Mulder: A Fictional Narrative

Mulder as a husband is nothing but a non sequitur.

That’s not to say he doesn 't try. But trying just makes it all so much harder, like a rabid dog pleading for a cure.

All the usual suspects are lined up against the wall and shot. Mulder rids himself of his porn collection and stops speedballing with sunflower seeds. Scully confides in him what she can, cries late at night over what she can 't. They hop from marriage counselor to therapist to psychiatrist and back again to marriage counselor.

Certain facts they keep to themselves. Among the discarded are two children, one buried in southeastern San Diego, one in their minds.

Hundreds of Emilys and Williams pass through the clinic. Faces and smiles and toys meld together, a

She’s out the door and off to the pied-à-terre she wishes she could leave behind.

A knock, twenty more. The smell of unwashed skin reaches her before the rest of him does, possibly because there’s not much of him left. He’s bone and flab and dead 30 years before the fact. Stains on his clothes, questionable origin. She looks up at him half repulsed, half adoring, like she’s a little girl and he’s a pony but not the pony she asked for.

The sleeping bag dangles in plain sight from her shoulder. Mulder pretends not to notice, Scully pretends not to notice his not noticing. Collective

“I’ll take the couch,” he says, almost apologetic. Both know neither will touch the bed upstairs.

—

Somnambulism takes on a new meaning in this house. The thud of his feet against hardwood, the scuff of hers as she trails after him, like a duckling. Sounds heard so often they’ve become a new kind of home.

"There are men in the sky.” Mulder 's low on the floor, reaching up toward the low-rise ceiling. One thumb traces the lines of the plaster.

"They’re cutting into me.” The fear in his voice is almost palpable, nauseatingly so, beyond reach. Arms slick with sweat stretch out to expose wounds she can’t see.

Like a prayer, he mouths her name over and over. Mostly he’s just replaying old memories. Down the stairs, across the living room, back again. Once he even brushed his teeth, something he can’t manage while conscious.

She feels like a voyeur.

In the quiet of 3:43 in the morning everything is more intimate and more removed. The walls are suggestions, his face a rough draft. Boyish and grinning is how she’d like it to look, how she imagines it.

There is no pulsing soundtrack to mark the time, no commercial break, only the muted sounds of an airplane in the distance and the muffled stomps of feet and Mulder’s panic-laced babble. It is a joke without a