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In the glimmer of glass, he dares to imagine her reflection.
Back when there wasn’t a versus, and she belonged to him, he pictured their initials pressed together like limbs at two a.m. WM: McGill would always follow, like how he moved behind her, letting his lips touch the base of her neck. Wexler to lead: into the light, into something better, together. She would push him onto his back, eager to be on top and swallow him whole.
Memories were the darkest con, stalking behind him until they made room for her too, enticing her mother’s child. She dared to ask for more when he dared to say enough, but like he decided all those years ago, she was Eurydice and he was Orpheus, trespassing into the underworld. He believed in the vows he had made, saying I do in the glint of her glacier eyes.
It was never a legal agreement for a man who skirted around the law. And it was his marriage he worried for first when she called, when she said she was no longer going to be a lawyer. How is that possible? he yelled into the chasm of his car. How can I be McGill when she was no longer Wexler? He hunted through the dashboard, searching for an old WM business card, craving to tear it up like they tore up their lives.
Now, in the shameful gaze of the blown up Statue of Liberty, he thinks it’s better that they never exchanged rings. Saul Goodman likes strippers, dollar bills hanging from his well-pressed suit. He likes the swath of his mansion (don’t think about touring the house with her and watching her turn on the shower and laughing as his grey sweatshirt got soaked). He likes putting in his earpiece and winning cases (don’t think about her pressing him into the wall of the courthouse stairwell, the victorious touch of her lips). He likes being the man that everyone told him he was (except her—she called him Jimmy with her arms around his waist, holding him close just because she could).
He calls the radio station and demands to know how far his commercials will go. Past Albuquerque? Past New Mexico? Into Nebraska?
He doesn’t know where she is. Her number burns a hole in his pocket. In his daydreams, she returns and is even brighter than he remembers. His ties look pale next to the glow of her cheeks, gasping under him, doing what they were always best at. Her smile brands his skin, and he clings onto the last time she loved him like that: right there, across from his desk and the drone of his phone, the couch groaning under the weight of their triumph.
He blinks away the fading colors and lets the monochrome set in, black and white around its edges. She would never walk through his front door and like who he has become; Saul Goodman was her invention and he sullied it with his garish touch.
When he takes out his earpiece, but so what rings in his ears, as clear as the footsteps she took to walk out of his life. He turns on the TV and her favorite movie plays—oh what would she think about him funneling his dirty money through something she cherished most? Days burn into weeks, into months, into years, and he finds himself mourning who he was. He once thought there could be nothing worse than being Jimmy McGill: poor Jimmy whose brother hated him and let his father be swindled, poor Jimmy in the desert and the scars still on his shoulders, poor Jimmy whose wife left him.
Wife.
Sometimes, when he pushes out the latest women and walks to his mailbox, he traps the air in his chest with a jilted breath. Maybe this will be the day she sends him divorce papers, a swift signature of indifference marking the death of JMM.
But it never is, and he wonders if she holds onto him like he holds onto her.
-
She does.
In the chill of her hometown, she lights a cigarette so she’ll stop craving his warmth. She doesn’t end up at the Hinky Dinky—she doesn’t end up anywhere, really. The flat earth stretches out under her feet, pushing into the horizon, but she feels trapped by her own misgivings. Days wander past, and she wakes up to a check in the mail for a million dollars with a smeared sticky note.
We won this together.
-SG
She hates that she molded him into a man with new initials, dousing her lungs with vodka like it’s gasoline. She never changed her name, but in a childish, dreamlike way, she felt like McGill was hers.
From the living room, her mother yells for her, calling her Kimmy, and each time she flinches. Too close to what she called her husband, trade a K for a J, and suddenly the two of them are back in their bed, whispering sins like they’re secrets, and holding onto their marriage as if it was a determined eternity.
Time passes by in unrelenting cruelty, and she turns on the TV to hear the ringing words of Albuquerque, cartel, DEA. Shock overtakes her, as violent and shattering as the day she left their apartment, staggering in its upheaval. She’s not sure how she walks, how she turns on her car, how she makes it there, SAUL GOODMAN & ASSOCIATES standing too large and proud.
But she does, and when she looks into the empty office, all she sees is her reflection.
-
He pushes the Gene name-tag into his shirt and it pricks his skin like the Zafiro Añejo bottle topper. The pain is almost a relief—he’s still here, alive, breathing somehow. Cinnamon gets caught on his skin, and he’s hit by a memory he thought disappeared: when he made her coffee because her arm was broken, so he put some cinnamon into her drink to see if it would make her smile.
He nearly doubles over when he realizes their 6th year anniversary is in a few days—they didn’t even make it to their first one. Now, he thinks he only deserves to be Saul; at least Saul was free, wrapped up in colorful armor and strangers in his bed. Tragic but rich, hollow but afloat, a haunting version of the American dream.
The grey in his life is vast and sweeping, sinking into his dreams and clouding his eyes. Couples in line hold hands without uncertainty, rings flashing in unknown mockery. Women blur in front of his eyes: too tall, too short, too quiet, too loud. They aren’t like that photo he hides away in a shoebox. The only person who never wanted to change him.
It’s the day before Valentine’s Day that the color of yellow sinks into his vision. He snaps his eyes shut, thinking his brain is playing tricks on him. Slowly, daringly, he opens his eyes, and the world seeps in.
The blonde in her hair, the blue in her eyes, the sharp black of her shirt.
She rebuilds him in a word.
“Jimmy.”