The Epiphany Machine
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ALSO BY DAVID BURR GERRARD
Short Century
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by David Burr Gerrard
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN 9780399575440
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Grace, my parents, and my brother
CONTENTS
Also by David Burr Gerrard
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Things to Consider Before Using the Epiphany Machine
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale.
—JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
This tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted.
—FRANZ KAFKA, “In the Penal Colony”
Words are like weapons: they wound sometimes.
—DIANE WARREN, “If I Could Turn Back Time”
THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE USING THE EPIPHANY MACHINE
1. The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know. But think for a moment about surprise. What is surprising is never what is revealed but the grace with which it has been hidden.
2. The unexamined life is often entirely worth living. If there is nothing gnawing at you, put this pamphlet down and never think of us again.
3. If there is something gnawing at you, that means you’re delicious. That gnawing is the universe trying to get at the tasty juice inside of you. Your entire unsatisfying life is just the rind. When you look at our device, think of it as a peeler.
4. When most people look at our device, it reminds them of an antique sewing machine. Others think it looks like the fossilized jawbone of some extinct, single-toothed great cat. We could sit around and psychoanalyze you based on what you think it looks like, but that would take decades and cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Using the epiphany machine takes about fifteen minutes and costs a hundred bucks.
5. The machine does not tell your future, or even specific facts about your present. It does not know who will win the World Series or whether your wife is having sex with your neighbor. Or if it does know, it has yet to display any propensity to tell.
6. We limit each user to one tattoo. The device’s value lies in its limits. Any more than one epiphany and you might as well consult the vast libraries that are already available to you and that have clearly not done you any good.
7. CLOSED OFF is a common epiphany. This is often cited as evidence that we are charlatans. We would argue that many people are closed off.
8. There is only one manner in which you may receive your epiphany: a tattoo on your forearm. The machine’s design demands it; the jaw, as it were, can open only so far. You may want your epiphany on your stomach, but no matter how much you diet, your stomach will not fit. You can argue that the machine is less than perfectly designed for the human body; you can argue that the human body is less than perfectly designed for the machine. You can argue, you can argue, you can argue.
9. In no way is the placement of the epiphany tattoo on the forearm intended to mock or otherwise evoke the Holocaust.
10. We do not shy away from tough questions, including those about Rebecca Hart. Ms. Hart murdered her three children about a year after using our device. What the machine told her: OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES. This was a logical deduction derived from a reading of Ms. Hart herself, and we certainly take no pleasure in deeming it an accurate one.
11. This case aside—and despite malicious rumors—there are absolutely no circumstances under which your epiphany or any other personal information will be shared with law enforcement, direct-marketing companies, or any other persons or organizations. Though we are generally agnostic on political questions, this is a principle that we consider sacrosanct. Your secrets are as safe with us as they would be with a priest, therapist, or lawyer, give or take the necessity of acquiring a wardrobe full of long sleeves.
12. If you believe that you do not need to use the machine, but that your husband or wife or mother does, you may be right. Are you?
13. Some of you are here because of a lover, parent, sibling, or child. You are here because someone you care about came to us and got an epiphany tattoo that changed or clarified his or her life. You are here to investigate our facilities and prove to this person that the epiphany machine is bunk, that he or she has been, in the term you will probably use, “brainwashed.” (We plead guilty to scrubbing the thick film of self-deception from the thoughts of our users, but this is probably not what you mean.) We welcome you as we welcome all other visitors. We merely encourage you to ask yourself: Why? Why am I so suspicious of
the newfound happiness or self-knowledge of this person about whom I claim to care? Am I truly committed to this person’s well-being, or do I miss the comfort of feeling unshakily superior? These are uncomfortable questions to ask yourself, so you might consider asking the machine instead.
14. We have little interest in defending the device, and less in explaining it. If you are intent today on thinking of the machine as a kind of Magic 8 Ball, then today you will think of the machine as a kind of Magic 8 Ball. We will risk being cheeky by inviting you to ask again later.
15. One way to think about your life is as an extended freefall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.
16. If you believe that the epiphanies you have seen tattooed on the arms of your friends suggest that your friends are better, luckier, smarter, or more virtuous than you are, bear in mind that many disreputable establishments offer counterfeit epiphany tattoos that are no more indicative of a person’s innermost mind than is a vanity license plate.
17. Then again, your friends may simply be better, smarter, or more virtuous than you, though they are probably not luckier. It is unlikely, though certainly not impossible, that the machine will remark on this. While always bracingly honest, the machine does display a certain quality that we might anthropomorphically describe as tact.
18. Your epiphany may be removed as any other tattoo may, which is to say: imperfectly.
19. You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot—you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?
TESTIMONIAL #101
NAME: Rose Schuldenfrei Lowood
DATE OF BIRTH: 12/19/1947
DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 01/06/1972
DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 01/10/2017
In those days I had contradictory feelings about almost everything, so I was delighted to find that I was only delighted to be bringing bad news to Adam Lyons, the notorious huckster behind the epiphany machine. Even the potholes and the slush that the cab driver did not try to avoid made me feel like I was a bold adventuress on a dangerous road. Granted, instead of a sword I was armed with a manila envelope full of legal papers, but one makes do with the weapons of one’s time.
Usually, when I was delivering envelopes like this one, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how it would feel to be sued, how it would feel to be forced to stand respectfully before a judge who was probably going to take your money away for no better reason than that you were a sleazeball. I sympathized with sleazeballs, since if you didn’t sympathize with the sleazeballs you were left with the nuns, and years of Catholic school had taught me not to sympathize with them. But Adam Lyons combined the worst aspects of the sleazeballs and the nuns, so he unquestionably deserved what I was delivering.
The driver pulled up into a filthy winter puddle at the address the client had given. The client was suing Adam over the tattoo on her arm, GIVES AWAY WHAT MATTERS MOST. Her fiancé, having goaded her into getting the tattoo in the first place, interpreted it to mean that she was marrying for money, and he consequently dumped her—her family was almost as rich as his was, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. The client’s father interpreted the tattoo to mean that she had been having sex with her fiancé prior to marriage, and was furious that somebody who lived in old converted maid’s quarters on the Upper East Side had scrawled this fact on his daughter. So the family was suing Adam Lyons for $40 million. A spoiled rich girl was certainly not someone I would have envisioned myself feeling honored to fight for, but I admired her refusal to go away without blood under her fingernails. And her father actually had the resources to go up against Adam Lyons, or more accurately whoever was propping up Adam Lyons. Though there were rumors about a real-estate heir, nobody knew for sure how he could afford the legal bills from various lawsuits, or why he was permitted to run a tattoo business out of his apartment, even though tattooing was illegal in New York City at the time and you’re not supposed to run any business out of your apartment.
“Spending the morning with your boyfriend, Blondie?” This question from the cab driver confused me, because I had forgotten for a moment that I had dyed my hair blond. The driver was digging his thick fingers into the passenger seat and baring his yellow teeth at me. I said yes, I was spending the morning with my boyfriend. One of the worst things about men is that they make it dangerous not to lie to them.
I handed him a wad of bills, stuffing the five that was going to be his then generous tip back into the pocket of the fox fur coat I had bought for the same reason I had dyed my hair blond—because it was something I normally wouldn’t do. I was usually quite clumsy, but, maybe emboldened by the coat, I leapt from the cab over the puddle and onto the curb with an elegance that could only be described as foxy. Not a trace of slush on my coat or my shoes, not the slightest totter on my heels, a safe several inches from any of the dog shit that sits for weeks in the New York City slush.
The driver, seeing that I had stiffed him, called out the name of a body part that it was unlikely he had been permitted access to ever since he exited one, and he tried and failed to splash me as he pulled away. I gave him a little four-fingered wave and felt ready to make the wicked bleed.
Adam’s apartment was only one flight up, but the time it took me to climb that flight proved enough for all my self-confidence to evaporate. I think it was the sight of my coat against the dingy stairs. Something, anyway, turned me from feeling good about the coat to feeling horrible about the coat. Your grandmother had told me that the coat was a betrayal, a waste of what we needed to survive, especially given how little money we had with me going to law school at night. I could have answered that the reason I was going to law school at night was that I had, ahem, a mother to support, and that if we wanted to talk about bad money decisions we could start with her decision to marry a man who drank his salary every week for several decades prior to drinking himself to death at the age of fifty-seven. Or maybe we could start with her decision to give up the excellent radio-factory job she held during the war to become an ordinary housewife, forsaking the construction of complicated machines that fostered communication among millions so that she could spend her life talking to two people she would never understand. But if I had said any of this, she would have pointed out that she had done all of this for me, which would have left me in the silly position of pointing out that I didn’t ask to be born, an unassailable point that only an adolescent would take seriously. Or she might have told me yet again that all of her friends had told her it was a waste of money to send a daughter to college, at least a daughter who wasn’t an obvious genius. Worst of all, I would have been inclined to agree, since it was humiliatingly easy for my mother to make me feel stupid and worthless. And if college had been good for anything, it should at least have given me the ability to outsmart a woman with an eighth-grade education. Rather than open any of this up, I just apologized for buying the coat, and then apologized again, and then apologized again. The conversation ended with my thanking her for forgiving me.
I arrived at Adam’s door raging at my inability to confront my mother, or at my inability to confront the extravagance and irresponsibility that she had diagnosed in me. I found myself hesitating to knock, overwhelmed simultaneously by a sudden rush of understanding for the anger and confusion that leaves people desperate enough to seek out a magic tattoo, and by an equally powerful and equally sudden rush of intense hatred for anyone stupid enough to actually go through with it.
I was still hesitating when the door opened to reveal a man who looked like an egg, an egg with a thick head of black hair, an egg with a beard—a beard better gro
omed than the Moses/Manson model—an egg with a short-sleeved, button-down shirt open two buttons to show a great deal of black hair on its eggy chest. He smiled, showing me the missing tooth that, he would later joke, was “the open window through which the truth rushes into my body.”
“Your name is Adam Lyons and you live in this apartment?”
“Two true statements. Let’s see if we can get you a third. Come in.”
He had confirmed his identity, so this was where I was supposed to just thrust the manila envelope into his hands and be on my way. But I followed him through the door.
The foyer of his apartment, which was also his shop, was overstuffed with books, mostly thick, well-thumbed works about philosophy and religion. There were a lot of books by and about Kafka, whom I had discovered at a bookstore when I was twelve, and who had made me secretly dream of becoming a writer for a few years, until I realized that becoming a lawyer was a more practical way to spend your life staring at sentences.
Adam said that he would pour me some whiskey, gesturing to the bar that I was surprised to find at the center of a tattoo-parlor-cum-church. I responded that it was ten in the morning. Men need to be reminded often that it’s too early for oblivion.
“Have you ever gotten a tattoo before? It’s going to hurt. I’d suggest a drink.” He poured some whiskey and threw in a couple ice cubes with his tobacco-stained fingers.
“No, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and put the glass down. “So what brings you here today?”
I knew that if I answered his question with any words at all, rather than with a manila envelope dropped silently into his hands, then sooner or later I would give him my arm. I started talking anyway.
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