Where Everyone Dreams of Drowning
Rating: PG, language
Disclaimer: I do not own The West Wing, or most of the characters portrayed in this here fic. Two or three are of my own invention, but I don't know if that matters any. There's a line from Fleetwood Mac's "Sara" in here, and a phrase by Douglas Adams (the tea-time one).
Time: Post-Josiah Bartlet, by quite some time -- spoilers for Season 6 (not that knowing these things actually makes the episodes any worse, actually "spoils" anything, but that's my opinion)
Summary: Thoughts of a future White House staffer, in a moment of weakness, very late at night. "There are ghosts in this place, and everyone who works here knows it."
(-)
There are ghosts in this place, and everyone who works here knows it. It seems to get stronger every day. Maybe some sort of wall between this dimension and the next is crumbling or something, or, more likely, maybe they're all suffering from mass psychosis.
Well, no. That's a bit harsh. She thinks it's probably just the power of suggestion; someone said it one day, and you just couldn't stop thinking about it, and every strange thing that happened, the first explanation you thought of was ghosts.
But there are ghosts in this place, even if they're just figurative, and the fact that they all believe it is proof in itself.
Probably ghosts have always been here. This is the sort of place that ghosts would flock to. They'd try to go someplace that had been important in their lives, and the White House is a pretty important place. Once you accept the hypothesis that ghosts exist, it's hard to believe that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all their buddies don't stop by once in a while, just to see how the old place is doing. They probably don't spin in their graves every time someone says they are, 'cause that'd just be damn tiring.
What other presidents? She knows less about them than she should. WIlson, Wilson was pretty tragic, he probably hangs around. Maybe Truman. Maybe Jackson... Maybe old William Henry Harrison is so bothered over never really getting to be president that he hangs around here all the time to compensate. It's possible.
Hard to think of a President who wouldn't wanna stay here. It's kinda part of the job description, it's kinda a requirement.
But the ghosts they're really aware of, the ghosts they're talking about, aren't of the Presidents or the VPs or the FLOTUSes. They're of the people like them, the staffers who've come and gone. But it's not even that general, really. They're thinking of the people who served under the first President Bartlet.
When she arranged her furniture in this office, she made sure to put her desk a little to the right of the indentations on the carpet. She wsan't sure why. Something about she didn't want to sit where he sat, was afraid of -- she wasn't entirely sure -- some sort of posession. It was really silly, and she had no idea why she'd sucumbed to such crazy superstition.
The only person she'd ever admitted it to was Arthur, who had admitted, to her surprise, that he'd done much the same thing. "It's not so much that I think if I sit in the same place he'll take over my body or something," he'd said, "but... Let's face it. He was brilliant, he was good. But I don't want to end up like Leo McGarry."
She'd thought of the passage from Bartlet's autobiography: "It was hours before we found him. Hours, it was. I don't know how. I certainly don't know why. I don't know if he ever completely recovered from that. I sure know I didn't."
Ending up like Joshua Lyman... not quite so bad. Still, the guy'd died way before his time, and -- well -- it was superstition. It was fear of the ghosts.
Echoes there were, voices with no source, ideas borrowed or stolen from Josiah's administration. Joyce swore up and down that sometimes she heard thumping, and Joyce was so damned practical you wanted to bash her head in sometimes. Annoyingly often she'd have to explain, usually to Miyako, why these pretty ideas were very nice but did not mesh with our reality, which she would now explain in the excruciating detail that was evidently required, thank you very much. On the other hand, apparently Joyce hated doing it as much as everyone else hated it when she did it... She was usually reasonably pleasant.
Joyce said that the ghost of Toby Ziegler was obviously in her office. Winifred had pointed out that Toby Ziegler wasn't even dead yet, and Joyce had corrected her; she claimed he was. Winifred had apparently missed that and said he shouldn't be dead yet, should he? Joyce had told her to look it up, and Winifred had managed to get Mr. Ziegler himself to call her and tell her that he was still among the living, as it happened. Joyce said that maybe death was retroactive. They stared at her for a while until she told them to go the hell away and slammed the door.
Miyako, as a counterclaim to Joyce's frequent stories, said that if the ghosts of former communications officers were looking over her shoulder, then Toby Ziegler and Sam Seaborn probably got into catfights over her speeches every two weeks. "It would explain a lot," she said. They'd then reminded her that she'd always written like that, and she just shrugged a little and smiled.
Miyako was quiet. She was easy to run over in meetings, she had little or no ambition, and she had no skill or use for strategy. President Bartlet played chess with them sometimes, claiming it was a tradition passed down from her father; she'd always skip Miyako, because you could always pin her down in a very few moves. She was smart enough to learn strategy, but wouldn't. She made up for all these deep political flaws with her speeches, because the woman could write. She wrote speeches that flowed from beautiful lyricism to irresistible pragmatism, and sounded unbelievably natural and good coming from the President's mouth. She earned her paycheck.
She wonders sometimes if they're worthy successors. Wonders if Sam Seaborn would be a little bit annoyed that the nineteen-year-old mouthy intern from the GAO now has his best friend's job. She's kind of embarassed about that incident now. Oh yeah, she was right, but the thing about him asking her for a job was kind of cruel. But he still deserved it...
She could theoretically still ask him herself, but she'd never dare.
How old are they all now? 60, 70? Fewer of them should be dead. Joshua Lyman, he should still be around. Sam Seaborn still is, Toby Ziegler's around somewhere. Leo McGarry, God rest his poor old soul, is a long time gone, but it hasn't been long since president Josiah Bartlet went away. She's met Sam Seaborn a couple more times, and he's different than he used to be. A little less arrogant, a little more complex, a little more grounded. And really old. When did he get that old, anyway? Maybe sooner than he should've?
Joshua Lyman had had the darkest things to say about this place, when they'd somehow gotten access to his e-mails after his death. Illegimati lupaeque. He said this place could break you, and it did. He said if you were unlucky, you had a spark of hope, a beacon to follow, and he'd thought it would lead him to shore, but it was a will-o'-the-wisp and eventually you followed it into the swamp, drowning gratefully in the mud.
She tries not to think about that. She tries not to think about that, but Joshua Lyman is still looking over her shoulder, calling her assistant hot and making her say stupid things to senators' staffers and inducing her somehow to yell vicious slurs about the parents of random inanimate objects when times get bad. She thinks maybe she's his plaything, he's having the time of his afterlife just screwing with her mind.
Miyako said, when she mentioned that, "Except you've always been like that, too."
"So we're clones," she said. "Wonderful. Freakish genetic experimentation by secret government agencies or something like that. Yeah, by the way, Joyce, did you ever find out if there really is an Area 51...?"
She still doesn't know if there's an Area 51, Joyce has never gotten back to her on that.
She wonders which Joshua Lyman she should believe: the one who thought his years in the West Wing were the best of his life, or the worst?
She can hear their voices when everyone's talking, just another strange conversation about eggs or cows or baseball in the crowd, just more staffers, with their own unique objectives, impossible to differentiate from the rest. And these all-nighters, when she's waiting for something or there's some other moment of silence, she just knows there's someone empathetic behind her, in some corner of the room.
Nights like these when everyone's here waiting for the world to end. Trying to stop an avalanche with a couple of two-by-fours and a ball of twine. You rub your eyes and feel the coffee buzz go through your system, shoring up the back half of your mind, and you think about stupid things like reincarnation and the meaning of life and ghosts.
"Where everyone would love to drown." Miyako murmured that. The first day she came into the White House, as an employee, at least. The first thing she'd said.
Evidently Winifred wasn't the only one familiar with the life story of Joshua Lyman.
Or maybe it was something completely different. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe this was the beginning of some sort of psychotic break, maybe she'd wake up someday naked in an alley with a bloody knife in her hand and three dead gangbangers in the dumpster.
Or maybe this was all just her excuse to wonder what she was doing here, if she was doing the right thing. If she wouldn't end up regretting this, too. Wonder if they could do more things right, and maybe make a few fewer mistakes.
Wonder if history would be as kind to this Bartlet and her staff...
She hates four a.m., because this is what happens. It's the parallel of four p.m. on Sundays, "the long dark tea-time of the soul". You shift into the dark side of eternity. Waiting for the phone to ring.
"Hell, it's too dark to be in that office by myself."
She starts from her half-asleep state, as Aaron walks in.
"It's eerie as hell," he continues, "and I really can't stand the suspense. I thought maybe company would help. Someone sympathetic. So why I chose you? I have no idea."
"Yeah," she says.
"So that attempt at humor fell pretty flat there?"
"Oh yeah."
"Well." He pauses. "Did you ever find out what your neighbors were doing?"
"Yeah," she says, rubbing her eyes. "They're having, for reasons I cannot possibly comphrehend, weekly discussions of Joshua Lyman."
"Josh Lyman?" he echoes. "Discussions? Seriously!"
"You said yourself it's like a cult."
"Yeah, but still! They've gotta be fangirls. They're fangirls, right?"
"Most of them."
"Otaku low-level aides?"
"Yeah, all of them."
"What the hell could they possibly talk about?"
She smiles wryly, propping her head up on her arm. "The first half was discussing how they could use what they know of Joshua Lyman's life to find wisdom and improve their lives."
"Oh my God."
"And the second, of course..."
"I'm supposed to be able to guess?"
"Fangirls?"
"It's pretty late at night, here, so if you could maybe have a little mercy..."
"A lively debate on the exact nature of the relationship between Joshua Lyman and Samuel Seaborn," she says, shaking her head a little.
"You're kidding me."
"They're fangirls, they're otaku. They have no shame."
"Sam Seaborn should, like, sue them for slander."
"He doesn't want to sue anybody anymore. Shows up for the Senate votes, that's about it... Though he shows up for more of those than anyone but a couple newbies who haven't realized they can skip a few..."
"Yeah," he says, "Laura keeps trying to make a story out of the stats on that."
"I'm letting Gary decide what to do about it. Give him some political experience without, you know, actually entrusting him with anything."
"Good idea."
There is a silence for a while, which she doesn't mind, except for the fact that she needs the phone to ring. She slips back down into what's almost a light doze, the way she had during her ruminations before.
"You always use his full name," Aaron says.
It takes her a second for her to drag herself back to consciousness, and she realizes she still has no idea what he's saying. "Whose full name?"
"Josh Lyman. And Seaborn, and Ziegler, to a degree. But especially Josh Lyman. You never call him Lyman, or Josh. You never even call him Josh Lyman. You always say Joshua Lyman."
She thinks about that. "Well, yeah, I do, don't I."
"So why?"
"That's... how I think of him, I guess."
"Why?"
"Because..." She thinks about it, though the thought croses her mind that it's a pointless waste of time. "It'd be disrespectful, otherwise. Josh Lyman... I never even knew the guy. Don't have the right to talk about him like that. Call him 'Lyman'... I respect the guy. You don't call people you respect by their last names. Unless you're, like, Mulder and Scully."
Aaron seems to accept that. "His name comes up a lot."
"He made an impression," she says.
"Yeah. That, and all their names come up, 'cause we're in Zoey Bartlet's White House."
"That too," she agrees.
"You think maybe it's too much to live up to?"
She has no answer. She has an answer, and doesn't want to say it. She has to say it, because he's sitting there staring at her. No-- she doesn't have to say it. She nods.
"Sometimes," she says anyway.
The phone rings. She's relieved and she's frightened and she's angry, because a few seconds earlier and she wouldn't have had to answer the damned question.
"Winifred Hooper," she says. Listens to the terse statement as Aaron stares at her apprehensively. "Yeah," she says, "thanks. Thank you."
She hangs up and Aaron's still staring at her. "WELL?"
"It's over," she says, "they got them out."
"Thank God," Aaron breathes.
"All this time, been waiting on a damned phone."
"It's all they have over there."
"Yeah, I know."
"I have to get ready to brief," he says, and stands up.
"Maybe it is too much to live up to," she says, as much to herself as to him. "Maybe we won't be as good, maybe we will fail. But we can't just compare ourselves to them all the time. We do our job, and we're doing it pretty damn well, don't you think?"
"Yeah," he says.
"And we're doing good," she says. "Isn't that what we wanted?"
"Yeah," he says. "It is."
"Well, then," she says. "To hell with everyone else."
"Kinda contradictory," he says, smiling, "but yeah."
Aaron goes to the door, then stops and turns back around. "I was talking to Senator Seaborn once. The official matters we were supposed to be discussing were done pretty quickly, and we got to talking about the West Wing, then and now. I told him I was worried that maybe I wasn't nearly as good as, say, CJ Craig, and I said I was worried that we were losing sight of our goals, that we'd become a political machine like everyone damned else in this damn town. He said, 'When I joined the Bartlet campaign, I knew, almost immediately I knew, that there was no way I was getting out of this intact. If we losed, it would crush me. If we won, everything would change. Back then, I thought leaving the White House would be what would get me if I won. I know better now.'"
Aaron pauses. "So I asked him, if he knew then what he knew now, would he still have done it. I asked him, was it worth it?"
She knows it's a dramatic trick, but she can't help falling for it anyway. "So what'd he say?"
"He said he didn't survive intact, and he thought for a long time it was the worst mistake he'd ever made. But he realized that his time in the White House, those were the best days of his life, and looking back, he thinks the good they did was worth all the cost. He said it's easy to remember only the bad days. But you've got to remember the victories, too."
She nods, slowly. He grins, having accomplished his mission, and walks out the door.
A few things float through her mind. She wonders if he meant it, if it was worth Joshua Lyman. She wonders if they've done enough good things to outweigh it all. She wonders if this time has really been so bad, or if it's just the time and the caffiene that's burned her throat. She notes that nothing looks good at four o'clock in the morning.
She remembers the last State of the Union, Miyako's brilliant words, the promises mostly kept. The Democratic Convention, taking just a few minutes off from politicing and polling and spinning to dance in the balloons. Fighting though Justice Mendoza's replacement, who was as brilliant a jurist and as impossible a nominee as the man she was replacing. Aaron running through the halls last Thanksgiving, raving hysterically that the turkeys were molesting him.
They have no legacy to live up to, she realizes. Because they're damn well going to make their own!
Craft their own legacy and make the ghosts proud. Maybe join them someday, prodding young staffers into greatness. She and Joshua Lyman. Who knows?
She's still sleepy as hell, but there's an energy back in her soul, something she'd completely forgotten. Possibility. She stands up, grabs her briefcase, and heads resolutely to Arthur's office, and to an assault by detail-hungry Joyce and Miyako on the way there.
May the ghosts look on us kindly, she thinks, and forgive the conceits of youth.
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