Part 4 - State Of Being
~~~~~
"If the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad."
~~~~~
Ron Butterfield's hand found its way to his bald spot, a habit he'd picked up over the years because he'd been paranoid about it growing larger.
Colleagues often misinterpreted it as a sign he was unfeeling about the life-and-death situations he was involved in every day. Butterfield preferred to think of it as a sign that he was still human in spite of it all.
He was no egotist, but he knew it took a special kind of character to face these things and walk away.
The man seated at the table in front of him clearly did not have that kind of character.
William Eastman. 58 years. Divorced with one child, a daughter named Karen. No police record unless you counted a few speeding tickets.
That was the really ironic thing. He hadn't even been speeding when he hit them. Driving irresponsibly fast for that section of road, certainly, but breaking the law, no.
Butterfield's investigation had uncovered no grounds for blaming him. His contacts at the White House certainly did, but Butterfield knew better than to listen to them when they didn't know what they were talking about.
What he had yet to explain to the President was that the accident evidently hadn't been the sole responsibility of this guy. If he'd made a mistake, it hadn't been any bigger than any CJ Cregg had made.
It was obvious that the man was emotionally shattered. He'd seen it often enough before in survivors of carnage. The press hoopla surrounding this particular event could not be making it any easier.
Butterfield wondered how Eastman would handle it if CJ Cregg or Toby Ziegler died.
* * * * *
I should try to get some sleep, they keep telling me. What a joke. I don't ever want to close my eyes again.
I don't want to see that woman's face again.
It can only have been a fraction of a second during the moment of impact – after I hit her and before we went flying in different directions. Our eyes met in the same instant she realised she couldn't stop. Then she turned to her passenger and I carried on into the crash barrier on the other side of the road.
It was such a beautiful day.
This is crazy, crazy. I might as well be trying to sleep if I'm going to keep going over and over this again. I'll have to go over it again for them soon anyway. They've already told me there's another man who'll need to ask me a few questions – someone involved with national security or the President or something.
I know they're investigating my background as well, not that they'll find anything colourful. I've had a pretty boring life up until now.
The big events, the emotional stuff, it's been the same kind of thing most people go through: I got married to a pretty girl who was too young; we fought a lot; I drank some, which gave her eight sisters more ammunition to use against me. I swear it was her stupid sisters who persuaded her to hook up with that loser. I mean, what kind of man takes a mother away from her child?
This is all flashing through my mind right now because I desperately want to see Karen. One of the greatest blights of my life is that I can't think of my daughter without thinking of her mother and how I screwed that up.
I always thought that was the biggest mistake I'd ever make.
Now those two people are lying in hospital, they might even be dying, all because of me. Because it comes naturally to me to squeeze the gas when I'm on the open road.
But I wasn't on the open road, that's the problem. If I had been we'd have seen each other coming and even if I had bumped her it wouldn't have been at that angle, the angle that sent her over the edge.
It was a few minutes before I recovered from the impact and got out of my car. I even closed the door behind me and as I staggered over to the bridge I was thinking, why did I bother to close the door.
Then I realised she was gone. Her car wasn't lying with some scratches in the paintwork and a dent in the front bumper like mine. Her car was nowhere to be seen.
I was a little shaken up already and I started getting all these crazy ideas, like you know the stories people tell about truckers picking up phantom hitch-hikers, and drivers seeing ghosts in the road?
It makes no sense, none of it. How could the world change so much in a minute?
I followed the skid marks because they seemed to be real and everything was feeling very otherworldly at that point.
Now it's starting to sink in, just how real it all is.
I made my way to the bridge, wondering if she'd just driven on. It didn't seem likely but I was too dense to realise where she must have gone.
I thought of Karen, and along with the customary ex-wife-related anger comes anger at myself for not listening to my daughter and getting a cell phone. It'll come in handy, she said. You might need it in an emergency.
Karen's a lot smarter than her father. She's not a small-town hick like me. She moved to DC just like those people I might have killed.
She has a job on the Hill – don't ask me to explain what it is, I'm far too old and backward to understand the details, but she loves it and it makes her happy. Now I keep thinking, what if it makes her dead?
I need to see her but at the same time I never want to see her again. How can I look my daughter in the face knowing she knows what I've done?
They tell me she's been calling but that it's important I don't speak to anyone just yet. I wonder if they think she might talk to a reporter. Or maybe they think I might have been acting in collusion with her bosses to kill those people.
It seems so ridiculous, them wasting their energy on nonsensical ideas like me being an assassin when something as real and undeniable as this has happened.
Anyway, I couldn't recreate that accident if I tried – except in my mind, of course. A second earlier or later, or a centimetre to the left, and I'd have passed them by.
I was at the edge of the bridge, hanging over, before I realised what had happened to the woman's car.
The ripples on the river where she'd hit had yet to subside; a man was clinging to a boat that must have capsized.
The first thought I had was that even if the man on the boat had a cell- phone, it would have been ruined by the water.
My second was that the woman I'd seen was dead.
I stumbled back to my car and started driving towards the nearest town at twenty miles an hour.
Actually, that's a lie. The nearest town was back the way I'd come but unconsciously I made the decision not to drive back over the bridge and chose the other direction.
They picked me up five miles out of town. Agents from every law enforcement agency you could name. I guess another boat came past. They thought I was fleeing the scene.
I haven't tried to explain that I was just trying to find someone to tell but I think they've figured it out.
When they told me who I hit I almost passed out, not because they have important jobs and have been on TV but because it's easier not to put a name on a person you might have killed.
I'm too ashamed to ask how those people are but they've been telling me anyway, every time there's news. It never sounds too good.
Well, they both survived surgery which, they tell me, is a miracle in itself – but they're both going to need more, if they make it that long.
The man, her passenger, has already had his arm taken off: his left, above the elbow.
They say he's a speechwriter, I sit stupidly thinking I hope it's not his writing hand.
I'm sure Karen's read me parts of his speeches before. She does that, even though she knows I don't understand. She gets carried away by her own enthusiasm.
Now that they've told me who those people are, I'm sure she's spoken of them. Karen's not in that league yet but she wants to be and she's learning by observing the masters.
The thought suddenly hits me that I might have ruined her career. They say this President's staff is very close-knit. She'll forever be remembered in politics as the daughter of the man who took those people out of commission.
I know their names now but I don't feel I have the right to use them.
I've ruined my daughter's life as well as her mother's. At least her life isn't over.
I'm not just talking about the people in the car. My ex-wife died last week; I was driving back from the funeral when it happened. I'm not sure why I went. She wouldn't have wanted me to be there. She hated me. Karen didn't even go, why the hell should I?
I'm lying again. I know why I went. The same reason I still get angry whenever I remember she exists – existed. I loved her.
You know why she died? Her liver packed in. Too much alcohol over the years. And why did she start drinking? That's right. Me.
I drank more than she did. I drove faster than the woman in that car.
Why the hell am I still alive?
My life is over now. How will anyone ever be able to have anything to do with me knowing what I've done? I should be dead. If anyone ever hurt Karen like I hurt that woman I'd want them dead.
Though I probably wouldn't be able to find the courage to kill them.
Maybe I can still save Karen. If I die the world might forgive her for being my daughter.
I'm not getting carried away; I know there's nothing I can do just now when all these people are watching me.
But when all the fuss dies down and they've found out I'm not a killer-for- hire and those people are still lying dead or maimed and nobody's looking anymore, then I'll have my chance to put a tiny part of this right again.
Meanwhile I wonder what I've done on a global scale. I know what Karen does is important, multiply that by a big number and you've got what that woman and the speechwriter do.
They say the President is getting sick over this. God knows what this is doing to the nation. What I've done to the nation.
It's almost funny. Me. I'm nobody. What other way could anything I ever did possibly have had any effect on the world?
This is my legacy.
For Karen's sake I hope they don't die.
TBC
~~~~~
"If the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad."
~~~~~
Ron Butterfield's hand found its way to his bald spot, a habit he'd picked up over the years because he'd been paranoid about it growing larger.
Colleagues often misinterpreted it as a sign he was unfeeling about the life-and-death situations he was involved in every day. Butterfield preferred to think of it as a sign that he was still human in spite of it all.
He was no egotist, but he knew it took a special kind of character to face these things and walk away.
The man seated at the table in front of him clearly did not have that kind of character.
William Eastman. 58 years. Divorced with one child, a daughter named Karen. No police record unless you counted a few speeding tickets.
That was the really ironic thing. He hadn't even been speeding when he hit them. Driving irresponsibly fast for that section of road, certainly, but breaking the law, no.
Butterfield's investigation had uncovered no grounds for blaming him. His contacts at the White House certainly did, but Butterfield knew better than to listen to them when they didn't know what they were talking about.
What he had yet to explain to the President was that the accident evidently hadn't been the sole responsibility of this guy. If he'd made a mistake, it hadn't been any bigger than any CJ Cregg had made.
It was obvious that the man was emotionally shattered. He'd seen it often enough before in survivors of carnage. The press hoopla surrounding this particular event could not be making it any easier.
Butterfield wondered how Eastman would handle it if CJ Cregg or Toby Ziegler died.
* * * * *
I should try to get some sleep, they keep telling me. What a joke. I don't ever want to close my eyes again.
I don't want to see that woman's face again.
It can only have been a fraction of a second during the moment of impact – after I hit her and before we went flying in different directions. Our eyes met in the same instant she realised she couldn't stop. Then she turned to her passenger and I carried on into the crash barrier on the other side of the road.
It was such a beautiful day.
This is crazy, crazy. I might as well be trying to sleep if I'm going to keep going over and over this again. I'll have to go over it again for them soon anyway. They've already told me there's another man who'll need to ask me a few questions – someone involved with national security or the President or something.
I know they're investigating my background as well, not that they'll find anything colourful. I've had a pretty boring life up until now.
The big events, the emotional stuff, it's been the same kind of thing most people go through: I got married to a pretty girl who was too young; we fought a lot; I drank some, which gave her eight sisters more ammunition to use against me. I swear it was her stupid sisters who persuaded her to hook up with that loser. I mean, what kind of man takes a mother away from her child?
This is all flashing through my mind right now because I desperately want to see Karen. One of the greatest blights of my life is that I can't think of my daughter without thinking of her mother and how I screwed that up.
I always thought that was the biggest mistake I'd ever make.
Now those two people are lying in hospital, they might even be dying, all because of me. Because it comes naturally to me to squeeze the gas when I'm on the open road.
But I wasn't on the open road, that's the problem. If I had been we'd have seen each other coming and even if I had bumped her it wouldn't have been at that angle, the angle that sent her over the edge.
It was a few minutes before I recovered from the impact and got out of my car. I even closed the door behind me and as I staggered over to the bridge I was thinking, why did I bother to close the door.
Then I realised she was gone. Her car wasn't lying with some scratches in the paintwork and a dent in the front bumper like mine. Her car was nowhere to be seen.
I was a little shaken up already and I started getting all these crazy ideas, like you know the stories people tell about truckers picking up phantom hitch-hikers, and drivers seeing ghosts in the road?
It makes no sense, none of it. How could the world change so much in a minute?
I followed the skid marks because they seemed to be real and everything was feeling very otherworldly at that point.
Now it's starting to sink in, just how real it all is.
I made my way to the bridge, wondering if she'd just driven on. It didn't seem likely but I was too dense to realise where she must have gone.
I thought of Karen, and along with the customary ex-wife-related anger comes anger at myself for not listening to my daughter and getting a cell phone. It'll come in handy, she said. You might need it in an emergency.
Karen's a lot smarter than her father. She's not a small-town hick like me. She moved to DC just like those people I might have killed.
She has a job on the Hill – don't ask me to explain what it is, I'm far too old and backward to understand the details, but she loves it and it makes her happy. Now I keep thinking, what if it makes her dead?
I need to see her but at the same time I never want to see her again. How can I look my daughter in the face knowing she knows what I've done?
They tell me she's been calling but that it's important I don't speak to anyone just yet. I wonder if they think she might talk to a reporter. Or maybe they think I might have been acting in collusion with her bosses to kill those people.
It seems so ridiculous, them wasting their energy on nonsensical ideas like me being an assassin when something as real and undeniable as this has happened.
Anyway, I couldn't recreate that accident if I tried – except in my mind, of course. A second earlier or later, or a centimetre to the left, and I'd have passed them by.
I was at the edge of the bridge, hanging over, before I realised what had happened to the woman's car.
The ripples on the river where she'd hit had yet to subside; a man was clinging to a boat that must have capsized.
The first thought I had was that even if the man on the boat had a cell- phone, it would have been ruined by the water.
My second was that the woman I'd seen was dead.
I stumbled back to my car and started driving towards the nearest town at twenty miles an hour.
Actually, that's a lie. The nearest town was back the way I'd come but unconsciously I made the decision not to drive back over the bridge and chose the other direction.
They picked me up five miles out of town. Agents from every law enforcement agency you could name. I guess another boat came past. They thought I was fleeing the scene.
I haven't tried to explain that I was just trying to find someone to tell but I think they've figured it out.
When they told me who I hit I almost passed out, not because they have important jobs and have been on TV but because it's easier not to put a name on a person you might have killed.
I'm too ashamed to ask how those people are but they've been telling me anyway, every time there's news. It never sounds too good.
Well, they both survived surgery which, they tell me, is a miracle in itself – but they're both going to need more, if they make it that long.
The man, her passenger, has already had his arm taken off: his left, above the elbow.
They say he's a speechwriter, I sit stupidly thinking I hope it's not his writing hand.
I'm sure Karen's read me parts of his speeches before. She does that, even though she knows I don't understand. She gets carried away by her own enthusiasm.
Now that they've told me who those people are, I'm sure she's spoken of them. Karen's not in that league yet but she wants to be and she's learning by observing the masters.
The thought suddenly hits me that I might have ruined her career. They say this President's staff is very close-knit. She'll forever be remembered in politics as the daughter of the man who took those people out of commission.
I know their names now but I don't feel I have the right to use them.
I've ruined my daughter's life as well as her mother's. At least her life isn't over.
I'm not just talking about the people in the car. My ex-wife died last week; I was driving back from the funeral when it happened. I'm not sure why I went. She wouldn't have wanted me to be there. She hated me. Karen didn't even go, why the hell should I?
I'm lying again. I know why I went. The same reason I still get angry whenever I remember she exists – existed. I loved her.
You know why she died? Her liver packed in. Too much alcohol over the years. And why did she start drinking? That's right. Me.
I drank more than she did. I drove faster than the woman in that car.
Why the hell am I still alive?
My life is over now. How will anyone ever be able to have anything to do with me knowing what I've done? I should be dead. If anyone ever hurt Karen like I hurt that woman I'd want them dead.
Though I probably wouldn't be able to find the courage to kill them.
Maybe I can still save Karen. If I die the world might forgive her for being my daughter.
I'm not getting carried away; I know there's nothing I can do just now when all these people are watching me.
But when all the fuss dies down and they've found out I'm not a killer-for- hire and those people are still lying dead or maimed and nobody's looking anymore, then I'll have my chance to put a tiny part of this right again.
Meanwhile I wonder what I've done on a global scale. I know what Karen does is important, multiply that by a big number and you've got what that woman and the speechwriter do.
They say the President is getting sick over this. God knows what this is doing to the nation. What I've done to the nation.
It's almost funny. Me. I'm nobody. What other way could anything I ever did possibly have had any effect on the world?
This is my legacy.
For Karen's sake I hope they don't die.
TBC