Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 16

Somewhere in his mind, a man significantly braver and less organized than he waits in mental wings, offstage and in the dark.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 16

On Monday morning, Hermann wakes before his alarm, courtesy of some particularly upsetting dream or a too-high spike of early-morning cortisol. He can’t say which—but either way, dread is coiled in and around his viscera. Whether it’s residual dread from a night of dreaming in hi-fi catastrophe or the anticipatory dread of the coming day is impossible to determine. 

He’s giving a talk at fourteen hundred hours, Pacific Time.

He loathes giving talks.

Hermann has never enjoyed the real-time, personal communication of results to a collection of his peers. Let them read his papers. Let them examine his mathematics. Let them familiarize themselves with the evidence he’s happy to present in written form. Let them study it. Let them ask him pointed questions via email. 

The culture of science deems this insufficient, however, and so he’ll comply with academic norms because he must.

His discomfort is compounded in the setting of a job-talk like this one, which is nothing more than a summary of a decade of practical successes—its purpose is to secure him a position, a position that he needs, both for financial reasons and for reasons best described as ‘bureaucratic tactics’.

He lies motionless in bed, his eyes closed, his nervous system punishing him in confused anticipation, until his cellphone alarm goes off at six in the morning.

He opens his eyes to Newton—a dark and eidolic silhouette against a gray dawn. He’s dressed and standing at the window, looking at the Wall of Life, or, perhaps, behind it. Toward the sea.

“How long have you been awake?” Hermann asks, watching Newton readjust the fisted grip he has on the cuffs of his own shirtsleeves. There’s something new in this clasp and twist of fingers; something that Hermann doesn’t understand and therefore doesn’t like. 

“Meh,” Newton says, half-turning to give him a one-shouldered shrug. “Not long. Just enjoying the view before the sun comes up and knifes me in the retinas.”

“It’s a terrible view,” Hermann says. 

“I know,” Newton replies, the words laced with an atypical self-possession. He seems to realize he’s giving something away. He lets go of his shirtsleeves and scrubs his fingers through his hair. 

To Hermann, even that gesture looks pained. He can already feel the beginnings of the struggle that may well define the next decade of their relationship, because the pity he feels and the terror he feels have the scope of an Athenian tragedy in the Aristotelian tradition but it will ruin everything if any fraction of that spills into all that lies between them. 

Hermann can keep this secret.

He knows he can. 

He hadn’t felt this way before the drift and Newton’s keeping post-drift secrets of his own; given these two facts it should possible to classify Dr. Geiszler as a post-aristeia Homeric hero poised for a tragic decline solely within the confines of Hermann’s own head and nowhere else. This is important for two reasons. 

One—Newton would hate knowing that he felt this way.

Two—it’s important to keep in mind that for all his bravery and fits of insight, Dr. Geiszler behaves in a moronic fashion on a fairly consistent basis and romanticizing him is an abysmal idea.

“You’re going to need to buy me something,” Newton says.

“Am I?” Hermann replies, throwing the covers back and shivering slightly in his undershirt and boxers. 

Newton turns away, looking out the window. “Yup,” he says. 

“Anything specific?” Hermann asks, his tone somewhat in need of a verbal whetstone.

“No,” Newton replies. “Literally anything. I’m so bored that I might actually die. Buy me Halo 12: Tactical Revolution. Buy me a tablet. Buy me a book. Buy me the most ridiculously convoluted book you can find that neither of us have read. Buy me the complete works of Spinoza. Buy me a Portuguese dictionary. I don’t care what it is, I need something to do or I’m going to die. I think I might actually die, Hermann, this is absolutely necessary.”

“Can you read?”  Hermann asks him, unfolding his shirt from the chair and pulling it on in the gray light of early morning.

“Yes,” Newton replies, affronted, turning to glare at him in brief irritation.

“Hmm,” Hermann replies skeptically, inclining his head toward the desk while fastening buttons. “Read that menu.”

Newton gives him an irritated downward press of his eyebrows as he picks up the room service menu from atop the desk.

“Not that one,” Hermann snaps. “The one beneath it.”

“Are you indirectly insinuating that I might cheat?”  Newton asks, swapping the familiar hard-bound room service menu for a paper one that had been shoved beneath their door the previous afternoon. 

“Yes,” Hermann says, stepping stiffly into his pants. “Though I’m not clear from where you’re getting the word ‘indirect’.”

Newton opens the menu with an unnecessary flourish and says, “let’s start with seafood, shall we? Number thirty-one, crabmeat stuffed with bean curd. Number thirty-two, curry crab. Number thirty-three, stir-fried squid with pickled mustard greens. Number thirty-four, octopus in XO sauce. Number thirty-five, salted fish and eggplant casserole.”

Hermann rolls his eyes. “Very convincing, aside from four points: a) If you could read, you’d be using your phone and would be significantly less bored, b) after the nuclear detonation of 2013 one can no longer buy consumable seafood in San Francisco, c) the menu you are holding is for an Italian restaurant, and d) you are clearly reciting the menu from the take out place two blocks inland from the Hong Kong shatterdome with which I am extremely familiar,” Hermann says, sitting to pull on his socks. “Otherwise? An entirely commendable effort.”

Newton sighs. “I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to read in eight hours.”

“I’m absolutely positive that if you would sleep, your eyes would improve in a more expeditious manner.”

“It’s just that I enjoy the not-sleeping so much, Hermann. God. Use your brain. Insomnia is like any pharmacologic euphoriant. Why do people do it? For the pure, intemerate, undefiled, uncontaminated, sparkling, double-distilled pleasure of the experience. I love sleeplessness, personally.”

Hermann rolls his eyes. “I will buy you a book,” he says. “I will, in fact, buy you several.”

“You are both the worst and the best,” Newton says. “Also, do you have my wallet?”

“Yes,” Hermann says. 

“Just keep it,” Newton says. “Use my credit card for whatever, if it works. I think I may have not paid it off last month, due to world-saving?”

“Your wallet is in the bedside drawer,” Hermann says. “You did not pay off your credit balance last month, but I paid it for you.”

“Really?” Newton asks. “When?”

“Yesterday,” Hermann says shortly, “while Dr. McClure was performing your Sunday-afternoon EEG.”

“I can feel entire swaths of my ability to manage the boring ephemera of life turning from minimal to vestigial as we speak.”

“I will not be paying your bills in the future,” Hermann says dryly.

“No,” Newton agrees, “you will not, because as soon as I can reliably see, I’m changing all my passwords. God. First you kidnap me, then you start managing my finances? Not cool.”

“I completely concur,” Hermann replies.

“It’s too bad I’m eight million percent useless right now. If I ever get fine motor control back, I’ll make this up to you. I’ll let you watch me play guitar, how about that?”

“Will you shut up?” Hermann snaps, not picturing any such thing, not picturing it in the slightest. 

“Standing offer,” Newton says, and manages to catch the pillow Hermann pitches in his direction.

He completes his morning routine, takes an aspirin in the hope of filing the edge off a building headache, and declines Newton’s offer to order breakfast because he has no intention of being late, and room service leaves much to be desired when it comes to expeditious meal preparation.

He does not like the idea of leaving Newton alone. 

Despite Newton’s EEG of the previous day, which had showed a mild degree of normalizing to a typical human baseline, despite the fact that Newton hasn’t had a seizure for roughly three days, and despite the man’s semi-regular claims regarding being ‘fine’—Hermann doesn’t like the idea of leaving him unsupervised. Partially, this is because he’s fairly certain that Newton still has post-panic time intervals where he’s not entirely oriented and Hermann hates to think of him confused and alone in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar city. Hermann has an entirely well-founded fear that Newton is going to do something horrifying if left to his own devices, but this is ridiculous, because how much trouble can even Newton cause in a hotel room with poor enough vision that he can’t reliably operate his own phone?

This is a terrible, misfortune-inviting rhetorical question and he literally cannot believe he just posed it to himself.

“Do not,” he snaps, halfway through sliding his computer into his shoulder bag, “leave this hotel room.”

“Yeah I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Newton says, sitting hunched on the edge of the bed, gripping his own shirtsleeves.

“Do not,” he continues, unmollified, “watch the news.”

“Sure,” Newton says. 

Hermann narrows his eyes.

“What?” Newton demands. “Look dude, I’m going to sit here, probably meditate, maybe take a nap, ask my phone to read me the complete works of René Descartes, be disappointed when it says no, and maybe eat an overpriced salad full of pretentious greens, such as radicchio. Possibly fennel. Chill.”

“I believe that you would spontaneously combust if you attempted meditation, so I advise against it,” Hermann says.

“Yeah that was never happening, I was just trying to send you on your way with some reassuringly Zen parting thoughts. Is there anything you do advise?” Newton asks.

“Eyedrops,” Hermann says, “and sleep.”

“Noted,” Newton says, with the edgy irritation of a man not willing to directly engage with the logistically impossible. 

Hermann deposits his bag on the floor near the desk, then moves to sit next to him on the edge of the bed. 

There is an awkward silence.

“Why is it that you think you have to do this now?” Newton asks him. The question is ambiguous, but for the fact that Newton has been asking it in iterations for the entire weekend. There is no indication in his tone or his phrasing that he believes Hermann can be dissuaded from the course he has set for himself.

Hermann wonders what concerns Newton most—being left alone, or picturing Hermann addressing a massed and anticipatory crowd in a confused and confusing mental state. 

“You are welcome to accompany me,” Hermann says, rather than asking for clarification he’s certain Newton doesn’t want to give.

“I know, but this is going to suck enough without having to deal with—” the man makes a nebulous circular hand gesture in the general vicinity of his own left temple. 

“True,” Hermann admits, staring intently into space, trying to master his own dread.

“Just do me a favor and call me or something,” Newton says, “so that I know you didn’t die of apoplexy or something mid-spiel.”

“Charming,” Hermann says.

“Guilty as charged,” Newton replies.

They stare into space, not looking at one another, trapped by what is, in all likelihood, nearly identical mental dread. 

Then Newton stands and turns to face him, holding out a hand. 

Hermann eyes his extended hand dubiously.

“Are you even real?” Newton asks.

“Are you?” Hermann replies.

“That sounds like something a thought-construct would say,” Newton says, pushing his eyebrows together.

Hermann gives him just the barest hint of an eye-roll before taking his hand. 

Newton pulls him to his feet and straight into an unexpected embrace. He has no idea how Newton manages to accomplish this kind of thing so easily, it is simultaneously enviable and horrifying, and it’s certainly a skill that Hermann should have somewhere deep in his brain—he has enough other Geiszlerian habits that he’s certain he doesn’t need. 

He awkwardly reciprocates the gesture, not really sure what’s happening or why.

“You’re going to be fine,” Newton murmurs. “You’re going to be awesome. You had better be awesome. I will personally upbraid you if you are not awesome. That’s a lie, I’ll order you soup and watch you eat it like an overly solicitous creeper. This is getting weird; I’m going to stop talking. Bring me some rationalists when you come back, yeah?”  With that, Newton claps him on the back and lets him go.

“Ah—“ Hermann says, in monosyllabic prelude to absolutely nothing.

“Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Now get out of here, man.”

Hermann is too unbalanced by Newton’s unanticipated invasion of personal space to do much other than stare at the man while he retrieves Hermann’s bag from the floor, now weighed down with nothing other than a laptop and required adaptors. 

“Ask for a laser pointer before you start,” Newton says, settling the bag across Hermann’s shoulders for him. “I always forget, and then I hit my first data slide and I’m missing a light. It kills the build and the bystander effect will ensure no one gets up to give you one.”

“I—“ Hermann says, flustered, his brain rejecting everything coming across his cognitive desk. “All right.”

“Easy to say now,” Newton says, turning him bodily and pressing him gently in the direction of the door. “Easy to forget when you’re facing down a packed auditorium.”

“Thank you, Newton,” Hermann snaps, more out of instinct than anything else. He feels unbalanced. 

“It will be fine,” the other man says stopping next to the door and shoving his hands deep into his pockets. He leans against the wall. “You look good,” Newton says.

“I what?” Hermann asks.

“Your sweater could fit slightly better, not gonna lie dude, but you look like a guy who’s going to blow minds with supererogatory quantum cartography. And for what did we get into this business if it wasn’t for the blowing of minds? I ask you.”  Newton gives him a half smile, leaning against the wall adjacent to the closed door.

“I don’t know about you, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann says, dropping his eyes, “but I got into it for the mathematics.”

“Oh sure,” Newton says. “The math. Me too. Definitely.”

“If you have a seizure while I’m gone, I will murder you,” Hermann informs him.

“I’m not planning on it,” Newton says. 

“Do not watch the news,” Hermann reiterates.

“Would I do that?”  Newton asks.

Hermann glares at him. “Don’t forget your eyedrops.”

“Don’t forget to turn your microphone on.”

“Don’t bleed to death.”

“Don’t fall off the stage.”

“Take your anti-epileptic.”

“Exchange pleasantries with your future colleagues. Call them by their first names, even.”

“Idiot,” Hermann says.

“Jerk,” Newton replies with indolent familiarity. “Get out of here. Bring me back a present.”

“You should be so lucky,” Hermann replies dryly, but he makes no move to leave.

Newton opens the door for him. “Go,” the other man says. “You’ll be late.”

“You could come with me,” Hermann says, knowing it’s a terrible idea, but suggesting it anyway because he’s not going to shut the metaphorical door in Newton’s metaphorical face, even if Newton is about to shut the literal door in Hermann’s literal face.

“Quantum cartography,” Newton says, his expression nearly twisting out of his control and into something distressed. “So boring, dude, so not relevant. To anything, except for like, you know, monster inventory on our side of the verse. The universe? We’ve got to chuck that word. Etymologically it’s misleading. But I digress. As if I want to hear your talk. Again. I prefer staring into space trying to think of nothing. Yikes, okay, sorry, I overshot sarcasm and ended up in self-pity. That’s never a good look. Whatever. Get out of here, will you please?”

They nod awkwardly in one another’s direction and Newton waves him through the doorway. 

The door shuts behind him.

Hermann resettles his bag across his chest, double-checks he has his computer, his adaptor, his wallet, writing material, a pen, his phone, and his hotel room key. 

He has everything he needs, and nothing he doesn’t.

And so.

He leaves. 

In early 2013, the cab ride from San Francisco to UC Berkeley would have taken thirty-five minutes without traffic. It now takes ninety minutes. The route circumnavigates Oblivion Bay—the remnants of the Golden Gate to the north and the decontaminating Bay Bridge to the east are both impassable. He directs his driverless cab south, passing through Palo Alto before turning back north through Fremont, Oakland, and Berkeley. 

There is no wall around the bay.

The Wall of Life lies to the west, along the coast, cutting off the bay where the Golden Gate Bridge used to stand. Behind the Wall, the water is now is a stagnant lake—dark, brackish, and contaminated. The Bay Bridge still stands, skeletal and untrafficked against the pale gray of a clouded dawn. He watches until it fades from view at the beginning of his journey and comes back into view near its end, as his circumnavigation of the bay is complete.

He arrives at UC Berkeley’s Mathematics Department at nine in the morning. When the cab stops, he collects his cane, his computer, and himself before banishing it, then walks along a tree-lined street through a campus that’s either still half asleep or half-deserted. It’s more likely to be the latter than the former. The coastal exodus has influenced the allocation of academic excellence over the past decade, but there were plenty of people who were disinclined to cease their work for the purposes of relocation, even when faced with the risk of death. 

Science waits for no one.

Hermann spends his morning in the painful slog of meeting the department, member-by-member, discussing NP-completeness, integer programming, the Hadamard conjecture, the inverse Galois problem, number theory, and other fascinating mathematical varia.

This is almost absorbing enough to allow him to forget his anxiety regarding his coming talk.

Almost.

There is an unmistakable trace of anticipation in the voices of the professors and students that he meets. He has a difficult time getting through lunch with the department, because it is, of course, stilted in a way he’s forgotten is the academic norm. He’s become too accustomed to Newton and his ability to cut through constraint of any kind.

He and his faculty liaison arrive at the lecture hall fifteen minutes before his talk. The room is a high ceilinged, wood-paneled affair that has been lit to a warm, day-spectrum yellow. It is already full of people—full of faculty, full of students, full of phones and glasses sporting the subtle blue lights of recording cameras, and full of anticipatory chatter. 

Even now, even before he starts, everyone is watching him.

I told you, dude, his brain says, choosing for its incarnation the sanctimonious tone of Dr. Newton Geiszler of the fenestrated perception and the knack for loose connections. Did I not tell you this was exactly how it would go down?

Had his brain been in the habit of addressing him as Newton, pre-drift?

He thinks not.

He feels nauseated.

His hands are cold.

His mouth is entirely dry. 

His digestive system has declared war on the rest of his organs.

He doesn’t understand why he must respond like this, when faced with public speaking. No one is literally trying tokill him; he is simply required to give a talk. It’s, arguably, one of the easier things he’s done in the past ten days.

His nervous system seems to be unconvinced by this argument. This is not surprising. He has been able to talk it out of very little when he pits cogent arguments against evolutionary imperatives. This is one of the curses of the human condition, he supposes. 

Hermann deposits his bag on the nearest chair in the still empty front row, feeling the slowly filling capacity of the room pressing down on him.

“Ninety slides?” says his faculty liaison, looking over his shoulder as Hermann connects his laptop to the projection system.

What of it? his brain snarls.

Hermann doesn’t say anything. Engaging in small talk feels like an inordinately torturous effort and will probably be recorded by half the audience members and analyzed for all time. 

His chest feels strange; his stomach’s in knots; he can hear the rush of blood in his ears, and—

Yeah, we’re not doing this, his brain snaps, sounding exactly like Newton before the man makes a terrible—

He’s not sure what happens.

He staggers under the sensation of an almost physical snap of something that’s entirely in his head, and, with the shock of unexpected, long anticipated relief, his anxiety is gone.

He feels vaguely uneasy about this, but he’s also vaguely disinclined to question it, because—yes. It’s just best not to question.

“Are you all right?”  Professor Starr asks him. 

David Starr. That’s the man’s name. It strikes him suddenly. Professor Starr looks concerned and competent and like he has glorious taste in NP-complete problems. He’s actually been quite helpful.

“Yeah,” Hermann says, but that doesn’t sound quite right, so he amends it to, “yes. Yes, I’m fine. Thank you for your assistance, David.”

“No problem,” Professor Starr says, looking surprised and warming up appreciably. “You ready for this?”

“No doubt,” Hermann says dryly, surveying the room with a vaguely alarming sense of predatory anticipation. This is, in all likelihood, the most fortuitous thing to have happened to all three hundred assembling people in a decade because they are, in fact, about to hear about the breach, about its discovery and composition, about the things that came through it, about how it was closed. Hermann can’t think of anything more topically relevant or viscerally satisfying than a mathematically laced account of an apocalypse averted by science. Plus, he’s a fabulous speaker. There’s that to consider. 

He flexes his hands, he pulls off his glasses, he asks David for a laser pointer, which is green, that’s outrageously acceptable, he’s not going to lie about that, green is really his preferred laser pointer color; red is too-often washed out, and hello, who is he? A Sith Lord of Science? No. No he is not. The room has the promising feel of his sixth defense, which had ended with the somewhat eccentric chair of MIT’s Biomedical Engineering department theatrically dropping to his knees to literally beg him to stay on as faculty within the department and not defect (again) to Neuroscience as he’d been threatening. His closed door session had been a tenure track negotiation, and yes he’d done exactly zero postdocs and yes he’d gotten six degrees, sure, he admits it’s a little weird, but in the end, he’d been tenured in his twenties, so it was fine, he’s not insecure about it, the point that he’s lost track of slightly is that he is an awesome speaker. The kind of speaker who sends undergraduates back to their dorms starry-eyed and graduate students straight to drunken misery as they question their life choices and career trajectories. It might be a little bit difficult for the Mathematics Department to choke down their collective envy and hire him, but he’s pretty sure they’re going to do it, no one can hunt down Riemann zeros like he can hunt down Riemann zeros—but wait.

Massive, massive identity confusion, his brain says, sounding unmistakably like Newt.

Like Newton.

This is bad, he says to his brain, not sure who he sounds like. This is not preferred, you’re defaulting to a pathway that isn’t yours. You’re defaulting to a guy who doesn’t live here, not in this head, not really. How is this even possible, this is not okay, this is why people don’t lower their membrane potentials; you should really write a paper if you make it through this with your selfhood intact. Or if you don't. Either way, it's a win.

Shut up, he snarls back at himself.

“Excuse me,” he says to Professor Starr. He looks at his watch. Seven minutes remain until he is due to begin his talk. “I’ll be back shortly.”

He leaves the room, finds a unisex bathroom, steps inside and locks the door. He leans back against it, not seeing the confining spread of white tile.

He’s freaking out a little bit.

Or—he’s—

He’s marginally anxious about this turn of events? 

He has leveled up when it comes to identity confusion. Or—he has plotted new reaches of—how should he classify this—cognitive consonance?

Cognitive consonance. That has a nice ring to it. 

This might not necessarily be a bad thing, he thinks. I am an amazing public speaker.

Well, one of us is, his brain answers, sounding vaguely affronted. The question is, dude, can you give a talk as Newt? Or, can Newt give a talk as you? Or, most correctly, can Hermann Gottlieb give a talk as Newton Geiszler giving a talk as Hermann Gottlieb?

Yes. 

Certainly. 

He is certain he can do exactly that. He can do nearly anything. He's never encountered an intellectual roadblock he hasn't shattered his way through. He can build a drift interface out of salvaged parts and use it to—

“This is the worst,” he says and it is dark but even so, he can see the cracking of the ceiling, feel the dust on his face and the dirt beneath his hands. He needs to find his glasses—this is so cliché; he will be so annoyed if he dieswithout at least seeing what’s eating him; after all the work he’s put in that seems the least that he deserves. He finds them and the ceiling cracks apart and something blue descends in front of him, some kind of sensoryexploration—and and and he doesn’t like this, somehow it’s more terrifying than the blind groping of a mindless thing in search of caloric intake or programmed for destruction; there’s something careful in its movements; he’s too horrified to scream, why is he sure this blue tissue is conductive? He can almost feel it wanting him to just—to simply, to reach out and—

He manages to make it to the toilet before vomiting, his digestive system panicking as it is wont to do, and he does not blame it; no he does not. 

“For the love,” he gasps. He had wondered what it was exactly that was happening to Newt—to Newton—to Newt at those times, now he knows, now he has much too much insight into Dr. Geiszler, thank you, and yet not enough at all.

He braces one hand against his wall, one hand on his cane. He breathes too hard and too fast.

He, whomever he is, has gotten himself into an insupportable situation.

One of many, truth be told. 

His nose begins to bleed.

He decides he needs to organize his thoughts. 

He is—

He looks over at the mirror to visually verify who it is that he is.

Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. 

Yes. 

Good. 

He is currently standing in a unisex bathroom at UC Berkeley, leaning over an unsanitary toilet, one hand pressed to the tile of the lateral wall that is, in all likelihood, revoltingly unclean. His current status is, alas, best described as:  bleeding from the nose post-vomiting, post-flashback, mid-identity confusion. 

He erases the evidence of his rejected and yet still recognizable lunch because looking at it is not helping him out at all; he is not going to lie about that one. Nope.

He is extremely confused.

He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief, staggers to the sink, and watches blood drop dark and slide bright over sloping white porcelain. He tries to keep his head entirely still so that his shirt remains unstained. He pulls out a fresh handkerchief and presses it to his nose.

He’s supposed to be giving a talk.

In approximately three minutes.

To four hundred people, give or take.

It will, undoubtedly, be recorded and subjected to live streaming by members of the academic community he’s about to address.

I’m not sure that’s happening, his brain says, sounding like Newton, under duress. The talk, I mean.

Yes it is, he snarls back.

He must do this. There is literally no other alternative. He needs this appointment. It is absolutely required. Unfortunately, he is also almost certainly going to have a panic attack when he gets to his first slide, which is terrible, which is bad, which is unsalvageable, which is not adaptive, which is entirely Newton’s fault.

In his pocket, his phone vibrates.

He pulls it out, glances at the caller ID, and answers it.

“Newton,” he snarls, the effect somewhat diminished by the handkerchief he’s using to pinch his nose shut. “This is not a good time for me.”  He nearly appends the word ‘dude,’ but stops short.

The line is silent.

He feels acutely guilty—for all he knows, Newton is calling him because the man is panicking in a hotel room across town, uncertain of where he is or who exactly he is. For all he knows, the man is hemorrhaging from a venous plexus somewhere. For all he knows the man has had a seizure. For all he knows—

“Chill,” the other man says, annoyed, annoying, and putting to rest all of Hermann’s guilt in a single word.

“Do not,” Hermann snarls, “tell me to chill. I hate it when you tell me to ‘chill’. I’m speaking in three minutes.”

“I know that you don’t think I have a theory of mind, Hermann, but guess what? I do. I even use it sometimes, when I think about it.”  Newton’s tone is a blend of irritation and caution. 

Hermann supposes that he doesn’t sound quite like his usual self. “What do you want?” he snaps.

“Do you have a theory of mind?” Newton asks him with a calculated indolence that’s, possibly, intended to be calming. “Why do you think I called you? No wait, don’t answer that—whatever you say is going to piss me off. Look, what are you doing right now?”

“If you must know, I’m standing in a bathroom, bleeding from my nose,” Hermann says, in waspish misery.

“You threw up.”  At least the other man has the decency not to frame his statement as an interrogative.

“This is your fault,” Hermann says.

“Oh yeah. You got me,” Newton says. “Guilty. Professor Geiszler, in the hotel room, with the syrup of ipecac, hours ago, in the breakfast you didn’t eat.”

“Shut up,” Hermann whispers. 

“Seriously man,” Newton says, “you’re gonna own this thing for sure. Come on. They already think you’re a rockstar. All those people out there showed because they’re half in love with you already. There’s literally no way for you not to hit this one out of the park. Even if you give the crappiest talk you’ve ever given in your life, which you probably won’t, because that talk in 2017 was pretty bad, it would be hard to top that one—”

“You’re not helping,” Hermann interrupts through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, sorry, I’m not on my A-game. Are you still bleeding? Because that’s probably step one.”

Hermann pulls the tissue away from his face and watches blood continue to drip into the sink.

“Yes,” he says. 

“Okay well, it will stop, eventually, I’m pretty sure,” Newton says.

“Newton, I have two minutes,” he snarls.

And an identity crisis, his brain cheerfully adds.

“Are you serious?” his colleague asks. “Hermann. They can wait for you. They will get their sweetass talk when you’re ready to give it to them and not before, okay? You saved the world. Without you? They’d be lunch right about now. Right about eight days ago. Whatever. Try to keep that in mind, will you?”

He sounds so much better over the phone than he looks in person, and this whole thing would almost almost be reassuring, but for the incontrovertible fact that Newton cannot possibly rescue him from an excess of Geiszlerian thought patterns.

“Have you noticed,” Hermann murmurs, shutting his eyes and shifting his weight and pressing the handkerchief against his face, trying not to think of a clock counting down, ‘that—”  He breaks off. 

There are too many things wrong with the thought he’s trying to construct and he’s too stressed to salvage it.

“Probably not,” Newton says quietly, after several long seconds pass. “I’m only hyperobservant in the face of glaringly unsubtle stimuli. You want to come back? Just come back. Screw UC Berkeley with their Fields Medalists and their more than decent theoretical quantum people. We’ll get room service and you can stop me from watching twenty-four hour news.”

“Don’t watch it,” Hermann says, half choked with despair over everything that he has no time to explain.

“Yeah, I tried, it did not go well for me. I switched to Star Wars. That’s going better. Lightsabers. You know. There’s an all-day marathon, apparently. I’m midway through Episode IV.”

For a moment they are silent.

“Spit it out, dude,” Newton says, not ungently.

“I am finding that during periods of acute distress I default more to your coping strategies than to mine,” Hermann whispers.

“Really,” Newton says, the word conveying no surprise, glazed with exhaustion. “So are you charming everyone with a borrowed narcissistic personality disorder?”

“You’re not a narcissist,” Hermann murmurs, his eyes still shut. “It’s not narcissism if it’s justifiable.”

“Yeah, okay, wow, that’s so true, thank you for noticing, but I’m going to level with you, dude—you’re pretty far gone if you’re saying things like that.”  Newton’s tone is appealingly wry. “But if you did accidentally step into the shoes of science’s most frontable frontman, I don’t understand why you’re throwing up in the bathroom. I’m awesome at giving talks, if you don’t count all the interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary fights I start.”

“One of your assumptions,” Hermann replies, “is mistaken.”  He opens his eyes and inspects the handkerchief he holds. It’s nearly covered with blood. He pulls it away from his face and waits.

“Ugh,” Newt says. “I hate that. Being mistaken. Especially about assumptions. Hermann, let’s be real, my brain is like a neuronal fricassee right now; can you just point out my biases so I can drag them outside the Venn Diagram of Rightness that I like to hang out in?”

“Your brain is fine,” Hermann replies, not at all certain of any such thing. “You spent most of last night in eloquent speculation on the nature of consciousness and so I will thank you to stop playing the neurological injury card whenever you’re feeling rhetorically disinclined, man.”

“Are you still bleeding?” Newton asks. “Also—did you just call me man?”

“No,” Hermann says.

“So. Step one, tell me what I’m wrong about. Step two, wash the blood off your face. Step three, light that talk on fire and, step four, burn it down,” Newton says.

“I did not end up vomiting in this bathroom out of anxiety about the talk,” Hermann informs him. 

“Well crap,” Newton replies.

“I seem to have, unfortunately, in borrowing your hubristic sense of scientific entitlement also borrowed nearly everything else, including your alarming propensity to ah—”

He’s not sure how to talk about this without initiating another immersive sensory recapitulation of a terrifying memory that isn’t his own.

“Freak out a little bit about near death experiences directly related to the subject material you’re about to be discussing?” Newton asks. “Okay, yes, I could see where that might be inconvenient for you right about now. So, to summarize, in feeling super anxious regarding public speaking, your brain decided that rather than be you, in anxious misery, it would instead be me, the glam-punk master of the oral presentation. Can I just make an aside to say that this is weird? Like, I’m not sure I approve of this. I’ve definitely trended a little bit in the you-direction lately—I may have kind of just obsessively cleaned our hotel room, but it’s not the same thing, I don’t think.”

“Newt, seriously?” Hermann says, picturing the slightly uncomfortable expression Dr. Starr is likely sporting at the moment,  several rooms away, “I have no time for this.”

“Oh my god. Did you just call me Newt? I have kidnapped your brain. I am so sorry. Yeah, okay. So. Focusing. Sorry again. Okay, so your brain decided that when faced with an audience it would rather be my brain, but unfortunately you’re now flashing back to—”

“Nearly being eaten,” Hermann snarls at him. “Could you not have asked one of the military personnel to locate the illicit Hong Kong kaiju market for you?”

“This is not the thing to focus on right now dude, I’m pretty sure about that,” Newton says, and his tone is so entirely reasonable that Hermann can barely stand it. 

Newton is not the reasonable one.

“Okay, so you got nervous, your brain decided to pretend to be me for the duration, which is going to produce a pretty interesting effect on your general demeanor I’ve got to say, fortunately some ballsy grad student or fifty is going to post your talk for the world so I can watch it and later mock you, possibly compliment you, actually, because let’s be real, I’m a pretty great speaker and if—”

Newt has now summarized what Hermann has been trying to tell him in three different, wandering ways, and Hermann finds this totally insupportable given his current time pressure. He can’t remember how to direct the man into saying something sensical, even though that’s a skill he knows he should have. All he can think to do is demand precision. 

“You will be able to do neither if I never give it. Get to the point, would you please?”

“Okay, so thanks to EPIC Rapport, you’re no longer nervous about the talk itself, you’re more concerned that midway through you’re going to flash back to a crap public shelter and then throw up and bleed out of your face in that order whilst in front of hundreds of people and being live-streamed to everyone in the world who’s interested in what you have to say, which, honestly, is going to be a pretty significant fraction of the total population of humanity—”

“You are useless,” Hermann says. “We literally cannot converse. I’m hanging up.”

“No!  No no no no. I'm hypothesizing while talking. Don’t hang up.”

Hermann looks at the ceiling, so frustrated he thinks his brain might implode. 

“Hello?” Newton says. 

“I’m waiting,” Hermann says.

“Oh. You are? Cool. Great. Okay so I think you’re just going to have to be nervous about this talk. Embrace your anxiety, man. I think that might work.”

“That’s your solution? I fail to see how it improves my situation. I was already anxious, that’s what generated this problem in the first place.”

“Nope. False. The anxiety itself wasn’t the problem. The problem occurred when your brain decided that it would rather be me under duress than you under duress, because that is not a good choice, dude, it was probably never a great choice but it’s a worse choice now than it would have been circa 2020, because you’ve got my synaptic pathways post-drift numero uno and so, yeah, no matter how satisfying you might find it to bitchslap your audience with awesomeness so hard their teeth rattle, the associated sequelae are a no go.”

“You realize this is impossible, correct?” Hermann asks, “What you’re proposing? I can’t just leverage my own psychology into a less emotionally advantageous state, Newton, biologically—“

“Sure you can,” Newton says. “As if you know anything about biology, dude; you think you defaulted to this pathway you stole from me? You didn’t default into it, you escaped into it, but there’s not supposed to be any escaping here, Hermann, you need your anxiety to focus, to haul ass through a ninety-slide slide deck in a fifty minute time slot. You think you can give a talk as me and not end up all over the map? What are you on, dude? This is a nonviable pathway, so snap out of it. This is horrifically, totally, one hundred percent terrifying okay? You’re about to give a talk to a packed house with global overflow seating. Everyone is going to be watching, everyone, okay? Everyone you know. It’s going to be recorded for posterity, it’s going to be dissected and analyzed by the scientific community, by the military, by Sunday morning political shows, by Mako the Magnificent, by your dad, by your exes, by your middle school math teachers, by Possibly Flow, by Hypothetical Rain, by everyone in your field, by mathematicians, by computer scientists, by fourteen year olds with an interest in quantum or in kaiju, by creeper monster cults, by Hannibal Chau’s leaderless gang, by your future biographer, and of course, by me. Later. As soon as possible. And I will literally never let you forget even the smallest error that you might make, okay? You should live in fear of me Hermann, I am a relentless jerk with an unbelievable mnemonic capacity and I will judge you, dude, I will judge you. Harshly. Loudly. Eternally. To the full extent of our combined lexicons.”

Hermann feels the echo of recalled anxiety and attendant nausea. He clenches his jaw, breathes slowly, and tries not to bleed.

“You had better be silently freaking out right now, Hermann,” Newton continues, “because this is going to be totally, one hundred percent awful and literally everything will be ruined if you don’t pull it off. You are not a frontman, okay, you’re a mathematician who hates crowds, let alone addressing them, this is pretty much your worst nightmare. Now go wash your face and get this done, right? Just the facts, just the math, just the schematics of interfaces and the innovations in computational modeling and the quantum foam that you mapped every night for years, like the super boring, super anxious quantum cartographer you are.”

Newton is silent. 

Hermann feels confused, upset, and increasingly anxious. His mouth is dry.

“Hundreds of people,” Newton says. “Hundreds. That you can see.”

“I feel deeply ashamed,” Hermann says, “and endlessly vexed that your extremely transparent strategy seems to be working.”

“The brain,” Newton says. “Pretty powerful, not always the smartest, especially mine.”

“I’ll call you later,” Hermann says.

“Hundreds of people,” Newton replies. 

“Yes, thank you, message received.”

“That you can see. Probably thousands that you can’t.”

“Newton.”

“Video evidence.”

“Newton.”

“And you’re already late. Are you kidding me? I’m docking ten points for style right there. Lateness. Just who do you think you are?”

“Thank you,” Hermann says. He can feel his hands shake subtly with adrenaline.

“Light it up,” Newton replies, and the line goes dead.

After his talk, which is enthusiastically received despite the crushing anxiety he both suffers beneath and, cruelly, works to maintain, Hermann leaves the auditorium by a back door. No one who lacks a UC Berkeley ID card has been admitted, but he is told after he fields his last question that scattered members of the press have gathered outside, barred from entering but waiting for him to emerge. When he indicates he’d prefer not to interact with the press, thank you, he is accompanied by Professor Starr and by the head of UC Berkeley’s Mathematics department out a back door, down a flight of stairs, and through an underground connection to an adjacent building before emerging beneath a clouded sky.

Hermann doesn’t feel quite right—as if, somewhere in his mind, a man significantly braver and less organized than he waits in mental wings, offstage and in the dark.

What does it say about his state of mind that this doesn’t frighten him?

It should. 

He has daguerreotype of a living man etched into the substance of his mind. 

Other things are etched there as well.

“Something on your mind?” the Department Chair asks him, in subtle Scottish accent. There is something overly smooth in the other man’s delivery, as if he’s aware of his own intrusion into thoughts that might be private and is working to sand down any interpersonal rough edges.

“Too much,” Hermann says, smelling the sea, remembering what it was like to breathe underwater.

“Yes well,” the other man says, “you’ve had an eventful year.”

Hermann says nothing, because he’s concerned that whatever response he can excavate free of a decade of detritus will compound the unsteady shifting of his thoughts.

He has a difficult time composing himself until he is back inside, until Starr has peeled away, vanishing to an office or a waiting bank of monitors, or wherever it is that Algebraic Topologists go in the mid-afternoon at UC Berkeley. He collects himself, his thoughts sharpening into their old, familiar lines as he seats himself in the Department Chair’s cluttered, ground-floor office, and narrows his focus down to the gray-haired man with square framed glasses and a sharp look.

Hermann likes him.

They are cut from the same cloth, he suspects.

They exchange labored pleasantries for ten minutes before the other man decides to cut to the quick and make him an offer. It’s better than Hermann had been bracing himself for—he’s not insensible to the fact that UC Berkeley is as strapped for resources as any institution not devoted solely to the preservation of life on Earth. A full tenure package, relatively minimal teaching responsibilities, and an office that the man assures him is “a fair bit nicer than my own,” with an understated wryness that makes Hermann vaguely suspicious that he might have some ulterior motive.

Perhaps he doesn’t like being the department chair. Hermann doesn’t blame him. He’s certain the administrative duties are atrocious and unrewarding.

“I find your offer extremely suitable,” Hermann says, after an appropriate pause.

“Perfect,” the other man replies.

“But,” Hermann says.

The Department Chair raises his eyebrows.

“In order for me to accept, my—” he hesitates only a fraction of a second, “partner would also need to be offered a faculty position.”

“Ah,” the other man says. “This wouldn’t be the reclusive Dr. Geiszler, would it?”

Reclusive? Hermann thinks. He can come up with a plethora of words to describe Newton Geiszler, but ‘reclusive’ is certainly not one of them.

“I see you’ve been watching the news,” Hermann says dryly. 

“To my perpetual disappointment, it generally fails to qualify as any such thing,” the other man replies, hooking one hand over his shoulder and pressing down, as if to massage away some element of strain.

“I’m glad to see you view the current coverage with the skepticism it deserves. I can assure you that Dr. Geiszler is hardly ‘reclusive’. Nor is he brain-damaged, having a nervous breakdown, a traitor to his species, persecuted by the military-industrial complex, heartbroken over the closure of the breach, a drug addict, poisoned by Kaiju Blue, Mako Mori’s biological half-brother, or affiliated with Kaiju Worshippers in any way. He’s—” Hermann isn’t sure how to end his sentence in an accurate and circumspect way.

The other man looks at him, gray eyebrows edging above the rims of his square-framed glasses.

“Recuperating,” Hermann finishes, curling the word into something pointed and frosted over.

The other man nods, breaking the steeple of his fingers and turning his hands over in an unmistakably conciliatory gestural paraph. “I’ll make a call. He’s a biologist, correct?”

“He’s qualified in multiple areas,” Hermann says, de-frosting his tone. Slightly.

“Do you happen to have his CV?”

“I do,” Hermann replies, pulling it out of his bag and passing it across the desk.

He watches the other man flip through the thing in growing and familiar consternation. “How many degrees does he—“

“Six,” Hermann says dryly. 

For that admission he gets another eyebrow lift. “Seems a bit excessive, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hermann admits. He rolls his eyes in the general direction of the ceiling, exceedingly glad that Newton is not present and will never hear the words that are about to come out of his mouth. “His first advanced degree was defended at age fourteen, however, so his academic indecisiveness is, perhaps, somewhat understandable, given the unusual educational choices he made at age ten.”

“I suppose,” the Department Chair says, narrowing his eyes. “That might explain the first three—possibly the first four. But—“

“His publication record is stellar,” Hermann says, mentally cursing Newton for failing to commit to a single field of study. He’s certain that a large part of Newton’s staying power in the field of exobiology derives directly from the fact that his civilization would have ended had he not kept his mind in a single track. 

“It is,” the other man agrees, still flipping pages. “He was based at MIT before leaving academia for the PPDC?”

“He was,” Hermann confirms. “He has a standing offer to return, which will likely be what we choose to do if UC Berkeley is unwilling to make him an offer.”

It is, technically, a lie, but, with some well-placed emails, it could transform into something true. 

“Berkeley is certainly a better fit for your interests,” the other man says with an incisive coolness that Hermann very much admires.

“It is,” Hermann admits.

“I have every confidence that the Biomedical Engineering, Integrative Biology, Neuroscience, Molecular and Cell Biology, and, possibly, the Bioethics Departments would all be willing to invite him to give a seminar.”

Now for the delicate part.

“Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann says carefully, “is unlikely to be sufficiently recovered to give an invited job-talk for several weeks. But unfortunately, I can’t accept your offer until I’m certain that he has a position here.”

The other man gives him a look roughly on par with the outrageousness of Hermann’s indirectly stated ultimatum. “What is it exactly that you’re asking me to do? Extend a standing offer on behalf of a department that I don’t chairto a man who hasn’t interacted with any members of the faculty in any department he might be qualified to join?”

“I recognize that this is highly irregular,” Hermann says. “But, as I mentioned, we had planned to return to MIT. Please don’t inconvenience yourself if you find this to be an unreasonable request.”

The Department Chair makes him wait, just long enough to demonstrate a wry cognizance of Hermann’s rather crass negotiating technique before he says, “I am certain, Dr. Gottlieb, that this institution would only benefit from employing the pair of you. I am also certain it will be a relatively straight-forward matter to convince someone to offer Dr. Geiszler a position based on reputation and CV alone. Presuming I can secure him an offer in an expeditious manner, would you be amenable to joining our department?”

“I would be delighted,” Hermann replies.

“Then welcome aboard,” the other man says, extending a hand across the chaotic expanse of his desk.

After his meeting, Hermann calls Newton, who, against all odds, seems to be fine. He informs Hermann that he will, “literally kill you if you don’t go out drinking with the Berkeley Math Department, dude, it’s a crime against humanity, it needs to happen, I will never forgive you if you come back here pre-socializing. It’s a whole new decade; the world didn’t end, so I fully expect that you’re going to be bitching about these guys for the foreseeable future and I really want that to start as soon as possible. It’s going to improve my life a lot, because, as you know, the only thing I like more than complaining about mathematicians is listening to you complain about other mathematicians.”

So Hermann goes.

He goes first to a somewhat awkward dinner in a half-deserted restaurant of mediocre quality, and then for substantially less awkward drinks in a bar that is small and dark and lined with shattered spars of wood that he makes a point not to try and recognize or place. 

He resolves not to mention Newton to any of his new colleagues.

He fails.

He fails multiple times.

This point is driven home to him by the fact that his evening ends with a trip back to Starr’s office to pick up a pre-publication copy of the mathematically-demanding Rediscovering Leibniz that the man has been editing for the past eight months. Hermann fends off a dinner invitation, extended ostensibly to the pair of them, but, mostly toNewton, in absentia. He fends it off three times. Newton is never allowed to cross paths with the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. 

Ever.

Hermann would have a lot of explaining to perform on two fronts if such an event ever came to pass, and when it was all said and done, Newton would likely be entirely insufferable for years.

The return cab ride from Oakland to San Francisco is long and dark and driverless.

He spends the time in an exhausted blur, watching the shifting lights of decimated cityscapes blend and curve in a broken crescent around Oblivion Bay. Again, the Bay Bridge bookends the open loop of his journey—still standing, still untrafficked, still lit up in the style of Villareal; a bizarre defiance of a war torn decade, a memorial to a time before the breach had self-organized into a traversable passage. 

Hermann’s not sure what to make of the Bay Bridge Lights.

Are they a hopeful return of the city, of the coast, of the planet, to the flaws of human stewardship? Or a memory of a history set aside by foreign influence? 

He doesn’t know.

He tries not to remember rolling into the bay with the fog and the tolling of bells, rending apart a bridge like it was nothing, watching vehicles spill into the water without a clear understanding of what they were, tracking the ripples that formed and cracked in distorting asphalt as he tore through small and interesting structures built by small and interesting mammals who hadn’t been here, not last time, not on this world, and who did not belong here now.

Hermann spends the cab ride back in the vertiginous darkness of the mildly intoxicated, not thinking of the view of Oblivion Bay from the west.

The return journey is shorter; it is late, the traffic is minimal, and alcohol and relief have loosened the tight gears of his mind into something that runs smoother and less precisely.

It will be all right. 

They will rejoin academia. The PPDC will not reclaim them. 

They never belonged in the military—not truly. They belong in labs, with cadres of graduate students that complain about them, secretly and bitterly and passionately, over too much coffee. 

The cab pulls up in front of the off-white hotel, lit up against the night sky. Hermann swipes his credit card and steps into the brisk night air, feeling strange, still half-drunk, still more than fractionally Newton Geiszler, which is a problem he thinks he may have for the remainder of his life.

The air smells of salt, of the near but invisible sea. 

His thoughts are a fugue in three parts, but he’s certain he can track the through-line that’s his own. It’s the one that started first, the one that frames the others, the only one that will ever change.

He wonders which will be harder to bear when he’s drinking tea and misplacing his keys through the final decade of his life—his memories of alien destruction or the version of Newton Geiszler, frozen at age thirty-five, in medias res, that he will carry in his head for the rest of his life.

Hermann adjusts the strap of his bag over his shoulder, and searches for his room key with alcohol-blunted coordination.

The wind fights with his hair.

He feels, in this moment, as though he can sidestep the past miserable decade of his life, like he can obviate it, like he can pretend it never happened, like he can wake up in the morning two weeks from now to mathematics that has nothing to do at all with the ending of the world; he can go his whole life without firing off another salute, or sharing a workspace with extraterrestrial entrails, or ignoring another backhanded insult about the value of what he’s chosen as his life’s work, like he can leave all of it behind and he can keep only the things that had made the entire experience worthwhile—his quantum cartography and his closest friend—and drag both those things into an alternate pathway, the way things might have been if he’d had less of a chip on his shoulder the length and breadth of the Wall; if he’d met Newton at the peak of the  ‘Nerd Rock’ genre in 2020, instead of in 2016, when humanity had turned back to science after years of defunding basic research.

When he returns to their room he finds the lights off, Star Wars: Episode VIII halfway over, and Newton lying in bed with Hermann’s sunglasses on, the partially consumed remains of a room service dinner spread around him on the coverlet in a semi-circle. The only illumination comes irregularly from the television.

“Did you bring me a present?” his esteemed colleague asks him.

“I did,” Hermann says.

Newton looks over at him, cocking his head in a subtly skeptical manner. “Are you drunk?”

It vexes Hermann significantly that Newton can determine his state of inebriation from two monosyllabic words.

“I am most certainly not intoxicated,” Hermann says crisply. 

Relatively crisply.

He steps out of his shoes.

“You are,” Newton says, but the words lack any kind of victorious edge. He simply sounds exhausted and reassuringly familiar. Hermann’s colleague of a decade with impeccable timing and dubious taste in outerwear. 

“Slightly,” Hermann admits. “Extremely slightly.”

Newton smiles at that, quick and crooked. “What did they do to you? Set up an ethanol drip?”

“Hardly,” Hermann says. “Just because you cannot hold your alcohol does not mean—”

“Hey hey hey hey. We have never gone head-to-head, okay?” Newton says. “The record is very clear regarding a straight-up alcohol tolerance test. Everyone has to be reasonably well-rested, hydrated, and with equal access to food. We have never met those conditions, so relative alcohol dehydrogenating prowess has never been truly assessed.”

“Mmm hmm,” Hermann says, with blatant skepticism.

“Don’t give me that,” Newton replies, watching in evident interest as Hermann deposits his bag carefully on the desk, opens it, and pulls out the book. 

“Please tell me that’s the complete works of René Descartes,” Newton says. “Not that I care. Not that I’ve been thinking about Descartes all day. Do you think he’d mind if I called him René?”

“Historically,” Hermann says, “you have displayed no concern for either surnames or appropriate titles and I am somewhat at a loss as to what might make you start now. Furthermore, Descartes is dead, Newton, so I don’t think he’ll take issue with your presumptive familiarity.”

“Oh you are drunk, aren’t you?” Newton says, reaching out to take the book from Hermann with a notable effort. “You never humor me unless you’re drunk. In other news, Descartes will never be dead. To me, okay?”

“That is blatantly untrue,” Hermann says. “Ninety percent of my waking life is spent humoring you.”

Newton angles the book and cocks his head, trying and likely failing to read the title in the dark without his glasses. “You also get hyperbolic when you’re drunk.”

“False,” Hermann says.

“True,” Newton replies. “You should give up now.” 

“I’m certain that only a miracle would enable you to read without your glasses in this kind of lighting,” Hermann says.

“I’m a very good guesser,” Newton says, re-angling the book.

“Leibniz,” Hermann says, reaching out to tap its cover. “Rediscovering Leibniz. That’s a pre-publication copy.”

“Fanciness,” Newton says, letting the book come to rest on his chest. “Poor Leibniz. Isaac Newton was a complete dick. Personally. Optical baller though, not gonna lie about that. One can’t, really. Lie about Sir Isaac, I mean. He took issue with Descartes, I think, or rather, you think? I’m getting all this Descartes stuff from your brain, you know, I just—I can’t really blame you for the fact that I seem to have some wires crossed when it comes to rationalism and like, romantic love. I’m pretty sure that humans were never meant to feel this way about invalidated philosophical disciplines.”

“I’ll buy you a rationalistic bodice-ripper tomorrow,” Hermann says, pulling off his jacket. 

Newton rolls an r into an obscenely modulated purr of inappropriate appreciation, but at what, specifically, Hermann can’t say. Possibly Descartes. Possibly Hermann’s unconventional application of the term ‘bodice ripper’ to rationalism as a philosophical discipline. 

Either way, this sort of thing is not to be encouraged.

Admittedly, he himself had instigated it, but he is intoxicated and he has had an atypical day.

Descartes is a fellow mathematician and deserves respect.

Hermann therefore coolly segues into, "and yes, I believe you are correct, your namesake was—"

“He’s not my namesake, Hermann, as you know, because you’ve shared brain space with me and I’ve told you exactly eighty-thousand times if I’ve told you once. I was named after the SI unit of force.”

“Which was, in turn, named after Isaac Newton. By the transitive property—“

“You can screw off via the transitive property,” Newton says, with zero ire, predictably distracted by the on-screen fight scene.

Even in his mildly intoxicated state, Hermann has the good sense to leave that one where it lies. He redirects. “I sincerely doubt that you parents named you after the SI unit of force.”

“That has been a longstanding element of my personal mythos, dude, and it works pretty well as a pick-up line, so I’m sticking with it.”

“I suspect,” Hermann says, unbuttoning the upper button of his collar, “that you were named for the Hurricane that hit Cabo San Lucas in 1986.”

“Um, excuse me,” Newton says, smiling faintly, looking over at him, “but what the actual hell, Hermann?”

“Your parents met there, in that year, did they not? During a hurricane? While touring with their respective musical ensembles?”

“First of all, that makes them sound like poor, free-spirited vagrants, while, in actuality? They were much more boring than that. A little bit. Second of all, can we not juxtapose my family history with the Skywalker family history?”  Newton gestures vaguely at the screen. “Because I just don’t feel great about this as a side-by-side. I’m developing a supervillain inferiority complex, did you know that? Have I mentioned that to you? Third of all, what’s with your creepy hurricane knowledge? I don’t believe that you could possibly have any grounds for this kind of irresponsible supposition. You—”

“A),” Hermann begins, unbuttoning the cuffs of his dress shirt, “I obtained my knowledge of your parents via the drift. Obviously. With this knowledge came the extreme suspicion that they would not have chosen to name you either after the SI unit of force, or Sir Isaac Newton.”

“So you’ve been like—what, sitting around, performing some closet onanistic onomastic analysis when you’re not busy pretending to be me or freaking out about your to-do list?” Newton asks, tapping the remote against his thigh in a restless rhythm.

“B),” Hermann continues, “I have been paying an inordinate amount of attention to tropical disturbances in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres of the Pacific Oceaon for the past decade and I did make a particular note of the fact that shortly after you joined the PPDC in 2016, Hurricane Newton interfered with the deployment of Romeo Blue off the coast of Southern California.”

“I like that you especially noted that,” Newton says. “Very you. Did you file a formal reprimand against HurricaneNewton, or did you just save those for me?”

“C),” Hermann says, unperturbed, “following your assertion a few moments ago regarding the origins of your name, which I have heard before and of which I have always been skeptical, I realized that, arithmetically, with the six-year cycling of tropical system names, your hurricane could, potentially, be back-dated to the year in which your parents met.”       

“First of all, you have no idea when the ‘Newton’ entered the naming cycle,” Newton says. “For all you know, 2016 could have been its debut. You are proceeding on extremely sketchy evidence. Even for me, let alone for you. Do you know how many assumptions you’re making right now? A lot. At least two. The first is that hurricane Newton existed at all in 1986, which is not a given. The second is, that if it did, it hit Cabo San Lucas while my parents were there.”

“Shall we check?” Hermann asks, pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“No,” Newton says. “Yes. All right fine. Now I have to know. Who names their kid after a hurricane anyway?”

“Your parents?” Hermann suggests.

“Maybe,” Newton says, with the tone of a man who is narrowing his eyes invisibly behind sunglasses.

“Ah,” Hermann says, skimming the information on his phone. “Unsurprisingly, Hurricane Newton did indeed hit Cabo San Lucas in September of 1986.”

“You are the worst,” Newton says. “It’s entirely unfair to just reanalyze the data of my life in new ways because you have access to it all now. In other news, your parents—um, yeah. I got nothing. Just wait though, Hermann, I’m literally going to sit around, staring at a blank wall, thinking intensively about your childhood so that I can offer you creepy insights about your own origins.”

“I look forward to it.”

“Well you shouldn’t. My uncle has some explaining to do. He confirmed that whole ‘unit of force’ thing. I feel weird about this.”

“In his defense, I presume that you, as a child, were extremely difficult to contradict once you were possessed of a particular opinion.”

“I'm told I cried a lot,” Newton admits. “Historically.”

“Did you eat this dinner?” Hermann asks, looking critically at the crescent of plates that surrounds Newton on the bed. “Or were you just arranging it in an aesthetically pleasing manner while reviewing the Skywalker family pedigree?”

“I ate some of it,” Newton says, “and then I organized it by probable protein content and started eating it until I remembered eating other things and then felt sick. Did you just say ‘Skywalker family pedigree’?”

“I’m finished pretending I didn’t inherit your knowledge base,” Hermann says. “Primarily because I am envious of your facility with mine. What ‘other things’?”

“Whoa,” Newton says. “That was more upfront than is typical even for drunk-you, so—”

“What ‘other things’?” Hermann asks again.

“Well definitely not people,” Newton says, quietly, looking away from him. “I’ll tell you that much.”

Hermann feels sick in simpatico and fails in his effort to not think about how the experience of consumption had varied by kaiju, managing to push the thoughts somewhere back to the furthest reaches of his mind. 

He suspects that Newton has a much more difficult time employing a similar strategy, so he doesn’t say anything, he just begins the process of removing Newton’s crescent of plate and bowl and fruit cup and saucer and packet of crackers and silverware from the bed. 

“I can do that,” Newton says, not doing it, his fingers tracing the edges of the book Hermann has brought him.

“Undoubtedly,” Hermann replies. 

“You,” Newton says, watching Hermann reload the room service tray and banish it to the other side of the room, “are just opening all kinds of doors that should remain closed. For your own sanity.”

I implied to the entire Mathematics Department at UC Berkeley that we were romantically involved, Hermann thinks. He does not say this out loud. He is not that drunk.

He will never be that drunk.

“This is not a new habit,” Hermann says agreeably.

“Are you going to wear a bathrobe?” Newton asks. “Danielle brought us a new one.”

“Who is Danielle?” Hermann asks. 

“She works for housekeeping. She’s cool. She came asking about all the blood on clothes and sheets. I told her I have an incurable yet non-communicable disease, and then she brought me leftover donuts from the continental breakfast downstairs.”

Hermann looks at the ceiling. 

“Dude, I’m just saying. If you want a bathrobe, we have a replacement. We also have clean towels.”

“Thank you, Newton,” Hermann says, loosening his tie. “I will take that under advisement, post-shower.” 

“If you hurry, you can still make the lightsaber-crafting montage pre-arc-of-confused-redemption-neé-ambiguous-vengeance,” Newton says, looking at the Leibniz he can’t see rather than the movie he can’t see.

“Splendid,” Hermann replies. “I shall make every effort.”

When he reemerges from the shower, bathrobe-clad, carrying a cup of water and Newton’s anti-epileptic, he finds the other man has migrated to a position that’s mostly horizontal. Hermann thinks he might be sleeping until Newton points at him and says, “yes. Geiszler-approved attire.”

“Have you taken this yet?” Hermann says, giving the medication a subtle shake, certain the answer is no.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t need it,” Newton replies. “I think I only get epileptiform discharges when I give them to myself on purpose a little bit.”

“Try to reduce the scope of your own idiocy as much as possible.” Hermann replies dryly.

“I like that,” Newton says, taking the proffered pill and water with no further argument. “It makes a good motto. Reducing the scope of idiocy since—when did we start corresponding? 2013? Let’s custom-order matching T-shirts, what do you say.”

“I don’t wear T-shirts,” Hermann replies.

“Mugs,” Newton says. “Hats? Extremely tasteful ties. What if it were in Latin? Would that make a difference? Would you wear a T-shirt with Latin on it?”

Hermann leans his cane against the wall and Newton moves laterally, giving him space on the bed. “No,” he says, lying down.

“You are so boring. You are seriously the most boring ever. In news totally unrelated to your boringness, about eight people called me this afternoon, presumably to tell me what a badass you are; I don't know for sure because I didn't answer my phone but I will congratulate you anyway. Strong work.”

“Thank you,” Hermann says, trying to thank him for more than just his words, but not quite managing to get it out.

“Maybe one day I’ll be able to watch your internet-enshrined talk without having a panic attack.”

“It wasn’t anything you haven’t seen before,” Hermann says.

“I know,” Newton replies. “Boring. Joining brains, killing monsters, quantum cartography, dimensional transit, rockstarishness, blah blah blah. Sign me up for the next cataclysm, will you? I’m so over this one.”

“You know, Newton, I was thinking,” Hermann says, as the lightsaber-crafting montage comes onscreen in front of them to an appropriately epic soundtrack.

“I have never known such a thing to occur,” Newton says. “How irregular, by Jove. What aberration is—waaaiit. What am I doing? You’re drunk, and I’m British-hazing you? No. I change my mind. This is going to be awesome. Tell me, Dr. Gottlieb, of the arithmetic destiny and the sprawling chalk dust legacy, what were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that we could have ended up this way even if they’d never come.”  He does not need to specify, and so he does not. “Even if neither of us had left academia, we might have still ended up at UC Berkeley at the height of our academic careers, we might have still met.” 

Newton looks at him, waiting for whatever might follow with notably unusual patience, but there is nothing else.

Because, even inebriated, Hermann cannot verbalize the rest of it, cannot fully admit to the same susceptibility that all Jaeger pilots have—to be unable to separate the fight and the pain and the death and the loss of life from the uncontextualized and uncontextulizable closeness shared with another living person.

“Hermann,” Newton whispers.

“What?” Hermann whispers back.

“You’re insane,” Newton murmurs, with conspiratorial fondness. 

“Shut up,” Hermann replies.