He scoots closer and pulls himself up to sit. Gripping the knob with both hands, he rattles the door, praying for this to be a dream. He looks around. The window. He drops to his belly once more and makes his way back across the room. It’s all going to be fine. He’ll open the curtains, and Sidney Pigeon will be there at the end of the driveway like she always is, with that prizewinning cocker spaniel. She’ll come unlock the door, and Sam will say hello and elbow-walk right past her, out the door, over the bridge and straight to the bakery, where the nice old woman who works mornings will give him two Tylenol for his headache and let him use her phone to call Annie.
He reaches the window and catches his breath before hoisting himself back into a seated position and pulling open the curtain. He freezes. The window is boarded over with a sheet of plywood, nailed into the wall on either side of the window, letting in not an ounce of light.
I’m locked in a room with two broken legs. And then it hits him. Misery.
The memory is clear. The front porch, the leaves turning gold. Albert came out and asked what he was reading. Sam showed him the cover. It’s totally deranged.
His skin prickles with heat, and he’s quite sure he’s going to throw up, but then something else happens. He starts laughing. A giggle at first, and then the dam breaks and he’s laughing so hard he can’t breathe. Textbook defense mechanism: using laughter as a way to ward off overwhelming anxiety. Of course the whole thing is made even more absurd by that bright yellow smiley-face rug staring at him from the corner of the room.
“Oh yeah, rug?” he says through the laughter. “You think this is funny?” He’s still laughing as the panic rises further, the gravity of the situation dawning on him. He stops laughing and cocks his head. He could have sworn he heard the sound of a car engine, but it’s quiet. He must have been imagining it. But wait, no, there it is: a car door slamming. Someone is here.
Thank god. He was right. It is all going to be fine. Albert’s not some crazy, obsessed woman. In fact, at this very moment he’s outside, in the driveway, meeting the ambulance that has taken inexplicably long to arrive. He’ll show the paramedics the way to this room, offering a perfectly good explanation for why the door is locked and there’s plywood covering the window. Annie is probably here, too, yelling at everyone to hurry up, insisting on being the first one inside. They’ll all think it’s sweet, but the truth is, she’s got some things she needs to get off her chest. Four days, and you couldn’t find a phone to call me? Really, dickbrain?
He waits for the sound of footsteps in the hall, but instead he hears the unmistakable slam of his office door. That fucking door, he thinks, the one that Albert kept promising he’d fix, interrupting his sessions every time someone came or went. Sam’s head is pounding, and he’s doing his best to make sense of why (1) the paramedics are going to his office, when clearly he’s here, in a bedroom upstairs, and (2) how they got in when he has the only key, when the strangest thing happens.
The happy-face rug starts talking to him.
“Do I call you Doctor?” the rug asks. It has a man’s voice.
“What?” Sam says.
“Is it Dr. Keyworth?” the rug says.
The voice is familiar. “No,” Sam replies. “It’s Dr. Statler.” The thought occurs to him that maybe he didn’t survive the car accident. Maybe, in fact, he’s dead and discovering that the afterlife looks exactly like that time he did magic mushrooms in Joey Amblin’s backyard the summer of 1999.
“What happened to your hand?” the rug asks.
Sam holds up his hand.
“I cut it putting down a glass.” Those words didn’t come from Sam, and he’s losing track of who’s talking, distracted by the strange familiarity of the rug’s voice. And not only that, but in the pauses in the conversation, Sam makes out what he’s pretty sure is the sound of someone eating popcorn.
“Who are you?” Sam whispers to the rug, inching closer.
“Dr. Keyworth, I’m the deputy White House chief of staff,” the rug says.
“What?” Sam’s confused. The voice. Where does he know that voice?
“I oversee eleven hundred White House employees,” the rug says. “I answer directly to Leo McGarry and the president of the United States. Do you think you’re talking to the paperboy?”
“The paperboy?” Sam asks the smiley face, lifting the rug and holding it at eye level. Something metal glints on the floor. A vent. He places his ear to it, just in time to catch the unmistakable whoop of Albert Bitterman’s laughter, followed by the sweeping opening notes of the best theme song in television history.
The West Wing.