DUM SPIRO, SPERO
Part 68
 

"Yes, but these stiff minds are the first to collapse.
Fire-tempered iron, the strongest and toughest,
That's the kind you most often see snapped and shattered.
I know horses;
Slim reins discipline even the spirited ones.
You can't be brave and free with your master nearby."

"Antigone," Translation by R.E. Braun. Lines 578-583. Used without permission.
 

FROHIKE:

I'm telling her our story. It's falling off my tongue as if I'd drunk two fifths of J&B.

And I'm stone cold sober. That's the scary part.

I wasn't sure if I intended to tell her or not. I would certainly have given her the skeleton of the story, but why am I sitting here, giving her the blow-by-blow, in excruciating detail? She doesn't really need to know this.

Does she?

Yes. She does. And I'm oddly comfortable telling her. She's not a loose-tongued woman. And she's lived in situations where the incredible does not seem so impossible.

Yes, I've wanted someone to love. I've certainly craved the touches, the warmth, the sex. But mostly, I've missed having someone to talk to. Someone that I can share both the mundane and the amazing.

And I know now that I've found it in her.

And she's made an exception tonight and brewed real coffee for us. I will probably pay for this in the morning, but I don't care. I've missed this, too. One of my little pleasures in life, and I've felt so damn deprived without it.

Deprivation ending in a steaming mug, just as it did not long ago in a steaming shower.

Life is good.

Strange, but good.

I take a momentary break from regaling the saga of how the three of us came together to bask in the aroma and flavor of the brew she's placed in front of me.

"One cup. And you're done," she warns.

Only one?

Hope she's not going to start rationing sex that way-so far, no problem there.

"So Langly agrees to help us out, so you figure, he's going to bail on a game, it must be pretty good. All the while, much as I'd like to help the young lady, there's something hinky about her, about the whole situation.

"Langly does the decryption-and we're freaking out seven ways to Sunday. Especially when the lovely young lady comes in and has a gun trained on us."

"What?!"

"Wait, it gets worse. We discover that she isn't who she said she is-she made up the whole thing about her daughter being kidnapped. There's no daughter, there's no kidnapping-the whole thing is bizarre. My impulse is, let's just get the fuck out and forget it ever happened, but not a chance. Especially not after we find out that she's being followed-every move she makes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

"How many people were following her?"

"Hard to say, but she'd had a homing device installed by her dentist in a filling in her tooth. While all this is going on, our lovely lady friend decides to do a little oral surgery on herself-and we find out, she wasn't kidding."

"Who the hell would want to track her like that?"

"She was an organic chemist for the Army Advanced Weapons Facility in New Mexico, and it was her job to develop certain chemicals that could be used on people experimentally."

"What?!"

She looks disbelieving now.

"Martha, I think you know in your heart of hearts, this happens. Look at what happened to your husband."

She's quiet for a while. You can almost watch the thoughts turning over and over in her head. All the questions, the grief, the anguish, the struggles, the inability to get anyone in an official capacity to believe her and Daniel...

"Do you want me to stop?" I ask her gently. I really don't want to put her through more than she can take.

"No. I want to hear it. All of it." Her face is weary, sad, but resolute. "I'm puzzled, though. Where does your friend Mulder fit into all of this?"

"I'm getting to that, darling. Be patient."

I see a light blush forming on her cheeks-and a soft smile of pleasure.

She said nobody ever called her darling before.

Time to change all that.

"Mulder's former career was as an FBI field agent-and he'd been assigned to find her and bring her in."

"Why?"

"Because Susanne-that's the young lady's name, by the way-was about to expose the US government in their preparations to experiment with these chemicals on the American public."

"You're kidding. I hope."

"Wish I was." I take another sip of coffee-since I'm being rationed, I have to make this one last. "But we were able to document that indeed it was about to happen."

"Did it?"

"It did." We ran several exposes on it, but by then, the testing had been under way for a time. I believe the chemical was eventually abandoned in favor of more specific, controllable drugs. "It was in that moment that for the three of us, it all began to fall together. You know I did prison time. I told you that."

"You did it for stealing data from Bell Labs in conjunction with the government on how private citizens were being spied upon."

"That would be correct." I feel a bit wistful here. "You know, I liked working at Ma Bell. Interesting work, and we had great health insurance. But I just-I couldn't stomach what our government was doing. And I don't think the public would stand for it, at least not back then."

"What about now?"

"One of the things we're starting to see-it's bearing out our hypothesis-is that this type of testing is taking place more than ever. More chemicals have been developed, and we've acquired some documentation regarding this-regrettably, we need a lot more, and people are a lot more careful about encrypting things these days. Makes our job more of a challenge."

"What is your job, exactly?"

"Within our small organization? Well, nobody is officially relegated to one thing, but we all have expertise. You want military and government systems information, how to search resources, formulate a reasonable hypothesis? See Byers. Nobody does it better. He devises most of the theoretical framework of what we do, mostly because he's outstanding at it. If you need something related to communications and encryption, anything heavy on code, you call Langly. He's very possibly the most adept at getting around systems of all of us, and the best programmer in the bunch. My specialty is in surveillance and photography. Basically, I'm a snoop at heart."

"And your son?"

"Still wet behind the ears, but getting a lot better."

"Who's getting better?" I didn't even hear the keys in the door-oh hell, don't tell me that's going as well. I am, however, aware of a loud, wet cough accompanied by a yawn.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in," I greet my son as he drops his backpack by the door.

"And who're you, Miss America? How're ya doing, Martha?"

"Fine, thank you."

She may or may not be at this point-it's hard to tell from the look on her face.

Bet that woman can play cards.

"What're you guys doing?" Michael asks, opening the fridge and scoping out the contents. He finally locates a Canada Dry lurking in there and pops it.

"Just talking."

"Yeah, well, how come when I tell you that's what me and Kelly are doing, you never believe me?"

"Because you're 25."

"For your 411, Dad, we were studying."

"What? Biology?"

"Not the kind you're thinking of." Michael, mature as always, sticks his tongue out at me.

And he wonders why I doubt his judgment in determining as to whether or not he's ready to get married.

"How's Kelly?" Martha asks him.

"Kelly's hanging, she's got a cold, too, but she's getting by." He seems pleased that she asked him.

"And things at the Langlys are?" I inquire.

"About like they usually are, except Langly's like he's gotta go to work tomorrow and Ally's like she's going tie him to the bed if he even tries."

This is an amusing image.

"He might enjoy it too much," I decide.

"He's getting real panicky about not being there, I guess his boss keeps calling him up and asking stuff and bugging him about coming back. That just like so sucks. And they say they wanna do away with some of the laws that make employers behave, well, sort of behave. I mean, what is this, you get a job, your fucking employer owns you? Gimme a break."

"The hospital feels that way." And they do. I'm lucky I have Gizzie between them and me, especially since most people there fear her. I've seen her make mincemeat out of hospital administrators and rumor has it she made a thoracic surgeon cry one time. It's damn hard to make a thoracic surgeon cry. I'll have to ask her if this is true or just part of the large urban legend at Georgetown that is the Giz. I have to believe there is some basis in fact to these tales, as she is generally not questioned too hard when she says something has to be done. Probably because she's almost always right.

But the people Gizzie absolutely refuses to treat with anything other than respect are the people that work for her. Interns and residents we get in are notorious for treating the nursing staff badly. In Gizzie's department, they do it as well-once. After that, they either shape up or get lost. She doesn't tolerate shit from anybody to her nurses.

"Yeah, they do at school, too. Like I wanna cut my hours down to 20, I got 25 right now, I really need time to study, but it's like they got a lot fewer tutors this year, and they're talking now like they wanna pay stipends instead of hourly, so basically I'd like be on salary, and they can make you work as many hours as they want. And that sucks."

I was not aware of this. Of course, I think this is the most my son has spoken to me in weeks.

"Course, they just fired the disabilities coordinator last Friday, we didn't find out till this week, but lots of people are there 'cause of ADA and they get tutoring because of it, and now we're not gonna get funding they say, and a lot of these kids, they're gonna not be able to continue, or they're gonna have a real hard time of it. It sucks."

He looks depressed as hell. And tired.

"I mean, I like tutoring and all, it's okay, but I got no life. I'm either working or I'm studying, and when I'm with Kelly, I'm like usually studying, too. And she's always working or studying. I mean, could be worse and all, but man, when I hear they want us to just work more for less money, it really pisses me off. It's not like I'm getting rich off this job."

No, he's not.

He seems to have struck a chord in Martha. "As of December 31, we will no longer be paid time and a half after 8 hours, and they're talking about not paying overtime after 40 because there's a general feeling that we're in health care, we should just be open 24/7, and why should an organization have to pay overtime and shift differentials? I'm telling you, the only reason I'm working so many days right now is because we have so few people on staff, particularly since our child care center was shut down. Quite a few of our staff members have had to quit because of it. And the bitch was, I think it was self-supporting. You had to pay to use it, it wasn't that expensive, but you did have to pay on a sliding scale according to household income. Now it's not even an option. So what happens is that those of us who are left are slogging our butts off and giving pretty third-rate care. We're supposed to legally have one nurse for every two patients in intensive care, but we're lucky if we have one for three. And that's on a good day."

She's off and running now. "It used to be, we'd bitch about the physicians and the money they made and the freedom they had, but they're in the same boat with us now. Basically, they have to do whatever a 7-dollar-an-hour clerk in the insurance company tells them they can do, regardless if it's their medical opinion that that would be the optimal treatment. We're forced to use drugs that are not as good and have more side effects because they're less expensive. Some of the newer drugs are very good, but we can't get them, unless they're part of a research protocol. Which, by the way, we routinely do on patients that are indigent and illiterate. Informed consent is a joke."

"Nothing new there. We've been experimenting on the poor since way back." Which we have.

"It's wrong. Sure, we give them a consent form, but what happens if your patient reads at a third-grade level? Or not at all? Or doesn't read English or Spanish, and the Spanish is being eliminated from the newer forms. Is that informed consent?"

"Your lawyers say it is." I cringe whenever lawyers come up in conversation. Not my favorite species of predator, to be sure.

"Well, it's not. It's unethical."

"I'd have to go with that," Michael agrees. "Kel and me, we were talking about this stuff tonight, and it really hacks her off, she always had to go to charity hospitals, never had health insurance, like it's supposed to be some fucking luxury or something."

"It shouldn't be," Martha says.

"Prof wrote this entire proposal one time, submitted it to Congress and everything, national health care, everybody would have it."

"I don't think bringing in the government would solve the problem," I remind him. And I don't. Byers's proposal, which I did some work on behind the scenes, was a good one on paper-but I look at the experiences of countries like Canada and Sweden, and I'm not encouraged.

"Yeah, well, everybody thought managed care was gonna take care of it all. Let the free market drive it and all that," Michael's into his second Canada Dry now. He'd better watch it-those babies are mine. "Problem is, we don't got a free market, not by a long shot. No such thing as a free market. I think it's a myth."

He's right in that regard.

I don't know why I should be so surprised that my son is thinking on this scale these days. Maybe he's not all hormone-driven.

"So all our politicians rag on and on about how business has too many constraints holding it back, but then they feel like they got to regulate every part of our private lives-I mean, Jesus! I feel like I got no privacy at all!"

"You don't," I remind him.

"Yeah, well, I don't think it's any of the government's business what I do with my fiancee when no one's watching, I mean, really, I had to fake a marriage cert just so I could get condoms, for Christ's sake!"

Well, nice to know he's being careful. I still worry, though. Abstinence is probably the only thing that's 100 percent effective...

Frohike, like you're a great one to talk right now. Like you ever abstained when you had the chance.

And I've got no intentions of doing so now.

Thank God we don't have the contraception question staring us in the face. But for my son, it's a constant struggle and issue.
 
"Like they're trying to get people to have more kids, I think that's wrong," Michael is off and running now, and there will be no stopping him until he runs out of breath. Which, if he doesn't take care of the cold he's got, will be soon.

"But only certain people," Martha reminds him. "They want to institute mandatory sterilization for certain people. I don't think they'll ever get it passed, but they're sure as hell trying. I think there's a fine line myself-I think you should be responsible for the children you have, and believe me, I've seen enough crack babies and fetal alcohol babies that I want to take some of these women and throttle them, but I still don't think we can regulate reproduction."

"What really gets me, though, is how people are just like putting up with this!" Michael is outraged, as are we all, but he's young, and passionate, and not much for restraint in his opinions. "I mean, are they like putting something in the water or something that makes people just lie down and say okay, screw me?"

Interesting question, now that he's put it in that form.

Martha smiles at him. "Well, Michael, if they are, you must be immune to it. I see you haven't stopped using your brain."

He looks a bit embarrassed, but pleased. Michael loves recognition.

I need to give him more of it. But I also need to make sure he stays on track.

"Don't you have an early class?" I ask him quietly.

"Yeah, I do. Guess I'd better crash. G'night all." He turns to leave, but just before he does, he puts an arm over my shoulders and gives me a quick squeeze.

Maybe I'm not losing him after all.
 

I tell Martha more-about how we got the magazine started. About how we ended up in jail. About how our partnership with Mulder started, and evolved as he became involved in more and more increasingly bizarre cases. About how he was teamed up eventually with Dana Scully. About some of the near death experiences we've had in the service of Mulder. About some of our research.

We talk forever. By now, I don't need more coffee-we're both hopped up on adrenaline.

And I promise her that I will look into what killed Daniel. Because the more we talk, the more we're both convinced that it was no accident.

We're finally quiet. Just looking at each other, CNN Late Night murmuring behind us in the living room.

"I love you, Mel," she says gently.

I'm about to respond to her, both verbally and physically, when a bedraggled figure, toting a pillow and a blanket, slogs into the living room. It's Michael. He looks like hell.

"Not feeling well?" I ask him. He just coughs and shakes his head in the negative.

I look at Martha. "You mind?"

"Not at all."

I pull Michael on to the sofa and place the pillow in my lap, setting his head down so I can stroke his hair. Martha fixes the blanket over him and puts his feet in her lap, and pretty soon we at least have him asleep. He's mildly feverish, but between our ministrations, he's quiet in short order.

"Not exactly the height of romance, eh?" I look at her, I feel a rueful smile forming on my face.

"Oh, I don't know," she smiles and winks at me. She pats him on one blanketed leg. "He's a sweet boy, Mel."

He's that, and apparently a whole lot more I wasn't aware of.

"You seem to have a way of getting more out of him in an hour than I can in a month," I marvel at her.

"Not true. Just listen to him. That's all he wants, Mel."

I'm pretty sure that's not true, but it might be on the list.

The three of us end up falling asleep on the sofa together.
 

ALLY:

"Forget it. You're not going to work tomorrow. End of discussion." My husband's recalcitrance is being elevated to new and dizzying heights. "And I'm going to Yom Kippur services, and you better be here when I get back."

"What time?" He whines at me.

"They start at ten."

"Well, that'd give you time to do my hair."

"Langly, have you heard a word I said? No, no, and no. Which one didn't you understand?"

He's coughing like crazy still, I think he's a little better, but if he heads back to his desk tomorrow, he's not going to be better for long.

"Ally, I gotta. I mean, c'mon, you were here, Zupan-prick calls like every hour on the hour, he's like you could at least do some stuff while you're at home, when the hell are you coming back, blah blah blah...I got to, girl."

"I'm not about to be an accessory to your death," I remind him. And I'm not. I nearly lost him two years ago, to God knows what. I've already buried one husband. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to bury another.

"Ally, you're not being reasonable."

"Why, because I won't do it your way?"

"Well, yeah, actually!"

I'm typing some e-mail responses, he's sitting on the edge of the bed, clad only in sweatpants, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. I just washed his hair a little while ago, and I mean it was washing his hair. This was not one of our great erotic shower experiences. It's cascading down his shoulders in wet yellow strands.

"Langly, one week. Supposedly you can go back next Monday, provided you don't do anything stupid this week."

"I'm getting real behind."

"Uh-huh." I'm not impressed with that argument. He's always behind anyway. And he works damn fast, so I know it's volume that's killing him.

"Ally, just say you'll do my hair in the morning, okay, please?"

"No, because once you're there, your darling boss will hold you captive until God knows what time."

"I'll tell him I gotta leave at six. 'Sides, aren't you making dinner for lots of people?"

"Oh, like that will impress him, babe. Not! Particularly if you tell him it's Yom Kippur. In case you haven't noticed, nobody gets Jewish holidays off anymore unless they want to take it as personal time."

"What're you doing with Patrick?"

"He's going to Azani's, Jaleel's cousin. I'll pick him up afterwards. I figured you weren't up to watching him for four or five hours."

"Well, not if I'm gonna go to work."

He is hopelessly stubborn.

"You're not going to work. I told you that already."

"Al-ly! You're not listening!"

"No, you're not listening. You've got pneumonia. You said yourself your arm was still killing you. Yep, you're in great shape to work."

"I gotta get fitted for a half-QWERTY, anyway, so I can work one-handed. Might as well do it now."

"So what's the deal here, Langly? They'll let you have time off when you got nine toes in the grave?"

"No, I think you gotta be all the way in."

"Not funny, babe."

"Wasn't trying to be. You think I'm kidding? Ally, you see how much that bastard calls. You saw that they come around and snoop on me when I'm not there! I'm not gonna have that. I'm not gonna get better with that going on."

I turn to him. I'm truly baffled. Not so much by him-all right, I'm always baffled by him, but this goes beyond the usual.

"Let me see if I'm getting this. You're not allowed to leave early, or even on time, for that matter. You can't quit. You can't take time off even to be sick. Am I doing all right here?"

"You're pretty on, yeah."

"This is insane!" My red-headed temper finally flares up. We've been involved in this back and forth for over three hours now, and we're not getting anywhere. "I mean, work in the 90s wasn't wonderful, but this is getting totally nuts!"

"Tell me about it. You're lucky you're not out there."

"Lately I wonder." And I do. Hell, this isn't employment, it's indentured servitude.

"You need at least another day at home," I tell him.

"No can do, Ally girl."

He looks so damn tired. And he's never going to get better at this rate.

Maybe that's the idea.

Oh, Allison, stop being so paranoid!

And then I remember a phrase from my childhood: Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Maybe a little paranoia is a healthy thing.

END OF PART 68