Revelations

Hoel Erik Hoel

Description

An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he's offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project-investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be happening all around them.The Revelations, not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive, challenging and disarming. Bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today, The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and its cyclically dreamlike structure pushes the boundaries of literary fiction. Erik Hoel has crafted a stunning debut of rare power-an intense look at cutting-edge science, consciousness, and human connection.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 06 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647000981
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

This edition first published in hardcover in 2021 by
The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS
195 Broadway, 9th floor
New York, NY 10007
www.overlookpress.com
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address above.
Copyright 2021 Erik Hoel
Cover 2021 Abrams
Passage on this page quoted from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, published in 1962 by University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Control Number: 978-1-4197-5022-9
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5022-9 eISBN: 978-1-647000-98-1
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
Let us now return to our main problem. This is to locate the awareness neurons and to discover what it is that makes their firing symbolize what we see. This is like trying to solve a murder mystery. We know something about the victim (the nature of awareness) and we know various miscellaneous facts that may be related to the crime.
-Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis
Silly fish learn nothing in a thousand years.
-James Joyce, Ulysses
MONDAY
Kierk wakes up in the back seat of his car, brought into being by a knocking on the window so loud and forceful the whole car shakes. Silhouetted by the dawn light coming through the back seat window the knocker is opaque and strangely shaped. Kierk s movement in the sleeping bag stirs books aside as he struggles to extricate himself, then, expecting another policeman come to hassle him about sleeping in his parked car, he unlocks the door. Quickly it swings open and then more than one set of arms pull him out, his shirt riding up, his form dragged and his palms skinned against the pavement until he s up, standing, pushing away, and then everyone retreats for a moment to look at one another and consider the scene. Beyond there is the expanse of a high school parking lot made wide and empty by morning. There are three of them. One has a nose ring, the other a shaved head, and the third is heavyset and shaggy. All are acned, teenagers or recent high school graduates. The shaggy one is lounging against the car and smoking a cigarette. The shaved head is now digging through Kierk s back seat, tumbling books out, angrily kicking aside the sleeping bag with a boot. He hands a plastic bag from the back seat to the one with the nose ring and he empties it, pages spilling.
Your phone. Give us your phone.
Cash, man. Where s your cash?
Kierk fingers the small wad of cash inside his pocket. This money is supposed to be for gas, coffee, some trail mix to munch on, and, most importantly, a new notebook. Today Kierk had planned on using those supplies to-not for the first time-give his writing one last try. He s supposed to be out here in California devoting himself solely to his work, living on what little he had stashed away. Back as a graduate student in the wintery folds of Madison, Wisconsin, when he had found time to write in the stolen midnight hours after leaving the lab, there had been a rich river of prose waiting for him. Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, everything. But with the hours of the day now empty, that torrential river had instead become a stream, then a creek, then dried up altogether, running itself out in ink. His previous attempts, all that writing, all those words failing to take hold, are now being scattered on the ground . . .
Nose ring holds out his hand and Kierk sighs, warily giving over the money, which is snatched away immediately and handed over to the shaggy smoker.
So who are you, anyways? We ve seen you out here before, you know.
Can I have a cigarette? Kierk asks, scratching at his beard, watching his pages stir in the wind. And I don t have a phone, so that s it.
Ignoring him, nose ring holds up a book with a brain on the cover titled The Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Vol 2 .
Who the fuck doesn t have a cell phone? You re some kind of college student, right?
I left graduate school ABD . . . all but dissertation. Like T. S. Eliot.
So you dropped out. Or got kicked out? When Kierk only shifts mutely, nose ring gestures to the books. What s all this stuff about, anyway, brain surgery?
Neuroscience. In fact, I ah, coauthored a paper with the writer of that very book.
No shit, a genuine scientist. I haven t met a homeless scientist before.
Give us your fucking phone man.
Kierk looks at each of them in turn, then says sadly- You re all just kids who don t know what you re doing.
The closest, nose ring, first scoffs at him, then pretends to turn to the others before whipping back around and punching Kierk squarely in the jaw. Everything speeds up and they are all around Kierk, who s curled up in a ball, both arms covering his head as they kick him. After a dull pause, after the parking lot has emptied itself of all motion and the kid with the shaved head has gone back to digging around in the car, Kierk realizes that he isn t actually seriously injured. Next his feet are digging underneath him searching for traction and he takes off running to shouts and for a while there is only the sound of eight pounding pairs of sneakers over pavement and then grass and then pavement again and then Kierk hops a curb and has gotten his speed and the kids fall behind halfheartedly. Kierk crashes through the crowns of thickets and brambles and scrambles up the jungle of a chain-link fence and then circles around to the other side of the parking lot to watch the kid with a shaved head put a rock through his windshield like a punk. After some fiddling around the kid pulls out the intestines of the car radio and carries it under his arm out of the lot, the other two following. Kierk is pretty sure they destroyed the radio in the process of extracting it.
He sits down in the tall beach grass and watches from afar as the morning fills up with sky and the car hemorrhages his meager belongings into the windy lot. In the dry scrubs Kierk takes stock of his wounds. He notices with interest that when there s a lot of blood in your mouth it doesn t hurt, but rather it s like your mouth is overflowing with water, your tongue moving about in a pool. He thinks-my cup runneth over. Something keeps leaking into his vision, and he wipes at the arch of his eyebrow, which a stray sneaker had cut a significant gash into. His lungs are still ragged from the mad sprint and as some sort of aftereffect of the violence his mind is so crystalline bright it aches.
After about half an hour Kierk stalks his way back to his car, spinning when he hears a noise to see the three of them just a couple hundred feet away, running toward him now, and Kierk sprints the rest of the way, starts his car, and in his haste throws it in drive instead of reverse and goes straight into the lamppost in front of him, the hood giving a small cave and Kierk bouncing forward in his seat. Then Kierk reverses and burns out of the lot.
After a couple miles, smoke starts billowing up in gulping gouts from the hood, each plume swallowing the last, and Kierk pulls over to the side of the road and starts yelling- FUCK FUCK FUCK you little shits you re going to die in a gutter little goddamn FUCK YOU and fuck ME stupid stupid fuck me what the FUCK am I doing here -and beats violently his steering wheel and then in a frantic search finds an old bottled water under a seat and pours it over his head to calm down and wash the blood from the cut over his eye, leaving a damp spot on his jeans. By the side of the road he uses a dirty T-shirt to beat at the smoking parts under the hood until they subside. Panting and praying it hadn t been lost, he digs around the back seat for a letter that had arrived in his PO box last week. Finding it smudged and folded he lets out a small half sob, double-checking that it contains the number to call.

Dear Kierk Suren,
We are extremely pleased to accept you to the Francis Crick Scholarship program at New York University . . .
With the letter folded in his back pocket he quickly stuffs what little is worth salvaging from the back seat into an old backpack of his, from journals to unwashed clothing to loose change to books with their bindings long broken. Leaving the rest behind, he starts hitching. No one picks him up. Cars blow past, children pressing their faces against the glass.
The arrival of the letter from the director of the program had been a shock given how tenuous his connection to the world was. Kierk has been living in his car for almost six months. Car insurance, his next meal, and a place to park overnight have been the daily concerns. Every week he s driven to the San Diego Public Library to grab a new pile of books and use the computers and revisit the bank to extract cash from his minimal savings, less and less each time, approaching the limit of being flat broke. The sunsets here have been like falling bundles of white wood, and standing amid the birch forests of light he had thought he might never return to civilization, that his brief life was over at twenty-seven. It s been months of dry California nights sleeping in his car somewhere on the coastline with his legs hanging out the window, his toes feeling out the slow seas of air. In all this Kierk has known that he was slowly receding from the world, that his depression was rising like an internal tide. He had sifted through the dog-eared copies of his fav