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

they walk up the path to the front door, their suitcases a track of noise behind them in the dark. Put the luggage at the bottom of the hallway stairs. The house is freezing, so find the thermostat and adjust it up. Get out of this suit. Get out of this dress. Brush their teeth. Put socks on. Collapse into bed, but not before resting on the mantle the gold and glamorous Nobel Prize on its stand. Then the lights are turned out and they lie next to each other in the dark. Besides their wizened forms underneath the sheets the house is empty. There is no one to tuck into bed, no turning of a small body from its back to its side, no pajamas to put on one leg at a time, no small hands, no small toes. There is no small bed frame to check under for monsters, there are no children’s books on the mahogany bookcase, no toys left underfoot. There are no bedtime stories, no giggling and soft sleepy yawns, no restless visits in the blue-black of the morning, no small hands, no small toes. There is just the empty altar of the house, a piece of metal on the mantle, their age, and the haunting by a child that never was.

Carmen stands under an overhang with wet splotches all across her shirt, her ponytail now a wet rope, and she’s wiping away the drops clinging to the fine hairs of her arms like ants, which had been the advance guard to the army that is now marching just beyond her little rectangle of shelter. The street is a sheet of water. The rain has taken on its own patterns, a series of shifting frames spliced at just wide enough of an interval to bob up as discrete objects in her stream of consciousness. Cars come and go like ghost submersibles. Under the same overhang is a girl, maybe an NYU undergraduate, having taken shelter at the same time as Carmen when the sky broke with a crack and the white noise of rain boomed up the avenue and all the humans scrambled for cover. On the concrete wall behind them both are words writ large in red spray paint: DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. Carmen feels camaraderie with this girl—she looks as miserable as Carmen, and though they haven’t spoken since they both nodded to each other upon reaching the overhang, and although the girl has been texting on her phone this entire time, Carmen feels that they are sharing this little intimate experience. She had also been wearing mascara like Carmen so now it looks like they’ve been crying together, two sad raccoons huddled from the rain.

Then through the shadows of rain a young man under a giant umbrella comes jogging up. The girl hugs and kisses him, casts a quick look of apology at Carmen, and then the two of them vanish into the rain, leaving Carmen alone in front of the red lettering, shivering and hugging herself.

“Oh, give me a break,” she says, her teeth chattering.

She stares out into the rain at the barely visible entrance to the church where the Following Brothers of Christ are supposed to be meeting. What the hell is she doing here? Of course she can account for the material sequence of events: that night, the train, the email from Atif’s mother, the investigation, Kierk’s finding of the pamphlets. But these were merely the surface occurrences, not explanations of her own motivation. Carmen knows that even for a simple artificial neural network, trained by humans to, say, identify pictures of cats versus dogs in photographs, expressing the why behind any decision it made was in many cases mathematically impossible. A dark truth that made the naïve ways people tried to explain human behavior nothing more than a series of fads and post-hoc explanations, from Freud to therapy couches to the physiological analogy of “trauma”—what hubris, to think that what was impossible for a few hundred lines of code was possible for the brain! Perhaps the true prime mover of her motivation could only be found in some memory hidden deep down in the weights of connections between neurons, a delicate piece of neural lace that if held up with the smallest of tweezers would appear barely a gossamer strand of a spider’s web, but if unraveled in some still-unknown way would contain a single memory: as a girl she’d been given D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Carmen the little girl had splayed it out on the floor almost every night, and leaning over it had flipped through those colorful pages, hypnotized by tales of gods and monsters and titans and men and women, and within those pages one had been a colorful sketch of a woman surrounded by impish monsters, a woman who had seemed the epitome of beauty to Carmen as a child, a woman who was drawn inexorably to a box, haunted by it, until she had finally thrown it open. While for the adult Carmen, approaching this mystery in a scientific way is important to her—gather evidence, be open to possibilities, rely on both deduction and induction—those scientific methods don’t account for her abiding certainty that there is something to investigate, no, that certainty came from that young girl crouching over the colorful pages. There are boxes in the world that contain mysteries, and they must be opened; such irrational faith is what exists behind all of science.

“Brrrrrr,” Carmen says, pacing from one side of the overhang to the other, crossing in front of the giant red letters.

Then through the rain she makes out a form sprinting across the street, and after clearing a knee-deep puddle by the curb in a giant flying leap Kierk is under the overhang, completely soaked like he had just emerged clothes and all from a pool.

“Oof!” he says, as she hugs him, laughing.

“You’re freezing.” He’s rubbing her arms, which are suddenly lined with goose bumps as they pull