Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 13

Delicious pancakes are delicious.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 13

Aww yeah.

Delicious pancakes are delicious.

Newt still feels like crap, like he’s on a tragically disorienting, weirdly uneven trajectory from something he can’t really remember toward something he’s unable to predict, which isn’t the best, per se, which is a troubling state of affairs—this failure to be certain about where his current curve falls on a magnificently metaphorical coordinate plane. The Cartesian obsession he’s rocking might be the strangest out of an already strange set of post-drift cognitive epiphenomena.

The strangest? his brain asks pointedly, I really don’t think so, friend.

Are we friends? Newt counters, equally pointedly. I’m not convinced.

The Cartesian love he’s got going on is some weird, residual, conceptual crush from Hermann’s adolescence or childhood, it must be, because, honestly, if Newt were to pick a mathematical concept to crush on, oh god, what would he pick? Insanity, insanity even to try. People have, he’s certain, lost their minds over more trivial things. But man, he might pick Cantor’s “grave disease” infecting mathematics with the awesomeness of set theory that would eventually and circuitously lead to Bertrand Russell accidentally bitch-slapping Aristotle in the face with predicates not predicable of themselves and then being horrified about it, until Gödel came along and demonstrated what true mathematical terror really was. Could those linked events count as one conceptual victory regarding the unprovability of certain questions at the heart of mathematics? Yes. Yes they could. Other candidates might be the relationship between irrationality and universal constants—that one will be interesting to contemplate if anyone lets him within four thousand kilometers of a mind altering substance ever again. Topologically, he’d go for compasses pointing forever north as they navigate loxodromic pathways. Then there’s the whole laundry list of stereotypical mathematical sex symbols to consider, which are still pretty baller, even if popular culture dresses them in revealing outfits and puts them on nerd posters alongside Princess Leia in her metal bikini: pi, e, phi, imaginary numbers, fractals, platonic solids, the Pythagorean Theorem and other cheap arithmetical erotica for the mathematical masses, but he won’t hold that against them. Much. Newt makes an effort to hate the game, rather than the player. Hermann hates the player rather than the game, so he disapproves of the way fractals are dressing these days. Kind of. Anyway. Newt’s point is that in the face of this Gabriel’s Horn of Mathematical Plenty, it’s a little bit embarrassing to be obsessed with the coordinate plane. Boring. Predictable. Which is why this Descartes obsession he’s rocking must be Hermann’s fault.

On the other hand, Hermann’s buying breakfast, so, there’s that to consider.

Breakfast, freedom, and still-aliveness.

There’s got to be another word for that.

Oh right. That word would be “life.”

Breakfast, freedom, and life.

All are ongoing processes, but the breakfast is pretty great, so it’s at the top of his priority queue right about now.

This might be the high-point of his week, if one doesn’t count literally witnessing Mako the Magnificent save the world and survive the attempt, dragging Becket after her, with what Newt assumes was nothing other than screaming stubbornness.

“You rock, dude.” Newt, enjoying his pancakes, vows to, at some point, have a breathtakingly awkward conversation in which Hermann gets appropriately and specifically thanked by Newt for his material role in preserving all Newt’s currently running protocols.

“Thank you,” Hermann says, sounding suspicious.

Whether or not he looks suspicious is something Newt, tragically, cannot determine. Because someone had decided that “bringing his glasses” on this particular breakfast expedition would be “too tempting” for Newt to handle, and so he has only sunglasses, which he’s wearing, inside, like the hung-over rockstar narcissist he may actually be.

“Let’s replace our historical tradition of insults with compliments,” Newt says. “The decade of mutual admiration. What do you think?”

“I cannot even conceptualize what such a thing would be like,” Hermann says cautiously. “Though I am not categorically opposed.”

“I could see it getting weird,” Newt replies. “I like your handwriting.”

“I don’t particularly care for yours,” Hermann says.

“I feel like you’re not getting this as a concept, dude,” Newt replies. “Try again.”

“I like the way you touch your guitar,” Hermann offers.

Newt, in the middle of sedately sipping his orange juice, inhales it, chokes, starts coughing, and then manages to hang onto his hysterical laughter by the skin of his teeth, put his glass down, and gasp, “Oh my god, no. Or yeah, okay, good try, I guess? I was not expecting that one, I’ll give you that, and guitars are sexy, sure, everyone knows—”

“Will you shut up?” Hermann snaps. “You miserable excuse for a biologist. Do you even have a prefrontal cortex?”

“Or, we could just have another insult decade.” Newt, still amused, presses his fingers against his temple and shovels another forkful of pancakes into his mouth. “That might be safer, though I advise you, in the spirit of sportsmanship, to stay away from biology-based insults because you do not want to go up against me in that particular subgenre of verbal warfare. But, um, getting back to the guitar thing, would you describe yourself as having inappropriate thoughts about guitars I’ve owned over the years? Because I’m pretty sure those aren’t my fault. Your hypothetical inappropriate thoughts, I mean. I have a normal relationship with my guitar du jour, in that it’s a little bit of a love/hate thing. Wait. On second thought, I don’t know, do I have an inappropriately sensual regard for my guitar? Maybe I do, maybe I lack calibration when it comes to ‘sensual regard’ and there’s a flaw in my perspective that I can’t see? I’m willing to entertain the possibility. For sure. I don’t think so though. Seriously, listen to this: there’s something really unnatural going on with Descartes in my brain. I’m not sure if it’s literally your fault, or some kind of mental synergy, but maybe it’s the same for you; are you obsessed with guitars, a little bit? Inappropriately so? Do you think about them a lot? Do they crop up in your inner monologue from time to time with a horrible and bittersweet Absolut Longing for a more rational world?”

“Guitars?” Hermann snaps. “No. On a related note, I never wish to speak of this again.”

“Dude, I get it.”

“You do not ‘get it’, Newton, of that I’m certain,” Hermann snaps.

“Yeah dude, pretty sure I do.”

Hermann doesn’t reply, and nope, there’s nothing awkward about admitting to accidental pining for Descartes, that’s totally normal. Whatever. Newt casts his terrible, useless vision around the blurred perfection of this diner of almost infinite freaking virtues. One—it’s open, two—it’s mostly empty except for scattered clusters of people he can’t really see at all, three—it’s very diner-y for the impassionedly hip war zone that San Fran has become after a decade of half-hearted rebuilding by indigent secular humanists, immigrant kaiju-worshipers, and the people who’d just lived here, man, and who hadn’t moved away, people like Hypothetical Rain and her ilk, four—the pancakes this place produces are unreasonably delicious: chocolate-chip, three of them, probably neatly stacked, he can’t tell visually and he’s not going to touch them, gross, who touches food? That is just bizarre. Isn’t it? Hmm. Maybe not. Ugh, he can’t remember if he had a thing about touching food before drifting with Hermann. He thinks maybe he didn’t?  Should he be eating pancakes with his hands? No, probably not, conventionally the correct answer is a “no,” but would he have, hypothetically and previously, rolled one of these things up, maybe put something inside like butter or fruit and eaten it like a taco or a crepe or an enchilada? Thaaaat seems like a thing Dr. Newton Geiszler of the high-gross out index and the gloves made of fauxtex might’ve done or still might do, it’s confusingly appealing and disgusting at the same time and he feels a little bit sick and confused and like he’s one wrong thought away from a blazing episode of cognitive dissonance.

He stops eating, puts his fork down, and takes a breath.

There’s a choice here, true. More correctly, there was a choice here, but he already made it, and, because of that, no real quandary exists as long as he doesn’t manufacture it by second-guessing his flatware preferences.

“Newton,” Hermann says, like the slide of a razor, sharp and slow.

The guy does not miss a thing.

Newt drinks some orange juice. “Hermann,” he replies, fifty percent touched, fifty percent creeped out, and not really needing any additional stimuli that may tip him into utensil-related trouble.

Hermann doesn’t say anything else, probably because the guy is stressed and tired and about four thousand ninety-six percent done with Newt and his mobile, old-school card-catalogue of active ongoing issues. Newt doesn’t blame the guy for that. Not at all.

Newt eyes his fork to the extent he can; it’s sort of a poorly defined silver blur right now, abandoned on the white haze of his plate.

Okay. He’s going to make an executive decision about not questioning his initial fork-instinct here and just leave it alone for right now, before he becomes too confused about his own mental preferences to eat the rest of his breakfast. Because these pancakes do not deserve that. They are exemplary in their consistency and ridiculously high caloric content and, most importantly, he is something on the order of sixty-four percent sure this meal won’t make a reappearance. Nope, these straight-up carbs are going directly into his straight-up recently neglected anabolic pathways, repairing structures that need to be repaired, dragging his blood glucose level out of the basement; he already feels warmer, he already feels less irritatingly shaky, he already feels sharper than he’s felt in days, probably, though he can’t be entirely positive about that; he might be even more of a genius when he’s post-drift and post-benzos and post-postictal, he has no idea, but it’s possible, he’ll have to ask Hermann when Hermann’s less traumatized about the whole Newt-as-bureaucratic-victim thing. Newt himself isn’t that traumatized by it, not on a moral scale, it sounds about right to him: large organizations that put collective good above individual good are often not to be trusted when it comes to personal welfare or autonomy. On a literal scale, um, yes, alas, unfortunately one could make a case for about eight different kinds of psychological trauma of the really unusual variety, but that’s fine, he’s adaptable and able to turn off his own self-reflection like a light switch. Sometimes. Like now. Yup, doing that.

“You okay, man?” Newt asks, not really timing his question and his pancake consumption perfectly, in terms of etiquette or diction. “I mean, really?”

He’s wanted to ask this one for a while, but it’s hard to expect a decent answer from the questionee when the questioner is doing something alarming like bleeding or throwing up or appearing to cry while not actually crying; he wants the record to be very clear on that last point there. But nothing alarming has happened for a good thirty minutes now, and Newt is feeling awesome, like maybe he can start participating in real discourse, which would be good for him, but even better for Hermann. The man looks like he’s rating about a negative eight on the Negative Ten To Ten Scale. He’s only making a nominal effort at consuming of the presumably appetizing spinach omelette sitting in front of him. He looks exhausted and miserable and depressed, or Newt is sure that’s how he would look if Newt was capable of seeing the world in anything but the most dim and blurry of ways. He can tell though, even without remotely adequate vision, he knows, courtesy of a decade of shared experience and maybe a little bit courtesy of EPIC Rapport. He’s getting a powerful misery vibe from a guy who participated materially in world-saving and is about to become the most famous mathematician at UC Berkeley. Newt gets that, yeah he does, there’s a giant vacuum in Hermann’s personal and professional life, now that he’s not allegorically whispering in Computational Esperanto to decaying Jaegers and doing research that amounts to beating back death with progressively better metaphorical sticks constructed from dwindling resources.

“I am fine,” Hermann says. “How are you feeling?”

Newt is feeling like invisible but not necessarily non-existent parties are trying to open his head from the inside with sharp implements. Their preferred point of egress seems to be through his eyes, considering the raging varieties of bilateral orbital and intraocular pain he’s got going. Maybe they can buy some kind of painkiller, or maybe he can just scrape the agonized goo formerly known as sensory organs out of his eye sockets when Hermann isn’t watching. The sunglasses thing is helping him out, taking the screaming edge off his raging photosensitivity. Fortunately for Newt, he’s a pretty good visual guesser in predictable environments; this is partially courtesy of inherent skill and partially courtesy of practice, given that he has a habit of taking his glasses off as much as is evolutionarily permissible.

“Good,” Newt says. “On a relative scale. Really awful on an absolute scale. Even my hair is contributing to my simultaneous headache variants.” He shoves another forkful of triplicate pancake wedges in his mouth and raises his eyebrows at Hermann. “That was an informative answer I just gave you. Not only was it informative, it was accurate. Maybe you could think about doing some kind of reciprocal information exchange here, where you tell me anything or engage with me in actual, meaningful conversation rather than just misrepresenting your ‘fineness’, and my eventual fineness, and your theory that sleeping will solve all my problems, because it won’t, dude, sleeping is a problem creator, and I—”

His vocal chords decide to crap out on him.

Careful, his brain says, like a team player. Careful.

Newt breaks it off right there, because, because, he’s just, he doesn’t, he can’t really, he’s not going to—look, the point is that he’s built for this. He is literally built for exactly this. He’s built for finding food and eating it, he’s built for resource conversion, signal transduction, environmental analysis, adaptation in the pursuit of survival. He’s great at it. He is, in fact, so great that not only can he do it for himself, he has, on one occasion so far, done it for his entire species, so yeah. Suck it, anteverse.

He swallows, takes a deep breath, and says, “Whatever, man, sleeping is giving in.”

“You are a nightmare,” Hermann says, like an emotionally conflicted, confused, depressed wasp.

“Nah man, just your nightmare.” The counter-waspishness Newt was aiming for turns into weird innuendo, which is really the only kind of innuendo he’s ever fully mastered or managed to display, mostly when he doesn’t want to be displaying anything of the kind. Whatever. He just goes with it, following that statement up with a suggestive rearrangement of his eyebrows and, “Come into my dungeon, man, bring your eight-sided die,” in his most inappropriately lascivious whisper.

Hermann kicks his ankle beneath the table.

Newt keeps a straight face, takes another bite of pancakes, then favors Hermann with an unimpressed eyebrow lift/head shake combo that pours straight out of the Gottliebian Catalogue of Facial Expressions he now has on tap in his cerebellum.

Hermann sighs in a way that indicates he’s not sure whether he should be impressed, upset, or amused.

“Let’s have it, dude.” Newt gestures with his fork, impatient with Hermann, with himself, with his stupid throat and stupid eyes and stupid brain, and deciding he is, in this instant, done with Hermann’s interpersonal attempt at generating some kind of protective, unnecessary Leidenfrost effect of the mind. “All the stuff. Let’s go. You’ve been wanting to yell at me for days, I’m sure.”

“Very true,” Hermann admits, in clipped restraint, “but I have no plans to start now.”

Newt finds this nearly impossible to take because it makes him feel like he’s on the ledge he knows he’s on. Half out of his head, half dead, one foot in the door of an annihilated portal, forever in need of something that no longer exists on his planet because he orchestrated its destruction—

You idiot, his brain snarls.

Oh crap, he thinks, not certain where he is, Oh god, he thinks, we’re networked, we’re networked, we’re networked, we’re net worked. He’s got the most capacity, he’s slotting right into his role of cyan cynosure, his sense of self begins to shred beneath the weight of linking, desperate anger and before it pulls him under Newt wrenches the trajectory of his thoughts out of the oncoming, self-organizing mess, Newt does that, Newt does it, he does it lacking any other option in total abject terror of the alignments forming in his mind; rends himself straight out of reliving (or, oh god, recreating?) what was done to him, because he wouldn’t have—whatever that was—he wouldn’t have—not him, he wouldn’t have done it, not if he hadn’t had to; he tries to remember what it was they’d wanted to know, the team that fried his brain, they’d wanted to rule something out, they must have done it, they must have been successful because, in the end, they’d let him go.

His hands snap shut—around the table, around his fork—and he’s breathing very hard.

“You,” Hermann says, quietly, distinctly, “are fine.”

Yup, Newt agrees.

Nope, his brain chimes in.

Newt’s a little too locked down to talk just yet, to do really anything other than sit here on top of the powder keg that is his brain and the lit match that is his own adrenaline and try to keep those two things from coming together in a catastrophic cognitive conflagration.

“We are in San Francisco,” Hermann says, still quiet, sounding way calmer than the guy probably feels, or, maybe not. Maybe relative to Newt’s current state of raging panic anyone would sound calm, and Hermann is freaking out right about now, “eating breakfast.”

This is a terrible riff Hermann is laying down, terrible because Newt appreciates it, appreciates knowing, for sure, where he is to the extent that’s possible, to the extent he can differentiate actual sensory input from sensory input recalled and reproduced, terrible because he thinks he remembers Hermann telling him things like this before in places he can only half remember.

You are not doing very well, his brain observes. I think some epic weirdness might have gone down before you left the PPDC. Don’t start screaming.

Thanks, Newt replies.

“Following breakfast,” Hermann says, “I propose we procure some necessary personal items, presuming you feel up to such an activity.”

Newt cannot relax his jaw, he cannot unclench the hands he’s wrapped around the edge of the table and his fork, cannot release the total body tetany holding him still but for the nearly imperceptible tremors of exhausted muscles restraining themselves with maximum effort in the face of an onslaught of catecholamines.

“Then again, perhaps you don’t,” Hermann says, in a matter-of-fact way that Newt could just worship him for right about now. “Perhaps later would be better.”

Hermann knows what’s going on, Hermann gets it—gets the scope of the minor disaster that’s Newt locking himself into total control post mystery memory and the scope of the major disaster that’s his mind docking into ports where it doesn’t easily slot. Hermann’s been plotting the borders of this mess, Cartesian-style and carefully, for days now. Newt’s way behind on this curve, so far behind he hasn’t realized until this precise moment that Hermann hasn’t asked him anything about what happened to him, not one thing, other than, “How much do you remember?” one time on their balcony, and it hasn’t, until right now, occurred to Newt that Hermann knows less than he does and yet has not asked him, and frankly, yup, Newt has to give it to him: that decision was and is a pretty genius call because even oblique references to that time when that thing that happened happened are plunging him into something really unfortunate, and great, does this mean his entire past decade of work is just off the table as a topic of actual and mental discourse? That would be bad, that would be extremely, just extremely, bad.

“I think,” Newt says, and stops, not doing the best job with simultaneous breathing and talking. “That if you w—” His jaw clamps shut in a weird compensatory response to his left hand loosening up on his fork, but then he tries again, and things smooth down. “If you want me to come with you, we should go now. Post-pancakes, I mean.”

He peels his right hand away from the table edge, then the rest of his musculoskeletal system falls in line behind hands and jaw and he can move again.

He’s fine.

Not really, but kind of.

At a first approximation he is.

First approximations suck though, as a general rule. Nuance fail. Accuracy fail. At a first approximation the world looks flat, so, yeah, case in point, quod erat demonstrandum, drop the chalk, flip over the table, he’s done here. Newt’s just discovered this place where he is now might nominally be San Francisco but it is also, experientially, First Approximation Hell (FAH). His brain has put him here. Hermann’s good judgment has put him here. And man but this is this going to drive the pair of them straight into the realm of aggressively irrational and overly emotive discourse because FAH is no place that scientists can hang around very long and keep their conversational and cognitive cool. It’s a little bit antithetical to the whole nature of scientific inquiry to avoid the pursuit of objective truth. At least Hermann has the sense to realize they are where they are and keep dragging Newt back inside the approximate bounds of his current mental and emotional capacity but Newt doesn’t like that, does not like it at all; he determines his own course, thanks, and if Newt wants to claw his way from first approximations to second ones he will, when he wants, maybe later, because even Dr. Newton Geiszler of the sub-par brain and the bilateral migraine is smart enough to put that off until he isn’t in public.

“How do you feel?” Hermann asks, for the two hundred and sixty-two thousandth time, probably because he wants a real answer almost as much as Newt does when he asks the same question, reversed. Probably he deserves one, given all the restraint he’s been displaying and good decisions he’s been making, but Newt isn’t totally sure how to go about answering in a meaningful way, not now, not yet, not over pancakes, yeah, that would be a bad idea.

“Um.” Newt pushes the bounds of first-approximating into something like three-halves-approximating with, “I think that my brain might be trying to freak out about something it only partially remembers.”

“Yes.” Hermann meets him at the three halves mark. “I’m certain you’re correct about that.”

“Not really sure how this is going to go,” Newt confesses, in what turns out to be a passably conversational tone, finally.

“Yes,” Hermann says, equally passable. “That is life, I suppose. But I’d advise against equating your current system state with a future one.”

“I would never,” Newt whispers.

You wouldn’t let me, is what he doesn’t say, please don’t let me.

“Good.” Hermann takes another bite of his omelette with resolute German fortitude.

“What are you doing dude?” Newt asks, not knowing himself what he means, exactly, by posing the question, knowing it’s something profound, knowing it’s something so weighed down it’s broken loose from everything he’d like to burden it with because he’d tied a rock to a jet plane with the verbal equivalent of an old and brittle rubber band, and yeah, the link between question and intent snaps under next to no tension, and he’s useless sometimes, god, but, even so, he relaxes his shoulders, shifts his position, and picks up his fork because he is eating these pancakes, for sure—they are delicious and eating is necessary.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Hermann replies. “My thought processes are not entirely my own at present.”

“Geiszler’d,” Newt says, with deep and profound sympathy.

“Indeed,” Hermann replies.

“This is the worst for you, dude,” Newt says.

“And yet I prefer it to ‘death’,” Hermann replies pointedly.

“Meh.” Newt, noncommittal, isn’t sure whether Hermann means his own death via consumption by kaiju or Newt’s hypothetical death during Drift number two, which, had it happened, likely would’ve also included Hermann’s kaiju-mediated death at a later date. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck,” he says, with all the chivalrous empathy he can scrape together pre-dawn and post-panic.

“There are compensations,” Hermann says, “as you pointed out earlier.”

Yup.

Earlier.

By ‘earlier’ Hermann evidently means when Newt had woken up out of an amorphous nightmare he doesn’t remember to find Hermann had decided “bed sharing” was now a thing that was happening? Newt likes to think the rationale for that particular decision had more to do with Hermann’s insomniac loneliness meeting the general interpersonal camaraderie of communal sleeping and less to do with Hermann deciding Newt needed it for some reason? No matter the specific rationale, it’ll be a little hard for Hermann to justify beneath the painful glare of twenty-four hour fluorescence. Newt owes the guy a ridiculous amount of slack, so he won’t inquire about the bed-thing just now.

“You,” Newt says, with a passably coordinated fork-flourish in Hermann’s general direction, “are enjoying my biological knowledge. Don’t even lie to me about that.”

“I’m finding it useful,” Hermann says, “if only in interpreting you in retrospect. I’m not sure what your post-drift experience has been, but personally—” Hermann stops.

Like a jerk.

“Oh no,” Newt says. “No no no. Finish that sentence, dude.”

“We should discuss this later,” Hermann replies.

“Here’s a thing you may not know,” Newt shoves more pancakes into his mouth, even though he’s less excited about the eating thing than he had been about twenty minutes ago, “though I’m not sure why you wouldn’t, because you’ve known me for a decade, and last week you shared my brain, but this thing you’re doing? It is killing me. I get why you’re doing it. I get I’m a neurological disaster in a black box right now, but honestly, dude, honestly, if you keep shutting me down—”

“Shutting you—” Hermann half shouts the words then shuts himself down and reboots in whisper mode. “Shutting you down?” he hisses, sounding a little more upset than Newt can easily explain. “Shutting you down?”

“Or,” Newt begins, layering extreme reasonableness overtop alarmed tonal contingency within the span of a single syllable.

“You have no idea how difficult it was to rescue you from your own stupidity, let alone whatever might have previously been or whatever might currently be happening in your mind—”

“Okay,” Newt says, “I get it, I—”

“—you horrifying, miserable excuse for a scientist—”

“Horrifying? Seriously, dude? Horrifying?”

“—is it too much to ask that you spend twenty-four hours in quiet, limited self-reflection and enjoy the fact you managed to contribute significantly to averting a catastrophe on a global scale, rather than pushing yourself past the point of your ability to cope because you’re bored, because you have no self-restraint, because when you’re unoccupied you take apart the most interesting thing in your immediate vicinity and right now that is, unfortunately, your own cognitive architecture and possibly mine as well?”

“Okay, I guess that’s fair as far as it goes but—”

“I am not finished, Newton,” Hermann hisses. “You are irresponsible. Flagrantly so. You make rash decisions without fully considering their implications. Everything you do in every sphere of your life is aimed at rocking whatever dominant paradigms you decide have suspect foundational bases and are able to be pushed to crisis for no other reason than you enjoy dismantling things of flawed design.”

“I never pictured you as a Thomas Kuhn ‘groupie’.” Newt rolls his final “r” egregiously. He’s not liking where this is going; he’s starting a derailment campaign.

“I’m not,” Hermann snarls, “that’s you.”

“You’re welcome,” Newt replies through clenched teeth, “you logical positivist.”

“I’m not grateful.” Hermann speaks over him. “Incommensurability, as a concept, is worthy of ridicule. Shut up for two minutes if you’re capable of doing so, which I very much doubt. You—”

“You should be grateful.” Newt brute-force intercalates his own words into Hermann’s accelerating philippic. “I’ll stake the entirety of my personal assets that your problem with Kuhn stems from your own onanistic, objectivist fantasies about absolute truth—”

“I do not wish to discuss The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Hermann leans forward, overpowering Newt with freakishly intent hissing. “I want to know if your perception of the past week approximates anything remotely akin to what actually happened to you. I want to know if you have any objective idea of what you’re capable of doing to yourself if you turn the full force of your intellect on your own mind. I want to know if you have any awareness at all of how astronomically ironic it is to accuse me of ‘shutting you down,’ when really I have been doing absolutely everything in my power to prevent exactly that.”

Okay, so Newt is going to need to adjust his assessment of what’s happening here, because, nope, it hadn’t been obvious to him until about thirty seconds ago, but Hermann’s having his own breakfast freak out session, immediately post and possibly related to Newt’s breakfast freak-out session. That’s what’s happening.

“Hermann.” He lifts a hand, trying to cool things down in an uncomfortable inversion of every instinct he has.

Newt isn’t sure he’s ever defused anything in his life, literally or metaphorically.

But he’s trying now. Apparently.

“I would like nothing better than to listen to your unique mix of specious and insightful conjecture on any number of topics that materially affect us, but that is a terrible idea, Newton, terrible. I’m not sure whether you’ve realized this yet or not but you—”

“Hermann.” Newt makes an impressively accurate grab for Hermann’s nearest wrist. “Chill.”

“Do not tell me to ‘chill’,” Hermann snarls, somehow even more furious, temporarily losing his ability to speak and yanking his wrist from Newt's tenuous grip.

First effort at conflict mediation ranks you a D minus, his brain says. If he flips over this table, you’ve totally failed, and also ruined his mind. Definitively.

“Okay,” Newt says, distilling and eluting all available verbal diplomacy, “good call, I could see that being annoying coming from me, but I get it, man, I do. I get more than you’re giving me credit for, actually. Look. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m really—”

“Newton, if you apologize to me even one more time I will drown you in the Pacific.”

“Um—” Newt says, entirely at a loss.

Yeah, I’ve got nothing, his brain admits. We’re failing abysmally at this.

Hermann stews in aggrieved silence.

Newt also stews in silence, except his is more grimly contemplative than aggrieved, trying to figure out why Hermann’s freaking out in the abstract but also in particular and in detail. He turns up the usual array of suspects: death, bureaucratic violence, Newt being inconsiderate, disorganization in his world and in his brain. Finally, he starts silently wishing for his glasses, because visual cues wouldn’t hurt, wouldn't go amiss in this current scenario, no they would not.

He tries not to fidget.

He tries hard.

He fails.

Really, Newt is only capable of waiting so long.

“Specious.” Newt dials his indignation down as far as it will go, which is not as far down as one might assume. “Really, dude?”

“On occasion,” Hermann replies with stiff dignity.

They spend a beat looking at one another, which is unfair, since Newt can’t see.

“Uh huh.” Newt does some squinting, which doesn’t really help him out. It hurts a lot; that’s about all he can say for it.

He’s doing a crap job assessing how upset Hermann might or might not be.

“Stop that,” Hermann says, twenty seconds into the tragically useless squinting.

“I’m literally sitting here in silence,” Newt snaps.

“Stop trying to see.” Hermann sounds like he’s ramping down his freak-out curve.

“You stop trying to see,” Newt replies, deciding to test the downtrend of Hermann's freak-out by perturbing the system a little bit.

It’s not his best work, but after a few seconds of approximating he grabs Hermann’s coffee cup in one quick motion and doesn’t knock anything over in the process.

“Do not—”

Newt takes a measured sip of stolen coffee. It’s bitter, clean, unadulterated, rating about a six point five on the Negative Ten to Ten Coffee Quality Scale, perfectly complementing his chocolate chip pancakes, redolent of innocent addiction and headache reduction. He can feel his blood vessels constricting everywhere in anticipation of relief they’re not going to get.

Hermann yanks the cup out of his hand, and Newt lets him do it.

“Do not do that again,” Hermann says.

“I’m literally going to do that at least once per day until such a point you either stop drinking coffee in front of me like an insensitive bastard, or Hypothetical Rain clears me for caffeine consumption. Besides, you deserved it. ‘Specious.’ I don’t think so. In other news, I’m vetting you as a potential roommate right now. If you won’t let me drink your coffee, I foresee approximately four thousand one hundred other problems.”

“You’ve been drinking my coffee for approximately nine years,” Hermann replies dryly. “I will never cease demanding you desist, no matter our housing situation. It is not sanitary.”

Newt infers from Hermann’s return to baseline arid disdain that he’s forgiven for unfairly implying Hermann is a subpar life partner.

This may or may not be true.

The forgiveness part.

Not the subpar part.

Everyone is on par here.

“So,” Newt says, “it seems you have a quarter-cup of contaminated coffee of mediocre quality. I could take that off your hands for a negligible neural cost to myself, I’m sure.”

Hermann picks up the ceramic mug. In blurred deliberation, he drinks the rest of his coffee.

Newt stares at him, mouth slightly open, wishing fruitlessly for his glasses so he could be sure what he just saw was really what he just saw. “Did you just—” he breaks off, too incredulous to end his sentence. “I don’t think I like this,” he decides, giving up and starting afresh. “I think I feel about this the way you would feel if I showed up at work wearing a thrift-store sweater, or shelving my books by descending height from left to right, or not even that, more like—”

“Quiet.” Hermann is suddenly tense, suddenly understated, suddenly carrying an unmistakable eau de Us-versus-Them.

Newt stops talking.

Briefly.

“What?” he whispers.

“Nothing,” Hermann replies, in a way that doesn’t mean nothing at all.

“What kind of nothing?” Newt demands.

“We appear to be part of the morning news cycle.”

“There’s a television in here?” Newt asks, making a well-founded assumption.

“Behind you,” Hermann confirms.

Newt twists, and, sure enough, there’s maybe a widescreen TV he can barely see and had previously labeled as “people” or, “a window” or “people in a window.” So sue him, he’s not that interested in what he can’t really see, at least when it comes to inventorying the interior detail of a perpetually open diner. But apparently it’s a television and apparently currently featuring him. That’s cool.

“No,” Hermann mutters, “it is, in no way, ‘cool’.”

Seriously, what. The hell.

He definitely hadn’t said that aloud.

Right?

I’m not sure, his brain weighs in. For all your commendable surface sass, I’m not sure how together you are, champ.

He’ll spend time considering how empirically supportable this Hermann-reading-minds conjecture is at a later point. Right now, he’s slightly more interested in his apparent fame. He can’t hear anything that sounds like the continuous journalistic masturbation of the twenty-four hour news cycle, so presumably the TV is muted. He finds this vexing. He stares at it for a moment longer, wishes again for his sinful, tempting glasses, then turns around, because really, this is worse than useless.

“Well what are they saying about us?” Newt asks.

“Based on the text and visuals,” Hermann replies, “I’d say that they appear to be curious about why we immediately departed Hong Kong and have failed to make ourselves available for interviews and other—” Hermann breaks off.

“What?” Newt hisses.

“That’s—unfortunate,” Hermann says.

“Hermann, you are literally killing me, here. I’m losing brain cells and cardiac tissue in frustrated anticipation. Let’s go. Use your words. Start talking.”

“It’s nothing.” Hermann sounds like he’s being strangled. “This particular news outlet appears to have obtained some footage from the Hong Kong International Airport, and you look, we look—we look quite—memorable. Based on the text accompanying the image they’ve chosen to display, they appear to be speculating on the etiology behind our sudden departure from the PPDC and your appearance on the footage.”

“I haven’t heard you describe something that poorly and euphemistically since—”

“Is that you guys?”

It’s their waitress, but she’s close and standing outside Newt’s limited visual field, so Newt twitches so violently that dishware rattles and the waitress immediately says, “Sorry!” either in response to Newt nearly sending breakable objects to the floor or to Hermann leveling a steely glare in her direction, which is what he assumes is happening, though he can’t say that's the case with absolute certainty, because, again and still, he can’t see.

“No.” Hermann says, with enough tensile strength in his tone to imply corresponding eye-contact failure because he needs work in the deception department and always will. “I assure you that we are not those people.” The guy is way overdoing it in terms of vehemence, getting himself into a the-lady-doth-protest-too-much situation.

“Nope,” Newt says, with what would’ve been calculated nonchalance if he’d managed to deliver it a little more off the cuff and a little less like someone recently resuscitated post drowning. “Totes not us.”

“Okay,” the waitress replies, long and slow.

“Check please,” Hermann says, clipped and fast.

“No charge,” the waitress says, just enough of a screw-you twist in her voice to call the pair of them on their bullshit. Newt likes her immediately. San Fran is full of cool people. Okay, well, he’s two-for-two, Hypothetical Rain and Soprano Waitress.

“Unacceptable.” Hermann sounds flustered.

“Thanks, bro,” Newt says, less flustered and cracking an asymmetric smile while looking at the indistinct outline of a woman holding what is probably a coffee pot.

“It’s Flow, actually,” the waitress says.

“Get out of here,” Newt says. “Your name is not Flo.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it’s ‘Flow’ with a ‘w’,” Possibly Flow says. “More coffee?”

“I’m afraid we must be going.” Hermann stands. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” the waitress replies.

“For what, even?” Newt asks, displaying maximal casual charm coupled with minimal suave motor control as Hermann takes his elbow and helps him to his feet because Newt can’t really see, can’t really easily unclamp on the things he’s clamped down on, can’t really say for sure which of the blurred boxes in his vision might be the door, but if he had to guess, he’s pretty sure he’d guess right.

Usually he does.