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CHAPTER TWO
I haven't fucked much with the past, but I've fucked plenty with the future
Draft 1: 6/19/01
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"...A--...-rel...-ow-...d--...eel?"

It took several repetitions of the same question before the angular gyrus in the mush of my brain creaked and groaned into function and translated the tedious drone of sandpapered babble into comprehension.

"I said, Agent Pendrell, how do you feel?"

"My eyes."

"Beg pardon?" Guess leatherface was expecting something a little less prosaic.

"They used to be blue. Give me back my eyes."

"I'm sorry, Agent Pendrell." I imagined removing the smirk creasing his face with the point of my knuckles. "That can't be helped."

I was still standing in front of the mirror, staring at my own remains, less out of vanity than just general, slacked-jawed incomprehension. That face in the mirror that I could have called mine at one point glowered at me as it realized there was something wrong, something different. Wrong. Somebody was fake. Maybe I was the reflection and the real Sean Pendrell was on the other side looking in.

"Where am I?"

"That's not important."

"Why?"

"That's not important either."

"Well then tell me what the FUCK IS IMPORTANT, and I'll quit asking!" Another trail of cloudy grey bit into my eyes and nostrils, yanking me out of yokel contemplations and I swung around at the suit standing in the middle of the room as lab rat anal-retentive reflex shot up and out of my mouth. "Are you supposed to be smoking in a sterile area?"

"I wouldn't worry about second hand smoke if I were you."

I contemplated that for a moment. "In that case, you got another one?"

He flipped open the lid of the hardtop box and flicked a stick in my direction. As the flame of his lighter chewed up the other end, I sucked in two lungfuls of tetrahydrocarbons, savoring the taste of smoke sizzling through my trachea, and marveling at string of thin grey smoke that drifted out through the shrinking hole in my chest.

"So," I finally wheezed. "I'm actually important enough to warrant a peek at from the Cancer Man."

I would have wagered he was responsible for the present situ of biblical proportions, but there was no way in hell I'd ever call that tobacco-sucking bastard who was studying me like I was stuck-to-the-wall-with-a-pin-through-my-gut Jesus.

"You know me."

Agent Mulder's described you more than a few times. Though it's usually sandwiched in between a string of curses." I paused, watching a half-centimeter bit of ash drift downward and land on the floor next to my right foot. "And 'Cancer' isn't really the 'C' word he usually uses either."

His upper right lip twitched nonplused for a second, but recovered quickly. If the Smoker bore any surprise about my apparent flippancy towards my newfound not-quite-undead status, it didn't show.

I'd been resurrected, reborn, for some unknown reason. That I'd accepted. It wasn't as if I was important enough in life for anyone to miss, for anyone to care, anyway.

The remaining half-hour was spent actively polluting the air of the sealed room as the both of us silently consumed the remaining pack of cigarettes.

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I was screaming, I was crying, gibbering, twitching and seizing through an endless array of injections, each intended to drive the parasites from my body, each offering the cure of death that never came. I moved through each microsecond of eternity in excruciating, perpetual pain, razorblades in my nerves, piss and bleach in my blood, acid in my bones. And as the next series of shots came, the howls that shrieked through broken and twisted vocal cords struck a hymn of lividity in my brain.

I couldn't tell exactly what happened, except for the vague feeling that I'd just given birth to a tac-nuke.

A pop. A rush. Skin bubbling as it boiled to leather, melting and sloughing off like the Wicked Witch of the West except without the dry-ice effects. The vile stench of ozone and burning hair, guttural, esophagus rendings screams of agony cut off by watery gurgles, the popping sounds of bones crackling like dessicated leaves. Black, blistering smoke rose from the cinders, staining the ceiling with soot, the scorched remains of three nameless, now forever formless, Mengeles a mess of of bubbling carbon matter splattered all over the sterile interior, the stagnant walls looking like they'd had been painted by an epileptic with a soot-covered rollerbrush.

I probably would have puked right then and there if there was anything in my stomach at the moment, but the three beers and half-plate of nachos I'd had moments before being shot had burned themselves from my system what seemed to be eons ago, leaving my innards hollow and still, like an anatomically correct mannequin. Not even the reflexive rise of bile that would bring a normal person's gorge shooting up their esophagus at subsonic speeds seemed to functional.

Peristalsis, for me, was a thing of the past.

Rats are also unable to vomit.

It's why arsenic works so well.

The solid iron braces used to fasten my limbs to the specimen table were forge-fire red, branding themselves to my wrists and ankles. Soft and somewhat malleable from the heat, the metal peeled easily from my blackened arms and legs, but not without first taking several layers of skin along with it.

Ignoring the sizzle of smoking, charred flesh of my fingertips, I gripped the table I'd been poked, prodded and ripped apart on, and with a strength I didn't know I had, pushed. Pushed with my fear, pushed with my hate, anger and desperation driving everything I had until, screaming, the quarter ton mass of steel ripped through the battered wall.

The slab landed with a spectacular crash far down below, the resulting explosion setting off every car alarm within a five-block radius.

I leapt, or rather, fell seventeen stories, landing lengthwise on some unlucky car, my ass plowing through the hood until I finally came to a stop, folded like a jacknife and facing the rear window in the backseat. Leaving glass and splinters in the white leather upholstery, I dragged my aching, broken body into the drivers side, fumbling palsied hands tore the dashboard apart, pulling apart wires from the starter and battery. On the third try the engine finally gunned to life and planting the gas to the floor, I tore the car out of the lot-- just in time to see a flank of armed, hooded guards dash from around the building. Fully-automatic bullets sprayed chunks of rear light and bumper on the ground, leaving behind a trail like Hansel as I squealed and shimmied unlit down the road before finally hitting the I-270.

Doubtless, the plates had probably been flagged and an aerial call was already in place. I figured I had a good twenty minutes before the helicopters tracked me down, but I still didn't know where I could go.

I couldn't go back to my apartment, they were certain to be there, yet I couldn't go parading around in scrubs that made me look like I'd just escaped the mental ward, and between the spastic drumming and incessant murmurs swirling through my brain, I couldn't be too sure this wasn't the case.

If I could get to a laboratory, I could try to figure out what was in me, but without any means of identification, I doubt I would get very far.

I wanted-- I wished that I could go to Dana Scully and show her all that happened to me. She'd be shocked. And horrified. Then disbelieving. Then she'd shoot me.

A quick glanced at the digital clock hangin limply off a wire in the ruined dash told me I had ten minutes. Glancing up at the exit sign, I turned onto the Capital Beltway. Wherever I was headed, it wasn't going to be in this vehicle. I had to get my own ride back.

Which meant returning to the Headless Woman.

Snapshots that declared themselves memories trickled into back into my brain, each frame sliding into place in the disjointed movie until there were enough parts to play back the jerky, lopsided film reel. Memories of that one fateful night.

On a whim, I'd taken my Shovelhead out of storage. She was a big, ugly green monster who belched and fussed all twelve-hundred cubic centimeters of her surly presence through the set of python pipes, and I loved her dearly. Breaking all sorts of noise pollution laws, I puttered on the old beast around town, until I finally came to a halt at my old watering hole.

I remembered Dana Scully sitting inside, a long forlorn look on her face after being abandoned by her partner on her birthday, and all I wanted to do was to put a smile on that face for just a little while. It seemed that she never had the opportunity to do that anymore.

Liquid courage had helped me approach. If things had gone well, I would have asked her to hop on my bike and take a ride. Looking back at that, maybe it was lucky that I had gotten shot. After all, few things are more pathetic than making a fool of yourself trying to impress a woman by trying to make like the Fonz when you look more like Richie C.

After hiding the ravaged car deep within sixth floor the bowels of the parking complex four blocks away, I slunk to the parking lot of the Headless Woman as unobtrusively as possible.

The Shovelhead had sat there since my death, unmolested in front of the bar, AGV helmet still perched on the seat. No one fucks with a rat Harley, especially when you don't know that the owner isn't some seven foot three hundred pound biker who could tie you into a square knot instead of a skinny, burnt, freaky-eyed barefoot experiment escapee.

The steering lock snapped under my fingers, after putting up a momentary struggle with the mighty endurance of a fortune cookie. I reluctantly marveled at the unprecedented strength the vermiform gave me. A tradeoff, I suppose. I jumped on the kickstart, and on the second try, the old girl acquiesced with a couple of coughs in the kickback that, accompanied the popping of joints on my bare toes and right knee, eventually smoothed out into deep throaty rumble. The shake and rattle was a comforting familar roar of welcome, as if I'd never left, and with that purr, she welcomed me back into her purring arms.

There's a certain point in your life when you stop fighting and just accept the fact that it's all gone to shit. I'd passed --no, correction-- I'd gone blazing though that intersection like a banshee on ecstasy what felt like an eternity ago.

No ID. No alibi. No life.

And nowhere to go.

Instinct was pushing me in one direction, to back to the place of my origin, despite the inner voice that muttered my childhood held few and faulty pleasant memories. Perhaps like salmon, I was simply feeling the need to return to the place I was spawned, return to where I'd been born and try to die. Or maybe it was the only place I could think of, blurry as the image was, the only reflexive synaptic pattens my hopelessly blank brain was capable of at this juncture.

Shifting into first, I tweaked the throttle and turned out of the lot, automatically heading northeast towards New York.

* * * *

Brooklyn, NY

Montague Street smelled of piss and poverty, of ramshackle buildings built on cheap foundations that sank further into the ground every month, every year, sides held up only by tacky, cracked wallpaper that housed baby-eating rats and multiple families with squalling, dysenteric children crammed under one creaking roof, lifeless, broken spirits that had nothing to look forward to except their next bit of government subsidy, clawing, crawling over each other, dying rabbits in a poisoned underground burrow, desperately reaching, screaming, flailing up, up towards the air that choked thick and still with pollution and the rancid aura of misery and hopelessness that passed like lineage from one generation to the next. And in this place where the commonplace joke was that steam rose up from the manhole covers because it was so close to hell, no one bothered to molest the old abandoned house with the grimy, battered sign covered with barely visible numbers 417.

Ah, home, sweet home.

On the west side, three boards that had formerly sealed up windows had been pried open and the glass cracked by more adventurous pillagers who had probably been disappointed that nothing of value was left inside. Nothing of value had ever taken shelter inside of my home, unless you counted the two hundred-odd or so decaying photographs that were rotting into mulch from the rabid consumption of antagonistic mildew. There were dozens of faded and yellowed pictures scattered around the floors of the house, multiple visages of a woman photographed to sin in Norma Desmond's favorite fantasy. Evidently not even the most desperate homeless shacked up in this gloomily glorious reputation as the local Amityville Horror. Yeah, it certainly was haunted, I had created most of the demons here, and now...now I was returning. To join them perhaps.

It then struck me. I hadn't ever dwelled on my childhood before today. As a matter of fact, I was having trouble remembering any concrete details of my life before the FBI. Maybe this vermiform was washing away other things in my brain as well, slowly unsealing bolted mental doors I never knew I had.

I picked up one picture frame and with the corner of my shirt, wiped the slimy black away from the glass to reveal an aging, yellowed photograph of a woman I knew was my mother. The edges and lower half had already fallen prey to the attack of fungi, much like the rest. There were no photographs of me, even with her. If it hadn't been for the yearly grade-school identification cards that I was forced to sit for, I would have had no memory of what I looked like in my youth. Then again, I wasn't much to look at as a kid or even now, but my mother, she was, simply, beautiful, so of course, she deserved far more. Yes, they were all of her, and through these photographs, I could chronicle my childhood.

When I was very young, like all children, my mother was the most amazing thing in the world to me. "Your mother," she would croon in that melodic voice as she rocked me sleep with the tongue of thousands of storytellers in that dreamy, lilting accent, "Was famous." Her eyes were illuminated with the torch of memories of her youth. "She made the world bow before her." Her tales were woven in a tapestry of circuses and children dancing in a circle around her to the panpipes and fiddles of a Nino Rota parade, and always, she raised her hand to stroked my face with a gentle, delicate finger. "I held a great many hearts in these hands." This was surely true, because she held mine.

It wasn't until many years later that I realized she'd been lifting wholesale from 'Nights of Cabiria', merging Giulieta Masina into her version of reality, but I didn't care. I was quite happy to live in the illusion of her painted sunsets. I had nothing else to cling to.

Smashing the black and white picture of her on to the ground, I watched the glass spider and crack loudly, her face shattering and splintering into sixteen asymmetrical pieces radiating out from the center of her eyes.

A mistake. It was a big fucking mistake to come here. I didn't want to remember this, didn't want to relive the shredded remains of my childhood. Hate ran like heroin through my veins, coursing with the adrenaline-pumped lava of solar fury. I left thirteen years ago to forget this, forget I hated this place that hadn't been my home but my prison for sixteen years, forget that I hated my mother, hated myself for hating her and yet the insinuating voice inside me that followed me for thirteen years insisted it was my fault for her sickness, my fault for her rage and yet when I remembered, it was with the awe and faulty memory of selective hindsight, because as the assorted fragments of memory stabbed themselves into my brain, I also remembered that she was insane.

I was six. A collection of people from Social Services stopped by to inform my mother that under law I was required to begin attending school. I hid behind the curtain of faded, cheap polyester trimmed with old lace as she screeched and hurled obscenities and dishes at them, cursing the pigs for trying to take me away from her, to make me abandon her. She gibbered spells and incantations in to ward off the ghosts, the devil and demons, and when they finally left, shaken by the spectacle of her frothing destruction, she crumpled into a heaving, sodden pile of broken sobs, wailing impotently against the impassive floor.

On Monday, after the bewildering humiliation of being escorted by a Social Worker to school (mother had locked herself in the bedroom and refused to come out), I began the first grade in a class for special children. The only language I had ever known, a broken mishmash of bad Italian and misconjugated English, added up to nothing more than gibberish to them, and I hardly spoke up enough to be intelligible anyway.

I suppose had I hated school, come running home sobbing from the remnants of the brutal outside world, back to the arms of my mother, things would have turned out better. I had her blood, I should have been able to deceive with the tongue acquired genetically from at least one generation of liars. But what do you know when you're six? She took one glance at my flushed, excited face and bright eyes and promptly turned away.

That same night, she cut her wrists for the first time.

In its own way, her madness was quite stunning in itself. There was a certain elegance to the destruction, the rages, much like Rachmaninov's piano concertos flowed and ebbed to her mysterious internal rhythm. The storms were terrifying, lulls, exquisite. Mother would often go into a trance, staring off with glazed fascination into the eyes of oblivion, unaware of any other presence or surroundings. For hours, sometimes days, she would stare at the wallpaper, occasionally mumbling to herself or conversing with ghosts only she saw, but for the most part stayed pleasantly unresponsive. Those were her better ones.

Then there were the ones that involved flying crockery. Screaming, hollering, spitting and chewing, gibberish leaping off a slickened tongue, followed by hurling of plastic dishes (the only ones that hadn't been been broken from a previous tantrum) and utensils against the wall in the symphony of her shattered mind.

Then again, this was all perfectly normal to me.

"Hey Pendy, I heard yer momma's a psycho," the tatters of an old voice sneered me, and I still distinctly remember every tone, every inflection of those words. I turned around and was instantly ten again, holding three oversized textbooks in my arms three blocks before my home and facing Todd Brewington, who was thirteen and a foot taller than me.

"A psycho, a psycho, Pendy's mom's a psycho bitch!"

Between the urge to fuck him up, hurt him badly, drive him into the ground, turn his face and bone into a bloody pulp the same color running behind my eyes, the insidious voice of fear took hold of my freezing brain. You see, I learned quite early on that kids who defend the fact their mothers talk to the boogeyman and try to kill themselves got the shit kicked out of them on a regular basis. This voice, cowardice disguised in a rational tone, told me what to say, coached me with its patience of re-enacting a well-rehearsed role.

"Yeah, she is," I replied.

Todd stopped short. Anticipating a fight, but only receiving affirmation, his underdeveloped neural system was evidently not prepared for such a reply.

"You heard me, you shit? I said she's a psycho!"

"I said yeah!" I stepped up to him, dropping my books, the fury in my body turning my vision into a psychedelic rainbow of telescopic tunnel-vision. "She's a fucking psycho. And you know what else that means? It means I'm prolly a fucking psycho too, so you better watch out, Brewington, 'cause I maybe I'll do something crazy!" Adrenalin pumped so high behind my eyes that I was was practically hyperventilating, and my head was spinning, ears ringing and any second now I would have probably thrown up. Todd may have been an asshole, but he wasn't completely stupid. Smart bullies knew when to back off, especially when the victim looks like he had nothing to lose. Plus, he probably wasn't too sure whether or not madness was contagious, and didn't exactly want to find out, so he backed up, grinning like an idiot, the smirk stretched from one corner of his crooked mouth to his right ear.

"Yeah Pendy," he guffawed, slapping me on the shoulder with a big paw. "You're a fuckin' cold lunatic. You're o-kay."

I nodded mutely, feeling the rush and roar of red drain out of my body, feeling stupidly proud while a small piece of my heart turned cold and black.