Chapter 20

The quote elaborates about the part of the episode where these insights start.

I do not own The Mentalist and make no money from this.

Season 2 Episode 10

"Parents thought you were wasting your time so they made you quit baseball. Crushed your dream. You were angry about it but you couldn't express that directly, so you joined the gang as an outlet to all that anger…", Jane says with a smile of certainty.

"Actually I tore my ACL. Nice try…", Cho snatches away with a tug at his mouth.

"Ah… Meeeh, Parents…", Jane notices Lisbon's chaffing and admits.

I bear my mark against them... It's a role that's popular, coveted among everyone and yet most people can't do justice to what the responsibility entails. It's interesting how readily a child will worship the ground their parents walk on because when a child has no knowledge of the world, there's only a parent that can calibrate a their mind. It's only later that the child understands what a parent is supposed to do and that theirs never fulfilled it. It's a pet peeve of mine- parents and their perpetual need to make children fulfil personal unrealised dreams…

The stench of whiskey, rotting bills of money and unwashed hair threatens to pull me back. I dust a piece of lint off my suit.

Won't ever go back.

"Jane?" "Hey, you alright? Jane?" Cho and Lisbon wander in and out of focus.

"I see ya….", smiles Jane with eyes closed.

The tang of silver tastes bitter. There's sweat, expectation and wonder swirling in the tent. But the only weight that presses on my back is that of "Do it son", when I move a hand or leg, chain links rattle, a menacing threat. But I can still control the words that flow out of my mouth. The girl's face shines in the dim muggy light of my memory- it could almost be the truth. When I offer salvation on a platter, she never thinks that it might be an illusion. I had needed the solace in it once but that won't ever come, I have known. Needn't deprive others of the relief though. The consequences are noted for later, right now, in front of me, I watch Hope aglow. Regret might land swiftly later, take hold, but now I let the radiance permeate my empty bones. It can't be denied even inside my own mnemonic banks- how good that feels…

"I imagine these two had their differences. The gold watch, the Italian suit, well I'm sorry, the Taiwanese suit made to look Italian.", remarks Jane.

"I don't have to listen to this…", Fitch stomps away.

Fitch clearly could never understand Sloop's intense sorrow after losing a child. He doesn't get that they can never be whole again. Instead of my daughter though, another reluctant kin takes space in my head.

I dislike thinking of the man that has influenced what he can in my childhood. It's a constant toil to stay far away from even the wisp of that willow but it has roots, it is strong. I cannot deny the hold. The projection I lash out, the provocations I taunt with, possess equal power, that can't be helped. This method has worked several times in the past and I can't regret employing it liberally. I will admit the throb at my temple doesn't help, it's less painful though than what the ball has broken into… I am taking advantage of Lisbon's leeway; it's difficult to process this, a stern thick voice keeps intruding as it had after Angie and I had run away from the circuit and I had been developing my solo act. It had been hard then but there was happiness because we were together. There was the world left to tame yet…

"Yup, that's my boy! You have X-ray eyes, no doubt about it…", Alex Jane pats his son biting back envy.

And I never asked for them! At first, it was only games, diversions, amusement, a jolly taught to occupy tiny attentions. But they were all so interesting that learning another new trick, tic, the minute line that moved over muscles and what it meant, soon became a path through which I could handle life, my father's ruthlessness, the abuse and an absence of a mother that cut everything ever more sharply, the burdens which had ground ever more crudely and failures that began to taste ever more bitter and cruel. It was a nightmare I wanted to escape.

Carny people can be very good in that they accept every oddity, eccentricity, queerness and incongruity which a misfit might be but they see family and emotion more in black and white. By the time I had acknowledged my talents, I knew it was somewhere grey where my sentiment lay because of that cocky calculative abrasiveness that had threatened to erode whenever I had sought to build a semblance of my needs. I knew that the line had to be toed, my father's fragile egos needed fodder and protective vigilance; anything else could hardly be afforded… And yet in my race to become the exact antithesis of him, it was agony to discover that I had come so close to being him. I had run but the nightmare hadn't vanished as an after-thought to my flight.

Losing the most momentous of the life I had built, that's what it took to realise it so there's a bitter taste permanently inked at the back of my tongue…

I am never going back to becoming an Alexander 'Alex' Jane ever again.

The nightmare can not stay only to fester. I write defeat for it.

"We're clearing people. We're supposed to be catching them…", grumbles Lisbon as she leaves.

Grey fog suspends me somewhere nothing can reach. I see Scotty Sinclair struggling to understand or separate right from wrong, restricted by the shadow of his own father. I wish the usual distance and objectivity could be maintained but the baseball messed me up. I am tired of the assault of affairs that have been sorted, yet the rudimentary emotion refuses to vanish. So I go back of my own free will. Nothing better than taking the bull by the horns, they say…

"What part? What part can't you do? The gag? That's easy! I did the hard part! I put the money in the tent! All you have to do is pick it up!", growls Alex.

Yep. That was my father… The old lady was obviously loaded but that wasn't important. When I had called him out for a bit of conscience, for conning a dying little girl all for what? Money. Money which could be scammed, defrauded, made from anyone else, anywhere else! But no, he had 'worked' hard to put the morsel in front of mouth, he meant that all I had to do was bite, chew and swallow even if they were the bones of a desperate terminal girl. He had even had the nerve to threaten that you had to be either with the show or you were left to be a loser- I had heard that hammered carefully crafted line so many times, let it manipulate me, taint my being so thoroughly that the rotting parts had been hard to dissect, cut off or tear away because it had been years since they had been ever looked at and where they ended and I began-that was impossible to tell. I was not allowed my Grey because it always had to be Black or White. Nothing else, either in between or beyond them. And then of course, if all else didn't work, there was always the jab at how my puberty, his child's growth, a fact another sane parent would be proud of, was dwindling down his options for business.

Later, when I had a sparse urge to revisit the damage, that spite, the green over his face was always most visible… I wondered how it hadn't disgusted me then.

"Ten grand, my son! You were great in there! The crying? That was fantastic! I almost bought it myself…", Alex declare gleefully.

Because the salt had been real... No purchase necessary though. Acid creeps, leaps up burning my lungs.

It wasn't as if I didn't know where most of the money would go…Game nights had been the same way since a decade. My father always liked to show he had my best intentions at heart but the pretence wore thin as I began to see too much. It had been too bitter to swallow that there was only one thing that my father cared about-himself.

But he had been unfortunately correct. In that moment what was I going to do? A solo act? What would that even be? Was this how a father behaved? Weren't they supposed to think after their child's well-being? It had been the first time I regretted not stepping foot in a school. The first time that I yearned for being 'normal', not a carny freak who had failed to ever register in the mainstream, whose father never used a social security number.

Not the first time that I had thought of escaping but the first that I had ever worked to formulate some sort of plan to actually do it… Because however amoral and wrong we had been, that girl with the tumour- she weighed, her inside joke of a compliment on my shirt, the laughs turning into coughs, a choke at my throat, a vice on my heart. I was drowning and escape couldn't come fast enough…

Angie had come sometime later and it had been a hit of relief, our shared dream. She had asked once how much, how long would I blame myself, why I liked to make things more difficult, for myself and others, always…

When Sean and Pete had reached out in Detroit that his heart had failed, I had to work through all that inherited muck to process the news. It was a surprise that his liver hadn't failed first on account of him haven fallen into the deep end of the bottle. It had been most difficult a thing that I decided that I had to forgive myself for consequences borne out of his decisions. So later, I also had known the responsibility of the girl with the tumours was not mine alone. Though I never heard him admit even once after that, it had been his, too. That is the only streak I am willing to share with my dear father- such a nice legacy that he has left in my care…

And so, the hard-won wisdom of my teenage that i shared with Cho, I warn young Sinclair and Gallidos even if the latter is hiding his real age, that on their claim to fame, they mustn't let anyone compromise with their dreams, principles, the moralities if they have any(mostly the glory will do that anyway)- not even and especially their own fathers…