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When Newton leaves for Shanghai, Hermann finally has the lab to himself. It’s…fine. He isn’t upset about it. He’s fine.
He is not fine. But he has a lifetime of practice appearing to be so. He carries on. He does not rage or weep. He does not ask for help. He is wholly self-sufficient. Hermann has always been self-sufficient. His decade of tumultuous association with Newton Geiszler has been the anomaly. He’s just getting back to normal.
He should have expected this. Hermann is the type to get set in his ways. He has never coped well with change. And Newton has never known how to sit still. It took the threat of the total annihilation of the human race to keep him in their lab for as long as he stayed. Of course he was going to move on once the threat was gone. Of course Hermann was going to be left behind.
Really, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as he’s making out. It wouldn’t hurt at all, or not much, if not for…well, it must have been a misunderstanding. Obviously he’s misunderstood.
They’re friends, or were friends. Newton cares for him, or did at one time. But it’s nothing lasting. Hermann is clinging to their relationship through force of habit. Newton is moving on.
It’s fine.
Everything is perfectly fine.
Everything is fine when he goes to breakfast on his own, and sits off in the corner with no one to talk to. This is as it should be. Hermann does not enjoy talking to people, especially over a meal. The social calculus of conversation has never come easily to him, and frankly he would rather be alone than set himself up for failure.
But it’s different now. There’s a lack he’s never felt before, and he finds himself covertly watching Miss Mori and Mr. Becket from across the room, wondering what they would think of him if he sat, uninvited, at the end of their table and dredged up some inane question about their plans for the weekend.
This may be some piece of Newton held over from the drift. Newton always has the urge to talk to everyone he sees, whether he has anything to say to them or not. He always has to be the center of attention. He can’t stand to be alone.
But maybe this is nothing to do with the drift. Maybe Hermann is simply off balance because he’s grown used to having Newton by his side, every step of the way for so many years. Maybe he’s forgotten how to be alone.
Maybe that’s something he’ll have to relearn. Now that Newton is gone. And that’s all right.
Everything is fine.
Everything is fine, week after week, until Newton calls him from Shanghai, and Hermann is disgusted with himself for his eagerness to answer. He tries not to think of Newton’s fond smiles and their increasing frequency, the way Newton’s hands lingered just a moment longer than necessary every time they touched, the way Newton was always there by his side, right up until he wasn’t.
None of that meant what he wanted it to mean, but still he eagerly, breathlessly says, “Hello!” when Newton’s face appears on the screen. He awaits the smile that lights up Newton’s face, brighter than the summer sun.
It doesn’t come.
“Oh hey man, what’s up.” Newton looks at the screen for barely a second before he turns his attention to the papers strewn across his desk. He looks exhausted, the shadows under his eyes magnified by the lighting in his new, ultra-modern office. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and his face looks naked without them. Has he switched to contact lenses?
“Hello, Newton,” Hermann says again. Newton looks up at the screen, a bit startled, as if he’s already forgotten who he called. The corners of his mouth turn up, but no smile lines appear around his eyes.
It’s the screen resolution, Hermann tells himself. Of course he can’t make out all the little details that make his Newton so alive. Things would be different in person.
“Hey, Hermann,” Newton says. “How’s it going? Long time no see.”
“Weeks,” Hermann agrees. Five weeks, three days, seven and a half hours since he last heard Newton’s voice. Five weeks, two days, nineteen hours since Newton walked out of the Shatterdome. He didn’t say a proper goodbye, and for the first few days, Hermann couldn’t help believing, hoping, that he might come back.
He’s gotten over that by now.
“How are you settling in?” Hermann asks.
“Fine, not bad.” He picks up a pen and scrawls something across one of the pages. “You?”
“I…haven’t moved,” Hermann says.
“Oh, yeah, right. Same old Hermann.” Newton taps his pen thoughtfully against his lips. Tap-tap-tap.
“Are you happy?” Hermann presses. It won’t be so bad if he knows Newton is happy. If this new life is really what he needs.
Tap, tap, tap. His eyes are distant, but his smile looks real.
“Yeah, it’s great here. I should have taken this step a long time ago.”
Tap-tap-tap. He never could sit still.
Hermann waits for Newton to reiterate the suggestion of a second job there for the taking, only half articulated before he left. Hermann will not accept that job offer, not even for a chance to keep working with Newt. But he would go down to Shanghai and tour the facility. Spend the weekend in the penthouse Newton took as a signing bonus. Have a chance to talk things out at last. And maybe this time, when one of them leans in close, heavy with meaning, the other won’t flinch away at the last second. There will be no awkward attempt to pretend that nothing happened. They will finally connect.
He finds his eyes drawn to Newton’s mouth. Tap-tap-tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap-tap—
Newton bites down on the end of his pen and holds it in his mouth like a cigar.
“So, Hermann!” he says brightly.
“Don’t talk to me with that thing in your mouth.”
Newton pulls a face, spits out the pen, and tosses it away.
“So sorry, old chum. Must maintain proper decorum, you know.”
Hermann can’t even get angry at Newton making fun of his accent, it feels so familiar. He’s the same old Newton, never too serious, always quick to tease.
“Look, anyway,” Newton says, “the reason I called you is ‘cause I have something I need to ask you.”
“Yes, Newton?”
Newton rests his chin on his hand, and immediately starts his tapping again, this time with a finger. Tap-tap-tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap-tap-tap.
“You know all that stuff I left in my room?”
“Yes,” Hermann says, still dreaming that Newton will ask him to close the distance between them.
“Can you throw that out for me?”
“Oh,” Hermann says. “Oh. Yes. Of—of course.” He can do that, certainly. If that’s what’s needed.
“Cool, thanks. Knew I could count on you.” Newton smiles, vaguely, not quite in Hermann’s direction.
But that’s just a trick of the camera. It would be different in person.
It would all be different if Hermann could look him in the eye.
Newton locks his fingers together under his chin and leans in closer to the screen.
“I would have had the maintenance guys clear the place out, but I left some books and stuff I’d feel kind of bad about getting rid of. If you find anything you want, you can go ahead and take it.”
“Is there anything you’d like me to save for you?” Hermann asks.
“Nah, don’t worry about it. There’s nothing there worth coming back for.”
Oh. Of course. Nothing.
“I could mail it to you,” Hermann suggests halfheartedly. Since there’s nothing here worth coming back for.
“Hermann, come on. It’s all junk. Take it, donate it, throw it away, I don’t give a shit. I don’t need it anymore.”
“Right, yes, of course. I’m sure you have everything you need in Shanghai.”
“Yep!” Newton turns his attention back to his papers. He picks up an unchewed pen. “Listen, thanks for helping me out, you’re awesome, but I kind of have a lot of work to do, you know? I wish I could sit around and chat all night, but…”
“You called me,” Hermann reminds him.
“Yeah, totally.” He clicks his pen. “Talk again soon?”
Hermann bristles. If this is Newton’s idea of ‘talking,’ he has no wish to do it again. He won’t be summoned to do a favor and then dismissed like he’s nothing.
But then he lets it go. Clearly, he has overestimated his own importance in Newton’s mind. Better not to embarrass himself demanding more attention from a man who’s trying to move on.
“Call again when you have more time,” Hermann says, mostly as a matter of form. Newton is so busy now. He isn’t going to make time to talk to someone who no longer matters to him. If he ever mattered at all.
“Yeah, I gotta go, but thanks for being cool.”
“Goodbye, Newton,” Hermann says.
Newton’s posture straightens. The smile slides from his face.
“Hermann,” he says earnestly, “stay safe.”
He disconnects the call, leaving Hermann alone with an empty screen.
There isn’t much left in Newton’s old room. Hermann knows that much from having helped move some of the boxes. But he hasn’t taken everything. The plan, when he first left, was for him to come back periodically, at least to visit, possibly to consult. The PPDC was more than willing to hold his place for him. But if that plan has been scrapped, there’s not much reason to keep his things here. Not anymore.
Hermann opens the door to a room stripped mostly bare, but still unmistakably Newton’s. A bed left unmade, a desk mostly cleared except for a small stack of paperbacks and comics on one corner. The closet door stands open, revealing several empty hangers and a couple of abandoned shirts. Presumably, the state of the dresser drawers is much the same. There are still posters taped to the walls. And a guitar case sticking out from under the bed.
Newton couldn’t have meant to leave that behind, could he? Hermann will have to call him back and ask about it. Assuming Newton can find a free moment to take his call, now that he’s so very busy with his new life.
Grumbling under his breath, Hermann bends down to pull out the case. To his surprise, he finds it not nearly heavy enough to contain a guitar. If Newton expects him to clear out a lot of old rubbish with nothing at all important mixed in, Hermann is going to be very put out.
He picks up the guitar case and deposits it on the bed, entertaining, ever so briefly, the notion of taking a trip to Shanghai in spite of it all, to deliver some valuable collector’s item directly into Newton’s hands, with the excuse that he couldn’t possibly have meant to leave such a thing behind. An action figure still in its box, a comic book signed by the artist, some hidden gem, something. Or maybe there is a guitar in there. Hermann has never handled one personally. He only knows the weight of it secondhand. He has names and positive associations in his head, soaked through with Newton’s enthusiasm, but Hermann is not the musician. He could be completely misremembering the feel of it in his hands, absent other sensations: blinding lights in a dark room, the tang of sweat and beer and smoke in the air, the muted roar of a crowd ready to be captured.
He’s smiling to himself as he flips the tabs to open the case, wondering how long it would take to learn to play, thinking of surprising Newton with a new skill when they meet again, imagining the warmth in his old friend’s eyes as he says, “Hermann, you’re a rock star!”
He puts back the lid of the guitar case, and his smile dies a quiet death.
He was right the first time. There is no guitar in this case. Instead, it’s full of paper. Stationery, to be precise. The very same that Hermann received as a graduation gift, years ago, took away with him to university, and then left to gather dust, having no one to correspond with.
No one, until Newt. When he received that first letter from Massachusetts, Hermann dug out his stationery simply for the sake of having a fresh page to write on. And over the next few years, he used it all as he wrote back again and again, pouring his heart out in letter after letter to a stranger, then a colleague, then a friend.
And, briefest of all, the man he loved. Hermann never said so—Newton never indicated that it would be welcome—but he’d felt so much, he’d etched it into the paper with every stroke of the pen, a sweet ache bleeding into all the empty spaces. Their first meeting face to face put an end to any thoughts of romance, but he never quite forgot how it felt to write, with a world of possibility before him.
And Newton…
He thrusts a hand into the case and comes up with a handful of crumpled letters, hardly comprehending what he’s seeing.
Newton kept his letters. All this time. Maybe, maybe hoping, as Hermann hoped—in vain.
Because he’s left them, now. After they’ve drifted, after he’s laid bare every secret corner of Hermann’s heart and seen what was always his for the taking, now he’s given it up.
Hermann’s fingers open. The letters fall, back into their case with a sound like dirt into an open grave.
In Shanghai, Newt waits for Hermann to call him back. They have his lines all written for him, ready to perform. Newt can’t stop them from rooting around in his head, and he’s handed them the words that will hurt Hermann most when he tries to confront him about the letters.
Oh, shit, I completely forgot those were there. Important things on my mind, you know how it is.
(Like there’s anything more important to him than Hermann, like he could ever, ever forget.)
Sorry, I wouldn’t have asked you to do this if I’d thought of it. I know you’re still hanging onto some…well, you know.
(Hermann feels something for him, yeah, and he’s pretty sure it’s actually—)
(He doesn’t get to name it anymore, but he tries to hold into that feeling, even when Alice washes over him and through him, blotting out everything that came before.)
Want them back? No, dude. I told you, there’s nothing back there worth saving.
(He wants his letters back, he wants them so bad, but Hermann is not the only one they’re trying to hurt. And they won’t let him save anything. Not the letters, and in the end, not Hermann either.)
He waits. They wait. And Newt tells himself that, at just the right moment, he’ll fight them off, and his own voice will break through, and Hermann will know the difference.
He keeps telling himself that. And he keeps waiting.
And Hermann doesn’t call.
Finally, they stop waiting—they let Newt stop waiting—and Alice takes him back into herself and reminds him, almost tenderly, that Hermann may have given up on him but she never will.
And he finds it that much harder to hold onto the will to fight.
Hermann stays in Newton’s room, unable to face the world outside it. He sleeps in Newton’s bed, on sheets that smell like him, surrounded by the things he’s left behind. Just one self-indulgence before he makes himself face up to reality. And the ways that Hermann breaks that night, no one will ever know.
He emerges in the morning, dry-eyed and outwardly composed, guitar case in hand. He puts in a request for the custodial staff to clear out the rest of the room. It can all go. No point being sentimental about any of it. Newton is never coming back.
But he’ll deal with the letters himself. No one else should be allowed to get their hands on those. No one should even know they exist. They represent a past long out of reach, and a future that never existed.
In the hallway, Hermann is faced with a choice. One that shouldn’t be difficult at all.
To his left is the way to the incinerator. To the right, his own room, where his own box of letters lies hidden at the back of his closet. He could reunite the two, even as their writers will never now be united. Or he could take the rational step and consign it to the fire. Let the past all burn away.
Cut out his own heart and throw it away, or keep it aching inside him for the rest of his life, knowing the man he loves is gone for good? There is no equation for this. No elegant mathematics, no answer to be found in chalk.
Hermann’s job is analysis and prediction. His purpose is to see the future. But for the first time in years, he looks at the path ahead, and doesn’t know which way to turn. He’s as lost as anybody else.
And still he tells himself that everything is fine.
…---…