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

night to get frozen yogurt and take a walk while it melts, to perform those small daily things which are the rituals that separate the living from the dead.

And it is there she will resolve to do all she can to answer the question that has been put to her.

MONDAY

Kierk wakes up fully aware and feeling an urgent need to move. Rising, flipping sheets onto the floor, he does a set of exercises until he is panting red. Breathing deeply in the bathroom light he looks at himself. He’s always been able to put on muscle quickly, filling out his frame to its natural proportions. Patting his taut stomach he goes to shower. Under the water he soaps himself, pausing when he gets to his hip. Its bruise is in full bloom, still painful from his collision with the turnstile, and it is only then that he remembers everything that had happened over the weekend.

Kierk limps his way to the CNS, an occasional hand going down to check his hip. Upon arrival he finds the halls eerily bustling, graduate students and technicians waiting for the animal elevators, the professors and administrative staff energetically popping in and out of rooms in what all seems a rude assault on mortality. It was as if Atif’s death had never occurred. Karen waves at him as he walks in, as does Carmen, but she doesn’t get up from her computer. His hip is so bad that he nearly lets out a yelp when he sits at his desk. He checks his email and, besides the unanswered one from Atif’s mother that he avoids opening again, finds only a bland departmental missive detailing a “tragedy among the staff.” It goes on to give a short biography of Atif and express its deepest condolences. He spends a while looking up the few short articles pertaining to Atif’s death on local news websites. There is nothing on there that Carmen hadn’t told him, just a low-resolution close-up of Atif’s grinning face. There is no mention of the police, or any investigation.

The picayune events of the day pass him like flotsam; his hands move by themselves, doing without doing. It doesn’t feel like he should be working. It’s this feeling that eventually draws him inexorably to Melissa Goldman’s lab. There he finds a more muted atmosphere. Only a few hushed whispers float over the maze of cubicles and computers. Atif’s desk has already been cleared. On it is a cardboard box with ATIF written on the side. Inside there is a stack of printed-out documents, a small wrist cast for carpal tunnel syndrome, a number of pens, a set of headphones, a framed picture of an older woman—it must be of Atif’s mother, who is smiling manically with her arm around a younger Atif in a graduation robe, both of them on the long and well-kept lawns of Oxford, romantic Gothic buildings soaring behind them on that bright summer day. Kierk takes one of Atif’s pens from the box.

He’s also extracting the stack of papers when Melissa Goldman, wrapping a scarf around her shoulders as she exits her office, catches sight of Kierk and approaches him with a questioning look on her face. As she does Kierk is thinking about what it must have been like to find the bomb materials outside her house, leering and obscene in her driveway out in the suburban wind.

Kierk gestures to the box. “This for the police?”

“Actually some university employee is going to send it home. They said they’d be down about twenty minutes ago. You’re one of the Crick Scholars, right?”

“Yeah, hi, I’m Kierk Suren.”

“So you knew him?”

“I was one of the last people with him.”

“I’m sorry. I only heard last night, I packed up his effects. I’ve never done anything like this. What a sad thing.”

“Listen, I’m sorry, but I was working with Atif on a project—”

“Oh, the one with Carmen?” Melissa says. Kierk opens his mouth, closes it again. “Because Carmen already looked through this stuff for those notes.”

“Sorry, I should’ve mentioned, I just talked to her, actually, and she wasn’t sure she had gotten everything of relevance. You know, making sure.”

“Well it can’t hurt, go ahead, just don’t actually take anything. I have a meeting to get to.”

As she leaves Kierk quickly scans the room, looking at the other workstations, some of which are occupied by the stooped forms of graduate students. Then he’s striding through the lab surreptitiously snatching up printed-out documents from the various unoccupied desks, keeping an eye on the door and the seated lab members, a few of whom glance at him, and he seriously nods back at them, and in a minute he has a stack about the same size of that in the box. He replaces one for the other, and with Atif’s documents under his arm he walks out with purpose. He passes two people in the hallway. One is pointing the other toward the lab—“Atif’s workstation was down there”—and Kierk, not looking up, hurries out into the stairwell.

He goes up a few flights. Pausing, he thumbs through the documents, which from a brief perusal are mostly just science papers but contain, to Kierk’s surprise, all of his papers as well, which Kierk raises his eyebrows at and smiles, pride mixed with melancholy.

Eventually he goes back to his lab, walking past rows of heads whose names he’s never learned.

Carmen, seeing him coming, turns in her chair and looks expectantly up at him, waiting for him to speak.

“So I’ve been thinking, and listen, I’m not saying you were right, but I am saying that it’s not so far out there it shouldn’t be considered.”

“You’re apologizing for yelling at me?” she asks, with some coyness.

“I am. I was wrong.”

“Okay, good.”

“Melissa said you read through his notes and papers.”

Carmen holds up her phone—“I tried to take some photos. Didn’t get everything though.”

Kierk pats the sheaf of documents he’s holding. “I grabbed everything.”

“What?”

“I stole them. Purloined. Pilfered. Absconded. Shanghaied.”

“Jesus. Okay, but smart.”

“He