Title: Sour Times
Author: CGB
Email: luberluber@hotmail.com
Archive: Will send to Gossamer myself, anywhere else is OK.
Category: S V
Rating: PG
Feedback: Sure.
Spoilers: "Emily", - the rest are probably a bit too vague to be real spoilers
Summary: What to do and how to feel when there's nothing left but the memories.
Largely inspired by an amazing episode of "Law and Order" called "Aftermath". Big 'thank you' to August for introducing me to it.
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Who am I, what and why?
'Cause all I have left is my memories of yesterday,
Oh these sour times.
- Portishead "Sour Times"
She has photographs of all her family spread throughout this room. There is Melissa and herself in school uniform. There is Bill and Tara proudly holding their baby boy. There is her mother and father on their twentieth wedding anniversary. There is the one photo she has of Emily.
And there is Mulder on the bookshelf standing next to her at one of the few Bureau social functions they had attended. Her mouth is open, frozen forever on the verge of speaking, a memento of the point in time before the event, before anything is said.
She is stuck like that now. About to leap off but never quite jumping.
She reaches for the frame and sits it on her lap. Another reminder of loss, it fits in well with the shrine like nature of her living room, a monument to the inevitability of memories, destined to be the last word on all her relationships.
Still, she is adamant that Mulder's place is not here amongst the memories. Missing, not dead. The limbo-like nature of Mulder's predicament leaves her with a vague feeling of needing to feed the photograph to the garbage because it doesn't belong in here and it doesn't belong out there being exhibited to her work colleagues like wedding portraits or holiday snaps.
She thinks it would be quiet gratifying to throw the frame through the window, however frivolous. The sound of glass breaking guarantees a shock, a violent extraction from her the ever present numbness.
Instead she takes a memory inventory. It becomes necessary from time to time, to posit the memories in places where they are easily accessible and the recollection has a quick reference point.
The memories are filed,
stored and catalogued, numbers and letters placed on the spine of each.
Scully's memory is one large library with story upon story being constructed as
each year goes by.
Numbers and letters...
Ahab had US Navy written
across his pocket from the day she was old enough to know what letters meant
and to sound them out. Melissa showed
Dana the '501' on the pocket of a close fitting pair of jeans she'd 'borrowed'
when she was fifteen. Emily's hospital
bracelet had 'Emily Christine Sim 11.12.1994' typed across it and one big X
loomed at her from the cover of the file she was given on the day she met a
paranoid Fox Mulder in the basement of the Hoover building.
Not everything has a
convenient place. A large house with a trampoline that two children fought over
could have been her neighbour's on the naval base but may have belonged to a
friend that she visited after school. Then again she may have been there only a
few years ago asking questions about an escaped mummy or a man alleging to be
the second coming.
Another memory recalls a
woman about to be sacrificed on a stone altar. It troubles her that she can't
remember whether this was real or whether it was a horror film she saw at
college.
Funny, how the mundane blends
in easily with the peculiar now. Her life is so comparable to a B grade movie
that someone actually decided to make it into one. She still hasn't seen the end of that film.
Ahab is the most
difficult. There stopped being a time
when the memories where of words or actions and became still-lifes. Too much like photographs to be real
memories. More than likely they have combined with the scrap book cuttings and
photo albums her mother exhumes at Christmas to form memories that are not real
but accessible, a kind of mezzanine floor in her library where revised volumes
are stored.
She has this picture in her
head of Ahab smiling, almost laughing and it comes to mind as easily as a
picture of him straight and serious in his parade uniform. When did he laugh
like that? Her brother's habitual poker
face is more reminiscent of Ahab than the jovial character in the photograph
but it's the laughing photo that she recalls first. The memory is particular about what it chooses to exhibit to the
fragile mind.
Melissa had red hair like
Dana's only deeper and somehow without the pale freckled skin that plagued
Dana's teenage years. She remembers
Melissa's pointed features punctuated by the cross that hung around her neck long
after she had forsworn her religion.
She remembers Melissa on the
phone in the middle of the night because she'd forgotten that Dana goes to bed
early. She remembers Melissa smiling
too, like another photograph that sits on her bedside table. The two sisters
professionally photographed and looking angelic (a present for her mother but
she kept a copy too) instills in her a memory of a less complicated
relationship than she and Melissa could ever have hoped for.
Her mother took Melissa's
death hard. Harder than Ahab's. She said she'd never expected it to be Melissa
and Dana chilled at the inherent meaning in that statement.
Her mother was languid in her
grief for way too long. Dana kept busy,
always busy, with work and the sight of her mother's pain was all too much for
many months afterward but there came a time when she could visit without the
fear of a hurt so deep she drowned in it.
She mentioned, casually and
insensitively that it was time her mother went out with her friends. Maggie had turned on her.
"Do you expect me to stop
grieving Dana?" she had said and Dana was speechless having dug herself into a
hole and finding herself without a means of climbing out.
"If you expect me to wake up
one day and forget that your sister is dead, you can forget it. It won't
happen".
Dana forgot that pain. Forgot
Melissa's 'life' and remembered her as her dead sibling. Her mother knew of course, that worse than
the pain of grief is the coldness that comes with the lack of feeling, the time
when there's no feelings left to remind you of how much that person meant.
She admits to having added
more to the memory of her time with Emily than could ever have been achieved in
the short time of their bonding. To
think of Emily as a daughter whilst simultaneously attaching suitable memories
to that definition of the relationship is no mean feat but she does it because
the alternative is to think of Emily screaming in pain, alone and frightened in
a quarantined hospital room.
The single photograph Emily
suggests a pensive little girl rather than a smiling, happy little girl but at
least it shows her alive, comfortable and doing something that all children
should do - blow out candles on a birthday cake.
Emily's memory is problematic
it its bitter-versus-sweetness. There are no rooms in her library for such
complexity and she finds herself forced into making a choice. It doesn't matter
of course, because she needs to place it somewhere because she knows that these
are memories she isn't supposed to have.
When does the memory become
the substance of a relationship and which memories define that substance?
Everytime she tries to
remember details about their time together the memories become tangled up in a
cacophony of contradictory images. She
wants to remember a partner, friend and finally a lover, but she is assaulted
by the recollection of Mulder's eyes meeting Diana Fowley's, exchanging a look
that signaled history and plenty of it.
She was standing right next to him but the memory is like
voyeuristically peeking through a telescope at an intimate encounter.
Another image. Mulder in a
high security mental hospital screaming her name at the walls. The recollection
has a surreal quality to it but she knows, at the time, she was frightened.
Very frightened. She was so frightened
she ran all the way to Africa. Even
then she had to ask herself what kind of relationship she was having with a
person who sent her running half way across the world.
She could edit that out. She
could edit it all out. Every last scrap
of confusion, terror, frustration, anger and pain that rose to the surface when
she tried to remember. She could think that she was happy and possibly in love.
She could think it was reciprocated and maybe it was.
Maybe it is.
In the photo Mulder's hand is
on her arm. She can't remember why but it looks like he's restraining her. He joked about that when he saw it. He said he was her anchor and implied that
she was in danger of losing control without him and they both laughed at the
irony.
And she had been fixated on
his hand. Even now it draws her into
the photograph at the point his fingers wrap around her arm. He has such good hands, large, strong and
with long fingers.
She remembers his hands for
reasons inexplicable. She doesn't
remember anyone else's hands. Not her mother's or Melissa's. She imagines Emily
had the tiny hands of a child but no matter how hard she tries she can't think
of a specific image of Emily's hands.
But Mulder's hands loom in
her memory, casually swinging a pen between two fingers on the other side of
the desk in their office, typing at a keyboard with a grace that belies such
large hands, or lifting sunflower seeds to his mouth with one hand whilst the
other holds the steering wheel.
Mulder's hands are always in
Scully's field of vision, whereas his face requires a stretch. She imagines herself drinking coffee late at
night still on the job and watching his hands through half closed lids. Did that actually happen? Maybe that is Mulder to her memory, hands
flying in front of her face, dancing, lilting, doing.
Mulder's hand smoothed a
trail across her skin from her belly to her neck. That happened, only it's
became more and more a faded impression that it's authenticity is questionable.
It won't be long before she doubts that too.
It won't be long before all of her memories of Mulder are constructs
based on a lonely mother's wistful reminiscence of halcyon days with the father
of her child.
God, she doesn't want to end
up like that. Pining for memories that
never were.
She thinks about the hands in
her inventory and files them under '5'. Five fingers on each of Mulder's hands.
Five long fingers that tremble, touching her skin like rice paper, so afraid of
a tear.
Five fingers on a hand that
pulls her back from that instant, so that she never make an event of that
photograph that she can remember.
The photograph goes back on
the shelf next to other memories that never happened, never were and always
will be.
All are filed for efficient
retrieval and ease of access in meticulous order. So meticulous that if she's
careful she need never come across them again.
Fini