The Depths

[Near]

"Guess you've gotten better at driving since last time?"

Jude had included, long ago and far away, driving on the list of things he wasn't good at. Near has a feeling there were many other activities and standard human qualities on that list, but he remembers the driving specifically, Jude citing it, and a passing thought that maybe Jude just didn't like driving or maybe he couldn't, because what did that even mean, to not be good at driving? But it hadn't mattered much then. It still doesn't matter, except as another point of reflexive curiosity that develops and then emerges with a distinct tinge of hostility that Jude's regal little face seems to inspire in him.

It's not as if he enjoys it. It's not him. Ask anyone: Near Farr is pleasant. He is likeable. He is a nice, patient, easygoing guy.

Or. No, he thinks, the hostility has been there for a while. It doesn't go anywhere. Jude just seems to be its only outlet.

He sighs and slides into the passenger seat, noting the lived-in smell of the car's interior. "Left out of the parking lot and then straight. I'll tell you when to turn."

[Jude]

"Yes." The engine turns over smoothly and the adult contemporary station last on the radio begins to play. Toni Braxton mourns her messed-up mind since her lover's departure. The volume is medium-loud, indicating that Jude was actually listening to it, but he turns it down several notches when Near enters. He is self-conscious that any detail, any detail at all, offers opportunity for commentary.

Is it that Near wants to know him, understand him? Is he trying to put together a picture of a person, and the details are so sparse that he grabs for anything he could find? Does he want to know Jude's favorite color, his birthday, his favorite food? Would a list of such trivia soothe what feels like Near's endless nitpicking curiosity?

For most people, Jude's exceptional qualities overshadow any and all humanizing details. What does it matter whether he prefers coffee or tea? (Tea, green or white, black stains the teeth.) He can defeat entropy itself. And yet that interests Near the least.

He follows the directions silently. He is a cautious driver, slow to accelerate and braking early. Once he is on the road, he asks, "Left or right?" He doesn't' like missing turns. (No one does, but Jude especially.)

[Near]

It takes effort, like physical effort, to keep his mouth shut, but he does for a while, allowing a brief marinade in how much their tandem silence bugs him, even though he knows, knows it's ultimately preferable to any attempt at conversation. The radio mumble is better than nothing at all to keep the tension from congealing too thick, anyway better than engine noise, but he can barely make out what song is playing and he is not going to reach over and turn it up.

Jesus fucking Christ, why is he subjecting himself to this?

Oh, right, he's angry. Something like angry. Angry-adjacent to the point that it's a persistent distraction, a low allover ache that the more immediate discomfort of hanging around Jude has temporarily overshadowed. Maybe that's all he wants Jude for really, to irritate him into forgetting how angry he is.

"Right," he says, pointing that way too for emphasis, in the general direction of the cheap-ish-for-Seattle complex where he rents a one-bedroom in a building with a mansard roof that lends it a weird, barnlike aura.

Then, not stopping himself, "This is better? You drive like an old lady." Curiously, the observation is neither conceived nor presented as an insult; it's an absolute neutral; hell, it might be the least combative he's felt toward the kid since he laid eyes on him in the promenade.

[Jude]

It would make sense that Near's anger is drawn from another well, something deeper and more affecting than Jude. But Jude, by virtue of being a Chosen One, has a bit of a narcissistic bent — no malevolence attached, but he is prone to thinking things are about him when they are repeatedly directed at him. He lacks the perspective to guess that the real troubles are elsewhere. Instead he thinks Near is positively out to get him. But, fate of the universe and all that. So undignified to need to canvas for its preservation. The climate change activists must feel similarly.

He had turned right into the right lane and remained there, so Near's direction does not necessitate any lane changes. But the added commentary inspires Jude to brake check Near, pumping his foot on the brake suddenly enough to cause a lurch. Without responding, he turns up the volume on the radio.

Jude's default mood isn't anger. It's a flatness, a stale, gray landscape of dogged determination. He was born a creature of purpose; affect mattered less than direction. But when he's with Near, the gray, flat desert becomes red, jagged, mountainous. Why doesn't he crash the car and see how Near likes it!

He doesn't. He stops dutifully at a red light. A Tom Petty song comes on.

[Near]

Fine, he doesn't say anything else for the rest of the short-but-too-long drive, until he ushers Jude into the final turn with another wave and a flat "There."

Home.

The faded blue barnness is what made him settle on this complex over all the other comparable options, and there were plenty. It is a small and squat and unpretentious small-town glitch of a place between a half dozen buildings that are trying too hard to appeal to somebody with their sharp corners and modernist aspirations. The units are small, and the walls are thin.

He could afford something better. He's a millionaire, remember?

(No, really, he forgets his financial status more often than he remembers. He could buy overpriced real estate out here without batting an eyelash, but the concept of owning property has always come with a mildly daunting effect: what do even you do if you can't just pull up stakes and run?)

The open parking lot is occupied with the usual cadre of vehicles, Near's nondescript black Jetta included. As they pull in, he notes an unfamiliar car, too, which isn't an especially strange sight when at least one of the units is being used as an illegal Airbnb, but he's developed a habit of keeping tabs on what doesn't belong, so there it is.

"I'm in the the third one, but park wherever."

[Jude]

The blandness of the complex is surprising, especially in comparison to The Reaches. Since the pretense of civility has already been abolished, Jude doesn't bother to hide his frown as he turns wide and slides into a spot labeled VISITOR in white paint. Near had been raised in class, in culture, and to judge by the exterior of this place, he has opted into something as cookie-cutter as the mall they've come from. He wonders if this is Near's attempt to play-act 'normal'.

Their drive ends on the opening piano bars of a Celine Dion song. Jude cuts the engine, and when he opens the door, he silences the violin. (In fact, he opens the door specifically to keep the song from starting, because in the fashion of a true paranoiac, the random selections of the radio feel like a soundtrack inflicted upon him.)

Faithfully, he reaches into the backseat and gets his backpack.

Now Jude finally sees his opening to ask about the boyfriend. "Do you live alone?" His curiosity can now be tied back to practicality instead of self-indulgent nosiness. (And again, why does he care and what does it matter?)

[Near]

Near's face shuffles itself into a furrow/grimace composition that has more to do with perplexity than displeasure, like the audio channel flipped to Spanish and he had to puzzle out the gap of why he suddenly couldn't understand, except what Jude flipped to was asking a question instead of glowering silently at the soft rock whispering from his car speakers.

He wants to lie about it.

Not just to Jude but to anyone, in any case.

Actually, no. In this case he wants to declare that it is not any of Jude's damn business who he lives with. Whom. Who? Grammar aside, it doesn't matter what Near wants: it's not as if Jude won't be able to assess the situation for himself when he walks in.

He does spend nights at Guthrie's sometimes. Of course he does. And Guthrie will, on occasion, come to him, always with an air of concession because Guthrie lives in one of the sharp-angled modernist façade buildings across town and as such harbors unexplored and frankly ironic feelings of social superiority toward Near and his slubbier accommodations. That's Near's theory, anyway.

Near who can't bring himself to invite anyone to stay with him, even though not coming home to someone feels like defeat again and again and again. There was always somebody to keep him company before, whatever dump he was calling home. Not *good* people, but *his* people: the deadbeat roommate, the itinerant toxic lover, the homeless girl crashing on his couch for a few nights before she disappeared. A whole series of beloved fuck-ups.

"Just me," he says, spotting for only-the-facts and wobbling a little on the landing. The "There's a cat that comes around sometimes," that he tacks on as he jangles a set of keys out of his pocket ends up heavier than he intended.

The inside of the ground floor unit that peeks out from the door when he gets it unlocked and open is as unremarkable as the outside: an ensemble of beiges and off-whites, a smattering of Ikea furniture, couple of shirts tossed on the floor to be picked up later and taken to the laundry room.

Near slips in first, figures Jude will follow or won't.

[Jude]

With Near's answer, there is the subtlest shift in the atmosphere between them. Like a pool cue angled just a few degrees in another direction, it is the kind of adjustment that can unfurl to more exaggerated proportions across time. Just me, Near says, and Jude makes an instant assessment about Near's relationship with the unnamed man he meets with at the mall. Just me, and any further lack of mention of this man has the air of duplicity and conspiracy. Jude, professional paranoiac, reader of auras and senser of vibes, is suddenly alert to alternative possibilities of this interaction. As Near unlocks the door, Jude studies him in brooding silence.

Compared to the imposing, embellished Reaches, Near could be squatting in an abandoned sitcom set, or perhaps an overly plain vlogger's backdrop. There is little to suggest that this is Near's home. It feels liminal. A nomad lives here, one who has been forcibly restricted from travel.

Jude has more practice now at choosing his words. At the Reaches, he said whatever came into his head because other people were in charge of pitches and framing. But Near says whatever he wants, and this has the effect of dissolving the barrier between Jude's brain and his mouth. As he walks to the center of the small living room, he unwittingly says one of the most presumptuous things imaginable.

"Were you waiting for me?"

[Near]

The "living room" and the "kitchen" are a single space delineated by a difference in floor: fake wood-looking vinyl on the one side, fake tile-looking vinyl on the other, a little bump of transition strip to make it official. Open concept. So Near's journey from A to B is all of a few steps, over the course of which he manages to retrieve one of the stray t-shirts from the floor, ball it up, and underhand toss it into the open bedroom doorway a few more steps away.

On the kitchen side of the line, he plucks a cleanish glass from a small proliferation next to the sink and fills it with tap water: mental buffer time before turning back to face what he has brought upon himself. Yes, that is in fact Jude standing in his apartment with his fucking backpack, and in a purely visual way there is a surrealness to the vista, but it's still somehow not as strange as he would have expected, as if they just saw each other a few days ago and not ... however long it's been.

Is that because he was waiting?

"Not really," he says.

Well. "Sort of. I guess." He has been waiting for Jude the way a Christmas-Easter Catholic is waiting for the rapture, as a matter of course with no real expectation of it actually coming about.

"Want anything?" Space filler. Habit. Bad move. Watch him ask for Evian. For tea and crumpets. For Turkish delight.

[Jude]

Everyone is a genius is hindsight, making Jude a genius when he guesses right. He doesn't expect to be right, and even if he was, he certainly doesn't expect Near to say so. Instead, Near admits to it, something honest and direct, and Jude's default blank expression schools itself into a different kind of neutral. He lowers his eyes and his shoulders, modest and no longer primed for a fight, and he sheds his backpack and leaves it leaning against the couch.

"Water is fine." The water in Seattle tastes fine to him. Moving around the States, he's sipped from a variety of taps. Some are bitter, more mineral. Some are saltier, just the faintest edge of it. There are places where he just buys Evian, as Near suspects.

He preempts further offers with, "I ate before I saw you." Now he walks to the couch and sits down on it. He doesn't lean back or slouch. He sits up attentively -- graciously? He looks at Near's back as he fills the glass, then averts his eyes when Near turns around. As if staring is rude. As if they are not mutually rude.

It's just a very sentimental thing, a serious thing, to have waited for him. He is annoyed again at Near for unsettling him, but the annoyance is now tamped down by a different moodiness.