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

she was a bored suburbanite concocting a fantasy about a neighbor. The organization helps her consider the main points of the case: Atif, herself, Kierk, Alex, Jessica, Mike, Leon, Greg, SAAR, the Following Brothers of Christ, the kallu, Bleecker Street Station, the taxi, Mike taking Jessica home, Kierk and her kissing in the lobby then leaving, the aftereffects, all forming a set of conceptual points that she arranges and rearranges into different constellations trying to make the outline into a shape she recognizes. She enjoys doing this—after all, isn’t the fundamental plot of a mystery identical to the fundamental plot of science: distinguishing the true causal structure of a series of events? Untangling correlation and causation? Coming up with the simplest theory that explains as much as possible? Was the fact that none of them had clear memories a mere stochastic event with no ties to Atif’s death, or was it central? What about Greg leaving early? What about what the leader of the local SAAR meetings, Allen, had said about there being an insider in the CNS? All accompanied by the remembrance of a bit of trivia she recalls: that the English word “mystery” comes from the Greek word muein—to close one’s mouth.

She also remembers an article she’d read about an animal rights spy who had infiltrated one of the top primate labs in the world, the Max Planck Institute. Carmen flips to a new page in her notebook and writes at the top CANDIDATES FOR THE INSIDER/DOUBLE-AGENT OF SAAR IN THE CNS. She chews on her pen. It can’t be one of the Crick Scholars. They arrived too recently for any sympathies or effective collusion to be established. That leaves faculty, an unlikely option, and staff, which is much more likely. A janitor or security guard? No, she thinks, the ideals of SAAR are too abstract to gain serious blue-collar converts. She can’t imagine anyone not educated at a $80,000-per-annum school nodding along to “the intersectionality of animal research and multiculturalism.” Which leaves students. But not graduate students, for the same reasons that excluded professors and postdocs. Which leaves undergraduate researchers. Plants. Looking up the process online it certainly seems pretty open. You just had to declare a science major, which you could do at almost any time. But what science undergrad is going to appear to be the perfect little scientist for their entire undergraduate career, while at heart believing the moral calculus worked out firmly against research? So applying Occam’s Razor she knows that spy must be an undergraduate staffer or research assistant, or someone who very recently switched over to the neuroscience, psychology, or biology major, i.e., someone with an incongruence between what they are doing now and their previous classes.

She flips to a pristine page and draws out her deductions in logical form from premises, listing where she applies the Razor, which facts are contingent, and after the whole structure narrows down to the conclusion of her semiformal proof she writes Quod Erat Demonstrandum in big elegant letters at the bottom. She takes a photo and texts it to Kierk.

Carmen puts on some NPR and gets into her comfy underwear. It’s getting dark out but she makes herself another iced latte, realizing that the CNS departmental website should have a list of student research assistants if it’s up-to-date. Carmen gets into her bed, turning on WNYC with an outstretched toe. With the soft voices in the background, she balances her laptop on a pillow so it can sit on her lap without burning her, the air-conditioning a stuttering hum going on and off at intervals and only rippling at the surface of her attention, one hand going out to touch the handle of the iced latte habitually, not even picking it up but instead occasionally just hovering near it or gently touching the sweating glass and then retracting. Sitting at an incline, her legs out beyond her so that she can see her toes peeking up from behind the pillow/laptop construct that takes up most of her vision, the air-conditioning and iced latte a welcome contrast to the intense outside heat that she can, even from here, feel pushing in through her street-facing window like a forceful invisible beast—it is in this manner that night comes on and the room goes from gold to red to blue to black around her until the only light is from her computer screen.

By the end, Carmen has investigated every undergraduate working at the CNS, stalked each of them online, found their social media accounts and comments and blog posts and looked up old class websites to see what courses they’ve taken, slowly pruning the list. Occasionally, while doing all this, a detail of the night before with Kierk pops into Carmen’s mind and she smiles to herself in the blue light of the screen, excited but confused about this morning. At the end she circles a name in her notebook: an undergraduate research assistant for Professor George Williams: Skylar Davis. A sociology major who had signed up to get research credits by working on the fMRI. The ongoing project she had requested assignment to? Getting the macaques into the fMRI scanner so they could be neuroimaged. Carmen drafts up an email demanding Skylar’s presence in the CNS tomorrow afternoon, even though it’s the weekend, claiming that there is an urgent issue concerning usage of the fMRI by the macaques. She also sends an email to Kierk asking him to meet her in the CNS tomorrow afternoon a bit earlier so they can coordinate.

Stretching, Carmen is restless from being in her apartment all day today. So she puts on some shorts and a T-shirt and grabs her purse and heads out into the summer night, into a city hallucinogenic with neon, the lights of cars, everything melting in the heat. Kierk still hasn’t responded to the previous text, so she sends him another one. Looking up from her phone she realizes where she has been unconsciously walking toward