The Reaches

[Near]

A larger piece of his childhood than the topic merited had been spent wondering what Daddy was up to.

He knew better than to say so out loud. Asking would only have upset his mother; he did that enough unintentionally. And it was never a matter of wanting to be there, just a private game of speculation: while Near was sitting at his desk at school, learning about the Spanish-American War, was Courtland in the boardroom with the big table? Near in bed, counting ceiling tiles: Courtland in his leather recliner, watching the news or staring at his laptop in the dark? The frequency of these wonderings slowed as he gained distance from his childhood, as life got more complicated, but they still strayed into his day-to-day thoughts now and then, inspired by tickles of deja vu or nostalgia or something like that. It had been happening more since word of Courtland’s death reached him. Of course, now, when the question rose up to annoy him like a new shoot of a vine he thought he’d done a pretty good job of pulling up, he could remind himself that he knew exactly what Daddy was up to.

None of his mind’s eye Courtland activities had involved any patronizing of the arts, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. Clearly not buying canvases.. None had featured interactions with a kid who couldn’t answer a question and talked about magic, whose grin was taking on an unsettling cast.
“What, was he fucking you?”

He asked with some legitimate concern, narrowed eyes, a curious tilt of his head, in spite of the blunt phrasing: it seemed clear enough that talking around things was less likely to get a straight answer than asking outright.

[Jude]

That got a laugh out of Jude. He did his best impression of condescension, which, unlike Near, he had far from mastered. The whole attempt was distorted by the garish, amused twist of his lips. "Oh no, no. That would be unseemly." Jude took it as a given that cutting up live animals and drawing blood runes was less unseemly. It was not that the family respected Jude's bodily autonomy, so much as they believed intimate relations would introduced unneeded complexity, both for their wards and for their patrons. Whether or not various parties projected sexual overtones onto the blood runes - well, that was the business of the individual, excusable so long as they paid their dues. Best of all, once one started paying, it was very difficult to stop.

"No," he said. "Just magic. My sister and I." The smile dropped away, at Jude's first mention of her. Yes, Juliet was out there, somewhere - probably helping the family look for him. She did not share his doubts about their purpose or their future. He had left her behind without warning or explanation; she was sure to be furious.

The thought of her faced sobered him. He cast his eyes down, trying to wipe the image away. He shrugged, then looked up to hold the cutting board out to Near.

"But he's dead, and you're here instead." They had both suffered a loss, though for entirely separate reasons, with very different impacts.

"Are you... going back to sleep?" If Near was going back to sleep, that entitled Jude to going back to sleep. Otherwise, the familiar sensation of being on display kept him rooted, answering questions and doing tricks, over and over.

[Near]

In the breath-long space between question and response, he braced himself against the prospect of an affirmation or a negation with an obvious lie in it, and what that would mean.  Because, once he asked, the fact that it almost made a kind of sense crept up on him.  The kid showing up like this, his familiarity with the house, his mention of parties, his unpredictability, his overall strangeness: frame it right, and parallels appeared to some of the people he knew who’d been abused at some early point in their lives.  He may have accepted, as best he could, that Courtland was an abusive piece of shit, but this would be a whole new level to absorb.  Yet the idea of his having a part in some basement child sex cabal (the scenario his head chose in spite of having no evidence for it) felt squarely within the realm of possibility.

Jude’s laugh, weird and reflexive and open, with no discernible shadow of denial, came as a relief.  Even excising all lurid, imaginary details, the thought of his father doing anything with a man so close to Near’s own age was distressing in a way he preferred not to explore.  Better, somehow, if Memory Courtland’s proclivities remained contained to teenage girls and fits of violence.  He was already inured to that.

“Good,” he answered, a single flat syllable.  Then, to the sleep question, “Eventually,” with a slight bristling at the impression that Jude was trying to get rid of him that he battened down for the sake of non-antagonization.  He didn’t reclaim the cutting board.

“So, what would have been different if Courtland opened the door?”

[Jude]

Jude was absolutely trying to get rid of Near. While he was inexperienced at manning his own sales pitch, he had subconsciously picked up a rule of the family: if you can't close the deal in a certain amount of time, it's best to give up; if you keep pushing, and they do buy in, there will be buyer's remorse, and inevitable complications. Perhaps Near wanted to be convinced, but that was quite near to wanting to want something. It wasn't the same as being convinced, or wanting.

The cutting board dropped as Jude lowered his hand. He sighed, and thought about Near's question for a moment. What would it have been like? He took the time to visualize it.

Courtland opening the door, recognizing him. Maybe some words like, 'There you are.' or 'It took you long enough. And then he'd come inside, and it would be warm, and the rooms would be well-lit and attended to. There would be dinner, and then, most importantly--

"He would have had a plan." Jude's mouth stretched into a wry line. That was why he came here first. More than anyone else, Jude felt like Courtland would have had a plan. Or, if he hadn't had one, he would have come up with one rather quickly, something that tied up the loose ends and had a success rate higher than fifty percent.

[Near]

A plan.

He didn’t have to wonder if the supposition was correct, didn’t need to sift through faded memories looking for a time that Courtland proved himself capable of handling a situation. It just clicked: sure, of course Daddy would have had a plan.

To Google Courtland Farr (2AM, last call, the smell of stale smoke long soaked-in and three people nursing well scotches in their respective corners; Near with a rag in one hand, poised to wipe down the sticky bartop but squinting at the phone in his other hand instead -- search results fractured across cracked screen of a phone he can’t afford to replace) was to immerse yourself in praises of the man's business acumen: he had navigated mergers and takeover attempts, economic downturns, the odd scandal involving his board of directors but somehow never himself. And he had apparently always gotten Farr Ventures through the maelstrom intact, still standing tall at the helm. Whatever else he might have been, he was a man with plans. Near might have gotten The Reaches, the money, but Courtland had known better than to leave him any piece of the family business: it would have ended up wrecked against the nearest crag sooner rather than later -- by accident if he didn’t have the heart to run it into the ground on purpose.

Courtland would have had a plan. Near, on many levels, did not.

“A plan for what?”

[Jude]

"For what to do." He was going to have to put this cutting board back himself, he suspected. That gave Jude the opportunity to start walking away, talking as he walked, under the presumption that if Near really wanted to keep listening, he would follow along. The hope was that he didn't want to listen, but Jude had the sinking feeling that, at last, Near was coming around to the way things were. Jude might be exaggerating - what was the end of the world? - but his minor displays of power could belie greater destructive potential. What Jude offered had been enough to tangle Courtland Farr up in it. Perhaps, too, Courtland would have known the right questions to ask, the path of least resistance, so Jude's spacey meandering would have added up to more.

But he was not here. No ghost manifested in the dusty halls to guide them. Jude wandered back to the kitchen by instinct, and began scanning the walls and nooks for the cutting board's proper place.

"I think he changed his mind, near the end. About the Family. What they told him would happen. Whether it was a good thing. And he figured out that it needed the both of us to work." The cutting board has a loop on the end; Jude found a hook that looked suited to it. "Maybe he left you a plan." He felt an strange pang in his chest once he said it. Sorrow? Regret? Most likely regret. Perhaps the preemptive sting of disappointment.

[Near]

“A plan.  For what to do.”

He lobbed the words at their source’s turned back in a tone halfway between resignation and disappointment, as if hearing them in someone else’s voice might make him realize how meaningless they were, how unhelpful.  Maybe unhelpful was the whole point, the construction of an unscalable wall of unhelpful as a passive-aggressive effort to get Near to lay off.  But why bother with the extra effort of passive when a glimpse of aggressive would have done the job and better?  Near was pretty sure the kid could turn him inside out if he felt like it; he had to realize he’d cease and desist if asked.  But no, he just kept offering up answer after answer that added up to nothing, got neither of them anywhere.  Running in place.

An exit could be the closest thing he ever got to a definitive, Near realized, and resolved not to follow as Jude wandered off into the hall, where, if the powers that be had any shred of altruism in their hearts, he would dissolve into the paneling, an hallucination after all, induced by a gas leak or mushrooms Near had forgotten he’d taken earlier in the evening.

He was trying to settle on how long to wait, how much of a head start the kid deserved, when he wandered back in, still fiddling with the cutting board, still talking, and if he was tired of being asked what, why, he should have offered a smooth surface of silence and not these little hooks of ambiguity that caught and tugged and begged to be clarified.

“Maybe.”  Uncertain agreement.  Maybe Courtland had left a plan, a weapons stash, the Arc of The Covenant, who knew.  The heir hadn’t finished digging through everything yet.  “I wouldn’t --” from his pocket pealed a string of jingly noises that he had to pause and to recognize as the notification tone of his phone, which hadn’t had reception the last seventy-four times he’d looked at it.  The thought the sound had cut into lay severed on the kitchen floor somewhere while he dug it out and squinted at the screen, which displayed the fractured evidence of a day’s worth of missed messages.

Another jingle as the triangle in the corner went hollow again.  “Goddamn it, Isa ...”  He glanced back up to Jude with all of his its and what they told hims.  “Do you have reception out here?”

[Jude]

Jude wouldn't have been able to explain it if he tried. He'd been born six years old; the whole defiant/independent stage of the terrible twos never existed. Everything he'd ever needed or wanted in life had generally been handed to him, on the condition that he been well-mannered, obedient, and intuitive above what was expected of him. He responded to Near's superficial expectations - frustration, a desire for answers - while only abstractly knowing that something lay beyond that. Jude did not really understand the idea of "incomprehensible" - he just knew that it was one of many phrases that the Family employed when describing the reactions of ill-disposed people.

Said differently: it has never been Jude's job to think or speak for himself. He had learned to go through the motions, but this was his debut. He really was doing the best he could.

The phone was a pleasant change of subject. This was a pre-assembled track; Jude could attach himself to the general rules of conversation and ride along. "I didn't bring my phone." Juliet could find him without it, but he didn't want to make it easy for her. "Oh, and if anyone asks if you met me, you didn't." He nodded in emphasis. The Family might not even come here, with Courtland dead, but it was good to be sure.

[Near]

Truth: his money was on the kid being clueless. Reception, what’s that?. Or, The people whose basement I escaped from stole my phone. Or, They don’t allow us to have those at The Home. But Jude just hadn’t brought his along for the nocturnal jaunt, which was a jarringly mundane answer at the same time as it wasn’t, because who walked around on a rainy night phoneless? Right: this one did. And even though there were a dozen more important things on which he could have expended his mental energy, Near wondered what kind it was, the phone he hadn’t brought.

“You didn’t see me” got an automatic “Yeah, of course,” as if there was a snowball’s chance he’d keep this to himself. Elide over some of the details, maybe: the shitless feeling that came over him when the bottle reconstituted, nobody needed to know about that. Maybe all the magic talk, depending on the audience. But, assuming he was still alive by the end, someone would be hearing about the rest, about the time he went to his dead dad’s house and got accosted by a guy ranting about the end of the world. And whether “someone” was a friend he was trying to impress, a tipsy raconteur he wanted to one-up, or the next person who came knocking at the door trying to find a runaway (in his mind’s eye, a Tolkien-style wizard cloak; he couldn’t help himself) remained to be seen. But if anyone did come around asking, he was absolutely turning Jude in: the reasons he’d been given not to were outweighed a thousand times by the ones he had to think it was probably better for the universe if whoever might apparently be looking for him got him back.

But since the opportunity hadn’t arisen yet, he agreed to secrecy and squinted, flicking through the first dozen or so messages on his screen: varying degrees of concern and outrage from various people because of course Isa would recruit all of their mutual friends and a few names Near didn’t recognize into a grassroots campaign for justice, and this all felt more relevant, or at least more actionable, than any chance of the world coming to an end. He flicked another box away, remembered in the motion:

“The asshole texted me a couple of times. Months ago. Like eight, nine months ago. I stopped reading when I found out it was him, Hell if I know how he even got my number.” He hadn’t deleted the messages, though; hadn’t blocked the sender; just labeled him with a 0 and left his words to rot. They’d stopped coming eventually. He’d thought about it when he got the news about Courtland’s death, figured he’d known and indulged in a last-ditch effort to reconnect and felt proud of himself for not succumbing to the temptation to look. Afterward everything had been too hectic to worry about old texts.

[Jude]

Jude was able to leave in the first place because he wasn't kept in a basement; after a certain point, his cooperation in the Family's apocalyptic venture was assumed. From this point forward, it would not be, which meant that this was his one and only chance to realize his goals. If pressed on the matter, Jude would have served Near some compressed Luddite lecture, on how people had survived centuries of rainy nights without cell phones and was Jude going to die if he didn't have one dying in his pocket? The truth was more tinfoil hat theory: Jude didn't know if even speaking into a phone would, somehow, give him away. Space and time were puzzle pieces to be dismantled and moved around, and who was he to guess the limits of possibility?

"The asshole?" Jude was slinking towards one of the kitchen exits, and his echo did not slow him. Interpretation made him pause. "Courtland?" He looked back across the room. "What did he say?" He had other questions, such as, Why wouldn't your father have your phone number?, but Jude realized this would only illustrate a greater gap between the two of them. They had known the same man, but different versions; lived in the same time, but had vastly different understandings of the world.

If Jude failed in his venture, Near would have a grand story to tell. With his flair, his listener would be no doubt entertained. How much grander would it be, if this all faded to nothing, a series of lost messages, only to return some day, with the sun going dark and the rivers turning to blood and the cicadas screaming in the night? Near would take after Courtland after all: a front seat to the end of the world.