Subsumption: A Fugue
the stylus

DISCLAIMER: I promise not to break them because I cannot afford to buy them.
SUMMARY: "They believe and they don't. At the same time. This is possible and is happening."

I. CONFITEOR

I watched the news conference without the sound, as if it were something far removed from me, strange and fabulous like the performance of a troop of mimes. Alone in the dark, I wanted to shrink even farther away from this humming under my skin, this aura of dread shimmering around the edges of familiar objects: desk, bureau, bed.

When he turned his head, hands in his pockets, I knew. Had always known: I admit that to myself now. I knew what he was going to say, even before the announcement, and I already resented him for it.

There is a thing in Haiti. A thing between him and the American people and their Congress. Another thing and another ad infinitum. The next six years are an infinite regress of things that spiral down into darkness. Dinners with dignitaries and soft-footed waiters who keep refilling my wine glass. Nights I stretch both arms out across the bed, fingers splayed, and strain against the empty air. Until he went into politics, we had never spent more than two nights apart in a row. Now, more mornings than not I wake up shivering, empty.

When he was diagnosed, I thought that I could bear it if the disease took his brain because I would still have his heart. I knew his soul was not mine when I married him. I could give his brain to this disease- like Abraham, my hand trembling over him. But now he is asking something that may be beyond my capabilities to give. I am selfish and bitter and so very afraid of losing myself in this unruly love that I cannot seem to subdue.

He has taken his case to the people for absolution. Penitent, brilliant: the prodigal prodigy sheepishly making his welcome way home. They will celebrate. They will open their arms and their homes to him. If I thought he would lose this election, if I even for one moment believed him to be capable of not winning, I could bear it.

But I have sat at the side of too many beds that were all his bedsides. Sitting in the orange hospital chair at GW, his hand in mine, the blood seeping and the heart monitor lurching along and the anesthesiologist asking if there was anything he should know, I found I forgot how to pray. Not the form but the meaning, as though the words had bled from my brain. He has never asked about that night. We learn to ask: teach us how to pray. I have never told him that I no longer know what to ask for. It was a week before I could eat a meal without throwing up.

II. SWEET DREAMS AND FLYING MACHINES

"Mrs.- Dr. Bartlet?"

"Sam. You startled me."

"I'm sorry. I'm just not used to finding First Ladies wandering the halls of the West Wing at-" he checks his watch, "3 a.m."

Her voice is worn. "No, no. I suppose you're not."

He looks closer, close. There are lines at the corner of her eyes and mouth, spreading fanwise across her skin. He has thought her beautiful and cold at times. Now he looks in recognition, because he, too, feels that tired. "Are you ok, ma'am?"

Her eyes flicker, a trace in them of the sort of smirking laughter that is usually Toby's domain. "Why do you ask?"

Sam finds that he is too tired not to tell the truth to someone. He also finds that he can get away for a moment with not blaming her, with making her a fellow victim in this tragedy of Greek proportions. He slumps slightly, gracefully against the wall and shifts the papers in his arms. "Because I'm not."

She makes a soft noise of understanding and lays a hand on his arm. Through the rumpled dress shirt, he feels the warmth and the steady, fines bones of it. Surgeon's hands: straight, sure. "He's a good man, Sam. And he didn't mean to hurt any of you."

He wants to believe that. He needs to believe that. It's why he's here, why he works through meals and dates, why he endures Toby's caustic humor and talent. But the sheen has worn off. And he is tired. "Ma'am, I know neither of you intended for this to happen this way, but-"

"Sam." Her voice pulls him up short, the half-formed sentence dangling; his eyes snap to hers. "None of this should have happened."

If he thought it were an apology, he would walk away right now: take his Mont Blanc and his Willie Mays baseball and hop a plane to somewhere warm so he could drink beer and run on the beach until he found the part of himself that thought he could make a difference.

"He's a good man," she says again and it is not hope in her eyes but resignation. Her hand slips off his arm as he shifts away from the wall. She is not apologizing and he is relieved. There is no place for that sort of thing this late in the game; and besides, he wants to feel that his is anger is righteous just a little bit longer.

"But none of this should have happened," he repeats, as if answering a question. The words are bitter in his mouth and in his stomach. She nods once, staring off over his right shoulder. It is ridiculous that a whole country is composed of phrases as tenuous as these, rumpled and weary in a long corridor very early in the morning. It is his job to make their speech fine, to consume and refine even in the heat of battle. So maybe it's not surprising that he finds himself unable to say anything at this moment, watching a pain like his own on someone else's face. Maybe it's not surprising that he has to see this feeling on someone else to be able to name it for himself.

III. ODI ET AMO

He fucks her from behind, not gently, his hands digging into her hips. Normally, she does not allow things like this to happen to her. Normally she gets a little drunk and goes to a bar that is all dark wood and brass and quiet corners; she takes a taxi home with someone and slides between his sheets or her sheets and then takes another taxi to her apartment before they wake up. Normally he gets a little drunk and Donna takes him home and wants to put him to bed but ends up naked in it, with him. Normally.

"SNAFU," she says to him the next day in the doorway of the bullpen.

"Huh?" His hair is a little wild and so are her eyes. He makes one of his large, eloquent gestures of incomprehension that takes in her, her words and the whole of the hive behind her.

"SNAFU," she repeats. "An acronym originally used by the US military. Do you know what it means?"

"Uh, no?" he ventures, looking up at her. Because he is pretty sure he doesn't know what she thinks it means, even if he could use it in conversation. And because he fucked her last night from behind, which makes him realize he doesn't know her at all.

"Situation normal, all fucked up." She rolls the words off her tongue, savoring. She smiles for the first time since he saw her in the bar. He smiles back. There is nothing else to do.

They are both a little stiff today, but they are good at pretending that one night does not change things. They sit together in briefings, they strategize. She comes up with answer A and he with answer B. Normally they would start a bet on something like this and she would go home with an extra ten dollars. Today, either answer feels like failure. Today she's not the only one out of the loop. There is nothing to say about it, and that hurts, too. They believe and they don't. At the same time. This is possible and is happening.

IV. 'LATE TO ASK ABUNDANCE'

"Toby?"

"Yeah?"

"Go home."

"Okay."

"No, I mean it, go home. Now."

"Yeah, okay, Leo. In a bit."

Toby is bent low over his desk in an attitude of working. "You know," he says without looking up, "this was the first campaign I ever won. The very first. I was terrified, because I'd never won before. I didn't know what happened after the concession speech. But somehow it all fell into place and I woke up one morning to realize that I worked at the White House.

"The White House, Leo. I worked there, and it wasn't academics or parlor tricks. I mean, all of a sudden the good fight, the moral victory, they seemed possible."

"And now they don't."

He lifts his head to look at Leo, standing patiently. The hall beyond his office is dark and silent at this hour. "No, I haven't lost my faith in that. Whatever else, we've fought some pretty spectacular battles here. We've even won some of them."

"And we will again."

"I know. I know this because it's my job to dress the facts up or down to suit the occasion. I have seen the facts, Leo. And the facts say that ninety-seven percent of the time we're still on the right side. We: the White House, the West Wing, the President. It's just that..." He makes a gesture of wordless frustration, his hand open and large in the wan light. "I thought I knew what I had to work with."

Leo moves over to lean on the front edge of his desk, facing the wall of the office. When he speaks, he doesn't look at Toby but at their shadows on the wall. "He's my best friend. Has been for longer than I care to count. And he didn't tell me for eight years. Never said anything, just let me believe it was the flu, or carelessness, shrugged off any hand I held out. I want to believe he was just afraid, because then I don't have to think that he didn't trust me with it. But I've never known him to be afraid of anything. Ever. So...Eight years."

He turns to face Toby. "You know what, though? In the end it doesn't matter. I wanted him to run, encouraged him to, even. And it was still the right thing to do."

Toby sighs and shifts wearily in his chair. "Yeah, it was. But, you know, I'm still angry. And I'm right to be angry, because this is important and I'm finding out about it way too late in the day. Sooner or later he's going to have to answer to me-not as his employee, but as his employer. Because I worked on this campaign, helped this man sell his ideas to the people. But I also voted for him."

Leo smiles, just a little. "Would you do it again?"

"Vote for him?"

"Yeah."

Toby leans slightly back in his chair, the leather creaking. "Yeah, I would. Even this late in day. Even with all the paperwork it's going to mean and the crappy hours and the low pay. I like this fight. And I find that winning suits me."

V. ET EGO TE ABSOLVO

Simultaneously:

"Abbey, I don't know if I can do this without you."

"Jed, I don't know if I can do this with you."

Even now they move together. She will give in, she knows. She has never been quite able to believe that the meek will inherit anything but more torment; but because he no longer assumes, she will give in.

They will win again. For weeks, everyone they know will want to drink champagne. This will all be a technicolor memory, this ragged attempt at a scandal. She will not ask him, what if? Because he has a country to run and three daughters who look like them both. Some nights when he touches her, his big hand cupping her breast, her belly, it is like the first time. Thirty-three years and they are still starting over, more faithful to the thing itself than to the idea of it.

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Fin
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