The Depths

[Near]

Should’ve thrown a little harder, Near thinks, as Jude succeeds in catching the bag lobbed at him but not the implication that he is now supposed to get his shit together and head toward the nearest exit. (Yes, with the sandwich, because A) its existence is an irritating reminder of what just happened and B) there is a small part of Near that would feel bad about kicking Jude out hungry, go figure.)

But no, there he is still, Jude, some indecipherable expression plastered on his face, declaring his hatred then issuing sit down, like his refusal to leave has given him squatter’s rights. Like he’s mistaken himself for the adult between the two of them.

“Really?” demands a still-standing Near. “You just torpedoed my relationship with your ‘gee golly mister it depends on what is is” – and no, he has no explanation for why this becomes an impression of a deep-voiced helicopter-hat wearing hick, but that’s not the point – “Bill Clintony bullshit, after throwing shoes at me, and I’m the big mean asshole?”

He does not sit down because Jude told him to. He is not Jude’s dog. He sits down because he is tired and he wants to, back in the chair across from the couch, widely, with a huff of something like defeat. “You can start a support group with my exes, I guess.”

[Jude]

Jude is almost herded back into his holding pattern of passive-aggression, the one where he submits to snide shots that never confront the undercurrents. Does Near like him or hate him? Does he want to help Jude or does he just want to be a shitty little antagonist because he's bored and indecisive? Trying to pursue a clear answer has felt like a humiliation ritual.

Only now Jude has temporary immunity. He's unbreakable in the rubble of Near's relationship. "You're a little shithead," he snaps back. "Getting dinner later with someone – and canceling?" Jude lowers his chin and dramatically arches his eyebrows. Then he says plainly what he earlier implied. "I knew you had a boyfriend." So it's interesting you didn't say so, Jude's steady eye contact says. Real fucking interesting.

"You're such a fucking weirdo," the sideshow laughs. You know, if this was about sex, it'd be a lot less weird. It would explain away behavior that until now has felt senseless. Since Near doesn't want to sit with him, Jude stretches his legs along the couch again. "And you call me weird." He lifts his eyes to heaven and shakes his head.

[Near]

“You knew I had a boyfriend,” Near’s rendition is flatter than the source material with just a tiny dash of extra quizzical: he is uncertain why Jude feels the need to announce this fact with such revelatory gotcha glee. “Great. Congratulations. Ten points, you win.”

The odds favor Near having somebody on the significant other scale at any given time, so it’s not like a miracle bullseye. Not that Jude knows anything about Near’s particular preference to never be single if he can help it. How could he? Jude doesn’t actually know shit about Near outside of the handful of contentious hours they’ve spent together, which only feel like an eternity. Still, the odds of anybody being with somebody are pretty good. Maybe it’s the “boy” part; prissy Jude thinking he’s stumbled onto some kind of gay scandal. That would track with the weird cult business; they tend to really focus on men marrying underaged girls in gingham dresses, don’t they?

“Am I fucking weirdo because I have a boyfriend, or because I don’t think my personal life is any of your business? What did you want me to do, tell you I could wait until the next time you showed up because I was busy? Bring you out with me to meet the boyfriend?” The word is briefly embraced, wielded, on the off chance that it makes Jude uncomfortable. Pausing for a second, Near notices another thing about all this is bothering him, like a stone that's been rattling around in his shoe. “Actually, you know what, I’ll bite. Why did you know I had a boyfriend?”

[Jude]

No, no no no, not this time. Near's pissy attitude is always blood in the water for Jude – how he says things, not what he says, that always drives Jude into a frenzy. But Jude knows if he loses his grip now, he will not regain it. He will lose his temper, he will take the sandwich, and he will leave. He will not come back, because in his heart he will blame himself, for being whatever, whoever he is that is such a ham-handed baby when he talks to this one particular man. At some point the start-up CEO has to seek out other venture capital.

It's not the being gay. It's what would be so obvious if there was a gender swap, if the palettes were switched. Is Near blind, stupid, or dumb?

Jude ignores the mocking hypotheticals; he stays the course. He waits and watches Near until there is a question worth answering. "Because I've been watching you for three months." Not a trace of shame when he says it. "I didn't know if I could trust you, so I watched you."

So he watched Near live his banal, boring life in little pieces from a distance, waiting and wondering when the requests to meet would stop. Jude waited for happiness to turn Near's head and avert his gaze from the great, stupid unknown. He waited to catch sight of a trap in Near's shadow. Now, here they are.

He meets Near's gaze stubbornly. Go on, tell him he's crazy again. It's Near's favorite thing to say.

[Near]

A small, truncated sound of disgust precedes “You fucking creep.”

Not wanting to grant Jude what he assumes will be the satisfaction of knowing that he has rattled him, Near attempts to hammer the observation down into the same flat affect, like he is saying it because it is a thing that must be said but saying it is boring. In fact he is significantly creeped out by the newsbreak. He thinks of stories where someone has discovered thousands of snakes living under their house. Couldn’t have bothered them before they knew, but surely forever after their memories of the house are haunted by rearview mirror knowledge of the thousand snakes slithering below their feet. Now Near gets to reassess his last three months with a specter of Jude peering in through the window. Did he do anything embarrassing? Revealing? Anything that would give Jude extra ammunition in their little conflict? He frowns, trying and failing to reel in any discrete moment, but it has all melted suddenly into an incoherent blur.

Or, hell, maybe it really was all an incoherent blur.

A knock on the door interrupts. Thank god. Near clambers to his feet and goes to handle the Doordash driver he didn’t hear drive up. Outside smells like wet asphalt and curry. Before stepping back in with the paper bags in hand he scans, stupidly, for Guthrie’s car, but of course it’s gone by now.

“Well, great. Great. I’m so glad that three months of stalking means you trust me,” he mutters, pulling the door shut again and turning to face Jude. “Did you have fun? See anything interesting?”

[Jude]

Jude laughs out loud; with his all-American look and smug carriage, he looks positively fratty. So that's what trips the wire with Near? Not his father's secret room past the wine cellar; not Jude's appearing from the mist and revealing an apocalyptic cult; not Jude's bloody defiance of entropy. A little light stalking! He studies Near now with something like beneficence, as if he has great wisdom to impart on what qualifies as 'creepy', and soon he will lighten Near's burden. Then he says nothing at all, and only smiles.

He waits patiently as Near gets the proper food. Good. Jude is one step closer to resolving this encounter on a final high note, so in the event of it sputtering out like a car without gas (and Jude thinks this is the most likely), he will not have been chased off. Near won't get the last word, the last laugh.

"No," he answers, once the door is shut. "It was all pretty boring." Near said it himself: he liked being bored. That was how it looked to Jude too.

[Near]

Probably “pretty boring” is intended to be a dig at Near’s lifestyle, but his knee-jerk reaction is only a broad relief that simmers toward satisfaction.

Good.

“Good,” he echoes himself out loud, plunking the bag on the kitchen counter.

He hopes every single second Jude spent “watching” him was torture-by-banality. The thought does absolutely nothing to mitigate the skin-crawly feeling of having been creeped on, but it does balance some internal scale of justice a tiny bit, which is better than nothing at all. Though he does find himself somewhat disappointed to have no evidence in favor of the homophobe theory. “Boring” doesn’t exactly make the cut for righteous condemnation, which might have been fun to fuck with. It occurs to him that he cannot conceive of Jude in any variety of PG-13 and up situation: the two categories are incompatible …

It’s as he unpacks containers that the assessment starts to bother him, slow-release poison. Not that he’s been leading a boring life here for a while, but that fucking Jude has most likely decided that he is boring. That annoys him.

“I used to be kind of interesting, you know that?”

Of course Jude doesn’t know that: how once upon a time – not really all that long ago – Near had a growing collection of interesting stories! Noteworthy intimate relationships with people of various genders! A weird estranged family! He was more interesting than the average guy you walked past on the street. It’s kind of too bad, in a broad sense, that’s been smudged out of him.

[Jude]

It is a dig if Near takes it to be a dig. 'Dig' is not the word Jude would assign to describe Near's feelings though. Could he even describe Near's feelings? Could he differentiate emotions in that kaleidoscopic mass? With every turn of conversation, the feelings twist, the shapes warp.

The PG-13 assignation confuses Jude's hiccupy humanity with his capabilities and proclivities. Or perhaps Near extrapolated from Jude's very poor experience drinking. Jude has no problem having sex and he has no problem killing things; issues are more likely to arise from his blase attitude towards both than any prudishness. Neither is he much of a flirt, and certainly not a boisterous vulgarian. Near's mind is a careful editor: he has forgotten that Jude cut his own hand open to try and make a point. That might make it into a PG-13 movie, as long as there wasn't a long shut of glass opening flesh.

"I'm sure you were," Jude responds evenly. "Your father was interesting." That remains the biggest disappointment of them all: that Near is not a bridge to his father, the man that Jude knew and liked better.

Near is the one intent on smudging out what's interesting about him. He was trying to smudge it out with Guthrie -- Guthrie the good, the normal, the boring. Near doesn't truly believe the relationship is forever-broken -- that would be too much to hope for. Near need only sacrifice his pride on the altar of boring, grovel a little at the mall, and he can have it back. Jude will go like he came, strange weather that rolls in and out, clouds like the back of a tortoise shell that bring thunderstorms and depart after dumping two inches of rain in an hour.

[Near]

Near glances up from the counter:

Look, there’s Courtland’s ghost again!

It was so close to being exorcized by the power of other, fresher preoccupations. Now Jude has gone and summoned it right into Near’s direct line of sight, as if he wasn’t satisfied with the unexplosive result of the last button he pushed and has decided to try his luck with the big flashing red one instead. And he’s right: “Your father” does come a hell of a lot closer to a kick in the ribs than “pretty boring.” It lacks the septic sting of, say, “that time I abandoned you in the woods,” but it reaches deeper. A veritable classic.

“Oh, was he? Was he interesting?” An acid bite in his voice betrays resurging belligerence. “How was he interesting, exactly? Other than his having too much money and giving any fucks about your useless superpowers?”

The glaring danger in posing this question, which he intends as retaliation against Jude’s miserable offensive tactic of dredging the topic back up and setting it between them, is that he doesn’t actually know the answer. Maybe Courtland was the most fascinating man in the world. Maybe he was the second coming of Indiana Jones, regularly rescuing priceless antiquities from Nazis via parachutes and gunplay. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to know. It doesn’t matter now. He only wants Jude to regret making the comparison.

[Jude]

Funny, how when Jude tries to hurt Near, to express anger -- the shoe throwing, for instance -- the shot always goes wide; yet when Jude is simply saying something innocuous, he cuts to the bone. He only intends to make a neutral comment: yes, I'm sure you were interesting, yes, your father was too. Jude knows nothing of Near's relationship to his father, drawing only on his own fondness for Courtland scattered across the years to make his assessment. Jude was so put-off by Near's incredible denial back at The Reaches that he had never gone in-depth to what made Near so sour towards the deceased patriarch.

Again Jude feels the magnetic pull of Near's moods. He starts to feel crazy again, that Alice in Wonderland state where up is down and left is right and he, Jude, is the crazy one, instead of being dropped into the labyrinth of Near's insecurities, denial, and aloofness. He won't go again, he doesn't want to, because he'll lose his mind and his tongue and he cannot throw his shoes at Near twice in a day.

"You're such an asshole," he complains instead. "Do you know anyone else with superpowers?" This is what gets on Jude's nerves the most. He's never met anyone else like himself save for his sister, yet Near acts like Jude's ilk is showing off their magic tricks at Old Navy every day.

Jude doesn't regret the comparison, not yet. He still doesn't regret coming here. Maybe Near will yet find a way to reverse that.