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

has everything I’ve ever published. Some of which is not exactly easy to find. There were philosophy papers too. He was more knowledgeable than I thought . . . I should have discussed more with him. Point is that I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say my priors were significantly updated.”

Carmen kind of just pats his leg. “Great. Have you thought about where our, um, investigation should focus first?”

“I figured I’d let you do the honors.”

“Well, a certain acronym comes to mind.”

“Atif did work in Melissa’s lab.”

“And I heard that last week they staged some kind of an ‘occupation.’ They disrupted a neuroscience class. And they do have meetings.”

“Are they open to the public?”

“It’s every Wednesday.”

“I’m in.”

“Okay, do you need any help getting ready?”

“I’ll pick something up tomorrow.”

“I already have my disguise, the origins of which will remain unspoken. Let’s just say there was a phase.”

“Listen, it wasn’t just the email from his mother, or what he was reading about, that changed my mind. There’s something I need to tell you. Just, ah, bear with me okay? This is going to get . . . a little weird.” Kierk pulls up the side of his shirt with one hand and pulls down the belt of his pants with the other, revealing a deep purple bruise that contains whirls within whirls.

Approaching the door to Karen’s lab Max prepares himself, all the things she’d said to him on Saturday ringing through his head.—“I just really need to be alone right now, Max.”—“Just let me be alone for a couple days. That’s all I need, a couple days.”—“Max, I’m . . . I need to go.”

Half hoping to avoid her, half hoping to run into her, he peeks in to see Kierk talking to Carmen, his shirt pulled up. Shaking his head Max continues to the elevator. He’s running late. Apparently, his son, Jared, is having one of his bad days. Not that this wasn’t near routine at this point. It’s been four years since Max had, with the manner of those cursed by the gods, watched his child, his precocious and beautiful boy, who had loved Goodnight Moon, loved talking and being read to, who for two years had been normal, even bright, begin that terrifying regression into his autos (which Max learned was Greek for “self ”), which led eventually to the oubliette of severe autism, that trap of a self, as all his son’s attention seemed to turn inward. Jared no longer looked out on the world but merely into the mirror of his own consciousness. The first symptom had been when he stopped looking Max in the eyes, followed by the lexicality that had marked Jared’s early childhood beginning to vanish daily, words gone, slipping away, replaced by—what? Betrayed by expression, his mimetic skills failing, his child took to rocking back and forth, endlessly, an interminable movement that was so easy to associate with helplessness, with hopelessness. Animals pacing in their cages at a zoo. Max speculated that the reward systems just got off track. The world is a thing to be decoded in a certain way but his son’s brain was using the wrong key. Max had been horrified at these ideas that occasionally fled like bandits across his mind—at another time this child would have been left out on the cold slab of rock on a mountain and we would have had another. That other child that his wife said she didn’t want—because it would apparently detract from Jared, she was too busy making sure Jared got to cognitive behavioral therapy twice a day, making sure he had his allotted floor time, his glucose-absent meals, his immersive activities, all the failed attempts to create any kind of paracosm for him to inhabit. Max knew his desire was selfish, and couldn’t help it, couldn’t do anything about it, the want was so deep it was everything, biological, spiritual, mental, and so after six years of faithful marriage he found himself with Karen, and knew it was wrong and that he still loved his wife, or still loved the idea of his wife. Max knows that couples who lose a child often get divorced and no one blames them, and he would never say it out loud but to him it was as if his beautiful boy had been murdered as surely as if he had been shot. Something in him just never reached escape velocity, instead retracting. How far had it retracted? It was impossible to know, but as he watched Jared follow simple but alien goals, like moving certain objects to a certain corner, or yelling at a particular window, or rocking back and forth, Max sometimes couldn’t help but think the most hideous thought of all—that even while his son was doing all these things there was no longer anything going on inside. That the complex actions, even the emotional outbursts, were all going on in darkness, an automated program still running after all the light had left, and that, since no one could pinpoint where consciousness began or ended, his child might truly be just a biological robot, performing its actions for no reason outside of how it had been wound up, conscious of nothing. In comparison, Max’s hatred at himself for even having such thoughts burned in him like an internal flame.

. . .

Running into Kierk in the stairwell Alex considers for a brief second before going in for a solemn hug, followed by the metacognitive shame that he still calculates this stuff with his straight friends. Kierk returns it pretty casually, though Alex can discern just the slightest stiffness to it.

Kierk, as he disengages—“Can you believe it?”

“No. Not at all. I’ve been reading all about it online. I can’t stop. I feel like a freak.”

“Any new information?”

“Just that the operator saw him, and that Atif was laid out on the tracks.”

“Yeah, I read that too. And there was nobody else in the subway.”

Alex glances down at his shoes. “It could have been