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It’s a plane. He gets to it like this: he drives to the airport. Buys a ticket on the next flight to Sacramento. Waits. Boards. Sits.
The flight attendant walks down the aisle, cart in tow.
She stops by him. Moments later, a mixed drink is in his hands, the iciness of the glass bringing the world back into focus. He isn’t seated in a smoking section this time around, like he has been with Bill. Like he had. He doesn’t know if Bill will ever want to work with him again. He doesn’t know if he’ll get the chance to.
He takes his tie off, loosens his collar. Pauses. Undoes the top two buttons, and breathes.
At times, Holden observes life from five steps back, waiting for something unfamiliar to happen, a chain reaction that he’s seen before but been unable to categorise. Dissects the sequence of events, looks at its anatomy, works out what it is. Fits it into his personal algorithm. The plane was too busy for this, the cacophony of signals coalescing to become noise.
It gives him a strange kind of focus, makes him turn in on himself, revisit the past. The cop back in the Jury Room, he’d said something that stood out. That ‘losers’ wanted the uniform and the power that came with it. Holden had kept that statement in mind when meeting Kemper, and it had stayed there ever since, like an image burned into a television left on too long.
But patterns don't apply to Holden. Holden applies the patterns, to the world and to himself, controlling as many aspects as is feasible to, reducing the amount of unknowns. Right now, there are far too many. There wasn't a comprehensible set of outcomes for this situation. No certainties.
The tie lying on the adjacent seat doesn't help, and his mind calls to him to put it back on, to resume normalcy. Holden sips his drink instead. Bourbon and coke. Familiar. Wearing the suit every day made it a known quantity, made so much else predictable. He knew what people would say to him when he met them for the first time, when he knew them slightly better and wore it when they didn’t expect him to. If he wore something else?
No.
That was never an option.
He’s near the end of his drink now. The plane tilts rightwards, and all the lights of Sacramento are visible from its window as it maneuvers back to earth.
Holden isn't sure how he’d intended to reach Kemper within the day, even with time zone differences. It’s obvious visiting hours are over. He checks into a hotel, his urge to speak to Kemper scratching at him more and more as the night sets in.
He notices that the room is familiar, then that the hotel is the same one he’d gone to with Bill. He's falling into old patterns, old habits. This room, however, is a single: similarly decorated to the rest of the building, but smaller, without the space for a second person. Everything, he notices, has suddenly become ‘without Bill’ or ‘without Debbie’. They’ve become part of his predictions, skewed them. He’s had experiences with both he’d never had without them.
He wonders how that’s going to work later.
He’s spoken to Kemper without Bill before. Somehow that psycho was the sole constant in this fucked-up mess, the last signal in a world swiftly descending into a sea of noise.
Holden wonders how fucked-up that makes him.
Eventually, he falls asleep, suit on, on top of the covers.
He rents a car the next morning and drives to the hospital, painfully aware of his outward appearance but not finding the wherewithal to care. His last recollection of his tie is taking it off on the plane. Instead of stopping to get a new one, fix his appearance a bit, maybe, he heads straight to Kemper.
The man he’d been paid to make sense of, he realises, is the last thing he can.
Reality presents itself differently, and with that, everything is out. The focus he’s placed on Kemper gives way to panic, and he thinks, up until the moment he cries, that he’s concealing it well. Kemper asks him why he’s here. Why he visited, after months of nothing.
He doesn’t know. He says as much. Kemper reaches out and strangles beheads hugs chokes him and his body takes over and he’s dying and running and collapsing and a nurse is there. And it’s all he can say to her. The truth of the moment, which she denies.
You’re not dying. You’re in a hospital.
After that, there is nothing left to grasp.