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A mostly barren room, a bright white glare through the small window. When Saul had come to New Mexico, what had he expected? A John Wayne set? Turns out all those old westerns were filmed in Utah. Still, through the thick panes of the vacuum-repair-shop-cum-halfway-disappearance-house he can see the mountains on the edge of town, the big bright blue of the sky. He wants to focus on it, to let it glow on his face, to soak up as much as he can before the crew ships him somewhere dark and cold. Everywhere will be dark and cold after Albuquerque, but to be fair the room itself feels pretty dark and cold with Walter White having just told Ed that Saul will be going with him to wherever he’s going.
Instinctively, Saul objects. “No, I don’t think so. No.”
“I can use him,” Walt says, like this explains everything. To be fair, it does. That’s what Walt does, after all.
Ed, impossibly average, as unmoved by the threat of violence as Mike ever was, all these old guys who went to the same School of Violence, looks the situation up and down and determines its not his problem. “I’ll give you two a minute.”
When the door of the safe-room is closed again, Saul starts trying to speak, to ask what the fuck? What kind of shit-for-brains plan is him going with Walt to wherever? Saul is, as he verbalizes it, a civilian. The word sounds strange in his mouth, and he starts to repeat it, knowing that it conjures the image of a child on a charity poster.
But Walt is undeterred, steps to him with that low-shoulder, hawk-eyed menace. “Do you remember what I told you?” And then Saul is against the wall and then --
There’s a small solace in knowing that this will be, is, actually, the last time Walt threatens him but it isn’t the first time Walt has threatened him and, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re both going to god-only-knows-where next, it probably wouldn’t even really be the last. Christ, the first thing Walt decided to do to him, other than lie which Saul respects or at least respected, was stage a kidnapping. Not that Walt could have killed him then. Now? Well. Do they have to talk about it? Not that they could, even if for some reason they wanted to, to have some kind of heart-to-heart about the cold body of a child, because Walt’s got one hand on Saul’s throat. Tends to end discussion, that move. Not a lot of opportunity for chit-chat without the use of a windpipe.
He had suspected it would come to this. It could have come to this before, weeks before, when Walt menaced him in his own office against the backdrop of the Constitution. The Constitution, for Christ’s sake! Plenty of men like Walt, middle-aged conservatives with a violent streak who thought it set them apart instead of making them painfully common, had been cowed into submission by the wallpaper. But not Walt, determined, always, to be exceptional which again, Saul wanted to respect but now, gasping, found repulsive.
The Venn diagram of “being a good lawyer” and “being a good criminal” is just a circle. The skills are essentially the same and the biggest ones are these: can you remember, can you make a connection? Can you remember just weeks ago when your most problematic client pinned you in your office with the unspoken threat of violence, telling you it’s not over until he says? Can you make a connection to his previous actions, find the precedent for a case like this? Could you find the precedent of that relationship in a mental case called The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing v Goodman (a.k.a. McGill)? And can you use that recollection effectively, leverage it into a connection? But there’s some danger in that, as well. Can you take your head out of the clouds of memory for just a moment? If crime is a body, money its blood, violence a shadow that follows it around town, then its heart is a series of strings, ties that connect one to one. Saul’s brain fires off frantic synapse after frantic synapse. Where are the connections he can draw here?
Well, to himself, mostly. He has his hands, both hands, on Walt’s wrist and tries to pry himself free and it’s impossible not to consider them as a divergent path. Kim had once, when Saul was not yet a lawyer, not yet Saul, loaned him a book on multiverse theory -- the result of a long-running joke about lost mail. Oh, it got delivered, just not in this universe . Not that Jimmy lost mail often. Other guys, sure, not Jimmy. He was a good guy, an honest, hard-working younger brother. But there was a specter, a doppelganger, a blurry figure in the corner of his eye. There was a collapsing series of worlds that he had discovered in his youth that hinted they would find him, that eventually they would catch up to him. Did he see himself in those off-color suits as a child, these colors like a warning? Hey, it’s me, your legal counsel the goddam poisonous Amazonian dart frog. Those frogs are endangered. At the moment, Saul is also endangered. Imperiled, actually, is the more precise term, since he’s a human being. Some nightmare edition of himself lurked at every corner.
A series of bright stars is bursting before his eyes as Walt leans in, their forearms pressed together, the bright light through the window illuminating half his face. Shit. Shit, is he going to die here? Saul considers this possibility, wonders what’s going to happen when Kim Wexler of Santa Fe gets that notification, some fresh-faced clerk giving her a call and then having to endure the outrage that follows because Kim Wexler of Santa Fe doesn’t know she’s still listed as Saul’s emergency contact because she hasn’t talked to Saul in years. Sometimes he wonders if she ever sees his ads but he tries not to kid himself, she doesn’t watch TV at 2 AM. Which reminds him, he’s going to have to get Franchesca to shut the business down. How’s he going to do that once he’s dead? Fuck. No way to fast talk his way out of that one.
Walt’s face is close now, too close, too intimate. As a child, Saul had missed or suppressed most of the lessons on morality from St. Anthony’s, the top-rated Catholic primary school in the neighborhood that his parents were so proud to send their boys to, but he hadn’t missed the angels. Angels that appeared, like those fantastic visions of another world, another self, in moments of great need. Walt, now, is made almost angelic. A force beyond him, bright with the New Mexico sun. New Mexico was practically founded by Catholics, after all. New Mexico, where the sun was as gold as any of the cathedrals. A good place to die, surrounded by all that glistening.
And then Walt starts coughing. It sounds like hell. Like someone dragging a bag of glass over wet gravel, sharp and bloody. It sounds painful. He lets go of Saul and Saul can breathe again, can shake himself free of whatever the fuck all that was. Christ, near-death experiences are a kick, huh? He can’t say he’s looking forward to another. All he can say, with some relief, on his way to the door to find Ed, is, “It’s over.”
Out in the open, on the way to a nondescript Ford truck, he takes a moment to catch his breath. There’s the world, in all its beauty, waiting to be cracked open. There’s the Sandias, there are the bright white clouds in the impossibly blue sky, there’s the skyline of the city stretched out towards the desert. There’s so much in this place he would never have come on his own that he now desperately wishes he didn’t have to leave alone. He opens the passenger side door and climbs inside. In the corner of his eye, he can see a shadow in the window of the room he just escaped. He decides to believe it’s Walt. That the threats will always lie outside, despite the evidence.