The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“Did they catch who did it?” Jessica asks.

“No, and it got very political. The student body was really riled up. You know how they are now. This is why you cannot take any pictures, ever.”

Cages line the wall stacked on top of one another. Most of the monkeys lay unmoving, enervated and sunken. Almost all have recording apparatuses attached to their skulls—after being anesthetized the monkey is scalped, the top of the head removed to bare the skull. Then the skull is softened, a portion removed, and an open grating is installed through which the scientist can peek in at the brain. Finally this grating is sealed from above with a removable cap, to provide easy access, and a kind of plastic concrete is spread over the naked skull to cover it and support the recording chamber. Eventually electrodes can be lowered during behavioral experiments to listen to the pop-pop talk of neurons. The monkeys thus wear crowns of concrete, often with blood or pus ringing the annulate barrier where the skin meets the installment, with little plastic caps at the summit like miniature chimney tops that can be unscrewed.

“What are those?” Kierk asks, pointing to reams of crumpled tinfoil in several bins.

It’s a veterinarian who answers. “The city is always generating electromagnetic background noise. To keep it from influencing the data we wrap their heads with tinfoil during the sessions.”

“You make them wear tinfoil hats?”

“How come some of the monkeys have problems with their hands?” Jessica asks, and Kierk notices what she’s talking about—the monkeys palm the floor with flat hands, try to scoop up their toys with their wrists.

It’s Atif who answers from across the room in his deep voice—“Because the recording chamber is at the top of their head. Often right over their primary motor cortex. And since you keep moving a needle down through it . . .” He makes repeated stabbing motions.

“Oh!” Jessica’s eyes widen.

“Anyway, as I was saying, some of these monkeys share cages . . .” Norman continues as Kierk and the others move about the room. In the far cage-cleaning room, through the door, Kierk can see powerful hoses operated by undergraduates foolish enough to sign up for research credits spray animal feces, fur, drool stains, pus, and food remnants from empty cages into a wide drain in the floor. In their cages the proto-humans squat around him, alien in their familiarity and the uncanny valley of their dark beady eyes, their imploring hands held palm out for food in a manner that is disturbingly human. They stare out at Kierk like things before language, guttural expressions begging for meanings, all of them lined up with ebony eyes turned toward him. He imagines them in their natural state as dark rustling shapes in the forest of home, in a play of chiaroscuro and canopy, with their mischievous haired limbs turning over logs and leaves and rot and excrement, all dug through with black nails, the echoing screech of excitement, defending, offering, proffering, the curved kowtow of submission, the occasional portentous spark of altruism, the small fingers stripping a dirty avocado of its broad peel, and in the twilight of the jungle floor a small creature is looking with its black eyes at him, hunching its back, what is that in its arms?—recognition—it is cradling a baby rhesus that has been dead for days . . .

Jessica nudges Kierk, who has been looking lost into the dark of a cage. She enters a single gloved finger slowly through the mesh. On seeing Jessica’s finger the macaque, which had been curled up in the back, lopes curiously up to the front, then turns to face the opposite direction and presses its back up against the mesh, its fur now sticking through the grating in tufts. Jessica scratches the small patch of exposed skin, and Kierk follows suit. Their smiles show in their eyes above their face masks, scratching away to happy grunting. Then the macaque whips around viciously, banging the cage, causing Kierk and Jessica to jump back and Jessica to quiet a shriek behind her face mask. With the same immediacy the monkey resumes its previous position, waiting to be scratched. Kierk shakes his head at it and turns to a pair of the smaller bonnet macaques that glare at Kierk with red eyes from their shared cage. One erects himself in his cage above the other, his little sex hanging in the air. He looks Kierk straight in the eye and begins to piss in a long stream as Kierk jumps back, avoiding it. The other macaque in the cage, servile and slinking, hunkers down in front of the pissing one and in a quick motion takes the stream and the organ itself in its mouth. With his thick glove Kierk taps Alex on the back to get his attention.

Instead of sleeping Kierk is out grabbing beers at a bar, sitting at the open window in the breeze and watching the late-night groups of people walk past in fits of laughter or discussion. Then he’s out to join them, meandering past the bright lamplights and shuttered store windows of New York City at night. To be a scientist again, to be working on consciousness again—he can’t believe it. He is a secular priest once more. In this he feels the possessor of a great secret, a thing unknown to everyone he passes, a thing that buzzes inside him and keeps him from bed. No longer is he on the outside looking in. It is happening again. He is a man catching fire. Eventually this feeling grows until his path becomes directional, purposeful. He can now enter where others cannot. Stalking through the darkened trees of Washington Square Park he veers sharply toward the CNS.

The building stands as a dark windowless tower, which he approaches in the night. A single light is on from somewhere far above. The ID card he’d been given