Aftermath: 45 - The Garland of the War (2027)

Something out of dreams he’d had a dozen years ago: Dr. Geiszler, world-weary and sad, carrying a terrible equanimity.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

2027 (Forty-five – The Garland of the War)

 

“Newton,” Hermann says, watching the man make dinner in the midst of an explosive proliferation of containers of all kinds. “Are you breeding our saucepans? I don’t seem to recall owning so many.”

 

“Guilty as charged,” Newton replies, smirking. “I’m mating them with mixing bowls, actually. Hybrid vigor.”

 

“Charming,” Hermann replies. “I wonder if you might tell me something, or whether you need to use all of your processing power on—whatever this is.”

 

“Oh I’ve got a good 80 IQ points I’d be happy to throw your way,” Newton says, tasting something that’s simmering on the stove, then scanning the spice rack. “Do we have tarragon?”

 

“To your left,” Hermann says, as the man pulls it out of the rack. “I’m curious about how your upper level colloquium is going.”

 

“Oh, um, good I think.”

 

“I’ve been asked to teach one,” Hermann tells him, quite truthfully. “I haven’t committed yet. I don’t have a good sense of how much work it will be.”

 

“For you?” Newton says, placing the lid back on the saucepan, turning the heat down. “Not much. Well, actually, I’m not sure what the math ones are like. But In the life sciences you just assign some papers, cold call the kids on figures, and free associate in chalk. I put in maybe two hours thinking about which papers, what I’m going to say, and what I want them to get out of it. And then the class is ninety minutes.”

 

“How many students?” Hermann asks, as the man starts chopping carrots. 

 

“Ten. I didn’t want that many, but Sam Gordon twisted my arm. I don’t—I’m not in love with bigger groups.”

 

“Twisted your arm,” Hermann echoes with a mild disapproval.

 

“Eh. Nah. He was nice about it. He just gave me a sob story about how many people wanted to take the class and then I caved and said I’d take everyone, and then he felt bad about the arm twisting and backpedaled and said how about twelve and I said how about ten but you can pick the additional four and he liked that. So I have ten.”

 

“I understand you’re quite well regarded.”

 

“Meh.” Newton shrugs, pushing his glasses up his face. If the man had any idea how attractive Hermann finds him in this precise moment—distracted by the dinner he’s putting together, not particularly interested in his own raging popularity within the neuroscience department, slicing carrots with profligate dexterity—well, it’s best he stay uninformed. “I mean,” Newton continues, “sure. There’s a little bit of an art to it. You just have to know your own style, stick to it, and be especially nice to the shy ones. You’ll be great. Did you do any teaching in Berlin during grad school?”

 

“Very little,” Hermann admits, as Newton moves on to cutting shallots.

 

“Meh,” Newton says, unconcerned. “You’re, like, I don’t know, a world-preserving badass. You have zero to worry about.”

 

“Don’t mistake me,” Hermann says. “I’m not worried.” 

 

“Hmm,” Newton says, looking up, a mischievous cast to his features. “Weird.”

 

“As I mentioned, I’ve heard that you are particularly effective in a didactic setting and I was hoping for something more concrete than ‘don’t worry about it’.” Technically, this isn’t true. What he really wants is Newton’s side of Dr. Gordon’s highly enjoyable narrative regarding the man’s exploits in the realm of neuroscience.

 

“Hmm. Where’d you hear about my supposed effectiveness, anyway?” Newton asks, moving on to celery.

 

“I happened to run into your department chair a few days ago,” Hermann says, “on his way from some meeting or other.”

 

Newton nods. “Ah. Yeah. Last Thursday. That was a good one.”

 

“What happened Thursday?” Hermann asks.

 

“Well, as I described, I usually structure classes based around the cold-call method that everyone loves to hate, but they always know their stuff, well—” he pauses. “Mostly always.”

 

They exchange a knowing look.

 

“Anyway,” Newton continues, “the paper was on motor-circuit diagrams, and, I’ll be honest, I’ve developed a little bit of a practical interest in those, as has Jake. It’s like a weird hobby we share, me for obvious reasons, Jake because, well, he was there for that day when Bach had his way with my motor cortex and that kind of needed an explanation, so. We talk about it sometimes. I’m interested. He’s interested. I usually don’t send Jake up to the board, because then it would just become the Newt and Jake show, which is, you know, great for Newt and Jake—less interesting for everyone else. But it’s weird if I never send him up. So. Thursday was the day. I didn’t warn him or anything, but I knew I was gonna do it ahead of time. I had him draw out all the circuitry. And then I got this other girl, Rebecca, who has a crazy amazing memory, to go up with him and draw the reward pathways. We talked about it like normal people for a while, but then I had an idea.”

 

Newton finishes slicing vegetables and breaks off to evaluate the relative merits of orecchiette versus tagliatelle. He holds the two up, and Hermann points at the orecchiette. “Okay, great,” Newton says, shelving the rejected pasta varietal.

 

“You had an idea?” Hermann prompts.

 

“Right, but like an idea.” Newton says, pulling out another saucepan from whatever den of sin they share with the mixing bowls. He fills it with water. “I was kind of into it, you know? It was fun; I just went with it.”

 

“Where ‘went with it’ means…” Hermann trails off.

 

“Eh, some approximation of what you’re thinking it means,” Newton says, snapping on a burner with a dexterous twist of the wrist. “I told Jake and Rebecca to sit down then I just stared at what they’d drawn until I was sure I had it. And then, normally I would have talked them through it but I was too impatient for that, so I jacked my laptop into the overhead 3D projector and pulled up ReModL, which is this new, cloud-based platform for exploring connections between known circuits, and just, sort of—” he shrugs, smiling faintly, “showed them?” 

 

“Sounds dramatic,” Hermann replies.

 

“Oh it was.” Newton dumps his collection of vegetables into a skillet. “But not in the way you’re thinking. I’ve lost my flair for grandstanding a little bit.”

 

“I know for a fact that is untrue,” Hermann states.

 

“Okay okay,” Newton admits, smirking as he pushes vegetables around the skillet. “How about this. It’s not quite as easy to turn on in public venues. The switch flips or it doesn’t. During that class, when all of that was happening—there was no switch flipping. I was in no way ‘on.’ I really didn’t do much talking. Can’t say why exactly, maybe just that the subject matter pertained somewhat to me. So I really—I almost had to do it the way I did it; I’m not sure I could have talked them through it.”

 

Hermann says nothing, his chest aching terribly. He can picture what Newton looked like: silent, anxiously absorbed, snapping the input into his laptop with shaking hands as ten people watched him in sympathetic silence. 

 

“They could see that, I think.” Newton says. “It was getting awkward, right until the moment they realized what I was up to. Then it turned super magical. The conference room has one of those rotating 3D displays, and everyone just looked up, then looked at the board, and then looked back up. One of them turned out the lights. No one said anything for a long time. Finally Jake pointed out something about one of the connections, and then people just started talking about it, taking their time. It was nice. Semi-mystical. Extremely weird. Even if I had tried to think up an unconventional lesson plan I wouldn’t have been able to come up with that.”

 

Hermann doesn’t say anything, just watches the man push vegetables around the pan. Was I right, he asks himself, not to tell him? Did we walk the narrowest of paths to reach this place? Did it all depend on us? On me? On what I said and what I didn’t? Is this the best of all possible worlds?

 

“Probably we’ll get a theoretical paper out of it. Should that be their final?” Newton pauses, staring absently at the carrots. “Maybe I should make them write it up. I think they’re supposed to write a mock grant for their final though. Oh, or how about this—what if I present it to the Electrophys Subgroup, but invite Tom, who works on the basal ganglia; they might be able to patch onto a neuron (or several thousand) in the striatum, inject some dye, and see how they disperse themselves into the VTA. Do a little mapping of the warp and the weft of the mesolimbic pathway see if they can unbraid a few strands from the brainbow? What do you think?”

 

Hermann clears his throat. “Sounds reasonable,” he replies.

 

“You hate it,” Newt says. “I can tell.”

 

You can’t, Hermann thinks. 

 

“You hate it whenever anyone alludes to the shortsightedness of John Keats because you feel really conflicted about him. But look. It’s not an idea I need. I don’t want to work on anything that pertains to me. It gets weird, with the—er, it just gets weird. It would be useful for the basal ganglia guys. Probably I should try to get people to like me. Don’t you think?”

 

Hermann absolutely cannot answer that question right now. 

 

Newton looks over at him, snaps the burner off, and comes to give him a hug. 

 

“Hey,” he says, murmuring the word into Hermann’s hair. “Why’d you call me today, hmm?”

 

“I don’t know,” Hermann whispers, his voice cracking.

 

“You know,” Newton says, gently. “You don’t have to talk about it, but if you don’t, I’m going to have to guess. I can’t help myself. Dead rationalists? Our friend, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz? I cry about that guy once a week, as you well know. Are you going to teach your new math kids set theory? Were you thinking about Galois? You were, weren’t you?”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann says, weeping discreetly into Newton’s shoulder.

 

“You want to know my real theory,” Newton says, very gently rubbing the back of Hermann’s neck with one hand. “It’s this. You ran into Sam Gordon and he told you I was getting good teaching reviews. You had a minor freak out, because the fact that I’m getting good teaching reviews reminded you that I wasn’t so far from totally crashing and burning a year and a half ago, and you love thinking about all the ways things might have gone wrong. It’s your number one hobby.”

 

“Something like that,” Hermann admits. 

 

“Well, don’t think I’ve forgotten about my threat of aggressive Voyager cuddling. Because I have not, Dr. Gottlieb. I have, in fact, been thinking about it all afternoon.”

 

“The scope of your brilliance terrifies me at times,” Hermann says.

 

“Uh—” Newton replies, pulling back to look him in the eyes.

 

“Could you have done it,” Hermann asks him, hands wrapped around Newton’s biceps, “any other way than the way you did it?”

 

“Done what?” Newton asks.

 

“Any of it,” Hermann says. “All of it. Could you have invented the filters, improved Lightcap’s rig, discovered all you did about kaiju physiology, drifted with one—any other way?”

 

“What other way?” Newton says.

 

“What if you’d been happy?” Hermann says.

 

“What kind of question is that?” Newton asks, half horrified, half amused. “The worst question I’ve ever heard. Literally the worst, Dr. Gottlieb, stop torturing yourself. It’s a Wednesday. Everyone knows that Fridays are for torture. Keep the schedule, please.”

 

“I love you,” Hermann tells him. “Sometimes the experience is excruciating.”

 

“You are so weird,” Newton says, smiling. “I love you too, you know. I wouldn’t describe it as excruciating though. ‘Nice’ would be the word I would choose. Everything is fine. Except our dinner. The pasta’s going to be overcooked. You know what? You need to stop thinking so much about past!us and think about present!us. We definitely have the better end of the deal. We’re lucky. It’s usually the other way around.”

 

For all Newton’s perpetual claims of obliviousness, the man can be terribly sensitive, when engaged. “I knew you would be like this,” Hermann says. “I knew you would be just this way.”

 

Newton looks at him searchingly. “What are you talking about?”

 

“You’ll never understand,” Hermann says. You couldn’t.

  

Newton appears unimpressed with this response. “You’re behaving very badly, Dr. Gottlieb. Go get out of these work clothes, I’m going to feed you dinner, and then we’re going find out what happened to all those silver goo people on that planet that looked like Mars.”

 

Two hours later, Newton, dressed very becomingly in black sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, also black, makes good on his promise from earlier in the day, and wraps himself over and around Hermann in front of Star Trek Voyager, which he decides is completely inappropriate when the chief engineer unexpectedly dies. Obviously, there will be some twist of the plot, but—

 

“Ugh,” Newton says. “I can’t even with this right now. No way, am I right? No way does Torres die. I don’t remember what the deal is with this episode, but she definitely doesn’t die. You don’t need this in your life right now, I can tell.”

 

“Not really,” Hermann says, flat on his back, Newton lying atop him. 

 

“You going to tell me what’s wrong?” the other man asks.

 

“I worry about you,” Hermann says, looking up at him. “Constantly.”

 

“I know,” Newton murmurs. “Can we talk about this? You look miserable. You’ve been miserable all day. What are you worried about? I’m fine.”

 

“I could have done more for you,” Hermann says, reaching up to stroke his hair.

 

“In what universe?” Newton replies, catching Hermann’s hand, kissing his knuckles. 

 

“I think if I had been a better person,” Hermann whispers, “I could have been strong enough, mature enough, to help you.”

 

“Hermann,” Newton says, his expression grave. “You need to stop this. You did help me. You saved me twice over. At least. Don’t go spinning a narrative where—ugh,” he drops his forehead to Hermann’s shoulder. He lifts his head. “Try to live here, okay? Yeah?”

 

Hermann nods.

Newton kisses him. It is tentative, gentle, polite. Something out of dreams he’d had a dozen years ago: Dr. Geiszler, world-weary and sad, carrying a terrible equanimity. 

Hermann hadn’t understood, then, what such maturity would cost. 

 

He’d give almost anything to preserve the man as he had been at twenty-five, full of fire, full of confidence and hope. The man who had befriended Mako Mori, who had shouted down Caitlin Lightcap at the height of her powers, who hadn’t been able to climb two flights of stairs without stopping to catch his breath. 

 

Hermann, as usual, has the powerful urge to overwhelm Newton’s erotic empiricism, dismantle the man’s composure piece by piece. Eventually, such a thing may be possible. A few years, perhaps. He follows his usual pattern, allowing Newton to control the encounter, until he can no longer tolerate the man’s slow restraint. He flips their positions, pushing Newton as far as he dares. The man is a surprisingly considerate lover, but there is a sense of remove, at times, as if this is something of an academic exercise for him. Hermann thinks it may be. The man has never been well seated, physically. He couldn’t be and do the things he does. 

 

Hermann makes every effort to tie him to this moment, his body. So strange it is that, of the pair of them, Hermann is the one most grounded in this way. He would never have predicted such a thing. It’s one of the few surprises left, post-drifting. Newton cannot entirely get out of his own way, even after eighteen months. He will, at unpredictable intervals, go entirely still beneath Hermann’s hands, unable to articulate that which troubles him. 

 

I will hold you here, he thinks, fiercely.