The Reaches

[Near]

Like there was anyone else he might be referring to as “the asshole.”

He almost laughed at the way that phrased itself in his head, the words trimmed and prepped and ready for consumption.  Irritation at the cost of accuracy: he could, in fact, have listed about eight people he might have been referring to as “the asshole” at this very moment.  But he and Jude had only one of those people in common (excepting Jude himself), and he found it frustrating in a novel way that the kid failed to instantly connect the epithet with Daddy.  Generally when the Courtland subject arose, Near’s assessment was religion.  The people with whom he spent enough time that his personal history became a talking point, they tended to share a predisposition toward disliking father figures; it rarely took much convincing to get anyone to accept as fact that Courtland Farr was trash.  Strange to be in the same room as someone with a fully-formed, different opinion.

“Yes, Courtland,” he confirmed instead, aware that stressing the name was unlikely to communicate the extent of his thoughts on the matter.  “And I don’t know.  Just bullshit, mostly.  Like actual bullshit.”  As opposed to the kind you might expect, the “only son I’m dying please forgive me” bullshit.  These had been strange, a cross between those almost-comprehensible emails from Russian spammers that sometimes sneak past the fortifications of filters and that you read knowing better than to click on the links and the tracts handed out by bleak proselytes on city corners.

No fresh messages from Isa’s infantry or anyone else had arrived as he was sweeping the shrapnel of the first blast away.  A glance at the corner of the screen confirmed his reception was gone again.  Just as well.  It took a few more swipes to get to what he was looking for.

“When I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you Jan 3 11:00.  Mr Crewdson, for instance, says that after the Slingersfontein fight he met at least a dozen men who declared that the Boers drove up the hill in front of them hundreds of armed Kaffirs.  Ch 2 whatever can be proved to be (good) must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be (good) without proof MVP.”  He read three of the messages out loud, letting them melt into one another.  “I think the last one’s Mill.  Like somebody taped a goddamn ‘harass me’ sign to my back ...”

[Jude]

Jude did not hate the Family - the closest thing that he had to parents. Then again, he was still in that strange, blissful state where ignorance reigned, where it had not occurred to him that his caretakers could have been other way. Maybe they really couldn't have been; Jude hadn't exactly come into the world in a human way, and it wasn't totally clear if that was what what he was. Maybe the only options were to be born and raised like this, or to never exist at all. Maybe those were the only options for everyone, and the idea that one's progenitors could have done better was just a bitter, masochistic fantasy. The sum of the absence of possibility and thought was that Near's comment seemed petty. Children generally avenged themselves by surviving their parents.

Those text messages, read to anyone else, would have probably elicited the same reaction as Russian spammers. Instead, Jude frowned, and looked somewhat disoriented. "The common salvation...?" Jude turned his head sideways, considered. Salvation.

"Maybe he was trying to tell you something." Jude felt definitively that that was the case, but partly by default - pretty much any sentence-shaped noise that emerged from a person's lips or fingers was designed to informed. Whether Courtland had wanted to impart information on literature or the actual apocalypse, Jude could not guess. It occurred to him that if Courtland had warned Near, the latter would have not come out to the lawn holding a gun.

He gave another nod, the kind meant to signal, Well, there we have it. Courtland had taped the 'Harass Me' sign to Near's back, and Jude had dutifully obeyed. Time to take it off.

[Near]

“Maybe.”  A continuation of the weighted “no shit” tone that was fast becoming his default for communicating with the kid.

What did the third Courtland Farr actually recall about the second?  Which scraps of memory would he be willing to swear were unaltered by time and outside influence -- the shadow of his mother’s opinion; his own repetitions, gathering new exaggerations each time like tiny mutations that end in a new species after generations?  Fleeing The Reaches, although Courtland didn’t really feature in the scene on the driveway.  Before that, the book flying across the room, hitting its mark, landing open to a sketch of minarets against the sky.  Daddy against a whole backdrop of books, the library at their own home like a movie set, floor to ceiling weathered spines, telling Near that if he didn’t know the damn word he needed to write it down and look it up in the dictionary.  Like he had taken as much pleasure in not being comprehensible without a bibliography as he had in being right, in winning out.  And maybe he was no Everett (after all, who was?), but he’d liked his puzzles, too, his riddles, his strategy games, his correspondence chess with the engineer in Belarus.  Near had learned not to touch the pieces on the board after the first time.

These were the memories that had left no space for wondering, when the source of the messages became clear, if the sender might have simply lost his mind.  He had known without having to think about it that of course there was something in there, some knotted-up message.  It had pissed him off then and continued to piss him off now that it had to be cryptic, which was part of the reason that he hadn’t made any effort to unravel it even though the thought had crossed his mind that succeeding might lead to treasure, to Nazi gold, whatever.  His interest in treasure was less pressing than his interest in not giving Courtland the satisfaction of knowing that he’d succeeded in forcing his son to dig up his worn copy of Utilitarianism or research the Boer War from afar.

"No mystical insights into whether that something is related to this plan of yours?"

[Jude]

Entirely human or not, Jude had gone through puberty, and with it, that span of teenage time where he was liable to question everything. It was a shorter, less intense period than many of his peers, mostly because the ability to maintain a stable psyche depended on accepting what was, on a scale mostly peddled by new-age meditation book authors. Was something a memory, or his imagination? Was it something other people were capable of knowing, or was his knowing it predicated entirely on seeing, hearing, sensing things that lay beyond? Too many questions like this, and reality was no longer a pretty kaleidoscope, but an endless earthquake, the ground never stable, always shifting underfoot. Yes, the self-help gurus called this 'acceptance', but it was just as much birth control for self-reflection.

What Courtland could have meant was a path with a thousand forks. That he meant something was self-evident, and therefore, acceptable. The next question was not, 'What did Courtland mean?', but, 'Do you want to know?', and after that, 'Are you capable of finding out?' Near was skipping steps; he was liable to stumble, tripping over possibilities.

He was starting to understand Near's sense of humor; he was being made fun of again. "Sure, let me just touch your phone to my forehead, and it will all become clear." Jude rolled his eyes, to indicate it was pure stupidity to assume forehead touching was the best way to osmose information. "I could probably find out, but--" He waved his hand in the air. "It's breadcrumbs. They'll find me faster."

They would find him eventually, Jude knew. Hopefully he'd have something to wedge between him and them, by then.

[Near]

He was shit at the show-offy irony thing; that forehead quip had the same toddling ungainliness as a bad liar trying out a lie — which Near, bad liar and practiced ironicist that he was, recognized intimately.  The eye roll was a nice touch, thirteen year-old talking to Mom-style, just in case my sarcastic voice wasn’t enough to prove I was being sarcastic.  The thing was, if the statement had come with just a hint more gravitas, Near wouldn’t have put the possibility of a full-out Carnac performance past him, phone to brow and then ... what?

“How would that work, exactly?” he asked.

Because the bit that followed, that wasn’t ironic.  The kid really did think he could suss out some meaning, or at least intention, from Courtland’s nonsense, but it seemed to Near that doing so would either require either a few rounds of Googling or a consultation with the source himself.  The former could be accomplished easily enough without mystical intervention (unless Jude could turn himself into a cell tower; that would actually be helpful); if the latter were a possibility, if he could commune with his old friend Mr. Farr, then why the hell hadn’t he done it already?

“Just hypothetically, I mean — don’t want to bother ‘Them.’”  He was still questioning whether “Them” turning up might not be a development in his favor.

[Jude]

Yes, that was the point of hamming it up, of being obvious - said seriously, Near might think that mind-reading was actually done with forehead-to-forehead contact. Jude had not learned the word 'grift' until his twenties; while he did not consider what the Family did to be grifting, they were not above using common cultural assumptions as gateways for more superstitious patrons. When magic was presented in familiar ways, it gave the scenario an 'aha!' sense - the stories were true all along! They had always suspected! They had always known. The truth was more esoteric, less sparkly.

"Do you have tea?" It occurred to Jude all at once that wriggling out of this was not possible, at least not in the way he hoped. Jude was blunt, but that the style of his personality and less an indication of willfulness. All his decisiveness was wrapped up in running away and saving the world, and years of obedience had him hung up on niceties. "Can you make some?"

"It would be like..." How to describe it? "...scrying intention. Feelings, thoughts, memories - they attach to things. I can dust off those attachments. Or, if it's really important, I can look back in time. But that's more... material intensive." Jude found an empty piece of countertop and hopped up, looking suddenly more normal, like he was an old friend who'd come up to have a few beers and shoot the shit. "But it'll attract attention," he repeated. And I don't think you like attention.

[Near]

“Tea?”

The question -- the raw syllable -- became a source of bafflement for a moment, like a foreign word dropped into the middle of a conversation otherwise conducted in comprehensible English. (He was not unappreciative of how ‘scrying’ and ‘time travel’ was the English in this case -- and what did that say about him, how quickly his skepticism had eroded? This, this was exactly why he stayed away from churches.) It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar with tea as a choice of beverage, only that the concept was discordant here, within walls where his own focus had been narrowed to wine and brandy and cedar-smelling duvets. Tea.

He appended a “No,” once the word settled in, “of course not” implications because why the hell would he, did he look like a person who carried around tea? And then, as it dawned on him that Jude probably meant something more like was there any here, he shrugged and revised to “No idea.” Tea was not one of the effects that he had been taking any note of as he rifled through cabinet contents -- none of which he considered his anyway, since he was still allowing himself the novel sensation of drinking Courtland’s reserves and putting his feet up on Courtland’s furniture. He shook his head, more a reaction to the whole situation than a doubling-down on his no. If he was being honest, the thought of serving up a drink -- tea or cocktail, just something in a cup -- came with an odd shade of familiarity, of normalcy, as if he might be able to pretend himself into his comfort zone if he tried hard enough.

He fumbled at the double light switch by the entry, flicked the one on the right upward. Overheads all came on at once, white a couple of shades too cool. He blinked through the brilliance to locate something he knew he’d seen: a kettle, hefty chrome modern-art number, across from the kid, in the midst of a kitchenware cluster (big pot, little pot, canister with utensils) next to the range built into the island.

“Feel free to look,” he said, as he went to play with the knobs on the range, omitting the bit in his head about how he could go ahead and scry out his favorite flavor. “That thing earlier, that didn’t ‘attract attention?’” Surely that had thrown up a giant fucking neon beacon in the psychic landscape.

[Jude]

Jude waited patiently as Near cycled through his answers, like a roulette wheel slowly coming to a halt. If Near had been raised with manners, Jude's request was really just a polite demand; refusing him would have been inhospitable, even if he was an intruder. He continued his vigil as Near located the kettle and brought it to the stove. Only when he was directed to look for himself did he slide from the counter and busy himself with the cabinets.

This was a part of the house Jude wasn't familiar with. In the past, tea had always been something he was served, not something he made himself. He went through the cabinets one at a time - dishes for casual use, fancy china, wine glasses, spices, baking trays, silverware - before arriving at the pantry. It was lean, having been picked clean of perishables, but an assortment of dusty tins and sealed plastic packages still occupied one shelf. Jude brushed away the dust with his fingers and read the labels. No, no, no, no - that would do.

"I'm sure it did," he answered. "But it was a small thing. It could pass as a generic anomaly, or as background noise, for a little while. Long enough for me to leave." He emerged from the pantry with a sealed plastic packet. He set it on the kitchen island, then turned his attention to the drawers, hunting for tea infusers. "Looking into the past, or the future, or the present - it's more noticeable. More helpful to them."

[Near]

He studied the packet Jude tossed onto the counter, then picked it up and tested its weight in his hand.  Well.  He would have come across it eventually, digging around a few days from now, after he had exhausted the supply of what was apparently edible but before he worked up the resolve to leave.  He would have opened the package with tamped-down eagerness because the label was incomprehensible and it might be anything and been disappointed by what he found inside.  So there, he’d been saved some trouble and a letdown.

The smell when he tore the top away was dark, grassy, herbal, related somehow to what he imagined was the smell of the undead gin in the front room.  Surely Daddy was never a tea-drinker?  There was something too effete about it, little cups and old English ladies knitting.  While Near might profess a sincere appreciation for “effete” in a variety of circumstances, his father was not one of them; he preferred a sharp-edged, order-barking Courtland with his Wall Street Journal in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other.

“Generic anomaly, huh?”  The water was heating, and the edge in his voice was wearing away.  Not a word the kid said made any real sense; it was all this thin skin of recognizable vocabulary, standard syntax and matter-of-fact delivery draped over something lumberingly preposterous, Frankenstein’s monster in a T-shirt -- which was the same general formula for some of the shit he used to read in school.  Whatever; exploring why the past or present or future would differ from … rewinding reality, say, was beginning to feel less imperative than avoiding what would count as significant, if that last thing had been a blip.  (Easier if you just relax, right?)

“Where'd you come from, anyway?”

[Jude]

"Yes. Probability hiccups." There were plenty of webinars and YouTube channels that wielded the same gobbly-gook vocabulary as Jude, a multitude of personalities who insisted that aliens had helped Moses part the Red Sea and that the power of the universe was in your hands if you concentrated on the correct runes with your third eye. In fairness to the easily-dismissed prophets, many great thinkers had been written off as madmen and crocks before their equations and history vindicated them; Eastern medicine was even experiencing a revival, with the decline of Western capitalism. Maybe what Jude needed was a livestreaming channel -- he was younger and more attractive than many of the washed-up hippies aligning their chakras.

The tea brought civility and ritual into the chaos of the evening. Really, everything had gone off the rails starting with bad manners -- Jude had not come in through the front door. The puff of steam from the kettle was a defibrillator, recalibrating the heart attack of the past few hours. Jude found two infusers in a drawer, and brought them to the sink to rinse them off.

"Northern California," he answered. He looked over his shoulder and arched his eyebrows. Is that what you meant? Sometimes people meant where he was from from -- which, in his case, was much harder to explain. Aiming to block that fork in conversation, he said, "I took a bus." For part of it. Bus terminals had security cameras. So many cameras, so many eyes to avoid.