The Reaches

[Near]

Despite the impressions hauling a dog across multiple states in a rented coup conveyed, Near considered himself a cat person.  Dogs were too easy, too eager.  Yell at them, and they cared.  Cats were a challenge.  So he’d made an adulthood-long habit of feeding strays.  And not the sleek nomads that wandered from doorstep to doorstep in decent neighborhoods.  His were the gaunt, mangy things that were as likely to tear a hole in your hand as take a scrap from it.  Missing eyes, Missing ears, stumps for tails.  There was at least one such creature haunting the alleyway behind every shitty dive he’d ever worked at, and it was a point of immense private pleasure when he could convince it to come out from under the dumpster and twine itself around his legs.

This was frequently included in litanies of his personal failings, framed in one of two ways: why are you fucking around with that thing -- we’ll all get rabies/fleas/the plague; or why are you fucking around with that thing -- it isn’t worth your time.  There was some irony to be sussed out of the fact that these complaints tended to issue from the gaunt, mangy people he also made a habit of trying to tame (he was hardly blind to how it all bled out beyond feral cats and into his dealings with his fellow human beings), all of whom chomped down on his extended hand eventually.

Like it or not -- and surely neither of them liked it -- the kid was playing on the same obdurate impulses that underlay those stray-feeding instincts, as if Near were a guitar that only played One Way.  So, though he should have done anything except stick around after being dismissed, his liquor-fuzzed head heard and decided to dig in, nudging him down until he was seated on the kitchen floor with his back against the wall beside the door jamb, so that he could twist to continue his downward-pointing end of the conversation.

“I really think you should come up,” he countered, “unless there’s something interesting down there.”  A prompt, like tiptoeing toward the subject of how he hated the idea of the place without knowing why.

[Jude]

Near must want him to leave. Alternatively, he was too afraid to come down into the basement, supposing that Jude was lurking down here in preparation for some act of violence. For another minute, Jude did not respond. He stroked his hurt palm with one finger, staring in silence at the glyph carved into the floor. Never again would he sit on that floor, or on this bench. Never again would  They murmur their secrets in the musty dark. Jude felt a strange tightness in his chest. He could taste mucus in the back of his throat. Perhaps he was getting a cold.

After that minute, if Near was listening, he could hear footsteps. Jude left the doors open behind him. He didn't know how to make the wall go back to its place anyways; that part he had never paid attention to.

He tucked his hands into his pockets and watched his feet as he came up the stairs. He walked at an even pace, neither hurrying nor dawdling. At the top step, he looked down owlishly at Near on the floor. He was waiting for the next prompt.

Maybe the universe had spun a wheel, and Near had lucked out with the world's strangest, most guileless home invader. Weird? Yes. But aside from cryptic stories and a nap, he had extracted nothing. (The gin, after all, was back in the bottle.)

[Near]

It felt furtive to have settled so low.  Lying in wait.  And too theatrical, like sitting in the dark until a late lover tried to slink through the door, snifter of cognac in hand for an ominous swirl except he was done with the metaphorically hard stuff for a while, his crutch having become a more literally hard cutting board to which he offered an inside-joke smirk -- what was he about to do, thwack the kid in the shins if he decided to emerge?  That’ll show you.

Really, what the hell was he doing?

Checkerboard ceramic tiles suffused the back of his own legs with their coolness.  He considered -- but did not follow through with -- rearranging to rest his head against them.  Even now they were cleaner than any of his kitchen floors, territory that trended toward a state of neglect, the no-bare-feet-recommended kind.  He would have thought twice before planting himself on those stretches of faded linoleum with their marks like cigarette burns, forgotten Rice Krispies, shoe residue, dust warrens, unidentifiable grit.  Only through clean floors does one become an ambush-animal, ear cocked toward the sound of footsteps.

“Find what you were looking for?”  So proceeded the ambush: a blase question steeped in only the mildest accusation, founded on an assumption that Jude had, in fact, been looking for something, even if it was just a particular vintage of Chablis -- because there was (should be) no other reason to venture into a wine cellar.

[Jude]

For an ambush, it was fairly tame. Jude had a feeling he would be hard to kill - he wasn't sure if he was unkillable, but he had a general sense that 'dying' wasn't something he was allowed to do easily. Had Near hit him over the head with said cutting board, or stabbed him, or come around the corner with a gun, Jude would have probably given him that same blank look, the one constantly plastered to his naive face.

"The room was still there." 'Looking' half implied that the thing Jude wanted was hidden, or at least its exact whereabouts nebulous, when the room had always been in the same place, and always would be, unless the house was torn down and the basement dug up. Perhaps Near, some months down the line, would be feeling more energetic about renovations, and he would come across that open door and board it up properly, maybe even fill the whole thing in with bricks. It would give him something to do, maybe even a purpose. Jude had decided Near was lacking one.

"I think I'll go back to sleep, and then I'll leave after I wake up." He watched Near's face as he spoke, looking for what he assumed would be a positive reaction. Jude was going to go away. Everything would be fine.

Jude's palms were turned towards Near, visible in the light. The cut on his palm was already half gone, a narrow, dark scab when it should have still been an open wound. Another part of the disappearing act.

[Near]

A fresh swell of puzzlement crinkled his eyes at the answer.  Of course the room was still there.  Because cellars didn’t generally go anywhere other than where they’d been put.  It took only a second of considering the statement’s superfluousness to sour perplexity into suspicion that he was being made fun of.  Inexpertly, awkwardly, as if Jude’s native tongue were one lacking normal inflections of sarcasm and the accent he brought to his English meant the expected overtones of “you idiot, rooms don’t go anywhere” were nowhere to be found.

But he continued.  Leaving.  Good.  That meant it would be Near on his own again.  Near and the dog and the staticky radio drone and the gaping chasm where what he was supposed to do from here should have been.  What were the possible routes he had considered, after he realized that The Reaches weren’t the answer to anything and never would be?  Before the kid showed up?  Stick around indefinitely, try to sell the place, abandon it and don’t look back?  Courtland Farr, complicating the calculated simplicity of his son’s life from beyond the grave.  Good, Near thought, the shell of the word with none of the looking-forward-to-being-able-to-concentrate-on-his-thoughts-again relief that ought to have propped it up.

Aware that Jude was watching him, he arranged himself like he might be about to stand -- empty hand flat against the floor, knees bent.  He pushed off once, then decided better of it and just stayed down, asked, “So.  What was that, before?” with a note less of sincere curiosity than a resignation to the necessity of asking.

[Jude]

Jude's eyes were on Near, but his mind had begun to wander. Where would he go next? There was no one helpful in Washington who came to mind. California, then. Nevada after that, if his luck did not improve. The initial bitterness of his failure had passed through him; Jude accepted that Near had taught him a valuable lesson. He had been the first test case. Jude would plan his next appearance more carefully. He would not just show up at someone's door. He was short on time, but surely he could spend a day or two priming the pump. It would be worth not cutting his hands all the time.

Near was asking him a question. Jude tuned back in with an arch of his eyebrows and a "Hmm?" What was what? Oh, probably his hand. "Magic. Or, that's the easiest way to explain it. I never did the explaining part." He spoke in the same neutral tone as 'the room is still there' and 'it's raining'. Magic was unexceptional to Jude, which made it difficult for him to offer embellished descriptions. He did want to make sure that he answered Near's question, so he leaned back against the wall across from Near, and folded his hands in front of him. Would that be all?

[Near]

Near might have dismissed the absurdity of “magic” if it had come from a person who had clearly never been granted the opportunity to learn that a camera can’t steal your soul, that a sunrise is the result of a solar system in motion, that a talisman can’t cure cancer, that your uncle didn’t really just pull that quarter out of your ear. Benefits of cultural relativism. (Sitting in the kitchen of what was, to some extent, his childhood home, he considered how his mother, who believed he had wasted his education not once but twice over, would have been surprised -- though not impressed -- to know the frequency with which he found himself drawing out threads of concepts he still remembered from his college days. Plenty of lonely drunks loved late-night philosophy-lite, and apparently outlandish intruders had a way of inspiring reminiscences of Anthro 101.)

From a besweatered kid who existed against a backdrop of modern Washington, “magic” wasn’t an answer to a question any more than “Because I said so.” It was a lazy word, a throwaway slapped with a coat of so-what mysticism, or -- and still he was lacking any evidence to back up the suspicion other than his gut -- he continued to be made fun of, and “magic” was Jude’s equivalent of “fuck you, I can’t be assed to actually explain myself to idiots.”

He lifted the cutting board up and let it fall the short distance to the floor, wincing regret at the clatter that resulted as it struck the tile and bounced once. “That’s magic.” In his ringing head was a shapeless touche about gravity intertwined with that quote about magic and science not being distinguishable at a certain point whose source and precise wording he couldn’t recall. It failed to manifest into words.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” Rephrased somewhat for the context, but at its core this was the same question he had been asking over and over since Jude arrived.

[Jude]

Near finally framed an argument in a way Jude understood. He watched as the cutting board clattered to the floor. His blank, empty expression was finally transformed into something more recognizably human. Jude looked amused, perhaps even a little sly. Where he had possessed no confidence in his explanations before, he had entered an arena where he did speak some of the language, where he could meet Near on (at least some of) Near's terms. Cultural relativism, Anthro 101, Plato's Cave - Jude did not have those. But he did have something.

He crouched and picked up the cutting board. "That's not magic." Jude stood up, and held the cutting board with both hands. Opening them, he dropped it, making an even louder sound as the board rocked back and forth on the ground, before juddering to a stop. "That's gravity." He waited until the board was still, before he looked down to stare at it.

There were a few seconds of silence and nothing. It was not dissimilar from a child trying to perform a 'magic' trick from a ten cent book. But then the board, after some contemplation, leapt up from the floor, into Jude's waiting hands. Forwards, then backwards. Gravity, then magic. "That's magic."

Terribly satisfied with himself, he held the cutting board out to Near with a small smirk. It vanished as he considered Near's question. "Well. I think - I am very sure - that something terrible is going to happen, with magic. I guess it's what you'd call the end of the world." Jude, to whom the phrase 'the end of the world' was quite pedestrian, looked calmly into Near's eyes as he spoke. "So I'm seeing who can help me." He almost interjected, Not you, but he feared if he was rude to Near now, he wouldn't get to go back to sleep.

[Near]

He had not yet overcome the profound sense of disturbance the kid’s last show-and-tell session inspired, but distance had mellowed its intensity somewhat, the way air was supposed to round the tannic angles of an old red, so that he could almost make himself believe that the lingering recollection of the whole thing was an exaggeration, a scene from a movie he’d watched half-asleep and if he were to see it again it wouldn’t seem nearly as terrifying. Nothing could have been as bad as all that.

Show-and-tell part two: levitation of the discarded cutting board didn’t hold a candle in effect to what had happened before -- anywhere else, any other time, it would have been a shruggable parlor trick with bonus noise -- but it did snap the sensation of something being incredibly wrong back into focus sharply enough that he wished he had just let it alone. No, had to reach out and touch the glowing burner again to see if it had really been hot enough to blister … He pushed himself up like he’d been scorched. Success, this time, the power of raw discomfiture getting him back up on his feet and a couple paces away from Jude in a motion that he only half-heartedly tried to pass off afterward as a need to move his legs (one calf up in a brief, stork-stand stretch).

The world was always going to end. He was no nihilist, not exactly, but he did take some pride in his being a realist, a position that required certain respect of the fact that everything was going to end at some point. As much as he sort of wanted, once he gathered his internal shit back together, to bluff at not being shaken and ask why Jude thought anyone would be able to help him do anything about the world ending, something else overtook it as more pressing.

“What the hell was Courtland to you?”

[Jude]

Well, at least from here on out, they were in agreement over what was and what wasn't. What was - Jude was something else, was capable of things outside of rational human understanding. What wasn't - Jude was just some wandering maniac who had read Courtland's name in the paper and drifted up to the estate with a fairy tale wrapped around his brain. However this went, they had finally arrived at a mutual understanding. They would not spend the rest of their time together speaking completely different languages.

Jude shrugged when Near scrambled up. He had seen that reaction enough times now that he didn't take it personally, or even see a need to provide reassurance. There was nothing he could say that would make everything better. It was up to the individual to bridge the gaps between what they believed and what they had seen, sometimes by changing their beliefs, sometimes by elaborate justifications. Again, what was important was that Near had finally come along for the ride. He could get off, but he'd always have gotten on.

"A patron." Jude's mouth twitched at the corners again, and he went on, "A patron of the arts, the family liked to say." He smiled again, unable to restrain his amusement at this joke. "But he didn't seem to like it so much, at the end. He said--"

"--if you ever get away, come back here."

Why would I want to get away?