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

Carmen, muscles languid with pleasure but mind awake, looks up from the notebook she has been reading to candlelight over to the sleeping form of Kierk in her bed, who is pleasingly naked except for the thin tus-sled sheet that covers little. Is he waking? Around her the room is a blue eye dissolving in liquid, materials left around, the shucked remnants of clothes, everything has gone soft, physics has left them alone for now and only the delicate birds of thoughts lie roosting. Kierk, still near-dreaming something sinister and sweet all at the same time, moves a foot, finds nothing but sheet. His head turns away from an empty pillow, looks around for her. Maybe just the occasional flip of the page had awoken him, or had he sensed her absence? Carmen is a few feet away on the small couch, reading his notebook by the single remaining candle on the end table. Her expression as she looks up from the pages is one of consternation, no, revelation, while his look is one of unkempt waking, small shock, bleary, propping himself up on his elbows. She glances down at the notebook in her hand.

“Kierk, you know . . .”

“Come back to bed.”

“But these aren’t just some random notes. This is a whole journal. And it’s good.”

“. . . Yes. I know.”

“I want to finish this part.”

“Come back to bed.”

“Okay, in a second . . .”

“Just . . . come back to bed.”

Kierk holds the blankets open for her. They settle in together, afraid to inconvenience the other in their movements. Eventually, after he has done so, Carmen falls asleep, and dreams of blue dissolving, of sounds and pleasures, of strange happenstances, primitive feelings with only bare visuals, and for the first time in a long time she does not have the dream of the subway train light impossibly bright and impossibly close bearing down with the sound of screaming metal.

SATURDAY

Carmen wakes up. A slow and refreshing waking without the beep of an alarm, the natural waking point of a dream comfortably ended, and as REM sleep slides away Carmen opens her eyes. Her familiar apartment ceiling. She comfortably moves a knee and finds a startling heat, and, smiling, rolls over to find the still, sleeping form of Kierk, his mouth open. She pauses, oscillating between intense melancholy that this moment is already passing, and an ebullient joy and nervousness.

“Kierk!”

“Mmm . . . hey.”

“The power is back on.”

The apartment is a palladium of sunrays now—there are clothes everywhere, the bed is clearly askew, diagonal now, and she has no idea how that pile of books was knocked over, maybe when—Carmen smiles idly. An arm reaches out and pulls her sitting form back into bed. His face up against hers.

“Well,” she says, in close, “would you like a latte or something?”

“That sounds great.”

“Alright,” Carmen says as her hand plays over his shoulder, tracing with her fingers the geometrical designs there. “Buuuut first you have to tell me what these tattoos mean.”

“No.”

“Tell me!”

Kierk slowly props himself up. “They’re designs from Giordano Bruno.”

“Oh! He was the guy, the monk, who was burned at the stake for suggesting the universe was infinite? Right?”

“These are combinatoric wheels for his art of memory. They were supposed to combine to create a perfect language. It preceded the Turing machine by three centuries. Same idea, really.”

“Why’d you get them?”

“Besides being twenty-two? I had just gotten back from Toronto. I told you about that . . . I got it because, if you had a theory that would really describe consciousness, the how and why of it, its content, its level . . . that would truly be a perfect language.” He smiles. “And because I thought there was dignity and romanticism in impossible projects.”

“Do you still?”

Chuckling, but a sadness to it. Carmen shares a long kiss with him—“Alright, you get your latte now.”

She hops out of bed and looks over to see Kierk looking at her. Pulling on panties as she sticks her tongue out at him, then walking bare-breasted to the kitchen, she puts a large cup under the nozzle of her espresso machine that she starts up to a familiar mechanical hum, a tune she hums along with, kind of dancing. Her dance takes her to the refrigerator, where she pulls out a mason jar, unscrews the lid, pours in some 2 percent milk, then shakes it back and forth really hard, her butt stuck out and wiggling, and she hears Kierk laugh from the bedroom where he still has line of sight. When it’s done she unscrews the top of the thick now-foamy milk and sticks it in the microwave for thirty seconds as she takes out two big saucer cups from the cupboard and sets them out on the counter. The microwave dings. Taking a big spoon out she sticks it in her mouth concave side down, where it is cool and wide against her tongue, the handle projecting into her field of vision, and, still humming, she first pours the espresso that has accumulated in the original large cup into both saucer cups equally, then, taking the big spoon out of her mouth and using it to keep the milk foam at bay, pours a pattern of milk into each with zigzagging movements so it looks like a Christmas tree when she’s done.

She turns holding the two cups and sees Kierk, fully dressed and leaving the bedroom. Carmen is suddenly extremely aware that she is not wearing a top.

“You’re . . . clothed,” she says, as he takes one of the lattes from her.

“So I had . . .” He pauses. “On waking today . . . and maybe it was you, maybe it was the talk last night, or last night in general, but when I woke up today it was like . . .”

“. . . Like what?”

He pauses to sit down in her kitchen chair, taking a deep swig of