The Reaches

[Near]

“Fine, fine. Now, stick around,” she said.

The truck’s lights reached hazily through tree-clotted dark to glare against the front of the cabin, a rundown and tiny thing with a single window, surely no one really stayed there, and then just a wide enough sliver of the woman’s face to prove she was holding onto that same tight-lipped deadpan she'd had when she pulled over, although “stick around” had to be a joke, didn’t it? Near even tried for the front end of a nervous chuckle, hah hah isn’t that a good one we’re all friends here, but it guttered and died before it got too far, at which point he let himself wonder in all seriousness: what were they going to do, make a break for it, run into the damn woods? That was exactly the kind of stupid thing you’d yelled at people for doing in a movie, the kind of bad decision that ended in broken ankles, bear attacks, mutant cannibals. Near was not going to be those people.

(Never mind that he might already be those people: he’d gotten in the truck in the first place.)

She peered at Jude for a few long, uncomfortable, seconds, or seemed to, then back at Near, and then turned and marched toward the building, bypassed the front door and disappeared around the back. That she had left those lights on was a sign, maybe, that she didn’t plan on staying long, but whether that was good or bad, Near couldn’t figure.

“Bet this isn’t at the top of the list of places you thought you’d be tonight,” he muttered. “You’ve been lugging that bag around. Got anything useful?” GPS systems, flare guns, fold-out helicopters ...

[Jude]

Jude peered back at the woman. His brown eyes bore no relation to meeker beasts of burden; instead he looked like a discontented big cat, some panting predator of the savanna. Certainly he was very drunk, and that gave his stare a leering quality, but his intoxication made his equal parts hysterical and unpredictable. Bovine Near might march dutifully into the murder cabinet, but the good Samaritan best not lift a reassuring hand to pat Jude's shoulder, lest he bash her with his backpack.

It was an improvement when the woman left them alone, but scarcely. Jude (who must have felt a certain eagerness toward the idea) considered bashing Near with his backpack.

"I don't have a gun," he muttered back, which showed where his mind was. He slipped the backpack around to his back, and did a half-loop around the truck so that he imposed its metal body between him and the cabin. "But she might, soon."

His position gave him some comfortable distance from Near, which helped with the urge toward violence. Jude felt both uncomfortably warm and cold. He leaned against the body of the truck, letting the cold seep into him. "What are you going to do after this?" 'This' being very general, referring to either tomorrow or next week or next year, all of time afterward. Jude certainly considered the night an event, as distinct as Christmas or Halloween. If nothing else, Near would probably remember the day he lost his dog.

[Near]

Oh, good, now they both knew one item that Jude wasn’t carrying. A billion or so possibilities to go until, by process of elimination, they whittled all of the universe down into whatever was in that backpack. Fun game for a long car trip, maybe, but since the car trip had already been spoiled, Near decided he’d rather not play.

“Big secret, huh,” he said, flat in surrender, tracing the line of halfdried blood down his chin with a fingertip. Stubble, stubble, stubble. When was the last time he’d shaved? “Don’t you get tired of those?” The kid’s whole deal seemed to be a patchwork of big secrets. Maybe he loved being an obnoxious enigma. Maybe he didn’t know any better. Near knew he couldn’t have kept it up. Nature abhorred vacuums, Near Farr abhorred secrets. Keeping them, being kept from them. Open doors only, his policy. He licked his finger and began trying to rub the blood away.

But what was this, an attempt to distract him with small talk? “Depends,” he said. “Depends on if we get murdered. If the world ends. You know.” In fact, he hadn’t thought much about it beyond an implicit assumption that he would at some point just head back home and try to get his shit back together – return Isa’s dog, at least.

Hah.

The woman reemerged from the dark, now loaded down with an armful of indeterminate somethings. She stopped in front of the house, spotlighted by the truck beams which blew her shadow up into a looming monstrosity against the trees, then let it all clatter into a pile on the ground. Propping what looked like a piece of rebar upright, she began to pound it into the dirt with a hammer.

“If I said,” she called out between swings, “That at least one of you,” swing, “Is causing,” swing, “interference,” swing, “What would you do about it?”

[Jude]

Near asked questions that didn't even enter the realm of what Jude considered a question. There were assumptions baked into Near's inquiries about the world and the way it worked that did not hold true for Jude's universe, and the missing gaps were so great as to immediately yield irritation. It felt like Near talked this way on purpose, to be as difficult as possible, to antagonize Jude about things he didn't even know he could be antagonized for. To make matters worse, it was an existential question, the kind that drunks either had the most thoughts about or none at all. Did he get tired of secrets? Did he get tired of the sky?!

"The world won't end right away," Jude said matter-of-factly. "It's in process." It would all probably happen very fast once it did happen, but until it happened, it would be very slow. Slow then fast: the way of many events. History set up her dominoes one by one, and then they all went a-tumbling.

Jude's attention flicked back to the woman when she emerged from the house. She was doing some sort of manual labor, something with metal, and he had to wonder what possessed her to do it now, in the middle of an errand. Was this a time sensitive task? Or was the price of the favor that her schedule wouldn't be interrupted?

Interference. Well, that's definitely a Jude question. He taps his fingers along the top of the truck bed. "I would take me to Burley," he says. And then he can be causing interference somewhere else.

[Near]

Slow, then fast.

If that was how it went, what was the difference between an imperiled world in need of Jude’s unspecified intervention and its Judeless counterpart with all other slow-then-fast in-process perils intact, rising oceans and mass extinctions and distant black holes and mutually assured destructions, the threats in which no intervention mattered? Near would have asked how slow, if it was a matter of days or centuries, but it didn’t seem right to go on about it in front of this woman (for so many reasons), so he observed her progress, a knot of puzzled suspense tightening in his gut. No good ever came of any combination of hammers and rebar.

Slight relief when Jude spoke up instead of waiting for Near to denounce him as ground zero. Never had there ever been a more likely source of interference, whatever the hell she meant by it. And he was still hung up on Burley, which at this point Near might have bet against being an actual place.

“You? I’ve been out here all night trying to find it,” she said, pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hammer hand. “Where it’s coming from. You’d be amazed, some of the things that get in the way. You might be. Might not. Sometimes you just have to rearrange a few rocks. Sometimes it’s more complicated.”

She finished with the first pole and straightened, stretched her arms across her chest one at a time, and shuffled to just outside the reach of the spotlight to start on a second one. The clang, clang, clang, was slow then slow.

“Look, I don’t have anything to do with this,” Near attempted, because he didn’t. Not a damn thing.

“Fine. The other one, what’s your name? Bring the bird over.”

[Jude]

Near's scope was too large, his view too macro. It was a catastrophe if the manager of the fruit section failed to put out new apples and bananas; what would she do about a black hole? So too can Jude not calculate the doom of oil spills and offshore tax havens and wars that begin and never end. Questions of time would only make him stumble. Jude was not actually as old as he looked, and his sense of time was garbled by what felt slow and fast, what felt near and far. No wonder he had such enormous problems with Near Farr.

Oh no. Burley was not an actual place. Jude shifted the woman from the category of 'clueless but helpful' to 'ignorant in a malevolent way', the same category he had placed Near in. What were they going to do now?! Near was about as useful as a rotten banana; he squished under slight pressure. Drunk Jude didn't feel capable of taking anyone in a fair fight.

(Of course, there's always the unfair fight.)

"I really can't stay here," Jude decided to insist. "It would be bad, if anyone found me. Especially with other people around." Still, he came around the truck, shifting his backpack to his back and peering into the bed of the truck at the bird. The woman was speaking gibberish, but the rhythm of it was soothing and familiar. Interference. Rearranging. Complication. Where it's coming from. Yes, it sounded like that.

Jude climbed back into the bed of the truck to retrieve the owl. Though the tarp could have provided a buffer, he did not hesitate to handle the corpse directly. Its hollow body drooped in his hands. Its beak sagged open. The deadness was also familiar.

He sat and awkwardly slid from the truck bed again, extending the owl in front of him at arm's length. "How long is this going to take?" Jude felt more confident asking questions, now that they're on a topic he's more familiar with. They couldn't rearrange all night, interference or not.

[Near]

“Can’t you. Really?” she asked. One more swing and hit to punctuate. Apparently Jude’s portents of coming badness failed to move her, and Near – a sliver of Near – warmed to the woman. Just a little. They fell on the same side of the Jude debate.

 “You’ve had plenty of time to go anywhere else. Now you have to stay here.” Here: she arced the hammer wide over her head toward a canopy leaning in to listen. Behind her, her distorted shadow performed a blown-up parody of the same gesture.

Warmed or not, Near considered the strategic possibilities of bolting while her attention was on Jude, but he couldn’t bring himself to commit while visions of broken ankles danced in his head.

“It won’t take long.”

She plucked the avian offering from Jude’s hands and hefted it upward once, testing something: its weight, its deadness. One wing dangled below her hand and swung limply. Whatever she was doing, she seemed satisfied enough with the result to turn around and nestle it down at the feet of her pounded-in posts before swapping the hammer for something longer, sharper, curved, by which she began to string the dead thing up, stitching quick loops into feathers and out, tight around rebar and back through, one wing at a time until it hung outstretched between the poles in a grotesque imitation of flight, at which point she straightened, brushed detritus from her knees, and walked a wide circle around her project.

“Stand there,” she said, pointing with the needle toward the space directly in front of the bird.

[Jude]

Jude had given up on trying to explain magic to Near. Near was clearly too stupid to understand things beyond what he's already been taught; his brain is at capacity. This woman, on the other hand, might be capable of grasping the situation at hand. All he needed was blood.

The dead bird was no help; it needed to be fresh blood, and it's just a hunk of coagulation now. As he waited for the woman to liberate him of the owl, Jude's eyes swept over the area in front of him again. Beneath the bandage on his hand, his palm was once more whole. Maybe he'd split the other palm this time, in fairness. Maybe he'd do something a little more... aggressive. Defying entropy had been too elegant for Near.

"No, I haven't," he argued angrily. "And I would have been getting somewhere if not for him!" Finally he could complain to someone about Near. If the woman isn't going to do what he says (right away), then she could let Jude vent his ire. Once the bird was out of his hands, he crossed his arms, tucking his cold hands underneath his armpits. Once again, though he had no particular idea what the woman was doing, he sensed in her a kindred spirit. The bird apparatus indicated a certain mindset, as did her language.

Like a sulky child, he huffed in irritation, but walked to the spot indicated.






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The question flashed through his head in a pang of pain. Jude's face twitched once as he took his position. They didn't have time for this.

[Near]

Call it the gravity of habit or wishful thinking or just bullheaded denial. Whatever it was, it mixed with stilted dialog and bad effects and bad angles, the telltale accouterments of no-budget horror movies, to coax Near toward a separation of him from whatever the hell was going down a few yards away in the headlight/spotlight. In spite of his better judgment, he slipped toward the foxhole position of uninvolved observer where he was more comfortable in any case but now especially, when active involvement meant some probability of danger.

If this was just between the two of them, between Jude and the owl woman, Near was allowed to wonder what was going to happen next. He could pick a team to root for.

Maybe she would do a trick and make Jude disappear.

What did happen next began and ended across a span of seconds, before he could react, before he could even really register: the glint of metal when a knife appeared in her hand, extracted from a pocket surely but as good as materialized out of thin air according to his eyes. She reached forward, across, and ran the blade over the bird’s neck – a single motion, quick and certain; and the bird, which had been lolled obviously dead in the bed of the pickup, convulsed its wings against the web by which it had just been strung up without resistance and shrieked – an impossible, earsplitting wail that shattered against tree trunks and that had nothing to do with anything Near had ever learned about owls or birds or nature.

The headlights surged and flickered in concert with the scream, then steadied to prove the owl was once more slack on its frame, the paler of feathers freshly blood-blackened. Near found his palms flush against his ears and he lowered them, tentative, and took in a weird new silence, one that was profoundly either denser or emptier than the one it had replaced.

“There,” the woman said, eyeing the dripping hunting knife she held up in the light. “Feel that?”

[Jude]

At the scream of the owl, Jude did not flinch. In fact, he straightened, a wave of clarity washing across his face. Drunkenness still hung over him, his head thick, his body leaden, but the blood-- Yes. He could do something with this. His hands opened and closed at his sides. His pupils dilated. As human as he looked -- as human as he was, for most intents and purposes -- he was also something else, a man who had never been a child, a being who could hear and see things that mere mortals cannot.

Perhaps Near has never wondered about God. He is at the age where perhaps God is dead to him, or at least boring. God is wondered about most intensely by teenagers and the old, those who are just coming into the swing of life and those who are closer and closer to death. The hunger for meaning pries their minds open; they are waiting for something to crawl in. Jude and the Family have crawled in. But Near, confined to the earth and the known, is a door locked and barred. There is no faith, or hope for it, to bring him over the threshold. Even his own eyes do not persuade.

He walked to the owl and put his palm on its neck, unhesitatingly coating his hand with blood. The woman's hunting knife was of no interest to him now. "It's not much," he said. "But I can try." The look of determination on his face was visible only to their strange new companion. Touching his forefinger and thumb together, he circled them against one another. Already it was growing sticky.

Time and space were illusions of human constraint. 'Here' and 'there', 'then' and 'now' -- projections, circumscriptions.

"Do you need anything before I go?" There were rules about how to travel: Jude has always done it the normal way, by car or plane. No one wanted to risk his going into some wormhole or pocket dimension and not coming out. Still tipsy, he was inclined to recklessness. He will bring himself to Olympia, or he'll bring Olympia to him. He will fold the two ends of the paper so they touch, walk across, and bend them back. Easy peasy.

It was a lot to ask of the owl. Would have been better to have a dog. Or a deer. But beggars can't be choosers.