Aftermath: 28 - Untangle This (2030)

The xenoepilepsy thing feels, at times, like a process that must go to completion.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2030 (Twenty-eight – Untangle This)

Hermann has pulled out the Kid Gloves of Guilt and Concern and is doing all his Newt handling with them. Newt vacillates between finding this cute and finding it depressing. He’d really rather Hermann make the drive to UC Berkeley; Newt has a strange desire to be alone. To kinda go somewhere by himself, maybe just the bathroom, shut the door, give the kids their way, lie down on the floor, start bleeding, pass out. 

The xenoepilepsy thing feels, at times, like a process that must go to completion; like there’s not a way to get around the Metaphorical Board without passing Metaphorical Go. There’s nothing akin to it—those moments right before he loses his hold on himself—head snapping back, that warm rush of blood, then a ricochet release of tension he’s only partially aware of until it’s strong enough to crack his consciousness right down the center with its going.

Maybe the tension is always there, some part of his primitive reward system mournfully and metaphorically masturbating to the memory of the anteverse. Hypothetical Rain asks him about auras. Like, does he have one before he gets a seizure, and if the answer to that is really “no,” how come he has a better than fifty percent success rate at finding an abandoned room to lie down in before they happen?

The day that Newt figures out how to say, “Yes, Hypothetical Rain, I do have some warning. It’s not an ‘aura’ per se, it’s a little bit of psychosis without insight plus or minus a Leibniz sighting coupled to the sensation that I’m about to relieve some pre-existing mental tension so profoundly that I’ll end up unconscious for days,” without admitting he’s lost touch with reality, he will get right on that.

The quantum foam thing might count as an aura if Newt could reliably recognize it as such when it was happening. His track record on that leaves something to be desired

Also. Sometimes the epilepsy seems a little like giving the kids their way? Taking them to the park or something? What the park is, he has no idea. Are the kids even real? Definitely not. Well, they were real, but then they died tragically in a Thought Experiment Lake. Soooooo yeah, just neural patterns. Still, he kind of OWES them something, right? Like a trip to the park. If kids…weren’t real…but nevertheless went to the park…after incapacitating their parents…with metaphorical brainstorms. 

Newt hasn’t mentioned this to either Hermann or Hypothetical Rain because there’s just no way to make it sound reasonable.

Hypothetical Rain: So, did you take the prophylactic seizure cocktail I spent years of my life perfectly formulating just for you, out of extreme dedication and purity of heart? Using materials that your father in law committed international crimes to obtain?

Newt: Um, no.

Hypothetical Rain: WHY. NOT.

Newt: Welllllll—

Hermann: Because he lives to make other people suffer.

Newt: More like YOU live to make other people suffer. Am I right?

Hypothetical Rain: Quit it guys. Get a room. Why.

Newt: Turns out, I kinda feel like I owe something to the disembodied fragments of kaiju that I accidentally vivisected? It makes me feel better when they torture me? Not physically so much as ethically? Don’t you think they deserve some kind of recompense? I know they’re not real, technically, but does that mean what they deserve isn’t real? Don’t you guys think they should get to have a neurocognitive outing every once and a while?

[AWKWARD SILENCE]

Hermann: NO.

Hypothetical Rain: DEFINITELY NOT.

Newt: Also, in the interest of full disclosure—this is complicated, but go with me here. The kids are me. I am also me. The kids enjoy the occasional fusion of my brain circuits. Does that mean I also enjoy it somehow? There’s a component of reward that goes along with that fusing. They definitely crawl around in my dopaminergic pathways. Kind of like in the novel Terminal Man, but less stupid and more abstract. 

Hypothetical Rain: What.

[MORE AWKWARD SILENCE]

Hypothetical Rain: Everything about this is wrong. Science? Wrong. Medicine? Wrong. Ethics? Wrong. Your actions: wrong. Everything? Wrong.

Newt: I’m just telling you about my subjective experience, man. 

Hypothetical Rain: When these many things are this much wrong, do you know what that means?

Newt: No?

Hypothetical Rain: YOU ARE CRAZY.

Hermann: I knew it. I knew it all along. 

[EVERYONE LEAVES NEWT FOREVER]

Kids: Yay!

Newt: No! Not yay, damn it. 

And so he never has and never will admit anything about auras or monster thought children or braingasms that he doesn’t want but doesn’t not!want as much as one would think. He’ll take all of that knowledge to the grave. It’ll begin and end with him. It’s probably a good thing he set himself up with a life partner, otherwise his choices might not be so clear. Maybe reopening transdimensional portals would seem like a good idea.

At this point, what he should do is a high resolution, high contrast, crisp little picture.

He? Will be good.

Extremely good. Extremely nice to his life partner, who definitely cried a little bit yesterday about Newt getting wet (unrelated to sickness, which was certainly on board and incubating well before the downpour), a decade of scolding (that really wasn’t that bad), future worsening epilepsy (2028 and 2029 were not great years, Newt admits that), and some really complicated feelings about the past (and how it relates to the present).

So.

Fine.

Newt eats breakfast and drinks, like, a liter and a half of non-caffeinated tea in anticipatory hydration. He rests an elbow on the table, props his chin in his hand, and raises an eyebrow at Hermann. He feels strange. He feels strange in general, but he feels kinda extra strange interpersonally, because, aside from the allo-sadomasochism of his little monster thought!children, there are other reasons he doesn’t like the idea of voluntarily embracing maximum vulnerability? Despite what Hermann says, Newt knows he won the guy over with his super sparkly intellect; it’s his only good feature. He’s supposed to just—trade it in for a while? Put it up as collateral for the sake of xenoepilepsy prevention?

Hermann returns his look with a look of overt trepidation, which is just—ugh. It strikes Newt as way too sad for 2030. He’s doing this. About eight things have clinched it, Hermann’s tragic countenance out of, like, a Brontë novel or a Doctor Who Holiday Special is just the latest.

“All right. Let me see it,” Newt says, opening his free hand.

Hermann takes the non-bottle bottle out of his pocket and passes it to Newt. 

Newt makes a show of looking at Hypothetical Rain’s tiny printed formulation. What exactly she put in here doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Newt makes a good performance out of assessing her work. Hermann probably knows this is all for show, because Newt has minimal interest in medicine. He has anti-interest in it, actually. All he needs to know is what Hypothetical Rain told him: this thing is a personally tailored, best-possible, rapid-acting cocktail of CNS depressants that will, hopefully, head off seizures in seizure-prone times. 

Like now. 

Newt pops the plastic shell open, pulls out the thin, nearly transparent sheet that’s Hypothetical Rain’s Actual Strip of Personalized Medicine. He looks at it speculatively, snaps the shell shut, then shoves the strip under his tongue before he can change his mind.

He and Hermann have some non-sexual and yet absolutely scorching eye contact. 

Newt has just shocked the hell out of Dr. Gottlieb, in a good way, and Newt hasn’t been able to do that in a while. When was the last time? He can’t even recall. Probably when he’d said, “But what about the angular momentum?” at that Math Department party in 2028. And that wasn’t even that impressive. It’s always the angular momentum. Everyone knows that. It was probably his delivery, which was well timed, and the way Starr was, like, intellectually wing-manning him to make him look cool.

“Newton?” Hermann asks, a cautious draw at a slight remove.

“How bad can it be, really?” Newt asks, going for philosophical. His diction is already a little less crisp. Huh. That’s pretty fast. But the strip is dissolvable, and already dissolved, which means it’s in his bloodstream, bypassing gastrointestinal absorption; of course it’s fast. 

He may have made a tactical error. He probably should’ve been lying down for this. 

When he realizes his mistake, which he does, and quickly, because he’s a freaking biologist, he gets up from the kitchen table. Alas, he overshoots or undershoots re: the getting up. Should have been more careful. He falls pretty gracefully, or at least it feels that way. It probably looks like he decided sitting on the floor was a good idea. Maybe it is a good idea. Who can say? A better idea than a chair right now, probably. He thinks about what he should do next. Get up, maybe. 

“Newton,” Hermann says, kneeling next to him, making his name a whole kaleidoscope of sympathy, which Newt does not need, man. 

“Yeah yeah,” Newt says, discouraged. This isn’t a great start. “I’m fine, actually,” he tells Hermann. 

“I know you are,” Hermann says. Sounds pretty patronizing to Newt. But then again, what’s the guy supposed to say? Newt should change the subject. He actually is fine though. Probably would be good to make that much clear.

“I,” Newt says white-knuckling his articulation, “evidently, have some slight yet immediate problems with my vestibular system. But oth’rwise.” FUCK. “Other. Wise. I’m fine. ‘m not even tired. I could work from home.”

“Why don’t you get off the floor,” Hermann suggests. 

Yes. Newt agrees this is a good first step. Everyone would. 

“Slowly, please.” Hermann takes Newt’s arm for balance. 

“I need to—” Newt pauses to marshal his powers of articulation, because he can. “What I was planning on doing, today, in a perfect world, is, or would have been, looking over the normalization they’re doing for the heatmap—” he loses it. “I don’t think they’re doing—the Z-scores are weird, is my issue. That’s what I’m saying. Whatever. You know math. You get me.”

“I get you.” Hermann pulls him politely but insistently toward the couch. “Personally, I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,”

“L’what’s your suggestion?” Newt says. “What. What is. Your suggestion.”

“My suggestion is that you wait twenty minutes and re-evaluate before tackling any statistics,” Hermann says. He presses down on Newt’s shoulder, nicely but also in kind of a please-lie-down-before-I-push-you-down way.

“I am fine,” Newt informs him archly, lying back against a pillow that Hermann had sneakily put here at some point earlier in the morning. “I know that face you’re making and I don’t like it. I’d have to be dead before I couldn’t interpret a heat map, Hermann, okay?”

“I never—” Hermann aborts whatever that was gonna be, and sits down on their coffee table, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. Favorite pose. “I don’t necessarily disagree, but maybe you can explain to me why you seem to expect your cognitive processing to stay clear when you’ve taken medication that’s been tailored to slow electrical impulses in your particular brain.”

“I don’t,” Newt says, defensively. That would be stupid. 

“Then explain why you think you should be troubleshooting ‘weird’ Z-scores right now.”

He makes a good point.

“But I—” Newt says, realizing that Hermann has rhetorically trapped him. That shouldn’t be able to happen.

“Listen to me, Newton,” Hermann says, gently rubbing his chest. “Are you listening? Don’t think. Just listen.”

“Fine,” Newt says, with mild to moderate dignified poise. 

“I’m going to quote for you one of my favorite scientific thinkers. He observed that ‘it is the nature of human thought to be subject to both bias and biochemistry.’ Does that ring a bell?”

“Myeah,” Newt says resentfully. Bias and Biochemistry is a good thought but a better band name. He digs the fingernails of his mind into it and hangs on for dear life.

“Good, it should, since it was you.” Hermann gives him a significant look. “I don’t understand why you seem to consider certain biologic imperatives character failings despite claiming, repeatedly and correctly, that they could not possibly be such.”

Predictably, this distracts him from his bias and biochemistry thought, and, as soon as he lets it go, it falls away like leaves, damn it. Something had. 

“I don’t—” Newt says, his thoughts scattering, his body relaxing under Hermann’s hand.

“You are a brilliant scientist,” Hermann says. “Scintillating, even. I have always considered you such.”

Newt doubts that’s true, but can’t muster much of an argument. His face must display some skepticism, because—

“Always,” Hermann says, firmly. “Any alternate perception on your part comes from my poor communication skills I’m sure. The chair of your department told the chair of my department that you are in the process of ripping the field up by its roots, turning it over, and planting all kinds of hybrid varietals. As a metaphor, it’s somewhat rococo, but I find I know exactly what he means.”

Newt lifts an eyebrow. 

“Oh hush,” Hermann says, smiling. “At some future point, you must explain where that comment came from, because I find I very much want to know.”

Newt forces his eyes open, focusing on Hermann.

Hermann sighs. “Why are you trying so hard?” he asks, his hand resting on Newt’s chest. 

“Seems the thing t’do,” Newt says, nearly unintelligibly. 

“There is absolutely no need.” Hermann replies. “Go to sleep.”

Newt can’t—quite—