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they who should love me / walk right through me / i am a ghost / and as far as i know i haven't even died / and my love is under the ground / my one true love is under the ground / and i'll never be / i'll never be / i'll never be anybody's hero now
001.
Sam sits in the middle of a sun that is providing warmth to other places. In his lap there is a piece of paper. The writing covering it is the the work of a few days' effort and is a prose poem on a single theme.
Toby. Toby Ziegler. Tobias, diminutive. Ziegler is German for 'bricklayer'.
Tobias Zachary Ziegler. TZ. Apocryphal hero. Tobit - Tobiah - Tobias - Toby.
A matzoh ball of a name, round in the mouth; comfort food.
Now: ID #076352. White. Male. Color of eyes brown. Color of hair black. Height from 5ft to 6ft. Weight up to 200lbs. Age from 51 to 61. No distinguishing marks. Search completed. Is this your felon?
Former White House Director of Communications.
Boss. Friend. Heavy is my secret.
Sam balls up the piece of paper, and throws it into the sun.
002.
For a while the papers keep up a shallow kind of legend: they turn him into an awkward, distant god who reached up into the void and caught a star in his hands. Some of them even sound sorry. All of them are careful to use the word 'hero' at least once in every article.
When Sam reads them his predominant reaction is just the same sadness and more than sadness that has been heavy on his back since he found out. The tower of newspapers will not petrify into a legacy, or not the kind that Sam wanted for him. It is that which breaks his heart, in meandering cracks; understanding coming slowly like a thaw.
He wants to call, to tell someone, to protest, to be angry, but there is no one else here.
003.
He feels small in New York, and for a while, before, that was comforting -- it is pleasant to be lost and silent and unnoticed when you know the back alleys of a city, when you have already learned its secrets. For a while he walks around, map-making, but when he gets the news that the pardon will not be granted, cartography suddenly fails him. He cannot map the erasure of Toby Ziegler from the free places of the world: and in New York, where he might have been waiting at the end of every street or at the corner of any bar, the constants of distance and direction seem to break down completely. Sam gets lost in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and pays a cab driver twenty dollars for a two block fare. At night the room spins on an axis of whiskey and shock. Eventually his boss suggests that he should take a vacation; Sam had already booked the tickets.
004.
The screen between them is not made of glass or of plastic and bullets and contraband alike might easily be passed through it. Rather, it is layer on layer of past things, greying and dusty, and the anger on Toby's face that has been scrubbed up to a blazing shine.
Words glance off Sam's chest, shoulders, and throat like arrows, but tear at the skin.
He finds a patch of worn finish on the table-top, just beside Toby's motionless hands, and stares at it as the first attack falls on him.
When he looks up again Toby is breathless and the light in his eyes is febrile, mad. It is this which Sam takes back with him to the hotel, and wakes up to in the night: two brown eyes flecked with red staring at him from the big-screen TV in his unconscious.
He sleeps badly that night.
005.
He makes a schedule of weekends away from the city. He takes the week of compassionate leave that is offered (he had no idea he looked so much in need) even though he will only be able to use one of those days to see Toby.
He gets a place in Maryland, as near as real estate will allow to Cumberland. A box in which to store his grief so that it may be fresh and waiting for him with a soft word and a pair of slippers when he returns from New York. The air in the three rooms plus bathroom is cold, and all the bread he buys and the water he takes from the faucet tastes of iron. All the photographs he nails to the walls go white in the sun. The bed seems hard, and never warm.
006.
His curls look decadent flowing over the collar of his prison jumpsuit, but Sam is terribly glad he has not cut them. They mark him -- the rest of his face is grim, the grey catching hold in his beard and all the lines of his face now a little deeper under the fluorescents, but the curls are quintessential, and describe insoluble equations of longing in Sam's eyes.
He would like to put his fingers in them, would like to reach across the table between them and do this, but he knows that, once done, he would feel emptier; cheated of his moment of revelation.
He thinks it would take the rest of a long life to solve the chasmic math of his relationship with Toby Ziegler, and probably at least one day longer than that to breathe his fill of Toby's body, and have in his mouth enough memories of that skin.
He thinks, to himself, that he'd better get busy on that problem, and smiles briefly; Toby's eyes narrow in response and Sam elides his thought into an appropriate look of contrition: no recourse to happiness here.
007.
In the box apartment there is a narrow bed and at night Sam lies on it and makes himself small with the consideration of other people's lives.
He makes plans that might deliver Toby back, relatively unscathed, to something like his old life. He counts bodies and distances, considers job markets and decent districts in which to take a half-share in bringing up two children. He subtracts and divides on account of Toby's attitudes and prejudices; he carries forward proximities and histories, good bookshops and Reform synagogues.
His struggles are both gymnastic and insomniac, and he falls over his good intentions many times, and sprains his positive outlook on the small stone of jealousy in his shoe.
And he fails to bring the sum of his task to a whole number, and falls asleep at dawn, his thoughts an elaborate but futile abacus.
008.
He sleeps curled around his longing. He sleeps fitfully. He is troubled by his dreams, by the memory of Toby's face, and by how often the two combine with an ugly sweat and the moment before his orgasm in which he wakes up not knowing where he is.
Sometimes, lying in the sourness of his bed in the daytime, with the sun flooding in through the skylight and half-drowning him, he begins to feel untethered: small and insubstantial he is being pushed upwards by someone's whisper of a wind; a dust mote he is floating, just about to make it rain.
And when his eyelids get heavy under the sunlight he dreams about the rain in vast puddles, making patterns at his feet and covering his shoulders until they sink under the weight.
He dreams about the sky falling down, and if he is Atlas then Toby is the sky, only ever getting heavier.
009.
Sam is watching him as he steps out of the mouth of the jail. Its walls bend around him, like the embrace of a round-shouldered mountain, and then lets him go. Toby stands on the asphalt, the toes of his shoes scuffed and peeping out from under the cuffs of his pants, his hands calm by his sides, and stares straight up at the sun. He squints but does not cover his eyes. Sam looks away: he has never been comfortable looking at greetings between pairs of lovers. Toby's fingers twirl a little, like a pair of leaves falling to the ground, and then he takes a step.
010.
The drive back to Sam's Maryland apartment is short but elongated by silence. He has not asked the destination and Sam has not offered it; any promise would be given back and any assurance scorned.
He watches the trees flash by on the highway with his face turned out towards the window.
Rejection is all over him, red hot, steaming off his shoulders, boiling up even the suggestion of pity into the air where it condenses sadly on the windscreen. Sam drives trying to will himself to stay in a solid state, but his fingers on the steering wheel feel watery, and his mouth is by now nothing but vapour.
011.
He is heavy, dead-heavy, when he throws Sam up against the only strong thing in the apartment, the door that Sam rented it for in the first place: doors to hold them both safely, to lock them in; doors that would not buckle, even under the weight of one year's rage and six feet of earth.
Sam holds on tight: his hands cling to shoulders as dense as ice, his thighs graze against stone, his mouth splits and his teeth smash. His pity dies slowly, roasted black.
Toby has always made promises with his body but he does not promise Sam anything: what do dead men have to promise?
Sam wrestles comfort away with the bruises. He allows pleasure to take bigger bites out of him than pain. He lets Toby's fingers slide right through him. He is somewhere else, making maps.
012.
It takes longer than one night. It takes longer than one month. Sam goes back to New York; Toby stays in the apartment in Maryland and lies in darkened rooms, thinking. Sam does not try to tell him that he deserves the sunlight, that he never lost its favour at all; it wouldn't be any use.
One day on an icy sidewalk in New York, Sam walks past the window of a diner, three paces, then stops and walks back.
He is sitting in the window, by the door, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times. His liminality fades here in the city: he is just one more silent man with secrets in amongst a whole crowd of them. But Sam smiles all the same. When he rests his hand on Toby's shoulder, both of them caught halfway between the shadows inside and the January brightness out, the skin beneath the thin shirt is warm, and Sam thinks about pressing his mouth there, drinking in the sunlight.
Later, they walk out together, and they both know where they are going.
it begins in the heart / and it hurts when it's true / it only hurts because it's true