05-17-2022, 05:17 PM
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."
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."