Only In Threes
1. You Watch Them
In the dream you watch them. At first, you watch. You don't know how you got there and you don't know where you are. It's a hotel. It's every hotel you've ever been in. It's dark and it's small and the neon shines through the frayed curtains and maybe it's a movie you've seen. Maybe it's every movie you've seen.
You have a cigarette in your hand and you take long drags while you watch them. You are as intrigued as you are betrayed.
He always wanted this and you couldn't admit it, didn't want to think that he could do this to you.
And maybe that's why he's here. Maybe part of you knew. You can control your dreams. Always could. You're controlling them now.
You wanted this.
His hands are stroking her ribcage, trailing upwards towards her breasts. His fingers sense her, brush across her nipples, feeling them harden beneath him. She leans her head back and gasps. She's calling out his name and in your ears it's a curse.
She rocks her hips against him and she's all cream curves and red hair. Her belly rounds in front of her and you're amazed at the detail you give her in your dreams. You've paid attention. She's beautiful, of course, and you wonder whether you always knew this about her.
She moves and you can't take your eyes off her. She's close. She tells him so.
You drag on your cigarette and you hear the sound of smoke rushing through your windpipe into your lungs. You hear your heartbeat as it gains momentum, as it pounds against your ribcage, harder and harder with each thrust he makes in her.
And then she's looking at you. She's looking at your through red tousled hair that hangs in front of her face. She's looking at you with her lips parted and he lids slightly lowered. She's saying his name: John, John, John over and over and she's saying it for you.
You are transfixed by her and when she beckons you move forward, hypnotised by the sound of her voice and the swaying of her body against his.
You want this. This is your dream.
She smiles at you and licks her lips. You move closer. Your hand is on the bed, you lean into her and she raises her head to meet you. You kiss, her tongue tracing your lower lip.
2. When She Wakes
When she wakes the wind is blowing the curtains. They hang suspended in the air and then drift into position again like a great jellyfish that fills and propels.
She breathes hard. Her body still feels the dream, still pulses from her unconscious orgasm. Her dreams, sexual or otherwise, are not usually this vivid.
She gets up and closes the window. The clock by the bed reads five am, too early to be awake, too late to get any quality sleep in before morning.
The room is cold and she's thinly dressed. She wraps arms around herself and stands in the centre of the room for a while, unmoving.
You wanted this.
She's not sure that's true, and even if it were it wouldn't solve the moral ambiguities inherent in fantasising about one's colleagues - especially in situations that said colleagues would no doubt find perverse. Dana and John suggest a rigid inflexibility in all things and it's difficult to imagine their sex lives any different.
She's used them, violated them somehow, John and Dana and their Patrician nobility. They make her feel left of centre, slightly off balance. Imperfect.
And obsessed. She reaches for the sweats lying draped over a chair. Every g-woman jogs sometime or so it seems. Maybe it's the only way to be in the job, and stay sane. Maybe it's just easy.
She runs. Too fast, too hard. She goes one more block and then one more block and then sprints the last one hundred yards. She breaths awkwardly, breaths coming and going at the same time, coughing a little because she still hasn't quit smoking (not yet, not today).
And she thinks that if she just tried harder, pushed a little further, she'd be just like them and she wouldn't be fighting off feelings of inadequacy and pretension.
It must be normal to feel like this.
But it's crazy too and she's always been dancing on that border and she wonders whether the insane know something the sane don't.
She finds the coffee maker, throws the used filter into the bin and begins filling the new one. One scoop, two scoop, three scoop and it's probably going to be a four scoop day.
3. I See Her
She sips her coffee like it's part of the conspiracy. Delicately, not trusting it to be the right temperature. She doesn't trust me but I become less offended as I see her lack of faith in the everyday, the little things.
"Everything okay, Dana?" John takes his role as Alpha Male seriously and Dana seems to work within the model. He likes to think she needs him.
She doesn't of course.
"Fine," she says. She places the cup back on the desk, 'hmming' over the coroner's report on our Methuselah. He didn't live to be nine hundred but the neighbours claim he's been the same age since they were children.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the light on the ceiling. It's a dull week - ergo the John Doe investigation.
John leans over her shoulder as if he could possibly understand what she's reading. "Interesting," he says. John finds everything she does interesting.
I close my eyes.
Shapes dance before me. For a while they are meaningless - remnants of the light's impression on my retina - but gradually they take form, become people, friends, colleagues.
I dreamt about them last night. They flash before me now, subliminal images feeding into the data stream from my optic sensors. A conspiracy in itself.
I don't know why I do this. A good psychologist will say it isn't wrong but the collective undercurrents of baggage and emotional overload in this room ensure there's no way it can be right. There's too much that isn't said. And maybe that's why I'm compensating with midnight fantasies that aren't as much a part of my unconscious as they should be, but I'm not about to excuse myself. Not here.
"Agent Reyes?"
I open my eyes. She's looking at me expectantly. John is nowhere to be seen. "Where's John?"
"He went to get the missing persons reports..." She frowns, concerned and confused.
"I'm sorry - I wasn't paying attention." I shake myself and lean forward.
She looks back down at her reports. "Well as I was saying, there's no 'Cosimo Boadicci' listed in Italy either but there's always the possibility..."
I become fascinated by the colour of her hair. It's a rusted brown today, and it usually is. In the dream it is a brilliant cherry red matching the gloss on her lips.
"Of course the Fascist regime made many Italians citizens persona non grata..."
"Agent Scully?"
She pauses. "Yes?"
"Have you ever had a prophetic dream? I mean - have you ever had a dream that came true?"
She taps her pen against the table a couple of times, and then she puts it down and clasps her hands together.
"Is there something you want to talk about, Agent Reyes?"
You. Me. John. Sex. Love. Dreams. You.
"No... I had a strange dream last night." I wonder whether she sees through me, whether that stare hides telepathic capabilities.
"Have any of your dreams come true?"
I take safe ground. "They're usually nonsensical - places I used to live, people I knew... What about you?"
"I dream about the end of the world," she says and her face gives away nothing.
She holds me like that for a while, her expression unchanging. I till her words in my head, playing with appropriate responses that don't sound trite.
And then John returns and saves me.
"Here you go." He throws a file down in front of Dana and she opens it casually.
"My god," she says. "That's him." She flicks over the page to the report. Her mouth falls open slightly and instinctively I feel her disbelief. Dana can use the words 'aliens' and 'national security concern' in the same breath but I get the feeling it's against her better judgment. I suspect she still has a super-ego that insists on making sense of it all.
"What is it?" I ask.
"That photo was taken in 1952," John says.
Dana offers up theories: a father, brother, close relative. John suggests two generations of illegal immigrants might be the cause. And it's all plausible and probable but I know it isn't right.
Dana stands up and shuffles into her coat, promising to revisit Forensics after her stint at Quantico. John nods goodbye while claiming the chair she has vacated. He sinks down heavily, needfully.
"Are you okay, Monica?"
I take a styrofoam cup from my desk and crush it in one hand before relegating it to the waste-paper basket underneath the "I Want to Believe" poster. Dana kept the decor but we never asked her to change it.
Sometimes, I think about you...
I leave the words in my head, leave them for the end of the world.
"I'm fine," I say.