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

“Okay, Mr. Dramatic,” Alex says, “we’re not leaving you anywhere. Let’s go. Come on.”

“This is all second-order reality anyway. The only really real thing is consciousness.”

“Kierk, I never know what you’re talking about,” Jessica says, moving to help, but Carmen gets between her and Kierk. With a hand under each arm Carmen and Alex prepare to lift.

“Kierk, we’re going to lift you up okay, and take you home. You ready?”

Kierk says upward at them—“To a materialist there’s no beginning and no end to a Rube Goldberg machine. Trace its history back to the big bang and forward to heat death. Nothing starts and nothing ever stops for them. It can’t be true. It’s too absurd.”

Carmen pauses. “Maybe I’m drunk too, but that just made a lot of sense to me,” she says.

“Alright, let’s get him up . . .”

SATURDAY

Kierk wakes up and rubs the salt of sleep from his eyes, rolling over, his horizon the pillow. Maybe he’s still drunk because the dream had been drunken, loose with imagery.

Some sort of Grecian monster, a surreal nightmare of a thing, had chased the fleeing Kierk into the benthic dark of the CNS, its stamping hooves following close behind, hide and seek, the thing behind him closing in, and he knows that if it finds him it will dig out his intestines, turn him into spilling offal, so Kierk keeps running until he’s deep down in the basement. There he had flung open a door and found waiting for him a pale rubbery white wall, betraying a giantism that went back and back, revealing what was actually a great whale literally under the entire building, in fact holding up the entire structure that was resting on its monstrous bulk. Kierk, thinking beyond the curvature of his pillow now, the dream fading like an afterimage, wonders at the lack of realism. Not concerning the dream’s events, but in his own reaction—that if you are being chased by a monster the most vivid thought would be that monsters existed at all, that up until now you’ve had the ontology of the universe entirely wrong. That’s how he knew he hadn’t really been there, because in the dream world you’re dreaming up a self too, it’s not you in the dream at all. . .

The bustling dusk streets are so hot and humid Kierk feels his blood might curdle as he lugs his grocery bags and dodges through the crowd.

As much as Kierk might protest at the characterization, the grocery bags attest that he’s really more of an aesthete than an ascetic. In California he ate only cheap sandwiches, pizza; he picked through cans of vegetables using plastic forks, ate handfuls of spinach directly out of the bag. Not just because of his meager budget but also it seemed a metaphysical statement, that this was fuel, just fuel, for an engine that sputtered the more he tugged on the pull cord. Now his three heavy bags are filled with figs, lobster salad, truffle oil, arugula, several cow’s milk cheeses, a half pound of sea bass, extra virgin olive oil, garlic and fennel, some cooking wine, parsley and rosemary, polenta, garlic and herb crackers, salt, pepper, butter, a lemon. In another bag is a bottle of Riesling from Alsace.

At the steps of Union Square a small crowd has gathered around a street preacher standing on a wooden footstool, one hand raised in oratory. Most of the crowd appears to be accidental audience members. Kierk, passing through, stops to set down the bags and tie his shoe and wipe the sweat from his brow.

“And it is not JUST that they ask us to take a knee, and say that science is salvation, but that they force us to embrace it with open arms! Should we embrace the ATOM BOMB?! Should we embrace CLONES?! Should we embrace drugs that create ARTIFICIAL HAPPINESS?! We fund this research but give no money to those suffering on the street! We fund scientists who say they want to reduce humankind to biology!”

Kierk straightens up and looks over the crowd. He moves to the front concrete steps where there is clear line of sight. The street preacher is around Kierk’s age and is wearing a red bowtie despite the heat. Sweat stains are clearly visible under his arms against his white dress shirt. A poster stands next to him with the words in blocky yellow letters: THE LIE OF EVOLUTION.

When the street preacher shouts the words he spits them out like he’s been masticating them for a while, waiting for this. Kierk imagines in his personal life he would be shy and avoid eye contact, a bent head with a clean haircut, but once he’s on his little footstool he spits and seethes. While examining him head to toe Kierk is also realizing what has struck him, a thing making its escape, a dark association—words identical to those on dozens of purple pamphlets spilled out over the subway floor.

Kierk sets his grocery bags by a tourist couple and moves through the crowd to the front. The street preacher is yelling out the running prose of himself—excising bile like the draining of a medieval humor; he’s all spleen, lip spittle, and theological tax returns.

“—too long have our children been taught the undignified lie that we evolved from apes. But there are IN PRINCIPLE reasons to deny evolution! Yet this is not taught. The corruption prevents the return to the fold. The fight against modern science is done with the sword of faith. The rule of Christ is at stake, and unless these deceits are cast down—”

A few of the more downtrodden have separated themselves from the cosmopolitan passerby who are clearly taking this as entertainment. Three men in the front are ragged, unhealthy, moving in an offbeat tempo to the preacher’s speech.

“—and it is only through coming to THE LORD that you can defy such forces, that we can become human once again, not animal, but