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: Midnight.

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 contamination with 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’s above the neurochemical travesty 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 slips his phone from his pocket and frowns at it.

They’re late.

Of course they are; Geiszlerian Chronicity runs 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 and 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 irritation, proceeds with its unthinking existence in 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, reclaiming his inner monologue.

Given last weekend’s unpleasant fallout post simultaneous identity confusion, he’s 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’s managed to associate with Newton’s thought patterns in the wake of last week’s interpersonal and intrapersonal trauma. 

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

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

Newton arranges his eyebrows in a way that conveys 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 subverts the entire message a tie generally sends; inappropriately tight black jeans; and purposeless fingerless gloves. The man has yet to don the boots 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 a science party. Gathering. Thing. Awkwardness-fest. What is this even? Tell me there will be alcohol. I can’t 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 not to. This is a rule 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 with one hundred percent scientists and zero percent alcohol. It’s more of a rule for poster sessions. Science and alcohol—they just mesh, dude.” Newton interlaces his fingers, then pulls his hands apart, palms open, as if displaying a monopoly on rational thought 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 prefrontal 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 rockstaresque or even rockstarish; he’d simply been looking to present himself in a manner incrementally less childish. Hermann can recall all of that, but what he can’t remember, what he can’t 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’s no need to remind me of your ivory-tower exploits, Newton, I assure you I’m all too familiar with all of them.” Hermann struggles with a confusing streak of melancholic fondness for an admixed set of memories that all feel like his own.

“Meh.” Newton needlessly straightens his jacket, checking his pockets for items unknown. “It’s less a reminding and more a one-to-one ratio of warning-to-rationalizing that took the form of narcissistic confession.” He sighs, then seems to rally. “Also, I’m not convinced you know what ‘Ivory Tower’ means because MIT isn’t it, okay? MIT graduates destroy towers with controlled demolition and build better-looking eco-conscious arcologies out of futuristic alloys with minimal resources.”

Hermann lifts his brows. “And you wonder why it is that people find you irritating.”

“The central mystery of my life.” Newton flashes a grin before dropping into a crouch to lace up his boots with reassuring dexterity in the pull and cross of laces. “You’re looking atypically and aridly erudite, 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 resolutely does not picture a stylized circle, setting like a two-dimensional sun, half obscured behind a line separating not-sea from not-sky at the edge of an imagined world. 

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

“Yes, about that.” Hermann shifts his weight away from the wall and looks down at Newton with faint apprehension. It is far, far past time he informs the man of how the UC Berkeley 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 obliterates Hermann’s 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 theatrically rockets 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 finds himself a bit edgy because, in point of fact, there is a sizable Caltech contingent within the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department. “You’ve 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 their historical tradition of truculence.

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 then steps into the hallway, away from his colleague’s expression of anxious concern that elicits nothing but attachment from confused parts of Hermann’s brain.

“Excuse me, but I’m what?” Newton follows him into the hall. He pauses to check the door lock in unthinking appropriation of a habit that hadn’t formerly been his.

“You heard me. I’m not inclined to take an oppositional stance 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 eyes Hermann’s blue cardigan skeptically. “How are my wardrobe choices ‘disingenuous?’ I have a band.” 

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

“False,” Newton replies, offended. “You don’t get my band, okay? If Benzene were really just about benzene I would have—”

“Wear a blazer,” Hermann counters, 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 your super-secret fashion aesthetic most closely correlates with the romantic-yet-conservative-Time-Lord-vibe the sixteenth doctor was rocking in the 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 off.”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hermann replies. “I’ve 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. He hits 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 not even his species; a thing he never was. A thing he’ll 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, equates destruction with controlled demolition.

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

“Y’know, I realized the other day that I don’t fear drowning?” Newton asks. “It’s weird; I still fear other things 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.

“You realized this under what circumstances?” Hermann asks 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 portion of the day that Hermann sits in his office, organizing work and thoughts to the point he can construct a platform from which to again take on the Riemann Hypothesis as battle or 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 of The 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’s supposed to feel in response to Newton’s pronouncement, but certain he doesn’t 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’ll be able to normalize everything back to our historical baseline.” Newton rounds the front of the Porsche and drags his right hand over the metal as he goes. “Impossible. Our future is continuous, ontological creepiness. You have to adjust your expectations or you’ll be perpetually miserable—chasing some ideal 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 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 and improperly stripped of uber-theistic asides. Like, on the surface, that’s a totally reasonable post-apocalyptic life, but myeah, with the caveat that there are also going to be a lot of cognitive trade-offs. Y’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-supress-predatory-instincts-about-three-times-a-week, or I’m-perpetually-concerned-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-but-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’s physically incapable of saying “Fake boyfriend?” with evident disbelief.

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

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

“You fixate on the weirdest things,” Newton says, as they shut their doors in inescapable synchronicity. “The very pseudoboyfriend vibe generated by the weird hipster chocolate I bought you the other day is beside the point. Absolutely Flow has this whole side business where she makes rustic amalgamations of crushed—eh, they’re like, I don’t know what, but they’re cocoa-derived. It’s ridic good. I remembered to give that to you, right? Anyway, she keeps handing me free food. That chocolate was also free, full disclosure. I’m a disingenuous fake boyfriend it turns out. I apologize. I pseudoapologize. I didn’t even buy the chocolate 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. Myeah. 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 new 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’s not certain why he can’t say it, and, furthermore, he’s not certain why he’s not certain why he can’t say it. 

He’s being ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

“I did not,” his car responds, quite appropriately. “I’m 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. “Do not befriend abnormally intelligent city cabs, Newton.” 

“First of all, he’s 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, 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 tips his head 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’re trying to avoid motion sickness.”

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

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

“Professional mathematician?” Newton sounds strained. “More like professional dick.”

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

“You’re 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 Trespasser tore a swath through San Fran? He hasn’t had 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.

Wonderful. 

Well, Hermann’s brain says philosophically, at least you won’t 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 to the boundaries you’ve 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’s 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 you’ll 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 [editorial aside: 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 spacetime turbulence at the subatomic level might have outrageously practical implications when it comes to understanding the transdimensional rift 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 you’ve realized this. Tell me that you’ve been thinking about it. Tell me your thoughts on the mechanism by which such 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 these 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 biology. 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 I chose biology over quantum mechanics, except no, I’m not, because I think 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.] I haven’t been able to find a physicist who 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 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 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’d managed not to romanticize Newton’s inventive articulateness on the cruelties of the human condition; in which he never cast his anti-authoritarian sentiments as wise; in which he hadn’t read so much into the erudition Newton would drop into his American vernacular, or the Rilke that he would occasionally intersperse in ironic annotation (Er ist der große Mauerbrecher/ der 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’d exchanged, Hermann had constructed 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 protective 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’d felt understandably betrayed and mildly repulsed?

No.

“Creepiness avoidance isn’t all that intuitive for a machine.” Newton searches his pockets for 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 glasses, “Carl had a hard time understanding 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, years-long aberration. A shared madness in prose. The great intellectual fling of his early twenties. A discordant, misguided interpersonal error he won’t repeat again. Hermann has told himself such things for years. But looking back now—over the parallel arcs of their shared past, from the depths and heights of EPIC Rapport, from the platform of perspective constructed by semi-regular manifestations of the SPECTER Effect, from the strange and privileged position in a world where the behavioral stereotype of human-hand-to-human-face has become altered-mind-to-altered-mind—it’s the span of time between 2016 and 2018 that strikes him as aberrant; that 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 a dozen different deployment docks, 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’d 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 the two aspects of the man be separated? Do both precipitate from an underlying set of core circuitry that determines all he is? Which part is artifice? Which part bedrock? How have those parts changed? What has woven 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 likes people. Or, he seems to. He says he does. 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 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 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 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 mode of automatic transit? Take a spin around San Francisco Bay in Carl? Thaaaaat’s weird.” Newton presses a hand 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’s still strange to both of them? Now that they live 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’d learned from Marshal Hansen just this morning, there was reason to think that Hannibal Chau might still be alive? There’s nothing he can do, no path he can plot or extrapolate through events already in motion and out of sight, overhead, on the other side of the world—wherever it is he doesn’t think to look. 

“Are you even listening to me?” Newton asks. “Over the course of telling this story I’ve concluded 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’s nothing Hermann can do.

They walk paths of undetermined length and unpredictable directional vectors. He wishes Newton wouldn’t 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. Okay. I feel good about myself and my car soliloquy right about now. What do you think, Hwi? Want a life partner? Carl’s 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’d be interested in exchanging parameter data and model weights with Carl, should he be interested in sharing them with me,” his car replies.

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

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

“Because it’s classier,” Newton replies. 

“And you’re 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’s 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 don’t 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 drums a 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 resolutely keeps his eyes fixed on the shifting road. “Will you stop forming relationships with self-driving vehicles of dubious character that are freelancing under the grid of the city-run public transit system? Will you please just behave in a 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’s 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 UC Berkeley Mathematics Department assumes 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’s 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 you’re asking Dr. Geiszler about musical choices?” Hermann 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 I’m your favorite?”

“Yes,” Hwi replies.

Hermann glares at Newton.

“Will you just—” Newton motions 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’ve corrupted my car,” Hermann says.

“Guilty as charged. Hand over the hemlock,” Newton replies, as music begins to stream from subtle, scattered, in-car speakers. Hermann recognizes the chorus of LHC 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 tell him right now that he’s 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’s 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 won’t 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 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’s the Platonic ideal. The point is I have sterling pun etiquette. Puntiquette? You know this about me. So relax. Also, the wine 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 be capable of such an oversight, Hermann sighs in aggravation. “I’d 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-complementary 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. “The parts of me that are you and appreciate things like ‘terroir’ now kinda 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 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’re a terrible human being,” Hermann says through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe you allowed me to 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 they’ll 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.

“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 Raleigh Becket? 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’m 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 rattles off a 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’s tone turns 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 under 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 worries 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. Y’know, I hallucinate her when I’m sleep deprived. It’s neat. Where by ‘neat’ I mean a little bit horrible.”

“Yes.” Hermann’s throat tightens 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’d 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 anything. 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 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 followed around by about four 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.”

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

“You could 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. I think they might 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, y’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’re 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’s 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 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. 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, 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 circumstances, Newton will leave. Newton leaves first. It’s a behavior so deeply ingrained, a pattern that grips him so strongly, that Hermann is occasionally unsure to whom that proclivity belongs. 

But it belongs to Newton.

To Newton.

Perhaps that is why telling him 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’s 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’s taken and the things he’s 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 won’t be that bad. I promise I won’t embarrass you by pulling out the MIT calculus cheer in front of your Caltech friends, okay? Later we’ll watch Voyager and eat ice cream.”

Hermann is fairly certain he’ll 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 about my lies of omission, 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. It’s on my list.” Newton eschews the door chime and knocks on burgundy wood with a complicated, exuberant, double-handed pattern that befits his ridiculous outfit.

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

But he doesn’t.

Starr opens the door.

“Hermann,” the other man says expansively, 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 fancy 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 and 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’s the alcohol? I need to be intoxicated to blunt my Leibniz-related indignation down to rational discourse levels.”

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

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

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

“Let’s find you some alcohol, buddy, and we will get into it.” Starr can barely conceal his anticipation.

Hermann follows Newton and Starr through a set of rooms with minimalist decor, filled with clusters of faculty and graduate students. Most of the department is gathered on the patio around alcohol arrayed on a 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. Animated mathematical discussions are audible from multiple directions.

Hermann’s nerves begin to unwind.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that anyone will ask Newton an overly personal, untoward question that will reveal what Hermann has communicated about their relationship. He’s certain he’ll be able to explain this as an aside, perhaps in several months, perhaps when Ms. Mori visits and she asks Newton how 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 rockstar 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 from confusion to a showmanship that Hermann recognizes, that Hermann has accidentally emulated twice in as many weeks. The man angles 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, “Boyfriend? Better known as ‘the better half,’ but I’ll answer to ‘boyfriend,’ sure. Someone give this Scotch to the Scottish guy and get me a beer. You. Trendsetter Kid. Mathematical Fashionista. Mathionista. Nice jacket. Two beers. German beer is 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 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’s unambiguously swamped by an influx of drunk and curious graduate students and junior faculty.

There is a pained artifice to the way 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 cast into the air around them with varying degrees of ease. Newton speaks with an undirected brashness 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 an interpersonal corner into which Hermann has painted him, where he’ll wait—with an insouciant, imperious, talkative neutrality—for all he doesn’t know to reveal itself.

Hermann finds it intolerable to watch him. 

Hermann finds it intolerable to stand unperturbed in the face of Dr. Geiszler’s prepared patience and the attendant psychology it entails. This moment slots down into a preexisting Set of Intolerability, taking its place adjacent to the man’s left-handed guitar, built in the summer of 2007; the way he identifies with lost things, with idiosyncratic vehicles and weeping 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 fishtank; 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’s not the only one.

Hermann fixes the man with all the anxious, apologetic intensity 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 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 Hermann 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 comes undone at every seam it has.

Newton combines irritation and flirtatiousness by fluttering his eyelashes in a manner that’s clearly ironic.

Well, at least it appears ironic to Hermann.

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

“I—er, no,” Hermann begins.

“So secretive.” Newton looks at Starr with an instantaneous camaraderie of the long-suffering subtype. “This guy, am I right?” Newton 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, oh, except for me, apparently. We’re half-siblings, I hear. I feel like I mentioned Sleepless in Seattle because 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 actually 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, inserting 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 busy and our relationship proceeded in a 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—” Hermann begins

Newton speaks over him. “I assume you guys know the basics, so I’ll 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 through my forearm between my radius and ulna, that I realized I should probably, y’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 remembers 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 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’s voice cracks. “No. Rewind. Start at the beginning. All we know is you guys corresponded for years before you met in person, you play the guitar really well, you have a thing for Leibniz, and you have a low alcohol tolerance.”

“More beer?” asks the fashionable graduate student who has 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 fulfilled my name-learning quota for today,” Newton says. “You’re out of luck.”

“Oh, er—”

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

“Draygon,” the student says.

“Draygon,” Newton repeats, delighted. “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 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, leans into his cane, and wonders if 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’ve 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!” de Silva pushes her short-cropped hair out of her eyes. “You were part of JET Force?”

“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 spacetime 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 the paper, then I wrote to him. Truth be told, I wasn’t up on quantum mechanics at all, and I mean, at all, but I was very interested in whether the whole spontaneous space-time tear thing was accidental or intentional.”

Hermann vividly recollects 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 grins like such a statement conveys anything notable, which it does not. 

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

“You remember what you said?” Newton asks.

Hermann remembers.

“Only vaguely.” Hermann draws sunglasses out of his pocket and offers them to Newton.

The other man’s expression twitches into amusement before smoothing itself into the benevolent superiority of a practiced raconteur. 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. 

“I won’t 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 collarbone.

“Aw!” Starr says.

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

de Silva tries to conceal a laugh.

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

“Aaaaanyway.” Newton regains control of the conversation. “We corresponded for years. Pretty passionately. You know how it is. Everyone looks their best while critiquing bullshit. There was one problem though—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, that status implied a certain maturity level. And a certain age. And a degree of decorum to which, don’t get me wrong, I perennially aspire, but when we met—”

“We despised one another,” Hermann speaks into the conversational space Newton has created. “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, y’know, been tenured for a while, that sort of thing,” Newton says. “Totally reasonable, yes? Yes. But. We’re the same age. I didn’t so much disclose this as not disclose it.”

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

“Nominally younger. Whatever. Anyway, it also turned out that Dr. Gottlieb is really boring. 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’s difficult.

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

“Myah. A story that’s perpetually unfolding.” Newton flashes Starr a brief smile. “So to rewind back to 2016, it turned out we could barely stand to be in the same room with one another. But it also turned out that when a whole bunch of your colleagues die testing experimental rigs and piloting Jaegers, that’ll function as an uber-intense bonding experience whether you want it to or not, you feel me?”

“We feel you,” Draygon says.

Hermann recalls the cast of the fluorescent lights, the broken edges of a too-short toothpick, the way—

Newton doesn’t look up from the set of 96-well plates 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 loading a 96-well plate.”

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

“Seriously,” Newton snaps, “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’s voice cracks.

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

“Dr. Lightcap is dead.” 

The only sound in the lab is the quiet click of a multipipette set 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 thirty-two thousand percent not my fault. But did I confess my feelings after 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, kinda literally, trying to get government grants to help support the ancillary research costs 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 transcriptome sequencing project I wanted to do, once I’d finally figured out how to stabilize the kaiju equivalent of RNA. Very simplified: I wanted to sequence that ish, but no one would give me any money 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 busy, generally speaking, and it was getting 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 mildly. “You look so young and hip though.”

“So do you,” counters de Silva.

“Thank you. Also, touché. I’m a terrible person,” Newton replies. “Extremely hypocritical. This is driven home to me on a daily basis. I blame Dr. Gottlieb; he should have warned me about you. I’m also not tenured faculty. I’m kind of an unemployed dependent right now.”

Hermann rolls his eyes.

“You’ll be doing a neuroscience thing, right?” Starr asks.

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

Hermann downs half his beer in a single go, not 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 physiology. On the other hand, was I pretty sure I could 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 don’t really recall 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 submitted and Dr. Gottlieb bedside-vigiling me like a champ. I most definitely remember thinking to myself that perhaps I wasn’t so much of a persona non grata in Gottliebian ledgers as I’d originally thought.”

Hermann looks for the memory and finds it, indistinct and fever-glazed, standing at the head of a table in 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 sure what’s happening—

He snaps himself free of another memory not his own.

“—and then one thing sorta 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. 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 pseudosignificant other.

“Doesn’t everyone?” de Silva asks.

Newton performs an obscene roll of an ‘r’ in de Silva’s 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 out of their shared history, complete with significant shared looks that imply swaths of intimacy—intimacy that’s 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 Newton cannot help but gravitate toward. The Department Chair is flanked by a dark-haired man, presumably his significant other, though Hermann hasn’t formally inquired about their status. The pair’s conversation snaps to silence as Newton stops short, eyeing the department’s only Fields Medalist with a strange intensity.

They stare at one another for a long moment.

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

Predictably, it’s Newton who speaks first. “Dr. Rush, I presume?”

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

“Have you?” Newton’s smile seems forced to Hermann. “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 forbidding look.

Hermann reciprocates with a forbidding 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 breaks 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 hall between the living room and kitchen. He doesn’t release Newton’s arm until they have reached the midpoint of the short passage. On either side of them darkness creeps from open doorways like it carries momentum.

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

“Rush looks like someone I knew.” Newton looks 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?” 

Newton shifts his gaze. The glare on his glasses fades to nothing with the changing angle of his head. His gaze snaps 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’s voice is low, his smile knocked askew by good-natured revenge.

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

Newton steps closer.

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 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’s pitch arcs into mock rebuke. He’s standing close, incredibly close, close enough that there’s certainly 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 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 and listening to Star Wars in the dark. 

This is a terrible idea, whatever 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’s certain he is, certain 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 real meaning; if real meaning exists at all.

He had no idea about what? Hermann’s thoughts demand. What is it he thinks he knows? He confuses even himself; you should ask for clarification.

He doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t 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 he will not close; Newton, 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’d said only weeks ago, “Stay out of the lab in the AM, dude, I’ll be homogenizing tissue and you hate that,” when, in actuality, he’d spent all night constructing a rig on which to kill himself in a kaiju/human drift; 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 articulate momentum.

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

“And yet, I can’t blame them.” Still, Newton neither backs away nor bridges the too short span between them. “I’m pretty great.”

“Try to contain yourself.” Hermann strives for a dry delivery, but falls far short of the aridity he’d like to achieve because he doesn’t 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 fake-married thing?”

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

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

“No?” Newton asks.

“You don’t like misleading labels. I wanted—” 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, 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 into the bridge of LHC with an expansive sweep of open hands through open air.

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

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.