| Death and Proximity By Amanda Finch [email protected] CATEGORY:
VA, Post-ep xxxxxxxxxx I slammed the door to my apartment. As usual, I was running about twenty minutes late. And as usual, I didn't check to make sure I had my keys on me until after I would've been locked out, but I had them. The police were still milling around Padgett's sparsely furnished apartment, disgruntled over the lack of personality it gave them about the man. Maybe they felt insulted at the lack of detail, as if someone had cleared the place of evidence before they'd stepped up to bat. They'd be cleared out by that afternoon. They'd converge then at street-level with the men who were stuck down in the building's core with the incinerator and the bloodstains, left behind by the heartless man the building superintendent had found that morning. I'd give them my version of events, but I learned a long time ago how much they enjoyed Storytime with Fox Mulder and had ceased. Besides, they knew where to find me. I was right next door. I passed the doorway with only a brief glance inside at the lone desk with its ten-year old typewriter, stacks of thin copier paper and gum erasers. A police officer now sat in Padgett's chair, turned towards the window. The sunlight slanted in and laid fire to every sallow corner of the unlit room. It threw my shadow across the parquet floor, and quickly I stepped out of view. Padgett had only been there for three weeks. The dry staccato of his typewriter, which in retrospect reminded me of a frightened heartbeat, had continued well into the night. I would doze off, then stir with the ending of a dream, only to find him still typing. I had vaguely wondered before what would happen if the words stopped flowing for too long. I'd had neighbors from hell. The Slayer fans had, during particularly gleeful listening parties, scared the shit out of my fish and shook small items off my shelves. The thrown vases and dinnerware of the unhappy married couple had shattered against the other side of the wall like it was embedding into my skull. The exuberant song of loud lovers had been more embarrassing than awe-inspiring. ("Mulder, what *are* they doing over there?") ("If you have to ask, I think your mother owes you a talk.") "It's some crazy shit, huh?" I turned to match the voice to the face of my other next door neighbor, a guy in his early 40s. Not much older than me and he was already going gray. He worked in some civilian capacity with the Defense Depot down at Dulles. I prompted my mind for his name. Sheridan. Well, that was a last name. Did I not pay attention to first names anymore? "Very crazy," I agreed absently. "Did you know him?" Brian, my mind offered suddenly. Brian Sheridan. "No, no," he answered, pulling his jacket around him. "Had the misfortune of coming down all eight floors with him once, and he wouldn't shut up about winter. Damnedest thing. 'This is when everything dies, Brian. What if Spring never comes again?'" We stepped into the elevator and he punched number one. "Freak." I shuddered involuntarily from the cold in the elevator. What if Spring *didn't* come again? It was April now and D.C. refused to make up its mind. Last week it was July, and this week it was December. "You remember when old Mrs. Quinlan down the hall offed her husband?" I willed the elevator to reach its destination. "I seem to remember that." "It's kind of like that," Brian replied. "It's like it's too much, too close. You think they'll find out who killed the guy?" "No," I said, more darkly than I intended. "I don't think so." The elevator doors opened onto the main foyer. "See ya, Mulder," he called out, my name coming more easily to him than his had to me. "Try not to get us another CDC quarantine this week, huh?" For crying out loud, did I have to buy everyone a fruit basket or were they going to let that go? I just laughed awkwardly and shoved my hands in my pockets. Sheridan. I remembered his last name because it was emblazoned on the funeral wreath that had been mistakenly left at my apartment door two weeks before. Christ, his damn wife had died and that hadn't even occurred to me. I should've said something. Well, I'd see him later. He'd made a good point though, about how the mood had been so thick around here after the Quinlan shooting. Death itself was universal enough to almost change the composition of a room, and when it was paired with proximity -- when it happened down the hall -- it suspended the animation of everyone who tiptoed around it. Padgett's death seemed to do the same, but I suspected coming within a hair's breadth of losing Scully obscured any lesser incident. No, I knew it. x Who started this whole flower-buying trend for the hospitalized? I could've choked the responsible party, because it seemed so ridiculous to me. The roses symbolized too much and the daisies too little. Like the more specialized Hallmark holidays, I suspected marketing and guilt played a lot into the economy of gift shops. Finally, I realized it was just another stall and took the stairs up to her room. Damn her. What I expected and who she was never quite matched up. Instead of the pained, pale woman I'd prepared myself to confront, she actually appeared robust, and dare I say -- obstinate? The doctor who exited the room as I approached it bore the expression of a weighted saint. I smiled. "She's not that bad, is she?" He raised both eyebrows and sighed. "She just contested her diagnosis." She caught sight of me through the window and waved me in. "I thought patients did that all the time." "They do," he concurred, exasperated. "But they're rarely *right.*" I chuckled to myself as I opened the door. "Here's the Terror of the Ward now." A magazine was open across her lap, though I would've bet money she wasn't really looking at it. She glanced up. "Is that what he just called me?" I yanked a chair out of the corner and sat down. "That's what *I* just called you. From now on, you're going to carry the gauze and Bactine and penicillin in a little bag around your neck, like a St. Bernard." She swept the magazine aside and gathered her hair behind her neck with one hand. Strength catalyzed every move, and no trace of the woman who'd dug her fingertips into me and held on like she was falling existed now. "It's not my fault he couldn't think of the right thing to do. I'd be in here for three more days if I went with what he said." "Would that be so bad?" That question awarded me an eye-roll, which is sort of what I wanted her to do. "Where's Padgett?" "Down at the gift shop. He's still trying to decide between daisies and roses. I'm thinking he'll go with the latter." "Mulder..." I pulled my hands out of my pockets to crack my knuckles, letting the tail of my trenchcoat hit the floor. "Morgue. He was found downstairs, right next to the incinerator where I'd left him. He had his heart in one hand when the superintendent found him." "His heart?" She asked. "His own heart?" "Quite the parlor trick, don't you think?" "We can put enough together from your apartment and the basement to bring in the accomplice," she said resolutely. "In fact, you need to call them now and tell them not to touch Padgett until I --" She narrowed her eyes. "You're making that face, Mulder." I was? "What face?" "That placate-her-because-she's-in-the-hospital face." She stabbed the pad of her thumb at a button not far from my face so that she sat up a bit straighter in the bed. "I hate that face." I closed my eyes for a moment. She'd clung to me, sobbing into my neck. I broke away from her once the crying started to subside, and realized that her tears faded only because her consciousness was closing the door. "You don't remember do you?" "I remember everything," she insisted. "Do you remember firing four shots into him?" I searched her face. "Your weapon's in a bag on Skinner's desk with the four casings if you're interested." "Four shots?" I nodded. "And the only blood at the scene belonged to you. When I came in, you were in my apartment, alone. It was as if you had fallen asleep." "So your point," she murmured, "is that we can't track down the accomplice because the accomplice isn't a person." "Or if I really wanted to go a bit a farther at the risk of making you laugh your stitches open, I could say that Padgett threw his book in the furnace and the -- apparition, if you will -- he was attacking you until the book itself was destroyed, but not before he destroyed Padgett, the man who brought him to life." She tilted her head to one side, smiling tightly. "They have a ward for you upstairs. Two floors up." "That's a slightly abridged version of what Skinner told me on the phone this morning." She straightened the white blanket, pulling the hem even with her navel, fingers curled under the bracelet they'd fastened to one wrist. "So the book is gone?" "Unless he left parts of it in his apartment, then it burned in that incinerator." She stared past me at the wall. "Unless he made a copy." I crossed my arms, trying to not make the hated placating look. "Do you *want* there to be another copy?" "No, no," she answered quickly. I opened my eyes wide, wordless. She exhaled angrily. "Okay, so I wouldn't mind reading what he had to say." "I'll ask the police if they found one," I promised, all teasing gone. "I'll put it directly in your hands. Alright?" She pushed back into the adjusted mattress, relaxed now. I had questions to ask, and the silence would've been the perfect conductor to my waiting voice. The moment came, and I missed several beats just thinking of wording and the right level of detachment. When the nurse came in with her blood kit and told me I'd have to come back in a few hours after the next cycle of heart repairs, I couldn't say if I were annoyed by the intrusion or relieved. Maybe the investigation started on my apartment floor for Scully, but for me, it started there in the hospital room. And like a lot of investigations, it stalled just as it was about to advance, no thanks to me. I still didn't know the extent of what had happened in this case. The moment she'd snidely thanked me for making her schedule, she'd cut me out of the picture. Next thing I knew, I was busting in on a heart-to-heart chat between her and Padgett. What had happened in the interim was still just as shadowy and mysterious to me as any childhood memory, more painful now because of its recency. I told her goodbye and took the stairs instead of the elevator. What had six years told us about each other? I wasn't sure. But I'd read enough of Padgett's narrative -- the words that had made her so uncomfortable -- to think maybe I hadn't been paying attention. In light of current events, it didn't seem surprising. For three weeks, not one of those formerly trustworthy profiler instincts had twitched, even though there was a psychopath right next door. I hadn't noticed? Maybe I simply wasn't watching anymore. And now, it turned out that I didn't know my partner as well as I'd smugly assumed. There went paranoia. There went Scully. Those were two things I took for granted as being set in stone. What scared me more than anything was the very darkness in myself that made me a profiler to begin with - a darkness I sensed in Padgett. Where would I be without my FBI career? Sometimes when I thought too much about it, I could see myself not making the profile, but *being* the profile. What if I understood the killers because the predisposition in myself to be one of them had always resided in me? I'd thought of killing Padgett in the elevator, for reasons that bother me even now. A random madman had profiled her *perfectly* -- or at least close enough to shake her to her soul, while I, her less-than-random partner of six years, couldn't get through one paragraph of her purported life without realizing I'd missed something. ("Agent Scully is *already* in love.") God help her. x I stopped at my apartment before returning to the hospital to see her again, and was surprised to find the police still there, six hours later. What could possibly be taking so long? Barring any paranormal explanations (and I'm sure the paperwork on that would be severe if they were accepted), their work was done. But as I passed Padgett's place, I realized none of them were standing there. They were a bit farther down the hall in front of Sheridan's door. I dug my keys out of my pocket. "What's up?" "You seem to be having neighbor troubles," said one of the officers waiting there. "We called the paramedics to come get the guy." I peered around the doorframe. All I could see was the back of his head as he sat on the couch facing his own window. "Are you going to help him?" "He's gone," said another officer, bluntly. "Got a call from his brother in law about an hour ago, worried because the phone was off the hook or disconnected. He's been taking some sort of heart medication. Today he took all of it." I thought of the funeral wreath on my doorstep. "His wife died a couple of weeks ago." "He been acting depressed?" Sort of a moot question *now* wasn't it? "I guess so. Wasn't paying attention." I heard the sirens approaching Hegel Place as I put the key in my door. One of the officers was telling the other about the suicide note left behind, almost as if he were critiquing its literary merits. Something about Spring never coming, and how it wouldn't matter even if it did. And what in the hell, they asked, was that supposed to mean? They joked that the cold draft under the door had killed him. I closed the door behind me, as if that could keep the feeling out. The feeling anytime death came close, and changed the way light was absorbed, changed the way people spoke. It was time to wake up. It was time to start profiling again, knowing the people around me. Living inside my own head wasn't benefiting anyone. I felt a sudden chill at the thought, a chill that dragged my eyes to the wall I shared -- had shared -- with Padgett. Words Padgett had said to Sheridan still rung loudly enough with the now-dead man to assist him in his decision to hasten the inevitable. I thought of words as potent as those singing through Scully's mind and stepped back out into the hall again. It was time to go profile my partner. ~~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~ ---------------------------------------- April 1999 |