The Reaches

[Near]

He pretended to himself that he would pointedly not get up before ten, even though he only rarely slept beyond 8:30, for better or for worse, regardless of the preceding night -- a sometimes point of friction between him and his later-sleeping bedfellows.  He pantomimed it out in his head, future Near checking the time on his phone, stretching in a bed that still felt fresh and strange as a hotel bed until his back popped,  then listening to the way his solitude had settled back into the Reaches, his guest having shoved off as promised.  He envisioned all this knowing full well that, whether or not he actually ended up giving the kid a ride anywhere, he would certainly be up before ten and thinking about it.

This would all be so much easier if Jude actually seemed to need anything.  Near was tuned to need, he watched for it.  Asking once and meeting the first hint of a turndown with the bland indifference of “I’ll take it as a ‘no,’” that wasn’t needing.  It was barely wanting.  “I’ll take it as a ‘no’” was smug, more like Jude had offered Near a favor instead of asking for one.  “I’m going to the waterpark in the morning.  You can come with, but if you’re not up by ten, I’ll take it as a ‘no.’”

Library.  Good.  There was at least one book he wanted to find.  But first:

A second sip of tea.  Still too hot, and a waste that verged on personally offensive of the better options that were so easy to be had here.  “What are you going to do, walk to Olympia?  Uber’s out, no phone, right?  Hitchhike?  I hitched from Pocatello to Salt Lake City once; it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  I'll make you a deal: split a bottle of something with me, I’ll take you to Olympia or wherever the hell tomorrow.”

[Jude]

It was not that Jude had never known need, or that he did not understand it. He had simply been raised by very clever grifters -- and grifters of aristocrats, no less. There had been times when patrons had fallen through, when investments had collapsed and support had been withdrawn, and the traveling carnival of the monster twins had to go on the road. But the family did not beg. To beg before these sorts implied you were a desperate charlatan at best, and an animal at worst. Need was not something to be freely admitted, especially before someone who had power over you.

Better to conceal need and be dismissed, than admit to it and suffer the same ends. At least the former allowed the preservation of one's dignity.

Now, bargaining -- bargaining was within the realm of the acceptable. Conditional offers -- especially ones where the conditions were simply promises of the future -- could be worked with. Jude arched his eyebrows when Near said he'd hitchhiked. You? Hitchhike? Why? Wasn't the point of wealth to distance oneself from the world? That had been Jude's experience in his encounters of it. Why else was The Reaches in the middle of nowhere?

A bottle of something. Warm static hummed in the back of Jude's mind, machinery behind a thick door. "I don't... really drink," he said carefully, careful not to double-cross himself and lose the ride. "Nothing too strong." This is dangerous. But it could take him days to go from the Reaches to petty civilization, from petty civilization to proper civilization. At once, Jude had nothing but time, but time was of the essence. Days versus hours: wasn't that worth a little danger?

[Near]

He hadn’t forgotten Jude’s reaction the first time he’d tried to foist alcohol on him.  That had been back when Near was still young and innocent, still languoring in the embrace of too much too-good-for-him wine and whatever else, still puzzled but not quite bothered by the kid’s presence, and he’d made the offer to share with intentions approaching something like hospitality.  And in the name of something like hospitality, he hadn’t pressed the matter when Jude declined to do anything but stare at the bottle.

Now it was “I don’t really drink,” which explained the first time, but Near was older.  Wiser.  More hungover.  It wasn’t clear if the statement was supposed to mean the kid rarely drank, had never drunk, used to drink but had stopped (he had some serious amends to make if he was a twelve-stepper).  Whatever it meant, he had faith in its sincerity, that it wasn’t just “I don’t want to drink with you,” and knew he probably should have left the kid alone because of it.  Would have, normally, probably, but he had passed beyond the phase of tentative affability into a different space, one defined by irritation and unresolved resentment that weren’t entirely Jude’s fault but mostly were.  And something else, too, enmeshed with his coming up short of anything that resembled need, like when Shay would announce he was kicking his habit and Near would invite his dealer over to play cards.

“It’s all too strong.  That’s the point.  What’d you find down there, anything that looked interesting?”  He inclined his head toward the cellar the kid had crawled out from.  Mercy: an option of wine instead of harder stuff.  But maybe only because Near didn’t want to venture back to the cursed front room where the bar was.

[Jude]

Jude calculated that if he had one glass of wine, and he had it very slowly, it could present the illusion of sociability whilst also not muddling his head too much. Sober, it was easy for him to seal the doors of his mind, observe any attempts at intrusion, repel anything that felt too pressing, too nosy. It was like holding his breath. He was practiced enough at it that it came automatically, as long as he was not tired or intoxicated. Hence his refusal earlier in the evening.

But he needed this ride. He needed Near to like him, at least a little, and Jude knew that Near certainly did not.

It was the first time Near had actually asked about the cellar. Jude shrugged. "I just wanted to see if the old room was still down there. And it is. I didn't really look at the bottles." Jude was just fine not going to the bar room either. His palm would be mostly healed by morning, whole in a couple of days, but remembering his parlor trick made the scab itch.

[Near]

“The old room” clearly did not refer to the wine cellar itself, but something distinct.

A few hours ago, the suggestion that there was something other than wine and cellar and dust and centipedes in the wine cellar would have caught Near off-guard. It would have upset him. He had played down there (illicitly) when he was a kid -- hide and seek, Indiana Jones, army men at war. So what had he been brushing up against?

He still wasn’t happy about it, but at this point he wasn’t surprised, either. Not surprised enough, at least, to let it rattle him while he posed a chain reaction of guesses, “Catacomb? Speakeasy? Underground railroad? Bunker? Sex dungeon?” each of which, despite its wry intention, gathered an ominous aura of possibility once it took shape out loud. Third drink of tea, deeper. As it cooled it was turning bitter, mossy, and marginally more thirst-quenching than "bitter and mossy" should have warranted.

[Jude]

"Any dungeon can be a sex dungeon if you have sex in it." This Jude said with a straight face, but a spark of amusement leapt in his brown eyes. He had tried not to deliberately antagonize Near too much, but now it felt inevitable, even invited. Formalities and gravity suited Farr Jr much less than Farr Sr; seriousness was an imposition, offensive. Fine then. Nothing was serious at all then -- except that morning ride. Let that be the one thing that was not a joke.

"There's a ritual room," he explained. "Secret panel, rotating wall. And then there's a small bedroom, behind it." He shrugged. "I wondered if it had been filled up. Nope. It's just like it was." There was a pause, while Jude considered. "I can go down and get the wine. Just tell me what you want." Shooing Near down there felt a little cruel. As long as Near didn't see the room, he could take shelter in the possibility that Jude was making it up. Nothing was real until it was seen with one's own two eyes -- and even then, eyewitnesses testimony was terribly unreliable.

[Near]

The question of why the hell a hidden “ritual room” existed anywhere in the Farr family’s ninety year-old summer house could almost have a rational answer in the Freemason business Near had never been inducted into. As rational as Freemasons were. And then, maybe not, but he decided to stick with that conclusion.  Of course The Reaches had a “ritual room,” all the really nice houses had one, and only a loser acclimated to cheap apartments would think having one was strange.

“Counterpoint,” he said, choosing semantics over pragmatics because he was pretty sure it would be more satisfying to argue Jude out of looking amused with himself than worry about whether Daddy had gone to the trouble of installing a room for whatever he was doing with the damn kid, “you can have sex in any dungeon, but that doesn’t just make it a sex dungeon. And not having sex in a sex dungeon doesn’t turn it back into a standard dungeon. If I … ritual right here, is this a ‘ritual room’ now, too?  It gets down to the intrinsic nature of the thing; you can use a screwdriver to pound a nail into a board, doesn’t make it a hammer. And I can drink Courtland’s wine, doesn’t make me a wine guy, so I don’t really give a fuck. Whatever has the most interesting label or the Frenchest name or the most promising magical emanations.  Christ ...”

[Jude]

Jude took the last sip of his tea, and was already sliding from the kitchen island as Near began his speech. He did his best to nod dutifully and look attentive; it would be ungracious to do otherwise. Despite Near's best attempts, Jude's amusement continues uninterrupted. "It's about the primary and intended purpose of the room," he said, at last, but by the time he answered, he was at the threshold of the kitchen. "Most promising magical emanations, noted." And he slid around the corner before Near could take on anything else.

His step was brisk, descending into the cellar once more, and his movements were more purposeful. The light flowing down from the upstairs barely eased navigation, but Jude moved slowly, and opted not to look too hard. If Near was not a 'wine guy', it did not much matter what Jude picked. Presuming that the most expensive and cherished bottles would be toward the back, and the newest and cheapest toward the front, Jude opted for something a few rows back, not quite in the center but not the first thing. He didn't bother to blow the dust off the label -- too dark to see anyways. He came, he picked, he left. His steps echoed up from the cellar, into the kitchen, before Jude himself reappeared in the light. Only then did he take the wind in hand, exhale across the name, and see what it was.

"Chateau Pavie 2005. Bordeaux Red Blends from St. Emilion, Bordeaux." That might have meant something to someone else. Jude shrugged. "Just one glass," he repeated. Then, let him sleep.

[Near]

“That’s exactly --” but the kid had already hopped to his feet and was headed toward the stairs, anxious, it seemed, to get his trial of endurance over with. So Near stopped short of completing his spoken observation that they seemed to be in agreement with one another, at least about sex dungeons, a topic that felt both more accessible and more urgent and more interesting than that of unspeakable peril facing the world. And what did that say about him?

He bided the time the kid spent down in the depths by dumping the remainder of the tea in his mug down the round, open mouth of the kitchen sink, replacing it with water from the tap, and throwing it back like tequila. After, he retrieved the corkscrew he had used to open his Barolo from the drawer closest to the hall and waited, flapping its arms like wings. He was still headachey, still dog tired (somewhere among The Reaches’ fifteen rooms, a dog was sleeping better than him, or else she was chewing up priceless family heirlooms -- he was a little envious either way). More than shuteye, though, he needed the win that the bottle of wine had come to represent in his head.

The bottle of French wine. Boring label, old enough to be in high school. Old enough to be messing around under the bleachers with another teenage bottle of wine. Probably worth something.  “Nope. ‘Split a bottle,' half and half. Four glasses, if you're generous.” He snatched it out of Jude’s hands, stabbed it artlessly in the neck. Only after he’d dug the cork out and offered it back to the kid (seemed fair to let him pour first) did the thought occur, “Shit, you probably could have done that better with your mind, huh?”

[Jude]

Four glasses. Four glasses! This is dangerous. Take the walk. He stood in silence as Near wrestled with the bottle, only just managing to defeat the cork. Jude's expression appeared stoic, until Near's comment punctured the surface, and a wrinkle of his eyebrows revealed that blankness as irritation. "I'm not a circus animal," he snapped. And yet there was the impulse to smash something, demonstrating exactly the opposite of his point. Luckily for Near, Jude's little tricks didn't come for free, and it would have been very melodramatic to use a knife to cut his other hand.

"What is the point of this?" Jude wandered from cupboard to cupboard until he hunted down the wine glasses. The two he found were dusty, necessitating a quick bath in the sink. "Are you some kind of alcoholic?" Were they bonding? Near did not strike him as someone who wanted to bond. Maybe he was bored; maybe the Reaches had gotten to him more than he admitted. He delivered the glasses, still wet, at the base of the bottle.

Four glasses. Something terrible was bound to happen, unless he wanted to drink those four glasses very, very slowly. And he didn't, he wanted to get to sleep. Sleep -- it shimmered before him like a kind of resolution, a marker of progress. He walked here, he went to sleep, he woke up. Time was still linear. The world was still in motion. This kitchen was chrono-quicksand. Jude fought it, and sank into it.