Designations Congruent with Things: An Interlude In Two Parts

They make it out of Hong Kong.

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

An Interlude

Later, when Hermann stands alone in undisturbed reflection on a windswept foreign balcony in reddish evening light, he will become, slowly, so terrified that to contemplate a vista will be a hardship for the remainder of his life.  This consequence of cognizance comes as capitulation to a penchant that is not his own. It is a thing that comes from Newton—who professes a disdain for anecdotal thinking but who must combat this personal proclivity every waking hour of his life.

They make it out of Hong Kong.

But only barely.

Only after a breathtaking example of institutional and interpersonal maneuvering that Newton—that arrogant, magnificent, manipulative, terrifying man—initiates a mere two days post their drift when he stops eating, terminates a half-formed thought mid-word, and says, “who’s got the better black book of influential contacts—you or me?” in a tone that is light years away from a good-faith interrogative.

Hermann’s too enmeshed in arguments of quantum decohesence to tolerate this verbal whiplash with his typical aplomb. But when he looks at Newton’s face he sees disquiet there—in eyebrows pulled together, in the setting of his jaw. The man is looking at a thing across the mess and out of Hermann’s line of sight, until he veils and redirects his focus.  Hermann starts to speak but Newton lifts his eyebrows, cocks his head, and slides his tray across the table, saying, “we both know it’s not me. I’ve upended one too many tables in my academic life. Do your best to mount a rescue that’s within the bounds of reason, don’t always be so honest; bus my tray and take my carrots. I don’t want them.”

Hermann’s hand snaps shut, pinning Newton’s wrist so he’s incapable of rising.

There they sit, locked in wordless conflict in the busy, crowded mess.

Then Newton says, "let go," and Hermann does.

They make it out of Hong Kong.

But only barely.

Only after Hermann buses both their trays and leaves the hall while Newton makes a scene, upends a table, and allows Ms. Mori to step in, preventing violent escalation of a clash he’s manufactured before giving up his freedom to a formalized “request.”

Hermann spends three days obscuring his involvement in Newton’s second drift, cashing in the favors he recalls or manufactures, and feeling lost in wretched mental conflict; trying to divine a moral course of action that does not involve a lie and does not involve abandonment of Newton to a Pan Pacific lab. 

His conflict resolves in a four day evolution of evening visits to the med bay that proceed in this direction: “I am not enthused, man, no one understands the science," to "co-authorship’s alluring—but where’d they get their funding?" to "what would happen in a drift, given breach annihilation?" to—

Nothing at all.

Because his colleague is “unfit for visitation.”   

It is at this point the stakes become clear to Hermann. 

They become so clear, they become so immediate, that in a terrifyingly uncharacteristic move that comes from an area in his mind he can no longer call his own, he books flights out of Hong Kong, packs all the technology he can fit in a single bag, orders a taxi for two in the morning, returns to the medical bay, presents a forged letter of resignation to on-duty personnel, then—

Abducts his colleague from the Hong Kong shatterdome.

His plan is a disaster from the point of its conception. It succeeds for just three reasons—Newton’s free cooperation, which leaves his room unguarded; Hermann’s history of submission to decisions from above; and the lack of firm directives to the staff that work the nights, who might otherwise resist the force of Hermann’s glare and his litigious ultimatums. 

In a miracle of willpower, both heartbreaking and striking, Newton pulls himself together to the point he can withdraw consent and requests his own release.

They make it out of Hong Kong.

But only barely.

Only after Hermann helps his listless, silent colleague into clothes he’s brought for him and then spends several hours dragging Newton through a nightmare, berating him so he’s alert while hauled through public spaces; an experience that climaxes when Hermann keeps him conscious in the bathroom of the airport with a vicious, long cadenza of creative verbal threats—this string of words is all that keeps his plan from certain failure as Newton struggles not to faint and Hermann tries to help him. Please, he thinks, one hand on Newton’s blazer, be too exhausted; be too drugged, or maybe too post-ictal to be forming memories of this. Please let there be an explanation, please let this not be lasting, please tell me that this isn’t you, you moron; if your mind’s been ruined I will destroy so much in compensation that even you’d be shocked.

Hermann doesn’t ask what happened in that four day evolution, doesn’t inquire, doesn’t demand it of the medical staff or attempt a distillation from Newton’s mixed and broken words, but that does not mean he will fail to find out.

He spends fourteen hours of a fifteen-hour flight in a blitzkrieg of medical terminology and wi-fi granted planning while Newton sleeps or is unconscious on his shoulder. Forty minutes before they start descending, Newton stirs, sits up, and slurs, "we’re on a plane? Good show, old sport," in increasing British accent, then inquires after breakfast and the location of his glasses with a set of ordered sentences and slowly crisping diction.

Hermann can’t decide if he’s enraged or he’s relived; whatever he is feeling is unparsably extreme, so he just stares at Newton, who is pale and still too still, and because he cannot shout, ‘never do that again you reckless halfwit', in the face of a man who was willing to walk straight into the very thing he most feared on the unstated faith thatHermann would pull him out, instead he says, “go back to sleep.”

“Meh,” Newton says, noncommittal but compliant.

They make it out of Hong Kong.

But only barely.

Only after being stopped at Customs because in the fifteen hours that they’ve spent upon their plane, there’s been an order to detain them—placed and then rescinded—as favors counter favors in interfering waves. Newton spends a quarter hour in loquacious fantasies before he takes his anti-epileptic, a prophylactic courtesy. He talks himself to sleep atop the table in their holding room while Hermann waits in locked-down panic, his back to where a camera’s perched, unblinking, on the wall.

When all wave functions in the void collapse into their outcomes, they stagger free of Customs and they travel to a campus—green-lit, under trees. The doctor who they meet there has ears that have been pierced in quadrupled iteration and an eyebrow ring that’s shell-like in a tribute to the sea. Her name is “Coral,” and when she extends a hand, beneath the edge of her cuffed sleeve, the margin of a blue tattoo appears. Despite her skills on paper and the branching web of contacts that have fostered this connection, Hermann doesn’t like her.

But Newton does.

“I hear you saved the world by tweaking your membrane potentials,” Coral says, unhurried and at ease, “and in exchange, became a little epileptic?”

“Myeah,” he says. “Or maybe not? No. Possibly? We’ll see.”

“Well either way, that’s pretty rad. So thanks, man. Have a seat.”

This perplexes Newton—to the extent a man who’s half-aware can be perplexed—but for what reason, Hermann can’t precisely say. Possibly it is because he doesn’t understand he’s being thanked for averting an apocalyptic end to human culture. Possibly it is because his mental function is a shadow of its former self. Possibly he’s flummoxed by his female doppelgänger.

“Yeah,” Newton says, slow motion revelation. “It is rad.”

Hermann warms to ‘Coral’ a small amount. He despises her still less after careful neural testing is performed on each of them once Coral has cleared her schedule for the day. He decides he finds her ‘adequate’ during Newton’s EEG when he discovers she remained in San Francisco despite the constant kaiju threat because she was unwilling to leave a city, half-destroyed, with even one less physician. He decides that he quite likes her when she tells them both their EEGs are, “ragingly abnormal, guys, so that’s not great.  But it isn’t unexpected either, so I vote for careful observation to see what trends emerge. You boys cool with cognitive kinetics?”  He reclassifies her as ‘exemplary’ when she says, “Dr. Geiszler—please lie down. Dude, y’got worked by ethically conflicted military types who were packing XR-benzos, and I’m finding this more than a little painful to watch.”

“For all you know, Hypothetical Rain, I’m ethically conflicted.” It’s a knee-jerk opposition—disorganized, in torment.

Hermann stands to help him up.

Coral gets him on the table.

“Were you addressing me as ‘Rain?’” she asks.

“Myeah,” the man admits, tracing frames of borrowed glasses like he wants to get his fingers underneath them.

“What kind of name’s ‘Hypothetical Rain’?”

“It sounds better aural than ‘Actual Coral’,” Newton counters.

“You’re a little bit cute, Newt,” Coral says.

“You’re certain he’s drugged,” Hermann snaps, not in a rhyming mood.

“His blood work confirms he’s postictal and heavily medicated. Based on what’s coming out of his mouth given that double caveat, I’d say he’s likely not to show any significant cognitive deficits.

“I like this one.” Newton looks at Hermann behind darkened, borrowed glasses. “Let’s keep her.”

They keep her. 

It is only late in the day, when Newton is still sleeping off whatever he was given, this time in tangled hotel sheets, only after Hermann has showered and donned a robe because the only change of clothes he’d thought to pack hadn’t been his own, only when he is standing on borrowed balcony—bare feet, damp hair—that he allows himself to dwell on how narrow their escape from Hong Kong had truly been and how tenuous it still remains.

They’ve made it out of Hong Kong.

For now, it is the best that he can do.

He hopes that They—this nebulous, precarious concept of the authoritarian, occulted Other, that he’s received from Newton and cannot shake—got all that they needed in those four days. Hermann still doesn’t know exactly what is was they did. Coral has offered to make an inquiry on their behalf, and Hermann is content to allow her to petitionThem for all materials related to the four days that Newton spent in “volunteered” collaboration.

He has no plans to try and wring any details out of Newton, unless the man should offer them to him.

Hermann stands on cool cement and grips the railing, tormented by a terror he can’t shake.

The sun sinks in a red haze behind the gray and monochromic Wall that has obscured the whole horizon.

He has so much to do.

And all of it seems impossible.

“Wall’d Sunset,” Newton says, from the open door behind him. “Good band name.”

Hermann jerks and grips the rail, then looks back at Newton.

He leans against a glass edged wall—Eurydicean, spectral, and by no means out of hell. Hermann doesn’t say ‘what happened’ and he doesn’t ask, ‘who did this?’ he avoids both Coral and Keppra, to choose gentle disputation.

“I’m sure I don’t agree,” he says, “but when compared to ‘Superconducting Supercolliders’, anything’s preferred.”

“The name reflects the ethos of the band.” Newton sighs—philosophic, windblown—abridged by his exhaustion.

“Ethos, is it?” Hermann asks. “Then try tasteful misdirection. You’re certainly practiced enough.”

“It’s an art form,” Newton says, his steps unsteady, fingers closing on the rail. “I think I might throw up. I think I might be starving. My brain is overtaxed. My proteins won’t go down a pathway labeled ‘catabolic’, or if they are, they’re taking their sweet time.”

It occurs to Hermann then that he has not eaten for what must be twenty hours. He has no idea how long it’s been since Newton ate. “We should order food,” he says.

“Yeah, dude,” his colleague says, “but let’s just wait a beat to make sure there won’t be gross dry-heaving over twilit metal rails.”

“Delightful,” Hermann offers.

“Well yeah, what can I say?” Newton rests his forearms on the rail and twists to look at Hermann. “Delightful is my skillset. Winsome even. Fab. You have made a splendid life choice, Dr. Gottlieb, sticking with me. Commendable. Praiseworthy. Laudable. Meritorious. Just think of all the escapades we’ll have together as I demonstrate my own stupidity in pursuit of larger goals and you rescue me from resulting permutations of triggered consequence.”

“I regret nothing,” Hermann says.

“I do.” Newton coughs. “A little bit. I should have tried that second drift alone.”

“You said it would have killed you.”

“Now, I’m not so sure.”

His head tips back, his eyes fall shut, and Hermann looks away so that he does not scream at him in mangled German/English, ‘do you know because you tried it?'  He cannot speak past locking jaw, and wonders if he’ll always be this angry. He is sure the answer’s yes until he turns his head and Newton looks at him with windswept hair and rumpled shirt, a principle of entropy who’s been cursed with human form.

Newton’s nose begins to bleed and he searches vainly for a handkerchief before settling on his cuff.

“I find you wretchedly infuriating,” Hermann whispers in the dimness. His throat is tight, his eyes are hot, and he can no longer look at Newton. “Borderline intolerable.”

“I know,” the man replies, choked with words or blood. “Thanks for rescuing me anyway.”

“You are quite welcome.”

“This is less yelling than I’d have predicted, were I in a predicting mood,” Newton says, his wrist pressed to his face.

“I prefer to yell at you only when I’m certain you won’t faint if I trigger an episode of intense self-righteousness or cognitive dissonance.”

“Are you implying that I would lose consciousness in the face of my own perceived superiority?”

“No,” Hermann says. “I implied no such thing. I stated it directly.”

“Whatevs, man, I’m gonna go bleed in the sink, rather than raining blood on benighted—where are we?”

“San Francisco,” Hermann replies, his eyes narrowing. “How much do you remember of the past twenty-four hours?”

“Planes,” Newton says. “Rain. Head pain. That’s pretty much it.”

“There was no rain,” Hermann replies.

“And by ‘Rain,’ I meant Coral.”

“Of course you did,” Hermann says, then watches him in silence, fighting with the questions he’s too terrified to ask: ‘are you all right; what happened; how could you let them do this?’ while Newton stands there twitching, clearly trying not to cry.

“How much do you remember?” Hermann asks, in compromise.

Newton shakes his head and swallows.

Hermann guides him back inside.

Time passes.

Hermann tries to track the things that change, because someone ought to, and Newton’s not inclined.

Their hotel gives way to an apartment. Hermann’s realms of bravery expand. Newton straightens items left askew. The number of communal handkerchiefs increases at a rate suggesting unseen reproduction. Hermann now reads Neuron, sometimes even to himself. Newton walks a widow’s walk in front of west-faced windows. Hermann brokers UC Berkeley tenure for them both. Newton undermines him by refusing an invited talk and spending weeks on re-deriving calculus for purposes his own. Hermann asks no questions and enjoys his proxied Leibniz. Newton spends six weeks exclusively in clothes that hide his skin. Communal nightmares rise. Hermann waits three weeks before he buys tequila. Newton waits for half a bottle to elapse before admitting to the final drift that Hermann’s long suspected. They speculate on consciousness in pieces: what happens to a fraction of a hive mind? Hermann throws up in the sink, Newton throws up in the trash, then everyone is bleeding. Hermann takes a daily aspirin. Newton takes twice daily Keppra.

When something runs away from them they stop and watch it, frozen by an instinct of predation.

But there’s the day that Newton drives to Berkeley, talks to his department, then spends a week in frenzied inspiration that Hermann thought he’d lost. There’s the time that Hermann puts on Queen in absentminded preference and Newton tackles him to stop a musical correction. There are the nights when no one dreams, or dreams are small and life-sized—espresso grounds and science books, the tenure track, or people.

There are the dawns when Hermann wakes, and does not find his colleague fully clothed and staring toward the sea.

Of those, there are not many.

But there are some.

In Two Parts

Later, when Newt weaves across a semi-dark hotel room, lit to rust at sunset, and sees Hermann, barefoot on the balcony, clutching its rail as though he thinks he’ll fall, he will come to feel, slowly, so guilty he’ll have difficulty ever asking Hermann for anything again, tacit or overt; a consequence of his own narcissism subluxed beneath a borrowed weight of crushing, total duty to some nebulous concept he’s never able to fully define and that must haunt Hermann every waking hour of his life.

His third drift is clean.

In a way.

It is clean in the way that that all terrible decisions made from pure motivations are clean; it is clean like a circuit, clean like fiberoptics, clean like a prism, clean like a paring away, clean like an informed sacrifice in good faith is clean because he doesn’t do it from desire, he does in the place of someone else, he does it because he’s already been more damaged than Hermann has, he thinks. He does it because they will not stop asking him, he does it because they will start asking Hermann, and Hermann might do it, Hermann has done it, Hermann would do it, Hermann will do it; it is a certainty, it is factual, so Hermann must not be asked, there must be no Race to The Prize a la The Flaming Lips, it must be only Dr. Newton Geiszler of the neuronal debris and the epidermal verdigris who discharges this lien on his cognition in full. That was what he signed on for, his poor, perspicacious past-self, and Newt owes it to past-Newt, to Hermann, and to everyone to control what happens in the aftermath of this apocalypse, averted.

So when they say, ‘if you’re not interested in helping out, perhaps your colleague would be more amenable,’ Newt lifts a hand and eyebrow and comes back with, ‘history favors the jerk first published—so, sure. I’ll help you. No need to call the physicist, he hasn’t got a clue, wasn’t even really involved, not in a material way, do not even thinkabout opening my skull, I’ve got a workaround for that. What are we, barbarians? Build me a ziggurat and ask me again—I promise I’ll consider it.”

This is your brain, his brain says. This is your brain on blood. Always say no to trephination even if it is in the ostensible name of scientific progress. Or, in this case, apocalyptic prophylaxis.

Good advice, brain, Newt replies. You are rockin’ it this week. I’ll miss you if we’re cut apart because of questionable choices that I’ve made.

Speak for yourself, his brain replies, sounding just like Hermann. It watches waveforms change as he attempts to realign a foreign rig to match the one he built.

His third drift is clean.

In a way.

It’s clean in that even though he commits some sins of omission in order to break the news of what’s going on to Hermann in a sort of slow motion bowling-ball-meets-bowling-pins-and-sedately-knocks-a-few-over kind of way rather than mallet-meets-a-giant-single-paned-window kind of way, his intentions going in are good. It’s also clean in that the last clear memory he has is engagement of electrodes and membrane voltage fluxing, which, in and of itself, should not be a problem—

Except for how it is.

The rest of it?

Confusing.

Spatial distortion, derealization, whose hand is that that’s shaking? Simple partial, that’s not good—oh look, he has an aura. Some guy’s neurons are depolarizing before they’ve read all the directions. Some guy’s visual field is turning blue. We should have loaded him ahead of time, Dr. Geiszler can you hear me Dr. Geiszler can you talk. That would be a negative, thinks the man whose simple partial seizure’s trying to rickroll to a complex class; a transmitted bait and switch in waveform current before this trial has even started, but what in god’s name isexpected when one queries ns of ones? So sorry to have inconvenienced you, someone should have seen this coming; in retrospect it’s clear. Not clean, not in the drift, not even clean, ‘what a mess,’ is spoken words. That guy losing consciousness concurs, clean in nothing but intent. Some loser’s brain has sided against him. Geiszler’s back is starting to arch.

His third drift is clean.

In a way.

It’s clean because he can’t recall it, knows it happened, someplace blue and buried beneath the plate tectonics of a molten sense of self, there’s so little he recalls and most of it is shouting. Newton get up, Newton get dressed, Newton when they get back in here communicate your vanting out, Newton if you faint inside this men’s room I will flay you alive with the sharp edge of your long-lost trigonometry textbook do not test me do not breathe so fast you will be fine you will be fine. Blue light, confused thoughts, a consciousness in search of missing aperture.

He nearly falls but someone rights him, he needs to sleep but someone fights him.

His eyes are burning, he cannot feel his hands he cannot exist this way it is too hard; he cannot shut the doors that don’t have hinges; he has no place to stand, let alone a way to leverage any order in his thoughts.

Relax.

The word is close and urgent, smooth and distant. Hands are pushing him back, hands are pulling off his glasses, an upward press of thumb opens one eye, then the other. Something holds his head in place. What is happeningexactly? He thinks he’s sitting up and this is Hermann; he thinks he’s lost his hivemind—this is hell. The only thing collective consciousness cannot conceive is the terror of aloneness, and now the breach is closed; all dead parts are lost. Who knew that they were screaming, disembodied, silent, cross-linked? Active even in their prisons made of liquid aldehydes? He tries to scream, he cannot scream, he screams in all directions.

Something runs into his eyes and leaks across his face before it’s wiped away.

His glasses are returned, but they are dark and they are not his glasses.

His third drift is clean.

In a way.

It’s clean in that it cleans him out—his mind feels reinvented. Is this a plane? Are these his shades? Who dressed him in a blazer? The answer to that question stops typing and turns to look at him in tense anticipation. “Good show old sport,” is all Newt says until he also says, “when’s breakfast?” and, “whose glasses do you think these are? I’m sure that they aren’t mine. I think they might be non-prescription shades.”

Newt doesn’t know what’s happening, but nobody is screaming.

Hermann stares at him in long and neutral silence.

Newt considers anterograde amnesia while Hermann says, “go back to sleep.”

‘You’re not the boss of me,’ turns into, ‘I don’t care for your tone,’ turns into, ‘no, thank you,’ turns into, ‘no,’ turns into, “meh,” which is what he actually says, while reappropriating shoulder real estate.

Hermann adjusts his posture in a facilitating manner and confusingly pats Newt’s hand in quiet reassurance, with a whispered, “idiot.”

Even Descartes, prince of coordinates, might find this confusing, so Newt doesn’t judge himself too harshly. He tries to remember if he’s done anything stupid but comes up with echoed nonsense. The last thing he can remember is Seattle—

But he has the feeling that it isn’t 2020 anymore.

He is lying on a table in a room that has no windows.

Hermann’s watching him and frowning.

It occurs to Newt that he now knows what’s going on. Exactly. Only one thing makes some sense—it’s obvious he’s dreaming. So, ex tempore, what the heck, he says: “what’s a nice rationalist like you doing in a dystopian nightmare like this?”

Hermann rolls his eyes in blurry irritation. “You dragged me here,” his colleague says.

“Sounds right,” Newt also says. “Man but this is hyper realistic. I don’t understand why my glasses aren’t working.”

“They’re not your glasses,” Hermann says. “They’re my sunglasses.”

“Oh,” Newt says, unnerved by watching air turn into see-through glue. “That’s nice of you.”  His eyes burn and ache; he think’s they’re made of sand except for how they’re leaking. He wonders if they might turn liquefacted and create sinkholes in his skull. It happens with real sand, so does it happen also with eyes if they are made of sand, in dreams?

“I hope to god you’re drugged,” Hermann whispers, arranging Newt’s hair for no reason Newt can see. “Your eyes are fine and you’re not dreaming—try to keep that in your head.”

“But it explains so much,” Newt argues back. “The eye thing has me worried.”

“Are you trying to communicate that you need more eyedrops?” Hermann asks.

“No,” Newt says, in deep offense. “I doubt you’re even real.”

“Will you hold still,” his colleague snaps, while pulling off Newt’s glasses.

Eyedrops will only pool in there and up the liquefaction, god; do mathematicians ever even have minimal good sense?

“Can you not? Arithmetical autocrat much? What is that stuff?”

“You were discharged with it, and I will thank you to stop moving,” Hermann says, going at Newt’s second eye with more success than stands to reason for a guy whose hands are shaking.

Surprisingly, there is no liquefaction because his eyes stop being made of sand, so things work out for everyone, except he’s not quite sure—

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Open your eyes—

Ow. What a terrible idea, Freddie Mercury, can you not? Unplug your mic and go home.

Hypothetical Rain’s name is Actual Coral, and she does nothing to diminish Newt’s sense of unreality by thanking him for his world-saving, calling him ‘rad’ and using the word ‘sick’ as a stand-in for ‘awesome’ while gradually winning Hermann over in a sustained display of total improbability and then telling Newt to take a nap on her exam table while the people with baller executive function talk it out in complex strings of words with more idea density than some losers can currently handle, and he just does it because he feels like maybe if he goes to sleep he can eventually wake up and see with eyes that aren’t aflame. Maybe he’ll Descartes his way to happy endings—

But how? His coordinate planes are rusted, filled with glue and dirt.

“There’s so much walking,” he says to Hermann, out of breath, half blind—he thinks his eyes are melting? He is stumbling across the planar tile of a deserted echo chamber hung with chandeliers.

“I know,” Hermann replies, one hand on Newt, one hand on his cane, as theoretically exhausted as theoretically he gets.

“What if we just stop here?” he gasps in desperation.

“We cannot stop here,” Hermann says. “We are literally in the hotel. Do not lose consciousness.”

“Do you think that’s a possibility?”  Newt watches as his vision grays along its edges.

“No,” Hermann says. “It is not. Keep going.”

His inertia’s bent on leaving him; he tries to fall in iterations—in doors, the elevator, and halfway down a hall—he’s never quite successful until he’s collapsing, uncontrolled, face first, and straight into a bed, so this is a hotel after all. He thinks he drifted, he thinks that screwed him up, he thinks he remembers why he did it and that was because They’d left him here, alone.

There’s something that he’s missing.

The horde in his head isn’t there anymore.

Sodium carbonate is grinding in his skull. Someone, maybe Hermann, has pitched him off a hypnogogic cliff. 

His third drift is clean, or so he tells himself. It must be, because his hypochlorite mind is oxidizing every thought he has.

When he wakes, the world feels real.

His hair’s a mess, his muscles sore, his tongue is stuck against his palate, his eyes are burning, his head is pounding, he’s tasting days-old blood, he’s not sure where he is, he’s much too hot, and someone has his shoes.

The room’s a blur.

He isn’t wearing all his clothes?

He lacks the mental resources for ‘concern,’ and so he tries to find his glasses.

Obligingly they find his fingers when his fingers find the nightstand. He puts them on, and an impersonal room sharpens into red relief.

It is evening.

There are hard drives on a desk.

There are folded clothes atop a shoulder bag.

There are two pairs of shoes on the floor.  

There is a scrambled set of lines behind a frame that’s reminiscent of a piece by Kupka, but is not.

This room seems less stationary than rooms he can remember.

But.

He’s in a rented room, and rented rooms have bathrooms.

Getting up is tricker in practice than in theory and his nervous system sends him anxious autonomic signals while the thing’s in progress but eventually he’s standing with one hand on the wall.

After five more minutes he’s contemplating an alarming version of himself who might have bled into his sclera and who could use a razor if he’s got one, and who, like Newt, is gripping sink and wall.

“Well,” he says to his reflection, “it seems you bought a week of stupid that you’re slowly paying down.”

Brain, he queries, are you there?

No, his brain informs him. Try back later.

Thanks a lot, he thinks, and fills a plastic cup. He chokes on rusted water and spits some mystery blood into the sink. The blood becomes less mystifying when his mouth reclaims its own pain variant from agony more generalized and head-shaped. Newt discovers that, at some point, he’d bitten the inside of his left cheek.

“Oh, you did not have a good day,” he says, trying not to see his body art. “Did you.”

His reflection gives him a pale and bloody step-off stare.

Someone’s been drawing Venn diagrams again, his brain opines.

“Did you do acid?”  Newt inquires, polite and nonjudgmental. He helps himself to the damp toothbrush he reallyhopes is Hermann’s—because if not?  Well, he’s extremely screwed. He finishes his brushing and spits more minted blood into the sink. “Because if so? Why.”

He splashes water on his face, runs hands through hair that’s stiff with flaking glue. He finds a sticker on his temple and remembers someone mentioned EEGs. Could he still be in Hong Kong? He remembers walking in a grayish haze through different buildings and lying on a two tables. Sitting on a plane. Wearing Hermann’s sunglasses, that’s weird; it makes him nervous.

Two eyes, both red, snap back to the mirror.

The memory of drifting hits him like a slap unformed—blue, amorphous, so full of longing that he staggers, trips on nothing, and ends up on his knees, dry heaving on the floor beneath the burden of a nauseous desire.

“Why would you—” he gasps. His body tries to rid itself of things it doesn’t have in blind pursuit of what it shouldn’t want.

He lies down, his nose is bleeding, so he breathes in through his mouth, tips his head back, thinks of kittens, and does his best to prevent death in a foreign hotel bathroom because that would be tragically unfair.

To Hermann.

To Hermann, who he hopes is here. Somewhere. Around.

If Newt hasn’t died already, he doesn’t think he will.

Drift number three? he asks his brain. You thought you could withstand it? 

His brain is MIA right now and not inclined to answer, a mental divahood that’s going to make his life less good; we already talked betrayal and how it’s good for no one, brain.

He pulls himself up, he washes his face, he wonders where his shirt is. He traces back along the wall to clothes that have been folded. He shakes them out and puts them on, foregoing socks and buttons.  His shoes he leaves right where they are, tangled with their playmates.

Intent expands his field of view.

Hermann’s backlit on the balcony. His hands are on the rail, his shoulders square and bathrobed, while in front of him the sun goes down behind a darkened Wall.

Sun Sets Disgusting, Dr. Geiszler tags this vista.

He has to hold the wall to cross the room.

It’s the thing Bosch would have painted had he ever seen the Wall—the falling sun, a hellish red, a wall, a man in bathrobe. But who’s that creep who stands in open doorways with a disregard for buttons and those eerie bleeding eyes?

Hermann, Newt begins, leaning edgewise on paned glass, I’m sorry that I did this. 

The door is hard, his head is hot, his eyes are silicized if what was silicized could suffer. 

I’m sorry that I left you, that I dumped this at your feet—but you’re for sure the better man. In a reversal of position I could not have pulled you out, all I’d have done was join you in some final, ending blaze. Did you think we might escape drift three? What kind of story is this? There’d be a third, I knew it, I knew it in that alley. We cannot leave a thing alone when hypotheses are proven. Even you cannot quite do it—why else would you be looking at the sea, the turning tide, the deepest trench, the bridges that might form there?

Around him he can feel the ghostly glide as metric tons of displaced water stream across the scales he doesn’t have.

Too late, my time has come,
Sends shivers down my spine,
Body’s aching all the time.
Goodbye everybody, I’ve got to go,
Got to leave you all behind and face the truth.

Shut up, Freddie Mercury, shut up.

Newt pulls shirtsleeves down as far as they will come, gripping cuffs with fingers, feeling fabric tense across his back. He is too wrung out to be upset; he wipes his eyes on cotton shirt cuffs and tries to think of what he’ll say that won’t end with him a sobbing mess on Hermann’s shoulder. Descartes is out, and so is ‘thanks,’ so is, ‘sorry that I did this’. ‘Hieronymus Bosch’d’ might get him punched, coming out of nowhere, but that’s the avenue he’ll take when he’s pulled himself together, he’ll comment on the vista. That should be safe—no one will cry, freak out, or lose it, in a perfect world, that is.

“Wall’d Sunset,” Newton says, when he thinks his voice is steady. “Good band name.”

Hermann turns to look at him.

Time passes.

Newt cannot help but track the things that change; he doesn’t want to, and keeps them to himself.

San Francisco yields to Oakland. Hermann buys them both new clothes. Newt returns the clothes, or would, if he were leaving their apartment, which he’s not and so he wears them. Hermann arranges him a job talk, Newt arranges, ‘how about no’.  Hermann wrests a standing offer out of UC Berkeley Neuroscience, and leaves it on a table made of pointed metaphor. Newt gets a little monomanic and takes up with Descartes who leads him into Leibniz. No one ever mentions Nietzsche, ever, not now, not anymore. Hermann drags him out to dinner and they live with epistaxis. On the day Newt leaves their building, he walks a massive circuit through abandoned, ruined streets and completes it on the Wall, where he knew he would. He looks out at the sea—the running tide, the creep of life upon the outer concrete leaflet—but he just stands there, nothing happens, nothing really matters, anyone can see, so he walks back in the dark. Hermann studies eigenvalues and picks through zeta zeros at the times he’s not distracted by the way that Newt will stand at windows, and bleed there, unprovoked.

When they argue, really argue, they stand distant and immobile, shouting, but unmoving, because they do not know if hands are clawed or not, and someone might get shoved through a window, someone’s skull might get staved in with a cane.

But there are the times that Hermann pulls out shades and reads him Neuron while Newt lies in sunglassed darkness, attentive, listening; and the times he reads him Goethe when Newt’s pulling down his shirtsleeves and staring towards the sea. There is the afternoon that Hermann spends in Newton’s lab at Berkeley, setting up a rig, unasked, in waspish, quiet glee. There are the nights when no one dreams, or dreams are small and life-sized—broken strings and shipwrecked boats, dishabille, or seagulls.

There are the nights when Newt can sleep, the dawns he doesn’t see.

Of those, there are not many.

But there are some.