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

open and eaten out his heart, all in plain view of his friends and family, who had watched it happen, issued warnings as dire as the young man would allow and then those same friends and relatives had to look on with the same morbid fascination felt when watching one insect cannibalize another gruesomely, as this witty and skinny, smiling and blonde, charming and singularly intelligent, aloof and unpredictable young woman had utterly destroyed the young lawyer, he who had imagined her one day on a beach somewhere in whipping white mouthing, “I Do,” but instead she had left after just three months, after licking her fingertips clean of her meal, her pretty mouth smeared with blood and chunks of gore, standing beside the couch in the subtly ornate living room of his family’s beach home, looking around as if saying: what? what? Clearly there has been some misunderstanding, you didn’t think this was going to be it, oh, you did (how much of her knew he thought?), and leaving the family with a corpse next to that plastic-wrapped couch (the scene of the final massacre), a corpse that would take years to revive, perhaps some five-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapy, and it was probable that even then every woman the young lawyer met ever after would be compared and contrasted, seen to fit in congruency or break in some asymmetry, to her. At first she had felt guilty, but it really wasn’t her fault, she had been as clear as possible (hadn’t she?) that this probably wasn’t going to be enough, that she wanted something different than everyone else had right from the beginning, and hadn’t he agreed anyways, proffered himself even, like certain species of male mantises?

Research articles, covered in marks made with Atif’s pen, are scattered around Kierk’s bed. Books are splayed out on the floor, the ones Atif had mentioned in his notes. Reading neuroscience textbooks had always given Kierk that creepy feeling of being a machine reading its own blueprints. Now though he’s just lying on his bed, a thing coming apart, pulled at a frayed edge and unraveling into spools of string. He has been thinking about consciousness, or rather thinking about Atif’s thinking about consciousness, which he finds surprisingly sophisticated. Atif had been bothered by the same issues, found some of the same dead ends. And within the notes, Kierk had found the occasional cartoon drawing of a great eye with spindly human legs.

The softness of the bed is rising around him like dough. He bakes in the pleasurable heat, is swallowed, drifts off into a sea. Images come and go, some of them are of her, he’s not dreaming yet, he’s in the lands between, an indefinable time erased every night by retrograde amnesia, but it is here that he sees a series of doors, doors slamming shut, again and again, echoing in their closing, cutting off a sound from the other side, the babbling of an idiot, a scream, and then slam, and then silence, until even this image cannot maintain coherence and Kierk dissolves into mere associations, a million things at once, the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle thrown against the wall. Sleep is a series of doors slamming shut.

WEDNESDAY

Kierk wakes up like a fish twisting on the line, struggling against the force reeling him into the world. There is already someone standing on shore, a form in the light with a hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun, hair whipping behind her. Throwing off his sheet, Kierk knows what has woken him just ahead of his alarm—expectation of her.

Among the heterogeneous pedestrians that crowd the streets of New York, Kierk doesn’t look that out of place, but the moment he steps into the refrigerator air of the CNS he feels ridiculous. When he walks into the lab Carmen, turning in her seat, becomes locked in humor. A hand tries to cover her reaction as she, who is quite normally dressed, rushes up to him.

“Oh come on, you’re not even wearing yours,” he says, looking her over.

“I am not insane, so I didn’t wear to work my costume-slash-disguise-slash whatever that is. I brought a change of clothes.”

“Oh . . . right. In California this would actually be pretty normal.”

“Well, it’s . . . magnificent.”

“Thanks.”

“Here, look at this little pamphlet I got of theirs.”

Carmen hands him the SAAR pamphlet. Flipping through it he sees the disturbing images of vivisections, experimental animals mixed freely with scenes from factory farms. On the front of it is a lone rhesus macaque, the photo a dense grain of color showing that it has been scalped and one of its eyes has been sewed shut. The remaining open eye is a black stone, a dark planet far beyond the others tracing out a long elliptical orbit where it is always night.

Carmen’s head pops into Karen’s office.

“Carmen—what can I help you with?”

“I just wanted you to know that, um, despite the unfortunate event of Atif’s passing, Kierk and I are still going to be working on that project together.”

“Oh, the brain-to-brain communication in monkeys?”

“Yup! Just wanted to let you know that if we’re both gone that’s why. Like this afternoon we’re going to go down to the primate lab. But we’ll be around.”

Karen seems to be smiling subtly when she says—“Okay. Sounds good.”

Carmen nods to her and exits, walking past Kierk, who is emitting a soft jingle as he types (there’s a bell somewhere on his person), and when he looks up questioningly she gives him a thumbs-up and continues on past through the quiet working bustle to get coffee and a quick snack. The lab itself is not something most nonscientists would immediately recognize as a lab, looking as it does more like an office space well-equipped with broad-screened Macs all separated off by modular panels. Ergonomic chairs with wheels and an adjustable back are standard. There are probably about thirty such workspaces arranged in segmented cubicles. The first hints are the books—Monkey