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

Mike’s scoff is quieted as his attempt at sneaking the fifteen past the guard of the four instead goes wide and the four meanders inexorably into the pocket.

“The house of neuroscience will collapse,” Kierk proclaims like a priest, walking around the pool table. “In the ruins nothing will grow.”

“Then it’ll crush you and your ego as well.” Mike’s hands are white on his pool cue.

“No,” Kierk says, lining up for the only remaining solid. “See, I don’t plan on being inside of it.”

A dream of chartreuse loses itself into the waiting netted mouth.

“You don’t have the authority to dismiss an entire field.”

Kierk smiles devilishly—“Truth is always in exile. Don’t think that if a theory of consciousness were offered tomorrow everything everyone at the CNS does wouldn’t disappear in a puff of smoke. Calling my shot: far right pocket.”

“So what’s next then?” Carmen stirs her drink. “If you’ve got it all figured out, Kierk, which apparently you think you do, oh please let us in on the secret.”

Kierk, eye level with the cue ball, takes a deep breath, and everything slows down. He can hear himself talking, and then calling his shot, a thing apart, but he is here, with this long field of baize and the dynamics of these reversible mechanics, in this dream of a physics that never happened. Words, his, are spoken—“Perhaps nothing will grow. Like the fields of Carthage after the salt. Carthago delenda est.”

With a clack the cue ball traces a line across the table, tapping the eight toward the right pocket. But as it rolls the eight instead comes to rest at the trapezoidal edge of that pocket’s mouth while meanwhile the cue ball itself listlessly meanders into the far left pocket, tips in, and Kierk scratches.

For a moment there is silence. Then Mike, laughing, throws his hands up in victory.

“Good game, buddy!” he says loudly, already putting up his pool cue.

Kierk is still staring at the leather pocket as if expecting more from it. He can’t believe he lost.

Alex calls out—“Kierk, funny how the first three games you were shooting with your left hand. And this game you played with your right.”

This time, Carmen does fall off her stool with laughter. “You were robbed. You were robbed,” she says, recovering.

Reaching over, Kierk takes her Manhattan out of her hand, cheering her—“So it goes.” Finishing his sip—“I’ll be back with your winnings, Mike.”

Eventually he returns to the table bearing a tray full of pitchers and shots. Everyone does one. Mike is red-faced and avuncular. He keeps clapping Kierk on the arm, saying, “Good game,” again and again.

In no time at all, Carmen and Kierk, leaning in to hear one another above the din, have separated off and are talking in fast tones about life, literature, science, language, purpose. How a personal worldline is guided by both teleonomy and teleology.

Finally Alex interrupts them, informing them that they have been huddled up together for an hour, that it’s unfair, particularly to him, and that they simply must do another shot with him.

Soon after that the bar becomes a toy workshop that Kierk is moving through, drunk on airs. Carmen’s face floats in his field of vision, too much stimulation for Kierk to make sense of. Fuck, he needs a cigarette. Intentions are brighter than lights. Kierk, outside somehow, maybe he left for a cigarette, he can’t remember, is inhaling the deep, aquatic air, and thinking—not me, not me, I can see things clearly, can’t I? I am the fish who learns.

Drunkenness takes him away, a dark carriage of smoke and gestures, one thought still echoing, bouncing off the buildings and into the streets, slipping down the drains, finding its way to the sea—I am the fish who learns.

Kierk is writing in his Hello Kitty notebook by the light of a lamppost. He doesn’t know what time it is but he’s taking burning swigs from a small bottle of whiskey he bought from a corner store because he doesn’t want to sober up, no, not yet, not when words are flying off like colored scarves from a magician’s hat; he’s spastic, impulsive, expunging sentences in rages, generating more in rapture, not realizing people passing down the midnight steps of Union Square are looking at him as he smacks his forehead and pulls his hair and mouths words aloud, shouting to feel them leave him like Flaubert, standing up and then sitting back down, clenching his fists in self-loathing and belletristic anger. He rips up the page he’s working on, stuffs it in his mouth and chews it in anger, shreds the soggy mess between his teeth, grinding it and feeling his jaw muscles work, and then it’s spewing out of his mouth as he starts laughing hysterically. He keels over and sprays the inky mush over the concrete steps. Making a face, he picks the bits of remaining paper out of his mouth, then, still laughing, gets unsteadily to his feet. He knows he is a dense knot of metaphors faking at being a man, that he is the mere shambles of an apology with nothing to apologize for—no theory of consciousness, no writings—a mere strawman dissolving into parts, a pile of clothes on the floor, a poor synecdoche, a thing like that can’t impact the world anyway . . .

SATURDAY

Kierk wakes up to music. His shoulder blades ache as he rolls over on the floor. Hungover, he opens one eye onto the expanse of the carpet. His thoughts begin in a sluggish smog, gray themes and colors, but then, like breaking cloud cover, a thing rising and set free into the blue—in drinking he has reset everything, he feels, his mind is scrubbed, tilt-a-whirl, all of yesterday’s habits gone. The music is coming from his damnable phone.

Soon, still nursing his hangover, Kierk is underground and everything is shaking about and screeching. Following a trail of text messages he’s meeting Carmen and Alex at