In this show about not knowing, then, the agents confronted two distinct sets of frightening unknowns. On one side was the shadow government represented by the Smoking Man. On the other was the evil that lurked beneath the surface of every American town. Often, Mulder and Scully’s role was simply to act as interpreters between their own antagonists, rendering chaotic eruptions of village horror comprehensible to men in marble corridors in D.C. Think of all the shots of the heroes in their oversized 1990s glasses laboring at their field reports, or again of all the shots of them cruising through a hostile rural enclave in businesslike topcoats and a sensible rented Buick.
The X-Files was probably the first great TV show to be galvanized by the Internet and the last great TV show to depict a world in which the Internet played no part. Its fan culture found a home online early in the series’s run, but though the role of computers became both more central and more realistic as the show progressed—in season 1, an operating system became sentient and took over an office building; three years later, Scully’s word processor made the switch from green text on a black background to black text on a white background—it was possible at least through the fifth season or so to see the web as a distraction, something with no important bearing on anyone’s life. Remember when you could turn it on and off?
It used to be a critical commonplace to say that the Internet destroyed the old American monoculture, because it freed us to be absorbed by our own interests, to spend our time downloading obscure anime rather than caring about Madonna or ABC. But the Internet also created a new type of monoculture: It made every place accessible to every other place. We no longer assume, now, that the peculiarities of our own environments are private. Our hometown murders might appear on CNN.com. The world of small-town X-Files episodes is still that older world of extreme locality, where everyone in town grows up knowing that the rules here are different and we handle it ourselves. Children vanish or trees kill people or bright lights appear in the sky, but there is no higher authority to appeal to and it has nothing to do with what goes on a few miles down the road. In my hometown we knew that the spillway by the lake was where you painted a memorial if your friend was killed in a drunk-driving crash. It’s the same thing. Here is here. And this is just the opposite of the here-is-everywhere world inhabited by the conspiracy, which is global in scale, utterly connected, and ruled by pseudonymous men whose flat-affect, no-eye-contact meetings were almost the personification of a chat window.
SmokingMan1963: how do u want to proceed
FirstElder: u need to take care of the girl
SmokingMan1963: haha the pieces are already in place
FirstElder: i hope so
FirstElder: for ur sake
SmokingMan1963: haha lmao
SmokingMan1963: u don’t trust me?
SmokingMan1963:?
The small-town grotesques in the series lived with secrets. The Syndicate curated them. Almost more than belief and science, the sustaining tension in The X-Files is between two manifestations of the American psyche, one fading and the other just taking form, as they encounter each other for the first time and recoil in horror.
* * *
One day in the spring of my senior year of high school, Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. I was not at home, having left that morning on a trip to visit colleges. It was the first time I had been on an airplane.
There was something wrong with the government. In Oklahoma, we all knew that. Some injustice or some imbalance, some flaw too deep to be named, seemed inherent almost in the landscape. The silos spoke of it and the trucks spoke of it and the big sagging hay bales spoke of it, and the oil wells rolling their shoulders on the horizon thought of it but didn’t know what to say. The TV above the Super Mario Bros. machine at Mazzio’s Pizza played a never-ending montage of police swinging batons, Los Angeles burning, the white Bronco gliding down the freeway, oil fires in Kuwait, and when our fathers sometimes pulled their tables together they smiled terse smiles over their pizza and talked about taxes and said it was coming on time for a change. Donald Trump was a fading minor celebrity and the idea that he might one day enter politics would have been too inane even to be comical, but a wave was building, a long way away. If we borrowed our parents’ cars and forgot to hit the preset for KMOD or KOSU, we might catch ourselves listening to hypnotic radio hosts who claimed that Bill Clinton was mad, a cokehead, a murderer, none of which we could prove or disprove, it was all so far away. The margins of knowledge receded into a distance that left the feeling of wrong intact but removed the explanation. The structure of things was a skeleton whose skin was falling away.
This is why I stopped at saying I would almost agree with you if you thought The X-Files’ paranoia had mostly to do with cities and small towns. For all their differences, the series’s two realms shared a basic assumption about America, which was that in essence it was still meant to be the country found in Frank Capra movies: white, Christian, centered on families, governed by old men. This was a status quo that was already doomed, though still superficially in effect, when the show began. Mulder and Scully function as its representatives, figures of a weird reactionary beauty, struggling to understand and then prevent the profound transformation breaking out across their world. Earth is not alone, aliens are among us, our way of life is under threat; is it so hard to locate within these sources of terror the sense of a vanishing historical phase? (“Fight the future” was the tagline of the first X-Files movie, in 1998.) Think of the way, for most of the show’s run, Mulder and Scully have chemistry but not sex: Sex implies procreation, hope, a continuity that their experiences have destroyed. (When Scully discovers that she has a child in season 5, it’s an alien hybrid, created from harvested eggs.) Instead, they move in the dark with a sort of numbed longing, whispering to each other through cell phones, waiting for the world to end, not a hair out of place.
* * *
In 1995 I left for college on the East Coast, where I spent four unhappy years watching beige snow pile up on sidewalks. The day the plane landed in my first year I had a melodramatic impression that my life was over and in fact it was, at least as I remembered it. I spent a great deal of time remembering, an absurd amount of time for someone so young. I did not know—because I had still not watched The X-Files, had still seen it only in the background of things—that Mulder’s obsession was just as wrong as Scully’s: There are forms of resistance that hasten the disappearance of the thing they are trying to preserve. Mulder’s sister was abducted by aliens when he was twelve, and his monomaniacal quest to find her underlies the plot of much of the series. But it leads him into a world of conspiracies and lies that destroy his ability to experience life as he knew it before she was taken. Trying to prove the reality of his loss makes the loss the only thing that’s real to him. The show repeatedly underlines the self-defeating tendency of Mulder’s work. Innocents die (Scully’s sister in “The Blessing Way”), monsters are freed by the system (Eugene Victor Tooms, the liver-eating mutant, in “Squeeze”), the truth retreats from view (in “Gethsemane,” for instance, when the conspiracy manipulates Mulder into suspecting that everything he’s learned about the conspiracy is a lie planted by the conspiracy). The futility of Mulder’s heroism is probably the aspect of the series that’s proved most prophetic. Mulder’s life’s work was essentially to become a Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, revealing secret government misdeeds to a public he trusts to correct them. He would have loved WikiLeaks. But WikiLeaks, far from forcing a great moral reckoning, only subsided into a continuum with Russian state hackers. It became a tool of the state repression it set out to expose. The accounting Mulder assumed would happen never took place.
“What is more precise than precision?” Marianne Moore asks in a poem. “Illusion.” In the same vein Albert Einstein said that all true science begins in “the sensation of the mystical.” But The X-Files was never interested in science. I remember as clearly as anything a night when one of m
y best friends showed up at the ice cream parlor with a goldfish. His parents had just been divorced and he was assigned to do a school project with a girl and in a helpless gesture of sympathy the girl brought him a fish. She hadn’t thought as far as a bowl so they were taking it around in the plastic bag from the shop. It was the most beautiful thing. We ate our sundaes and it hovered on the table, this bright discrepancy. Recently I asked my friend about this and he couldn’t remember that it had ever happened, or he said it seemed vaguely familiar but he couldn’t recall any details. His girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife, had no memory of it at all. Neither did anyone else I talked to.
Was it real? Did my memory invent it? What about the owl I saw once, which landed in front of my car, with a silent clatter of wings, one night in Ponca City? I stopped the car and it looked at me in the headlights. I remember its furious eyes. I remember the gray-brown half-moons on its white belly. I don’t remember precisely when or where I saw it. For years I’ve wondered if I really did.
My friend who did or did not have a goldfish was the one who eventually introduced me to The X-Files. My father told me not long ago that we did have an owl that year, living in our backyard. He saw it many times, he said, gliding at night over the creek that ran behind our house. I never saw it again.
Once and Future Queen
1. ELIZABETH IN ENGLAND
Her City
London, late summer, the trees inheriting autumn, the pavement a history-book map tracing a dwindling empire of rain. Traffic pushing through the evening, along the parks, around the monuments, a stream of headlamps parting for angels and cannons and kings. England in September: The sky is gray but the air is blue. Beside the river, the crowds lined up beneath the Eye are craning their heads back to take pictures of the sky’s steel miracle, the plexus of spokes and beams; above the river, the crowds inside the Eye are craning their heads forward to take pictures of two little gingerbread castles, Parliament and Big Ben, lit up for the night like sweets wrapped in gold foil. Twilight, a rider on a different Ferris wheel, coming slowly to the earth. Faces of walkers along the Thames, and of cyclists along the Thames, and, half glimpsed, of drivers along the Thames, moving in and out of shadow like a word on the tip of your tongue. Buildings shining out of puddles, upside down. This present moment: darkening London, settling itself down to begin, once more, the work of becoming yesterday.
At night the city is illuminated. Each gargoyle on a wall grins in its own clear spotlight. Globes of light run in the water like smears of melting pearl. Walking east beside the river, we have passed towered bridges and merloned battlements, feeling as darkness comes on the presence of an older London, that low-slung city whose arms open out toward the sea. Even at this distance, the sea is palpable. You feel it in your sense of scale, a width just past perceiving. The men who laid these stones were masters of the sea. The strength of this city is the ancient strength of the sea. Englishmen, when they sleep, dream of the sea. In old days, these waters were crowded with masts. Ships with huge sails set forth from here to make war upon the world. England’s safety is its ragged coast, its rocks, its cliffs, its place at the convergence of the tides. England pulls the sea around her like a mantle: these waters our robe of ermine, these stars our imperial crown. This is the order that outlasts one night and the next. That outlasts circumstance. What you feel around you, in this cool air, is not what’s passing or what’s past. It’s what’s perpetual. Sea and stone, the steadiness at the core of things, the solid facts of place and ritual. No need to make a fuss. It is enough, if you trust your role in the order, to hold your gaze steady. Sometimes it is enough in this world to be patient, and do your duty, and bide your time.
Her Handbag
She carries a five-pound note, crisply folded, for the church collection plate. Sometimes ten pounds; never more. She carries lipstick, which at least twice she has been seen to apply in public: once in 2000 and once in 2014, first at the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Show and then at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. Her mirror she keeps in a small metal makeup case that her husband gave her on their wedding day. Her wedding was in 1947. The country was still under austerity measures then. She bought the silk for her dress with ration coupons. The silkworms that spun it came from China. On the day of her wedding her train was thirteen feet long. Her white satin dress was sprinkled with embroidered flowers. Her wedding was devised as a symbol of England’s rebirth, its recovery from near destruction in the war. The emperor of Ethiopia sent her a golden tiara as a gift. The nizam of Hyderabad sent a wreath of diamond roses. On the morning of the wedding, the tiara she planned to wear as her “something borrowed”—it belonged to her mother—snapped. A police escort rushed her jeweler to his workroom. He fixed it just in time. As she stepped down from her carriage outside Westminster Abbey, light shone on the loose pattern of wheat ears, an ancient symbol of fertility, made from the ten thousand seed pearls sewn to the gown’s skirt and bodice.
Her bags are made by a company called Launer, from calf leather lined with suede. She favors long handles because she is often called upon to shake many hands in a row, and she finds it most comfortable to slip her bag over her left forearm as she does so. For many years the contents of her bags were a mystery, but then someone wrote a book about them, a book based partly on information divulged by sources in her household, and now most of the newspapers in England have run stories about what she carries in her purse. She carries her reading glasses. She carries treats for her dogs. Sometimes one of her staff cuts out a crossword puzzle for her, and she carries that. In her father’s time it was considered shocking for a servant to speak to the press. In 1950, her former governess, Marion Crawford, whom she loved, published a book about her and her sister. The book was called The Little Princesses. Neither she nor her family spoke to Crawford again. Crawford moved to a house near the road to their estate in Scotland. The family would pass by without acknowledging her. Crawford attempted suicide, writing in her note, “I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road.” When Crawford did die, in 1988, thirty-eight years after The Little Princesses was published, neither she nor her sister sent a wreath to the funeral.
There are so many claims on her time. Because she is often required to be gracious while also being greatly in demand, she uses her bag to send coded signals to her staff. Placed on the table, it means I wish to leave within five minutes; on the floor, it means discreetly extricate me from this conversation. At luncheons and dinners, she likes to hang the bag from the underside of the table, on a hook she carries with her for the purpose. More than one guest at an occasion of ceremony has registered surprise, before the meal, at the sight of the queen of England spitting into her hook’s small suction cup.
Her Standard
There is, or was, as recently as a few years ago, a bluff-faced man in a dark blue uniform, looking something like a constable—plump of cheek, erect of bearing, wide of eye—whose job consists in raising, lowering, and caring for the queen’s royal standard at Buckingham Palace. When he receives word that Her Majesty’s motorcade is approaching, he climbs by a narrow set of back stairs onto the palace roof, carrying the bundled flag under his arm like a rugby ball. He positions himself upon the roof in such a manner as to be able to identify the motorcade from some way off. When he makes visual contact, he salutes—a lonely, invisible figure—then runs the standard up the flagpole. The black iron gates swing open for the line of automobiles. As the queen’s state limousine drives through, he pulls the cord that undoes the bundle, allowing the flag to spill out into the wind. Her Majesty is officially at home.
There are other standard keepers, because the standard must fly wherever the monarch is in residence, and the queen has other homes. Indeed, she has other banners. Her personal flag is not the same as her royal one. Her royal standard in Scotland is not the same as her royal standard in England. The protocol of her flags and the protocol of her family’s flags are coordinated by professionals within h
er household and within a multitude of international governments. The papers now, in this September of 2016, are full of the news that later this month, her grandson William and his wife, Kate, will fly to Canada on a royal visit to the Yukon Territory. Complex conventions govern the standard that will fly over their visit. William’s personal standard in the Yukon Territory is based on the escutcheon of the Royal Arms of Canada, defaced with a roundel bearing his cypher, a W surmounted by a cornet, and a label charged with a red shell resembling that of the coat of arms of his late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
But the standard keeper at Buckingham Palace is responsible only for the standard that flies over Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty’s standard, and that, in his view, is quite enough for one man to worry about. He folds the flag according to a special method, in a special room. He keeps it dry. He airs it out when Her Majesty is away. He ensures that each of its four quadrants remains lustrous in color and free from dirt, from rents, from moths. It is the little rift within the lute, Tennyson says, that by and by will make the music mute, and if the standard keeper does not quote these lines to himself as he goes about the performance of his duties, he would surely recognize them as an apt motto for a man in his line of work.
He knows the flag’s four quadrants like the back of his hand. First and fourth quadrants: three gold lions passant guardant on a red field, representing majestic England; second quadrant: red lion rampant on a gold field, representing bold Scotland; third quadrant: gold harp on a blue field, representing tuneful yet curiously lion-averse Ireland. He thinks with satisfaction of the black cabs all over London. When they drive tourists past the palace, what do the cabbies point out? They say, if you ever want to know if the queen is at home, just look for that flag there, that one. What is that moment but his own small kingdom? He faces the camera, in the royal documentaries in which he appears, with bashful pride, looking a little amazed, a little transfixed by the dignity of his office and the responsibilities vested in him.
Impossible Owls Page 20