Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998

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The Man on the Hotel Room Bed
by Elizabeth Gerber
elixia@aol.com

Rating: PG
Classification: VA
Spoilers: Very basic plots/themes up to Ascension. Nothing specific.
Summary: MulderAngst while he's on a case during Scully's abduction.
Disclaimer: The X-Files and it's characters do not belong to me, but rather
to Fox, 1013, etc. This story is also inspired by the poem "The Man on the
Hotel Room Bed" by the contemporary American poet Galway Kinnell. No
offense is meant to any parties, and no money is being made off of this.
Please see the end of this story for the poem in its entirety.
Archive: Gossamer, MTA--please do. Anyone else, please just let me know
first. Thanks!

"He shifts on the bed carefully, so as
not to press through the first layer
into the second, which is permanently sore.
For him sleep means lying as still as possible
for as long as possible thinking the worst."
from "The Man on the Hotel Room Bed" by Galway Kinnell

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mulder clumsily runs his key card through the reader and walks into the
hotel room. Dropping his bag on the floor, he moves past the bathroom, past
the TV, and sinks down onto the bed. His suit hangs off him limply,
rumpled, forgotten; he's been wearing it for at least two days. For the two
days he's been working on the VCS case he's assigned to. Profiling another
monster, pulling a woman--still alive, thank god--out of her captor's van.
The local bureau agents thanked him and let him go, and his flight back will
be tomorrow morning. Alone. Back to a DC with no Scully and some more fun
the with the boys in profiling.

As Mulder lies there on the bed, knowing he should sleep, knowing that he
hasn't slept at all in two days and precious little for the last month, he
feels the tiredness settle in his body. It begins in his throat, and
spreads down into his chest, his lungs, making his breathing heavy. As his
heart slowly beats, the weariness spreads down his arms, into his back, his
clenched stomach, his sore ribs. His legs that, all on their own in the
night, dream of running, of chasing after something too far away to ever
catch.

He will have to sleep. If he lies awake all night, shifting slowly through
his layers of guilt, he will go mad. At least the dark madness of his
nightmares fades in the morning. Most times he remembers nothing at all,
sometimes just a washed-out image. A woman turned away from him, a tear
sliding down her cheek. A soft, cool hand on his forehead, brushing stray
hair back from his hot, dry face.

Other times a spiked, bright flash of dream comes to him while he's taking
his morning shower. Water pouring onto his back, shampoo in his hair, and
then the pits full of bodies, the fire, the gunshots. More than once he's
ended up doubled over in his bathtub, and it disturbs him more than he's
willing to admit. One day they might find him with his head cracked open,
and he would never know it. He would die trapped in his nightmare, in his
own hell.

If he stays away tonight, that will be one less nightmare, but one more
night of lying like this, awake, on a hotel room bed, awash in the strength
of his desire for times and people past. Playing his mental slide show of
horrors, of the people he failed, he learns this litany of guilt like a
prayer. Saying it over to prevent forgetting, he lets his mind play the
images. *Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.*

Bright copper hair gleams in the twilight of the basement office, a smile as
she turns around to greet him. She reaches out to touch him with one white
hand. His eyes search for hers, clinging to her gaze as though to hold her,
but the image goes dark. His skin feels colder, and the light comes up
slowly revealing his father. The man looks firmly at Mulder and steps
forward as though to bridge the distance. But he falls away into a teeming
blackness below, and the light from above becomes increasingly bright until
it surrounds Mulder. He seems to be swimming in an ocean of light, and
looks to his side to see his sister. Her long brown hair floats on the
surface, suffused with brilliance. She giggles and steps further, deeper, a
look of daring in her eyes. He reaches out to stop her, but an unseen tide
sweeps her away, into the source of the brightness, away from him. The
light dims, and he seems to see his mother's arms reaching up as though to
hold him, but she turns away. Her hands to her face, she lets him fall.

With a harsh gasp he wakes up, in his suit, on the hotel room bed, to see
the first pink of morning staining the sky. All his life, he has searched
for the truth, risen each morning to pray to his faith of memory. He has
held to a rope, tracing a path back to its origins, but he feels his hands
going slack, his steps slowing. Slowly rising, he gathers the pain and
weariness back into his core, back into the hard, sore place in his body
where the fear rests. In the faint light of dawn, he can see the night of
the next day already forming.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for reading this. Please send comments to elixia@aol.com. This is my
first XF story, so please be gentle.

Here is the poem that inspired this. I'm considering writing a series of
vignettes based on favorite poems of mine.

The Man on the Hotel Room Bed
by Galway Kinnell

He shifts on the bed carefully, so as
not to press through the first layer
into the second, which is permanently sore.
For him sleep means lying as still as possible
for as long as possible thinking the worst.
Nor does it help to outlast the night--
in seconds after the light comes
the inner darkness falls over everything.
He wonders if the hand of the woman
in the print hanging in the dark above the bed,
who sits half turned away, her right hand
clutching her face, lies empty,
or does it move in the hair of a man
who dies, or perhaps died long ago
and sometimes comes back and puts his head in her lap,
and then goes back and lies under a sign
in a field filled nearly up to the roots
holding down the hardly ever trampled grass
with mortals, once-lovers. He goes over
the mathematics of lying awake all night alone
in a strange room: still the equations require
multiplication, by fear, of what is,
to the power of desire. He feels around--
no pillow next to his, no depression
in the pillow, no head in the depression.
Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.
No doubt his mother's arms still waver up
somewhere reaching for him; and perhaps
his father's are now ready to gather him
there where peace and death dangerously mingle.
But the arms of prayer, which pressed his chest
in childhood--long ago, he himself, in the name
of truth, let them go slack. He lies facedown,
like something washed up. Out the window
first light pinks the glass hotel across
the street. In the religion of love to pray
is to pass, by a shining word, into the inner chamber
of the other. It is to ask the father and mother
to return and be forgiven. But in this religion
not everyone can pray--least of all
a man lying alone to avoid being abandoned,
who wants to die to escape meeting with death.
The final second strikes. On the glass wall
the daylight grows so bright the man sees
the next darkness already forming inside it.