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

showing signs of waking, and so Carmen, still giggling, has to lean over and uses her mouth to dial up the anesthesia dosage knob. The knob is cold and awkward in her mouth, both of them laughing now, and Carmen then stands up, not letting go of anything, and, stretching, spits out the metallic taste in her mouth into the sink at her side, getting ready for some flirtatious banter as she turns back. But she finds Kierk lost in thought staring as the little mouse’s belly settles into a steadier rhythm—what marvelous skin and globular eyes you have, and your splayed feet, the obsidian of your claws, the dome of your skull, and, inside that, the oracles of peduncles and ligaments and cranial webbing, and all the textbooks and anatomical drawings unfold before Kierk like a flip book, all primary colors of the capillary structure and strung-out webs of neurons, and then down at the cellular level, a galactic exchange of ions, those millions of little Maxwell demons of transport exchanging one for two, one for two in a steady windup of available work, and beneath that the equations and stochastic mechanics of thermodynamics and the exchange of heat, motion, energy, and below that, still flipping the illustrated pages of the book of existence, the arcana of the collapsing waveform, the quantum phenomena stuck in their multiple coexisting tracks, and Kierk knew that he could spend a whole life, an all-too-short span, sifting through the tottering and holed web of concepts stacked on top of one another in supervenience without ever ordering them correctly . . . that all these levels dropped away like the sea floor, farther and deeper than anyone could hold their breath for—and then he looks up at Carmen.

“Hi,” she says, smiling. From his gaze she knows she has interrupted something, and as he returns he pierces Carmen with those green eyes, a locust whine of green, sleeves of it in a thunderous forest bringing forth a memory long forgotten. Carmen has seen those eyes before . . . It had been dawn, and she, blushed with herself, in her yellow raincoat of youth and on her way to school hopping over puddles, all pink notebooks and ballpoint pens and report cards, had been confronted on the road by a fox not five feet in front of her, a fox with green eyes just like that. It had been frozen waiting for her to notice until she pulled up short and they stared at each other, speaking no language at all, Carmen’s central faith shaken by such a thing, her unspoken belief in only bodies and languages had been uprooted, all done away with by those eyes screaming that within me is something else, an entire simulated world, mental phenomena living and birthing and dying in ferocious, pullulate growth, a whole ecology but internal, like it’s climbing the walls of a space without walls, a presence looking out from behind the biological wet of those eyes. Kierk, in his motions and speech, points her toward this same basic question, somehow making it obvious that beyond her own enclosed world there was a whole other world, but this one was inside him. Biting her lip she considers—should a fox have such an effect on my ontology? Should a boy?

“Hi,” he says, finally returning her smile. But now they have been staring at each other too long and the moment becomes self-conscious, so they busy themselves until it dissolves.

After finishing the electrode placement, they use a kind of liquid concrete to create a skullcap on their little patient, just like those on the rhesus macaques, molded around the long wrapped snake of wires that now sprout up from the mouse’s head and connect it permanently to the recording equipment. The mouse is put back in its cage, a sleeping, healing husk. They wash their hands thoroughly, pushing each other a bit for space over the sink, which escalates into soapy water throwing. While hanging up their borrowed lab coats Carmen notices through his dress shirt the tattoos on his back and becomes insanely curious, but doesn’t mention it, storing it for later with a small pulse of satisfaction. Instead she gestures as he rolls up his sleeves.

In small dark print up the inside of his forearm it reads: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

She looks at him questioningly.

“The title of a Gauguin. It’s hanging in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I only saw it once in person, and I got this immediately after at a parlor in Cambridge.”

“It’s beautiful . . .”

“It’s the second question. It’s that second question that has captured me.”

“Okay, I’m going to show you something, but you have to take it to the grave, okay?”

Carmen, with a quick look around, wiggles down her jeans a bit, presenting to Kierk her left hip where there is, peeking out from behind the surprising red lace of her underwear, the black outline of a small dolphin.

“That. Is. Fantastic.”

“I got it when I was modeling with my girlfriends in Paris. Nobody actually spoke French but we were in a French tattoo parlor. It was a mess. I don’t know. I like it now because it reminds me of who I was. And who I am now.”

“I’m so telling Alex.”

He blocks Carmen’s kick.

“So do you want to play hooky?” she asks.

They report back to Max and let him know everything went (Carmen’s word) “swimmingly” and tell Max not to forget the mouse head waiting for him in the freezer. Kierk feels like he is the victor of this game and so he grins his best shit-eating grin at Max as they leave.

When Max hears their high-five before they get on the elevator his anger fades. Thinking of office romances brings only sadness. Karen’s been avoiding him. Karen who up till now had always been drama-free, had always been wet and humorous (a sense of humor, when had his wife lost hers?),