Under the stars each night
I wonder if stairs go there
I’m lonely driving behind the wheel
Can’t get nowhere
I can’t seem to get it right
Is there a place?
And under the stars tonight
I wonder if someone cares
I’m lonely that’s the way I feel
Can’t feel no stairs
There is a place…
- Frank Black, “Man of Steel”
She looks down over the side of the Hoover Building at the D.C. night below, feeling the icy touch of the cold wind and the lonely symphony of her heart beating in her chest. She feels different without him, ostracized, missing a part of herself as if she is now possessed of a gaping entrance wound made by a rocket launcher. She looks down at her hands, a useless gesture, and she can find no words for herself. No one gets there alone, they say. But no one said what happens when you get there, what happens after you’ve been standing there. She stands there even though her work day is over because there is no reason to go home. Because she cannot believe him and in turn she can’t believe herself. The impossibility of us, she thinks, the impossibility of life.
She can hear him coming, not by any trick of hearing but by the tingle at the base of her skull that could always detect him from a mile away, the sensation of calm that now drapes over her like a web of her own creation. And she turns to face him, a frozen shade in her decisiveness and the dead flicker in her eyes, not being able to find any words for him, either. She is not possessed of anything other than simply being and she can only look at him and know this is the man that is her world, and that her world is falling out of orbit faster than the Mir space station on a really, truly, horrible day. She can only look into his eyes and see mirrors that reflect who she really is, and realize that mirrors can be deceptive, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
His voice is possessed of the symphony she knows it to be, this time driven by an undercurrent of acceptance and loneliness and cognizance and loyalty that has been sharpened over seven years, the wounded pride, the wounded human being that comes from the cut of this razorblade and the burning, searing pain that she can feel inside herself. Two words. No more than necessary. In a strategy all about the extra mile, he allows himself only what he needs, holding back, at least for now, all that he wants.
“I know,” she says.
She matches him expenditure for expenditure, undercurrent for undercurrent, risking the exposure of part of herself she thought had slipped away under his careful ministrations. It is barely there, but she knows that it is, the hint of a younger, more untested, more unforged ex-Baltimore homicide detective who didn’t know where she was going, who was running and she didn’t know where, who didn’t know about the man she met. She didn’t know him but by chance, by being thrown together with him and looking at him, into his eyes, and knowing he was something different. In coming from a world all about darkness, she saw in his eyes and his welcome smile and the way he handled her, that first day and every day thereafter, a ray of Edenic light.
“Can we talk about this?” he offers.
He knows what she is feeling, the memory she remembers, because it is imprinted in his mind as well as hers. He knew that he would be assigned a partner in due time, but he hadn’t expected it to be the woman who walked into his life that day and who will never walk out. She was inherently confident, her intelligence no secret, and there was something about her that made him know that this particular arrangement was not in any way destined to hurt him, but only to help him. Help him so much that he knows what she wants to say, but will not allow herself to say.
“Yeah,” she says.
These are the motions, those which they go through maybe once or twice a year if they are unlucky. These are the words of partners who for once have met at a crossroads and gone separate directions. These are the actions of two people who truly want to forgive each other and hold each other and say that everything is okay but who cannot do so because they are who they are. These are the battles that they pretend to fight to assuage their intelligences, even when their hearts break, crying for each other’s forgiveness and everything they give to each other. This is the war, on this night, that is a lost war and no one cares.
The war that began, as every time, by accident.
He had said one thing, she had said another. He had called her on it, she had called him on something else. And by that time they had grown to pointing out all the problems of those strategies until their confidences, their thinking minds, were simply torn apart by the friction. A simple verbal disagreement which escalated. No punches were thrown, except the phantom ones to the gut which they can feel even when they try to play past the pain.
“You deserve better than this,” he insists, hanging back while there is still tension. “You could get the transfer out any time you asked. You should get out of here. This place takes over your life, your mind, your dreams, the way you think, the way you act, it owns you. Herman Stites, you saw what he did to Harrison. Reptile men and antivenin treatments and wayward gunshots and all those screwups out there that happened that day, any day … You’re better than all of this. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“It’s not that way,” she insists back. “All those things you talk about … My mother and my sister and upstairs and the whispers in hallways, they did those things to me. No X-File has ever done what everything else already did. I’ve been through all this before. I’m still standing here and I won’t walk away. My getting here’s got ulterior motives. I know that. But my being here is my choice.”
“I…” he begins, closing some but not all of the distance between them; she is barely out of arm’s reach. “I didn’t want you to risk yourself. Not for something like this.”
“I wanted to,” she says after a heartbeat. “You know I would, because I have to.”
“You never have to,” he says, doesn’t wait, then again, his voice quieter, out of respect and other emotions he cannot easily classify this moment. “You never have to.”
“Yes, I do.” She looks up, into his eyes, holding his gaze. “I know I do.”
He reaches for her hand and his fingers close over hers. “I’d never ask you to.”
“You’d never have to,” she assures him.
A small smile crosses his face. What have I done, what past life have I lived, in order to deserve to be so blessed? he wonders. Why am I so honored so as to have this woman, this paragon of all I want and need in someone else, my partner, my best friend, why am I so lucky to have her follow me anywhere?
“I’m sorry,” he says again, needlessly.
“So am I,” she replies, briefly looking down, away.
He doesn’t let go of her hand – he couldn’t bear it, not this moment, not when there is unbearable space between them – but he reaches over with his other hand and brings her head back to where it was. She should never look down, she should never feel she has to, he thinks. He adjusts her heaD so they make eye contact again, and she smiles at the gesture, her eyes shimmering in the light of the D.C. evening. He puts his arms around her, invites her into an embrace that she accepts. Her head rests on his shoulder, tucked against his neck, listening to his heart beat, inhaling the air and his cologne, watching the stars past him, and he holds her against him, not too tight but never weakly, feeling all of her muscles relax. He listens to her exhale a breath he knows she’s been holding, and without knowing it he lets out one of his own. Expressions of relief cross their faces but they don’t see them, and they don’t have to.
There is silence for a moment, the only sound two hearts beating in almost unison, the way it should be, he reflects.
“What time is it?” she asks him.
He checks his watch. “Ten-thirty.”
“Later than I thought,” she admits, almost sheepishly. He smiles. Everything is usually later than she thinks. She is usually later than she thinks. It has become a fixture in her life. She is a fixture in his. “No surprise,” he says, daring to venture a joke, waiting to see if he’s fucked the whole thing up again. She laughs dryly and his fear dissipates. Only after another moment do they pull apart.
“I left my backpack in the office,” she tells him.
He nods. “My stuff’s still there,” he says, but he doesn’t want to leave this moment. To leave this roof might concede the moment, might break this fragile reconciliation. “It’ll wait,” he says to her.
She smiles. He has never seen a more beautiful smile.
“Come here,” she offers, starting towards the edge of the roof, the spot where he first found her, tense and quiet. “I want to show you something.”
He moves with her to the edge, looking down on the D.C. streets and traffic below, the conflagration of lights, yellow, red, white, and other colors, lights of vehicles and buildings and traffic poles and neon signs on the street below. A tapestry of small suns of various shades, flaring up, flickering, dying out, rising again, making a fascinating image. Much like those who observe it. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she says quietly, taking her eyes off the road to look at him. He looks down a moment longer, then meets her eyes and nods. “The one bright moment of the day,” he quips with cognizance.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says absently.
“You were thinking what you have every right to,” he says immediately, trying to erase any further doubt, put this night’s battle at peace. “Don’t ever think you weren’t.”
“I can’t help it,” she admits with a smirk. “Some days,” she continues, looking back toward the stairwell for a moment, “I just want to put my head in my hands and say ‘This is not happening. This is not happening.’ But I know it is.”
They sit on the edge of the roof, on the railing, nothing but air between them and certain death, and they realize they really don’t care.
His eyes flash with knowledge. Of an earlier time, when he was in her place. Of an earlier moment, when all he wanted was her and he couldn’t have her. “This is happening,” he says, “It’s all I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Chasing down aliens mistaken for the Second Coming?”
He laughs at the absurdity. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he says through the laughter. “I was talking about my partner.”
She smiles again. “I can’t believe you stayed with me this long.”
“I couldn’t see any of this without you.”
“What about them?” she asks of him. “You’ve worked with them almost three years now. They’re just as good as I am. They’re better, even.”
“They’re very good, but there’s no one else,” he says, sounding almost like Charlie Cass from a Clifford Odets play he likes and can’t remember the name of.
“Stop with the B.S.,” she insists.
“It’s not B.S.,” he says firmly.
More silence.
“You want to go grab a drink?”
“I don’t think I’m in the mood tonight,” she says.
“What are you in the mood for?”
“Peace and quiet,” she says, glancing at him then, “and the eleven p.m. SportsCenter.”
He smiles knowingly. “Want company?”
“Always.”
He offers his hand like the gentleman he is, and she takes it with the firm hold of a partner as they stand. He glances to the door as she takes one last look at the stars, but they don’t make any particular motion. Instead, he watches the smile come to her face as she observes the pattern below them, and then he reaches out for her one more time, resting his head on the top of hers, looking out at the world around them, feeling time stop and settle. There is no other moment, no other concern, he decides. This is a time when all he needs to do is just to be. This is a moment he wouldn’t mind capturing for the rest of his life. These moments which remind him, personal hell and aliens and upstairs B.S. aside, that he is still alive. And that this life may not be perfect the way it is, but that there are pieces of heaven in it, things that make life worth living at any cost.
It is not that this fight is over. They will sit wherever they end up and discuss it, getting technical, possibly pointed, until they reach an agreement, a consensus. They will remember it and they will work around it until in a day or two it no longer matters. But it is that every argument they’ve ever had provides the smallest window into reminding them that while they’re different, they are still together, and that that difference is important to them. It is as important to them as anything else in their lives, because they are important to each other. And perhaps a few heated words don’t hurt if it helps them to remember that which they can’t forget.
“Are you ready?” his partner asks of him.
“Maybe we’ll wait a couple more minutes,” John Doggett says to the night.
Chances are I’ll see you
Somewhere in my dreams tonight
Chances are I’ll hold you
And I’ll offer all I have
I’ve always wanted to stay with you
And see you in the morning light
And I’ll wait with you
Till the night…
- Vonda Shepard and Robert Downey Jr., “Chances Are”
