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

everyone is comparing the scabs on their arms. Jessica complains they’re probably going to have scars but Carmen is delighted—“It’s like we got matching tattoos or something!”

Then everyone is inside getting beers and chatting. Except Kierk, who’s lounging on a barstool looking at nothing. Mike thinks he must be so incredibly high right now. Alex is talking to some guy—no, scratch that, Alex is flirting with that guy. Mike, surprised, realizes that the weird thing he’s been sensing about Alex is that he’s gay, which is, in hindsight, totally obvious. Maybe Alex and Carmen are both in love with Kierk—who else could stand him? Mike buys a drink for Jessica, and then soon after everyone circles around a table on fast-forward drinking and talking, except, Mike notices, Kierk, who seems to be in some sort of fugue state. Eventually something Jessica says makes Kierk suddenly perk up, lift his gaze, actually acknowledge them as people speaking words in a language he understands.

“Wait, what did you just say?”

“She’s talking about how anesthesia functions. You with us, Kierk?” Mike says.

“No, she said . . . something, what was it?”

“I said, anesthesia prohibits communication. It blocks feedback in the brain, like between frontal to posterior regions. It causes you to lose consciousness.”

“Ah. Yes, that’s it. Delectable.”

“So?”

“Anesthesia blocks feedback, making you lose consciousness?”

“Yes,” she says slowly, as if expecting a trap.

“Do you know who Molière is?”

“No.”

Kierk looks down for a long second, then up with a smile.

“One might even say that anesthesia . . . has a dormitive principle!”

“Umm is there a joke here or—”

“Ah, well, it’s all explained then,” Kierk says, draining the remainder of his beer in a long swig. “Virtus dormitiva. No feedback! Four hundred fucking years and we’ve added one step to the causal chain.” Somehow his words clearly aren’t addressed to any of them, said even as he is standing, moving away. Kierk feels the centuries spin by like marbles on a frictionless surface.

But after a while the colors of pool balls are also moving like marbles across the flat green in a dream of Newtonian Laws. Orange lighting, sea-like surfaces, the grain of wood, a pocket of talk. They are three games in of partners play: Jessica and Kierk against Carmen and Mike. Alex had said he is awful at pool and refuses to do things he isn’t amazing at, and so has been watching the games while drinking a series of Manhattans. Carmen and Mike have won two games already, and as Mike sends the cue ball rolling toward the eight Kierk lets out an anticipatory groan before the eight sinks into the called pocket.

“Ouch,” Jessica says, “three for three.”

“God, Kierk, you suck at pool,” says Carmen.

“Well, Jessica over here is killing me.”

Mike scoffs. “Oh, really.”

“Actually it’s Carmen, she’s too good.”

“What?” says Mike. “I’m sorry but I have been on fire tonight.”

“I would not describe it as such.”

“Let’s play again then.”

“Alright, boys,” Carmen rests her cue against an empty chair. “I think Jessica and I are going to sit this one out and drink Manhattans with Alex.” Alex cheers from the corner.

“Next game’s loser buys what, two pitchers of beer?” says Kierk.

“No, you guys are not betting over this,” Jessica says, waggling a finger.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Mike says, grinning. “If Kierk wants to buy the next round, he can.”

“Rack it,” commands Kierk, suddenly serious, walking to the far side.

“So after the program is over, what’s everyone going to do?” Jessica asks.

“Well, no one wants another postdoc,” Mike says as he racks the balls. Kierk makes a face in response as he chalks his cue.

“What, Kierk, you agree? What’s wrong with another postdoc?” Jessica says.

“Stay in neuroscience? Are you crazy?”

Mike finishes racking, and Kierk, still talking, begins to line up the break. “The whole field is pre-paradigmatic. The reproducibility crisis is going to hit us hard. We’re just waiting for enough scientists to die. Most of this so-called ‘research’ will be incommensurate with whatever’s next. We’re all just too stupid to figure out what that is right now.”

He lets fly and with a thunderous crack the balls careen all around the table too fast for the eye to see. Kierk walks around, pulls out the red three from the pocket, drops it back in, even now half of him musing—so many more disordered states than ordered ones, Boltzmann, you genius . . .

He eyes the baize, and then lines up an easy shot of the two ball.

“You can’t just look at something and declare that it is pre-paradigmatic,” Jessica says. “I mean, people publish, I publish. My results, my data, they aren’t meaningless.”

“Actually,” Kierk says, releasing in a sharp snap so that the two becomes a blue streak that disappears into a middle pocket, “no offense but they probably are.”

Mike makes a parodic sweeping gesture. “You can’t just say to her, to her face, that her research is meaningless. You don’t even know what it is, right? Honestly, dude, it’s insulting.”

After just missing his next shot, Kierk gestures to Mike with his cue and says—“I’m honestly not trying to be. Until we have a theory of consciousness we’re physics before Newton, biology before Darwin. It’s just that no one can build a career on admitting this and the bureaucracy is already in place so people get grants and self-perpetuate and metastasize. They’re playing the science game, not doing science.”

As he says this Kierk feels the hum of shifting into intellectual high gear. For the past six months his dialogues have been muttered to himself on the beach, addressing fake audiences, giving the James Baldwin lecture in philosophy to a half-buried log, a sloping section of wet sand, a distant girl under a beach umbrella.

“But we’ve shown—” Mike begins but Kierk interrupts him, speaking so fast it’s like the words are liquid pouring out of his mouth.

“You’ve shown what? In neural terms we still don’t know what a thought is, or what a feeling is, nor an action or decision. To really figure any of that out you