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

her in every position, he wants to lay his head between her breasts, wants to tease her and spank her and kiss her and hold her down and save her. Wants to stay up all night talking. Everything he eats tastes like her. For he himself has been dumbstruck these past few days by the happiness that suddenly seems so graspable. The two of them together made him feel a poet, a teenager. He knows he could circumnavigate the globe and find nothing like what he has found here.

He feels guilty about not responding to her calls and text over the weekend, when she had needed him. Yet in a sense he’s also wary of these feelings. There is developing a clear choice, a metaphysical choice, two roads. Because he cannot help but think—FURTHER. I must go further. Something calls to me, tugging at me. Carmen is an exit on the highway, a highway headed to . . . I don’t know, but I do know that this age needs me in some way and that I, like the storm petrel heralding a hurricane, must comply.

He has not told her everything. He wonders what she deduced from his journal. Had there been mention of his fatal melancholy? For he knows there is a fundamental flaw deep within him. He could leave, run from her, but if he does he will be forced to love her forever but from a distance, an infinite resignation. There must be some way he could spare her from his melancholy, his torment and ephemeral nature, from his monomania. Sometimes the Egyptians would grow corn out of the mummified bodies of their sacred dead . . . What will grow from me? Such a thanatological crop can only sprout from a gift wrapped with appropriate ceremony and set out upon a sacrificial altar, a body primed and stripped of everything . . .

The other path is to cast everything away, all these strivings, so that he might be light enough to follow her. He knew this was inevitable because it had happened before. A girl he had known in graduate school. Their hookup at some bar which led to a relationship. Seemingly without any demands or expectations, it had all fallen together easily as they had just followed what everyone around them was doing at the time, pairing off, going on the same types of dates, the same restaurants, the same parties. And after a year of that relationship had passed, he had been smoking outside at night on the balcony of their joint apartment, while inside the lit living room she waited with their freshly cooked dinners to start a TV show they had been watching the episodes of each evening, and it was only then Kierk had realized he had not accomplished anything that whole year, produced no writing, no theories, that his journals had no entries, and suddenly going back through that glass sliding balcony door into the light had seemed unbearable. This is the dilemma: if he loves he loses himself and perhaps his genius. He thinks—whatever little creative spark I have left will vanish into Carmen and I will again live a normal life, just a normal life, and the flaw in my constitution is that I can handle anything but a normal life . . . How can we make choices like this? If my consciousness could take both roads in the woods, I wouldn’t hesitate. Something is so fundamentally wrong with a universe in which you can only live one life. How many times in history has this choice been made? How many times has it been made wrong?

And how impossible to explain such a decision! What vague metaphysical reasons they will seem! How crushed she will be. Because he feels the same. The deep cut of it, with no way to spare her . . . unless, perhaps, if he dissembles, if he gives some other reason, or acts sardonically and like it was all just raillery, nothing too serious at all . . . A conclusion part of him must have known earlier when he hadn’t responded to her calls or texts. He rages at the unfairness of it but this is a paradox he must protect her from, a naked singularity. He must from now on make her believe that he will not, could not, does not, love her. This way forward imposes no burden upon her, makes no demands of her. And years from now if they see each other at a conference or event they can be cordial and she will not know that he still carries his love in him like a secret stone, a hidden altar, an inexpressible heart, the last solid remnant of a body become a sprouting garden.

TUESDAY

Kierk wakes up to his phone ringing. Answering it, all he can muster is a bleary, “Yes?” before a salesperson launches into a robotic spiel. The phone spirals away across the room to a disconcerting crash.

He sits up on the bed with his feet on the floor. He’s confused by a strange sensation for a second. Looking down, his bare feet are resting on sheets of white paper filled with his drawings and writings and equations.

Sighing, he stands up naked amid them. They extend outward, an entire carpet, spiraling until his whole bedroom floor is covered with the overlapping sheets. They are slick under his feet as he walks but some adhere and stick. A path is traced through them.

Brushing his teeth in the bathroom he rubs at his bloodshot eyes. He opens up the window and is hunting around for clothes as he smokes inside. The screen on his phone is cracked but it still works.

Outside he crosses Union Square, still bleary and blinking against the light, moving amid a giant crowd of other morning-goers, a brusque human flow. In the thick of the moving mass, Kierk, about to step, glances down and sees lying there on the sidewalk the