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

Cicero, Ramon Llull, and the origin of the concentric circles on his back—Giordano Bruno. Then he filters out everything. The outside city sounds become a white noise. His whole mind is now laid out as landscape, passages and buildings of artful Grecian architecture, workshops cluttered with hand-drawn maps and wooden globes, beakers and trigonometric instruments, chalkboards lined with mathematical scrawl, the reliquaries of books, hanging gardens, pools with bottoms of smooth white stones traversed by bulbous-headed fish, and a room with a view and a typewriter sitting by the window. Beyond this small village of civilization are the desert regions where desire and ambition rage as dervishes of weather and sand, and where half-buried pharaonic halls contain within them the stone statues of himself, their visages worn in the timeless heat, all bearing different versions of his face. Kierk summons forth a white space where his mental avatar appears to him, awaiting attributes like at the start of a video game, and he first wraps it in the clothes he had been wearing, then sets it walking out of the hookah bar, the rain is added in, Alex is set laughing on the steps, Atif is set standing looking up, Carmen is set smiling at him. From the surrounding white infinity a taxicab drives into the little domain of color and objects. As the avatar climbs into the cab the perspective shifts and it is Kierk climbing into the cab, Carmen scooting up her butt into his lap. Rain on his hands coming through the window. Her hands over his hands in the spray. Leon in the front seat, the outline of his head shifting about. The jerk of a stop. The form of Leon is exiting, leaving just Alex and Kierk and Carmen, and Alex goes to the front, and then the lurch of a start again, Carmen ending up in his lap, thrown over him, body unto body, hair mixing so close now, their faces inches from each other, the exotica of another’s breath, lips meeting, her tongue surprisingly cool, wet from rain, the incredible texture of an unknown mouth responding, everything spinning but her mouth, hands gripping at each other, trying to break free of the material world and into each other, and then there is a wall of obsidian black, perfectly smooth and texture-less and extending like a monolith up and up forever. Kierk opens his eyes to the passing lines of people, the burned-out cigarette in his hand. If any part of him remembers the further events that memory is wrapped up as tight as the higher dimensions of string theory, everywhere and nowhere in him all at once.

Professor Norman Bennett watches the verbose young man in front of him pick his nails down to the quick as he talks, a rolling expanse of words, a prolix assault that Norman can’t quite make sense of. They’re supposed to be having a meeting about scheduling participants for neuroimaging runs (Norman has surreptitiously checked his calendar twice to make sure), but instead Kierk is talking about subtle biases in the setup of neuroimaging experiments, and something about “tracing causation in reentrant chaotic systems is a mathematical impossibility.” Indeed, he’s still blathering on—“. . . I mean it’s basically a convenient happenstance that hemoglobin responds differently to magnetic fields based on whether it’s bound to oxygen. Sure, neurons in a particular brain region might increase their energy-hungry firing and therefore the vascular system initiates a hemodynamic response bringing more blood to the area with increased glucose need. In theory! So yes, presumably this hemodynamic response increases and decreases with neuronal firing. But we all know how sluggish it is. The blood takes two seconds to rush to the aid of neurons in need, and oh hey, it’s variable in its intensity and timing, meaning that fMRI has a temporal resolution that’s like averaging a symphony into a single note . . .”

The girl, Jessica, sitting next to Kierk and nodding, is looking more and more convinced. Norman holds up a hand.

“Thank you, Kierk, but just so I know, as a Crick Scholar, are you planning on actually doing any neuroimaging while you’re here at the Center?”

“Honestly, no.”

“Okay, well, let’s focus on that, not on the effectiveness of neuroimaging as such, hmm. I have a meeting in a few minutes,” Norman lies. He stands up behind his desk and begins to move toward his office door, a trick he has found which causes people to begin automatically retreating. Kierk and Jessica are ushered out, thanking him for his time. As the two of them recede down the hall, he hears them mention “Bennett” and “Nobel” and smiles as he closes his office door, goes and sits behind his desk. He leans back in his chair, reliving in his mind the handshake with the king of Sweden, that red carpet, redder than anything he’d ever seen, the flushed pride of his wife. Yes, her pride. His research on functional magnetic resonance imaging, the first real leader in the field, led to him sharing the prize in physiology with two colleagues.

In this, his memory is transparent crystal—he’s almost there again on the plane ride back from Stockholm. First class. He and his wife are holding hands, hands beginning to vein with age. The endless parade of parties and processions is over. They have laughed together and danced together, along with the other laureates, in a ballroom of red and gold. She sleeps but he can’t, so he watches the in-flight movie. It’s a romantic comedy. They are both exhausted as they take a taxi from the airport back to the house. The road is dark and bumpy and hypnotic. Looking out the window their home comes up on them in the darkness. He pays the cabdriver and assists his sleepy wife out of the back seat. He worries about her. It is December and very cold. The lawn is frosted a ghostly white and their breath comes as fog as