***************************************************************
   RivkaT's e-mail address has changed to: rivkat@gmail.com
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From: RivkaT@aol.com
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 19:37:35 EDT
Subject: Tikkun Olam (Prologue) by MustangSally & RivkaT
Source: xff


Tikkun Olam  
MustangSally and RivkaT 

Classification: XA(R) 
Rating: NC-17.   (Guildenstern: Is that what people want? Player: It's what 
we do.) 

Content: "I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you 
blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or 
consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is 
compulsory -- they're all blood, you see." 

Warning! Characters die. Is it anyone you care about? That would be telling. 

Summary -- "Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, denouements 
both unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels 
including the suggestive. We transport you into a world of intrigue and 
illusion ... clowns, if you like, murderers -- we can do you ghosts and 
battles, on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented lovers -- set 
pieces in the poetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all 
means, faithless wives and ravished virgins -- flagrante delicto at a price, 
but that comes under realism for which there are special terms." 

Archive: We are now charging royalties on archiving -- contact RivkaT@aol.com 
for details (we have to support our chocolate habit). Gossamer gets a free 
pass for old time's sake.  

Disclaimer: The safe word is "noodles." If things get too intense for you, 
just say the word and we'll stop. Why don't you repeat the safe word now ... 
Good. Let's begin. 

Tikkun Olam -- Prologue

Hamlet: I say we will have no more marriage! Those that are married already, 
all but one shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. 

 

I didn't want to get up. I knew there was still a mess of lamb chops 
congealed in pans down in the kitchen. Gummy bits of matzo were glued to the 
floor where the kids had flung them. Dana had been decorating Easter eggs for 
the last few days and had hidden them all over the yard last night. Moonlight 
madness, me and the missus crawling under bushes and getting covered with 
grass stains and dirt. We fell dirty and bone-tired into bed, too beat to 
make love, Dana sniffling from whatever it was that she'd caught from the 
twins. All that work and in the morning, we'd have to drag the kids around, 
point them at the eggs and then applaud their stunning detective work in 
retrieving them. Plus, she had already eaten the ears off of five chocolate 
bunnies and watching that always disturbed me at a fundamental level. Why the 
ears? 

Blended families, feh. 

I decided to go for my morning run, get away from it all for a little while 
before launching the full onslaught of domestic bliss. Blinking in the 
morning sunshine, I pulled on sweats and a T-shirt and turned to look at my 
sleeping wife. 

She was blue and silent, her outline distorted and inhuman on the bedside. 
Cold. 

And I remembered. How her cheekbone had felt against my knuckles as it 
crumpled, the salt spray of hot blood from her mouth as she fell back and 
back. I remembered collapsing her throat with the edge of my hand. It felt 
like fruit, bursting and bubbling beneath the elastic skin. 

I remembered the sounds she made when her lungs wanted what her throat could 
no longer give. It wasn't even human. 

After that things were distorted, like opening your eyes at the bottom of the 
swimming pool and looking into the stinging chlorine blueness. But I knew 
better than to go running for the kids. 

The kids were never going to need hurrying again. 

Now, standing in the bedroom with the evidence of my crime before me, I could 
not begin to explain what I had done. I could only want, as I had never 
wanted anything else, to take it all back, to be someone other than the 
monster who had done this and then fallen into a sound sleep next to a 
cooling body. 

So I did what I'd intended to do when I first rose. 

I ran. 

End Tikkun Olam -- Prologue

Tikkun Olam 1/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com
Guildenstern:  You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in 
your death?
Player:  On the contrary, it's the only kind they do believe.

Light lanced through the bedroom like tracer beams, seeking me out so that 
the morning could slay me. 

Scully doesn't like to get up early, but that Sunday she was up before me. 
Going to Easter Mass. I couldn't believe that she'd offer herself to God, 
cranky and caffeinated, when she wouldn't roust herself to go look at the 
strange markings on the ground at the apple orchards near Herndon. 

We'd fought about it the night before. 

Then I fucked her on the coffee table, hard and fast the way she likes it 
when she doesn't want to acknowledge that she's with me.  

But she stayed for the night which was an event in and of itself, even though 
she had curled up at the far side of bed like an inanimate object. The only 
time I slept in the bed was when she was with me, and it was still like 
sleeping alone. I reached out for her sometime before dawn and she grunted in 
something that wasn't English but deigned to let me slide my hands over her 
breasts without breaking any of my fingers. In the morning she showered and 
dressed without a word. Scully's return to God is one more bone of contention 
between us. Just a metacarpal in our skeleton of issues, really. 

While she showered, I stared at the ceiling and wished, for a few moments, 
that I had a quiet, normal life with a family. Wife, kids, cat, SUV--the 
basics. Maybe a nice, manly dog. I wished more than anything else that I was 
not this person, this lunatic freak. I wished that Samantha had never been 
taken and that I had remained an ignorant innocent until colonization 
descended. I heard Scully bumping around and fumbling with the vagaries of my 
plumbing. Finally, she went and I lay in bed, dreaming like Dorothy Gale sans 
tornado. I must have drifted back to sleep again, because it was nearing noon 
when I checked the useless alarm clock. 

Ah, fuck it. A little coffee, a good run, and I'd be ready to rumble. I swung 
my legs off of the bed and bent to grab some sweats and a T-shirt. 

The phone trilled. 

"Mulder." 

"Yo, Spook." 

I tried to place the voice, and failed, lacking sufficient information. 
"Who's this?" 

"Lieutenant Gregor," he said, miffed. "I guess the star doesn't remember the 
backup singers." 

"The Lloyd case," I recalled. 

"Yeah. So, I hear you're into the mysterious and suspicious now. I've got a 
hell of an Easter gift for you." 

Lt. Gregor had been a nice young patrol officer when we worked the Lloyd case 
together. He'd been a big help collecting evidence and keeping my brains off 
of a hotel room wall, and I suppose that I owed him. "What is it?" 

He read off a Virginia address instead of answering. I could feel the scowl 
distort my face, but I recorded the information on the back of an overdue 
Amex bill. 

"Are we going to need autopsies?" 

"Four, looks like." 

"Half an hour." 

I hit the off button and then the only speed dial number that involved a 
human with an IQ over seventy. 

"I'm in line for the confessional," Scully hissed, her voice almost lost 
under the disapproving cough from someone beside her. 

"I'll pick you up there, we've got a case." 

She hung up before I could manage it. I hate it when that happens. 

I considered changing but it was a favor on a Sunday morning. Gregor could 
suck it up. So I snagged a Pop Tart on my way out the door and galumphed into 
the car. I was glad that I already knew where Scully went to church; I 
doubted that she was in the mood to tell me. She was waiting outside for me 
on the hard gray gravel of the church's sweeping driveway. I considered it a 
great favor that I didn't have to go in and get her. Maybe she wasn't sure if 
I could cross the threshold.  

My partner, naturally, was pale and seamless in her fine blue suit.  I 
wondered if I had made it onto her Top Ten list of things to confess. 

We pulled out of the church parking lot and into the crush of traffic. I 
thought I knew where I was going, but the green Beltway sign popped up like a 
target in a Quantico training simulation. I cursed and swung the car onto the 
entrance ramp that would take us to the scene of the crime, if we could 
survive the ongoing criminality of DC traffic. The guy I'd cut off honked and 
flashed his lights. "What are you doing, Mulder?" Scully asked sharply. 

"Sorry," I said, rattled. "I could have sworn we wanted the Outer Loop." I 
hit the gas and concentrated on making it safely through, which was not 
unlike landing on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, though there were fewer 
dead fish. 

Scully was silent the rest of the way, the late-morning sunlight rendering 
her sunglasses opaque, and she was as inscrutable and smooth as a robin's 
egg. Silence from Scully is generally not a good sign. It means that she is 
thinking and it usually ends as a shot in the balls to me either literally or 
metaphorically. And she was smelling like one of the many tiny hotel shampoo 
bottles that bred in my shower stall. I wished I had never let her get out of 
bed. 

Gregor was waiting for us on the steps of a beautiful house. A station wagon 
and a Range Rover were visible in the dimness of the open garage. 

Gregor licked Scully from high heels to hairspray with his eyes.  She noticed 
and did not introduce herself. 

"So, why are we here?" I asked.

"Woman and three kids found slaughtered in the bosom of their home. Signs of 
a man's habitation everywhere but he's not around. Classic domestic case with 
skip-out." 

Can you say Simpson, boys and girls? Good, I knew you could. 

"Yeah, so?" 

"So, the people who discovered it are the realtor showing the house and the 
nice young couple with her. The house that is supposed to be entirely empty 
but somehow has furniture, along with cars, clothes in the closets, mail for 
Robert and Dr. Dana Rothstein at this address. Freakier still, you saw the 
two vehicles? Plates don't exist; they're made-up numbers. And we can't find 
Bob or Dana in any state database. Even AT&T, which sent them a bill five 
days ago, doesn't think they exist -- and you know the phone company never 
forgets about you." 

"You're suggesting the house and its contents somehow emerged from the Outer 
Limits?" 

Gregor looked at Scully like she'd made a racially insensitive remark. I 
figured I ought to introduce them. 

"Lt. Gregor, this is my partner, Agent Scully. She'll be your forensic 
pathologist today. Shall we take a look at our mystery guests?" Scully's 
incredulousness matched my own growing excitement. What if the Rothsteins 
lived here in some parallel universes, the boundaries breached in a moment of 
crisis? Maybe they came from a place where I was a happy, hauntless man. 

The house smelled like talcum powder and, underneath, death. Death is a rich, 
complex smell, black and blue with bacteria toiling and teeming. After you 
get past the nausea, it's fascinating. 

"You want to see the kids first, or do you need to work up to that?" Gregor 
asked as he followed us in. 

The order the killer did them in mattered, but I wouldn't know that until I'd 
looked around some. I looked at Scully. 

"Let's see the children," she said. She could never resist a dare. 

The twins, a boy and a girl, had been strangled. I could smell the dirty 
diapers from six feet away, but Scully put her gloves on, got up close, and 
poked around. 

"Manual?" 

"One-handed," she replied, not looking back at me. It would have been like 
picking a kitten up by the scruff of the neck. 

"How big would his hands have to be?" They'd been left face-up. If they 
hadn't been moved by the photographers or, worse, someone hoping against hope 
that they might still live, then that suggested indifference to their 
identities. That meant the killer might not have been the dad. 

I wondered why I didn't want it to be the dad. 

Scully looked back at me speculatively. "Not unusually large. I'll need to 
measure the marks, but I think they'd be about the size of yours." 

Gregor and I stared at my hands. 

Then, into the bathroom. Scully gasped and fell back a half step, careening 
into me as I crowded into her. 

When we stood side by side in front of the tub, I saw why. 

The toddler floating like a drowned watersprite in the stillness could have 
been Emily's twin brother. I suspect that Scully sees the resemblance in 
every child who passes by, but this, even I could see. The child even had 
that same pathetic bowl haircut that I thought went out of style twenty years 
back. 

I'd seen what I needed to and backed away. Scully was still looking down at 
the dead child, but I doubted that she was compiling forensic evidence. I 
knew better than to try to comfort her, so I followed Gregor into the master 
bedroom. 

This was the worst. The woman on the bed was about Scully's height, and her 
hair color had to have come from the same Clairol box. 

The victim was at least thirty pounds heavier than Scully, who'd been thin as 
a Communion wafer even before the cancer. This woman had seriously generous 
breasts and hips to match. She'd been the kind of woman you could easily 
think of as a mother, or more to the point, the kind of woman you could spend 
a lot of time trying to impregnate. Lush, full body that a man would need a 
rescue party to pull him out of.  Her hair was impracticably long; the kids 
would have yanked it out by the handful as she carried them from place to 
place. Nyquil and tissues on her side of the bed suggested that she was 
fighting off a cold before she failed to fight off her killer.

The beating she'd received had obliterated any previously extant facial 
features. Presumably the guys back at the lab could reconstruct a face for 
her, but for the moment she was as featureless as a Barbie whose head had 
been held in an open flame. 

That, unfortunately, was a pretty good sign that it was the dad. 

I needed to find out more about our primary suspect. I turned to Gregor. "Any 
pictures of the man of the house?" 

He shrugged. "Not that we've found, but we've just been taking pictures and 
dusting. There's a study with two computers in it if you want to look for 
records or something. But you might want to take a look in the kitchen, 
first. Seriously dead cat in there." 

"'Seriously'?" I asked as we headed back towards the stairs. "The others are 
only mostly dead?" 

"Let's put it this way, Spook. When the Resurrection comes ... this cat ain't 
gettin' up." 

Gregor had definitely been watching too much Homicide.

By the smell, at least one big-hatted cop had tossed his (or her, I shouldn't 
be sexist) cookies in the kitchen. People can tolerate anything inflicted on 
other human beings, but puree a kitty cat and you've crossed some deep 
boundary. You'd think that species loyalty would make it the other way 
around, or at least that people would recognize that cats lack the basic 
indicia of consciousness, but you'd be wrong. People often reserve their 
inhumanity for other humans. The American Society for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Animals existed a generation before anyone thought to do anything 
similar for children. And Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. 

What's black and white and red all over? 

Answer: your basic household pet after a psycho killer had an in-depth 
conversation with him. Most of the fur was centered around the garbage 
disposal. It had been a black cat, probably with a white belly and adorable 
white socks. It looked like he'd done most of the chopping on the cutting 
board designed for that purpose. He hadn't bothered to clean the knife, which 
lay blood-blackened by the stove. And on the stove there was a pot. And in 
that pot there was some meat, E-I-E-I-O. 

I guess that explained the barbecue smell in the air. 

"Did he leave the stove on?" I asked Gregor, turning to where the detective 
was waiting outside the kitchen. I didn't really blame him for staying in the 
dining room; he'd be seeing this scene in his nightmares anyway. 

Gregor shook his head. So, our pussy-poacher didn't intend for the house to 
burn down. Maybe we were supposed to see all this. 

"Study," I ordered and followed where Gregor led me. 

end 1/25

Tikkun Olam 2/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com

Player: There's nothing more unconvincing than an unconvincing death. 

The sermon was the kind of New Agey Catholicism that might eventually have 
brought Melissa back to the church. Me, it just annoyed. I didn't 
particularly care about the historical connections between fertility rituals, 
spring planting rites, and the Resurrection. I didn't want to hear squat 
about fertility. I was in a bad mood even before Mulder called me. Then 
Mulder forgot the basic layout of the District, which did nothing for my 
mood. And driving past all the happy Easter Sunday families strolling through 
their upper-middle-class neighborhood could induce nausea as easily as your 
average chemo course. 

The toddler was difficult. His face was so fragile, even in death when 
nothing worse could really happen to him and his eyes were so large and open 
although they were never going to see the world. The last thing he'd seen in 
his short life was the shiny white ceiling of his bathroom behind the face of 
his killer-creator. His rubber ducky had fallen into the tub at some point 
and nudged his unresponsive eyebrow as I stared. I handled it all. That's 
what I do. 

"Scully!" 

Mulder's bellow was not his Scully-I'm-in-danger noise but his 
attend-me-now-woman noise, and so I took my time getting downstairs. A good 
thing, too, because otherwise the skirt might have torn. The attractive if 
slightly greasy-looking Lt. Gregor pointed me in the right direction with a 
smile.The study was nice, dark paneled wood and a leather couch that could 
have been an upmarket cousin of Mulder's own monstrosity. Mulder was at the 
far wall, looking at the diplomas hanging over the computers. 

"When's the last time you looked at your diplomas, Scully?" 

I shrugged and walked towards him. "Years, I suppose. They're in a box at the 
back of my --" 

Actually, they were on a wall in a Virginia house of horrors. I stared 
dazedly at the evidence that Dana Katherine Scully had been awarded her 
bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland on this 15th day of June 
1986. The one next to it indicated that she had received her medical degree, 
in like fashion, in 1990. 

"What --?" It came out more as a whisper than a demand. 

"Still wondering if this is an X File?" He pulled away from the wall. "Robert 
Rothstein draws comic books, there's a bookcase full of them and his current 
work is on that table under the window. He's in the middle of an issue so 
it's fair to say that he wasn't expecting this to happen." 

I looked around the room. I saw the brightly-colored illustrations, flattered 
by the spring sunlight shining through the window, and the bookcase filled 
with plastic-jacketed comic books. There were no family pictures on the walls 
and none on the desks. 

"They haven't found a purse or a wallet," Mulder said in answer to my 
unspoken question. "Why don't you look through the files in the desk and I'll 
check for any secret photo album stashes in the living room." 

I nodded blankly and he left me there. Moving over to the desk, I put out a 
hand to touch the diploma. The glass of the frame was cool and smooth under 
my fingertips. Robert Rothstein had graduated from Maryland too. His diploma 
looked much the same as mine -- hers, only he'd gotten a liberal arts degree. 
They must have met in college, and I couldn't read the ketubah so I couldn't 
tell off-hand how long they had been married. Had they been happy? It was 
hard to tell considering the fact that the wife was beaten to a bloody mess 
upstairs. 

Maybe an intruder had killed them and abducted Dad for further fun, but I 
doubted it. Ninety-eight percent of all domestic homicides are committed by a 
friend or family member. No matter what The Fugitive taught America, most 
women who are murdered in their homes are murdered by a husband or a 
boyfriend, not a mysterious one-armed man who leaves a trail as wide as 
Constitution Avenue. And Krycek hadn't been spotted in the area lately.

I rifled through the file drawer that was built into the desk. Years of tax 
returns -- Robert made good money for a man whose literary vocabulary was 
limited to "Pow" and "Ka-zam," and Dana was an eye surgeon. No wonder they 
could afford this house that wasn't theirs. Contracts with comic book 
companies, health insurance information, medical records. Robert Rothstein 
was taking enough drugs to start his own neighborhood pharmacy. Tegretol for 
manic depression, Verapamil to control migraines and maybe some off-label use 
against violent outbursts, the aptly named Paxil to make him feel warm and 
fuzzy, Klonopin and Trazadone to let him sleep, and Inderal for anxiety. It 
didn't escape my attention that Mulder had taken most of these once or twice. 

I continued on through the medical records to a worse surprise. 

Robert Rothstein had just undergone extended medical treatment for a 
nasopharyngeal tumor. A letter from his doctor suggested that he needed a 
screening every two months to ensure that remission continued, and thanked 
him for his willingness to participate in the experimental program. 

I knew this doctor. Given the other circumstances, that fact was not so 
surprising -- nasopharyngeal tumors aren't like ear infections; there were 
six specialists in the United States worth consulting, and I'd had some 
contact with all of them. This woman, though, worked out of Georgetown, and 
she'd been my primary oncologist throughout most of the cancer. 

She'd never told me about any experimental program. 

I looked up as Mulder reentered the room. He looked -- normally I'd say he 
looked like he'd seen a ghost, but with Mulder that event would involve a 
happy, excited face and not the shell-shocked expression he actually wore. 

"What did you find?" I asked.   "Family album," he said. "Lots of kiddie 
pictures. Dad was behind the camera most of the time and Mom was a pretty 
poor photographer. Brown/brown, about five eight or nine, a hundred and 
seventy pounds, clean-shaven. They're both wearing glasses in the wedding 
pictures, young geek love, and it's hard to tell what either of them really 
looked like." 

"Was it him?" 

Mulder looked down at his hands, strong strangler's hands. "I don't think 
we'll know for sure until we get the prints and hear his story." 

Robert Rothstein wouldn't have been the first person framed for a family 
murder to get him out of the way when he was no longer convenient. "Let's run 
the Rothsteins through the federal database and see what we come up with. 
I'll send the diplomas to the lab to see if there are any prints on them." 

He looked over at me as though I had suggested that we forget the whole thing 
and go out for an Easter Egg hunt instead. 

"I need you to take a look at something," he said. "In the kitchen." 

Mulder followed me into the kitchen and I was drawn over to the shiny silver 
sink. Tufts of black fur protruded from the disposal, clumped from the 
mixture of water and blood that lay still in the drain like the calmest of 
seas. I turned like a marionette and went to the stove. The cat's face hadn't 
been submerged, so it was still mainly intact, but the rest of the body had 
been boiling long enough that the sharp feline bones were visible in the 
brown stew. 

"I need to know," Mulder said carefully, "if he did this first. I'm betting 
yes. The cat's the only one who'd trust its instincts that something was very 
wrong. Everyone else would see Daddy and ignore all contrary input." 

I looked up and whatever he saw in my face made him turn celadon, though the 
kitty slaughter alone hadn't been sufficient. 

Hours passed of bagging and tagging evidence with the annoyed Arlington 
Police who would have been happier celebrating Easter with their families. 
Mulder had all the comic books boxed up as potential clues to the mind of a 
monster and then disappeared like Ben & Jerry's when I was feeling down. Not 
that there was any correlation between my feelings and Mulder's flights. 

 ****

I felt like I was moving through water. The world had taken on sinuous 
outlines and even sound seemed muffled. The feeling of unreality was enough 
to make the hair on my arms stand on end and I rubbed at them through my 
sweatshirt.  Blurred vision and muffled sound are not inconsistent with sinus 
congestion from allergens, Scully's voice whispered in my mind, due to inner 
ear involvement. 

I walked around the Rothsteins' neighborhood, looking at the neatly tended 
front yards with the tulips slick with rain reaching up at the dull sky. 
There were ruined Easter Egg hunts all over town that morning, with the rain 
coming out to make the backyards into pools of red Virginia mud and 
flattening all the meringue ruffles on the little girls' dresses. I walked, 
absorbing; taking in the feel and the smell of the area and wondering where 
Bob had gone. Where would I have gone if I had been Bob? He hadn't taken 
either of the cars and dispatcher reports showed that a taxi hadn't picked 
him up, so when Bob had left, he had been on foot.

At least there wouldn't be a low-speed chase with a white Bronco any time in 
the near future. The credit cards I'd found in Robert's wallet had come up as 
invalid numbers when I called the companies, so he wouldn't be found that 
way. I'm sure they worked on his Earth. 

The wallet was in the drawer of the end table next to the couch, exactly 
where I put mine when I came home from work. I checked there on a hunch. It's 
where Dad put his and, were I ever to inflict a son on the world, I suppose 
he'd put his wallet there too when he grew up, if he grew up and was not 
abducted by aliens and filleted like a swordfish before he got his own place. 
The social transmission of knowledge is often more effective than the 
genetic, which is subject to the vagaries of recombination. 

The vagaries of recombination. Like the kids on their way to the morgue. Like 
the many futures I could have had if I'd chosen differently, before choice 
evaporated like water in the desert. The butterfly flaps its wings, the alien 
turns its glowing gaze to me, and it could have been different. 

Robert and Dana. Dana and Robert. Dana and --

I pulled out my phone and speed dialed. 

"Scully, are you familiar with any of the theories about parallel universes?" 

"I've watched The Twilight Zone." 

Scully humor can be used instead of bitumen for mummification. 

"What if Dana is you? And Robert's the psycho in her life?" 

The line hummed and crackled for a moment, as cellphone lines do. 

"Isn't it a little early in the game for you to be identifying with the 
UNSUB?" she asked and I had a mental Polaroid of her looking at her watch, 
"It's only been three hours. It usually takes you at least a day." 

And waste valuable plot time? 

"Okay," I looked down at my shoes in the mud, another pair ruined in the 
cause of Justice, "Submitted for your approval, at certain points in a 
person's life there are seminal events which dictate the course of the rest 
of a life. For example, the moment that you decided to join the FBI, at that 
moment two paths diverge and the time line where you join the FBI is the time 
line which is the now. Which means the time line where you decide to be a 
county pathologist is another time line." 

Or an eye surgeon. 

"I'm listening--" she prodded me. 

"Well, what if Robert and Dana are from another time stream, where decisions 
were made which affected the course of their lives and this ended up with 
their marriage and the children." 

A snort of bitter amusement split the static. 

"Meta-realities? Why not go back to the Hegelian Paradox where you go back in 
time and kill your father to prevent your own birth, but you must have been 
born in order to kill your own father. It doesn't work. It's science fiction, 
Mulder." 

"It's the only thing that makes sense. Eliminate the impossible and what 
remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer." 

"I don't have time for this," she snapped, "the coroner's van just got here. 
I'm going with them -- I'll call you when I'm done with the autopsies." 

For the second time that day, she hung up on me. I cursed and jammed the 
phone back in my pocket. I should have waved that album in her face so that 
she could see her zaftig twin playing with photographic children, but at the 
last moment I couldn't do it. I couldn't show my barren partner --barren 
because of me as surely as if I'd given her an STD -- pictures of her 
otherself playing happy and carefree with her adorable children. 

Scully was probably already coming up with a good explanation for why Dana 
Rothstein had her diploma. But I already knew why: It was Dana Rothstein's 
diploma too. Funny, Scully never struck me as the type to take her husband's 
name. 

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move in the bushes and 
I held my breath while I watched. Was Robert out there watching me and 
listening to me talk about him? What was he thinking? What had he thought 
when he squeezed the life out of his children, his own blood, little lives 
snuffed out like birthday candles in a ungentle breeze? 

The squirrel emerged from the bushes and chattered angrily at me, reminding 
me of Scully. 

I wandered back to the house, thinking about chaos theory and complexity 
theory and piles of sand shifting, grain by grain, as stresses accumulated 
until the whisper of an angel sent everything tumbling down. 

I ducked under the ugly yellow police tape, the color of investigation, and 
went inside to where death and dust were already settling like veneer over 
the Rothsteins' former possessions. Our reptile brains tell us to take our 
secrets down, into the darkness and the damp. I once worked a case where the 
killer kept all his victims' shoes lined up on shelves in the basement. There 
were two rows of size four women's, one and a half of five, another row of 
six, and sevens broke the record with a whole five rows. I hadn't counted 
further because he was already in custody. I'd predicted that they'd be 
organized by size, but I hadn't really understood how it would look, there in 
the basement with the light bulb hanging yellow off to the side and every 
pair different, some worn and some unmarred, like the Goodwill sales rack. 

Some things you want to keep underground. 

The Rothsteins didn't have shoes. They had some boxes of baby clothes that 
looked like they'd been raided when the twins came. They had spiders, sticky 
and prolific. They had Dana's college textbooks, with a neater version of 
Scully's loopy handwriting in the margins, and old ski equipment. 

In the far corner was a bookshelf, and that's where Robert was. Not his body, 
but his life. At least two hundred sketchbooks, probably more, ranging from 
the cheapest drugstore books to expensive, thick handmade paper. 

The cheaper ones were generally older -- they were on the top shelves and his 
technique was fairly crude in the first ones I flipped through. They were 
black and white, with no helpful dialogue balloons. I don't think the 
characters depicted could really talk. Screaming pretty much ran the 
communicative gamut for them. 

In pencil, in pen, sometimes as light as if he'd traced the frost on a winter 
windowpane and sometimes carved into the paper as if he was trying to chisel 
the images out of his brain, Robert had filled these sketchbooks with 
abduction images. Corridors curved wrong around monstrous forms with 
inexplicable machinery in their hands, as if Escher had designed a spaceship 
and populated it with H.R. Giger organic monsters. Humans and parts of humans 
tumbled through the pages like Holocaust victims, thin and screaming, always 
screaming. If I tried I could hear it in the back of my head, the mechanical 
din interwoven with the sound of human suffering. 

The images were repetitive, though the styles varied and improved with time. 
A boy screams as he is strapped down and his abdomen or genitals punctured by 
what looks like an enormous mechanical cock. At times it is composed entirely 
of thick, slimy tentacles, still with the jagged edges of metal visible where 
the skin is thin. At times it is all hard edges and needles. At times it is 
smooth and featureless like a termite's egg, dull plastic under artificial 
light, or the light of unmapped stars. 

And the worst is that, in the middle of the destruction, the boy's face 
convulses in unwanted ecstasy. There is no narrative structure; his violation 
is complete or in progress or just starting and then the same image will be 
repeated, or another image, or we find the boy cowering in his cell, 
searching for a corner but unable to find anything in the circular world of 
his insanity. Other times the boy is an observer, his eyes glassily drugged 
as a woman's skin is lifted off of her in layers or the alien embryo claws 
its way untimely from the womb. The Abduction Variations, by Robert 
Rothstein. 

The babies in his pictures had the almond eyes of every Whitley Streiber 
fantasy but they were not all-powerful and I doubted they were benign. They 
deformed under the irritated pressure of gravity, bones pushing out from 
latex skin. Limbs, sluglike and uneven, left gray wet trails on the seamless 
floors of the ship-lab-torture chamber. The women's faces were dead, 
beginning to decay, as the fetuses were extracted, but in the sterility there 
were no blowflies or maggots. Sloughed skin lay like wetsuits in the 
corridors of the ship of nightmares. Despite the graphic nudity, there was no 
sex, no human-to-human contact. Always the alien or the machine initiated the 
touching. 

Either Robert was an abduction victim with continuing flashbacks, or he was a 
paranoid psychotic with one of the most complex and dangerous delusional 
structures I'd ever encountered. This is what he saw when he closed his eyes 
and when he kept them open. Years of repetitive vomiting it onto clean paper 
hadn't helped him. I wondered if killing his family had. 

I couldn't go through all of the books at once, so I took some representative 
samples to scare Scully with.  

I stopped at the Bucar and stared. It was gray. I could have sworn that it 
was blue. No matter, one Bucar is pretty much the same as the other. My key 
fit the ignition so I gave it no further thought. 

end 2/25

Tikkun Olam 3/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com

Guildenstern: There is an art to the building up of suspense..... Though it 
can be done by luck alone. 

 
I hate Sunday afternoon autopsies. Let alone on Easter, which is the day that 
Christ rose from the dead. Not that I expect to witness such an event, that's 
more Mulder's line, but it's hard enough to get right with God when I don't 
have to deal with His creatures' favorite sport -- murder -- afterwards. 

With a crushed larynx, Dana died choking on her own blood. The twin babies 
suffered a related fate when they were subjected to manual ligature until 
they suffocated. The toddler had been held down until he vomited and sucked 
in two lungfuls of water. It didn't take much to fill his lungs, less water 
than you'd need to make a pasta dinner.

We still didn't know their names.  

When I opened Dana Rothstein's abdominal cavity I found that, in addition to 
the normal complement of organs, she also had a four-month fetus which, 
depending on your viewpoint, could add another murder to the total. In 
Virginia it would be unlawful abortion; the killer -- or, realistically, 
Robert Rothstein -- could add another six months to his multiple death 
sentences. 

Like sands through an hourglass so are the days of our lives. Sunday passed 
into Monday while I worked on the bodies. If there were any unexpected chips 
of metal, inexplicable venous systems, or other indicia of government 
experimentation I wanted to know about it. The toddler's brain showed 
abnormalities surrounding the central sulcus, but, as usual, I couldn't be 
sure what my data meant. The Monday morning crew that came into the morgue 
was only mildly surprised to see me and the bodies that I had slid into the 
refrigerated drawers. I wondered how Mulder would convince Skinner that this 
was within federal jurisdiction.  Obviously, if Dana and Robert weren't from 
our universe, Virginia wouldn't have any particular claim over their deaths. 

If Mulder's theory were true, no one would claim the bodies and they would go 
into Potter's Field, unmourned. I wasn't about to call my mother, that was 
for damn sure. But I did take a sample of Dana Rothstein's blood and an 
impression of her prints. 

Since state and county offices are open the day after Easter, albeit 
grudgingly, I managed to finesse a phone and a desk at the morgue and started 
making telephone calls from the scant facts that I had been able to glean 
from Robert Rothstein's medical records. I made calls, took notes, and drank 
disgusting morgue coffee which had the chemical aftertaste of death. My 
doctor denied any knowledge of Robert. That meant zilch as far as I was 
concerned. But Robert hadn't been active on any of the newsgroups, nor did 
the families of my fellow patients remember talking to him, or his doctor 
wife. That was much more suspicious. You get to know your disease pretty well 
when it's as exotic as my cancer. There were housewives from Pennsylvania who 
knew as much about peptide agonists as I did, at least before their tumors 
expanded and they couldn't even control their own bowels. We'd known each 
other nearly as well as we knew the thing pulsing in our brains. It was a 
pretty close community of interest, and men would stand out, but no one had 
heard of the Rothsteins. 

My eyes were hurting from strain and formalin fumes when Mulder finally came 
to pick me up for lunch. 

It was the same table we always sat at in the corner of Starbucks, where we 
could see the entire shop spread out before us with the wall to our backs. 
The bored slacker types were putting "SALE" stickers on the chocolate bunnies 
in the basket near the cash register. I bought a grande and a purple foil 
milk chocolate bunny to fortify myself and sat down next to Mulder, who was 
reviewing my autopsy notes. I could believe that he had psychic powers when 
he read my handwriting. 

"Mulder," I started in a carefully neutral voice, "you realize that your 
theory about parallel universes is not going to stand up under departmental 
scrutiny." 

He smirked at me and I wanted to kick him. It was his smartass know-it-all 
smirk which never failed to make my palms itch with annoyance. The 
patronizing smirk, the 'silly rabbit, Trix are for kids' smirk.  

"People who don't really exist don't really get murdered, nor can they be 
prosecuted in a court of law," he said with the most caustic sarcasm in his 
monotone repertoire, "but if the phone company says they exist, they must 
exist." 

"Proving nothing. Queequeg was once offered a MasterCard with a 
three-thousand dollar limit." 

"That's a lot of doggie biscuits." 

I bit the right ear off of the rabbit and Mulder shuddered in sympathetic 
horror. Freud would be so pleased. My stomach was as hollow as the bunny's 
and the cheap chocolate was exactly what I needed. 

"Do I really need to point out to you that you're projecting my entire 
experience onto these people who have the vaguest resemblance to me." 

Vaguest. 

Point being, Dana Rothstein had given birth to three children which I would 
never be able to do, and Rob Rothstein had slain those three children and his 
fecund wife. Which, one hopes, Mulder would not do. He's too chicken shit. 
Should Mulder ever find himself in the same situation--three kids and a 
fourth in progress--he would be more inclined to hare off to Tibet and put up 
with the lack of cell phones rather than commit murder. On the other hand 
whoever marries Mulder and is capable of handling the Spawn of Mulder would 
be more inclined to sling his slacker ass out the door before his internal 
pressure cooker spurted blood and gore on the ceiling.  

The Sumatra coffee was bitter the way that I liked it. 

"Well we're all guilty of looking at the world through the prescriptions of 
our own experience," he said and slid longer and thinner over the chair, 
stretching out like a Toon character until he had taken up most of the 
legroom in our section of the caf, "some prescriptions are more rose-colored 
than others." 

He stuck his finger in the froth clinging to the bottom and the sides of his 
cup and slowly sucked the foam off his forefinger, his gaze never breaking 
mine. 

"What's your perspective on it, Doctor Scully." 

You're a pig, Mulder, a big, oinking pig. But even as I thought this my body 
reacted to the sight of him sucking off the foam as though it had been me. 
The bastard. 

"My perspective is quite simple, it's a series of unfortunate coincidences 
and mistakes. She was accidentally issued a copy of my diploma, same first 
name and no human being checks these things, the signatures are 
machine-drawn. The realtor was mistaken about the house listing and the 
social security database used by the DMV and the telephone company was either 
corrupted or accidentally deleted." 

"Mistaken diploma, twice, that she framed and displayed in her house without 
correcting. Self-effacing of her, don't you think? And she still would have 
gone to school with you." 

I refused to look at his finger circling the top of the cappuccino cup in the 
same rhythm he had used to circle my clit two nights before. "Do you know 
everybody you went to school with?" 

"I would have if they had the same name." 

"'Dana' is more common than 'Fox'. As a matter of fact I went through medical 
school with two other Danas and one was male." 

"Was that him in there? Maybe he got tired of the jokes and went in for a sex 
change." 

I missed the smell of coffee. I missed X Files that were just mysteries, 
without providing commentary on my own twisted life. "We have to leave it to 
the local police. Without any evidence of what happened or why this woman had 
my diplomas, it's a domestic crime, not something of cosmic significance." 

"But every life is sacred, so it is of cosmic significance." 

That was a deliberate reference to my decision to go to Mass on Sunday 
morning and had nothing to do with the case. I finished my coffee and looked 
at the few black grounds clinging to the bottom of the cup. What was I 
supposed to do? Explain to Mulder how my on-again off-again relationship with 
God was back on again? Knowing Mulder as well as I did, I found it unlikely 
that he would ever be amicable to sharing me with even anything as 
non-corporeal as God.  

It was Mulder's strange form of jealousy that he wanted my undivided 
attention. I wasn't about to try to explain to Mulder that I found Father 
McHugh as soothing as the sweet, milky tea that my mother had given me when I 
was a sick child. Could he understand that sometimes, I seek comfort the same 
way that Mulder seeks discomfort? That guilt feels best when it can be built 
up and discharged in a concentrated recitation of sins like draining a 
battery of energy?   And under that, I knew, Mulder distrusted faith because 
when he prays, he prays to me, for me, and he knows that he is not heard.

I wanted to know God's existence, the way I used to know, but now all I was 
capable of was belief.  Knowledge had fled, bleeding and tattered, after 
Emily died.

All I could do was look back down into my cup as though the answer was 
somewhere among the grounds. 

"Computer error," Mulder said with another one of his smirks. 

"I'm going back to the lab," I told him.  

He was looking out the window and his eyes slid over the street outside 
without seeing anything as I took the bunny and ran. 

 **** 

Preliminary fingerprint results from the house suggested that Mulder and I 
had walked around, latex-free, for four or five months, pawing every 
available surface. We've had a less than stellar evidence control record, but 
I was pretty sure that we hadn't been to blame in this case. Sure enough, 
Dana Rothstein had my fingerprints and my blood type. I was willing to bet 
that the DNA tests would also label us twins, but -- despite what the movies 
tell you -- DNA typing takes a bit longer than an afternoon. 

I had no idea what the DNA would prove. The tests could hardly show that I 
was actually dead on a slab. Cloning was a strong possibility, especially 
with the nasopharyngeal tumor in the house like a helpful sign: "the 
Conspiracy was here!" 

Would it have been worth it, to retain my innocence and my fertility for six 
extra years and produce three and a half lovely children? They hadn't 
suffered long, and even Dana hadn't known what was coming, from the lack of 
defensive wounds or skin snagged under her fingernails.

I wanted to go shopping to take my mind off my troubles, but my credit cards 
wouldn't bear the weight. Instead I went to the gynecologist for an 
appointment I'd scheduled days before, just the thing for the single woman 
who is feeling a bit dissatisfied with her lot. 

Mulder called while I was waiting in the reception room, reading a back issue 
of Glamour. "What have you found out?" he asked without preamble. 

"Soylent Green is people," I told him and hung up. There was no way I was 
discussing Dana over the phone. And we never talked about Scully. 

 ****

All I wanted to do was flop out on my sofa with a bag of Doritos and a copy 
of Independence Day and watch the good guys beat the crap out of the aliens. 
If it had been me up there, with my luck, the alien computers would not have 
been Mac-compatible and it would turn out that Bill Gates was quisling on the 
human race.  But children love their special treats, and the Gunmen had 
devoured the stack of comic books I had brought to Paranoid Central the night 
before and were waiting for me with bright shiny faces. I wished they had 
enough enthusiasm to go around but, unlike D&D scenarios, it couldn't be 
shared.

"This is amazing," Langly said as soon as I'd gotten past the locks. 

"Enlighten me." The boys were arranged around the room. Langly had on a 
Sisters of Mercy T-shirt whose gothness mocked his blond hair. Frohike was in 
the flak vest he'd begun wearing everywhere at some point and Byers was the 
man in the gray flannel suit. All of them had piles of Robert's comic books. 
The ones by Byers were neatly stacked; Frohike and Langly were not so neat, 
but they had respect for the comics and so the precious pages had been 
returned to their clear plastic envelopes. 

"Well," Byers pointed out, "we already know that the comic book doesn't 
exist. Some of the people on the credits with Rothstein are definitely 
working in the industry, but they're doing different things. If it's a fake, 
it's a very well-thought-out one. I actually got an offer from the people at 
Forbidden Planet -- they wanted to order the whole series." He stroked his 
chin, torn between nervousness and profundity. 

Hey, wait. "When did you get rid of the beard?" Byers was always the stable 
one and the change made me uncomfortable. 

He gave a sheepish smile. "Mulder, I haven't had a beard in three years." 

"Nice of you to notice," Langly chimed in. 

"Never mind," I said weakly. 

Langly held up one of the comics. On the front, two small figures raised guns 
against an enormous sea-beast. "So, the heroes of these stories are two 
G-folk named Rex and Samantha, right? And they investigate the paranormal and 
the deeply strange? And they have some technogeek friends called the 
Mouseketeers, dedicated to proving that Disney is out to take over the world 
--" He sneezed, which gave me an opportunity to interrupt.

"It must be a parallel universe, they're not worried about Microsoft." 

He tugged at his glasses. "Listen, Mulder --" If I looked closely I could see 
a small furry creature at the bottom corner of the cover, right near the UPC 
code. About the size of a midget, annoying dog with a pretentiously literary 
name. I could feel the blood vessels in my brain about to burst.  

"Either this guy has hacked his way into the FBI mainframe and read your 
reports for the past five years-" 

"Or," Byers said judiciously, "he's got another kind of source." He templed 
his hands below his chin and looked at me with the appraising eyes of a 
surgeon evaluating how much of the tumor can be cut away without killing the 
patient. 

A psychic doppelganger. Scully had been more accurate than she knew when she 
accused me of identifying with the suspect. What will they think of next? 
More of me? It was bad enough staring at my face in the mirror with my ghosts 
staring back and I wasn't interested in sharing with anyone. Not even myself. 

Frohike sniggered in his corner, drawing my attention. "What these goombahs 
didn't mention," he said, smiling like a frog, "is that Rex and Samantha are 
doin' the hot monkey love thing on the sly, after four years of bantering 
foreplay. Which reminds me, where is the enigmatic doctor?" 

Frohike's chuckle degenerated into some wet chest-coughing and he spit 
something foul into a handkerchief. 

"She had to see a man about a corpse," I told him in my best monotone. And 
you'd better believe that it's a very good monotone indeed. 

 ****

"So when did the spotting start?" Dr. Shimada said from the other side of the 
sheet which was keeping me from seeing what she was doing between my legs. 

How strange. Mulder could go down on me for hours and I was permitted to see 
the whole thing. However, in the confines of the doctor's office, I was 
reduced to trying to figure out what was being done by a series of cold 
sensations and the shadows on the sheet. 

"Three days ago. I couldn't get here any sooner because of work." 

That sounded so respectable, when what I needed to say was that I couldn't 
pay adequate attention to my own health because a man had gone crazy in 
Arlington and killed his wife and children, a wife who had my name and a 
resemblance to me. 

"Work's been really busy," I elaborated. 

"I think what we're seeing here is a variation on breakthrough bleeding which 
is often seen when women use artificial hormones after menopause and the 
hormones go slightly out of balance. This is not a normal menstrual cycle." 

I had always hated the mess and the pain of my periods as much as any woman, 
but after the cancer and finding that I was sterile I missed them. I suppose 
I had hoped in the back of my mind that the process would somehow reverse 
itself and I would be healed of all my ailments. At least that was what I had 
been praying for at Mass all these months. If God could see fit to cure me of 
one malady, why not another? It wasn't that I was suffering from baby-hunger 
per se, but I was suffering from not being able to make the choice between 
reproducing or not. You can't create multiple universes by exercising free 
will if there are no choices to be made. So once I had been abducted I had 
killed all the potential childbearing Dana Scullys and now I had to face more 
dead children with what were presumably my genes. All my options were 
postmortem. 

"Oh," I summarized. 

"I think that you ought to consider the artificial hormones I suggested at 
your last appointment. You could be a candidate for early onset menopause. 
Considering the fact that you have ceased menstruating, you virtually are in 
a menopausal state. What we would like to curtail with the hormones are any 
of the unpleasant side effects from an uneven hormone production -- excess 
facial hair, lowering of the voice and suchlike." 

You're such a boy, Jack had said all those years ago. 

"Also the risk of osteoporosis." 

How inconvenient to break a hip falling down the stairs while chasing a 
suspect.  Skinner would be so pissed. 

"Let me think about it," I said. 

The Razor's Edge was four blocks away from the medical center and I had 
gotten pretty familiar with the frozen margaritas when I had been undergoing 
testing to determine the causes of my infertility.  The Edge made a great 
tart margarita with top-shelf tequila, fresh lime juice, and kosher salt 
thick enough to melt ice on sidewalks or psyches.  The first margarita went 
down with the sharp bitterness of love while I watched the late breaking 
international news on CNN on the TV beyond the bar.  Not unusually, there was 
something horrible going on in Asia where people were dropping like 
proverbial flies from some upper respiratory ailment, which had apparently 
come from birds.  I watched the glossy heads of the news announcers smile 
with pity while they announced the death tolls. 

The murder in Arlington hadn't made anything more important than the police 
blotter in the local rag; the department had seen to that. 

The second margarita was as good as the first, better possibly. 

On the TV, the bodies were piled like autumn leaves as inadequately gloved 
and gowned workers shoveled lime on the dead with a careless disregard 
usually not seen on American television. 

"Ah man, why did they have to show that!" the man next to me grumbled. 

I looked over; he was Asian, in his mid-thirties and had lines of tiredness 
around his eyes, behind his glasses. He was also wearing a scrub shirt from 
the hospital and had blood splatters on his sneakers. 

"Sorry," I said. 

He took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, "I'm having a bad day." 

"Join the club." 

A small smile crossed his face. 

"Edwin Kim," he said, "Eddie," and my brain slowly processed that as an 
introduction.  

"There's a lot of that going on. Those people in wherever --" he gestured at 
the TV -- "are having a worse day than we are." 

That was debatable. Whatever pain they were going through was over. The 
uncertainty was past, no more branching timelines for them. 

I could have left then, walked out and hailed a cab and the cab could have 
taken me to the airport for a new life. Instead I sat there like a dead thing 
and pushed my empty glass forward to the bartender for a refill. The tequila 
was racing through my blood like a Formula One racecar and I could hear the 
buzzing of the motor in my head. 

"But here I am drinking margaritas at noon on Tuesday because I've been 
losing patients." 

"What did they have?" 

"Pneumonia." 

"Viral or bacterial?" I asked and he gave me a look, "I was pre-med in 
college," I said and it was true if misleading. 

"Non-AIDS gram-positive pneumonia. They did not respond to standard 
antibiotics. Adults and children with highly-resistant pathogens who crash 
after about three days." 

"Sounds like the epidemic on the news." 

"I ran tests to isolate the pathogen and nothing was detected in 
bronchoscopy, transtracheal aspiration, or lung puncture. I called the CDC 
and got a canned message about flu shots. I fucking hate this town." 

He slammed his glass down on the bar and the margarita sloshed over his 
knuckles. 

The bartender refilled our glasses with another round of frozen oblivion. The 
cold stung my nose and the salt worked with the tart and melted on my tongue. 
Two more of these and I was going to think that I could climb the Washington 
Monument, which might do more to take my mind off of things. I could be on 
the Fox six o'clock news, reinventing government with my buddies Smith and 
Wesson. I looked over at Edwin Kim and wondered what it would be like to lose 
a patient or two. My patients were always dead before I got to them and my 
cases were mostly about the dead. When I walked into a situation, it was 
already over. The same way that most of my life was already over. 

"What's your pain?" he asked. 

"Life," I said and shrugged. 

"That's enigmatic," he said and gave a little smile. 

"That's been said about me before." 

"What's your name?" 

"Samantha Mulder." 

I don't know why I said that. 

At my weight, which was at the low end of my ideal range, two drinks were 
really my limit. I had five.  

After the third drink, Edwin Kim was starting to look like a double-chocolate 
muffin after six weeks of dieting, and when he put his hand over mine on the 
bar top, I wondered if the rest of his body was as neat and cleanly muscular 
as his hands. The mutual buzz of depression and alcohol moved from his 
fingers to mine like an electrical current through copper wire. When I came 
back from the bathroom, Eddie was standing next to the to barstool and 
looking at his shoes. 

"Samantha," he said and I almost didn't react to the name, "I don't usually 
--" 

"Me either." 

He kissed me then, outside the kitchen door of the bar, and although I shut 
my eyes and exhaled, nothing happened. 

Damn Mulder. 

"I can't," I said. Whether it was fate or just one of many possible outcomes 
I don't know, though I did not feel that I had any choice.

He looked even sadder than before. 

"At least let me buy you another drink," he said. 

It seemed the least that I could do. 

The sun was setting when I finally left the bar. I was very drunk when the 
cab pulled up at the curb. 

"Hegel Place, Alexandria," was all I said and looked out the window. 

Passover hadn't passed over the Rothstein house, or me either. 

end 3/25

Tikkun Olam 4/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com

Rosencrantz: Well, there are only two of us. Is that enough?  
Player: For an audience, disappointing. For voyeurs, about average.   

I fled from the Gunmen and the adventures of Rex and Samantha who never 
stayed hurt, at least not for long, and who forgot the past with each new 
issue. I was so desperate to get to my apartment that I didn't even take the 
time to write a nasty note to the person who'd parked in my space.  

Getting the door open and staggering inside was as much of an accomplishment 
as laying a girl for the first time. I'm not as much of a slob as Scully 
thinks; I rolled my tie up (it was a Ferragamo, after all) and put it away in 
the dresser. The jacket and shirt I just tossed aside. 

I didn't recognize the Native American wool blanket masquerading as a 
bedspread on my recently sex-christened bed. I examined it carefully but 
couldn't find any metallic objects embedded in the weave. It smelled like 
everything else, my sweat and a dash of Scully's private essence, as if it 
had been there for months.  

Maybe Scully had brought it over. Didn't Phoebe have a blanket like that? I 
had a Guinness-soused memory of sex under stars that involved a scratchy 
blanket. Losing my virginity had been an event worth commemorating, but I 
didn't recall any souvenirs. I checked the apartment for bugs, searching high 
and low in my T-shirt and dress pants and getting the pants ridiculously 
dirty by crawling on the floor to get under the furniture, but I didn't find 
anything except previously uncharted dust. 

The phone rang just as I gave up. 

Frohike's voice was music to my ears the way John Cage was, but I couldn't be 
picky.  

"Good news, Mulder." 

"You found Pamela Lee's private number." I leaned back on the couch, looking 
up at the ceiling as I spoke into the phone. I wondered who was spying on me 
lately, as the folks upstairs appeared to be recent Indian immigrants and I 
doubt they were part of the Master Plan. 

"No, but I did find an interview with Rob Rothstein in the back of one of the 
books. Issue twenty-four, the two-year anniversary issue. The interviewer's a 
real person, he inks for Dark Horse Comics, I made some calls and he denies 
knowing who Rothstein is, says the comic doesn't exist." 

Or exists just a universe or two to the left. "And what did he reveal in this 
ground-breaking interview?" 

"That his lift doesn't go to the top of the slope, basically." 

I scratched at my stomach, feeling like a stranger in my own skin, as the 
underwater feeling was back again. "I've got the psych degree, why don't you 
give me the data and I'll draw the hasty conclusions." 

I wondered if I had any decongestants. 

"He told the interviewer that he has no memory of his life before age 
thirteen, when he was found walking down a highway in New Jersey. The 
Rothsteins adopted him and he says they're the perfect parents even though he 
was a pretty fucked-up kid, always cutting school and getting into fights." 

I heard the key in the lock even as Frohike was talking, and I have to admit 
that I did pick up my gun. But when the door opened and Scully glided in I 
put the gun back on the coffee table. Like a ghost, she slipped past me and 
into the bathroom, and I heard the shower running. That was odd. 

Before I could think much more about it, Frohike dragged my attention away 
again. 

"He says he was in and out of trouble with the law, that he was locked up for 
stealing a car when a shrink encouraged him to draw out his troubles and 
pain." He sneezed, and then did something that probably involved a tissue and 
certainly was no better to listen to than to watch. Phlegm-fest over, Frohike 
continued. "He got a G.E.D., then went to college where he met his wife, the 
lovely and talented Dr. Dana, and he put her through med school. Surprisingly 
enough, she didn't dump him for next year's model when she was through. D'you 
ever think that women are just superior to men? Anyhow, he says that Dana's 
the model for Sam the cute little Fibbie." 

I'll just bet she is, I thought. 

"Does he have any idea where he really came from?" 

"Interestingly enough, he underwent regression therapy a few years back. He 
recovered some memories of being abducted from his bed and experimented on by 
sinister gray forms. The interviewer asks 'Aliens?' and he says, 'we're all 
aliens, aren't we?" 

My head was pounding with the distant roar of water against the shower 
curtain.  

"Listen, Mulder, I gotta get back to my MUD. You know me and the boys aren't 
into this alien abduction shit, but if he's involved in a sinister government 
plot to control the minds of the counterculture, let us know." 

I grunted into the dial tone and clicked the remote. 

The television was choking out canned laughter and stupidity again; a woman 
with short blonde hair was wearing a sari at some stuffy society function, 
upsetting the country club types who reminded me somewhat of my parents. I 
wasn't sure exactly what was going on but the TV audience thought it was 
funnier than a rubber crutch. The water in the shower finally shut off and a 
few moments later, the door opened and Scully wafted out wrapped in the 
shredded remains of my bathrobe with her clothes bundled under her arm. While 
I watched, she went into the bedroom and came out without her bundle of 
clothes, combing her wet hair. 

"What are you watching?" she asked and slid onto the sofa next to me. 

"Don't know," I admitted. 

This was unusually domestic of her, with her feet stuck under my thigh and 
the wet hair sticking to the sides of her face. The next thing I knew, she'd 
be making popcorn and sending me out to the video store to rent some fluffy 
date movie like Say Anything. Or even worse, a costume drama where all the 
characters had British accents and no one got laid like Howard's End, or a 
tearjerker like The English Patient. The woman dies tragically and alone 
because of the man's dubious allegiances. I get enough of that at work, 
thanks.  

I could feel the warmth of Scully's body soaking through me like sun through 
glass. All I could think of was the way that a cat lies on its back and 
entices you to rub its belly simply so it can have the pleasure of digging 
claws and fangs into your hand. I leaned against the arm of the sofa and 
looked at her for some kind of sign as to what her interior weather forecast 
was. However, the radar had gone down like Monica Lewinsky and I stared at 
her like a man staring at a sky that could mean tornadoes or spring rain. 

Regarding the television for a few minutes, she wiggled her toes under my leg 
and stared at the flickering idiot box as though the answers to all the great 
questions of the universe were written on the blonde woman's very tight, 
cropped t-shirt. They weren't, I'd already checked.  

"I think this is Dharma and Greg." 

Trash television was usually only for the nights in hotels when we were too 
tired or too sick of each other to screw, and we'd vegetate in front of the 
television in our separate hotel rooms. Both of us looked at the bright faces 
of the asinine characters for distraction from the horror we spent the day 
chasing. 

"She's very tall," Scully added a moment later when the blonde wrapped her 
arms around the man's neck without having to climb on a stepladder. I began 
to suspect she'd been drinking. Scully generally didn't like to acknowledge 
that taller women existed. I think she believes that if she keeps her spine 
straight enough on top of those three-inch heels we'll all believe that she's 
really tall enough to ride on a roller coaster unaccompanied. 

Aided by the blonde's superior height, the couple was kissing. Whatever faux 
pas she had committed was forgiven and they all lived happily ever after in 
thirty minutes with commercial breaks. 

"You were right, Mulder, Dana Rothstein appears from all objective indicia 
except fertility to be identical to me." 

The first four words shocked and disturbed me more than the rest of the 
sentence. "Scully?" 

"I'm fine, Mulder." That was more of a non sequitur than usual, and I would 
have investigated further had she not reversed positions on the couch so that 
her nose pressed into my stomach and I could feel her hot wet breath through 
the cotton of my undershirt. Wet tongue through the knit cotton, the shirt 
pulled out of my pants with her teeth and licked an arrow down towards my 
nether regions. She'd bite off the button, gnaw through the fly, so I reached 
down to help her out. I saved the pants but got a good set of Scully's dental 
impressions on my hand for my trouble. She didn't break the skin; she only 
did it to get the adrenaline running. 

And run it did. 

I put my hand on her neck as she drew my zipper down with her teeth. Until 
then, I'd only read about that in Letters to Penthouse, but I'm here to 
testify that it can be done. I raised my hips and we got my pants and boxers 
off, leaving me rather pathetically clad in an undershirt and socks, but then 
she brought her mouth down on me like a tropical storm and it hardly 
mattered. Soft finger pads teased the helpless skin on my balls, making my 
skin creep with sensation. 

Oh yeah, just like that. . . 

The softness of her hair against the top of my thigh was like a painter's 
brush sweeping over canvas. She the artist was tracing me with her tongue, 
sucking each of my balls in her mouth, lapping at my inner thighs, and 
returning to work on the protruding flesh where most of my consciousness was 
centered. I stroked my hand through the burning sheaf of her hair and mumbled 
that she was beautiful, wonderful, amazing, the most incredible woman in the 
world in incoherent rambling. 

When I was entirely helpless, thrusting up despite my attempts not to choke 
her, she pulled away and all I could do was stare while she divested herself 
of my bathrobe. Already smelling of me, she climbed onto my lap to lower 
herself down like a girl visiting a very pornographic Santa. My cock slid 
home into the tight, hot chamber of her cunt like a bolt clicking into a 
lock. With her legs wrapped around my waist and my mouth roving her breasts, 
we rocked back and forth for an eternity. I was gliding through the hot water 
of her, moving smoothly from one shade of fuck to another, her skin wet suede 
under my hands, my mouth. Her fingers dug valleys into my shoulders and the 
look on her face almost made my dick shrivel. Wild anger, acidic intensity, 
and something as desolate as a whitened skull. Her tongue slipped into my ear 
and I could feel the breaking drumbeats of her around my cock and in my arms. 
I felt her clench and shudder with the force of her climax, her spine bending 
backwards until the bright coral tips of her breasts brushed my nose and her 
hair swept over the crumb-laden expanse of the coffee table. Then I took 
over, turning and pushing her into the couch so that we could fuck like 
teenage lovers on a babysitting gig.  

Her breath, when I tasted it, had enough tequila in it to send an alcoholic 
running for his one-day chip again. 

"What the hell have you been up to?" 

"Shut up and fuck me," she hissed. 

I jerked my head back from her lips painted with bitter limes. 

"Scully --" 

Fingers in my hair pulled, making me yelp in surprised pain, and the nails of 
her other hand scratched the cleft of my ass like broken glass and it hurt, 
damnit. 

"Knock it off," I warned and grabbed at the hurtful hand behind me. 

"Fuck me hard. What's the matter? Too fucking scared?" Her lips thinned with 
contempt and her voice was as hard and bitter as the limes on her lips. 

"Stop it. I mean it, Scully." 

"I've seen corpses with stiffer dicks than you." 

Ugly, ugly hard thoughts bubbling like crude oil behind the cobalt blue 
isinglass of her eyes. I took a deep breath even as my cock twitched with 
interest inside her. 

"You're drunk." 

Scully's got a pretty good left hook and the right side of my face went numb 
and then burned like hell as I realized she'd laid her fist on me like Tyson. 
I blinked pain tears out of my eyes and looked down at her where her hair 
flowed like Greek fire on the blackness of the couch. 

"Bitch," I choked. 

"Asshole." Breathing hard, her breasts hitching and jiggling liquid 
underneath me, she moaned when I slammed into her as viciously as I could, 
again and again, while she stretched her hands up above her on the couch, 
caught in invisible bonds. Boiling honey, tight, killingly clenched around me 
as I gave it to her with all the fury and lust of the insulted male ego.  

Her legs stretched open to the breaking point, hard muscles and angles of her 
meager frame underneath me, I wanted to crush her like a pile of dry sticks 
covered in silk, a biplane, a kite, a Chinese lantern. I reached down and 
found her clit with my shaking fingers and she started and came again like a 
door slamming, shutting me out of her head by letting me into her body. But I 
was ready to go on forever, hard as steel and unfeeling as any of the 
specialty store dildoes she must use when I wasn't around. I flipped the limp 
armful of wet laundry that made up her body over and shoved into her again 
while her breasts crushed into the back of the sofa and I knelt on the seat. 
Her forehead thudded against the sofa while I jackhammered into her. I 
pinched her clit again and all she could do was moan into the leather. 
Infuriated, I drew back and slammed into her again while I landed an 
open-handed slap on one white globe of her ass. She screamed into the sofa 
back, closing down on me like a wolf trap, the hard shock of her climax 
running electric through me and triggering my own. My teeth closed over her 
shoulder and I tasted the coppery flavor of blood. She moaned and went liquid 
underneath. I came and came and came, silver tracer bullets dancing through 
my vision as I emptied my anger into her. 

When the shaking was over, I pulled her into my arms and made my 
rubber-legged and bare-assed way into the bedroom, burdened with her slight 
weight. Her skin was clammy and feverish. 

"I'm sorry," she mumbled into my hateful chest when we had bundled under the 
covers. 

"It's okay," I muttered as automatically as I breathed and with about that 
much thought. 

Despising myself, I watched the shadows of the leaves dance on the ceiling. 

End 4/25

Tikkun Olam 5/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com

Player: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.  
Guildenstern: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for 
all we know it isn't even true. 

 
When I was a child, my parents had a chair that they had bought when they 
were in Japan, before I was born. The seat cushion was stuffed with straw and 
sawdust. Bill hit me over the head with the pillow and it broke, filling my 
mouth, and nose with dirty old straw and sawdust. I cried then, I cried again 
when Bill blamed me, and I cried still more when Dad hit me with his belt for 
ruining the chair. I tasted the dirty straw and the tears when I woke up. I 
was sweltering hot, crushed, and gasping for breath. Mulder was plastered to 
my back like a postage stamp affixed with saliva. I fought out from 
underneath his arm, found some cold sheet space and fell asleep again. 

Some time later, I swam out of a headachy morass and looked around. One of 
Mulder's suits hung like a dead man from the closet door and the 
bloody-fingered dawn flared out of the dirty windowpanes and burned holes 
into my brain. I wanted to crawl back underneath the smelly sheet and sleep 
for a decade, but there were calls to make and bad guys to put in jail. 
Mulder continued to snore next to me, his mouth hanging slackly open as 
though he had been the one drinking the night before and not me. I was sore, 
my arms, legs, back, neck muscles, and my entire groin. I worried about 
cystitis. Groaning, I pulled myself out of the bed and fumbled around for 
something to wear. I ended up wrapping myself in the crocheted blanket that 
had fallen to the floor during the night and took my headachy self out into 
the kitchen for the first caffeine jolt of the day. The coffee was thin and 
weak but it was better than nothing. By the time that Mulder finally got out 
of bed and stumbled into the kitchen I was three cups into the day. He 
stumbled over to the coffee maker and poured himself a cup, looking at me 
over the rim of his mug. 

"Hey --" he said, adjusting his boxer shorts. Ugly shorts with the Yankees 
logo on them, his legs sticking out like a cartoon chicken deprived of its 
feathers. That and the bed-head made him singularly unappealing. These were 
the moments when I wished I had never slept with him. 

"You know we have a meeting at nine today. Just a status report for the local 
cops on the Rothstein murders." 

"What is the status of the Rothstein case?" he asked and managed to sound 
more smug than anyone has any right to in the morning. 

"Unsolved." I took a deep breath. "And no explanation why someone would -- 
would want to make a duplicate of me and then kill her and her children." I 
didn't mention that Mulder's prints had covered the house like they had 
covered my body last night. "I want to issue a statement that Robert is 
wanted in conjunction to the murders of his wife and children. I want to name 
him as the main suspect." 

"Don't you think that you might want to have some facts to back up your 
accusation?" Mulder asked and filled his coffee mug again. 

"Something other than the sketchbooks that you found? As if that isn't some 
kind of pathology in and of itself?" 

"It's -- when did I tell you about the sketchbooks?" 

"Last night? When you told me what Frohike said about Robert's not-so-comic 
proclivities?" That was disturbing, Mulder getting sucked so far into the 
case that he couldn't keep track of his own communications. "Do you not agree 
that those sketchbooks are the sign of a profoundly disturbed mind?" I asked. 

"Cry for help. How would you or I look if someone read our journals?" 

I slammed the coffee mug on the table. "I'm going to take a shower." 

Mulder has this amazing ability to get my temper from zero to sixty faster 
than a Porsche. I should have stopped and pointed out that we needed to talk 
to Robert as he was our only potentially living source of information. 
Instead, I stomped off to the bathroom to wash my body as if I could wash it 
all out of my head as well.  

In the bathroom mirror, which needed to be cleaned, I looked like hell. There 
were dark shadows underneath my eyes, my hair was in rats, and my mouth was 
red and swollen. Feeling like something death had abandoned as not worth the 
bother, I rinsed my face with cold water and it didn't improve much. The area 
between my legs felt like I had been having sex with a pneumatic drill, and 
it was no one's fault but my own. I ran lukewarm water in the shower and 
stepped under the anemic flow.  

Okay, we weren't going to talk about what had happened the night before. Par 
for the course: we were sleeping together but not really. I didn't want to 
talk about it. I didn't want to talk about how I had wanted him to punch me, 
to crush out the memory of the day before.  

The fact was that I had been one molecule away from fucking a man I picked up 
in a bar. Instead of going through with it I fled back to Mulder for my 
penance. Sex with Mulder should have made me feel dirty and guilty according 
to Father McHugh, but I really didn't feel bad about it. The thought of sex 
with the nice young doctor made me feel filthy and guilty as hell. Funny, my 
mother would have been so happy if I had brought Dr. Kim home rather than 
Mulder, she might even have gotten over the fact that he was Asian. 

I shampooed my hair and washed all my sore skin. 

     I'm gonna' wash that man right out of my hair       And send him on his 
way . . . 

Dressed in the suit from the day before and a clean shirt that I had stashed 
at Mulder's apartment for just such an emergency, I sat at the kitchen table 
where the light was better and put on my make-up. Mulder went into the 
bathroom for his own shower, and he came out again with his hair in a wet 
mess around his face. 

"What did you do with your hair?" 

I reached up and touched the wet strands of my French braid. I didn't have a 
curling iron or a hairdryer at Mulder's so this was the only convenient way 
of looking professional under the circumstances. If I kept appliances at his 
place that would make it official; without supplies, it was just a series of 
one-night stands. So, whenever I ended up at his place and had to work in the 
morning, I ended up with a braid. Half the FBI must have figured out that a 
Scully with her hair in a plait was a Scully who had gotten laid the night 
before. 

"Five years and you never notice my hair and now you say something." 

Men. 

 ****

The phone rang. I considered leaving it alone, but hope springs eternal in 
the breast of Fox Mulder. 

"Mulder." 

"Ah, I'm trying to reach Samantha Mulder?" 

They say rage is red but I saw yellow, molten metal that should have melted 
the receiver in my hand. "Who are you and what are you trying to prove?" 

"Um, my name is Eddie Kim, Dr. Kim, you're the only Mulder in the Metro area 
and I was hoping you'd know where I could reach Samantha." 

"Fuck off," I rejoined and slammed the phone down. Then I decided to go for a 
run to work off some of the incredible anger that had risen in me like a 
tsunami in a bad disaster film. 

I should have told him that he had the wrong girl, I thought as I laced up. 
It's Scully who goes for the Eds of the world. 

Runner's high is about the best feeling I get in my life, so I pursue it 
carefully. I don't want to be laid up with shin splints or a bum knee, and I 
always pace myself. 

This time I didn't pace myself. I wasn't even sure where I was going; I 
passed streets whose names I didn't recognize as I ran into the spring sun. 
There were too many foreign things in my everyday world for my liking. Ever 
since this case started. 

"Mulder, are you suggesting that there are 'eddies in the space-time 
continuum' at work?" I knew it wasn't really Scully's voice in my head I 
heard because Scully couldn't keep up with me without panting. 

I ran and apartment buildings turned to stores turned to houses. Eventually 
the lawns started to increase in size and I was in suburban Virginia in all 
its glory. I was going to have to find a cab; there was no way I could make 
it back to my apartment in time to get dressed and make the meeting. With 
that thought, my legs gave out, and I staggered like a man just cured of 
paralysis by a faith healer over to a bench that was conveniently waiting to 
catch me. I could feel the bruises being born as I thudded down. 

The traffic sounded a hundred miles away. 

Shaking my head like a wet dog to get rid of some of the sweat, I observed my 
surroundings. I'd run out of energy in a semi-public park, municipally 
maintained but private in practice because no urban riff-raff would ever come 
out here. Well-dressed children played on tire swings and super-safe plastic 
twisty slides, exchanging germs as they sneezed and spit on one another. At 
least five suspicious pairs of adult eyes watched me, the only male in the 
vicinity past puberty, with extreme paranoia. I couldn't blame them, but at 
my level of exhaustion the only thing I might be able to abduct would be a 
blade of grass, and even then the roots had a good chance of winning the 
struggle. 

I was soaked and dehydrated, and even in the warmish sun I was beginning to 
shiver now that I was no longer generating enough heat to offset the damp. 
Suddenly I noticed an exponential increase in the wariness of the women 
watching me watch the children. I turned my head with only as much difficulty 
as jacking a car off the ground, and I saw another scary man. 

"Robert Rothstein?" I asked as if this kind of thing happened every week, 
which it pretty much does. 

He kept staring at me. My head was buzzing but I think that it was just 
dizziness from letting my electrolytes get out of whack. He had a two-day 
growth of beard and looked like a Miami Vice extra in his stylish yet rumpled 
jogging outfit. 

I could remember owning that outfit, taking it out of the dryer and sorting 
it from the kids' jumpers, and Dana smiling as she swung the baby around and 
around, giving him his own carnival ride. I was so happy that even the 
spit-up stain on the suit that never came out was worth it.  

The memory snapped and spun away from me like a broken 8-track tape and I 
blinked at him, even more confused. 

"Robert," I said, taking in the weed-whacker brown hair, the eyes that now 
seemed more hazel than brown as they'd been in the photos, the straight nose 
and the mole on the left side of his cheek, "I think we need to talk." 

The gunshot split the difference between us, embedding itself in the bench 
with a crack like a spine breaking, and I rolled off and behind for some 
cover as I cursed my failure to bring a gun. It would have been hell on my 
back but so would getting shot. 

Screams raked through the air like tickertape as the nannies ran for the 
children or for cover, depending on their loyalties. The shooter's next 
bullet hit the top of the bench, spraying me with splinters, and then my ears 
popped as if I was leaving on a jet plane. The women and children were still 
screaming like slasher film victims but I felt the lack of danger.  

Blinking the sweat out of my eyes, I dared a look around the bench. Swings 
were swinging, empty of children, strollers and Big Wheels abandoned like a 
parent's nightmare of custody theft. There was a Harlequin, trampled on the 
ground, ten feet away. The lover's gleaming chest accused me as I searched 
for Robert. 

He was gone. 

When I looked I couldn't see the bullet mark on the bench.  I couldn't even 
be sure that he had ever been there. 

 ****

Mulder never showed up at the meeting with Lt. Gregor at the Rothsteins'. 
Since the Arlington police didn't know me, they had no idea how thin my 
functional veneer was. I drank half a gallon of burnt coffee and couldn't 
even work up the energy to be nauseous.  The cops treated me with respect and 
courtesy, even if they wouldn't let me into the house until Lt. Gregor 
arrived. I'd been treated worse. 

By Mulder. 

The minute I saw him again, I was going to pull each of his carefully-coiffed 
hairs out if his head and then spit on his bald and bleeding scalp before I 
castrated him with slow and painful thoroughness. A girl has to have things 
to look forward to. 

"Has anyone come forward to claim the bodies?" I asked Lieutenant Gregor when 
she finally appeared. 

"No," she said as she accepted the paperwork that officially designated 
Robert Rothstein as a wanted criminal, "But I'll refer anyone who comes 
forward to the FBI morgue." 

"Why would you do that?" I asked. 

"You had the bodies transferred, right? But you still have to fill out the 
transfer orders." 

My mouth opened and closed for a moment. 

"The bodies are not at the county coroner's office." 

"No, I assumed you had them moved." 

I had done no such thing. When I had left Easter Monday, the bodies were 
nestled all snug in their plastic wrap, waiting for the resurrection. Had 
Mulder ordered the bodies moved? It was possible, and even more so that he 
would not tell me. Another black mark on his already besmirched record, 
personal and professional. Whatever expression I had on my face must have 
been clearer than a DC street sign and Gregor's pale eyes flicked over me 
with some element of sisterhood -- another woman passed the shit detail by a 
man. 

"Do you have the transfer orders?" I asked and she looked into her file, 
producing a document that looked authentic enough. The agent's signature at 
the bottom was nearly unintelligible, and I didn't recognize the handwriting. 
The first name might have been 'Dana,' but the last could just as easily have 
been 'Mulder.' Will the real Mrs. Spooky please stand up? I glanced over to 
where Gregor was giving me the suspect once-over. "We may be encountering 
some official resistance to the investigation. Sometimes the crimes Agent 
Mulder and I investigate aren't supposed to be solved." 

"Where is Agent Mulder?" 

That was the question. 

"Agent Mulder is following another lead."  Gregor frowned but accepted my 
answer despite the fact that it stunk enough that even I could sense the 
odor. If you hate covering for him so much, Dana, why the hell do you do it?  
If I didn't, what would he need me for? 

Gregor and I walked into the house as if we owned it. The furniture was 
sturdy Ikea knockoffs with round edges to protect the children and large 
floral print to hide the stains. Toys congregated under the coffee table. 
Videos lay naked, their cases lost, their labels obscured by childish purple 
scribbles. It would have been homey if they hadn't all been dead. 

So many impertinent insights into a family's private life. Dead people have 
no rights.  We were looking for address books, email or letters that might 
lead us to Robert's friends, people who would take him in. 

"I'll check upstairs, you try the study," I suggested and headed for the 
staircase, not waiting for a reply. 

I checked the bedside tables in the master bedroom, then the dressers and 
even the closet. The only written material in the room was the latest Dean 
Koontz, on Robert's side of the bed. 

It had to be Robert's side because Dana wouldn't read Dean Koontz. 

Now why would I know -- 

There was a low rumbling sound from beneath my feet and the house shook like 
it was Baba Yaga's on chicken feet. I fell against the bed, bouncing up as I 
realized that there had been an explosion. 

Lt. Gregor, in the study, with the bomb. 

I ran into the hallway, where black smoke was curling up from the stairs like 
a night train leaving the station. I leapt down, three steps at a time. 
Through the living room and towards the study, where black gave way to the 
infinite colors of fire, creeping across the ceiling. The door was open but I 
couldn't see anything in all the smoke. 

This was foolhardy, I acknowledged as I stripped off my jacket and dashed 
into the kitchen to soak it with water. Breathing through the wet fabric 
wrapped around my nose and mouth, I crawled into the inferno that had been 
the study, searching for something alive. There had been cops outside -- 
where the hell were they? 

The room was hot as a magnifying glass focused on an ant and I could feel my 
forehead start to burn. Above me a pall of smoke and burning air filled the 
room and lines of fire sputtered to both sides of me. Blacker than cancerous 
lungs, bitter as regret, the air clawed at my face with heavy paws. 

Gregor was lying by the desk, collapsed like an old rag, hands and face burnt 
terribly. She must have triggered the device in her search. I grabbed her by 
the waist, choking as I overextended myself. Gasping through ruined Donna 
Karan, I dragged her over to the window -- the door was too far and the fire 
was already running through the house faster than I could -- and I struggled 
with the scorching-hot window sash, fumbling to open the latch and push it 
up. 

With a lurch the sticky window gave way and I smashed my face into the storm 
window. Fuck! It was spring, couldn't they have dewinterized already? I shook 
my head, bleeding onto the bubbling white paint. 

Groping through the smoke on the bookshelf by the window, I found a small, 
solid statuette -- the Thinker sitting on a toilet, there's no accounting for 
taste, and I didn't blame Dana for insisting it be hidden in the study.  

On my knees, I raised both hands over my head like the ape in 2001 and hurled 
the statute through the window.  

Crash! The smoke poured out as the fresh air was sucked in. The smoke was 
still in my lungs like hairballs twisting and slicing my innards, but I could 
see the rough spring light outside. I wrapped the arm of my jacket around my 
fist and cleared away the jagged window shards that ringed the window like a 
jack o'lantern's teeth. 

Turning back, my shoulder muscles groaning, I bent and gathered Gregor's limp 
body to me, hoisting her over the window ledge with a grunt that sucked 
poisoned air into my lungs. I choked and fell back to the floor, Gregor's 
legs still stuck inside the building like oversized Lincoln Logs. 

And then she was moving, pulled from outside. I pushed myself up, leaning 
through the window and coughing as the firefighters grabbed me. The world 
whirled and roared around me as the oxygen mask covered my face. I struggled, 
knowing that my smoke inhalation had been minimal, but they held me down and 
I stopped, looking back at the House from Another Dimension as it dissolved 
into flame and foam. 

end 5/25

Tikkun Olam 6/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com


Guildenstern: Syllogism the second: One, probability is a factor which 
operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a 
factor. Three, we are now within un-, sub- or supernatural forces. Discuss. 
Not too heatedly. 

I always keep an emergency twenty in my jogging suit. When I couldn't move my 
legs further I stopped in front of a 7-11 and bought bad coffee and worse hot 
dogs. My calves were beginning to spasm, so I also got a Post and sat down to 
read the Sunday Style Invitational. 

When I looked up again I was in a public park. 

For a while I thought that my lost time might be a symptom of MPD. The time 
just disappeared like I was an ATM and someone made a withdrawal.  But Dana 
didn't believe that MPD was a clinical entity and no one had ever seen me 
exhibit a different personality.  At least no one that I knew of.

The sun overhead suggested it was afternoon. Which afternoon? Children were 
playing and women were looking on. No dads, no singles with dogs. I felt 
nauseous with hunger. I doubted that it was still Sunday. 

Slowly, I got to my feet, sniffing at my arms to see how rank I was. Answer: 
pretty rank. Nannies and mothers, perhaps smelling me, looked me over in 
horror, prepared to snatch their vulnerable darlings away from me. 

Little did they know. 

It wasn't me who killed them, I insisted to the voices in my head. I had no 
control. I should go to the police and give myself up, get help. 

I couldn't explain the deaths. Deaths, multiple -- whoever said that after 
the first death there is no other never lost a child, I thought, and felt the 
tears leak down my face like condensation in the muggy air. If the deaths 
came from the same broken place in me as the missing time, then why did I 
remember it? And what had I done during my earlier blank periods? Waking up 
with no gas in the car and scratches on my legs. Waking up in the basement 
with another book of drawings or a new storyboard. Waking up a prune in a 
shower long gone ice cold. 

What had I been doing before I killed everyone I loved? 

I stumbled towards a bench, but then the bench wasn't empty anymore as I 
approached. Flickering like a bad television image, the man turned to me. His 
eyes widened in shock. He looked like I always wanted to when I was growing 
up--tall, well-muscled, sleek like an otter. His expensively messy haircut 
framed his tired face. 

If he'd had a suit and a badge he would have been Rex. 

"Robert Rothstein?" my fictional creation asked. 

I just stared. 

"We need to talk," he said and disappeared as if he'd been flicked off. There 
was a loud noise in the distance and I whipped my head around, seeking the 
source, but there was nothing. 

Tripping over my own feet, I reached the empty bench and fell onto it. 

I want my life back, I thought. 

The sun smiled down on me. 

 ****

It had felt like such a long day that I was shocked that the sun was still 
high in the sky, and the day was only going to stretch asymptotically into 
infinity when I talked to Mulder. I know my duty, though, and I sat down on 
the coffee table, pushing junk mail out of the way to clear myself some 
space, so that I could look down at Mulder's head.  He was lying like a Roman 
potentate splayed across his couch. Only Roman potentates were fat and happy 
and Mulder was neither. 

"Where the fuck where you?" 

I liked watching his eyes close shut between me and his thoughts. It showed 
that I mattered, somehow. 

"I saw Robert. I went for a run and I saw Robert." 

I clenched the side of the coffee table. "What happened?" 

Mulder turned his head to show his distressed profile. "I tried to talk to 
him and he disappeared. Somebody shot at us." Mulder's not stable, I know 
this, but hallucinations were above and beyond the call of Spooky. I reached 
out, like a member of the bomb squad trying not to set off a proximity 
grenade, and put a hand on his knee as I suppressed a hacking cough. 

I needed him participating in consensus reality for a while. "Did you have 
the bodies moved from the county morgue?" 

He opened his eyes and focused on me, confused. "Why would I do that?" 

"If you didn't, someone else did. The bodies are gone. Lieutenant Gregor was 
under the impression that I had them moved. Is there any reason why she would 
think that?" 

"I didn't do anything, it must be someone in the government who wants this 
kept quiet ... She?" 

"Shit, Mulder, your powers of observation are shot to hell." He hadn't 
noticed my post-fire suit change, but usually he could be counted on to 
notice nubile women. 

He blinked at me a few times and collapsed a little further into the sofa. I 
noticed that he had more of Robert's sketchbooks piled around him like porn 
mags. And they were pornographic, serial killer porn with enough rape and 
torture to get Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and Ted Bundy through a serious 
circle jerk. And Mulder.  Let's not forget that little factoid.

"What's so important about those notebooks?" 

He shrugged into tired leather. "The notebooks are a pipeline into his mind. 
What happened to make him the way he is. If there is alien involvement, it 
could explain the otherwise inexplicable events surrounding that very solid 
nonexistent house and the connection to you." 

That's right, I still hadn't told him about his own fingerprints scattered 
like breadcrumbs over the house. He didn't really need to know that until all 
his processors were cycling properly again.  

"So you think, what, that the psychic energy released by the slaying of his 
pregnant wife and three children allowed Robert to cross the space-time 
barrier just to complicate our lives?" 

Blinking, he looked at me as though he were a cat and I was holding out an 
orange. 

"What have you been doing?" he asked in a weak, scratchy voice. 

"*I* went to the meeting with the Arlington Police. We were going to search 
the house again but an incendiary device ripped through the first floor, 
destroying most of the contents before the fire was put out. Gregor is in 
stable condition at the hospital and she will probably regain most of the use 
of her hands." 

"Were you --" he sat up and reached for me, so I leaned back. 

"I'm fine, Mulder. I checked various aspects of Robert's story. I spoke with 
social services agencies throughout New Jersey, and I even tracked down most 
of the caseworkers who were there in the period from 1973 to 1975. They have 
no record of an amnesiac boy of about thirteen years appearing during that 
time. Also, there's no record of a nine or ten year old girl appearing under 
similar circumstances." 

"What are you saying?" He was already distracted from the topic of the fire.  
Mulder's enthusiasms are many and his ability to give me his undivided 
attention is, at best, limited. 

I suppose I was really saying 'I'm sorry.' "Whatever ... whatever you may 
believe happened to Robert ... the parallels aren't exact." Or maybe the same 
thing had happened to Samantha in our reality and she'd been discovered 
walking down that highway by the unfriendly neighborhood pedophile, but I 
could hardly say that. 

Mulder surged off of the couch and wrapped his arms around my waist. I could 
feel his sobs shudder through his body as he pressed his face into my lap. I 
rubbed his shoulders, feeling helpless and out of sorts. I am not so devoid 
of self-knowledge as to fail to understand that I require a certain, not 
weakness, exactly, but need from Mulder. It is important to me that he is 
flexible and I am unbending. Still, I'm uncomfortable with the emotions that 
flow from him like foam from an over-boiling saucepan. I think Jack was 
trying to flatter me when he said "You're such a boy," and in a way it's 
true. Of course in retrospect the homoeroticism implicit in that statement 
sheds some light on his overidentification with Warren Dupre. But, as I was 
saying, excessive emotion is a lot like unpleasant body odor to me, which I 
imagine was why I was thinking of Jack instead of Mulder who was present in 
my arms and rapidly dampening my blue suit. 

When he started pulling at my clothes, I knew who I was dealing with. And 
thank God for that, might I add. Jack, though a great instructor, was a lousy 
lay. 

He was clumsy with the buttons on my jacket but once he'd freed me of the 
burden of my formal attire he was as gentle as a butterfly collector, his 
fingers skittering against my skin as if he were afraid to bruise me. A good 
thing too as I would have dissolved into swirls of smoky coughs otherwise. 

Underneath the tight grayness of his t-shirt, his muscles moved like animals, 
hard and hot under my touch. He still smelled like his run, like sweat, and 
his shirt was sticky with half-dried perspiration. Under my face, his jaw was 
rough with stubble, hands shaking when they moved over my breasts, up my neck 
and into my hair. 

"Your hair is different," he whispered and his fingers worked into the French 
twist that was rapidly sliding into an untidy mess onto my shoulders. I ran 
my hand down the hot slope of his neck, in the soft place below the razored 
line of his haircut, the vulnerable vertebrae standing out like jewels in the 
golden setting of his skin. 

His nose pressed between my breasts and his arms circled my waist, Robert's 
notebooks sliding to the floor between our feet. With his face pressed into 
my tired skin, I could feel the after-five shadow of his beard brush like a 
cat's tongue. I smelled his shampoo and his hair so soft underneath my face 
while he buried his face deeper into my chest as though he were trying to 
crawl inside me. Hands roved over my ass, squeezing almost to the point of 
pain.   

The tenderness and the need burned off like morning fog and he was ripping at 
my blouse, as clumsy as a chimpanzee undressing a doll. I could see the light 
of the sunset shimmer on his teeth. Underneath him, pressed into the coffee 
table with his legs prying mine open and the center seam of my skirt 
screaming in protest, I caught my breath and let the firewall down. He fought 
my pantyhose off as though they were evil and the hard, dead skin of his 
cuticles scraped down my stinging legs. While his pelvis smashed me into the 
oak veneer, he wrapped his fingers in my hair and pulled my head sideways, 
hurting me, but I moaned when his teeth sliced into my neck, his free hand 
crushing my breast between us. 

So good to scour, burn, break away, break free, obliterate, and destroy. 

The cotton of his shirt was tight over the cable muscles of his back and 
hissed when my nails scratched down the soft fabric. My blouse wadded up 
under my arms and my bra was hanging loose as a forgotten Post It while he 
suckled and bit at my nipples. The pain was so good and so clean that I 
arched my back against the table and whined for more. Fingers, hard and dry, 
circumvented my panties, and a sharp pinch to my clit made me squeal before 
he pressed his twined fingers up and into me. I shut my eyes and watched the 
blood flow through my eyelids while he drew his fingers in and out, pressing 
hard on all the right places and making me shudder while the inner springs of 
my nervous system wound tighter and tighter. His thumb ground down against my 
clit and I jerked upright with the silver razor shock that raced through me, 
our foreheads smacked together and I saw stars even as I was coming. 

He didn't bother to remove my skirt or his sweatpants, just pushed up and 
shoved into me with the force I'd wanted the night before. God, all I wanted 
was ten minutes outside my head . . . More notebooks rained onto the floor. I 
gripped the sides of the table, feeling him fill me, stretching and pressing. 
Sawing in and out, fine tuned machine, autobahn, gears moving, shifting, fuel 
injected, pistons, chambers firing, well-oiled, smooth, hot, breaking a sweat 
again over his shoulders, at the hairline. Each rib, each tendon, sinew, 
muscle, bone in wrapped steel wire harmony, in and out and his breath in my 
ear, hot, catching, hitched passion need and --  

And the world came down around me, gray dustclouds of orgasm sucking the air 
from my lungs and shaking my foundations apart. His fingers cut through the 
flesh at my hips, pulled me back as the slapping of his flesh into mine 
reached his breaking point.  He came with a surprised noise and shuddered to 
a halt inside me, vapor-locked. 

We lay, gasping, on the creaking coffee table for several minutes, until he 
pulled me up and we staggered like friendly drunks into his bedroom and 
collapsed into the bed in roughly the same position we'd been in on the 
table.  

I could feel the words trying to escape his chest but for some reason he 
caught them and just pulled me closer. I let him hold me, though my lungs 
ached. Soon enough he'd drift off and then I could get going. 

 ****

Surprise of surprises, I woke up alone. Scully had vanished. She claimed that 
she couldn't sleep with me, and I wondered what exactly what she meant by 
that. I pulled myself out of bed, slouched into the living room, and tripped 
over the sofa. For some reason, Scully must have seen fit to rearrange the 
furniture, which I didn't understand in the least. But my desk was against 
the wall where the sofa was supposed to be and the sofa had its back to the 
windows where the desk should have been. All my scattered books had been put 
away and there were plants strewn about the place. Plants? I never had plants 
before. I could have killed paintings of plants. My apartment was a 
concentration camp for plants. Bringing a plant into my apartment was the 
equivalent of a boxcar pulling up to the village in the middle of the night. 
Plants howled in agony when they saw me come into a store, and even cut 
flowers were nervous, yelling "Dead Plant Walking" to their compatriots I 
carried out the door. 

My fish tank was gone.  

Naked, I sat on the sofa. 

Had I gone through some kind of a fugue state? 

The clock on the VCR indicated that it was barely after ten, so even taking 
into account that I had fallen asleep after Scully had left, there really 
wasn't enough time for less than an army of aliens to come into my apartment 
and rearrange all my furniture. Aliens may be wily in the extreme, but 
furniture-moving wasn't their usual MO. 

Maybe something had happened and I didn't remember. Ever since I'd let Dr. 
Goldstein frappe my brain, I'd been plagued with tiny glitches in memory. I'd 
forget conversations with Scully, forget where I left my car keys, which was 
all easy enough to write off to preoccupation or incipient senility. But this 
furniture-moving was different. That, coupled with the murders of the 
Rothstein family and Robert doing his disappearing act in the park. Or had I 
talked to Robert and forgotten it? 

Was I suffering from artificially-induced amnesia? And how would I find out 
if I couldn't remember forgetting? 

Okay, corpses that suddenly appeared and as suddenly departed, a killer, 
comic books with my cartoonish career history, Scully's hairdo, a sudden sex 
change in a Arlington detective, and the names changed on street signs in 
Alexandria, all that I could take. But my furniture had been moved, my 
apartment had been raped. The lines of dust were thick on the floor. The 
squares of un-faded paint on the walls indicated that the prints had been 
there for an extended period of time. Unless the set dressers had been up to 
their old tricks, it wasn't my apartment. It was something like what another 
Fox Mulder would have done with his apartment, in a world where Scully had 
hair down past her shoulders and wore pink pearl nail polish. Another Mulder 
in another universe. 

It was time to stop the unaided speculation and get some help speculating. 

All I need is a fast connection and a good search engine to steer her by. 
Once I got past all the New Age crap about regressing to your moment of birth 
(thank you, no; once was enough), I started finding websites with academic 
addresses. There was no small amount of research being done in various 
thoroughbred universities in the US and Canada.  

According to a physicist at Lawrence Livermore, au courant parallel universe 
theory suggested that, if some "large discontinuous event" occurred that 
brought material manifestations of a parallel reality into this zip code, the 
incursion was unlikely to knit itself back up. God may not play dice with the 
universes, but He's no seamstress either. Theory suggested that the people 
closest to the event would experience "reality disruptions" which sounded 
cool, like ripples in a pond, but was disconcerting in practice. What made 
the Fox Mulder next door so different that he would rearrange his furniture? 

So, it was possible that I remembered things being different because in the 
world I was used to, they were. The physicist speculated that consciousness 
might be able to go perpendicular to the boundaries of reality more easily 
than matter could. Possibly, she theorized, when breaches in the watertight 
compartments in God's ageless and eternal mind occurred, spirit could be 
freed to travel like tourists doing the two-week, ten-city European tour. 

When the Rothsteins' house had appeared out of elsewhere, it hadn't crushed 
any wicked witches but the damage was more serious than that. Basically, I 
needed a pair of ruby slippers to take me home. Then Robert and his 
slaughtered Scully would disappear. 

Or they'd just decompose in a reality hermetically sealed from mine. Maybe 
the best I could do was find a universe, among the infinite alternatives, in 
which I was happy, and leave all the other Mulders to rot in their various 
and several hells. If the physicist's theories were true they were all doomed 
to suffer anyway because every possible outcome of every possible act 
existed, somewhere, so what was wrong with trying to come out on top? 

I paged through the sites between cans of Diet Coke. I could have really used 
Scully to help me with this. Of all her stellar qualities one of the 
non-physical attributes I adore is the way she's able to pull amazing 
knowledge out of her beautiful little skull.  

I clicked on the final link from my search and landed on a website that had 
Proust wallpaper but otherwise looked serious. It was about digging memories 
out of unwilling brain tissue with drug and electrical therapies. There were 
references to the 1964 Cronin-Finch experiments which proved that time isn't 
perfectly symmetrical, that electrically charged particles could travel 
backwards in time but not in a mirror image of how they traveled forwards. 
The theory was that a combination of software and hard drugs could enable the 
human mind to do the same and thereby explore alternative histories. One of 
the few things that I could understand was a name and address on one of the 
web pages. A name and address at the University of Virginia in Richmond. 

Sun was slanting through my now-clean windows when I unshipped my cell phone 
and dialed the airport to book a seat on the first puddle-jumper to Richmond. 

end 6/25

Tikkun Olam 7/25 
MustangSally78@juno.com & RivkaT@aol.com

Guildenstern: I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could 
even rise to a little gentle skepticism. 


"Dr. Strauss?" I poked my head around the doorframe of the lab and looked 
around. 

An unremarkable science lab with computers on every lab table. There didn't 
seem to be much in the way of people around other than a young woman at the 
far lab table with a pair of headphones on, drinking orange juice straight 
from the carton, working at a terminal and bobbing her head to music I 
couldn't hear. Carefully, I walked over to her and positioned myself with the 
monitor between the two of us. 

"DR. STRAUSS?" I half-bellowed in the voice that I usually reserve for the 
elderly. 

She jumped, pulling the headphones off a cap of short black hair and blinking 
in shock at me like a surprised cat. 

"You scared the shit out of me!" she scolded and threw the headphones on the 
tabletop, "what do you want?" 

I produced my ID. 

"Special Agent Mulder, FBI, I want to ask you a few questions about the 
research you've been doing on the physiological aspects of memory and 
trans-dimensional events." 

"FBI, right? Not FDA?" she asked in a curt tone. 

"I'm not interested in the RDA of the vitamin C in your orange juice." 

Glancing over at the carton, Dr. Strauss smiled and shrugged her shoulders, 
"Okay, what can I do to help Los Federales?" 

I had really made out well here. Dr. Lexine Strauss was one of the latest 
generation of scientists, the ones who had grown up on MTV and Star Trek. 
Taller than Scully, she could just about look me in the eye when she finally 
stood, and she did look me in the eye as though I were something of interest 
that had been coughed up by one of the homeless. She was wearing a lot of 
black, black workboots and black eyeliner. A silver hoop glittered in her 
nose. Not the geek that her published papers would have indicated. 

"I found your latest publication on the University's psychology department 
website -- the hypothesis that by re-activating memory cells one could 
actually catapult the test subject into the past. Not re-living the memory, 
but experiencing it for the first time -- travelling in time," I smiled and 
leaned a little closer to her, until I could feel the heat from her body, 
could smell her sharp perfume. 

In return, I got a dry little smile from burgundy painted lips. 

"I've created a valid method for uncovering hidden or repressed memories," 
she said. "Without all the bullshit hypnosis and the subjective influences 
you get on the Jerry Springer show." 

Set phasers on charm, Mr. Sulu. 

"I spoke with Dr. Goldstein before he lost his license and went to jail." 

"Pump someone with enough Vitamin K and ask them how they enjoyed their lunch 
with Elvis and they'll describe the entire menu," she snorted and ran a hand 
through her inky spiked hair. "The media has been saturated with alien 
abduction stories for decades. There's no way of proving that the subjects 
weren't just parroting something they saw on Sightings. Especially subjects 
with a confabulatory nature and cable." 

"They could just be parroting their innermost fantasies, then?" I asked, 
"Like they wanted to be sexually assaulted by aliens." 

She smirked. 

"If they're sick fucks, yeah. The difference is that I deal with the physical 
traits of memory, the archaeological dig of the human mind, with a 
combination of electric stimuli and lipid treatment." 

"Lipids?" 

"Phosphatidylserine, actually," she leaned over the keyboard and let me have 
a good, long look at the black bra she wore under her tight maroon polyester 
shirt, "Phosphatidylserine is a phospholipid and a rare constituent of 
lecithin that facilitates the functioning of brain cell membranes. Membranes 
are the cells' major work surfaces and nerve cells especially depend on 
membranes to carry out their specialized functions. Phosphatidylserine helps 
activate and regulate many of the proteins which play key roles in these 
membrane processes." 

Turning, I looked at the screen, moving my head so I was looking over her 
shoulder, barely grazing the side of her cheek and she leaned a little closer 
to me so her hip brushed mine. A decided sexual thrill started creeping up my 
spine towards my brain. It had been months since I had thought about a woman 
other than Scully and now it was hitting me like a double-shot of whiskey 
after months of tee-totaling. She had great breasts, full, round and 
succulent as fresh peaches. It wouldn't have taken much for me to bend Dr. 
Strauss over her lab table and ram myself home into her like the uncivilized 
creature that I am. 

I wondered what the difference in her taste would be, sharper, sweeter, 
smokier, or saltier. 

"Cell membrane support from phosphatidylserine translates into support from 
the nerve cell as a whole. In turn, support for individual nerve cells 
translates into support for the brain as a whole and facilitates 
memory-events. Like memory lubricant." 

She looked sideways at me to see if it was sinking in, sleek as a Siamese. 
Her fingernails were long and dangerous on the keyboard as she tapped at the 
keys. 

"EEG tests indicate Phosphatidylserine globally enhances brain performance. 
The Phosphatidylserine subjects not only showed significantly greater brain 
activation, but performed better on the memory tests. This coupled with 
select stimulation of brain areas increases cognitive recall. Recall enough 
memory-events and you are essentially living in that moment again." 

My brain wasn't processing the technobabble nearly as well as my dick. 
"Memory events where the subject re-experiences the memories as if for the 
first time? Like the first time you ever made love?" 

"Changing the time line. Theoretically." She smiled and I could hear her 
breathing quicken, "Essentially traveling through time driven by their own 
memory. Memory-gate theory states that events become memory-events as 
impulses travel through the sensory dendrites going from the spinal cord to 
the brain. As the memory-event becomes memory, it may be altered or modified 
pre-synaptically at any point along the transmission route from the spinal 
cord to the cerebral cortex." She illustrated the spot by lightly tapping the 
base of my skull and my cock stirred to life in my trousers. "The lipid 
therapy is combined with electrical stimuli to the brain via small electrodes 
placed on the scalp emitting a low-intensity signal. This stimulation is 
characterized by a quick onset of memory-event recall, but has only a short 
carryover, anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours." 

She realized I was barely listening and shot me a wicked smile. 

"Or you could drill holes in your head and score some heavy hallucinogens." 

Been there, done that, ruined the T-shirt. 

"I have to give a lecture in ten minutes so why don't you tell me what you 
really want to know?" 

Top or bottom, Dr. Strauss? 

"I need to know what I can do to be a test subject." 

"I'd love to experiment on you," she said with something more blatant than 
double-entendre, "But I'm not conducting clinical trials right now, that part 
of the research isn't in the budget. But --" she scribbled a number on a 
sticky note, "if you need to talk about it, or anything -- this is my home 
number and address. Call me." 

I walked around the campus for awhile, thinking of Poe and his drinking until 
the local bar opened and I followed in the footsteps of the master. 

The thought that was circling my mind like a great white off the beaches of 
Nantucket was frightening in its simplicity. What if Dana Rothstein was Dana 
Scully and Robert Rothstein was Fox Mulder, only a Fox Mulder who had been 
abducted rather than sister Samantha. See, if I had been starved and tortured 
during the crucial growth spurt years rather than fed and ignored by my 
parents, I might be five foot seven with Robert's thin frightened face too. I 
might have lost all consciously accessible memory of the unspeakable things 
that had been done to me and I might only have been able to draw pictures to 
stop the hazy dream-recollections from burning holes through my brain. 

I'll never be able to forget the look on my mother's face the night that I 
had asked her if Dad had made her choose between Samantha and myself. Was 
Robert what Samantha had become? Had she been the unwilling participant in 
the experiments that I had seen enacted on the pages of Robert's sketchbooks? 
I imagined that Robert had recorded the tortures initially designed for me 
which Dad had forestalled by offering Samantha up instead. 

Let's not forget the question which was lingering somewhere around my 
crotch--was this what had been done to Scully? Had she been machine-raped as 
well? 

So, in a parallel universe, I had been abducted instead of Samantha, had 
grown up and become a comic book artist, married Scully and produced three 
lovely children who I then killed along with my parallel wife. 

Then I/Robert showed up here, wherever here was, and things really started 
going to shit. Robert and his consanguineous corpses had crossed the barrier 
between his universe and mine, skewing the neat parallels until they crashed 
into one another like Amtrak trains. The question was whether Dr. Strauss's 
memory-gate therapy could fix what had gone wrong, by returning us to the 
point of divergence. 

It was almost enough to send me running for the antipsychotic meds in my 
medicine cabinet. Of course they were probably past their shelf date anyway 
and would be about as useful as drinking Drano. I didn't need to be a doctor 
to know that. 

It was raining when I went back to the lab. The weather was conspiring to 
make me even more miserable than I usually would have been under the same 
circumstances. The new green leaves fluttered underneath the cold rain and 
students huddled in raincoats and wet sweatshirts hurried from one building 
to another, sneezing and coughing. I had forgotten to bring my trenchcoat and 
I was cold and wet by the time that Dr. Strauss emerged from her lab 
building. Her short skirt -- shit, I remembered pants, didn't I? -- was 
quickly soaked from splashing through puddles with her sturdy boots. The 
umbrella that was keeping her head dry was patterned with rain forest frogs. 
I kept an eye on the frogs and followed her off campus. Feeling like any 
number of the predators that I had profiled, I stalked her through Richmond. 
I trailed her to a turn of the century house on a pleasant residential 
street. There was an old Dodge Dart in the driveway and roses were looking 
spiky in the front garden. Like most women, she made the mistake of taking 
too long to get her keys out of her handbag and I caught her arm before she 
got the key in the lock. 

"You have to help me," I said. 

Her eyes were enormous with surprise with the black lines around them. The 
alcohol must have skewed my normally attractive intensity too far towards the 
insane. Or maybe I just didn't look as good in the dark and the rain as I did 
in the pristine lab.

"I need your help," I added, trying to look earnest but with my infamously 
uncommunicative visage that wasn't an easy task. 

It took her a few moments to come to a conclusion; intellectual curiosity 
battled natural suspicion. I love watching women think. They have the most 
elegant ballet of thoughts in their eyes. She made a decision and her lips 
quirked in a crooked smile. 

"Want another drink?" 

Of course. 

"What the fuck is going on?" she asked with that uncanny way women have of 
pinpointing emotional distress as I followed her through the first floor of 
the house. 

While she poured Cuervo Gold into jelly glasses, I told her about Robert, the 
dead bodies, the sketchbooks, and a brief rundown of the changes that I had 
experienced in my day to day life. 

"So you think you're experiencing time slippage?" she asked. 

"The other possibility is that I'm going insane. Given the choice between the 
two, I'll take the slippage." 

The rain was still falling outside while I sat in her quiet living room, on 
her hard couch, while her ginger cat romanced my ankles. She had cement block 
bookcases, rummage-sale furniture and knick-knacks from the fifties. Your 
typical teaching assistant dcor. For the first time in days I felt like I 
wasn't breathing through cement.  

Dr. Strauss sniffled and rummaged for a tissue box. I could see tumblers 
clicking over behind her eyes as she tried to decide what to tell me. "There 
were experiments in the memory-gate theories done in Oxford during the Second 
World War. The general plan was to go back in time and prevent the rise of 
Hitler, but the technology wasn't available at the time and there were some 
very serious ethical questions raised. I was able to obtain access to the 
data from those experiments, such as they were. I used that data to begin my 
research with new technology and an understanding that the prime goal was 
personal history, rather than historical events." 

"Someone has been fucking with my personal time line." 

She shrugged. 

"A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and who knows what shit happens in 
China." 

My throat was closing around the tequila even as it burnt through to my 
stomach. 

"You realize that anyone finds out about this and I could lose my teaching 
job, my grant money, everything? You're asking me to put my whole fucking 
future on your halfassed theory?" 

"I want my life back," I rasped. 

The cat chased his tail under the coffee table and my eyes burned. 

"Shit," she groaned and rubbed at her eyes, "I must be as fucking nuts as you 
are. I'll do it." 

Fifteen minutes later I was in her bed. 

There was a black Kit-Kat clock ticking on the far wall and I wasn't 
surprised that she had a cast-iron bedstead and framed Peter Max prints on 
the other walls. The room smelled like incense and warm woman, discarded 
clothes in various shades of darkness littered most flat surfaces. She opened 
up a steel attach case and pulled out a scarred laptop which looked like it 
had gone through various unaesthetic upgrades. 

"You didn't just talk to Goldstein, did you?" 

Damned scar tissue. 

"You know this makes you an inappropriate subject." She stopped attaching the 
cold gel-smeared patches with their wires trailing to her Frankenstein's 
laptop, "you're drunk and you've already been through Goldstein's therapy." 

The bed was soft as a dream and the cat was lying on my calves. 

"If your theory is correct I'm the most appropriate subject you could have. 
I've undergone hypnosis many times before the ketamine treatment and there 
are other incidents in my past that cast doubt on my consciously retrievable 
memories. If you can help me re-experience the actual memory you'll 
demonstrate that your method is impervious to confabulation." 

She chewed her lower lip, wavering, and what a lovely lower lip it was as 
well. 

"At worst you can throw out the data if you conclude they're unreliable." I 
could detect the not-so-subtle signs of sexual interest in the human female: 
color high, eyes dilated and bright, breathing faster than a standard 
sedentary rate. As a woman, she was statistically unlikely to molest me while 
I was under (which was kind of a bummer), so this could only work to my 
advantage. I took a deep breath, glanced shyly at her and then away, and 
said, in a low voice calculated to draw her closer to me, "I can't live in 
this flux state, where I don't know what's going to change next." I reached 
out and took her hand by the wrist. "Please help me." 

Dr. Strauss leaned closer in, her maroon lips parted, eyes dark. 

I unbuttoned the cuff of my shirt, and rolled it up past my elbow, symbolic 
surrender. 

Shaking her head to clear it I supposed, Dr. Strauss ran her fingers down the 
inside of my arm and the skin tingled in the wake of her fingers. 

"You have good veins," she commented. I didn't let her know how often I'd 
heard that from medical personnel. For some reason they think this counts as 
a compliment. Instead, I blinked up at her with my standard soulful 
expression. Smart women in particular, I've found, enjoy thinking that 
they've successfully hidden their interest as professionalism. 

She frowned and grabbed a cotton ball, sloppily soaking it with disinfectant 
before she swabbed my arm, like the executioner does before the convict 
receives the lethal injection. The cool alcohol tightened my skin and sent a 
shock of adrenaline through my body as I realized what I was about to do. 
"This is going to sting a little," Dr. Strauss mumbled as she uncapped the 
needle and squirted to rid it of air bubbles. 

Actually, it stung a lot, like cheap whiskey. 

She began to lecture again. "Subjects report that the electronic signals can 
be disconcerting as the drugs begin to take effect. In order to capitalize on 
the biofeedback mechanism, you must concentrate on the memory to which you 
will return. Remember, you must observe, not attempt to interfere. If you 
attempt to alter the course of your memories, there is no evidence that you 
could succeed, and even if you did there would be no way to know once you 
returned." The silky hum of her voice was drawing me down like rainwater 
running into the gutter, towards the sea.  

"Theoretically, if enough of the lipid builds up in your brain tissue, you 
could regress without the light stimulus. Hence the importance of keeping the 
lipid levels in your brain low. You wouldn't want a flashback at an 
inconvenient time, now would you?" 

As I drowned in hopeful thoughts, something in Dr. Strauss's lecture struck 
me. How would I know if it worked? How would I even know what I was looking 
for? I needed a control situation, I needed to revisit a bad decision in my 
past to see if I could fix it. Phoebe was a possibility, but that had lasted 
so long there was no crucial twenty-minute period I could use. In my 
drug-addled thoughts only one thing seemed reasonable: I should change things 
with Scully. The swirling patterns on her laptop screen pulsed outwards, into 
the dingy air of the bedroom, drawn towards my brain by my drug-addled 
desires. Scully, I thought and dived into the dead pools of my mind. 

end 7/25