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

sweet little life together for the next few years, everything became as sensible and obvious as Euclid’s axioms.

And graduate school itself went well, almost easy, really, in comparison to the chaotic juggling act that had been her undergraduate experience. Looking back she felt distant and empathetic to her old self, but also embarrassed. As ridiculous as the whole charade of it all was to her, the glamour had been real. There is something it is like to see yourself on a billboard, or in the September issue of Vogue modeling coats, or tell a group of people at a party that you work as a model. It was a powerful, competitive draw. In graduate school she defended modeling from attacks by her friends who dismissed it as solely misogynistic, objectifying, and unhealthy. But most didn’t even know she once worked in the industry, as she learned to keep it to herself, and spoke of it almost solely with Josh in their insular couple life that took place in small apartments sprinkled over Manhattan.

So when Josh broke up with her with no warning in her fourth year of grad school she left his apartment like a bat undone, without echolocation, flopping hysterically from surface to surface, in purposeless flight across the pinwheeling lights of the city at night all overloading her as she spun in a centrifuge, his words coming, speaking themselves to her again and again—“You are leaving and you don’t even know it yet. I’m doing this to protect myself. When we started you were this student who came to me for advice. I loved lecturing to you. I loved watching you learn. But now you’ve surpassed me in everything. You’re going to breeze through a postdoc and I’m going to end up some fucking research tech somewhere. When was the last time I won a debate with you? You contradict me about everything and you don’t even notice. But what’s fucked up is that you’re always right. You’re a better scientist than me. And that makes you a monster. Because, also, I mean, look at you. Sometimes I can barely stand it. So what do I have left? Nothing. Just my damn dignity. And I can’t take watching you fall out of love with me. You’re going to settle with me and you’re never going to forgive me and then one day you’ll leave me. I have to do this to protect myself . . .” All as Carmen tried to just remain upright, tried to comprehend what was happening, because her insides had clenched up into a spasming wall and she had waves of nausea coursing through her, while an abstract small voice, an academic part of her somehow divorced from her, was commenting—isn’t absolute mental anguish neurologically quite interesting? She had cried uncontrollably on the subway while people avoided looking at her. In her apartment the noises she made were barely human, so far from language it was as if she had become an animal wrestling with an injury.

In the breakup the same enigmatic indexical knowledge appeared: Carmen had known that it was possible to cry for two days straight, but she hadn’t known it. She received copious deliveries puffy-faced and in pajamas. She spent her time ignoring calls and emails and instead sat in the bathtub and watched dumb TV shows with her laptop resting on a fold-out chair beside the tub. In the hot water she had cried and cried and cried until she became delirious from dehydration. A few times it was Josh’s number on her phone. Each ring tore her apart until only pride remained. She bellowed and splashed around in the bathtub as if she were cauterizing a wound. Alternating in affect between vengeful and overwrought with loss, she shouted aloud one-sided conversations over the echoing tiles, cycling through invective tantrums where she accused him of just wanting to fuck other women, to stick his dick in someone else, always followed by reconciliatory begging sessions. She replayed that final night a hundred times over in the proceeding weeks, looking for a hint, a sign, a place where if she would have acted differently it would have changed everything. Finding it, and finding that everything he said had been true—this had been what really let her begin to recover, a long scarring process ending with a tender gratefulness for the existence of one self over another.

Kierk gets back to his apartment after the zoo, his mind full of lions and chimpanzees and the bat exhibit and the bar where he and Alex and Carmen had drunk pitcher after pitcher of beer. He fumbles with his key and then the door is open and where the hell is the light switch and the only visibility is from the city coming in like a machinery of light through the window and then in the bathroom he turns the faucet on full blast and rapidly cups water into his hands to drink, again, again, the roar of the sink and the hot, hot, hot water, the water burning up his throat and he’s just standing there leaning over the sink and wildly drinking hot water for a good minute before he violently and drunkenly hits the sink off and strips off his shirt over his head on the way to the bedroom and then slams into the pillow and sleeps.

At first there is nothing. But then, later, a body, a place, distinct spatial relations. The body is huddled and curled and slept in the folding of itself upside down, an upside-down world around it, and it is dark and warm here amid the mewls of the young and soft ticking motions of bodies around, all the bodies around, this small crevice from which I hang, fold, still, still as the rock and the cave, as within the belly is no longer full of movements ended, things caught, no longer full of catching of chasing of eating, the black shadow of anticipation to fall on