The Reaches

[Near]

He didn’t care, really, what the answer turned out to be -- if the kid decided to claim the house next door or France or the La-La-Land that was obviously his actual point of origin.  It wasn’t as if he would have bought any answer wholesale.  So “Northern California” was as good as the next place, even though it was a non-answer, functionally equivalent to “Oh, here and there” in its obvious deflective breadth.  It was the kind of thing you generally knew in an instant either to let go or to wheedle at, depending on who was talking -- and in this case it seemed better to simply accept it as it was, especially since the asking had less to do with wanting to know than keeping silence from settling in too thick.

“Nice bus ride,” he said, a bland but sincere observation prompted by thoughts of mountains, fields, forests, the kind of scenery he used to see more of when he was younger but hadn’t lately.  Nice bus ride, but he wouldn’t have traded places with the kid’s seatmate.  The top of the kettle shuddered.  “Do they talk about watched pots in Northern California?”  Like it was a code name for somewhere else, a far-away country with a different language, different customs, different aphorisms.  “The thing is, they always boil eventually.”

He plucked the top away with two fingers and dumped a quarter of the package into the hot water.  The scent bloomed upward, brighter, until he stopped it up again and hazarded another glance past the cracks in his phone.  Nothing new.  Whatever can be proved to be good -- even if Courtland had ever been inspired to sit around and think about Utilitarianism, there was no way he would have subscribed to it.  Except apparently he did subscribe to a system of “probability hiccups,” so maybe he had just decided to believe in everything.

“How long does this take?” he asked, meaning the tea, because he couldn’t read whatever was on the label and the kid seemed better-informed on the matter.  At the same time, he dug back down for The Courtland Messages, copied the first one, and did a search for the text that went to a “You’re offline” screen.

[Jude]

"Long bus ride," he rejoined, with a tone of voice that implied he was generally not the sort of person to ride buses. Unfortunately, he was also not the sort of person that drove. He had his license - the Family had considered it too strange for the twins not to possess them - but he never had his own car, and there had been just enough wariness in the collective to ensure Jude never had access to anyone's keys. When he left, he'd just - walked off. Well, run off was technically more accurate, given the speed with which he'd departed, and the Family had been living in Salt Lake City at the time, but these and other details were idle conversation fodder, held in reserve for desperate measures.

He smiled at Near's comment; it reached his eyes. "They do," Jude said, and he sounded genuinely amused, as if the saying was as clever as it was true. The pots did always boil, and conclusions were always arrived at, and rivers flowed to the sea.

'Nothing in life is guaranteed' - another cliche, intended to guard against entitlement, but it had different connotations entirely, from a quantum perspective. Nothing was promised, nothing was sure, no particle's speed or placement -- somewhere, the watched pot did not boil. "Two minutes." Inevitability coexisted with possibility.

"Do you think you'll sell this house?" It felt as good a question as any, if they were going to be making late night conversation. Surely, too, it should be easier for Near to talk of these things - the real, the tangible, the probable, all of them preferable to the possible and impossible and inconvenient. Jude sat poised with a list of alternate questions, such as, 'Do you have a girlfriend?' 'How old is your dog?' 'Do you like the weather here?', all of which felt more natural to him as he settled into the role he knew how to play. It had been too unfamiliar, even painful, to try to be the other person, the Jude who needed to explain what eerie catastrophe loomed on the Farrs' horizon. This was easy. This he knew.

[Near]

Two minutes. Didn’t sound like long enough to accomplish whatever alchemical reaction turned water and bits of black grit into the beigy, homogeneous substance he thought of as tea. He had other tea-relevant questions, too. Mostly: when it comes without the paper bag and little tag that says Lipton, what’s the preferred method of separating solid from liquid? A vague collective-consciousness notion of “tea leaves” -- of gypsy women wrapped in scarves, reading them to predict futures -- was lodged in the back of his head, but he'd never had much reason to consider the mechanics of the process until now.

But he had a feeling voicing any of this would highlight some part of him that was lacking, and he didn’t want the damn kid judging him ignorant. (Even as a more logical voice suggested the kid's judgment didn't matter in the least.) So, he lifted his phone again, a quirk of his eyebrows betraying the moment he registered how his failed search from a minute ago had metamorphosed from error message into a burgeoning of results. He pulled up his clock to set a two minute timer and flipped back to the search screen, read Jude 1:3, Jude 1:3 KJV, Jude 3, Jude 1-3, Jude 1:3. Great, thanks, Pops.

“Hm?” He broke away from the phone and looked back up at the kid. Book of Jude, who knew? Another life experience lacuna: he had no idea how many books were in the Bible. Add that to the tea situation, it was almost enough to make a guy feel ignorant. But then he’d never claimed to know much of anything; a little bit of philosophy, some alcohol-related fun facts. His bars of choice had never been the ones with trivia nights ...

“Don’t know,” he said. “Thought about it, but it’s a lot of trouble, and it’s not like I want the money. I keep meaning to look up whether it’s illegal to set fire to your own house around here ... Might just leave it to rot. Why, you want it?”

[Jude]

Oh no, no tea leaf reading - and no palm reading, and no tarot cards, and no horoscopes. The Family considered these parlor tricks beneath them, though some patrons had, tentatively, hopefully, set porcelain cups before Jude and Juliet, water steaming, leaves swirling. If anything was possible, mayhap there really were people who could divine cosmic probabilities from soggy plant matter. The past was easier to look to; the observed quantum state was final.

Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

Jude slid from the counter and took the kettle. He opened the infusers over the mugs, jaws gaping like mesh Pac Men, and used them as strainers to pour the tea through. Unlike Near, Jude derived no particular pleasure from superior knowledge, from knowing things other people didn't. The thing that made Jude truly odd - questionable humanity aside - was that he'd never had anything to prove. His existence was so deliberate, his purpose so defined, that he did not need to know anything, or be good at anything, or do anything.

"Maybe," he answered. "If I live through this." Jude didn't sound distressed at the possibility he might not. That was the downside to having a clear purpose: living through it would likely feel weighed down by obsolescence. "Don't burn it; it's done nothing wrong." The house was still serving its purpose, as nobly as it ever had. It did not deserve to be cruelly discarded.

[Near]

“It hasn't done anything right, either. It's a house.” But buried in his disagreement for disagreement's sake, he knew what the kid meant, met it with a sort of concurrence mixed with some surrender to the vagaries of the legal system. Even if it was legal to burn down a house for the unadulterated satisfaction of watching flames peel it apart, for the sensation of unburdening yourself of worldly possessions you didn't want, there was probably some underlying insurance situation that he wasn’t aware of or hadn’t paid attention to that would complicate everything, turn it into a money-grab and land him in a courtroom. He wasn’t about to really burn down the house anyway. It was too decisive a move, too irreversible, especially when he didn’t bear any ill-will toward the structure, only things a fire wouldn’t erase. Hell, part of him still hoped the homecoming revelation he would never admit to wanting was just slow in coming. Couldn’t come home to a pile of ashes.

One-handed wave toward the teapot, do your thing, kid, while he watched the phone like something might jump out of the screen. Offhanded: “If you live through what, The End of The World?”

So Daddy, moldering on his deathbed, regrets his associations with whatever the hell Jude represents and turns Biblethumper, sends verses to everyone in his contact list as penance, gets into heaven. Okay, fine. But the stupid “Jude” thing wasn’t a coincidence. So maybe not. Message to Near: something about the kid, about faith and salvation and basically Fuck you, Courtland, if you wanted to say something, you should have said it. January 3rd didn’t ring any bells for significance, either. Not anybody’s birthday, at least not that he could think of. Not the date of the message. He sighed. Maybe Jude tea connoisseur was also Jude Bible expert?

For now, though, he held off asking. He didn’t trust either of them -- not Courtland, not Jude -- and that felt like a good enough reason to keep quiet.

[Jude]

"It sheltered you. It's sheltering you now." He closed the infusers, trapping the loose leaves, and gingerly lifted them from the water. With two deft throws, he landed them in the sink. The rattling was loud this late at night, loud in the empty kitchen, loud in the empty house. It did not appear to bother Jude. He popped himself back up onto the counter, before holding his cup in both hands, sipping carefully. Tea, then sleep. Every minute that passed puts distance between Jude and the levitating cutting board, Jude and the reassembled gin bottle. Reality demanded proximity. What was real, now, was that Jude seems perfectly human, sipping his tea, talking about whether to burn a house.

He shook his head at the question. "If I stop it. I'd live through it, if it happened." But there would be many who would not. It wouldn't just be bunnies in the basement anymore.

"Do you think you could drive me to town tomorrow morning?" Maybe Courtland did die with regret. Maybe he regretted not living long enough to atone, or to help, or to tell Near whatever it was he wanted to tell. But Near didn't have to die that way, or live that way. It was all about what he would regret more - getting involved with a spooky stranger, or leaving him behind at a Seattle bus stop.

What if Near had come home, but home was just more secrets?

[Near]

Jude’s three-pointers evoked another wince from Near, whose head was still throbby and noise-sensitive. He cast a glance toward the cup, the pillar of steam snaking upwards from it. Didn’t take it. Didn’t quite trust it. Less because Jude had made it (although that probably should have put it in a category of suspicion), but because he still wasn’t sure he trusted tea as a concept.

The whole Armageddon thing was feeling shady, too.

“Sounds like you’ve already got a plan,” he said, carefully neutral. So he had to have some notion of what stopping it entailed without any brilliant Courtland plan. Live through the end of the world or die stopping it. Maybe. The thought of the kid heroically throwing himself in front of a supernatural bulldozer to save the world was troubling, less because he was bothered by the idea of a universe minus one Jude ... (was there a last name?), but because the notion of anyone adopting this kid as some kind of martyr/savior figure rubbed him the wrong way. Like if he’d known Jesus was kind of a jackass but still had to listen to everyone being grateful he’d died for their sins.

Eleven o’clock, January 3rd. Next year? Last year? Every year? He scrolled down the wall of text on the screen, found a little superscript 11, read “Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core,” and didn’t feel any more enlightened than he had a second ago, except that “perishing” and “woe” all clicked with his evening so far. Even assuming he was going in the right direction, assuming that there were breadcrumbs to be followed and not just random crazy, so what? Did that make Jude “them?” Jude’s “them” them? Near? Courtland?

“Which town?” he asked, neither a yes nor a no.

[Jude]

Jude shrugged and sipped his tea. Did this qualify as a plan? Finding someone else who could come up with a plan? He supposed Near had a point. He watched as Near ignored the tea; Jude arched his eyebrows, but did not comment. Did Near purposefully try to avoid having proper manners? He'd let Jude into the house, and had not thrown him out, but every centimeter of further hospitality was treated as a Herculean act. Jude was trying to make this easier. Sip tea, talk about nothing, go to sleep. Wasn't complication what Near was trying to avoid?

Maybe the truth was that Near's life was too simple. Maybe that was why he just couldn't seem to commit to staying or going, living or dying. To tea or not to tea. Make it then don't take it.

"Olympia, if that's not too much for you." Another sip of tea. Olympia to Seattle to -- Reno, perhaps? Big Sur? San Francisco? Or should he throw himself eastward as soon and as quickly as possible, hoping to better elude his pursuers? Thinking about the logistics did not upset Jude, not really. He was a little frustrated, a little ponderous, like a student preparing for a difficult exam, but beyond that, nothing. Maybe something lurked beyond the nothing, maybe not. It wasn't worth thinking about. Olympia, a plan, who could come up with a plan. Those were things worth ruminating upon.

[Near]

Over the years, Near’s internal map of Washington State had devolved into a boardwalk caricature: big star above Tacoma; Seattle up north somewhere; Canada border norther; The Reaches perched on a distant coast, prominently oversized; and all the rest a nebulous tree-flush wasteland, question marks where points of interest might be.  He had been caught off guard by how close the house actually was to the city -- as far as his childhood-distorted memory was concerned, trips there and back had always been eternal license-plate-game affairs broken up by plenty of gas station bathroom breaks and the shivery excitement of a long bridge.  In reality, the drive took an hour and a half from the America’s Best Value Inn in Lakewood, and the only reason it didn’t take an hour was because he told Waze to avoid tolls.  So he missed the bridge, too.

The kid failed to name any of the places on his cartoon map.

Was Olympia too much?  It was the state capital, a fact he retained largely thanks to an indelible fifth grade geography song, so in his head it was somewhere in the middle of the state, because that made sense on a basic level.  How far away it might actually be mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t here.  He lowered his phone.

“I don’t know.”  Not stinginess, though he sure as hell didn’t feel like the kid had earned a ride across the street, much less another zip code.  “The thing is, this is it.  This is supposed to be it.  I come up here once, and then I’m done with this, screw it, I don’t come back.”  His own plan for after was as dotted with question marks as the rest of Washington.  Did he go back to Isa, who still had all his shit?  Find a new place and get new shit?  Let Lew loose in the woods?

“I mean, I'll think about it."  He snatched the cup up at last and took a tentative sip of its contents.  Hot.  Too hot.  But not offensively flavored.  "There’s a library upstairs, isn’t there?”

[Jude]

The way Near said it -- This is supposed to be it. -- felt like he was issuing a complaint to Jude, in the fashion of someone complaining about their service at a fast food franchise. My burrito was supposed to have extra guacamole. Jude, the manager of the establishment, could only nod solemnly and agree, yes, the burrito was supposed to have extra guacamole. It was a crime fit for a beheading, only the blade of the guillotine just wasn't sharp enough today. Will another burrito do? How about another burrito, and a coupon for a free burrito at the next visit? They both know that Near had the money to afford the drive, and that he had the time. Disposing of Jude was as easy as that, just as a solution the burrito problem was as simple as obtaining a new burrito. But, like frustrated TexMex customer, it was not about the burrito. It was about -- please insert a long-suffering sigh -- the principle of the matter.

"Well," Jude said, "if you're not up by ten, I'll take it as a 'no'." If nothing else, Jude was learning how to herd someone to a decision. Open-ended questions left too many opportunities for circular answers. Left or right? Coming or going? Tea or coffee? Courtland had been so much more decisive. Courtland decided things before questions were even asked. Sometimes it felt like he waited for the question just out of courtesy, a chess player allowing his opponent to make their move, even though no matter what they did, the trap would be sprung in exactly the same fashion.

Jude lifted the cup to his lips, and blew small clouds of steam away from the rim. Blow, sip, blow, blow, sip. "There is." The guest bedroom Jude was using was likewise upstairs. Will Near lead the way? Has he walked through the house at all? Really, it is a lovely place. It's too bad that Near was so insistent on being 'done' with it. Like it was that easy. Like things can just be 'done'.

Maybe for Near Farr, it can be. Maybe that's the Farr blessing, or curse.