Chapter Six: Occam's Razor
"Hey, Marie. It's Skyler." She's standing in a bathroom stall, one foot on the lid of the toilet and her phone tucked behind her ear. Walt is still wiling away his time in the waiting room, she knows – but she had to get away for a moment, had to check in, had to get her head above water. Soon it will be back to Walt and back to this and back to…
"Oh, hey, Skyler," Marie answers quickly. She sounds slightly distracted, but Skyler can't put a finger on what she's distracted by. She then thinks of a few scenarios, and decides it's better not to know – hopefully she hasn't interrupted a moment between Marie and Hank. "Did you track down Walt?"
"Yeah, I did," Skyler replies, "I may be here a while, Walt is… it turns out he's somebody's primary health… person." She can't remember the term off-hand, and she's pretty sure that Marie is about to jump in with the right word – either that, or encourage her to drag Jesse to the hospital she works at instead.
"Whose?" Marie inquires, her voice perking up.
"Jesse Pinkman's."
"The Pinkman kid? But why…?" Marie's voice sounds like it is somewhere at the intersection between shocked, offended, and insatiably curious.
"Seems like he and Walt are… close," Skyler replies, slipping the implication in effortlessly.
"Close… like how?" She has Marie's full attention now. She can actually see Marie's eyes widening in her mind, and she smiles. Sometimes her sister is just too easy.
"Like… close… I don't know. I'm as surprised as you are, Marie."
"You mean… Well, you know… Why someone would put someone as their health care proxy?" Marie begins (oh, that's the word – proxy. Walt is Jesse Pinkman's proxy), then answers her own question, "Your husband is having an affair with…"
"Shush, Marie," Skyler interrupts quickly, "Keep it down. You think Hank would let him live that down?" Not that Walt doesn't deserve it, but… well, let Marie tell Hank. If that ends up being Walt's cover, so be it.
"You're not upset?"
"I'm supposed to be upset because you think Walt is sleeping with Jesse Pinkman?" Skyler tries to sound offended and shocked, and the result sounds pretty authentic.
"I never said 'sleeping with', exactly," Skyler can almost feel the wink in Marie's voice, "I just… Come on, Skyler, look at the simplest answer. Occam's Razor. It fits, though – it's a mid-life crisis. Sports cars and 25 year olds." Except we returned the sports car, thankfully.
"Except Jesse Pinkman is a 25 year old boy." Occam's Razor doesn't fit Walt. Maybe it never has. If Marie only had any idea what's really going on, she would… Oh, I don't even know.
"Well, there's no accounting for taste," Marie replies.
"Well, that's true," Skyler agrees, and wonders how true that really is. "Anyway, I had better get back, I suppose. It's not like Walt can do anything without my help." She gives a light giggle with mirth that she doesn't feel, hasn't felt in almost a year.
"Where am I now?" Jesse can't bring himself to open his eyes, because he knows the answer, and knows that if he opens his eyes whatever he's about to see is going to scare the shit out of him.
Upon getting no answer, however, Jesse cracks his left eye open and sees a blue wall.
Okay.
Not too scary so far.
He cracks open his right eye, before craning his head around. No sign of Gus or Mike.
Suddenly, his eardrums rattle with a sharp, high-pitched sound.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Jesse shudders and turns quickly, to be faced with the foreboding form of Tuco Salamanca.
"Hey! It's the little bitch!" Tuco exclaims, laughing hysterically.
The shriek of the bell cuts through the air again.
"Tio?" Tuco calls. "I'm coming, Tio, don't worry!"
Jesse's eyes open a little wider.
"Have you seen my Tio?" Tuco asks him, almost politely, as if he hadn't just called him a "little bitch".
"No," Jesse stammers out. "He's still alive, I think."
"You're lying!" Tuco barks, slapping Jesse hard across the face. "He's here! I just haven't found him yet – can't you hear his goddamned bell going off?"
Ding. Ding. Ding. Tuco turns and runs off, out of view. Jesse is left staring, before he slowly, tentatively takes a step forward, feeling his feet sink into wet sand or mud or something – he looks down and it's a dark red mud. It looks like the bits of Emilio that rained from Jesse's ceiling and his stomach turns; he feels a stab in his gut and he leans forward.
Behind Jesse there is a growl, and he flips around. Now he is facing Krazy-8, his neck covered in contusions and his eyes full of pure red/black hate. Jesse takes a step back.
"Happy with your Heisenberg, are you, Jesse?" he hisses. "Are you glad you teamed up with him?"
Jesse backs up and bumps into a hunched over woman wearing a black hood that obscures her face and allows just a bit of pale skin to shine through, and as he looks at her he can tell she's one of the meth addicts he used to see roaming around ABQ, near the bus stops. He's never really thought about it before, but looking at her now, she looks like Death himself or herself, like a huge white malformed snake dressed up to look like a person, a person reduced to a shell by his product.
"Change?" she wails at him. "Change?"
Jesse turns and runs, but he trips, feels the red slime fall out from under him as he collapses in it, feels the paste stick to his lower body. He lurches, throwing up in front of him as he starts to cry. He can feel now, a needle prick his skin, drive in tight – he cries out. In the background, he hears, "You damn skank!" and then a crunch.
There's a hand on his shoulder that violently jerks him up.
"Come on, kid," Mike's voice tells him, "Let's get you out of here."