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post-the end; much credit is due to ming-liang tsai's goodbye dragon inn (2003)
—
It’s a scuzzy haunt now and soon it will be a CVS. The swaybacked chairs will come out; the blanched grey posters will come down. Gutted, it’ll take on the same eerie echo Jonah surely once knew well, down deep in the belly of some leviathan. Scully goes in to be swallowed. It’s raining the rain you find in good Raymond Chandler adaptations, and her apartment is two blocks too far away. Three days ago her office had burnt down at the wrong end of a cigarette. Scully goes in not to drown.
—
Burnt popcorn, old smoke. This time next month the marquee will read BUY TWO GET ONE FREE ARM & HAMMER TOOTHPASTE. Today it reads: NOTORIOUS. And lower, on the orange hand-written slip of paper on the window: Last picture show! Tickets half-price! We have loved sitting in the dark with you!
There’s no one behind the counter. Not paying for things makes Scully nervous. She fishes around in her purse for a fiver, then folds it into a neat square to tuck behind Paul Newman, whose reliable face is taped to the register. His eyes are clear and blue. It feels safe to leave cash there with him because he’d loved Joanne Woodward so well in the movies and also in real life. It seems an honest thing to do.
The theater door daggers light across scabby carpet. The movie’s already started: Ingrid Bergman in a little kerchief, driving Cary Grant crazily down Miami streets. Palm trees cave paint their shadows against canvas sky. Scully flushes, wrong footed by her own lateness. She never used to get so anxious. What had Gibson said? “You don’t care what anybody thinks. Except for her. The other one.” Well, she isn't here.
And neither is — anyone, really. Scully gleans off the shadows a moment, leaning on the long wall like Hopper’s thinker, letting her eyes adjust. Down front light from the projection booth catches in an older woman’s silvery hair. A man just behind her in a breasted suit, something too fine for a matinee. Two teenagers slouching with their knees up, ankles thin and socks ruched. The one on the aisle glances at Scully, then away. Scully ducks into the back row, where the dark is darker and it feels too easy to be alone.
—
Bergman’s deep in Nazi territory, Grant is deeply territorial. Scully is soothed by the mid-Atlantic diction, by the imbroglio of Hitchcock’s espionage. The grainy sound of the storm outside audible over the whir of the projector. She watches through her lashes, drowsy. Light and shadow flake into the front row. Bits of image come down like rain. The old woman turning her silver face up to the silver screen like some Méliès moon, unblemished.
Then the itch of eyes on her. Unease straightens her spine. Scully blinks the film away and turns down the dim row toward where a silhouette is watching her watch the movie, two or three seats over. Its face turns curiously toward her in the dark.
There’s the flare of irritation, then shame again — she’d thought she was alone. But this stranger is too, so what’s there to be embarrassed about?
The stranger moves in her direction. Maybe she's just blocking the aisle. Scully sits up taller in her seat, pulling her knees in to let it pass. As it gets close she can make out the blue edge of a pack of Red Vines peeking out of a jacket pocket. Oh, and it makes her feel lonely. Mulder ordering Red Vines and Raisinets at the Avalon and talking her ear off about witch cakes through the entirety of The Crucible. Mulder with his knees cramped up nearly to his ears in a church basement theater in Abernathy, Texas, because it was the only place in town with AC. Mulder as they emerged from shadow into sullen sunshine after rain, turning to her the way he had for years: with a question in the angle of his body. Mulder not even having to ask it, because it was always already there between them, hanging in air the way light from the projector did, a beam of refracted meaning without which there would be nothing to sit in dark rooms about. Well, it went, what’d you think?
The stranger stops and blocks the screen. When she looks up to complain, there is nothing to complain about. She knows him better than the movie, and she's seen it at least three times.
“Mulder,” she says, too loud for the theater.
“Of all the gin joints,” says Mulder, cut out of the stars on screen. He’s looking at her like he had after he’d told her she should thank her lucky ones in a hospital bed, years back. It’s only been a couple days.
“Wrong movie,” she whispers.
“Nah.” He settles in beside her. He offers up a tacky Red Vine, which she accepts. “It’s definitely the right one.”
—
Mulder pulls popcorn from God knows where. Mulder magicks Raisinets into existence. Mulder offers her handfuls of things that taste like better years and understanding, and she accepts them all. Mulder tucks his chin into his throat and tells her about how this film probably coasted to box office success on the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and did she know it had an FBI detail assigned to it, the whole shebang?
Scully flicks him in the thigh. Scully forgets there are other people in the theater. Scully had once been fifteen and had sat in the back of a Planet of the Apes movie bored out of her mind and wanting a boy to kiss her. Scully is thirty-four, and she is not in the habit of giving herself whatever it is she is wanting, and she likes Planet of the Apes fine. Scully pretends she'll move a seat down. Scully says, "When you're ready to watch the movie, I'll sit with you again."
Mulder says nothing and gives her a look like crushed velveteen.
Cary Grant says, “When I don’t love you, I’ll let you know.”
—
In the bathroom line it’s just Scully and the old woman and three Humphrey Bogart posters. The woman wears a glamorous set of pearls like Scully’s mother’s mother had had once, heirlooms. They’d buried her in them when she'd died.
“Are you enjoying the picture?” Her voice is mannered and precise. There’s a lilt to her plosives that’s like an old accent.
Scully just got into a fifteen minute whispered argument about uranium ore. “Yes,” she says, “very much.”
“It’s too bad about the theater closing.” The woman tilts her head cozily against the underside of Bogie’s chin. “Although nobody goes to the movies anymore.” Her eyes close, then open again. Her throat is smooth and brown. The pearls look silver, like nitrate. She catches Scully looking and smiles with her mouth closed. She says, “Except ghosts.”
—
Rain runs off the marquee in a shining curtain. Slowly it’s gone on seven o’clock. Little round bulbs buzz above their heads, the yellow of spectacle and warm summer nights. Paul Newman blue in the shadows, trustworthy and true.
“I can’t believe it’s still coming down like this.” Mulder rocks on his heels. “You bring an umbrella? Yeah. Me either. Kinda why I’m here.”
“Me too,” Scully says. “I was on my way home.”
She waits for him to explain what he was doing two blocks from he apartment when the last time they’d spoken he’d said he “needed some time to think” and “didn’t see the point of doing a post-mortem on both of their careers when the body had been cremated.”
He looks off down the street instead. “Did you see those two old people coming out?”
Scully shakes her head. “No, why?” She hasn’t told him about the bathroom line because he hasn’t told her why he was so close to her apartment because he hadn't told her about Diana because she hadn't told him she'd sat in her car for an hour three days ago mostly just thinking about St. Paul's celibacy and carbon monoxide poisoning. Because it is so hard for them, always, to admit to what they already know.
“Everyone’s left but them.” Mulder frowns. “Maybe we should go check if — “
But the door opens then, and it’s the woman in her pearls and the man in his too-nice suit, both in hats and neither with umbrellas. The woman has tucked her hand into her partner’s elbow, and he moves at her easy pace.
“Good evening,” he offers, tipping his hat. “Cats and dogs out here, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Mulder says. “Uh, sure is a humdinger of a storm.”
“I’ll say.” The man’s smile a dazzle of pure white. A dimple deepens in the center of his chin.
“You get yourselves home safe,” the woman adds. Her cheeks are rounder, fuller than they’d been under the poster, in the bathroom line. There is a hollow below the pearls at her throat that bespeaks vitality and youth. There is a familiarity in all her mannerisms that makes Scully’s fingers go numb at the tips. “We have loved,” she says, “sitting in the dark with you.”
And then they walk out into the rain like at the end of the famous scene.
Mulder turns to Scully with the question in his eyes, but he doesn’t ask it. One by one, the lightbulbs above them fizz and go out. The sound of rain like grain on film; the thing that reminds you that real life made up all this fantasy.
Mulder offers her his arm, like Cary Grant had offered his to Ingrid Bergman. Scully tucks her hand into his elbow, and turns up to face him with her face in shadow.
He says, “I’ve loved sitting in the dark with you, too.”
Their ruined office. Their aborted careers. Their doomed quest and its incomprehensible subplots and ensembles and third act twists. Their quiet habit of staying on too late after five o’clock, just to face each other across desks in a basement that was only theirs, and ghosts’.
Scully says, “Let’s do it again sometime.” Let's never stop.