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October 2008
The dinosaur with pointy teeth is looking down into the swirl of water, and Jesse’s about six inches from the screen, entranced. He’s seen this episode a million times but it never gets less awesome. Behind him, Combo and Skinny Pete are having a loud argument about who the fuck knows what.
“Yo, Jesse, settle this,” Combo says, throwing a Funyun at Jesse’s head to get his attention. Jesse doesn’t look away from the screen. “It’s gay as shit, right?"
“Not if it’s with a girl, bro!” Skinny sounds like he’s actually getting upset. “It’s not gay if it’s a chick doing it.”
“For real? You’d seriously be cool with a chick, like, getting behind you and—”
“Shut up a second,” says Jesse, still watching the dinosaur fishing around in the ocean. “This is the best part.”
His boys go quiet and Jesse can just make out the end of the British narrator dude going, “…on his unwary victim, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.” He bounces his leg in anticipation of what he knows happens next.
FWOOM! A giant fucking sea monster leaps out of the ocean and bites the shit out of the land dino. Combo screams and flings the bowl of Funyuns into the air. They go flying. Jesse’s laughing his ass off. He turns to Skinny for a reaction.
“Yooooooo!” Skinny Pete’s eyes are like Frisbees and he’s definitely forgotten he’s still holding the pipe. “I thought the dude on the land was the predator, but he was, like, the predatee! That shit’s tight.”
Jesse dumps the bag of Jolly Ranchers on the ground, fishing through them until he finds a grape one. “I told you, Discovery Channel’s sick as hell.” He adds the empty wrapper to the growing pile and flops onto his back. “Pass that shit.”
Skinny does, giving Jesse a sheepish look as he realizes he’s been bogarting the pipe this whole time. “Oh, sorry, I just got way into the dinos and all. And yo…you said you made this?”
Jesse nods, exhaling his hit around his mouthful of Jolly Rancher. He passes to Combo, who’s doing his best to clean up the mess but still has a lost Funyun in his hoodie. “Yeah,” he says. “Me and…just me.”
Combo laughs. “Right on, Jesse, my man! Who needs Emilio?”
The mention of Emilio harshes Jesse’s buzz for a moment. But then Pete adds, “Yeah, bitch! Best batch ever!”, and Jesse can’t even pretend to hide the dumbass grin that breaks out on his face. It feels amazing to be good at something, finally. The thing with Emilio was the most messed up shit he’s ever seen, but it’s over now. He’s with his boys, smoking the best batch he’s ever made and watching dinosaurs fuck each other up. It’s a good day.
January 2009
It’s 4am, again, and Jesse can’t sleep, again. Gave up trying to hours ago, if he’s honest. Maybe he wasn’t honest when he went to bed, telling himself that he didn’t need weed, that Jane’s gentle breathing next to him could quiet his frantic inner monologue. But that was 1am Jesse, and 4am Jesse’s been staring at the ceiling long enough to know that 1am Jesse was full of shit. So he rolls onto his side, Jane quietly hmming in her sleep as his movement dislodges her arm from his waist, and pads out into the living room.
He keeps the TV volume low, which is kind of a waste of the Dolby six point whatever, but he figures that just because he can’t sleep doesn’t give him the right to wake Jane up too. It’s some kind of science show, they keep showing those big windmill things, Jesse can’t remember what they’re called. Mr. White would probably know. Would have known? Because it’s been weeks since Jesse left Mr. White at the airport after he promised Jesse that he’d hear from the guy, and since then, nothing. Every time his burner phone rings and it’s just Combo or Skinny Pete, his heart sinks a little more. Because Mr. White promised, so if Jesse hasn’t heard from him then there must not be a him to hear from anymore, and that fucks him up more than he thought it would. Like, Mr. White is an annoying old prick, but he’s Jesse’s annoying old prick, and without him around—
God dammit, he’s doing it again. Stop thinking about it, asshole, Jesse tells himself. He tries to pay attention to the TV. Some old dude in a garage is pointing at a diagram and talking about fossil fuels. He makes them sound like a bad thing, which makes like no sense because fossils are totally badass. Maybe it would make more sense after a fat bong rip, or at least it would be more fun, but with Jane down the hall there’s no way Jesse is lighting up. So he’s just gotta sit here, staring at the screen, fucking raw dogging reality.
Now the old dude from the garage is, like, in the middle of the desert testing this giant spinning machine? This is some shit Mr. White probably would have been into, but Jesse has no idea what the fuck is going on. Kind of stupid of Mr. White to trust Jesse with getting his money to his family when Jesse can’t even follow a TV show about windmills or whatever. He’s going to do it, of course, he made a promise and that’s sacred, but he has no idea how. Like, check the obits every day until he finds the one he’s looking for, wait a few weeks for the family to grieve and all, and then…what? Drop a bag of money down the chimney like he’s goddamn Santa Claus? Pile it at their front door and ding dong ditch? He can’t just talk to Mrs. White, she hates him and honestly he’s kind of scared of her, but how does he know they’ll even keep the money if they don’t know Mr. White wanted them to have it? He buries his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes hard. It’s so complicated. It’s so much.
“My snoring’s that bad, huh?”
Jesse startles, looks up, and sees Jane leaning on the breakfast bar, smirking at him.
“Shit,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”
She shrugs, making her way over to Jesse. “I’m a light sleeper.” She drops into the empty recliner next to his. “Rough night?”
“I guess,” Jesse sighs.
Jane’s not big on words, when it comes to sincere shit, but Jesse can read the “want to talk about it?” in the way she leans her body toward him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to forget. He turns back to the TV. So does Jane.
“So…wind turbines?” she says after a while.
Jesse laughs. “Turbines!” he says. “I’ve been trying to remember that word this whole time.”
Jane takes his hand in hers. After a while, they turn the volume up on the TV.
April 2009
What the fuck is Jesse supposed to do all day?
Maybe it’s a stupid thing to wonder. Like, he’s the bad guy, obviously he should be doing bad guy shit. But he’s gotta wait for Saul to get the deal to go through, and he’s done cooking for now, so what other bad guy shit is there to do? He could sit and stroke his mustache, maybe, but first he has to grow a real mustache and that sounds like it’s gonna itch and take forever. So he’s out of bad guy shit to do, and all that’s left is normal guy shit, and what does that even mean now? He can’t call a friend, they’re all either dead or in Fresno, which is almost the same thing. He’s done using. Definitely done. But if he's not spending hours of his day getting high, what’s he supposed to do instead?
So that’s how Jesse ends up alone on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, flipping channels. There’s nothing good on, it being the middle of the afternoon and all, and without anything to enhance the experience, daytime TV is kind of…really boring.
Maybe he should get a hobby. Back in rehab he planted flowers. He kind of liked it, the smell of the soil, the grime under his nails. He thinks about maybe getting a plant, but it’s a stupid idea. Everything he touches dies anyway.
Wait. Jesse flips back a channel or two. There’s a new Mythbusters?
He used to watch this show all the time with his boys, but he’s never actually seen it sober. It’s probably not as good as he remembers, like how Seth Rogen’s actually kind of an annoying tool when Jesse’s not blazed. This is pointless. He shouldn’t be here, he should be out selling, or—
Is that a helicopter carrying a car?
Okay, yeah, Jesse’s invested now. They’re, like, trying to figure out if a car can drive faster than gravity? So they’re driving one car as fast as it can go, and they’re actually dropping the other car from the helicopter, and Jesse’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, watching it plummet and waiting to see where this goes. And suddenly--oh shit—it smashes into the ground, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and flying car parts, and when the dust clears there’s all this busted glass and metal everywhere and Jesse never knew a car could get so flat.
Turns out he doesn’t have to be high, this show still owns.
Jesse settles in on the couch. Being the bad guy can wait. He’s got normal guy shit to do.
June 2009
The partiers have all cleared out, thanks to Mike, but Jesse’s house is still covered in trash and dirty laundry and what he really, really hopes isn’t a pile of puke. He started letting the mess pile up on purpose, kind of, but now it’s overwhelming, and since Jesse’s wish for a meteor to hit him on the way to work doesn’t seem like it’s coming true, he’s gonna have to deal with his house eventually. For now, though, he’s keeping the volume on the TV up loud and his eyes fixed right at the screen so he doesn’t have to look at the graffiti and garbage.
They’re airing some murder show. Jesse didn’t even know Discovery Channel made one of those. At first it’s all forensic experts and fingerprints and shit, and that’s chill, but they keep cutting back to a photo of the dead guy, with his smiling face and his collared shirt and the biggest eyes Jesse’s ever seen. He looks nice. Innocent. Like he didn’t deserve this.
It’s not until Jesse hears the glass in the coffee table rattling that he realizes he’s bouncing his leg. He stops.
They catch the guy who did it, of course, because on this show the guy who did it always gets caught, because on this show there’s actually consequences and justice and shit. It’s the ballistics that get him caught, which is like, the bullets and casings and whatever gets left behind. The guy wasn’t careful. Maybe the guy wanted them to catch him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to stick around to see what he had done.
And now the dead guy’s mom is on the screen wiping at her eyes. “What kind of monster would do this?” she gasps out, and she can barely stop crying long enough to put a sentence together. “He killed him—monster—just this subhuman monster—”
Fuck this. Jesse changes the channel. Maybe Ice Road Truckers is on.
October 2009
Jesse double locks the door behind him and pulls all the curtains, blocking the midafternoon light, before he pulls the weed out of his jacket pocket. Then he changes his mind and peeks around the curtain, checking the block for familiar cars one more time. Still no one, thank God. Unless someone’s in his house? He freezes, listening. No noise except the blood pounding in his ears. No light except the TV, still on mute. No one’s here. He can relax.
He doesn’t relax. He pulls the bowl out of the bong and realizes it’s full of ash. Fuck it. He dumps the bowl out on the table and starts packing a fresh one, breaking down the weed with his fingers. He just needs to get this done as fast as possible so he can do as many hits as it takes to stop fucking thinking.
All Mike’s guys dead. Jesus. And in different prisons, right at the same time. It would almost be impressive if it wasn’t fucking terrifying. And if it didn’t mean that Mike—
Nope. Stop fucking thinking. Jesse takes a long pull, then yanks out the bowl and clears the chamber. His eyelids get heavier but his brain still feels like it’s vibrating. He takes another, longer pull. Better. Maybe.
On TV, people in heavy coats are wading through a stream. Some kind of survival show, but from the way these dipshits look, who knows if they’re going to survive. It’s snowy where they are, and full of trees taller and greener than Jesse’s ever seen. And then the title card pops up. Of course. It’s Alaska.
Mike was right, Jesse realizes as he takes in the wintry landscape on the screen. There’s something about Alaska. It looks quiet. Beautiful. The last frontier, Mike called it, that day on the river. Or is that space? It doesn’t matter, when even space isn’t far enough away. Because Mike is the strongest, smartest person Jesse’s ever met. So Jesse doesn’t have a chance in hell, not if Mr. White killed Mike.
He hasn’t cried. The old Jesse would have cried. Maybe he’s betraying Mike by not crying. But Jesse doesn’t have any tears, just vast, dark emptiness.
He’s not supposed to be thinking about Mike. Or about anything. He hits the bong again.
He should leave. Maybe there’s nowhere to hide, but he should at least try, should get in his car and just drive…somewhere. Alaska. Oregon. Anywhere that isn’t here. But he can’t move. He’s so tired. He just wants it to be over.
Jesse falls asleep on the couch, and dreams of evergreens and snow.
August 2010
The TV is off in Jesse’s dark, abandoned living room, covered in a layer of dust.
October 2010
He’s had nightmares every night since he got to Alaska. In the compound, he never had nightmares. He’d dream of seeing Jane or Mike or Brock and Andrea again sometimes, but mostly he just dreamed of cooking. But now that he’s somewhere safe and he’s supposed to be starting a new life and leaving that shit behind, every fucking night he’s been waking up screaming or throwing punches or grabbing for the gun he doesn’t have. And that’s almost starting to be okay, or at least something he can learn to live with. But tonight he has a new kind of nightmare, of rough hands massaging his shoulders and a voice whispering “it’s okay, it’s okay” and green eyes looking at him with what he wants so badly to believe is tenderness, and he wakes up sobbing so hard he can’t breathe.
By the time he can get some air in his lungs, he’s cried himself dehydrated, and revulsion has formed a knot in the pit of his stomach. He’s not going back to sleep, not if that dream is a possibility, so he pushes himself out of bed and crosses the one-room cabin to the wall he’s calling a kitchen.
His hands shake as he pours a glass of water. He tries to take deep breaths to calm himself, but it’s like his lungs are shaking too. He slides down the wall to a sitting position and clutches the water glass with both hands, trying to hold it steady. When he looks back up from the rippling surface of the water, he’s face to face with the black screen of the TV on the opposite wall.
He’s not even sure why he bought it. He vaguely remembers a Jesse who cared about things like blacker blacks and surround sound, but that feels like someone else. His Alaska ID says Jesse Driscoll, but Jesse isn’t him, Jesse is a hand at the small of his back as he walks in chains and dark curls framing a smiling face that will never smile again and the green eyes from his dream urging him to believe all the things he needs him to believe. He doesn’t feel like Jesse. He doesn’t feel like anyone.
He needs to get off the floor. His back is starting to ache, like it does all the time now. He peels himself off the wall and lurches to the couch, hating the unfamiliar way his body moves. He sinks down into the soft leather. And maybe it’s the muscle memory of an old routine or maybe it’s the desire to hear something louder than his thoughts, but he finds himself turning the TV on. He flips channels, not sure what he’s looking for until he finds it.
There’s a tiny baby monkey, clinging to its mother’s soft fur as they both bathe in a warm pool that sends off clouds of steam into the snowy night. The mother’s eyes are half-closed, almost serene. And he remembers now, how him and Badger and Skinny and Combo would spend hours watching everything this channel had to offer and punching each other in the arm when the good parts came on and falling asleep on the couch next to each other. It’s something from his old life, but it’s something he actually wants to remember.
He keeps watching the monkeys in the pool, and for the first time in a long time, Jesse takes a real deep breath.
October 2022
“You have wood shavings in your hair,” Mikayla tells Jesse by way of greeting, when he finally hangs up his tools for the day and makes his way into the living room. She’s sitting on the couch with her little legs tucked under her, remote in one hand, Caligula the bunny clutched in the other.
Jesse collapses next to her. “Seriously?” He runs a hand through his hair, and yep, little scraps of wood come away in his hand. He smirks at Mikayla. “So do you, kid,” he says, sprinkling them over her dark hair.
“Eww!” Mikayla shakes her head, getting wood shavings all over the couch and the floor, and shoves Jesse. “Don’t do that! My mom’s gonna kill you.”
“Probably,” Jesse agrees, then notices that the desk he built for Morgan is empty. “Hey, where is she?”
Mikayla keeps scrolling Discovery+, looking for something to watch. “She took Steve Holt for a walk.”
Steve Holt is their six-year-old husky. His name is some joke that Jesse doesn’t get at all but Morgan finds hysterically funny. Jesse doesn’t mind not getting it, he just likes to hear Morgan laugh.
“So what’d you make?” Mikayla asks, not looking away from the screen. “Snake? Bat? Octopus?”
Jesse laughs. “Octopus—that’s a good one, I’ll have to do that one. Nah, this one’s a commission. Dark walnut, thirty-seven inches, toucan.”
The custom canes had been Morgan’s idea at first. Jesse was so angry when his doctor first suggested walking with a cane on his worst back pain days, and even angrier when it fucking worked. He told Morgan he hated that his health was just one more thing they’d taken from him, and how walking around with a shitty plastic drugstore cane made him feel old and pathetic. When he was done crying about it, Morgan squeezed his hand and said, “So make one that makes you feel like a badass.” Jesse thought it was stupid at first, but later that week after he put the finishing touches on a gnarled black cane topped with a skull handle, he kind of did feel like a badass. The people in their PTSD group agreed, and a few of them offered to pay him to make animal-head canes for them, and then their friends, and then their friends’ friends. His Etsy shop is doing good enough business now that Jesse might be able to cut back his hours at the cabinet company soon.
Jesse’s lost in thought, thinking about an octopus-head cane with tentacles winding down around its entire length, when Steve Holt and Morgan crash through the door, both soaking wet.
“It’s disgusting out there,” Morgan says, wiping Steve Holt’s paws with a towel. He gives a full body shake, jingling his collar, before running off to find his water bowl.
Mikayla gives her mom the side-eye, watching her pull off her wet things. “Yeah, that’s why I said I didn’t wanna go.”
“Well, I guess that makes you smarter than me,” says Morgan, running a hand through her hat hair. Jesse scoots over to make room for her on the couch, and she studies him as she nestles into the empty space. “You were in the shop a long time. Not pushing yourself too hard?”
“Nah,” says Jesse, though he does feel a twinge low across the back of his hips. He tries to sit as much as he can while he works, but it doesn’t always help.
Morgan raises her eyebrows. She has an uncanny sense for when he’s bullshitting her. It would be irritating, except for the way she asks him, “Back rub?” but keeps her hands by her sides so Jesse knows it’s a question and not a command, and the way she doesn’t push or look hurt when he shakes his head no.
Things like that are easy with Morg. Like when they first spent the night together and Jesse uneasily started explaining how sometimes he wakes up screaming, and Morgan just nodded and said, “Me too.” And he wishes they didn’t each have their reasons, but in ways it’s a relief to have that shared language. Like Morgan said to him once, it’s up to him to decide whether to share his story, and he never has to explain anything he doesn’t want to. And once Jesse felt like it was really his choice, he realized he did want to. He’s told Morgan a lot—some names changed, some details fuzzy, but the emotions stay true and it feels good to get them out. Morgan listens and holds him close and doesn’t ask too many questions about why he’s from Wisconsin but all his really bad stories take place in the desert. He thinks about telling her the whole story someday. When he’s ready.
Morgan’s never said anything, but Jesse’s pretty sure she knows his last name hasn’t always been Driscoll.
Which doesn’t matter anymore, because when they got married last year (courthouse ceremony, ring bearer Steve Holt in a bow tie, flower girl Mikayla dressed in black at her insistence), Jesse took Morgan’s last name. There’s probably a former version of Jesse who would have called him gay for taking a chick’s last name, but it feels more like home than Driscoll ever did. Like having something to run toward instead of from.
Morgan tucks her legs up under her body the exact same way Mikayla’s sitting and rests her head on Jesse’s shoulder. Then she eyes the screen, where her daughter is still scrolling through the menu. “You still haven’t picked something to watch?”
“No,” says Mikayla. “I wanted to wait for Dad.”
Jesse’s heart leaps, and he and Morgan share a look. “Dad?” they both say at the same time.
Mikayla just shrugs, pulling Caligula the bunny closer to her chest, but Jesse can see she’s fighting back a smile. So is he.
It’s quiet for a minute, until Mikayla picks a show—something with ghosts, of course. The three of them settle into the couch, and Morgan gives Jesse a quick kiss.
“You have wood shavings in your hair,” she says, grinning. “Dad.”
“Yeah, I heard,” says Jesse, but he doesn’t mind. It’s a good day.