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

sky, just so menacing and hot, and there’s this pond in the middle of the UMass campus and I was down by the pond just walking around holding the box under my arm, and everyone is just walking around so nonchalantly, so normally, and I’m holding these rats with human neurons and I can’t stop thinking about what the researchers there are going to do to them, like implant them with those skullcaps and stuff, but then also I’m like, holding an invasive species you know, like what if these rats are supersmart and can outcompete all the other rats? The sun was reflecting off everything, the water, the tall buildings, getting me in the eyes, it was just so hot, and I’m standing on this little bridge right in the middle of the pond with people walking by and I drop the box into the water.”

“Oh my god.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“God that sucks.”

“You couldn’t have done anything differently.”

“I just didn’t know what to do.”

“That’s, oh my god, that’s such an intense story. Listen, if you’d like, if you’re ready, we have a newsletter that you could write something up in. Because that was also kind of beautiful. Like in a way. I don’t know . . .”

“Thanks, Allen, I’d love that, thanks. I thought you all might, well . . . Oh, and I got fired, by the way, it’s one of the reasons I came here.”

“Yeah, they can’t stand having anyone stand up to them.”

“I wasn’t. At the time I wasn’t trying to do anything like that, but yeah, I feel that way now.”

“Wait Jim, you were at UMass too?”

“No, I was here at NYU. Have been for three years. Her backstory is more elaborate.”

“Oh, right, right, okay.”

“And how do you two know each other?”

“Oh, let’s just tell them. So Jim and I have been dating for a couple months now. Ever since I moved here, we met and it was like—bam! That’s it. Keep trying to change how he dresses though.”

“You guys are suuuch a cute couple.”

“Oh thank you, thank you. We hear that all the time. No need to be embarrassed, Jim.”

“Oh, guys, I made vegan muffins!”

“Achoo!”

“Bless you, Carol.”

Tonight sleep is elusive for Kierk. He keeps looking over at the dark of the hallway door, the maw of the bathroom door. There are far too many doors and nooks and crannies in this apartment, areas he cannot see in the crouching darkness, a slim lock on the door, an open window, a thing beyond, a stillness to make movement in. He’s been tossing and turning in the oppressively hot breeze from the open window, and he keeps replaying some deeper intuition inside, a stone unspoken, dropped into a well. Because he has been dwelling with a brain close to dream on the mystery of the roof, on bones. He feels febrile, insane, he keeps clenching his teeth and hissing into the pillow, there’s a feeling like a needle is being held inches from his eye and his whole body reacts, his fingers grip the sheets, his feet dig for purchase. One foot bumps up against a book in bed with him and Kierk goes berserk kicking it off. Something is wrong, he feels he has been poisoned. He lies panting in the heat. Soon all the covers join the excommunicated book on the floor. The kitchen is a whole other room beyond him, anything could be happening in it. The suicide-proof bars on the window mean that only the most deformable body could enter through it—a thing with suckers and a beak for a mouth, stinking of ambergris. He gets up and tugs the window closed, then lies back down. This is all because, he thinks, while walking back after the meeting he had passed again Bleecker Street Station. Kierk had taken up position sitting on a stone wall opposite the entrance and there he stayed as the sunset and night came on fully. With the patience of a hunter in a blind he had charted the comings and goings of those who entered the subway station, trying to note each in turn but just as often drifting off in thoughts on consciousness. Eventually, the people entering and exiting had become a slow trickle, and Kierk, immensely bored, had made his way home. But here he couldn’t focus, couldn’t sleep. And now he is eyeing that slit of light from the hallway, which he can see in a diagonal line of sight from his bed, because he is sure that he had seen something move, that a shadow had drifted across then stopped, then withdrew, but only slightly. He could have been followed back. From the meeting. From the subway. From both. Something just now had clearly moved, a person making no noise but standing outside his door, still and patient, breathing through their mouth to minimize noise. Maybe who or what had knocked on his door previously. Or maybe a thing that arranges the bones of pigeons into macabre patterns. Kierk lies on his side utterly still. There is a heavy breathing that is not his own. It is wet and deep. A protuberance of shadow moves to reveal more of the thin slit of light, very obvious, very definite, and Kierk is lithely on his feet, slipping quickly across the bedroom and into the kitchen, where he, very slowly, opens a drawer and withdraws a large kitchen knife. Holding the knife in one hand and keeping his eye on the door he locates some boxers in the dark with his toe and quietly shuffles them on. Now his anger’s rising—in the dark Kierk’s face becomes a rictus, a sneering grimace that exposes his teeth. He flips his grip to underhanded, for slashing, and so it would be harder in a struggle for an assailant to grab hold of his wrist and immobilize the knife. Then he rips open the door and leaps into the hallway in his boxers, the knife low and leading