Designations Congruent with Things: Chapter 3

“I feel weird,” Newt decides.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None

Chapter 3

“I feel weird,” Newt decides.

He's still staring at Hermann’s wall of math, and he's a little bit, but only a little bit, resentful of the fact that staring at it like this makes him appear to be having either some kind of arithmetic awakening or a mental epiphany regarding the importance of Hermann in his life, but he’s NOT having any such revelation, not either of those revelations actually, because, first, he'd understood Hermann’s math, mostly, before the Drift—if he hadn’t, what had all those doctorate degrees been, other than something to repetitively do until he got old enough to apply for grant funding with a straight face, like the cross-disciplinary cross-dimensional intellectual baller that he, for sure, definitely was and is—second, he's pretty sure he understood Hermann himself, sort of, from about the midway point of their joint-appointment-to-the-apocalypse, but, presuming both those statements are givens, why is he staring at the man's spread of chalk now?

Because he'd come here for alcohol. He's pretty sure about that.

Newt supposes the appeal of those ranked and filed equations up there and down here and all over the wall is that they now feel more personal to him, as if string theory and parallel universes have suddenly and irrevocably come under the purview of his own body of work, as if he had written the things, as if he were the one who’d known, had known exactly, when the world was going to end, had felt the press of future annihilation in a rigid temporal way and—wow, yeah, that had been hard to take, extremely hard to take, hard to feel, hard to bear alone because his immature savant of a lab partner—

Wait.

That hadn’t been him after all, had it? That had been— 

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Hermann says dryly.

UGH. And he’d been thinking what now?

Hermann has a talent for interrupting his train of thought at the most inconvenient times, cognitively speaking, and Newt is pretty sure, pretty outrageously positive actually, that the guy knows it and does it on purpose even though he can remember no such thing from the Drift. He has evidence, empirical evidence; it’s happening right now, in fact. Data doesn’t lie, it can’t, it simply exists, waiting for the gloss of interpretation, but sometimes underlying mechanisms can be confounded by the story that stitches them together—

“If you consider your previous twenty-four hours, you’ll discover that you experimented on yourself, neurally entangled your consciousness with a hostile alien mind, traipsed about Hong Kong, were nearly ingested several times by, I believe, two separate kaiju, drifted with me, entangled yourself again with the hivemind in the kaiju anteverse, consulted on the best way to detonate a thermonuclear warhead so as to seal a dimensional rift, and then proceeded back to this lab for no rational reason I can determine.”

That’s probably the longest sentence Hermann has said since they drifted, and Newt gets that, yeah he does, because the post-Drift mental state, well, it’s a designation congruent with the actuality of things, but he doesn’t have words for it; how could he? It's a post-verbal phenomenon, meaning he just knows Hermann now like he knows himself; he can conjure up the cognitive image of himself-as-Other without words, but honestly Hermann had never really, never entirely, been “Other” to him in the philosophical sense. They’d worked together too long for that.

“Yes,” Hermann admits. “I suppose we have.”

Newt stares at him in abject astonishment.

“That was atypically poetic,” Hermann says, “but didn’t pertain to your earlier observation.”

Newt stares at him in even more abject astonishment.

He’s pretty sure he has no idea what’s happening here.

I think you just responded to my internal monologue, dude, he thinks in Hermann’s direction. That, or my internal monologue went external without my permission.

Hermann looks away from the chalkboard. He takes one look at Newt and he snaps, “Newton,” in that way he has, that super-irritated way, which Newt now realizes also has an element of anxiety to it.

What? Newt thinks, mildly affronted.

“Say something.” Hermann looks a little bit more freaked out than faux-British put out.

Okay, so maybe he was wrong about Hermann being able to read his mind. It’s still a little ambiguous though—Hermann could be quietly imploding because he can hear Newt’s thoughts and he thinks that’s about eight kinds of terrifying, or he might be freaking out because Newt is staring at him like maybe a little bit of a creeper; he thinks his eye probably looks pretty disturbing, it hurts like hell if hell was glaucoma—does he have unilateral cerebral edema?

Can you read my thoughts? He stares at Hermann in intent, purposeful silence. If so, please respond in a complete, unambiguous sentence. For science.

The sharp sting of Hermann’s palm cracking against his cheek is so surprising he flinches and overbalances and then falls over.

Now he’s on the floor?

Yeah.

And he still doesn’t know the answer to his question.

He will admit, however, that a trend is starting to emerge.

“Ow.” The word comes verbally rather than mentally and lands as kind of a bewildering mixture of annoyed and outraged and confused and betrayed and also, mostly, confused. “What the hell, Hermann?”

“Newton.” Hermann looks ten percent aghast, fifty percent satisfyingly guilty because—well duh, the dude just slapped him and because of coordination problems the whole thing escalated—and thirty percent confused. The final ten percent Newt will equally distribute into the categories of “somewhat distressed” and “very tired.”

Hermann’s eye looks as bad as Newt’s feels.

“You stopped responding to me,” Hermann says, very slowly, kind of insultingly slowly, leaning on his cane like his leg is killing him.

“You can’t read my thoughts,” Newt concludes, coming up on his elbows.

“What?” Hermann says.

“I thought maybe that was a thing you could do,” Newt explains.

“So—you weren’t briefly catatonic then,” Hermann says, faster now, with the air of a man coming to his own conclusions.

“No man, I was hypothesis testing.”

Newt is pretty sure Hermann was also hypothesis testing, which would explain the slap. They’d just begun with different hypotheses. It turned out neither of them had been entirely correct in their initial suppositions, but they’d ruled some stuff out at the end of the day.

Science, man. Kickass.

Demonstrable kickassishness of science aside though, he's still not totally sure what just happened there and whether his observations on the philosophical implications of the Drift had made it out of his mouth, and, if they had, what he'd actually said. Apparently, if he’d said something? It had been poetic.

In Newt's opinion, that argues against it being a verbal thing.

“Ah,” Hermann says. “Naturally. Can you simply—”

The other man breaks off as Newt gets his feet under him and pushes himself up. The guy is slightly late to the Newt-acquiring-vertical-momentum proposal, but he reaches out to grab the front of Newt’s jacket in a belated and kinda superfluous stabilizing maneuver.

Or, huh, nope, actually, not that superfluous after all, Good call there, Dr. Gottlieb, because Newt’s a little bit lightheaded as it turns out, but he has definitely had a rough day so that makes sense.

“Yeah dude,” he says, hands on knees, trying to look at the floor but looking at grayness instead, “I can simply.”

“No,” Hermann says in disapprovingly crisp stereo or maybe surround sound? Newt’s not sure, but his head is now the headspace of the audiophile he’s always been or always meant to be; it’s hard to do much with a laptop and the crap acoustics of a metal lab but he makes it work. “Incorrect. You’ve demonstrated repeatedly that that’s not the case. You’re barely standing, and, based on the last five minutes of conversation, I have material doubts about the coherency of your thought processes.”

Hermann has a point.

Usually he does.

Newt is fine, but he can see how he might not look it.

He gives his cardiovascular system and his nervous system time to have a confab, the main topic of which will be, ideally, where his blood should be going, i.e. not just his feet. Everybody crosstalks it out like champs—nice work, nervous system—and then he can see and hear normally, and he feels less like he’s got one foot in the door of a room labeled “unconsciousness.”

He straightens.

He’s good.

He’s awesome.

“Medical,” Hermann snaps. “Now.”

“Aw,” Newt says again, touched for the second time in a ten minute span by all the super-secret concern that Hermann has been plastering over with outraged decorum for something like—well, a lot of years.

“Stop saying that,” Hermann says.

“Medical.” Newt decides that rational decision making cum subject change is the better part of valor. “We’re going.”