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fifteen days since
When Jesse can’t sleep (which is most nights, now that he’s through withdrawal and off of crystal, heroin, oxy, even weed, everything), he pads through to the living room and watches the TV with the volume on low, or sits on the back porch and listens to the crickets and the passing cars and the dogs barking in the distance. Mike knows this and still makes him get up at six every morning. His days start with a curt tap on the door and then a gravel-voiced command: Jesse? Get up. It’s a little bit like being in rehab, although they were all so nice to him in rehab, in a smooth, plasticky, paid-for way, and Mike is just Mike, this hardass old guy who gets up at six and goes to bed at ten and barely says a word in between, and that’s easier to deal with. He knows Mike isn’t going to try and lecture him about Using Symptoms or encourage him to use “I Feel” Statements. No tears here, no campfires, no workshops on Setting Positive Goals on craft paper in Crayola marker. He’s allowed to be every bit as miserable and fucked up as he is, until it starts to manifest in a way that interferes with Mike’s whole drill-sergeant daily routine, shower-dressed-coffee-breakfast-work-home-dinner-TV-bed, and then Mike will gently encourage him to pull himself the fuck together. This, too, is easier to deal with than rehab, where they would tell him the same essential thing just much more nicely, because he guesses people would complain or drop out if they were all Mike about it. Jesse, are you going to participate today? Jesse, how about we make it a goal that you get out of bed and eat breakfast today? Can you do that? And so on and so on. Like he was a child.
An awful clarity has come back to him since the drugs worked their way out of his system. He’ll catch himself feeling normal for minutes at a stretch, and then something will send images flashing up in front of him, visions of Gale or Jane or little Tomás Cantillo, and reality will assert itself again, and his hands will automatically go to his pockets, feeling for a joint, a teenth, a couple of oxys, a cigarette, anything, and of course he’ll come up empty, because when he was first dragged into Mike’s house Mike took everything he had on him (he doesn’t really remember that part, just remembers Mike’s hands rummaging through his pockets as he lay shivering on the bed, burning up from the Narcan) and has watched him like a hawk ever since. Mike won’t let him smoke in the house or on the back porch, won’t even let him have a beer, though there’s a couple of six-packs in the fridge; that irritates Jesse. He gets that, technically, having a beer would threaten whatever sobriety he’s got going here, but it wouldn’t even put the tiniest dent in what he’s feeling. Those are the rules, though, and Mike has made it clear that if he breaks the rules, he’s out on his ass. Again, it’s a bit like being in rehab, except he knows if Mike ever does throw him out there won’t be a meeting beforehand, and he won’t be told what a shame it is that he wasn’t ready to engage with the program, and he definitely won’t be told that he’s welcome to come back.
There’s not much to do around the house when they’re not working, and Jesse’s tried the going-to-bed-at-ten-o’clock thing and is convinced that it only works if you’re over sixty or have access to some hardcore downers, or the discipline of, like, a Zen monk or something, so he ends up watching a lot of TV. Late at night, when the bright lights and fixed smiles and urgency of the shopping channels have started to rub his nerves raw, he switches over to PBS, where at that hour (they seem to be scheduling for stressed out people with kids who can’t sleep or something) it’s either Bob Ross painting his happy little trees or ancient episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. “When bad things happen, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping,” Mister Rogers says, sitting there in his cardigan in his bright little room. Jesse scrunches himself up on Mike’s couch, pressing his knees to his chin, trying to make himself as small as possible, as Mister Rogers acts out scenes with puppets and says hello to the mailman and narrates a sequence on how crayons are made.
Sometimes during these nights he wonders if, had he watched more Mister Rogers as a kid, he would be less fucked up than he is now. Maybe he would have paid more attention in school and got along better with his parents. Maybe he wouldn’t have done drugs. Maybe Mr. White wouldn’t have turned up outside his house that night. Maybe Jane wouldn’t have died.
Jesse ends up watching so much The Joy of Painting in the hours between twelve and three (the guy made, like, a million episodes) that he learns the colours on Bob Ross’ palette by heart. He can’t hear alizarin crimson any more without mentally filling in and a touch, just a touch, of the phthalo blue. He comes to anticipate which brush Bob Ross will use, or what he’ll paint with it. The fan brush means fringes of little trees speckled with snow, the two-inch brush means mountains, seascapes, towering clouds, the palette knife means worn shingles on an old roof, blue-white snow scraped over the face of a rocky peak. They’re schlocky, sugary landscapes that Jane would probably have rolled her eyes at, but Jesse is fascinated by how delicate the gradients are. Just pretend you’re a whisper floating across the canvas. Can you believe you can paint something this delicate with a two-inch brush?
four hours since
Jesse’s wide awake, drenched in cold sweat, lying in Mike’s spare bedroom like an animal in a trap, and looking at him Mike feels a reflexive distaste. He’s too young and stupid to know what he came within inches of and he probably won’t understand any time soon, and yet here they are.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Mike says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “We are gonna stay right here until you’re out of withdrawal, and then we’ll talk.”
“Don’t you have to go to work?”
“I called the boss. He knows what’s happened.”
“I get it,” Jesse says balefully. His voice is slowed and thickened by the drugs and the sickness; the muscles of his neck and jaw stand out, trembling. “I don’t get a say, huh? Why don’t you go ahead and handcuff me here for good measure?”
Again, Mike doubts himself. Asks himself if the better part of him really did win over tonight. There were several good reasons for him to leave Jesse where he’d found him.
“No,” Mike says. “I’m not even going to lock the door. If you want to leave, be my guest.”
Jesse glares at him. Mike knows he could get up and walk out if he tried hard enough, but the look in his eyes says he’s not going anywhere.
Mike is halfway out the door when he turns.
“I don’t suppose this was part of your grand plan, but what you did is probably gonna make the local news,” he says. “Come morning, your parents are gonna think you’re dead. Is there anything you want to do about that?”
“I don’t give a shit,” Jesse mumbles, face buried in the pillow.
four days since
Whatever he’s coming down from, Jesse spends the worst of it in bed or bundled up in a blanket on Mike’s couch, shivering in front of inane daytime television as Mike does his crossword. Mike makes him shower as soon as he can walk and eat as soon as he can keep anything down; he doles out aspirin for the pain and makes sure Jesse drinks enough water. Jesse keeps looking at him like he doesn’t quite understand what Mike is doing. He gave him the same look when Mike told him he’d sent Saul to talk to Jesse’s parents and tell them that whatever they may have heard on the evening news (Local Man Missing After Margo Street Fire), Jesse was very much alive. Apparently the Pinkmans were deeply relieved but declined Saul’s offer to set up a meeting, which tells Mike a few things about the family that weren’t picked up in his background check.
On the fourth day, Jesse wakes without having to be woken; he appears in the kitchen doorway at twenty past six, yawning and rubbing his eyes. He looks like he doesn’t quite feel allowed to cross the threshold until Mike pulls out a chair for him. They eat breakfast in silence. Jesse sips coffee and picks at triangles of toast while Mike reads the paper.
“How are you feeling?” Mike asks, when he’s nearly finished eating.
Jesse looks up, bites his lip, swallows. “Like shit,” he says, flatly. “But, uh… you know. Not coming down any more, so.”
“Good,” Mike says. “I’ve got work to do today. Are you up to coming with me?”
“What kind of work?”
“Driving around. Making collections.”
“Collections,” Jesse says. “What, like… shaking people down?”
Mike raises an eyebrow. “Picking up dead drops.”
“Oh.” Jesse shifts in his seat. “What do you want me for?”
“I’d rather not leave you here on your own.”
Jesse’s look turns sharp, suspicious, and Mike gets the sense he’s looking at someone else; it’s like Jesse drops years in age before his eyes. It’s the most life he’s shown in days.
“So you don’t lock the door on me, but you don’t trust me alone in your house.”
“That’s not what I said,” Mike says. “I do not think you would benefit from being left alone. So, are you well enough to sit in a car all day, or not?”
Mike’s job turns out to be boring as shit. He drives out of the fringes of the city to some place in the middle of nowhere and retrieves a package from its hiding place, and then they get back in the car and repeat. Jesse has nothing to do but stare at the scenery. Out in the desert even the living plants look dead; occasionally there’ll be a twisted old fence to look at, or a rusty outbuilding, or an actual road to drive down instead of tire tracks in dirt, and that’s as interesting as it gets. The highlight of the day is getting to smoke three whole cigarettes outside a bodega while Mike pays for gas and talks to the owner.
Jesse wishes Mike would talk, because with no conversation and no music he can do nothing but replay his own thoughts over and over, but he doesn’t feel like Mike could have anything good to say to him. He killed Gale; if it hadn’t been for Mr. White, Gus and Mike would have put a bullet in his head weeks ago, and if it hadn’t been for him, they would have done the same to Mr. White. Talk about Kafkaesque.
nine days since
Mike watches these old movies after dinner, and Jesse doesn’t have anything better to do. He tries not to fidget too much in Mike’s line of sight, but it’s impossible. After sitting in a car for six hours he brims with useless energy.
“Do you need something?”
“Uh. No. I was just…” Jesse trails off. “Could I maybe borrow a pen? Some paper?”
To start with, he’s just moving his hand across the page, moving the tip of the pen in a jagged barbed-wire mess, smudging the ink. He sketches loose circles, then honeycombs. He divides part of the page into a grid and colours in alternating squares like he used to do in the margins of his assignments on slow days at school. Leaning back in his seat, kicking the crossbar of the chair in front of him, watching the hands of the clock inch towards three. Counting the ceiling tiles. The characters in the movie start shooting at each other and the pen jumps in Jesse’s hand; a chill pours over his shoulders and down his back.
“You okay?” Mike asks.
“Yeah,” Jesse mutters. “Sorry.”
There’s another volley of gunfire, and Mike eyes the TV, picks up the remote, and switches over to something else.
twelve days since
Jesse knows he’s coming up on fourteen days clean, and you get a chip for that, which makes him feel like he’s making progress and should be doing something about his living situation; and yet his stomach drops when he thinks about leaving Mike’s house for good. He tries to think of a single person he knows who isn’t either using or trying to stay clean. His parents aren’t going to take him in again, no matter how relieved they were to know he’s alive. Mr. White, if he knew what was happening, would probably make concerned noises about sending him back to rehab (and taking his money away again, for good measure). He knows there are homeless shelters in the city, but he’s not really homeless; well, he is, literally— come to think of it, he’s never been more homeless in the literal physical sense— but he has a roof over his head right now, it just happens to be Mike’s roof. So, when they’re almost finished dinner, he broaches the subject.
“Look, I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” Jesse says. “Seriously, it’s… if you hadn’t come along, I’d have… and I’ve been doing better. Much better. But, uh…”
Mike stares at him, waiting for him to finish.
“I don’t really have a place to stay yet. I mean, I’ve got people, but… and I’ve been looking at apartments, you know, in the rentals section, but…” Jesse bites his lip and makes himself look Mike in the eye. “I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go.”
“You want to stay here,” Mike says.
“Just… until I figure something out. If it’s okay with you. I mean, it’s your place.”
Mike seems to consider it for a painfully long time. Long enough that Jesse starts thinking about Wendy’s old room at the Crystal Palace. He hasn’t seen Wendy in weeks; he wonders if she’s okay after everything that happened with the gangbangers and the ricin and, Jesus, that little kid…
“Same rules as before,” Mike says, finally. “If I catch you using, you’re out. If I find out you’re dealing… well, you’d better hope I don’t find out you’re dealing.”
“You won’t,” Jesse says, in a rush of relief. “I promise you— shit, I mean, I won’t be dealing. Thanks. Really.”
twenty days since
One of the twelve steps is making amends, owing up to your sins, apologising to those you have wronged. What a thought. Hey, Gus, I’ve been doing some real soul-searching lately and I just wanted to tell you I lifted nearly three pounds of meth before you put those cameras in the lab. It was wrong and I regret it and all, so please don’t cut my throat? Of course, after thinking about it he starts wanting to actually say it. Not to Gus, but to Mike. Maybe Mike would feel differently about him if he knew he’d stolen from them. Maybe Mike wouldn’t be so keen on taking him in and getting him better. He’s been given chance after chance after chance and he just keeps fucking it up and he doesn’t see how that’s ever going to change. Walk with who you are, they said in rehab. It sounds nice. It would look good on a poster. It feels awful. It hurts a lot more than they made it sound.
He still has to go to work— things haven’t changed that much— so he tunes out the lab until it’s an abstraction. Great slabs of red in his peripheral vision and the black slice of the catwalk above. He measures and titrates and mixes and packs and weighs, and time moves along by itself, until Mr. White motions for him to take out his earbuds and he’s allowed outside for a smoke and a sandwich. He’s getting used to pimento.
Eventually, he has to go out and buy clothes and shit, because everything he used to own except that duffel bag full of money got burned up. Standing in a store with a thick wad of bills in his pocket, he feels overwhelmed. Runs his hands over racks and rails. There’s just so much. The money rubs between his fingertips, that creased, soft, slightly waxy feel of notes that have been well-handled. Jane’s voice floats into the gap between his thoughts and the background noise: this says, you can be anyone you want to be! you can go anywhere! His palms sweat; his fingers twitch. His heart beats double-time against his ribs.
He goes outside and has a smoke and thinks about how pathetic it is that he can’t handle the fucking mall any more, and he watches cars pass for a while, and watches someone help an old lady load her shopping into her car, and eventually goes back in and buys two identical pairs of jeans, three identical t-shirts, one jacket, one pack of boxer shorts and one pair of shoes, and decides that’s enough for today.
twenty-five days since
The book is heavy and expensive. Jesse feels like he should wash his hands before touching it, so as not to mess up the thick white margins with grimy fingerprints. Jane never told him the full story about Georgia O’Keeffe. She painted a lot of different things. He doesn’t remember how many of them he must have wandered past after he lost interest at the museum in Santa Fe. There are the big flowers, which, yeah, he sees what Jane was talking about there, but there are landscapes, too, dozens of them, harsh New Mexico landscapes made harsher by the way she looked at them. Hills rise and slump in swathes of black and orange. There are delicate studies that look half-finished: plants, a cactus limb, cow skulls. There’s one of a tree all in green and black except for a vivid red scar where one of its branches used to be. There’s a whole section of paintings that are just blue, just different shades of blue, as if Georgia O’Keeffe decided that all the other colours in the world would just mess up her concentration or something.
This is everything he knows about Jane: she was an artist. She worked at a tattoo shop near Kirtland. She liked Georgia O’Keeffe and Elizabeth Bishop, who was a poet. She drank her coffee black and wore lipstick that tasted like bitter candy. She had been eighteen months clean before everything went to hell. Her birthday was April fourth; he only knew that after she died. Jesse reads the book as if Jane is somewhere on the other side of those paintings, and if he just understands them well enough, maybe he can get to her; but when he turns over the last sleek white page, she's no closer than she was before.
the night of
Mike has watched Jesse for several seconds before he breathes. It’s a longer stretch before he breathes again. His lips and fingertips are bluish already, and Mike can’t help feeling a sick sense of relief. He has two thoughts in quick succession, reflexively: there’s Narcan in the first aid kit he keeps in the car. Then: this has been a long time coming. Who is he to drag this miserable junkie kicking and screaming back to life? The fire in the living room is gaining ground, climbing the walls and eating into the ceiling, exhaling noxious black smoke. He could call the fire department right this second and there wouldn’t be much left to save when they turned up.
All there is to save, he thinks, is right in front of him, breathing a few times a minute, slipping away.
Against his better judgment, Mike walks downstairs and fetches the Narcan from the car. Against his better judgment, he climbs the stairs again, uncaps the syringe, takes Jesse’s limp arm and injects. The sound, the awful groaning yell, he makes when he revives is nearly enough to make Mike jump. It’s like someone waking from a nightmare. He starts to writhe on the bed, his lungs sucking in air like he’d been drowning. He yells again, teeth gritted, veins no doubt on fire.
“Oh, God,” Jesse moans. “Oh, Jesus, fuck… Mr. White?”
Mike looks around for the duffel bag full of money— exactly where it’d been before— zips it closed and tosses it out of the window onto the lawn, because if Jesse decides he wants to live after all, he’ll need it. It occurs to him that a good cure for his professed indifference to money would be for him to lose it all, but the house is burning too fast for life lessons now.
“Get up,” Mike says, sweeping the syringe and Jesse’s works into a plastic bag and hauling the kid to his feet. He can’t stand, of course, but Mike manages to drag him out of his house and into his car before the police and the fire brigade and the ambulances turn up. Neighbours are already on the street, peering, huddled in coats over nightgowns, and Jesse’s house is destroying itself from the inside out, smoke and sparks pouring from second-floor windows. There are dull crashing sounds that could be floors collapsing. Depending on how long it takes the fire department to get there and how much is left when they do, there could be hemming and hawing about how it started— a dropped cigarette? faulty wiring?— but Mike can smell the gasoline on Jesse’s clothes. And despite the Narcan he’s still high out of his mind, so much so that he doesn’t know where he is, and keeps grabbing helplessly at Mike’s hands, trying to get away from him and back into the burning house, back to the place where Mike found him, passed out on his bed as smoke from the living room sofa cushions crept under the door and through cracks in the floorboards.
twenty-seven days since
“There’s something I want to tell you,” Jesse says one night, because he can’t bear not saying it any longer, and it’s been a while since he took something good and fucked it up beyond all repair. “I stole from you. From the lab. I was dealing it on the side. I think I got maybe three pounds before… everything happened.”
They’re standing only a few feet apart. He waits for Mike to grab him by the collar and throw him out; his skin prickles with the expectation of contact. Instead, Mike pauses, then continues drying his dishes with a teatowel.
“We know,” Mike says.
“Wait. What?”
“We noticed the discrepancies as soon as you started,” Mike says. “It was fairly obvious what was happening. Only you, Walter and Victor were in that lab. Victor knew better, and Walter had no reason to take it nor anyone to sell it to.”
“So you knew and you just let it happen? Why?”
“I’m not the one you should be asking.”
“Gus?” Jesse runs his hands across his scalp. “The only reason he didn’t kill me too after Gale is because of Mr. White, and vice versa, so, uh… there but for the grace of God, huh? Jesus. All this time, you knew?”
“Kid,” Mike says, “you are smarter than you think you are, but not nearly as clever.”
“So is this just how it’s gonna be from now on? I keep fucking up and Gus just lets it happen because he can’t afford to lose his meth genius?”
He’s on the offensive now, his blood’s running hot, he’s almost daring Mike to shut him up, but Mike won’t be baited.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“How things stand between you and Walter.”
“Look, he saved my life. I’d… I’d have been dead in a ditch on some reservation six months ago if it hadn’t been for him. I’d have…” Jesse trails off. He never would have met Jane. He never would have met Andrea. He never would have killed Gale.
“All I’m saying is there may come a time, sooner rather than later, when you’ll have to make a choice.”
Jesse stares at the countertop. Of course: us or him. It’s the same thing over and over again. Like his life is some problem the universe is trying to reiterate until it gets it right.
“Back when… a few weeks ago, I knew you were going to kill both of us,” Jesse says. His throat feels raw. “You had Mr. White and I knew you’d find me in the end. And I didn’t want to do it, but… Mr. White told me you had him, and I knew it was gonna be us or him.”
Jesse’s hands have started to shake. Mike holds his stare.
“He was just… just this guy,” Jesse says. “He looked harmless. He thought I was going to rob him. He… he put his hands up and told me he had money. He looked at me, like…”
Jesse realises he’s started to cry.
“And I killed him,” he says. “I looked him in the eye, and I shot him dead. He’s dead because of me. Because of what I did. And I’m still here.”
Mike looks back at him in a way that makes Jesse think he’s never looked older, like for an instant Jesse can see everything he’s done in his life weighing him down like layers of old overcoats.
“I’m still here,” Jesse says. “Why?”
thirty days since
Turning into Margo Street, Jesse remembers his dad talking about how much money he and Mom poured into the renovations, back when they were trying to take the house from him. All gone now. How much money did they pour into him before giving up? The fire department put tape around the house to stop people from going in, not that there can be much left to loot. Half of the roof is just gone, and it’s on the side where Jesse’s bedroom was. It’s stupid: he was the one who set the fire, and yet looking at it he feels kind of sick and weak at the knees. He never wanted this. He wanted to annihilate himself, not to live and leave an ugly wound.
He’d thought of a handful of things in the house that he wanted to have with him if he was going to really commit to being alive, but he knows once they step inside that he isn’t going to retrieve any of them. The living room floor is burned through so badly that he can see into the basement and Mike won’t let him walk across to the stairs. The sound system is an unidentifiable charred mass; the furniture is nothing but black smears and heaps of ash on what’s left of the floorboards. The graffiti on the walls has cracked and peeled away in places, leaving glimpses of blistered floral vinyl wallpaper underneath.
“It’s still my house, right?” Jesse says, hovering on the sidewalk by Mike’s car. “I mean, legally.”
Mike looks at him strangely. “If you’re the owner, then yeah, it’s still your house.”
“I figured the city would…” Seize it? Impound it, like a car? “I don’t know, man.”
“Have you decided what you want to do about it?”
Jesse sits down on the curb and stares at the house. He could have it built back up, or have it razed to nothing. Both seem impossibly huge in his imagination. If he wanted to rebuild the house he’d have to hire an engineer or something, to make sure that it was structurally sound, and if he didn’t want it any more he’d need to find a demolition guy. They’d probably tell the police he wasn’t really dead and then people would start asking questions about him and his money. He imagines the house gone, the lot levelled and turfed, snapped up by some developer who’d put up a bright new house for strangers in the shadow of the old oak.
“It’s just… all of Aunt Ginny’s stuff was still in there,” he says. “All of her dining chairs and ornaments and shit. I had all these boxes in the garage. She never said anything about it in her will, and I never got around to, like…”
Jesse rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, and then it all just hits him like a tidal wave, all of it, and he hasn’t cried this hard since the day Jane died. Because Mike is right next to him he tries not to make a sound; crying in front of Mike is worse than crying in front of Mr. White. But Mike sits down next to him on the curb and plants a hand between his shoulderblades, and says nothing.
thirty-five days since
Jesse writes himself another shopping list. He forgets how to spell phthalo blue until the next episode of The Joy of Painting reminds him again. He buys it all at an art supply store downtown and sets up his easel in a corner of Mike’s living room that Mike said he could use as long as he put a cloth down first. The first landscape he paints looks like shit. The second, too. Like a Hallmark card gone wrong. But with this technique if you mess something up you can just scrape off the paint and start again, so that’s what he does.
Eventually he gives up on trees and mountains and paints very carefully a pale yellow box in the centre of the canvas. He adds narrow black boxes for windows, a flight of steps outside, a red tiled roof, and two doors. All around it is white.