The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “Careful not to brush your arm against the neck of the machine,” he said as he lifted it. “It’s very hot.”

  When he saw what was written he brought his hand to his mouth and bit his latex-covered index finger.

  “Remember, there are a number of ways to interpret this.”

  DIRTY JEW

  “I know what it means,” I said. A neutral observer would probably have thought I had been the victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime. But you have to remember that the only person who can really understand an epiphany tattoo is the person who gets it. The machine was telling me that I had dirtied my Jewish heritage and that I needed to clean up.

  The first step was to break up with Julie, which I did that very night, after I asked her to convert and she said she didn’t think she could. So maybe breaking up with her was the second step. The second step, or the third step, was to have the tattoo removed. God had wanted me to get the tattoo so that I would see why I needed to get it removed.

  My stomach trouble went away immediately. Within the year, I was married to a Jewish woman. Now she’s pregnant with our second spectacular son. I’ve thought about leaving corporate law and going into nonprofit law, or maybe belatedly becoming a Talmudic scholar, but with the uncertain future of the American economy, abandoning a corporate law job would be tantamount to abandoning my family.

  I did run into Julie once, in a clothing store. She tried to pretend she hadn’t seen me, ducking behind a mannequin that was wearing jeans and a sweater with a much-too-big turtleneck. It reminded me how she used to hide underneath the kitchen table or under the comforter in our bed, depending on where we were in our foreplay. I’m not articulate enough to give you any sense of how great she looked, so I’ll just say she looked great. I tried to walk out of the store without acknowledging her, but in the course of trying to avoid each other, we wound up face-to-face. I told her that I was a husband and father now, and she told me that she was doing fine, incredibly fine, unbelievably fine, and then we talked about mutual friends for a couple of minutes before saying good-bye.

  Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I still get the strongest image of Julie’s ass in the air as I entered her from behind, or the look on her face when she would flip over after we had both come, this look of being completely exhausted and done but still ready for more, and it just stops me, like that was the purest image of himself that God would ever give me, and I rejected it. And, of course, if that were true, rejecting God is what would make me a dirty Jew.

  But that’s just God testing me again. After all, the real trials of Job don’t begin until after the Book of Job is over, when Job is confronted with a new wife whom he has to compare to the old one. Maybe Julie, I mean my new Julie, my Jewish Julie, I mean my wife, isn’t quite as right for me as the other Julie was. She doesn’t challenge me as much, we don’t laugh as much, and our sex isn’t as good. But this Julie challenges me almost as much, we laugh almost as much, and our sex is . . . fine. Julie and I might have been a little happier than Julie and I, but Julie and I are still happy.

  The question becomes: How much is an increase in happiness worth? Is it worth the very survival of your people? Maybe for you it is. For me, it’s not. And I’m not sure I would have ever figured that out without the epiphany machine.

  CHAPTER

  9

  A Metro-North trip through Westchester late at night was usually a dreary thing, with packs of drunk, loud teenagers conducting experiments alongside packs of drunk, loud middle-aged men to see whether drunkenness became more or less obnoxious with age, each one, like me, exiled from a city that had deemed them too unserious to spend the night. But the tattoo on my forearm seemed to infect the world with interesting things, things that I had been too DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS to notice. Now I felt happy simply to observe the people around me, not worrying, on the one hand, about what they were thinking of me, and also not worrying, on the other hand, about how I could distance myself from them so that imaginary other people would know that I was better than these loud, drunk, obnoxious losers. The gaggle of bankers who were all agreeing with one another that if the police had one problem it’s that they treated black people too gingerly: these racist idiots were not irretrievably awful; they could be guided toward a less-obstructed view of the universe. All they had to do was receive and heed messages on their forearms, rather than wave around beer cans the size of their forearms. And if they could be redeemed, then certainly so could the teenage girl wobbling around asking for aspirin through the shields that solo passengers had constructed for themselves out of newspapers. All it would take to get this girl to stop chasing the desiccated remnants of fun available to a society that was simultaneously decadent and repressed was for the epiphany machine to tell her that that was what she was doing.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m talking to you.”

  This was when I realized that she was in fact talking to me, rather than to the dozing woman in the row behind me.

  “Do. You. Have. As. Pir. In.”

  “No,” I said, remembering my decision not to hide from anyone ever again. “But I do have this!”

  I rolled up my sleeve and held up my arm. She laughed so hard that she stumbled and had to catch herself on the back of a seat.

  “Did your mom make you get that so that girls will know that you need her permission to go on dates? Because I don’t think that’s going to be an issue.”

  “It means that my natural tendency is to be too worried about what people think of me to show my true self. But I can use this tattoo to fight against that natural tendency, even when I probably shouldn’t, like now.”

  “Oh, shit!” she said, shrieking and raising her hand to her mouth. “Is that an epiphany tattoo?”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “That changes everything. I was afraid you were a freak.”

  After some burpy laughter she toddled on her way, like the childish pre-epiphany person I had been a few hours earlier. Shame sloshed around in my stomach, as it always did after I had been mocked, and reflexively I looked around to see whether anyone in the car was laughing at me. But even though I noticed two or three people who might have been actively averting their eyes rather than simply not looking at me, I did not care as much as I usually did, because I knew that I was on track to not caring what people thought.

  Rather than continue to engage with strangers, which I was probably not ready to do, I tried to focus on the physical pain that the needle had left me in, since physical pain is a famous cure for concern about the opinion of others.

  From the train station, I drove straight to the hospital and somehow kept taking the wrong turn in every hallway. Eventually, I found my father sitting with a stack of papers in a lounge in a part of the hospital completely different from the one I was trying to get to.

  “You took my car without asking,” he said without looking up at me.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your grandmother is dead.”

  “What? But I just left a few hours ago.”

  “Right. When you leave someone who’s about to die, that person might be dead by the time you come back. That’s the way it works.”

  “But I thought I’d have more time.”

  “I have no trouble believing that you thought that.”

  He still wasn’t looking up, and I felt emboldened to make him hate me. “She asked me to use the epiphany machine,” I said. “And I did.”

  I rolled up my sleeve and received the same exasperated look I had seen as a child when I told him I had broken something. I thought he would scream or laugh or maybe be silent forever, never speak to me again.

  “The worst epiphany of all. The one that tells the world you can’t think for yourself. A son who would think for himself is all I ever wanted, though Adam is right that I don’t have one. He was also right that I never sho
uld have become a father. Whatever else he is, the man is certainly perceptive.” Then he looked back down at his papers.

  For the second time in nine or ten hours, I turned around and walked out of the hospital, or through it and around it and finally out of it. I drove straight home and lay in bed until the sun came up, thinking about a time when I was small and I asked my grandmother if we could stay up all night until the sun came up, and she told me that I was too young to stay up all night, but she promised me that we would do that one day, or one night, maybe the summer after I graduated from high school. I thought that this should make me sob, but it did not.

  I called Adam Lyons at a number he had given me. He did not sound surprised that I was calling.

  “You do important work,” I said. “I want to come work for you. Be your assistant.”

  “Like mother, like son?”

  “I just want to help you do what you do. I don’t want to go to college, or even go back to high school. I don’t want to do anything except help you.”

  “I am not letting you drop out of high school. The biggest mistake I made with your mother was letting her drop out of law school to work for me full-time. This would be a lot worse than that.”

  “Part-time, then. Let me do something.”

  It occurred to me that the best thing I could do to address my own epiphany was to stay away from the machine, since remaining near a source of advice and reassurance might keep me DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Adam took a long time to respond, possibly thinking this as well.

  “Okay,” he said. “I think I have something.”

  Honestly, I probably would have agreed to become some kind of hit man for him; I would have hunted any enemies he had. Instead, he just suggested that I become the official oral historian of the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation; essentially, my job would be to take down the stories of people who used the machine. I would come on Friday and Saturday nights, “salon nights,” when people who had used the machine over the years would hang out, smoke, drink, and discuss how their tattoos had affected their lives. If so inclined, they could bring potential new users, and sometimes those new users would wind up using the machine. Many nights, salon nights and otherwise, were like the one I had just witnessed, with so much traffic that a line formed. (I would find that there were also often salon nights on Thursdays, Tuesdays, whenever Adam felt like it. And guests would come to use the machine at all hours on all days. Adam never really closed.)

  “Who knows,” he said. “Even Rose might show up eventually.”

  I accepted the position before he had finished explaining it.

  CHAPTER

  10

  My grandmother’s funeral was on Monday and I returned to school on Wednesday. On Tuesday, all I thought about was Leah. At first, I told myself that I was just using Leah to distract myself from the pain of losing my grandmother, but then I kept thinking about her. I also wondered whether she, not my grandmother, had been the real reason I had gotten a tattoo, and this started to seem more and more likely. I thought about calling Ismail and asking for his advice, but I didn’t want to be DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, and besides, he probably wanted Leah for himself. In any case, the first thing I did on Wednesday at school was find Leah.

  “I got an epiphany tattoo,” I said, dragging her onto a bench between buildings and rolling up my sleeve in one gesture. “Just like we talked about. I can take you this weekend and you can get one, too.”

  She looked at my tattoo for a while, then took a deep breath. “I’m really sorry about your grandmother, Venter. That must have been really awful. I can see how it might make you do something rash like this.”

  “I was trying to honor her by getting this tattoo,” I said, though at this moment it definitely felt as though I had gotten it just for Leah. “It was her dying wish.”

  “People say strange things when they’re dying. My dad kept asking me to give him his hat back, and I had no idea what he was talking about, because I had never seen him wear a hat. Actually, one of my dad’s college friends, who comes to visit my mother and me every once in a while, does laser tattoo removal. As a favor to us, he might be willing to do the procedure for you for free.”

  “Why would I want it removed? The entire point is for it to stay there and remind me what my flaw is. I thought you were into this.”

  “It’s just . . . you know how before you paint a wall you’re supposed to hold up one of those little cards, to see how the color will look? I sort of wish you had done that with this tattoo.”

  “I don’t care about how I look.”

  “It says right there on your arm that you do! Everybody cares about how they look, but they don’t want to be reminded that they do. That’s one reason people are going to hate you when they see that tattoo.”

  “If that’s the price, then I’m willing to pay it.”

  “Another reason people are going to hate you is that you’re going to say self-righteous shit like that. And it’s really going to bother you that people will hate you.”

  “You’re right. I am DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. I guess I forgot just now, but seeing that tattoo every day will remind me. Now it’s your turn to learn about yourself. We can get you a tattoo next weekend.”

  “Venter. I want to be an actress. I’m never going to get a tattoo of any kind. And if I did, it wouldn’t be an epiphany tattoo.”

  “But you said you wanted to get one.”

  “I was just talking, man. Words aren’t supposed to last forever. That’s why you should call that friend of my dad’s.”

  She reached for her backpack for something to write his number on, but I was already walking away.

  The day was over and I was rather melodramatically smoking by myself outside the auditorium when Ismail approached me.

  “Go away,” I said, hoping he would stay and praise me for being so much more honest than Leah, so much more willing to face unpleasant truths.

  “I can’t believe you joined that cult,” he said.

  “It’s not a cult.”

  “Fine. ‘Religion.’ I thought we agreed that all religion is bullshit.”

  “It’s not religion.”

  “What would you call it, then? Magic science?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I call it. What matters is what I do with it.”

  “I know you’re grieving over your grandmother, but this is not the way to do it.”

  “I’m not grieving over my grandmother. This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually paid attention to her.” I tried to ignore the fact that I wasn’t sure whether I had gotten the tattoo because of my grandmother or because of Leah. “It’s like the first time she’s ever been alive for me.”

  “You sound brainwashed, Venter.”

  I dropped my cigarette and made a big show of walking away. When I got home, I pulled out my notebook, intending to write down my observations about what happened, but I wound up just getting lost in my own thoughts.

  By the next day, word had gotten around to the entire school that I had joined the same cult that my mother had joined, but that was fine with me. My thoughts were not with school.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Armed with a tape recorder and microcassettes, I showed up the next Saturday night, prepared to ask users if they wanted to be interviewed. If they said yes, I was supposed to take them into Adam’s bedroom, sit with them at a desk he had set up, and have them give their testimonials. Adam told me to aim for a total of one hundred testimonials, “an arbitrary but suitably large number.”

  I did not immediately take to the job. Talking to people has never been my strength. Instead of anxious, most people on salon nights were relaxed, only in part because of the joints that Adam continuously circulated. I would later discover that there are many parties, particularly in New York, where everyone is stoned or otherwise i
ntoxicated and still a nervous wreck, because everyone is worried that everyone else sees through them to their deepest, most secret flaw. That worry was nonexistent here, with those flaws all out in the open for everyone to read. (There was an unspoken rule that salons were short sleeves only.) “We’re all like criminals who have been caught,” somebody said once. “We can finally get a full night’s sleep.” Not everyone claimed to be living a perfect life, of course, but everyone who attended—meaning machine users who had chosen to come back for salon nights—thought the machine had been a mostly positive experience, and had directed their energy away from trying to deny what was wrong with them and toward fixing or accepting it. Of course, if I had been paying attention, I would have noticed the intense rivalry among members, each of whom wanted to be Adam’s favorite, the most improved user of the epiphany machine. But I still felt too suffocated by my own need to make a good impression to notice anything beneath the surface.

  “So I’ve really accepted the fact that I’m DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, and I’m trying to get better about it,” I kept finding myself saying within a minute or two of starting a conversation. I say that I kept finding myself saying this, but actually Adam pointed out that I kept saying this, and for some reason I couldn’t stop myself from saying it even after he pointed it out. For a while, I tried not introducing myself to people, and just hanging around and eavesdropping instead. There was one guy who said that his marriage had been saved by his tattoo—DISTRACTS HIMSELF FROM WHAT MATTERS WITH STRING OF EPHEMERAL OBSESSIONS—not only because it told him that his wife was what mattered, but because it made him realize that he did in fact have a string of consuming crushes on female coworkers that he made his wife feel crazy by denying; his wife confirmed this, and said that she had felt so grateful and inspired that she too used the machine, which told her that she FOCUSES ENERGY ON OLD RESENTMENTS, a tattoo that helped her stop obsessing over her husband’s obsessions once the obsessions stopped. This seemed very interesting, but when I introduced myself and asked them if I could record their story, they looked at me as though I had asked to record them having sex, which, in a way, I suppose I had.