Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 18

Hermann is personally offended that, as he’s brushing his teeth in an immaculate, white-tiled bathroom, Is this it? by The Strokes begins to play on repeat in his head.

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 18

Hermann awakens to a sharp pain and a loud crash in a bright room.

He’s lying on a hard surface.

He’s not sure where he is; he’s not sure what’s happening; there’s a vicious ache in his chest that makes him wonder if he’s dying; he thinks he’s died before; he remembers nearly dying; his brain is full of cognitive sludge but even so, he half recalls and half fabricates an explanation, running mental models of the last few minutes in reverse then forward again. They oscillate with increasing detail each round until he stitches something together that makes sense.

He’s in San Francisco.

No he isn’t.

He’s in Oakland.

He’s fainted.

No he hasn’t.

He has, improbably, fallen asleep on the hardwood floor.

Something is wrong with Newton, because he’s atop the coffee table, looking only semiconscious.

Hermann puts this information together with the fading ache in his ribs and shoulder and comes to the conclusion that Newton stepped on him, likely because Hermann is lying on the floor. 

Somehow this had resulted in Newton falling into the coffee table. Because yes, of course it had.

“Seriously.” Newton interrupts Hermann’s oscillating thought models as he consolidates his askew limbs into a semi-fetal curl on the coffee table. “Seriously?”

“Good morning.” Hermann doesn’t bother to sit, already hopeless about the coming day as more details of the previous one come back to him. His throat is intolerably sore from the hours of reading he’d done the night before.

“I don’t—” Newton slurs. “Why are you on the floor?”

Newton is not a morning person.

Hermann is not a morning person either, but at least he doesn’t lose fifty IQ points before noon.

“I frequently sleep on the floor,” Hermann says.

“Lies. Hermann. I have your brain in my brain,” Newton replies, with long-suffering petulance.

“Then use it.” Hermann stares at the lines and planes of the walls and ceiling.

“I stepped on your sternum. A little bit. Possibly.” Newton sounds aggrieved, even though Hermann is, unarguably, the injured party.

Probably.

Hermann comes up on one elbow in the space between the table and the couch. The other man is curled atop the surprisingly sturdy coffee table, his forehead pressed against the dark wood of its surface. It’s hard to be certain where his gaze is directed because he’s still wearing Hermann’s sunglasses. He has both hands clasped around his shin.

“I presume you’ve broken your leg?” Hermann inquires politely.

“Um, no.” Newton shifts to look at Hermann, much good may it do him with shades rather than corrective lenses. “My bones are super dense. At least, I’ve always pictured them that way? Meh. They’re probably of disappointingly average density. Also. Hey. I’m fine. I’m a peak evolutionary specimen. If I could pick the most evolutionarily fit human as a representative of our entire species, I’d choose Mako, because duh, but I’m at least the upper decile, okay? I’m fine. I’m scrappy. Scrappy. You’re less scrappy. I probably broke all your ribs.”

Hermann gingerly presses on his chest, but his bones seem to be intact. “I don’t think you did,” he replies. “Miraculously.”

His esteemed colleague pantomimes the waving of a small flag for no reason Hermann can discern. He then says, “Yay,” with an aridity Hermann finds paradoxically winsome.

Hermann clears his throat. “Try not to step on me in the future?”

“Well, try not to sleep so stealthily. On the floor. Like a creeper.”

Hermann sighs aggressively and glares at Newton.

“Seriously though.” Newton seems to be trying to merge with the coffee table. “You were on the floor because why, exactly?”

Because I don’t want to find out whether or not insomnia is lethal by watching you push the borders of human wakefulness, if that’s all right with you, Dr. Geiszler.

“I’m not going to die,” Newton says, his response timed so perfectly to Hermann’s unarticulated thought that Hermann finds it difficult to hang onto his skepticism regarding a real-time cognitive connection.

DESIST, Hermann mentally screams at maximum volume.

Newton doesn’t so much as twitch, but he does continue with, “Are you internally screaming right now, dude? I’m sorry I stepped on you. It didn’t turn out that well for me either, y’know. Take my credit card and buy yourself a compensatory present. Like maybe a hot date with a hypothetical physician re: your hypothetical cracked ribs?”

“My ribs are fine.” Hermann sits and rubs his rib cage, feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally wretched.

“On the plus side, I’ve discovered our coffee table to be unexpectedly sturdy.” Newton raps its surface half-heartedly. “This changes my whole mental image of Amalgamated Paulerika.”

“What?” Hermann collapses against the base of the couch, still much, much too tired for any of this.

“Try reading my mind.” Newton makes a loose circle in the air with one hand. “That’s the only way you’ll ever find out.”

“I cannot read your mind,” Hermann says firmly. “Alas, I’ve known you long enough that I’m certain ‘Paulerika’ is a portmanteau of two conjectural names with which you’ve tagged the interior decorator of this particular pre-furnished apartment. You are, however, incorrect. The interior living experience at Bayside Towers was tailored by an Eco-Designer known professionally as ‘Blaze.’ He specializes in the respectful integration of humans into barely survivable regions.”

Newton tries to laugh and speak at the same time with dubious success. Hermann parses the sound he makes into something approximating: “What?”

“I have his business card.” Hermann smiles faintly. “The walls are lead-lined, the air is filtered and recirculated, and the building’s water supply is piped from an inland reservoir.”

“Um, good? That seems unnecessarily—hmm. Actually, I could see the fog being slightly radioactive as it rolls in over the bay. Maybe? It’s been a while since I’ve given a crap about the water cycle. Fog comes from where? Condensation on salt spray produced by breaking waves? What if that salt spray is radioactive? Would it be? People have looked at this, right? Like, nuclear physicists and meteorologists are teaming up and getting government grants to study this, yes? Will we get thyroid cancer from working at UC Berkeley? Common sense says ‘no’ but biology maybe says ‘maybe?’ I haven’t thought about this at all, since I don’t go outside. This building seems like overkill, though. I mean, people are walking around on the streets, Hermann, I get why this appeals to you, but it seems kind of unnecessary, probably, maybe, I’m not one hundred percent sure. The part of me that’s me and drinks tap water is rolling his eyes at you but the part of me that’s you and only drinks filtered water is internally applauding you right now. Seriously though, a guy named ‘Blaze’ designed this place?”

“Yes.” Hermann eyes Newton critically, torn between speculating about the frequency and intensity of radioactive fog, inquiring about the man’s progress in holding two simultaneous opinions, and— “What do you mean you ‘don’t go outside’?” 

“Um.” Newton lies atop their coffee table, familiar and unkempt and pathetic in Hermann’s sunglasses and his clothes from the previous day. “It’s actually an extremely complicated situation? Very difficult to describe to people who aren’t me. Yet also totally normal and not worth the calories expended by the circuitous commentary that would be required for your full comprehension.”

“I am, in part, you,” Hermann counters in dry determination.

“Ugh, I know that tone.”

“Explain.”

“I’ll explain if you make me coffee. With caffeine, I can’t talk to you like this, you’re an order of magnitude more crafty than me at baseline and three orders of magnitude more crafty than me within three hours of when I wake up.”

“No caffeine,” Hermann says. “Explain.”

“Oh sure. Sure, Newton, explain. Just ‘explain’.”

Hermann sighs.

“I’ll explain when you explain the hunting thing to me,” Newton says.

Hermann looks away as all the despair of the previous day rises from compressed places in his mind and settles over everything in a thick and toxic cognitive fog.

“Yeah, okay, that was defense as offense, I’m a jerk—”

“Shut up,” Hermann snaps.

Newton reaches over and makes a halfhearted attempt to fix Hermann’s hair.

“This,” Hermann says, shoving Newton’s hand away, “is my hair, Newton. I realize it’s confusing for us both but please try to keep track of this much at least?”

“I have a proprietary interest in your hair,” Newton gestures at Hermann’s head, clipping Hermann’s temple in the process, “but I can separate it from my own, thanks,” he finishes, shoving his own hair into total disarray. “Spatially separate. Attached to different heads. Governed by different organizing principles and life philosophies. I get it, dude.”

Hermann sighs. “Did you break anything when you tripped over me? Your skull, for example?”

“No,” Newton says. “For the eighth time. Do you think my answer will change if you keep asking?”

“Are you certain?”

“I’m sure I’m bleeding into my skin in various places, but I don’t think I’ve had a massive structural failure.”

“Good.” Hermann stares at an unadorned wall.

“Let’s fast-forward to six months from now,” Newton whispers. “What do you say?” 

“I’d be amenable to that.” Hermann doesn’t look at him.

“In other, totally unrelated news, thanks for reading me to sleep like the super badass K-science Division Chiefs we are. Or were. My point is we’re very secure in our intellectual prowess and that’s why we can do this kind of thing without it being at all weird. We’re excessively badass. We should watch sports. Do they even have sports anymore? Are sporting matches of various types part of the post-apocalyptic human cultural zeitgeist? Like, does tennis exist still? We should find out. Tennis is maybe not the most macho. Football? I feel like we’re baseball people, if anything. Polo? With horses? Water polo? Or maybe like, figure skating? I like playing racquetball but not watching it, really. Actually, as a general rule, sports are boring and don’t equate to badassery. Discuss.”

“I think you need more sleep.” Hermann finds it physically painful to utter such a gross understatement.

“What time is it?” Newton asks in the unmistakable cadence used by The Spin Doctors in their musical piece of the same name.

Hermann is extremely tempted to respond with, “Four thirty” in lyrical capitulation.

But it is not four thirty, and he humors Newton too much as a general rule.

He pulls out his phone to confirm the time. “It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“How long do you think I slept?” Newton asks.

Hermann spends a moment trying to estimate, subtracting the periods of semi-lucid wakefulness and the two episodes of epistaxis from the total to come up with an approximate number. “Six hours,” he decides, “with the caveat that it was poor quality sleep.”

“Meh,” Newton says. “That’s more than enough to get by on. Speaking of things that are totally under control and not wrong with me, don’t turn around, by the way.”

Hermann immediately twists, eyeing the moderately bloody towel laid out over the couch. This isn’t news to him. He was awake for most of the bleeding the previous night, even if Newton doesn’t clearly remember it.

“I said do not turn around, Hermann. Not.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Hermann replies, unperturbed.

“Oh. Well, good? Wait. Not good. Are you getting catastrophic nosebleeds?”

“Catastrophic?” Hermann echoes. “No.”

“Me neither,” Newton says.

Hermann has his suspicions on that front, but he says nothing, balanced between confrontation and compassion. This dichotomy is the only thing in his mind that feels familiar to him. No resolution is forthcoming, so he gets up and walks away from this mental stalemate just as he’s walked away from so many others. He leaves Newton curled atop their coffee table like the entirely appealing wastrel he is and hopefully will always be.

Hermann is personally offended that, as he’s brushing his teeth in an immaculate, white-tiled bathroom, Is this it? by The Strokes begins to play on repeat in his head. 

He chalks this up to the long list of things that can be classified as “Newton’s fault.” 

In front of a light-lined mirror, Hermann weathers the cognitive crush of failure and culpability and fear. All the limits he’d chalked around the foreign places in his thoughts hadn’t stopped him from staring down his colleague like a thing to be torn apart.

He needs to get out of this apartment.

For a time.

A short time.

So he brushes his teeth, he changes his clothes, he fixes his hair, he takes an aspirin in the hope of headache aversion, and then reenters the living room. 

Newton has relocated from the coffee table to the kitchen, where he contemplates the contents of their pantry with his head cocked and his glasses in place. His fingers curl around his sleeves, tugging them down in a new and troubling habit that Hermann, in this otherwise unremarkable instant, abruptly understands.

He cannot bear to see his skin.

It’s a hypothesis his brain upgrades straight to working model. He’s certain he’s right. All he needs is a timetable.

Hermann stares at Newton, running his memory backwards, scanning through all that had happened, trying to remember the last time the other man had rolled up his sleeves.

He’d seen the tattoos after the man’s MRI at the PPDC, when he’d exchanged his clothes for scrubs. He’d seen them in their San Francisco hotel room when Hermann had divested his semi-conscious colleague of everything he was wearing except his boxers and undershirt. 

He hasn’t seen them since. 

Not one time. 

Newton’s tattoos are a subject on which Hermann has spent a good deal of speculative cognitive currency.

He has called them shortsighted, misguided, unwise, the trappings of a kaiju groupie writ large and permanent across the man’s skin. He has called them displaced fear twisted into inked bravado. He has called them a decade of horrified fascination with alien monstrosities rewrought as awed regard. He has called them a tapestry and tally of an evolutionary arms race in which brains are pitted against mindless brawn. He has called them a litmus test in acid green to which Dr. Geiszler has a habit of subjecting everyone he meets. He has called them a misguided romanticizing of an alien biology. He has called them an anti-establishment semiotic manifesto. He has called them an artful slice through society’s penchant for stereotypic labeling. He has called them a confusing species-on-species scorecard cum epitaph. He has called them a living memorial to the most impressive predators ever encountered by man. He has called them an outlet for an irrepressible artistic impulse. He has called them an exercise in spite leveled at a future failure. But now—

Something has transmogrified his colleague’s body art from atypical armor into incessant psychological assault. 

I told you, he has the urge to scream at Newton, who is adjusting his glasses in blithe unawareness of Hermann’s self-righteous and complete sympathy. Did I not tell you it was a mistake?

“You bought six boxes of Raisin Bran?” Newton scrubs a hand through unruly hair. “Were they on sale? I hate you.”

“I’m going out,” Hermann snarls.

Newton looks at him, startled. 

Hermann turns away.

“I don’t mind Raisin Bran?” Newton says. “Raisin Bran is fine?”

“Good.” Hermann opens the closet and wrenches his coat off its hanger. “Enjoy.” 

“I—um, full disclosure, don’t actually hate you?” Newton follows him to the door, one hand on the wall. “Don’t spread it around, though. I have a rep to maintain.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, clipped, collecting his cane from where he’d left it, leaning against the wall. “I’m aware.”

“Okay, so, you’re outrageously pissed at me,” Newton says. “And yes, I commend your emotional choices, because enumerating retrograde-style from right now: I was a jerk about the cereal; I bled all over a towel that’s probably new because last time I checked we had no towels; I failed to be adequately appreciative that you read to me for hours and hours so I can stay current with science and not because I needed a basic science bedtime story, let’s keep the record clear on that one; I kind of didn’t mention the not-sleeping thing until it had been a fait accompli for approximately ninety-six hours—”

“I’m not ‘pissed at you’,” Hermann says, so overwrought that he can barely speak, but needing to put a stop to this list of things that Newton seems to think are his fault. 

“Whoa,” Newton says, both hands outstretched. “Just, um, chill, would you please?”

Hermann makes a strangled sound; he’s not certain how that happens.

“Okay, not the best choice of words on my part, granted, but—” Newton begins.

Hermann doesn’t hear the rest, because he’s through the door and slamming it in Newton’s face for the sake of his own sanity. 

For a brief interval he stands frozen in the hall, picturing Newton staring at the opposite side of the door, confused and caffeine-less, holding whole swaths of Hermann’s mind hostage in a blameless multiplicity of ways.

Hermann turns, proceeds down the hall, descends in the elevator, and breaks out into crisp maritime air beneath a pale sky.

Already he feels better. Autonomous. Independent. Part of no cognitive collective.

Hermann leans on his cane as he makes his way down a hill. He’s heading toward the bay, passing through streets that feel empty after the recent crowds and clamor of Hong Kong. He comes to the edge of the Habitable Zone, which extends nearly to the water. He stops in front of a sign that reads “Radiation readings exceed background levels beyond this border.”

He sighs. 

The three nuclear devices deployed against Trespasser had been detonated in the northernmost reaches of the bay. Despite heroic decontamination efforts, radioactive material had diffused southward, exposing the entire body of water. As Hermann understands it, filtration, sequestration, and storage remain the central tenets of the ongoing cleanup, but such efforts only get a society so far when faced with the fact that there is no minimum biologically safe dose of radiation.

He probably shouldn’t be standing here.

Nevertheless, something appeals to him about Oblivion Bay, slow and constant source of leaching mutagens that it is. It suits the cast of his current mood. 

In the distance, barely visible through the haze, he can make out the dark, linear stretch of the Wall of Life that fences the bay away from the ocean beyond. 

He hasn’t come here for the Wall, or for the water. 

He’s come for the gulls.

To watch them.

He casts his eyes skyward, following their curving flight paths above the dark water, trying to call forth something horrendous and predatory from the repressed depths of his mind. 

Nothing happens.

They’re gulls, for god’s sake; he has no urge to chase them.

Hermann’s expression cracks and reforms, but only in despair, and not in any instinct of predation.

Is this a manifestation of what Newton had meant when he’d mentioned “evil,” days ago? The unwanted external influence, worming its way into the mind, cleaving a sense of self that should be whole, bringing it partially into accord with all it had ever opposed?

Insofar as a thing is evil to us it is contrary to us, his brain offers.

Please, he says in response, turn on your instincts of predation so I may know I’m capable of turning them off. 

Yesterday, in the subterranean reaches of his mind, beneath the quiet, continuous reading of the latest neuroscience to his half-delirious colleague, he’d intended to come here. To look at the gulls. To call up everything his brain is actively burying and to practice snapping in and out of lateral pathways.

But he can’t do it.

Hermann Gottlieb cannot stand on a pier, stare at seagulls, and force himself to want to eat them for the purpose of immediately dissuading himself about his taste for those selfsame seagulls.

This will never work for him—he can’t do what Newton has done and is doing. He can’t incorporate catastrophic cognitive disruption into a reforged sense of self. There are two people and a collective consciousness in his head, in his head, where there should be only Hermann Gottlieb. 

His brain isn’t cooperating. It can hollow out idiocy at a distance of one hundred meters and is therefore unwilling to call up any predation instincts when presented with seagulls. Of course, it’s willing to back his already stressed and deeply troubled colleague cum roommate cum drift partner into a corner in a dimly lit kitchen and terrify him for no other reason than that he’d happened to combine visible anxiety with a physical retreat.

It had been that unsteady, backward step that had initiated the entire unfortunate episode. 

There’d been something unfit, something prey-like, something unconsciously vulnerable about the way the man had moved that had, instead of triggering sympathy, triggered something else.

His memory of the darkened kitchen is painfully sharp, painfully full of a need to drive forward, his muscles tensing, his hands open, his fingers arced as if they ended in claws rather than in nails.

That cannot happen again.

Ever.

Never ever again.

Not even one time.

He has no idea what might have happened had Newton not, with typical insight, determined what was happening and corrected Hermann’s disastrous trajectory by aggressively shouting directly in his face. Would Hermann have stayed locked in predatory consideration? Would he have, at some point, launched himself at Newton and attacked him? Would he have snapped out of it on his own?

He doesn’t know.

There’s something too stringent about the control Hermann exerts over his own mind. Something he will obey but other cognitive parties won’t. Had he been incorrect about the optimal strategy for dealing with his current set of mental challenges? Is the driving of parts of his consciousness into neural subjugation so unremitting that they have no choice but to build up pressure behind the mental walls he’s been bricking until they explode outward, burying his sense of self for intervals until Newton, of all people, pulls him free of the ensuing mental debris?

How is that Newton manages to be only tormented by that which is in his head and not occasionally possessed by it?

It doesn’t seem fair.

It certainly is not.

Hermann pictures the other man managing his consciousness like a sound engineer, never isolating any one line, fading himself and his co-worker and a screaming, rage-filled, alien consciousness up and down in the mix of his thoughts, never losing any through-line, until, when his system fails, it fails in the distorted scream of audio feedback, all through-lines fluxing at once into a whiteout of panic.

Hermann wraps a hand around the cool metal of the fence that separates him from the no-man’s land of a glacis that descends for thirty meters to the edge of the dark water.

Should he change his cognitive strategy?

Should he attempt to be more like Newton—with his looser control, his bottom-up rather than top-down organization? Could he be more like Newton? He’s not sure that even now, even post-drifting, he understands exactly how the other man’s mind manages to work, but Hermann has the wits to see it’s more organized than it might externally appear. He won’t get the same effect simply by loosening the constraints of his own self-discipline. All he’ll get will be shoddy results.

Most likely.

But his current strategy isn’t working either. He can’t spend his life in fear of turning into Newton or attacking a passing child in a fit of blind and predatory instinct.

He can’t.

He won’t.

He absolutely refuses to admit the possibility of any such outcome.

Hermann takes a shallow breath and expels it in a short exhale.

It is certainly a mistake to work against his own strengths, which lie in analysis and organization.

He will think his way out of his current problems.

Such a strategy has never failed him.

He ought to take a step back and reconsider his previous two weeks as a whole. He has been distracted by an array of terrifying problems: a shortened attention span that was certainly Newton’s fault, bureaucratic difficulties, a job search, the brief but torturous belief that the PPDC had ruined his colleague’s brain, finding an apartment that was not dangerously radioactive, insomnia, headaches, intermittent episodes of epistaxis, nausea induced by cognitive dissonance, the concern that his colleague was on the verge of a psychotic break secondary to sleeplessness, the concern that he himself could get lost in the neural pathways in his head that weren’t his own—

Yes.

He’s had many distractions.

This is no excuse for not laying things out in an organized manner. Now, here, on the edge of this radioactive bay, seems as good a place and time as any other, given that the events of the previous afternoon had provided him with an array of new information to plug into his working model regarding what has happened, what’s currently happening, and what will happen.

After organizing his thoughts, he comes up with three outstanding questions. One—what happened to Newton in those three days they’d been separated? Two—is real-time cognitive influence a true post-drift phenomenon and, if so, how might it be demonstrated? Three—what is the best method to prevent the unwanted appearance of Geiszlerian or kaijuesque impulses in the brain of Dr. Hermann Gottlieb?

Hermann shifts his hand on the rail.

Question one is the question he least wants to consider. As the days pass, he feels himself circling an answer he’d initially rejected because of how openly ludicrous it was, how stupid it would have been to attempt. But Newton’s comments of the previous evening, while falling far, far short of confirming anything, had suggested exactly what Hermann has been trying not to believe. 

A third Drift.

With fragments of alien tissue that were a portal to precisely nowhere. A connection to nothing rational, nothing but disembodied misery. 

Even now, even faced with building evidence that Newton drifted for a third time, he still can’t quite believe it. He can’t believe Newton would have agreed, he can’t believe anyone would have asked it of him, he can’t believe such a thing would have been possible; it had only worked the first time because the man had jacked himself into a terminal that shouldn’t have gone anywhere, but had turned out to be a signal transducer for thoughtwaves from the anteverse. In the absence of an open connection to a collective consciousness, there should have been nothing but dead static. Neuronal noise. Cognitive chaos.

It is a miracle the man is neither dead nor floridly psychotic.

Hermann hasn’t contacted anyone at the PPDC since he was cleared of charges of abduction and breach of contract. He has no desire to reopen lines of communication, but the PPDC has sent Dr. McClure none of the medical records she requested after their first meeting.

It is time to take some action.

Some action that does not involve prying the information out of Newton.

Hermann can’t see such an attempt ending well. He has no idea what the man’s limits might be, but he has no desire to map their borders in any kind of empirical fashion.

Newton will tell Hermann what he wishes him to know.

Eventually.

With some coaxing.

Question two, the issue of whether real-time cognitive influence is a legitimate post-drift phenomenon, is not something he’d spent much time worrying about. He’s dubious about the mechanistic underpinnings of—

Hermann lifts his hand from the rail, sweeping it up in a wave of helpless skepticism, which he realizes is a strange blend of his own critical thought and Newton’s propensity to punctuate his inner monologue with gesticulations.

Soon, he’ll be talking to himself.

Will that be progress, given he’s considering changing his strategy to incorporate low-level integration of all the parties taking up space in his mind?

He has no idea.

He glares at Oblivion Bay and returns to the issue at hand.

He simply cannot see how such a real-time connection might work. Newton’s half-panicked, sleep-deprived ramblings of the previous evening had seemed to favor the idea of a biological ability to transmit or receive exogenous signals and transduce them into thoughts. Hermann isn’t categorically opposed to such a possibility. Clearly his brain has the capacity to interpret kaiju-derived voltage fluctuations, but he’s quite skeptical of the ability of electromagnetic waves to penetrate the dense bone of the human skull. There could be a poorly understood quantum mechanical effect at play.

He’d like to determine that there is, in fact, a reproducible phenomenon to study before he starts theorizing about quantum phenomena on a macroscale.

That way madness lies.

He’s relatively certain they should be able to devise a system to determine whether their ability to “read” one another’s thoughts, actively and in real time, is indeed a legitimate and repeatedly observable post-drift effect. There may already be experimental systems in place to test extrasensory perception, and much though it deeply, materially shames him to look into this, he’ll do it, because he promised Newton he would and the man will be a nightmare to deal with if he believes he’s being unfairly dismissed. Alas, Newton now has the moral high-ground when it comes to outrageous conjectural thinking, and will. Forever. To Hermann’s perpetual shock, gratitude, and regret.

Fine.

He will participate in testing Newton’s hypothesis.

That should cheer the man up.

Self-experimentation always does.

Hermann sighs.

This brings him to question three: how he should best prevent the unwanted appearance of Geiszlerian or kaijuesque impulses in his own brain. Immediately post-drifting, he had feared subtle foreign influence, something he might not recognize, something that would not feel foreign, something that would appear to come from inside himself but would actually come from an alien source.

While such a concern still cannot be ruled out, the true problem is more obvious in character than Hermann had been preparing himself for. Two weeks of insomnia and distracted, stress-filled attempts at exerting mental discipline have left him with stray tendencies he can identify as externally-derived but that have the unfortunate habit of rocketing to the fore of his consciousness and suppressing that which should rightfully be occupying prefrontal cortex space.

He had not anticipated this.

It hadn’t been immediately apparent, but it had appeared in the relative short term. Is it a consequence of sleeping, of memory integration, of synaptic plasticity at work? Is it a phenomenon arising purely from his own mind, or, if Newton is correct in his theory that they may be susceptible to external influence from one another and the kaiju anteverse, is it something else? Are those lateral snaps into thought-patterns not his own a consequence of external thought pressure?

He sounds ridiculous.

Then again, drifting with dead, formaldehyde-fixed (or fetal) tissue had also sounded ridiculous. He’d been certain no one would survive such an attempt.

He—

He is certain—

He is certain he made it out of the Drift.

Isn’t he?

Of course he is.

Of course he is.

He’s familiar with reality and he’s familiar with the hyper-realistic overwhelming onslaught of the Drift, and he can tell them apart.

He flicks a nail against the metal rail and is rewarded with a hollow tone and a jolt of pain in his nail bed.

If he can’t trust the observable universe, there’s nothing left to trust and he should surrender himself to existential nihilism.

He winces at this unlooked-for insight into Newton’s current epistemological obsession with rationalism as a discipline.

Hermann doesn’t know if he should change his strategy of attempting to identify, isolate, and repress the proclivities, the desires, that come from Newton and from the remnants of a predatory pack of alien monsters or if he should let some of them out where he can keep them under the lens of the continual observation of his conscious mind.

He doesn’t particularly care for this as an option.

Hermann doesn’t like many of his options at present.

He has no desire to allow additional Geiszlerian proclivities into his thoughts and behaviors.

He has even less desire to adopt the cognitive characteristics of a voraciously destructive biological war machine.

But.

Both options are better than unpredictably terrorizing his already traumatized roommate or attacking the undergraduates he’ll shortly be intimidating with algebraic topology.

Fine.

He turns away from the dark water of the bay and walks back toward the apartment, trying to see the streets with their steep grades and clustered buildings, the people, the pale sky, and the humidity-blurred air in a controlled triplicate—desolate, boring, packed with underutilized resources in the hands of a stupid, backward species that builds structures beneath the haze of their own carbon waste.

It takes him twenty minutes, but he finally pulls forward an impulse to stand and watch the silhouette of a spandexed jogger and his dog with a shadow of whatever it was that had rocketed to the fore of his mind in a dim kitchen the previous day.

Afterwards, he feels sick and faint and crushed under the prospect of spending his life in triplicated misery.

It’s not that bad, his brain offers, impersonating Newton.

Hermann shakes his head in bleak reply. He stops with that, primarily because he’s sure nothing good can come of allowing his mind to wholly personify alternate neural pathways. 

He’s trying not to fracture his consciousness, thank you.

He intends to limp up and down steep streets a few times before returning to the apartment, but he stops, distracted, in front of a store window hung with an array of musical instruments, many of which Newton plays with varying degrees of proficiency. Overlaid above the displayed guitars and banjos and mandolins, he sees his own reflection, ghost-like in the glass storefront. 

It looks familiar, but not familiar enough. 

Hermann is curious and possessed of the strange freedom from self-censure that he’s only ever experienced at the absolute nadir of personal misery.

He enters the store with the quiet chime of bells. It smells of wood warmed by the sun and old sheet music, printed on real paper. There is a bookshelf crammed with vinyl albums on the back wall, which he interprets as “a good sign” with an enthusiastic hauteur so intense it feels unmistakably voyeuristic. 

He nearly loses the tenuous grip he has on his selfhood in this surge of energy that’s not his own—but he hangs on, not moving, mastering the impulse to touch everything until the desire dissipates, the edge is filed off the intensity of his thoughts, and he’s left standing just inside the door, one hand over his chest.

He feels a surge of triumph that carries a predatory edge and a Geiszlerian arrogance.

Hermann walks into the store, past the racks of sheet music, past the guitars he has no plans to touch. His self-control only goes so far and he can see the likely limits of his grip on this triplicated worldview. 

He stops when he reaches the back wall, where an electric keyboard is connected to a speaker system. 

He turns the volume down, glances around the mostly empty store, then sits on the dark bench.

Just the left hand. 

He touches the keys, presses one down, then picks out the melodic line of Syncope in flawless transposition. 

It is a fascinating experience. He has the neural pathways of a talented musician but the muscle memory of someone who’s never played the piano and who’d given up the violin for mathematics circa 2003. He’s not terrible, but he’s by no means excellent either. 

It would take him almost no time at all to become excellent. 

“Nice,” someone says from behind him. “The Supercos, right?”

Hermann turns to see a young man with multiple facial piercings and full tattoo sleeves standing behind him. “Yes,” Hermann replies stiffly. “You’re familiar?”

“Who isn’t?” the teenager asks.

“Rrreally,” Hermann leans into a Geiszlerian guttural ‘r’ denoting extreme interest of a dubiously appropriate character before reasserting his own personality in reactive anxiety. “But they’re an obscure band in an unpopular genre,” Hermann finishes, full of contingency. 

“Yeah, they were,” the employee says, “until their frontman quit music for science and low-key saved the world. Have you been living under a rock, or what?”

“Ah,” Hermann says, his uncertainty transitioning to understated alarm, but at what, specifically, he can’t say. 

He needs to pay more attention to the cultural zeitgeist.

“Word on the street is that the guy might be local now,” the young man continues.

“How interesting.” Hermann gets to his feet.

“We have some of their stuff, if you’re into it.” The teenaged employee pushes dark hair out of dark eyes. “On whatever your preferred media is. It’s hard to keep in stock, but their independent label just issued a re-release—“

What? Those bastards, why wasn’t I consulted, he almost snaps. But, thankfully, he doesn’t. He instead says, “No. Thank you, but no.”

“You look familiar to me.” The child eyes him with impertinent speculation. “Are you anyone cool?”

“No,” Hermann says, quite truthfully, backing away. “I’m no one ‘cool’. I really must be going.”

He makes it back out onto the sidewalk without being further detained by the curious teenager. He signals for a driverless cab in a blind desire to get off the streets. He doesn’t want to be recognized, he doesn’t want to talk to anyone, he doesn’t want to steal someone else’s musical genius, doesn’t want to look at joggers like the breakfast he didn’t have, doesn’t want any of it.

“Please state your destination,” the cab requests with mechanical pleasantness when he slides into the back seat.

Of course, he has no destination.

None at all.

He wants to work, but his onboarding hasn’t been completed at UC Berkeley; he wants to code, but there are no more Jaegers; he wants to do mathematics; he wants to design simulations for closing an already closed Breach; he wants to drive himself somewhere; he wants to do something that Newton or alien hive minds have no interest in.

He wants, as he has always wanted, to pilot a plane off the edge of the world.

“I need a car,” he confesses to the cab in waspish discontent.

An array of nearby car dealerships spring up on the touchscreen display built into the cab.

He sighs.

He can’t simply go purchase a car.

Can he?

Why not? everyone in his head asks.

Well, perhaps he can.

He studies the array of options before him and selects one, trying to make it his choice alone, trying to make a decision only as Hermann Gottlieb, but aware he can never truly know if he’s successful. Will he look back on his snap decision to purchase a sports car from Stuttgart as an injudicious impulse for which Newton should be blamed, or as his own confused proclivities tearing their way out of the snarled mess of his conscious experience?

Best not to overthink it, his brain advises, sounding like Newton in an incendiary mood.

The cab pulls away from the curb.

Eight hours after he’d left, now possessing an ostentatious car that he cannot justify purchasing and a bag of fish he also cannot justify, Hermann returns to the apartment in a state of significant trepidation.

Partially, his dread is derived from guilt, because he had uncharacteristically slammed the door in Newton’s face that morning in flagrant indulgence of his own distress. Partially, his dread is derived from his perpetual and mostly unjustified fear that any time he returns to their apartment he’ll find Newton seizing, unconscious, or dead on the floor.

This is a banner day for irrationality on the part of Hermann Gottlieb, Ph.D.

He makes an effort not to visibly wince as he opens the door.

Newton, fortunately, is not on the floor. He is, in fact, sitting at their kitchen table, recently showered, wearing jeans and a green sweater over a white dress shirt, reading about rationalism.

He glances up coolly when Hermann walks in, then returns to his reading without saying anything, readjusting his glasses with his right hand, turning a page with his left.

Hermann feels somewhat at a loss.

Likely because he is somewhat at a loss. 

Hermann supposes he deserves whatever it is that this is—the outrageously superior example of Newton’s most attractive brand of arrogance filtered through a new lens of self-containment for which Hermann credits his own influence. It’s a magnificent thing to behold and may actually be that which, in the end, drives Hermann to a point incompatible with rational thought. 

I am awesome, his brain says, sounding like Newton confusingly admiring himself from within the confines of Hermann’s own head.

Dr. Gottlieb cannot take much more of this.

He leans back against the door, trying not to feel horribly awkward, post impulse car-buying and impulse fish-buying, a confused mess of a mathematician with closet musical interests, a skull too small for all its tenants, and a coat too large for his frame. 

“You didn’t take your phone.” Newton flexes a bare foot against the rung of his chair.

“I know,” Hermann says. “I bought a car.”

That earns him a brief glance punctuated by an atypically uncommunicative eyebrow lift. “Did you.”

This is an interpersonal catastrophe. Newton is absolutely not allowed to wear sweaters, read rationalism, and be restrained in glorious simultaneity; it is just unfair. 

“I bought you some fish,” Hermann offers.

Newton looks up.

Hermann displays his bag of goldfish.

Newton frowns. “Did you also happen to buy me a fish tank?”

“No,” Hermann admits. “That was an oversight on my part. Apologies.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” Newton looks back at his book. “Apologize to Fire Truck.”

Hermann looks skeptically at Newton and then at the four goldfish in the plastic bag he holds. Not one of them looks deserving of such a name. “You’re christening one of them Fire Truck?”

“Fire Truck, Descartes, Group Theory, and Tiffany,” Newton says. 

Hermann looks at the ceiling, appealing to the heavens for patience and profusely thanking them for returning his roommate to baseline. 

“Do NOT roll your eyes at me. What would you name them? Fish One through Four?”

“No,” Hermann says defensively. He pushes away from the door and approaches Newton. He places the bag of fish directly over the man’s English translation of La Géométrie, by René Descartes. 

“Uh huh.” Newton lifts the water-and-fish-filled plastic bag gently off his book. “And no fish on Descartes. Have some respect, Hermann, god. Some basic decency. Who are you even?”

“As to that,” Hermann says, sliding out of his coat, “I’m sure I don’t know.”

Newton says nothing. 

As Hermann hangs his coat in the closet, he’s certain that if he were to turn around, he’d find the other man giving him an unforgivably incisive look. 

He straightens the seams of his hanging coat, and doesn’t turn.

“I’d introduce a theme to my naming system, rather than a random collection of a class of vehicle, a philosopher, a branch of mathematics, and an otherwise traditional name that seems particularly unfishlike.” He takes his time in closing the closet door. 

“How is ‘Tiffany’ unfishlike?” Newton asks. “What’s a fish-like name?”

“Marina?” Hermann suggests, returning to the table.

“Not bad.” Newton gets to his feet with the unsteady stiffness he’s been unable to shake for weeks. “If you buy another fish, you can name her Marina. Unfortunately, this little lady is already named Tiffany. There’s too much identity confusion going around without bringing our fish into it.”

“True,” Hermann says. “Exquisitely true.”

“Excruciatingly true.” Newton, while still wry, is beginning to thaw into a tone less Gottliebian and more Geiszlerian. “Seriously, how do you go to a fish store and forget to buy something to put them in?”

“It’s been a difficult day,” Hermann confesses.

“Oh I get that,” Newton says, opening cabinets. “Do I ever.”  He pulls out a mixing bowl, fills it with water, and submerges the plastic bag of fish to thermally equilibrate.

“You’re going to put fish in a mixing bowl?” Hermann asks.

“Where else am I going to put them, Hermann? You haven’t left me with a whole lot of choices, here. We’ve got to dechlorinate this water somehow. Also, did you seriously buy a car?” Newton now carries only a trace of the strange reserve he’d displayed when Hermann walked through the door. 

“We don’t have to dechlorinate the water,” Hermann informs him, “because the building’s water supply has a carbon-filter dechlorination system built into it. And yes, I did buy a car.”

Newton eyes the tap with an expression both impressed and skeptical. “You realize it’s weirdly badass to just stroll out and buy a car off the cuff, right? Like, most people do angsty soul-searching first. And research. Though, I guess you’re in more than decent financial shape, so—“ Newton opens a hand and shrugs. “Good job? Way to be decisive? What kind of car?” He opens the fridge and begins inspecting its interior water filtration system.

Hermann would really rather not say at the present moment. If he plays his cards right, he won’t have to.

“A manual transmission. Don’t put the fish in four-degree water, Newton.”

“Oh, a manual transmission. How predictably pretentious,” the other man replies. “Also? I’m not going to kill the fish. I’m not that cognitively impaired. I’ve never killed anything I—”

Newton breaks off, staring into the interior of their refrigerator.

“Newton,” Hermann says quietly.

“—was trying to keep alive,” the other man finishes.

“You,” Hermann continues, stepping into a flow of thoughts not his own, “deserve an honorary degree in botany for all the plants you’ve rescued from serial neglect.”

“I left them,” Newton murmurs, still staring, unseeing, at the interior of the fridge.

The plants? Hermann doesn’t ask. Instead he steps to Newton’s shoulder and forcibly closes the refrigerator door.

“Contact Mr. Choi.” Hermann keeps his tone brisk enough to snap them out of morbid double-speak. “He’s the only person to ever take umbrage with your botanical kleptomania.”

“I take umbrage with your use of the word ‘kleptomania’. It was always rescue, never thievery,” Newton regains some of his conversational poise. “I do not kill plants. Mako kills plants. The Jaeger techs kill plants. Dr. L murdered swaths of plants. You kill plants.” Newton picks up the fish, studying them under the kitchen lights. “I am so sorry, guys. This is a terrible showing on our parts, but I want you to know that this bowl-less, gravel-less, plant-less, fish-food-less situation is one hundred percent Dr. Gottlieb’s fault and will be remedied shortly. By Dr. Gottlieb.”

In Hermann’s opinion, the fish look unperturbed. “I did buy food for them.” He pulls a small container of fish flakes out of his pants pocket.

“Well that’s something,” Newton says dryly. 

“Did you eat?” Hermann asks.

“Yes.” Newton gently replaces the fish in the bowl. “No. I thought about it. Did you?”

“No,” Hermann says.

“You don’t have to make me dinner,” Newton says. “I mean, I’m pretty clearly in the ongoing process of ruining your life on local and global levels so—” he loses steam beneath Hermann’s increasingly aggressive glare. “What I’m trying to say is that we work really well together, kind of, if one doesn’t mind the truculent ambiance generated by semi-regular shouting matches, but I’m not sure we make the best roommates. Discuss.” 

“You’re literally the stupidest person I’ve ever met.” Hermann pulls a pot out of a cabinet. “Do you want spätzle?” 

“Um,” Newton says, “you’re super German, you realize, even though you secretly wish you were British, which is, confusingly, kind of an American shtick. Anyway, I know for a fact that you have inappropriately rhapsodical thoughts about my career trajectory and facility with disparate fields, so, um, can you say something useful possibly, other than just calling me stupid, which is clearly some kind of weird compliment I don’t fully understand, because it’s so demonstrably false? It’s not nice to denigrate the intellectual capacities of your colleagues turned roommates, y’know. Also, I’m smarter than you, and everyone, including you, agrees. And yes. I would love some spätzle.”

“You are not ruining my life,” Hermann says, “so I will thank you to stop being so dramatic. I’ve spent years becoming irrationally fond of you, I’ve allowed not only you but also an alien consciousness into my brain for the purpose of saving your life, I pulled you out of a bureaucratic mess that was actively killing you, and, finally, I found you a job at an institution that will legally support you against unreasonable demands that might be made upon you in the future. Your doubts about your role in my life are insulting. You’re hardly someone I picked up off the streets or a bus passenger I’ve been forced to talk with for nine years. Yes, my recent decisions have radically altered the trajectory of my personal and professional life, but I am—“ his throat closes, briefly and inexplicably. “It was worth it.”

“Yeah,” Newton says. “I hear that. I get it. I do. World saving. Newt saving. All of that is good. But it doesn’t necessarily translate to—” he waves a hand in an expansive semi-circle to take in their apartment. The movement exposes a thin band of color at his wrist.

It’s the first sign of the other man’s tattoos that Hermann has seen in days.

“Whatever,” Newton finishes. “Making me spätzle? I’m endlessly pissing you off, Hermann. I can tell.” 

It isn’t you, Hermann wants to tell him. It’s everything you cannot articulate because it torments you so much. It’s what you’ve done to yourself. It’s what other people have done to you in search of a surrogate endpoint that might correlate with your threat to human society. It’s the parts of my mind I can’t control. It’s the part of me that might attack you for the anxiety I’m sure you’ll never shake. It’s the questions I can’t ask you, it’s the things I can’t tell you, it’s way you stand at windows and bleed there, unprovoked.

He can’t force any of this beyond the shut gate of his throat.

So instead, Hermann reaches over, grips Newton’s shirtsleeve, and yanks it down to conceal the edge of color at his wrist. “You’re terribly shortsighted when it comes to the realm of interpersonal dynamics.”

“A little bit, yeah,” Newton agrees, staring at the white cuff of his dress shirt beneath the green of his sweater.