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

hard, he bounces off to a loud clank. He looks over the edge of the railing all the way down and neither sees nor hears anyone. So he kicks it as hard as he can, once, twice, three times before his heel explodes in pain and Kierk hops up and down—Fuck fuck fuck—now leaning against the stairwell wall, one hand on his hip too, eyeing the door vehemently. Defeated, he limps away from his search.

Against his better judgment Kierk buys another pack of cigarettes at a bodega and, looking up and down the busy street, lights up in the braggart heat. Sigh of relief. The palindromic drone of cars. People talking on cell phones. Night is the old Indian woman discarding wilting flowers on the sidewalk in a heap, looking up at him from dumping the cut stems from an old white plastic bucket. He feels he is already forgetting California, that everything prior to this was a dream someone else had. Today he’s been toying with the idea all day that consciousnesses are tautologies tied in nature—he’s taken Schopenhauer’s “world knot” seriously in his wondering at exactly how one might tie such a knot: through reentrant cortical connections, or through some kind of meta-mappings of sensory maps, and so on, but it’s never enough, it’s never radical enough to produce phenomenology from mere wrappings and recursion. Just another thing to add to the scrapheap. His shoe pokes at the pile of cut stems. He’s reminded of the infinite theories of Adolf Lindenbaum’s work, who showed that Boolean operators could make a lattice out of the infinite set of all possible theories, all possible models, every thinkable thought of the world—the vast majority of which are wildly incorrect. Lindenbaum showed how to order (but not to search) this vast library, which holds all truths. Somewhere, lost in that tower of Babel, that library of Borges, was the theory of consciousness. The one and only correct theory an infinitesimal needle in an infinite haystack. To see a glimpse . . . It would fit in how many English words, how many sentences? Half a paragraph, for those with the right vocabulary? Would it use information geometry? Thermodynamical work? Autopoietic symbol construction? Algorithmic complexity? Computation? Symbolic recursion? Stacking of hierarchical receptive fields all the way up to grandmother neurons? Quantum physics? Would any such theory give the tools necessary to describe exactly the inner life of the same Adolf Lindenbaum on that beautiful summer day in Lithuania, 1941, as he was rounded up by Nazis along with hundreds of other Jewish intelligentsia, all marched under that cheerful summer sun to a place of deep ashy pits and tall trees and faraway bird calls. Stand around the pit. Line up. Don’t look behind you at the deformed faces amid the ashes. Pray. Know that the idea of God is a member of your ordered set of infinite theories, but hope now that He is a member of the by-definition true theories, the set of tautologies, the theories that must necessarily exist. Your heart is impossibly loud and the sky is impossibly blue. You are so afraid but cannot move. When it comes it’s sudden, loud noises accompanying a rough push back like being shoved hard but in many directions at once and your body isn’t really your body anymore. Then you’re lying there mortally wounded among the dead, and all the theories in all the world bleed from you and slip into the sea of ash. All the dark embers are set to flame, a cigarette sparking against concrete, a heel crushing it out.

“You know it’s only been a week since . . .” Jessica trails off as she shuffles off her coat and hangs it on her chair at the bar.

“God, I know. It feels so much longer than that,” Carmen commiserates, setting down their beers on the table. As Jessica picks one up she says—“Should we be drinking again? I feel weird.”

Kierk raises his glass. After a moment so do Carmen, Jessica, and Alex, and all four put them together to clinks.

“To Atif. May we honor his memory with deed,” Kierk says. Carmen and he make eye contact as they sip.

Carmen asks—“So, Jessica, I haven’t gotten to really talk to you about that night.”

“Oh, God. No, Mike and I didn’t hook up. Sorry. Too much information.”

“Well, how much do you actually remember about that night?”

Jessica makes a face, shakes her head. She looks reluctant. “I . . . I actually don’t remember much. The hookah place. And I remember the cab I got with Mike, kind of. Like a blur, or like, the sensation of walking. I must have been really, really drunk. And then the next thing I know I’m in my bed and it’s morning and I have the worst, I mean, the worst hangover I’ve had. Ever. And it’s weird because I never get hangovers. My dad is like that too. I didn’t learn about Atif till Sunday and the email. God, his poor mother.”

“So you don’t remember how you got home?” Alex asks.

“No,” she says, hesitantly.

“What about being with Mike afterward?” Carmen asks. “Does that fire any neurons?”

Jessica pauses. “Well, I don’t really remember, but I asked Mike. Apparently he and I took a cab back to my place, where I, just like, collapsed. But he, like, helped me to my bed and there was a pot beside me when I woke up. Which was really nice of him.”

“So he was there for a while?”

“Yeah, I guess. I haven’t like, talked to him too much about it.”

“And you were still in your dress?” Carmen asks.

Jessica set down her beer. “Why? What are you asking?” she says defensively.

“No, listen, okay, nobody remembers anything about that night.”

“None of you remember either?”

Alex and Kierk shake their heads and Carmen raises her eyebrows as if to say—see!

Jessica puzzles her mouth. “Weird. Because it’s like, if he was drunk, and that’s why he . . . fell. But when we were