Nancy listens to Shane and his goth-skanks discuss the relative nutritional value of Pop-Tarts, which is to say, they talk about nothing. She makes coffee and listens half-heartedly, because that's all she ever does. Finally she admits to noticing they're still here, and asks if their parents are okay with them sleeping at some boy's house -- because that's real bohemian. One of the girls explains that, no, their parents are American, which I think engages Nancy's love of irony to the point where she realizes it's time to talk. Pop-Tarts are delicious and take a minimum of effort to enjoy; they're the kind of meal a parent might cook, or toss onto a plate, if she were only pretending to parent. It's the idea of food with nothing behind it; if you ate Pop-Tarts every day you'd die.
So this science experiment: it includes information on reproduction? Disease? "Your presentation includes those things? In addition to volcanoes and ... wind." The girls start getting scared, but it's only when Nancy asks what went down last night that they scatter. Shane doesn't answer: "I'm thirteen." Nancy points out that they are too.
What I mean to say is that he's smuggled them into her house, under her nose, through a tunnel she dug herself. They're only thirteen.
"Fuck you, Judah!" she finally screams. Finally. Shane swears he can handle it; his mother swears that she can't. And he tells her it's over, the joke is over: "Quit pretending to be a mom." Her face goes vulpine, that awful face, that "STFU Marvin" face, and she grabs him, striking out in anger, spanking him like a child. But if half his life was learning to survive without her, how on earth can she complain when he does?
Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.
Silas chuckles nervously, entering by another door, and asks if she's okay. Too high on adrenaline, she pours the coffee down the sink and asks WTF she did, to bring us here. "How did this happen? What did I do?" Silas says it's because she had boys, and that's true because Judah died, and because nobody, especially Nancy but including Andy, Doug and the boys themselves, has any idea what a man looks like. But if their roles were switched and it was Celia standing here, then Isabelle could say it's because she had girls, and that would be true too.
Doug watches Mermex sleep in his dingy new place, with coffee and donuts in his lap. She wakes up to him staring, and he smiles -- he tried waking her up with a little nookie, but she sleeps like a corpse. She laughs nervously, because at least he didn't realize she was awake. He stares at her: "You are so totally beautiful." He's so well-meaning, and yet so deeply creepy... I always thought this show dropped the ball on his creepiness, based on the abject fear Josh showed in the pilot, but it seems to be coming back to center with this whole immigrant hostage sex doll situation. Nasty fuck. He drops his pants and Mermex is horrified, all, no: "You must ... win my affection." He says he understands, they have to get to know each other, he must win her heart. Every word is crawling like spiders with scare quotes and air quotes: "Can I just see one boob?"
Celia is passing out in a rehab group session as the woman talks about how "all the pain will hit you at once," which... I wish Nancy were in rehab. Celia is lucky as hell this season. The group leader says they are not alone, and the others in the group will become their best friends, which seems like a sketchy proposition until the camera pans to ODENKIRK!, who looks twitchy watching Celia scratching and sniffing herself and the world respectively. "You're all going to hell together," the lady says comfortingly, and ODENKIRK! raises a fist:"Give it up! Let's go to hell!" Anywhere. I would go anywhere with that man. I would go to Naperville, IL for Bob.
Sanjay's reading one of the Knopf James Merrill editions, I think Changing Light At Sandover. I looove James Merrill; I wish he were famouser. I wonder what he would think of this show. I think he'd love Nancy; I think he'd love Celia more. Nancy appears at the door of Maternity World, which is locked at midday. Why? At the edict of, quoth Sanjay, "The sexy scary bearded one." Nancy's incensed, but Sanjay has a point: "I do what I'm told by men with semiautomatic weapons. I'm a total bottom that way." That would be a much better line if Sanjay's entire personality didn't end in that same punchline every single time he's onscreen. Could you pass me the salt? "Yeah, of course. I'm a total bottom that way." He asks why Nancy looks so tired: "Love tired? Sex tired?" White slavery tired. Gun smuggling tired. Child Protective Services tired. "Tired tired; I'm just tired."
Into the back room, where there are crates. Going into the hole, not coming out of it. Ignacio points out also that she looks tired, from all those girls on her back, and she asks what's in the crates -- he reminds her that he will shoot her. "It's your job to threaten to shoot me, not actually shoot me," she says. Hello, Entitled White Lady here! He fires over her head, and Entitled White Lady shoves a crate over onto the floor, like a toddler would. It's full of guns, which Nancy correctly identifies as "not pot." Guillermo comes in, and he's so over Nancy and her reality allergy that he can barely come up with a half-decent WTF. "This is a Weed-Only tunnel!" Nancy says, and the force behind that total head cheese sandwich of denial causes great cracks to form in the tectonic plates beneath California. Guillermo points out that in fact it's just a tunnel. There's another box with big bricks of heroin or cocaine or something. Nancy sighs. "When did the floodgates open?" And Guillermo's not saying anything Heylia didn't say that first rainy day: "When the water got here."
Silas is selling "head" cheese sandwiches -- in six and twelve inch sizes -- at a brisk pace, to businessmen and vegans. One dude actually orders a head-cheese sandwich, so when Lisa charges him $240 for it he's legitimately confused. He asks and asks and asks what's going on, while the onlookers worry about their own personal head cheeses, and finally Lisa panics in a total southern California way: "You're too fat!" she blurts, which causes the dude to go on whatever sizist tirade, and he ends up telling Silas that his mom's a rude bitch. Silas, who got irony from his real mom like a virus, almost grins: "Nice save, Ma."
Celia shows up at Group without her rehab buddy, and soon realizes -- "Because I can't do this alone... I do this as a we" -- that she's expected to go find him. She's looking great, finally, in a dress-and-pants combo, which I mean, we work with what we get. It's been a long time since hot Celia was around. She finds him with a quickness and, of course, he's snorting huge lines off a mirror. He complains that he can't do rehab sober, pointing out that his career as an airline pilot has gifted him with superhuman abilities to get shit past security. Heh. He goes on a long coked-up rant about how he flies better when he's high, so really it's a public safety issue that he do as many drugs as possible. Thanks, Barry. We the passengers salute you.
They chat about how great coke is -- she likes the moment just before, whereas he (as an actual hopeless addict and not just Celia Hodes trying on outfits) prefers the "fucking awesome" moment when it goes up your nose -- and he offers to share it with her, but she gets all Celia Hodes Has A Purpose In Life on him. They struggle over the coke while she's basically threatening to kill him with support, and of course right then the counselor walks in, looking for them both. He turns on Celia and whines that she was trying to force the coke up his nose, but I doubt a professional addiction therapist is going to buy that.
I had gone so long without loving/ I hardly knew what I was thinking.
Doug complains to Andy about how their shared ADD is making one and a half days with no Mermex sex feel more like a billion years. They discuss their differing life experiences: Andy yearns for the easy sex and drugs of the '70s, and when Doug points out that he was on drugs and getting laid throughout the '70s and '90s too, Andy says that it was different because he had to wear a condom. Doug says maybe the funniest thing he's ever said, about how after all he's done, she could at least give it up to the point of some "cockamole on her faceadilla." That is so, so funny. I'm sorry, but the whole coming on the face thing makes me laugh every single time. Andy tells Doug, because he actually knows Maria and not the idea of Mermex, some facts about Maria, like how she grew up in an orphanage. Doug calls this a jackpot, because with the implied Daddy Issues, the age difference should work in his favor. Men are beasts.
Esteban is wheeling and dealing with a priest guy; he leaves and Nancy grins wryly up at him. "Finding God?" Esteban is the Mayor of the TJ: "God finds me." He kisses her, and becomes the third person to note how fucking tired she looks. She blames the ayahuasca -- "all the pain will hit you at once," the lady said -- but notes that he is working the tux hardcore. He pours them drinks and asks what she wanted to talk about. The tunnel, and what comes through it? Boxes, he says. Which is the correct answer. "Weed ... Heroin, cocaine ... Guns..." No, just boxes. The boxes that come through the tunnel are just boxes, with things inside we don't care about. Nancy's just a front owner and drug dealer; what's inside the boxes doesn't matter. Or didn't, until the ayahuasca.
Merrill fought his whole life against science: unable to understand the rules beneath the world, he started looking elsewhere. He saw the legs of long-dead frogs lit up with electric impulses, kicking, as I say, long after the frogs had died, and realized the world we see is not the world. We're just little boxes on the hillside, and the things that we do are what fill us up. But as long as we're just boxes, it doesn't matter what's inside, or what motivates the frog to kick. It was the existential pain of knowing that we're all black boxes, machines working on unknowable impulses, that sent Merrill off into Ouspenskaya places, Ouija boards and messages from beyond. There must be something more than this, he knew, and this was his war on science: "Did Newton need Blake?" Not if we're just boxes on the hillside.
And then there are the girls, coming through the tunnel; boxes full of drugs and sex, boxes waiting to be filled by the highest bidder. "Guillermo said she was his cousin." Esteban says the boxes have to stay boxes, the whole world and shadow economy rests on never crawling down into the tunnel: it's how he builds schools and hospitals in border towns. It's now Nancy provides for her family. "She wasn't Guillermo's cousin," Nancy insists. A guy comes to get Esteban, as usual when things get interesting, and he grins: "Charity calls." Nancy speaks from the clarity of her visions: "It's not enough, your charity." He tells her to go home and sleep, on a pile of boxes as big as the moon. "Nothing is ever enough. But we live, and we try." They kiss, sweetly. And they're both right, but Nancy's more right. If I save your life and kill your friend, are we even?
Nancy goes home to get clean, pouring a bath. Silas arrives to ask her to bankroll a larger grow house. "I need more space," Silas whines; Nancy says, from inside her little box: "You and me both." She reminds him that they've fucked up large-scale operations, grow houses, twice now. He says that this means they've learned, how to do it better, but she says what they've really learned is not to do it anymore. She's right, but Silas is more right, and knows her better than anybody now that Conrad's gone: "Lisa said you would say that." The magic words. The better mother. "Let me think about it." And she swears that's all she's doing.
But you were everywhere beside me, masked/ As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love. I miss Judah too, and I never even met him.
The goth-skanks stare at Shane and Isabelle from another table in the lunchroom. Isabelle looks totally awesome, her gigantic wonderful Leo hair pulled back with a wide headband. She looks like if Carole King were your school counselor. She asks Shane what it was like and he describes it beautifully, and in a very Shane-like way: "Confusing, brisk, messy." He admits that Nancy hit him -- which I hope fucking bites her right in the ass, and knowing this show it will -- when the pressure got to be too much. Ask Celia about how willing Nancy is, to hit you when it gets too scary. I loved U-Turn, but I'm under no illusions: that was one of his gifts too.
Isabelle is disturbed that he told Nancy about his threesome: "Have I taught you nothing? Tell her what she wants to hear, and then do what you want." Speaking of moms, how is Celia doing in rehab. Imagine your children having these conversations. Isabelle says that she's got it all figured out: Maternity World is obviously a front, and both of their moms are dealing coke, but Celia is weaker and more addiction-prone. Isabelle still doesn't know Nancy very well. Isabelle wishes, like Silas before them, that they could just be 18 already; she asks if he's going to dump the goths. "Why, because a slaphappy drug dealer told me to? Screw that." Well, good. Don't hit your kids. Parenting is about self-control. That is literally all parenting is about: not giving yourself a pass at any point. Nancy's written herself so many passes that anybody could see how much erosion her authority is wearing. Shane is right, I'm sorry, but this war is over. He nods the goth-skanks over and introduces them to Izzy. "Do you party?" they ask. "Depends on the party," she answers. When precisely did this storyline go from being the most ludicrous one to the most realistic?
Mermex is worried to be walking along the beach pseudoromantically with Doug, but he tells her that, absent coming out of the surf fully dressed with a dozen Mexicans, she looks just like a real live girl. They attempt to get to know each other, which is a bad idea for Doug, because what Doug is, is: awful. The embezzlement, the not-quite-finalized divorce, his abandoned children -- all of it comes out in three seconds. Then he gets into a fight with a little kid after stepping on his sandcastle. Mermex realizes that she's in over her head with a total douchenozzle, and gets sick to her stomach; she asks if they can stop talking, I'd imagine permanently, and he's icky some more. "Let the silence bring us closer. I can dig it." Girl, the call is coming from inside the house.
Barry atones in group, with a speech about how he "let the plane fly [him]" and how if it weren't for Celia taking control of his life for two seconds he'd come to the end of his thirty days and be right back up there, snorting off the dashboard and "jamming blow up my urethra so I could fuck Paula the 57-year-old flight attendant." Wow. Even the most jaded upper-middle-class white person there is like, "Whoa." He apologizes to Celia for freaking out, and everybody claps. Celia Hodes gives a pretty bleak, funny/scary speech about how rehab is like "one big wonderful dysfunctional family" and she loves them. I would love it if this were like day two of her stay at the clinic.
She starts to weep, and not even Celia is capable of admitting how far down the bullshit extends here, or how nakedly honest she's being at the same time: "I have a family, but they're not like you guys..." One of the admins comes to borrow her, and Barry says to hurry back: "Because I need you. Everybody needs you." And as much as I want Celia to hear those words, every day for the rest of her life, because in fact they are the magic words she needs and deserves to hear: she's still broken. It's not time for that yet. So whatever horrible shit is about to happen to her, I'm looking forward to it, because she deserves to actually be fixed.
Celia, of course, has no insurance; drug front employment, even for the five seconds she was employed, is not rife with benefits. And, awesomely, the policy number she gave the clinic belongs to a dead Korean. Celia panics about how it's actually going well, and she's on her second step, and she's ever so "proud of me," and the lady says she shares that pride, built as it is on nothing but empty revolving-door-rehab bullshit talk, but Celia's still going to the actual rehab across town, where people without options or insurance go. Which is exactly where she needs to be. Which she knows, which is why she's panicking and offering to do their dishes or some landscaping, to stay. "Best of luck with your recovery... Vacate within the hour."
Andy comes to Doug's sad little crib to visit; Mermex tells him Doug's gone to get "mouthwash, toilet paper and tweezers." She tells Andy straight up that thinks are freaky-bleak and that Doug is a terrible man. They have a logic fight. Per Maria: Doug is a criminal, thief, who has "abandoned his wife and family and wants to make me his whore." Heh. Andy translates this into white assface language: Doug is a CPA with legal problems who's going through a divorce, and is wildly in love with you. Doug is a box on the hillside, and the things he does are what fills him up. Call it what you like. However, Maria's trump card is Doug's genital warts, for which Andy has no easy euphemism. Doug enters with a gift basket and a headboard, which -- after stiffing the moving guys and telling them not to "start that Mexican shit" when they question his math -- he bumps slowly and rhythmically against the wall. Reciprocity, it's how guys think.
In Celia's new facility, a woman with a neck tattoo relates a hilarious story about stabbing a man in the neck with a crack pipe -- "I'm not using this ... except to kill you, motherfucker!" -- because for half a rock he wanted to fuck her with a mannequin leg with the shoes still on it. "Fuck that," she says, and I heartily agree, but Celia's eyes are bugging out almost as far as her lunch has made its way up her throat. This is the girl Celia needed to meet. The group leader, who has been just as horrified and disgusted by Celia's horror and disgust as she was with the story, pronounces her name like in Italian, her correction of which crack lady finds ridiculous: "Ain't we fancy?" The guy tells her to leave the fucking attitude at the door: "We don't play that shit out here."
And I mean I'm all for dismantling the eighteen levels of bullshit that make up Celia's outer carapace, but doing it this way... At some point won't it just, you know, kill her? No, she's an immovable object, exquisitely disciplined, hard as nails and twice as sharp. The world has never stood a chance with Celia Hodes, which is the problem and always has been. The smarter you are, the crazier you get to be without anybody stopping you: she needs to die to get anywhere. You can't miss the bear:
He thought of certain human hearts, their climb/ Through violence into exquisite disciplines/ Of which, as it now appeared, they all expired.
Back to the back room, the tunnel, the truth. You already know. Guillermo hustles girls out of the tunnel, with their purses and eyes wide. I think they're speaking Russian. He grunts at Nancy, hisses, bitches about changing the combination. She spits back that she's just putting money in the safe, with which he can't argue, and then looks at the girls. Looks right at them, finally. ("Is she buying us?" they ask. Yes. Buying and selling and standing right there.) "More cousins? You girls okay?" He hustles them out and into the van, and tells her the day is over: go home.
The tunnel has always been this: Wonderland, where nothing is true and everything is permitted. Lacey died down there; Nancy was born again. Every night when you go to sleep, that's the tunnel that you go into. All the things you can't look at in the sunlight.
Nancy locks the door of Maternity World behind her, and walks out into the San Ysidro strip mall, where everything's on sale. She waves to another storeowner. She's just a girl. She's just a girl in love with a boy.
The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine.
His master's voice rasps through the grooves' bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the grave's
He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone...
You could get to hate yourself, jumping to your master's voice every time it calls. It's all we ever do: pain and loss, grief and need, loneliness and madness. The only difference between Doug and Nancy is that she's just doing it to herself. Or she was, until she looked that girl in the eye. It kept spinning around, coming back to the same mistakes and the same place over and over, like a broken record on a broken Victrola, and like with any addiction the question was: how do you stop the record spinning? How do you keep from ending up in the same place?
"How did this happen? What did I do?" You had boys. "Can I just see one boob?" Is that rape? "Do you like to party?" Depends on the party. "When did the floodgates open?" When the water got here. "Give it up! Let's go to hell!" It's the water gets you clean again, too. Every life is a Rubik's Cube, and Esteban's right: you can never completely solve it. But we live, and we try.
A little dog revolving round a spindle...
Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief,
A cast of stars . . . . Is there in Victor's heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.
The life it asks of us is a dog's life.
Outside, on the other side of the glass from us -- and from Ignacio, from Guillermo, from the tunnel, from the truth -- her hands are shaking. She dials, and speaks. That'll be Till. It has to be Till.
She worries at the cube, the puzzle, in a beautiful bower. "Thank you for coming. I know you're busy." She's so sad, and tired. "Guillermo Garcia Gomez." Till sits down, across from her.
He offered to pull her out, so many times, out of the tunnel, but that's what this looks like to an addict: like a monster, like an intervention, like an attack. Like the world coming up at you at 32 feet per second per second, knowing that no matter how fast you talk or dance or how many drugs you do or how many times you get eaten by the lion, you're still going to hit, hard. Law enforcement was always the bad guys, on this show, the same way therapists are always the bad guys, if they're doing it right.
This part's going to hurt.
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