lift you up until you break
continued from here
A Campaign Thing
By March, the campaign was going badly.
Bartlet had lost three of the early primaries after winning the New Hampshire opener (a predictable victory, but because it was the first, it had nonetheless been nerve-racking, and when Josh had come to Sam at two in the morning after the celebration, they hadn't even made it to the bed, their lips crushing together so hard both their mouths would be swollen the next day, CJ making jokes about bar fights, they had crashed against the wall, nearly punching a hole in the cheap plasterboard, bruising Sam's shoulder blades, which neither of them noticed until after, and Josh spent a hour apologizing, terribly distraught, Sam touched and amused by his guilty distress, and they fell asleep with Josh's hand gently cupped over the discolored skin, the tender gesture a perfect bookend to the violence of their desire), and as Super Tuesday approached, the governor's numbers were tail-spinning in Michigan and Ohio, big industrial states whose voters perceived the governor as arrogant and condescending, who somehow viewed his intelligence as a liability.
Bartlet still hadn't bothered to learn any of his staff's names, his near-constant impatience with them sparking like subway tracks. That afternoon, he had ripped apart a speech Sam had been painstakingly working on until five in the morning, Bartlet dismissing the delicate phrases after the briefest of cursory glances, snapping sharply, "We can't do this, we can't do affirmative action and welfare benefits in one of the most blue-collar districts in the Midwest. This is simple stuff, you should have learned this on your first day." Sam was stung, deeper than he would admit, feeling stupidly young and worthless. He hadn't let himself cut his eyes over to Josh, because Josh would look at him with either pity or disappointment, and Sam never wanted to see either of those directed at him from Josh.
They were in Detroit and everything was the same color, the sky and streets and buildings flattening into a scarred, uniform plain. The clouds were dirty and dull steely gray, the ground hard and scoured of any green.
When he had returned to their hotel after the governor's early afternoon speech, Sam had hidden himself, finding a blank unmarked door at the top of the twentieth flight of stairs, the lock busted, and he had shouldered it open to fall out onto the roof, crushed gravel under his shoes and impending rain clouds pressing down on him.
He stood staring out across the pitched roofs which arrowed upwards, the sun gone but night not yet fallen, that odd half-way time of the day just before dusk sets in, when five in the evening looks identical to five in the morning. Fingers of dark smoke itched from the chimneys, and somewhere in the clash of concrete and metal, a dog was barking, fitful and echoing high above the city.
Somehow Josh found him despite Sam's attempt to disappear. Maybe Josh had seen him duck through the broken roof door, maybe he had caught sight of Sam from the street, standing silhouetted against the pale sky like a figure cut out of paper. Maybe Josh just always knew where Sam was, instinctively, the way Sam's Uncle David always knew which way was north, could point out the direction even if he was in a mineshaft miles below the ground, born with a compass inside him.
Sam heard the slow squeal of the door's hinges, then the hard metallic bang as it fell shut, and knew that Josh was behind him.
"Don't jump, Sam, you've got so much to live for," Josh said, his voice picked up by the wind and carried hollowly to Sam's ears. Sam knew Josh meant it to be a joke, but the words were drained of intonation by Josh's exhaustion and Sam's terrible mood, and Sam deliberately took a step towards the low curb that ran along the lip of the roof, tilting forward meanly, peering down at the patchwork grid of the city, spread out like a game board twenty stories below.
Josh came to stand next to him, the jagged gravel crunching under his feet. Sam could sense Josh's hand twitching, wanting to reach out and take hold of Sam's elbow, tug him gently back to a safer place, where gravity wouldn't twist so gleefully around him, where the wind wouldn't whip Sam's coat like a flag, violent and with a power all its own. Josh didn't let his hand find Sam's arm, though, Sam's whole body tense and ready to jerk away from any attempt at physical contact.
They stood for a moment, watching the shadows creep up the heavy walls of the buildings. Sam could feel Josh's eyes on him, Josh's gaze having weight same as the full rays of the California sun that rested on shoulders like warm, gently protective hands. Sam wouldn't let himself turn to face Josh. He was angry, frustrated as all hell, and reveling in it, drawing his harsh, dangerously frayed temper around him like a cloak.
"Think we can see Canada from up here?" Josh asked lamely, the feeble attempt to start a conversation crash-landing in the space between them.
"I don't know," Sam replied flatly, his lack of interest crystal clear in his terse voice.
Josh sighed, or at least Sam thought he did, the sound almost lost in the fleet wind. "Look, you shouldn't take what he says so seriously," Josh began, and Sam wanted to punch him. "He's just tired, we're all tired, we're on edge, he doesn't mean anything by it."
Sam spoke with rage crackling in his voice, "You know what, Josh? I'm getting real tired of you defending Bartlet." Sam shifted to nail Josh with his furious eyes. "Maybe he's not just tired, maybe he's not just on edge, maybe he's just an asshole, you ever think of that? He's not what you thought he was, why can't you just admit it? You dragged me away from my home and across the country, and for what? He's not the real thing, Josh, I don't know how you could have ever thought he was."
Something was falling in Josh's face, his expression going stricken and anguished. Sam didn't care, he felt unruly and savage. He was intentionally picking out the words he knew would cut the deepest, something fierce and wicked driving him to rip Josh to shreds, beat him until Sam's fists were bloody and Josh's face was deformed and unrecognizable.
"I mean, do you even get what you've done? What the fuck am I doing in Detroit, for Christ's sake? I'm a thousand miles away from my life and everything that matters, and it's all your fault!"
Cruelty, blinding silver and as sharp as an icicle, was streaming from Sam and Josh was staring at him helplessly. Sam knew him so well, knew what would hurt the most, what would cause the most damage, knowledge he never thought he'd use like this, but Sam was feeling disconnected, watching from a distance as he decimated his friend.
Josh rasped out a response, his words tearing and rough with pain, "Your . . . your life is here. With me."
At once, Sam collapsed back into his body, blinking at Josh in surprise. That was something that was very close to acknowledging all that was between them, that wasn't at all what he had expected. Sam found his anger rushing from him, quick and swift like water flooding out a hole in a dam, until he was empty, washed clean.
"Josh," he breathed out, unsure and stunned, and watched the wind dragging through Josh's hair, and couldn't find any more words.
Suddenly something snapped inside Josh, a string breaking, his whole body trembling, his eyes shuddering closed, like a flash of pain had ripped through him. When Josh pulled his eyes open again, and raised them to Sam's, the agony there staggered Sam.
Josh said, his voice all shattered, "I'm sorry," and the words seemed to undo him, his face twisting like he was about to cry, and Sam was overwhelmed by a wave of regret and guilt that was shocking in its force. Whatever had made him lash out so intensely and determinedly at Josh was utterly extinguished from him as he stared at the other man.
Sam tried to say Josh's name again, but there was no air inside of him. Josh spoke again, moving a shuffling half-step closer to Sam, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Sam reached out, wanting nothing but to wrap Josh in his arms and apologize, take it all back, do whatever he had to do to get that look out of Josh's eyes. Sam's hands fell on Josh's shoulders, and Josh choked back a wracking, devastated cry, burying his face in the crook of Sam's neck, hiding his eyes in Sam's coat. And Josh kept saying, over and over again, the words like sobs, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Sam. I'm so sorry."
Moving his hands to the back of Josh's neck, weaving his fingers together, frantic with the need to make this right again, Sam whispered, "Hey. Hey. Josh, hey." It was the only thing he could say, all his beautiful language had fled, his mind wiped blank. Sam was nothing but scared to death by the look on Josh's face, the look that had been seared forever into Sam's brain. Josh's hands were clinging to the back of Sam's coat with desperate, terrible strength, and all Sam could say was `hey,' like he was calling to Josh from across some unspeakable distance.
Sam didn't know what Josh was apologizing for, if it was for drawing Sam out of his carefully-constructed life, leading him across the country with a promise of the real thing, if it was for the fact that Josh's real thing was turning out to be anything but, if it was for starting this campaign thing between them, messing everything up, if it was for the knowledge they both struggled to ignore, the knowledge that refused to fade away, the knowledge that neither of them were good enough men to have it be anything other than a campaign thing, neither of them were willing to go through what it would require for the two of them to be something more, something true.
Josh moved his hands up to mirror the position of Sam's, clutching the back of Sam's neck, their arms crossing like swords between them, shifting to rest their foreheads together, the two of them closer in that moment than they'd ever been before, hanging onto each other with all their strength, breathing the same air, and Josh closed his eyes against the unreal pain and whispered into the wind, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
And Sam was frozen with terror and sadness, and all he could do was breathe the air from Josh's lungs and feel the night falling around them, and Sam was fragmented, he was in pieces, and he knew he would never be whole again.
* * *
That was the end of their campaign thing. Josh stopped coming to Sam in the night, and Sam stopped waiting for him.
Sam told himself that it was for the best, for it to end like that, simply and only affecting the two of them. It didn't end in a tabloid, or with some embarrassing revelation involving the whole staff. It didn't end with Sam breaking his knuckles on Josh's jaw, or Josh casually ripping out Sam's heart and flinging it into the street. It ended as cleanly as could have possibly been hoped.
So there was really no reason why it should hurt the way it did.
There was really no reason why it should continue hurting for as long as it did, why it should continue aching within Sam like a phantom limb for the rest of his life.
* * *
When Sam was eighteen, his dad had taken him to the airport, putting him on a plane for Princeton, on the last day of August.
Sam had lived his entire life in Southern California, where the sun was steady and bright, flooding through the valley, sparkling off the ocean. He had never spent longer than two weeks at a time on the East Coast, a few cold silvery Christmases spent with extended family in Boston, a school trip to Washington, D.C., in April when all the trees were exploding pink and white, never getting anything more than a taste of the other side of the country.
All through Sam's last summer, every party had been drenched in sentimentality and endless, gnawingly repetitious goodbyes, all his friends acting like they were going off to war, and Sam had heard the same jokes over and over again, about him freezing to death in New Jersey, cautionary tales about poor unprepared Californian transplants who'd been unable to handle the existence of actual weather, way out there on the opposite end of the continent.
Most of his friends were going to UCLA, USD, Stanford, schools in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, almost everyone staying within the state, and they all thought he was crazy, leaving behind the warmth and the beach and the pale blue skies and the unbearable beauty of the Pacific Coast, leaving behind everything he had ever known, to go live in New Jersey, of all the godforsaken places. Jersey didn't even have a baseball team, how would Sam be able to stand it?
Sam would laugh and shrug and be a good sport about it, but he couldn't fight the niggling sense of unease that began to grow as his freshman orientation loomed, the X-ed-off days on the kitchen calendar marching closer to the date that was vibrantly circled by a blood-red marker, the square scrawled, `SAM LEAVES,' in his mother's quick hand.
Every morning, eating his breakfast of cornflakes while leaning against the waxed Formica counter, Sam had found his eyes magnetically drawn to that crimson ring, reading the words a million times, thinking irritably as the summer wore on that his mother could have written almost anything else, and it would seem less foreboding. Why not just write, `Princeton,' on the day of Sam's flight? Would that have been too obscure? Would his family have gotten it mixed up with another seminal event having to do with the Ivy League school that they were involved in on the same day? Why not, `Sam goes to college'? Was she trying to conserve words for some unknown reason? `SAM LEAVES,' in those bold capital letters like a yell, made Sam's going away seem like a terrible, tragic experience, like he was being taken to prison, or embarking on a suicide mission in the jungles of Africa, some dire calamity from which Sam would never return.
Sam began to hate any mention of the East Coast, a dark feeling sinking in his stomach whenever he thought of it. Reality was setting in, the growing awareness that he would be utterly alone at Princeton, no one to help him should he begin to stumble or fall. A full appreciation of the sheer size of the country he was crossing was coming to him more and more with each day. It was six hours by plane, the prohibitive cost of a ticket back meant that Sam wouldn't be able to come home for the holidays; it would be his first Christmas not spent with his family, the first Thanksgiving when he wouldn't good-naturedly suffer his father expansively cajoling `what they were thankful for' out of everyone at the table, Sam and his sister rolling their eyes at the sappiness of the tradition, their mother smiling, her gaze warm and laughing over the festive candlelight.
By the time the actual day had come, the calendar's black X's meeting the red circle, Sam was treacherously close to being petrified. He was shaky, faltering with a constant unease, his brain terrorizing him with slideshows of all the possible catastrophes that could befall him. Masochistically, he was helpless to turn his mind away, compulsively picturing himself being defeated by the first true challenge of his young life, letting everyone down, being revealed as a fraud, not smart enough, not strong enough, nowhere near good enough, making a disaster of a monumental opportunity.
Doubt grew and Sam never felt less grown-up than he did those last few months before he left everything behind.
On the way to the airport, Sam and his father had talked about the business trip his dad had just returned from, and the Dodgers' middle infield, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (his dad marveling over the fact that Sam knew more about the events of October 1962 than his old man did, despite his father having actually lived through it, his dad ribbing Sam good-humoredly about being too smart for his own good, the distinct undercurrent of pride in the elder Seaborn's voice robbing the jibes of their potency).
They didn't talk about college, tiptoeing around the subject like it was a grizzly bear they were trying not to wake up. They didn't talk about moving away, or the fact that every mile they drove tightened a vise in Sam's chest, and Sam wondered if the throbbing, airless pressure would follow him to the East Coast, if the pain would stay with him forever.
In the airport, they stood before the long belt of glass windows that circled the terminal, gazing at the planes taking off. Sam always watched the planes, as far back as he could remember, every time he'd ever been in an airport, and almost always with his dad standing right beside him, the uneven progress of Sam's growth punctuated by the way his perspective crept upwards, in fits and starts, from his eyes being level with his father's knees, then even with the man's waist, then as high as his ribs, then tall as his shoulder, then staring directly at his dad's nose, Sam measuring his life on the upright ruler of his father's figure.
Sam liked to see the airplanes speed up, faster and faster like the building roar of a crowd, then the split second before the wheels left the ground, the second during which Sam always found himself holding his breath, and then the break from gravity, the plane rising on an impeccably straight line to become a small glinting silver spear cutting through the sky.
When Sam was a kid, airplanes taking off had seemed like the culmination of all human endeavor, an absurd, irrational sight, those huge heavy machines that had no business splitting clouds, winging through the air, held up by nothing more than the intelligence of people who believed they could fly.
His father stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit coat, his eyes tracing the planes leisurely, a faint smile dancing on his lips, like there was some private joke playing in his head. Sam's dad carried himself with simple dignity, quiet assurance, his head up, his shoulders thrown back, his blue eyes, identical to Sam's, keenly inquisitive.
Sam snuck quick, covert glances at him from out of the corners of his vision, unconsciously straightening his posture, pulling his shoulders up, tilting his head at a confident angle, distributing his weight evenly so that he wouldn't slouch, trying to replicate his father's easy poise, his effortless composure.
Watching the planes take off, his stance a dim echo of his father's, Sam wondered if his dad had felt like this when he had left for college, but the idea of his father being scared was jarringly incongruent, it fit nowhere within Sam's view of the world. Sam's anxiety was just one more way in which he had fallen short of his father's example.
Saying goodbye to his mother that morning had been more embarrassing than sad or unnerving, because she had cried, and clung to Sam, and he wanted to close his hands on her shoulders and push her away, hating her needy grasp, wishing she would get a hold on herself. Sam had no idea how to say goodbye to his dad, the man he looked up to exactly the way a son should look up to his father.
Travelers milled around them, dragging suitcases and backpacks and duffel bags, plane tickets sticking up out of their pockets like students raising their hands in class. Every language of the world was being spoken, foreign words and phrases darting around like hummingbirds. Weary families on London time slumped together on molded orange plastic chairs, husbands' arms slung around the shoulders of their wives, little kids sitting at the feet of their parents, playing with toy cars, running the tiny rubber wheels over the shoes of resting passengers, up roads made of pants legs.
It occurred to Sam that this terminal was a place where lives began. Train stations, bus depots, airports, raw heartbroken stretches of desert highways-people come to these places to leave, to come home, to start over, to find their way back to what they had lost. Last- ditch confessions of love, tearful reunions, families being split apart, all the key moments that marked a person's existence like signposts, they all had in common these places of motion, places of arrival and departure, places where every corner of the world was at your fingertips.
Sam's dad asked, his voice jovial and grand, "So, are you excited?" It was the first thing either of them had said that even obliquely broached the fact that when Sam's plane left in a half an hour, it would be the last time the two saw each other for most of a year, the span longer than they'd ever spent apart before.
Sam swallowed hard and thumbed frantically through his mind, looking for the words that would hide his uncertainty from his dad. No matter how scared out of his mind Sam was to be leaving, that fear wasn't the worst-he was even more aghast at the thought that his father would suspect Sam's cowardice and apprehension, Sam would do anything to prevent that.
"It's . . . it's pretty far, you know?" Sam said feebly, his voice cracking slightly, feeling frustrated and disjointed, dully unintelligible, his quick mind deserting him.
There was more to it than that, there were things Sam wanted to say to his father, and certainly things his father wanted to say to him, but they weren't things that an eighteen-year old boy could say to his dad, not when the boy was trying as hard as he could to be a man, trying to be brave and steadfast, trying to be the kind of son a father could be proud of.
There was too much between them, dreams and bloodlines and songs they both sang with the same wrong words, the well-worn history and idealized memories of every family. There was a blurry, sun-drenched childhood in which Sam had believed in no one as much as he believed in his father, and his father had never known his capacity for love until the perfect spring morning his son was born.
Sam was already thinking ahead to the handshake that they would say farewell with, reminding himself to wipe the sweat off his palm inconspicuously, grip the other man's hand firmly, keeping his wrist strong, making good eye contact, the same handshake that the father had taught his son when the boy was twelve years old, the honest unwavering handshake that inspired trust and confidence. Sam was thinking of that handshake, even though he had never felt less trustworthy in his life, and praying that his father wouldn't see the dismay shading his eyes, he was using all his strength to hold himself together, there was no room in him to find a way to articulate the crucial, utterly overwhelming tumult that ransacked through him.
There were things that fathers and sons couldn't say to each other, not in this place where lives began, not at this moment when a man was watching his child take his first steps into the real world. Some things are too vast to be expressed with words, some things break your heart before they can make it to your tongue.
Before them, planes were taking off, because people believed in flight. Around them, people were coming home, and leaving home, being lost and found like mittens, and the destinations of the world were moving lightly through the air.
Sam stared out at the long ribboning gray runways, and wished with everything in him that he could see the course of his life, see what would become of him. He thought that even if he was shown the fulfillment of his worst fears, even if he was shown failure, and humiliation, and defeat, even if he was shown a disastrous life on the wrong side of the country, next to the wrong ocean, under the wrong sky, it would still be better than this beating worry within him, this insecurity like a disease sneaking through his veins, corroding his strength, a rusty scrape in his mind.
In Sam's future, there was a brilliant, meteoric track through Princeton, and an equally illustrious career at Duke. There were friends who would be more dear to him than any that he had when he was eighteen years old. There was a love of the snow and the true winters of the Eastern Seaboard, which he would discover only a few months after the time when he had stood in an airport with his father and tried to be stronger than he was. There were women who would bewitch him, and men who would baffle him, and he would only ever talk about the former when uncles elbowed him and asked, their faces slanting with conspiratorially suggestive grins, "How's your love life, tiger?" There was an unprecedented rise through Gage Whitney Pace, positions granted to him years before he expected them, and there was a woman named Lisa, waiting for him at the end of every day, with who he would believe with all his heart that he was in love.
And in his future, wreaking in and out of his life, dangerous and scattered like landmines, there was a man named Josh Lyman, who would be the end of Sam. There would be an embrace in a law office and questions asked on a city sidewalk that had no answers. There would be the two of them in a getaway car, speeding north to New Hampshire, driving out of the rain, talking so fast, their words tumbling over each other and getting jumbled up in laughter and the young, amazed expressions on both their faces. There would be an addiction, building through the days and weeks and all the interchangeable towns and cities, until it was as vital and definitive a part of Sam as his fingerprints, and Sam would need Josh the same way he needed air.
There would be a strange, aching campaign thing, inexplicable and unacknowledged and inviolate, flaring with moments of tenderness and beauty that would make Sam feel like his life was made out of crystal, exquisite and delicate and breathtaking, always trembling on the edge of being shattered. There would be mouths pressed to skin, and forearms knocking against ears in clumsy embraces, and hair in Sam's eyes, and heat, and motion, and tongues dragging over ribs, and hands twisted in bedcovers, and the taste of sweat, and bruised shoulder blades, and no way to make sense of it, and moments that were everything. Just . . . everything.
There would be a five o'clock in the evening that looked like five o'clock in the morning, on a rooftop in Detroit, scarred by the wind, when Josh would beg Sam's forgiveness and Sam wouldn't have the words to say anything that mattered, and they would be ruined together. They would try with everything in them to hold onto each other, but their hands would be lacerated, their fingers fractured, their grips torn away, and there would be a hole inside Sam, a ghostly, hollow vacancy echoing in the place where his heart had been.
There would be a good man elected president, a man who turned out to be the real thing after all, and on the velvet November night when the networks announced the winner, all the world would be empty save for the one grin that illuminated Sam from the inside out, made him shine like a spotlight, made him sadder than he'd ever been.
There would be gunfire, one black, unmerciful night in May, and harrowing fear like an animal caught in his throat. There would be a Christmas full of soaring string music and broken glass, and Sam would watch, helpless, as Josh fell apart. There would be a phone call in the middle of a rainstorm, and Sam's father would topple the foundations of the world, sending everything into anarchic disarray, making a riot out of universal certainties. Sam's existence would go chaotic and fragile and precarious, all his known landmarks disintegrating in the wind, and he wouldn't be able to find himself on the map. There would be deception, and a tropical storm, and their real thing would be dying slowly, in secret, and then not so secret anymore.
There would be a middle of the night when Sam wouldn't have anything left to have faith in, all his fathers having betrayed him, all his sacred tenets disproved, any evidence of God abolished from his reality, and the only thing he would want to see was a pair of dark eyes and a brilliant smile, because maybe then he would be home again.
There would be Josh and Sam, together in every way that two people could be together, hating each other and loving each other and annihilating each other and needing each other and shoving each other away, friends and lovers and enemies and rivals and brothers and, occasionally, every so often, during slow lavender dawns, the only two people on earth.
Sam couldn't see any of that. He was only eighteen years old, excruciatingly, impossibly young, and he was blind to all that would come, in an airport a half an hour before he was lifted off from California and flung out into the blue.
Years later, tracing the twisting path his life had followed, he wouldn't be able to decide if he would have gotten on the plane, had he known then what he would learn.
Sam was doomed, there was an apocalypse in his future, but he didn't know it then, he had never even heard of a man named Josh Lyman, the two, if they met on the street, would pass each other carelessly, as strangers, and Sam's heart was still his own.
There in the terminal, on that day in the sweetly dying twilight of the summer, there was only Sam, and his dad, and their muddled, stuttering conversation, which shivered and keened with all that was not spoken. Sam had said, "It's pretty far, you know?" when what he had meant was, "God, Dad, I'm so scared, what if I can't do it, what if I end up all alone out there?"
His dad put a calm hand on his son's shoulder, and Sam turned and looked at him, with the uncomplicated eagerness of a boy who never stopped believing that his dad could fix anything, make any problem better, his dad who was everything Sam wanted to be, his dad who Sam knew for sure could do no wrong.
Sam met his dad's eyes, and they were the same height, and Sam had once thought that when he was as tall as his father, he would be a man.
His dad's face was lined and his hair was gray, but strangers had always been able to tell that they were family, and Sam had always pulled his shoulders straight and felt so proud whenever anyone had said to him, "You're his spitting image, boy, you sure are your father's son."
Sam's father sighed and looked at his son, his lying blue eyes like mirrors, and it seemed that he had heard everything that Sam had not said, because he replied, his voice clear and certain, "Don't look back, Sam. Never look back."
THE END