The Depths

[Near]

"Christ, give it a rest," Near groans, exhausted with all of this. "Courtland never had a plan. If he did, if he gave a shit, don't you think he would have told someone? Left it somewhere you could find it before he checked out? Sent you a letter? Put it in his will?"

Press him: he might admit that he's not totally qualified to make suppositions regarding his late father's preparations for the end of the world. Or his lack thereof. It's true that he never really know him as a man. What he did all day; who he spent his time with. But he did know him as a controller.

Courtland's penchant for tyrannical planning had rippled across a broad region of Near's life, for all the chasms of distance and emotion that stretched between them. Schools, extracurriculars, career trajectories, trust funds, he had wanted to play puppetmaster for everything, and had attached web of strings to everything he touched. Near, once he realized they were there, had taken great pains to burn the whole production to ashes.

There are times -- usually they coincide with the delivery of a bank statement -- when he hates himself for not giving into the temptation to light up The Reaches when he had the chance. Literally. Cathartically. Thinking about it now, he wonders if he wouldn't be tempted to help fuck the world over too, if he knew for sure that Courtland had intended to save it. But he's pretty sure that if there had ever been a "plan," he would have made it known.

His phone makes an appearance. He digs up Doordash, slides through a list of options he's seen often enough he could recite them alphabetically. "What do you want?" He asks. Since he is now on the line to feed Jude. Then, "Want me to buy you a plane ticket?"

[Jude]

Near almost gets to him. He gets close. Isn't it funny that Jude, god-adjacent, needs something to believe in too? He needs there to be someone who knows better than him and is on his side. Courtland the puppetmaster is a reassuring deity, his power such that he can persist even though he's gone. Near tosses a very heavy stone into that clear, glass-like surface of Jude's face and voice, the watery ripples threatening to crystallize into shattering.

Jude folds his index finger into the snuff bowl of his palm, digging the nail in until blood wells. The pain calms him. The disturbance in his eyes settles, he reforms.

"Maybe it's still coming," he says. "You certainly don't know about it. You didn't know about me." And Jude smugly retires into the shelter of an unfalsifiable conclusion. He moves the goalpost so Near cannot possibly win, and he leaves it there.

The mention of money brings him back into this world, exiting the temple and dragging him back into the world of the profane. Plane tickets, Door Dash. "Is there Indian food nearby?" He covers his mouth briefly, then rubs up and down his cheek. "Probably. In a bit." Despite his conviction in Courtland's having a plan, Jude can see that Near doesn't have it.

He pauses. "Did you want to come?" With him. On the plane. Like, seriously?

[Near]

"What?"

After a few seconds, browsing dinner options has devolved into aimless thumbswiping and staring holes into the phone at intervals. The screen is as good a place as any to concentrate his frustration at the fact that somehow, with Jude in the room, Courtland has been reinstated into a starring role after being somewhat successfully relegated to the background of Near's life for a few years.

Jude's question yanks him away from the activity like a choke-chained dog. The tone is wrong. Not snide enough, should be Did you want to come?? Instead, a jarring wrong note in an otherwise flawless snipe symphony. He looks up and stares holes into Jude instead.

"Fuck off." This is filler, not expletive. It is tired, empty, accompanied by a shake of his head -- the least contentious thing he's said for a while, despite the words that frame it in. He waves the phone in the air, temporary white flag.

"Here, order whatever you want."

[Jude]

Jude regrets asking once Near starts staring. He deflates a little under the pressure, then swells up again to counter it -- shoulders folding inwards first, hands twisting, and then sitting up straighter again, shoulders broadening, jaw setting. "Well it's not like you're doing anything," he says, recovering from the fleeting moment of openness. It's not like Near's job or life are real. He doesn't have to work. He doesn't have to live in an apartment this boring. It's not like Jude was trying to tear a married man away from his children with the suggestion.

He takes the phone and adds yellow daal and lamb vindaloo, and then, after slight hesitation, a mango lassi. He spends very little time contemplating; food is a rare area where Jude simply opts to be decisive. This is because one of Jude's quirks was that he was 'born' with a most accepting palate, such that he has virtually never come across something he couldn't eat. (He has never tested the limits of this, such as experimenting with anything rotten; there's no winning answer.) Sometimes he is in the mood for specific things, but more often than not anything with a genre can appeal.

Soon he is turning the phone back to Near and holding it out again, the screen away from him. This small exchange here is the most normal (and the least hostile) thing that has happened between them.

[Near]

He reclaims the phone almost delicately, careful not to let his fingers brush against Jude's. Jude, whom he finds himself wishing he could box into a neat category but can't quite. Are they enemies? Allies? Nothing at all? Right now it feels like they're old school friends who have bumped into one other somewhere unexpected -- or at least how he imagines that would feel, because it's never actually happened to him. Ridiculous:

He disappeared.

He disappeared.

But he said it once already to barely any reaction and let's not talk about that anymore for the sake of whatever weird semi-combative equilibrium they've managed to slip into in the absence of the battle plans Near had hoped for.

"I have a job." (The "you asshole" is implied.) "A -- boyfriend." Slight hiccup, "boyfriend" is never not an embarrassing word to speak out loud, juvenile, but still better than the available alternatives. "I was supposed to see him later." Like he's doing plenty of things. Like he's built himself up a full and fulfilling life and hasn't been hanging around solely because waiting around for Jude has kept him anchored to one spot for too long.

He adds a couple of items to the cart, then glances at Jude's vindaloo, contemplating a surreptitious update to extra spicy. He doesn't go through with it, completes the order before he can give into the temptation that is at least as juvenile as calling the grown man he finally texts a quick cancellation to a boyfriend.

"Anyway, don't you kind of hate me?" He kind of hates Jude, figures the kind of feeling is mutual.

[Jude]

The thing is, Jude doesn't want Near to come, not really. Doesn't he? They have failed to get along at any given moment. Near asks all the wrong questions. The only thing Jude wants is a check: to maintain his lifestyle, to stay on the run. If he was going to ride into battle, it will not be under Near's command. Certainly there's better captains and calvary to be had.

Nor is Jude the cannier of the twins, the one best equipped to shove a crowbar into the gap between 'a' and 'boyfriend'. Juliet was always the dominant personality; it was such a surprise when Jude had a thought of his own, and one so contrary to his breeding. And yet he narrows his eyes as if he's been deceived, when Jude isn't even surprised. He knows Near has a boyfriend. His mall spying revealed as much.

So his own voice is a surprise to him when he asks flippantly, "What? Is it serious?" He doesn't clarify whether this refers to the job or the boyfriend.

Jude knows he disappeared. He didn't think it mattered to Near, until he saw those stupid newspaper ads. "You're the one who hates me." He bends from the waist over himself and unties his sneakers, hiding his face. He slips them off and sets them aside, and then he moves to one corner of the couch and stretches himself across it. Outside, it starts to rain.

[Near]

Oh sure, take off your shoes. Why the fuck not. Stay a while.

The internal sarcasm bubbles up and pops, eyes roll, before Near can remind himself Jude is staying a while, isn't he? Still, it is unspeakably annoying that he can waltz in, kick up his feet, and look more at home Near's drab little apartment than Near feels on a typical day. He wants, briefly, to hurl his keys toward the couch, shout fine just keep it, and storm off into the sad Seattle drizzle. Crazy. He's not usually the histrionic one between two personalities in his house. The opposite: he is the solid wall still standing through other people's hurricanes. He likes it that way. But maybe he's always just been the less histrionic one, inadvertently soaking up melodrama all this time.

He has not taken off his own shoes. Rarely does, a habit formed in deference to an adult lifetime of floors left unvacuumed because there were better things to do. Or at least not worse things. He did buy a vacuum. On sale. Bagless. It lives a mostly undisturbed existence in the hall closet.

"As serious as anything else," he answers for either or both of his fulfilling life developments, which is meaningless unless you know that nothing Near Farr has, does, says, is ever serious. Or so he's been told. It is not something Guthrie would be pleased to hear. And, "Yeah, but I figured we hated each other." A little thing they could have in common.

[Jude]

It would be completely in line with the shaky relationship they have for Near to pelt Jude with his keys and leave him stunned and mildly injured on the couch; it would maintain the poetic rhythm of their connection, as impulsive and pointless as it would be. It would be just as natural for Jude to commit some act of serious self-harm in order to make a point that Near would then deny.

Instead Jude takes off his shoes, which is the normal and respectful thing to do if one is staying a while and wants to put their feet up on a couch. The Reaches was forbidding and formidable, demanding stiff posture and discomfort. Near’s apartment does not intimidate. It doesn’t hiss at Jude to keep his feet off the couch.

As serious as anything else. Jude quirks his eyebrows. They move in coordination, though he would prefer the ability to lift only one at a time. Oh well. No one can do every single thing.

In sulky silence, Jude debates which answer to provide. He is so, so tempted to be contrary, to pin all the hatred in the room on Near like he is the histrionic one. But when he thinks about it for a little longer, that feels like admitting his own petulance. “I guess we do,” he says. Now he hopes that Near will not ask why Jude invited him along, why Jude would keep company with someone he hates. Jude already knows he cannot answer.

[Near]

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?

[Jude]

Near is losing the game because he has set out to play it without confirming the other player knows the rules and the goal. It must be that much more humiliating to be beaten at it: to be determined to be the least nonchalant, the most removed, the most reasonable, pelting dodgeball after dodgeball. Jude evades not because he is burning with competitive spirit, but because he doesn't understand there is some value in being hit. There's no guarantee he would submit to a strike if the game was explained, but maybe he would go on the offensive if he knew he was supposed to pick up the balls and throw them back.

Throwing Jude out right after he's ordered food -- right after Near has cancelled his plans for the evening -- wouldn't that be just like them though?

Having agreed to dinner, Jude has promised Near at least a few hours of his time. He hopes that they can do a dance he has some experience with now: suppertime small talk. What have you been doing? "Traveling." His first instinct remains to leave it there, just the one word, but Jude swallows and presses on. "When I was younger -- when I met your father -- it wasn't like I kept track of the addresses. Where the Family took us." He stops again, rolling his tongue around his mouth, feeling the inner ridges of his teeth. This isn't coming out the way it does at the suppers, perhaps because he's not trying to sell Near anything. Jude is usually selling. "But I remember the broad strokes. I go places I've been, try to remember who I talked to, find my way back. Talk to them again."

He is eliding the financial components. It was very difficult, in the beginning. He was nearly arrested several times -- for sleeping outside, for loitering, for panhandling. But once he found his first real benefactor, he's stayed on his feet. These details he isn't eager to provide, because he imagines Near is just going to make fun of him. Opening a bank account was a nightmare for Jude.