckle, the personalized grip-tape of a fingerprint, the miraculous convex lens of a human eye. All of it machine-oiled with blood and mucus and lymph. She blinks up at the skylight and waits. The phone buzzes in her hand.

“Did you know the word ‘testify’ comes from the Latin ‘testis’?” Mulder says into the catching-cup of her ear. “That ancient Romans used to swear on their ‘nads they were telling the truth?”

He has an unparalleled talent for dodging difficult subjects.

“That’s actually a popular misconception,” she informs him. “Etymological backward chaining. Testis in Latin is best translated as ‘to witness’.”

“Buzzkill,” Mulder says. Under his words she can hear Michael Stipe listing things on the radio and the rumpled sound of wind tearing at the phone and she imagines him behind the wheel: driving south along the Potomac with his arm out the window. They haven’t spoken in three days. It is next to impossible not to smile.

“How was yesterday?” he asks with calibrated nonchalance.

“Fine” she says, and there is a long moment of silence during which she can hear him waiting for her to say more. “Ritter’s been placed on indefinite leave.”

Mulder’s grunt sounds approving.

“How was Parnassus?”

“Rural,” he says bluntly. “Pretty awful,” he admits, like an afterthought.

He sounds almost contrite and she wonders if he regrets the trip. He’d registered for the conference, coincidentally, the same day she’d received word that her testimony would be required at an OPR Hearing. A senior citizen marginally employed by the NYPD had been handcuffed to a desk and shot dead in his own apartment. The man was unarmed. He had no criminal record. The Bureau would launch a formal inquiry as a matter of course.

...And wouldn’t you know it, Fox Mulder just happened to have pressing business in small-town Pennsylvania that week. As if he’d believed that maybe, just this one time, looking away from the truth might indeed hold some power of negation.  

“Well,” Scully says into the phone, goading him a little,“What did you expect from a lecture on palm reading?”

“Not palm reading,” Mulder corrects, “Dermo-optical perception. Bio-introscopy: the ability to see through one’s fingertips. Practitioners claim they can feel colors. That they can read numbered dice inside sealed boxes...”

She is only half listening. Fox Mulder and his Book of Sand, she thinks: a never ending catalog of blood floods and locust blizzards and carnivorous flora. Dowsing rods. Human solar panels. Disappearing movie theaters. Hoop snakes that grab their own tails and roll themselves downhill like old tires (“You’d love them, Scully, right up your alley...”)

“It’s a form of extrasensory synthesia,” he continues. “While palm reading, formally Chirology, is predictive. It’s divination. A kind of soothsaying. Vaticination. Have I ever showed you my union line?”

He talks and Scully pins the phone to her ear and stares at a patch of sun already fading the new carpet. His beloved basement: baptized in fire and deceit and born anew. It’s closer now to the platonic ideal of an office: a little more up-to-date, a little less womb-like, although the footprint remains reassuringly the same. Like a piece of land: worked on, lived on, grown-over, plowed-under, the borders stitched and restitched. Touched briefly by human lives passing over or along or through it, as if incidentally. A clearing already re-crowding with the stumps of bankers boxes and endless leaves of manilla and white copy paper. A meadow growing wild. The forest taking back the fields. I lived there once , she imagines she’ll think back on it some day...

“Hey,” he says, his tinny voice in her ear like a tap on the shoulder. “I got you something.”

She frowns. Mulder’s proclivity for gift-giving has lately been approaching a kind of fever pitch and she has steadfastly resisted the impulse to assign this behavior an intent. These days it seems like he’s forever turning up with somethings for her consideration: library books or Griess tests or photographs of invisible ghosts. Last week he’d spent a day consulting with a Professor of Antiquities at Healy Hall and, on his return, conferred upon her a souvenir t-shirt emblazoned with the phrase HOOKED ON CHTHONICS!

Novis munera, Scully thinks. Strange gifts.

“Dare I ask?” she asks.

“You’re going to love it. It’s something just begging for scientific explanation.” He clears his throat. “There’s just one little rider...”

“You need me to submit a 302.”

“Actually,” Mulder says, “I need you to meet me at Dulles.”

It was years ago now and she can’t remember for sure. She suspects she probably humored him.

II. Brane

In this dream time floats on the surface. The bulk of the Altair sways on the thin membrane of a pitted sea.

The ship is double-hulled: a 120ft blue water research vessel, equipped with three winches, two fixed cranes, two rigid-hulled inflatables, a hydrographic boom and an A-frame. She is not ice-class, but then there hasn’t been any ice south of the 75th for over a century.

In the late afternoon Scully steps blinking from the hard white fluorescence of the lab. She climbs the ladder to the well dock and looks out to where a grey sea meets a grey sky.

Below deck a substantial amount of space is given over to either research or storage: 4,100 square feet (380 m²) of impedimenta gathering dust. The hold contains an Optical Multichannel Analyzer, a few hundred tanks of liquid hydrogen, a handful of distribution analyzers, a shoebox sized block of plastic that supposedly measures Planck’s constant, two bowling alley-sized supercolliders, a well organized wet lab, a poorly organized library, and a walk-in freezer that Amil refuses to enter on principal.

“Who pays for all this?” he’d asked, incredulous, on his first day of work.

“General Mutual,” Scully had answered cryptically.

“Who is that? Someone in the military?”

“It was an insurance company,” she explained. “A long time ago.”

This time of year the waves are rough: pounding the boat in cyclical big bangs. More than a decade in the Norwegian Sea and she still can’t shake the feeling that they are far from home waters: far from the streams and estuaries and rivers of the Mid-Atlantic. Far from the Chesapeake and the Delaware and the Elizabeth Islands. Far from Ahab’s whaleboats and far from those glassy inland lakes she had once thought so vast: Briar and Heuvelmans and Betty Park. Is Okobogeee dried-up now, like all the others? It must be.

The Altair is running in the trough, the deck tipping sickeningly from side to side. A Quaker graveyard, Scully remembers. Hundreds of years of sunken wrecks. She’s not worried about the ship’s structural integrity, but the waves tend to wreak havoc in the lab.

“We’re blowing through glassware at an alarming rate,” she tells Amil later in the dark messroom. Above their heads miscellaneous provisions shift around in the cabinets.

The boy across the table gives her a patient smile. He is wearing his most hideous shirt today: a patterned Hawaiian in fuchsia and tan. “Every evening I pray to Poseidon,” he jokes, with exaggerated gravity. “And still the waves come.”

Dinner is sardines on saltines. The two of them do very little cooking, relying primarily on canned goods and quick grits. Amil grew up on MREs so his standards are horrifyingly low, and for her part Scully stopped being able to taste food somewhere around the turn of the century; about the same time she lost her appreciation for music. Besides, there isn’t really any place to cook - the Altair has a chronometer the size of an Airstream where the galley should be.

The ship heaves to starboard and Amil pins a silvery fish to a cracker with one finger to keep it in place. “What does it matter if we lose a few flasks?” he asks contemplatively. “I thought we had given up on chemistry?”

“We haven’t given up,” Scully says, frowning at a cloudy pool of sardine juice sloshed on the counter. “We’re focusing elsewhere. And technically speaking it’s molecular biology.”

“To a physicist,” Amil says dismissively, “All the rest is chemistry.”

Technically he is not a physicist, though if he had stayed in school he would probably be one by now. Instead he had thrown away a promising career in quantum mechanics to go poking around in the ocean with a bitter (albeit rich) urban legend. She often feels guilty that he is out here at all, when he could be off living his life somewhere. Getting his degree. Spending time with his family. Meeting some other young person at a bar or at a party or at the office. Slowly falling for that person...

The ship sways and Amil’s shoulders sway comfortably with it as he lathers a saltine with mustard. “Will you explain to me again, why the thing in the lockbox is not an answer?”

“Myelin,” Scully tells him, sweeping crumbs off the counter into the palm of her hand. “The problem is always myelin. Biology isn’t like physics, the rules aren’t there to be broken.”

“Hmm,” Amil says thoughtfully, resting his elbows on the mint green formica. As he leans forward the subterranean light of the cabin catches the tech in the corner of his eye; the disabled teardrop flashing like a metallic wink.

At least he says it’s disabled. Scully has no way of knowing for sure. These days she has a difficult time trusting people: even Amil, who is the only person born in this century she has let herself feel remotely close to. Was she always this wary, she wonders, or is it a trait that has magnified in her over time, just as other pieces have faded away? A paranoia compounded by years of travel, of sleeplessness, of feeling adrift between two worlds... An unease born of the inescapable feeling that she is haunting any house she lives in. And, on top of that, that she is being haunted. Which, she has to admit, would be totally Mulder: hovering around in her periphery for all of eternity like a theory waiting to be disproven.  

“Speaking of biology,” Amil says, digging his index finger into the mustard jar instead of just using a knife like a normal person, “When was the last time you ate a vegetable?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Scully tells him, trying not to sound resentful. It’s the truth: nothing she eats or does not eat seems to have any noticeable effect on her body anymore. For years she hasn’t felt much of anything: not hunger or cold or the nettle sting of salt water. Her body has been stripped of sensation, pared back to basic impulses. An overly simplified algorithm of survival. She’s lucky to have someone around to remind her to eat and put on gloves and go to sleep.

“You are very jaded,” Amil pronounces around a mouthful of cracker. “I think you would probably be less so if you consumed the occasional vegetable.”

“‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference,’” she quotes at him, screwing the lid back on the mustard.

“Em,” Amil says, his eyes full of mirth, “I have absolutely no idea what that means.”

III. Holographic

In this dream time is a reflection. The two of them kneel side by side on a marble ledge and peer down into a reservoir.

The water is black and bottomless and its mirrored surface offers their own likenesses back: two gargoyles crouching. Scully’s grim expression and her men in black glam. His own dumb face and his own black coat.

Her watery doppelgänger turns and addresses his: We can’t be certain , it says. Not until we see some blood work.

Superimposed above or past or on top of their reflections the winter sky is white and still. And under it all, like a ghost hoax hidden in a roll of double exposed film, two naked bodies hang in the black water of the Occoquan.

Two teenagers. They could be twins. Bound together at the hands and feet, each weighing the other down like a sandbag. Their faces are bloated and white and wisps of hair waft around their shoulders - each strand an identical shade of brown. The swimming of witches. Mulder thinks. Indicum Aquae. A trial by water.

“Who would do that?” wonders a Sheriff's Deputy, cupping his chin in distress. “They were just girls...”

They were, Mulder thinks. It’s the last thing they were. Below him the corpses regard one another with lustreless, unblinking solemnity and he looks at their suspended bodies and in that moment he feels numb and in that same moment he feels everything: an empty sucking void and the fleshy snarl of what remains. So many lives mangled or bruised or snuffed. Deaths marking time like signposts along a highway. His palms on the steering wheel and Scully beside him in a dark car and two pairs of wide eyes hanging on his in the rearview.

The bodies are suspended under the surface like mosquitoes trapped in amber. Rigor mortis has set it in. They are still holding hands.

Scully’s reflection beside his is blank and unreadable. He’s accustomed to seeing her from above and viewed from this low angle she seems vulnerable somehow: pale and tragic. He remembers that in certain religions the appearance of the angel of death changes to reflect a person’s earthly deeds and actions: that those who lived well see a beauty while those who did wrong see a monster. Between the two of them they are 17 years deep in all this. They have both become familiars of small dooms.

“You need to tell the morgue to order a karyotype,” Scully says, her spectral reflection turning to face the Deputy.

“A karyo-huh?” says the kid.

Mulder fishes in his coat pocket and comes up with a crumpled receipt. Around them the winter day is every shade of brown and every shade of grey. The ink in Scully’s ballpoint pen is frozen and she shakes it and touches the tip to her tongue. She uses his shoulder as an impromptu plane surface so she can scratch down the name of the test.

“We don’t know for sure,” she says under her breath. “Not yet.”

Through the thick wool of his sleeve he can feel the frantic zigzag of her pen. He’s starting to wonder if it’s him she’s trying to convince.

The afternoon already looks like evening and there’s weather in the forecast. Scully takes one for the team and does all the requisite thanking and shaking of hands. She gives the Deputy the number for the office fax.

Forensics is bustling: everyone trying to wrap-up and get home before the snow starts. A dive team is suiting up. A flatbed with a winch is easing towards the reservoir, the rhythmic blare of it’s back-up alarm pulsing like an ictal headache. Scully waves the keys at him and they set off over the grass for the car.

“Your pen!” the Deputy shouts after them.

Scully puts a dismissive hand in the air. “Keep it!” she calls back.

They drive north from Fairfax in a mutual daze, the Cavalier passing silently under the January sky. Inside the heater blasts dry air and outside the world unspools ad infinitum: grey schools and grey prisons and acre upon acre of rimy winter wheat.

They were just girls, Mulder thinks. Not normal girls, certainly. Not innocent, but then what teenager really is?

They cross the county line and he is struck anew by the strangeness that is urban living: all these concentrated masses. An entire population stuffed into subdivisions and Section 8 and the prismatic honeycombs of stacked, identical apartments. Everyone policed into submission; any latent dissonance lulled away by sitcoms and beer commercials and the threat of foreign war. All of them penned together under close surveillance, where, should the time come, they can be  mass-bombed or mass-gassed or mass-stung with the least amount of effort expended. A flock already rounded-up, waiting benignly for its numbers to be thinned. The wolf is at the door.

It gets dark at four-thirty this time of year and the sun is low behind the strata when Scully doubles in front of Hegal Place.

“Last stop,” she says, her voice cracking from so much silence.

He would like to see her face but he’s afraid of what might happen if their eyes meet so he focuses on her hands on the steering wheel instead.

“It was 8,” he says.

She sighs and puts the car in Park. “Mulder....”

“It had to be, Scully. They grew up and got stronger and she must have realized there was no way to control them. You remember what they were like when they were together...”

The sun is winter haloed behind the clouds. Around them the streaming traffic slows and diverts to accommodate the fluvial obstruction of the car. Mulder studies the thin trees that rise up out of every third sidewalk square: their narrow trunks bound by iron palings, their twiggy branches reaching at a hollow sky like new small hands. He thinks about bears and spiders and sharks: creatures that devour their own young at the slightest hint of resource scarcity. What is the societal carrying capacity, he wonders, for the sons and daughters of Litchfield?    

“What do you want to do about it?” Scully asks grimly, pinching the bridge of her nose.

He bites his thumbnail and stares at the bleak lunar world out the windshield. “They looked so grown up,” he says, and then regrets it when she turns quickly away from him.

Her fingers are white on the steering wheel and the contrast reminds him of that watery monochrome. Did they fight at the end, he wonders? Did they struggle to swim? Did they churn their bound legs and arms, desperate to keep their chins above the surface?  

They were 15 years old. They were just girls. Though he’ll concede the word “just” is probably relative...

The heater hums. The car is silent.

Did they hold their breath? Face to face, like best friends playing games in the deep end of a swimming pool. They had a kind of telepathy, he remembers: those knowing looks, that eerie way they spoke in unison. Did they count it down together: the moment they would let that first icy gasp fill their lungs? In those last moments did they know each other’s fear?

He wonders if they lost consciousness at the same moment: spared the pain of that psychic connection severed. Is it possible they might have died together? He wants to believe that they did...

“Mulder? You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, snapping back. “I’m okay.” That tired old safeword. A cheap bromide. “You?”

“Fine,” Scully says, and her tone is an echo.

“I should let you go.” He kicks open the car door and looks up at the dark rampart of his building stamped against the milkhaze sky: a low grid of windows, alternatingly bright or dark or lit blue with the flicker of television screens.

He finds his own apartment windows in the grid, black and empty, and suddenly he has to ask.

“Do you want to park? And come up?”

“I can’t,” she says reflexively.

_____________________________________

He’s at his door when he hears footsteps: a gait he memorized years ago. She stalks towards him down the cloacal length of the hall; all heels and hips and set jaw, the car keys in her pocket ringing like spurs.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Scully says, looking fixedly past him as if she’s addressing someone over his shoulder.

“I thought…?”

She interrupts him with a head shake; nodding pointedly at his closed door.

His apartment smells not great: like aquarium and stale winter air. Scully follows him inside and waits with her hand on his heavy German lock, listening for it to catch. Above her the light from the hall is split by the transom: two long rectangular bars that widen and spread across the ceiling. She stares beseechingly up at the panes of light and Mulder imagines the war raging in her: Apollo repeating a patient refrain in her left ear while an oft-ignored Dionysus shouts havoc in her right.

“Here,” he says, trying to help. “Let me see your coat.”

He puts a hand on her shoulder and she turn suddenly as if she’s just remembered something, groping for him in the dark. Her arms slip around his waist and he feels the world around them desaturate: everything transmuting into shades of grey.

“I don’t want to talk about today,” she says, like a caveat, and she waits for him to nod, agreeing to those terms, before she stands on her toes and presses her lips to his.

He backs her up against the door and she pulls him along by the coat, opening her mouth under his. It’s like some folk dance: something reciprocal and earthy and deep with meaning. They've spent so much time together in these bodies: the two of them shivering in the cold and sweating under the sun. Missing meals and sipping stale coffee and staying up late. Her shoulder brushing his in a cornfield; his face in her lap in the woods...

He feels hers hands move down his back, he feels the world tilting into shadow. Is it any wonder, he thinks, that this is how it feels when they put these two bodies together?

“You remember those charismatics?” he asks against her lips. “Speaking in tongues?”

“Glossalia,” she breathes into his mouth, trying to hitch her leg high enough to catch on his hip

“Glossalia,” he agrees, pressing a thigh between hers legs, and she breaks the kiss with a sharp inhale, her hands slipping into his back pockets.

He kisses her and flashes back on some grim case in the Northwest: the two of them driving in an inky dusk. Wet newspapers stuck to a rainy sidewalk. Honeysuckle and cordite and the whimper of whipped dogs. In the memory he picks at a vine of bindweed coiled on a fence, hands her a bit of it and is struck by a familiar ache when she takes it. In the memory she smacks down some explanation he offers; tells him it’s pseudo-science. In the memory she explains tropism to him. In the memory she's flirting with him. A long forgotten rental car moves under the stars and she's next to him in the passenger seat: fighting the wind for the map, her laugh corkscrewing in the night air.

Desire is rising up in him like a fever: a visceral heat at the back of his neck, a delirious hormonal edge creeping into his psyche. “You remember that curse?” he asks. “That animal spirit?”

“Yahe,” she says, her nails sharp in his pockets. “Are you quizzing me?”

“Go with it,” he says. He is drowning, caught up in a flood of lust. You don’t fight a riptide, he remembers, the trick is to swim with the current.

He presses himself against her and feels her press back against the sprinting muscles of his leg and his stomach goes hot and his blood bolts. Fuck everything else in this world, he thinks. Fuck cases, fuck killers, fuck winter and clones.

Somewhere down the hall an apartment door slams and she freezes against him: a seed of paranoia planted, taking root...

“...Remember that time my pen ran out of ink?” she says in his ear.

He groans into the place where her neck meets her shoulder. “Vaguely?”

Scully removes her hands from his back pockets and he extracts his leg from between hers. They run through the usual routine: he rechecks the lock on the door. He pulls the jack from the phone. He twists the blinds closed. Scully throws her coat over a chair and flips on the television, thumbing up the volume until it reverberates back against the walls. His apartment is dark. They leave the lights off.

On the couch he lays with his hips between her spread legs like a ship in drydock. Her winter complexion gives new meaning to the word ghostly: a blank slate for whatever color the television emits: first she is blue under him, then red, then grey.

“Remember that cave?” he asks, propped up on his elbows so he can watch her face chameleon in the stygian dark.

Her mouth curves at the edges as if they share some private joke. “The fungus? Or the stimulant?”

They fool around on the narrow ledge of the couch, fumbling like high schoolers in the flickering light. They’re still in office clothes, rumpled and sweaty, and she kisses his neck and rocks against his belt buckle, and just that, just the thought of her getting herself off makes his hips buck. He palms her kneecap; pushes it so that her hips open and watches the way her hot eyes go dark.

He kisses along the rod of her collarbone and his mind’s-eye pulses in reiterations: Scully in a black dress, Scully in a navy raincoat, Scully in white decontamination scrubs. That last one causes a mental paper-jam: Dana Scully wrapped in the steamy mantle of a Silkwood shower, her shoulders flushed, her eyes fixed on his...

A sundown chill is creeping over Alexandria. There is chimney smoke on the wind. The world is swinging into shadow and she’s saying something to him but the sound is far away, as if it’s reaching him through the white haze of some distant planet: a world where every darkness is obscured by luminous fog.

“Come again?” he says and she cups his face, her thumbs on his cheekbones, as if she can hold his attention in her hands. “Take off your shirt,” she repeats, amused.

Somewhere a mad scientist lights a bunsen burner: the flint spark of ferrocerium puffing into a torch of blue butane. Somewhere hydrogen atoms fuse into helium. Somewhere a murderer goes on her psychotic way, her teeth bared at the world, the only one left of her kind. A suffering that is born and dies in a monster’s mouth.

He feels the numbness in him ebbing, a dark tide pulling at the creosoted pilings as it recedes and leaving in it’s place a familiar awe. Scully works a hand between them so she can get at his fly. She pushes down his shorts. She looks him dead in the eye and licks the pad of her thumb.  

They move slowly, there between the twin glows of the fish tank and the cathode ray tube: tomorrow’s weather forecast roaring over them to cover the sound. His apartment is cold and the sweat on his back is cold and her stomach is searing hot against his and he feels desperate to make her come and desperate to draw this thing out: to make it last for hours. He spreads his palms against the leather and closes his eyes and tries to focus on very boring things, instead of how wet she is, or the way her hips shudder.

He imagines them alone in some scrapped, apocalyptic world: two warm breathing things in the dust and the rubble, two hot bodies under a dead sky. They have a woodpile stacked. They have canned food and jugs of water and thick blankets and they tape up the windows and make love through the nuclear winter. They are the only ones left. There is only time.

“Go slow,” he says, pressing his damp forehead to hers.

“Need a minute?” she breaths, but her hips keep moving under his. A perpetual, wanton motion.

“Who, me?” he manages through gritted teeth, and she turns and hides her smile in his bicep.

He shifts his weight, rocking forward on his elbows so the angle is better and she laughs at the move and then her laugh turns to something else when he grinds shallowly against her. She rolls her hips under his and he kisses her eyes: first one then the other, like an accolade. She has shared so many wonders with him, and so many horrors, and somehow she is still here.

Somewhere boxcars couple in distant freight yards. Somewhere stalactites drip onto waiting stalagmites. Somewhere, on certain frigid nights, the woman he loves moves under him, arching her back, the friction building in her eyes. Somewhere she says his name and when she tries to repeat it she gets stuck, gasping, on the vowel. Somewhere they two of them are spending one of a thousand lifetimes together. It will never be enough.

“Remember the one with the near death experiences?” he asks later, his lips pressed to her temple. “At first there was nothing, and then I saw this brilliant white light…”

The room around them hums with television static and outside the snow has started: fat flakes floating gold under the street lights like baryonic matter. Like dust in the sun.

She holds him tight to keep him from falling off the couch. “Dissociative hallucinatory activity,” she says in a manner purely scientific, turning her face into his neck.  

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he says, and her laugh is just a single exhalation in his ear.

IV. Simulated

In this dream time is entirely mechanical. The refrigerator hum of the Altair’s engine is the same complex, overlapping hum of the infinitely buzzing multiverses. Amil Cousin-Its his hand across the counter and taps the top card on the deck.

“Wait a minute. It was the same dream? Or you were both dreaming different dreams? And they just happened to be the same?”

“It was a long time ago,” Scully says, flipping the card face up.

“Em. That cannot be the end of a story.” 

“How many times do I have to ask you not to call me that?”

“And how many times do I have to explain to you that it is a truly fantastic joke?”

She sighs and puts the fan of cards face down on the counter, feeling distantly irritated. There are pictures tacked up on the wall of the cabin and she studies them absently: a photo of Amil with his mom. A photo of him with his arms around an ex-boyfriend (“But I look very handsome. So we will ignore the rest.”) A photo of him the day he graduated from college, looking uncharacteristically put-together in a black robe and a charcoal suit.

Amil watches her across the table, spacily fingering the metal in the canthus of his eye. “What do you think it will be like?” he muses. “When we find it?”

“I hesitate to speculate.”

He rolls his eyes at her dramatically. “Sometimes you are a horrible person to talk to.”

Among the photos, crowded between a promotional calendar and a stylized Medieval map, hangs a small polished rectangle: it’s resin-coated luster a relic of the printing processes of another century. It is the only picture she still has of him: the two of them perched side by side on a desk, dwarfed by their massive black overcoats, frozen in a moment of impossible youth. How unaware they were, she thinks. The picture reminds her of those black and white images of people celebrating in Times Square: all those masses gathered in the streets, strangers hanging on one another, lifting their hats, cheering together, madly, blindly, because the Great War was over and it had not yet been renamed World War I.

Scully sighs. “Well,” she says, pulling her eyes from the photos, “I think if we find something it will probably present itself as a breakthrough in our research. Perhaps an inductive leap of faith. Historically some of the most significant scientific advances have come out of left field; the result of theories that might previously have been dismissed as far-fetched...”

“What is ‘left field’?” asks Amil.

Suddenly she feels very tired.“It was a position in baseball,” she says, gathering up the bicycle deck. “Let’s turn in.”

“Was there a right field?”

“There was.”

“Em theory,” Amil jokes, standing from the table and stretching. “An infinite number of experiments, each producing a single outcome. Do you think we will find it in my lifetime?”

She is trying to think of way to soften the odds when the boat rolls suddenly, a fusilade of waves pounding the hull. They both grab reflexively for the tabletop and underneath their feet there’s a muffled crash as something left unsecured falls from a shelf in the lab.

“Your ghost?” he teases.

She gives him a weak smile. “My ghost, yeah.”

Amil gathers up his charts, rolling each glowing sheet with care. “I think we will find it in my lifetime,” he declares, tucking a map under his arm. “I feel very sure.”

“Spoken like a true physicist,” she tells him, ducking under the bulkhead at the cabin's threshold.

She moves through the ship turning off lights, her arms stretched zombie-like before her as she navigates in the dark. The Altair's passageways smell of sea and metal, like stacks of old green pennies.

“Bonne soirée,” Amil calls from down the hall.

In her cabin she sits on the narrow bunk and draws a slim folder from a tin foot locker. For decades now she has been reading herself to sleep with old files. They aren’t comforting per se, but she feels inexplicably stuck on them, like a soldier returning decades later to the field where he lost an arm or a leg. The stiffly formal reports pulse in her psyche like a phantom limb: the need to go back and see those years again.

Tonight she turns the yellowed, chromophored pages, noting the coffee rings, the edits, the redactions, his twisted notes scrawled in the margins. A stain that looks like smeared bile. Someone had been hurt, or maybe just nicked a knuckle, and left little streaks of blood on the coversheet. The red has long since dried brown, and seeing it makes her feel like she’s peeling apart two pieces of electrical tape.

The waves line up in sets to crash against the oil drum of the the ship's hull and as her heartbeat slows an oneirogogic image flickers on the silver screen of sleep: a bright field, fringed at the edges by dark trees.

V. Landscape

In this dream time is a line stretched taught. An electric fence. A frantic tensioned cord. They are in the Midwest. She stands in the center of a vast field of wheat, a grey lith in a sea of whispering gold, and he orbits her in slow circles, his eyes on his feet. He is thinking about prayer.

It is Autumn in Ohio. They are searching for surface burns.

In these last, nightmarish weeks before her hospitalization he plays it like Scheherazade: desperately packing their calendars, as if by spinning enough stories he might somehow win them endless days together, in fields of Einkorn or tobacco or soy...

It is eight in the morning and Scully stands stone-still in the hueless light and he stomps circles around her, kicking at the hoary wheat and the sneezeweed and thistle, looking for anything charred. The amber is up to his waist and pushing through it feels strangely exhausting, like wading out into deep water.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees her pinch her running nose and then reflexively check the palm of her hand. Over breakfast she’d complained of a lingering mineral taste at the back of her tongue. A week ago she’d explained to him the science coursing through her veins: antibiotics and alkaloids and heavy metals blocking her mitosis, upping the viscosity of her blood. For months now he’s watched, helpless, as she dabs at the watercolor rust that seeps from her nose, like oxidation dripping from a metal pipe.

These days he is coming to terms with a new truth: the creeping probability that death truly is a reaper. That it is indomitable, peerless, outstanding in its field - that regardless of what he may want to believe, death keeps swinging, and that with every pass of its scythe a few more stalks are felled.  

She’s too weak to be doing this, he thinks. What was he thinking, dragging her out here?

He circles back, katydids springing madly out of his path. She watches him trudge and he sees her watching and does his best Nancy Archer: taking slow exaggerated steps, waving his arms clumsily in front of him, putting on a show. The bugs leap away in terror and Scully crosses her arms and gives him the weakest of smiles.

Let her stay, Mulder thinks. Please, this time just let her stay...

“Anything?” she asks.

He bends and picks a spear of wheat and spins the stalk contemplatively between two fingers, squinting off over the gold. He remembers that some, those of religious faith, consider the absolute fixity of time a testament to the divine: proof positive of some creator’s hand. But what does that suggest about the nature of God, if all that carefully measured time is meted out with such agonizing disparity?  

“Let’s get out of here,” he says.

Somewhere a man with a dowsing rod stands in a field and insists he believes. He holds the thin Y of it in two shaking hands, feet planted in the dust and he wills it to work. Insists to himself that it will work. Focuses on it. Prays for it. Is sick with the need for it to work. He wants so terribly to believe.

Let her stay this time, he prays. Please God, just let her stay.

VI. Quantum 

In this dream time branches: every diversion in events creates a fork from which spawns one of many worlds.

In this improbable reality all bodily sensation is a faded memory, except for that split second when she wakes from sleep. It’s the same pain every time: she jolts awake and feels the stab of it in her forebrain and her stomach and the back of her throat - as if her body, long promised rest, is fighting consciousness with every tired cell. She can’t breath. She can’t see. She is flayed: pinned to the bunk by a white handled athame.

Amil’s eyes are inches from hers. He is shaking her shoulder. “Em!” he pleads. “Em! Please, there’s something in the water!”

The pain is almost transcendental: fast and then slow, like a finger smashed in a door.

Amil looks terrified and with a little effort Scully thinks she can remember what fear felt like in the body: adrenaline, the pounding of blood, a watery weakness behind the sternum and in the long muscles of the legs... Her pain is starting to ebb now, replaced by the usual nothingness.

“Okay,” she tells Amil, crawling out of bed. She pulls on a wool sweater and a pair of rubber sandals and as she dresses she tries to remember the dream but it’s fading. Something about drought.

She follows him through the ship’s mazey ductwork, out into the raw salt air. The sun isn’t up yet but morning is dawning deep red in the eastern sky.

“What is it?” says Amil, pointing down at the dark water.

Alongside the ship a monstrous corpus rolls slowly in the waves, whitecaps frothing against its fleshy sides. It trails massive anemic arms in its wake like the tail of a comet. Like a straw in the wind. Scully stares down into one wide, brobdingnagian eye and the eye stares back up at her, unblinking.

“It’s a giant squid,” she tells Amil. “Architeuthis.”

“Archit..?” 

“Architeuthis,” she repeats . “A cephalopod. One that lives at extreme depths. It’s an example of abyssal gigantism. Long before I was born sailors used to tell stories about animals like this sinking ships.They called it The Kraken. Actually the whalers on Nantucket used to refer to this whole sea as a Quaker Graveyard.” 

“What’s a Quaker?” whispers Amil, horrified.

“A religious person,” she tells him. “They were just stories. It’s harmless, it probably won’t survive long up here at the surface.”

“Sinking ships,” Amil says. “My, what a fortuitous omen...”

Is it an omen, Scully wonders? Back in the day she had her share of visions, but even after all that she has never felt wholly comfortable with the idea of a harbinger. And yet...she can’t explain it, but lately there are days when she feels a tug at her bones, like the pull of some complimentary gravity. There are flashes, brief moments where she almost knows it: that some change is afoot. That they are on the verge of something. She wonders if this is how Mulder used to feel about his hunches: like he knew a sudden truth he could not reasonably put into words. She remembers the way he used to jolt awake in the night with the reflection of some monster moving in his Third Eye. She used to think he was crazy. She used to think he was brilliant.  

For the billionth time it occurs to her that he is the one who should have been made immortal. It’s easy to imagine: Fox Mulder and his Book of Sand. She can see him hunkered in that 20th century office, flipping page after page and finding each account more amazing then the last. The days waxing and waning with the same fixity of a pendulum’s swing, the seasons ebbing and flowing in a kind of slow, mesmeric torture, and through it all the tall, shambly shape of him behind the desk: dropping slides into the carousel and whistling lonesomely into the face of eternity. He could have lived one billion days on this planet, and still found something fascinating to poke at on his billionth and one...

“What does it feel like”, Amil had asked her once, years ago.

“Like a million year picnic and you’re the only one at the table,” she’d told him and Amil had nodded once and never asked again.

No, Scully thinks. She would never wish this on him.

Beside her Amil grips the taffrail with both hands, craning to get a better look. ”..A squid...” he says reverently, trying the word out for himself. “A squid…” 

In the water the animal’s great arms arch gently above the waves like kite tails. Each clubbed tentacle is tipped with pink suckers and each sucker contains a whorl of fine papules. The Droste effect, Scully thinks. An infinitely receding fractal.  

“It is actually quite beautiful,” Amil concedes. “I could not have imagined…”

The squid is beautiful: it’s stark albinic hue against the slate sea, it’s edges tinted pink and red and orange as if it’s gradually joining them in this world of color. It lols serenely in the choppy surf, its sober eyes round as dinner-plates, conveying an almost human intelligence. It gazes placidly up at the deck of the Altair, as if it has come all this way, surfaced from unfathomable depths, just to meet their eyes across the crests and trenches of the waves.

Scully looks down at its strange, alien grace and finds her vision strangely blurred. There are tears in her eyes. God, when was the last time she cried?

“Come on,” she says, putting a hand on Amil’s shoulder. “I’ll make breakfast.”

VII. Quilted

 In this dream time is muffled and pulpy. In this place time operates with a set of laws very different from that of the surrounding space. Cause and effect are not necessarily stable. Sometimes the latter precedes the former. The magnetic fields are in flux, Mulder says - a specious whisper in her ear. The poles might reverse any day now… 

It was years ago, and Scully can’t remember under what loose definition of the word jurisdiction they might have rationalized a trip to Eastern Siberia. Is it any wonder they were audited?

“The Chuchunya,” Mulder says, butchering the Russian. “In 1928 the Soviets sent an expedition to survey the land between the Indigirka and the Yana rivers where they encountered a mysterious hominid, the description of which bears striking similarities to accounts of the Mongolian Alma. Only hairier.”

“I would’ve thought you’d had enough Siberia for one lifetime,” she says to him in the airport.

Passengers mill around in their periphery, the demotic masses gathering up luggage and filing towards the gate. She is keenly aware of the sensation that the two of them are standing very still while the rest of the world clamors heedlessly on.

Something passes over Mulder’s eyes and he takes a step forward, past any conceivable definition of respectability. One of his wingtips bumps the toe of her shoe. “Well,” he says, studying their feet as if fascinated by the juxtaposition, “Last time I didn’t really have a chance to look around...”

In this dream the two of them layer-up and lash on sinewy snowshoes and crash around in the white. They stand in the midst of a vast boreal forest and watch a man in a fur hat fashion a dead-fall trap out of the biome like some kind of bushcraft Goldsworthy.

The Russian is ancient and bearded and strong as an ox and he goes about his engineering with a kind of hardened minimalism: a woodsman who can fell a larch and hew it to shape on the spot, armed with nothing but a whetstone and a CCCP hatchet.

“Like so,” he shows them, muscling together two posts of green wood in a rough lap joint. “With time? An alder will bend.”

Beside her Mulder squints, canting his head to one side. “...And you think this is going to be strong enough to hold it?”

The trapper straightens and sniffs and wipes his nose with the back of a broad, flat thumb. He surveys his work, gives it a cursory nod, and bends again to resume construction.

Scully studies the trap over the man’s shoulder, trying to make sense of its 4-figure design.

“So do you tie a string...?” Mulder asks, sounding just as baffled as she is.

“No string,” the Russian says gruffly. “Is all wood.”

The sun is low on the horizon, the angle of the light harsh between the trees. A wolfish dog sniffs impartially at Scully’s boot laces, waving its sickle-shaped tail, the ruff of its coat so thick she thinks she might lose a hand in it.

Later the trapper digs a trench in the snow and lights a fire and makes them cowboy coffee for the hike back: a thick cup of mud with a fine grit one is supposed to sift through the front teeth.

They sit duck-footed on a massive log, legs splayed wide to accommodate their snowshoes. The forest floor is littered with jackpine bows - blowdown from some recent windstorm - and Scully takes a tin mug in her mittened hands and lets the steam from it warm her chin. The ground around them seems to undulate in waves: sagging unnaturally in places where the permafrost has thawed.

Mulder glances down his shoulder at her and then looks away and then hazards another look: the only person she has ever known who can hover while seated.

The Russian crouches, poking expertly at his fire. “Your job,” he calls out to them bluntly. “You are also hunting?”

The two of them confer with a brief sidelong glance. “Something like that,” Mulder says humbly.

“Mmm,” the man answers dispassionately. He sits back on his heels and scrutinizes them both over the fume of his coffee, his eyes tapering under a heavy brow. “You enjoy it?” he asks, tilting the mug up to his beard. “This work?”

Mulder gives her shoulder a friendly bump, quirking his eyebrows, his smile hidden behind his coffee.

“It has its days,” she tells the trapper, because after all, she has a reputation to uphold.

“Good!” the Russian announces with finality, slapping his knee. “Good. There are not many who can say this. That they enjoy what they do.”

Nightfall is strange in this world: the low sun fracturing between the trees, turning the snow blue and luminous and the forest a deep purple brown. The Russian lives in a corrugated maze of tin and wood in the village of Tungokochen. At the door she and Mulder pry the snowshoes from their boots with slow, cold-numbed fingers.

They sit on the floor beside the red heat of the woodstove and the trapper hosts them as if they are animals he is charged with tending. He hangs up their wet wool socks and fixes them each a plate with a boiled egg and a slab of thick brown bread and a hash of pickled beetroot.

“For health,” he says, pouring them both a tall glass of something clear and dry, and then he pulls on his boots and steps back out into the gloaming snowpack to feed the dogs.

There are no witnesses to question and no reports to write so they walk the length of the bunker and back, stopping at each portal to watch the sun inch its way along the horizon until every window is black and all they can see are their own faces reflected in the plexiglass.

The double shot of vodka is singing in her ears, and Mulder must also be a little buzzed because he keeps lacing his fingers with hers as they walk, as if the two of them are kids buddied-up on a school field trip, and not armed Federal Agents conducting an international bigfoot investigation (thus confirming the suspicions of every Siberian they meet, as to the staggering bureaucratic frivolity of just about every government west of Moscow.)

Scully lets him swing their arms as they wander the dim hallways, and she feels horribly complicit and impossibly happy.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Mulder says, as if that’s something coworkers say to each other all the time.

“It’s my job,” she reminds him, and then winces, immediately regretting it.

Beside her Mulder swallows and gives a subdued nod of agreement, and his fingers suddenly feel heavier in hers.

That night she lies on a low army cot and listens to a generator churn. She feels wholly awake, and wonders if her diurnal rhythms have already been thrown off by this latitude's short, bright days.

Mulder lies mumbling on a cot beside her, propped on his side with his arms folded mummiform over his chest in a loose letter X. In the low light of the single bulkhead fixture she can just make out his closed eyelids flitting in desynchronized sleep. His Army Surplus long johns are off-white, the color of old bones, and she examines the warm, waffled stretch of him and it takes her a minute to realize he’s awake.

“You were dreaming,” she tells him.

“I was,” he agrees, his sleepy, grisaille eyes on hers.

She holds his gaze in the decommissioned light and Mulder blinks evenly back at her and then looks suddenly away at the ceiling. He lifts one corner of the felted blanket, a silent invitation, his eyes trained steadily on the exposed pipes as if trying to interpret some cipher hidden in their parallel lines.

This must be a universe with a very different set of laws, because she slips from her own narrow cot and ducks under his outstretched arm, pulling the scarfskin of wool tight around them. She settles alongside him and he expels a deep, relieved breath that ruffles her hair.

Their knees are touching and he puts a cautious hand on her waist, like he’s afraid she might slap him with a harassment suit.

“It’s freezing in here,” he says, as if they’re just making friendly conversation, and not playing with matches.

She taps the front of his thermal. “Cotton kills. You know they make these synthetic now?”

He gives her a lazy smile. “‘Wrapped in plastic,’” he drawls folksily, his fingers tightening on her hipbone.

He smells like dirty laundry and woodsmoke and Scully puts a hand on the back of his neck and he ducks his head and kisses her, hesitantly, like he’s testing the waters. She kisses him back and tastes fructose: the rotgut vodka metabolized and turned sweet on his tongue. It tastes like digitalis.

The sound of the gas generator leaks from the window above their heads. Somewhere a dog barks sharply in the greyblue night.

“This place is unreal,” she says against his lips.

“Mmm,” he agrees, wrapping his arms around her.

“Is this just us dreaming?” she wonders, and Mulder makes an appreciative, considering noise.

“If it is a dream,” he says speculatively, “It’s a pretty loud one.”

She falls asleep with her forehead against his and in sleep she sees the Taiga: reindeer pelts tacked out to dry and the meaty black treads of a snowmobile. The intricate weave of their snowshoes: yellowing bands of connective tissue tied off in knots and strung web-like inside a bent sapling.

“It is best advice,” the Russian declares, clapping a massive hand on Mulder’s shoulder. “You agree?”

Even now, so many years later, she can remember how natural it felt: the pair of them cloaked in Soviet wool there at the quiet limit of the world - two warm bodies breathing together in the lamplight. Two sojourners, miles and miles from home.

VIII. Cyclic

In this dream time is a reverberation. Universes collide and bounce away and are pulled back together and collide again, and with every collision time itself is destroyed and is created anew.

She thaws frozen waffles over the gimballed range while Amil plots their course. In the cabin windows the sky is a deep orange, the sun a carmine disk on the curved horizon. On a whim Scully takes two plates and two napkins from the cabinet.

“Wow,” Amil says when he sees her setting the table. “May I ask the occasion?”

Maple trees have been extinct for almost a century now but she digs a jug of cider-colored Karo out of the pantry, remembering how Mulder (a born New Englander) had griped about the inadequacies of table syrup until his dying day.

Amil hunches over the countertop in good-natured frustration, running his fingers across the ship’s electric sheets. “Today, I am having a hard time navigating!” he announces with exaggerated grandeur, pinching and un-pinching the map to various scales.

Scully flips the waffles on the range barehanded. “You know before advanced signaling we used to refer to location in terms of GPS coordinates...”

Amil frowns down at his charts, his face underlit by the cartographical glow. “Yes, yes,” he says grumpily, “Enough already: you are very old. Here, come look at this.”

Scully peers over his shoulder at the numbers he’s dead-reckoned on a notepad, taking into account the Altair’s set and drift. Mulder used to believe in Ley Lines, she remembers: that various land forms and places of cultural or religious significance might together form some kind of path. That if correctly charted and connected a handful of dots signifying ancient wonders (menhirs, causeways, pyramids, wayside crosses) might form some kind of spiritual roadmap. Pseudoscience, Scully thinks. Any distribution of a sufficient number of points on a plane will inevitably form something resembling alignment.

“It is not possible...” Amil mutters, shaking his head.

“What isn’t possible?”

“In the night…we somehow tracked nearly 90 to starboard. We are miles and miles off course...”

Unbidden Scully thinks of gas stations, by-ways, truck stops and murky bars. She had grown up all over, but she had never really traveled before she met him...

Amil gazes up at her, his dark eyes widening with realization. “Em,” he whispers. “It is as if we are being pulled.”

IX. Ultimate

In this dream time is infinitely layered. It is dense and it is light. It is every mathematical possibility and it proves and disproves every law of physics. It is a decree handed down: an edict of the eons. A slipknot pulled undone. It is daylight savings time: that cold dark morning when all the clocks fall back and the world slips into shadow and suddenly every angle of the light is changed. It gets dark in the middle of the afternoon. A single hair turns from brown to grey. The snow outside Mulder’s apartment window is lit twilight blue by dusk and then a brilliant halogen gold by the streetlamps of old Alexandria, and the two of them lay on his tar-pool couch and watch the reds and yellows of brake lights track slowly across the walls and ceiling.

In the memory he is telling her about Jung’s astrological predictions: about theospohy and karmic debt, about Saṃsāra and the Red String of Fate. In the memory he is playing with her fingers, pressing his palm up against hers as if fascinated by the juxtaposition. In the memory his familiar voice is soft and low. In the memory he is flirting with her. Novis munera, Scully thinks. Strange gifts.

In this world the Altair begins to spin, clockwise, on the margins of a vast whirlpool.

“Do you really believe this is it?” Amil asks, his eyes wide. He has donned a pair of orange foul weather bibs over his second-most horribly patterned shirt: a brown button-down polka dotted with baby blue paisleys.

The Altair ’s hull groans ominously and Scully watches the horizon track, zoetropic, across the window. “If I had a nickel,” she says softly, “For every time someone asked me if I really believed...”

“What is a nickel?” asks Amil.

Out the window the maelström is a dip in the offing: a gently sloping grade in the flatland of the sea. A valley of coriolis bottoming into a wheeling funnel, the belt of it disappearing into a dark hole in the ocean. A vortex of seething water. Through the cabins thick windows Scully can hear the strange murmur of it: a whisper and a roar.

“I wish you’d let me drop you in Tildeskan,” she tells Amil, and for the second time today she realizes she’s crying. “We don’t have to do this...”

He gives her a sad smile. “If we left now I doubt you would find it again. Besides, someone very wise once told me that science is a high stakes game...”

The ship is gaining rotational speed, it’s deck tilting almost vertical as its orbit tightens. Out the port window a wall of water towers over them - frank, imperturbable and grey - and its hovering vastness reminds Scully of the parabolic range of the Appalachians. Of home.

“You know I don’t know what’s going to happen, right?”

“Oh,” Amil says with a teary laugh, “I’m aware.” He swallows hard and wipes his streaming eyes with his shirtsleeve. “It’s alright, Em. We will find out.”

The boat is beginning to vibrate, the windows creaking, and Scully feels a cold wind weave through a crack in the glass like a February chill. She is in a bathroom in Alexandria. The tile floor is freezing under her feet and Mulder is trying to kiss her but he keeps fucking it up by smiling. She pokes him in the ribs and he starts to laugh against her mouth and the tile under her feet is cold and both their lips are a little chapped. It feels as if the two of them are trailblazing: as if they’ve stumbled on something impossible by chance. A Mundus Novus. A new world.

In Baltimore in 1879 a Russian chemist steps from a lab at Johns Hopkins and locks the door behind him. He walks home through the sootblacked streets, his hands dusted with the coal tar and phosphorus residue of his tests. That night, at home, he put his fingers to his lips and finds that the combination tastes sweet: he has discovered saccharin. And isn’t that the way it is? Archaeologists pry opens tombs and find love poems scrawled on the backs of turtle shells. Every generation thinks they invented it...

Scully feels the nose of the Altair start to dip, bow-first into the vortex. Everything is spinning, everything is motion, and she and Amil slide instinctively to the floor as the world goes plumb around them. She feels the pull of centrifugal force between her shoulder blades; she hears canned goods slamming violently in the cabinets overhead. The bright sheaths of Amil’s electric maps slip from the counter and drift away down the length of the dark cabin and they remind her of the lights on the underbelly of some ship as it recedes over the ragged points of dark pines.

She closes her eyes against the motion and unbidden she remembers running inside a luminescent dome: her jacket pulled up over her ears, the floor beneath her seething. She remembers standing at the counter of some dim hardware store, the two of them peering out the plate glass window at some small, grey town.

Somewhere a famous physicist pedals a bicycle in loopy figure eights, his white hair swept back, a knowing smile behind his eyes. Somewhere fires burn blue. Somewhere hydrogen atoms fuse into helium. Somewhere a woman steps out of taxi and stands on a busy street corner in Chicago, waiting to meet a particular man.

Now she sees the two of them from above; spinning awestruck in a field of bent wheat. The January light is pewter and the wind is like the lonesome call of a shofar in her ears. The sun is moving behind the clouds. The light is falling around their shoulders. The world is theirs.

Beside her Amil hooks one arm around a forged metal ladder and gives her a nervous smile. The metal of his tech winks in and out of light, his face grey with fear. There are tears in his eyes.

Scully looks out at the spinning water and in that moment she can see the two of them together: standing in one of many fields of Einkorn or tobacco or soy. Mulder stoops and snaps a bent stalk and stands again, twirling the stem between two fingers. He passes it to her. She reaches out and takes his hand in hers, maybe in this world or maybe in the next. The field of wheat is vast and rippling before them. She feels his fingers flex in hers. She feels the earth turn. She says his last name.

and in a mystery to be

(when time from time shall set us free)

forgetting me, remember me

- e. e. cummings