Petaluma
by Jintian (cooljinbeans@yahoo.com)

Disclaimer: I got nothin', you got nothin' on me.
Category/Keywords: vignette, angst, weirdness
Rating: PG
Archive: Unless it's automatic, please let me know.
Website: http://thedoublehelix.org/jintian/
Summary: Scully in the white light, pre-One Breath.

Notes: This is for MA, who is MIA.  Thanks and appreciation go 
to Alanna for the Faulknerian beta, to Liz for general eddy-cay-
shun, and to Musea for the medicine.

_____________________________

Petaluma
by Jintian (cooljinbeans@yahoo.com)

_____________________________


When the bright light came down.

When it came down I thought for half a second, just half, that it 
was Heaven.  Not even enough time to blink an eye.  Then I 
realized that the sound drumming the air was a chopper, even 
though for that half second, that briefest moment, I fancied it was 
the heartbeat of God.

Our priest used to say, the heart of the Creator was home.  But I 
was not going home, and as far as I knew I would never see home 
again.

It is cold here, Mulder.  Something beats, but not a heart.  I think 
engine, I think machine, I think motion.

This will not be a linear tale.

~~~

My brother Charles failed the fourth grade.  I remember my 
parents called a meeting with all of us, and Charles sat on the 
davenport with his ears flushed red, and my mother cried.  Not 
loudly, but with tears leaking down her cheeks.

We, as the older siblings, were assigned tutoring duties.  I was to 
make sure he expanded his reading material.  I let him look at my 
science books, my *National Geographics*.  He loved the pictures 
of the lions.

Lions in the golden grass of the savanna.  He used to crawl the 
floors of the house, growling.  Sometimes, I would get down and 
growl with him.  The lioness.

"Lions have big hearts for hunting," Charles told me.  "Animals 
with little hearts, they're the ones that get eaten."

~~~

I used to think my daughter would be dark-haired.  I thought I 
would grow up to meet the mysterious stranger, to let him sweep 
me off my feet or vice versa.  Above all he would not be a military 
man, because I hated moving.

Moving almost every year, we picked up roots and we left homes 
and we made new ones.  I think I grew taller but then I hit five feet 
and began to slow down.

So I thought, well, when I meet this mysterious stranger, I'll simply 
look up.

~~~

For a year I looked up at you, and for a year I trailed nearly every 
step you took.  You would follow your intuition, wherever it led, 
and I would follow you because --

Because.

They say curiosity killed the cat, and Mulder, I think it could be 
true.  It isn't God, it isn't home, and what if I'm just lying here with 
my eyes left open and dead?  They will stare into the white 
expanse until the universe crumbles to pieces.

I wonder what you are staring at, wherever you are.  I wonder if 
this is what you have been searching for all of these years, and if I 
have finally found it.

But then, if I can wonder, can I be dead?

~~~

I used to follow you everywhere, even though we looked at Truth 
from opposite corners of the room.  You forced me up from where 
I sat and held my face to the wall, where the seal of Justice hung.  
You pointed to the tarnish and traced the cracks with your fingers.

Mulder, you are like Richard the Lion-Heart, donning armor and 
sailing for some holy land to battle what you think are infidels.  
Your crusade is conversion, is awakening the world to the presence 
of the devil amongst us.

I watch you from my tower, the ordered stronghold I have built 
from push and backbone.  And yet I have wanted, at times, to leap 
from my window to join you.  I would defy gravity -- with your 
faith, I could bend the rules of science.

Bend.  I have bent and bent from the very first.  You and your 
basement, your cave of hidden treasures.  Some fire of yours, some 
magnetic pull that draws me out of shape.  All of my straight lines 
going to curves.

The scale of Justice has tilted to one side.

~~~

What's happened to me?

I think they have taken my eyes and replaced them with glass.  I lie 
here prone in the great emptiness of the light and oh, the light has 
seeped through my skin.

I see people in this wash of winter, and now they are my family, 
and now they look like -- strangers.  It is stranger and stranger, the 
world that beats cold and white in my vision.

The strangers hide their faces.  Surgical masks, hair covers.  I 
remember those were my armor once, when I taught the secrets of 
the body.

What of my nakedness now?  Have I lost the ability to speak?

~~~

At age sixteen Charles dropped out of high school.  My old 
magazines lay in boxes, in leftover ashes in our fireplace.  It was 
long since we had crawled and growled on the floor.  I used to look 
at him, caught in the grind of texts and numbers, and wonder what 
he was hunting.

Two years passed.  We moved, we picked up roots.  And Charles 
put his down again without us, in a sun-dried California town 
called Petaluma.  That was the last I knew.  He has faded since, 
into the unknown.  Into the abyss of America and all the devilish 
life a holy land conceals.

Melissa has disappeared as well, lost from us somewhere on the 
West coast.  Roaming runs in my family, I suppose.  Sometimes 
we would go for weeks without a word from my father.  Were it 
not for this light I could picture my brother Bill on a stretch of 
ocean, everything merging into sky.

~~~

What happens to missing people?

~~~

Mulder, I think I have not blinked since I last opened my eyes, and 
that was an eternity ago.

Mulder, your crusade -- your battle for the holy land.  There are no 
infidels where you seek them.  There is no princess taken from her 
Vineyard castle.

Those are here.  They are here in the place of forgetting, in the 
white light that is no one's home.

~~~

My mother's voice trembles when she cries.  I have heard it happen 
twice.

I'm losing family members one by one.  Their faces fade and 
vanish with each passing year.  There have been no new Scullys 
made.

I have always thought my daughter would be dark-haired.

~~~

Let there be light, the Creator once said.  His heart is home, and I 
am not there.  I do not need Mulder's truth to know it.  Not in this 
coldness, this sweeping vacuum of eyes open and unblinking.  It is 
nowhere in my vision.

I may never be the lioness again.  The light is too bright.  
Therefore I say now, let there be dark.

Let there be dark.

Let there be dark.

_____________________________

end


cooljinbeans@yahoo.com
june 2000