"Catch, Finish, Drive, Recovery" He has never really been a fan of running. Track always seemed like a consolation sport -- You're too short for basketball and too small for football? There's always track. -- and cross-country bored him silly. He was on the coxless four instead, spending his high school and college years getting out of bed at 4:30 and waking up to the rhythm of his blade as his shell skimmed the water. Ostensibly, rowing was as tedious as running, but he figured the possibility of sucking in a lungful of the Charles before breakfast added an element of excitement. Then he grew up, got responsible, and acquired a schedule that made joining an amateur rowing team in DC impossible. He supposes he could pretzel his schedule around the practice times, but it requires a little more logistical thought than he's willing to put in. He settles instead for hitting the erg in the House gym. Occasionally, he gets the urge to feel cold air moving across his face as the rest of his body unravels in tired heat, so he grudgingly runs. At least DC's a pretty running town, and at this time of the day, at this time of the year, he won't have to deal with tourists on the Mall. He can push down toward Haines Point maybe, and by the time he comes back, sifting through another eighty pages of deposition transcriptions won't seem so tedious. So he runs. His feet crunch along the Mall's paths as he thinks that the problem with running is the mindlessness it implies. You're either chasing after something, or trying to escape something else. Rowing, on the other hand, has technique and strategy. As he crosses the Mall and shoots down toward Haines Point, he jogs past Sam Seaborn running the other way. The other man nods stiffly, then fixes his eyes on something in the middle distance. People in the Bartlet administration have a knack for that thousand-yard stare, he thinks. God knows he's seen enough of it. The thing is, he's sure they'd be doing the same thing he's doing now if the tables were turned. He's not a bad guy -- he's sure of this -- and he's doing his job. He's knocking himself out to do it well, too, otherwise he'd have a handful of new friends courtesy of the Potomac Rowing Club and a dramatically reduced schedule. He's not a bad guy. He just made a few mistakes, and they won't die down. As he hits the edge of the park, he reviews those mistakes for the thousandth time. Mistake number one was losing his cool and bolting from that date with Donna three months ago. In his defense, he thinks, he was out of practice. He hadn't been on a date in a while, and although this one had been going incredibly well despite its dubious start, he had forgotten all the exit strategies. He smiles as he wonders if he can blame Betsy for that. He imagines the phone call. "Hey, Bets. How's it going at the alumni office? Yeah? Listen. Thanks to us being together for three years, I lost all my tricks, screwed up with this girl, and ended up with a problem on my hands ... what? Damn straight I blame you. You took me off the market, princess." As much fun as that call might be to make, it's probably another bad idea. Besides, the last thing he really wants is to have his ex-girlfriend finding out that he recovered from her by getting embroiled in a mess with a woman on the other side of the aisle. So, he thinks, the moral of that story is to have an excuse ready. Maybe teach himself to program his Blackberry so it appears to page him when things get weird. Of course, he thinks, running along the point, he could always -- wait. How many miles is this going to be? Ten, he's thinking. When did he get to the point when he was running ten miles at a time? When he started working for Oversight, that's when. And when he started wondering if he was really doing the right thing more often than not. He blew date number one, he thinks, and he almost smiles at how stupid he was to spend the night sweating it. He had been worried about how fraternizing with Donna would affect his standing with the committee, and then he worried that Donna thought he was a jerk. Which, of course, led to mistake number two -- going over to her house the next night. * * * "Hey," he said. Donna had been leaning in her doorway, looking down on him as he stood on the steps to the front door. "Hey yourself. Let me guess: you were in the neighborhood, and you happened to come by?" "Yeah. I figured I'd just randomly ring doorbells until good-looking women consented to talk to me." "And then you got lucky." "It took a lot of doorbells," he cracked. She smiled back, and he found himself thinking that he could make the time to see that smile a lot more. Betsy hadn't been a big smiler -- she was more the ice-goddess type -- so being around a woman who seemed visibly pleased to be around him was a head trip. "I'd give you candy, but you're four weeks early." "Plus I'm not wearing a costume." "What are you going as for Halloween?" she asked, playing along. "Someone with a really good explanation for flaking out last night." Donna studied him for a moment, then said, "Do you want to come in and give me this explanation?" He shrugged. What was the worse thing that could happen? * * * If he wants to split hairs, mistake number two has a number of sub-article mistakes. Since he's only at the one-third mark on his run, it seems like a fine time to review these too. He shouldn't have gone in her place. They could have had a short conversation on her stoop, he could have explained how he immediately perceived the potential for the conflict of interest and decided to reduce that potential. Then he could have begged a post-investigation raincheck and left. Instead, he came inside, watching her long legs take the stairs to her flat and thinking that it wasn't every day a man got to watch a woman with legs like that. * * * "So that's it?" she had asked. "It's a pretty big 'it,'" he pointed out. "Well, yes." "And it's killing me here, 'cause we were getting along so well, but until this investigation wraps up --" "I know," she had said. "And it's killing me because really, if I had been thinking, I would have found some excuse for kissing you last night before I put all the pieces together. I'm just too smart sometimes." There, he thinks. Cover the lack of smooth with a compliment and a self-confident dig. "If it's any consolation," Donna said, "I would have let you." There was a pause, and then he figured, what the hell. They both knew they wouldn't be going out again, not for a long while. So he leaned toward her and she met his lips, and then next thing he knew, they were making out on her couch like a couple of teenagers, her impossibly long legs sliding up his, and there was no way she could miss his hard-on with the way he was pressed on top of her. "Donna," he managed. "Donna, we can do this, but it's a really bad idea." "Then leave," she murmured. "Why do I have to leave?" "'Cause this is my place." "That's right," he mused before kissing her again. "If you left, you'd have to go to my place. That makes no sense at all." "You're not exactly leaving," she pointed out. "No, I'm not." And that had been it. He stood up, and pulled her off the couch, but instead of walking to the door, he had walked in the opposite direction. She hadn't stopped him. In fact, once they reached her bedroom, she had been more than eager to pull him down on top of her, on top of the bed. That was how mistake number three began, with his mouth on her neck and his hands working the clasp of her bra as they rolled recklessly across her sheets. * * * He feels the wind coming off the Potomac and misses rowing more acutely than ever. It was something -- is something -- he could do in his sleep. And while winter is the time for dryland training, there is always the pleasure of putting in during the fall, feeling the soggy September air gradually turn crisp and cool through fall, or resuming spring training and noticing how each morning is a little lighter and softer than the one before. It's impossible for him to notice the same details on land. Instead, he notices the jolting through his legs and thinks that the trouble with ground is it doesn't give when you move against it. Not like water at all -- you can use the force of a river to move yourself forward. That's the heart of a good stroke: use the drive and finish to pull forward, one smooth motion down the body, down to the water, moving on. * * * She ran her hands in one smooth motion down his body. It was wrong, and -- oh God, he had no idea whether that wwas what made it feel so good, and he didn't care. It wasn't until later, after a fuzzy post-coital conversation where they really didn't say too much, that he woke up in a strange bed and realized he suddenly cared very much. The next morning was awkward for them both. He coped by smiling, and rooting for his clothes, noticing all the little artifacts of Donna's personality scattered around her room. It was a crash course in learning what kind of person he had just slept with. He consoled himself with the idea that at least he'd have something to talk to her about after this was all over and they could resume dating without worrying. In retrospect, this was the last part of mistake number three -- thinking that somehow, everything was going to be okay. * * * The giant awakens perpetually, and he smiles despite himself as he runs past it. He's not a big fan of public art in general, but he does like this statue, and the idea of giants beneath the earth, hovering on the edge of perpetual wakefulness. His job is an exercise in handling giants, he thinks. Giant egos, giant intellects, giant ambitions, giant mistakes. When he rowed, he used to occasionally amuse himself by trying to imagine the Charles as it must have been to the Americans who first lived on its shores. Teeming with sea life, giants beneath the waters, their thoughts impenetrable to the people who watched them go by. Score another point for water: the sheer otherness of it makes it somehow more forgivable if you misunderstand it. This is another reason he keeps beating himself up on these runs. He should know this place. He's prepared most of his life to work here, studied it, studied the rules it runs by, studied the people who make and honor the rules. He should know himself. Instead, he keeps bumping up against the rules that giants apparently make as they silently slide along, people and lives altered in their wake. * * * "First order of business is to interview assistants to the senior staff. It should be brief -- these people aren't going to be pulled into the loop." He nodded, only half-listening as he surveyed the stack of boxes and thought back to his first date with Donna. She had been responsible for these. The boxes and -- "Excuse me, sir?" "Yes, Cliff?" "Before we proceed with the deposition schedule, I should disclose that I saw one of the witnesses socially on several occasions. We were ... we were set up by a mutual friend before the decision was made for Oversight to handle the investigation. Is that going to be a problem?" His co-counsel, twenty years his senior and marking time until this was over and he could retire to a cushy partnership in a private firm, raised an eyebrow and asked, "Will it be a problem?" "I don't believe so, no, sir." "Carry on." They continue setting the schedule for the assistants, and for a moment, he sees how this entire investigation is going to play out: rattle the assistants, then go after mid-level staffers, refine questioning for senior staffers, then take on the President's family and the President. It's not going to be a problem, he thinks. Donna gives her deposition, things move forward, with luck, he can have a life again in about ... a year, he hopes. And that was mistake number four. * * * He hates running up this side of the point. Further away from the river he could understand in a day, and closer to the most recent mistakes he's made. The problem, he thinks, is that he forgot how to row on land. Every stroke forward has four parts -- catch, drive, release, recover -- and he's always used that as a model for whatever he does. Catch: enter the situation, assessing it before anything else. Drive: push forward, applying strength and pressures at the right moment. Finish: follow-through, and exit the situation. Recover: the moment when you glide, before starting again. It used to work so well. * * * 18 USC 1.0.0.1: lying to Congress. Ten thousand dollars and not more than five years in prison. 18 USC 1.5.0.5, obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees. Not more than five years. 2 USC 192 -- contempt of Congress. A thousand dollars, imprisonment in a common jail for not more than twelve months. All he had wanted to do was help. She had lied -- he knew this only because his mind had looped over what he saw on her bedroom floor. A stack of magazines waiting to be read, a number of DC guidebooks with seamed spines and tattered Post-it flags sticking out, a diary laying half-under the bed. The magazines, the guidebooks, their underwear, her diary. The things she read, the things they wore, the things she wrote. Perhaps she didn't know that he knew about the diary, so he alerted her as gently as he could, hoping she'd catch the hint and walk back her answer. She had clarified the photographs -- she could clarify this too. But she met his gaze with a cool flicker. He had no idea what baffled him more: how she couldn't separate their personal connection from what had to happen professionally; how she could be so cold; how she could lie; why she lied. He had waited for her in the rain, tellng himself she had made a mistake. Protested the invasion of her privacy. Displaced some anger. It wasn't anything he had done, but because he was a good guy, he was still going to do damage control. 18 USC 1.0.0.1: lying to Congress. Ten thousand dollars and not more than five years in prison. 18 USC 1.5.0.5, obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees. Not more than five years. 2 USC 192 -- contempt of Congress. A thousand dollars, imprisonment in a common jail for not more than twelve months. He somehow doubted she would sympathize with his dilemma: if she lied about a diary, what else in her testimony was false? How could he do his job if he let a witness lie? It wasn't about her -- it was about something much bigger. Their exchange on the stairs still bothered him, because the gently amused, smiling woman who had taken him to bed was completely gone. Donna had been angry and remote. And maybe he shouldn't have appealed to her like he did -- "it's me and you" -- because it really wasn't the two of them, it was the two of them caught in the wake of giants. Maybe that's what set her off. Whatever it was, she rejected everything about him. He's still not sure if mistake number five was in trying to be a good guy and help Donna, or in deciding that a lie only two people knew about was worth trying to reconcile at all. When she went inside, he thought about the jerky, failed strokes that presaged an all-out disaster on the water. Catch and drive, but no room for recovery. * * * He reaches the end of the point and begins running back toward work. He has the day's testimony to look forward to reviewing, poking holes and trying to justify another round of subpoenas and questioning. This testimony should be fun -- it's all senior staff level. They've worked their way through the assistants, through the deputies shoved in pigeonhole offices and obscure three-letter agencies, and now, they're on the big guys. So long as he lives, he'll always remember how it felt to sit across from Joshua Lyman, Deputy Chief of Staff for the President of the United States, and give the other man his best boy-next-door grin. * * * Lyman hadn't been amused, but he hadn't expected him to. Lyman hadn't been amused when he called earlier, nor was he amused when he handed over the diary, nor was he amused an hour later. He had wondered why a seasoned pol like Josh Lyman would go out of his way to broker the kind of deal he did for Donna and her lie. He had his answer in the first conversation. "If I read any of this in the newspaper, or anything happens I don't like, I've got the entries for October 4th and 5th." "What's October 4th and 5th?" he had asked. The days ran together for him, always had. Something in Lyman's face had shifted and grown predatory. "You." "That's fair," he responded, proud of his finish. He wanted to look over at Donna, but the faint fluttering of her hair out of the corner of his eye told him she wasn't looking at either man. He didn't read the entries for October 4 and 5. He read in gulps, skimming for phrases like "the President," or "the deal." He learned to skip around accounts of first dates, found himself almost smiling when he got sucked in to Donna's accounts of life as a newcomer in DC, blew twenty minutes reading about working for someone in the throes of PTSD. Nothing about the President in there, and nothing about anyone else he couldn't corroborate elsewhere. Once he got to October, he shut the book and thought that the real pisser in this situation was that he liked Donna more now that he knew more about her, but the way he had found it out guaranteed she liked him less. He still had no idea why she lied -- whether it was because of him somehow -- but he was a little irked that he had spent an entire afternoon with his stomach in a knot over a no-consquence lie, and that he still liked her despite everything. And then, when he had handed the diary back to Lyman and caught the look on the other man's face, he realized why Lyman had gone out of his way. This was leverage. The minute something went wrong -- for him or for Donna -- Lyman would simply send the entries on to someone. Cue the end of his career. Donna lied, and he tried to help, and with one small deal, Lyman demonstrated why he would be a giant someday. For a moment, he had stood there, debating whether he should say what was on his mind: this is all part of the job, and it's a part I don't like, but I can't walk away from it in good conscience. I'm trying to do the right thing here. You people need to admit that sometimes, you make mistakes. But Lyman had a thousand-yard stare and he wasn't the person who deserved to hear it. His last mistake, he reflected, was thinking that Lyman was right when he said, "That's that." * * * As he heads back toward the locker room located in the basement of the Rayburn building, he wonders abruptly if he needs to send Jennifer out for another bottle of Tums. His stomach hasn't been the same since he left Ways and Means. This is the problem with endlessly dissecting everything, he thinks. It makes him quick on his feet, but sooner or later, he's coping with the fallout, plus interest. At least it explains why he's still thinking about a woman whose relationship with him could be charitably summed up as one error in judgement followed by many more. He's trying to figure out how he could have prevented it, or what he can do to salvage it now. Catch, drive, finish, recover. He's always been about the art of recovery -- pausing to improve on whatever finished the moment before. * * * Nobody had expected questioning Joshua Lyman to be easy. The man was known as the kneecap guy in the Bartlet administration for a reason, and he had worked the floor, so he was entirely familiar with the head games and tactics used to throw high-profle witnesses off their strides. Still, it had been kind of fun to note the slightly puzzled looks his colleagues had given him when he smiled easily at Lyman and the other man responded by staring in surprise for a moment. He could practically see the wheels turning. A little payback, he thought. The son-of-a-bitch had made him lose sleep for weeks. He had sweated over the phrasing of every question, knowing full well that one slip of the tongue could mean the end of the investigation, and his career with it. Let the guy get rattled by his grin. Besides, it's not like Lyman could see how his knees were shaking underneath the table. That, he thought, is what it's all about: the art of finishing well, even if you screwed up the drive. * * * Occasionally, he worries that of all the people he'll see as he comes slumping into the locker room, of all the people he's questioned, he'll run into Josh Lyman. With everyone else, it's easy to hold on to the conviction that all he's doing is what he's always wanted to do. He's working for a party whose ideals he mostly upholds, he's doing his best to ensure that the investigation is fair and nobody gets hurt. Except that he suspects Lyman wouldn't see it that way. The other man would give him that studying look, and he'd begin questioning his judgement in everything, and then it would really be a mess. He's got to stop running, he decides. It's making his knees hurt on cold, frosty days and it's turning him into someone who really does buy into the runner's mentality: chase or be chased. Catch -- enter a situation, with conviction and a plan. Drive -- put the best of yourself into it. Finish -- follow through, absolutely correct. Recovery -- glide on, fast and sure, before starting again. Tomorrow, he decides, is the day he begins figuring out how to put his blade back in the water.
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