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Jimmy’s first morning at HHM passes quickly. Henry, the bony older man he noticed earlier with the mail cart, provides a clearer-eyed tour of the mailroom after Ron leaves for somewhere upstairs. Henry gives Jimmy a rundown on a copy machine’s basic functions and then hands him an enormous stack of papers and tells him come back with twenty-seven black and white copies of each sheet, two-hole punched.
It’s only a few printing mishaps (surreptitiously disposed of) later that Jimmy gets the hang of it. He spends hours sliding papers into the document feeder, checking and rechecking every button before he brings his finger down. It’s mind numbing. It’s boring. Slippin’ Jimmy the mailroom boy, huh? laughs a voice at the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Marco. Poisonous thoughts hover nearby, thoughts of how his price for freedom is doing this for years: the same button presses that are already starting to feel repetitive, every day the same, over and over again.
Thoughts that’ll send him screaming up the stairs and out the door before he can stop himself.
So Jimmy doesn’t think. He lets himself become his task, become one of the machines. And then, before he knows it, Henry is tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “Lunch break, Jimmy!” and leading him to the kitchenette. There’s a solitary vending machine from which Jimmy buys a packet of chips. He sits and chews on them slowly as Henry chats with another man whose name Jimmy hasn’t caught yet, and when he realises this he reaches out and introduces himself.
“I’m Burt,” the man says. He’s young and dark haired and bright eyed. “So you’re Mr. McGill’s brother, huh? Ron told us you were starting here.”
Jimmy nods. The red-faced supervisor hasn’t returned since this morning. “What’s up with Ron, anyway? Doesn’t he work in the mailroom?”
Henry shrugs. “He’s Hamlin the Elder’s man. Been here longer than I have, and always claims to be allergic to something down here in purgatory.”
There’s a rattle of wheels outside, and then the blonde woman from earlier enters the break room.
“Finished up three and four,” she says curtly, as she retrieves some neatly-wrapped package from the fridge and plonks down in a seat. “We’re set until the afternoon delivery.”
“Wonderful,” Henry says. He turns to Jimmy. “Ron’ll probably get you doing the mail cart rounds later this week.”
“It’s like work release,” Burt says. “Get to leave this dungeon and explore the hallowed upper floors for a little bit.”
“I hope you’re good with names,” Henry adds.
“I’m great with names,” Jimmy says, but he’s looking at the blonde woman.
She unwraps a sandwich and begins eating it with determined precision, brow pinched, staring down at the table as if it still bears that enormous legal textbook from this morning.
Burt follows Jimmy’s gaze. “Hey, Kim, you met our mini McGill yet?”
The woman, Kim, looks up. She puts down her sandwich.
“I’m Jimmy,” Jimmy offers, holding out a hand, and Kim shakes it crisply. “We met earlier.”
“Oh, right,” Kim says, sounding distracted. She frowns at the table again, mind seemingly back on other things already—focused and diligent and everything he knows he's not.
“So, you got any fun family stories, Jimmy?” Burt asks, filling the silence.
Jimmy pops a BBQ chip into his mouth and crunches contemplatively. Fun stories? He picks some adventure that he and Marco took in eighth grade, swapping out Marco for Chuck and omitting a few of the more illegal parts. It’s not really as good of a story without them, but Henry and Burt seem to enjoy it, and the idea of Chuck hauling ass away from an enormous Rottweiler does eventually bring a smile to Jimmy’s face, too.
Jimmy doesn’t see Chuck at all that day, or either of the Hamlins. He doesn’t, in fact, leave the downstairs level at all, just watches the sunlight slowly change through the small high windows and thinks that maybe he should take up smoking again just to have a reason to go outside.
The afternoon mail delivery arrives at some point, and Kim and Burt sort through it in the cubbyhole room and distribute it between the carts again. The balding, Rolex-wearing man Jimmy met in the HHM lobby stops by that afternoon, too, a sheen of sweat visible on his lip even from across the mail room. He waves them all away jerkily and photocopies some papers himself, hundreds of sheets of color copies using one of the most expensive machines.
Jimmy wonders if he should go say hello to Chuck. His natural instinct is that he should—that he should waltz upstairs and follow his nose (presumably to the grandest office in the tallest tower) and annoy Chuck where he lives. But it’s such a strong instinct that something tells him the ‘right’ thing to do would be to leave Chuck alone. And yeah, if he examines the instinct long enough, follows it to its inevitable conclusion, he knows it’s born out of a desire to embarrass Chuck more than anything else.
Ron returns to the mailroom right as five o’clock rolls around. He casts a disparaging eye over them all, and then wanders down to Jimmy, who’s unjamming a copier that tried to swallow hundreds of sheets of paper simultaneously for (it seems to Jimmy, anyway) absolutely no apparent reason.
“You set the feeder size correctly?” Ron asks by way of greeting.
Jimmy grunts.
“He didn’t do anything; I jammed it,” Henry says, joining the two of them. He pats the copier like it’s a misbehaving dog. “Temperamental thing. Jimmy’s helping me out.”
Jimmy plays along, snapping the tray shut and waggling his eyebrows and his hands. “I’ve got the nimblest fingers!”
Ron just sneezes, then wanders off to the breakroom.
Henry gives Jimmy a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Don’t tell your brother I said anything, but Ron can’t work one of these machines to save his life. Call him for help sometime; it’s worth a laugh on a bad day. And hey, closing time!”
The glowing face of Jimmy’s watch reads 5:07pm. He watches as the others amble towards the lockers in the break room. Only Kim remains, standing before a distant copier as it spits out sheet after sheet.
As the others wave goodbye, Jimmy leans forward over the table and thinks. He could get another taxi back to the hotel and spend another night in the insipid hotel bar. He could figure out public transport and catch a bus back instead. He could find a nicer bar somewhere in Albuquerque, or even a more divey bar. He could see if Chuck’s still here—no, out of the question.
He could order Chinese from whatever menu’s in the bedside table in his hotel room and then immediately fall asleep. At the thought, the tiredness that’s been pressing on him all day becomes more insistent, and he sighs. Chinese it is.
Kim begins packing up at the same time as his realization. She heads to the breakroom and shortly after emerges with her bag, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and tapping it rhythmically against her other palm as she makes for the elevators.
“Hey, can I bum one?” Jimmy calls out.
Kim stops and looks over at him.
“Can I bum one?” Jimmy repeats. “Could really use it.”
“Sure,” Kim says, and she flashes him a small smile.
Jimmy pushes himself up from the table and glances around. “Do I need to turn anything off?”
“No. The cleaners come through on Mondays,” Kim says. She runs a fingernail under the seal of the cigarette packet and opens it, then taps one out and holds it to him.
Jimmy takes the offered cigarette. “Thanks.”
Kim inclines her head. She pulls out a cigarette for herself and heads for the two elevators. Jimmy follows, standing beside her in silence as she pushes the down button and then closes her eyes. She sways a little on her feet and Jimmy frowns. She looks, suddenly, tired.
He can’t get a good read on her.
And then as if she can hear his thoughts, Kim surprises him again by asking, “So how was your first day?”
Jimmy nods. “Good. Printed a lot of things, licked a lot of stamps. My tongue’s already dying!”
“…Yes, that’s the worst,” Kim says, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye.
The elevator chimes and they step in. Kim presses the button for a basement level and then looks up to him, but, when Jimmy doesn’t indicate any other floor, she lowers her hand.
They ride the elevator down in silence, Jimmy absentmindedly tapping his cigarette against his palm. Kim has her eyes closed again, and her lips are moving a little, quietly, as if she’s running something over in her mind.
When the doors open, they reveal a small, under-lit landing leading out to a darkly cavernous parking garage. The shadows stretch long, like something out of All the President’s Men, and, as Jimmy and Kim step onto the concrete, their footsteps echo, ringing in the air even after they both stop moving.
Kim clicks her lighter and ignites her cigarette. She takes a long pull. Holds in the smoke for a while before releasing it, like a sigh.
“Can I?” Jimmy asks, gesturing to the lighter.
Kim nods, passing it to him. She leans against the wall and Jimmy stands, a little awkwardly, nearby, lighting his own smoke and then dragging on it before handing the lighter back. Kim accepts it with a quiet thank you.
His voice echoes hollowly in the garage. “I thought you were a lawyer. This morning."
Kim nods. “That explains the ‘give them hell’.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says.
Kim takes another smoke. “I’m studying to be one. Second year at UNM. Night classes mostly.”
And suddenly that worn-down edge of tiredness makes sense. A worse version of him would look at this woman working all day in a mailroom and somehow finding time to study for a law degree and think that she’s a sucker—that there must be some easier way to do it, some short cut, some cheat. But Jimmy can remember when Chuck was off at Georgetown, younger than all his peers but you wouldn’t know it to look at him, and already so busy he could barely make it home for family holidays.
He can’t imagine Chuck delivering mail or two-hole punching documents for hours on end.
He can’t imagine having that kind of drive.
“So why the law?” Jimmy asks.
Kim looks at him curiously, face striped with shadow.
“Sorry,” Jimmy says, holding up his hands, cigarette pinched between two fingers. A speck of ash falls onto his shirt. “Personal question, I know. Chuck has a standard answer he trots out at family gatherings.”
“Sounds helpful,” Kim says.
“Something about the law being the most important invention in the history of civilization, I think,” Jimmy says. “Mankind’s greatest achievement.” He gives a short chuckle. “I don’t get it.”
“You don’t?” Kim asks. “I thought you were here—” She catches herself and stops. “Sorry. Almost asked a personal question myself.”
Jimmy shrugs and deflects, happy to avoid explaining why he’s working in his brother’s mailroom. “I mean, the law is great and all, no offense,” he says. “But greatest invention? Guess Chuck hasn’t discovered flushing toilets yet.”
Kim snorts quietly. She drops her cigarette and stamps it with her heel. “It’s the new environmental policies they’re rolling out. No more flushing.”
Jimmy grins delightedly and finishes his own cigarette. “That explains it, then,” he says, breathing out smoke.
“I’m off. I have class in an hour. See you tomorrow,” Kim says, and she pushes herself up off the wall and begins walking deeper into the garage.
“Thanks for the smoke,” Jimmy says, inclining his head.
Kim nods in acknowledgement and then disappears into the darkness.
But Jimmy can hear her long after she vanishes, heels clicking metrically on the concrete floor.
That night, Jimmy falls asleep by 9.30pm, lying fully clothed atop his covers and drifting away to the lulling sounds of Murphy Brown. When his alarm blares the next morning, the TV is still going, some religious local thing that fills the darkened room with flashes of color.
He groans and rolls over onto his stomach but doesn’t shut off the alarm, knowing that if he does he’ll sleep for another few hours at least. Eventually, he slides out of bed. Showers and gets dressed almost on auto-pilot, brushing his teeth in front of that zombie in the mirror, who today has hooded bags beneath its eyes.
The bus stop is a little way down the road from the hotel, and Jimmy walks to it in the almost dawn with his hands in his pockets and the cold air tickling his bare forearms. He steps from pool to pool of yellow light beneath the cones of the streetlamps, mothlike.
At the stop, the bus arrives with a grumbling moan, moving as sleepily as its passengers, who sit here and there and stare with lidded eyes out the windows. Jimmy finds an empty seat and watches the squat, square buildings of Albuquerque drift by beneath the purple light of magic hour—an auto parts shop, a drug store, a McDonald's. And then, as the bus hangs a right, they pass a sign for the University of New Mexico, its campus buildings as geometric as everything else.
Jimmy arrives at HHM early again, even with the added time of bus travel. He walks through the darkened lobby, feeling the difference from yesterday, enjoying the knowledge that today he does belong, and he does have a purposeful destination. He nods at a woman waiting by the bank of elevators and descends the stairs, emerging into a mailroom that smells, once more, of fresh coffee. He smiles and, though the door to the break room is closed, he heads for it determinedly.
And, sure enough, Kim is sitting at the table again, facing the door this time, but similarly surrounded by books and notepaper. She glances up at his entrance and nods in greeting.
“Morning, uh”—Jimmy snaps his fingers—“Katherine Hepburn.”
“Katherine Hepburn?” Kim asks.
“Sure, Adam’s Rib,” Jimmy says, folding his arms. “She’s a lawyer in that, right?”
“I’m not a lawyer yet, remember?” Kim says. “I'm just tired and grumpy. Better make it On Golden Pond.”
Jimmy chuckles. He pours himself a cup of coffee and sits opposite her at the table. Kim drops her head back into her hand and stares intensely at the book before her, eyes tracing back and forth. She doesn’t seem distracted by his silent presence, so Jimmy stays there. He picks up a spare book from the pile beside her (the thinnest one) and skims the intro, something dull and pompous about how contract law will change the world. After a few paragraphs he almost checks the front cover to make sure Chuck hasn’t written it. He closes it again with a snap, and Kim chuckles.
“What?” Jimmy asks.
“Boring, huh?” Kim says, looking over at him. She puts down her pen and flexes her hand. “It’s great having access to the HHM library, but I don’t think they’ve updated the books since Howard passed the bar.”
“Library?”
“Upstairs,” Kim says. “My roommate is a disaster and I don’t like taking the books home. So I come in early and make as many notes as I can. I don't want to buy what I don’t need.”
“Couldn’t you—” Jimmy begins, and he glances towards the door and then back at Kim. “There’s a whole stampeding herd of photocopy machines out there, couldn’t you just copy the pages? Ron told me my employee code to use if I need to photocopy anything personal.”
Kim chuckles. “They still charge you for that.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” she says, and taps the side of her head with her pen, “it’s better to make notes as I read. Have to do it eventually, no way around it.”
Jimmy hums. Kim flexes her hand one last time, and then she begins scribbling again, eyes drawn downwards in intense concentration. Jimmy sips his coffee contemplatively, and the two of them sit in a silence marked only by the whispering of the pen over paper, until Ron arrives and the workday begins.
It’s the third visit of the balding, Rolex-wearing man that gets Jimmy really curious. The guy’s been down to the mailroom twice already that day, and, just like yesterday, he spends his time photocopying hundreds of pages, standing alone before the expensive colour copier.
“Who is that?” Jimmy asks, looking up again from the order sheet he’s supposed to be checking off against a set of printouts.
Burt follows his gaze. “Who, Carl Vernon? He’s a fifth year associate.”
“What’s he doing?”
Burt shrugs. “Likes to make up his own binders, real fancy. Runs through the high GSM paper. Like that’s gonna win him the case.”
Across the table, Kim clicks her tongue. “What a waste of time.”
“And money,” Henry adds.
“Doesn’t trust us, maybe,” Burt says. “I guess he’s got something big coming up, he’s not usually down here so often.”
Vernon leaves with his stack of papers, and Jimmy forgets about him again, falling back into the calm monotony of his work. It’s easy to become nothing in the mailroom, surrounded by the humming photocopy machines and repetitive snapping of staplers or hole-punches. Hypnotic, almost. Therapeutic, a better person might think.
Or maybe it’s easy to become nothing as Jimmy McGill because he’s already—
—but, like last time, Jimmy cuts this thought off before he can finish it. He slams down on a stapler with the palm of his hand, then onto the next sheet, moving fluidly.
Well-oiled.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Jimmy looks up. A frazzled young woman stands before the expensive color copier, pressing buttons hurriedly as the machine spits after sheet after sheet of blue-streaked paper.
“Shit!” she hisses again, dropping papers to the floor. She looks over helplessly, and, since Burt and Henry are upstairs for the afternoon mail run and Kim is busy across the room, Jimmy realizes it’s on him to fix things for her.
By the time he reaches her, she's given up, and is just watching the copy machine in despair.
“It won’t stop,” she whispers helplessly as he steps up beside her.
Jimmy grunts. He hasn’t used this machine much, so, after a moment of deliberation, he reaches around the back and switches it off at the wall. The last sheet of ink-streaked paper spits out of the tray, then it stops.
“Whew, thanks,” the woman says, running a hand over her face. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Nothing wrong, I’m sure,” Jimmy says placatingly. Kim looks over at them and he shoots her a thumbs up.
“You can fix this quickly, right?” the woman says.
“Um.”
“It’s just that Mr. Vernon sent me down with a print order, and he has to leave in five minutes, and he wanted me to redo the assessment Mr. McGill wrote up for him so that it’s on the right paper—” She pauses, collecting herself. “I'm sorry. I'm Clara, I'm Mr. Vernon's assistant. How long until it’s fixed?”
“Can’t you just use a different machine?” Jimmy asks.
“No, no, no, he says it needs to be this one!” Clara says. “I messed up once before and used the wrong one and I never heard the end of it.”
Jimmy swallows. He reaches out and turns the machine on again. The status light flickers orange for a few pulses, then turns red. He hears footsteps approaching and looks up to see Kim.
Kim frowns at the machine. She holds down the power button to turn it off, then turns it on again. The light pulses orange, then glows red. Kim sighs. “I can try some things, but this might need a technician,” she says. “If you’re in a rush, I’d use one of the other machines.”
“No, no—” Clara says. “I can’t just—he's going to think I broke it—maybe if one of you could come up and explain?”
Kim blinks.
“To Mr. Vernon, I mean. It needs to be this machine. He can tell. If he thinks I broke it…” Clara says, voice thin and desperate. She looks between them helplessly, and Jimmy can see the exact moment Kim resigns herself to going up and getting yelled at by a balding, Rolex-loving fifth year associate.
He sees it, and he steps forward. “No. I know what to do.”
“You know how to fix it?” Clara asks.
“Well, no,” Jimmy says. He looks between them, between Clara’s wide eyes and Kim’s intrigued ones. He smiles and he can feel his shoulders relaxing. “Let’s grab up all those papers—the streaked ones, you got it. Stack them like you would normally.”
Clara follows his directions with shaking hands as he passes her the sheets that had fallen to the ground. She squares off the edges of the stack.
“That look right? Too thin, maybe?” Jimmy asks.
“Yeah, too thin.”
“Okay, shove some blank sheets in the middle,” Jimmy says. He hands them to her, and Clara slips them into the center of the stack. “Looks great. Now, what floor is Vernon on?”
“Four.”
“Four, okay. I’ve never been to four, is there a break room?”
“Sure, by the elevator.”
“Perfect!” Jimmy says, grinning. He inhales slowly, and it feels like bursting up through the water’s surface and breathing again. It feels like the first hit of oxygen after drowning. “Now, here’s how we’re gonna play it…”
Jimmy can barely keep the smile off his face as he waits by the entrance to the fourth floor breakroom with an enormous cup of coffee in his hand. He takes a small sip from it—it’s lukewarm.
It’s perfect.
The minutes drift past, that special kind of time that's both slow and fast at once. Jimmy leans casually against the wall, and he feels like he’s been waiting here for hours—yet, as the elevator doors open with their musical five-note motif, and he hears Clara give the predetermined cough, part of him would swear that no time had passed at all.
Jimmy steps out of the breakroom door and hangs a sharp right, whistling to himself, head down and focused on an imaginary task and then—
SLAM.
As Jimmy and Clara fall together, the world slows again, and he glances at her, at the bundle of paper clutched to her chest, and he has enough time to snake his hand out and make sure the entire stack is completely drenched in coffee.
“Hey!” Clara cries, hitting the ground hard.
Jimmy winces for her, and pulls himself free. “I’m so sorry!” he says, bumbling and hopeless, grabbing the soggy papers from the floor and rifling through them as if checking to see if they’re salvageable. “This isn’t too bad, once it dries it’ll—”
“It’s ruined!” Clara spits, pulling herself to her feet.
Jimmy smothers a grin. She’d said she wanted to be an actress when she was a kid, and he definitely believes it now. He lets her have her moment yelling at him in front of the fourth floor citizens, her eyes flashing, until finally she extends an apologetic hand like the bigger woman. Jimmy, his striped white shirt stained and dripping, shakes it warmly.
When Carl Vernon finally comes charging out of his office, Jimmy and Clara have almost finished collecting up all the completely ruined papers. The desperation that Jimmy sensed in the man at their first meeting is vividly clear now, and he glares at them with eyes bloodshot and dark like a man strung out on coffee and no sleep.
“I’m so sorry,” Jimmy says, holding up his palms. “My fault, I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
In a cubicle nearby, a man chuckles. “He ain’t kidding. Went charging down the hallway like a bull.”
“Is that the copy of Charles’s final Farnsworth assessment?” Vernon asks.
Clara nods, gripping the wet pages.
Vernon curses. “Don’t you know how much it costs me to redo it like that? Papadoumian is definitely going to notice. God!” He turns around and kicks one of the cubicle dividers. His shoulders shift as he breathes heavily, and his hands tremble.
“I’m really sorry,” Jimmy says lightly, eyes flicking to Clara and back.
“It’s too late now,” Vernon says, looking at his Rolex. “We’ll have to make do with the black and white non-lettered copy.” He huffs, and surveys the two of them. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he adds, unconvincingly, and then turns and storms back to his office. Clara nods once to Jimmy, a small, almost unnoticeable, thing, then she trails after her boss.
Jimmy returns to the mailroom damp and stinking of coffee. The dark liquid has soaked into his undershirt and spread over the front of his slacks. He steps out of the elevator and looks at the broken copy machine, and then around at the rows and rows of boxes and white electric lights shining bright in the central space.
Across the room, he sees Kim watching him, smiling.
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