Out of Many Scattered Things: Things Exactly As They Are

“Like,” Newton says, in helpless appeal, “wave functions, man.”

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

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Things Exactly As They Are

In the dim light of a single bedside lamp, Hermann opens a metal cabinet and removes an unadorned box.

“I mean, shit, man,” Newton says, from where he has draped himself in an inebriated sprawl atop Hermann’s bed. “I mean really.”  

Hermann does not believe this particular string of words merits a reply. He therefore begins unboxing sake glasses with quiet precision.

“No but listen,” Newton continues. “Listen though. Schrödinger aside. His poor defenseless cat aside.  Beer aside. Gödel aside. Dirac aside. Heisenberg aside. A New Kind of Science aside. The origins of our universe aside. Firecracker metaphysics aside. Dead intellectual hotboxes of all kinds aside. You aside. Me aside. All things aside—”  

Newton elects to pause dramatically.

Hermann looks over one shoulder and eyes his colleague in a manner he hopes captures the unimpressed skepticism he is currently feeling.  He does not believe he has ever seen Newton quite this inebriated. Such a state does nothing for the man’s ability to express himself.  

“Like,” Newton says, in helpless appeal, “wave functions, man.”

Hermann does not quite manage not to smile at that comment, but it is a faint smile and one that he manages to direct at his sink, rather than his colleague. “Yes,” he agrees, because ‘wave functions’ manages to cover nearly everything in existence and he can therefore hardly dispute the man’s assertion.

“I am exceptionally pissed,” Newton elaborates.

“About what, exactly?” Hermann replies, already understanding the implied answer but trying to pull the question into something that might serve as a lacquer over his own unfinished despair.

He pours clear and perfect sake into clear and perfect glass.

“About what. About what?” Newton asks, taking the alcohol that Hermann offers him and commencing what will likely be their final round of drinking for the night. “You know exactly what.”

Hermann sits next to him on the bed and says nothing.

He takes a measured sip of his sake and stares at the opposite wall.

“No comment?” Newton asks, with notably delicate irony.

Hermann says nothing because there is nothing to say. His equilibrium has been destroyed—by this humid night in Hong Kong and its attendant alcohol, by his father’s fragile Wall and the funding it’s diverted, by the continuing grind of political interest superseding rational inquiry time after time after time after time even under the metaphorical gun of literal extinction.

“You feel me. Hermann. Hermann. I know you. I know you and so I know that you know that I know that even though (and reveal this precisely never to precisely no one) I ostensibly give you a hard time about it in a quotidian way, as it were, by Jove, and et cetera—bottom line? All the kaiju-whispering in the world won’t shut that breach.”

“No,” Hermann replies, staring at his own hands, holding his own glass, full of someone else’s sake.

“And a Wall isn’t going to shut it either.”

“No,” Hermann says.

“The Jaegers will not, in isolation, shut it.”

“No,” Hermann says.

“No. There is only one thing that will shut it, Hermann,” the man continues, speaking with a nonchalant, didactic arrogance that is absolutely maddening to encounter head on, but is, actually, quite appealing when aligned in defense of Hermann’s personal interests. “That thing?” Newton says, teeing himself up for whatever rhetorical point he is about to drive home. “That thing that will shut it, if it can be shut?  Is further inquiry into the nature of spacetime and what the hell supposedly quantum-level phenomena are doing showing up on a macro scale and making us take it in the neck. There’s this culture, a culture that I do not understand by the way, of leading basic science to the edge of the practicality volcano every single time some nebulous authority figure becomes restive in the hopes that, by shoving it in, system efficiency will increase and the rains will finally come, when really?  That kind of thinking ultimately sabotages the end game.”

Hermann looks up at him.

“Unfortunately,” Newton continues, meeting his eyes, leaning forward, snapping into rare and total simpatico, “in this particular case, the ‘end game’ is the ending of our civilization.  And it was always you, right from the beginning—you were the guy addressing the etiology of this horrific mess of a ‘war’, and if anyone’s funding should have been preserved, should have been continued to the very end, until the concept of money collapsed—it was yours. They don’t get it. They don’t get it. They’ve never gotten it. The breach must be shut. Nothing else will fix this problem.”

Hermann raises his eyebrows.

Newton begins working a finger into the tight knot of his already too-lose tie. “This entire time?  You have been right about that. You’re still right about that. You have had your eye on the end game for the entire metaphorical chess match, dude; and it must suck to feel like that guy who knows what must be done but whom no one’s listening to, and I just—”

Newton pauses to drag his previously knotted tie into a linear drape over the back of his neck, entirely unaware that Hermann may throttle him with it if he does not complete his thought.

“—even though we have our conceptual disagreements? I just want you to know that I get it,” his colleague finishes, managing to a) obliterate the importance of seven years of continuous arguing, b) demonstrate unusual (if inebriated) insight while simultaneously conveying c) an exhausted sincerity that Hermann very much appreciates on this night, in this moment.

Hermann’s funding has been cut; he has just calculated the approximate expiration date for his own civilization; he is tired; he has not spoken with his father in eighteen months; the room is dark; the sake is warm; and the light from his bedside table glints off reflective surfaces everywhere—his mirror, his dead computer screen, the glass of sake in his hand, the metal of the walls, the frame of his bed, the pen in Newton’s pocket, his eyewear, and his hair.

Circa 2025, the accelerating rate of breach transit will become incompatible with human life.

Even now, he can’t forget. There will, in fact, never be a moment when he can forget—not until the breach is shut or he is dead.

“Two years?” Newton whispers, with an uneven smile and solemn eyes, his thoughts evidently paralleling Hermann’s own.  “I’d better start spending down my savings.”

Hermann leans forward into a kiss that tastes of sake and salt, feels like the running lines of code in a completing model, like an inevitable iteration toward a final system state that he cannot yet see.  Newton kisses him back like he’s been waiting to do it—for hours for days, for months, for years, for a decade—and perhaps he has, perhaps they’ve both been waiting for some kind of fallout from all that has been buried so long and so deep beneath the catastrophic differences in their respective personal styles.

After almost no time at all, Newton pulls back and gently drags the glass from the lax cage of Hermann’s fingers before knocking back his stolen sake with unforgivable panache.  

Hermann flushes, intensely self-conscious.

Newton sets both glasses on Hermann’s desk, following his hands with his eyes in a manner that Hermann finds both endearing and terrifying.

“Um,” Newton says, without looking at him. “I sort of figure that if we’re going to cross this bridge we might as well set it on fire. Discuss.”

“I entirely concur,” Hermann replies.

Newton fixes him with a gaze that is the undeniable apex of Geiszlerian virescence; bright, intent, magnificent.  He doesn’t elect to reply in words, per se, he simply pushes Hermann back against the covers of his own neatly made bed, climbs on top of him, and authoritatively continues what Hermann so impulsively started.

It strikes Hermann then, beneath the ache in his hip and the sensory flux in skin that has gone so long without human contact, that this—whatever it is that they are doing—is neither a promise nor a thing to be ignored.  Much like Newton himself.

Bridges burned indeed, Hermann reflects.

“Please do not think,” he manages to say after a few moments, in an attempt to slow their rate of progression, “that this means I will become any more tolerant of your penchant for skipping mandatory briefings.”

“Oh certainly not,” Newton replies, agreeably breathless and already pleasantly disheveled. “Please do not think that this means I will be building you an intellectual ziggurat of any kind. No temples to math. No temples to numbers. No altars to rationalism.”  

“I would never assume such a thing,” Hermann whispers, kissing the shell of Newton’s ear. “Please do not take this experience as tacit permission to allow your studies in comparative anatomy to intrude into my workspace.”

Newton shivers in a way that Herman finds extremely satisfying. “Well it’s going to be hard,” he replies, his fingertips tracing the line of Hermann’s jaw. “But I’ll make an effort.  Please do not conclude from my comments this evening that I will be calling you ‘right’ about anything on a regular basis.”

The same momentum that has carried them here, to this point, on this bed, tangled together over a crisp coverlet, seems to preclude any undiscussed undressing. Newton’s fingers trace the edge of Hermann’s sweater; Hermann’s fingers hover at the collar of Newton’s shirt, but neither of them do more than approach that interpersonal asymptote.

“If you leave my shirt on,” Newton whispers, attempting to kiss Hermann and smile at the same time with limited success, “that means you have to respect me in the morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann replies.

“I’m really not sure how I’m supposed to take that,” Newton says.

“There is a right answer,” Hermann informs him.  “I assure you.”  He brings a hand up to run his fingers through Newton’s hair, tracing the lines where green streaks once had been. “They should not have made you change it,” he whispers.

“The hair?” Newton replies, pulling back and looking straight at him, his left thumb still trailing along Hermann’s jaw.

“Yes,” Hermann says, without sound. “That is where it all began to go wrong, I think. When the ethos changed. When we began to favor the short term over the long.”

“Nah,” Newton replies, smiling faintly at him. “We’re humans. Short-term rewards are going to get us every time. As for where it went wrong? Well. That was somewhere in the quantum foam. You know how it is. Some wave function collapses into a shit outcome and planetside real-estate hits rock bottom.”

Hermann can feels his throat close. “We’re not going to survive, I don’t think.”

“The numbers say no,” Newton says gently, “but I’m not impressed.”

“I see no way out,” Hermann replies, shutting his eyes against a threatening heat, “I honestly see no way.”

“Oh you never know,” Newton murmurs, shifting slightly and pressing his lips against Hermann’s temple. “We’ll find a place and we’ll dig our last ditch with whatever we’ve got to dig it with.  In the meantime, what the heck are you doing, dude, interrupting my carpe diem style make-out with your angsting about the fall of civilization, I mean really.  Talk about missing the very nice trees for the very ominous forest.”

“Apologies,” Hermann whispers.

“Meh,” Newton replies. “You’re much too responsible to date me until the world doesn’t end.  Don’t think I don’t know that.”

“Can you imagine if we had a falling out?” Hermann murmurs, still tracing remembered lines through Newton’s hair.  “It would be a disaster.”

Newton grins at him, wild-edged and still, improbably, hopeful after all Hermann has told him, after the fatal spread of math he has seen. “I know.”

Hermann shakes his head faintly.

Newton drops his head to rest on Hermann’s shoulder, and relaxes into a sprawl. “Can I stay?”

“Yes,” Hermann says, his arms tightening around the man.

“Ha,” Newton says. “I should compliment you more often.”  

Oh Gott, Hermann thinks. Please do nothing of the kind.

“Hermann,” Newton whispers.

“What,” Hermann replies.

“Please don’t leave,” Newton says.

“This is my room,” Hermann reminds him.

“No,” Newton says, in a flat whisper. “Until the end. Whatever that end is is. Don’t leave. Don’t leave K-science.”

“Ah,” Hermann replies, thinking of ways to die, ways to try to live, machines he has conceived and programed and designed and built, of the Jaeger Academy that had rejected him, years ago. “Where else would I go?”

Newton says nothing.