The Depths

[Near]

Near Farr is not, in his own estimation, a hothead. He is, under normal circumstances, a reasonably patient, reasonably empathetic individual who does not tend to resort to physical altercation easily, exactly. If he were otherwise, this situation – whatever it is – would have come to blows ages ago. Years ago.

But it would not be an unfair assessment to suggest that there exists a lower mental barrier between him and taking a swing than if he were, say, a Quaker. Jude’s challenge is goading enough to inspire him to make the leap right over that barrier.

Tempting as it might be to go on the offensive, right hook square to Jude’s temple and the satisfying sting of knuckles thrown against bone, he instead opts for disarmament.

It’s not his first rodeo: Near has wrestled various items – knives car keys credit cards needles – out of various grips – drunks’ friends’ muggers’ significant others’ – for various reasons. He knows that success in this enterprise relies on decisive action, movement made with precision and without any telegraphing of his intentions. So he moves fast on the tail of that make me, primed by the adrenaline spike of a moment ago as his arm shoots out toward the wrist attached to the hand that is once again flaunting a knife, reaching for the network of tendons and nerves that, if wrenched hard enough, will cause the attached fingers to release their grip whether Jude wants them to or not.

[Jude]

If Jude was a drunk at a bar, Near would definitely get him. If this was a real fight -- a fight with fists, or with the knife as a weapon -- Near would win. Jude has never learned how to throw a punch or dodge one; the only gun he's ever fired has been an air rifle. Not only does he have the odd manners and queer sensibilities of an artistocrat of yore, he is about as physically useful as one.

Unfortunately this is not a real fight. Unfortunately it is bait.

The distance between Jude's other hand and the knife is shorter than the distance between Near's hand and Jude's wrist, so it is relatively easy for Jude to close the distance between the former pair before the latter make contact. Here arrives another misfortune: Jude's reflexes are quick, but his dexterity for this gesture is imprecise. Instead of gracefully slicing open his hand, he stabs himself with the first inch of the blade before Near grabs his hand and he drops the knife.

Conditioned not to scream, Jude looks wildly at Near as blood begins to pulse from his hand to the floor. He stares at Near angrily and then he says something in that nothing language of his, words that vibrate in the ear as they do in the teeth, words that taste of ash. The floor beneath Near's feet becomes soup for a second and a half, and then Jude says something that sounds like a mosquito's rejection, a whining-hiss word that reconstitutes the matter of Near's floor around his calves as if it had been built around him.

The knife clatters to the floor somewhere near Jude's sockfeet. Jude lets his hand bleed freely, bright red dripping down his fingers and pooling near Near's knees. "You dumb fucking asshole," Jude says, with a tone that indicates this completely describes the situation. The wound in Jude's hand is narrow but deep, and despite his silence, it is rather painful. He keeps from complaining because he knows it will be over soon, the way all pain ends, the way all things end. The way all things will end, if left in the hands of people like Near Farr. Dumb fucking asshole.

[Near]

Since that night at The Reaches, the sensation of Jude’s bullshit magical whatever has been another memory collecting dust on the same shelf where all unpleasant experiences go to fade away. Since Near hasn’t made a habit of pulling it out for review very often, it’s been shoved farther and farther toward the back with the passage of time, so that now he can recall the objective fact that he found it upsetting then, but in a secondhand way – a scene from a book he read or movie he watched years ago, severed from whatever salience had made it so upsetting. It’s easy, then, to tell himself it wasn’t so bad. Really. An overreaction. He’d been caught off guard by some weird shit in an unfamiliar place. He’d been drinking. It wasn’t really that big a deal.

But again he is caught off guard: the snare of his fingers tightens fast around Jude’s wrist, but not before Jude manages to stick the knife into his own palm. Something clicks into place. Self-mutilation as requirement? The two pieces hadn’t aligned the last time. In fact, Near had outright forgotten that part: how there was not only the bottle stitching itself together, but the blood, too. And as someone who was not a stranger to cuts on broken glass, he had empathized, shoved a towel or something at Jude to staunch the wound. Thing A and Thing B had never linked up in his head, and both were overshadowed by what came after. But it had been intentional, hadn’t it?

God, what an idiot he’d been.

For ever feeling sorry for Jude. For wanting to help.

There is time for only this flash of garbled recollection/recognition/regret before the ground under his feet goes haywire and that feeling rears its head again: something turning upside-down deep inside of him, a dissonant tune just beyond his range of hearing. Everything is wrong. His pulse surges a second time, explosive tickticktickticktick concentrated in the vein below his ear as something impossibly solidifies around his legs. The bellowed “fuck” that escapes his throat is a mixture of terror and frustration. He still has Jude’s wrist, squeezes viciously and yanks down as something adjacent to a loss of footing sends a wave of something adjacent to vertigo upward into his gut, his throat, his head.

Bloodspatter in the corner of his vision.

Near struggles for a few seconds, glaring with wide-eyed wordless panic at the line where floor meets leg, his free hand testing this horror geography, proving it, until, a moment after, it begins to erode. Small fissures in the vinyl spread outward, grow deeper, wider, join into a lattice, a crisis, a rejection.

[Jude]

Yes, it was intentional. Jude isn't just inhuman in that queer personality way, that sense that he has been assembled in imitation of a person but not well-enough. He's inhuman in the sense of a twisted relationship to his body and life itself. Near must have also forgotten that in the few hours Jude spent on at the reaches, the gash on Jude's hand vanished entirely. Perhaps that creepy resilience was overshadowed by Jude's later disappearing act.

Jude goes tipping forward with the yank, but he maintains his balance and pulls his arm free of Near's grasp. Clutching his own wrist, he grumbles wordlessly and grabs a dishtowel hanging off a little rack near the sink. Pain is temporary, as is life, but Jude resents performing for someone who surely is not going to appreciate the wonder of what he's done. And he isn't even going to get dinner out of this!

Moments into his silent lament, he notices that something is happening around Near. That -- that should not be happening. Whatever is happening around Near should not be happening. Jude's thick blonde eyebrows knit together. Near is panicking; Jude, not yet. He does, however, crouch and retrieve the knife.

"What are you doing?" He steps back as the fissures spiderweb out towards him. "You shouldn't be able to do that." Part of Jude thinks that now is the time to make his exit. Yet he is hypnotized by whatever unexpected thing is occurring in Near's kitchen. It feels like something worthwhile is finally happening.

[Near]

He teeters there, trapped and tipping-point nauseous, the sparse contents of his stomach – coffee, tapwater, not much else – sloshing like whatever fluid the floor became then unbecame. The danger of everything spilling over and out of his throat turns dangerously present as he opens his mouth to shout some blunt invective, probably motherfucker. Bile rises where a syllable should be. Spilling his guts on the kitchen floor wouldn’t reach number one on the chart of shitty things that have happened to him (and/or the floor) today, but hell if he’s about to give Jude the satisfaction of being the cause if he can help it. So he snaps his teeth back together and swallows hard, tries to deep-breathe the vertigo away while Jude, who has managed the unlikely feat of wriggling free of the adrenaline-fueled vice of Near’s fingers, continues to bleed all over shit that isn’t his and then ruin a dish towel for good measure. God forbid he grab a wad of paper towels.

As he goes back for the knife, Near takes another swipe at him. But his heart isn’t in it; he’s not sure if it will make the weird no-motion motion sickness worse, and at the last second his brain decides to play him a cute cartoon of him wobbling off balance while his calves are encased in floor, falling wrong and snapping a bone or two in half – so he fails to make contact and pulls back, scowling.

If Jude decides to come at him now, he will defend himself as best as he’s able, but the truth is doubts that will amount to much. He’ll get a couple of jabs in, at least. He lifts his arms, boxing-defensive style.

But instead of coming at him, Jude asks what Near is doing.

Near is trying not to get stabbed and also trying to get himself out of the goddamn fucking kitchen floor is what he’s doing. Because this should be obvious and because he sure as hell doesn’t owe Jude an answer, he doesn’t say so. He grunts a closed-lip noise that translates into something like fuck your mother, and tries to wrench one of his legs out, pushing off with the other. It does move. Just a bit, like a tooth wiggling in rotten gums. The surrounding floor emits an ugly crunch and continues to disintegrate. He tries again. Makes a little more headway.

[Jude]

Where Near gets the idea that Jude is out to get him, Jude will never know. If Near was going to get got, Jude could have done it a long time ago, and in a much more straightforward fashion. He picks up the knife because he considers himself the superior trustee of the weapon. Having acquired it and asked what Near is doing, he steps backwards, not forwards. Unfortunately that puts him further into the box of the kitchen, when Jude knows he should be making an effort to escape.

"You shouldn't be able to move." It should be impossible. No matter how cheaply this apartment is made, Near should not have the strength nor the momentum to be breaking up the floor. The entire point of Jude's choice in trick is to have rendered Near immobile, incapable of lunging, grabbing, and thrashing. Something is distorted in Jude's surefire equation. There is a disobedient variable. Jude does not know what it is; he cooks like a grandmother, describing things in pinches and scoops. He detects the error by taste. Too salty. Too much movement.

"Stop." He points at Near with the knife. "Stop it now." Jude presses his back up to one of the kitchen counters. Sliding with his back against it, he attempts to scoot his way out of kitchen, trapped between the Scylla of the counter and the Charybdis of Near flailing in the floor. "Just stop moving and I'll let you out in a minute."

"There's nowhere for you to go," Jude complains. "I don't know what you're trying to do." What Near wants, what he's been trying to prove -- Jude will never know, he decides. Jude will never understand. He has been fooled enough times. Just let him take his shoes and leave.

[Near]

Nowhere for you to go.

Jude waving around his fucking paring knife and making weird, villainous proclamations. Oh there are plenty of places for Near to go, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to wait “a minute” to get there.

With an upsetting crunch like horror movie bones breaking, something gives. At the next yank, his foot comes free. The lack of resistance against the desperate effort of it sends him lurching forward ungracefully as the second foot follows the first into freedom. If it weren’t for the narrow dimensions of his low-rent kitchen he might trip all the way forward and fall flat on his face, but thank god there’s the counter, and he catches at it. Presses into it. Stays standing. Clings to it like a lone buoy in an ocean churn as he fights a fresh, somewhat lesser, swell of nausea.

At the crest of this, he risks a downward glance under his arm, toward the treasonous floor. There should be impossible damage. A crater gaping back at him. Instead, the same scuffed vinyl that has always been there. No hole, no scar, no proof. It doesn’t make sense, and he’s not in any kind of headspace to try to figure it out.

He knows he should go after Jude. He wants to go after Jude, in a visceral, pit bull looking at a cat kind of way. Instead, he shoulders past Jude and makes a beeline toward the bathroom, managing a compacted “You’re fucking evil,” before slamming the door shut so he can crouch on the floor and cough up bile into the toilet bowl, an activity he’s engaged only a handful of times since his wasted youth era.

[Jude]

Jude has not lived as long upon the earth as Near, but Jude feels like he has seen many things, enough things. He knows -- or, he knew -- there there was no one else like him in the world, aside from his twin sister. This was the cornerstone of the Family's existence. It had always held up, as evidenced by its success in extracting large amounts of money from their patrons and quietly pushing physics departments the country over in particular directions.

When Near pulls himself from the quicksand of his kitchen floor and there is simply floor in his wake, the cornerstone cracks.

Shock prevents Jude from feeling the enormity of the moment. He looks at the floor and he thinks, hmm. Near curses at him and then barrels around the corner to retreat into a room and slam the door. Running on auto-pilot, Jude commits to his original plan of pulling his boots on and grabbing his backpack from its spot near the couch. The unlaced laces of his boots threaten to tangle as he vacates the ground-floor unit in a whirl. He rushes out to his paint-peeling Forester not cognizant of the ringing sensation building distantly in his ears.

He drives aimlessly for two hours until he has to stop at a gas station, where he watches the digital ticker for the charge climb with undeserved consternation. The satisfaction he feels when it comes to a halt, when the tank is full, is the inverse of the hole that has opened up inside him, which is sucking down all certainty. Still it is not until another two hours later, night at the hotel after dinner at Applebee's, that Jude turns his mind to the unharmed kitchen floor.

Who the fuck is Near Farr anyway?