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

rolling it in his fingers, and then looks farther into the small corner—wind whips behind him, but this place is secluded and protected amid the rubble of brick and copper wire. In the dark, pressed up against brick and concrete there is a small ritualistic gathering of tiny bones—bird bones. Kierk sees the fine spread of a wing, and the skulls, some intact, others chipped or malformed or crushed, picked at, bones almost all separated out, discolored, some white and fresh and others older and yellow, a little nest all laid out. None are full skeletons, rather they are disjointed, taken apart, such that given this jumble of bones it is impossible to tell how many birds—pigeons, these must be pigeons—actually contributed to the mortuary. Or perhaps this is some sort of a nest? Kierk takes a piece of rusted wire from the ground and uses it to poke and disturb the collection, noticing as he’s digging around the bones that there seems to be an implicit order in their layout, as if certain types of bones, skulls, wings, have been sorted independently and grouped together as sets. He is thinking of the ethology of octopuses, that they and humans are the only kind of predator who arrange the bones of their prey in geometric patterns, the only hyper-intelligent predators—maybe the first true intelligence that ever existed was in a carnivore playing with the bones of its food. Kierk stands back up, holding the wire at his side, looks around at the empty gray roof. Across the street from him a lower roof is thick with pigeons, sitting on structures, flying from one post to another, and on the neighboring roof in the other direction he sees even more rounded forms dart from one pipe to another. Here, nothing moves except the wind.

“Huh.”

Leaving a meeting that afternoon Carmen takes the stairwell, pausing on the landing, feeling overwhelmed. So much has changed so quickly, and now within her there is a cacophony of feelings and valences. Every other minute she flips: Atif, the mystery of it all, the investigation, the responsibility, the occasional flit of worry about her own safety—and then on the other side, the new job, the job of a lifetime going well, all the mundane things are good, and, of course, the people here that she’s met, the people who are new to her life promising more change. One of whom she refuses to think too much about. This whirlwind has in turn engendered within her a kind of thawing. Yesterday she’d stood in line at the grocery store face-to-face with a baby looking at Carmen from behind the mother’s shoulder, all blue-eyed and mouth open, absorbing everything and everyone around it as receptively as a Buddhist monk, with a forehead as placid and calm and wise as a sperm whale’s, and Carmen had let out a squeal and a wave in a way that would have made twenty-one-year-old Carmen roll her eyes, because back then she hadn’t really gotten the point of babies, except as something to be observed in neurological interest, thinking of them then as these giant diffuse and basically randomly wired neural networks trying through a response-reward curve to make sense of the world, trying to define the fire hose of undifferentiated input into categories that could be used, bound together, but lately whenever she got close to a baby all she wanted to do was smell it and interact with it and basically just teach it, feed that response-curve with funny faces and giggly waves and winks, which Carmen knew made sense, because every cutesy thing that adults do around babies is not random, no, all those funny faces highlight expressions, and the tone taken is precisely tuned to stimulate a baby’s developing auditory system, and the googly eyes and funny voices and little games are in-built—adults are as genetically programmed to teach babies as babies are to learn, an oscillating cycle, a generational handoff that goes back and back and back. And she finds this beautiful.

“How are you doing that?”

“Doing what? What’s he doing?” The baby’s mother had turned around and asked her, smiling.

“Being conscious,” Carmen had said seriously, bent and gazing into the blue eyes going to-and-fro, rheumy but brilliant in their color. When she had given that blue-eyed baby a wink and wave the response was a happy crinkling gurgle that was literally too cute for Carmen to handle and she actually had to leave the line to calm down.

Maybe it was age, maybe it was something else. Everything felt so different now, even from just a few months ago, and how quickly that internal distance had grown surprised her now. Back then she had, with little hesitation, given up a sure bet for a family, a whole other life. Her last boyfriend, whom she had left seven months ago, had been a lawyer, having only just passed his bar exam but with great prospects. At thirty he was four years her senior, and what had happened wasn’t her fault, not really. She, vivacious and enigmatic, concerned with her latest research study and living in a small studio apartment, always pausing to sneeze loudly as she walked outside, and he, all old money and sailboats, from a family grown bored with its wealth, passionate about becoming a public defender so he could work with the disadvantaged and institutionally overlooked, bristling at social inequity—a man who, for all the irony of espousing the benefits of a welfare state while on a yachting outing off the coast, was a good man, a decent man, which Carmen had known from the start. And she also knew from the start that she should feel a sense of promise, but instead she felt a slowly advancing sense of panic, entrapment. So without meaning to, quite incidentally really, just as a consequent of their dynamic and personalities, just something that happened without her knowing about it until it was over, Carmen had cracked his chest