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

and it was that sense of humor, that thrown-back horse laugh, an equine whinny, even at her own jokes, that attracted him so much. Without her he feels like he is slowly reentering some sort of prison, that gates are closing behind him . . .

After their last liaison, Max had left to pick up Chinese food for his family. Then at home he had watched his son try to open the white box of fried rice, and Max had insisted—“Let him do it himself.” And his son, who at that age should have been in school learning trigonometry, instead couldn’t open even a simple takeout box, and after fiddling with it for a while (hands along the top, then the sides, then even the bottom) had just stopped and stared at it like it was the greatest puzzle in all the universe.

The two forms brush past Karen as they exit the CNS, so wrapped up in each other they don’t glance up to acknowledge her. She watches Carmen double over laughing as Kierk is gesturing, and then they are out of view. Maybe just a year ago she would have disapproved, but now since Max and she had begun the affair (even though it feels clichéd to even think the word) she just wants people to do what makes them happy.

On Friday they had “stayed late to work”—Max had bent her over her desk and she had felt his hand searching her, a single probing finger that caused a whelming and responsive moan, the onset of her tic of shifting her weight from one leg to another uncontrollably as she waited, her ass in the air squirming, and then she had heard the zip of his zipper and his slow, teasing entry accompanied by slaps and gasps. Unknown to them a janitor had stood outside her office door paused in mopping. After they were done Max had, as always, slapped her ass one last time in appreciation and kissed her roughly, and then slowly that retraction of emotion had begun, that withdrawal like an undersea animal into its shell, a calcium carbonate composite of clipped words and clothing, and she’d still be hugging him to her nude body while he was fully dressed as he dialed enough takeout to feed three. Most of the time she tries not to think about it, not to think about his wife, or his kid, the morality of it, whether it was right or wrong, but just to be with him, when she could, when he could, because this intensity of being stood unsupported, un-needing of justification. Such thoughts keep occurring to her today; she’s finding it hard to think, everything seems to whizz past. But then occasionally something like seeing Kierk and Carmen together slows it all down into an almost indefatigable beauty and stillness. Karen is so regular that just an absence of three days is enough to get the test. She touches her stomach. She is pregnant. All is phenomenon.

TUESDAY

Kierk wakes up, rolls over, painfully slaps his hand on the wall next to him, and comes to consciousness cursing. His alarm did not go off. Hastily he dresses, grabs his notebook, dons his new Mets baseball cap, and thunders down the stairs without waiting for the elevator.

Walking, he spills some spots of coffee on the burning pavement. Everything on Broadway dissolves in the omnipotent light—the smoke from his cigarette, his sneakers jutting forward in front of him, and people become whitewashed outlines; even the butt that Kierk flicks away vanishes into the light.

Kierk sits at his desk professionally, mulling over the meetings he’s had so far this morning with Max and Karen. He’d told them he wanted to delve into pure theory, examining consciousness from a fundamental perspective. They’d disagreed, and now Kierk was thinking about the compromise they’d landed on for a first paper. The idea is to write up a review paper of the extant measures of consciousness, using his old computational model of the cortex as a test case. If the measures fail in application to give sensible values for a model of the cortex, such measures cannot be correct and a new one is necessary. So Kierk just needs to adapt the handful of measures invented by other theorists into heuristics he can apply to his simulated network. Since most had never been subjected to a test, the idea was to separate the wheat from the chaff in the literature. According to the committee, Kierk must complete this first paper to receive his PhD. But he knows the paper is pointless. Everything in the literature is chaff. Trying to communicate that . . . had been difficult. It’s been too long since he’s had a real professional conversation. Being alone for so long with only his notebooks, Kierk’s wondering if he has become an island ecology unto himself, if the population of his thoughts had become isolated, if the genetic bottleneck of founding effects had amplified into a full-blown speciation event and all that remains are centaurish forms, hopeful monsters.

He gets a text from Carmen that tells him to meet her and Atif. After hunting down the room Kierk finds the two sitting on a couch facing an empty chair, which Atif gestures at, smiling. Instead Kierk squeezes between them on the couch, the three now sitting in a row awkwardly.

He immediately leans down to tie his shoe. “We wanted to talk about—” Atif leans forward, then backward, to get line of sight, “—about doing some kind of joint project.”

“Why ask me?” Kierk calls up.

“We have both read your papers. Obviously, we think such a pairing would be beneficial.” Atif’s voice is tinged with amusement.

“It would look good for the program if people coauthored,” Carmen says as Kierk finally comes up, everyone shifting their weight on the squishy couch. “And—excuse me, Atif, sorry—also our skills are well matched.”

“What would it be about?”

“Well. Atif and I have been discussing your research.” She holds