All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Title from Seamus Heaney's poem "Weighing In." Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. A Deep Mistaken Chivalry Violet
"Did you hire the shooters? Did you buy their ammo?"
"I know what you're trying to say--"
"Because even for you, it's a bit extreme."
*
Josh went back and forth between pitch black and pure white.
They had him trapped, horizontal on the bed. Immobilized. Restrained against his own reflexes. He was glad for it, because he was afraid he couldn't move if he tried. The restraints were an excuse. But even motionless, everything hurt. The drugs were the best he'd ever had, better than anything he'd smoked or sniffed or swallowed at frat parties. They would take him away and bring him back, and the pain waited like a wolf.
He didn't think much for a while.
His body remembered. Hitting the pavement, trampled by crowds that dissipated like frightened deer in a Disney cartoon. His chest remembered the impact, a punch thrown by a drunk, except hotter. A flash burn and then the chill of what he recognized later as shock. His hands remembered pressing against wounds he didn't dare look at, frigid under the warm rush of blood. His body remembered very little agony before the hospital.
They gave him new skin on his chest and his back, where the old had been torn away. They said they had sewn his arteries back together, although everything still felt shattered. They said his spine was intact, that he would walk again, given a couple months of torture under the rubric of therapy. They said there was no reason his life would change. And he'd always thought that doctors were smart.
At some point during his second night of consciousness, they asked if there was anyone they hadn't called. Against all logic, he gave them her name. Against all odds, they took the time to find her phone number. Against all his expectations, she came.
*
"It's not over," Mandy had said a year before, and set her bottle of Heineken down so hard it smashed all over his coffee table. That had made her start to cry and giggle at the same time.
Josh had looked at her like she was a strange dog barking, like showing fear might mean her teeth in his throat. "It's really very over," he'd said, a drunken lilt in his voice.
She stomped out of the room, heels clomping heavily on the floor. He winced and sopped the beer up with wads of paper napkins stolen from fast-food restaurants. After, he went into his bedroom and found her already naked. It was hot and there was a lot of sweat. The sex wasn't as good as he expected it to be, knowing it was the last time. It wasn't until after, as she yanked her pantyhose up and swore at a rip, that she chose to explain herself.
"It's not over because I'm going to get you for this." Her eyes slid toward him, wet and black and inscrutable. "You slept with that woman."
"What woman?"
"What woman?" she mocked. "The whore. Sarah. You did."
"I didn't."
"She's old enough to be your mother, for Christ's sake." Mandy laughed and fastened her skirt. "You're not off the hook yet."
"I'll be sorry?" he asked. "Cue evil cackling, ominous orchestra, fade to black?"
"You think you're so smart." She folded her arms and looked at him, suddenly cool. "And of course, you are. But you're an arrogant fuck, Josh, and everyone lets you get away with everything because you're brilliant. So, no. No. Just because I'm leaving and I won't be in town and you won't have to see me every day and kick yourself, doesn't mean you're getting away again."
She stuffed everything she could into her oversized purse. He watched from the couch, as if it was all happening on television. When she took a snow globe she'd given him and dropped it hard, he barely winced. "Yeah, go on, break everything. Crazy--"
"Bitch," she finished for him, and shoved her hands through her tousled dark hair. "But I'm too good for you."
"I want my Mets T-shirt back," he called.
She threw her key at him. She said, "Goodbye."
*
His body remembered but his mind refused to. He tried to make himself see it happening, to draw on the thoughts--there must have been thoughts, in the minutes before the paramedics arrived--but he failed. He told himself it was because of the potent painkiller trickling into his arm. He didn't want to think that there was time lost forever from his life, dead air broadcasting on his brain.
He wanted to recall gunfire but all he heard were sirens, and they might have been outside the hospital or they might have been only in his ears. Sometimes he heard his name spoken by people he loved who are long dead. And sometimes he heard his name spoken by his friends, woke up and there they were, uninvited but present. They told him what he'd been missing. They told him that they loved him. He knew they mean it but he didn't want them near him. Not with their eyes full of fear and guilt and sorrow.
He told the doctors to call Mandy because he thought she might not be afraid.
She had left town in order to leave him, as if he was all of Washington. He was white columns and a long green lawn, and back-room deals, mundane drudgery and big dreams, and he thought she wanted all of it out of her life. But in the winter she came back, spinning from one job to the next and finally showing up in his office.
"Anyone but Mandy," he'd begged, "hire anyone but Mandy." So of course, they called her in. She was capable, useful and absolutely horrible. She made all his friends hate her, and he didn't even have to help that along much. She was grating and untrustworthy and she exposed their weaknesses to the world. He had never honestly loved her and he didn't try to defend her. Mandy didn't belong there, and everyone knew it, and when she'd earned all their distaste and doubt, she decided to leave town again. Back to New York, Josh assumed, running from the dirty looks everyone fired at the back of her head.
She got on a plane the same night that it happened. He'd been laughing. He'd walked out, with his friends, into a crowd. Someone shouted something, glass broke. There were sirens. That was all he remembered.
*
"You look like hell," she said frankly when she came back the second time. Her hair and eyes were still close to black; her clothes were navy. She was ink in the paper-white sterility of his room, and it was strange and dreamlike to be lying back and looking at her on her feet. "Seriously, Joshua. You've let yourself go."
He was one of a handful of people who knew that her name wasn't Amanda. "You're stunning as always, Madeleine," he said. His voice was a feeble whisper and even that hurt his dry throat.
"I know."
"You always know."
She looked at him and at the machines. He was grateful that the restraints were gone. "What's it feel like?"
"You know, needles." He tried to sound playful and it came out pathetic. "Like getting all your shots at once. Normally they'd give you a lollipop after. But, you know. I'm not on solids yet. I'm not on liquids yet, for that matter. I'm on ice chips."
"I didn't mean needles." She folded her arms firmly. "I meant the other thing."
"I don't remember," he said. His chest felt hollow, like a balloon swollen to exploding, the strain of every breath making his eyes water. He blinked. "Let's not talk about me."
She laughed. "That's the first and last time those words will come out of your mouth, huh?"
"How's the city?"
"I didn't go to the city. I went to a city, but not New York."
"Oh. Where--"
"Raleigh."
"What's in Raleigh?"
"It's a nice city," she said, tossing her head defiantly. "And there's a very nice Governor who might pay me to kick your Yankee ass."
"My Yankee ass? You were born in Trenton, New Jersey."
"And your friends, and your boss. We're gonna scatter you to the four winds."
"And your little dog too," he said.
He wasn't expecting what happened next. She stepped forward and sat on the foot of his bed, crossing her legs--smooth and still very good, he noted automatically. Her face didn't fall so much as it opened, eyebrows knitting, lower lip thrust out in a bit of a pout. His eyes were blurry but he thought hers were too.
She said, "This is all my fault."
All he had was a weak joke. "First and last time you'll ever say that."
"Fuck you. I'm trying to be nice." She was crying now, he was sure of it. "It's my fault."
"How?"
"I wanted--"
"I wanted Santa to bring me a motorcycle. That didn't happen."
She threw her head back, a trick he'd seen her do a few times, to make the tears stream out of the corners of her eyes and protect her mascara. "You're Jewish. You don't believe in Santa."
"That's what my mother kept telling me. I wanted the presents anyway."
"I wanted something bad to happen to you," she said. "Because you were a bad boyfriend and you fucked around--"
"Didn't," he insisted, though it didn't seem important whether or not it was true.
"And you were a bad ex-boyfriend. I came to work for you, and everyone hated me and you let them. And I tried to be a bitch." She laughed. "I was a bitch and you should've done something, not just stood there and let me make trouble."
"I'm not the boss of you."
"I wanted everything bad in the world to happen to you."
He thought about touching her, but even if he could make his arm move that way, it didn't seem wise. "This is stupid."
"I wasn't even there," she said, looking up at the ceiling.
"Did you hire the shooters? Did you buy their ammo?"
"I know what you're trying to say--"
"Because even for you, it's a bit extreme."
"You can't even let me do this, can you?" she said bitterly, bringing her chin back down to her chest. "You can't even let me be nice to you now. You have to make me the bad guy again so you can be right again."
"Either I died a little there and missed something, or this conversation makes no sense." He sighed awkwardly. "Look, it was very nice of you to come."
"Not particularly," she argued. "I waited to see if you'd call."
"That was nice of you too. You can't do the guilt thing, though. You can't take on other people's problems."
"Really, Mister champion of the underdog. Mister liberal. Mister master politician." She swallowed. "That sounded pretty stupid, even to me."
"They were skinheads." He felt cold again, clammy, claustrophobic. "They were a couple of Nazi teenage bastards and I hate them. But they were doing their own crazy psychopath thing, Mandy. They weren't influenced by any of us, not me and not anyone else I know, certainly not your little rain dance of evil."
"I think I'll have that printed on my business cards."
"They were skinheads. And you know you can't make anything bad happen to anyone by just thinking about it. Believe me when I say I've wished you off this planet plenty of times."
"Really?" She peered at him critically. "You wanted me dead?"
"I wanted you dead," he assured her.
"Well. That makes me feel better." She stood up just as suddenly as she'd sat down.
He would have smiled if it didn't seem like too much work. "You're sick."
"So are you. And this is the place for it." She did smile, bright and beaming and almost kind. "I'm not staying. I'm not staying in Washington."
"I know that."
"And don't think that I won't, you know, still kick your ass. Don't think I won't get this Governor in gear and come gunning for you--" She pressed her fingers to her lips when she heard herself say the word, but did not apologize.
He flinched, but mostly hid it. "Because you're the sensitive type. That's always what I've liked about you."
"Don't think it won't happen, is all. I feel bad, but I'm not, I won't change."
"I know."
"Neither will you," she said.
He took a breath long and slow and then let it drift out of him. The ache that built and ebbed in his chest had already grown familiar. He couldn't remember what it was like to inhale and exhale without thinking about it. "I don't know that."
"I do." She shook her head at him. "You're too stubborn to change. You're always going to be you. Some things are set in stone."
He still didn't think he believed her, but he could tell by the thrust of her jaw that there wouldn't be any productive argument. "Have fun in Raleigh eating grits."
"Have fun here being a stereotypical jerk." She turned on her heel and then spun back in the doorway. Her eyes drank him in. "I'm glad you're not dead."
"Me too."
"But if I never see you again, it won't kill me."
He was puzzled. "Would it have before?"
"Maybe. But not now." She looked at him until his urge to squirm under her gaze was almost undeniable. Then she stepped back and said, "Goodbye."
*
With the lights out, the white room was smudged gray. An artificial orange glow crept in from the parking lot, around the blinds and onto the ceiling. He lay still because he had no choice. They'd given him drugs, but they were dropping the dosage and he could feel the damaged nerves beginning to cry out. He wondered if he could shout or beg or threaten the nurses for more medication.
Alone in the almost-dark he was disgusted with the pain, disgusted with a body he could no longer control. They promised it would return to him. They promised him that the new skin would heal, that the scars would be visible but subtle. They promised him his life. He didn't trust them, but he had no evidence that they were lying. Just gut instinct, and his guts hurt enough that he didn't trust them either.
There was a siren.
His muscles tensed involuntarily and he had to grind his teeth on his lower lip to keep from screaming like a schoolgirl. He hated it. He wouldn't say that to his friends, who believed that he was getting better, needed to see that, needed to reassure him at every turn. He wouldn't voice what the voice in his head said: that death had to be easier, gentler, that a bullet in the head would have come wrapped in a lot more peace. He couldn't say it and he couldn't sleep.
He might have told Mandy, if she had stayed longer. But she was finished. Finished with him and finished with Washington, with the smoke-filled room and the open debate. And when she came back it would be to run him out of town.
She was gone and he couldn't believe he missed her. She was gone and it didn't matter.
Josh shut his eyes, preferring black to gray. The hum of electricity was faint, but constant and grating. There was a siren. His body remembered breaking but he turned his mind away from it, by sheer will, and thought instead of sex. He could, and did, conjure up the mental image of every woman he'd ever slept with. Sarah wasn't one of them.
Mandy would come back to haunt him. She always did that, and she didn't change. He wondered if she'd throw it up to him someday that he'd let her off the hook, even that he'd called for her in the first place. She would, he thought, be cruel when he deserved it. But she wouldn't wish him dead anymore.