The Revelations by Erik Hoel (some good books to read TXT) 📗

the Bronx Zoo, but right now he is standing amid an incredibly crowded train, a hurtling hot metal box making its way beneath the earth. He’s pressed up against the glass windows of the door staring out at the stream of passing earth, metal, odd lights, brief glimpses of entire subterranean spaces. At one point a wall ends and for a second Kierk thinks he’s staring into a mirror but it’s just another packed train traveling alongside them, with people other than him staring back, strangers staccato blinking in the chthonic yellow light so that they look sickly, like dream people. Expressionless the two sides gaze at each other, neither one moving. Yet both move. If even motion is relative, what isn’t?

Interspersed into his stream of consciousness, like frames spliced into one movie reel from another, he thinks of Carmen. He feels this lust is entirely absurd, doesn’t make any sense for him. He had thought his life was all charted, that the ouroboros could be traced again and again, that he would die before thirty. In the lurching and heaving of the mechanical turns he thinks hot, dark thoughts of relativity, of sex and death.

Just one subway car behind Kierk, unknowingly thundering down the same tunnel, Carmen sits statuelike amidst the dense crowd. She is in the neutral spine position on the edge of her seat, one hand searching around in her purse beside her, discriminating objects by touch, moving past and over lip balm and a Nabokov short story collection to take out some gum, thoughts drifting. She watches herself in the moving black planes of glass opposite her. As they slow down for the next stop she sees, in a flash of illuminated yellow underground construction, a lit alcove, a concrete wall on which is spray-painted in red: DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS.

Pulling into the platform she’s craning her neck, even briefly fighting her way out to look down the tracks, but she gives up and slides back in as the doors are closing. This is midtown, well beyond NYU-student territory. Doesn’t make any sense. One thin pinky goes up to smooth an eyebrow as she sits back down, confused. It’s a further addition to the already merry-go-round nature of her thoughts.

She’d spent the whole morning feeling like a stalker as she searched the internet for signs of Kierk. There’d been no social media presence, no personal website, no pictures of him, none of the usual information about places he’s lived and weight fluctuations and fashion changes, and for some reason this lack of information intrigued her greatly, and she knew she was acting strange—she had actually smashed a glass while rinsing it in the sink from scrubbing too enthusiastically, like there was this building kinetic force inside her.

It’s been a long time since she felt anything like this, and it’s never hit this quickly before. Relationships, Carmen thinks, are only sensible when they’re over. During, the fog of war reigns. In the plastic seats of the swaying metro, Carmen handles the last time she had been in love in her mind. The memory is not narrative in structure, but geometric. It exists outside of time, a faceted gemstone of movements and greetings and sex and food and holidays and plane flights and phone calls and parties and moments of early-dark animal warmth. Carmen turns it over in her mind, seeing the beginning, the ending, all of it at once. She would think that time is an illusion, but she knows that’s a poor metaphor. Rather, Carmen feels that time is a solid; that the way God would see a life is as a solid geometric shape of a billion dimensions, a diamond shaved and smoothed by the tides of eternal return.

It had all started the beginning of her senior year at Columbia University, when she was deciding whether to apply to PhD programs. It had been the crux of her young life, but its seed had been present from the very beginning. For one of Carmen’s earliest memories is of her mother, a huge head of plastic-perfect blonde hair and dangling jewelry, presenting her before some man (in the memory the man has no face) in some nondescript hotel ballroom and saying—“Here she is. I told you! She could turn you to stone just looking at her.” It had been at one of those pageants her mother used to drag her to. Little Carmen would stand up on stage in her frilly dress and talk about how she wanted to be a scientist, and how she actually liked doing math in school, and all the while the judges would nod with wide-smiling approval. Carmen got the sense that her statements were taken about as seriously as the other girls’ requests for world peace. And she had hated the smell of hairspray and the fake eyelashes with their tacky strips of adhesive. She hated the hotels she and her mother stayed in, with their double beds and her mother’s elaborate nightly rituals of face masks and scrubs. Generally Carmen placed well in the competitions, but never Grand Supreme. Somehow everyone could tell she didn’t want to be there. And so, as her mother’s dreams to see her crowned Miss America disappeared with each runner-up performance, a new dream materialized: one of glossy editorials, billboard ads, and runways. Her mother stepped nimbly into the role of de facto agent and began to book Carmen as many gigs as possible. The two would travel to go-sees, cattle calls, and test shoots together; her father, a quietly supportive but overworked engineer, never came along.

To Carmen, modeling wasn’t nearly as distasteful as the pageants. Solitary affairs spent mostly around adults rather than girls her own age, she’d pass much of a shoot’s requisite downtime lost in a book. As a teenager she learned a lot about how to classify her looks through the conversations that happened around her. A natural projector. A downward-turned mouth that revealed just enough teeth. An