All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Title/lyrics by Ben Folds. This is part of a Project.
Please send feedback. Carrying Cathy Violet
Woke up sad from this dream i've been having
The last couple nights or so
With her father, her brothers, we're all at the funeral
Carrying a box through the rain
And somebody says, yeah, it's always been this way...
Falling asleep is floating, trusting one's weight to the supple, subtle surface of the water, letting the current take over for the will.
He is walking into a room he's never seen. But he knows he must wipe his dress shoes off at the door. Most of the mud--gobs of it, whole wet clumps of rotting earth--comes off, but his feet are still heavy. His head is heavy, chin to his chest, eyes on the dark gray carpet. He's waiting for someone to greet him.
He's waiting for someone, and it isn't her.
A cold wind blows through the strange house. It closes the door behind him.
*
There are calendars all around the office, the time on every wall and every wrist. But it still twists past him, quicker than the clock. Sometime last summer, or last autumn, it became harder to concentrate on appearances. This is a liability for someone in his position, for someone who knows his place. Still, Toby stands in the doorway of C.J.'s office this evening, watching the last of the reporters leave, watching her come down the hall.
She stops, ten feet away, when she looks up from her notes and sees him. "Don't."
"Hey," he says, because it's all he was going to say.
"Leo said I could call a full lid, Toby. Please, please don't tell me whatever it is you're about to tell me that means I have to go back in there--"
He takes his hands out of his pockets, turns them up in surrender, speaks while she speaks. "We're done for the night."
"--for crying out loud, it's a Friday," she finishes. She takes her glasses off to study him. "You're going home?"
"I have a couple errands to run."
"Huh." She walks past him, into her office, and starts rearranging paper on her desk for no reason he can see. "These days if I finish early, it's like I'm waiting for the axe to fall."
He does not wince. "Come with me."
It's an impulse he would have checked last winter, last spring. Now he doesn't bother to lower his voice. She peers at him again as if he spoke in code. "I don't have to sort your recycling, do I?"
"I thought you were environment-friendly."
She chuckles sadly, leaning on her desk. "My father says I'm a tree-hugger."
"I'm going," he says, without moving.
She straightens up, full height, and smoothes her hair. "Give me ten minutes?"
"Sure."
"No." She sighs. "In ten minutes something could happen and torpedo the whole night. Let's go now."
He holds out her coat before she can reach for it. He wonders how long he's been doing that, as her arms slide into the sleeves. "Let's go now."
*
It's her brother who comes down the creaking stairs. Toby has never met C.J.'s brother, but he looks exactly like Peter O'Toole. Peter O'Toole shows him where to sit down, on an old sagging sofa that turns into a rigid bench. The dark gray carpet is a stone floor, they are in a Gothic church, and he is sitting with her family.
An old woman is crying. There are no flowers. There are candles, and they are the only light. The windows are stained glass, stained black.
He wants to believe that the box at the end of the aisle is empty. It must be empty, because otherwise she's inside, and she can't be here for this. He tries to explain this to Peter O'Toole, but Peter O'Toole isn't paying attention. Everyone's attention is on the box.
*
When he's driving, she plays with the radio. It's the navigator's privilege, she says, though when she drives it becomes the pilot's privilege. He pretends to mind, pretends not to listen when she starts humming along with Eddie Money. But the song belongs to her now and it will be stuck in his head for days.
"I'm hungry," she says, when the commercials come on. "Do you have anything, you know, edible at your place?"
The corner of his mouth twitches. "C.J.?"
"Don't answer that."
"I have..." Toby pictures the inside of his kitchen and realizes he's been neglecting it for a while. "Frozen waffles. Mayonnaise. Taco shells."
"The frugal gourmet." She wrinkles her nose, her face half streetlight and half shadow. "At least I've got pasta at home, and sauce."
"In a jar?" he guesses.
She nudges his arm with her elbow. He holds the wheel straight, keeping his eyes on the road. "You're in no position to be a snob. Where do you turn?"
He shrugs. The leather car seat offers little support against the vague pain that moved into his back sometime last year or the year before. "I haven't been there that many times."
But he finds it easily, just around a corner, a big, zigzag building with a blue and yellow sign: Goodwill. He parks by the curb without killing the engine. The windows are dark; the loading bay is empty. C.J. frowns as they stop, her hands between her knees, playing with the handle of her briefcase. "I hate to state the obvious, but it looks closed."
"Thanks." He gets out of the car anyway, opens the trunk and hoists out the Hefty bag. It's stuffed, near bursting, with sweaters, sweatshirts, jeans and coats, all old and misshapen and stinking of storage. But they can still provide warmth. Even a few old ties and shirts, hell, maybe someone's got a job interview. He slings the unwieldy thing over his shoulder; it feels like a wrecking ball, and he steps toward the building.
Someone's loitering near the corner, a man with stringy, scorched hair and a dirty orange ski cap, a sweatsuit the color of the grime on his skin. He's rifling through a cardboard box of battered toys, and he looks up with a grunt when Toby approaches.
"Do you, do you work here?" Toby asks.
The guy stares at him, his eyes dull as petrified wood. He thinks about it for a few seconds. "Yeah," he decides.
"I've got a bunch of clothes."
Another long pause, and they blink at each other. "Yeah?"
"I, I want to leave 'em off."
The guy jerks his head toward the narrow alley between the store and the neighboring garage. "Clothes go over there."
Toby looks over his shoulder at his car, at C.J. waiting in her seat. He shifts to balance the Hefty bag. "My car's running," he says.
"Huh." The guy tugs at the collar of his sweatshirt. His face is red, and Toby can't tell whether it's chill or drink or disease. The guy sighs deeply and shuffles forward, pale feet staring up from weather-worn sandals. "Give 'em here."
He hands over the bag of clothes and the guy staggers away with them, leaning backwards to rest the load on his chest. Toby goes back to the car. As he opens the door, C.J. laughs. "What was that about?"
He recounts the conversation as he drives. At a red light, she says, "You know what the beautiful thing is?"
"There's a beautiful thing?"
"The beautiful thing," she tells him, "is that he stole your stuff, but he talked his way into the position of having to carry it for you."
"I just wanted to get out of there."
"He should've written you a fake receipt." She shakes her head. "Although, I'll give him credit for pretending there was some organization at work. 'Oh, clothes go over there. This part of the curb is for toys and games.'"
Toby doesn't smile. "He probably just wanted to get out of there too."
"He could've just told you he was stealing from the place. You didn't care. It's not like you were there for the tax deduction."
"He didn't know that." He pauses, then adds, "Most people don't know that."
"Well. You'd think you'd be more nervous about him than the other way around," she says. "But you'd have given him your stuff anyway."
He doesn't answer. But he turns left when the light goes green, the first turn that takes him definitely toward her building instead of his own. She notices. In the windshield, in the corner of his eye, her reflection smiles.
*
The old crying woman has hold of one of his arms, her hand clamped down like a claw, and Peter O'Toole grabs the other. They force him to his feet, toward the front of the church. They are expecting him to speak. Of course he will; it's all he can do now, all he can give her. They hold him up; he looks around. There are people he knows in the crowd, but he can't recognize anyone. He must have something prepared, but he has no paper. He opens his mouth, and his tongue is dust-dry. No words at all.
The people laugh at him, but he needs to prove his point somehow. He turns to the box, its surface lacquered black as the windows, opaque as a secret, but he knows it must be empty. He'll open it, and they can all go home. Except that he can't, can't pry the lid up, can't even find the lock. He scrapes his hands on it until they bleed. It doesn't give.
Then the others come forward, the brother and the old woman and the homeless man with burnt hair who is also part of the family. They take their places around the box; Toby is already in his place. And Peter O'Toole says, "You know what we have to do."
He does. He knows what they have to do.
*
C.J. has more than spaghetti and Ragu at home; she has bread and beer. "It's all you need," she says, and he's inclined to agree. He always leaves his coat on the same chair in her apartment, his keys in the same dish by the door; if there was a reason once it's long since become habit. They eat in the kitchen and drink in her bed. He makes fun of CNN while she sits beside him, half-undressed, scanning her notes from work. She puts them down and picks up a paperback, Wuthering Heights.
Her knee is bent above his; he reaches out now and then to play with her hair. The bedroom's warm, and comfortable, and quiet apart from the television and the radiator. Too comfortable, perhaps. They've been having less sex lately, less than last year, and he's taken it in stride. He isn't sure why. They're not that old and it should matter, it should bother him. There ought to be a problem.
"I hate this," she says suddenly.
He almost agrees before realizing he has no idea what she's talking about. "What's that?"
"This book." She smacks the cover with the back of her hand. "I didn't like it when I had to read it for school, and I don't like it now."
"I hate to state the obvious," he says, muting Wolf Blitzer, "but nobody's making you read it again."
"My first year in college, I had roommates who used this book to tell the future." She traces a finger over the white letters on the book's black spine. "Seriously. They'd--here, concentrate on a question."
He wrinkles his forehead at her instead. "What are you, Shirley MacLaine?"
"Fine, I'll do it." She closes her eyes, skims through the book and places her finger on a page. "Well. That's useless."
"I'm stunned."
"I concentrated on what'll happen tomorrow, and the sentence is, 'I would give no information.'" C.J. tosses her head. "Anyway, the book gets on my nerves. You want to know why?"
He leans back against the headboard, setting the remote control on her nightstand next to the empty bottles. "If I said no?"
"Well, then you'd just have to suck it up and hear about it anyway, pal."
It's fair; it's what they expect from each other. "Go on."
"Because it's--" She yawns and folds her arms on top of her knees, hair in her face like a schoolgirl. "It's not that I don't understand it. I do. I get that it's supposed to be about the place. The landscape, and stunted growth. Whatever. I get it. But I still hate it."
"I read it in eighth grade."
"And I bet you hated it."
He barely remembers. "Sure. Because I'm not much for the Romantic period."
She laughs. "And because you were a thirteen-year-old boy."
Thirty-five years ago. His only mental image is a movie poster in sepia, windswept and wistful. It fades as he looks at the lines of C.J.'s back under her camisole. "Well, that's not your excuse."
"I hate Catherine." She turns the book over and reads mockingly from the blurb. "'Her love is so great it transcends even death.' But it doesn't. It's all Heathcliff's action, Heathcliff's obsession, and anyway Catherine doesn't love anyone. She's just selfish and annoying and blown around by fate. And it's a Victorian novel so no one ever has actual sex, they just cling to each other all the damn time. They barely even mention that Catherine's pregnant and then she dies, having conveniently produced a daughter who's exactly, exactly like her, down to having the same name. So the book doesn't take this difficult childish woman and deal with her growing up, she just has to drop dead and run around haunting people on the moor and hope that the next generation figures it all out. And she doesn't even love Heathcliff, she just loves herself in him, it's--"
She stops, because she has to breathe. She blushes and glances over her shoulder at him, expecting a counter argument because it's what happens every time anyone makes a point.
Toby scratches his chin. "So, she's shallow?"
"Yes." She slumps back against her pillows, tucking her legs under the sheet. "And she's supposed to be. But I don't--it's stifling, because no one actually changes. There's no romance in that."
"No," he says. "There's not."
"And besides," she says, yawning harder now, "it's depressing. Everyone's crazy or dying and I've had enough."
He touches her collarbone with two fingers. "You sound like you're ready for the final exam anyway."
"Underline the 'final.'" She smiles, but her eyes are already closing. Soon she turns onto her side, murmuring into her folded arms until she falls silent, falls asleep. He shuts the lights off, and the TV set, and lets her have most of the covers. "Take Me Home Tonight" plays in the back of his mind, in her voice, and then he is sleeping too.
*
In one synchronized motion they lift the box from the altar, eight arms to raise it, four shoulders to balance its weight. So much weight that he can no longer believe the box is empty.
They carry it out of the church and down a road that is not a road, but a long strip of land where nothing will ever grow. The wind blisters their skin and the rain washes the blood off Toby's hands. They slog forward, sinking deeper, and the mud itself buries their tracks. There is something dead lying in the tall grass at the roadside; carrion crows descend through the gray storm.
His back hurts, but he can't talk, can't ask the others to stop so he can shift position. He has picked things up and put them down before. It won't be that way, this time. He realizes that they will never get to a graveyard. That they will just keep walking.
It happened suddenly, he knows, and it doesn't matter. Whatever suffering preceded it, death is always sudden: she was alive. Then she wasn't.
Now it is permanent. Now she'll always be gone and she'll always be here, dead in the box he can't open and must carry. Now the wind is so strong that he can't breathe.
*
Waking up is surfacing, the visceral struggle back to the surface, blind and starving for consciousness and air.
The first thing he sees is the darkness inside his eyelids, before they open to the dull glow of not-quite-daylight. The muscles of his shoulders are locked; they begin to relax as he catches his breath. He's cold, sweating, shaking, but he clenches his jaw to make himself stay quiet, so that she can sleep.
C.J.'s breathing is broken by the occasional sniffle or wheeze, but it's regular, as continuous as time. These days are patterned, one after the other, cut from a mold that they constructed last year--last election. He knows the routine, the habit, knows everything that will happen when her alarm goes off. Every crisis is built into this life. And whatever suffering precedes it, all lives end the same way.
The alarm sounds. She gets up and he closes his eyes, counting her footsteps and knowing her exact position. The dresser to the bathroom--he hears the sink and then the shower. He knows these things about her without thinking, the same way she knows his behavior, and it gets harder to change.
He sits up to look at the clock, ready to hurry and retrace his steps, pick up yesterday's suit, wondering if he'll have time to stop at home before the office. It's five a.m., and he thinks for a moment before settling back into his place in her bed.
C.J. emerges from the bathroom with a towel around her hair and nothing at all around her body, no regard for the open blinds on the window. He watches her pace--dresser to mirror, powder to cologne--and he chuckles out loud. Because this is the beautiful thing.
"What are you laughing at?" she snaps, seeing him in the mirror, blinking sleep out of her eyes. "You have to get up. You have to get up now because if you show up at work in the same suit, then all day you'll have Sam giving you that, you know, the look."
"I don't have to get up yet," he says.
"You do. You do! Don't sit there looking comfortable. If we're late and everyone's picking up scent--"
"It's Saturday."
She spins to face him, hands on her bare hips. "Don't argue with me."
"Okay," he says calmly, careless about staring at her. "But it's still Saturday."
There are a few quiet seconds and then her arms drop to her sides. She laughs, long and slow and delicious, head back, breasts trembling, a Saturday morning laugh. He smirks a little, listening and watching. Memorizing her body as if he won't see it again, even though he will.
"I could've slept another six hours," she sighs, rubbing her eyes.
"Or I could've let you figure it out yourself from the car radio, five miles from here."
"You're not that cruel." She hugs herself and gives him a steady look, just beginning to smile. "Know what I'm going to do now?"
He's pretty sure he can guess. "What?"
"Well." She sits down in the wooden chair between her dresser and the wall, crossing her ankles and leaning back gracefully. "First, I'm going to have a cigarette."
He knows that she'll smoke it slowly, crack the window open and exhale toward it to keep the smell out of her room. She'll brush her teeth again when she's done. He remembers that her window faces an empty rooftop; the pale dawn painting her skin is something no one else can see. "What am I supposed to do while you're doing that?" he asks.
She considers this, eyebrows raised, smiling all the way now like a dirty-minded schoolgirl, and she lights her cigarette. "You could go back to sleep."
"The hell I could."
"Okay, then--you could tell my future."
He reaches for the paperback and studies the cover. It's like the movie poster, and looking at it he remembers Heathcliff calling at the window, trying to talk to a ghost. There's no romance in that, for him. He sets the book aside. "I don't want to."
C.J. nods, and it's enough. She takes her time with the cigarette, and he counts off every second from the warmth of the bed. He's waiting for her, because he knows she'll come.