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Jimmy turns off the faucet, and the last of the water gutters slowly down the drain. He dries his hands then lobs the paper towel toward the trashcan—and sinks it and grins, and his reflection grins back, bright and crinkle-eyed.
And Jimmy pauses, watching himself. He reaches up and runs his fingers through his bangs. Pushes them back from his forehead, examining the receding peaks of his hairline. Runs his tongue over his teeth and smiles again, more studied this time.
“Jimmy,” he murmurs, turning his head a little, still smiling. “Jimmy McGill.”
He taps his palms on the edge of the sink—one-two-three.
A toilet flushes, and a man steps out of one of the cubicles, politely ignoring him. Jimmy shakes his head to settle his bangs back into place, then leaves, back out into the busy restaurant.
It’s loud with laughter and chatter, and Jimmy tips an imaginary hat to one of the many portraits of John Wayne that he passes on his way back to the table, the old actor nestled between haphazardly-hung tapestries and desert landscapes. Kim’s sat beside another of the smiling cowboys, her back to Jimmy as he approaches and her head propped on her hand. Her hair is up in a half ponytail but still falls in waves over her shoulders beneath it, and the tips of her ears peek out from beneath the gold.
“Hey, so you know how the bathrooms here—oh.” And Jimmy stops, smirking.
Kim’s asleep: her mouth open, cheek squished upward by her palm.
He slides into the booth opposite her and watches her for a moment. Most people look peaceful in sleep, but not Kim—not right now. Her brow is still slightly furrowed, her eyelids twitching. Dogs dream of chasing rabbits, but Kim, he thinks, Kim dreams of standing before a jury and clearly and articulately convincing them to save a lost cause.
He reaches forward and lays a hand on her upper arm, and she starts awake. “Jimmy?” she says, blinking at him.
“Kim,” he says somberly. He lets go of her arm and leans back again. And then in a slightly darker voice than normal: “It’s 2003. You’ve been asleep for ten years.”
Kim gives a soft smile. “Huh,” she says, and she peers out at the restaurant. “And we’re still here, are we?”
Jimmy glances around too. “Yeah, we’re still here.”
“Wow, and the rest of my food, too,” Kim says, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise as she looks down at her plate. She picks up her burger with both hands as if she’s going to take another bite, but after a moment she just sets it down again and sighs.
“I’m surprised you managed to drift off at all with that group right behind you,” Jimmy says, and he inclines his head to a nearby booth of women—who burst into booming laughter as if on cue.
Kim taps the sheet of notes lying beside her plate. “Never underestimate the powers of the Uniform Commercial Code.”
“Well, I try my best not to,” Jimmy says lightly, and then they fall silent for a while. Jimmy eats the last of his fries, chewing slowly and idly watching an arguing couple a few tables down. The man looks frazzled and on edge, and the woman just looks bored with the whole thing, delivering each of her responses with tired perfunctoriness. Jimmy pinches his straw between his fingers and sips his drink.
There’s a crinkle of paper as Kim tucks the next sheet of her legal pad behind the others. She blinks, and her eyes stay closed for longer than normal before she snaps them back open.
“You okay?’ Jimmy asks, voice gentle.
Kim nods once. “Of course.”
“Right,” he says.
The nearby women laugh loudly again. They’re celebrating a birthday, Jimmy thinks, focusing all their attention on one person, though there’s no gifts or cake. Across from them, another group of women seem to have cast themselves in the opposite role, and they sit silently, picking at their food.
He turns back to Kim, and points to her burger, still half finished. “Wanna just take the rest back?”
“You sure?” Kim asks, but she’s already reaching for her papers to tidy them away, flicking the notepad back round to the beginning. “I’m done, anyway.”
“Yeah, let’s go,” Jimmy says. “I feel like watching an old Western now, no idea why…”
Kim chuckles softly. “All right,” she says, sliding out of the booth and eclipsing John Wayne’s smiling face. “Twist my arm.”
And it doesn’t take much—though she keeps studying through The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance of course, leaning against the headboard on the bed beside him with her knees up, marking key phrases in an enormous bundle of printouts with a yellow highlighter. She looks up at the film during the good parts, and Jimmy hasn’t seen it before, or at least he doesn’t remember it, so he lets himself get sucked into the story until it’s time to rewind the tape, to eject it from his new VHS player and tuck it back into the Blockbuster box.
John Wayne’s blue-eyed replacement is Jay Leno, the talk show host grinning out from the tiny television set. Jimmy settles back down on the bed, careful not to jostle the legal textbooks that pile on the mattress around Kim’s feet. They’ve been shifting closer and closer to her as the evening’s worn on, as she continually picks them up to reference and then discards them again.
Leno wraps up his opening monologue, and Jimmy sighs. There was a time, once, when his father would shake him awake late at night, would sneak him downstairs on tiptoed feet because Carson was doing the Tea Time Movie (and Jimmy, in his best impression, would quote along, “Oh, are we back already?”) or because Albert Brooks was on with another stand-up set, angrily shoving a pie in his own face and shouting at the audience. The two of them would sit beside each other in the living room, lit only by the buzzing light of the television, shaking with wheezing laughter but trying to keep quiet—because it had always felt like a secret, back then, had always felt conspiratorial, though Jimmy wonders now if his mother really knew.
It was the only time he’d ever seen his father laugh like that. Those magical midnight hours with El Mouldo and Carnac.
Kim flicks back another page in her sheaf of papers, then lowers her left hand and rubs the knuckle of her forefinger over the bare skin beneath the edge of his shorts. Her brow pinches tightly as her gaze flickers over the text on her lap.
With another stinker of a joke, Leno cuts to commercial. Jimmy watches a few of them roll, then turns to her. “Whatcha working on?” he asks mildly, glancing down at the tiny font.
She makes a humming noise. “Final paper for that criminal procedure course,” she says. “Reading over this appeals decision.” She highlights another line. “Cops used the new protective sweep exception from that Supreme Court case.”
“That the one with the pizza thief in the red tracksuit?”
“Mmm,” Kim says. She sighs, long and drawn out, then leans back. Rolls her head from side to side. “After this I just have another—oh, twenty thousand papers left to write.”
Jimmy chuckles. “All in a day’s work.”
“You know it,” Kim says quietly. She rubs her eyelids.
“So what’re you gonna do with yourself when it’s all done?” Jimmy asks. “I mean, no more studying after the bar, right?”
She turns her head to him and sighs. “Yeah, real cases then. Or all the grunt work the partners don’t want to do, anyway.” She flicks over another page, highlighter wedged between two fingers. “This isn’t so bad, though. Least I’m not napping over a green chile cheeseburger.”
“Hah,” Jimmy says quietly.
Then her highlighter whispers over the paper, and Leno starts up again, so Jimmy looks back to the television. The first guest tonight is someone he doesn’t recognize, some actor with big hair who’s gesturing confidently, and Jimmy’s gaze wanders, over the stack of Blockbuster rentals on the floor beside the TV cabinet, over his open wardrobe, where his shirts hang like empty shells. The studio audience laughs perfunctorily, and Jimmy thinks about just switching it off, but the remote’s over on the cabinet, out of reach.
Eventually, Kim turns the last page in her stapled printout and then tosses it to the side. It lands among the mess of textbooks.
“So, anything interesting from tonight’s batch?” Jimmy asks, raising his eyebrows.
Kim sighs. “Oh, just the continued erosion of the Fourth Amendment, but what’s new? Least it gives me something to write about.” She rubs her knuckle over the side of his hamstring again. “What about you, anything interesting?”
“Nah,” he says, and he gestures to the television. “This new guy still sucks.”
Kim chuckles, and she looks down between them. She smooths the back of her forefinger up the thin surgical scar that runs around the outside curve of his knee. “Doesn’t hurt if I do this, does it?” she murmurs, stroking it.
“Nah,” Jimmy says again, watching her hide and reveal the scar tissue.
She still lifts her hand away, glancing over to the stack of papers. He hears her exhale, long and measured. But then instead of reaching for another batch of notes, she turns, twisting her legs out from her fortress of books and laying them over his own. She tilts her head sideways against the headboard and closes her eyes, chest moving slowly.
Jimmy rests his hand on her thigh. It’s warm through the cotton of her pajamas, and he outlines one of the little animals on the fabric. “So, c’mon. Really. How’re you gonna celebrate when you’re done with it all? Fly to Belize, sunbathe on the beaches, bottomless margaritas?”
Kim snorts, eyes still closed. “Yeah. I’ll go to Belize with mailroom money.”
“Okay, your first big paycheck, then,” Jimmy says, circling his finger around a tiny giraffe on her leg. “You’ve just defended your first wrongfully-accused teen. Saved them from a murder rap. What do you do?”
“You mean after the city finishes building that statue of me outside the courthouse?”
Jimmy chuckles. “Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t want to miss that. Big plaque at the bottom. Kimberly Wexler: People’s Champion.” He traces another animal, a tiger that’s running over the curve of her knee. “Kimberly… what’s your middle name?”
Kim hesitates for a long moment, then says, “I don’t have one.”
Jimmy nods. “Kimberly No-Middle-Name Wexler,” he says softly. “Champion of the People.” He runs his thumb over the tiger’s tail. “So, the ribbon-cutting ceremony’s just finished, what do you do then? Belize time?”
Kim smiles, her eyes still closed. She nestles against the headboard, tucking a pillow up beneath her head. After a while, she murmurs, “You mean after they’ve thrown the parade?”
And Jimmy chuckles. “Right, the parade.” He continues to stroke his thumb slowly over her leg, and he talks about what else would be in the parade, the route it would take, the big musical numbers and colorful floats, and then, of course, the biographical film about her life—and with each detail he waits for Kim’s quiet responses, which come at longer and longer intervals as the conversation goes on.
Leno bleeds into Letterman and eventually Bob Costas, the chatter on the television consistent and reliable. Outside, the traffic on the road quietens. The silent, small hours of the night.
“…Okay, but after that, and after they’ve renamed the moon in your honor, what next?” Jimmy murmurs, and he looks to where Kim’s tucked between his shoulder and the headboard, her neck cricked, body folded towards him. “Kim?” he whispers, squeezing her leg gently, but there’s no reply. He stares down at her, at the tension in her forehead and eyebrows.
He thinks of her reclining on a beach somewhere, the sun on her skin, surrounded by white sand. Somewhere far away from the beeping copy machines of HHM, from the suited men and women who move through the upper floors so efficiently. Far away from lecture theaters, from law libraries, from yellow highlighters and yellow legal paper.
Sipping some bright-colored drink and smiling.
A loud jingle sounds on the television and jerks him from his reverie, and he exhales. After a moment, he slowly lifts Kim’s legs up and eases out from beneath them.
She stirs, twisting her head down into the pillow and away from the light, and Jimmy pauses until she's still again. Then he moves off the bed and gets the remote and kills the TV. Collects up all the textbooks from the bed and stacks them on the floor nearby. Flicks off the light and finally slides back into the bed.
“Mrph,” Kim says into the pillow as he jostles the mattress. She twists her head to look up at him. “It morning already?”
“No,” Jimmy whispers. “Go back to sleep.” He slips under the covers, and Kim shifts, pulling them over herself, too.
And Jimmy lies there, facing the wall, eyes open to the darkness. Not tired at all, his mind turning and turning.
He wonders what he’s doing. He wonders how he got to this place. And not just Albuquerque, not the relatively straightforward roadmap of Chicago sunroof to Cook County Prison to Hamlin, Hamlin McGill; but here, in this bed, with Kim.
He wonders how she ended up here behind him, years after twisting down the Sandias, alone in her beat up car, looking for someplace clean and empty.
Looking for a land without storms.
At some point, she wakes up again, and moves closer. Her left arm worms beneath his pillow and he shifts to make room for it, lifting his head and then settling back down. She presses a kiss to the sensitive skin on the back of his neck and then tucks her face down between his shoulder blades, wrapping her other arm over him tightly, tighter than usual. He can feel her breathing, her knees pressed up close behind his, her chest against his back. Her heartbeat seems to pulse through his skin.
If he didn’t know better, he’d feel like the Sandias, like a line of protection between her and the world.
But he does know better.
“That’ll be you soon,” Jimmy says, as he watches Chuck and Howard vanish around a corner, silhouetted darkly against the bright windows. Other associates drift in their wake like pilot fish: the unstoppable pull of a victorious Charles McGill.
“Yup,” Kim says, finally. There’s another beat, and then she turns to him and smiles, her eyes flashing. “Okay. See you later, Jimmy.”
He nods and smiles back. “See ya.”
And Kim is a beacon of color between the grey cubicles of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. A bright spot of clarity until she, too, is gone, her green cardigan dipping around a corner, her hair flashing one last time with gold.
But Jimmy can still hear her long after she vanishes, mailcart wheels thundering over the carpeted floor.
The door opens easily.
And for all of it, for all the study help and quizzing, Jimmy’s never actually been inside the HHM library. It’s a small room, the walls lined with bookshelves, the dark spines rising monolithically, glowing beneath a reverent light.
He steps over the threshold. Lets the door drift gently closed behind him. It blocks out the sound of the office, leaving just an empty-aired silence. A hush.
And in the silence he watches himself, like a stranger on a screen. He sees a thirties guy in a short-sleeved button-up, standing before the dark shelves like a tourist. A guy who reaches for the books and pulls one out almost at random. Who lets it fall open in his hands, stares down at it like it’s going to stare back.
Jimmy flicks through the pages slowly. They’re pristine, not marked with Post-It notes or pencil underlinings, not bent or folded. At the top, some words: Negligence, and Breach of Duty, and Proof of Breach, black and sharp on the white.
They remind him of Michigan Avenue in the winter: the wrought-iron lampposts that lined the snow-covered sidewalk. The square-windowed skyscrapers that towered above him, and beside him the bare-limbed trees, their boughs dusted in snow. The patches of ice that caught the yellow of the lamps, glistening like puddles.
And everything so still. Everything waiting.
Jimmy remembers playing with Marco when they were little kids, laughing and training to be stuntmen. He remembers dropping out of the tree in Marco’s backyard and dive-rolling over the grass, or leaping from the tool shed, or asking Marco to throw another fake punch so that Jimmy could hurl himself one more time into the fence and then collapse dramatically to the dirt.
He remembers teaching Marco how to cushion a landing, parroting some bullshit theories he’d invented after watching Buster Keaton movies with his mother. Marco had even sprained his wrist one afternoon trying to do a stunt in his uncle’s living room, and maybe that was why he’d never been as interested in the slip and falls—not like the other scams, not like the colorful ones that let them talk their way out of trouble. Marco had always just frowned when Jimmy sat up at the bar at Arno’s with an icepack pressed somewhere, cash in his hands and shit-eating grin frozen on his face, and Jimmy had tried to ignore him.
As he slowly flicks through the pages of the tort law book, he remembers that ice, cold and sharp on his bones.
It’s a hard feeling to shake as he returns to his mail cart, glancing again at his watch, wondering if they’re missing him down in the mailroom yet, if they’re already drowning in discovery. The chill of the ice clings to him as he wheels the cart forward—and with it the familiar anticipation, the desire to do it all again. The tension of Michigan Avenue on a winter night. Potential pulled back and waiting to be released.
He hears his name, and blinks, turning back down the hallway.
It’s Hamlin Senior. He approaches Jimmy, cane thudding over the carpet, and he offers a warm smile. He’s looking for Chuck.
“I think he’s in Howard’s office,” Jimmy says, gesturing vaguely in the right direction.
“Wonderful,” Hamlin says. He’s wearing an overcoat, long and beige and still tied at the waist. He catches Jimmy looking at it and smiles. “Not staying long today,” he says. “I just stopped by to offer my congratulations about Isaacson.”
“Right,” Jimmy says, relieved he recognises the name now. “Yeah, Chuck really hit it out of the park with that one, huh?”
“As always,” Hamlin says warmly, fingers tightening as he leans on his cane.
And in the lull the follows, Jimmy can suddenly hear the rasp of the Hamlin’s breath, the heavy way he’s inhaling through his nose. The way he’s drifting on his feet a little, despite the knuckled grip on his stick. Jimmy waits patiently beside the older man, his hands resting on the bar of his mail cart, looking around at the empty walls as if there’s something of interest there that they’ve both stopped to study.
“So,” Hamlin says eventually, still a little breathless, “Once upon a time, I would have asked how you were settling in, but I suppose we’re past that, aren’t we?”
Jimmy gives a weak laugh. “Yeah, guess so.”
“How long’s it been?” Hamlin asks.
Jimmy frowns. It’s been—God, it’s been a year, he thinks. Almost to the day. A year of mail deliveries and photocopiers and lever-arch files.
“That long, eh?” Hamlin says, evidently reading something in Jimmy’s expression. “I find Albuquerque does that to a person. Just tricks you into staying here forever.” He breathes steadily and looks around him, then says, “You never told me what you thought of the tramway.”
Jimmy makes a little grimacing face. “I still haven’t been.”
“Well, there you are then,” Hamlin says, voice suddenly brighter. He taps his cane. “Been here so long, but there’s still something left to look forward to.” He gives a crinkled smile, then breaks eye contact, glancing down the hall. “Howard’s office, you said?”
Jimmy nods, and George Hamlin heads off down the corridor, moving slowly, cane thudding alongside him.
Later, at the end of the day, Jimmy stands, watching Kim from the doorway of the breakroom.
She’s staring inside her locker, her lips folded inward in thought.
The fluorescent bulbs flicker above her. The thin blue light of them washes her out, drains the color from her skin. Darkens the shadows beneath her eyes.
On the inside of her open locker door is a square of pink paper: a drawing of a woman in a graduation cap and gown. A smile on her face. A gavel in her hand.
The Honorable Kim Wexler.
Later still, at the bottom of the Sandia Peak Tramway, Jimmy stands alone.
It’s early evening, just before twilight, and there’s a chill in the air, a slow wind that whispers through his jacket. He’s in line outside the ticket building, waiting for the tram. It’s a short queue, just a few tourists around him, all talking softly between themselves. Young friends on a road trip, heading to Texas tomorrow. A couple on their honeymoon.
The tram approaches slowly. It arrives at the platform and empties of passengers, more people coming down than going up.
Jimmy steps on board. The floor rocks beneath his feet, and he shifts to the side, leaving space for the others to gradually file in. The cabin gets about half full, and Jimmy turns, facing down towards to the ticket building, studying the empty gift shop through the glass. Novelty t-shirts stare back at him from the racks.
Then, with the ding of a bell, the tram glides away. It rises above the landscape: the foothills pockmarked with rocks and dark green bushes. The conductor starts talking, but Jimmy just lets the words run past him, his eyes tracing old dirt roads and walking tracks. Looking for footprints in the dust. As the tram climbs, it lifts higher above the earth, and the finer details of the dirt and the plants and the boulders diminish, becoming part of the texture of the whole.
And soon he can see the city falling away beneath him, too. The jagged gridlines of the roads and freeways and buildings that split the land, fracturing it like hot cracked earth, like the granite rock of the mountains, like the grooved and hatchet-marked cliff-faces below the tram.
Through his airplane window once, Albuquerque had looked like an afterthought, dwarfed by the sky. It had looked like something ready to be forgotten, just another thought to fall out of his head along with so many others—along with the thought of his brother’s eyes as Jimmy had unbuckled his airplane seatbelt; along with the thought of the heavy suitcases that he’d watched slip and shift in the overhead lockers before takeoff; along with the thought of their drive out to O’Hare, Jimmy silent in the passenger seat of the rental car, the radio off and Chuck’s grip tight on the steering wheel.
And along with the thought of a phone call.
It had been cold that day in the holding cell, colder than the season, the metal handset pressed tightly to his ear. Jimmy had listened to the line ring for what felt like forever, each silver chime spinning a silver thread across the city, winding toward his mother’s living room.
And between the chimes came his own breath, fast and heavy, uncontrolled. It echoed through the handset like it was being piped back to him, like the prison phone was just a sick joke, a closed loop, locked inside, and he stood there, his body twisted away from everybody else, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But then she had answered.
In a bright and steady voice, or at least his brightest and steadiest, he had said, “Hey, Mom. Something’s happened.”
With a dinging bell, the tram reaches the top of the line. Jimmy steps out, weaving between the tourists, heading to one of the emptier viewing platforms. He’s a little breathless, still, but he’s ten thousand feet up now, and he can feel the thinness of the air.
He leans against the railed edge, pressing his forearms into the corner of the wood. The mountains drop away sharply beneath him.
In the dusk, Albuquerque glimmers to light. It seems unfamiliar at first, but then the city starts to take shape, and he thinks he can see the squat skyscrapers of downtown, the geometric cubes that rise from the flat land. He thinks he can see Central Avenue cutting across the city, historic and neon-glowed. And, far away, he thinks can see the airport, its runways stretching along the desert shore.
He wonders whether, if he looked hard enough, if he stood here long enough, he might also see Hamlin, Hamlin McGill. Might also see Kim’s apartment and the square brightness of her television. Might even see Chuck’s house, still lit by lantern light.
If he looked hard enough. If he didn’t turn away. If he kept them all in his sights.
And in the west now, clouds. As the sun vanishes below the horizon, they become briefly clear, shadowed with lilac and orange, and Jimmy can see their shape by the light on them. Can see their dimensions. If he watched for long enough, he thinks that he could also see them moving slowly, driven by high winds.
The winds move through him, too, hollowing him out.
He draws his jacket closer.
As night falls, the distant curve of the horizon vanishes. In the darkness, the flat land below the Sandias seems to go on forever, black and flickering with dying embers: scorched earth. The glow of the city lights is the glow of distant fires burning. He can even smell them on the wind: the woodsmoke scent of evening, of imaginary fire blocks. Stripping everything back so that only the dirt is left.
And he thinks that his whole life since arriving in Albuquerque has been like a controlled burn: searing away the silk shirts and the fake Rolexes and the ice of Michigan Avenue until nothing remains—breath on a cold mirror vanishing—a blank slate.
Burned back and clean.
So he thinks about what he could build.
He thinks about his brother on a park bench, surrounded by luminarias. He thinks about a paper-wrapped book with fourteen words inside it. He thinks of other books, too: piles of them on the floor of his apartment, or on a table in a restaurant, or monolithic on shelves at HHM. He thinks of—God, he thinks of Joe Pesci, enormous on the silver screen, running a court room like it’s one big bar trick.
And he thinks of Kim. He thinks of her asleep at a table in the breakroom, of her lit by neon lights, of her in the driver’s seat beside him.
He thinks of her tracing letters over his breastbone: H-H-M. J-i-m-m-y. K-i-m.
He thinks of letting her move against him, move over him, move around him. Of letting her define the edges of him.
And he thinks of Kim in an Alamogordo motel room, laughing and tapping her fingers up his chest, her voice rising like a scale, like familiar elevator chimes: “You could be a lawyer?”
Jimmy wonders if he’s allowed to stay here all night, up on the Sandias. Up on this one high place.
He imagines everyone else leaving, he imagines the city falling dark. He imagines waiting exactly here until the sun returns, until it rises behind him and breaks over the mountains.
Like sitting beside Kim on the trunk of her car, their legs pressed together beneath the blanket. Then, the dawn had seemed to reach out close enough to touch them, huge and breathless, warm fingers on his skin. And Jimmy had inhaled the colors of it: blue and gold and orange, streaks of brightness across the enormous sky. Morning sliding over the land.
And now he stands on the edge of the viewing platform and he looks out into the darkness of the city.
And he imagines it all bathed in light.
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