Aftermath: 33 - A Borrower of the Night (2020)

The pieces come like shards, stay like shards.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2020 (Thirty-three – A Borrower of the Night)

Geneva is a disaster. An unmitigated, horrible conflagration of strain, terror, exhaustion. 

Hermann captures only fragmented moments that might, when viewed by someone else, make an understandable whole. Living it is intolerable. He will never remember the trip in its entirety. The pieces come like shards, stay like shards.

On the plane. The knot of anxiety in Hermann’s chest, a faint nausea when he thinks of his upcoming talk. Newton, feverishly working across the aisle, headphones in place, brow furrowed, glaring his screen into submission. Tendo leaning over to whisper in Hermann’s ear. “Not gonna be easy to salvage this.” 

Day one. Newton screaming himself hoarse in the midst of a rioting room, shouts, “FUCK you,” at the American structural engineer in charge of the design of the Coastal Wall. Two fingers, pointing. Head cocked. Dynamic delivery. Current jumping a spark gap. Black hair, provocative dermal art, those green eyes. The mood in the room detonates. The organizers turn on the lights, cut off his microphone. Newton continues, undeterred, arms spread wide, welcoming the chaos as though he is its avatar. People rise from their seats. You are magnificent, Hermann thinks, sitting, watching the man in the dim light. 

Deserted second floor rest room. Dr. Geiszler’s hands gripping the edges of a marble sink, sleeves rolled up, head down, staring at nothing. Knowing he’s being observed, the man clenches his jaw, tips his head back, glares at the ceiling, drops his head forward, fixes his hair, runs a hand across his face, and begins washing his hands. 

Hermann has never seen him so acutely miserable. He begins to engage Newton in their usual fashion, but there’s something off—the man isn’t reacting as he normally does, and then, when Hermann chastises him for his overt antagonism—he smiles. His face is full of despair, twisted into a thin veneer of amusement, and Hermann actually has to look away, his heart racing.

Newton believes he’s failed Caitlin Lightcap, and it looks to be killing him. 

“Are you all right?” Hermann asks.

“Excuse me,” Newton says, starting icy but turning hot over the course of three short syllables, “but who the hell do you think you are?!” He’s shouting again, his voice frayed with overuse.

And, by God, it’s a fair question.

Nevertheless.

“Unacceptable,” Hermann hisses back at him. “All of this. I understand that you are upset. I understand why you are upset. We are all, all of us, distressed by—”

Newton, his face a frozen mask, throws up a hand, palm out. The man walks past him without a word, hand up the entire time. He passes through the door, leaving his tablet on the edge of the sink. Hermann doesn’t see him for the rest of the afternoon. Or evening. 

He’s supposed to be focusing on his Keynote, but he can’t. Would it have been so hard, he berates himself, for once in your life, to be kind to the man when he’d needed it? ONCE. He texts Newton repeatedly, getting only occasional one-word responses, until, finally, after threatening the man with a missing persons report, he finds that he is with an “old friend.” Whatever that means. 

Day two. His keynote speech is as stressful as he imagined, and then, when he thinks he’s finally free, he’s approached by his father. Wonderful. The man ostensibly wishes to congratulate him on his talk, but, in actuality, wants to recruit him to the think tank designing the Coastal Wall. The conversation deteriorates. Hermann leaves the restaurant before his meal arrives, returns to his room, and lies on his bed in abject misery. 

His email client pings.

It’s a message from Newton. Of course it is.

Hermann opens it with dread and reads a well-crafted, beautifully worded, thoughtful missive that he simply cannot take right now, he cannot take it, HE CANNOT TAKE IT. He begins drafting a response, scribbling across a cheap pad of hotel paper with a cheap hotel pen. 

Dear Newton, he begins, you are driving me to despair. Do you not understand how deeply I care about you, how horrible this is for me to watch, how profoundly I fear the coming end of our civilization? Why did you love Dr. Lightcap so much that even from beyond the grave she still has the capacity to drive you out of your mind, to work you to death?

The letter is terrible. Unsendable. But he is SO angry—

He storms to Newton’s room, begins the conversation by shouting, “What’s wrong with you?” And poor Dr. Geiszler—who is exhausted, grief-stricken, as he has been for months now—starts weeping. 

Not much, but it’s unmistakable. 

We are theoretically but not practically compatible. The man had said that in his letter. He’d cited it as one of his sources of deep unhappiness, certain of Hermann’s agreement. And why would he think anything else? What has Hermann ever said or done to convince him otherwise? 

“You in theory,” Hermann says, tracing a circle in the air with one finger, trying not to choke on his own unshed tears. “You in practice,” he finishes, tracing a second circle, clearly not overlapping with the first. “You on the page,” Hermann says, retracing the first circle, “you in reality,” retracing the second.

“I get it,” Newton shouts, voice cracking. 

He does NOT get it. 

“Say any of it,” Hermann practically screams it at him. “Say any part of it. To me. In person.”

Newton stares at him, confused and upset. Hermann yanks the papers Newton holds right out of his hands. 

“We are done with this,” Hermann says, brandishing the pages. “We are finished with this,” he continues, icily. “We have known one another for five years, Newton. In person. I am tired of trying to dredge anything of substance out of the cesspool that is your constantly unprofessional demeanor, especially since I know, so acutely, that there are things that might yield to dredging. So. If you wish to discuss something with me, then, by all means, discuss it. Converse.” 

Newton looks at him—confused, hurt, anxious. “Cesspool though,” he says weakly. “Really?”

Of course not really. Hermann sits down on the edge of the man’s bed, abruptly hopeless, not sure what this is, what’s changed, what he’s trying to do. He cannot say the words he wants, his family is upmost in his mind, so he tells Newton that he cares for him in that way—acknowledges the closeness that does exist between them—and ends up in bed with the other man. 

And what do they do?

They talk about Caitlin Bloody Lightcap.

Certainly, such a conversation has been a long time coming, but it still feels typical. Unfair. 

Newton falls asleep, physically and emotionally exhausted. Hermann is no less so, but he stays awake, dismayed by the nested revelations of the day. Newton cares for him deeply. He has always known that. The man has consistently succeeded in making that clear. It is Hermann who has set and maintained the distance they have kept. He explores again, for the second time in six months, the idea of telling Newton how he truly feels.

Hermann shifts and pulls the other man against him, enjoying the weight of his body, unfamiliar but not unimagined. He can smell Newton’s hair gel, his aftershave. The man’s glasses are digging into Hermann’s shoulder. He removes them, places them on the nightstand. 

Would this be easier? Some things surely would be. He could stop wasting a quarter of his brainpower trying to repress his attraction to the man. He could have this, consistently—physical touch, affection. It would presumably be easier to get the man to sleep, which would free up another ten percent of his brain. 

There are two dangers. One—though in the near term his life would certainly improve—what of five years down the road? Already it is so difficult to struggle through all that happens. Already he dreads the coming end. He will love Newton with an acuity that might destroy his mind under that kind of strain. Two—Newton is impulsive, infuriating. What if they should have a falling out? Catastrophe. Absolute catastrophe. The kind of thing that really could hasten the ending of the world. 

He sighs, rubbing Newton’s back with one hand. The man is a surprisingly heavy sleeper, if this instance is representative. It may not be. Hermann will probably never know for certain. 

The thought strikes him as acutely sad.