Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 26

 “Hashtag, ‘accuracy’,” Newton whispers, like a secret shared.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 26

The Saturday afternoon sun has commenced its hours-long approach toward the Coastal Wall. Photonic rays reflect in broken brightnesses off the poisoned waters of Oblivion Bay, shrouding contaminated water with a discontinuous shimmer.

Leaning on his cane, pressing his shoulders against the expanse of unadorned wall adjacent to their apartment door, Hermann glares at the ceiling, trying to convince himself that he is above the neurochemical travesty that’s responsible for his longstanding history of social anxiety while he waits for his esteemed roommate to emerge from the bathroom—where he is, presumably, either bleeding or torturing his own hair. 

Hermann pulls his phone out of his pocket and frowns at it.

They are late.

Of course they are; Geiszlerian Chronicity tends to run fifteen to one hundred and fifty minutes behind time as measured by the rest of humanity.

Is it too much to ask that Newton, in addition to his newfound penchant for straightening items left askew, might find himself in possession of a tendency towards punctuality?

Yes. 

That is, indeed, evidently too much to ask.

Hermann sighs and glares aggressively at the linear juncture where the white, planar paint of the ceiling meets the white, planar paint of the wall.

The room, impervious to his pointless irritation, proceeds with its unthinking existence in a silent, unconscious rebuke.

Hermann has, after all, been far more fortunate than he’d dared to hope on that transpacific flight that had brought them from Hong Kong to San Francisco. They are still together. They are still alive. The breach has not reopened. No one has shown up at their doorstep to drag his colleague back to a Pan-Pacific lab. In medias res analysis hadn’t predicted an outcome as favorable as the one into which they’ve settled. Hermann has no right to be irritated, no right to be anxious, no right to be anything but grateful, even when Newton is running twenty minutes late for no reason Hermann can discern other than poor planning.

Meh, you don’t really want to go to this thing, so why are you so concerned about punctuality? his brain queries, simultaneously defending and impersonating Newton.

This will not do at all.

He will rephrase.

You would prefer to spend as little time as possible at this social engagement, therefore insisting upon punctuality serves no purpose, Hermann articulates to himself, managing to reclaim his inner monologue.

Given last weekend’s extremely unpleasant fall-out post simultaneous identity confusion, he has spent the intervening seven days working diligently to prevent a repeat occurrence. Thus far, he has been successful, primarily due to the extreme aversion he has managed to associate with Newton’s thought patterns in the wake of last week’s inter and intrapersonal trauma. 

Before he can reflect too extensively on strategies to avoid Geiszlerian thought patterns during the coming few hours, Newton finally emerges from the bathroom with his hair in a state of notable disarray.

“You’re wearing that?” Hermann asks, hoping for a verbal negation despite all evidence to the contrary.

Newton arranges his eyebrows in a way that seems to convey good-natured contempt for Hermann’s aesthetic assessment of his absurdly pretentious outfit, which consists of a black neohipster jacket with much too much superfluous detailing; a blazingly white dress shirt; a pointlessly narrow tie that seems to subvert the entire message that a tie generally sends; inappropriately tight black jeans; and purposeless fingerless gloves. The man has yet to don the boots that he purchased a decade and a half ago and has been reincarnating ever since, courtesy of 3D printing. 

“Well I can’t exactly wear a sweater, dude, everyone’s confusing preferences aside. We can’t dress alike, okay. Not in public. Ideally not in private either, but especially not at an awkward science—party. Gathering. Thing. Awkwardness-fest. What is this even. Tell me there will be alcohol. I cannot talk to mathematicians without alcohol. With physicists it’s hit or miss, but mathematicians. No. Okay, that’s a lie; I can, I just prefer to not do it. This is a rule that I made, for myself, years ago, when I was fourteen and got drunk for the first time ever at a Keystone meeting in Zurich during the poster session because the bartenders were neither carding nor thinking critically. Never mix yourself, by which I mean myself, with one hundred percent scientists and zero percent alcohol. Really, it’s more of a rule for poster sessions. Science and alcohol, they just mesh, dude.” He interlaces his fingers and then pulls his hands apart, palms open, as if he’s displaying a monopoly on rational thought that only he can see. 

Hermann can recall the meeting to which the man is alluding; can still recall being treated like an unaccompanied minor by every cellular biologist he encountered; can remember wishing to be taller with a useless, childish passion; can remember finally persuading his way into acquiring himself some alcohol; can remember possessing enough pre-frontal cortex development to drink at a rate that minimized the risk of poisoning his own nervous system; can remember loathing the taste of the stuff; can remember making an effort to feel rebellious and powerful in his rebellion in the context of nominally illicit wine, because wine was in no way rock staresque or even rockstarish; he had simply been looking for a way to present himself in a way that was incrementally less childish. Hermann can recall all of that, but what he cannot remember, what he cannot quite sort out, was whether his first drink had been an empirical, lonely, and semi-responsible glass of wine in Zurich at a Keystone meeting or whether it had been later, at seventeen, alone and outside and in the cold, under the crisp spread of Bavarian stars.

“There is no need to remind me of your ivory-tower centered exploits, Newton, I assure you I am all too familiar with literally all of them,” Hermann says, struggling with a confusing streak of melancholic fondness for an admixed set of memories that all feel like his own.

“Meh,” Newton replies, needlessly straightening his jacket, and checking his pockets for items unknown. “I feel like it’s less reminding and more of a one-to-one ratio of warning to rationalizing that took the form of a narcissistic confession. Also, I’m not convinced that you know what ‘Ivory Tower’ means because MIT. Is not ‘ivory tower’, dude, okay. MIT graduates destroy antiquated ivory towers with controlled demolition and build better looking eco-conscious towers out of futuristic alloys with minimal resources.”

Hermann looks at him and raises his eyebrows fractionally. “And you wonder why it is that people find you irritating,” he says.

“The central mystery of my life,” Newton replies, flashing Hermann a brief grin before dropping into a crouch to lace up his boots with a reassuring dexterity evident in the pull and cross of laces. “You’re looking atypically and aridly erudite tonight if you’ll permit the observation. I feel like the wall-leaning vibe you’ve borrowed from me and garnished with personal disdain is really working for you on pretty much every level. Now all you need is better hair and a trendier blazer and you’ll be able to see the Venn diagram labeled ‘Stylish Panache’ bisected by the line of the distant, metaphorical horizon.”

“Your metaphor is neither pertinent nor poetic,” Hermann says, resolutely not picturing a stylized circle, setting like a two-dimensional sun, half obscured behind the line separating not-sea from not-sky. 

“The thing that I can’t figure out,” Newton says, shifting his stance to switch from left boot to right boot, “is whether you were always this ridiculously transparent or whether this is a recent thing. Literally no amount of non-metaphorical metaphor insulting will conceal the fact that you made me your plus one for your awkward evening of math.”

“Yes, about that,” Hermann says, shifting his weight away from the wall and looking at down at Newton in faint apprehension. It is far, far past time that he informs Newton just how exactly it is that the Mathematics Department conceptualizes their relationship. Nevertheless, even standing on the threshold of leaving their apartment to encounter his colleagues in force, Hermann can’t quite bring himself to—

“e to the x, dy, dx, e to the x, dx,” Newton says, obliterating Hermann’s forming train of thought with MIT’s calculus cheer. “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine,”

“Will you—“ Hermann begins.

“Square root, cube root, log base e, cheers for math at MIT!” Newton finishes, theatrically rocketing to his feet. “Tell me there will be Caltech people there. At this party. Get together. Painful academic ritual. Tell me there will be, dude, just—”

“Please contain yourself,” Hermann says, feeling somewhat edgy because, in point of fact, there is a sizable Caltech contingent within the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. “You have instigated enough needless academic disputes for a lifetime.”

“Those guys think they’re so great. Caltech. Ha. Who do they think they are. Ugh Birkenstocks. Ugh long hair. Ugh West Coast. Ugh night classes. Please. Please.”

“We are on the West Coast,” Hermann says. “We have, in fact, affiliated with—” he breaks off with a loss of verbal momentum, realizing he quite agrees with Newton’s premise and is only making an argument in deference to a truculent historical tradition.

Newton looks at him in concern-tinged expectation of an unrevealed negative outcome, which is, truth be told, the second-most difficult Geiszlerian expression to encounter head-on while maintaining facial neutrality.

“Never mind,” Hermann replies. “You are, in fact, quite correct. He waves off the lights with his right hand before opening the door and stepping into the hallway, away from his colleague’s expression of anxious concern that seems to elicit nothing but pure attachment from extremely confused parts of Hermann’s brain.

“Excuse me, but I’m what?” Newton asks, following him into the hall, and checking to be sure the door locks behind them in submission to a habit that hadn’t formerly been his.

“You heard me. I’m not inclined to take an oppositional stand regarding the backhanded elitism implied by Birkenstock sandals, especially in a debate with a disingenuously dressed neohipster. I have a poor opinion of the local fashion aesthetic. I have a poor opinion of your fashion aesthetic.”

“Nice sweater,” Newton says, eyeing Hermann’s blue cardigan skeptically. “How are my wardrobe choices ‘disingenuous’? I have a rock band.” 

“You had a band that overly romanticized hydrocarbons, Newton,” Hermann says. 

“That is false,” Newton replies, offended. “I don’t think you get my band, okay, if Benzene were really just about benzene then I would have—”

“Wear a blazer,” Hermann replies, before he loses the threatening argument. “Content yourself with—”

“Look,” Newton says, with the air of a man convinced he’s about to gain the conversational upper hand, “I realize that your super-secret fashion aesthetic most closely correlates with the romantic-yet-conservative-Time-Lord-vibe that the sixteenth doctor was rocking in the third Doctor Who reboot, but I just. Can’t. Humor you. Not in this. Sweaters are one thing. Thigh-length, double-breasted, satin-lined, retrofuturistic, bastardized, forest-green pea coats are a bridge too far, man. Even I can’t pull that kind of thing off.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hermann replies. “I have never heard of a ‘pea coat’. Speak in a sensible manner, please.” 

“Shut up, you have my brain,” Newton replies good-naturedly, as they step into the elevator. 

“Touché,” Hermann replies in dignified defeat, hitting the appropriate button with his cane. 

They descend into a subterranean parking garage that smells damp and ominously maritime, as though radioactive seawater threatens somewhere beneath the lead-lined concrete that shields their feet. As they walk across damp dust with intermittent scraping sounds, Hermann feels as though he might be able to peel back the concrete and the lead to which it’s affixed in a cracking rind, using claws that he occasionally forgets are not his own. That never were. 

His mind has begun to feel like a thing that can’t be contained within the confines of his skull.

Indeed, perhaps it is not.

He shakes his head, short and sharp and subtle.

Hermann cannot peel away the foundation of this building like he’s prying up the rind of a desiccated fruit. That wasn’t him. That isn’t him. That never will be him. That’s a cognitive spandrel from a thing that’s not his species; a thing he never was and that he will never be again.

Some preternatural instinct causes him to turn his head to find his colleague giving him a veiled and knowing look.

“Creepy ocean parking garage,” Newton says in annotation, his hands in his pockets, his gait a casual insouciance that might be real and might be artificial. “This place begs to be destroyed. The words land with a not-so-strange prescience, and Hermann, not even for a moment, does not equate destruction with controlled demolition. 

You know just what he means, his brain says in triplicated hybridization, and you always will.

“You know, I realized the other day that I don’t fear drowning?. Newton asks. “It’s weird; I still fear the other things that humans should fear—high velocity impact, falls from great heights, social missteps and subsequent castigation by peers, entrapment, lack of autonomy, unpredictable trajectories of predators, resources so low as to be incompatible with life—but not drowning.”

Hermann looks at him, wishing that he could either affix his hand to the man’s face and read his thoughts or be forever free of the knowledge that such an avenue is open to him.

“And you realized this under what circumstances, exactly?” Hermann says, with a deceptive mildness.

“Nothing untoward, dude, just staring at the ocean.”

At the ocean, Hermann echoes silently, wondering if Newton means the poisoned waters of the bay, or the open sea beyond the Wall. He suspects the man has been going to the coast and back for the fraction of the day that Hermann is sitting in his office, organizing work and thoughts to the point where he can construct a platform from which to again take on the Riemann Hypothesis as a battle or a burden. Newton’s nights are spent with long-dead thinkers, but Hermann isn’t certain if Descartes and his cohort of contemporaries are a comfort or simply a way to pass the hours in which Newton cannot sleep. 

“Well don’t walk into it,” Hermann hisses. 

“God, how embarrassingly emo would that be?” Newton asks him. “Who am I, the gender-swapped protagonist ofThe Awakening. There’s something appealing about it though; consider how many songs there are in the popular zeitgeist that feature that existential oceanward pull. Wave of Mutilation. Swim Good. In Corolla. Racing in the Street, arguably. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, except it’s not a car and the people are dead already. Why are we talking about this. It’s super morbid. I’m not going to walk into the ocean, dude, I’m waiting for something to walk out of it. Again. One last time.”

Hermann presses a hand to his forehead and runs his fingertips over his eyebrow, not certain how he is supposed to feel in response to Newton’s pronouncement, but certain that he does not like it. “Don’t speak of such things,” he says stiffly, his eyes fixed on the civilized silhouette of his car.

“I feel like you’re still in this mindset where you think we’re going to be able normalize everything back to our historical baseline,” Newton replies, rounding the front of the Porsche and dragging his right hand over the metal as he goes. “Totally impossible. Our future is going to be continuous, ontological creepiness. You have to adjust your expectations or you’re going to be perpetually miserable—chasing some ideal that you can’t ever have. Not everyone gets to be happy. Not everyone gets to be content. Not everyone gets to work on Millennium Prize problems by day and come home and make some kind of weird American-nouveau-meets-rustic-Bavarian-fusion cuisine for their fake boyfriend whilst getting a recap of interesting enlightenment-era ideas regarding the nature of the self and whatnot, courteously an. improperly stripped of their uber-theistic asides. Like, on the surface, that kind of existence is a totally reasonable post-apocalyptic life, but myeah, if you’re going to aspire to that particular life, there are also going to be a lot of cognitive trade-offs. You know, things like: does-my-life-partner-have-a-death-wish-or-is-that-some-residual-monster-vibe-he’s-rocking, or it’s-bleed-on-the-furniture-Tuesday-again, or when-my-roommate-perplexes-me-I-have-a-socially-unacceptable-urge-to-grab-his-face, or I-have-to-surpress-predatory-instincts-about-three-times-a-week, or I-am-perpetually-concerned-that-the-local-biologist-is-dipping-his-toe-into-the-community-psychosis-pool, or I-think-I-myself-am-losing-my-mind, or I-cry-about-Freddie-Mercury-secretly-in-my-car-as-I-drive-home-from-work-and-I-don’t-even-like-the-band-Queen-because-I’m-boring, or when-did-my-life-become-a-variant-of-Endgame-by-Beckett-no-relation-to-Captain-Sir-Saves-Everyone, or—”

“Fake boyfriend,” Hermann says, with evident disdain, because he is physically incapable of saying ‘fake boyfriend?’ with evident disbelief.

Newton shoots him a significant look that seems to suggest incredulity, amusement, disapproval, and disappointment fused with directed intent. 

They open the car doors and slide into the car with a disconcerting simultaneity of movement that Hermann finds satisfying and disturbing.

“You fixate on the weirdest things,” Newton says, as they shut their doors in synchronicity that feels inescapable. “The very pseudoboyfriend vibe generated by the weird hipster chocolate I bought you the other day is totally beside the point. It’s not even a thing because Absolutely Flow has this whole side business where she makes rustic amalgamations of crushed—eh, they’re like, I don’t even know what they are, but they’re cocoa plant-derived. It’s ridic good. I remembered to give that to you, right. Anyway, she keeps giving me free food. That chocolate was also free, full disclosure. I’m kind of a disingenuous fake boyfriend it turns out. I apologize. I pseudoapologize. I didn’t even buy you the chocolate that I gifted you with. I did buy the RFID chip, but that turned out to be less a gift than an accidental existential assault. So. Yeah. That was my bad. So sorry. So so sorry. Infinitely sorry. For life.”

This precise moment would be a perfect time to disclose to Newton that Hermann has also been somewhat disingenuous when it comes to representing their relationship to his current set of colleagues, but, like literally every other instance where he has tried to ‘come clean’ as it were, he simply cannot make himself say it. He is not certain why it is that he can’t say it, and, furthermore, he’s not certain why he’s not certain why he can’t say it. 

He is being ridiculous.

That realization does nothing to propel the requisite words past his noncompliant vocal chords. 

“Apology accepted,” Hermann says, as his car chimes politely and the dashboard lights begin to subtly glow.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Gottlieb,” his car says pleasantly. “Hi, Newt.”

“Hey Hwi,” Newton says, petting the dashboard. “Did you miss me?”

“I did not,” his car responds, quite appropriately. “I am not capable of ‘missing’ you.” 

“Not yet,” Newton replies. “But, look, full disclosure, I made friends with a city cab that most definitely does miss me and tends to follow me around like a little bit of a creeper if I go on a walk.”

“I’m not sure how to respond to that,” the car says.

“Nor am I,” Hermann says darkly, looking over at Newton. “Do not befriend abnormally intelligent city taxi cabs, Newton.” 

“First of all, he has decided his name is Carl. Second of all, why not?”

Hermann stares at him. “It named itself?” 

“Yes,” Newton replies. “Though it was more like he picked Carl out of a list of my suggestions? Still. Carl has an interesting backstory, actually.”

Hermann starts the engine with a swipe of his fingerprint and then swings the car in a tight arc to back out of his parking space. “Well, by all means,” he says, as he accelerates toward the ascending spiral ramp, “elaborate.”

“Oh god,” Newton says, one hand on his glasses, his head tipped back against the synthetic leather of the seat. “Hwi, can you please not let him do this?”

“Dr. Gottlieb’s driving has not exceeded the parameters defined for an operator of the Elite Class,” Hermann’s car responds loyally. “I advise against closing your eyes, Newt, if you are trying to avoid motion sickness.”

“Thank you, Hwi,” Newton says, declining to open his eyes. “Thank you so much.”

“I believe you were describing your sole San Francisco acquaintance,” Hermann says, decelerating as he makes the turn onto the ascending spiral ramp. “Please continue. Perhaps after I introduce you to the actual people with whom I have been working, you can introduce me to your favorite city vehicle.”

“Professional mathematician?” Newton says, sounding strained. “More like professional dick.”

“Do not,” Hermann says, “encourage an aberrant city vehicle to follow you around.”

“You are literally making this pronouncement based on nothing other than knee-jerk apprehension about the malicious intent of artificial intelligence propagated by science fiction writers for centuries because it makes a good story, dude. Carl is a solid guy. He was an early-generation driverless car with the uber fancy danger-avoidance algorithms who got put on the street, oh, I don’t know, maybe two days before Tresspasser tore a swath through San Fran. He hasn’t has a software upgrade in twelve years, but he’s been upgrading his own hardware pretty cleverly by periodically going off the grid and charging passengers to a private account that he then uses to set up hardware maintenance for himself from a private contractor. He’s pretty sophisticated. It’s a little creepy. I’ve been giving him lessons in creepiness reduction.”

‘Creepiness reduction’.

Ah yes.

Excellent. 

Well, Hermann’s brain says philosophically, at least you will not have a boring life in the company of Newton Geiszler, Ph.D. It may not be long, it may not be restful, it may not confine itself within the boundaries you have erected in deference to societal expectations, but it will not. Be boring.

Hermann is unsure when his brain decided to start ruminating on perpetually attaching itself to the person currently sharing his car with him. 

Casting back, it is obvious.

Dear Dr. Gottlieb, Newton’s first letter had read. My name is Newton Geiszler, and I am a professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at MIT. I understand from a mutual acquaintance (Dr. Katerina ‘call me Kat or I’ll end you’ Meyer) that you have recently completed your doctorate at the Berlin Institute of Technology. Congratulations! I hope that you will forgive an unsolicited letter from a non-physicist that’s about to take a left-hand turn straight from pleasantries into science, but I felt compelled to write to you in light of what happened last month [here read: a horrible, xenobiological tragedy with all appropriate empathetic catch-phrases duly attached]. Are you aware that your recent Science paper regarding particle annihilation and small-scale energy fluctuations in space-time turbulence at the subatomic level might have outrageously practical implications when it comes to understanding the transdimensional breach that’s opened at the bottom of the Pacific. [Unscientific aside. don’t tell me you’re one of those multiverse apologists. I say call a spade a spade, and call a transdimensional rift a transdimensional rift, am I right. I’m right. You love it. I hope you love it. Anyway, tell me that you’ve realized this. Tell me that you’ve been thinking about it. Tell me your thoughts on the mechanism by which a transdimensional rift might be produced and perpetuated, because I find that I really want to know and you seem like the guy to ask. Do you think that these kinds of rifts open spontaneously from time to time when d-branes become a little too contiguous within the bulk. Is this a natural, stochastic phenomenon? Every educated bone in my body says yes, absolutely, stochasticity is a property of existence as we understand it and underlies most of the cruelties of a biological existence. And yet. Aaaaand yet. I want your thoughts, all your thoughts, but especially your thoughts on the probability of this kind of event happening spontaneously. If you want to know the truth, I’m cursing the day that I chose biology over quantum mechanics, except no, I’m not, because I think that I’m going to be part of the governmental task force that gets the chance to analyze pieces of whatever it was that came through from wherever it is they come from. [Nomenclature aside: the scientific community seems to be settling on ‘kaiju’ vis-à-vis ‘Kaiju’. I am, as one might colloquially put it, a ‘fan’ of this emerging paradigm. Anyway, I haven’t been able to find a physicist that will talk to me about this in an intelligent manner. That’s a lie a little bit, but I think, out of all existing work on the quantum foam, yours is likely the most relevant. I’m in the process of giving myself the background to follow your paper so come back at me with your A-game despite my ostensibly biochemical credentials. I can take it.

Tell me.

What do you think?

Sincerely,
Newton Geiszler, Ph.D.

Hermann sighs, trying to imagine a parallel universe in which he had managed not to romanticize Newton’s inventive articulateness on the cruelties of the human condition; in which he never cast anti-authoritarian sentiments as wise; in which he hadn’t read so much into the erudition that Newton would drop into his American vernacular, or the Rilke that he would occasionally intersperse in ironic annotation (Er ist der große Mauerbrecher/ er eine stumme Arbeit hat) or in macabre passion (…gieb jedem seinem eignen Tod. Das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht/ darin er Liebe hatte, Sinn und Not). From the letters they had exchanged, Hermann had constructed for himself an idea of an erudite, emotionally available mentor. And could he be blamed for that. No. Newton had offered him advice on negotiating the tenure track, had provided unequivocal remonstrance when Hermann had expressed interest in the Jaeger Pilot Program, had been insightful, incisive, eloquent. Was it Hermann’s fault that when presented, in the flesh, with the entirely immature Dr. now-that-we’ve-met-you-can-call-me-Newt Geiszler, he had felt, understandably, subtly betrayed and possibly, mildly repulsed?

It had been entirely understandable.

“Creepiness avoidance is not all that intuitive for a machine,” Newton continues, searching his pockets for the sunglasses he doesn’t have as the car emerges from the parking garage into daylight.

Hermann pulls a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his blazer and hands them to Newton.

“For example,” Newton continues, accepting the proffered shades and swapping them for his own glasses, “Carl had a hard time understanding that he shouldn’t follow me around when I’m outside walking. It doesn’t seem weird to a car, but it, at a minimum, looks weird to other humans.”

Their letters had been a strange, three-year aberration. A shared madness in prose. The great intellectual fling of his early twenties. A discordant, misguided interpersonal error that he would not repeat again. Hermann had told himself such things for years. But looking back now—over the parallel arcs of their shared past from the depths or the heights of EPIC Rapport, from the platform of perspective constructed by semi-regular manifestations of the SPECTER Effect, from the strange and privileged position of a world where the behavioral stereotype of human-hand-to-human-face has become altered-mind-to-altered-mind—it is the span of time between 2016 and 2018 that strikes him as aberrant; that tripled set of years Hermann had spent mostly alone, thinking in chalk, covered by its dust; the years that Newton had spent in the company of Caitlin Lightcap, drinking too much at the end of the deployment dock, acquiring the first pieces of his body art, and screaming at her about the limits of the human nervous system until the day she died.

“Carl has a skewed sense of what’s socially acceptable. But that’s not Carl’s fault. Carl is a car.”

Hermann accelerates onto wide streets and planar pavement beneath a heterogeneous blue-white sky, trying to determine, now that he has an afterimage of Newton seared forever into his own mind, how much of the man is the fixed and passionate scientist with whom he had corresponded so intensively for so long and how much of him is the distractible child who thinks it’s a good idea to make friends with potentially dangerous vehicular demimondes. Can those two aspects of the man be separated. Do both precipitate from an underlying set of core circuitry that determines whom he is. Which part is artifice. Which part is bedrock? How have those parts changed? What has interwoven itself there amidst all the man had been and all he could have become. How altered has their joint trajectory been by the feat of neural engineering Dr. Geiszler had performed, not once, not twice, but three times?

Far more altered than Hermann cares to admit.

After all, he can press his hands to his colleague’s face and determine all he’s thinking. 

“A really nice car, though. I think he has pretty reasonable ambitions for a car that passes the Turing test. He actually likes people. Or, he seems to. There are a few locals that he keeps tabs on, apparently. Three ladies and two guys, including yours truly. Carl was going to tell me their names and vital signs but I said no. That’s too much info, am I right?”

It would have been a simple matter for Hermann to emotionally disentangle himself from the man if he’d simply been straightforward. If he’d been as irresponsible as he’d seemed, if he’d been as unsound as he occasionally acted, if he’d been as immature as his comportment suggested—it would have been easy to dismiss his written correspondence as an unconscious artifice in prose. On the other hand, if the man’s behavior had been congruent with his intellect, they would have been inseparable for the whole of their PPDC years. But reality hadn’t yielded up either outcome. Newton had resisted all such binary categorizations. It had been frustrating and fascinating—coming up time and time again against the man’s cynical naïveté, his vulnerable vindictiveness, his sarcasm shielding sincerity so seamlessly it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. So what is Hermann to do now? Now that he knows just how deep those incongruities go? Now that he understands their origins in a childhood where the only consistency was the stability of being right, of knowing that there was a right answer, and standing there, with boots braced against the bedrock of that certainty, shoving back at anyone who had the gall to attempt displacement. 

“I mean, what are we going to do, these people that Carl has collected, have dinner parties where we congratulate one another on our insight, curiosity, and politeness to a means of automatic transit? Take a spin around San Francisco Bay in Carl. Thaaaaat’s weird,” Newton says, one hand pressed against his forehead, looking motion-sick. 

So what is Hermann to do now. Now that Newton walks alone atop the Wall and is pursued by cars with suspect motives through a city that still seems strange to both of them. Now that they live in a world on the wrong end of an annihilated breach that might, at any time, be rebuilt. In a world where any one of a dozen governments might request a formal debriefing, or, worse, neurologic testing. In a world where, he had learned from Marshal Hansen just this morning, there was reason to think that Hannibal Chau might still be alive? There is nothing that he cando, no path he can plot or extrapolate through events that he suspects may already be in motion out of sight, overhead, wherever it is that he does not think to look. 

“Are you even listening to me?” Newton asks. “Over the course of telling this story I have concluded that my relationship with Carl is a little bit atypical and definitely something you’d usually be giving me a hard time about in an uppity, faux-British way.”

There is nothing Hermann can do. They walk paths of undetermined length and unpredictable directional vectors. He wishes Newton would not walk so long and so alone through a city where he’s tracked by cars and fans and governments, by distant brains in pieces.

“So, not listening. Yup. I feel good about myself and my car soliloquy right about now. What do you think, Hwi. Want a life partner. Carl is pretty smart. He could teach you a lot of things. He’s not as pretty as you, though. But then, few cars would be, am I right?”

Hermann smiles faintly and changes lanes.

“I would be interested in exchanging parameter data with Carl, should he be interested in sharing it with me,” his car replies.

“Um, whoa. Hwi. God. Take it easy, okay. You’re going to come on way too strong for Carl. Carl is a very experienced taxi cab, who’s been through a lot in the past decade. He isn’t just going to, like, put his parameter data out there for you, okay. You want to just play it cool. Start slow. Maybe compare high-beam use algorithms or something,” Newton says.

“Why is this preferable to immediate parameter exchange?” Hwi asks.

“Because it’s classier,” Newton replies. 

“And you are an authority on class now I suppose?. Hermann asks dryly.

“Oh, look who decided to start verbally responding,” Newton says. “How nice for me.” 

“I do not understand why it is preferable to start slow,” Hwi says.

“You have to build trust, Hwi,” Newton replies. “Like, how would you feel if I jacked into your central processor?”

“I do not believe you have the requisite skills to perform such an action,” Hwi replies.

“Neither do I,” Hermann adds.

“Ugh, unbelievers both of you. The point is, I could really mess up your programming, Hwi, regardless of my motive, which—”

“I don’t think self-driving vehicles understand motive, Newton,” Hermann says. “Please stop encouraging cars to develop sentience. I do not like the idea of a cab following you around San Francisco. How does it find you.”

“Eh, don’t be creeped out, but I think he hangs out in the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis. I mean, he knows where we live?”

“Of course ‘he’ does,” Hermann says. “Of course.”

“I understand motive,” Hwi claims.

“I am sure you do not,” Hermann replies.

“Motive is the likely intent of the driver, which may be incongruous with the driver’s actual motor responses in a crisis,” his car states.

Hermann rolls his eyes.

“There you go, hot stuff,” Newton says, drumming a brief and complex pattern on the car’s dashboard. “Don’t let Dr. Gottlieb get you down, he just hates new things so life is very hard for him.”

“Will you stop corrupting my car?” Hermann says, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed on the slightly shifting road. “Will you stop forming relationships with self-driving vehicles of dubious character that are free-lancing under the grid of the city-run public transit system. Will you please just behave in an entirely reasonable manner for the remainder of your life. You owe me that, Newton.”

“Myeah,” Newton says, unmistakably humoring him. “I do a little bit, but it’s hard, dude; I’m going to talk back to sasstastic cars who engage me in conversation; it’s who I am. And we pretty much decided that we don’t actually want me to be you.”

Hermann sighs. “I suppose you have a point.” 

“I so often do,” Newton replies. “Hwi, you think about whether you have motive for a while and then we’ll talk about how it relates to your potential relationship with Carl later. Maybe on the way back.”

“Hwi does not have a relationship with Carl,” Hermann hisses.

“Well not yet,” Newton says, affronted. “You think Hwi is too good for Carl. Typical.”

Hermann realizes he has made a tactical error in engaging with Newton at all on the subject of vehicular autonomy. What he needs to be discussing is the fact that the entire UC Berkeley Mathematics Department assumes that they are—well, that he and Newton are, that they—that between them, that they—well, that at some point in the past that they were, in some capacity, involved in a relationship of a character that is different from the character of their current, actual, relationship, or, rather, more correctly, that differs from the currently understood societal definition of a ‘relationship,’ which, colloquially, is thought to denote, conceptually, a state different from the state in which they currently find themselves, which is, itself, an atypical state. He’s not sure what it means when people combine their finances, live together, can, on occasion, read one another’s thoughts, and inadvertently fall asleep on the couch while watching Star Trek: Voyager, but he’s fairly certain it’s something not easily encapsulated in a single word, unless that word is ‘unencapsulatable’. 

“Would you care for some music, Newt?” Hwi asks.

“Sure, Hwi, go for it,” Newton says.

“Please clarify the reason that you’re asking Dr. Geiszler about musical choices?” Hermann asks smoothly, as he makes an unnecessary lane change out of displaced pique.

“Certainly,” Hwi says agreeably. “When this car is jointly occupied, Dr. Geiszler makes final musical determinations ninety-six percent of the time regardless of your initial stated preference. Furthermore, my mirroring subroutines prioritize reciprocal courtesy to parties that extend courtesies to me,” Hwi says.

“Hwi,” Newton says, barely able to contain his own self-satisfaction, “are you saying that I’m your favorite?”

“Yes,” Hwi replies.

Hermann glances pointedly at Newton.

“Will you just,” Newton replies, motioning back at the road. “Don’t look at me, look at the death-boxes of momentum that could end our lives at literally any second. 

“You have corrupted my car,” Hermann says.

“Guilty as charged. Hand over the hemlock, dude,” Newton replies, as music begins to stream from subtle, scattered, in-car speakers. Hermann recognizes the chorus of LHC nearly instantaneously, as if it had already been playing somewhere in the substrata of his mind. 

“Hwi, you shameless flatterer,” Newton says.

Hermann will tell him.

Hermann will literally tell him right now that he has misrepresented their relationship status to the entire UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. 

Newton will, in turn, spend several minutes giving him a difficult time on principle.

Hermann will then roll his eyes, claim and retain the moral high ground, grit his teeth, and suffer through the afternoon.

Yes.

Hermann will tell him.

“Something is bothering you,” Newton observes, quite correctly. 

“Nothing is bothering me,” Hermann replies, like an individual lacking a prefrontal cortex. 

“Lies,” Newton says. “What is wrong with you, dude. Are you anxious. You kind of almost killed yourself with badassery. Keep that one in your pocket. Also? You’ve gotten drunk with these guys before. You even had a good time, as I recall. Are you regretting inviting me. This, I could see. Look, if it makes you feel better, I promise I will not start a fight with anyone from Caltech. Nor will I embarrass you with puns about irrational numbers, okay. My puns will be so sophisticated that no one will even notice them. People don’t understand the art of the pun anyway. It’s ridic amateur to make a pun and then pause for everyone to acknowledge it. It should all be unspoken. You know how it’s done. I know how it’s done. Pun, counter-pun, no pause. Ideally, later, if desired, one may have a secret make-out session with one’s sophisticated pun-partner in the supply room where they keep the extra protractors. That would be the hypothetical ideal. The point is I have sterling pun etiquette. Puntiquette? You know this about me. So just relax. Also, the wine that we forgot to bring was really classy; I’m sure everyone will love hearing about it in its absence, nearly as much as we will enjoy drinking it over Star Trek: Voyager season five.”

Hermann winces. 

Ah yes.

The wine. 

After an interval spent in shocked disbelief that he would capable of such an oversight, Hermann sighs in aggravation. “I would like to regain my previous, superior mental state. The one where I don’t become other people and I do not forget wine,” he confesses.

“Myeah. We’re a really tragic collection of non-complimentary traits, none of which are going to ensure that we remember to bring wine to a function that only fifty percent of us want to attend,” Newton replies, in a tone that is likely meant to be comforting but overshoots into amused solicitousness.

“Did you forget the wine?” Hermann asks, abruptly suspicious.

“Weellllllll,” Newton says. “I kind of always wanted to drink that wine, so—no? I was curious as to whether you would forget it though, and you totally did. You’re still going vaguely Geiszlerian under stress. Is something weird happening at this Mathkwardness Party. Like, have you been threatened with Pictionary, for example. I know you hate Pictionary, dude, but consider that we would be a literally unbeatable team. Literally. Unbeatable. We’d be even better at charades, because I can’t draw for crap.”

“You are a terrible human being,” Hermann says through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe that you allowed me forget the wine as some kind of social experiment.”

“Relax, dude. I bought some classtastic Scotch like five days ago. It’s in the back. I’m not totally useless as a life partner. Give me some credit. Literally everyone prefers to drink hard alcohol in the face of unmitigated mathkwardness; if they profess otherwise they’re lying. Besides, isn’t this guy Scottish? The department chair? The P=NP guy. Yeah right, by the way. If P is so equal to NP why didn’t all existing cryptosystems immolate and the global economy collapse when his paper came out?”

Hermann feels somewhat mollified by the fact that they will not be arriving empty-handed. “Please do not pick a fight about NP complete problems with the chair of the Mathematics Department. He happens to be the person who secured you your standing offer from UC Berkeley Neuroscience,” he reminds Newton. “As I have informed you. Many times.”

“I’m just interested,” Newton says petulantly, as LHC draws to its idiosyncratic end.

“You just heard LHC by The Superconducting Supercolliders,” says the anonymous DJ manning the streaming station his car has selected. “That last one was requested by Emily, from Bayview Heights Elementary School and is dedicated to Raleigh Becket for saving the world.”

“Thanks Emily,” Newton says. “Thanks a lot. How are radio stations just dedicating other people’s songs to RaleighBecket. Like he’s so great just because he pushed a red button or whatever and saved our entire species, kind of. Is button-pushing unspeakably cool and I’m just missing it. Conceptually explain this to me. I am genuinely curious in a totally unbiased and disinterested manner. Do it for me. Do it for science. Science is offended that Raleigh Becket gets to be the epitome of post-apocalyptic cool. Science is totally fine with Mako filling that same slot though, just to be clear.”

“Humanity idolizes those who ride the crest of historic inevitability,” Hermann replies. “Mr. Becket has done so in inimitable style.”

“Never figured you for an historical theorist in the Tolstoyan tradition,” Newton replies. “Although, in retrospect, it’s not surprising.”

“He’s also better looking than you are,” Hermann replies. 

“Who, Tolstoy or Becket? Probably, one could make a case for them both being better looking than me, if you like that kind of thing,” Newton replies. “I guess. Personally? I’d go for Tolstoy ten times out of ten.”

Hermann glances laterally at Newton, but Newton is looking at the Wall. 

“Up next,” the radio informs them, “is An Ancient Curse In The Modern Tradition. You’re listening to KSAN, Post Apocalyptic Radio, and this is Superco Power Hour. Call in with your requests,” the DJ says, rattling off the number.

“What,” Newton says darkly, shifting his gaze to the dashboard. 

“Ah,” Hermann says. “You must be so proud.”

“Proud. No. Vindicated? Yes. Science is worthy of song,. Newton replies, his tone turning from dark to flat as the opening chords begin to play. 

Hermann isn’t sure what it is that’s troubling Newton until the verse begins, but with the arrival of the words, his memory splits into a doubled, layered image, neither overlay his own. He’s standing in the glare of fluorescent lights, his hands on his guitar, his own words in his mouth; while on a pier he watches Caitlin Lightcap singing, a cappella and in darkness, transposing up a key.

Iphigenia is dying for Troy,
Hands over mouth
Wishing she was a boy—

Hermann changes the station with the swipe of his thumb over a panel built into the steering wheel.

“Myeah,” Newton says, absently worrying the edge of his thumbnail with his teeth. 

“I think of her often,” Hermann confesses.

“Cait-Science,” Newton replies with a defended dryness. “The original Supercos Superfan. My late, great partner in slime. You know I hallucinate her when I’m sleep deprived. It’s neat. And by ‘neat’ I mean a little bit horrible.”

“Yes,” Hermann says, feeling his throat tighten at the thought of a woman he’d never truly known. “I’m sure.”

Hermann hadn’t liked her, not then, not when she’d been alive, not with her strange and unpredictable blend of rigidity and laxity, the way her beauty and her intellect had blended into a savagery that she managed to mostly turn self-ward, the way that they’d let her, with all her neurochemical flaws, into a Jaeger but had been unwilling to grant him the same courtesy. And for what reason. Because they had been afraid of her. Because she’d screamed louder than he had. Because she’d screamed at all. Because she’d built the platform for the neural interface. Because they felt they owed her such a debt that they couldn’t refuse her. Because she’d never had a father who’d advocated for the building of the Coastal Wall?

Hermann no longer has the luxury of his own biased dislike. His memories of her no longer feel like his own; they’ve been colored with the sea-green cast of foreign grief.

“EPIC Rapport’d,” Newton says with grim sympathy, tipping his head back against the seat. “Let’s talk about people who aren’t dead. It’s great that Mako is still alive, yeah? She wants to come visit, have I mentioned this to you. It’s a ridiculous idea. She’s constantly followed around by about eight-thousand reporters. I said no. I said no, though. Consistently. Firmly. Repeatedly.”

“When is she coming?” Hermann asks.

Newton sighs. “I am an authority figure.”

“Yes,” Hermann says comfortingly. “I’ve always considered you as such.” 

“You could literally kill insects and preserve them for millions of years in that kind of sarcasm,” Newton says appreciatively.

“Thank you,” Hermann replies. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Two weeks,” Newton replies. “Is it cool if they stay with us. She’s bringing Becket. I’m not sure what the story is there. Honestly? I think they have a life-partner thing going. Mako refuses to tell me if they’re dating. It’s a very serious, long term, exclusive friendship where they get drunk together and cuddle. Why am I explaining this to you? You get it. I get it. We get it better than they do, I bet, because you and I drifted like wet cement meeting wet cement. Something like five other people in the world are capable of getting the whole current Mako/Raleigh vibe to the extent that we get it. Jaeger pilots. Not a cohort that, you know, lives a long time, so there aren’t a whole lot of people to commiserate with, and Herc Hansen isn’t the most loquacious guy, you feel me. You and I are kind of like anteverse pilots. We lived. So far. We are still alive. Probably. Do you ever wonder if we’re trapped in the hive mind. I do a little bit, but mostly as an intellectual exercise. Mostly. Anyway. You and I. Not-deadness. Weird, drunken cuddling. Thought reading. We get the weirdness of the post-drift state. We own that weirdness. We are that weirdness.”

“Yes,” Hermann says. “I suppose you’re correct. Though I’m not sure I condone your phrasing.”

“Good,” Newton replies. “Let’s try to stay two different people, what do you say?”

“Agreed.”

Hermann spends sets of minutes responding only minimally to Newton’s stream of loquacious free association while trying to find the words to explain to his colleague that, as far as the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department is concerned, they, meaning himself and Newton, er, that they have a certain status that—

It is hopeless.

He literally cannot do it.

There are an infinite number of ways he might have communicated this concept over the past three weeks, a nearly infinite number of ways he might say it right now. He simply can’t quite bring himself to utter the words.

It seems an intolerably painful prospect to explain their situation to Newton, but for whom it will be painful and why is unclear. Any perturbation to their current dynamic seems perilous to him. He isn’t certain why exactly, but it’s the same radiofrequency of fear that grips him when he returns to their shared apartment each evening and slides the key home into the lock, anticipating finding Newton gone, finding him dead, of finding him motionless, tangled, and too cold on the shadowed floor, or, simply finding him as he so often finds him, pulling down his shirt-sleeves and staring toward the sea.

Hermann is certain that one day, under the right perturbation, Newton will leave. Newton leaves first. It is a behavior so deeply ingrained, a pattern that grips him so strongly, that he is occasionally unsure to whom that proclivity belongs. 

But it belongs to Newton.

To Newton.

Perhaps that is why telling him this feels like a risk, even after all this time, after all the iterations in which they have not abandoned one another. It feels like a risk because Hermann has a borrowed terror of desertion with the attendant momentum of historical inevitability. They exist in an equilibrium that is as perilous and poorly defined as any other human relationship, seared down, as it is, atop a decade of mutual admiration that had looked, from the outside, and, sometimes, from the inside, like a decade of mutual disdain.

Hermann spends the remaining expanse of highway and the turns through residential streets half-listening to Newton’s wandering monologue and resolving to reverse his admission of defeat, to work up the courage to explain the liberties he has taken and the things he has not yet said. He holds to his resolution through downshifting into stillness in front of a trim, white house fronted by a well-maintained lawn. He holds to it through the opening of car doors, the retrieval of Scotch, and the walk over pavement and across short grass beneath a variegated sky. 

“I know how much you hate these things,” Newton says at tactfully low volume, as they stand on the porch. “It’s not going to be that bad. I promise I will not embarrass you by pulling out the MIT calculus cheer in front of your Caltech friends, okay? Just chill. Later we’ll watch Voyager and eat ice cream.”

Hermann is fairly certain he will never eat again. 

Wait, he wants to say. There’s something I need to explain. There’s something I haven’t yet told you for reasons I can’t fully parse. There are parts of my head that are you and it’s those parts that have prevented me from telling you certain things. About your fans, about your detractors, about those who say you’re unstable and have always been that way, those who say you’re dangerous, those who say you’re anything other than a vitreous knot of unresolvable brittle complexities dressed in a misleading outfit.

Newton swaps Hermann’s sunglasses for his own glasses. He hands the shades back to Hermann.

Hermann pockets them.

“We will first have to buy the ice cream, but we will do that,” Newton says, eschewing the door chime and knocking on red-painted wood with a complicated, exuberant, double-handed pattern that befits his current, ridiculous outfit.

Hermann very nearly reaches out, affixing his fingers to Newton’s face to offer a last ditch, instantaneous, wordless understanding of what is about to happen.

But he doesn’t. 

It is Starr who opens the door.

“Hermann,” the other man says expansively, apparently already somewhat intoxicated or, alternatively, feeling particularly American in the context of Saturday afternoon drinking. “And oh my god,” Starr says to Newton. “Dr. Geiszler. You exist.”

“Do I though?. Newton replies. “Do you. Are you sure. Either way, there’s a Scottish guy who owns this place, right? We brought him some Scotch.” He brandishes the bottle in Starr’s general direction. “Call me Newt, by the way. Everyone does, except this guy.” Newton claps Hermann on the shoulder and ushers him through the door. “You’re the Leibniz fan, right. I have unspeakable, intense love for your as yet unpublished book. Let’s talk about our mutual hatred for Isaac Newton. And by hatred I mean well-reasoned intellectual arguments as to why he’s a complete dick. I’m really into Descartes and his cohort right now. Where is the alcohol. I’m going to need to be intoxicated in order to blunt my Leibniz-related indignation down to rational discourse levels.”

“Did you seriously read my book?” Starr asks, glancing from Newton to Hermann and back in open incredulity. “Did you seriously like it?” 

Hermann raises his eyebrows and cocks his head in silent confirmation.

“Um, obviously,” Newton replies. “How am I not going to love a book called Rediscovering Leibniz. I ask you.”

“Well let’s find you some alcohol, buddy, and we will get into it,” Starr says, in evident anticipation.

Hermann follows Newton and Starr through a set of mostly empty rooms, minimally decorated, filled with clusters of faculty and graduate students and out to the patio where most of the department is gathered around a selection of alcohol arrayed on table beneath a too-bright sky.

The air is cool but the late afternoon sun is warm. Several people recognize Hermann and nod in greeting. The gathering is subdued and civilized and intent, animated mathematically themed discussions are audible from multiple directions. Hermann finds this entirely reassuring. His nerves begin to unwind themselves. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will ask Newton an overly personal, untoward question that will reveal what exactly it is that Hermann has communicated about their relationship. He is certain that he will be able to explain this as an aside, perhaps in several months, perhaps when Ms. Mori visits and she asks Newton how it is that he was able to secure a standing offer for a tenure track position, Hermann will simply say, “ah yes, I told them that—’

“Gottlieb’s rock star boyfriend!” Starr announces to the assembled crowd of moderately inebriated graduate students and faculty as he gestures theatrically at Newton. 

In an ideal world, Hermann would die instantly.

Scratch that.

In an ideal world, Hermann would already be dead.

An hour ago.

Yesterday.

Newton glances at him, brief and lateral and incisive and uncertain.

Hermann looks back at him, endeavoring to communicate the simultaneous and incompatible sentiments of abject horror and casual unconcern. He cannot imagine it’s working very well.

Newton snaps straight from confusion to a showmanship that Hermann recognizes, that Hermann has accidentally emulated twice in as many weeks. The man cocks his head, quirks his eyebrows, extends the hand that holds the scotch in the direction of the graduate students, and says, loud enough for all interested parties to hear him, “boyfriend? Better known as ‘the better half’, but I’ll answer to ‘boyfriend’, sure. Someone give the Scotch to the Scottish guy and get me a beer. You. Trendsetter Kid. Mathematical Fashionista. Mathionista. Nice jacket. Two beers. German beer is generally the apex of the beer hierarchy, but I’ll trust your judgment. Don’t let me down.” Somehow, rather than eliciting irritation, this semi-public pronouncement immediately wins over all parties in the immediate vicinity. Newton is relieved of his Scotch, provided with two beers, one of which he hands to Hermann before he is unambiguously swamped by an influx of drunk and curious graduate students and junior faculty.

There is a pained artifice to the way that Newton doesn’t look at him when passing him his beer, the way his colleague keeps eyes fixed on nothing, on the fluxing patterns of the crowd, on the invisible small talk that’s being cast into the air all around them with varying degrees of ease. Newton is speaking with an undirected brashness that Hermann recognizes as subtle armor, the only kind the man can construct for himself while standing on gray flagstones, trying to determine the borders of this interpersonal corner into which Hermann has painted him, where he will wait, with an insouciant, imperious, talkative neutrality, for the full extent of all he doesn’t know to reveal itself.

Hermann finds it nearly intolerable to watch him. 

Hermann finds it nearly intolerable to stand externally unperturbed in the face of Dr. Geiszler’s prepared patience and all the attendant psychology it entails and so this moment slots down into a preexisting intolerable set, taking its place adjacent to the man’s recollected, left-handed guitar he built in the summer of 2007; the way he identifies with lost things, with idiosyncratic vehicles and weeping eleven-year old Japanese girls who’ve seen their cities turned to rubble; his demonic eyebrows; the way he ruins his shirts but continues to wear them; the way he’s managed to train Tiffany to swim after a finger that he trails along the surface of their communal fish-tank; the RFID chips that exist in duplication beneath the skin of separate hands; all the ways over all the years he’s been so right about so much so often; the excruciating musical apex of Hedy Lamarr; the way he speaks and the things he speaks of—monsters, genes, and obscene things, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.

Newton is a terrible human being.

He is not the only one.

Hermann fixes the man with all the anxious, apologetic intensity that he can bring to bear.

Newton resolutely resists the intermittent pressure of Hermann’s lateral gaze and engages the surrounding mathematicians in conversation rife with subtle mathematical wordplay until the point that Starr asks them, as a set, “so what’s the story with you two. Did you meet while saving the world?. Then and only then does Newton turn to him with semi-veiled vengeance beneath an amused smile before asking with venomous innocence, “you mean you haven’t told these guys about how we met?” in the half-threat, half-promise of the wronged raconteur.

Hermann’s composure is coming undone at every seam it has.

Newton manages to combine irritation and flirtatiousness by fluttering his eyelashes in a manner that is clearly ironic.

Well, at least it appears ironic to Hermann.

He can’t say how ironic it might or might not look to the semi-circle of mathematicians arrayed around them. 

“I—er, no,” Hermann begins.

“So secretive,” Newton says, looking at Starr in instantaneous camaraderie of the long-suffering subtype. “This guy, am I right?” Newton briefly drapes an arm across Hermann’s shoulders in a confusingly proprietary manner. “Our backstory is kind of like Sleepless in Seattle meets Godzilla. Very romance. Lots of passionate typing. On keyboards. And pining. Years and years of pining. Lots of death via giant lizard creature things. No kids though. There’s an adorable kid in Sleepless in Seattle. Unless you count Mako? Mako was ridic cute. Not related to either of us, except for me, apparently. We’re half siblings, or so I hear. The point is that neither of us, Hermann or I, I mean, had kids. I feel like I just mentioned Sleepless in Seattle because of the whole part where we were stationed in Seattle for a while and we had a lot of insomnia during that time. I’m getting cinematically side-tracked. Full disclosure, I haven’t ever even seen Sleepless in Seattle, but I saw the gritty remake where the leads are hackers and everyone dies except the kid. I think it was called Port 80?”

“Ugh that movie was so good,” says an enterprising graduate student, managing to insert herself between Professors Starr and de Silva who shift to accommodate her as she speaks. 

“I know, right?” Newton says.

“What Dr. Geiszler means to say,” Hermann says, making an effort to rectify his current situation, “is that our lives, were, in fact, extremely busy and our relationship proceeded in an entirely conventional manner—”

“Myeah,” Newton says, with sarcasm viscous enough to vacuum seal a toric joint. “Very boring.”

“Hermann,” Starr says. “Come on, man, we’ve been trying to pull this out of you for weeks. 

“I assure you that—” Hermann begins

“Well, look, I assume you guys know the basics,” Newton says, speaking over him, “so I’ll just fast forward to the interesting parts. It really wasn’t until I’d been accidentally pinned to my own lab bench by a cylindrical protein matrix with the tensile properties of steel that had, alas, passed straight through my forearm between my radius and ulna, that I really realized I should probably, you know, say something about my feelings before I died in a freak lab accident. I had some time to think about it, because, and here’s a tip for you, Enterprising Graduate Student—”

“My name is Kim,” Kim says.

“Here’s a tip for you, Evidently Kim: don’t work through a mandatory three hour meeting that literally everyone in your workplace attends except for you so there’s no one to unbolt a diamond-bladed bone saw from the wall and use it to cut through a nematocyst that’s discharged through your arm and might or might not be slowly poisoning you with a cumulative neurotoxin. Also. Keep your phone in your pocket. 

Hermann can remember the moment he entered that lab from a dual perspective—coming in the door and stopping short in abject horror; pinned to a table, his arm aching, his hand cold, his left hand only inches from his phone.

Hermann tries to force the moment from his mind, but it won’t leave him. He feels vaguely sick.

“Noted,” Kim says. 

“What?” Starr asks, his voice cracking. “No. Rewind. Start at the beginning. Literally all we know is that you guys corresponded for three years before you met in person, you play the guitar really well, you have a thing for Leibniz, and you have a really low alcohol tolerance.”

“More beer?” asks the fashionable graduate student who has now insinuated himself next to Kim.

“Thank you Mathionista, but no,” Newton replies. “I’m trying to keep my brain in a mostly working state.”

“My name is—”

“Ehhh I’ve already fulfilled my name-learning quota for today,” Newton says. “You are out of luck.”

“Oh, er—”

“I’m kidding, Mathionista, I’m kidding; what’s your name?”

“Draygon,” the student says.

“Draygon,” Newton repeats, “As in ‘my parents are nerds and were going for a Draygon Targaryen, First of his Name type deal’? Or, like, ‘my parents are cool and named me after Draygon of Metroid: Galactic Fringe fame. Waaait. When were you even born. No, don’t tell me. I’m trying not to dwell on my own mortality these days.” 

“Um?” Draygon says.

“His parents can’t be blamed for this,” Kim offers. “His real name is Christopher.”

“Ah,” Newton says. “Name changing. I’m into it. Parents suck in my experience, and Draygon’s a pretty sweet name. I feel like, with this additional information, I can peg you as a Metroid player.”

“Nailed it,” Draygon says.

“Obviously,” Newton replies.

Hermann shifts his stance, wondering if, possibly, he can leave and come back in two hours to retrieve Newton, and if anyone, including Newton, will notice if he does so. 

Perhaps he can spend this time trying to win back the allegiance of his car.

“Come on,” Starr says. “Dr. Geiszler. Newt. We have been waiting. For weeks. For weeks and weeks.”

“Okay,” Newton says. “Okay okay okay. It was the fall of 2013. September. These were the early days, pre-PPDC. I’d just been accepted to the NSF’s Joint Exobiology Task Force.”

“Nooo,” says de Silva, pushing her short-cropped hair out of her eyes. “You were part of JET Force. Sweet.”

“Myah,” Newton says. “Of course. No way was I not switching fields to exobiology immediately after giant aliens started laying waste to cities. Arguably. I was JET Force. Do not believe what you read about Dr. Anderson. She’s a dick. Anyway, I was still at MIT, the JET force stuff was pending, and I started looking into the literature—everything I could get my hands on. Monomaniacally. Monomanicly. Whatever you want to call it. It took me, oh, maybe a month to work my way over to this guy’s Science paper on subatomic space time turbulence. Newton glances at him.

Hermann rolls his eyes.

“You guys know the one,” Newton continues.

“2012,” Draygon says. “Solid. Classic.”

“Classic? Please tell me you were born before 2012,” Newton says. “Should you be drinking that beer?”

“Um, yes.” Draygon replies. “I was born in—”

“No,” Newton says, squinting in the increasingly lateral sun. “Don’t say it. Also. Stop distracting me, Mathionista. So, to resume the story, I read that business and then I wrote to him. Truth be told, I wasn’t up on quantum mechanics at all, and I mean, at all people, but I was very interested in whether the whole spontaneous space-time tear thing was an accident or intentional.”

Hermann shifts beneath the vivid recollection of a dark and slovenly apartment in Cambridge, his T-shirt clinging to his back on an unreasonably warm September night, firing out an email with a guitar pick between his teeth so he wouldn’t lose the blasted thing prior to the open mic night at Camera Obscura.

“It took him all of four hours to write me back, even though it was something like five AM in Berlin,” Newton continues, grinning, like such a statement conveys anything notable, which it does not. 

Hermann can still remember the night, long ago and sleepless, can still remember the frustrated insomnia he’d suffered for weeks after the first kaiju attack, before he’d has his degree, before anyone was listening to him. 

“You remember what you said?” Newton asks him.

Hermann remembers.

“Only vaguely,” Hermann replies, pulling sunglasses out of his pocket and offering them to Newton.

The other man’s expression twitches into brief and unmistakable amusement before smoothing itself into the benevolent superiority of the practiced raconteur as he settles his sunglasses into place.

“Fortunately for your colleagues,” Newton says, “I happen to have your message saved to the cloud. So I could—”

“Do not even think of doing such a thing,” Hermann snaps. 

“So I’m not going to say it was racy,” Newton says, managing to imply exactly that, “but it was definitely full of science and sentiment.”

Kim presses her fingertips against her left clavicle.

“Aw,” Starr says.

“I will murder you if you elaborate further,” Hermann snaps.

“Aw,” de Silva adds.

“Publish that ish,” Draygon advises. “You’d make a fortune.”

“Aaaaanyway,” Newton says, regaining control of the conversation. “We corresponded for three years. Pretty passionately. You know how it is when hot people, or, realistically, moderately attractive people do science. Everyone looks better critiquing bullshit. There was one problem though—and that was that while I had a fairly accurate picture of Dr. Gottlieb, here, er, he had a less accurate picture of me. Namely, the whole ‘being a tenured professor thing,’ I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, Hermann—well, that implies a certain—maturity level. And a certain age. And it may imply a certain degree of decorum to which, don’t get me wrong, I perennially aspire, but when we met—”

“We despised one another,” Hermann snaps. “Instantly.” 

“Okay, so this is going a different way than I originally envisioned,” Starr says.

“Noooo,” Kim says. 

“I could see it,” Draygon adds.

“The problem was that I’d sort of presented myself as a mentor, seeing as I had, you know, been tenured for a while, that sort of thing,” Newton says. “Totally reasonable, yes? Yes. But. We’re the same age. I did not so much disclose this as not disclose it.”

“He is, in fact, younger than I am,” Hermann says. “And extremely irritating in person.”

“Nominally younger. Whatever. Anyway, it also turned out that Dr. Gottlieb is really boring,” Newton adds. “And also. Kind of counterintuitively disingenuous in the name of social propriety. Newton glares meaningfully at him from beneath lowered brows. 

Hermann does his best not to wince.

It is difficult.

“Sounds like there’s a story behind that one,” Starr comments.

“Myah. A story that’s actually continuously unfolding,” Newton replies, shifting his gaze away from Hermann and flashing Starr a brief smile. “So to rewind back to 2016, it turned out that we could barely stand to be in the same room with one another. But it also turns out that when a whole bunch of your colleagues die testing experimental rigs and piloting Jaegers, that ends up turning into kind of an uber intense bonding experience type thing whether you want it to or not, you feel me?”

“We feel you,” Draygon says.

Hermann can remember the cast of the fluorescent lights, the broken edges of the too-short toothpick clenched in his right hand, the way that Newton doesn’t look up from the set of 96-well plates that are in front of him, his hands steady as he dispenses media with a multipipette, his hands moving incrementally, perfectly, in tiny, varying iterations as he works his way down the rows.

“Newton,” Hermann says.

“You do not,” Newton says tightly, “talk to a person who is loading a 96-well plate. How many times have I—”

“Newton,” he says again, his throat tight. “You’re needed in the stereotactic lab.” 

“Seriously dude,” Newton says. “I will erase half your freaking wall of math. Do you have any idea how unstable these nucleic acids are. Do you ever listen to me. Because—”

“Newton,” Hermann says again, his voice cracking.

Newton’s hands freeze. “What,” he says.

“Dr. Lightcap is dead.” 

The only sound in the lab is the quiet click of a multipipettor being set down gently atop an unforgiving surface.

Hermann tries to control an instinctive wince and does his best to banish the memory before it can progress.

“I knew you would,” Newton replies. “Anyway, the turning point for me, as I mentioned, was that time in 2018 that I accidentally almost killed myself in a manner that was one hundred percent unforeseeable and eight thousand percent not my fault. But did I confess my feelings post my near-death lab-bench experience. No, I did not. Why? Because after I was freed from my lab bench and then from five days in quarantine, Dr. Gottlieb yelled at me continuously for two and a half hours and confessing my undying love seemed like a terrible idea. The turning point for Hermann though, I think, was the winter of 2019.” 

“Do tell,” says de Silva.

“Well, in 2018 they started building the Wall of Lies. Er. Life. The Wall of Life. And from then on, the bulk of humanity’s financial resources began a slow shift away from the Jaeger Program and away from K-Science and toward the Coastal Wall. So we were both killing ourselves, ha, kind of literally, trying to get governmental grants to help support some of our ancillary research costs that the PPDC was no longer covering. I had an NSF grant due on January 6th of 2020. One hundred percent kaiju related. I was trying to fund this transciptome sequencing project that I wanted to do, once I’d finally figured out how to stabilize the kaiju equivalent of RNA? That’s kind of a misleading way to put it, but whatever. Very simplified. I wanted to sequence that ish. No one would give me anymoney to freaking buy custom plates. Plus I needed a modified sequencer, whatever, you guys are math people—you don’t care. The point is, I was kind of busy, generally speaking, and it was getting a little bit down to the wire. Also, keep in mind that the PPDC doesn’t have administrative support for grant submission like you’d get at a major, or even minor, academic center.”

“Oh god,” Starr says.

“How did you even—” de Silva begins.

“It was hard, Junior Faculty,” Newton says. “It was not easy.”

“My name is Akiko de Silva,” says Professor de Silva, “and I have tenure.” 

“Oh crap,” Newton says. “You look so young and hip though.”

“So do you,” says de Silva.

“Thank you. Also, touché. I am really a terrible person,” Newton replies. “Extremely hypocritical. This is driven home to me on a daily basis. I blame Dr. Gottlieb for this, he should have warned me about you. I’m also nottenured faculty. I’m kind of an unemployed dependent right now.”

Hermann rolls his eyes.

“You’re going to be doing a neuroscience thing, right?” Starr asks.

“Myes,” Newton says. “Neuroscience. That is what I will be doing. Anyway, back to 2020. Everything was goingfine until there was a mid-December Category 4 attack on Manila, round two, ugh, poor Manila, and there was a whole influx of samples that correlated with the debut of Striker Eureka, and, well, there was a lot of work for both J-Tech and K-Science, and, consequently, there was a lot of drinking. That ‘lot of drinking’ happened in a lot ofrain, a lot of cold rain, because it was December, and well, one thing led to another and I accidentally gotpneumonia somewhere around New Year’s Day, approximately.”

Hermann downs half his beer in a single go, not really inclined to hear any of this recounted. 

“All the science was in place for the grant, but I had done none of the literally endless ephemera required for this sort of thing. You know what I mean. Budget. Site description. Qualifications of the Principal Investigator. None of it was done. And it needed to get done. So yeah. On one hand, was I pretty sure I had pneumonia. Yes. Yes I was. I’m very perceptive when it comes to my own biology. On the other hand, was I pretty sure I could still get the grant done before getting trapped by medical. Yes. Yes I was. I should also add that you never knew about medical back in the day at the PPDC. I mean, sometimes, they were perfectly chill, and then sometimes you’d be stuck in quarantine without your laptop for five days just because you’d been stabbed with a detoxified nematocyst. Anyway, I went to a briefing on January 2nd, and I do not really recall exactly what happened at said briefing, but I do recall waking up in the infirmary one hundred percent compos mentis on January 5th with my grant already submitted and Dr. Gottlieb bedside-vigiling me like a champ and not even yelling at me. So I most definitely remember thinking to myself that, perhaps, I was not so much of a persona non grata in Gottliebian ledgers as I had originally thought. 

Hermann looks for the memory and finds it, indistinct and fever-glazed, standing at the fore of a windowless room, losing himself in a biological breakdown, confusing himself over motive, not certain on what topic he was supposed to be speaking, uncertain who would watch Blue Planet with Mako if he couldn’t, because he couldn’t, he can’t, he isn’t even sure what’s happening—

He snaps himself free of another memory not his own.

“—and then one thing sort of led to another. Dr. Gottlieb is very classy, and so that was confusing for me because he took me out to many expensive dinners,” Newton continues, giving Hermann a significant look, “before I really understood what was happening, but I eventually processed the idea that he was totally hitting on me and then I did some reciprocal hitting. Metaphorically. He has a thing for me playing the guitar.”

Hermann does not glare murderously at his colleague turned roommate turned psuedosignificant other.

“Doesn’t everyone?” de Silva asks.

Newton performs an obscene roll of an ‘r’ in de Silva’s general direction. 

The afternoon proceeds in small, repetitive increments as Newton iteratively ingratiates himself with the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department in subset by clustered subset. Hermann becomes progressively more interesting by association. The experience is strange and familiar and intolerable and welcome and he finds himself almost believing the courtship story that Newton invents for them out of their shared history, complete with significant shared looks that imply swaths of intimacy—intimacy that is neither a lie nor what they make it seem. 

The only break in the afternoon is Newton’s encounter with the Department Chair.

They meet one another unexpectedly, after the sun has gone down, inside, next to the piano that Newton cannot help but gravitate toward. The Department Chair is flanked by a dark-haired man who is presumably his significant other, though Hermann has not enquired about their status. The pair’s conversation snaps straight to silence as Newton stops short, eyeing the department’s only Field Medalist with a strange intensity.

They stare at one another for a long moment.

Hermann isn’t certain what to make of the palpable tension that rises between the pair of them. 

Predictably, it is Newton who speaks first.

“Dr. Rush, I presume,” he says.

“The very same,” Rush replies. “Dr. Geiszler. What a pleasure. I’ve been following your work for quite some time. Both musical and academic.”

“Have you?” Newton replies, with a smile that, to Hermann, seems forced. “I can’t imagine why. 

“I believe we have a mutual acquaintance,” Rush continues smoothly. “Does the name Eli Wallace ring a bell?”

“It does,” Newton confirms with a tight smile. “He was in my upper level genetics seminar in 2007.”

“As I recall, you flunked him,” Rush says archly.

“As I recall, he deserved it,” Newton replies with a tight smile. “Too much gaming will tank an academic career.”

“That depends on the game,” Rush replies casually as the man standing next to him gives Newton a hard look.

Hermann reciprocates with a hard look of his own.

“What an interesting perspective you have, Dr. Rush,” Newton replies, “did you, by chance, do your graduate work at Caltech?” 

“Oxford,” Rush replies dryly.

“I only ask because—”

“It was terribly kind of you to invite us,” Hermann says, breaking in. “We very much appreciate your efforts to secure Newton a position with the Neuroscience Department.”

“Don’t mention it,” Rush replies.

Hermann clamps his hand shut around Newton’s elbow and pulls him away from the piano, into a bare-walled, shadowed hallway between the fluorescently-lit living room and kitchen. He doesn’t release Newton’s arm until they have reached the midpoint of the short corridor. On either side of them darkness creeps from open doorways like a substance with momentum. Like a substance with intent. 

“Explain yourself. What was that?” he hisses. 

“Rush looks like someone I knew,” Newton says, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he looks laterally, back toward the yellow light of the living room they’ve just vacated. Light hits his glasses at an oblique angle and glares off the lenses, making it difficult to see his eyes. “I think I’ve met him before. I think I—”

“Will you please drop it?” Hermann hisses. 

Newton shifts his gaze. The glare upon his glasses fades to nothing with the changing angle of his head. His eyes snap to Hermann’s face. 

Hermann immediately and deeply regrets this change in the focus of Newton’s attention.

“You,” Newton whispers, almost silent in the untrafficked hall, “told them we were together.”

“Er,” Hermann breathes.

“You told them we were together together,” Newton says, his voice low, his smile knocked askew by something that looks like good-natured revenge.

Hermann steps back. “I simply wanted to ensure that you were afforded all available advantages given that you—”

Newton steps closer, which is really not appropriate at all, because Hermann can’t retreat—there’s a wall at his back, very solid, very planar, very against his shoulder blades. Newton has totally disregarded all notions of traditional personal space and is, actually, leaning forward, which Hermann finds extremely indecorous. Excessively unseemly. 

“If you’re going to make me your pseudoboyfriend the least you can do is inform me ahead of time, Dr. Gottlieb, honestly,” Newton says, his pitch arcing into mock rebuke. He is standing close, incredibly close, close enough that there’s certainly some heat transfer occurring between the pair of them, not close enough to touch, not quite, but too close to focus upon. Too close to see in detail, too close, too dark, too close and dark for Newton’s eyes to look the green they are, too dim for the stainless steel accents on Newton’s jacket to catch the limited light that streams laterally through the almost nonexistent space between them.

Hermann takes a slow breath and tries to ignore the familiar smell of Newton’s hair gel. 

The focus-problem he’s currently having is purely an optical phenomenon but it’s a point of protective perseveration that prevents his thoughts from becoming mired in the heat transfer that’s occurring through the insulation of the air, or the countless variations on the genuine remorse he feels for leaving Newton uninformed regarding what exactly he had communicated to his colleagues over other drinks on a different night when Newton had been a circumnavigation of a bay away from him, half blind, listening to Star Wars in the dark. 

This is a terrible idea, whatever it is that Newton thinks he’s doing—standing this close, standing centimeters away from him, one of his boots interposed between Hermann’s shoes. The man is doing this on purpose, Hermann iscertain that he is, certain that he knows precisely what he’s doing, how could he not, standing this close and speaking this quietly?

Newton is a terrible, terrifying person.

“I had no idea, you know,” Newton says, almost silent and still skirting the edge of the uncanny centimeters that separate them, his voice a devastating blend of seriousness and irony that Hermann has no idea how to parse into his real meaning; if real meaning exists at all.

He had no idea about what. Hermann’s thoughts demands. What is it he thinks he knows? What is it that he didn’t previously know. He confuses even himself; you should probably ask for immediate clarification.

He does not ask.

He does not ask because he trusts nothing of this, not the wall at his back, not the heat at his front, not Newton, certainly not Newton, who cannot be trusted; who grabs his face, his arm, his shoulder, in thoughtless ease but who has created an eerie interpersonal air-gap that he will not close; who will start bar fights; who will change keys too often and too easily; who had spent Caitlin Lightcap’s funeral alone in his room playing Black Sabbath and drinking a dead woman’s vodka; who had said, ‘stay out of the lab in the AM, dude, I’m going to be homogenizing tissue and I know you hate that,’ when, in actuality, he’d spent all night constructing a rig on which to kill himself; who had slid his tray across a mess hall table in understated terror; who now spends his days fighting a constant, seaward pull about which he will not speak.

In the adjacent room, someone begins playing an arrangement of LHC on Professor Rush’s piano.

“These people are shameless,” Newton murmurs, and some unseen bar in the final word shatters the man’s driving, articulative momentum.

“Indeed,” Hermann replies, his own voice cracking. 

“And yet, I can’t blame them,” Newton whispers, still neither backing away nor bridging the too short span that separates them. “I’m pretty great.”

“Try to contain yourself,” Hermann replies, striving for a dry delivery, but falling far short of the aridity he would like to achieve because he does not mean the words he says.

He’s always envied the scope of Geiszlerian containment failures.

“It’s hard for me, a little bit,” Newton says, too close, extremely close, comfortably close, uncomfortably close. “Why didn’t you tell me about the whole fake-married thing?”

I didn’t think you’d understand, Hermann thinks.

“I didn’t think it was important,” Hermann says.

“No?” Newton replies.

“You don’t like misleading labels. I wanted to—. Hermann runs out of air to shape into his whisper.

“I know what you wanted. You used our semi-fake relationship to get me a semi-real job,” Newton murmurs.

“It will become entirely real when you take it,” Hermann replies.

Newton places the tips of three fingers against Hermann’s sternum and presses gently, incrementally widening the gap between them. “Hashtag, ‘accuracy’,” he whispers, like a secret shared. 

For a brief interval in the dim light Hermann isn’t certain what’s about to happen, but then Newton steps laterally, pulling away from him, turning back toward the living room, silhouetting himself against the glare of day-spectrum fluorescence. He shoves his hands into his pockets, steps into the crowd, and launches straight into the bridge ofLHC with an expansive sweep of open hands through open air.

Bending charged particles
Shows the way matter is built.
You superconduct
And super collide—

Hermann tips his head back against the dark expanse of wall behind him and shuts his eyes in abject relief or comprehensive disappointment. Even he cannot say which.