Black slithering ooze under the skin, proptosis gestating, hybernating doom. Wars of injection rise up from under the sands, bees bred under clicking slats released like a twenty one gun salute. Enter the white surface cavern concealed where love hovers frozen, intubated. Release her and fight another day.

"Five years together, Scully. How many times have I been wrong? Never!"

Certainty, like an arrow, speeds forward into walls. Confusion, that spiked-drink paralysis, does the same. Stumbling blind-folded through the flooded basement of secrets, you must step carefully but never stop. Stay calm, senses open; wait patiently for the vouchsafing signal. Believe, and in believing, find doubt.

"What I don't want to see is the Bills winning a Super Bowl. As long as I'm alive that doesn't happen."

At benthic depths, a woman hides, working pelagic intrigues from the bottom upward and then back down, twisting memory and thought in on itself until there is nothing. Her world spans centuries, a lake at midnight, the littoral zone a chalk outline of a murder mystery. So tired, annihilated, empty-handed, she cannot go on. There is only one conclusion to draw, she says, there is no truth out there.

"What if, during their memory experiments, Aquarius stumbled onto a mind-control substance?"