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

really is. Occasionally she perceives an aural hallucination refusing to fully manifest, an acknowledgement of the K-sounding specter that is haunting her thoughts, mondegreens of his name in the clicking—kah, kah—back-and-forth movements of the fan, but she is refusing to ruminate on him, she is relaxing, happy, a thing alone and content with herself, with her body, her body that is like a hot collection of parts discombobulated about her, hair sticking to her forehead, unconsciously a fingernail is picking lint out of her bellybutton, one of her legs is up and stretching itself using a bookshelf on the nearby wall for leverage. Next to the bookshelf, are postcards announcing various art exhibits from the local galleries, along with a black and white NYC calendar, fitting the theme of her whole apartment; even when the city was separated from her by only a brick wall she still had gifts from it, a mute boyfriend expressing its love via fliers for concerts, found playing cards, little knickknacks from the city. Some people Carmen knew who lived in New York City for awhile become ironically muddled in their relationship with the city, but not Carmen, she loved in a pure fashion. A few of the things that hung on her wall were the products of taking art classes early on at Columbia University, amateur but talented drawings of buildings, courtyards, and her favorite, which hung by her bed: a negative-space self-portrait of just her own form, posing, one leg slightly behind the other.

Covered in sweat, Carmen finally drags the standing fan closer to her bed as far as the cord will reach. The air blasts her in the face and she sighs, the pages of the book now flapping wildly. The book itself had actually been a gift from a philosophy of mind professor whom Carmen had appreciated and thought of as an excellent teacher. He had even written her a graduate school recommendation (this is in contrast to the professor, who, in talking to Carmen after class one day had experienced a devastating attraction—a seismic mental event that had tilted his mental life on axis, had nearly led to the dissolution of his marriage, and had made him late for class several times because he was sitting in his office crying and occasionally pounding the desk in tortured abstinence, all of which Carmen still knows nothing about). When the professor was first explaining Descartes’ theories, Carmen, a freshman, had apparently posed the exact same question that Elisabeth (a potential intellectual equal of Descartes, being adept at mathematics and severe of beauty and thought) had originally posed, the primary objection: If the mind and the brain are different substances then how can they interact? Minds and bodies. Bodies and minds. Two substances which Descartes had never been able to reconcile to the Princess’ satisfaction. And so the professor had given Carmen the book as a gift. On receiving the correspondence between a princess and a philosopher, Carmen had thought that this was exactly the kind of fairy tale she was interested in. Reading the letters always begat a strange sensation in her, and it was this sensation that kept her coming back, rereading. It is perhaps too strong to name this sensation as déjà vu, but each sentence unfolded so naturally to Carmen that the motives and similes and metaphors and metonyms and the overblown compliments and obsequious mannerisms were all hiding something so clear: that these supposedly platonic letters between the princess and the philosopher were a code written so large they could only be read from a great height, dug in deep trenches into the earth like the Nazca Lines in Peru, and, given the right altitude and perspective the true message jumped out—Love! Love! Love! These were love letters disguised as letters of philosophy, and as she read them she would catch herself, unexpectedly, almost absurdly, crying over them, or having that tingle spread down her spine over them, because she could see this deep implicit longing on both sides, two people who had connected across historical events and social structures, both equally amazed that the other existed and expressed interest in them, yet they had missed each other, could never reconcile their different positions and worlds. An impossible situation, neither ever married, they had only a dozen visits between them but so many words. And every time when Carmen got to the end and read of Elisabeth’s reaction to Descartes’ death, when Elisabeth claimed that she had lost the only true friend she had ever had, Carmen would always break down and weep for an epistolary love affair four hundred years gone. But it is so lovely and sad that she reads it when she can’t sleep, like now, because her mind has been spiraling lately, concentric, always beginning with Atif but then jumping out to the suburbs of history, and then the whole of the pale blue dot, to all those who have lived and died—Descartes and the princess in love but kept apart, primitive hunters dying far from their beloved gatherers, all one hundred billion souls that have existed on this planet, until Atif became a semiotic signifier for the entirety of the sadness and the too-soon-ness that was human life . . .

A group passes her second-story apartment and their conversation breaks her from her meditative state. Stretching, lissome, she reaches over to the bookshelf and reshelves the book of letters, then says aloud to her apartment—“Whatever, I’m still alive”—and gets up to pull on her pants. Checking her phone she sees that Kierk called but judges it’s too late to call him back now, and she can’t decide if she’s angry or pleased that he called. She pulls a shirt over her head, still braless, at this point unable to bring herself to give a shit whether it will turn see-through in any kind of harsh lighting. Shuffling on her sandals and grabbing her purse she heads out into the wasting heat of the