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: Midnight.

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 has draped himself in an inebriated sprawl atop Hermann’s bed. “I mean really.”  

Hermann doesn’t believe this particular string of words merits a reply. He 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—”

Here, Newton elects to pause dramatically.

Hermann looks over one shoulder and eyes his colleague in a manner he hopes captures the unimpressed skepticism he’s currently feeling. He’s never 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 pulls all the power out of his smile, and what faint intensity remains, he directs at his sink, rather than his colleague. “Yes,” he agrees, given “wave functions” cover everything in existence; he can hardly dispute the man’s assertion.

“I am exceptionally pissed,” Newton elaborates.

“About what?” Hermann already understands the implied answer but hopes for an answer that might lacquer over his own unfinished despair.

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

Newton takes the alcohol Hermann offers and commences what will likely be their final round of drinking for the evening. “You know what.”

Hermann sits beside him on the bed and says nothing.

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

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

Hermann says nothing because there’s nothing to say. His equilibrium is gone, 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 studies his own glass, full of someone else’s sake.

“And a Wall won’t shut it either.”

“No,” Hermann agrees.

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

“No,” Hermann says.

“No. There’s one thing that’ll shut it.” The man speaks with a nonchalant, didactic arrogance that’s maddening to encounter head on, but is actually quite appealing when aligned with Hermann’s personal interests. “That thing?” Newton tees himself up for whatever rhetorical point he’s about to drive home. “Is further inquiry into the nature of spacetime and what the hell supposedly quantum-level phenomena are doing on a macro scale and making us take it in the neck. There’s this culture, a culture that I don’t 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.”

Hermann looks up at him.

“Unfortunately,” Newton continues, meeting his eyes, leaning forward with rare and total simpatico, “in this particular case, the ‘end game’ is the end of civilization. And it was always you, right from the beginning, you were the guy addressing the etiology of this 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. The Breach must be shut.”

Hermann raises his eyebrows.

Newton works a finger into the tight knot of his already too-loose tie. “You’ve been right about that. From day one. You’re still right about that. You’ve had your eye on the end game for the whole chess match, dude, and it must suck to feel like that guy who knows what to do if only anyone would listen, and I just—”

Newton shrugs, then drags his narrow tie into a linear drape over the back of his neck, blissfully unaware that Hermann may throttle him with it if he doesn’t complete his thought.

“—even though we have our conceptual disagreements,” Newton mercifully continues, “I just want you to know that I get it.”

Does he?

Hermann’s funding has been cut; he’s just calculated the approximate expiration date for his own species; he’s tired; he hasn’t 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 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 never be a moment he forgets—not until the Breach is shut or he is dead.

“Two years?” Newton’s smile is shaky and his eyes are solemn. “I’d better start spending down my savings.”

Hermann leans into a kiss that tastes of sake and salt, feels like the running lines of code in a completing model, like an iteration toward a final system state he can’t 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 maybe he has.

It’s a hopeful thought: perhaps Newton, like Hermann, waits for the fallout from explosive upper atmosphere clashes in their respective personal styles.

Hermann tries not to let the idea do him too much damage.

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, self-conscious.

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

“Um,” Newton says. “I sort of figure that if we’re going to cross this bridge we might as well set it on fire. Discuss.”

“I concur,” Hermann replies.

Newton fixes him with a gaze from the undeniable apex of Geiszlerian virescence; bright, intent, magnificent. He doesn’t elect to reply in words, he simply pushes Hermann back against the covers of his own neatly made bed, climbs atop 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 gone hungry for human contact, that this—whatever they’re doing—is neither a promise nor a thing to be ignored.

Bridges burned indeed, Hermann reflects.

“Please don’t think,” he manages, “that this means I’ll tolerate your penchant for skipping mandatory briefings.”

“Oh certainly not,” Newton replies, agreeably breathless and pleasantly disheveled. “Please don’t assume I’ll be building you an intellectual ziggurat of any kind. No temples to math. No temples to numbers. No altars to rationalism.”  

Hermann kisses the shell of Newton’s ear. “Please don’t take this experience as tacit permission to allow your studies in comparative anatomy to extend into my workspace.”

Newton shivers. “It’ll be hard.” He traces a fingertip along the line of Hermann’s jaw. “But I’ll make an effort. Please don’t conclude from my comments this evening that I’ll be calling you ‘right’ about anything on a regular basis.”

The same momentum that’s 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, “that means you have to respect me in the morning.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hermann replies.

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

“There is a right answer, I assure you.” Hermann brings a hand to Newton’s hair, tracing phantom lines where green streaks once had been. “They shouldn’t have made you change it,” he whispers.

“The hair?” Newton asks, his thumb trailing a line along Hermann’s jaw.

Hermann nods. “That’s where it all went wrong, I think. When the ethos changed. When we began to favor the short term over the long.”

“Nah.” Newton smiles faintly. “We’re human. Short-term rewards 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 an Eldritch nadir and planetside real-estate hits rock bottom.”

Hermann’s throat closes. “We’ll not survive this.”

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

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

“Oh you never know.” Newton presses a kiss to 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, wild-edged and improbably hopeful after all Hermann has told him, after the fatal spread of math he’s seen.

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’s arms tighten 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.”

“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. Don’t leave. Don’t leave K-science.”

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

Newton doesn’t answer.