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

Kierk has been sitting in lab since early morning, paper spilling out over his desk, each page covered in notations and equations and diagrams, the whirring of his multiple computers heating up the area around him like thermodynamical demons. Nearby undergraduates sit fanning themselves. The first paper, an overview of theories of consciousness and the application of them to a computer model of the cortex, is a mess. The truth is that it felt like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in high wind. And Kierk wrestled those flat, wide, bendy, wind-catching sheets across a field one at a time, trying to construct something, anything. The most hobbling issue was that the measures were so vague, so nonmathematical, that it drove Kierk to fits of frustration, and he found himself trying to formalize the theories, building on them even though he knew they were wrong, just so that there would be something definite to disprove. Except even in his efforts to improve them so that he could disprove them they would give way, the materials were no good, and the balsa sheet would fly off into the field and he would watch it go tumbling away, a piece of matter so animated in making its escape it seemed almost ambulatory, wood becoming an animal that would live as long as the wind kept blowing.

So after a few hours he, exhausted, hot from the computers, had gone to take a walk in Washington Square Park, joining the congregation around the geyser of the fountain. Teenage girls take off their shoes and sit with their feet dangling over the rim of the fountain into the cool watery spray. There is a grand piano out over to one side of the fountain, and Kierk recognizes the strains of an Erik Satie étude floating over to him on the air. Near the piano, surrounded by a low crowd of children, a woman has a kind of string contraption that blows huge soap bubbles larger than some of the kids. The bubbles gleam their oily curvaceous nature, vary from perfect spheres to elongated spheroids, platonic entities from outside the world forced to take form within it, lose their way and their nature. It’s windy and so the bubbles take flight in swarms all moving in the same direction, chased by the clapping and outstretched hands of the children, some flying low into their arms but others escaping into the air, become floating orbs passing above the piano, some even making it through the far stone arch. There they cohere, change, decohere. Sometimes two bubbles travel together for a time, then split off. Or a single bubble yearns to be three, while other times two bubbles will seek to merge into one. Sometimes a bubble will completely contain another one, unified but still with their surface boundaries intact, and carry on until they wink out together. When a bubble perishes it becomes a wisp, a vanishing string, or splits into smaller, rounded marbles, all going off in different directions. For a long time Kierk sits on a bench by the fountain watching the bubbles and the children and listening to the music, waiting for revelation to strike. He never goes back to lab. But he does while away the rest of the evening writing in his notebook with Atif’s pen.

Eventually he notices that someone is watching him. Across from him on a bench there is a girl, maybe college-aged, maybe younger, it’s hard to tell as she’s thin and wearing baggy clothing, and as her hair is natty and wild, and she is barefoot, and has hemp bracelets on her wrists and ankles, in dirty cargo shorts and a fading T-shirt, with a dog next to her, and one of her hands is stroking its forehead while her other holds up some used stock mystery novel, the kind with a glossy embossed cover. Around her is splayed the kit of the beggar—the wicker mat, upon which sits a cardboard sign and a plastic container with some change and a few dollar bills in it. Her smudged thumb turns the page, but she’s occasionally glancing at him, and now he at her: does she remind him of someone? Then he places it—Alice Waterson, a fellow neuroscience grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Three years into the program Alice had dropped out for reasons unknown, although everyone speculated. Madison was a small enough town that people from the program still saw her downtown occasionally, now with hippie tassels in her hair, zooming around on a skateboard with dirty bare feet. Everyone avoided her, and the girls in the program always gossiped about her, exclaiming about how embarrassing it was to see her downtown, how they always had to hide to avoid saying hi. But to Kierk it had seemed like maybe she had found some kind of inner peace. A few months after Alice left, Kierk had run into her one evening at the public terrace overlooking Lake Mendota. Over the sound of the live band she had talked about her renewed Christian faith, been energetic and engaged, happy to be outside, if a little thin and grubby. He didn’t see her again, and neither did anyone else, until a year later the next summer, when Kierk was driving back from getting groceries, his windows rolled down as he cruised the back roads. He spotted Alice again, walking over a hill toward a bus stop, wearing a shabby backpack. Kierk pulled over and approached her. She didn’t have her skateboard anymore, and though she lit up at seeing Kierk she struggled through their conversation, her gaunt face slow to respond to his comments, and she smelled bad even in the sunny breeze. She tried to summon up a brave face, dismiss everything, crack a few jokes, but after chatting with her for a bit Kierk told her to wait right there. He went back down to his car on the side of the road and lugged back