Fugue
Will and Mac and tabula rasa. Season 1x01 AU, in which Mac returns from her time embedded with an invisible injury.
"I tried to get in touch with you while you were on vacation," she began.
To grind home his disinterest, Will flipped through papers on his desk, refusing to even look up as she spoke.
"I asked my agent to negotiate a three year contract. I think that's the longest—"
"It's not a three year contract anymore," he said, lighting a cigarette. "It's a 156 week contract that gives me the option to fire you 155 times at the end of each week."
She swallowed and tried to recover. "I know you're concerned about m-my—medical situation. But you have to believe I won't let it be a f-factor. You can t-trust me to do this, Will."
He frowned, suddenly unsure of the distraction she had just introduced. Medical situation? It didn't matter. "We'll wait a few months to make sure it's not a story Bill Carter can shove up my ass—we'll do it then."
"How did you get my contract changed?" She was on the verge of hyperventilating. Something she had wanted, something that had been promised was being pulled away…
"I gave the network back some money off my salary."
She shut her mouth, which had been hanging open. No need to ask how much money. It didn't matter, except as an abstraction. Will didn't want her here and was willing to pay to reject her at a time of his choosing for no reason other than the fact that he wanted to.
"I see," was what she said, quietly, rising.
As soon as she was gone, Will picked up the phone. "Charlie, Mackenzie just told me she had some kind of medical condition. I thought you told me she was just tired. Is there something else?"
"Do you remember hearing about a CNN reporter who was caught in the explosion outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad?"
"That was Mac?"
"The blast wave pushed her into a wall. TBI."
Will flinched. "The EP of my show is damaged goods? She has frigging shell shock?"
"This is Mackenzie we're talking about, Will. Show some respect." Will felt the glare through the phone. "She lost parts of her memory, she has some hearing loss, sometimes she has aphasia—like everyone who's over 50." Charlie let that one register. "But she's still Mackenzie, the best EP in news. Period. Where's your compassion?"
"I am loaded with compassion. Loaded. And I wish her well, I really do. I just wish her well somewhere else, not here, not my show. Look, I'll make a donation to whatever institute studies these sorts of things—"
"When did you start thinking you could just buy your way out of uncomfortable situations, Will?" The disappointment in his voice was evident.
"Charlie—"
"She doesn't have ebola. She has gaps in her memory. An almost imperceptible stammer."
"Yeah, I know what's involved with a traumatic brain injury. And anxiety attacks. And depression."
"Neither of which impacts her professional performance."
"We don't know that. How am I supposed to know when she's okay and when she's talking off her head? I don't want someone in my ear if I can't trust what they're saying."
"For God's sake, Will, she's been injured, not lobotomized." Charlie exhaled heavily, suddenly tired of dealing with his truculent anchor. "She's staying, that's the end of it. She deserves a fair shake from us."
No doubt, Will had been surprised with the first day. The BP oil spill, brought to him largely through the tenacity and temerity of Mac and her team, was a ratings success, but even more than that, it felt like a return to something important. For the first time in months, years, Will had been proud of the content of the broadcast.
But he still found her blithe presence disturbing.
She stopped by his office one evening in the second week. "Charlie told me there was something personal and messy between us once. I just want to reassure you that won't b-be an issue with me. I have trouble remembering a few things—personal things, experiences and things like that—and whatever happened b-between us—well, that's one of the things I can't quite recall." She looked down. "But I wanted to let you know that I appreciate you giving me this chance and not allowing anything that may have p-passed between us b-before—"
"Memory loss is convenient. You know I told Charlie I didn't want you," he said flatly.
A beat passed. "R-right. Thanks for setting me st-straight." Her teeth locked onto her lower lip. "Like I said, I appreciate your c-confidence in me," this last offered without conviction and with unmistakable bitterness. She turned to leave.
He wanted to know for sure and this was the moment, now that a fissure had opened in her composure.
"Hey, Mac. In the B block, we've got the WikiLeaks release of those State Department messages and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. I think they're each about 90 seconds. How much time does that leave to fill?"
"Four and a half minutes. Sloan's been wanting to talk about the president's f-financial regulatory reform bill and I thought we'd let her have the time."
"Okay, that sounds good," he nodded and stood. "I've got to change now."
After she left, he sat back down at his desk and considered what he had just seen. Or, rather, hadn't seen. For the first time since he'd known her, he hadn't seen Mackenzie subtract using her fingers.
"I'm in."
There. The admission that despite the personal ruination, the festering resentment he still felt, that Will recognized a professional interdependence with Mackenzie.
He was in. He had been coasting for so long. It felt good to be challenged again.
Sure, the show about Arizona SB-1070 had turned into a goat-rope, but the ones that followed were successes that built upon each other. Characterizing the Tea Party. Calling out the radical right for co-opting mainstream Republicanism. Calling out Obama for a stunning absence of leadership on gun control. Making the humane and, as it turned out, correct call during the Giffords shooting. Recognizing that the economy was the primary driver of domestic politics and focusing increasingly on economic stories.
Something exciting was happening again.
It had occurred to Will that Mac's alleged medical condition might be nothing more than a ruse to manipulate him emotionally. Put him on the defensive.
Although careful to avoid direct encounters with Mackenzie outside the control room-anchor desk relationship, Will nonetheless scrutinized her during the course of the working day, looking for evidence of crippling debilitation. He found none. Whatever had happened in Pakistan hadn't compromised her proficiency as EP one iota.
He noticed the occasional hesitation in her speech during rundown meetings; it wasn't so much a stutter as a seeming reluctance to let go of certain consonants. There was no apparent pattern to it—just a random thing, except that it was obviously more pronounced when she was stressed.
He never heard it when she was in his ear during the show.
Infrequently, she would become distant, preoccupied. When this occurred, he observed, she would quickly wind up business (if in a meeting) and give marching orders to the staff, then disappear into her office. In these moments, Will pictured that she was running for the phone and privacy of her office in order to call her shrink. He was so certain of this that he once contrived to follow her, on a thirty second delay. But when he barged into her office after a perfunctory knock, she was not on the phone. She did not look distressed. She was leaned back in her chair, facing the window but with eyes closed, music coming from speakers behind her desk.
One day Will noticed a guitar in Mac's office.
"Is that a homey decorative touch or did you take up an instrument while you were embedded?"
"It's Jim's," she said softly.
"Why is it here?"
"Sometimes—music helps, if things begin to get away from me."
"What, Jim plays guitar for you?"
"When he has time and the inclination. Or—I just listen to stuff I already have." She gestured to the Bose system behind her desk.
So Will looked for an opportunity with Mac. It had to be casual, not confrontational. Bringing up the subject would have to appear a natural segue. It took him two more weeks to find the right moment.
The four o'clock had just wrapped up and the staff dispatched with last minute instructions. Will lingered in the conference room while Mackenzie gathered her notes.
"Things have been going well."
"I'm pleased you think so, Will." A smile touched her lips briefly, then retreated in anticipation of the snide comment she was certain would follow.
"No, seriously. I mean that."
She looked dubious.
Brace for impact.
"You're well?" he asked.
"What is this about, Will?"
His tactics blown to hell, he sought refuge where he could find it. "I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay, that you had what you need. The show's going well, Mac, and I'm—grateful."
That gave her pause. "You have a good staff. They'd walk through fire for you, to get the story."
"And you—"
"It's nice to be back in a newsroom."
"No, I meant personally. Is everything okay?"
She eyed him with uncertainty. "I'm getting along. No need for concern."
He stretched his hand across the table. "Do you remember how it happened?"
"I remember what they told me. No first person knowledge." She gave a wan smile. "Can't even remember what the Peabody was for."
"But the memory will be recovered eventually, though?"
"No. I'll just find something new to over-write the stuff that isn't accessible anymore." She finished the interminable stacking of papers and finally met his gaze directly.
He blinked at what he saw, grabbing her shoulders.
"Mac, are you all right? Your right eye—"
"The pupil's enlarged?"
"It's huge. Nowhere the near the size of the other one. What—"
She sighed. "It's called aniscoria. It's my little canary in the coal mine, an indication that I'm about to be at sixes and sevens—"
"I've never noticed it before—"
"No reason you would. It isn't always like that," she exhaled. "But it's a clue that I need to get to my office—"
"Wait." He was in earnest now. "I've been trying to understand this, Mac. We broke up, you come back, but you don't remember anything. Amnesia—god, it sounds like a plot from a sixties sitcom."
"It's real. I just don't know if it's deliberate." She paused to see how that word settled on him. "My therapist has reminded me about repression, you know. That perhaps I'm subconsciously blocking out the parts that I don't want to remember, or don't want to deal with." She looked away again. "Post traumatic amnesia is usually measured in weeks or months. Mine is years, whole blocks of time. Which makes mine not only a severe but wildly atypical case." She smiled weakly. "I really have to go now. The headache will be along in a few minutes. But if any of this was genuine concern for me—then I thank you."
But what Will couldn't reconcile, even at his most charitable, was the inherent unfairness to him of her losing her memory. She was the one who had hurt him, and she got to forget all about it? She escaped the consequences?
Withheld forgiveness wasn't much of a punishment for someone who couldn't recall the transgression.
He resented her not remembering how good it had been between them, and then how awful it was to have had that ripped away.
He had always taken for granted that memory was an act of will. You memorized facts before a college test; you memorized cases before the bar exam; you memorized the defendant's previous convictions before you went for the kill at summation.
Excising a memory also had to be an act of will, he decided.
Will sought out Jim.
"You're her amanuensis?"
The good humor on Jim's face froze and faded. He wasn't sure if the salvo had been aimed at himself or Mac. "No. I'm a senior producer for News Night," he said, pronouncing each syllable distinctly and slowly. "What's on your mind, Will?"
"What happened to her over there?"
"I wasn't there that day."
"The others who were there—"
"She was the only one who survived the blast."
"And she was broken—"
Jim's eyes narrowed. "For a man who makes his living with his words and his affability, you can be a strangely inarticulate jerk. Mac is not broken."
Will waved his hand. "I'm sorry. I expressed myself poorly. But I am concerned about whether she can take the pressure here. You know—since." He paused, allowing the apology and concern to sink in. "I don't want to push her too hard, Jim."
"That would be almost impossible to do. She anesthetizes herself with work."
Ah. There it is. "Anesthetizes—from what?"
"Survivor's guilt? Maybe. I don't really know." Jim exhaled loudly and crossed his arms over his chest. "There's no story here, Will. You've worked with her before, you should know her strengths. Nothing's changed. She blanked out some time and she picked up a little speech deficit."
"Why do you keep your guitar in her office?"
There was a protracted pause. "This is probably a really crappy metaphor, but music seems to let her go back to factory settings. Like when you defrag your computer sometimes, to allow the files to partition and sequence, stuff like that?" Jim squinted at the other man, to see whether he'd lost him. "It's just a little thing. I think she's come to rely on it. So maybe that makes it more important than it is."
A few weeks later, upon leaving the building for lunch, Will thought he saw Mac ahead of him on the sidewalk. He was trying to work his way forward in the crush of people surging toward the crosswalk when the light changed and the people ahead of him stopped abruptly.
Not everyone stopped.
"Mac—" Will lunged forward, seizing her arm as she was proceeding through the crosswalk, not heeding oncoming traffic. "Jesus, Mackenzie." He ripped the ear-buds from her head and she looked up with (finally!) alarm.
"What?—"
"Mac, you almost got yourself killed. You can't wear these things on the streets." He ran a hand through his hair in exasperation at the close call. "Sweet Jesus."
She looked amused and wound the cord to the ear-buds around her hand, shoving it in her purse. "Well, thanks for saving my literal life this t-time."
He pulled her back to the curb with him. "I was just going out for a bite… Join me?"
"You know you're talking to me, right? The p-probationary EP?"
"It's been six months. I think you've passed the audition."
"It would have been nice to know that—"
"Yeah—I should've said." He shuffled his feet on the pavement.
"All right. Let's have a bite or nosh or whatever." She offered a tentative smile. "I seem to be in want of a k-keeper just now, so lead on."
He took her to a small restaurant in the next block, going immediately to the rear of the place to avoid the interruptions attendant to his celebrity. They ordered and he leaned back in the booth.
"So, were you on an errand or is this just a fitness kick?"
"Just needed to—get out for a bit."
"Well, save the iPod for the park and the office. You need all your senses on these city streets." He added, "You listening to an audiobook?"
She shook her head slowly. "Just m-music."
"Let me see your playlist. Let me see what whisks Mackenzie away to another place—"
She handed him the iPod and he scrolled through artists and song titles. "Hmm. That's good, that's good, that's—weird." His eyebrows shot up. " Warren Zevon, really?"
"I like the song about lawyers—"
"Yeah, that one is pretty good."
His sandwich and her salad arrived and he laid the iPod on the table.
"So, when did you become such a music lover?"
She paused, weighing how she should respond to that. "Therapy, actually. After the b-blast—after I was injured, the therapist suggested m-music therapy." She gave a self-deprecating laugh and added, "Not like you're thinking, not like the Mozart effect or anything. But music is mood-altering—it involves the b-brain on every level—it even increases dopamine levels. It seemed as good a therapy as anything else and it k-keeps my head a little clearer. Than drugs, I mean. The music is just a little respite."
He nodded, unable to come up with anything to say because he was unsettled by the implication of needing a respite.
Respite from what, exactly?
"You seem to have all this under control."
Mac pushed back from the table. "Seriously?" She scanned his face for a trace of sarcasm.
"I am serious," he admitted, surprising himself, too. "The staff is trained and cohesive. Morale is high. The show's great, we've done justice to a number of important stories. Ratings are up, we're closing in on first. Charlie's happy, Reese is happy. I'm happy" He wiped his hands on his napkin and tossed it on the plate. "You assign the direction, you make the decisions, you train the personnel. It's your ship, Mac, and everything is just—well, er, smooth sailing."
"I don't feel that everything is under control," she said quietly. "I've been t-trying hard. I wanted to justify Charlie's faith in me—"
"—And repudiate my lack of faith?"
A ghost of a smile came to her lips. "You've got the wounded memory, Will. I've got white noise in m-my head. Much should be taken into account b-before tallying the damages for either of us."
"Will," Don leaned into his office. "If you have a minute—"
"Sure, Don, come on in."
"No." Don remained in the doorway, hand on the glass. "Jim's not here—there's something wrong with Mac—Sloan's with her—but some of the folks in the bullpen are beginning to freak out—"
Will pushed to his feet. "Where is she?"
"Her office." Don trailed behind, matching Will's giant strides. "It doesn't seem to be bad enough to call someone outside, EMTs or anything—but, you know—" He licked his lips. "Maggie said Jim usually handles this, but he's out of the office and not picking up his phone."
Will reached Mac's office but Don stayed outside, self-appointed sentinel at the door. Mac was in her desk chair, eyes closed, hands grasping the arms of the chair so tightly that her fingertips were whitened. Sloan was perched on the edge of the desk, concern and confusion plain on her face. She rose and walked around the desk to Will and whispered, "She won't talk to me."
"What happened?"
"Joint pitch meeting this morning, News Night and Right Now. Election prep. Probably 25 people in that little conference room, very loud, very close. We were almost done—she seemed to be nervous throughout, then suddenly—" Sloan made a gesture to connote a mushroom cloud. "Very agitated. Practically ran out of the room. I followed. She was throwing things around on her desk, looking for something, very upset. But she wouldn't acknowledge me, Will."
He suddenly wasn't sure what he was doing here. He didn't know what to do. "Are there some drugs—look in her purse, look in the bathroom, see if there's some prescription anti-anxiety-something." It seemed like a good start. His eyes roved the room and lighted on the Bose system. "And see if her iPod is in the purse."
"iPod." Sloan's face registered more confusion but she began to rummage through Mac's bag. In seconds, she produced an orange prescription pill bottle and handed it to him.
Xanax. This would be the thing, he thought. Just need to find out when she last took one and how to coax her into another.
Sloan looked up. "No iPod."
Shit.
He pushed Sloan toward the door. "Keep trying to reach Jim."
He went to her bathroom and filled a glass with water and set it on the desk, next to the bottle of Xanax. "Mac?" He leaned over her, noticing a tremble in her lips. "Mac? We have a show tonight—we need you here. Mac—"
Sloan had it right. Mac's wasn't so much an inability to respond as a seeming decision not to. Mac wasn't unconscious (the way she clutched the chair); she wasn't intoxicated with medication; this didn't seem to be a seizure. This seemed like self-protection, a reflexive way of hunkering down when the shells were falling around you.
A kind of momentary self-exile.
He looked around again, trying to think of something else he could do. He saw Jim's guitar. It was a goofy idea, but he reached for it nonetheless. It was something to do, and the situation begged that something be done. He strummed once, trying to get a feel for the tuning. He adjusted the G and B strings. Still not perfect, but—
He started with a few light, jazzy chords. In a minor key. Something contemplative but not intimidating; upbeat but not frenetic. Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass. This style really called for a different type of guitar, a big hollow-body electric, but Will tried to improvise something on the acoustic.
In only ten minutes he felt he had exhausted his limited jazz vocabulary. He riffed on the barre chords for as long as he could sustain it; this wasn't the sort of music he normally played, and he wasn't sure where to take it next.
Looking over to the desk, he noticed Mackenzie staring at him, head canted and the knuckles of one hand pressed to her lips.
He straightened from his crouch over the guitar. "How do you feel?"
"Headache."
"When was the last time you—" he inclined his head, indicating the prescription bottle on her desk.
"You don't have to do this, Will."
"Jim was out of the office and we thought—"
"We?"
He swung the guitar down so that it rested on the floor. "Well—this, this was me. I thought it might—help."
"Mac, you okay?" Jim materialized in the doorway, one hand on his waist and the other ruffling his hair. "I had a dental appointment and I turned my phone off…"
Will walked past Jim, thrusting the neck of the guitar into his hands. "Strings need changing."
He had fetishized his hurt, cherished his anger. For years he had wrapped it around himself like a comforting mantle. It would be hard to simply let it go.
He didn't want to just let it go.
But it was getting harder to hold onto it.
Understanding was dangerous. It might lead to sympathy. It might lead to empathy.
It might lead to forgiveness.
She never asked him to feel sorry for her. So, of course, that made it all the more possible.
When you got right down to it, what Mac was really missing was him.
A memory of them, together.
The next day, Will centered the wrapped package on her desk and dithered about where to place the card before she returned.
Too late.
"Will," she said, swinging into the door. "Did you need something?" Then, looking from him to the desk and back to him, she added, "What's this?"
"Something—" he shrugged, his stealth blown. "Something I thought you might like."
She picked it up and ran her fingers along the edges. "A book? Probably by Proust?" She had made a joke and checked his face to see if he got it. She was smiling, a pleased, genuine smile, not one of the ones she sometimes forced in front of him.
"Open it."
She tore the paper. "A new iPod."
"I think I'm the reason your other one got lost."
"It's very thoughtful of you, Will. Thank you."
"I loaded some music to it already, stuff I thought you might like—"
"I'm sure it will be fine."
"—But I have a large library on iTunes, you know, so maybe, if you wanted, you could come over to my place and we could select some stuff, make you a few playlists—"
"Are you asking me to your place?" She felt suddenly off balance.
"I—there's a card, too," he said, handing it to her. It wasn't a Hallmark card, just a piece of ivory-colored card stock with loopy blue scrawls. He swallowed. "Look, I get that this comes as a surprise. I get this isn't something you thought you'd hear from me. I haven't given you any reason—" he stopped, looked down and shook his head. "We used to be good together, Mac. I'd like to try to get that back."
She looked up from the card. "You signed it, Billy."
"Yeah. You used to—I'd like it if you would—"
"Okay." She nodded and tried it out. "Billy."