Work Text:
The basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., functions as a de facto storage system for both old cases best left untouched and the agents either stupid or driven enough to touch them. Between the stacks of musty old boxes and corkboards tacked with pictures connected by red thread there is a desk upon which sits a slightly out-of-date computer monitor and metal mesh basket containing a thick sheaf of manila folders that will soon be invariably marked either FOLLOW UP or FAKE LEAD in precise script. In front of the basket there is a nameplate that is always at least half-obscured by the overflow of oddly-sized papers from these folders. Today, it reads just CE S. Behind this Everest of paperwork there is a splay of auburn hair like an exit wound across the desk. It gleams like copper wire directly under the only light in the room, a dark metal desk lamp with a flexible gooseneck that is bent at an odd angle for maximum illumination. When Special Agent Dana Scully touches the knob to turn it off, her fingers brush the hot metal shade and she has to stifle a yelp at the sudden pain from the heat that surpasses the steaming mug of black coffee in her hand.
Despite her silence, the change in light and temperature is nevertheless enough to disturb the sleeping figure. Special Agent Clarice Starling shifts fitfully and her head rolls to the side so that her delicate profile is visible through a web of loose hair. There is a luridly pink flushed patch of skin that dominates her forehead from lying on it for so long. She does not wake yet, but sighs quietly as her eyes flicker slightly open and drift shut. Still, it will not be long before she is forced to surface by the righteous crick that must be developing in her neck from the odd angle of her posture. Dana considers waking her, but thinks better of it.
Instead, she scans the collages that Clarice has created around her desk with the care and expertise of a devoted, reclusive artist. One is a world map marked with multicolored pins. Clusters of red center primarily on Italy, France, and Spain, while yellow, blue, and green pins are more haphazardly placed across the map, from Alaska to Uruguay to Namibia. There is a map key on an index card tacked next to the display, categorizing sightings in terms of likeliness: RED - LIKELY; YELLOW - POSSIBLE; GREEN - UNLIKELY; BLUE - DOUBTFUL. Some of the red pins are linked by taut threads to a line of photographs above the map that are labeled by date and location. They vary in quality from grainy to blurred beyond recognition, but they all ostensibly are meant to show the same person, the one in the profile taped to the board and depicted larger than life in the poster on the square cement column three feet from Agent Starling’s desk: Doctor Hannibal Lecter.
The other board features more minutiae that would doubtlessly be holding Dana’s interest even now, were it not for the sudden sound behind her. Clarice’s bleary murmur is the only real sound in the basement, which is denied true silence by the susurrating creak and shift of files shifting, settling, demanding to be solved in their own unconscious way. Lifeless matter, be it organic or inorganic, has a way of speaking to the soul that often proves more catalytic than human speech.
“What . . . time,” Clarice exhales through a fog of sleep, making Dana’s gaze take a detour, forsaking its path from 7/23/97 PALAZZO VECCHIO to the X-Ray on the next board for the face of her watch. It is early enough that she needs a second to process the analog readout and attach meaning to the short hand that lies between the 5 and 6 and the long hand that shifts before her eyes from three to two notches before the 9.
“It’s five forty-five,” she says.
“Evening?” comes the hopeful inquiry.
“You wish,” Dana replies.
She plunks the chipped mug down in one of the two spaces on the desk not occupied by paperwork and is gratified to see Clarice raise her head from the other space in a cascade of tawny hair. Dana bites back a small smile as Clarice rolls her neck in a full circle and her clicking cervical vertebrae add percussion to the soft basement undersong. She reaches for the mug then stops dead for a half-second with her hand hovering almost motionless in midair, eyebrows shifting slightly upward. It’s obvious why Mulder had shoved it into the back of a drawer where it lay until half an hour earlier. In a bright red, obnoxiously cheerful typeface, the mug proclaims:
You Don’t
H A V E
to be
C r A z Y
to Work
Here . . .
When Clarice lifts it to blow away the steam rising from the coffee, the other side delivers its equally gaudy punchline:
BUT IT
HELPS!
If Power (shorthand for the act of gaining power) is defined loosely as Influence / The Ability to Influence and if Success (shorthand for the act of succeeding) is defined loosely as Achievement / Realization of Objectives, then certain equations can be held as at least mostly true:
Ambition + Diligent Work = Success
Intelligence + Hard Work = Success
Connections = Power - Hard Work
Success + x = Power
Theoretically:
Success + Exposure = Power
Success + Repetition = Power
Success + Time = Power
Points of interest:
1. Power - Hard Work = Ambition + Exposure = Connections
1a. Paul Krendler believes that Starling has power, achieved by luck, that comes from her involvement in high-profile cases and her overwhelming desire to shrug her freckle-faced, corn-growin’ hick past. Clarice Starling must have friends, and powerful ones, because if he dropped this many A-bombs of sheer bullshit defamation on anyone else, they’d be kicked out of the FBI so fast and hard that they’d end up orbiting Jupiter.
1b. There is just no way that some dime-a-dozen Little House on the Prairie white trash piece of tail like Starling—a student at the time—gets called in on what turns out to be the most exciting story to come out of the FBI this century out of sheer luck. There were senior agents in the Bureau who would have given their entire sexual apparatuses for the job that just fell like manna from fucking heaven into Clarice Starling’s lap.
1c. Speaking of her lap: who was she fucking? Crawford? But he doesn’t have enough influence to put all these pieces together. Lecter? But that doesn’t explain how she got assigned to him in the first place.
1d. Starling looks good for a cold fish. And in Paul’s experience, Good Looks + Daddy Issues + Power = Past Sexual Favors.
1e. Starling might be good, but I’m better. Who’s looking out for her?
2. x ≠ Exposure, ≠ Repetition, ≠ Time
2a. If exposure is what it takes to get ahead, then Clarice will eat her pistol with a side of fries. FBI agents don’t get national recognition, yet there she was, household name, America’s sweetheart, nice little Southern girl next door who “just did what anyone else would’ve done, ma’am,” looking young and innocent in the ID photo that every news source ran with the story.
2b. Repetition? Like she hasn’t proven herself time and time again?
2c. Time doesn’t do shit but tarnish. It’s 1998 and she’s not going to be a young hotshot much longer.
2d. Clarice doesn’t want power, though, and perhaps that’s the crux of it all. Clarice wants to finish one single solitary REM cycle without lambs screaming bloody murder along her synapses.
2e. I might be good, but what does that do? Who’s looking out for me?
3. Clarice ≠ Powerful, ≠ Powerless
3a. Trajectory doesn’t imply destination. Anyway, meteoric is a Godawful adjective to associate with ascent. As if meteors do anything other than crash to the ground in a blaze of self-destructive glory.
3b. I’m not going nowhere. She might be relegated to the bowels of the FBI, but they won’t take her down without some serious manpower. Krendler drips poison into her file but she’s got her foot in the door and maybe the antidote in her hand too.
3c. Stasis in darkness. She’s been dumped in a basement.
3d. Stasis in darkness. She’s got a niche and no one can oust her.
3e. Nobody here but the FBI’s Most UnWanted, Dana repeats with a rare grin. What does it say that we’re still here despite all attempts to the contrary?
Dana’s sense of power dynamics is very different from Clarice’s, and its treble conflict is, oddly enough, decidedly less mathematical:
1. Us vs. Them
2. Me vs. The Unknown
3. Good vs. Evil
1a. ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constantly shifting entities that are entirely subjective from person to person and time to time. Dana is always a part of her own ‘Us,’ as is the practice. The issue is that ‘Them’ is an oft-inarticulable force, and that the boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are never as cut and dry as they appear.
1b. Them > Us
2a. ‘Me’ is harder to articulate than one might think, because ‘The Unknown’ is defined in relations to the failings of the self to perceive and understand, meaning that, really, ‘The Unknown’ is really a part of ‘Me,’ and what the hell do you do about that?
2b. What she does is deny, usually.
2c. The Unknown ≥ Me
3a. All bets are off on this one.
3b. Good ? Evil
In defining ‘Us’ in its current state:
Evolution, most simply, is the process by which organism A.1 becomes organism A.2. Thus, evolution is the wrong term for what has happened here because organism A.1 and A.2 are one and the same, and to truly have evolved, A.1 would have to be entirely extinct. Progression also fails because it implies a linear movement from Point A to Point B, which are entirely distinct points.
Scully&Mulder:
What shit haven’t we seen? This is color theory; opposites complement. They do not change, merely understand.
Dana&Clarice:
This is growth, Dana would have to say. They set down roots and pushed up stems and here is the flower, the bloom unfurling toward the sun, resplendent with color.
They dance around it for weeks. What finally happens is almost anticlimactic:
“Do you want to get drinks sometime?”
Recognition: “Not as coworkers.”
“And not as friends.”
“I—God, yes.”
The basement feels unseasonably warm as Clarice scans the latest list of luxury purchases, imports, and exports. Dana is rolling a pen between her fingers as she stares absently at the computer where there is a half-typed document detailing her latest foray into the supernatural. Pensive contemplation on total disorder is something they share unspoken.
“Dana?”
Not a stir. Clarice watches the pen rolling between Dana’s fingertips and the play of light across her jawline.
“Dana.”
Dana blinks as she is disentranced and drops the pen onto Clarice’s desk which she is using to write her latest report. “Yes,” she says. The dreamy light in her eyes lingers and scintillates in the dim basement.
“Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere. Just for a day or two.”
How does one reconcile the following:
Person + Person = 2 People
Person + Person = Us
?
Three years later they pack their bags and pool their rainy day savings and request two weeks off. They end up, on the second to last day of their vacation, in Buenos Aires of all places. Clarice is dotted with freckles and they are both slightly pink, but not langosta red like some of the tourists.
They are approaching the Teatro Colon when Clarice jolts suddenly and her hand goes slack in Dana’s. Following her gaze to the very front of the Teatro, Dana watches a man climbing out of the back seat of a car that she recognizes from Clarice’s list of luxury goods as a Mercedes Maybach. His features are somewhere between familiar and foreign until he looks in their direction with maroon eyes. A shiver of fear runs up Dana’s spine, but Hannibal Lecter simply smiles at them and raises his hand in the slightest suggestion of a wave before he walks into the theatre without a backward glance.
“Holy fuck,” Clarice whispers in tones that are almost reverent. “That sonuvabitch—”
In defining ‘Us’:
Dana&Clarice:
Growth, always. The lone bloom was the first of many that have opened their petals to the sun’s warmth and blossomed.
In defining ‘The Unknown’:
Is it really so terrifying to be surprised? The Unknown is a reminder that we may always grow.
In defining ‘Good’:
Sun-kissed shoulders and the thrill of the chase. The reassuring weight of Clarice’s Colt .45 in her purse. Understanding.