The Reaches

[Near]

The kid didn’t put up much of a fight.

Too bad, sort of: Near was crouched taut (as well as could be hoped for) and ready to pounce on refusal, had begun to plot out paths to cajole, to convince. After all the point, dull though it was, had become the win. The point was sucking up whatever gratification might be squeezed from getting one over on his gate-crasher, even if he could only manage it in the very minor arena of turning a “no thanks” into a “fine, whatever.” Small victories were still victories. You could survive on a lifetime on small victories. But it wasn't as fulfilling when it came too easy.

He, showoff, poured with a loose wrist from a reckless height, tipping blackred Bordeaux and blendmates to slosh against the sides of the first glass. The move left the front of his shirt stippled.

“The point, kid, is to drink this wine,” he said, rather than betray his pettiness. A nudge of his knuckles shifted the too-full glass toward Jude. “Look at you, you’re too young to be on the wagon. You’re supposed to let it ruin your life first, then you start turning down free drinks. And no, I'm not 'some kind of alcoholic.' See how hard I'm working to not drink alone? What I am is hiding from my ex in my dead dad’s house with the uninvited company of a kid who doesn’t seem to realize that he’s a circus animal. And maybe the world is ending. So I think I get a pass if I don’t feel like sobering up, don’t you?”

[Jude]

Was this Near's attempt at socializing? Hadn't he been sent to boarding schools that taught him better? Or was the lack of polish some blustering attempt at affecting class betrayal? Jude considered rising to the taunt of 'kid', then reconsidered. There were many proverbs about the sanctity of the journey, but Jude was quite focused on destination. Tussling over the wine would not change the fact that there was wine. He was exhausted with being guarded and delicate and indirect; all remaning energy went to maintaining his manners, to prevent self-sabotage. Some good it would do to drink three glasses of wine, then throw the fourth in Near's face.

"Bold of you to think my life isn't ruined," was his crisp response. He swirled the wine around the glass -- very carefully, since Near had overfilled -- and then gave it the requisite sniff. He turned over Near's rambling in his mind: the attack on sobriety, the nagging loneliness, the... grief? Was it grief? Jude felt a spark of irritation towards the ex -- for dumping Near. Had Farr Junior still been happily paired off, perhaps Jude would have come across the house alone, and saved himself a great deal of trouble.

His first sips were small, conditioned by habit and etiquette. But time was of the essence. It would be ghastly if he made himself sick, and yet, not throwing up was not among Near's conditions. "Just make sure you can drive tomorrow."

[Near]

“Ex,” he named Isa without thinking, and the word fit wrong against the top of his mouth, a diminishing of something large and dramatic and complicated into a blandly insufficient syllable. Compare: those spans in the past when it was spot-on, when saying it hadn’t tripped him up in the least because that was all there was to it. Ex, ex-ex, ex-ex-ex. This, whatever it was.

“Dead dad” was diminishing too, and satisfying for it. If he didn’t possess his exemplary level of self-control, he might have caved to a temptation to chant it a few times over, gnaw on it for a while like a piece of gristle until all the flavor was sucked out. But whatever, there was wine to drink, a kid to cajole.

The whole little wine act Jude went through, the ostentatious swirl-and-sniff, the dainty swallow, Near observed with muted amusement written on his face before throwing back a careless swig from his own glass (It was wine. It looked red. It smelled like wine. It tasted like wine.) and settling his ass onto one of the backless stools huddled under the island overhang.

“That an order?” he asked, to “make sure you can ...” “If I’m too far gone to drive tomorrow, you can have the keys and I’ll sit with the dog in the back, how’s that? And I know what a hopeless drunk looks like. You’re not it. Hopeless something I'll give you … I’m guessing they don’t have programs for whatever it is you’re into. Hi, I’m Jude and I escaped from Witch Mountain. Or I’m, what, I'm Jude and I'm possessed?”

[Jude]

Once more, Near wanted Jude to explain something that Jude never had to actually explain himself. That wasn't to say Jude had never described what it was he did, and how it felt, but the people he did articulate things to -- the Family -- did not argue with him. They were more inclined to take notes, and then compare Jude's descriptions with the theories they had, what lined up, what didn't, why. 'Possessed' was inaccurate -- he was not a property with shared residence. And yet, it was at times untrue to say he was the sole presence in his mind, or his body. He was more like a time-share.

"I'm not very good at driving," Jude said thinly, which was his graceful way of admitting that he did not know how to drive. He had driven a few times, by virtue of having friends at boarding school, but he had never had his own car, or license, or any official driving lessons. It was unnecessary for him to know, the way it was unnecessary for him to have his own bank account. He did not want to start learning while hungover with some cranky heir complaining in the backseat.

With a huff, and a few larger sips, he polished off the first glass. Refilling it, he kept the bottle in hand, and said, "I'm going upstairs." The kitchen felt like a tragic place to drink, a place where people who were hiding their habit drank. Upstairs was the library, where books and candlelight would cast a halo of erudition.

"Escape from Witch Mountain," he muttered under his breath, as he turned toward the threshold. Juliet would have loved that joke. God.

[Near]

He wasn’t good at driving.

Of course not, why would Near have ever assumed otherwise? He wasn’t good at driving or persuasion or basic human conversation; and all of it was enough to make a person wonder what he was good at, if it was just the One Thing that Near wasn’t sure how to characterize as he thought this all out. And if it was just the One Thing, whether that was more a tragic state to exist in or an enviable one. Hell, it might be a pretty sweet deal to only have anyone expect One Thing from you, to be able to wave off everything else like “I’m not very good at that,” and here he was trying to get away from it. Somebody should have warned him that the world he thought he wanted to save would expect more out of him.

He wasn’t good at manners, either, for all the little displays of superficial etiquette, the delicate tea-sipping and wine-swirling. Like paint-by-number, he was filling in the colors without any apparent intrinsic capacity for art. See: bogarting the communal wine bottle and announcing his intention to wander into farther reaches of The Reaches with it.

“Hey, Near, mind if I take this bottle and walk away with it? Mind if I go upstairs?” Near recommended in conspicuous volume to Jude’s back. But he’d been headed that way himself (something to look up … he’d remember when he got there), so he hopped back to his feet, swallowed down the rest of his wine, put three--to-two odds on the kid spilling the contents of his glass all over the floor before he made it all the way up the staircase, and trailed him from several paces back to see if he owed himself anything.

[Jude]

Warning Jude about the world would have given him reason to prepare for the world; it served the Family's purposes that he was woefully unprepared. Elsewhere, with his sister, they were quite vexed he'd gotten as far as he had -- that he had managed to draw an original conclusion; that he had walked away; that he had gotten somewhere and not immediately drawn attention to himself, enough attention that he could be swiftly located. It was just fine that Jude be moderately incompetent at most things, the way someone with bound feet need not walk, as they were expected to very little of it.

Near would keep him cornered in the kitchen for all eternity, if Jude let him. Bogarting the wine bottle was a faux pas, but some veneer of class needed to be painted onto this binge drinking endeavor. Drinking in the library would at least make the process feel scholarly. "Chase me," Jude called back, without looking over his shoulder. His face went unseen, but it almost -- almost! -- sounded like he was laughing.

Things Jude was good at included steady hands: he poured himself a second glass as he climbed the stairs, observing the paintings hanging along the wall as he went. He liked the upstairs better. The downstairs was for entertaining, but upstairs -- upstairs was for living. He knew right where the library was, passing several other doors before shouldering the correct one open. The wine began to cast a warm, hazy hue across the cold night, twisting the stale futility of it into something cheerier, funnier. "What's your favorite room in the house?" The words echoed down the hall, as Jude slipped out of it and into the other room. His was the library.

[Near]

Some people, they could drink all day and it didn’t make much of a difference beyond a little slurring. Some, they drank and it twisted them vicious. Some melted into maudlin poor-me puddles. Jude apparently became a frolicking schoolgirl when he drank, and the worst thing about that was how his warbly “chase me” from the down the hall approached something like charming. Or maybe it was just the specter of sometime-warbler Isa that Near had dredged up for himself, momentarily obscuring his intruder’s jagged edges.

From the landing, the staircase, wide hardwood planks polished by generations of Farr feet, seemed more daunting than before, shooting upward an impossible distance like a hallway in a cartoon depiction of a dream. He shoved his phone in his pocket, grasped the banister with his free hand (had anyone, in happier days, ever slid down it from the top?) and hauled himself up slowly, impressed by the absence of any apparent bordeaux splashes or snail trails, though it meant he’d lost his imaginary bet.

Jude’s question landed after Near had reached the summit, while he stood trying to orient himself to the dim upstairs hallway.

“The sex dungeon,” he volleyed back. Esprit de l'escalier -- or, no, that was something different, but he didn’t have a sincere answer prepared, not from his childhood and not from the short piece of his adulthood he’d spent here.  “I think there used to be a playroom up here,” he added from just outside the library door, making a sort of verbal shrug out of the obvious answer.  “Think” because he had yet to find anything that resembled a playroom in the house as it was now.

“So what, you like fine literature with your wine?”

[Jude]

Jude's laugh rebounded out into the hallway -- yes, of course, the sex dungeon, how he had thought otherwise? The wine was loosening him up, regardless of whether he wanted to loosen up, and he started to wonder what he'd been so worried about in the first place. He was fine; he'd drank before. Everything would be just fine. Half a bottle of wine was nothing, if tempered by good nutrition and hydration. He turned away from the truth he felt but could not bear to see, silent fog rolling underneath the crack of a door -- the truth that, in the game of Hide and Seek, Jude vs The World, the best strategy was to hold his breath, and now he was getting... giggly.

"I think so too." By the time Near arrived in the library, Jude had already located a comfortable chair and a round end table, where the bottle of bordeaux lay in wait. Jude was making headway on glass number two, as if to make up for his prior teetotaling position. Was Near a drinker? Yes, probably -- he'd been drinking alone when Jude arrived. There were 'people who drank' and then there were 'drinkers', and the latter was determined by two things: the frequency of solo drinking, and the proximity of drinking to a meal. "I didn't come upstairs as often though." Wasn't Near's bedroom up here? That was probably half the reason. The children were stowed on opposite ends of the house -- not horizontally, but vertically. Monsters in the basement, heirs upstairs.

"I was just tired of sitting in the kitchen." It was true, just not the whole truth. Jude was now closer to bed; its gravity was stronger upstairs, and he could more easily assert he was succumbing to its pull. The kitchen was a wakeful place. The library -- dimmer, warmer -- was a lullaby.

[Near]

Yet more wood comprised the bulk of the library: a floor (dusty) with geometric inlays; bookshelves on whose shoulders rested a heavy coffered ceiling. The Reaches looked like a mantel-mounted Dickensville model from the outside, but inside it was like a coffin -- if pine boxes weren’t a quaint anachronism, who could be sure? Near had declined the opportunity to attend Courtland’s funeral, and his dead friends tended toward cheap cremation or just disappearing and saving everyone the trouble.

Courtland had been protective of his library and its denizens, rows of god-knew-how-many books, leather-bound and musty and likely worth something to someone somewhere. The door had been kept locked more often than not, which Near knew because one of the best ways to make an eight year-old want to get into a place was to tell him that he wasn’t supposed to be there. (Good thing nobody had demanded he stay out of the “Ritual Room” ...) Twenty years later, stepping inside without supervision still set off a little thrill of childish insurgence, even though it was only, after all, a bunch of books in a stuffy room.

A bunch of books and one Jude draped over a chair, and what was Near doing, anyway, trying to get the kid drunk? What did he think was going to come of it? He shook his head. Didn’t matter at this point. Boers and Kaffirs, said Daddy’s message, and if there was any clarification to be had, here wasn't a bad place to start looking for it.

“Did he let you come in here?” he asked, scanning shelves instead of watching Jude’s face. “I wasn’t supposed to. He thought I’d shit on his Audubon or something, I don’t know. I mean -- how long have you been hanging around here anyway?”

[Jude]

The Reaches wasn't quite home, the way it was -- or, it didn't have the homey feeling that it had once provided a younger Jude, not without the warmth of other life. Though the mahogany still glowed in the lamplight, though the leather-bound books still stood sentinel, the coldness that seeped into everything without the cook, the maid, the guests... That made Jude feel like a child, that made him feel sneaky, almost dishonorable. For the first time, he wondered whether he had remembered Courtland's invitation correctly, or whether he had simply imagined it. What if he had come here, truly uninvited, just to stir up dust?

No use in feeling guilty now, was the though that slid across his slippery brain, an ice skater gliding from one end of the pond to the other. I'm here today and gone tomorrow. An wave of queer, feverish nausea came over him briefly, then dissipated.

"Not by myself. But I was rarely by myself." He was either with Juliet, or a minder, usually both. Unfair to Near, perhaps, but Jude and his sister were the service dogs of children: exceptionally domesticated due to their public-facing position. How long? Jude shrugged. "A while. Long enough. I was here less, when I was older. When we had more places to go to." Homeschooling could only get Jude so far; eventually the Family had to fake their way toward real credentials for him, and that meant no perpetual cursed roadshow.

He nudged the wine bottle along the end table with one hand, as if scooting a treat toward a dog. "Your turn."