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

and an uncorked bottle of wine, toeing off their sandal wedges; the boisterous group in bright South African colors speaking English so fast and so accented it sounds like another language; the mother and father of a nearby family arguing about politics; some college kids all wearing Ray-Bans and playing cards; the cackling laughter, everything overlapping in a rising and falling surf, even the tinny digital sounds of a smart phone—that mix of conversations making a pastiche, an imbrication being constructed for no one, a dialog merging and breaking. A question is asked from somewhere and then, a few seconds later, Kierk hears it answered from somewhere else entirely. The crowd is having a conversation unknown by its parts. And in that darkening scarlet, in that ocean of sound, there comes through it, in one of the troughs of sound, a very specific voice, Carmen’s voice, speaking only for a single sentence that is clear and untouched—“I want to believe there is more to this world than we know.”

Kierk’s eyes snap open. But looking around he doesn’t see the speaker, not even when he stands and shields his eyes from the setting sun and scans the crowd for her. Then everyone stops talking, the entire park falling off in its noise, leaving Kierk standing alone, paused, looking at all the silent faces, until the sound of a lion roaring brings him around to the giant MGM logo on the outdoor screen. Sitting back down, a perplexed expression on his face slowly transforms into a grin; he opens his notebook in the waning colors. There’s still light enough to write by.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up, a thing previously untethered made fast, a boat moored to a dock. A dock somehow exactly the same as the one off the Union Terrace, and the lake blazing with summer sunset was Lake Mendota, for the dream was of his past, Madison coming and going, buildings rising and leaving as if through a fog, and there had been old faces he once knew, among them his younger self, four years ago at twenty-three, the two looking at each other in sadness. An old life is woken from.

Standing, he stretches in the harsh morning light coming through the window, blinking in it like an owl.

On the way to work the air is crystalline clear, a prism, and the city glints off itself. There are wild calls—everyone seems energetic in the sunlight. Kierk gets coffee from a food cart, then walks by the drifting snatches of a conversation in French, and then another right after in Spanish. Kierk finds himself at that spot on Broadway where one can see One World Trade Center to the south and the Empire State Building to the north.

Wasn’t this city itself also dreaming of its own past? In fact, looking up Kierk can almost see the ghost of Walt Whitman taking one of his carriage rides up and down Broadway, from the height of his swaying passage observing the hustle of horses and stands and merchants, men and women in the latest fashions, the gangs of workers in their overalls clamoring out construction, Whitman trying to identify from all these material signs the hidden consciousness of the city. He was right to seek in the city a consciousness, for it seemed to Kierk not impossible that the city might be pacing out a slow oscillatory phenomenology across the decades, following the organismal rise and fall of neighborhoods, that the universe might just allow for such a thing, a steel and concrete teratoma with an inhuman mind subject to sensations beyond expression. Like an oyster slowly building a pearl over centuries. After all, from where Whitman sat on his carriage swaying he would have nodded hello to the walking and bearded Herman Melville—the two had lived in the same few square miles for most of their lives. They never once met but surely must have passed each other, faces bearing the weight of history, a secret electricity leaping from one to the other, unknown to all but the city. The ghost carriage continues out of sight and for the rest of the walk Kierk wonders what has been lost, or if anything was lost at all, if it was still here in this great grid. New York seems to him to be a sworn promise once made, broken, made again, a thing forever imminent but never arriving, and even now Kierk felt the attraction to it, passing the people dreaming Broadway dreams, everyone seeing not the New York it is but the New York it could be, the island waiting to rise again, the Once and Future City.

The seven remaining Crick Scholars are all gathered on the fifth floor of the CNS attempting to find a means of entry to a lab there. Carmen is trying to espy one of the researchers who had first collected their skin samples, Todd, through the big window. She’d emailed him to see if the cerebral organoids were finished in their growth. Todd had replied that they were still relatively young but all the mini-brains had been successfully established in their tanks for growth, and were ready for a visit from their progenitors. For Carmen it is a good mask for an ulterior motive, which is to get Greg alone afterward and ask about the retraction. But Todd was late and now all of them have tried their respective keycards in succession, only to have the door beep in denial—all but Kierk, who just said something about induction and didn’t bother trying his.

Finally Todd arrives to usher the seven into the cool bright space. Carmen, Kierk, and Alex start barraging him with questions, and he raises his hands for them to desist.

“Okay, so clearly there’s a lot of interest here. Very exciting for me. But maybe the best way to do this is to give a general tour. You can ask your questions as they come up. Okay?”

There is a brief chastised silence. Carmen notices