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

way. Everybody does. Carmen’s little crazy project. Or is it just a way to flirt with Kierk? Because both you and Alex seem to be fucking in love with him for some reason. Everyone who isn’t in love with him hates him, just so you know. And for the record I didn’t have anything to do with Atif’s death.”

“It’s not a secret what I’m doing,” Carmen says defensively, even as she surreptitiously thumbs Kierk’s number on her phone, stealing a glance at it as Greg turns around as if he’s searching for something—words, emotions, it’s unclear—but when he turns back he continues as if she hadn’t spoken. Carmen’s phone is back in her jeans, but still on, hopefully ringing.

“You got the email from his mother too, okay?” Carmen says. “Don’t you care at all what happened? Don’t you want to know?”

“You’re saying because I don’t care that I murdered Atif? Why? Why the fuck would I do that, Carmen? Or do you just think that I’m some lesser creature compared to you, that maybe me, the fucking morlock or whatever, that I did it? Why? My morlock ways? Isn’t that how you see me? Some kind of freak?”

Some primate survival mechanism in her further clicks on, her appeasement takes a begging tone, and she can’t control the words coming out of her mouth—“I don’t see you as a freak at all, Greg, that’s ridiculous—”

“You can’t go around doing this. It has to stop.”

It is like gears clicking away in her as one mode is swapped for another. Drawing herself up, haughtily, angrily—“You will leave me alone. This is utterly inappropriate for a work environment, Greg!”

“Do you want to fucking know what I was doing that night?” Greg has tears in his eyes and is shaking, red-faced.

Finally, panicking—“I’ll scream.”

Greg pauses, unreadable but clearly tormented. She waits as he decides, but she doesn’t know over what—her mind is going wild in its search of the possibilities, and its own internal preparations. Then his face transforms from anger to anguish, melting in front of her with a brief sob. At that moment the door bangs open and Kierk enters the room with the phone pressed to his ear.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he says, looking between Carmen and Greg’s blotchy face.

After a glance of fear toward Kierk, Greg is looking pleadingly at Carmen as Kierk gets almost nose to nose with him.

“I asked what the fuck is going on here.”

“Greg was just leaving,” Carmen says.

“He was, huh?”

Greg wipes at his eyes, trying to move past Kierk, but Kierk puts up an arm, blocking him in.

“Got something to say, Greg?” In response Greg tries to duck under his arm but Kierk slams him back into the wall to an indignant yelp.

“You ever raise your voice to her again and your face won’t be your fucking face anymore. You get that?”

Head hanging, Greg won’t look up but just breathes heavily, giving barely perceptible nods.

Carmen’s hands go to Kierk’s back, light against the broad tightness. After a moment Kierk lifts his arm and Greg scoots past, trying to hide the tears as he rushes out the door.

Kierk turns to her, his face breaking from an intense scowl into concern. “Hey. Hey. It’s okay. What’s going on?”

Carmen hugs him tight, getting underneath his arms, feeling his tallness over her, pressing her face against his shirt and inhaling the distinctive scent of him.

“What? What happened? Carmen?”

She says into his shirt—“I don’t know. Maybe a misunderstanding. I asked him about Atif and he got upset. He lost it. He just lost it.”

Kierk strokes her hair. “So what should we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“So . . . Everything is alright?”

“Sure,” Carmen says, calming down, suppressing a tremble in her leg. “You’re busy?”

“I was actually about to head to the gym.”

“Oh, no. Yeah, that’s fine,” Carmen says, pulling away immediately.

“Are you sure everything is okay?”

“Go. Go. I’m fine. I have stuff to do here anyways. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Are you sure?”

Her brave face must have worked because he seems to accept her nodding.

He looks about to say something more but instead says—“Okay. Good.”

Leaving, Carmen makes sure she goes the opposite way down the hallway, then immediately rushes to the women’s restroom where she sits in a stall and cries and cries.

Panting, wiping the sweat from his forehead, Kierk is finishing his post-workout run, stalking through the lobby of his apartment building. Even despite the drama with Greg, and his guilt about trying to remain distant from Carmen, Kierk had spent most of his workout thinking about Antonio Moretti’s upcoming talk. In this field he would have to see Antonio again at some point, it was inevitable.

It hadn’t always been like this. Indeed, Kierk still misses the intellectual stimulation of working with Antonio in the early years. Sometimes the pair would have four-, five-, six-hour-long discussions. Hours and hours working on the details of the theory. Most people, outside of obsessives, have never experienced the true intellectual exhaustion that comes from thinking about a single complex problem for hours on end—the buzzing, drowsy feeling from your cortex burning piles of calories just to keep up. When there were others in their conversations Antonio and Kierk would outlast them all, a young marathoner and an older experienced one, still talking after everyone else had rushed out in tears of frustration or lapsed into a drained silence. Once a conversation about consciousness had begun at two in the afternoon and only when the night janitors came in to clean Antonio’s office had they realized how late it was. At near midnight the two had walked out together to their cars, the only ones left in the vast empty lot on the outskirts of Madison, a park set aside for research by the university, so the natural night world was all around them as they kept talking under the vastness of the Midwestern stars—the Milky Way a bridge of light above them, the dark grasses on all sides a sleeve running itself