****************** Working Title: Kinshasha Author: ebonbird (ebonbird@hotmail.com) Date: January 15, 2001 ****************** Vocabulary: anomalous brain activity. Electro-encephalitic trauma -elbow grease -an envelope marked *return to sender* -Skinner speaking Swahili -Sno-caps -an old tooth brush -one earring -a broken promise - a Mc Donald's happy meal - dental floss - a book entitled Powder Metallurgy Handbook - a CD snapped in half - a sign that says *live bait* - mention of Byer's mother People: Albert Hosteen Dr. Amina Ngebe Dr. S. Stewart Sacks (Nasa Goddard Space Center/government xenobiology) Kevin Kryder Dr. Bonita Charne-Sayre (virologist and authority on variola viruses – destroy smallpox) Col. Jenny Sparks Chuck Burks Special Agent John Doggett Dr. Barnes Albert Hosteen Chester Banton (Tony Shaloub) It's mostly carbon with some potassium and trace minerals. Jeraldine Kallenchuk (of J. Kallenchuk Salvage Brokers) Alex Krycek Marita Covarrubias JORGE CONCEPCION: Por favor, no me lastime! Yo tengo mucho miedo! Significant sound: eerie low pitched vibration – Mulder stuck his hand in it and he vanished. Terms: Electro-encephalitic trauma Anomalous brain activity polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (Dr. S. Stewart Sacks told Scully that was what was in that rock. Maybe. He was at Nasa-Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD) black vermiform organism attached to the pineal gland. there is a culture of lawlessness that has prevented me from doing my job- that the real target of this committee's investigation should be the men who are beyond prosecution and punishment....the men whose secret policies are behind the crimes that you are investigating. charged particle directional spectrometer C.G.R. – cosmic galactic radiation Blue Beret U.F.O. Retrieval Team. a gate that says "National Astronomy & Ionosphere Center; Arecibo, Puerto Rico; No trespassing." Billy Miles and other known abductees in Bellefleur, Oregon all experienced what Byers called it electro-encephalitic trauma. Scully described it as anomalous brain activity. Mulder manifested this in Biogenesis and the sixth extinction. SCENE 14 U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY; WASHINGTON, D.C. (Dr. Troisky is looking at the print-out. Scully sits across from him at the desk.) TROISKY: Looks like the "wow" signal. SCULLY: The "wow" signal? TROISKY: Ohio State has a radio telescope that conducts electronic searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. In August 1977, my buddy, Jerry Ehman, found a transmission on the print-out like this. He was so excited, he wrote "wow" in the margins. SCULLY: What was there? (He takes off his glasses and stands.) TROISKY: A signal thirty times stronger than galactic background noise. It came through on the twenty-one centimeter frequency which no satellite transmitters are allowed to use. (He sits down on the desk.) TROISKY: The signal was intermittent... like morse code. And more importantly, the signal seemed to turn itself on while in the telescope's beam. The "Wow" signal is the best evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But this... this is better. Where did you get this? SCULLY: Maybe you can tell me. Is that from Ohio State? (He looks at it then stands, going back to his desk.) TROISKY: Can't tell. There are a few nickel-and-dime S.E.T.I. projects around. U.C. Berkeley has one. The Planetary Society has one in Harvard and in Argentina. (He sits.) TROISKY: NASA was working out of one in, uh... Goldstone in California and Arecibo in Puerto Rico. (Scully sighs.) Krycek: Reading, Scully reads. Hard-earned paranoia and repeated viewings of 'In the Name of the Rose' have taught her well, rather than lick her fingers to turn pages, she keeps a wet roll of thick paper towel in a shallow dish and wets her finger on that. Revelations: MULDER: That was in the Bible. It's a parable, it's a metaphor for the truth, not the truth itself. Why didn't Kevin conveniently bi-locate when Owen Jarvis abducted him from the shelter. SCULLY: How is it that you're able to go out on a limb whenever you see a light in the sky, but you're unwilling to accept the possibility of a miracle? Even when it's right in front of you. MULDER: I wait for a miracle every day. But what I've seen here has only tested my patience, not my faith. SCULLY: Well, what about what I've seen? SCULLY: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six years since my last confession, and since then I've drifted away from the church. I'm not sure why exactly. PRIEST: Have you come to confess? SCULLY: No, um, there's a man that I work with - a friend - and usually I'm able to discuss these things with him ... but not this. Father, do you believe in miracles? PRIEST: Of course, I see them every day ... the rising sun, the birth of a child ... SCULLY: No, I'm talking about events that defy explanation. Things that ... I believe helped me to save a young boy's life. But now I wonder if I saw them at all. If I didn't just imagine them. PRIEST: Why do you doubt yourself? SCULLY: Because my partner didn't see them. He didn't ... he didn't believe them. And usually he ... he believes without question. PRIEST: Maybe they weren't meant for him to see. Maybe they were only meant for you. SCULLY: Is that possible? PRIEST: With the Lord, anything is possible. Perhaps you saw these things because you needed to. SCULLY: To find my way back? PRIEST: Sometimes we must come full circle to find the truth. (Scully looks up at the priest) Why does that surprise you? SCULLY: Mostly, it just makes me afraid. PRIEST: Afraid? SCULLY: Afraid that God is speaking ... but that no one's listening. [THE END] ****************** Juab County, Utah There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. Easy wisdom says, 'Find your center and make things happen.' The words present themselves to Scully bare of the tonal signatures that would have marked them as Mulder's - or Chevy Chase's; dark-eyed, quixotically handsome men whose monotone wit and faux soulful eyes may have more to do with old money perhaps than outrageous luck - good and bad. Scully stares hard at the Salt Lake City, D.A., but wishing does not make it so. The D.A. asks the question, and Scully keeps the tip of her tongue at the roof of her mouth and manages not to grind her teeth. The fans suspended from the ceiling are slow-moving. The Juab County DA speaks. "And then what did the woman known to you as Dana Scully say?" is his question. Scully finds her center, applies elbow grease. But the spirit of championship golf isn't with her. Scully breathes herself lightheaded, inhaling long and shallow, exhaling slow and deep. Scully tries to open her inner eye but this only makes her molars ache because she is clenching her jaw. Overexposed revelation eludes her with each blink of her eyes. The defendant says, "She asked us to please not do this because she was pregnant." Scully closes her eyes. New dust, stirred by the ceiling fans, is suspended in the air. It smells of deep desert, which reminds her of abandoned gas station. Scully's eyes are closed. Slowly, they open. Indeed, everyone is looking at her. If she had a cup of coffee in her hand she'd offer it to Dogget but the set of her jaw becomes enjoyable, and her eyebrow arches, and she welcomes the obvious discomfort it elicits from him instead. * * * * * * Scully prefers 'Bride of Spooky' to 'Mrs. Spooky' though she doesn't give much weight to idiots' gossip or idiots' pursuits. She's undergone a peculiar alchemy since being partnered with Dogget, most notable is the change in her sense of humor. Since Juab County, Utah, Dogget regularly expresses dismay at her breakfast choices. He's smart enough not to say 'morning sickness' when she holds her morning cup of greasy bitter, but his concern oppresses her just the same - even if that oppression lasts less than a moment of each day. Skinner is something else all together. Scully has discovered the satisfactions of amusing herself at her coworkers' expense. The elevators of the J. Edgar Hoover building run fast but are busy, waiting times being longest in the morning and mid-afternoon. She feigns obliviousness to the stares from the suits as she waits for the down elevator to come. Once in a while she focuses on a nosy bastard, having trapped him with preoccupied airs. Sometimes, after catching a staring person in the rude act, she allows herself a smirk. 'Your face gonna freeze that way?' drawls her inner voice, sounding utterly like Mulder, and her smirk blends into a dimple and she thinks, 'I will find you.' Scully takes the down elevator, wends her way through the bull-pen, goes down the other basement and checks the mail. She puts her hand, five fingers down, on Mulder's blotter. Her lips purse and she considers the inch high stack of correspondence. She moves aside the business size envelopes to reveal the manila envelope marked air, certified and return receipt mail. J.D. signed for it. It has been to Africa and back. Written on it in heavy green marker are the words 'return to sender'. Since Mulder's disappearance she has sent several letters to Dr. Amina Ngebe, Doctor of Biology at the University of Ivory Coast. Brought together by electro- encephalitic trauma they studied an artifact of unknown origins beached in a small cove of the Ivory Coast. While Mulder was in Georgetown Memorial Hospital, struck down by anomalous brain activity caused by a rubbing made from that artifact Scully was in Africa, trying to make sense of what had befallen him. Within 36 hours of his admittance to Georgetown Memorial Scully had flown from Dulles International Airport to the Ivory Coast. Reading and rereading papers by Dr. Samuel Merkmallen, Dr. S. Stewart Sacks, Dr. Bonita Charne-Sayre and others. Names she has come across in her investigations of the X-Files, of the strange and the unknown, of the bitter leavings of lawless men and women who have long considered themselves above the law. Scully is not paranoid. She is a woman accustomed to being subjected to lies, misdirection and deceit. She picks up the thick manila envelope marked 'return to sender' and resolves to call the University of the Ivory Coast and ascertain if a Dr. Amina Ngebe had ever been in its Biology Department. She rubs the back of her neck wondering why she, who is usually so thorough, has not called the University of the Ivory Coast before – then she wonders if she did and forgot. Scully is past shivering, but the hands she rubs together are freezing. Her fingertips are pads of affront against her skin. She is rubbing her hands against her thighs to warm then when Special Agent John Doggett enters. Looking more tired and put-upon than the day before, an attache case tucked under his arm, the bottom half of a bagel redolent of toasted onion in his mouth and a cup of tea in his hand. "Greenbelt, Maryland," Doggett says, slinging the brief from under his arm and slamming it on Mulder's blotter in front of her. The twine winding the attache case shut pulls from the toggle and glossy eight-by-elevens spill out of the opening. Scully is still touching her thighs. Dr. Amina Ngebe could be a figment of her imagination. What she is experiencing now could be a figment of her imagination. She could be in a hospital bed dying as her brain consumes more energy than her body can produce. Did Mulder know that he was sick and dying all the times that he was sick and dying and she was gone somewhere to save him? Mulder is gone. Who will save her? "Is there a problem, Scully?" She gasps. Her vision greys at the edges. A bright white light flares up around her and her pulse is a physical sensation filling her ears. Dogget darts around her desk, grasps her shoulders and eases her in her chair. "IS THERE A PROBLEM, DANA! TALK TO ME!" Scully blinks, crosses her hands at the wrists as he shakes her hard. "I'm fine! Let me go, damnit, I –" "What?" "I'm fine." Scully draws into herself. Dogget sits on the edge of her desk, staring – at her. Scully turns a photo on the desk to examine it more closely. She sees shots of a warehouse, scorch marks on the ground. One of the crates is missing a bottom side and packing tape roughly ex-es the ground next to it. "Is that a scorch mark," Scully asks, tapping at a thin edge of profound darkness at the upper part of what is certainly a leg severed below the knee. "Yeah." Dogget sounds preoccupied. Scully hunches in her coat. "Polaris Electronics–" Dogget sighs. "It's not my business -- what?" Scully has looked up at him in surprise at the name. "Polaris electronics?" "You heard of them?" "Maybe." Scully turns on the green desk lamp, changing the office's soft light into something immediately more shadowy. Using a magnifying glass she is able to see the "They're a small firm. A company van, a small shipment of experimental micro- chips and two of their vice-presidents are missing under mysterious circumstances." "How's a small firm have two vice-presidents?" Dogget shrugs. "And why involve us?" Scully asks, holding the photos to her nose. "Local PD said it looks like an X-File. They asked for you." * * * Greenbelt, MD On the way to the offices of Polaris Electronics, Scully and Dogget pass NASA- Goddard Space Center. Last she was there was with Agent Pendrell, whose first name, though she has learned it, often eludes her when she remembers him at all. Scully has not worn a class IV biohazard suit since. She drives, wondering if Dogget has seen tapes of her testifying before the Senate Subcomittee in 1996 regarding conspiracy theories. She wonders if Doggett is aware of his position, how his integrity is being used against him even now. She must think, she must think how to use him to the truth's advantage – and also how to use herself. Admittedly, her mind is not on the case at hand. The day is gentle. Clouds fill the sky, daylight is diffuse. It's the kind of overcast where Scully would burn her worst – as a child. * * * Georgetown, Washington D.C. Mornings, before Scully steps out her door for the first time, she remembers to give God her day. This Tuesday -- so cold -- and the humidifier -- so efficient -- the moisture has dried in thick scales, as big as Scully's palms, on the windows of her apartment. She looks at the door, thinks about closing her eyes for a quick 'Our Father'. Scully puts thumb and forefinger to both her ears, feels half carat studs in her ears – they appeared on her table, next to her gun, 63 hours after Mulder returned from chasing crop circles in Avery, England. The gleam of his eyes from where he slouched cross-armed and cross-legged in the doorway warmed deeper than the white fire stones framed by the open leather box in her hand. Scully runs farsighted. Some truths may not be for her, but she runs chasing a long-legged future. Imagining a far-off goal is how she got through medical school and the Academy. It's how she got back to Washington D.C. after waking up naked in Antarctica. Truth has been the light at the end of tunnel since she started investigating her life the X-file. Beside her, his arm under hers and holding her up beside him, had been Mulder. Night slips up and away from branches of trees. In the east distance, day makes its first appearances. Clarity glimpsed beyond the nude branches of birches rises, allowing her view of the Beltway. A slender horde of taillights – red one way, mostly white and yellow the other, mark the curves of it towards and away form Georgetown. This winter is damp, with a pleated edge in the mornings – too cold folding over bearable folding over too cold as Scully runs from shade to sunshine on the grass alongside sidewalks where there are sidewalks. She runs long and hard but protects her knees. She needs those. Dew wets her running shoes, foliage frisks her jacket. She marks her course against public water fountains as she goes – she needs to keep hydrated – but she varies her pattern. She will not be too predictable, though she is aware that determined kidnappers could pick her up on the way to the hospital when she delivers. Her estimated date of confinement has been stored in her long term memory, but she keeps a copy of it in blue in her short term register. The viewing background is sometimes beige. Scully has always been very visual. She reads street signs as she runs. She reads street names; Chelsea. Meridien. Day. She thinks of Mulders. In all her years with the X-Files Scully has never moved. Hers is a large, clean, well-appointed apartment in a charming and well appointed apartment building in the most charming of D.C.'s neighborhoods, Georgetown; the most unsavory elements of which are those attracted by Scully herself. She has not been asked to move. She may never. The elevator runs smoothly, if a little slow. None of the steps leading to her floor are soft. Dust does not collect beneath the radiators at the end of the halls. The declick preceding the sounding of the floor bell has not changed in five years and the UPS man who wears shorts year round waves at her when he sees her running or walking on the windy, narrow streets. Food smells sometimes eddy in the hallway, though never in the stairwell. The banisters in the stairwell are ever smooth beneath her sliding hands, never dank or cold unless she's terrified -- and then that's her. Scully eschews the elevator even though it's too early in the day for it to reek of take-out. Scully is in her navy blue goretex FBI Jacket, her hair in a ponytail, her head covered by a dark blue FBI cap. Her nostrils flare redly as she pants. She lifts the top of her collar up from the seam and pulls the zipper down with one brusque movement, removes her hand from the collar and pulls the zipper all the way down. She bats her jacket completely open, revealing black lycra pants. Pushes the stairwell door open and looks over her shoulder, opens the door wide enough to allow herself through, consults her instincts and pumps up the stairs but allows that run to drop into as near a lope her leg length allows. The fluorescent lights on each landing hum with 'h', teasing a buzz at the upper limits of Scully's hearing, eliciting a sympathetic shiver in her gums. She hasn't stopped clenching her teeth since Utah. She gets enough calcium; leafy greens, milk, supplements, but her teeth, as she runs up the stairs to her floor, feel soft. The metabolic and nutritional demands on her body are considerable. She dreams of losing her teeth. She's in a growth state. Her hair, her nails, her mind. A growing lattice of hypothesis expands in her brain . . . The push of water in her palm from the first great gush of the bath tap, the swirl and splash of it around her toes, heats and elements differentiate and coalesce. The scalding wet of the water, the eggshell smooth of the ceramic beneath her feet wear at that connection, obscuring her thoughts with sound and sensation. Her feet are hurting, but the pain from the hot water is less than the pain from the tension and ache. The bones feel brittle. They shouldn't ache but she's been walking too long and too hard during the days. She's been walking in her sleep, too. Glazed pear or vanilla lace? Scully asks herself, reaching at her collection of juice-hued shower and bath gels. Choosing the BodyShop's bergamot, she runs her thumb over the gray mottling the plastic bottle. Water and handling have worn away the green of the label. The adhesive is still a bit tacky under thumb. She squeezes the cutting-comforting heady lemongrass and carnation light musk of it into the porous synthetic ruffle of pale blue micro-waffle web in her hand and begins by washing her feet. She lifts her left arm over her head. Runs the pads of her fingers beneath her armpit, over every part of her right breast. The circular motions are comforting, habitual and precise. She switches arms and hands, examines the other breast with spirals over wet smoothness. When she was eight, she despaired of looking like her sister. Melissa had grown into her mockable frog-stick legs, and grown long and full where Barbies were long and full. At eleven Scully was small all over, the nails on her hands shallow and narrow and callused. On the baseball diamond, in cut- offs and a baseball-T, seen from behind, it looked like Margaret Scully had three sons instead of two. Dana, grew, eventually. Puberty made its disappointing appearance, cheating her of the Margaret's bust. Apple hard and high, her breasts didn't look like much clothed, and that was annoying but Scully's nineteen year old sphinx-like smile was born when she, running her hands up the length of her kicked up leg, witnessed that unwrapped they were a pleasant surprise - until inexplicably, they dropped. When thoughts of childbearing and marriage came along and vanity drew her to compare and contrast her bust with that of other women, she told herself that the flattest chested of women could nurse their young. Scully thinks of these things with a smile on her face, a far off one, for the breast beneath her smoothly studious hand is larger than the hand that holds it and firm with the miracle of life. Her breasts have changed. She can feel blush heat in her cheeks from the wonder that is her pregnancy. Her fingers reach six o'clock, an inch away from her nipple and her throat goes dry. There is a change, a new one, and it is hard, the skin patchy. She licks her lips, several times, her fingers on the same spot, a cold spot, but that's really the blindspot in her mind that manifested when she felt a lump. The latticework of hypotheses crystallizes. She checks once, twice, three times before getting out of the shower. Morning light on the ceiling and Scully's hair dries in limp one-way upcurls, like long wood shavings just as they're made on an impossible day. Steam snakes out on the ground, through the partially open bathroom door, but the water pouring from the shower head has gone cold. Scully doesn't hear the noise. Her robe is partially open over her damp body, she straddles the corner of her bed and looks at her breasts in the mirror in front of her. Her breasts are funny, lovely, fuller than ever before. In medical school she took issue with Dr. Gaudrault's insistence that only a woman in love had any business being pregnant, that pregnancy was the most dangerous undertaking a woman could ever attempt. Of the many things she had told Dr. Gaudrault, one was, "It's natural." "It's totally natural, Dr. Scully," Dr. Gaudrault had replied. "But so's dying." In pregnancy everything grows. Her hair, her intellectual faculties, her breasts. Scully sits in front of the mirror, straddling the corner of her bed. She raises her hands above her head to gauge changes and sees nothing. She lies back on her bead and checks again. There is that lump again. She makes an appointment with her gynecologist. She sees her gynecologist. She refers her to an oncologist. Scully has her pick, when cells in her body were lethally multiplying, she met many. The oncologist, Dr. Sarnow, tells Scully that, yes, she does have cancer. Doctor Sarnow looks younger than Scully remembers, her thin blond hair spilling around her face from the high gathering at the crown of her head. Dr. Sarnow wears scrubs and sneakers, because she too is pregnant. Once upon a time, Sarnow only wore Donna Karan and Tahari. Scully's not too sure she'll continue with Dr. Sarnow. From the bloodlessness of Dr. Sarnow's lips, Scully wonders how long it'll be before she's asked to find another oncologist. Scully spends the day in hospital. Instead of calling her mother she calls Skinner. And when she can she dials up Dogget to walk him through his first solo X-File investigation. Dogget is angry. When the tests are over, when Scully has made it through the B Avenue McDonald's drive-thru, sucking a relish packet dry while she waits for her Happy Meal, Scully decides between trying to explain to her mother, or explaining herself to Dogget. She takes her first real food of the day with her to his apartment. She goes to his apartment to apologize, but really she stares at him. She wonders if he will change into Mulder while he sleeps. She's hoping that Mulder has been hidden in plain sight. Asleep, Dogget looks like death. * * * * * * More and more often Scully is drawn to the one service elevator. She'll wait, after passing up an elevator that has enough room for her, though time is of the essence. Scully doesn't think in terms of scarlet letters and public shame, so she doesn't chide herself for avoiding high traffic areas but she likes the quiet back ways of the building all the same until - Until she catches herself passing up the opportunity to take a regular elevator up to the upper levels (Kimberly called her with a, 'Director Skinner needs a meeting.') She comes to with a squint, braces her hand on the open door of the service elevator, roused by the bump-and-bump again of the elevator door that's blocked open by her hand. She's resisting the compulsion to enter it, unable to remember when she got off the middle of the main elevators. And her free hand goes to the nape of her neck which she notices, after - how long has she been ignoring it? - throbbing and she swallows. It is throbbing. It has been throbbing since that day in Juab County cultists testified that she screamed for them to spare her because she was going to have a baby. Wasn't it? She backs away from the doors, her gun suddenly in her hand. She flicks off the safety and reaches for her cellphone, dialing the first five digits of Mulder's number, but there's no service. There's always service in the J. Edgar Hoover building. Scully looks over her shoulder to where the security camera should be. There's a light patch on the wall. Scully approaches it slowly, she gets on her tip toes and touches the pale patch. It is dust free. Biting hard on her inner cheeks Scully backs up, licks her bottom lip and leaves the building to find the Gunmen. * * * A London Growing up in the poorest parish in Jamaica, Atalia Donaldson was mocked for her thinness. A yellow-mixed breed, three legged dog lived beneath their house, known as 'the sufferer' because it never had enough to eat, and was too ugly to elicit pity and hand-outs from anybody. Atalia's brothers and cousins and neighbors called her sufferer because she was so thin. That was years ago, two decades ago at least, and Atalia has changed. She is round, the lines of her body soft. She is in electric pink fleece hat, scarf and mittens. Gleaming battle-ship grey lycra pants encase her legs and a large grey Cornell University sweatshirt, boxes in her upper body. It is immobile in the stiff breeze coming of the silver shat brown Thames. Atalia hops in place on the deck of the _________ museum. It is early in the morning - 6 AM and _______ trees frame the sky with thin and spiky bare branches. The sky is whiter than milk, gray as chalk. It will either rain or snow. Atalia, child of the Caribbean, and the sun, kept her dorm room thermostat at 84 all four years of college, but Atalia is dancing, on her toes and the balls of her feet. Atalia is jumping, her hands in throbbing in hot pink fists from her sides to her face and in the air. When she has enough air to breathe she shrieks and stamps to no music ever composed. Her large teeth, gleaming and white scrubbed, like salt and ice, framed by her dark skin and darker lips shrieking whiter than snow, parting for ecstatic, orgasmic shrieks that shatter up and up like vocal fireworks. The hat slips off her hair, hundreds of tiny braids wheel about her head and shuddering Atalia falls to her knees. Her hands outstretched before her body as she shivers and shakes. Tears run from her eyes. She shakes her head from side to side. Her lips are trembling. Of the many words she stutters, one is Jesus. Atalia sees things, things that she is commanded never to reveal, things meant for her spirit alone. Feeling no cold, Atalia gets to her feet. Atalia goes to an elaborate and beautiful grave, stares at the ornately framed portrait of the pretty girl. Long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail looking over her almost bare shoulder, her laughing eyes are full of experience but little peace and a cigarette hangs from her lips. Beneath the frame are the words, "Bugger this. I want a better world." When Atalia first fell in love with Jesus she was failing her premed courses at the only university that accepted her. She'd written her application in turquoise blue ink. Sent in her essay on one single sheet of not even college ruled paper. Dartmouth let her in and gave her a great financial aid packet. Jesus never got her on the Dean's list, but in the years since they'd grown tight, and she knows that Jesus isn't his name, he's got a ton of them but wonderful counselor is one - that any name she called him was fine as long as the Lord and Christ part was involved and they were speaking through the Holy Ghost. Atalia had a little cousin that would get in all sorts of trouble, Amina, who was half-African. A kid that couldn't pass up a tree for climbing. Ataliah warned Amina that she better not get over railings and jerk them because she didn't have the faith to raise her from the dead, yet. Amina climbed a tree in front of her, one day, broke his arm, and sure enough Ataliah couldn't heal it. In the days from when Ataliah was a b-girl with good grades and much attitude she's changed. Fasting, prayer, and obedience will do that to a person, not to mention divine love. Atalia puts her hands on the grave and closes her eyes. She's trying too hard, reaching reaching, for the strength and source of power that's in it and is also in her. She opens her eyes, brushes her mittened hands over her strong cheekbones and smiles. "Jennifer," she says, "get up." Then gasps. Ataliah's tip-tilted brown eyes roll up in the back of her head and she falls over. Twitching and drooling, fallen out in the Holy Ghost. There is a horrible groaning from the tomb. Long and horrible, and tired. In Georgetown, Washington DC a restless, a bleary eyed Dana Scully climbs out of bed in rose satin pajamas. She grabs an old toothbrush from the holder, clears off her sink, and begins to scrub. By dawn, she will have cleaned her bathroom and thrown out all the products she has not used in six months or now. By eight o'clock she will have called in sick to work. By 9:30, her doorbell will ring and she will open it after having taken her gun in hand, and looked through the keyhole. The federal express girl need not be a federal express girl. She hands Scully a package that is addressed to her from Dr. Amina Ngebe. Scully remembers telepathy, the evidence of her eyes, water turned to blood and an old African man, a native, who appeared in place of Dr. Ngebe, long enough to tell Scully that some truths were not for her. The package contains a cassette tape, wrapped in an 11 1/2 by 8 sheet of yellow ruled paper. It is a charcoal rubbing. The familiar symbols smudged. Scully drags her hand through her hair, reminded of Mulder in six point restraint, dying of psychotic illness; of evolution, her own personal apocalypse. Pain slices Scully open from womb to the bridge of her nose and she flashes on Mulder in a stone amphitheater under whirring blades, and lights and knives. Scully croaks and flashes on insects, and flies beating against a lit tent, glowing in the darkness of an ocean scented night. Scully comes to, curled up on her side, her throat shredded from screaming. There is pounding on her front door. "Are you okay," demands her neighbor, Mr. Poznanski. "Are you alright in there?" And Scully, touching between her satin slick thighs and so relieved that she doesn't feel blood, smiles wide. "I'm fine Mr. Poznanski. Great. Everything's fine." Scully packs quickly, pulls together her travel documents, performs her morning regimen. It isn't until she pulls her hair out from under the collar of her coat that she sees that she is wearing only a single earring. One of the topazes she suspects are really diamonds, cut down from a bigger stone set in Mulder's mother wedding ring is missing. Scully looks at that earring, frames it with two oval shaped nails and looks at half of Mulder's gift to her. She takes off the ring, drops it in a little silk pouch and ties that around her neck, for safe-keeping. In Kinshasha, The Democratic Republic of Congo on behalf of Polaris Magnetics a green-eyed, one-armed man makes an offer to a debt-plagued vice-president of Union Minière du Haut-Kritanga that he cannot refuse. * * * * * * Washington, DC "Uh!" Scully grunts in pain, and she hisses. Her legs go out beneath her, her knees bend and her back bows and she grasps Byers' sleeve, wrecking the neatly pressed crease. "Scully?" says Frohicke, the best man. Scully is still hissing, the back of her neck feels bee stung. The other slim women in grey suits and red hair don't react. "Let's get her out of here," says a lone gunmen. Langley grabs a Scully look-a-like and shakes her arm. The look-a-like notices Scully clutching at the back of her neck, glares at Byers in disbelief who is bent over, trying to keep an apparently besieged Scully upright. Byers widens his eyes at the look-a-like, emphasizing his need with a tight slow tilt of his chin and she begins to groan and thrash. Scullys fall over, rolling onto their stomachs to hide faces that don't resemble Special Agent Dana Scully at all. Wigs slide from heads, but that's okay . . . the women of Mufon have agreed that Special Agent Dana Scully must not found, neither her nor the child within her. 'Protect the mother,' said the man known as X to Special Agent Fox Mulder. He wasn't the only one charged by destiny and outrage to do so. * * * * * * Brazzaville, Republic of Congo At Customs Scully's German is useless and she doesn't remember any of her high school French. Scully suspects that the woman in the epauletted uniform speaks better English than Scully does the local Swahili variant but that doesn't help Scully any when a person wearing a more decorated uniform intervenes and walks off with her travel documents. Scully is pulled aside and asked to wait in a room. Minutes later Skinner enters. He grinds his teeth and glares at her, his hands on his hips. "I'm trying to help you," is said several times. "We have no jurisdiction here, Agent Scully," he says. She stares back at him, sucking in her cheeks, but that's how it is. He leaves. When he returns he has with him French fries. Why do you? She sits at the room's lone table and eats them. They are still warm. She looks up while one-by-oneing and looks at her reflection in the one way mirror. Her cheeks shine with grease, her lips are brilliant. She blinks with her reflection. They smile something unrecognizable but she feels the upward pulling of her cheek before seeing it and knows it is her. Her eyes are happy, though she is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Happiness is not something Mulder ever told her he wanted for her, not until after she thanked him for it. She had said, 'You know when there are things that happen to you, and there not things you were looking for, or even sure you had them, or even sure you wanted to keep when you realized that you did have them?" They'd been watching a guy movie on his couch in his apartment, and summer was just beginning but Alexandria had yet to feel the heat. She'd been smiling while talked, which was strange to him, then, too. Bemused by her smile he'd touched the tip of his finger to her nose, flicked off whatever he'd found and taken a deep and amazed breath. They'd been so new. She'd said, "Yes." He'd paused, his eyes searching hers as they sat on his couch where a lot, a lot a lot had already been said about their years together. He'd mumbled, "What you just said –" She'd interrupted him, her delivery matter-of-fact. "The way I feel," she'd told him. "The way you make me feel." He'd swallowed hard. Then he smiled. She'd known so many people, but there was nothing else like his smile, not on -- "Yes, Mulder," she had told him. His lower lip beneath her drifting thumb had been soft and wet as pleasure. "Me, too." Her reflection smiles back at her, because that wasn't the point. "How?" She'd asked Mulder too many times, she was sure, "How can you travel through this great country of ours but limit yourself to the same lunch, week after week after week?" Scully fishes in her breast pocket, pulls out the laminated sheet ripped out of chapter seven of the powder metallurgy handbook and a notebook. While she waits for Skinner's return she writes out a coded message to the Gunman in a precise hand. * * * * * * "Playing Ostrich is a misnomer," says the man. Former Director Skinner and former Special Agent Dana Scully, waiting out the day, he holding his condensing beer bottle to his temple while he sits on the couch, glances over to where Scully lays, pregnant stomach up, on the motel bed. "What was that, Agent Scully?" Both have resigned from the federal bureau of investigations in spirit, but the habit is deeply ingrained in him to refer to her as Agent Scully. "Please," she responds, lifting one foot, and then another as she shifts the pillow supporting her feet - support hose, like a shed skin, piled next to it. "Call me, Scully. Sir." Former Director Walter Skinner almost grins. "Can't play at something when you really are something," she adds, wishing she were alone so she could floss her teeth. They are far from drunk. They are tired. And his holding his condensing water glass to his temple while he sits on the couch watching Scully with steady eyes and her lying on the one bed with her feet lifted atop the pillow and the red and black Walkman between her stomach and her breast, she is also more than tired. The headphones hiss white noise into her ears from a tape she knows wasn't empty. Her face is moist and shining with what only pregnancy and pollution could do to her. Had anyone asked, anyone, she would have said her sigh was not one of resignation. It is a moment of peace. She is thinking to her child that she is not playing Ostrich. 'We,' she mentally directs at her child, 'are not playing Ostrich.' Doctor of Biology Amina Ngebe may be playing ostrich. She has not contacted Scully as promised. Every letter Scully has sent to Dr. Ngebe has been sent back, marked 'return to sender'. Scully has called the university and it refuses to release information. It will neither confirm nor deny that Dr. Ngebe was a visiting doctor from the university of Ivory Coast. Perhaps it is Skinner. She runs her hands over her stomach but gives that up after three passes. It is too hot, her stomach, and her sweaty hands only made the ribbed cotton of her white shirt cling to her skin. The tape runs off to the end. The play button pops level with the other buttons on the cassette player. "Sir?" She asks. "How did you learn to speak Swahili?" "Ki-Swahili, agent Scully." 'I'm rubbing off on him,' she thinks. Precision is everything. Smiling Skinner looks like he may have gas, his lips don't part and he sighs. "Elbow grease," he says, his voice fond. The fetus inside of her shifts like a fish, sloshing welcomely to her. "Scully?" Skinner asks through gritted teeth. He says everything through gritted teeth, like he wants to whisper but is saving that for a more important statement, and isn't sure if the most important one had just been said. "The thing about Skinner, Scully," Mulder had once told her, leaning up away from her as he stood in front of her, between her and the open driver side door. "You never know if he's really saved you or who he's really working for." She had kissed Sir -Skinner once. Kisses mean a lot to her. Maybe too much, but it had been gratitude and relief and Mulder had been lost to her and even himself and there was no help to be had. Only mercy to be prayed for. There was a certain inevitability to life with Mulder, that very easily it could turn into life without Mulder. "ninamleta mtoto." The man's eyes never stray from Skinner's face, but Scully is certain that he wouldn't look in her direction for anything. "What was that you told him?" Scully asks. "I'm bringing the child." Porcelain, it fits into the palm of her hand. Loaded with narcotic, not bullets, it will hurt, and with luck he is allergic. "Put down your weapon, Agent Scully." "Mulder warned me." Scully's voice is high. "Stay back, sir. How long have you been -" "You've got the wrong idea." "You always say that!" "Have I ever let you down?" "I don't trust you! I only trust him!" In the nightmare, as often happens in her nightmare, she squeezes the trigger and nothing happens. Scully awakes in the hotel room, in her shirt and dress jacket, clutching the wire of her headphones, thumb and forefinger fastened on it like it's a decade of the rosary. She moves as she were far more pregnant than she actually is. Her head is spinning. Her heart beats arrythmically. Her back hurts. Her feet feel like fragile clay. "You're not sick," she tells herself. "You're pregnant." She pulls on her jacket, pulls out all the money she's been sleeping on, folds it in separate rolls of five hundred and tucks it into her fanny pouch. Turns on the light in the bathroom. Turns on the shower. Opens the front door, praying that no one has seen her, and hurries down into the street. *** "I'm your sodding guardian angel, sunbeam." "Jenny." Scully gestured at the woman's lit cigarette. "I've only got this one you bleeding cow!" "I should be grateful you don't smoke Morleys." "Only decent American cigarette ever made." *** In Kinshasha, Western Democratic Republic of Congo, the women come and go, mourning the water buffalo. They had been airlifted out months before, along with the other zoo animals that had survived starvation and poaching, taking with them one of the city's few remaining sources of fresh milk. It is dawn. The red sun rises above the city. Runners of hot pink and gold waver over the mist heavy river running alongside the eastern breadth of Kinshasha. Machine gun pop and crumple sounds from the distance by Republic of Congo way. Those soldiers have always been coming. The short and false lightning of artillery fire strobes the underbelly of the heavy smoke where the fighting was. Dana Scully turns her back on this view. She does not see the flicker arc of blue electric sparks from working street light travel from working streetlight. Doesn't see it coalesce into a skinny ex-pat with long blonde hair. The expat breaks into a trot, a burning cigarette in her hand. Scully shrouds her eyes and looks out from her place on the helipad. Women dressed for work walk the broad but crumbling paths of the national zoo, sifting through old animal bedding made light and sear by unrelenting sun and increasingly dry days for what may be useful. Mist rises from the slow river bordering the city. Seconds won't past before the heat sucks it away. "Scully," shouted in estuary English. "Scully, you rigid sow!" Scully turns and sees the British ex-pat clamber up the rocky blasted side of the helipad, a cigarette, the size of a roach, clamped between her ruddy lips. Once she gets up she unloads three bottles of water, passing two to Scully. Scully doesn't want to eat the hot porridge the woman has gotten from who knows where. * * * * * * Working parallel to June 30 boulevard Jenny has set a wicked pace, and as far as Scully can tell, doesn't sleep, but the woman was looking fresh as long stemmed white tulips bound by yellow ribbon and centered in a handkerchief vase. Jenny tans dulce de leche and her heavy hair, pinned at the base of her neck, gleams like new wheat no matter the lighting. Her eyes are gently blue, their shade kind enough to put a smile on the face of anyone who would habitually ward off evil happenstance with two fingers and muttered words at the first glimpse of any shade of blue. Isaak Dinsen playing herself never looked more at home in wet paper bag color tencel pants and vest, than just-call-me-Jenny-I'm-helping-you- you-silly-sow does. But Jenny wears a hammer and sickle t-shirt. She is a foul- mouthed anarchist, and she sheds cigarette ash and liquor effluvia with a minimum of styles. Jenny is an anarchist who knows Kinshasha like the back of her nicotine stained hands. Thanks to her Scully hadn't run out of bottled water yet. Jenny, just Jenny, is Scully's angel, having gotten her out of the Cite and closer to Brazzaville. But she reeks. The hard perfume reek surrounding Jenny is gin coming out of her pores mixed with the gritty bottom of the oil can stink. Her voluminous tencel pants are the color of wet paper bags, the loose weave of the material at odds with her spare economical figure. Scully has burned, and peeled, and burned and peeled again during their trek around the outskirts of Kinshasha. Sun damage and freckles accentuate the delicacy of Scully's skin, and her red hair has gone to corona. "Why are we here?" Scully asked when the woman below had left the zoo in search of other useful things to do. "I've got us a lift outta here, is what," drawls Jenny. "Now you gonna drink your water or not? You're lookin' peaked." * * * * * * Jenny abuses herself for not being cheap enough to forego a glass bottle, shakes out the contents of her tarnished hip flask over her shaking hand. "You'd think that after 70 years of being a grown up I'd've done this a time or two," she says. "Cigarette," Scully pants. Jenny's damp cigarette is dangling from her lip. She spits it out onto the ground. Jenny wraps her hand around Scully's, and Scully hurts Jenny with a strength that wipes Jenny's mind momentarily clear of thought. "Contraction," Scully pants. "Sorry." Jenny bares her teeth, teeth far better than a British woman born in 1900 should ever have had. As good as any well-off American twenty-year old, but better, like the rest of her aside from that hideous booze and cheap cigarette smell. "Ready?" Jenny asks, fear and hesitancy in her eyes, belying her fierce grin. Scully snorts. "I birthed a parasitic alien being through the back of my neck without anesthetic via c-section. I can certainly - ow." Scully grimaces. "handle this."