The Depths

[Near]

A short purr against his thigh, and he reaches automatically toward his pocket. He knows that off-brand morse code by touch, how the single vibration of a text message lasts a split second longer than the one that means a change in the status of his dinner order, for instance. On the screen (he glances down), Guthrie, Everything good? His thumb hovers, about to swipe it open and blame work, then droops. He slips the phone away, sure he’d rather not lie about what’s going on but less sure if he should tell the truth, how Guthrie will feel about standing plans abandoned for the sake of Jude.

No believable explanation exists for Jude.

This unfolds quickly, while Jude is making vague references to travel, to Courtland, to people one can only assume bear some similarity (net worth) to Courtland but are alive. Only imagine a world where they’re all dead too, and Jude has only their less easily impressed relatives to wheedle. He thinks back to dear old dad’s garbled texts. After The Reaches he’d wondered if they weren’t some kind of message, and in the rah-rah spirit of fuck Courtland, fuck Jude, fuck all of it, he had archived them away.

“Think that’s a good idea?” he asks. He’s turned back around with his glass of water in hand, but he’s imagining cracking open a beer instead. Not driving anywhere this time. Probably. “With the whole ‘the psychos stalking you know where they live, too’ situation?” Not that it doesn’t seem to be working out fine for him so far.

[Jude]

They aren't doing anything wrong. They have just admitted to hating each other. That Guthrie is not privy to the precise facts about Jude is not a betrayal, but a mercy. Still, Jude pauses when the phone buzzes in the midst of his monologue. It is a brief pause, a cipher that could mean one of many things. Then he goes on.

(He does not know Guthrie's name, but he does know the text is Guthrie. Jude is full of these inexplicable, inconsistent knowings.)

Jude shrugs. "These are important people. They need to stop committing their time and money to this project." In a different time, the Family would have enmeshed themselves more directly in the government, as bureaucrats and politicians. In modern America, a corporate oligarchy, power lies outside the public sphere. The Family thus interfaces directly with the power brokers, not their pawns.

Arching his eyebrows, he nods his chin at the water. Come on. Bring it over. "There's enough people and places that it's a shell game. I just can't be under the wrong shell when they pick it up." The operation around Jude and Juliet was small but intense. At the time of Jude's escape -- and as it appears currently -- they lack the manpower to surveil all possible locations at all times. But yes, Jude is always in danger of dropping in somewhere that's watched, or dropping into someone who has been told to call if they see him. It's happened a few times. It's a life, but it's not an easy one.

[Near]

“Important people,” Near repeats, frowning, fingers playing against the side of the glass. The brief pause after, an allowance for Jude to absorb what he is saying as spoken by someone else’s mouth, implies the air quotes of incredulity without the actual gesture. The more Jude talks, the less sense any of it makes.

“So since you disappeared – ” (always in italics, in his head and on his tongue: if he forgets to turn it strange, he risks it fading into a normal word for an unremarkable occurrence) “-- and left me in the woods, you’ve been, what, cross-country road tripping in your Subaru to the general areas where you think you remember ‘important people’ living, somehow finding your way to their front doors, telling them to cut off their charitable donations to the end of the world endowment, they say sure, no problem instead of telling you to fuck off or turning you in, and then on to the next one? Is that about right? What are you even doing here? All these important friends you have, too smart for anybody to catch you, you sure as fuck don’t need me for anything. You happened to be driving through on the way to an important person’s house and didn’t feel like shelling out for your own dinner?”

[Jude]

When Near puts it how he does, it all sounds absurd. Well, it is absurd. It is absurd that Jude exists at all. It is absurd that the functioning systems of power are as opaque and aristocratic as they ever have been. And if Near approached that absurdity with any kind of compassion, then Jude could come around to admitting some of it, though there’s no pleasure in viewing one’s own life as closer to the building of a nuclear bomb than the organic and soulful birth of a life. But there is no kindness, there’s no mercy, there’s just the mocking tone of an opinion columnist who outlines the facts in such a way as to denigrate or even question their existence.

“You’re an asshole, you know that?” He doesn’t bother to hide the heat from his tone now. He crosses his arms and then crosses his ankles as his whole expression darkens. “I can’t believe you even have a boyfriend,” in a tone that suggests Near has lied to him about the seriousness of his association with Guthrie. “You’re just such a dick.” He throws up his hands.

“You asked me to come here! With your stupid newspaper ads!” Explain that, Jude’s tone says. Seriously, what the fuck?

[Near]

“I know I did!”

His voice has been creeping up in volume for a while and now crests into something approaching a real bellow. That’s no good, though. This isn’t an empty mansion with nobody around for miles. This is thin walls and anonymous neighbors probably standing with their ears to them, and the last thing Near needs is somebody lodging a noise complaint. He slams the glass down on the counter, the contents erupting in a little geyser.

For a few seconds after, he doesn’t say anything, just glares at the water spattered across the stretch of abused laminate and works on getting his voice tamped down. Then,

“I didn’t think you’d ever actually show up.” The truth, and probably confirmation of all accusations of him being an idiot, he guesses, if nothing else is, but he’s not about to try to justify his idiotic hobby to Jude. “And on the off-chance that you did show up, I thought you’d want to do something. Or that you’d want something. I don’t even know. I didn’t think you’d come just to sit on my couch and tell me you’ve got it all figured out, okay?” He leaves the boyfriend comment pointedly unaddressed, though the twelve year old boy in him itches to inquire on Jude’s own relationship situation, if he’s picked himself out a sugar daddy from among all these very important people he’s been hanging around with.

[Jude]

The anger doesn’t startle Jude into submission. He’s so peeved that he’s right on the edge of violating the protocol of manners and not staying for dinner. Also, since he doesn’t live here – and since Near has baited him into the disgraceful act of shouting – he isn’t concerned about causing a stir. He’s mindful of his words, enough that he won’t go blurting the fantastic details at top volume, but he bitterly hopes that someone will eventually relay the ruckus to Guthrie. The fantasy of revenge can warm Jude when he retreats to a safe distance.

“And how’s that my problem?!” The idiotic hobby would be forgivable if Near wasn’t on his high horse about hobbies: all his are good and everyone else’s (especially Jude’s) are bad. “I am doing something! Just because it’s not what you want to do doesn’t mean it’s nothing.”

He starts to say something else, but instead, he just lets out a frustrated “Aaaaaaggghhh!” He looks for something to throw at Near, some couch cushion or other. Then his eyes land on his own water glass, resting on the table.

He thinks about it. He remembers cutting his own hand at The Reaches, trying to give Near some undeniable proof of his story. Near’s denial seems more fantastical than anything else. Jude quiets.

Then, he reaches down, picks up his shoe, and wordlessly chucks it at Near’s chest. Absolute stupid fucking piece of shit rich boy.

[Near]

He should be ashamed, letting Jude push his buttons like a drunk mashing at piano keys, after all the times he told himself – if he laid eyes on Jude again, which he was never going to, so it was more like one of those abstract thought experiments than a serious resolution – that he could frame everything differently and do it better and somehow get on the same side of … whatever. The Situation. But here they are, fighting in a kitchen. Again. (Well, Near is fighting in the kitchen; can’t forget the Maginot line of not-tile vs. not-wood.) And nothing like shame has risen high enough above his frustration to make itself noticed.

Jude’s shoe lurches across the space between them.

That’s about right, isn’t it: Near may have raised his voice, he may have envisioned in vibrant detail hurling a variety of projectiles Jude’s way, but he has not in fact sunk to physical violence, a fact that provides a much-welcome toehold in the sheer cliff of moral superiority that he’s barely clinging to. Even though the lame throw plays out in semi-slow motion, he doesn’t step out of the way in time to avoid the shoe clunking against his shin before it falls to the floor, landing on its side like a dead plucked bird. He gives it a nudge with his own toe.

The last thing he expects is the hilarity that flash-floods up from nowhere and drags him away with it. Hard to tie it to a single thing, the shoe or the throwing of it or the thought of Jude limping across the parking lot half-shod or himself just standing there or the fact that Jude is here at all or how they met in the mall or how he’s put off a dinner date for this – but after a second or two, Near crumbles into spasms of genuine, unstoppable, breathless laughter.

[Jude]

Near should be ashamed of a lot of things, and Jude would suppose that urging Jude to push buttons should be included. Predictably the laughter relieves tension for only one of them. Jude realizes suddenly that he would like to hurt Near, possibly very badly. Though Jude spent many years killing things and getting their blood on his hands, it was never murder: it was never personal, and the death it brought about did not come from a place of hate or grief. And doesn't Jude care something for the world, to do his little life-risking cross-country trip?

As it happens with many people when they are under pressure and feeling humiliated, Jude considers whether he deserves an indulgence. He wouldn't kill Near -- just hurt him a little, scare him. Put the fear into him. It would only be fair, after all this meanness.

But Jude is inexperienced when it comes to individual, personal violence. A virgin in the realm of fistfights, he can't quite get it up to imagine breaking Near's arm. Instead, he picks up the other shoe and throws it harder, hoping to do some more damage and put the kibosh on the laughter.

[Near]

He doesn’t want to be laughing right now, but this is an episode of laughter-as-seizure, and all the more acute for being a long time coming.

Not that he’s entirely humorless these days – while bartenders of his ilk can get some mileage out of surly, bleak is an acceptable personality trait only in certain rarefied settings, at which point they are probably mixologists – but there’s no denying he’s different. Different from how he was prior to The Reaches, anyway. Nothing lands the same. Not funny things, not anything, like there is an invisible buffer insulating him from the full brunt of reality, which has, for the moment, ruptured.

Speaking of, another shoe comes hurtling his way. Better throw this time. Jude must be mad. (Also hilarious, the idea of steam coming out of those pretty little marble statue ears.) It thuds into Near’s collarbone and falls still to the floor not far from its mate. The whole thing conjures up cartoon-flavored imagery of people chucking boots out the window to shut up yowling cats on the fence. The spot shoe number two glanced off of smarts, so well done Jude, but it’s not enough to shut Near up. He has to tap himself out, clear all or most of it out of his system, which takes another few seconds after which he straightens, rubbing at his clavicle.

“For fuck’s sake,” he manages around his breathlessness, kicking shoe number one toward the refrigerator with the side of his foot. Amusement is still winning in the tug-of-war against annoyance. “You don’t have any more of those, do you?”

[Jude]

"I wish I did!" Jude wishes he had four feet, six feet, eight. He wishes he was a giant spider who wore shoes on his hands so he could pelt them all at Near Farr. He understands viscerally why adults hit one another: the instinct towards percussive maintenance, that striking or shaking or jostling will rearrange the necessary parts. Two shoes are not enough to rearrange Near's necessary parts. There are no more viable objects within his reach; getting up will unleash a chain of events he isn't sure he wants to follow through on.

Helpless as always. As helpless as he felt at The Reaches.

He's so angry it's hard to think. He cups his hands over his mouth and presses his fingers against the side of his nose, casting his gaze down between his knees. He doesn't recognize any difference between before Near and after Near, because both of them do nothing but aggravate Jude. Did Near lure him all the way here just to piss him off? God, what a scheme. Well, it's worked. A round of applause for the cackling bastard.