This edition first published in hardcover in 2021 by
The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS
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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.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 978-1-4197-5022-9
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5022-9
eISBN: 978-1-647000-98-1
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“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
