Lonely Nightmare I: Delta Traces
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0
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“I see the delta traces living lonely out on the limb.”
***
He dreamed that Scully had a new boyfriend, which was silly because she didn’t even have an old one, but that didn’t matter in the dream. In the dream, he saw her walking down the hall of his old high school wearing the black suit he liked so much, the one with the long skirt, and holding hands with Tommy Christley, the captain of the basketball team. He stood by his locker, watching her as she walked by. His calculus book slid out of his arms and onto his foot and he thought, “I am sorry.”
Mulder woke up with a pain in his foot and empty arms.
He knew he should just shake it off--the dream was a combination of the growing distance between Scully and himself, and a recollection of his high school feelings of inadequacy and it didn’t mean anything, not really--but it followed him into the shower. He stood in the scalding hot water (he couldn’t get the water hot enough lately, not even when he came out looking like a freshly boiled lobster) and thought about the image of her all red hair and black suit against the blue of the lockers, passing him by without a second glance. Those had been his old high school lockers--blue and gold for the school colors--and he remembered standing just there, day after day, while girls walked by on the arms of the other basketball players. He hadn’t been good with women then. Not like now, he thought, reaching for the soap. Not like now, he thought, reaching for himself, shaking his head in disbelief.
Afterwards, though, the dream had not left him. He shaved, got dressed, looked at thin approximations of food in his kitchen and headed out the door, and the dream still followed him. It went with him as he got in the car, it hung out in the passenger seat when he almost rear-ended the woman in front of him, it hovered near his shoulder when he pulled into the parking lot. Over and over again, he saw the scene in his head, the flash of red and black and blue and Scully not looking at him, and the other guy not looking at him and the thud of the book hitting his foot. He no longer felt the pain, but riding the elevator down to the basement, he thought it was weird that the scene should stay with him so long. He had had dreams before, even dreams that seemed precognitive, hell, even dreams that *were* precognitive if you weren’t Dana Scully, but this one seemed different. It wasn’t telling him the location of a dead little girl. It wasn’t telling him that someone he loved was in danger. It wasn’t even telling him that he wanted to kill his already-dead father and have sex with his mother, which would have been disturbing as he always thought Freud was over-rated, but not surprising. The dream wasn’t telling him any of those things, but it certainly seemed to be trying to signify something.
He sighed and pushed open the door.
Scully was already there. Maybe he would tell her the dream and she would look at him like he was crazy and smile that broad goofy smile she always gave him when he was being a nutcase. Maybe she would be ridiculously flattered. Maybe she had dreamed of him too, last night, and maybe he had been naked.
“Hey, Mulder,” she said, looking up from his desk. She was typing something on the laptop, probably her version of the report from the last case. That was part of this new distance, he thought, hanging up his coat. Before, she would want to see what he had to say. She would read his reports, frowning in spots, looking up at him as if she could not believe he would put such things on paper. Then she would write her own reports and slide them over the desk, leaving him to respond to her words in his own version. They rarely agreed, but they had been partners, shoring up each others arguments with their own counter arguments. Now she simply typed and printed and turned them in. He sighed. He was pouting and he knew it.
“Anything good?” he asked, sitting in the chair across from her. She had sat there just two weeks ago, sat there and said, “everything isn’t about you, Mulder.” It had surprised him that he was surprised by that. Ten things you don’t want to know about your relationship with your partner for a hundred, Alex.
“Just a report. What do you have on your plate for today?”
“Mail opening. Reports. I’m desk jockey with a vengeance today, Scully.”
She looked up and smiled briefly, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same kind of smile she had given in response to his smartass bullshit three weeks ago. Mulder resisted the impulse to say something else and leaned forward, scooping the mail out of the in-box. Before he could ask, she had slid the letter opener across the blotter.
“Thanks,” he said. She nodded, but did not look up.
He sliced open one envelope after another. Info he had requested as research on a case they had closed two months ago, an advertisement for time-share condos addressed to Ms. Fox Mulder, a notice that the Bureau health plan was about to be changed, several news clippings from the Weekly World News about aliens in Utah accompanied by self—important letters from believers (“I *new* that you shuld know about this, Mister. Mulder, because I was there and this IS THE TRUTH”—how come all of his fellow believers were wackos who couldn’t fucking spell, he wondered for about the six thousandth time), and an envelope with the address scribbled on it in big letters: Frank Mulder, FBI Paranormal Division, Washington D.C. The mail guys must have gotten a real kick out of that one, he thought, sliding the letter opener into the corner.
The letter addressed to Frank Mulder, Paranormal Division wasn’t the typical loony shit that usually came to him via the address-impaired. It was hand written, like all the rest of them were, but the handwriting was on notebook paper that had been torn out of a spiral binder--the left edge of the sheet was all fringed where it had been bound--and the handwriting was neat, but loopy, full of unnecessary bubbles and swirls.
Dear Mr. Mulder, the letter said.
I know that it is really weird to be writing to you like this because this is not how you get your cases, but I think there is something going on in my town that you should know about. I know you investigate stuff like ghosts and monsters and stuff like that because I saw your name in the paper when you solved that kidnapping case, and I think that something like that lives in my town. I’m not the only one who thinks that. I can’t really describe what’s happening here, because I’ve never seen it, but Alan has seen it and he thinks it’s the devil. I don’t think it is, but people are missing and if you don’t come who will stop it? The police are no help. They belong to it. I would really appreciate it if you could come and see if Alan is right or if we’re just being paranoid. I would be so grateful!
Thank you in advance,
Lisa Nelson
Mulder flipped the letter over. Nothing on the back. He read it again. A kid. A kid who saw his name in the newspaper in--he flipped the envelope over--Wisconsin, and decided to write him a letter because her friend Alan was telling her boogie stories. He looked over at Scully, who was still typing, biting her lip gently in concentration. He glanced at his in-box, which was empty, and at the file cabinets, which were full. He looked at the letter again, at the blue ballpoint pen ink on the wide-lined paper. At the exclamation point at the end, which didn’t have just a dot at the bottom but a big circle. All the “i”s had circles, too, instead of dots, and he wondered what might be going on in--he flipped the envelope again--Onowani, Wisconsin that would cause a girl who used circles instead of dots to write to the FBI.
“How would you feel about a road trip, Scully?” he asked. She lifted her eyes to his and he handed the letter over. She glanced at the envelope. Read the letter.
“Mulder,” she said. “I thought you would never ask.”
Halfway through the paperwork he remembered the dream. It no longer seemed important enough to tell her.
***end 1/13***
sing, blue silver: