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They’d never really said “I love you”; they’d never really needed to.
Before, it was all about maintaining the boundaries. They were friends with benefits, nothing else. There wasn’t any room to get attached; Kim couldn’t risk her job like that.
No matter that Jimmy had already decided months, maybe years ago, that she would be the love of his life.
Then things were real. At that point, “I love you” was shared in gestures and movements, small moments where the sun shone brighter and nothing was wrong in the world.
“I love you” was breakfast waiting on the stove. “I love you” was classic movie night. “I love you” was a tequila stopper.
“I love you” was Kim’s laugh. “I love you” was Jimmy’s crow’s feet when he smiled.
They didn’t need “I love you” because they knew “I love you”. They read it in the palms of each other’s hands and the winding paths of their scars, and similar but different bottles, lined up next to each other in a medicine cabinet.
They were “I love you”.
He said it because he needed something. Some last-ditch effort to remind her that at the end of the day, that’s what they had; love.
It wasn’t that she didn’t love him;
It was that love just wasn’t enough.
Love could not fix the damage. He knew it, she knew it. But he wanted her to stay anyway. He wanted, so much, to be selfish. To beg. To grovel.
She will leave. He cannot stop her. He loves her. She loves him. Those are the facts. The unchanging, unwavering facts; and there’s nothing either of them can do about it.
He wants to be angry. He wants to dig up Howard’s corpse, wherever it is, and yell at it. Why he had to ruin everything. Find Lalo, that son of a bitch, and punch him in the teeth.
Not that he’d survive that encounter, but it’s not like he cared a whole lot about living at the moment anyway.
He wants to be angry, but he can’t, because the only people he has to express anger towards are a dead man and a man that will make him dead if he tries, so he settles for sad.
He can do sad. He sinks into it like quicksand; slowly, and then all at once.
Sad drags him down into a sleep-like state, floating in and out of consciousness.
The sound of the door opening wakes him fully. He pretends he didn’t hear it. If he pretends then maybe she’ll do something she would dare do if he were awake.
Like kiss him, maybe. Like leave.
Like both.
And isn’t that just the fucking worst?
The door opens, then closes, and it’s quiet. So, so quiet.
He wonders if this is how Chuck felt when he decided to set himself on fire.
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C’est la vie; that is life, the French way. C’est la vie comes to him in shades of white.
White Cadillac, white pills, white powder.
White walls that hold white paper, white paper that makes him white checks, that buy him white suits and more white walls to live in and the white heat of an orgasm made with the help of a paid actor.
The white ceiling he stares at when he can’t sleep.
That is life; C’est la vie.
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Eventually, Jimmy McGill gets tired of being sad. It eats away at him until there’s nothing left; from the bones and viscera rises Saul Goodman.
Saul Goodman is a lot of things.
He is the ‘last line of defense for the little guy’, the criminal lawyer;
the kind of guy guilty people hire.
Takes one to know one and all that.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Sometimes he dreams about being in the desert. The sun beating down on his face, roasting him alive.
Mike by his side;
“That’s it. Money?”
“What else?”
“Nothin’ you’d change?”
Change. Hah.
“Always the same! Ever since he was nine!”
C’est la vie.
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It’s not hard to die when you’ve got nothing to live for.
But he wakes up to his alarm the next day, same as always.
Life comes to him in shades of white.
He thought death would, too.
He doesn’t know what color death is, but he isn’t afraid to find out.
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Death is brown. A hole dug in dark, sandy dirt. Concealed under the inky expanse of arid desert nights.
When he feels the coolness of the barrel press against the back of his head, he knows he doesn’t want it. Not like this, anyway.
Near death is green. The muted, dirty green of a dollar bill. A handshake. A business proposition that isn’t really much of a proposition at all.
Hands up, surrender.
C’est la vie.
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It’s easy to fall into, the business. Drunk on power, money. Dollar bills fill every hole and crevasse.
Almost.
But they can help you get as close as possible to the real thing. You just have to set aside a little dignity first.
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“No. I’m not doing this for you.”
Mike is tough nut to crack, but Saul will find his weak spot. He adds another thousand to the pile.
“An extra thousand for your troubles. C’mon, man! You’re killin’ me here!”
Mike turns away, sighs. He’s breaking him down. He knows it.
“Look. Your wife skipped town. You got divorced. That hurts; I get it. But she left for a reason, Saul. Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, leave her be. For her sake and yours.”
Not the answer he was looking for. But maybe the only one he’ll get before Mike just decides to walk.
“Fine. Don’t give me an address. Just find her. Let me know she’s doing alright. Please? That’s all, I promise. You can even keep the money, I don’t care.”
“Fine. No address. Don’t ask again.” Mike empties the stacks into a bag and turns to the door, shutting it firmly.
Saul throws his hands up. “Good talk!” he says to the empty room.
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A week later, Mike comes back.
“She’s fine. Has a job, sharing a house with some guy. Hair’s brown now. Some bangs, too.”
Saul grimaces. Brown? Bangs? Ugh. Kim, what have you done to yourself?
“Some guy? They together?”
Not like he cares or anything.
“Maybe. Didn’t stick around for that part.”
“Is she happy?”
“As happy as someone can be, given the circumstances.”
He knows what that really means is not at all.
“But she’s ok?”
“Yeah, Saul. She’s ok.”
Mike’s halfway out the door when he pauses,
“Palm Coast Sprinkler.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Where she works. Palm Coast Sprinkler. Titusville, Florida.”
“I--thank you.”
“Yeah.”
Left to his empty office, Saul opens a new tab. He hesitates. It would be so easy.
“She left for a reason.”
He closes it.
C’est la mort.
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He dreams for the first time in a long, long time. Of course it’s a nightmare.
There are no guns pressed to his back, no wire cutters poised on his fingers, no blood in his carpet.
It’s so much worse.
He wakes up to his alarm, just like always. But something is…different. Off. Wrong.
It’s only once he enters the bathroom that he sees it. The added weight, he should’ve known.
He reaches for his scars, only to find that there are none. In their place, fleshy mounds of skin. He panics, frantically searching for his phone while releasing a slew of expletives. In those words lie his next mode of distress; his voice is high and feminine, with a softer quality he hasn’t heard in decades.
His episode comes to a halt when he sees a drop of crimson mar his marble floor. A silent horror washes over him as his body falls apart before his very eyes.
He wrenches open the door of his medicine cabinet, only to find it empty.
Curling in on himself on that bathroom floor, he dissolves into a pool of sobs.
And then he wakes up.
He frantically pats his chest; flat, as it should be. His voice has the same, gravelly tone it always has. No blood on his tile; a fully stocked medicine cabinet.
It’s all in my head. But what does that make everything else?
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Nobody knows about it.
Nobody but her.
And Chuck. Bless him, for in all his righteousness, he’d never taken issue with it. Paid for it, even. Embraced him as a brother just like any brother would.
But Kim, she understood. She understood Jimmy in a way that no one else did, and no one else ever would. They were twin flames, or something. He thinks that’s the word. Something about the same souls or whatever. They were mirror images; they shared scars in the same places for different reasons, prescriptions which acted similarly but differently, small actions which defined understanding in more than words. Contained within needles and bandaids and small blue pills dissolved under tongues. Lives that knew each other before they did. They moved tangentially, away from different things and towards different things, but ultimately towards each other.
Somewhere, someone said that people used to have two heads, four arms, four legs, all that jazz. Then the gods decided to split them up; a head, two arms, two legs. That they would always search for that other missing piece. Doomed to spend their whole lives looking for something they may never find.
What would that pain feel like, to be split from yourself?
Jimmy knows, now.
It’s a chest wound: one that never heals, never scabs, never slows its bleeding. That itches and festers, burns with infection until the sepsis kills.
Kim always saw through him, like he saw through her. Like they were each made of glass, but only for each other. They always saw, observed, knew.
But that final night, she reached through him, into him, and closed her fist around his heart;
Her heart, really; had been since that first, shining moment in the mailroom.
And pulled. Yanked it out of his chest, carrying it with her out the door and down the stairs.
He saw it again, only once: when she came to sign the divorce papers. Clear as the day she left, his heart in her hands. Beating, steady and strong. Hands covered in a blood only they could see.
Whose, no one knows.
And she took it with her, away from that office, away from Albuquerque, across state lines to land in a bland little town called Titusville, Florida. Cradled it in her bloody hands, blood pumping out in great, red spurts, coating every place he’d ever touched her, and all the places he didn’t and never will.
If he has hers, he’ll never know.
C’est la cœur;
Ce n’est pas son cœur.
C’est la mort.
C’est la mort,
c’est la mort,
c’est la mort.
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The death of Saul Goodman comes in a camera flash; blotted out of existence by red tape and the odious march of bureaucracy.
Gene Takavic is a certified nobody; the kind of man nobody looks twice at, the stock character of a TV show. He has no discernable personality, nothing of note or interest. He is a hollow husk of a human being. Or at least that’s how Jimmy feels, living in his skin.
Life comes in values; blacks and whites and all the greys in between. There is no green money, there is no brown dirt, no bright red blood.
No little blue pills.
There is nothing to being Gene; just a slow, steady rot.
Sepsis.
An untreatable wound.
Dead in seven days.
Maybe Chuck had the right idea. Not like he has much to live for anymore, anyway.
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Miles from anywhere important, he stands in front of a payphone. His index finger hovers over the keypad, poised to dial a number he said he’d never call.
Well, not exactly.
He did call, once. Drunk and desperate and unable to comprehend a life without her.
The night that death was white.
Now, though, he’s terminal. Truly poised on the cusp of death.
How do you heal a wound that will never close?
You try your best.
“Come find me. I love you.”
C’est la…
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Vie.
Life is a barrage of color. The green, empty expanse of the plains. The delicate pinks and loud purples of the spring flowers. The ripe redness of a home-grown strawberry. A creamsicle orange front door.
Little blue pills.
In that little house in the middle of nowhere, they found each other. They made that house a home, and in their shared kitchen sink he took her hands in his and washed the blood from her hands, and hers from his. His chest wound was no longer; replaced with a shiny, pink scar. A scar they shared.
What does it feel like to be reunited with yourself?
C’est la…
Mort?
In life, we find death. And in death, life again.
Vie.
C’est la vie,
C’est la vie,
C’est la vie.