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+--- Thread: The Depths (/showthread.php?tid=3)
The Depths - Near - 05-09-2022
For a while he wore his hair short, a concession to the pestery itch of an idea that he owed himself or the universe something to acknowledge a demarcation between Near Farr now and Near Farr then. It never felt right; he would catch peripheral glimpses of himself in mirrors and think it was a stranger watching him. So he let it grow back out, and if anyone is watching him after all, should they be tasked with proving that he went on a pilgrimage to the Reaches and came back Changed, they won't find much evidence. Because what is there, really? A new phone; a new address. And three million dollars, give or take, languishing barely touched in a savings account, despite the shovel-faced lawyer's strong recommendation that he invest it invest it invest it.
He tried to set things right. Sort of. He got Isa a new dog, bought it off Facebook when he went to gather some things from the apartment or maybe he just wanted to see a familiar face even if it was one that hated him. This was after he settled the matter of the rental car, which he can hardly remember doing (days, weeks, months he can hardly remember, in and out like sleepwalking) but the proof that he managed to settle it is in the official record: Courtland Farr, III was driving alone and swerved to avoid hitting a deer, the physics were unfortunate but these things happen, it's why we have insurance.
Isa screamed about Lew then named the new mutt with its blue eyes Old Dread in all the weird certitude that made him charming, and it was funny, funny, and for a few minutes Near thought he could make this work. Maybe. Or not that he could, but that he would like to, to hit rewind and settle back into a mess he knew how to navigate. And, still thinking this, he told Isa that he would come back when he was finished with The Reaches -- which he was selling, there was nothing there for him -- that they would talk it all out then. But he never did. It shouldn't have surprised anyone: he had been drifting into and out of lives, cities, his whole life. Next stop, Seattle. Now here he is at dead o'clock on a Tuesday, Northgate mall where the murders happened, sprawled on a bench by the broken fountain and sucking at what was an iced coffee but has become mostly the double-pump dregs of generically sweetish syrup. Bad speakers turn the piped-in pop music into a vague smear of thumpy bass. He is, if anyone asks, waiting for Guthrie's shift to end.
Guthrie works at the Nordstrom Rack. Every piece of this sentence is chronically hilarious. It's a full-time thing, although Near's experience of the mall has led him to believe that maybe a dozen people total still shop here, and he can't understand how a job selling off-price department store clothing to a dozen people can keep a person busy for eight hours a day. They met there, which is also hilarious, met at the mall like they're teenagers in 1994 when in fact they are both grown men, one of whom needed a new pair of pants. He got pants and a phone number. Sure, people have to meet somewhere, but it feels vastly more respectable to have met at, say, The Door, the little bar where Near works not because he needs the money but because he needs to work, to occupy his time with shots and small talk.
They're going out to dinner when the store closes, somewhere cheap and easy. Near is technically very early, but only because the real reason he comes here the first Tuesday of every month (well, most months) is in case Jude decides to make an appearance, even though he's positive that Jude is dead, and that even if Jude isn't dead then he sure as fuck doesn't know how Near has, for at least a year, been extending covert invitations to meet at Northgate Station on the first Tuesday of the month.
RE: The Depths - Jude - 05-17-2022
Jude is not dead, for better and for worse.
He turned out not to be crazy, but that was a revelation that had been coming down the pipe since the moment he walked out of the fog. Things happened as he portended. Forty-five minutes after he pried open a crack in the world and hopped through it, two black Ford Explorers came roaring up the road to the Reaches and made their pit-stop at Burly. The most memorable of the Family, as Jude called them, was the sister he foreshadowed. She was his spitting image, only her curling blonde hair fell below her shoulders, and whereas Jude's face had a certain vacancy to it, Juliet's was occupied by malevolence.
The evidence of the Burly pit stop was the flecks of blood in Juliet's hair. Neither she nor anyone with her would explain further beyond a cold laugh.
As well as their physical features, Juliet managed to project a similar disappointment with Near: another person put-out that he is not his father.
They hit him enough to scare him and then go. They are not sadists; they are scientists and saviors, and they are on a mission. Jude is their real problem. No one anticipated that he was going to take the risk of using a Tear. It's very easy to get lost between Tears. There's no reason to do it when there's planes and buses and cars and plenty of money. Now they think if they chase him too fast, too hard, he'll spook again, and if he goes into another Tear, he might not come out again.
(He comes out this time. Juliet feels it when he does, a boneless relief. Quietly she fears that he will kill himself, kill them both. She must find him. She must make him remember all he has suddenly forgotten.)
*
The world gets a little worse every year. It seems that it will be that way for this year, and the year after, and the year after that. The world is dying. Just in the way people die, death creeps up slowly, day by day, wrinkles and stiff joints and blurring memories. The world moves so fast as to blur. Everything is always happening. Meaning and boundaries dissolve. It will all rise to a fever-pitch, a long, unending, painful scream. The first vibrations of it quiver in the air.
It does not make any sense that Jude would ever come back to Seattle. His positive experiences of the place were thoroughly burnt out, a cigarette hole in a tablecloth, by his episode with Near Farr. He needs friends and allies; Near proved to be neither. But if Jude is governed by sense it is one beyond the base nine, the twenty-one confirmed, and the thirty-three debatable.
Actually he has been coming to the mall on the first Tuesday for three months now. He has watched Near from a distance and wandered the mall and looked for whoever he assumes must be watching Near. Someone has to be. Someone has to be. This has to be a trap. Yet what if it is not? If it is not it still does not make sense that he detours from Portland and Vancouver to come to this shitty mall. (Jude's language has coarsened in the year of his independence.) If it is not a trap, then what is it?
There is a voice that tells him he should speak with Near Farr. The tenor of this voice is challenging; Jude mostly knows the voices that speak to them, has named them (but never asked their names.) This voice is either something Out There or it is within him, and it is troubling he cannot tell or decide which. Just go see, it says. Just see.
In Near's peripheral vision, there is just another man with his hands in his pockets, strolling through the mall, passing by the fountain. It is abrupt when he halts his casual stroll and sits down on the other end of the bench. Jude folds his hands between his open knees and stares at the fountain.
"I hate broken fountains," he says aloud. "Even if they're a waste of water." A pause. "It's sad, when you can't waste things anymore."
RE: The Depths - Near - 06-01-2022
The first words that leave his mouth, before he looks up from the slick of melted ice cubes to make visual confirmation, are "Fuck you."
His mouth shapes them casually, more or less like a "Long time no see" wrapped up in different-patterned paper. After all, how else will Jude know it's really him? And sure, maybe there's some resentment running underneath. Resentment because Jude has decided to open their brand new dialogue with some pretentious Deep Thought instead of "Hello." Or maybe because he literally disappeared the last time they were this close to one other; vanished into thin air and left Near to his own devices in the dark dark trees, but, hey, he's not as mad about as he could be.
The truth is, Near, in normal life, has never has been able to get a very good grip on resentment. Forgive and forget is an easier, downhill kind of option, with a couple of exceptions: notably Courtland his Father and notably Jude's people, whatever the hell they were. What spurred Near into leaving his little semidisguised messages in outer pockets of the internet was never any desire to get back in touch with Jude; it was more like the highly dramatic cinema sentiment that went the enemy of my enemy ..., etc. Strange, at first, to think in those terms, like stretching muscles he'd forgotten he had or never knew about, but by now he's used to it. It's just sunk into him.
Does he care that the world indeed seems to be fucked? Sort of. In an abstract way less pronounced than the concrete annoyance of Jude having been right about it, the idea that gnaws at his toes sometimes that if he'd done something then ... But more than that he has invested a very large chunk of himself into the idea of getting back at Those People, and the only person he knows who might have a parallel interest is Jude Nolastname.
So it's, "Fuck you," and on its heels, "I figured you were dead." Because he did figure, and it didn't really matter. The simple act of reaching out, even with no expectation of success, has settled into an illusion of making progress. Of doing something.
RE: The Depths - Jude - 06-05-2022
"Thought you would have gotten a haircut," Jude replies placidly. He has. Instead of the loose curls that cherubically framed his face, he has something more standard-fare, clipped closer to his temples. His bangs are slight. His good looks are more generic, more red-white-blue American. He fits in with the mall. He's blue jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers, black waterproof bomber jacket, because it rains here so much, god it rains. He mostly knows when it's going to rain.
(It's going to rain. Sooner if not later.)
The theory that he might have been dead receives a very bland look. "Well," he says after a moment, "I suppose you'd have no way of knowing if I was." He looks back to the fountain. He doesn't think there'd be any cataclysmic event to signal his passing. It would just be the Family's missed opportunity, the stars never fated to align again for many lifetimes. Jude reckons he's not easy to kill (he has not tested this theory out) but he imagines it would be just the same as anyone else -- the exception being, he doesn't he think he has a soul, if that's a thing people have. So he would go quietly, and then, if there's a place to go afterwards, he wouldn't go there. He will go nowhere. He's already there.
He takes a second glance at Near. Seems he turned out all right, even with Jude's disappearing. Jude checks for scars; he's watched Near walk through the mall and looked for any signs of a limp. The scars could be under the clothes, but in that case he can't have been taught too terrible of a lesson by his sister.
She's hunting for him, even now. She's gotten close several times, even closer than she did at The Reaches. It's less frightening on its face now. Or, Jude has adapted. He had incorporated that level of fright into his baseline.
"Why are you looking for me?"
RE: The Depths - Near - 06-17-2022
He rattles the ice back and forth a couple of times. It's a percussion instrument, war drum. Ready steady go, then at last he swivels around on his bench to conduct a head-on assessment of the prodigal whatever-the-fuck, and if his face affects a few contortions of exertion, it's because he finds himself abruptly obliged to recalibrate the "Jude" he expects to the one standing there, who is still Jude but who fails to line up with the version that has been hanging around in his head all this time, like a kid actor who grew up between seasons one and two.
And what is that, disappointment? Idiot, Near. Idiot. But hell if he hadn't liked the unshorn lamb look, held onto those curls as a defining feature because they had been one of the few things about Jude that didn't get to him like nails down a chalkboard. Now he looks like any asshole with nothing to do but walk through a mall on a weekday afternoon. The smirk that Near allows himself, faint and sardonic, has nothing to do with Jude and everything to do with own pettiness.
But he is petty. Always has been, no point dancing around it. And we have to accept the things we can't change, etc. So there, disappointment. It doesn't take much, the pull of gravity, for a sardonic smirk to wilt into a frown.
"That was a shitty thing you did. Disappearing. I met your friends."
RE: The Depths - Jude - 06-18-2022
Near ignores the question as if it hasn't been asked at all. Jude huffs under his breath, clasps his hands between splayed knees. Near is absolutely the same, the same stupidly difficult man that Jude encountered at the Farr estate. By now Jude has met more difficult men, and has more experience dealing with them. Still, Near was one of his firsts. This grants him the boon of being especially irritating, despite the fact that he's done little more than overlook a single question. Jude should have more patience. The mere knowledge that he should have more patience raises the temperature of his ire.
"I told you I needed to go." Already his tone has shifted into something more goading. The change is subtle, but instead of that neutral, empty philosophizing, it is a slight prod to the ribs. Near is not alone in his pettiness. Jude may very well have come to the mall to indulge in an I told you so, despite the risk to himself. "But you thought I was just making things up." There, he can't resist. His fingers fold over themselves in satisfaction.
"I take it you met my charming sister?" Juliet did not do any tricks for Near. She was distinctly more practical than her brother, though they both shared the awkwardness borne by people who did not do many things for themselves. The person who did most of the talking was a honey-skinned woman with dyed red hair who called herself Nora. She was the one who led Near's interrogation. Juliet did more watching, as if by looking into Near's eyes she could crawl into his brain and discern the truth value of his words. She was creepy.
Jude's voice does not convey that she is creepy. There's a certain wistfulness to it, like he's talking about an ex-girlfriend he fell out with. And that's not entirely false.
RE: The Depths - Near - 07-01-2022
"I told you I needed to go."
Jude looks like he thinks he's Bobby Fischer pulling off a checkmate to the onlookers' applause, but Jude's onlookers are a janitor pushing a mop cart, three teenage boys who turn the corner moshpit jostling one another down the hall, and Near, so all he accomplishes is opening up a direct line to such questions as So why didn't you go before we were stranded in the woods?. But steady on. Near doesn't ask. He doesn't.
What's the point in asking?
Here is one of several conclusions he arrived at while he was still playing the whole Reaches incident over and over and over in his head, not so much a favorite movie but one he was sure was concealing, in background patterns and in cut-in frames, answers to questions he didn't know to ask: Jude is congenitally incapable of giving a shit about anything outside of himself. He is like the handful of four year-olds that Near has met, whose brains have not yet developed the capacity to think outside of their own needs, concerns, knowledge, emotions. It's absurd, of course, because Jude is ostensibly a grown-ass man and looking growner with the new 'do, but he is in fact not the first grown-ass man to have stopped maturing at toddlerhood whom Near has known; he was just too taken aback by most of their previous encounter to recognize it, much less come to terms with it the way you have to if you're going to deal with people like that.
Near is petty. Jude is a toddler. These are the facts.
So he doesn't ask, because it would be the equivalent of asking Jude to look outside of himself, which is the equivalent of asking a man with no legs to roundhouse kick a watermelon off a fence post, and even Near knows that's stupid.
"You sure did," he agrees instead, blandly and punctuated with a tiny click of his tongue against his teeth. Yep, you got me there, kid.
Then, "Yeah, I guess I did. You know, I always thought it would kind of nice to have a sister. A brother. Whatever, somebody to talk to. I think that changed my mind. They ever find you?"
RE: The Depths - Jude - 07-06-2022
Near does Jude a disservice: Jude is not four years old. Jude bears a stronger resemblance to those self-styled titans of industry: Steve Jobs if Jude is to be trusted, Elon Musk if he's a pure asshole, Elizabeth Holmes if he's nothing more than a grifter. Jude is not concerned merely with himself, but with ideas so much bigger than a single person. This kind of big-picture thinking easily subsumes the suffering and inconvenience of any single individual. It is the inverse of the individual-tragedy-million-statistic quote: an individual is an anomaly; significance begins at a million.
Though it might interest Near to know that Jude never was a toddler. He and his sister 'hatched' at approximately age ten, with fine motor skills intact and very rapid information absorption. Depriving Jude of those stages of life has created some wrinkles that still need ironing out.
"She was nice to talk to," Jude concedes. "Charming, really, when she wants to be." He doesn't imagine that Near caught Juliet in a charming mood. Being apart from her has invoked a constant state of low-grade physical distress in Jude: a faint headache that never totally clears, a sense of taste that just isn't what it used to be. What is she doing now? Brushing her hair, talking to the Family, taking a shower. He thinks of her often. He aches.
But once more, individual suffering is dismissed.
"If they had found me, we wouldn't be talking." He pronounces the words slowly, as if Near will need more time to think the implications through. "I wouldn't get a second chance." By now the Family has worked out a precise plan on how they would ensure Jude's compliance -- several plans, more like it, contingencies upon contingencies. They should have known, really, they should have guessed. But only when the impossible occurs does it break the shell of blindness, dissolving the boundaries between what cannot be, and what can.
RE: The Depths - Near - 07-08-2022
Waffly confirmation that something happened is as deep as he's willing to delve into the incident, even if he catches a note in Jude's voice that sounds, for a moment, like he's hoping for more news from the other side. But you know, if he wanted to catch up with his goddamn sister he could have not vanished into thin air right before she showed up.
"Didn't ask if they found you. Just if they're still looking."
It seemed to Near that they might have given up the ghost by now, come up with an alternate for whatever position they wanted Jude to play and left their deserter to bungle through the real world on his own merits. Whatever those are. (The sixty-four thousand dollar question, Can Jude be charming, really, when he wants to be, or is that the sole purview of the sister?)
If that were the case, it would muddle Near's plan a little. Not that it's really a plan. It's more like a stretch goal, the gristly bits of a grudge he's been chewing at for too long and that, if he's being honest, he assumed was more of a fleabit hobbyhorse diversion than a real possibility, because, come on, what were the odds Jude was going to make an appearance? But here they are.
"Look, I still don't know what the fuck you're trying to do, but I'm guessing you haven't done it yet." He waves his unoccupied hand vaguely toward the mall promenade, toward the world around them, has disaster been diverted? "Hopeless causes," he adds. "I looked it up. Saint Jude. Got himself axed. Nobody prays to him for anything because they mix him up with Judas, so he jumps at whatever comes his way even if it's impossible. I'm sure you knew that." Thanks, Wikipedia. He looked up a few other things, too, enough to leave him with a fevered suspicion that Old Courtland's text spam might have been a veiled attempt to warn him against Jude. And oh, if only he'd known from the start, Jude could have had whatever he asked for, anything at all, because nothing was ever more of a driving inspiration to Near Farr than an opportunity to not do what his father would want him to. His whole life has been molded artfully around the armature of being a disappointment. But he has a new thing now.
RE: The Depths - Jude - 07-11-2022
His brows furrow. "You literally... said... 'they ever find you?'"
Jude has grown up in his year on his own. He's had to learn to do a lot of things that traditionally someone else has done for him, and that includes talking to people. He certainly practiced his pitch a great deal more after he narrowly escaped the Reaches -- sat in front of a mirror and everything, wrote down what he wanted to say and repeated it, over and over. It helped, but not in proportion to the effort he invested. He didn't know what sounded good to people, what sounded real. Presently, he has a much better idea.
But Near turns him into the person he was that night, drinking too much and seeing the shadows liquefy on the library floor, looking into the room in the wine cellar where he'd covered his hands in blood and conveyed the whispers from beyond. Near turns Jude into a pedantic idiot. Combined with his Steve Jobs attitude, this produces the social equivalent of ammonia.
His cheeks puff with air as Near explains a Christian saint, the bubble of his mouth popping with a forced sigh as the other man goes on. This is so stupid. I think I am becoming more stupid. "It's not that easy," he complains, hating the wheedling note in his voice. What was he expecting from Near? An apology, maybe? 'I missed you'? As if there was anything to be missed.
"They're going to look until they find me, and I'm going to run until I figure out how to stop them." He surrenders to the peevish note he can't drive out of his voice. He scowls at Near's empty Starbucks drink. Were there anything left, he would appropriate it for his own thirst. It would be too immature to grab the cup and dup the ice down Near's collar, but the thought crosses his mind.