09-21-2023, 03:38 PM
I guess we do hits Near as a listlessly begrudging sentence, like he’s agreeing only to shut the topic down. Jude’s favorite pastime, it seems: evading topics, deflecting them, blocking them. Conversational dodgeball champion. Still, it’s not impossible to twist it into something approaching a win, or at least imagine it somewhere on that trajectory. It has to be mutual; it is somehow even more frustrating to think that Jude might not hate him, that he might not feel any way about Near at all, that Near is the only one of them expending time and energy on keeping the antipathy alive.
That wouldn’t be fair, would it?
Jude reclined shoeless on the couch with his judgmental little look of faux-surprise, ready for his portrait to be painted. Near returns to the sink to refill his glass, swirling it into a whirlpool as the water rises, considers what it would mean to just throw his guest out at this point, since all the evading and deflecting and blocking has built up into what feels like a dead end. Jude is no good to him. He doesn’t want to be. The longer they are in the same room the more difficult it is to maintain the determination that he is a toddler – and that being a toddler is benign.
“What have you been doing?” he asks, suddenly. Obviously the answer is not “saving the world.” Because he does want to know. How does an unpleasant, evasive man-toddler compound-escapee get by in reality?
That wouldn’t be fair, would it?
Jude reclined shoeless on the couch with his judgmental little look of faux-surprise, ready for his portrait to be painted. Near returns to the sink to refill his glass, swirling it into a whirlpool as the water rises, considers what it would mean to just throw his guest out at this point, since all the evading and deflecting and blocking has built up into what feels like a dead end. Jude is no good to him. He doesn’t want to be. The longer they are in the same room the more difficult it is to maintain the determination that he is a toddler – and that being a toddler is benign.
“What have you been doing?” he asks, suddenly. Obviously the answer is not “saving the world.” Because he does want to know. How does an unpleasant, evasive man-toddler compound-escapee get by in reality?