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

and file a report. Keep in mind that it may take a few hours for the paperwork. But unless you have any further information I’m afraid all we can do is get a record of the event. I’m just being honest with you about how this is going to go.”

“Fuck you!”

Hanging up, Carmen experiences a surge of frustration. Did they even know what such a thing meant? She remembers a photograph she’d once seen in class. A 1950s housewife directly facing the camera. The only sign she’d had the operation were the dark bruises under both eyes. Back then a lobotomy was an outpatient procedure performed in fifteen minutes, often on depressed women. Some doctors performed dozens a day and patients would ride home in cabs after. To figure out how deep to swish around the ice pick, and when to stop, a common practice was to ask the patient to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as you did it. When she started forgetting the words, you’d gone deep enough. And sometimes the ice pick left behind barely anything, sometimes there was only a body remaining . . .

She shudders, rubbing her arms, looking around. As she was talking to the police she’d also been following the late-night weekend crowd, and so Carmen, with a nervous look around, shows her ID to a bouncer and follows a group of people into a bar. The music thrums around her, people packed in, drinks sloshing. Carmen jumps when someone puts an arm on her back to push past her. There’s a knife handle sticking out of her pocket, her body is still wet underneath her clothes, and in one hand she still holds Kierk’s notebook. She finds a backroom without as much noise and dials him. Again and again the phone buzzes to no answer at all.

Carmen lies awake in the hotel. At first she keeps jerking up at the slightest noise, very aware of the structure of the door, or the open glass of the hotel window, and at these times she clutches the Hello Kitty notebook to her like some kind of metaphysical shield. On the nightstand rests the kitchen knife. The door has stacked in front of it all the other furniture in the room except the bed and nightstand. Unable to sleep even in the sanitary hum of the hotel, she’s instead been trying to quiet her fear by reading the journal. It is the only thing that can occupy her busy mind, and, wide awake, she reads deep into the night, finally arriving at the last entry written in Kierk’s quick and spindly scrawl.

Sometimes I dream of a great tree. I dream of it at night but more and more during the day as well. I feel it may come to me in many guises, in other forms. In the dream it is a monarch of a tree, as if the land of trees had elected it unanimously to represent their kingdom. The trunk is so wide that it loses curvature up close, and only by stepping back dozens of paces does it finally resolve itself into a three-dimensional shape. A sequoia. Larger than any I saw in California. A great towering and branching sequoia, all alone in a great field. It is always night where the tree is. Thousands of years old, it spans the history of human civilization. Its mammoth trunk brachiates into knotty giant offshoots that run almost perpendicular to the ground, and this epigeous brachiation continues on and on, tufts of bushy dark green sprouting off, making the tree even greater in reach than it is tall. The body of it is huge even at the higher areas, the diameter of the branches large enough for a man to easily walk on, except at the very top where hundreds of feet up one has to climb carefully on the swaying branches, hoping they hold your weight, such that only the very tips of your fingers ever clear the tree and end up in the cold, infinitely fresh air. Above it swirl the richest stars you will ever see. The backbone of the Milky Way is a bright speckled bridge across the sky. One can almost see the hazy spun disk of light that is the Andromeda galaxy engaged in its four-billion-year collision course with us. The twinkles of stars are like pinholes poked in the canvas of the sky, and wherever you turn your head, to whichever direction you fix your gaze there is cosmic scenery, for the tree stands in some relation to the stars, but it is the kind of unspeakable relation that only deeply old and deeply natural things can possibly share with one another. Down at the base of the tree steps have been carved into its side, wrapping around, and there is occasional evidence of human engineering and controlled growth. And out along the thick roads of the branches, all over that expansive arboreal kingdom, are shadowed figures, sometimes moving about in small, lit areas, outlines of human forms. This is Yggdrasil. The world tree. The tree of knowledge. And on it wander those who have advanced it, natural philosophers all. There is an organization to it—older discoveries and more fundamental theories are medial to the trunk, and then the farther along a branch one goes, the more modern. This is often reflected in the means of illumination: the light at the base is from torches or fires, and then higher still candles, then lanterns burning whale oil, then hanging light bulbs and computer screens near the outer layers. I am simultaneously on the tree and looking at myself on the tree from the ground. How can both be true at the same time? Walking out along the branches faces come out at you in the darkness suddenly, and each is rough with a wild wisdom. Exploring at the base I find Plato, twenty-eight, only a year older than I, all in black and looking outward into the