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

school in Wisconsin, back when Kierk, ennui laying on him in a grime of nicotinic soot, had seen clearly his difference, his eventual end. One day he had gone to get the supplies for the neuroanatomy class: human brains. They were crowded in a white plastic bucket, suspended in formalin, bumping into one another like a school of marine life set to dead dreaming. They bobbed back and forth as Kierk had removed two, one after another. Each time his gloved hand had to cup the corralled reef of the cerebellum to keep it from detaching. He laid them delicately in a metal pan and took them glistening back to his lab partner. Then Kierk had stood posed with a scalpel in hand, staring. The classroom, the people, the voice of his partner reading aloud the lesson plan (step one: identify the central sulcus) entirely faded to the periphery, and instead all Kierk could do, sound and light and thought red-shifting in recession, was stare in deafness at the two brains, one bisected mediosagittally, the other still whole. In the buzzing deafness Kierk felt the problem was presented here so starkly, the problem he was most attuned to, his intellectual resonant frequency. How could such a gelatinous structure, suspended in fluid, sloshing to-and-fro under the force of acceleration, stabilized by the plush dura layer, the silky strands of the arachnoid layer, the skin of the pia matter, hold within its electrical storm the thin and definite and complex geometry of thought—of feeling, of blues and greens, of orgasms, of dying, of Jesus’ time on the cross, of every possible experience—the naked axe of phenomenological realism cut through materialism like a dream of shattering clocks. If such a graying and solid object, wrinkled with sulci and gyri, something you can hold in your hand, could be conscious by just the erotic swap of chemical packages, this is followed by the more terrifying awful amazing thought—then what isn’t conscious?

“Light is both a particle and a wave,” Kierk had whispered, and, his partner paused in perplexed expression, Kierk stripped himself of his nitrile gloves, muttering the mantra over and over, in his haste to leave nearly knocking over an empty beaker at another pair’s table. An aggressive question was thrown at his departing back. Thinking to himself—Both a particle and a wave. Both a particle and a wave. A particle and a wave. A particle and a wave. Some things have a dual nature. Subjective and objective. Subjective and objective. The brain is both subjective and objective. It’s a paradox. For how can a thing be both subjective and objective at the same time? But perhaps paradox is merely an opportunity for transcendence.

Ignoring everything, he shrugged on his black peacoat and stalked out of the Medical Sciences building and across the pavement of University Avenue, which was windy with leaves, moving off under a sky that was gray-white and infinite in all directions.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up to a concave whiteness, his body strangely placed, and in his slow movements of coming to he’s shifting his arms and legs about in this slick technologically alien cocoon, above him, a ceiling stretching out in the bright clinical light, and around him, the curved surface cupping his body. The light above hurts his eyes, one hand going up to rub his face. Then he’s suddenly fully awake and fully clothed, startling in his slouched position. Kierk is in the tub.

“. . . What? Why the fuck?”

Amnesiac, he digs around to check his phone. He’s late. With half of him pondering, worrying, the other half rushes from his apartment all the way to lab, sitting down at his desk pretending to be working, still wearing the clothes he woke up in, just as Karen comes out and waves him over to her office.

“How’s everything going?” she asks as he closes the door, still blinking away sleep. “I wanted to catch up because I’m leaving for a conference. I’ll be back next week.”

“I’ve, ah, run into some problems. There’s the issue of exactly how few measurements of consciousness can even be applied. Most are so ill-formed they don’t even make sense to apply.”

“Any good news?” Karen says with a chuckle.

“Actually I’ve been working on this little theory, more like an equation or two, to measure consciousness. Just something new to toy with right now.”

“That doesn’t sound like the first paper that the committee decided on.”

“It might go into a second paper. Maybe where I’m able to present some of my own ideas.”

“I’d like you . . . we’d like you . . . to focus on the first paper for now. That’s what the committee talked about. That’s how you’ll be awarded your PhD. Or alternatively the collaboration you were planning with Atif and Carmen. Everyone would love that. I bet you could get a first-tier journal.”

“One of my coauthors was hit by a subway train.”

“. . . Well, yes. Of course. But Carmen mentioned to me that you two were still working on that project? She said you were brainstorming together.”

“Yup.”

“How’s that going?”

“Real well. Real well. I think we’re onto something.”

“Well okay then. Good to hear. So that’s what you’ll work on when I’m away?”

“Definitely.”

For a reason he doesn’t wish to explicitly consider, Kierk is attempting to find the roof again. The bones. But upon reaching the top of the stairs and finding no rooftop door, he realizes he is in the wrong stairwell. He backtracks and wanders around the top floor for a while, trying to find the other paths to the roof, but runs into doors to which he does not have access to: his keycard merely makes the locks beep red. He passes the breathing machinery, all organic with pumps and fluids and the ticks of recorded electricity. An autoclave sits like a dragon and boils the entries in its belly with loud clanging. Finally, he finds the door at the head of a stairwell with the flaked NO—XIT sign. Shouldering it