The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “Do you have any idea how angry this is making me?”

  “Some. But you’re controlling it well, considering how tired and emotional you are. I’m proud of you.”

  “What do you mean you’re proud of me?”

  “I mean that I’m proud of you.”

  “You’re my real father, aren’t you?”

  Adam looked at me for a second and then guffawed. With some difficulty—his joints did not appear to be in the best shape—he crouched down by my stool.

  “No, Venter. Your mother was very attractive, and I would have gladly had sex with her, but I guess her tastes ran toward men who buttoned their shirts.”

  “Stop talking about my mother having sex.”

  “Difficult subject to avoid when you’re trying to establish your paternity.”

  I was, I had to admit, relieved. Whatever problems I had with my father, I did not want to stop thinking of myself as his son.

  “So my mother has never tried to contact you, and you have no idea where she might be?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick one of my needles in my eye.”

  “Then I guess I’m wasting my time with you. I should be spending this time with my grandmother.”

  I stepped off the stool and briefly cast a shadow over Adam.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked. “You couldn’t really have thought I could help you find your mother, at least not in time for her to see your grandmother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have to imagine that if you had thought that I had information you could use, you would have tried harder to get it out of me.”

  “My grandmother told me to come here.”

  “Why? Does she think I know where Rose is?”

  I searched his face for any sign that he knew why my grandmother had sent me here.

  “She told me I should use the epiphany machine.”

  Adam let out some kind of cough in disbelief. “Rose’s mother is doing recruitment for me now?”

  “It seems to be her dying wish.”

  “I definitely did not see that one coming. Guess I’m not much of a prophet.”

  I peered through the foyer into the room beyond, at the far end of which was the purple velvet curtain that shielded the room with the epiphany machine. “Was that curtain up when my parents used the machine?”

  “The very same one.”

  “Does it have some kind of meaning?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Like ritualistic significance or whatever.”

  He laughed. “No. No ritualistic significance. Although my mother did sew it, so that might sound like significance to you.”

  “So when am I going to use the machine?”

  Adam put his hand to his mouth, evaluating me. “You’re seventeen.”

  “So?”

  “Tattooing is finally legal again in New York City, but you have to be eighteen. I’ve found my way into the light of the law, and just as I’m blinking and my eyes are adjusting you’re asking me to scurry back into the darkness. Come back on your eighteenth birthday.”

  “My grandmother’s not going to live to see my eighteenth birthday,” I said. I hadn’t realized this until I said it, and the knowledge reduced me to sobs.

  “Good,” Adam said. “I’m glad to see you’re upset. Up until now I’ve wondered whether you have a heart at all. To be honest, I’ve been worried that you’re just going to get a CLOSED OFF epiphany, which would be a waste of my ink and your arm.”

  “Please,” I said. “Can I just use the machine?”

  Adam gave a different shrug, a more shruglike shrug than the Adam Shrug.

  “I’m just a boy who can’t say no,” he said.

  He led me over and around the piles of books on the floor, and through the purple velvet curtain. On the other side of the curtain was a small room that looked like a medical office. In the far corner there was a dentist’s chair; closer to me were white cabinets that hung above a sink. I noticed that there was a device obscured from my view by the dentist’s chair, and as I walked toward it, I could see that it really did look like an antique sewing machine.

  “Do you want the tattoo on your right arm or your left arm?”

  “What do most people say?”

  “Most people want it on whatever arm they don’t favor. It’s like wearing a watch.”

  “I’ll take it on my left arm.” I rolled up my sleeve.

  He tugged the device around on its rolling stand and told me to sit in the chair. He hit a button on a CD player and “Instant Karma” started playing. He washed his hands, put on a pair of latex gloves, and unwrapped a needle. He put an oven mitt on one hand. Then he was by my side, lifting up the arm of the device and sliding the needle into it. He pointed to a track on the underside of the arm, and explained that the needle would slide down the track to give me my tattoo. He told me to put my arm on the base and I complied. I was still getting used to the cold feel of the metal slab when he lowered the arm of the device, and then the needle was inside me, hurting me and telling me things. I was the needle and the ink, somehow; together, we were some sort of trinity that had come together to save me. I was also the paper in my own polygraph test. The metaphors were endless and so was the machine. I knew that my epiphany would be LONELY GULLIBLE AND NUMB. Or maybe it would be CLOSED OFF, because it was true, I was closed off, I didn’t know the first thing about myself and I made it impossible for anyone to tell me. Or maybe it would be CARES NOTHING FOR ANYONE OR ANYTHING EXCEPT BEING THOUGHT A GENIUS, and this one in particular seemed so terrible that I was certain it was going to be my epiphany.

  Thoughts about myself and who I was were enough to distract me from the pain until they weren’t. I saw what was happening, a foreign object was ripping open my skin and leaving behind a trail of ink that would never come out. The needle zagged and dragged and finally froze.

  When the machine stopped whirring and Adam lifted the needle from my arm, the pain did not subside. My eyes were closed now, and I wanted to keep them closed because I didn’t want to see that horrible word GENIUS.

  This was what I actually saw when I opened my eyes:

  DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS

  “No, no, no,” I said. “This is the one I saw on the guy who was leaving as I was coming in. This must have gotten stuck in the machine or something.”

  “It applied to that guy, too.”

  “But this is the worst possible thing you could say about someone. I’d rather be a monster than a sheep.”

  “If Rose were here, she would explain more delicately than I can that the worst possible thing you could think of to say about someone will almost certainly be your epiphany.”

  “Why isn’t she here? Why hasn’t she been here all my life?”

  “I’ve never been a big fan of mother-blaming, but what do I know?”

  For the second time that night, I burst into tears.

  “Epiphanies tend to cause the most anguish to the most intelligent,” he said.

  “Really?”

  And this was the first time he looked at me sourly. “What do you think it says about you that you’re so happy that I just suggested you were intelligent?”

  I knew where he was going with this, but I couldn’t take it.

  “I’m getting tired of being asked leading questions that are designed to get me to admit that I suck.”

  “Good!” he said. “Good. That’s an impulse to cultivate. But be careful, because it can also lead you back into servitude. Now, for the sake of the Christ who never existed, stop worrying about what I think of you and get back to your grandmother. Do you want gauze or Saran Wrap?”

  Later, I was to learn that Adam was conscientious about needle protocol, but mostly indifferent to hygiene as soon as the machine had done its work.
The room was well stocked with soap and two options for anyone who wanted to keep their tattoo safe from the elements in the hours after using the machine, and Adam intermittently insisted that one of the two options be used, but usually showed limited interest. I would also learn the politics: guests who were proud of their tattoos, or who wanted to appear proud of their tattoos, chose Saran Wrap; guests who wanted to shield the tattoos even from their own eyes (or who were truly serious about hygiene) demanded gauze pads; still other guests were so upset that they fled before either option could even be offered. Adam’s lax attitude should have led to infections, but it was surprisingly rare that infections were reported to Adam. This could have been because, as Adam liked to not-really-joke, “The god in the machine keeps the tats clean,” or it could have been because those who had gotten infections were afraid that if they came back they would have their minds further fucked with, so decided to just go to a doctor and get some antibiotics.

  My first instinct, of course, was to ask for a gauze pad. But then I realized that if I asked for a gauze pad, I would be showing Adam that I was worried what people would think about me. And I was determined never to worry about that again.

  “I’ll take the Saran Wrap,” I said.

  TESTIMONIAL #49

  NAME: Joshua Sternberg

  DATE OF BIRTH: 10/02/1967

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 04/03/1994

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 01/30/1999

  If anyone else had gotten the epiphany tattoo that I got, it would have ruined Adam Lyons. Maybe the fact that it went to me, rather than to someone who would have gone public with it, was a stroke of luck for him. Or maybe I got it because it was actually meant for me.

  Growing up, I went through the motions of honoring my faith and my ancestors. I studied the Talmud and was encouraged to become a Talmudic scholar, but really I was just a talented and insightful reader of whatever text was put in front of me; I didn’t really care about what I was reading.

  By my mid-twenties, I was putting my powers of textual analysis to good use as an associate at one of the top law firms in New York, reading through thousands of pages to find a stray phrase or two that I could deploy in the service of some brilliant argument that might help one multibillion-dollar company extract money from another multibillion-dollar company. The work was engrossing, but I lived for the vanishingly small amount of time that my associate’s hours allowed me to spend with Julie. Julie was an associate at another firm, so she understood my schedule. We did our best to see everything the Met put on and to eat at every new restaurant that was either ostentatiously healthy or ostentatiously full of pork, but that wasn’t the core of us. The core of us was what we would do in bed on Sunday, assuming neither of us had to work. I’m not just talking about the inventive, heroic, athletic love we made, though of course I am talking about that. I’m talking about the way it felt to be with her when we weren’t touching, or even talking. This, like, warmth between us. The way it felt to have her head resting on my chest.

  Eventually, I proposed to her. She wanted to get married in a Christian ceremony to make her mother happy. Since it didn’t matter to me, I said sure, get a priest, or a minister or whatever. Get a priest and a minister. Get two of each. Could not matter less to me. I told my mother, and she cried—we’re talking hard-core, sloppy sobbing, wailing about how she had always dreamed of continuing the Jewish line. But eventually she got it together enough to tell me she was happy for me.

  I recoiled at what I thought was my mother’s racism. I thought she didn’t want me to marry a Korean. But I think she would have been delighted if Julie had converted. She just wanted me and any grandchildren she had to be Jewish.

  A few weeks before the wedding, I started getting terrible stomach trouble. Worse than anything I had ever experienced. I saw a gastroenterologist, who told me that I had either a parasite or wedding jitters.

  “Of course, a wife sometimes is a parasite!” he said, laughing heartily in the way of unfunny men. I didn’t take this well; I loved that girl. But he said: “Look, let me just roll up my sleeves and show you something.”

  CAN TOLERATE WIFE was written on his forearm.

  “Before I got this tattoo,” he told me, “I never knew that I could tolerate my wife. I mean, I love her, but we argue all the time. I thought I would have to be miserable forever, or get a divorce, which would also make me miserable, since I love her. But after I got this tattoo, I knew: I can tolerate my wife. No question. When she yells at me for not cleaning the kitchen, or for putting forks tines-up in the drying rack rather than tines-down the way she likes, I think: I can tolerate this. So I do.”

  He gave me the business card of the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation, and as soon as I left his office, I tossed the card into an already overflowing sidewalk garbage can. When I got home, I scratched out the gastroenterologist’s contact information from my datebook. No way was I going to trust my stomach to someone who had joined a cult.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought about Julie, looking beautiful in her dress, but standing with me in the shadow of a Christian minister, who would of course talk about Christ. I thought about our children, who would not know whether to be Jewish, or Christian, or nothing. I woke Julie up to pick a fight with her about Israel, which however contemptuous I was of Jewishness I would always defend. She told me that she agreed with everything I was saying about Rabin and the peace process. I told her that as a non-Jew she couldn’t understand, so that even if she agreed with me she agreed for the wrong reasons. She told me she had a 7:30 deposition and did not have time for this.

  If I kept on letting the Jewish thing get to me, I knew, I was going to call off the wedding. So I had to do something that would keep me away from Judaism forever.

  It’s not true that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have a tattoo, but tattoos are banned by rabbinical law. Well, maybe they’re banned by rabbinical law. Like all law and particularly like all strict law, the more attention you pay to it, the harder it gets to know exactly what it’s telling you not to do. The relevant passage in Leviticus reads: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” The wording leads some scholars to believe that only tattoos that took the Lord’s name in vain were supposed to be forbidden. There was an obscure Jewish king named Jehoiakim who got a tattoo on his dick, either “Yahweh” or the name of a pagan god, either of which would be a pretty clear offense against Judaism, if also pretty badass. Most scholars think that it’s the permanent alteration of the flesh that’s the crime. That makes sense, right? God gave you this beautiful gift, and you want to draw on it like it’s a diner placemat and you’re a kid with a crayon? Tattoos are terrible, totally offensive to God; if that wasn’t the final rabbinical interpretation, it was, at the very least, mine. I was trying to run away from Judaism, so I decided to run to a tattoo parlor. A pagan tattoo parlor, actually, where the golden calf basically shits into your skin.

  I remembered the address on the card. I remember everything I read.

  Nobody was waiting to use the machine when I arrived, so it was just Adam, doing some sweeping. The emptiness of the place gave me pause. I never really liked going to temple as a kid, but you always feel like less of a schmuck when there are other people around doing the same ridiculous things you’re doing. I cleared my throat and said I was there to consult the epiphany machine.

  This made him turn around and give me that big, tobacco-stained, missing-toothed smile.

  “‘Consult’? Now you’re making us sound fancy.”

  He poured me some whiskey, and even though I had come for the straightforward purpose of getting a tattoo that would distance me from Judaism forever, we got to talking. Eventually I told him about Julie, and my reservations about marrying her, and he did this very distinctive but also very Jewish thick shrug and said: “There’s more than one pers
on for everyone. But not that many more. You’ve already given God your foreskin, you don’t owe him the rest of your dick.”

  I laughed at this and told him that this wasn’t about God, whom I didn’t believe in anyway, but about my mother.

  “So you owe your mother the rest of your dick?”

  Another good line, and I’m not sure what I said in response, but in a sense I did owe my dick to my mother—and to my father, and to the two sets of grandparents who had kept their children alive through the Holocaust by leaping frantically from country to country when no country wanted them, and to whichever of my ancestors had made bricks with their hands for the pharaoh while dreaming of the laws they would follow once they were free. My dick and what I did with it had been a gift from all those people, and no gift may be used just as one pleases.

  This is the epiphany I needed from the machine, and sometimes I think I should have just thanked Adam and walked out right then. But I had had similar thoughts before that hadn’t stuck. So I’m glad that I let him lead me through the curtain into the back room, and I’m glad that I didn’t let myself get too freaked out by the device, which, when you see it close up for the first time, is a very grisly thing.

  He put on latex gloves and an oven mitt as I collapsed into the dentist’s chair.

  “Sterile for the devil, cushion for the pushin’.” The hand covered only by a latex glove he put on the needle; the hand with the oven mitt he put on the arm.

  I asked him if there was any truth to the rumor that he had tattooed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  “I’m less an eighties war guy than a sixties love guy. Not ‘Come with me if you want to live’ but ‘Live with me if you want to come.’”

  “That’s a little gross, man.”

  Again I saw the shrug. “So is this.”

  He’s very conscientious about easing your arm onto the base of the machine and making sure you’re ready before lowering the arm. Worse than the sting—for me, anyway—was the feeling of losing control of my arm. Something very elemental in me wanted to gnaw it off, like I was a fox in a trap. Apparently, a lot of machine users report this feeling. Adam would say, wrapping his profundity in bluster and nonsense as he often does, that until we use the machine we are all gnawing at our arms in the trap of ourselves. Eventually this feeling fell away and I stared at the ink. I couldn’t read it from that angle, but something about it made me feel sharp. Then it stopped and I had nothing to focus on but the pain.