He woke in a cold house. It took some blank staring at the white ceiling before he was able to get up. Hermann made his slow way down to the kitchen, turned the coffee on, put his toast in the toaster. He went into the bathroom while one machine dripped and one ticked.
It was a Monday in late March. He took a hot shower, brushed his teeth, shaved, stretched, dressed. It was 5:25 when he sat down to eat. Toast was the most he could stomach for breakfast these days. Hermann sat at his small table by his kitchen window, looking at his frozen little back garden. His coffee was warm between his cold hands. He kept his house cold; he had always preferred it that way. It was solitary; he had always preferred that as well. His house was small, almost too cramped to be called cozy. This too, he had always preferred. Sometimes he missed the infinite openness of the prairie. But there was security in confinement.
Everything in his home was as it had been before: orderly. He did not think about how it might have been, with someone else, someone less orderly, living in it. His eyes did not linger on the places another person had briefly occupied, as fleeting as a firefly and just as fickle.
In truth—they did not. Hermann kept his memories from his voyage beneath a lid and he kept his souvenirs in the hall closet. The notebook, the seed, the gyroscope, other fragments. It was not that he pushed the memories back down when they rose; if one rose, he looked at it. But mostly, the memories stayed obligingly where he left them.
Provided Darwin cooperated. Which was not a given.
He finished getting dressed: sweater vest, blazer, shoes, glasses. He checked his messages. It seemed he had missed a call from his sister Karla. She had left a message on his answering machine, which he listened to while packing exams into his bag. She was asking him to come visit, again. She asked every time they spoke on the phone, which these days was fairly often. But when she asked, he always said it was not yet a good time. Maybe in a month or two.
They stand on the prairie, at the edge of the world. Before them is the door from mulefa’s world into Lyra and Newt’s. A goodbye delegation is seeing them off: Lyra and Pan, Will and Kirjava, Newt and Fern, the witch Serafina Pekkala, and Hermann. Serafina arrived a day ago. Newt likes her. Hermann has been surprisingly cold towards her, but Newt knows he’s just upset. He hopes Hermann isn’t going to be like that with everyone on this journey home. He holds out hope that there are still periods of happiness in their abridged future together.
Atal is saying a fond goodbye to the kids, touching Lyra’s forehead gently with her trunk. Lyra is crying a little. She’s only known Atal for two weeks, but she is a child of great love.
The zalif moves from Lyra to Newt in a slow roll.
Newt, she says.
Atal, he says.
Where is Hermann? Tell him to come close. We have gifts.
Oh, Atal, Newt says. You’re too good to us.
Too good? Impossible.
Newt glances around and finds Hermann, who is off fussing with the packs to avoid talking to others. “Hermann!” The physicist’s head jerks up. “Get over here.”
Gifts, to thank you, Atal says once Hermann has joined them. She gives a small fabric sack to Hermann, and one of equal size but greater weight to Newt.
It is us who should thank you, says Hermann, while Newt begins immediately untying his. You have given us a great gift of time and knowledge. Knowledge of you and your world and your ways. Nothing could be a better gift.
But you have given us the same gift, Atal says. It is a great privilege to know you. So perhaps consider these not gifts, but reminiscences.
Hermann puts his hand on Atal’s trunk gently. He feels as if his heart is so heavy that his entire body is going to collapse round it and form a black hole. He has been so happy here, in her beautiful world. Will he ever be happy again outside it?
I... We will never forget you.
“Wow,” Newt says. He’s emptied the contents of the bag into his palm: it’s a sack of seeds, all different shapes and sizes. At the bottom, there is an enormous one. A wheel-pod seed. Atal, this is a great gift. Thank you.
Newt, we know this is your area of knowledge, and we regret you cannot take your collection of plants. I will tend to them now that you have gone, as long as they live or as long as I am able. But these seeds, perhaps, will grow in your home. It will be an experiment. Hermann, I hope your wheel-pod seed will grow as well.
I do too.
Hermann arrived in his office at 7 sharp, where he sat grading exams with the door shut until his 9 AM class. If he was good at one part of teaching, it was quick grade turnover. He scheduled his time with severity: on Thursday his forty students sat the exam. Each took twenty minutes to grade, making thirteen hours and twenty minutes of work. He did two hours Thursday night, three hours Friday night, three hours and twenty minutes on Saturday, three hours Sunday, and two hours Monday morning (this morning). He liked the repetition and the thorny thickets of convoluted “show your work.” But on balance, Hermann was not a good teacher. When he graded, there was a clear difference between the tutorial groups. It was obvious which of the graduate students were carrying his weight.
Dr. Gottlieb had been teaching here since the beginning of term in January. It was a small college far from his house, and though he did not like the work, he needed the work. He needed to work.
“It’s not work,” Darwin said. “It’s busywork.”
Busywork is work, Hermann thought, but did not say.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she said.
He continued to ignore her.
It was surprising, and initially suspicious, how little trouble he and Will had fitting back into their world. Not many inquiries had been made after them. Whatever surveillance Hermann had been under had vanished; whatever manhunt Will had been the target of had ended. After some paranoid inquiries, they had learned that Sir Charles had gone mysteriously missing. That had attracted a lot more attention; but there were no leads, and all the strings he had been pulling to reel them in had fallen slack in his absence.
Will allowed Hermann to help him with his mother. He was the first adult Will had ever confided in. But his worst fears did not come true: she was not taken away. With a diagnosis and the beginning of treatment, she was allowed to stay with her son.
Hermann helped them sell their house and find a small flat close to his. He visited several times a week. Hermann thought (and Darwin agreed) that there was a lot he would have neglected if not for Will. Taking care of them, or rather, helping them to take care of themselves, kept him on top of taking care of himself. Relatively speaking. He often thought that he would have uprooted completely and moved back to Germany, or far away to Patagonia; or maybe he would have gone nowhere and done nothing, and wasted away in his house until the weeds overgrew and the paint chipped away and the dust choked him.
“You’re so dramatic,” Darwin said in German. Hermann said nothing.
Not for the first time, he tried to picture the life that could have been. Would Newton have become a researcher, or would it have been impossible? Would they have been happy living together, or would they have grown apart outside their first strange circumstance?
What was Newton doing now?
He found all these answers impossible to even speculate upon. His mind simply would not weigh any options. It stopped dead, as though Newton and the mulefa had never existed. When he tried, with miserable self-indulgence, to picture how the naturalist lived now, in his world, even that was impossible. No scenario presented itself. His mind was stuck like a record on his last image of the man, vanishing in the leafy, glass-lit dawn.
He shouldered his bag and went to the lecture hall for his 9 AM class.
Hermann is standing away from the sledge, looking over the ridge at the mountain range. The air is brisk. The light has that drained prismatic quality of the end of a late fall afternoon, when the sun does not so much set as vanish colorlessly. Newt crunches up behind him, absolutely un-stealthy.
Their hired driver is reorganizing some weight in the sledge. Will and Lyra are talking quietly while Serafina keeps watch. It is the third day of their journey south across the tundra. Hermann is looking east, watching the watery sunlight on the west-facing side of the mountains, watching it fade like a water stain drying away. The mountains remind him of home, a little. He feels an attempt at nostalgia in his stomach, but it is halfhearted. They are familiar, is all. That does not mean he missed them, or will miss them. But he thinks he did perhaps miss the cold. It is a bracing anaesthetic; he has been warm for too long.
He hears Newton, but does not turn. Newton’s footsteps stop next to him, a little below on the slope. It is another three days’ journey to the port town where Serafina says they will meet the gyptians. They will then take a ship southwards.
Newton's clouds of breath are encroaching upon his frame of vision. Hermann watches the mountains.
“You going to start talking anytime soon?” Newt says at last.
All he can see is Hermann's hood and the regular breaths venting from it.
“I have been speaking,” Hermann says without looking at him. “We are speaking right now.”
“You know what I mean,” Newt says to his hood.
“I'm afraid I don't.”
Newt can't tell if this is a genuine deflection or flirtatious pugnacity. He tests theory number one by presenting genuine advice.
“You should talk to Serafina. You should take her up on her offer. I think it would be good for you—especially after we—”
Hermann doesn't let him finish that thought. He clears his throat loudly and says, “Is Mackenzie finished with the sledge?”
“No,” Newt says, frowning. “No, you ass. You never listen. Ever notice that? It's not good for you. Other people know things that you don't. Someone is going to have to give you a hard time about it. It won't always be me, but it will be for the next two weeks.”
Again, Hermann says nothing. Every hour that passes, Newt gets more scared Hermann won’t wake up, and that the man he finally says goodbye to will just stare back with those dead eyes of defeat.
“I honestly don’t see the point.”
“The point?” says Newt. “How could you not get the point of learning to see your dæmon? Dæmons are great. You have a companion all the time, someone who understands you completely because they are you. Someone to love that you never have to worry about. Let Serafina teach you how to see them.”
“I have never needed one.”
“You don’t have to need something. You can just want it.”
Finally he turns. His eyes don't look terribly dead. But he also doesn't say anything.
“That is rarely enough,” Hermann says.
“No harm in trying anyway,” Newt says, before Hermann can drag the conversation somewhere melancholy. He searches Hermann’s eyes for something, anything. “Hey. Has anyone told you that you look adorable in a parka?”
Hermann actually flushes at that, and Newt laughs. He pats Hermann's frozen cheek with a massive mitten.
“Keep up, Dr. Decorum,” he says. “Your witty repartee game is way off. You're letting me score all the easy points.”
“You're ridiculous,” Hermann says.
“Will you talk to her?”
His eyes slide past Newt and fix over his shoulder in the direction of the sledge. Without another word he walks slowly back. Newt watches him go. So maybe he won’t snap out of it; but this is something.
The sea is ice and iron and as still as an active volcano. It bubbles and churns day and night. Hermann does not have the stomach for it. Though the wind is unforgiving, he stands on the deck through the day, eyes fixed on the horizon, willing himself not to be sick. It works. But it is tedious. The sea is winter gray and the air is cold, cold, cold. Sometimes Hermann imagines he is staving off the future the same way he is staving off his sickness; but it is just as illusory. As soon as he goes back below, he will be ill again.
They are navigating from deserted places into progressively more populous areas. His lack of dæmon is going to be noticed in warmer climates, where there are no parkas to conceal the presumed but nonexistent. In this world he is an aberration; in this world he stares at the horizon for hours instead of taking a simple Dramamine.
Newton materializes beside him.
“Am I interrupting?” he says with faux solicitude.
Hermann glances at him, but says nothing.
“You are the undisputed king of melancholic horizon-staring,” Newt says, following his gaze across the featureless seascape. “I'm minting you a medal.”
“This is not melancholic. It's medical,” Hermann snaps.
“Is it?” says Newt. “You’ve been moaning in my bunk for the past three days. I assumed that was melancholia-related. Now you're telling me you're physically sick? My God, it isn’t catching, is it? Am I infected too?”
Hermann is trying to hide his smile with limited success.
“If it is, you're far too late.”
“You’re telling me!” Newt says with loud fake indignance. “If I had known, I would have kicked you out! Instead of comforting you, by—”
Hermann clears his throat loudly as a crewman walks past.
Newt snickers.
“You are an atrocious man,” Hermann says.
“He would have loved it,” Newt says, winking at the crewman’s receding back. “Sailors love saucy gossip. Everyone knows that. How are the dæmon lessons going?”
“Poorly,” Hermann says, turning back to the sea.
“Why?” Fern asks.
“Because he's stubborn,” Newt says, leaning his shoulder against Hermann's.
“Because it is difficult,” Hermann says. “It is like the trance of the Cave or the I Ching, but less focused. More expansive. More self-directed.”
“How can it be all of those?”
“How indeed,” says Hermann grumpily. “That’s the problem.”
“Have you made any progress?” Fern asks hopefully. He has told Hermann about the wings he saw. He is intensely curious to see the dæmon, even perhaps speak to them.
“I haven’t managed to see anything. But sometimes I believe I almost hear something. I hear a... voice. It is muffled and distant. Like someone left the BBC on in the other room.”
“Hmm,” says Fern with interest, while Newt asks, “What's a BBC?”
Their sea journey takes a week. At night in their shared berth, in the churning belly of the sea, Newt does his best to keep Hermann warm and occupied. He knows he is keeping himself distracted as well. Hermann lies with his head tucked under Newt's chin, hand roaming across Newt's bare chest with slow intent. His palm finds its spot at the top of Newt's chest; there is a bump at the top of his sternum, below his collarbone. Hermann likes to press the indent of his palm to this bump. It fits perfectly.
“There you are,” Newt murmurs.
“Hm?”
“You,” says Newt.
“I have been here for some time.”
Newt can't see his face but his voice sounds warm, less unhappy than lately.
“All right, so, bear with me,” Newt says. “Dust.”
“Yes.”
“Consciousness.”
“I'm with you so far.”
“When we measure it on people it's everywhere. Not just their head, where their mind is. Dust is all over us. Consciousness is all through us. In every part of the body.”
Hermann says nothing, but presses his hand a little tighter.
“So this,” Newt says, gently lifting Hermann's hand off his chest and threading his fingers through Hermann's, “Is you.”
“I'm not sure I agree,” Hermann says as they watch their hands move slowly together.
“How could you possibly disagree?” Newt says. “You looked through the electrum glass. You literally saw the Dust yourself. It was all over. Are you going to ruin my poetic pillow talk with a metaphysical dispute? Oh my god, of course you are.”
“I would not be interested in your metaphysical pillow talk if it precluded civil disagreement,” Hermann says, “And I doubt you would either.”
“That's fair,” Newt says. “Except for your claim that your disagreement is ‘civil.’ I know how little it takes to get you uncivil.”
This earns him a swat. Hermann rolls over, hiked up on his elbow, and looks down at Newt. Newt's heart sinks at the look on his face. He looks sad and distracted—like he's trying not to be, but failing. Newt's banter hasn't helped.
“Sorry,” Newt says.
“For what?”
“I don't know,” says Newt. “Oh no, I'm ruining the mood now, aren't I?”
Hermann frowns.
“Do you love me?” Newt says.
“You know I do,” Hermann says, with an immediacy that eliminates irony.
“Am I helping?” Newt asks helplessly.
Hermann kisses him.
“You make everything more difficult,” Hermann murmurs. “Without exception.”
He's so close Newt can see all the details of his face without his glasses on. He slides his hand up into Hermann’s hair and strokes it fondly before pulling him back down.
By the end of the trip, Hermann is sick with a cold. Sunset finds Newt on the deck alone.
“Trying to catch the same cold?” says Lyra's voice. He turns, smiles hello. She is bundled tight, with Pan's auburn marten fur showing inside her hood where he is nestled like a scarf.
“If he's got it, my days are numbered,” says Newt.
Lyra gives a small laugh.
She and Pan come to stand beside him and Fern at the railing. They are on the same impassable side of the same impassable chasm. There is little to say about it.
The four watch the sunset.
“It's strange,” Newt says at last. He knows Lyra won't understand what he's talking about. But he wants to say it to her rather than just to Fern. “Ever since we found out... Hermann's been so helpless. It's upsetting, really. I feel like he’s drifting, I don’t know where, and I don’t know how to pull him back. It's why I keep pressing the dæmon issue. He needs someone to talk to, you know? We all do.
“Hermann is the caretaker. He always has been for me, and, from what I can gather, he has been his whole life. But these days he's in such a hopeless state it feels like I'm taking care of him. I’ve only ever had myself to take care of. I don’t really know how.” He frowns at the horizon. “And I'm not sure I like it.”
Lyra looks at him, but having nothing to say, only nods.
“But I guess there's a lot of unpleasant things we haven't had time to learn about each other. So now I know that Hermann doesn't take bad news so well. Or change of any kind. I suppose I knew that—but I didn’t know how badly. And to be sure, there's unpleasant things about me he hasn't had time to learn—I mean, God knows I have plenty.
“Or maybe this is a change in Hermann. Maybe he's never been like this before. I've never had to accommodate any kind of change in a person like that. I've never been that close to anyone for that long. So I never had to. I’ve never had to learn about these kinds of gritty, unappealing compromises.” He finds suddenly that he is crying. “Now we never will.”
Dr. Gottlieb's 2 PM class was no better than his 9 AM. For someone so good at abstract problems, he was not good at imagining all the ways others could misunderstand them. Hermann saw problems only the way he solved them, and so could only explain them the way he himself understood. When this explanation did not enlighten half his students, he did not have the right creativity to see what might be more enlightening.
This inability was one of the few things Darwin did not nag him about. There was very little his dæmon left unsaid. She told Hermann every day to call his sister, to plant his wheel-pod tree, to look for a new job, and for God's sake, to stop ignoring her.
She told him several times per hour.
She never shut up.
Since he had finally learned to see her, Hermann’s dæmon had not stopped talking. She vocalized every unwanted thought in the ‘should’ sector of his brain, embodied them, shot them at him in a stream of modulated English and German irritation.
Only Hermann could hear or see her. He felt like an insane person.
“I have a lot stored up,” she would say, “Since you spent the last thirty-five years ignoring me.”
Darwin had named herself. When Newton had told him what his mother almost named Fern, she had taken that name for herself. “It was obvious you weren’t going to give me one,” she had said. “Even if you ever did start listening. Remember when you listened for a day or two? We talked? It was nice, wasn’t it? But you’re a terrible listener. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Since their return to their world, Hermann had steadfastly refused to speak to her. She talked all day in her smooth, angry voice, and he did not say a thing back.
He refused to change a thing. Yet things changed. Darwin was here now, and she had a voice that he could not ignore.
“Professor, I don’t understand this question,” said one student in the front row. “Can you walk us through it?”
“It’s not that hard,” Darwin said haughtily, from the chair where she was perched. “Were you paying attention?”
“Certainly,” said Professor Gottlieb in a clipped voice. He turned to the chalkboard and walked them through it. When he was done, the student’s frown was only deeper.
He returned to his office to find the missed call light blinking. He dialed to return the call and waited while it connected. He looked out the window, where an unconvincing flurry was falling. Probably the last of the winter. On Sunday, without planning, he had taken the train to Portsmouth. He didn’t know why he’d gone. He hadn’t done anything there; he had just looked at the sea. He’d wanted to see the open horizon again. The sea had been dead winter gray and the air had been cold, cold, cold.
The horizon had been as empty as ever. No imaginary Newton had materialized to watch the view beside him. No imaginary Newton appeared to him now, hinting at what the real one might be up to. Only the last gasp of his reality, burned onto Hermann's optical cortex like a bad dream—a tear-stained face smiling as the green fabric of space sealed up between them.
A tinny voice snapped him out of his reverie.
“Hello?”
“Hello, this is Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, returning your call. To whom am I speaking, please?”
“Hermann!” said a warm American voice. “It’s Ritchie. How have you been?”
Hermann had worked with Dr. Richard Brand during his doctorate. Ritchie was an astrophysicist, and if memory served, now worked for the BNSC. He was extremely personable and somewhat oblivious, which made it impossible not to be on first-name terms with him. Hermann was glad to know him, in small doses.
“Oh, hello Ritch. Good to hear from you.”
“Listen, listen, is this a good time to talk?” Without waiting for an answer, he plunged on. “It’s not a great time for me, so I’ll have to be quick. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine at the ESA. Philipe. Great guy. New satellite project brewing there, an X-Ray survey. Space observatory, actually, rather. They're calling it the Cornerstone 2 mission.”
The ESA was the European Space Agency. “Didn’t Cornerstone 1 fail?” said Hermann, who followed these things closely.
“Oh, yes, last year. No liftoff. But they’re rebuilding, Hermann, and the replacement mission is looking excellent. Anyway, Philipe told me he was looking for some math on his space observatory. It sounded right up your alley. He gave me the overview—and asked did I know anyone? I sure do, I said! I told him about your dark matter project, and he was very intrigued. Can’t go wrong with Hermann, I told him. No one better. The man’s a stone cold calculator. I gave him your number. Let me give you his.”
Hermann obediently took the number down and thanked Ritch. The astrophysicist was pressed for time and had to ring off—to Hermann’s relief—but not before he exhorted Hermann in no uncertain terms to call that number.
There was no doubt what would happen once he hung up. In fact, it happened before he hung up. As soon as he had the thought, Darwin said, “You bet, buddy.”
Hermann put the phone down slowly.
“You’ve got to call Philipe,” said Darwin. “Right now. Call him. Oh my god. You’re not calling. You’re not serious, are you? Oh my god. You’re serious.”
Hermann exhaled slowly. Certainly, it sounded interesting. But there was nothing wrong with his life now...
“Are you kidding me?”
He folded the paper with the number on it.
“Good god...” Darwin said in exasperated German.
Hermann cleared his throat and put the paper in his pocket. He was nothing if not committed.
“I’m not going to ask you to stop ignoring me,” Darwin said, “Because, well, you know my thoughts on that. You can’t ignore me forever.”
Yes I can, Hermann thought. I’m getting better and better at it.
“You’re getting worse at it,” Darwin shot back. “I saw your face today when I backtalked your student. You almost smiled. I will wear you down, Hermann.”
Hermann is distracted when it finally happens. He is standing alone on a dock in the fens. They are waiting to switch boats. It is their eighth day with the gyptians, who met them at the port with their slow but mercifully steady riverboats. When they reach Oxford, Will will make the last cut with the knife and he and Hermann will return to their world. Then they will destroy the knife.
According to Serafina this, any moment of quiet, is an opportunity to practice. She is a rather harsh teacher, and Hermann often thinks that she would be more patient with a female pupil. She constantly describes to him, imperiously and obliquely, a state of perfect detached focus. But her repeated explanations are still vague, and he is starting to doubt that this state exists.
Not terribly committed to making the most of this practice opportunity, Hermann stares out over the twilit water. It is all hills and hummocks of bobbing waves, susurrating fields of grasses and cattails. His focus slips from the fore as his eyes follow a bright yellow butterfly, strange and luminous in the dusk. The voice slips in between the wind like a familiar voice from childhood, crisp and neutral and shaped just right. Hermann... Hello...?
“Hermann?”
He turns slowly. His stomach undulates like the waves around him. The sound is so familiar but the feeling so strange and distant. He feels the importance of what he will see—as soon as he turns, his life will never be the same.
“Hermann? Hello? Hello?”
She is perched on the rotting pylon. His dæmon is a bat hawk. He knows this right away, though if you had asked him the day before, he would not have known what a bat hawk looked like. But there she is, and everything she knows, he knows. Her head is sleek and triangular, her feathers as dark as the wood of her post, and her huge harsh eyes are so yellow they seem to glow in the dusk.
“Oh,” he says, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and inexplicably comforted, “Hello. Do you have a name?”
“Hello? Can you hear me?” she says. Her voice is neutral, like a reporter, like the voice of his own thoughts. “What? Of course I have a name. I’ve been trying to talk to you all this time. Hermann?”
Hermann stares at her, speechless.
She is shocked too, just as shocked as he. “Can you really hear me?”
They reach Oxford a few days later. They thank the gyptians and the witch and part ways. It is necessary to find a common space they know is shared between the two worlds. The teenagers request the Oxford botanical gardens and it sounds like they have discussed it prior. Hermann and Newt agree.
Will makes the cut. He shudders, knowing one last specter will be created. The window opens onto a secluded space behind some shrubs, and the four stand before it in the late morning sunlight.
“One day, and one night, as arranged,” Hermann says, looking at the two teenagers. “We meet back here tomorrow.”
Lyra nods. Will only stares at him.
“See you then.”
The teenagers disappear back into the green. One day and night in Lyra’s Oxford. One day and night for the scientists in Hermann’s Oxford.
Fern stirs uncomfortably. A field trip into this world means that he has to wear a leash and pretend to be a regular dog. Fortunately Darwin, as the bat hawk dæmon named herself, is invisible to others in that world. Fern senses Newt’s fear and excitement. Darwin, perched on a branch, shuffles and fixes her wings.
Newt looks sideways at Hermann, who is looking at the little window. All they can see is green leaves. But the light through them is harsher somehow. For Newt it sparks magnetic curiosity.
Newt can’t wait and Hermann won’t catch his eye—so he steps through.
Hermann stays a moment longer. This is the last time he will breathe the air of another world. But his thoughts are mostly on the next twenty-four hours. What will they do? What can he show Newton? Everything? Nothing?
Possibilities flutter through his mind. He sees them walking in the park, visiting the museums, the sights, cafés—no, Newton would want to see the exotically ordinary, he would want to see the grocery store, the cinema, the bus. Does Hermann even have a car anymore? Has it been towed? And what state is his house in? Who has missed him? Will the police be there?
“Come now,” Darwin says softly.
He looks at her.
“Hermann?” comes Newton’s voice from the other side. “You coming?”
“Yes,” Hermann says distantly.
Newt’s hand appears, reaching back through.
Hermann takes it and crosses home. Darwin follows a second later.
“What are we going to do?” Newton asks.
Newton is looking around, beaming, nearly bouncing. His big green eyes are full of light. Suddenly, in the familiar late morning sun of England, his excitement infects Hermann.
“There’s so much,” Newton is saying. “Too much to do. We have to choose carefully.”
“Yes,” says Hermann, nodding. He takes Newton’s hand and tugs it. “Yes we do.”
They rent Jurassic Park.
Hermann pressed the buzzer. He had a key, but he did not dream of presuming in such a way.
Darwin was perching on the railing behind him. He knew she wanted to perch on his shoulder, but she never tried. She never touched him, in fact. He wondered if she weighed anything. Was she real?
“I’m real, you ass,” she said.
Hermann shifted, leaning more on his cane.
“Wooden cane today, huh?” she said. “The one thing you didn’t lock up. Is it more comfortable? You should get a rubber tip for the bottom. Don’t want it splitting.”
He shifted again, looking at the door. Where was Will? Darwin was actually probably right about the cane.
“Of course I’m right.” She shuffled and opened her wings, then refolded them. “You’ve got to stop disagreeing with me on principle as though I’m Newton. And you need to stop being mad at me because I’m not Newton. I’m not him. I’m you.”
He stabbed the buzzer a second time with uncharacteristic heat. Her words filled him with miserable ire. He was angry—but it was pathetic, and he was angry at himself for being so pathetic. What was the point? Of any of it? Who was he trying to make the point to?
The door opened and Will’s face appeared.
“Hermann,” he said with what passed for a smile on his sturdy face. “Sorry. Come on in.”
“Hello, William,” he said. He stepped inside. “I trust you're well.”
“Hi, Darwin,” Will said as the hawk fluttered in after him. “What’s the word?”
“Hey, Will. Big news, actually,” Darwin said, eyeing her human. “I’ll let Hermann tell you at dinner.”
In this world, only Will and Kirjava could see or hear Darwin. They knew Hermann tended to ignore her. It was a relief to be around others who could share the burden, the burden of her stream of opinions that were really his opinions.
They ate at the Parrys’ every Monday, and the Parrys ate at their house every Thursday. Sitting at their small kitchen table overlooking the front walk, Will told Hermann about school. Kirjava lounged on the windowsill. Darwin perched on the top crossbar of the empty fourth chair. As usual, Elaine did not say much to Hermann. But when Will spoke, she listened intently.
“What’s your big news, then?” Will asked him after a while.
Hermann threw a glance at Darwin, who twitched in surprise at this acknowledgment of her existence. He knew if he didn’t say it, she would.
“I am a person of interest for a new project,” Hermann said delicately. “A satellite project.”
“A new job?” Will said. “Hermann, that’s great. I know how much you hate this one. That sounds really exciting.”
“It is not an offer, only a possibility,” Hermann said. “And to be clear, William, I do not hate my teaching job.”
“He hates it,” said Darwin confidingly.
“I know you hate it,” Will said. “You’ve got to call the satellite project. It would be so much cooler.”
“He doesn’t want to call,” said Darwin, when Hermann said nothing. “He doesn’t want a job he likes. He wants to wallow.”
Hermann’s jaw clenched. So this was her revenge. If he would not hear his inmost thoughts from her, others would hear them instead.
“But you’ve got to call!”
“And he still won’t visit his sister,” Darwin added.
“Go see your sister!” Will said.
“And plant the tree!”
“I cannot plant the tree,” Hermann snapped venomously. “It’s winter! The ground is frozen! Now for God’s sake, stop asking me!”
“Oh my god!” said Darwin. “You spoke to me!”
“No, I’m telling you, you have to keep it. It’s yours. End of conversation.”
The four are standing in the greenhouse on Will and Hermann’s side of the window. Newt has pressed the notebook of mulefa data into Hermann’s hands and will not let him give it back. This uncharacteristic insistence strikes Hermann as suspicious, or at the least motivated by something unstated.
He just takes it. He is in turmoil inside, neither the past nor the future mean anything; only the indecipherable gestures of the man he knows best mean anything, and soon he will have nothing more than a back catalog of memories to decipher in circles as they fade.
He takes the book. “Fine.”
Lyra and Will are talking quietly a few yards away. Lyra glances at Newt but he holds up a finger. Another minute.
“So this is it,” says Newt meaninglessly. He is past panic about his shell-shocked partner—Hermann has Darwin now, he has someone, himself, at least. Newt wishes he could trust that to be enough.
Hermann nods.
“You prepared a speech, didn’t you?” Newt says, smiling, searching Hermann’s eyes.
“A what?” says Hermann. “No. Did you expect me to?”
“I just thought you might,” says Newt, winking, his heart sinking a little. “Seemed like the kind of thing you’d do.”
Hermann shakes his head. He feels too choked to speak, and too desperate to say anything coherent if he did.
“You okay?”
“Just worried,” Hermann says. Which is always true.
“Don’t be,” says Newton softly.
Hermann closes his eyes against tears. He nods.
“You won’t be alone anymore,” Newt says, putting his hand on Hermann’s cheek. “And neither will I.”
Hermann nods again. “I know. You’re never alone.”
“That’s not what I mean,” says Newt from the darkness. “I’ll never be alone again, because you’ll always be with me.”
Hermann was on the train to Switzerland. Karla lived outside Zürich with her husband and two children. It was only a few days, but perhaps it would be nice.
The train car was mostly empty. Those in it, though, would have noticed him talking to nobody, so he said nothing to Darwin. Since he had started speaking to her, she had become quieter. In his lap, he held the notebook. He had got it out of storage and brought it on the trip. He was going to tell Karla. She wouldn’t believe him. Who would? His story was the talk of a madman.
He stared out the window at the passing valley. It was April, late afternoon. The green was blooming on the grass and soon the trees would bud. The final rays of light cut through the mountains, carving spring's first rays into the earth. The light of the mulefa world came back to him. So warm and fully colored, slicing through the massive trees and falling into ribbons on their roots. Without a warning, claws of longing clutched him. He wished so suddenly, intensely to be back there that it ached, right in the sternum.
Summertime. Summer had that light. Was it always summer in the world of the mulefa? He had never found out. But this world had summer. With sudden urgency he looked forward to the summer, to the return of that warm, full light.
Hermann opened the notebook for the first time since his return home. He flipped slowly through his first dictionary entries, his list of resources and uses, his proposed designs for the rope and climbing system, crossed out and annotated by Newton. Newton’s spike boot drawing, crossed out by him. The ache in his chest was only getting worse. A mockup of the binoculars. Pages and pages of Dust data from the gyroscope. Newton’s plant anatomy sketches.
There were a few blank pages, and he thought he had reached the end, and was about to go back to read thoroughly from the beginning, when he saw it. There was writing on the later pages.
Suddenly Hermann remembered Newton’s secretive notes in the back of their notebook. Newton had told him not to read them, and he had forgotten them completely. But here they were.
They were upside down. Heart thumping, Hermann flipped the notebook over and upside down. The entries began on the last page.
Day 33
Sunset
Dear Hermann,
It's week two of our platform study. We’ve just had dinner, and you’re screwing uselessly with the gyroscope in the front yard while I write. You just asked me what I was writing and I told you it was none of your business. In reality, it is very much your business, maybe only your business. But not yet.
Here is my plan. I aim to keep an operational log of our multi-longitudinal study, both anthropological and dust-ological (this is now a word). So far, our log has been only numerical. I know that’s your thing (numbers). In general, the empirical data is my thing as well. But I think you’ll find an operational log more useful in the long term, for personal reasons. Okay, maybe a better way to put it: consider this a gift. Alternatively, if you hate it, because you seem to hate my discursive style, consider it a thoughtful prank. Because I know you’ll read it anyway.
Pages and pages of entries followed. He had written to Hermann every day for almost two months. Wiping his eyes, Hermann flipped to the last one. Then he flipped back to the beginning, at the end. He checked the time—he had time to read them all before they reached their destination.
With a shush of feathers, Darwin hopped onto his shoulder to read along with him. They both tensed. It was the first time they had ever touched.
As he read, he understood as clearly as if she had been saying it for weeks and he had been ignoring her. As sunlight slowly turning on a hardwood floor. Hermann had returned home and refused to change anything—as a way to hang before to the past—to the person he was then. But the person he was hanging onto was the person he was before his journey. He had changed.
He had changed because of what he had seen, and because Newton had changed him. He was a different man for having met him. They would have gone on changing each other, and changing together, perhaps; but they had made a start.
Hermann had never asked what Newton’s plans were afterwards, and Newton never volunteered. He did not want to become attached to an imaginary life for Newton that would become outdated in a few years. For Hermann knew the naturalist would roam and that he himself would stay still, clinging to whatever fading details he was left with. So he asked for nothing. If Lyra’s land of the dead was real, he would find out the truth one day, either from the harpies or from the ghost of Newton himself. He comforted himself with that awaiting finality.
In truth, Newt and Fern did roam far and wide. Within the year, they left Europe for an exciting new research expedition in California. Lyra enrolled in a girls’ school to prepare for her lifelong study of the alethiometer. She received monthly letters from Newt, filled with descriptions of the terrifically grotesque La Brea tar pits and the terrifically bizarre things he was pulling out of them.
Before he left, Lyra took him back to the greenhouse in the botanical gardens. She told him about her and Will’s plan—to “meet” there every summer solstice, in their respective universes, and sit together. He liked the idea. He wished Hermann had been the type to make that sort of plan, because Newt certainly wasn’t. Then he thought perhaps Hermann was the type, and that he just had not been in the state to make it. He had been in a state of extreme, self-imposed future-blindness. And past-blindness. A state of present-panic.
Newt and Lyra found an unoccupied spot in the greenhouse and planted the wheel-pod seed. They marked it with a square of stakes and string, knowing no one would disturb or question it once it started growing. They liked the idea of it growing up to improbable sizes right under the noses of the experts, one day bursting through the glass ceiling, none of them knowing what it was or where it came from. For years, Lyra visited it to watch its slow growth.
Because in smaller ways, Newt was the type to plan for the future—in sentimental, symbolic ways that were for him alone to carry, like the career and interpersonal peripatetic that he was. For instance, unbeknownst to Hermann, he had saved a piece of the broken amber binoculars. He wore it on a chain around his neck. It rested near his collarbone and he fiddled with it frequently. Sometimes, but not often, lying alone, Newt fitted his palm over the bump on his sternum, as if it too was a talisman Hermann had left him. But he did not do so often.
Despite Hermann’s best efforts, Newt’s broken arm had not quite set right. It never healed properly. When people asked about its odd bent, Newt would tell them that it had been broken by his true love in God’s comedy of errors.
By the time Hermann returned from Zürich, the thaw had begun in earnest. On his first free day he took a shovel, went to the back garden, and planted the wheel-pod seed. Digging was hard for him, and it was raining. Darwin fluttered from perch to perch, shaking the water off her feathers. Neither of them minded the rain. And the physical labor, however brief, did Hermann good.
They sat quiet in his kitchen afterwards, drying off and watching the rain fall in the back garden.
“We can't ever move house now, can we?” Darwin said.
“I suppose not,” Hermann said with a frown. “But that’s all right.”
He had interviewed and been offered the job on the x-ray satellite, and he was going to take it. After that, who knew? Newton would probably settle down somewhere new. Perhaps he was on the move right now.
Since his trip, since reading the logs, something had been dislodged from the dam. Hermann was no longer incapable of picturing Newton in new places. He pictured him ice climbing, Fern harnessed to his back. He pictured him digging up dinosaurs in the salt flats of Utah, far at last from the reach of the Church. He pictured him deep in the sea in a dangerous diving bell, searching the ocean floor for the grotesque and fantastical, eager and invincible as ever. He pictured him sitting quietly in the Oxford greenhouse with Lyra.
He often thought of a conversation he and Newton had had on their last night together. They had been lying in Hermann’s bed at home. Something about separation; about the border between their worlds, which physical properties Newton never tired of speculating upon and questioning his physicist about. He argued that, since the worlds had the same physical laws, they must be contained in the same envelope in some higher dimension.
Usually Hermann made some counterargument backed up with actual math. But tonight Newt pressed on past this and said, disagree if you like, Hermann, but after all, if you think about it on that scale, we’ll still be together.
“Is that comforting?” Hermann said.
“I think it is,” Newt said.
“You would take wild speculation on astrophysics and bend it into some romantic comfort,” Hermann said, his tone chastising but his eyes fond.
Newt rolled his eyes. “Laugh all you want,” he said. “I know higher dimensions are real. As real as the multiverse.”
“How is that?” said Hermann.
“We could never see them or conceptualize them, I know, with our feeble human minds. But we can feel the shape of them, the same way you feel the sound of a loved one’s voice. You couldn’t describe that sound, or picture it in images, but even though it's a sound, you feel that it has a shape on some unattainable plane. It has a shape that you know.”
“Don’t be fanciful, Newton...” Hermann said softly.
Sitting by the kitchen window, Hermann thought about how the tree would probably not even be half-grown before he died. That was all right. Maybe when it reached a hundred feet it would begin to be noticed, and baffle dendrologists; maybe it would die and never be noticed. That was all right too. Maybe it would become petrified and baffle future archaeologists. Maybe it would be discovered by a plucky archaeologist who would make it their life’s work to fit it into the record.
Hermann knew he would not even see a sprout for a while. That was all right. He was patient.
