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

“I’ll just get to motor threshold and then we’ll quit.” With the coil set against his skull, the click of its activation is incredibly loud. They both stare down at his unmoving hand.

Karen watches the two of them lightly flirt and Kierk regales Carmen with the incident at the primate lab last night. At their banter Karen’s thoughts go to Max, and how she will sit across from him later today in a department budget meeting and slowly, very slowly, his foot will make its way over to hers, violating the stiller air of the committee, both their faces unchanged. Under the table an observer would see their shoes begin, like an alien life-form, a strange and silly and titillating courtship dance.

Yesterday she had showered at Max’s house in the morning after staying the night for the first time while his family was away. Standing beside him under the hot water the many bottles had stared at her like those statues on Easter Island. Even his son’s SpongeBob SquarePants bottle seemed solemn. She, in her presence, had violated a tight, closed space. Max had handed her his Old Spice bar (his wife’s soap, she couldn’t help but notice, was all the way on the other side from his) and as she stood lathering her body she wondered what he would do if she reached out casually and squirted some of his wife’s product onto her hands. She wanted to use too much of it, leave it noticeably lighter. But she didn’t. So yesterday at work she had often paused while walking, while in the elevator, or sitting in her office chair, and she would smell him and for a moment be so confused before realizing it was just the scent of Old Spice. When she had gotten home she hadn’t showered but instead had purposely climbed into bed and nestled about to lie in the fans of her hair like a primitive mammal, making a small nest of herself, a home of minute, comfortable movements, until she couldn’t smell it anymore.

There’s a loud click from mid-center-left above his head and Kierk’s right index finger jumps all on its own.

Kierk’s ID card gets him through the automatic gates of the gym near his apartment. As he passes the wide-screen TVs and upscale juice bar he feels like an imposter in his new running shorts and bright squeaky sneakers. First he heads to the weight room and lifts, feeling joy as his body assumes the proper forms, the burn and rush and release. After an hour he heads up the stairs to the indoor track to start jogging. About three or four laps in he begins to get that jouissance, that exuberant flushing all over, and he laughs wildly as he starts to push himself. There aren’t that many people on the circular track and Kierk has been smoking past everybody, breathing hard, yes, but there’s still that internal engine. Then there’s a rush of clothing and an undergraduate blasts past him wearing an NYU track-and-field sweatshirt. The kid gets about fifty feet ahead of him before Kierk growls and takes the lead once more. Kierk holds the pace a while, hearing the footsteps behind him as the two do a few more laps almost in lockstep, and then the frequency of footsteps increases and the young man easily sprints ahead. Kierk, now feeling the riptide of each breath surge through him, catches up, and for nearly a mile they run side by side, the pair thundering past the other runners who scamper out of the way, close to a five-minute-mile pace, and Kierk, his legs wobbly, his lungs on fire, feels everything inside shutting down but musters one last burning push and starts truly going all out, sprinting as fast as he can, and just as he gets around the bend out of view of his competitor he wheels off the track and through the nearest doorway, frightening a girl who leaps out of his way, and he’s gasping so loud it sounds like he’s screaming as he makes it into the men’s locker room, his vision narrowing to a blurred tunnel as he’s heaving trying to get air, a shaking figure busting open one of the stall doors and, every part of his body trembling as he kneels, vomits up a clear stream into the pool of the toilet bowl.

Sore naked muscles on smooth sheets, stretching out. Around the bed a fleet of cardboard boxes stuffed with his books, arriving now from California. Kierk’s taken out an old dog-eared copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, which is currently splayed out on his thigh. Keeping him from reading, haunting about his memory like the machinations of a ghost, is the God Helmet, the low bother of an existential itch. Coerced belief. These are precisely the kinds of things that can work themselves underneath Kierk’s skin—even the idea of solipsism had nearly destroyed him, hadn’t it? His first introduction to it had been amid the woodchips and hours of recess, after some skinny child boasted to a group of other children—“Well, what if the world was created just a second ago, huh, what if it was created just in the last second and then all your memories were made, how could you tell, what if God created it just now?”—and the little boy had snapped his fingers and Kierk’s young eyes had gone wide and he’d had no answer.

That same wonderment returned later when he, as many children unknowingly did, rediscovered the inverted spectrum argument with one of his friends. A sleepover with two forms lying on their backs whispering—“But what if my whole life my red has actually been green. And I still say ‘red’ when you say ‘red’ even though I actually see red as green. How would anyone ever know?”

It was trivial . . . and yet . . . not trivial. Kierk could now use technical terminology to describe it as a