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

Instead of responding Kierk takes a long drink of water.

“Come on, it’s not so far out there.”

“It’s pretty far out there. Okay.” Kierk keeps rubbing at the chisel in his head. “And, well, to be honest, I don’t trust it because it’s a view that relieves responsibility. We got him drunk, okay? We took shots and drank all night and he walked home and got hit by the goddamn subway train. Like being hit by lightning. Totally random but possible. But if someone murdered him it’s not our fault, you see. Because you pleaded with the taxi driver, right, but we couldn’t fit any more and we let him walk home and he died. It’s Nagel’s moral luck. But we still feel guilty. And it sucks. But honestly, I didn’t even know the guy. Not really. Someone who could have been maybe a friend, a coauthor, he’s dead. I don’t know what to say. The universe is purposeless.”

Carmen stares out the window for a moment, silent, but her mouth is working and she’s shaking her head slightly.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to imply you are, you know, making this up.”

“Fine, fine, you believe whatever you want, okay?” Carmen begins getting her things together.

“Oh come on, I’m just trying to prevent—”

“Listen it’s okay, I just need some space right now, okay?”

“Okay. Hey. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

He watches Carmen leave, her water bottle clanking. Kierk’s sandwich glares up at him accusingly, demanding an explanation for its own obscenities of meat. He can’t eat it. He feels he might never eat anything again. Perversely, at the same time he feels the need to move, to exercise, to run himself down.

Wrapping up the sandwich in a napkin he exits the deli. It’s not long before he finds a homeless woman propped against a wall reading a mystery novel to give it to. As he walks away he begins to speed up, first walking quickly around other pedestrians but soon he’s jogging, lightly at first, and then running, then sprinting, all the way back to his apartment building, racing up the stairs and throwing open his door and scrounging around for his running shoes and exercise shorts, breathing heavily.

Kierk takes off down the watery streets, the air hot and compressed and wet in each breath. He runs without a destination, progressing randomly, taking side streets and looping back, stopping to orient himself only occasionally as his endorphins battle his queasiness. He waits for the cross signs at streets, jogging in place with the pedestrians. Soon he begins to run straight out, zigzagging across streets to avoid having to wait, his sneakers throwing up flecks of water that wet the back of his shirt. Kierk feels that he is always flipping between two modes of thought when he is running, like looking at a Necker cube. In one mode, he is a homunculus guiding the machinery of his body faster and faster, driving it to ignore its small complaints, a small squatting demon behind his eyes. In the other his thoughts expand, lose precise form, bind with his flushed body to become a single identity, so that he is every aching muscle and gasp for breath, embodied and expansive. Today is like that—his sneakers are soaked through, he can feel his toes squish with each step. He sniffs deeply, smelling morning petrichor. His hangover throbs with each step, but he actually likes it now; the dimensions of his hangover are in some ways appealing, a presence he knows, and he’s never stopped to appreciate exactly how maximally annoying and painful a hangover of this magnitude is, how it has a warp and a shape to it, a distinct brutish thing unto itself, and isn’t it morally obvious that something is better than nothing?

As he runs Kierk’s thoughts wander to Atif, whose departure is so sudden it feels like something as delicate as a soap bubble was popped. When Kierk imagines the underground scene, the suddenness of it, he sees Atif’s skull coming apart sensibly, like a jigsaw puzzle hammered in midair, and then through the open remainder of the head would pour a parade of images and thoughts, all the silk Technicolor memories from childhood cartoons to personal sex scenes, all slinking and bursting forth in a great cavalcade, a world compressed like pressurized air inside a skull. But then he thinks about what really happened. Just a bunch of gray mucus expelled.

Soon he finds himself inexorably approaching the rain-washed sign that reads BLEECKER STREET STATION. It sits in the wet air like an eye, an omen, and Kierk spends some time in front of it with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. There are a few people milling about, coming up from Lafayette Street, but mostly the rain has driven everyone away and the streets are quiet and humming with a humid heat. He imagines the way Atif must have seen the sign in the drunk dark. After walking around the different entrances he finds the one that would be closest coming from the direction of the bar and Kierk takes the stairs down.

The subway station is a jar of hot air, a yellowing chamber halving away at the sides. Kierk, trying to look casual in his shorts and sweated-through T-shirt, descends into a thing organic with heat and grime. The hot air down here hasn’t been cut by the rain, so he’s flash sweating and it feels like he’s breathing inches away from a pot of boiling water in this stuffy annex that empties out into just a few turnstiles. He imagines Atif coming thundering down here drunk, lightning like shuttering camera flashes behind him as he stumbled from one side to the other, a hand went out, caught the wall by the staircase, lingered on the spot that Kierk’s glance lingers on now.

Kierk leans over the turnstiles with their blinking green lights, looking out. He doesn’t have his wallet, so he cocks