The Door

[Near]

It’s Minnesota, then.

Near has never been to Minnesota, but an ex-coworker he keeps in touch with (sporadically, from a distance, the way you keep in touch with anybody) moved to Bloomington a few years ago and likes it enough to recommend it, in an offhand way, when Near mentions craving a change of scenery. Offhand is all it takes to push him into a decision from his precarious perch of not sure where.

It’s always been like this. Places don’t fit him right. Or he doesn’t fit places. Every city is a shoe half a size too small – fine for a while, but then the blisters start to erupt. Time to try again. For years he nursed that silly Goldilocks fantasy about The Reaches being just right, which obviously didn’t pan out. Seattle is no different from anywhere else, except that he’s been trudging around for way too long now, and those blisters are starting to feel fairly septic. With the handful of reasons he had to stick it out having combusted with equally (or more?) spectacular pyrotechnics, it’s Minnesota ho. Why the hell not.

Under normal circumstances, he schedules his bouts of itinerancy around the length of leases. That was the plan here, too, at first, after he walked sour-mouthed out of the bathroom to find his home Jude-free. Judeless? It should have been nothing but a relief. But Jude’s absence, his just … getting away without any consequences, made Near angry enough that he threw his fist into the wall, left a dent to replace the one that wasn’t in the floor. Had it even happened? It was easy to choose no. No. He would stay in the apartment for four more months and just not re-up when the time came, then book it. It wasn’t even a plan, really, just a matter of course. It remained a matter of course right up until it dawned on him that “normal circumstances” were him not being solvent enough to want to shell out for a broken lease.

Well. Look at his bank account now.

Snow is something to look forward to, he decides, while he’s packing what he wants to keep into moving boxes. Small things, mostly. Clothing and pillowcases and knickknacks and folders that overflow with never-read paperwork, that damn piece of paper that spewed out on the floor while he was packing that he keeps thinking about. The landlord is free to do what he wants with the collection of Ikea furniture. And the knife block. Snow, the honest-to-god crunch-under-your-boots kind that he hasn’t seen much of since he left Colorado. The kind he would bellyache about when he was in Colorado and had to crunch through it. That’s what he tells the collection of boozers at The Door, a few of whom may actually miss him like they claim when he discloses his imminent departure; most of whom will forget him as soon as he’s out of sight.

He never called Guthrie. Probably the onus of reaching out, of apologizing and fumblingly explaining the Judeness of the whole thing, fell to Near. He knows that. He considered doing it. He picked up his phone and looked at it. But the lingering sting of hearing Guthrie’s abysmal expectations of him prevented the followthrough. Guthrie called once, texted a few times. Near didn’t listen to the voicemail. Never read the messages. Now he can tell himself he’s leaving anyway. It doesn’t matter.

“No, Minnesota,” he is correcting Crystal, who asked what he’s planning to do in Wisconsin for the third time. Her messy flirtations are getting messier as the night wears on, and so is her mascara, and god help him if he hasn’t been flirting back with some verve – if he isn’t considering the possibility of her still being there by last call, since, again, why the hell not? He’s leaving. Going somewhere with no Courtland, no Jude’s family, no Jude. Surely no one important enough to merit Jude’s attention lives in Minnesota. Near can enjoy the end of the world in peace.

“That’s the one with The Vikings.” He slides another Captain and Coke across the bar, looks at her like he might add something else, and stops. He really doesn’t have any other way to delineate Minnesota from the other states of the union. Just Vikings. She awards him a too-amused laugh and melts back into the scenery.

The Door is not the worst place Near has poured drinks by a long shot (he did a stint at an Applebee’s once), but it has a lot in common with a lot of them. The Door has been a mainstay of something since 19xx, the same year the smoke-darkened orange wallpaper was installed; there is always at least one ceiling light that nobody can be assed to fix; it retains une certaine cramped millieu even when, as now, coming up on midnight, it is not especially busy; the smell is a broad intertwining of beer and Pine Sol and the decades of smoke slowly leaching out of the walls; it pulls that particular Venn diagram demographic of tired working people, hipsters seeking authenticity, and actual drunks; etc., etc. Near likes this kind of dive. The easy work. The people who come in, many of whom just want to talk to someone over the low, persistent strains of 90’s alt rock. Near just wants to talk to someone too, about unimportant things, sports and the weather and who would win in a fight between Sasquatch and Simon Cowell.

The man a few seats down mutters, “Christ, I wouldn’t get too excited about the Vikings.”

[Jude]

"This shouldn't be so difficult."

Juliet has taken up smoking. Her health is valuable and precious, yes yes, but she has discovered that smashing mice with a hammer can undo the damage of one to two cigarettes. Heather will go to the nearest pet store and buy the mice in bulk, the cashiers benignly assuming that they're food for snakes or maybe larger spiders. Instead, Juliet will lock herself in a room and seal off the bottom of the door. Upon releasing the prerequisite amount of mice, she gives them a brief head start before pursuing them with a rubber mallet, reducing their guts and bones to a flattened, stinking puddy so that she can smoke one to two Virginia Slims a day without consequence.

It is also because she is angry. Her fury with her twin never abates.

At first Juliet thought he was playing a joke on her. Silly Judy, wanting a game of Hide-and-Seek... The Family was much more disturbed, while Juliet thought that surely Jude would be back within a day, no more than three or four. Instead his absence grew like an abscess. She realized he was serious about leaving her—leaving all of them, leaving their work undone. She was instantly incandescent with anger. Since then, Juliet has had that glow to her. To make contact with her is to ignite.

They have only come close to catching him a handful of times. Once was when he visited that silly old mansion in the Pacific Northwest, but they were just a little too late. It was cheap relief to torment the son of their deceased former patron, for Near Farr was apparently completely in the dark about his father's occult investment and not the least bit of help in determining where Jude could have gone.

Before Jude ever makes his way back to Washington, the Family does, several times. They know where Near Farr's ground level apartment is; they know his job; they stake both out several times. Jude never turns up. This appears to confirm the story they were told—that Jude had left abruptly, on poor terms, without any promise of future assistance. Near Farr is written off.

In a rented house in Denver, Heather goes into the empty bedroom where Juliet has bludgeoned the latest batch of mice into a pulp. Juliet pulls on a jacket to sit on the veranda and stare into the empty backyard, smoking her cigarette. She looks to be the spitting image of Jude, only her curly blonde hair reaches her shoulders, and her chin and cheekbones are sharper. She is the harsher sibling, and she looks it.

"Where are you, Judy?" she murmurs to the empty air, blowing smoke towards the dark sky. "What dumb shit are you getting up to?"

-

What Jude is up to is that he once again leaves Washington and spends two aimless months in Portland. His mission, which seemed so clear to him prior to his latest encounter with Near, is now encased in a fog so thick that Jude cannot see in any direction. His momentum is cruelly and abruptly halted; that, in combination with the fog, causes him disorientation so intense that all he can do is live very plainly in a nondescript AirBnB, the kind with the grey and medium blue color scheme, a few pictures of ships in the hallways, a modern-looking couch that's terrible to sit on, cupboards with the bare minimum number of plates and cups (four). It's an indulgence for Jude, who has preferred cheap motels and long-stay hotels, but a house allows him to connect with a long-lost feeling of stability and familiarity, one that he gave up when he parted ways with his Family.

His own existence has been explained to him several times over. He was not 'born' in the traditional sense of any human being, but 'rendered', the process worked out iteratively through the combined wisdom of the Family, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and sorcerers whose contributions of research and luck yielded the Twins. Jude was 'born' at age eleven, already capable of speech and fine motor control and with very basic social and cultural awareness. For coming into the world minus about a decade of adaptive living, there will always be some awkwardness. Ahead in other things, Jude is forever behind in acting like a regular person.

Near Farr was presumably a regular person. Now Jude knows to a certainty he isn't.

Never before has Jude needed to resolve this level of existential challenge. He has been the challenge. The shoe fits badly on the other foot. Inexperienced with the denial that human adults are so practiced with at his age, he cannot think of anything to do but to return to the scene of the crime. The mystery must be solved, the question answered.

He returns to the mall where he met Near, and then he traces his path back to the apartment complex. The memories resurface easily when he reaches into his mind, the water dark but the pieces in their place, so that when he stretches out his hands, he finds them easily and pulls them up.

It is an awkward week of watching. Jude rents a car for the purpose, a grey Nissan Versa. He watches movies on his cell phone, slouched in the driver's seat. His stakeout yields Near's workplace, a grubby little bar that feels like a hole a rat would hide in. It feels like a place that someone would go to forget or to ignore. The first time Jude goes there, he doesn't make it up to the bar, bullied into silence and submission by an atmosphere that demands he surrender confrontation that will yield complexity. Let things be smudged and simple.

He simply cannot give go. He has never hated doing anything more, never felt more like he is selling something. Jude returns on a Saturday night because that means there are lots of people. He has a very sharp switchblade in his pocket. Everyone around him is a potential conduit for a quicksand floor or a portal to Atlanta.

The way he shows up next to Crystal, both elbows on the bar, looking at Near with silent intensity while not seeming to notice anyone else, is its own statement. His folded hands and the guarded expectation in his handsome face are ex-coded. If there's any doubt, the first thing he say is, "Hi," and not his drink order.

Near could go anywhere, and Jude could probably find him, either the regular way or the magical way. There's things you can get away from and things you can't.

[Near]

Near’s body reacts before his brain does – sort of the opposite of when fingers brush against a hot surface but don’t register the pain until after the hand has already jerked away – so that there is a strange, detached moment during which he is plummetingly queasy but can’t understand why. Then both parts click together, and, Oh, if that isn’t Jude’s face bubbled up from the dim chasm of the bar. Hi. As if he has mistaken himself for a normal fucking human being who is allowed to come and go from normal human places as he pleases.

Another reason that Near likes (liked!) it here is because it feels (felt!) insulated from all that bullshit. The door to The Door as an airlock, through which the Jude/Courtland/etc plague could not pass. No logic ever existed to underpin that belief except the unassailable fact that, until right now, it was true. And not just in the exterior sense of Jude never having graced The Door with his presence; but maybe more importantly, it was easier to knock away the intrusive thoughts while he was busy wiping down tables and chatting up Crystals than when he was alone in his apartment.

Now here’s Jude, violating the dubious sanctity of a pact that Near invented without input from the other party, and Near is taken enough aback that surprise disrupts the formation of other feelings, anger or fear or whatever the situation deserves. He glares back from a staticky place of uncertainty for a few seconds, weighing pros and cons, before coming to a decision.

“I’m gonna need to see some ID,” he says levelly, through his teeth.

[Jude]

Jude is closer to original Jude now, his hair somewhere between the longer curls of the past and the close-cut Americana of the mall. He has the same leather jacket and jeans, but this time there's a blue flannel underneath the jacket, which aids in making him look blonder. The bar's low light and overall dingy atmosphere are passed onto Jude; his good looked are dimmed by The Door, making him stand out less. It does nothing to diminish the air of pleading though. If Near knows his romcoms, he can smell the script a mile away. Maybe that's what his body is reacting to—the cascade of confrontation that springs from this pivotal moment, as inevitable as the plot 'twist' where a car loses control on a rainy highway at night.

Jude, who has consumed distinctly less movies and knows less human interaction scripts, blinks. Then he reaches into his back pocket and removes his wallet, a plain brown leather piece that he opens facing himself. The Connecticut driver's license he produces indicates that he was born June 16th, 2000, and that his name is David Radcliffe. The picture matches Jude's. It is, in fact, an authentic license, that Jude authentically spent four hours in the Hartford DMV office to obtain. The birth certificate and renter's contract he produced were fake though. Connecticut doesn't need to know.

"We should talk." Jude skips the 'Are you busy?' question, because whether Near is busy or not, the necessity of a conversation remains.

[Near]

A small part of Near is disappointed by the lack of protest or even a put-upon sigh at the manufactured hassle; it’s the same part of him that briefly, as he spoke, fantasized he might catch Jude, who has never seemed exactly real enough to be carrying around legitimate legal identification or exactly savvy enough to procure a fake, in whatever level of wrongdoing walking up to a bar without an ID rises to. Enough to kick him out on his ass, anyway. But the odds were long; the loss is minor.

He snatches the license from Jude’s hand and takes more time with it than he needs to, gives it the minute perusal of a jeweler with a diamond under his loupe. The Door, once, years ago, pre-Near, was caught up in some underage drinking sting, so management (Kovich, lurking in the back room) came to Jesus and now demands compliance and splurges on those UV pen lights. Near digs one of these out from under the counter and uses it to search for who knows what, he’s never been to Connecticut, but it seems to be the word Connecticut and a tiny cartoon whale. Creative. Gun to his head, he’d say it looks real, but it is still fake as fuck, unless Jude is in fact David.

And here’s the thing: maybe he is. What does Near know? It’s not like Near’s driver’s license says “Near.” Why should the magic disappearing boy be going around introducing himself by his government name anyway? As to the Radcliffe, Near has never known what Jude’s last name is, or if Jude has a last name. It would feel like gaining a point in an unwinnable game if he could say that either of these unknowns had become knowns, but they haven’t. So, unsatisfied but with nothing else to examine, he flips the thing onto the table, croupier-style.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s talk. You owe me twenty bucks, Dave.” This is a rounding-up of the cost of vindaloo, which would have been his treat except for the whole fucking him over and running away thing. Jude owes him an apology, too, and while Near would prefer the apology to the money, the thought of asking for one and being refused feels too pathetic, so he sticks to the concrete.

[Jude]

Jude does have a legal last name: West. Jude and Juliet West. Those birth certificates place them in Delaware, but those are elaborate forgeries. The Kent General Hospital in Dover will not have any digitized records for Jude or his sister, but this could be written off as an administrative flub or data insecurity. Nevermind that Jude was never meant to have anything like a job, or destined to sign a lease, open a credit card, or otherwise function as a member of society. He is a tool, a knife that belongs in its knife block when it is not being used to cut things. Jude has a last name, but that is a mere formality. He does not need a last name.

An apology will be much harder to win than twenty dollars. As far as Jude is concerned, Near needed to be taught a lesson, and the real concern is that the teaching was not retained because Near's brain is a sieve. In that case Jude simply endured pain and blood loss and ruined a dish towel, on top of the vindaloo, bringing the total to slightly above twenty dollars. Near cannot claim pain and suffering for his indignity, because that's the least he deserves.

"What if," Jude proposes insistently, "we talk about your twenty bucks outside?" The way he needles at it gives the impression that 'owing twenty bucks' is some kind of euphemism, either for drugs or sex. Probably the latter, because Jude looks as fresh-faced as always, very poreless makeup commercial, maybe it's inhuman and maybe it's Maybelline—not the face of a junkie needing his fix.

Sex then, or something related. Jude lays his palm on his ID and drags it back towards him as he pins Near with his stare. Jude calculates he has, oh, maybe ten minutes to shove his hand into the briar patch that is a conversation with Near before the duties of The Door call. He will need to be very direct and hope for the best.

[Near]

If previous attempts to talk to Jude have taught Near anything, it’s that he absolutely should not agree to go outside. Venturing outside in Jude’s company will end with him trapped in the masonry and Jude vanished with his wallet or some such bullshit. Fuck that. Staying in the bar, in the presence of people who do not know what Jude is (not that Near knows what Jude is), grants the sense of a safety net hanging underneath the ugly belly flop that is any Jude interaction. Last time he had waited until Guthrie was gone to transition from lies to violence, anyway.

But people are a problem, too. As much as he doesn’t want to hand Jude an opportunity to finish whatever it was he started in the apartment, he doesn’t want to be proven wrong – doesn’t want Jude to decide the audience doesn’t matter and get into his whole self-mutilation holes in the floor shitshow here, either. That’s probably worse.

It’s snark guy that breaks the tie.

Near doesn’t know snark guy’s name. Snark guy isn’t a regular; hasn’t offered any identifying information; and Near had no reason, petty or statutory, to demand to see his license. He was, at first, just that guy, but after a few unprompted comments disparaging various people, places, concepts, he became snark guy, and Near has developed a sort of grudging appreciation for him over the hour he’s been perched at the bar slowly draining pints of light beer, the same as one might have, for instance, for one’s irascible neighbor who shouts at kids to get off his damn lawn. Hah, yeah, that’s just snark guy, he sure hates kids. And the Vikings.

Snark guy is doing nothing to disguise his interest in Near and Jude’s exchange, and in the end it is this and not any fear of sorcery that clenches the decision. There is something extremely private about Near’s association with Jude, about the absurdity of anything they have to talk about, and he suddenly intensely hates the idea of snark guy hearing anything else they have to say to each other, or hearing snark guy’s thoughts on the matter.

“Kovich, I’m going on break!” he bellows toward the employees-only door.

A few seconds later, Kovich peers out of his office like a burrowing rodent and gives Near the kind of nasty look that he might be worried about if he hadn’t already announced that he’s leaving. Kovich is lucky that he’s here at all. There’s Crystal in a corner with a couple of work friends, tracking his progress to the side door, which leads to the dumpster and unofficial smoking lounge.

Outside, the air is warm and damp and smells faintly of a nearby restaurant grill.

“What do you want?” Some of the discomfort he was left with the last time has crept back in, and the question comes out more enervated, more apprehensive, than he wanted it to.

[Jude]

Jude has no fear of snark guy, or Crystal, or Kovich -- largely in part to not knowing who they are, but knowing them would not serve to dissuade him anyways. Near was always in a higher tier of people in Jude's social pyramid, meaning that he draws and receives attention above others and that his attention must be obtained with less respect to risk and cost. Now Near has gone up another rank, a place in the hierarchy Jude never thought a non-Family member could occupy. Jude needs to talk to Near. Snark guy can hear or he can not. It doesn't matter, because snark guy doesn't matter.

Near feels differently about whether other people matter, Jude senses, though he cannot understand why. Near's behavior is as opaque to Jude as ever; this newly-discovered uniqueness means some of that opacity has gone from 'mind-bogglingly irritating' to 'mysterious'.

Still, Jude knows that Near is going to get under his skin. The pain is as predictable as stepping into an ant hill. Jude can only hope to get in a good kick before he retreats with his wounds until next time.

He follows Jude out the back door obediently. He has enough wherewithal to glance around, confirming the alley is empty before he speaks. "To talk to you," he says, when he looks back and catches Near's eye. A note of exasperation rings in his voice.

After a moment, he goes on, "About what you did in your apartment." Jude's eyebrows knit together. "Did you... know you could do that?"

[Near]

To talk to you, Jude grouses like a tired comedy routine, and if the only thing preventing Near from turning around and going right back into the bar isn’t his nagging fear of being swallowed by the pavement, he’s not sure what is.

For all the time over the past two months Near has spent trying to convince himself that the floor incident was pure hallucination, a surrender of his brain to some weird supervillain hypnosis technique employed by Jude to fuck with him, he has yet to really shake the yawning dread it stirred up. It clings like spiderwebs, like the dark residue of a nightmare. Pointedly not thinking about the whole thing helps, but that's been a challenge while he’s living in the same apartment where it happened. So there’s another separation he’s looking forward to in Minnesota. Successfully bottling up the ordeal at the Reaches took some time and distance, too.

“Do what?” he asks, going from confused to irritated over the course of two syllables as a recap of the visit flashes through his head, pop-pop-pop. What Near did: invite Jude over, order food, try to have a conversation, fight with Guthrie, play keep-away with a pair of shoes-turned-projectiles, have a knife waved at him, get trapped in the floor. None of these things immediately rise to the level of the question, so what’s left is that Jude is going out of his way to rub salt in the wounds he left, which feels like a shitty thing to do even for Jude.

“Get fucked over by you twice in one lifetime? I’d love to say no, but yeah, no, I probably knew I could do that."

[Jude]

If Near wasn't at the root of a straight-up existential crisis, Jude would like to believe he could label Near the dumbest trust fund kid alive and let Near go to Minnesota or Montana or Mississippi, burrow into whatever other state Near desires and let them both forget each other. It would be a blessing for Jude to forget his own humiliations and helplessness at the hands of Near Farr.

As it happens Near is the root of an existential crisis. Jude has come equipped with his metaphysical shovel.

Jude squints hard, then forces his eyes open. "No," he sighs. He lifts a hand and rubs his forehead with the heel of his palm, then reaches further back to scratch his head. When he lowers his voice, his eyes narrow. "You shouldn't have been able to get out of the floor," he says quietly. "You should have been stuck."

"But you weren't stuck," Jude goes on. He can't keep the trace of offense out of his voice. "You got out. So... did you know you could do that?"

There is a rock sitting in the pit of Jude's stomach. Not for the first time, Jude desperately wishes Courtland was still alive. Why did he conceal this from Jude? Wasn't it worth sharing? Or was there something in the Reaches meant to tell Jude that Jude missed? Is he, Jude, supposed to do something with Near?

Jude regrets coming back to Washington at all. He should have given up after the car crash.