Out of Many Scattered Things: Geneva 2020

THE WALL OF LIFE. All caps, to better match the shouting.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: This is where I live.

Geneva 2020

On a remarkable day in a remarkable city a remarkable biologist is giving a remarkable talk.

The remarkable day is Monday.

The remarkable city is Geneva.

The remarkable biologist is Newton Geiszler.

The remarkable talk is this talk.

The lights in this offensively amphitheaterized auditorium aren’t bright, but Newt’s final slide is. Bright white. Bright white within the dim purple glow of the room. Bright and white, rectangular and illuminated, and not what should come at the end of a talk, which is an “Acknowledgements” slide where Newt rhapsodizes about his Super Science Team of Super Science Friends.

Nope, that’s not what this is.

Not this slide.

Not this final slide.

Not this bright and white, rectangular and final slide.

Not this slide. This slide has a different title.

THE WALL OF LIFE.

All caps, to better match the shouting.

He gets through half a sentence, through one long, subordinate clause delivered with a contempt-cocked cadence before the audience becomes cognizant of the idea that he is NOT (as it were, is, are, and will be) A FAN. 

The room shifts, literally and figuratively. Audience members grow restless in their seats, turning toward one another. The whispers carry a threatening undertone, like the low buzz of a too-close nest of wasps.

Newt keeps going.

Newt keeps going and the low hum breaks into audible talking.

The talking ratchets up in volume.

He has six points to cover.

He’s not listening to what people are beginning to shout and he doesn’t have to, because he has a microphone clipped to his collar, three minutes on the clock, and a slide of ideas he’s planning to articulate. The first person who makes a real attempt to speak over him is a guy in the back row who has elected to go with an anti-Geiszler ad hominem and come on; that’s low hanging fruit, man. He’s made it easy for them, he’s not sure why, with the dark drape of his tattoos that look black under purple light. Should he have worn a blazer?

Probably.

When he hits talking point two, entitled: DESTRUCTION OF COASTAL ECOLOGY, another audience member stands up. Guy Two is planted smack in the middle of the central fan of seats. From a standpoint of academic tactics, this isn’t a great development for Newt. Guy Two joins his ideological friend at the back of the room in some sub par rhetoric. Newt hits Guy Two with his best back-off stare, long and fixed and derisive and disdainful and disdainful and disdainful; he can feel his own disdain distorting his expression, leaking out of his voice, dripping off the pointed ends of his consonants, sdaining the floor with dis.

“Catastrophic and pointless destruction of biodiversity aside, before moving on, I will again emphasize: it is a categorical impossibility to fence in the Pacific.” Newt slides his volume up, analog-style.

Someone accuses him of attacking a straw man.

Newt shifts his gaze, snaps, “In my dreams,” then continues, his rhetorical stride unbroken.

He glances laterally at Drs Choi and Gottlieb, who are taking this display with equanimity. Like they’re professionals or something. Weird. Tendo’s wearing a neutral mask but Hermann nails Newt with an expression that veers into incredulous while carrying a little bit of a do-what-you-must vibe. Newt looks away and moves to talking point three.

DIVERSION OF ESSENTIAL RESOURCES.

It’s here he begins to lose control of the room.

He’d rather not lose the room. Not here. Not now. Not at point three. So he hangs on, increasing his volume, spreading his hands, gesticulating, digging deep into all two hundred and six of his buried didactic bones, in order to last this out. He’s pushing it, he’s pushing it, he’s creating sustain, he’s modulating his pitch, he’s refusing to close a cadence, he’s using every rhetorical trick he knows to hook his train of thought into listening cortices, to keep the thread of his monologue from hitting the full stop where the room will break into something he can no longer speak over.

It is in this way that he makes it through point three.

He clicks a button and point four appears.

INEVITABLE FAILURE.

“Even if the Coastal Wall could overcome the obstacles I’ve laid out, catastrophic failure is inevitable,” he begins.

The room cogwheels another notch out of his rhetorical grasp. Two more people stand and still more are speaking—some in support of Newt, some joining with the opposition. People are shifting, moving centrally. Newt still controls each flank: the left, where no one stands, where Tendo and Hermann act as an anchor on the scientists around them; and the right, where the ecologists sit in a solid block, radiating approval—so he steps away from the lectern and looks up at the jackass in the center, not listening, not responding, just continuing, speaking louder, glaring right up the barrel of the amphitheater and talking over them, talking over them, talking over them at increasing volume until his voice cracks and he’s shouting into his mic. 

He’s still the loudest; everyone can still hear him, he’s sure of it.

He doesn’t look at the screen as he clicks through to point five.

EXTINCTION.

Probably he doesn’t need to explain this one. But he’s doing it anyway; he’s shouting over the loudest guy in the loud central section, the guy who seems like he’d like to get out of his row, but whose cooler-headed neighbors aren’t letting him reach the aisle.

“Given that failure is inevitable,” Newt says, maxing out his volume, “given that a child could understand that the walling away of the planet’s contiguous water-spaces is functionally impossible, we are left to speculate about the implied competence of—”

The thing that stops him doesn’t come from the guy in the center or his block of supporters. 

It comes from the back. 

Lightcap’s name breaks through his thalamic gate-keeping and derails his train of thought.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” Newt shouts over the dull roar, opens his arms, invites attack. Daylight streams through open doors in the back, people are leaving, people are getting the hell out, people are coming in.

“I SAID,” the man shouts, his voice fraying with the volume he’s bringing to bear, now that Newt has made him the focal point of the shifting attentional tide, “that Dr. Lightcap would have SUPPORTED THIS WALL. This Wall would have SAVED HER LIFE.”

“FUCK YOU.” Newt points with two fingers, turning a corner he hadn’t known was there, too much adrenaline in his hands in his voice, in his ears, where he’s not sure if the dull roar he’s registering is the room or the sound system or something internal to him. “She would NEVER have let so much as a BRICK get off the ground. She would have KILLED IT. She—”

Someone remotely deactivates his microphone.

That doesn’t matter.

Newt clicks through to his final talking point.

FUTURE PLANS.

“I WILL DESTROY THIS PROJECT,” he screams over the deafening roar of the room, over local and global arguments, over everything and everyone trying to speak.

“WE will destroy this project!” shouts an ecologist on the right flank of the room, standing this time, dragging the postdoc next to her to his feet, stepping into the aisle to block the path of a guy who looks like he’s maybe coming down to take a swing at Newt. 

“IT’S NOT VIABLE,” Newt continues, losing his voice to the effort of amplitude, “it’s ludicrous to the point of farce. I will do everything I can to bring it down.”

“The Jaeger Program isn’t viable!” A physicist leans over the front row, trying to shout him down. “Resource consumption by the Jaeger program is increasing exponentially as the rate of Breach transit accelerates!”

“It’s effective,” someone calls from the other side of the room, maybe Tendo; Newt’s not going to turn his head to see.

“That’s NOT the ISSUE.” Newt’s vocal cords are grating, his throat beginning to burn, “just like you wouldn’t compare the Jaeger Program to a collection of children who WISH for the kaiju to go away you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t EVER, compare it to building a WALL constructed of all your resources and mortared with your short-sighted DENIAL—”

The lights in the room come up, turning from the purple that’s ideal for looking at fluorescent microscopy to a brighter glare.

Someone grabs Newt’s arm.

He jerks away, stepping laterally, muscles contracting, but it’s only Tendo, who isn’t dragging him out, who has apparently decided to come stand here with him at the bottom of this academic pit, probably for the purpose of creating just a little bit of a higher bar for anyone who might be inclined to, oh, say, punch Newt in the face, for example.

An administrator with a working microphone steps through a door at the back of the room and announces the end of the afternoon session.

“Come on.” Tendo eyes the door behind the podium, already pulling Newt toward it. “That’s our cue.”

Newt shakes his head.

“Come on,” Tendo insists, and then Newt is getting dragged toward the nearest door, but after a few steps he decides to go with it because he’d lost the room at Lightcap’s name, or the room had lost itself there; it doesn’t matter, either way his platform is irretrievable. He’d made it through everything he had to say; there’s nothing left for him to do here other than face the fallout of his comments, which he’d fully intended, but which is seeming like maybe not the best idea to him right now. They stop long enough for Newt to pull off his microphone and for Tendo to release Newt’s tablet from the lectern, then they leave the room. There’s a small back hall, a sharp corner, then a flight of stairs that of course Tendo knows about because Dr. Choi is a closet architect in the secret dark of his brain and heart, obsessed with the utilization and mental mapping of interior spaces. 

They end up on the second floor of the building, where Newt is pretty sure they’re not supposed to be.

In the half-light of an abandoned corridor, Newt glares laterally at Tendo and snaps, “I’m not going to run away,” waaaaay too viciously while ironically, yup, definitely in the process of running away a little bit. 

“We’re not running away,” Tendo replies, unmistakably conciliatory, his hand still locked just above Newt’s elbow. “We’re just waiting until the most preeminent structural engineer in the PPDC forgets he’s planning to deck you. That’s not called ‘running away,’ that’s called a ‘good decision’.”

Tendo leads the way down the empty hall and doesn’t say anything else.

The silence weighs on Newt. 

“It’s just that she would never,” he offers, like a cogent explanation.

“Yeah,” Tendo says, hoarse and quiet, looking away, looking at the door he’s opening. “I know.”  

They enter an unoccupied men’s room, fluorescently lit and much too bright.

Tendo gives Newt’s arm a subtle shake.

Newt looks up. They stare at one another until Tendo sees whatever he needs to see in Newt’s face. Newt gets a shoulder-clap as reward or affirmation.   

“Hang out here, yeah?” Tendo says. “I’ll go downstairs and see if any security personnel or six foot five American engineers are spoiling for a fight.”  

“Sure,” Newt says, because he can’t quite bring himself to say, “thanks.”

Tendo leaves Newt alone.

Newt paces the length of the empty room, over the black marble of the floor, past three red stalls, and pictures a time ten million years from now when maybe an alien culture (that comes with spaceships rather than giant carnivorous unthinking yet admittedly kind of awesome monsters) finds this bathroom and maybe also finds some trace of Newt’s DNA long after the fall of his civilization and maybe they’ll improbably clone him from trace nucleic acids and maybe Future-Newt will be a good person who has an interesting and important and fulfilling life as an alien science experiment; maybe the aliens will be nice and they’ll be into talking rather than eating and they’ll try to figure out Newt 2.0’s wants and needs and it’ll be great all around. Maybe that’s what the kaiju are doing—kind of roaming the planet, looking around for something they can talk to and encountering all these delicious plankton-size little guys that build interesting sand castles that are fun to crush. Maybe the kaiju are just marauding teens and someday soon their even gianter lizard parents will tell them it’s time to grow up and get a real job, choppin’ down trees like ya do, or maybe in finance or science, or marketing or entertainment and then all the disaffected young people will go on to become productive members of kaiju society, unaware of how many little consciousnesses they’d killed and terrorized in their youth. 

Poor disaffected lizard teens trying to find their way through a dangerous multiverse.

Life is hard, kids, Newt thinks at Trespasser, Hundun, Kaiceph, and Scissure. Reckoner, Karloff, Knifehead, and Raythe. Stop coming here and killing people. Stop coming here to die. Start a thrash metal band instead or something. 

He’s crying a little bit, but that’s not weird. That’s just evolution. It doesn’t count. It comes with the adrenaline and the implied threat of physical violence from his peer group who subliminally and collectively desire to physically punish him for a threatening conceptual stance because they’re all, Newt included, descended from warrior primates with established dominance hierarchies.

That’s fine. 

Rise above your genetics, little cerebral primate friends, Newt thinks. Rise above. 

He puts his tablet down on black marble or fake marble, whatever, Newt’s not really great with rocks it turns out. That’s not his area. He grabs the dry edge of the sink, but doesn’t turn on the water. He swallows. His throat is hot and dry and sore.

Dear Hermann, thinks Newton Geiszler, PhD^6, standing under fluorescent lights in a Swiss men’s room, composing a letter it’s too late to send, I’d like to take this opportunity to both apologize for and explain my recent comportment, which I recognize has been less than ideal. A little bit sub par, even for me; a little bit of a bad idea in an unprofessionally disheveled shirt; a little bit like mv versus a brick wall, a little bit like one half mv squared versus a sick Wall, a little bit like critical mass meeting critical mass where both masses are previously apportioned parts of my personality. That got away from me a little bit, analogy-wise. I am sorry about that. I’ll redirect into more intellectual territory and give it another go. The human brain, am I right? Very plastic. Very lazy. It relies on expectation and fixates on novelty, so we take things for granted, like the sunrise, like the sensation of clothing after a lifetime of wearing it. We don’t have to work so hard to understand phenomena conceptually related to that which we’ve mastered. Expectation. It’s great. I’m a fan. Generally.

The door to the men’s room opens.

Newt clenches his jaw, tips his head back, glares at the ceiling, tips his head forward, fixes his hair, and maybe wipes his face a little bit. Let gravity do what it’s good for, right? He is very—he is just very. He decides to wash his hands because that’s what people do while standing in front of sinks. Tendo won’t judge him. Tendo’s not a judgmental guy.

Newt is slightly surprised when he gets a familiar, lateral, waspish, and notably judgey, “Newton,” that is not very Tendoish at all. 

“Hey,” Newt says without enthusiasm, not looking up, just staring down at his hands, at the colored dermal drape on his forearms that no one gets and that no one can get over; but it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t matter to him and if it doesn’t matter to him then who should it matter to, really? No one. That’s the answer.

“Do not say ‘hey’ to me,” Hermann hisses, coming closer, “as though I am some acquaintance you vaguely recollect. What is wrong with you. There is no excuse for such behavior in a public venue.”

“They had it coming,” Newt says, neutral and casual, powerful and freaking amazing, like some kind of rhetorical deity rolling his shoulders in a broadband broadcast of unconcern. “They all had it coming, actually.”  He adjusts his glasses, smooths a rolled sleeve, studies himself in the mirror, fixes his hair, and decides that no, Dr. Geiszler does not look upset because why would he? No reason. “You shouldn’t have involved the meeting administrators, or security, or whomever it was you involved. I’m assuming that was you? Never mind. I don’t need to assume. I know. The whole thing had you written all over it. Did you tell Tendo to drag me out of there? It doesn’t matter. I had it under control, for your information. I wanted to make a point. I wanted to make several. I do not appreciate professional interference of the kind you’re dispensing on a semi-regular basis these days; it’s not necessary, it’s not required, it’s not welcome, it’s not—”

Hermann interrupts Newt before he gets the chance to pump any more positive feedback cycles into his building oratorical momentum. 

“There is a sizable faction attending this conference that conceived, funded, and currently supports the Coastal Wall,” Hermann says in a secretmen’sroomesque hiss. “The project has the political and literal capital to progress itself over the next five years, so you would do well not to antagonize them quite so overtly.”

Newt rolls his eyes and exhales in obvious and (mostly) collected dismissal, as if he weren’t the guy who’d spent the final three minutes of his talk screaming down the people who’d started screaming at him, as if his throat doesn’t still feel like it’s bleeding somewhere deep down, as if his sinuses don’t ache. Everything is fine; everything is perfect. So he’s a polarizing figure. So people hate him. He doesn’t care. He’s doing his job. At the end of the day, science wins. Or, alternatively, at the end of the day science makes a stupid decision in the short term and, before the field can self-correct, everyone dies horrible, agonized, terrified, protracted deaths. So, myeah. Low stakes. He’s chill. He’s literally always perfectly chill; it’s other people who aren’t chill. Other people.

Newt smiles at Hermann, casual rictus style.    

Hermann looks away. Quickly and completely, turning his head to the side, like Newt is taking off his pants or typing an unconcealed password.

I feel ya, Newt thinks.

“Are you all right?” Hermann asks.

“Excuse me, but who the hell do you think you are,” Newt snaps in an inexplicable, aggressive reflex, zero to eighty in four words.

“Unacceptable,” Hermann hisses, looking at him again now that Newt’s rhetorical pants are back on or whatever. “I understand you are upset. I understand why you are upset. We are all, all of us distressed by—”

Newt throws a hand up because, turns out, despite his rhetorical pants and his snappy exterior and—and, well, he’s not sure, but despite all the things that are in an active state of “despite” this isn’t going to go well, this is outside his limits; it’s shouldn’t be, it’s weird, it’s like doing a drug in an unfamiliar location; not that he knows about that in a practical way, but his psychological tolerance isn’t as high in Geneva as it is at home; does he have a home? Probably not, but fine, his tolerance isn’t as high as it is in the lab, as it is in front of a bench, in front of a rack of tubes, a cytometer, a microscope, holding a scalpel, with a headache from the smell of formalin, where Mako passes him in the hallway with her new blue hair and her serious face, where the food is all the same, and the rain is hard and happens every day.

Hermann stops speaking in surprising submission to Newt’s silent sign for “stop.”

Newt doesn’t say anything, he just walks straight past Dr. H.G., PhD because he doesn’t have anything to say to him, not here, not now, not in this men’s room, not with all that’s happened and all that hasn’t; all that will and all that won’t. Hermann shouldn’t care quite so much about Newt, or he should at least have the decency not to show he cares. What is this, anyway? Some kind of men’s room intervention? The whole thing is disingenuous and unjust and not fair at all. Don’t write to a guy for years and years and years if you’re too inflexible to accommodate anyone else’s personal style, god, though, really Newt’s not one to talk, per se, but Newt is done with this train of thought, he’s been done with it for years, and he’s definitely done now.

Newt doesn’t need anyone looking out for him, Newt doesn’t need to be rescued from academic riots he purposefully creates, Newt doesn’t need anyone’s sympathy, Newt is fine, deeply, widely, always fine. Newt is a biological organism, a deformable sack of electrified goo, piloted by another even more deformable sack of even more electrified goo inside an ossified case. Newt is totally ridiculous and ridiculous things don’t need sympathy from colleagues who consider themselves less ridiculous and are, therefore, more ridiculous.  

 

He trips going down the stairs, probably because he’s thinking too much about his brain and not enough with his brain, but he saves it, it’s fine, and while he very much plans to descend upon the fifteen minute coffee break like he owns the thing, because he does; he doesn’t so much return to the main lobby as he walks through a back door out beneath the shredded blue and white sky.

He shoves his hands in his pockets and stares up towards the expanding edge of the observable universe. It hurts his retinas after the dark of interior spaces.

Everything is fine. A heated talk within a lifetime of heated talks isn’t a big deal. People love him or hate him; or first love him then hate him; or first hate him then love him; but there is not now nor has there ever been a whole lot of the oh-yeah-Newt’s-a-guy-I-feel-pretty-neutral-about-I-could-take-him-or-leave-him-really sentiment going around these days. Or ever.

He left his tablet in the men’s room.

Hermann will probably notice.

Hermann will probably hang onto it for him.

Newt decides to take a walk.

He heads in the direction of Mont Blanc. He can see its rise of rock only occasionally between the closer, steeper upsweeps of bright buildings—mostly it’s a cityscape of white stone and glass that reflects the clouds. It’s decorated with the pale glitter of traffic lights and other illuminated city-semiotics that are washed out beneath a pale sky. 

The wind blows through his hair and he can’t help but wonder if it hurts to die fused to a rig, caught in an undescribed memory. He hopes it was a good memory. He’s not sure why he’s sure it wasn’t.

Calm down, he tells himself. Pull yourself together. Grab the imploded pieces of your selfhood with tongs, pull them out of the vacuum suction that is your current psychology, put them in a dish, clean them, make a three-dimensional model of what they should look like, and epoxy them into a workable structure because there is a giant Wall of catastrophic stupidity that needs to be torn down. Literally. By you. In the relative near term.

Of course, his brain offers. Of course they’d wait until she was dead to propose walling in the coastline. They’d wait until she died. Did someone propose it like that? As an action item? When A, then B? Did they have this proposal in a drawer somewhere, waiting for the day she couldn’t laugh at it?

Did I need that thought? He asks his brain politely. Was that necessary? 

I don’t generate, his brain replies. I just articulate. Also? If you’re interested? You’ll fail. You’ve already failed. That Wall is going up. 

Newt ends up on the Promenade du Lac Léman, looking over a body of water that nothing will be crawling out of. That’s nice. That’s fun. That’s what passes for a vacation these days.

This is his second time in Geneva. He’d come five years ago, for the First International Breach Symposium. That time, he’d been giving the keynote. Giving the keynote, meeting Caitlin Lightcap, meeting some absolute dick who he’d corresponded with multiple times per day for two years in a bizarre flurry of total mental alignment, which had been very exciting until, well, alas, said guy definitely was not into him in the way that Newt was into said guy, and that was also fine because said guy was really, really really about one point two million subtypes of irritating so Newt didn’t care; Newt didn’t care at all, it turned out. He doesn’t care now. The past is always some halcyon misdirection of the consciousness; that’s what makes it the past. The present tends to feel like an ever-evolving slow motion catastrophe no matter what’s happening—or at least every present Newt can remember in a present-y sort of way? Memories. What are they even? NMDA receptors, long term potentiation, blah blah blah, he doesn’t care, he’s having a nihilist afternoon a little bit, kind of, not very much but yes, a little bit. Yes. Kind of.

Are you sure the lights were green?

Are you sure that the lights were green?

Not really.

He leans a hip against the white stone railing and looks out over Lake Geneva, which is beautiful to the point of offense, full of boats and clouds and birds and other things that people from the late Renaissance had secretly been dying to paint when perspective was a new and exciting thing and High Art was just all saints all the time, when the coming Dutch obsession with light was a century and a half away and Andy Warhol hadn’t yet emerged into the darkest prognostic dreams of the Artistic Establishment. Is any of this even true, or is it just a plausible story he’s absorbed, fabricated, and re-articulated about art history courtesy of too much time in academia and an ill-advised incendiary relationship with a Fine Arts grad student? Could go either way, really. He’s not great with rocks, he’s not great with art, he’s so/so with space, he’s fantastic with tech, he’s shit at most things involving hand-eye coordination, he’d rate himself a C+ when it comes to fashion, a C++ when it comes to programming, he is entirely unimpressed with his knowledge of history but he’s not into war, he doesn’t like it. The vista is pretty though. That’s the point. That’s nice. Whatever. He’s on vacation. He’s on fifteen minutes of vacation. He’s on a walk.   

His phone vibrates in his back pocket. 

There’s a one hundred percent chance that it’s Hermann. 

Newt tries to guess what will be appearing on his little pocket screen. Probably it will say: “Where are you,” without a question mark, so it reads as a demand. It might say something about his professionalism or his maturity level, neither of which are likely to be particularly impressive to Dr. Gottlieb right about now.

His throat feels hot and wet and he’s already sighing as he looks at his phone.

But. 

It’s a single message against an empty screen from a number he doesn’t recognize.

::Hi Newt, I’m not sure if you remember me…but this is Søren. I have a new number.::

Newt raises his eyebrows, not really sure how an event like this, with a near zero statistical likelihood, has happened to him. 

Dr. Søren Sen, the arrogant, well-spoken, irreverently poised, poisedly irreverent, one hundred percent attractive and one thousand percent intellectual hotbox, also known in the Geiszlerian cognitive catalogue as That One Guy from Prague, is—

Texting him?

Right now?

Newt hasn’t seen the guy in twelve years and hasn’t spoken with him for six. 

::Yes:: he texts back. ::I remember you.::  And then, because the set of words he has selected looks a little too collectedly ominous out there on its own, he adds, ::life can only be understood backwards::

Is this pretentious? Yes, it is a little bit, but Newt is having a Kierkegaardy day and a guy improbably named Søren is messaging him, so there’s also that. He’s within the bounds of nerd philosophy flirting. Nerdosophy flirting.

::…but it must be lived forwards:: he gets in reply. ::Can I take you to dinner?::

Newt’s face seems to be confused about what it’s supposed to be doing and, also? Søren’s skipped a step or five, which seems about right based on what Newt remembers about the guy, which is a lot, and he feels kind of disorganized and totally unprepared for a person that he knows, wholly unconnected to science or the PPDC or really any salience hook upon which Newt has been hanging his varied hats lately, to just contact him, out of the blue, while he’s sitting by a nice lake; what’s that about even?

::You seem to be thinking very hard about this:: Søren observes, after Newt spends a flustered set of not seconds but minutes, literal, actual minutes not sure what to say. ::If you’re busy, I understand::

::I’m in Geneva:: Newt types, confused.

::I know:: he gets in reply.

Newt’s brain is still grappling with working models when Søren elaborates, ::I’m also in Geneva. In fact, I’m attending the same conference you’re attending. If you want the next level of detail, I feel I must inform you that I’m leaning against the south wall of Poster Session C next to the wine (obviously) and listening to a grad student give a dramatic reenactment of your talk to a group of her peers.::

Newt backs away from the white stone railing and sits on a bench, resting his elbows on his knees, not certain how to reply.

He’s not sure what Søren, who has a PhD in philosophy, is doing at the Breach Symposium, but hey, sure, the existence of an inter-dimensional portal is a thing philosophy probably has something to say about, so fine. Admittedly, Newt isn’t excited about the idea of the guy listening to a biased blow-by-blow account of, arguably, the least successful talk Newt has ever given.

He’s not sure why he cares so much what Søren might think about this, because yes, Søren is hot, and yes Søren is outrageously, just outrageously intelligent, and they’d had a fun time, but they’d never really had a thing and if they had had a thing, which Newt does not admit, even if they had, he’s entirely over that thing, whatever it might or might not have been.

He’s over everything in his life. He lives in the fine-ground prism of the present, not in the unsplit light of the future or the magical rainbow past. Given his clear-headed total neutrality, does Newt really care what Søren thinks or is it that Newt cares what Newt thinks; and if the latter is true (as it likely is), what is it that Newt thinks? Newt’s not sure. 

::Still nursing a weakness for the fiery diatribe?:: Newt asks.

::Until the day I die:: Søren replies and Newt can hear the blend of sincerity and sarcasm coming off the digital page. ::You didn’t answer my question. Can I take you to dinner?::

::Drinks::

Newt’s not inclined to trap himself somewhere for hours with someone he’s not sure he knows, not inclined to do that today, not inclined to do that ever again, maybe, because he doesn’t need that. He has his people, Tendo who likes everyone especially those who carry too much, Mako who will (hopefully) one day grow out of her adolescent death wish before it obligingly ends her life for her, Hermann who doesn’t really like him but who hates Newt less than he hates other people, maybe, not really at all. The point is that Newt is fine, Newt is great, Newt doesn’t need to kill two and a half hours in a darkened restaurant with a guy he doesn’t really know, a guy who probably lives whole stretches of hours where he doesn’t think about the ocean, the Drift, the kaiju, the Wall, the Breach, the people who have died and the ways that they’ve done so; Newt doesn’t need a sexual fix, has never needed a sexual fix, has never needed anything really, and he just likes places he can walk out of, walk away from, because that’s something he finds he prefers to do on a semi-regular basis; it’s fine, it’s part of it, it’s part of his life now, it’s part of who it is that he is and what he’s becoming.

It’s what you’ll feel you owe me, she’d said. 

Maybe if he’d only replied, I don’t owe you a thing, Lightcap, and I never will, she’d have let him make that true.

“It’s okay,” Newt says, looking out across safe water, not talking to himself anymore, but to his memory of her. “It’s okay.” And it is, because he won’t let them speak for her, he won’t let them append her name in any way to a Wall she would have scorned. That she could have laughed down, once, on the nightly news. They would have said, “What are your views on the Coastal Wall?” And she would have looked at them, her expression twisting with her effort until she couldn’t stop it anymore and she would have laughed. High-pitched and musical and long, one hand over her mouth, one hand on her chest, her skin flushing, her eyes watering, trying to stop, but failing, saying, “Oh my god,” every time she took a breath, one hand over her mouth, staring at whomever it was who was interviewing her in that way that she had, that conspiratorial way, as the news anchor tried to get out, “I can see you’re laughing; what do find so funny?” but not making it through three words before they were laughing too, choking on the question, as Lightcap kept breathing over and over again in genuine helpless appeal, “I’m so sorry, oh my god I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” as she laughed and laughed and laughed until an unscheduled commercial break when she would have had to drink a glass of water and compose herself in a corner, alone, counting off in whispered sets of four.  

And that’s the way she would have killed the Wall. 

Newt can’t do that.

His phone vibrates in his hand.

::And by “drinks: do you mean a 16:00 cocktail or a late-night bottle of wine?::

It takes Newt a spread of seconds to understand the message. 

What drinks. 

What cocktails. 

What wine. 

But it comes back to him. 

::Are you propositioning me via text message?:: Newt replies. ::After twelve years of minimal contact?::

::Don’t redirect.::

::Nine o’clock. Wherever you’re staying. I’ll meet you there.::

Newt decides to class things up for his date/not-date and wears the blazer he probably should have worn to his talk. 

The lights in the bar are twilight-spectrum strips along wood-paneled walls. They give off a halfhearted glow that doesn’t quite make it to the dark spread of the floor or into corners created by block-like, minimalist tables and chairs. The air is warm and the room is crowded with too many people dressed in dark colors.

Newt hasn’t seen Søren in twelve years, but nothing much has changed about the man except for his newly acquired neohipster facial hair, his upgraded shoes, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that make him look even more thoughtful than Newt remembers, which seems like an impossibility, but, apparently, is not.

Newt gets an intense hug in the middle of the bar, long and hardcore and very much in the people-I-have-formerly-slept-with vein and he had forgotten that humans do this and that this is what hugs are really like and yup, nope, it’s unexpectedly hard to not cry in the face of real affection, because it’s not like buckets of the stuff get thrown his way with any frequency these days. He’s less erotically turned on by the whole thing than he is sort of totally and completely and acutely and precipitously aware of his own misery and just, ugh, nope, shutting all of that down, right here right now. Shutting, shutting, shutting, shutting, shut.

“It’s good to see you,” Søren says like paint thinner splashed against monster-stenciled walls.

“Yeah,” Newt replies, kind of. His mouth makes the right shape, but his vocal cords decide to sit this round out.

“You look good?” Søren says, a lie trying to torque an anti-parallel observation into something true by way of an interrogative cadence. Or maybe like it’s a statement being pried up by a subterranean unanswered query that’s powerful enough to warp the crust of a declarative delivery. Like, oh, for example, the question: “Are you crying?” or some other unaskable set of words.

“Nah,” Newt replies, “I’m outrageously jet lagged. You look like next year’s tech.”

“Meaning desirable?” Søren asks with a slow dry slide that settles Newt down into a previous pattern that fits like a sterile glove, close and satisfying and familiar, a faintly powdered slide of deformable plastic, like a thing he wears almost every day of his life. “Meaning something you want in your pants? Meaning something you already have in your pants? Meaning something doubling the capacity of currently available models? Meaning something flexible? Meaning—”

“Meaning something I want to interface with my brain,” Newt says.

“Ugh, that is so you.” Søren caricaturizes disappointment to the point it flips the bar and becomes innuendo again. 

They engage in the obligatory commentary about the conference, the weather, the drinks, the city, the vista, the flights that brought them here, paying occasional homage to Wittgenstein and his philosophical friends because they are who they are and why not, before they seat themselves at a low, dark table, in a far, dark corner, where the light doesn’t accent anything they do or say except for the dark wave of Søren’s hair and the thin line of gold that runs through the earpieces of his glasses. They look at one another over their respective alcohol. 

Newt starts chewing ice immediately.   

“I’ve been following your career since the summer of 2008.” Søren swirls his fancy scotch in his fancy glass and looks slantwise at Newt in a way that’s hard to misinterpret.

Newt almost says, “I’m taken, it turns out, just so you know. Taken by a guy who pretends to hate me, it’s weird, or, actually, it’s not that weird, he actually does find me all kinds of irritating. Full disclosure, he doesn’t actually like me very much. It doesn’t mean I’m not taken though, because I am. On a related note, have you seen any wood? I’m looking to build myself a Carthaginian Funeral Pyre.” What he actually says is, “JET Force, you mean?” and it sounds listless even to him, because he is not feeling the past, not feeling the future, not feeling this night, not feeling this day, not feeling this conference, not feeling this year, not feeling this decade, not feeling any of it.

“I mean all of it,” Søren says. “I remember when you used to be into philosophy of mind. I remember when you cornered me at the bar in Prague and we talked for six hours about eliminative materialism. What happened?”

“Meh,” Newt says. “Other than the alien monsters laying waste to coastal cities?”

“Yes. We will take that as given.”

Søren’s question seems to stand despite Newt’s implied answer. He’s not sure how to elaborate, not sure what to say that won’t land like a slap in the face, that won’t sound moralizing, that won’t sound like he’s the guy who enlisted while Søren ran away to the realm of meta-analysis even though Newt’s somewhat possessed of this opinion. 

Somewhat.

“I’m just not suited to philosophy I don’t think,” Newt says, in compromise. 

“False,” Søren says. “Discuss.”

Newt gives him a courtesy smile for an appropriated phrase and then says, “You don’t know me.”  

“I know you like I know everything,” Søren counters. “Narrow scope, deep insight.”

“Good pick-up line,” Newt replies.

“How’s it working?” Søren asks.

“I’ll let you know.” Newt chews on the ice in his rum and coke. 

“You’re quite a bit cagey-er than I remember,” Søren says.

That hits him hard and hits him the wrong way. He’s not sure why but he thinks maybe because it’s true—not in the conventional sense, not in the manner that people expect, not like he’s a guy whose luggage is full of secrets, but there are things on his skin that weren’t there before and there’s something in his brain that makes him scan the crowd for a woman who is blonde and tall and loud and quiet and dead and he doesn’t want to be here anymore, not really, in this stupid bar with his sleeves down and his boring hair, trying to escape something from his present with something from his past that wasn’t even anything at all other than a short set of nights where he hadn’t felt so horribly alone and so yeah. That’s his secret; a personal grief that seeps from work to life because, now, his work is his life. 

“Newt,” Søren says.

Newt puts his drink down, takes off his jacket, and begins rolling up his shirt sleeves—turn after turn after turn and it is a show and Søren watches it and does not miss the stylized spread of what he’d decided to start inking down into his dermis and does not say a thing as Newt finishes one sleeve and starts on the second, rolling pointedly to the elbow.

When he is done, he sits back and drinks his cheap, shitty, mixed drink.

It’s not even regular Coke.

It’s Diet Coke.

“Doesn’t faze me,” Søren says, point blank, ratcheting up the intellectual intensity, ratcheting down his body language, one hand turning palm up, his fingers opening casually and then shutting again in a gesture that hits the air between them like a capitulation, like a surrender, like Søren is trying to cede all his expectations back to Newt, like he’s content to sit there, to simply exist, as though he is prepared to be a thing that is walked away from, and that ontological security grants him some kind of non-threatening free pass to Newt’s psychology, which isn’t true, which isn’t true at all, but Newt doesn’t get up. Newt sits back and speaks with a cool poise he doesn’t feel and that he’d never forgive if their situations were reversed. 

“What doesn’t faze you.” It is and is not a question. 

“Indelible ephemera remains ephemera.” Søren swirls his scotch.

“Contradiction in terms, but it rates as a band name,” Newt replies, blunting the edge that wants to creep into his tone, trying to relax. “Indelible Ephemera.”  

“Thank you. I see you remain master of the non sequitur. That,” Søren says, waving vaguely in the direction of Newt’s body art, “is just an advertisement for some genuinely Nietzsche-level shit. Dionysian meets Apollonian Kunsttriebe. If you want to know what I read there? It’s existential instability in the post-modern tradition. Also, it’s hot. How far do they go?” 

“Both further and farther all the time,” Newt says, some of the tension leaving his back at being slightly more than slightly flattered. “Now I remember why I slept with you.”  

“It wasn’t my skill with the double-entendre and my neohipster aesthetic in a hipster-filled world?” Søren asks.

“Actually? It was your book,” Newt replies.

“Seriously?” Søren says. “Newt. How substantive.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” Newt says.

“I don’t think I have to,” Søren replies. 

“So how’s philosophy these days?” Newt asks.

“Obsessed with metaphysics,” Søren says. “The multiverse. The hard problem of consciousness. Lots of quantum handwaving. Everyone’s taking the Drift for a spin, and why not?”

“Mmm,” Newt says with a one-shouldered shrug, chewing more ice, making a genuine effort not to be miserable.

“So you must have known her pretty well, probably,” Søren says. “Dr. Lightcap, I mean.”

“Fuck you,” Newt replies reflexively, totally stripped of ire, suddenly crying a little more than a little bit into his rum and coke. He’s not sure why.

“Oh shit.” Søren leans forward, looking panicky, looking surprised, like this was a thing he definitely did not expect; and why would he? Pseudofamiliarity, four nights of sex, and twelve years of intermittent digital flirtation can only take one so far and they do not know each other, because unlike a PhD, deep and narrow is not enough, deep and wide is what’s required and there’s nothing deep about sex anyway. 

“Use your insight responsibly, man,” Newt replies, his voice cracking, one hand kind of over his eyes.

“Newt. Newt. I am incredibly sorry.”  

Newt feels a little bit bad for him. Søren is in a weird Geiszlerian sweet spot of emotional vulnerability or something, because people talk to Newt about Lightcap all the time. Every day. He’s taken over for her, he maintains her rigs, he maintains half her program, he continues her science and he continues her agenda, he lives a Geiszler-flavored variant of her life every day so it’s not a surprise to him that she’s dead, or, it shouldn’t be. This is Hermann’s fault, somehow, probably, Newt’s not sure how, exactly, he’s not sure why, but Hermann gets it, gets the whole thing, deep and wide, the length and width and depth of Newt’s entire existence, and Hermann does his treading carefully and lightly and around the perimeter of the maelstrom he’s been studying for months now. Hermann has arranged things so that no one says to Newt, “So I hear that your friend died, how’s that going for you?” Or, no one typically says things like that to Newt, because they mostly know how it’s going for him, it’s an extrapolation of how it’s going for them, which is shitty, which is horrible, which is not really that well, when the thing one believes stands between civilization and death is being defunded, is decaying, is collapsing. Newt isn’t doing what he’s supposed to do, what she’d wanted him to do, what she’d told him she wanted, because Newt is not her.  Newt can’t laugh at a Wall and make it fall down, Newt can’t torque the axis of bureaucracy around the fulcrum of his voice; Newt can’t do that, Newt can’t do any of the things she’d done, that she’d wanted him to do. He’s never let anyone down before, he’s never failed, he’s never failed a person who needs him so much because that person is dead and can no longer act at all. 

Newt mostly gets his crying stopped before it really has the chance to get going and then just wipes his face and looks laterally, not at Søren, but at the bar where a whole collection of people who passionately, passionately disagree with one another are still and forever arguing about a dying robotics program and the rise of a Coastal Wall. Some of them look back at him and then look away. 

“Do you want to get out of here?” Søren asks. “You seem like a guy who is not having a great time at the Sixth Annual Breach Symposium.”

“It’s been a rough day,” Newt admits.

“It’s been a rough year for you, I think,” Søren says with a Gottliebian style delicacy that makes Newt feel vaguely sick. He has the urge to check his phone, but doesn’t.  

“What are you doing here anyway?” Newt regains his poise, regains his cool, regains everything trying to slide out of his grip and phase through the floor.

“I’ve taken an interest in the Drift. I’m here for the science side of things. You know how it is. Another year, another book.” Søren looks concerned, looks careful, looks guilty, looks interested. 

“Send me a copy,” Newt says.

“Oh absolutely,” Søren replies. “Pre-publication. You can tell me what you think. Come on. Let’s apply the reductionist approach you love so much to my overpriced minibar and talk about the good old days, when everyone thought the development of Artificial Intelligence would destroy mankind.”

Newt cocks his head, downs the rest of his drink, and stands.

Søren likes him, despite Newt’s infinite collection of personal idiosyncrasies. Søren had liked him right from the beginning, unambiguously and without lying. He’d said, “So the American intellectual does exist; I had thought people such as you to be a myth,” and Newt had said, “That’s the most pretentious thing I’ve heard in my life,” and then Søren had switched languages and said, “If only you spoke German,” and Newt had said, also in German, “I grew up in Berlin,” and Søren had said, “I surrender, I surrender entirely, but this means you are not an American,” and Newt had switched back to English and said, “Tell yourself whatever you want, man,” and they had spent four nights and four days together in Prague.

“You look older.” Søren steps around the low table as he stands. 

“I am older,” Newt replies.

“Did I or did I not tell you that you’d be irresistible in your thirties. It will be one of the greatest regrets of my life that I didn’t know you were speaking. I feel it already. There must be footage somewhere online. Tonight I will look.”

“Meh,” Newt says. 

“Tomorrow I will look,” Søren amends. “Have you turned thirty yet?”

“Six months ago,” Newt says. 

“Ah yes. I remember. Your decades align with the Gregorian calendar. If one is to have an incendiary set of ten years, this seems like a good choice. Perhaps they will write about you in the future, at this meeting. The riot you nearly started. The way you inked your philosophy on your skin. Perhaps they will speculate as to what it meant to you. What it means to them.”

“If you’re trying to make me feel better, it’s working,” Newt says.

“Excellent.” Søren drapes an arm over his shoulder, steering him in the direction of the elevators. “But I must know—and then I promise I will stop asking you about it—did your audience upset you, or was it your intent to upset your audience?”

“The latter,” Newt admits, stepping into the dim, gold box of an elevator.

“Good.” Søren presses a glowing number as the doors close. “I spent an afternoon hoping so.”

“That’s—” Newt begins, but Søren reaches out with a delicate brush of fingers and tips Newt’s chin up, kissing him because they’re alone and because he’s a little bit of an interpersonal baller, and maybe because Newt has inadvertently been giving him a morass of desperate signals all night long, less because he’s feeling amorous and more because he needs something to get him through this conference, he needs someone to navigate for him while he tries to thread the needle in Beggar’s Canyon, he needs something; he’s not sure what, and he’s not sure it’s necessarily an elevator make-out session, but he’s not sure it’s not that either.

Søren moves from his mouth to his neck, and Newt tips his head back, tries to let go of himself, and finds that he defaults to drafting the pointless letter he’s been working on for days. The one he’s going to send to Hermann. The one he’s not going to send to Hermann. He misses it. He misses it all. The letters, feeling understood, drinking on dark deployment docks, breaking bottles, the rain, the funding, and Lightcap, Lightcap, Lightcap. 

Søren yanks Newt’s dress shirt out of his pants.

Newt tips his head to the side, eyes the slow digital slide of the ascending floors, and then—

His phone buzzes.

He slides it out of his back pocket and checks it.

::Where are you.:: It’s from Hermann. Again, demand-style, not question-style. 

::Why.:: Newt texts back, one-handed, also demand-style.

“Newt. Are you seriously texting right now?” Søren pulls back to look at him, torn between amusement and outrage. “I’m erotically biting your neck!”  

Newt is too wrung out to summon even a marginal amount of guilt, especially because his former colleague-with-benefits looks as though he’s trending more in the incredulous direction than the hurt direction. “Well, it’s just that you’re good-looking and all, Søren, but you haven’t written any books lately, so—”

“None that you’ve read, you ass,” Søren says, with no real ire. “Who is—” he pulls Newt’s phone down into his line of sight. “Hermann Gottlieb?”

“He’s my secular nemesis,” Newt says.

“Um, do you have a nonsecular nemesis?” Søren asks politely. “Is it god? Please tell me it’s god.”

The elevator door dings quietly. 

Newt smiles, a real smile this time. “No, I’m bastardizing terms. If I’m one half of a Hegelian dialectic? He’s the other half.”  

“Oh no,” Søren says as they step into the hall. “Do you have a picture?”

“A little bit, maybe.” Newt hands over his phone.

Søren studies the screen for a moment then says, “He looks intelligent. This is terrible for you.”

“I know,” Newt replies. 

::Because I want to ensure you aren’t upending any tables:: Hermann texts back.

“Tables?” Søren eyes Newt skeptically. “You haven’t. Have you? I can’t see it. In Prague I remember you rescued a spider from my sink. You trapped it in both hands and put it outside.”

“In Japan, morning spiders are lucky,” Newt thinks of Mako, of the years in Tokyo when so many people were so much more alive.

“Spiders are not lucky,” Søren says, “because luck does not exist. Have you actually upended a table?”

“He’s speaking metaphorically,” Newt says.

::Literally:: Hermann decides to add.

“He heard you,” Søren whispers. 

::I’m not at the bar.:: Newt texts back.

::Well I’m not in GERMANY, Newton.::

Søren laughs. “I like him. I think maybe you should go find this person,” he says. “This person you are messaging while I am kissing you.”

Newt sighs and pockets his phone.

Søren raises his eyebrows and says, “so that is how it is?”

“That’s how it is,” Newt agrees. “Where’s your room? You promised me a minibar and a night of identity theory.”

“Deeply offended though I am,” Søren says, lying on his hotel room bed, three miniature bottles of whisky into a sprawling and disorganized discussion on Drift metaphysics that’s winding its slow way down, “that you no longer seem to find me the adequate intellectual turn-on you once did—”

“Well, no,” Newt breaks in, also drunk, trying to merge with the chair he’s sitting in, “no, you’re just as much of a switch-flicker in the abstract as you’ve always been, man, it’s just that—” 

“Do not cut me off, Newton,” Søren says, cutting Newt off. “I hate that.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Newt replies in a torrent of poorly separated words. “Consequently, I am? Skeptical.”  He points at Søren. “Do not call me ‘Newton’.”

“Fascinated though I am with your unpracticed speculating regarding the nature of the Drift—”

“Unpracticed,” Newt says to the opposite wall. “He calls me unpracticed.”

“Whom are you addressing?” Søren asks.

“Me,” Newt continues, still talking to the wall. “Unpracticed.”

“You are a technician of the consciousness,” Søren says dismissively.

“Fuck you, I’m not.”  

“Fuck me, certainly. By all means. But you are. You clip little wires into place, yes? This is your job?”

“No. That’s not my job. I’m a xenobiologist.”

“I don’t wish to discuss this. I don’t care about the Drift. Well, to be fair, I don’t care about it right now. In this moment.”

“I just—” Newt begins. “You just—” he amends. “Your entire career trajectory—”  He gives up. “Pass me another one of those things.”

Søren makes a show of sorting through the contents of his minibar, which he’s deposited in an overpriced pile. “I confess I don’t know what you like. You seem to have poor taste in alcohol. Perhaps this sub par vodka will be to your liking?”

“Tequila?” Newt asks.

“You drank all of the tequila,” Søren informs him, “but for you, I have selected this rare and precious Americanized take on a traditional Russian spirit distilled from fermented potatoes.”  

“That is vodka and you literally just called it sub par,” Newt complains. 

“No.” Søren hands over a miniature bottle. “You are mistaken. That was a different one. This is excellent. You will love it.”

“Vodka Challenge Triple Arctic Berry Twist Adventure?” Newt says, squinting to read the minuscule print on the label. “I hate you.”

“No no no,” Søren says. “The flavor is ‘Arctic Berry’ but the experience is a Triple Twist Adventure of a challenging and storied alcohol.”

“What the hell is an arctic berry?” Newt asks.

“You are so uncultured. It is an arctic delicacy, made in the following manner: first, one creates a hard sugar resin around the edible stem of a tundra flower. I cannot, in this moment, recall the name of the flower, but honestly Newt, I am not a botanist. It’s yellow. That’s all I can tell you. The stem is cut from the plant and—”  

“What?” Newt says, incredulous. “This is an actual thing?”

“Well, it’s not a ‘berry’ in the traditional botanical sense, but an actual thing, yes. So you have the nucleus of the edible stem and the sugar resin that crystallizes around it—you are following me, yes? You look confused.”

“I’m not ‘confused.’ I’m skeptical. There’s a difference. Keep going.”

“As you wish. Following the creation of the sugar resin around the flower stem, one crushes a particular subtype of arctic moss to create a paste. That paste is molded by hand around the sugar-resin nucleus, then left outside to freeze. This is what is meant by ‘Arctic Berry.’ It has a delicate bitterness that is balanced perfectly by the crystalline sugar and the freshness of the edible flower. I think you will enjoy this vodka very much.”

Newt studies Søren through narrowed eyes. “You’re messing with me.”  

“Excuse me, but this is my heritage, Dr. Geiszler. Half my heritage. One quarter of my heritage.”  

“This vodka had better taste like moss,” Newt mutters, twisting off the top. He takes a sip, and, of course, he is rewarded with the revolting flavor of esterized raspberry brought to him via shitty organic chemistry. 

“You’re a dick,” he tells Søren, who is now laughing, both hands over his face. “I didn’t believe you. Not at all. Not even a little bit. I live in Anchorage right now, asshole. I am pretty sure if there were arctic berries I’d have started putting them on my PPDC issued cake months ago.”

“Oh no,” Søren says, still laughing. “No. You do not receive institutionalized cake. Please tell me you don’t.”

“Every other Friday,” Newt says. “Carrot cake. It comes in PPDC packaging.”

“Newt, I’m so sad for you; I cannot believe I convinced you to drink the shitty vodka. I apologize. Please take this overpriced sample bottle of Yamazaki 12-year in recompense.”

“I will,” Newt says, but he doesn’t touch the Japanese whisky that Søren puts on the nightstand, he continues drinking his Arctic Berry Triple Twist Adventure. 

“I’m trying to understand a set of certain things,” Søren says into the quiet that follows his laughter, “without asking you about them.”

“And how is that going for you?” Newt enquires politely. 

“Not well,” Søren admits, glancing at Newt’s phone as it vibrates on the nightstand between them.

“Myeah,” Newt replies expansively, drunkenly, sheets-of-raspberry-ice-clotted-over-a-four-degree-sea-ly. “I could see that.”  

“I’ve decided to take a calculated risk,” Søren says, “and ask you about this Dr. Gottlieb whom you curiously ignore for three hours of drinking but whom you decide you need to message precisely and only in the midst of my very well-executed elevator seduction.”

“Ugh.” Newt drags a hand over his face and kind of leaves it there because when one puts it like that, well, yikes. “Noooo, I did not do that. I did NOT do that and I did not do it like that, nope. You’re wrong. Totally wrong. No.”

“Poor Newt.”

Newt shakes his head, one hand still over his eyes.

“You need not discuss it,” Søren says.

“No,” Newt says. “Yes,” Newt says. “Okay, no, fine. This is good. This’ll be great actually.”  He drinks more of his disgusting vodka. “It’s not a complicated story.”

“I find this difficult to believe,” Søren says.

“Shut up. You’re wrong. It’s extremely straightforward. This is what happened. In 2013, after Trespasser did what Trespasser did to San Francisco, I wrote to a whole bunch of physicists about the nature of the Breach. He wrote back right away. Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. I’d caught him on a terrible day, and it was a great letter. You know the kind. A great letter. It was amazing. He sends me a manuscript. Like—” Newt shakes his head, shuts his eyes, “—a detailed, unpublished mathematical treatment synthesizing everything he’s pulled out of the publicly available NOAA and USGS databases. I’m not sure if you understand—what that means. The implications. Unpublished. Unreviewed.”

“I do. Of course I do, you ass. I still work in academia, you know.”  

“Okay, sorry. Sorry. I was extremely impressed. Right out of the gate—total trust. He had total trust in me and my intentions. Total disclosure. Total respect for the conceptual foundation of my interest and the credibility of my credentials. It was weird.”

“Commendable,” Søren says, interested-listener style.

Newt is giving too much detail. This much detail is not required. He decides that he’ll skip two years of passionate correspondence, he’ll condense it down, he’ll contextualize and forget about that day in Manila, when he’d sat with his back against a destroyed wall, breathing through a respirator with a filter that kept clogging, trying to navigate through the golden haze of dust that blotted out the sun, soaked with sweat, exhausted, composing a letter to a mathematician who was freezing in Alaska and longing to torque his thoughts so some machine could fuse him to a person that would always understand him. Better than Newt would. Newt, who was half a world away dehydrating to death and trying to terrify a team of former academics into being careful enough that an already-dead kaiju wouldn’t kill them. 

No, Søren doesn’t need any of that. Neither does Newt. There was nothing special about any of it. Best to be accurate.

“We corresponded for several years,” Newt says, “and we arranged to meet. But when we met, it didn’t go well.”

“You had feelings for him,” Søren says. “Already. At the time of your meeting.”

“No.” Newt nothing but defensive reflex.

“Newt.”

“Okay, a little bit, yes, but I’m very irritating and he has a low tolerance for anything even remotely akin to indecorousness, so, long story short, he wasn’t interested, and then I became less interested over time, and that’s it. The end.”  

“That story is pathetic,” Søren says, “it’s not a story. If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine; I don’t insist. But either tell me the salient details or don’t tell me anything; I am extremely busy, I could be asking you about metaphysics right now.”

“True.” Newt poisons himself with more Arctic Berry Vodka. “Okay, sure. Saliency. I’ll render up some salience for you, Dr. Sen. It would be my pleasure. I’m in a state of baseline upset post the death of a close friend and colleague. Consequently, my stupid brain is latching onto a broad array of misery subtypes and deciding to test them out. I tell it to stop, grow up, get a life, but it won’t listen to me. This is alarming another close friend and colleague with whom my relationship is significantly more complicated, because he’s arguably better filed under ‘failed romantic partner’ than ‘professional buddy.’ It gives everything a little bit of a weird vibe, because he cares more than he should and knows more than he should about my personal psychology, and so this tends to bother me, to irritate me, possibly to slightly upset me under circumstances such as these, where I’m constantly accidentally looking for a dead person at an unfamiliar coffee break, feeling nostalgic about being back in the city where Dr. Gottlieb and I totally tanked any potential relationship, and, oh, y’know, doing my best to kill a diversion of funding that will to have the end effect of screwing our species straight into extinction in, oh, I don’t know, the four-to-seven year range?”

Søren looks at Newt, then says, “This is an improvement.”  

“In saliency?” Newt replies. “I should hope so. Because that’s all I’ve got.”

“I will not argue with your conclusions,” Søren says, “though I’m dubious your potential prospects with Dr. Gottlieb are as dim as you make them out to be. He has texted you twenty-seven times in the past hour.”

“That’s been a sticking point, yes,” Newt says. “The general undeadness of our relationship prospects. Our prospects are not alive, mind you. But they aren’t entirely dead either. They’re just sort of crawling around, in search of brains to consume. Specifically, they’re consuming my brain.”

“When you say ‘failed romantic partner’—” Søren prompts.

“Ehhhh.” Newt makes an equivocal hand gesture.

“Tell me he is not straight,” Søren says.

“No no,” Newt replies. “He’s bi; I asked. I asked, like, early.”

“Smart. Lucky.”

“As for the former? Yes. Indisputable. As for the latter? No. Also indisputable.”

“Shut up,” Søren suggests.

“The problem wasn’t sex. Or, I don’t think it would have been sex, because we never even approached that as a possibility. The problem was that he kind of hates me and kind of likes me at the same time. It’s very confusing. Also? The same thing is true in reverse.”

“What?” Søren looks drunk and confused.

“He drives,” Newt whispers, “me crazy.”

“Ah. This is apparent to me, yes,” Søren replies. 

Newt scrutinizes his miniature bottle of terrible vodka, not sure what to make of the strange spread of his too-academized life within the context of an incipient extinction-level event. “I think I’m having an existential crisis,” he confesses.

“I believe you’re correct,” Søren replies. “In fact, you’re advertising as much.”

“What?” Newt says.

Søren gestures at Newt’s bare forearm.

Newt follows his gaze with alcohol-mediated detachment. “Ah. Possibly,” he admits.

“What do you say when people ask you why?” Søren asks, still staring at the spread of Yamarashi over Newt’s left forearm. 

“You would be astonished,” Newt says, “by how few people ask. By how many assume that they know. How many different things they assume. Even you didn’t ask directly.”

“Why, then?” Søren counters. “Why kaiju? Why on your skin?”

“Why not?” Newt counters.

“And now I know what you tell them,” Søren says, simultaneously dry and serious.

“Yes.” Newt pulls the s into something like a hiss.

“You are miserable,” Søren says. “Practically, that’s the issue, correct? So. How to effect resolution?”

“Impossible,” Newt states. “Categorically.”

“Fine,” Søren says. “I won’t dispute your assessment. How to achieve a decoupling then, from state of being and state of mind. From state of mind and exterior comportment.”

“Why? You don’t think it’s my professional goal to start riots at international symposia?”

“I suspect you may derive a certain peripheral and paradoxical gratification from your ability to provoke an emotional response by discussing an issue about which you have strong feelings—”

“A little less speculation, please,” Newt requests with poor diction.

“Yes, all right. Scope exceeded. Apologies. But you did ask.”

“I cede you your point,” Newt says with poised magnanimity. “Soooo—what. Are you going to offer me advice?”

“Oh god no,” Søren replies. “Just sympathy. And admiration. Sympathy and admiration and also thanks for trying to preserve my life and the lives of billions of other people at the cost of your own short term happiness and likely also long term happiness.”

“In that case,” Newt says, smiling, “you’re welcome. Especially you. Especially welcome. Keep doing metaphysics man, that’s kind of the point of it all. Iron that one on a T-shirt: metaphysics—kinda the point of it all.”

“I will take it under advisement,” Søren says. “In the meantime, I confess I’d like to return to the subject of Dr. Gottlieb. I am curious as to why you’re talking so intensively with me about the state of your thoughts, rather than with your lonely friend, who is clearly concerned about you.”

Newt narrows his eyes. “That sounds suspiciously like advice.”

“It is merely a polite inquiry,” Søren replies. 

Newt sighs and looks at the ceiling. “Because I’ve spent five years trying to decouple expectations from reality, but he has this ability to recouple what I’ve successfully decoupled without any intention of actually progressing things beyond a certain point. I don’t think? I don’t know. He’s complex.”

“This is becoming too abstract, even for me,” Søren says. “Can you illustrate?”

“Ugh. Yes. There are about ten thousand examples that immediately come to mind. Here’s a good one, one that reveals the ridiculous extent of what’s occurring: last winter, Dr. Gottlieb completed and submitted a grant for me. Like, don’t get me wrong, I wrote the science, but I left all the bullshit ephemera I didn’t want to do until the last minute, which is, as you know, a terrible idea, as the bullshit ephemera comprises the majority of the text of the grant. And yeah. He just—did it for me. Spontaneously. I didn’t ask him to do it. He, in fact, thought the project was a total waste of my time. But he did it anyway.”

“How?” Søren asks. “You said he was a mathematician.”

“Yeah!” Newt practically shouts at him. “Exactly. That’s why I picked this anecdote. Because you said ‘illustrate’ and it’s illustrative. He had to access my files on my personal computer and on the PPDC server, he had to make sense of my organizational strategy, which, admittedly, is best classified as “loose” by an outside observer, he had to estimate a budget for equipment he doesn’t use, based on extrapolations from previous grants I had submitted. If you’d asked me whether that submission could have been done by anyone but me, I would have said no.”

“One wonders where you were during this time,” Søren says.

“Away,” Newt replies evasively, “kind of unavoidably otherwise totally occupied,” because he’s not sure he likes the picture additional details will paint. “Anyway, I was sure I’d have to wait another cycle to get my grant in, but no. He’d submitted it. And then I tried to sincerely thank him for what must have been a sickening amount of work, but he shut me down, called me ‘unprofessional’ a gratuitous number of times, and things devolved from there. Over me thanking him. Ugh. He makes me think that he maybe has a thing for me, but it turns out, unfortunately, that beneath his unfriendly exterior he’s just—really nice. He just cares about people, I guess. Waaaaayyy more than the average human cares. While at the same time behaving like a counterintuitive dick.”

“Kindness strikes me as a good quality,” Søren says slowly.

“Myeah, not really. Not if you’re trying to date the guy. He hates me. Except when he really doesn’t hate me. Like, he won’t go out for coffee with me but he will take a bullet for me? What is that? What am I supposed to do with that? It makes no sense. He has a complicated psychology. We are a terrible, terrible match.”

“And the pair of you are jointly in charge of all major scientific PPDC efforts?” Søren adjusts his glasses.

“Yes,” Newt says, “but we’re very responsible, okay? And freakishly productive.”

“I did not imply otherwise,” Søren shoots back with a pseudo-innocent shoulder shrug.

“You did a little.”

“A little.”

“I know what I need to do,” Newt says. “I need to let it go, or not. My expectations, my personal feelings, all five years of them. I need to make a move or really, genuinely, truly, let go. Let him be whomever he is, not the guy I thought he was after years of letter writing. That’s the way forward. I know that. It’s not even some grade school lesson here. Grade school is too high a bar for this. I didn’t go to grade school, though, full disclosure. It’s just difficult. In part, because Lightcap used to deal with him. Used to deal with him, used to protect me from the acid rain of bureaucratic expectation, used to take my side, used to talk me down, used to, y’know, be alive. Anyway. Who cares. I’ve committed. I’m doing it. Prying my fluxing expectations out of everywhere they live, because I have bigger problems. Generally speaking, I’m doing a better job than this. You’ve caught me on an atypical day. I’m jet-lagged.”

Søren raises his eyebrows.

“I can let it go.” Newt stares at a dim ceiling and finishes his Arctic Berry vodka. 

“What makes you so certain?” Søren asks. 

“Because I expect it of myself.”

Søren nods.

“I should go,” Newt says.

“I forbid you to go,” Søren replies.

“You forbid me to go,” Newt repeats, impressed and unimpressed.

“Yes,” Søren replies. “You are far too drunk to navigate through a foreign city, and far far too many people are far far too angry at you for me to let you leave unsupervised.”

“A fair point, I suppose.” Newt capitulates, but dignified-style.

“Tell your friend,” Søren says.  

Newt picks up his phone and looks at his last message from Hermann. 2:04 AM.

::Newton, if you do not respond to me in the next two hours I will report you as a missing person to the cantonal police of Geneva::

“Oh shit.” Newt’s voice cracks and he sits forward. “What time is it?”  

“Nearly four in the morning,” Søren says. 

“Nearly four?” Newt begins texting furiously. “You’re sure it’s nearly four?”   

“Not yet four.” Søren gets off the bed and unsteadily wanders over to peer at Newt’s screen as he types. 

::HERMaNN. I am NOT missing. I have NOT been murdered by any truculent scientists. I have been catching up with a friend from the pre-PPDC days. Go to sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“This does not seem like a communication between colleagues,” Søren offers. “His response seems disproportionately upset and yours overly conciliatory given you are not romantically involved.”

“Wellll,” Newt feels slightly more than slightly guilty and therefore predisposed to be fair. “His response is proportionate to my track record over this past year or so.”

::Fine,:: Hermann replies, ::I will see you tomorrow::

::Why are you still awake?:: Newt texts.

“Perhaps call him,” Søren suggests, before vanishing in the direction of the bathroom. 

Hermann, predictably, doesn’t respond. 

Newt doesn’t call. 

Instead, Newt turns off the overhead lights and sweeps the blinds open, looking into a bright mist of streetlight illuminated rain that seems to hang in the air without falling. He removes his shoes and then his clothes, stripping down to his boxers and piling his business casual outfit on the chair where he’d tossed his blazer, hours ago. 

He stands at the window and looks down at the city, out at the rain, across a darkened lake.

In his head, he continues his letter.

Dear Hermann, he begins, I’d like to take this opportunity to both apologize for and explain my recent comportment, which I recognize has been less than ideal. A little bit sub par, even for me; a little bit of a bad idea in an unprofessionally disheveled shirt; a little bit like m*v versus a brick wall, a little bit like one half m*v-squared versus a sick Wall, a little bit like critical mass meeting critical mass where both masses are previously apportioned parts of my personality. That got away from me a little bit, analogy-wise. I am sorry about that. I’ll redirect into more intellectual territory and give it another go. The human brain, am I right? Very plastic. Very lazy. It relies on expectation and fixates on novelty, so we take things for granted, like the sunrise, like the sensation of clothing after a lifetime of wearing it. We don’t have to work so hard to understand phenomena conceptually related to that which we’ve already mastered. Expectation. It’s great. I’m a fan. Generally.

I miss writing to you. That’s why I do this occasionally. Send the epic email from the next room, I mean. I’m better on the page. You know this about me. Arguably, we’re both better on the page. I’m a little less me. You’re a little less you. Maybe we never should’ve met. There’s some appeal to that idea, except for the part where it would be totally horrible. Anyway, I digress. This has probably happened to you—defaulting to pathways where you think of Lightcap as alive. It’s worse in unfamiliar places. I know not to look for her at the Shatterdome. I’ve taught myself that much. But here, at this meeting; it feels like I have to retrain stupidly hopeful neural subroutines and I suppose I just thought that was a thing that was over. That I was done with. Maybe it’s never over. Maybe I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life. The long tail of neurochemical shortcuts.

I think the worst part about this meeting is that…I’ve let her down. Every moment of every day, I am letting her down, because I’m allowing this Wall to go up. It’s not just a subjective perception—it’s an objective truth. I’m failing to do what she expected of me. She doesn’t know, because she’s dead. A priori, one might predict that her being unaware of my failure would make it less painful. That, alas, is not the case. In fact, it turns out it’s the opposite.

Søren kisses Newt’s temple, interrupting his thoughts. “It is a storied lake.” His eyes are on the dark water. “The Shelleys. Lord Byron. An empress of Austria was stabbed to death here in the 1890s.”  

“You left the best one off the list,” Newt replies. “Freddie Mercury lived in Montreux, you know.”

“That’s the other side of the lake, darling,” Søren whispers. “I’m more partial to Byron, myself.”

“Well that’s just wrong,” Newt replies.

“If you want to go to Montreux I’d take you,” Søren says. “Skip the rest of the conference, rent a car?”

“I’ve become too responsible to be any fun at all. Tomorrow is Breach Physics, and then the next two days are all Xenobiology.”

“In that case, I suppose I’ll have to attend my own talk,” Søren says, sighing. 

“What time?” Newt asks. 

“Eleven o’clock, but not in the main hall. I’m in Conference Room C. Don’t come. You’re much too important. And I will be in no mood to be shouted at.”

Newt grins in the dark. “I would never shout at you.”

“Ah, you say that now, when you are undressed in my hotel room, but tomorrow it will be a different story.”  

“Nah,” Newt says quietly. 

“I’ll take the floor,” Søren offers.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Newt sweeps the curtains shut.

In the morning, Newt wakes to find it’s not morning at all. He detangles himself from unfamiliar sheets and opens glowing curtains to reveal a too-bright city and the glittering blue spread of Lake Geneva. He blinks, confused, but then he remembers Søren and the series of shit drinks that explain his location and the pounding in his head. On the nightstand there’s a note that says:  

Forgive me for not waking you; I can never forget the story of how Descartes died—I’m sure you know it.

Newt sits on the edge of Søren’s bed, feeling chemically if not physically debauched. He contemplates his coming day, the coming night, the spread and shape of coming days and coming nights, not sure what he’s doing, not sure what to do, but sure he wants to make Hermann’s keynote, which is happening in two hours.

He showers in Søren’s bathroom and pulls on clothes that smell like smoke and alcohol. 

He walks through the city, squinting through a headache he deserves and spends half an hour in a small café down the street from the conference center, drinking coffee, waiting until the last possible moment to leave, so he won’t have to mingle with the milling, anxious science crowd. He spends the time sending emails to his lab, to Erika and Anarud, who are trying to balance current needs with future demands in the setting of dwindling resources. 

When it’s time, he turns a corner and enters the building, then the auditorium, blazer on, hair flat and ungelled, head down, as incognito as he gets. No one recognizes him, but still he feels raw and exposed, like a nerve in an open socket. He tells himself it’s because he feels sick, because catastrophic stupidity always makes him nervous, because he doesn’t want to die and they’re the ones who’ll kill him, not now, but indirectly, years from now when the Wall that they’re building cracks and falls. That endgame is too many years away to sharpen up their thinking, but too few to abstract away the fear Newt’s too tired to turn into anger and too depressed to turn into inquiry just right now.

Newt slides into a seat in the back of the dimly-lit room, beneath purple lights, next to a man he doesn’t recognize and who doesn’t look up from the small glowing screen that’s waiting for his notes. Newt hooks a thumb beneath his jaw. He presses two fingers against his temple. The knuckles of his ring finger dig into the corner of his mouth. He fidgets, starting a tremor in his left foot.

The guy next to him gives him a lateral look of pointed irritation.

Newt looks away and tries to sit still.

Newt listens to the session chair’s introduction of Dr. Gottlieb. From the intermittent phrases Newt catches through his foreground-background focus shifts, it seems the chair is doing a decent job. All credentials, no personal anecdotes. It’s not that kind of meeting. It’s not that kind of room. Not anymore. There’s too much stress, too much unrest, too much of a we-almost-had-a-riot-yesterday type vibe.

The introduction closes and in the ensuing silence Dr. Gottlieb stands, straightening his jacket, smoothing his hair.

Newt actually has to look away in sympathetic anxiety as his colleague silently queues up his presentation. Hermann’s hands shake, but subtly. Only subtly. 

Hermann hates public speaking. He hates it so much that he’s managed to cast the prospect as some kind of incomprehensible science tariff exacted upon him by unforgiving social norms rather than what it is—real-time peer review. Newt remembers arguing about it one night, late, over coffee, in venomless exasperation, trying to talk his normally rational colleague out of an irrational antipathy. He also remembers reading about it for the first time on the DC metro and feeling less irritated and more sympathetic regarding Dr. Gottlieb’s total loathing of the oral presentation.

He feels sympathetic now, boy does he ever. He can’t help it. Sympathy has been beaten into him by what happened yesterday during his own talk. The atmosphere at this conference has been hostile and toxic and divisive and it’s only day two.

Hermann may not have an easy time of it.

That is, in part, why Newt has shown up. Even now, exhausted, distressed, hung over, unpopular, with flat hair and a predictable blazer, Newt could exert enough leverage in this room to rescue Hermann if things go wrong. Probably. Probably he could.

But that’s not the whole of it.

Because there are talks and then there are talks, and Newt suspects today’s talk will be one of the latter class—one of the seminal oral presentations of his time, maybe one of the last of the truly great moments in oratorical history, the last of the decade, the last of the century, the last of his species, maybe. He’s not inclined to miss it. 

The light glints off Hermann’s glasses and his hair, and something terrible happens to Newt, an unwanted and incomplete separation of who Dr. Gottlieb is from what he has done—the trail of ideas Newt’s been involved with for half a decade, that he’s heard about weekly, daily, hourly, for years. For years and years. Newt’s thoughts close down like calipers in tense, anticipatory simpatico, a total investment, his fingers pressing against his temple, against the arm of his chair, the muscles of his left leg contracting and releasing in a slow, tetanic strobe, until, finally, background slides on quantum field theory give way to that first and most important piece of data.

A detailed map of the Breach appears on the massive screen at the front of the room.

It’s an image that Newt’s certain will be iconic, going viral, stripped from Dr. Gottlieb as it appears on websites, on the nightly news, in the presentations of undergraduates all across the world.

“Oh god,” his seat mate murmurs in horrified release along with the rest of the room, as he looks upon the pastel topography of his own death. 

 

It has landed correctly.

Newt feels it in the rise and fall of quiet words in the room, the shifting in the seats, the unwavering attention, the fixed awareness of the shape on the screen.

“Was it good for you too?” Newt whispers to his traumatized seat mate.

The man smiles, faint and perfunctory, looks away, then snaps his head back. “Dr. Geiszler?” he mouths, incredulous and silent. Sympathy leaches into his expression like Newt himself is wicking it out of the man.

Newt puts a finger to his lips.

The man nods.

As Newt watches the progression of slides, the evolution of ideas, it occurs to him that he can love this, that he does love this. His life, the science and people he’s filled it with; he can love the whole thing, just like he loves Mako, who’s growing up to find she doesn’t like him very much; like he loves Lightcap who walked a straight and purposeful line into her own death; he can stop holding a part of himself in reserve. There’s no point.

His species is running short on resources and making bad decisions. 

He folds those memories he holds like secrets down into the extant, waiting whole of the relationship with Dr. Gottlieb he has rather than the ideal he thinks he wants; choking under gold dust in Manila; nights he spent in Cambridge re-reading Hermann’s emails on his phone, chewing on the collar of his t-shirt; things he’s written, things he’s said, the way that Lightcap used to tease him in the dark of the deployment dock, Better make your move, kiddo, before he goes for a passing physicist like she thought their relationship an inevitability.

Dear Hermann, Newt thinks, composing a new letter as he watches the crescendo of data he knows almost as well as his own. Do you miss it? The way we used to write to one another? I do. All the time. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it directly, though you likely suspect as much, given that I write you one of these things every six months or so. It’s a little juvenile. Sorry about that. Story of my life, as you know. I’m trying not to make this letter about me, but I’m already failing, only six sentences in. Narcissism’d. This afternoon I went to your talk. I sat in the back and watched you layer five years of quantum detail atop that first theoretical framework you sent me in the fall of 2013. I still have that letter, you know. I kept it. In fact, I kept all your letters. I’m glad I did—I like to remember the people we were then, before we knew one another, before we knew so many of the things we know now. Sometimes, when I look back, it feels like we can still win. Shut the Breach. Protect the coastline. Communicate with the kaiju, Star Trek style. Where’s a telepath when you need one, am I right? Though, I suppose we have the Drift now, so there’s something insane/inspired for the Geiszlerian cognitive back burner…human/kaiju drifting. Thoughts? Never mind; I’m sure you’re horrified.

It was a magnificent talk. You know that, right? It wasn’t just magnificent by the standard of your usual talks. It was a magnificent talk by any standard you might care to name. Historically, I might have listed all the professional accolades I thought might come your way, but [and this is one of the perks of actually knowing you] I suspect it will mean more if I say what I really think; that this is the best kind of science. Hypothesis leads to discovery. Salient, ground-breaking, profound. I think a lot about the bounded end of the human species, and if this is the last major concept humanity cracks wide open, it’ll be a good one to go out on. Doing science right to the end. And hey, you never know. Maybe we’ll live. Maybe we’ll figure something out. Empirical progress gives me hope. You give me hope. You’ve always given me hope, really, right from that first letter.

I think that maybe you thought I’d be different. Older. More mature. Better looking, more composed, less loud, more thoughtful. Taller. [Ha.] Not the kind of guy who’d go out and get tasteless tattoo after tasteless tattoo. Not the kind of guy who falls apart as often as I do and gets restive and angry and shouts down a room full of people representing the inevitable and misguided future. Even though we aren’t quite what we expected of one another, we still have that core connection. We’ll always have that. The thing that made me ask you the question that I asked. The thing that made you give the answer that you gave. You’re kind of my fave, buddy, and I have the feeling that you don’t really know that. So now you do. You. My favorite. Since 2013. If that seems too early, well, what can I say. I have low standards and fewer close friends than one might expect given my totally charming personal style. If this were a real-time conversation, we’d be shouting by this point, probably about something peripheral that looks central in the heat of the moment.

This letter dead ends there. Newt gives it up, lets it go, watches it sink into the Dagobian swamp of his mind, lost X-wing style.

He leaves the auditorium before the question and answer period is over, but not before his seat mate, who is, apparently, a new editor at Nature Kaiju Science presses a business card into his hand. He walks quickly through the lobby, his head down, his hands in his pockets, and squints at the yellow-toned light of a sinking sun.  

He skips the socializing, skips the collective dinner, skips the evening Breach Physics Poster Session, skips the bar. He replies evasively to texts and has dinner with Søren in a dark restaurant where no one speaks English. They converse in German and they don’t speak about anyone born after 1850, which is nice.

“What will happen to all of this when we die?” Søren asks, drunk and morbid and a little maudlin, referring to the entire discipline of philosophy with the word “this” and the human species with the word “we.”

“Don’t think like that.” Newt tips his chair back, waves a hand, and projects confidence with a high to moderate degree of underlying hypocrisy.

“I will think in what manner seems best to me, Dr. Geiszler,” Søren replies, drunk on expensive wine. 

“Well,” Newt says, “if it helps you, certain truths will persist in the absence of human observation. It’s like contemplating your own death, but writ large. All things fear their endings, if those endings are amenable to extrapolation.”

“I take some comfort in that, I suppose,” Søren says.

“Me too,” Newt replies. 

They part ways immediately after dinner, in the lobby of Newt’s hotel. Søren returns to the humid night and Newt returns to his room, whistling Dreaming Correctly through sensitive teeth. When he’s upstairs, in his own hotel room, he retrieves his laptop, seats himself at a desk much too clean to be mistaken for his own, and begins to write, this time in earnest.

Dear Hermann, he begins, I think every time I’ve written you a formal letter (post 2015, obviously) you have the suspicion I’m standing on a metaphorical ledge from which I need to be talked down. Let me assure you right up front: this is not the case. Turns out? I miss corresponding with you. I miss the better versions of both of us that have lived their filtered lives in digital typeface. You feel me? I’m pretty sure you do. I’m aware I’m not the clearest communicator in the history of our species, especially when it comes to real-time conveyance of complex feelings. But what do you expect? I’m a reductionist by training. We both are. I think I’ve solved all our interpersonal problems with that single observation right there. You’re welcome. 

I apologize for the ongoing train wreck that has been my professional comportment in the post-Lightcap era. This would of course include but not be limited to the following: a) my longstanding confrontation with the military PPDC hierarchy over the professionalism of my personal style, b) the time I flipped over a conference table during a meeting about resource allocation, [confessional aside: that probably did not do K-science as a whole any favors], c) the time you had to retrieve me from, er, jail; sooo sorry about that one, d) the time I made poor choices about a drinking location, then had to go on an inconveniently timed medical leave, e) yesterday. I’m not really into the idea of excusing this kind of behavior, but some sort of explanation seems in order, so here you go. I attribute my recent struggles with professionalism to two factors. 1) All the things Lightcap used to do for me. I never realized just how much institutional garbage she kept from coming my way. I was so distracted by how I helped her that I didn’t see the reversed assistance vector until the point I was getting informally and formally reprimanded for my hair, for my noncompliance with bureaucratic standards, for my comportment, for the way I chose to advocate for resources, the way I allocated those same resources…the list goes on. 2) The obvious part of it. The part where she died and it was so much harder for me for so much longer than it should have been. I know you know these things already. I’m grateful I never had to explain any of this to you in person; you just assumed accurately and acted accordingly. Paradoxically, I resent this act of assumption on your part—I suppose because when I see it, it reminds me I’m doing a sub par cognitive/behavioral epoxy job. The purpose of all of this is not to get this off my chest or elicit sympathetic counter-thoughts. It’s solely to communicate to you that I have insight into the root causes of my recent behavior. I’d bet that you’ve wondered about that. My insight level. It’s high.

Speaking of heretofore undisclosed things—for weeks now I’ve wanted to ask you about your family. About your father’s public support of the Coastal Wall and your, er, … opposed stance. Is he here? Are you talking with him? How is that going? I’m asking you in text because I’m terrible at not arguing with you in person. I’m also currently possessed of the rare urge to, y’know, not act like a dick. Strange, yes, I know. Anyway, I can’t imagine the Gottlieb family dynamics are easily navigable at the moment, and I say this with full knowledge that they’re not all that navigable at baseline. So if you want to send some details my way, well, I’m interested, is what I’m saying. 

That’s all, I suppose. Too much and not enough at the same time. Kind of like life that way.

 –Newton

He sends it.

Hours later, Newt is drinking alone in front of an open window, like the cool kids do, trying to screw himself down into preparedness for the coming morning session, or, failing preparedness, he’ll at least maybe achieve a cheap sleep state courtesy of his overpriced minibar.

Whatever. It’s good to have goals. Achievable ones, even.

Hermann has yet to respond to Newt’s epic and epically awkward email, but that’s fine. He doesn’t need to. It wasn’t meant as a discussion piece. It was a doubly analytical gift, meaning it is a piece of analysis and it’s also meant to hold up as the subject of analysis. It’s free. It stands on its own, requiring nothing, demanding nothing. Monograph as monolith. 

“I got this,” he says to no one, to someone who’s dead. “I do.” He looks out over Geneva, away from the lake, toward the cityscape in the south. “I don’t think I can bring it down,” he continues conversationally, “but look. Think about this critically—does it really matter? You’re going to say, ‘Yes, idiot, of course it matters’.” Newt clears his throat. “And sure. Practically, it’s bad to stack the deck against yourself. Stupid. But the Jaeger Program has five more years. I can do five years. I can figure it out by then. Five years. No problem. The length of an R01, am I right? I’m right. It’s a parsable academic unit. One more left. One more half-decade. Besides, Breach transit rates will probably come to a head around then anyway. It’s okay I failed to kill the Wall. That I’ll continue to fail to kill the Wall. I’ll redirect. That’s what you’d tell me, if you were here and watching me max out my emo quotient in a quotidian way.” He shifts his stance, takes a sip of tequila. “Less emo, more industry. Don’t be sorry, be working. Sure. Fine. Easy. I’ll do it for you, Lightcap. And, also, y’know. To live. There’s that.”

Someone knocks on Newt’s door.

Newt eyes his phone, raises his eyebrows at the lateness of the hour, crosses the room, answers the door, and finds Dr. Gottlieb on the threshold, wearing a blazer, leaning on his cane, a sheaf of paper crushed in his hand, already glaring at Newt.

Newt opens his mouth, but before he gets anything out he’s hit in the chest by Hermann’s handful of paper. He grabs it before it falls to the floor and steps back, unbalanced, as Dr. Gottlieb shoves past him into the room.

“Come in,” Newt says, belated and dry, closing the door behind Hermann.

His colleague turns to face him and gives Newt a look that’s hard to pull apart.

Ugh.

This won’t go well. Newt can feel it.

“Do you want to sit down or something?” Newt is irritated, anxious, frustrated, and really not in the mood to be on the receiving end of a lecture on scientific etiquette, appropriate comportment, or the proper way to organize one’s personal items in a Geneva hotel.

“What is wrong with you?” Hermann snaps, aggressive, accusatory.

Newt is surprised to find that he’s about to cry.

How inconvenient.

That’s not very punk rock.

That’s okay. That’s fine. He can compensate.

“What’s wrong with me?” Newt snarls, sweeping his arms open. “What’s wrong with you how about. What is your problem; would it kill you to just—” he stops when his voice cracks, not sure what to say, not sure if he’s supposed to apologize for sending a thoughtful letter, or for missing a day of physics, or for starting a riot, or for leaving his tablet in the men’s room yesterday, or something else. The list of possibilities is infinite.

“I give up.” Hermann’s voice cracks and he opens his hands, standing at an oblique angle to Newt while, weirdly, not looking at him. “I give up, Newton.”

This seems bad to Newt. He’s not sure what it means, but it seems bad.

“What?” Newt, hoping for some clarification, has accidentally loosened the metaphorical hemostats he’s clamped down on his crying.

“You in theory,” Hermann says with what seems to be barely contained rage, or, maybe, barely contained weeping, tracing a circle in the air with one finger. “You in practice,” he finishes, tracing a second circle, not overlapping with the first. “You on the page,” Hermann says, retracing the first circle, “you in reality,” he says, retracing the second. “Your—”

“I get it,” Newt shouts. “I—”

“Say any of it,” Hermann shouts over him. “Say any part of it. To me. In person.”

This sets Newt back. He’s not sure he knows what Hermann means, not sure he knows anything at all, not sure he’s ever known anything ever; he should stick with comparative anatomy, with long experimental takedowns in lonely, silent labs.

Hermann steps into his personal space and yanks his papers out of Newt’s hands. He steps back again in one crisp step, and Newt is suddenly positive he should have looked at what he’d been holding when he’d had the chance.

“We are done with this.” Hermann brandishes the pages, covered with what appears to be a handwritten letter. 

“What?” Newt can’t conceal the stupid edge in his voice, which is definitely an are-you-breaking-up-with-me-right-now type edge even though that’s weird, that’s inappropriate, what is that even? That’s not him, that’s the ghost of a vagrant child Newt has never been.

“We are finished with this.” Hermann is calmer now, with an emerging Gottliebian steel that’s just fatal to argue with; that particular tone is, in fact, filed under: Death, Bleed Out Until. “We’ve known one another for five years, Newton. In person. I am tired of trying to dredge anything of substance out of the cesspool that is your constantly unprofessional demeanor, especially since I know so acutely that there are in fact things that might yield to dredging. So. If you wish to discuss something with me then, by all means, discuss it. Converse.”

Ehhhhhh Newt isn’t into this, not at all; he’s so not into it, in fact, that he’s really really tempted to just get up and walk away in a silent calling of Hermann’s comment for the bullshit it is, because it is bullshit; Newt knows it is; if he goes, if he says nothing right now, Hermann will cave and write him back, some long and glorious missive that Newt can read alone in some dark, safe place and it will be better than this, easier than this, safer, by far, than this. This isn’t safe, this is weird and pointless and stupid and unnecessary and risky and he should go, he should really probably go; that would be better than staying, staying and standing here like an idiot and staring really hard, really intently, really fixedly at nothing at all while Hermann just sits there waiting for him to do some dredging. 

Also?

This is his room.

“Cesspool, though,” Newt says with a disappointing lack of verve. “Really, dude?”

Hermann looks a little like he has the urge to slap Newt for the inanity of his comment, but he doesn’t. He sits down on the edge of Newt’s bed like he’s been standing for too long, drops his cane, crosses his arms, and says, “in the past forty-eight hours you’ve participated in a screaming match, alienated roughly a third of the scientific community at this meeting, disappeared for hours on end, and missed a full day of an important conference, which is highly out of character for you.”

“Myeah, okay, maybe ‘cesspool’ is a little bit fair,” Newt admits.

“It is not fair,” Hermann says stiffly. “I was employing hyperbole in service of a rhetorical point.”  

Newt crosses the short distance between them and sits down next to Hermann on the edge of the bed. Not face to face but shoulder to shoulder. They both stare at the opposite wall and the crap piece of pseudo-modern art in a gold frame just above their current eye level.

“Can I see what you wrote?” Newt asks.

“No,” Hermann says. “You may not.”

“Okay,” Newt whispers.

“I will tell you,” Hermann says. “With words.”

“Okay,” Newt says again, this time doing a better job at producing sounds with his vocal cords. He chews anxiously on the glass rim of his miniature tequila bottle for about ten seconds before it occurs to him to offer Hermann a drink. “You want one of these things?”  He shakes the bottle.

“No,” Hermann says.

“Okay.”

“Yes,” Hermann amends.

“Okay.” Newt gets up, walks over to the small fridge built into the dresser on the orthogonal wall, and pulls out the most decent looking thing he can find, which turns out to be a middle of the road brand of gin. He hands it to Hermann and sits back down on the bed.

“There is something that deeply troubles me.” Hermann drops his papers on the floor and cracks the seal on the screw-top bottle. “It’s troubled me for quite some time, but I have never asked you about it, because I am certain that you will take it the wrong way.”

“Probably,” Newt replies. 

Hermann smiles an ironic half smile and starts in on his gin. 

“You gonna give it a shot anyway?” Newt asks.

“I suppose I will,” Hermann replies. 

Sometime this century? Newt doesn’t add.

Eventually, Hermann says, “You wrote about the ways that Dr. Lightcap had helped you, professionally and personally. You asked me if I’d noticed.”

“Yeah.” Newt’s throat tries to clamp shut.

“I had not,” Hermann replies. “I had not noticed. But you are correct. She shielded you from a great deal of scrutiny from the military side of the command hierarchy, and she did it without perceptible effort.”

“Myeah,” Newt says, totally but not unexpectedly miserable.

“What I did notice while she was alive,” Hermann says, “is how much, how intensively, and how genuinely you helped her. Personally. Professionally. Philosophically. Practically. You helped her troubleshoot the rigs, despite the fact that your primary appointment was supposed to be xenobiology. You kept pace with her. You kept her company. You became one of a handful of people who could talk her down when she became upset, which was often. When she was injured in her encounter with Karloff you spent hours per day acceding to her unreasonable demands to be kept involved with literally all active projects for the five weeks of her enforced medical leave.”

“Yes?” Newt isn’t sure where Hermann’s going with this.

“Yes,” Hermann repeats. “An affirmatory interrogative. That’s all you have to say.”

Newt’s not sure what that means, and he feels like he’s about half a step away from screwing up everything forever.

“Why,” Hermann asks, demand style. 

“Why did I help her so much?” Newt asks.

“No,” Hermann says. “I know why you did it. You did it because this, apparently, is your nature. You are generous with your time, your intellectual resources, with everything you have that can be given.”

This is news to Newt. He’s not sure it’s true. In fact, he’s pretty sure it might be false.

“Um,” he says.

Hermann shakes his head.

Newt sips more tequila and wrestles with the conceptual underpinnings of the question Hermann can’t quite articulate. It’s a why question, it’s a question that starts with the word ‘why’ and relates somehow to Lightcap, somehow to everything that’s happening, somehow to Hermann and the reasons he’s giving up on trying to deal with Newt, because even though Newt is, by Gottliebian standards a “generous” person, Newt has failed in some way, there’s something about him that just won’t do, by Jove, something he didn’t—

Waaaait, his brain says.

“Why didn’t I—” Newt says aloud, adding a negative, waiting for the rest of it, and it comes like something he already knows, has known for a long time. “—do that for you,” he finishes, fixing his eyes on the shitty painting on the wall, the texture of the carpet. “Why didn’t I do for you what I did for Lightcap, when I’d known you for years. Through the letters we wrote.”

Hermann shrugs, and Newt knows he’s nailed it. 

Nailed it about five years too late, sure, but nailed it all the same. 

Having nailed it, he feels slightly more than slightly offended. 

Only the deathly momentum in the room, the frozen line of Hermann’s shoulders keeps Newt from snapping, Because you hated me, because you clearly, clearly hated me, because you made me feel like shit, dude, right from day one, because you still make me feel like shit, like a kid that no one bothered to civilize, like someone raised by wolves, because you judged me by how I looked and how I spoke and by a thousand other things that shouldn’t have mattered to you because you knew what you knew about who I was, because I’d told you; in thousands and thousands of words I’d told you everything and still you hadn’t seen.

But Lightcap.

Lightcap had loved him. 

It had started so early and so deep. She’d loved him more than anyone had ever loved him, his whole life long. More than his own parents. He’d felt it, even in the earliest days, in Alaska, when he’d been bruised from his time JET Force, still recovering from Manila, when she’d dragged him to that bar in Anchorage, even that early he’d felt it from her; it shone from her face, it was in her laugh, her voice, but more than that, she’d said it, she’d told him, she didn’t care who knew how much she cared. He’d have done anything for her, anything she asked—

He stops himself. His eyes burn and ache.

It’s impossible to explain any of that to Hermann. He could wait a thousand years and still the words would never come.

“Because,” Newt says finally, “you didn’t seem to like me. And I get it, dude. I understand. I’m annoying. Day in, day out, rain, shine, apocalypse; there’s always going to be a 100% chance of irritation with me. We’re theoretically but not practically compatible. Or something. Both. Neither. I don’t know. It didn’t work out quite like it was supposed to. Did I feel the epic suckitude of that? Yes. I did. I’m sure you did too. But there was only so much I could take, really. Also, Lightcap was pretty miserable beneath that shiny exterior, so we bonded over that, I guess.”

“I know,” Hermann says.

“I know you know.” Newt stares at the floor.

“I hope,” Hermann says, “that you are aware that I consider you one of my closest friends.”

“Myeah.” Newt tries to drag the last threads of disappointment and grief from his voice and limbic system. “I know. Same. Likewise. It would be impossible for me not to like you after all that epistolary brain sharing. I mean really.” He gives Hermann a crooked smile, but Hermann doesn’t turn to look at him.

“In fact,” Hermann continues, “I—recently, my relationship with my family has become somewhat strained, and I—for me, you ah, have, to some degree, well, actually, to be fair, you have entirely taken on that sort of ‘classification’, if you will, by which I mean ‘family?’ Or some sort of—”

“What?” Newt says.

“Well,” Hermann continues, flustered, “I—”

Aaaaand that’s pretty much how far Hermann gets before Newt gives him a lateral hug where there is a very small amount of crying on his shoulder, probably not even a noticeable it’s so small. “Ugh,” Newt says into Hermann’s blazer, “me too, man,” and then Hermann stops awkwardly patting him on the shoulder and shifts, like Newt’s totally unintelligible string of words are some kind of free pass to real hugging, so they do that for a while, a little bit glued together, a little bit like setting epoxy, and it turns out Newt is fine with this, this is perfect, this has been what it’s been about for Newt, where physical intimacy is a shortcut to personal and psychological and emotional intimacy so if it’s going to be this way, this way that it is right now, then that’s fine with Newt, that’s all he really wanted anyway, to just—to be in the permanent picture, to be a part of a Gottliebian reference frame for the rest of his days.

Hermann’s breathing is shallow and uneven, his chin digging into Newt’s shoulder when he says, “I had an argument with my father.”

“Yeah,” Newt says into his hair, because it isn’t a surprise.

“He effectively disowned me,” Hermann whispers.

“This fucking Wall.” Newt’s voice cracks.

Hermann nods against Newt’s shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Newt says. “We can still save it. We can still save all of it. Ten years from now, you’ll be going home for Hanukkah, just you wait, man. Just you wait.”

Hermann doesn’t say anything.

Newt is pretty sure Dr. Gottlieb’s doing some silent stress-weeping of his own so Newt just sits there, feeling partially miserable and also partially amazed because they have not ever hugged before and this is like, falling off a personal intimacy cliff or something. Newt’s fine with that, except his back hurts, he’s twisted slightly, but he doesn’t want to mess this up, this—whatever this is—he’s worried that if he tries to effect any kind of shift he’ll ruin whatever delicate, dynamic, and bizarre equilibrium is going on right here right now. But while Newt is, admittedly, possessed of a good number of freeze-in-the-oncoming-traffic instincts at the moment, he’s also equally sure that he has a little more interpersonal clout in Gottliebian ledgers than he’d maybe previously thought, so he says, “Come on,” and when Hermann says, “Where,” he says, “Nowhere,” then kicks off his shoes and backs up with a whole array of vulnerable, open handed signals that say “Do not leave me here waiting for you on this bed, Dr. Gottlieb, honestly,”

And that’s how they end up on Newt’s bed, fully clothed, under dim lights, in an unfamiliar room, Hermann’s head resting on Newt’s shoulder, Newt’s arm across his back. 

“I am so sorry,” Hermann says, “that she died.”

“Oh god.” It takes Newt a few seconds before he can go on. “Me too. I saw it coming for so long, but somehow it still surprised me. That was the worst part.”

“I know it was,” Hermann says, a ragged whisper.

Newt’s expression cracks and reforms.

“She’d have loved your talk.” There’s a note of dark humor beneath the emotion in Hermann’s voice.

“You think so?” Newt lets his eyes wash themselves out.

“She would have adored it. I have absolutely no doubt,” Hermann replies.

Newt collects himself and asks, “Did your dad see your talk?”

“I don’t believe so, no,” Hermann replies.

Newt nods. 

“Did you see it?” Hermann asks.

Newt very nearly says yes. 

But he can’t.

There are limits to human endurance. He can’t lie here, in this bed, and discuss Hermann’s talk, the purple lights, the way that he’d made a hostile, restive crowd bend under the weight of well-presented science, the years of all their thoughts exchanged in letters and in briefings, the hours in their labs, the late nights drinking coffee, the slow disintegration of all they’ve tried to build, all the things Newt knows and all the things he doesn’t about the things that crawl from trenches, deep beneath the sea. 

“I skipped it,” Newt says. “I’m sure it was great.”

“It wasn’t,” Hermann says.

Newt shuts his eyes.

“And you’ve heard it all before,” Hermann continues.

Not quite like that, he hadn’t.

“True,” Newt agrees, a soundless lie.

“I was thinking that tomorrow I’d come with you to the xenobiological sessions,” Hermann says, “rather than attending the talks on human/AI interfaces.”

Newt nods. “I could see myself needing a wingman after yesterday. Or not. Maybe. Possibly.”

“Possibly,” Hermann agrees, delivering the word like brut champagne poured down the collar of someone’s shirt, dry and cool.

“So.” Newt’s thoughts slide back to the pages on his floor. “No more writing, then?”

“No,” Hermann says. “No more writing.”

“I’ll miss it,” Newt replies. 

“Not if we replace it correctly,” Hermann says.

“Well, no promises,” Newt whispers. 

“I suppose I could make an exception for extenuating circumstances,” Hermann says.

“Such as?” Newt asks.

“Well I’m sure I don’t know, Newton,” Hermann replies. “That’s what will define them as extenuating.” 

“Sounds fair.” Newt smiles faintly and doesn’t say any of the ten thousand things that come into his head that might be defined as mild Gottliebian abrasives, acetic acid to residue on glassware, sandpaper to varnish, freezing water to already cracking cement. It’s hard to map those interactions, to predict them, to ask the ever-changing questions: Who am I? Who are you? System states are what? Solve for position, solve for momentum, solve for everything not immediately known, stacking up inquiry on inquiry trying to make variables cancel out before they’re brought back as fun mathematical enrichment items, littered around an interpersonal cage that is, yes, a high-stress environment but also happens to be the place where one lives, at least for now, at least for the foreseeable future, the cage with the resources to stop an exterior fire but only if those resources are assembled in the right way at the right time and not piled into a Wall that blocks the view.

“What are you thinking of?” Hermann asks.

“Nothing man,” Newt says. “Just spinning the wheels. You?”

“Too much to fully recount,” Hermann replies. 

Newt nods.

A quiet interval passes.

“I’m trying to decide what I will say to my sister,” Hermann says.

“Ah,” Newt replies, unsure how to respond. Primarily this is because Dr. Gottlieb seems to prefer to project the impression that he sprung de novo from the collected knowledge of a fire-destroyed library of the ancient world, or self-organized out of a monomeric stew beneath a hot and electrified sky. He’s never brought up his family before, by Jove, not in words, or, rather, not in conversation. He’d written about them of course, back when they’d been writing, back when they hadn’t been able to stop themselves from writing, back when they’d been smarter and stupider than they are now. Than they’ve become. 

“I believe she’ll be the most upset by the rift between myself and my father.” Hermann stares at the ceiling and his verbal precision starts to go the way of the serial outlier. “Of all of them. My family, I mean.”  

Newt, too, stares at the ceiling, at its perimeter molding and its shadowed yellow cast. After scanning through the entire catalogue of all concepts and words available to him, he elects to go with, “Yeah.”   

Strong work, Dr. Geiszler. Strong, strong work.

“I can’t imagine this will come as a surprise to any of them,” Hermann continues, like a guy reassuring himself because someone else is sleeping on the job.

Newt can do better than this.

Screw your family anyway, he tries out. You don’t need them. 

Nope, that’s probably not a good thing to say.

This sucks for you so much, his brain suggests as an alternative.

He’s kinda already communicated validation, and this phrase doesn’t offer much beyond that.

Everything will turn out fine, might be a lie and he’s already said that too.

I don’t talk to my family very much, and look how well I’m doing, is likewise not very reassuring and a little more than a little self-obsessed.

Now you can spend the holidays working, turns out to be a really depressing way of improving anyone’s outlook.

Your family should disown its patriarch how about, while true, is neither practical nor useful.

Ugh he can get something good to come out of his mouth. He can. It’s happening right now. 

No it’s not. 

YES it IS. 

Dear Hermann, Newt begins silently.

“Genetics, right?” Newt says aloud, and usually, aloud, he’d leave it at that, but he’s trying to turn over a new leaf and find something under it other than forest detritus, rotting plant matter, and dead insects. “You’re biochemically tied to a little subset of humans, meaning you share these collections of monomers pushed into patterns outside your control, you share behavioral norms, you share a history that takes place during your physical maturation, and ideally all those things create a niche of pooled physical and metaphysical resources, right? But sometimes ideological rifts occur secondary to, y’know, having a distinct consciousness. Sometimes those conceptual differences can be homogenized but sometimes you spend a lifetime digging opposing trenches until a final rift cracks through the no-man’s land you’ve been mapping out for years. Family. It’s nice if you’ve got it in the traditional genetic and social sense, but if that stops being a fully workable model it’s also a term that’s appropriated and redefined all the time.  So, are you losing out on something? Yeah. You are. But at the same time, are you losing out on everything? No. There’s no sweeping categorical moratorium put on your communications with Karla, you feel me? So you guys don’t do the holiday thing because your dad doesn’t want you in the house. Maybe you start a set of new things. Your sister is not going to be a dick about this. Also? It’s not like this war, this effort will continue forever. Either we’ll live in a walled-off world with a monster-filled sea and you can go home and say, ‘By Jove, Sir Father, you were admirably correct regarding your postulated delights of a world sans ocean-based commerce’—”

Hermann snorts.

“That’s exactly how you talk, don’t deny it,” Newt says, before continuing with “or, you’ll figure out how to shut the Breach and your dad will try to crawl back into your good graces and you’ll let him. If you want. After an appropriate period of paternal abasement while you make up your mind.”

“You’re insufferable,” Hermann says in a way that implies no such thing. “You’ve also left the most likely alternative off your list.”

“What,” Newt says, clear-eyed and dry, dire and dismissive, “the slow, protracted, civilization-ending thing? Where we scatter and die in whatever holes we dig?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, equally dry. “That’s the one.”  

You’re the guy who’ll be trying to live, Lightcap whispers.

“Nah,” Newt whispers, not dry anymore. “That’s not how it’ll go.”  

You’re the guy who’ll be trying to live, Lightcap whispers, a ghost on the dark dock of his thoughts, right until the very last screaming second of his existence.

Hermann shifts, coming up on one elbow to look down at Newt, and Newt doesn’t like that, this too-close, too-far, eye-to-eye, set-of-eyes to set-of-eyes thing; he prefers the mutual stare at the ceiling they’d had going.

“I confess,” Hermann says in a way that makes Newt feel like dying, “that I’m not certain if your unpredictable attitudinal shifts over the past year come from a genuine change in your opinions, or derive from something else.”

Attitudinal shifts, his brain echoes, annoyed at someone, but not sure whom that someone should be. What a polite way of putting it.

Hermann holds up his hand in response to something he sees on Newt’s face. “Please do not misconstrue. Allow me to rephrase more clearly.”  

Newt raises his eyebrows and waits like a compressed spring.

“Your outlook regarding the eventual endgame of increasing Breach transit has never been as dismal as mine,” Hermann says. 

“True,” Newt says cautiously. 

“But recently, your optimism about the eventual success of our efforts has vacillated wildly.”

“Must everything be euphemism here?” Newt can’t stop himself from snapping.

“You have,” Hermann snaps right back, “over the past year, been actively trying to adopt a more optimistic personal outlook while simultaneously increasing your pessimistic rhetoric in public venues. Case in point, within the span of thirty hours you screamed yourself hoarse regarding inevitable, species-level extinction while literally just now you made a notable effort to present yourself as holding a more optimistic view of our chances of survival.”  

“And you want an explanation of that apparent incongruity?” Newt asks. 

Hermann looks away from him, toward the open window. “I don’t think I need one,” he says. 

You’re the guy who’ll be trying to live, Lightcap whispers, right until the very last screaming second of his existence. I love that about you.

I love that about you.

“There is something I’ve wanted to say for a long time,” Hermann continues, letting Newt off the hook by dropping his elbow and going back to a ceiling-ward stare. “A long time.”

Newt bites his lip, sure it’s not something he wants to hear, sure it’s not even about them, not about the two of them, all that they’ve shared, all that they haven’t, all that they’ve been to each other, what they could be and won’t, what they’d like to have but can’t, what Hermann won’t risk because of what Newt will inevitably screw up, it won’t be about any of that. It will be, of course, about Lightcap.

Kaiju-killer, Jaeger-builder, Drift-distiller, bullshit-filter Lightcap. Even dead, she stalks her way through other people’s thoughts, their academic papers, their meetings, the garbage comments they now must shout at lesser scientists. It’s only in Newt’s head that she sits on docks, alone.

“She wove a mantle for herself that only she could wear,” Hermann says. “It was never meant for you. Don’t try to make it fit.”  

The ceiling burns its watery image into Newt’s retinas.

“No,” Newt says, “I mean, obviously. Obviously not. You’re being ridiculous, actually, you’re—wrong. You’re—”

“I am not wrong,” Hermann says, like a guy who knows he’s not wrong.

I love that about you, Lightcap whispers, and he can almost hear her. I love that about you.

“It’s just,” Newt whispers, “we did have—a sort of understanding about what I’d do after she died.”

“Did you,” Hermann says, a supposed question that isn’t framed as one at all.

“But it turns out that I make a shit Lightcap variant,” Newt says.

“I cannot believe she wouldn’t have known this about you,” Hermann says gently. “Consider freeing up your interpretation of what was certainly an overly dramatic comment on her part you took too much to heart because you share her penchant for theatricality. She couldn’t have told you to prevent the building of the Coastal Wall because she didn’t know about it before she died. She couldn’t have expected you to wield even a fraction of the political capital she’d accrued. She couldn’t have realistically expected anything of you other than a sustained intellectual effort combined with the conceptual risk-taking for which she hired you, Newton. I am certain of this. Granted, I didn’t ritualistically shatter glass with her twice per week. I saw only a fraction of the humanity behind her professional demeanor, if one can call her demeanor professional, but I worked closely with her for years. Conceptually, technically, administratively.”

Newt gives Hermann a one-shouldered shrug.

Who are our dead? Lightcap had asked him years ago, turning Kaori Jessup’s wedding ring over and over and over again in her fingers, her eyes on it, her mind on it, a silent count of ring-revolutions rising in her head beneath the words she spoke to Newt, who had interrupted her too late at night or too early in the morning. Who are our dead, if not those whom we allow to haunt us?

I’m sorry, Newt had said, standing in her doorway.

Don’t be sorry, baby genius, Lightcap had replied without looking at him. Be working.

“You are unconvinced,” Hermann whispers. “I can tell.”

“Not entirely,” Newt says. “Case in point: I’ve decided to give up on trying to bring down the Wall.”

“While I applaud this rare stroke of rationality,” Hermann says dryly, “I’m not certain it’s at the root of your current problems.”

“Oh no?” Newt replies, equally dry. “Well I’m not sure my problems are even problems.”

“Hmm. Now we arrive at the tangled heart of your personal psychology,” Hermann says, dryness cracking into amusement under its own aridity.

“The horror, the horror, et cetera, et cetera,” Newt replies, with a lazy rotation of his left hand.

Hermann says nothing, but his eye-roll is audible. 

“I’m not sure we’ll ever give up on the prospect of talking one another out of being ourselves,” Newt offers.

“I’m sure I have no idea what that means,” Hermann counters. 

“Lies.” Newt can’t manage to manage anything else.

Hermann sighs and shifts, levering himself more on top of Newt’s shoulder.

If Newt had to guess, he’d say that misery-cuddling is now maybe a thing that’s permanently made it into their intrapersonal repertoire, albeit with a high activation energy, like incipient mutual emotional breakdowns or some equivalent insult. Maybe. What is this even, like, a new permutation of letter writing? That’s what Hermann had cast it as, kind of. It’s definitely a Geiszler-driven thing though, the misery-cuddle, because Hermann does not invade people’s personal space as a general rule, though Newt has the feeling that maybe he would, if he were so inclined, under the right set of circumstances, none of which have ever really been met and might not ever be met given that Hermann is Hermann and Newt is Newt, given that Hermann has a lot of propriety and Newt has less of that propriety, given that Hermann is only moderately tolerant of Newt’s truculent edge that doubles back on itself in infinite switchbacks of the self until all he is is that edge, given that Hermann respects authority to an extent that Newt views as not respectable, given that Hermann hates Newt’s awesome boots and Newt hates Hermann’s stupid sweaters, given that Newt will always and forever burn his virtual lighter for Nietzsche while Hermann’s more of a rationalist fan, given that Hermann favors substantive style while Newt favors stylish substance, given that volumes and volumes of words have been exchanged between them. 

They know too much about one another for romance to be anything other than post hoc. 

It’s a dimension that would cause nothing but problems, a dimension to screw up, a capitulation to a social ideal that neither of them need, well, that’s not necessarily categorically true, but Newt doesn’t need it; fifty percent of them are just fine sans sexual relations, thanks; not necessarily opposed but not categorically requiring romance as anything other than a marker of likely long-term continued association which is always the subtext of Newt’s personal life: the pursuit of a real and permanent deal.

Staring at the ceiling, one arm wrapped around his platonic slash possibly non-platonic superfriend/arch-nemesis/science-rival/debate-team-adversary/frenemy, Newt decides not to ruin his existing relationships in deference to chronic loneliness and social norms. 

That’s just stupid.

And it turns out that Newt is extremely smart.

He has the things that are important to him. 

He has them.

He has them already.

“You do realize that—” Hermann begins, sounding like a guy trying to navigate by stars on an overcast sea, “that I—” he doesn’t finish.

“Yeah,” Newt says, offhand, casual, in the tradition of Han Solo, his indubitable ancestor from a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, “I know.”