author: aj (another_juxtaposition@hotmail.com)
codes: cj pov
archive: permission will be given, but please ask.
notes: the very first thing i've ever written. be nice.

summary: "The world is spinning a bit faster than it used to."

for rachel, who didn't think this was pointless.

*

The beginning of the world had come and gone, but sometimes no one would be able to tell. Summers in D.C. were as if time returned to the primordial soup of creation, at least when referring to the temperature. It was fitting, she thought, that on the hottest day of summer thus far, her air conditioner decided to break.

It had been one of those days where nothing went right and things that couldn't go wrong did. It wasn't hard to figure out why all those bread revolts so long ago in Paris happened in the summer swelter. Heat sends things into chaos; the constant trend towards entropy is quickened.

They didn't understand her discomfort with heat. California always called to mind images of beaches, tans, and palm trees. Continual heat. Making sweat sexy. What they didn't realize was California heat didn't make people suffocate. Humidity was not the constant companion it was in Washington, and when it crashed the party everyone wilted.

She wilted more than most, with her six foot stem. Her feet had swollen, and she spent the entire afternoon stuck to her chair rustling through articles and notes and memos about everything that was of any importance in the world, even a few about things that weren't.

Wearing a cotton camisole and thin pajama pants that rested well above her ankles, she padded through her apartment to try and find a way to pour water into Hades.

It wasn't a day for impossible things.

Toby had yelled, but that was nothing new. His anger at the world found ts direction in her, and she took the brunt of the frustration with a grain of salt. Or so she tried, and so her intellect warned her. The fact was, Toby yelling was almost always somehow related to her, if only that it meant she had another mess to clean up, another spill to spin. She had been spinning so much she was growing dizzy, almost to the point of nausea, and the heat wasn't helping.

She thought about when she was younger, and her father had taken her to Disneyland. That was back when Disneyland was a new thing, a magical thing, sort of like the first tour of the White House. At some point though you realized the animals on the Jungle Cruise were fake, and that Dumbo would never fly higher than his crane would let him. But Disneyland would never lose the magic it held.

She preferred the Haunted Mansion with its creepy music and witty Vincent Price-read dialogue. The teacups were never her favorite ride, and yet they looked so quaint and pretty; her brother teased her for being afraid. She would climb in, never one to be left behind, gangly and awkward, trying to fold her legs and arms inside the cylindrical whirling dervish.

She was so dizzy afterwards she vomited. It became a ritual, the Cregg family on the teacups, and disproportionate Claudia Jean puking in the bushes behind Alice in Wonderland.

She learned to balance her stomach and the spinning world more easily. But on days like today, when her body temperature rose so high she felt as if she could hear individual enzymes burning up, the world moved faster than she was, and it was the teacups all over again.

C.J. dragged the armchair across the room until it rested against the window. Easing into it, hoping to rest the minimum amount of skin against the cloth, she tried to breathe. All day there seemed to be a shortage of air, and she had wondered if there was a way to work that into the 4 o'clock briefing. Instead she left the office before 8, convincing Carol that all she really needed was a good night of sleep and that the office could live without her that night. But then her air conditioner broke, hell followed her from the White House to her apartment, and she knew she would return to the office that morning with circles under her eyes and the same feeling of suffocation. She would smile and pretend as if she wasn't choking on the one thing that was keeping her alive, as if the world was spinning the way it always was, as if she didn't feel like she was 13 all over again, horribly embarrassed to be puking on a ride that 5 year olds found entertaining.

They hadn't trusted her for so long that sometimes she forgot that they trusted her now. It infuriated her, the little voice of insecurity buzzing in her ear. So often she wanted to just scream, scream at Josh with his thing, and Toby with his righteous indignation, and Sam with his belief that everything would turn out all right. Scream at them so loudly everyone in the entire White House would hear that she was tired of this. Tired of knowing that sometimes it wouldn't work, tired of the constant threat of failure, tired of cleaning the messes that they didn't even trust her to know about.

But they needed her; she knew that. She knew that she was remarkably good at her job, that she had a balance of humor, candor and honesty, which made people feel comfortable. And she could think on her feet. Sometimes she fucked up, she knew that and they knew that, but more often than not she was right.

Sighing, she thought about how often she had to remind herself of that. No one else was willing to say anything, except to complain because their thing wasn't getting enough coverage, or there was a leak that she couldn't plug. Her best never seemed to be enough. Her voice echoed in her head, haunting her in bars and offices and radios. She might be good, but she wasn't magical.

Looking at her hands, swollen and sweaty even at 3 in the morning, she noticed they were shaking. Almost as if she were detached from herself, from her own body, she realized that she was shaking all over. Startled, she got up abruptly and moved to the windowsill, leaning her tall body against it.

She was 40 years old, on the top of her game professionally, well respected, well known, well liked. She didn't sleep enough, or eat enough, or cry enough. She thought in words and swirls, consequences of phrasing whirling through her head at rapid-fire speed. She hadn't read fiction in years, listened to the radio for news not music, and learned to conceal her emotions so well sometimes she forgot she could ever feel anything.

She was alone. They were all alone in their own ways, each a shell cocooned against the coming storm. For the oppressive heat was always a sign of a storm. The rain would be a welcome change, until it rained a little too hard and a little too fast, and then even C.J. wouldn't have a mop large enough to clean up the mess. Après moi, le deluge.

She knew her place in this world of politics that spun just a tad faster than the rest of the world. Where trivial things like preferences for green beans became the cause for ulcers, where the right thing was never the easy thing, where bullets were always flying and they aimed to kill. She chose this world more than three years ago, not knowing it would take years off her life and turn her hair gray.

Not knowing the regrets would never be about her choice, never.

So she stood up, careful not to hit her head against the window frame, and walked to the bathroom to take a shower. As the water steamed against her skin, she was already thinking about how to work Josh's thing into the morning briefing, how to tell Sam that his belief in the goodness of the world was sometimes the only thing that kept her going, how to channel Toby's uncontrollable passion into something the press and the world could work with. Leo would want to know the latest numbers, and Donna would want to go to lunch, to ask not so cleverly concealed questions about her unprofessional feelings for Josh. The President would enter the office full of enthusiasm despite the chaos, fresh from his dreams of stardust. Maybe today would be the day it would last.

She would get off the ride, run to the bushes and empty her stomach, regain her balance, then get back on.

Shivering as she stepped out of the shower, her bare feet leaving small puddles in their wake, she prepared for another day. Because as dizzy and as suffocated as she sometimes felt, this was her.

*

the end.
  . send a flower .
    . back to the garden .