He left her for less than
five minutes. The nightmare
was significant. She woke still

in it. He saved her.
She left her
inhibitions in the grave.

I read that little piece on Valentine’s Day at an open mic at Fergie’s Pub. Before reciting these brief lines — based on a sixth-season episode of the American science-fiction television program The X Files — I sang a few bars from a song called Saint Valentine, by Joe Ely. The lyrics go “Saint Valentine drove a red Continental with a headlight out and a dent in the side. He swore it wasn’t his, it was only a rental, but he drove it every single night.” The song has always kind of reminded me of a man I knew near the turn of the century, an appropriate type of man to think of on this holiday. Then I said the poem and sat down. I didn’t even tell people my name.

Sometimes the young people ask me, “Is the show really scary?” I used to never be afraid, but now in middle age I have come into a great deal of fear. Last summer, I was scared because I had little red dots all over my skin. Then in the winter and spring, it was my teeth. Now in late summer when I’m forty-five, it’s my knees. I had to find someone else to host my food tour tomorrow morning, because I can’t trust my knees this week. I don’t know what’s up. The past week I’ve had no appetite.

What is scary about the show is that people made it, and they did a tremendously good job. People like that frighten me. I think there are people who make TV, and there are people who watch TV, and I watch a lot of it. But if I miss something, I might never know what it could have been a clue to. For instance, one of the interior scenes on the ship in Triangle, the third episode of the sixth season, the shadowy room from the music montage — that’s the room from one of the dreams from my last post, over a year ago. When I said “Come see me in Dreamland,” I didn’t mean the two-part episode by that name. In fact, I didn’t even remember that episode — or any other — a year ago. But here we are, and I’m getting ahead of you.

“Stop! This man has no answers. You’re killing innocent people to learn that he knows nothing.”

~ The 1939 Scully on the ship

You and me both, we don’t get it done. I don’t understand how anyone does. It’s like there’s a competition to see who is a healthy person and I ain’t winning. Sometimes I go on the cultural alliance job bank and the job bank says Do you want to work in a creative environment that gives back to its community and transforms lives? and it’s not that I don’t. But I don’t know what to say. So I would like to go back to my story.

So October started with September and there was a lot going on, with a powerful summer still lingering and literal alarms ringing and me thinking this cannot be. It started on the eighth. We called and called, we think it’s broken. The firemen came, they said it’s broken too. Anyway, so I moved. And at the new place, there’s this big TV. At first I think it’s just taking up a lot of space, but then I learn how to turn it on, and it turns out, they have Mulder and Scully on it.

I’ve been meaning to re-watch it. I only remembered the basics. I know Mulder and Scully are FBI agents who investigate paranormal cases and she’s a skeptic and he’s a believer and I’m a romantic and they love each other. Beyond that I remember only a few glimmering details. A lake monster. Baseball. A missing ship from history. An alien smoking a cigarette. An attic bedroom. A midnight kiss at the millennium. Rented cars on miles of highways under the moon. A frog on a lily pad. Someone says “It’s a good story” but they don’t believe it, someone else says they want to talk to the writer — although, at first I thought that was a line I was remembering from a Sorkin script — and somebody tells someone not to write this book, but none of those things are connected. I don’t remember much more. I knew there were, what, seven seasons? Or nine? And a movie, and a few years ago, they came out with something?

My new rental was furnished with a full-size bed, the first time I’ve had one in fourteen years. I rolled out my twin-size bedroll on top of the mattress, turned on the television, and began with the Pilot.

That the small
bones of the ear

are both how you hear
and hold

your balance
seems farfetched. You’re welcome

to fall
if that’s a problem.

I didn’t think the TV would even come on when I picked up the remote control and pressed a button. When it did, I assumed there would be no programming on it. When there was, I assumed I would need to subscribe to something to watch it. When I didn’t seem to, I assumed it was a mistake and would disappear any day.

Then one day in November, it happened. It said something went wrong. I turned it off and on again. I went into the settings but didn’t understand. I found the wi-fi networks, they all said they were out of range. I thought, it’s OK, I don’t need the TV on to eat. But I lost my appetite and sat at my desk refusing to believe. I knew this was going to happen. Why did I begin?

That night, I went for a long night walk through my new neighborhood. Before that, I went on YouTube and began watching fan remixes and clips. In the big re-watch, I was only as far as early season four and still only remembering things as I came to them. Even major turns of plot and substantial characters were still obscured from memory. On YouTube, I stumbled across the final scene of The Post-Modern Prometheus and began to cry uncontrollably.

Every problem is solvable, and sooner or later, so was this. All I needed was some wifi. The TV had finally logged itself out. I simply needed to supply it with some Comcast and it happily returned to me my beloved agents. When I picked up my new router, they handed it to me in a bright red shiny bag with an X splashed across it. Which stands for Xfinity, but try telling me that. That evening, I hooked it up and watched seven episodes in one sitting.

---

In season six, episode six, How The Ghosts Stole Christmas, when they are dragging themselves across the floor all bloody and frightened and in shock, blaming each other for their present condition, Mulder says to Scully, “You shot me first!”

She did though. In Anasazi, at the end of season two. And they never had a proper conversation about the brutality of that event, only the logistics. He forgave her, of course, but she never said she was sorry.

Fighting to breathe, Scully replies, “I didn’t shoot you, you shot me!” In the instant she says that, Mulder becomes aware that none of this is really happening and they will both live to see Christmas morning. How could he be so certain? I don’t think it’s a problem with the writing. I think it’s because he would never do that, for any reason.

In the penultimate episode of season three — Wetwired, a beloved outlier with a standalone feel and conspiracy elements — when Mulder walks into the hospital room after Scully has recovered from being brainwashed by a subconsciously hypnotic television signal installed manually by shadowy men on telephone poles, he puts his hands up in a “don’t shoot” gesture, sarcastically. She is feeling ashamed and doesn’t think it’s funny. I wonder why he made that moment into a punchline. Earlier that season, Pusher tried to get him to turn the gun on her by reminding him she did it first. A lot has happened. You know as well as anybody, it never really goes away. It isn’t a grudge or a judgment. It’s just some knowledge you can’t get rid of.

From the jump, the assumption was that it would come to nothing. It’s a pedestrian shushing – car tires on asphalt or runoff in gutters or boots in slush. All that matters is gold. The neighborhood lawns conspire to ignite from last night’s dusk a fire for the sunrise. Out of respect, you don’t reach for another cigarette. Your word is as good as the next. You remember nights late in the city when the fire escapes were down. The deli stays open and the cat stays in. The bus doesn’t come. No one has understood the costume. The wait is long and the weather grows cold. We’re talking about password permutations and it’s late. Someone goes to the opera, not in the movie but in the book. Someone walked the perimeter of the park, circling the roses like a lost moth, using a pallet, a mallet, and math. It isn’t evening yet. We have no proof we’ve done a thing. To live religiously is to throw in and participate. God is other people. Trust and believe. We live on favors and whatever is open. Nights like this don’t end. Winter is a magical time for kids, when darkness falls in the middle of the afternoon, and no one believes it so no one puts us to bed. It is not even evening yet.

“They’re oxidizing enzymes, just like fireflies.”

~ a shell-shocked season one Agent Scully, trying to have some control over a swarm of pinpoints of light that can eat them and could arrive at any moment

A million reasons why the room is humming. A still bloom, neither late nor coming. A system to deliver, a powdered tea on the tongue, and the neighbors are fighting again; one of them moved out two months ago and sometime since then crept back quietly in. It happens every so often and the rest of us sit here in our rooms, hearing, not taking the garbage out until it is done. None of us came to this life with a frame that would have us complain, and anyway to whom. 

Visions of us — with arms and legs for motion, a face for wondering, a heart for motivation — go exploring. Nerves are bundled by location, the location determines their specific blessing. Eyes to see and so on. A voice is said to be a powerful thing, but of course a voice would say that. A million things undone are not things, you’d be a fool to count them. You find it frivolous to love the flower and virtuous to love the fruit, but disregard the dirt. Too proud to languish in the dark, not a clue where better to languish. Just a number on the door and a curtain at the window. Sometimes sleigh bells ring but we still know. How far is far, how deep is snow, how many times does winter come and go. The elevator dings for who, it’s all for what? Where is Covarrubias who knows the truth about it, though, and what does she know? And when does she know it? Because time seems irrelevant to her. You have never seen her hurry although everything is urgent. The distance is melted with a syllable. Not everything dies, she says, and absconds with what was ours until a moment ago. We make a little place to live, we ask someone to show up, but then everyone comes if the serotonin clusters, if we land too many hits to miss. That’s what started all of this. The car horns that call out on a cold sunny afternoon were not for nothing but their meaning is indecipherable and irrelevant from this room, just another something done by someone, overwhelming like the fact that winter once was frozen. Where is Covarrubias? She has something for us. She is a time traveler who works from home. She doesn’t always win. She never wavers. She goes to the office in impeccable outfits.  When days are short, she never sees daylight. She answers her door in a moonlit nightie. Our man is spooked. He never mentions her when he gets home. He wouldn’t know where to begin. Sometimes she is left for dead. It couldn’t matter. As long as it isn’t everything, and as long as it’s never this. This over everything. She walks a high wire. We wonder where she is. In the opening credits of the second half of the two-part ninth season finale, I could have sworn it said Laurie Holden. Throughout the hour, I waited for Covarrubias to reappear, but she didn’t.

Graffiti’s gone. Next person
has to start again.

As Walnut and Chestnut go
back and forth over

which side
of the river we’re on.

Listen. I dare you to know what I’m talking about. This has all been by way of saying, it’s wrong. And I know it’s wrong. Moreover, it was always wrong, and I always knew it was. And furthermore, everyone does. You know as well as I do, and they know as well as you, and any person we could imagine would know too. I don’t have any doubts. Every one remembers, and nobody forgot. But I’m not going to say all that. If I say it’s wrong, then you’ll say I am, and that will be the end of it. But if you already know it’s wrong — which you do — then what are you going to argue about, and with who?

There’s an A.I. episode in season one, circa 1993, one in season five, circa ‘97, one in season seven at the turn of the century, and one in season eleven all the way in 2018. In season one, Mulder and Scully beat the A.I. pretty easily with a floppy disk. In season five, they beat it with an audio file. In season seven, they have to go inside the simulation to defeat it, which they are able to do, but not without leaving traces of it alive in the ether. By season eleven, they can no longer land a blow to the A.I. at all, but they triumph over it anyway by remaining human. That was six years ago.

We have here a constructed cup —
it has a cardboard curve and a black top.

Irritability is deputized —
the night beeping, the day grinds.

Learn what you have been told —
heartbreaking how no one knows

what they have done
wrong.

It was one of those community computer rooms
where someone saved their resume to the desktop.

It was one of those
cell phone plans with minutes and roaming.

It was one of those things
where you can’t afford knowing

what to say.
It was one of those days.

I drew a hard line between the nineties and the 2000s, and I left The X Files in the nineteen hundreds. The imaginary line between the millennia changed me, apparently. I stopped watching the show in February of 2000, abruptly. By looking at the original air dates, I can pinpoint the week, because it was between Closure, which aired on February 13th, 2000, and X Cops, which aired a week later.

To be honest, I never really cared where Mulder’s sister was, so I was never the biggest fan of storylines of him looking for her or finding her clones on an alien bee farm or whatever. But during the big re-watch, I did develop a theory. You know how Mulder never really seemed to like dogs? See, I think he wasn’t allowed to have a dog during his adolescent years, because I think Mr. and Mrs. Mulder would have been concerned that a pet would dig Samantha up.

I don’t know if they meant to kill her. Or if — as the detectives say in the interrogation rooms on YouTube — this thing just got away from them. I don’t know if they did it themselves, or it’s just something that happens when the powerful and the shadowy get together. But she died. And it had to be buried. And the boy, the sibling, had to be kept in the dark. Unless he could be trusted to join them? Ultimately, he couldn’t, because — you know — it may be a cold dark place for some, but not for Mulder, and so on.

But over the years, the parents grew bitter toward their son for not knowing — for remaining innocent — while the elders, always holding up the world on their shoulders, are burdened with knowledge and with culpability. Not the easy kind of culpability that can be regretted and atoned for, but the kind where you have to maintain that you are blameless — the really hard kind to live with.

Sein Und Zeit and Closure — the two-part season seven story where the series finally wraps up Samantha — were good episodes. I remember hearing that Moby song when all the children are climbing out of their graves. “They said the birds refused to sing.” And then the next week was X Cops.

But in 2023, when I came to X Cops in the big re-watch, I didn’t remember it at all. Like, at all, like less than the others. There’s no way I would have forgotten it entirely or especially. It’s my favorite episode. I was perplexed why I didn’t seem to remember it, but as the season went on, I realized I hadn’t seen any of the rest of them either from that point forward. I never saw them sitting on the couch drinking beer watching Caddyshack. Until 2023, I had never seen the zombies dancing in the fake graveyard in the fake moonlight. I never saw the genie in her coffee shop. I never knew of the proper series finale in which they returned to the very plausible state of Oregon. I never knew what happened to Mulder at the end.

But of course, it didn’t end up being the end. From what I hear there was a season eight and a season nine and a movie called I Want To Believe. I saw Fight The Future in the summer of 1998 four times in the theater. My friend got a tattoo of a bee on the back of her neck. Ten years later, as I understand it, I Want To Believe came to theaters. I don’t know where I was. And then, eight years after that — but on a completely different timeline — there was a stirring. A special reunion event. They called it season ten. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember when season eleven came out either. I remember somebody saying, “They’re making a new X Files.” I heard someone say the same thing just the other week, and I reacted with the same amount of interest: None. As I sit here one late-summer day in 2024, there are entire episodes of seasons eight and nine I still haven’t seen. Not that I don’t intend to, but I haven’t gotten to them. I skipped around. I heard Scully singing Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog to baby William. I still haven’t seen the 2008 feature film.

I wasn’t going to watch Seasons 10 and 11 at all. I watched the Season 10 premiere and it confirmed my decision to watch no further. Then one day in mid-February 2024, I was heading home from an early morning posing engagement out in the suburbs. I had a free afternoon at home stretching in front of me before an evening tour downtown. In these windows of time, it’s nice to watch a good TV show. On the bus on the way home, it occurred to me that I intended to watch the new seasons. Obviously it wasn’t long until I reached Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster.

I used to stand in front of a mural showing a massive angel holding the city of Philadelphia in its arms, a whirling sky behind it and to its left a column of text addressed to the God of Love but speaking directly to me. A lady used to come by and tell me I oughtn’t admire the painting because, something about the man who made it, she said he was bad. She told me this every single time she found me there. Several times I asked her to tell me more. She would walk away saying words I thought I understood, but somehow I never quite understood her. I never met the man, but I liked him by reputation. I have nothing against the lady, whoever she was, whatever she was saying. Somebody one day painted over the mural with a thick coat of light gray paint, I don’t know who, and I’m not mad at them. But I do miss standing there looking at that angel and saying that incantation.

So I stopped watching The X Files between 2/13/2000 and 2/20/2000. But why? One day I was pondering this and holding in my hand a piece of paper that I had been using as a bookmark in the old journal I was writing in. I had found the paper in the journal when I pulled it out of its hiding place. Hadn’t looked closely at the slip of paper but was holding it and turning it over in my hands while I was thinking about February of 2000 and wondering why I suddenly stopped watching my favorite TV show. Then I look at the paper and see that it’s a concert ticket. Can no longer read who the concert was. The ticket is autographed, but I can’t read the name. I can only read one thing on the faded paper, and that’s the date. 2/14/2000. The very week I was just sitting here pondering. What was the concert? If you went to a concert with me on Valentine’s Day 2000, let me know.

Never Take Me Alive

Glamour of the sun
on the leaves while
the birds

are shouting, evening
but not

sunset yet.
I’ll never tell

how I live, I live

like a criminal.
At dawn, copper

water runs
down a concrete wall.