"Pop Tarts & Secrets"
			       By Dawson E. Rambo

Disclaimer : Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner and any
other tangentially mentioned characters created by Chris Carter
remain his copyrighted property, the property of 1013 Productions,
and the property of Fox Television, a unit of 20th Century Fox,
Inc. No infringement of any copyright is intended. Characters
created by the author remain his property.

Original Post  :  June 29, 1997
Archive Entry  :  "Pop Tarts & Secrets"
Classification :  RH (Relationship, Humor)
Rating	       :  G
Archive	       :  Any public accessible server.
Missing Parts  :  http://www.sonic.net/~drambo
Feedback       :  All feedback (good or bad) to: drambo@sonic.net
Timeline       :  At any point

NOTE: This is a literary parody of Tom Robbins. For those of you who
don't know, he's the author of "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues," "Another
Roadside Attraction," "Still Life With Woodpecker," "Jitterbug Perfume,"
"Skinny Legs and All," and "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas." If you have
never read any of his novels, and you like the tone of this piece, I
strongly suggest you rush down to your bookstore and grab one of all of
`em.

				  Interlude #1
			  Thoughts on a Sunday Morning

	In the time between the end of the fourth season and the beginning
of the fifth season, the writer sits in front of his computer on a warm
Tucson Sunday morning thinking about the difference between True Love
and a Pop Tart. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and the
writer wonders which, in the long run, would be a better thing to have.
At this moment he has one but not the other, and he wonders, again,
which one he does have.
	He could get up, of course, and walk to the kitchen, bypassing one
of the two cats that always seem to be underfoot, cats that he suspects
are not cats at all but harbingers of an alien invasion. These cats, you
see, are not normal cats. One of them things she is a dog and follows
the writer around like one, making noises that sound suspiciously like
barks, and demanding the amount of attention that your normal addle-
brained pooch is want to do. The other one thinks she is a person
because she insists on holding lengthy, loud, involved conversations
with whomever seems to be around at the time. If you ask her a question,
you see, this cat-person will regard you with calm, intelligent,
obviously non-cat green eyes and answer. The pitch of her voice will
raise and lower itself with her answers, always depending, of course, on
the nature of the question you ask her.
	So obviously, the writer points out, neither of these cats are
actually cats. They are obviously some other form of life that has taken
the form of a cat and has decided to study the writer in his natural
habitat, which seems these days to be planted in front of the computer
as Harry Chapin albums croon softly over the CDROM. And at this moment,
the writer wonders what he would find were he to get up off his
buttocks, walk the ten feet to the kitchen and pop open the door on the
pantry closet. Because if the writer finds the white box on the third
shelf (the shelf below the soup cans and above the half-empty bottle of
Jack Daniels,) that would mean that he <does> have Pop Tarts. And this
might be a bad, sad thing, because it would then mean that the writer
does not have True Love.
	And one or the other is the most that any person can hope for.
There are reports of people that have had True Love who insisted on
having the white and brown box (any other flavor of Pop Tart besides
chocolate, is of course, a Communist plot; the writer is not dissuaded
by the fact that the number of Communists on the planet seems to be
decreasing as quickly as the national debt increases. Even one communist
on the planet is one too many, and they do tend to cause trouble
wherever they are...) and then having the woes of the world visit them
in the form of tax collectors, instrangient cable installers and traffic
jams occurring in towns that have more double-wide trailers than actual
functioning cars.
	So the writer sits in front of the computer and writes, thinking
that if he were to check the status of Pop Tart availability that he
would discover something about his life that he would rather not know.


				       -1-


	Red. Her hair was red, not quite the red of a Coca-Cola can, but
much more the red of another sort, the sort of red that defies
description. It was most obviously an attractive red, because as the
woman moved down the hall many, many pairs of eyes turned to follow her
progress. An outsider might have wondered if she were some kind of
manager or supervisor by the way that people made way for her, by the
way that people looked at her with the same kind of quiet awe that one
usually reserves for the two Pandas in the Washington Zoo, the two
pandas that seem monumentally disinterested in each other despite the
near-constant attempts by the zookeepers to get them in a family way.
	Maybe someone should ask them if they even like each other.
	Or maybe someone should check their cages for boxes of Pop Tarts.
	But we return our attention to the woman. She is carrying a manila
folder, the very same kind of folder that millions of people use to hold
millions upon millions of pages of paper. Thinking about manila folders
for a moment, we realize that it is quite an astounding invention. They
are all the same size and color, usually, and they line up like good
little soldiers, despite the tendency to slide down to the front of the
cabinet when there aren't enough of them. But this folder was not like
most of its brothers and sisters. For one thing, it had all kinds of
official-looking writing and artwork on the front, the chief, dominant,
head-of-the-pack writing being two very important words, two words that
were both obviously and visibly more important then the rest of the
writing on the cover.
	In large red letters, not quite the red of a Coca-Cola can or the
red of the woman's hair, but a fine red nonetheless, were the words TOP
SECRET. There were few words, that when joined together in the holy
matrimony of being stamped on a rather official-looking manila folder
that can inspire as much awe, fear or just general nonsense as TOP
SECRET. If you think about those two words together for a moment, you
realize that what they mean can't possibly be true. Top does mean the
very zenith of some measurement. Top of a building, top of a mountain,
top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. There can only be ONE "Top"
anything, but we all know that there must be gazillions of folders
across the world stamped with those two words. Sure, language
differences aside, some governments or businesses might use "Most
Secret" instead of "Top Secret", but the point remains the same. What
are the chances that the contents of any given folder marked thusly
actually contain "the" top secret?
	About the same chances that a box of Pop Tarts might be found in
the cages of those two pandas.
	But the woman wasn't thinking about that, about any of that
actually. She was wondering about the man she was going to see, the man
she saw most days. He wasn't anywhere near where she was now, and she
was going to him with that folder, the folder that had those two
ludicrous words stamped together in red (not the red of a Coca-Cola can,
and not the red of her hair, but still a fine red.)
	She got on the elevator and punched a button with an angry finger.
Well, the finger itself was not angry, because a finger has no emotions.
A finger has knuckles, and as far as knuckles go, she has very nice
ones. And as you progress up the woman's body, neither her hand, her
arm, her shoulder or her neck is actually angry. The woman herself was
angry, and rightly so, because she had neither True Love nor Pop Tarts.
At least, not as far as she knew, and this, then, was what was bothering
the woman.
	She couldn't decide if she wanted True Love or Pop Tarts.
	The elevator doors opened and she exited, turning left and heading
down the crowded hallway. There were no people there, of course, but the
corridors were filled with filled and forgotten filing cabinets (most
likely filled with the brothers and sisters of the manila folder the
woman was carrying, and there wasn't a betting man alive that would take
odds on how many of them were similarly stamped TOP SECRET,) and the
filing cabinets gave the impression of being very strong, very silent
soldiers standing guard, soldiers with drawers instead of arms.
	She stopped in front of the door and thought about knocking and
decided against it. Her finger still hurt from angrily jabbing the "B"
button in the elevator, and she didn't like pain.
	So she pushed the door open and entered, seeing the man she had
come to find seated behind his desk. He was studying another folder just
like the one she was carrying, but it wasn't stamped TOP SECRET. This
one had come from another family of the one the woman was holding, and
it also had very official looking stamps all over it. This one, however,
was stamped in black, the black of a coal mine at midnight, the black of
nightmares and really good blackened crawfish. The words were MOST
SECRET, and we won't even go into the oxymoronic debates about which was
more a secret, a "Top" secret or a "most" secret.
	"Skinner," the woman said, holding up the folder. The man nodded,
as if he knew what she had meant exactly and held out his hand for it.
She walked over and offered it to him, a manila sacrifice to the gods of
Secrecy. The man took it and donned a pair of glasses, and the world
changed for the woman.
	She thought about Pop Tarts as the man adjusted the glasses on his
nose.
	He opened the folder and read about the newest, coolest Top Secret
in the Secret business, running his finger down the pages as he absorbed
the material. He nodded and grunted, using his finger to dig in his ear
canal, returning the finger to his gaze to silently study what his
finger had uncovered and loosened in his ear. Returning his attention to
the file in front of him he continued to read, making more grunting
noises, sounding very much like a small constipated dog on his morning
walk.
	The man finished reading the contents of the folder and turned to
the woman.
	"Packed?" he asked.
	She nodded. "Always," she added.
	"Great."
	The man stood and grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and
reached into the top drawer of his desk. A sleek black pistol stared
back at him and he grabbed it, holstering it on his hip, feeling very
much like Wyatt Earp going out to do battle with the Forces of Evil. And
there, dear reader, is the third member of this little equation.
	True love.
	Forces of Evil.
	Pop Tarts.
	Does the world need anything more?


				  Interlude #2
				  More Thoughts

	As the writer considers the electrifying words of prose that he
has pounded out in the last half hour he wonders if anyone is still
reading. At this point, as his fingers fly across the keyboard, he has
no way of knowing if anyone besides him is reading it. Logically, no one
else could be reading it, because it is unfinished. Certainly the cat
perched on the windowsill to his immediate left could be reading over
his shoulder, since she is obviously not a cat but a harbinger of alien
invasion and since aliens must cross vast distances of space and time in
order to even be here, one must assume that they can read. It makes no
difference to the author that they cannot speak English; they must be
able to read. How else to explain how they manage to do the things they
do?
	But since Einstein and now Steven Hawking have both postulated
that time travel is indeed possible, there exists the small, remote
possibility that someone is, in fact, reading this as he writes it, that
they are at some point in the future, reading these words at the same
rate that he is writing them. He wonders if they are laughing or
smiling, if they are bored or angry, whether or not there are any Pop
Tarts in the pantry cupboard.



				       -2-


	The man and the woman make their way through the airport and to
the gate of the airplane that will take them to the secret place. The
place itself is not secret; many people live there. And the fact that
the man and the woman are going there is not secret; anyone with access
to the airline computer would be able to discover the man and the
woman's departure and arrival locations. The reason, then, is the
secret, and like all secrets it tends to extend itself to encompass all
events related to it, and indeed, even the location itself.
	Secrets are funny things when one stops to think about it. You can
take any piece of paper and stamp the words SECRET on it, and it becomes
a secret. Not a secret to the person who wrote it, unless they wrote it
with their eyes closed, and not a secret to the person who reads it,
unless they read it with their eyes closed, and certainly not a secret
to the manila folder that serves as the paper's home, and certainly not
a secret to the computer or the typewriter that composed it, and most
certainly not a secret to the people, places, and things that are
written about on the page. So then, to whom is it a secret? To anyone
else, one supposes. To the millions of Others that are not privy to the
secret, it becomes such. So then one can assume that anything that is
not known to a person is secret to them. Anything known is not a secret,
and anything unknown is; why bother to stamp what is unknown as secret?
To stop the process of knowing, of course. That is what must be
protected, because the more people that know a thing, the less secret it
is, until everyone knows everything, and all the rubber stamps that say
TOP SECRET will have nothing to do but sit in a drawer somewhere being
lonely and unused. The natural extension of that, of course, would be
that the entire rubber industry would collapse as no one would need cars
anymore to go and know things. No one would need planes to fly to
distant places (and follow me here, planes have rubber wheels when they
land,) since All would be Known and Nothing would be Secret anymore. So
we see that although it seems odd to stamp something as SECRET since it
will only be secret to those that to not Know, it is actually an
economic requirement that there be secrets.
	So then we discover that the man and the woman realize the
absurdity of the situation but buy into it because they like to go to
secret places and do secret things, things that set them apart from the
rest of humanity. This man and this woman like to do these things
because it gives purpose to their lives and a reason for getting up in
the morning and checking the pantry cupboard for Pop Tarts.
	And so they wait for their plane, the woman reading a paperback
novel, trying very hard to Know what the author has written so that it
will not be a Secret to here anymore, and the man reading a magazine for
the same reason. He lives to Know, to Discover, to Unearth Secrets.
	But there is a secret between them. It is something that they each
know, but are not aware that the other knows. The man knows that he has
no future need for Pop Tarts anymore because he has True Love. The woman
knows this also, and since she does not like Pop Tarts much anyway, it
is a Good thing because she likes having True Love much more than she
could ever imagine wanting or liking Pop Tarts.
	But the man does not know that the woman knows she has True Love,
and the woman does not know that the man knows he has True Love and thus
the secret is born. The woman's laptop computer Knows that she has True
Love because she has written about it, has pounded the keyboard about it
in frustration in the middle of the night as she asks the same question
of the machine (and of herself,) over and over again.
	Why does the man not know that she has True Love? Why must he
ignore it, even though it is as plain as the nose on the man's face?

				  Interlude #3
				    On Noses

	Noses.
	The writer stops his prose to think about noses. Much has been
written about noses, if `much' means more than a few words here and
there scattered through the sands of time. There have been famous noses,
(Mount Rushmore comes to mind because the author wonders who's job it is
to take the monumentally huge Q-tip that would be required to clean the
noses of the four faces on Mount Rushmore, and furthermore, who's dog
that person would have had to fuck in order to get stuck with that job,)
and there have been infamous noses (again, the author's mind wanders to
what, exactly, would make a nose infamous...) throughout history.
	But has anyone actually ever stopped to consider the nose? The
purpose of the nose is not to difficult to fathom. It's used to smell
things, to know the odor of things. Scientists tell us that the
strongest memory trigger is the nose, that the scent of something long
forgotten can bring the memory back with a flash of mental lightening,
transporting the smeller back to a time and place long forgotten. The
nose is also used to perch glasses on, and for a convenient place for a
man to put his finger at stoplights. (The author wonders why women are
never seen digging around inside a nostril at a stoplight. Men and women
are different, of course, but one must assume that they have the same
things inside their noses that men do...why don't women find them as
fascinating as men do?) The author wonders how glasses would work if we
smelled, say, through our ears. He assumes it has something to do with
either a high-powered industrial stapler or Velcro.)


				       -3-


	The man also knew that he had True Love and also wondered why the
woman did not Know this. He had tried to show her a thousand ways, by
touching her here and there, by touching her in places that not everyone
touched her. She seemed to like his touch, but the man wondered if she
hungered for it the same way that some people hunger for Pop Tarts and
Coca-Cola. He liked the red of a Coca-Cola can, but he also knew that
the woman's hair was a very nice shade of red itself, a shade of red
that tended to fill the man's dreams with thoughts of this woman.
	And so, even though their business was that of Knowing Secrets
(mostly Top Secrets, the occasional Most Secret and from time to time
the odd Very Secret secret,) this man and this woman had a very
important secret, a secret that had only to be Known by the both of them
for it to no longer be an actual secret.
	And yet, neither the man nor the woman wanted to let this
particular secret out, and that was another thing about Knowing Secrets
that they both knew.
	It's one of the more annoying things about secrets; once they are
Known, they can never be a secret again. You can't un-know a secret. And
this particular secret was just one of those secrets that was possibly
better left unknown.
	Eventually, the people responsible for doing such things does it,
and the passengers are called to the gate for boarding. Like huge herds
of very well-dressed cattle, the passengers board the plane. They rush
aboard, which is another thing that confused the man in the woman,
because it wasn't like the plane was going anywhere without them, and it
wasn't like they didn't have assigned seats, so it wasn't like anyone
was going to get a better seat by getting there first or anything. But,
the natural human tendency is to be first, to be there before anyone
else so they can stake a claim to the overhead bin, prospectors panning
for the gold that is being able to jam your garment bag into the tiny,
molecular-sized overhead compartment. It would be an entirely different
matter, of course, if the flight crew served the lunch and drinks in the
order that you boarded the plane, but then again the odds would be
against most people because they always seem to board the plane in the
reverse order of your seat assignment; if you're in the back, they
always seat front to back, and if the reverse is true, then they to the
reverse, again as always.
	So the man and the woman, who have been on more planes than most
people have empty McDonalds and Burger King movie tie-in-cups rattling
around inside their cabinets for `someday,' wait patiently to board the
plane. Each of them carries a very small bag, small enough to slip under
the seat in front of them necessary, yet large enough to carry at least
six changes of clothing, not to mention several dozen extremely loud and
ugly ties.
	They seat themselves on the plane, the woman by the window and the
man on the isle, each of them thinking the same exact thing, each of
them silently praying to the gods that oversee airline ticketing that
there will not be a third person in this row, a third fat, huge, sweaty,
talkative person to occupy the middle seat. They each hear the soft
cries of the colicky baby two rows up and an isle over and both realize
that somehow over the last ten years it has become a federal regulation
that each flight have a baby with the lung capacity of an opera tenor
with parents that take devilish glee in poking it with hatpins for the
duration of the trip.
	And each wonders if they'll be serving Pop Tarts on this flight.
	Never have either of them been on a flight that serves Pop Tarts,
but just as a man and a woman can each hold out hope for True Love, and
just as each can realize that an Unknown Thing is by definition still a
Secret, each can hold out hope (one hoping for and one against,) that
there will be Pop Tarts served aboard TransPacific Airways flight 440.
	The flight crew buttons up the plane, sealing the passengers
inside, and the pilot deftly taxies the plane to the runway and pushes
the buttons and pulls the levers and dials the gauges that need to be
pushed, pulled and dialed and the plane quickly defies all laws of known
physics and jumps into the air. The Gods of Airline Ticketing have
smiled on the man and the woman and left the middle seat empty. They
lift the two middle armrests, giving them more room, an additional six
total inches to move around and get as comfortable as two people forced
to bend their bodies in ways that neither Man nor God ever meant for
bodies to bend.
	The woman returns to her book, intent on Knowing all of it before
the flight ends. The man returns to his magazine, turning it sideways to
fully appreciate the literary depth of the article he is currently
looking at.
	The flight takes several hours and then it is over. The man and
the woman, who now understand completely why everyone is rushing to get
off the plane wait for the rush to be over. After all, it is only a
difference of about five minutes, and there are much nicer way to spend
five minutes than pressed up rather intimately against a stranger. After
all, the each think in Secret, I'd rather be pressed up against my True
Love for those five minutes than a paper-clip salesman from Walla Walla.
	Each knows, of course, that the other is their One True Love, but
neither knows the other knows.
	After the stampede of traveling salesmen, families on vacation,
and compulsive travelers exits the plane, the man and the woman prepare
to exit. He hands her her bag, and she thanks him with a wonderfully
expressive facial motion, a combination of a half-a-smile, a third-of-a-
grin, and some rather impressive eyebrow gymnastics. The man even thinks
he sees the woman's nose crinkle in a delightful sort of way and decides
that maybe today will be the day he tells his True Love.
	The man indicates the book.
	"Finish?" he asks.
	"Hardly," she answers, her face going through the Gold Medal Round
of Eyebrow Gymnastics.
	They exit the plane together, and walk down to the rental car
counters. They have both done this a thousand times, and they have a
brief discussion on who is to stand in line, fill out the paperwork and
complete all the necessary rituals to cause the android behind the
counter to finally break down and issue an actual set of car keys.
	"You?" the man asks.
	She nods. "Me," she answers, and goes to stand on line. And as is
their habit, the man returns to the concourse and finds a newsstand.
They like to purchase the local papers. It's a habit they've grown used
to over the four seasons they've been together. It's a little something
they do the first night in a new town, a little way of connecting
themselves to the place they are in. The man likes to know which
department stores are having sales on power tools and cameras, not that
he would ever need to purchase something like that on a trip, but it
grounds him, makes him feel like the secret that he is about to Know
might be a normal secret this time, like the secret of Yanni's appeal,
rather than a deeper, darker secret, like the secret of Barney's appeal.
	He finds the newsstand and finds the two local daily papers and
purchases both. Walking back to the car counter he sees that the woman
has completed the task and is waiting for him with a soft smile. He
wonders if the smile is for him and if it is time to tell her the only
secret they have between them. He wonders if finally knowing this secret
will change anything between them, if she will have wished that he kept
it a secret. He will tell her this night, he thinks. Dinner,
conversation, perhaps a regulations-approved single bottle of wine. Just
enough to loosen the tongue without making it dance.
	They take the bus to the car and then the car to the hotel and the
hotel doesn't move so they are done taking things places except for the
apparent need to take the bags to their rooms. The rooms, as always,
share the connecting door and to the man the connecting door looks like
a portal to another world, a passageway to a different place where there
are no secrets, where each of them, the man and the woman, know all.
Where Knowing is the reason for existence instead of the search for
things to Know.
	Tonight, he thinks. Tonight at dinner I will let her Know.


				       -4-

	As always, they each take a few moments to change out of travel
clothes and into something a little less formal and a little more
comfortable. They each take a weapon to the dinner table because you
just never know when a waiter is going to go off the deep end and just
stand there, repeating the specials over and over again. And after
having talked to a waiter friend back home, they both knew that the
waiter, any waiter, would rather be put out of his misery than spend the
rest of his life standing beside a table reciting specials over and over
again.
	They sit at the table, looking anywhere else but at each other,
each of them waiting for the ritual to start. They both know that until
the waiter comes over and recites the special that dinner hasn't really
started yet, that they are just sitting at a table in a room with some
food and other people. Dinner can't start until the waiter comes over.
Everyone knows the rules.
	The waiter comes over, and as waiters go, he's not bad. He doesn't
stumble over the recitation of the specials, and more importantly, the
thing that quite possibly saved his life was the fact that he didn't
talk to them like they were third-graders or a patient in a hospital: He
avoided the dreaded "W-word."
	We.
	"And how are we doing tonight?" some waiters, teachers and nurses
are wont to ask, and it always make an intelligent listener bristle.
"I'm fine. How are you?" is the natural response, but it sounds dull and
trite to anyone that has ever had to utter those words, and the man and
the woman have had to resist on more than one occasion the desire to
draw their weapons and bag another waiter.
	And as the year was going, both the man and the woman were under
the limit for officious waiters.
	But not by much.
	So the waiter was allowed to live and he left the man and the
woman alone.
	"So," the man says softly.
	"So," the woman responds.

				  Interlude #4
			   Thoughts About Harry Chapin

	At this moment the author wishes to take a break. He's heard
"Better Place To Be" by Harry Chapin perhaps six times since he's
started this little literary jaunt, and it's starting to grate on his
nerves. It's a good song, a wonderful song, one of the greatest songs in
the business.
	But eating seventeen boxes in one day has its disadvantages too,
True Love notwithstanding.
	The author studies the small figurine of Piglet that sits on top
of his computer and wonders why he feels such a connection to a piece of
ceramic artwork. It's not that he actually feels an attachment to the
figurine, just what the figurine represents. Piglet, perhaps the single
most understood character from A.A. Milne's Pooh stories. You can have
your "Bear of Little Brain," the author thinks, and the obviously
homosexual (not that there's anything wrong with that,) Christopher
Robin, and the always-gloomy and the more than just a little bit
annoying Eeoyre. You can have the grumpy Rabbit, the animal that most
reminds the author of his mother.
	But Piglet is the most complex, the most human of all the Pooh
characters.
	The author ejects the Harry Chapin disk and re-seats it in the
case and returns the case to the rather impressive rack of similar CDs
mounted to the wall next to his desk. There, in the rack, are nestled
almost a hundred different discs, all of them used by the author when he
composes. Selection of music is VERY important, the author realizes. He
has an important scene coming up, a scene where The Secret will be
revealed, and he needs to select just the right music for it.
	He selects Simon and Garfunkel, curiously aware that they were at
the height of their popularity when he was struggling not to crap in his
drawers. Yes, it is the "Concert in Central Park" live album, an album
that was recorded when he was 14, a concert that he actually attended,
but it still does not escape him that the music he has chosen was
popular to his parents.
	Rabbit, the mother.
	Eeyore, the father.
	So then, what is the offspring of an Eeyore and Rabbit?
	A horny grouch?
	The author selects "Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard" and begins
to write again.

				       -5-

	"So," the man repeats.
	"So," the woman repeats again.
	"I have..."
	"...a Secret," she finishes. The man is surprised, but then
cautions him. He has had many secrets for the four seasons they have
been together, not the least of them is that he used to get paid a great
deal more than she did. But that is not important now, he realizes. She
think she knows what the Secret is, and if she does know then it is not
a secret anymore, because she Knows it. And knowing a secret renders it
benign.
	Unless, he thinks quickly, it is a secret that she knows his
secret. And it would not be a secret from her, because she knows she
knows the secret; it would only be a secret to him. But it would be her
secret, and then the man would be owed a secret.
	"Yes," he says, slowly, wondering if he should ask her what the
secret is.
	"Do you know what?" he asks.
	"Possibly," she answers, her face going into warmups for the
Eyebrow Olympics.
	"How would I know if you know?"
	"You could ask," she points out.
	"Yes, but then if you tell me what you think the secret is, and it
is the secret, you will owe me a secret, and I thought this was about my
secret."
	She thinks about this. "Mulder," she says, because this is the
man's name, the only name he will answer to for her. She likes the way
his name feels in her mouth, comfortable, like a wad of chewing gum that
has been there for the exact amount of time it takes to be perfectly
bubble-ready elastic. Gum, you see, is not stretchy enough at first
because of the sugar coating, and the longer it sits in the acidic
saliva of her mouth, the harder it becomes. But there is that ten
minutes that totally belongs to every wad of gum, that perfect window of
time where you can stretch and bend the gum to your will, make it do
things that God and Man never meant gum to do. It's a perfect time, one
of those wonderful little moments that everyone cherishes, even if they
don't know they are, because there are few things in life aside from
True Love and Pop Tarts that can make you feel as wonderful as a perfect
wad of gum in your mouth.
	"Mulder," she said again, popping the bubble, "...do you want to
tell me something?"
	"Perhaps," he allowed. He didn't want to waste telling her a
Secret if it was something she already Knew.
	"Perhaps you can pretend that you are telling someone else. I can
pretend that I'm not who I am, and that I don't know anything that I
know, and I'll ask myself if I know what secret you want to tell me, and
if I do know, then I'll tell you."
	Mulder thought about this for a moment. "Scully," he said, because
that was the woman's name. She would answer to other names, most of them
her own, but he found that calling her "Scully" felt about as good in
his mouth as a wad of gum. Better, in fact. There would be only one word
that would sound better in his mouth when he referred to her or wanted
to catch her attention.
	"Love."
	"Scully," he said again, because he had lost his train of thought
thinking about wads of gun, True Love, and Pop Tarts. "It won't be the
same because I'll know that you're you and that you knew my Secret."
	"But if I don't, and you won't tell me, then I will never Know,
and I'll never know if I knew."
	Mulder considered this a minute.
	"Do you have any secrets from me?" he asked.
	Scully thought about telling him the One Big Secret and decided
that she would wait. "Yes," she said finally. "I have one secret from
you."
	He nodded. "I see. Will you tell me what it is?"
	She shook her head. "If I tell you the secret, and you tell me
yours, and they are the same secret, then that would be wonderful. We
could leave this table, go back to my room or your room and make love
all night. But if it's not the same secret, we'd have to watch a movie
or something like that, and then we'd both owe the other a secret, and
I'm all but out of secrets."
	Mulder considered her words. He went over each word individually
in his head, trying to plumb the depths of their meaning. He made the
mistake of not looking at the words in series, as you might if you read
them. His mind had heard each word separately, and had decided to
process them as such. Thus it was how he almost missed the two most
important words.
	"Or something."
	He wondered about those two words. What could they mean? Something
was one of those words. One of those words like..."anytime" that could
mean exactly what it sounded like, "any time," or mean nothing at all.
	And then another thought occurred to him.
	"Make love." She had said those two words. He went back over the
conversation and realized that if she didn't know his secret, that she
had the same secret.
	"Scully, can I ask you a question?"
	"Of course."
	"Do you like Pop Tarts?"
	"That's a secret," Scully smiled.


THE END
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