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

the city had become a playground, and sitting outside the cafe sipping her tea she watches the families stroll by and feels that something had broken irreversibly in her at the same time that the knot of blood had released on Sunday, something untied, bloody fingers unclasping from a tightly clenched fist, and synchronously something even deeper, a supporting subterranean structure, had cracked in response and wept its heartblood. She had spent the weekend drifting from bedroom to bathroom clutching a heating pad to her stomach and moaning whenever she sat down. Should she stop seeing him? Is this part of the plan, that grand plan she’s had since she was nineteen to become a successful, independent woman scientist? Because this didn’t feel like it was part of that plan. No, this was a sign from a God she doesn’t know if she believes in, this is revelation time, this is get-your-fucking-life-together time. A mask is settling, being fitted, she is discarding things in this cafe, coming to conclusions. Behind her, on the metal chair that is hot in the sun, she will leave a molted skin. Outwardly, however, there is calm. She quietly sips at her tea, she eats the cookie in little dainty bites with one hand held underneath to catch crumbs. When the bill comes, she signs her name with surety.

“It’s so hot out here! Yup, those are vegan, everything is vegan. Yeah, just pull up two of those chairs over there. Sorry, we’re organized, but disorganized, ya know?”

“Um, Allen, maybe we could ask if anyone wants to sit inside? Like, maybe the outside is problematic if someone has allergies?”

“Oh yeah, sorry, I didn’t ask. Is the location comfortable for everyone . . .? Good! Good to see everyone again! Thanks so much for showing up today, and uh, supporting our mission. I really think we have a lot of forward momentum. The student body, or at least the right parts of the student body, are energized. They see what’s going on. Everyone by now has heard about the occupation we did in the neuroscience class. I was there. A lot of cries for justice, the faculty didn’t know what to do, the department didn’t know what to do. The professor was so funny, he was like—‘What?’ He tried to say stuff and talk to us about animal research but we were all banging on the tables. Disrupt and Disseminate. That’s stage one.”

“Achoo!”

“Bless you! So anyways, we’ve got, well, let’s just do introductions for the two new members, or potential members. Feel free to introduce yourselves, just say maybe why you’re interested in SAAR and what brought you to New York.”

“Hey everybody, we’re both seniors at NYU, and, oh yeah, my name is Jim, by the way, hey everybody.”

“—and I’m Carol.”

“Hi!”

“And we’re both—”

“We’re both interested in the scene, you guys have been a pretty effective force, which is rare, you know, like where I was before I transferred, they just don’t take this really seriously so it’s nice to find a place where people do. We heard about you because of the occupation.”

“Carol, where’d you transfer from?”

“Oh, from UMass Amherst, it’s in like, the middle of Massachusetts.”

“And Jim?”

“I’ve been at NYU for three years but I’ve only recently gotten like, morally serious about this issue. But I’ve kind of always been into animal rights. I actually ran a chapter of PETA in high school.”

“That’s great. That’s actually exactly what I did, I also ran a chapter but it was in Brooklyn, where were you at?”

“Um, New Hampshire, actually.”

“I didn’t know it was widespread enough to have branches there.”

“I think it’s rare but I was lucky. Lucky Jim, that’s me.”

“Okay, great, well, so Carol, how’d you become interested in this stuff?”

“Well, okay, I transferred here, I mentioned that originally I was from UMass Amherst, but it wasn’t really my scene. So there I was, like, someone who worked in the biology building, like a work-study job. Well, I also ordered things for professors, and they’d be just like, hey, I want some primers from this company, here are the numbers, and I’d be like, what are primers, you know? But they’d give me like, these order numbers and the professors would just come to pick it up. Anyways, I’d been there like, a few weeks and I order this thing for this professor, I don’t know what it is, it’s just from this company. A couple days later I’m alone in the office and I sign for it and it’s got like, air-holes, which like, okay, I didn’t know we’d be ordering live animals, so I open up the box, and inside are just these little white rats, which as babies are like, really cute, and they’re all moving about in this straw stuffing stuff. And you can like, enter the order number, and so I’m reading about what they are and what they are used for, and I read that what they did was that they, the researchers at this company, had injected them with some genes, like a virus with genes in it or something, when the rats were like, embryos, and these are genes from humans that grow human neurons. So these rats are like, rats, on the outside, but on the inside, their neurons are all human neurons, like actual human neurons inside these rat bodies, and I swear, one of them was like, standing on his hind legs and sniffing up at me, just watching like, making real eye contact with those red eyes. And I just freaked, I couldn’t like, understand what this meant and it was like, a million degrees outside, like so incredibly hot even in the office and I just couldn’t deal so I like, plastered up the box again with packing tape and just took it outside and just like, ran around with it for a while. And no one stopped me or anything, I was just outside on this brutally hot day with this incredible low