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“I’m sleeping.”
The mattress sagged next to her. She was frequently surprised at the swiftness with which she’d become greedily accustomed to that sag. But she was sleeping, she said, and so he politely kept his mouth shut and his hands to himself. He folded them over his stomach, fingers interlaced. He was being very good. His black socks slipped against the bedspread and she burrowed her head deeper into the cool pillow. The crook of her arm was tented across her eyes.
“What time is our flight?”
He smiled and stretched. She knew what time their flight was. She was the holder of tickets, the checker of gates, the one who counted backwards from departure so a taxi was hailed at the appropriate time.
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“I am. Very soundly.”
“I see. It’s at 3:55.”
It sounded hours and hours and hours away. In DC time, that was 6:55, which was nearly 7:00, which meant it was in the future, practically. His leg was warm next to hers. She reached over with a blind hand and tugged gently at his tie, twisting it, tethering him. He took it as a careful invitation and reached over to toy with the hem of her shirt.
“Do you want to hear about the Great Muldini?”
“Is this going to turn into something lewd?”
“How dare you.”
He turned his head, keeping one hand on the thin ridges of her shirt, and looped the other over and around to softly brush against her temple. Her eyelids fluttered. Her sliced hair bunched messily against the pillow, a gap in the curtains dappling sunlight across her right cheek. She looked pretty and he told her so.
“You’re working awfully hard, here.”
“Who’s working? This is nothing but two partners shooting the breeze. Passing time.”
“Uh huh.”
“Anyway.”
“Anyway.”
“The Great Muldini,” he continued, “was—and I am absolutely being modest now—the best magician ever to come out of any fifth grade class, in any elementary school, in any city or town on the eastern seaboard.”
She pictured him at ten, all elbows and knees, incongruously dark and serious eyes. His skinny hands with Band-aided knuckles, palming cards, disappearing quarters. Kneeling in front of a coffee table, pressing a shag-carpet pattern into his shins as he lifted cups to reveal a jittery, marbled superball. Slapping a hand over it before it skittered off the table. A blanket as a cape, the silky hem dragging on the ground. Conjuring a wilting bouquet of tissue paper.
“This is a little known fact about magic. A trade secret, Scully.” He lazily ducked his head and pressed kisses down her jaw. “I can trust you with a trade secret, can’t I, Scully?”
She fidgeted, her clothes feeling two sizes too small at his touch, his tie still crumpled in her hot fingers. She opened her eyes and blinked, then turned on her side. She pressed her other hand briefly to his blue shirt, half-expecting the shadow of a sweaty, five-fingered print to remain.
“There you are,” he said. Slowly, he reached up and pushed her hair back, covering her ear with his warm palm, making her hear rushing water, rushing blood. His arms encircled her head like something in a Chagall painting and she felt momentarily vulnerable, bereft, when he moved them.
“Here I am.” Tell me your secret.
“This may come as a surprise to you, but six-year-olds make lousy magician’s assistants.” He made his way to her neck, where he sighed and rested. Slight of hand, busy underneath her clothes, her shirt and jacket rippling.
“Really.”
She was six. She had two more years. She would have wanted to dress up. Had she taken tap classes? Was she wearing a spangled and sequined leotard that was meant to accompany a scratchy recording of “Tea for Two”? Was she wearing a cheap tiara from her dress up box? Did she have a dress up box? Was Mulder bossy? Of course he was bossy. But if he was a bossy know-it-all, she had almost surely been a tattletale, a foot-stomper, a crier on cue. Two more years.
“Terrible, terrible assistants. The Great Muldini always worked alone.”
She made an unsurprised humming noise and he drew slow lines across her stomach.
“But his assistant had decided that he needed an assistant. She checked out a book called “Magic for Kids.” Exclamation point. The Great Muldini scoffed. He did real magic. Illusions. Not tricks out of a sticky book from the kids’ section that was held together with tape. But he agreed. Now, don’t become disillusioned, Scully, but at the pivotal moment of the assistant’s trick, she was supposed to surreptitiously tap the Great Muldini’s toe to let him know which card the audience member had chosen.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” Her fingers had worked their way into the knot at his throat, had undone the button there.
He leaned over, licking his lips as if it had nothing to do with her at all. Then his lips were touching hers, but he acted still like it was nothing out of the ordinary, like it was a normal part of everyday conversation. To speak to someone with your lips touching, with your teeth centimeters apart. So close it demanded the use of metric.
“It’s always rules, rules, rules with you.”
Then he kissed her like he was going to be tested on it: essay questions, closed book, no multiple choice. Like a report would have to be appended in triplicate and submitted to Skinner.
“Where was I?” Sometimes she wanted to slug him: that lazy unconcern he could affect so easily, that low, mumbly, crackling drawl of his, so unimpressed. She held onto momentary slivers of triumph, Mulder losing his cool, the slightly lobotomized look he’d get when she tipped her head back in the misty shower spray, when she dragged the toe of a shoe up the length of his shin beneath a dirty diner table, when they’d sit too close on his squeaky couch and her hand, delighted, would go where it had so long been forbidden to go.
“Six-year-old little sisters make terrible assistants and you were, unsurprisingly, a cheater.”
“Right.” His thumb rubbed the smooth taper of her rib cage, symmetrical like a valentine heart folded out of construction paper.
“So I was, at the time, planning on making magic my career. At least in the off-season. When the Yankees didn’t need me. I told you I was very, very good, right?”
“I think you mentioned that.”
“Oh, I was very, very good.”
She tugged on his tie and he continued.
“So. The assistant tapped once. The Great Muldini waved his wand and, without looking at the card, held it up.”
“Did you say ‘Ta-daa!’ and everything?”
“I may have. So I held up the card, which was supposed to be the king of hearts, but which was actually…the three of diamonds.”
“Poor Great Muldini.” She let go of his tie, which was now irrevocably wrinkled, and petted his hair with both hands, the short strands slipping through her fingers.
“When I finally looked down at the card I was holding up, it was too late. My assistant had screwed me over for her own amusement.”
“Was she laughing at you?” she asked quietly.
She proceeded with caution. They never traded stories like this. Because: her sister was shot dead and her brother really, really hated him (God forbid he find out what they were doing these days), and then mostly: mostly because his sister had been stolen away on a November night.
“She kept a straight face for about two seconds. Then she started laughing. And then my parents started laughing.” She couldn’t picture his parents laughing. She’d never met his father, but Teena Mulder seemed sternly disapproving in that cool, un-amused, New England way.
“What did you do?”
“Well,” he said, “first, I swept the whole deck of cards onto the floor. Then I broke my wand and punched the wall on the way to my room.”
She brought his heavy hand to her lips and kissed it, thirty-year-old bruises and scrapes under her mouth.
“Did you get grounded?”
“Very, very grounded.”
“Well. At least your head didn’t fall off.”
“It’s the little things.”
In the echoey hallway of the North Hollywood precinct, the look on her face had been devious, delighted. Like she’d been waiting for days, the seconds killing her dead as they ticked slowly by. Waiting until she’d be able to show him this, her hand circling around itself like a drowsy spider.
“And what about your trade secret revealed?” He poked his knee at her shin.
“I don’t have any secrets, Mulder, trade or otherwise.” He snorted. She was fathoms and fathoms deep. He’d been building a diving bell for years and he wasn’t sure he’d ever be done.
He prodded up and down her arm like a handsy apothecary looking for a broken bone.
“Oh that,” she said casually. “I told you. Magic.”
She gave him a quick, solid, stamp of a kiss and rolled out of bed. He groaned and unfurled his arms. He could see her in the bathroom mirror, packing.
“The thing is, Scully, “ he said, looking at the ceiling, entirely pushing his luck, “your clothes made it difficult for me to tell exactly how magical your little trick really was.”
“Is that so?” He heard the sharp zip of her black toiletry case. The shower curtain rustled as she checked for a hiding bottle of shampoo or bar of soap.
Later, waiting to board, she leaned in close. “So you really, really need proof?”
He studiously kept his attention on the thick, dog-eared file he was balancing on one open hand.
“I always need proof.”
She looked at her watch, delicately adjusting it, moving the face back to the center of her wrist.
“Well, we’ll be back in DC in 5 hours.”
She slipped him a grin, pressing her lips together.
Fathoms and fathoms deep. She pulled an endless scarf from her sleeve. Silver coins rained from her fingertips. She produced a fluttering dove—confetti—flowers from thin air and gave them to him.