The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  I was, if anything, even more sympathetic than the average teenager to any argument against selling out, and to the argument that there was no difference between selling and selling out. But that’s not what I was concerned with.

  “It wouldn’t be possible to sell out, right? Because the machine is the machine and can’t be copied once, let alone mass-produced.”

  “Anything can be mass-produced,” Adam said, “as long as you don’t care about quality.”

  The next day, I went to the library and was pointed to a recent (and rather lurid and gossipy) book about post-Soviet Russia that included a chapter on Vladimir Douglavich Harrican and his family. Vladimir’s father, Douglas Harrican, was a famous British violinist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1965. The book reported that Douglas may have used the epiphany machine while he was living in New York and that his tattoo might have inspired him to leave his fiancée and the West. (Adam refused to explicitly confirm to me whether Douglas had used the machine, saying only that he couldn’t be expected to remember every British tourist with some musical ability who wandered in looking for some divine advice in American spelling.)

  Virtually the moment Douglas arrived in Moscow, a provincial party leader named Anton Vasiliev, sensing an advantage in an alliance with the prominent, dashing convert, introduced him to his beautiful daughter, Anya, and, it seems, all but forced a marriage between them. Anton prepared a lavish concert that was sure to enhance his status in the party. But on the eve of the concert, Douglas announced that he was not going to perform, at that engagement or ever again. His tattoo was MUST MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS, which Douglas read to mean that he had to work in a factory rather than play the violin. The party, which had relished the thought of parading this violinist around the Western capitals he had renounced, was greatly displeased, but it was decided that coercing, jailing, or expelling Douglas would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Someone in the party who had evidently read about the machine and had a sense of humor put him to work in a factory that assembled, among other things, sewing machines.

  Anton’s status in the party was greatly diminished by the episode, and he himself was sent to work in the same factory. Anton and Douglas worked side by side on the assembly line, cursing at each other under their breath all day in a mix of English and Russian, and then returned home to yell at each other all night. Vladimir’s early childhood was dominated by screaming matches among his father, grandfather, and mother, replaced by screaming matches between his father and grandfather when his mother died shortly after Vladimir turned six.

  After several years, Douglas grew tired of making repetitive motions with his hands that did not require talent or skill, tired of his coworkers, most of whom took Anton’s lead in hating this strange tattooed Englishman who had appeared in their ranks, and he tried to return to playing the violin. But by now his hands were mangled. He had broken three of his fingers and worn the rest down, and he was judged unsuitable even to teach the violin to children. Finally, when Vladimir was thirteen, Douglas decided that the different use he must make of his hands was putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

  Anton remained furious with Douglas, even then. But he was a cunning, resourceful, and determined man, not the sort to give up. Slowly, he rose to become manager of the factory, and he used this position to become, at the apparent prodding of Vladimir, one of the first to smuggle personal computers into the country, an endeavor that proved much more successful than even he could have imagined. As the Soviet system collapsed, Anton and Vladimir used their considerable and retroactively legitimate wealth to take control of a number of formerly state-owned companies. Anton died of a heart attack in 1995, leaving Vladimir a billionaire and his grandfather’s presumed successor at the pinnacle of the new Russian system. But Vladimir detested Russia and moved to New York, using his billions to make investments, mostly in the tech sector, which had made him more billions.

  All this left me with many questions, not least of them why someone would want to invest in the mass production of a machine that looked like a device that his father had stood on an assembly line mass-producing until he killed himself, or why he wanted to hang out with the man who had given his father the tattoo that had led him to that assembly line in the first place.

  His strange and dark upbringing, his complex psychological reasons for both hating and being fascinated by the epiphany machine, and the perfect English he had learned from his father all left me with a theory that I knew was far-fetched, but that I kept on thinking about and filling in details for: that he was Steven Merdula.

  In any case, I intended to ask him many more questions the next time I saw him. But after that night he had talked to me, his frequent visits suddenly ceased, and I never saw him at Adam’s apartment again. I wish I had never seen him again at all.

  From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,

  by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 16

  That instant was I turn’d into a hart;

  And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,

  E’er since pursue me.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. The mind of a woman who murders her children can never be opened, and what can never be opened is empty.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her father told her this many times. My princess can’t seem to figure out how to play the piano no matter how many lessons we pay for, but that is for the best, because men do not like women who make a racket. My princess doesn’t seem to be taking well to her French lessons, does she, but that is for the best, because one language is all a woman needs. My princess is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is she, but that’s very good, because a man does not want his woman to be a knife, sharp or otherwise, but rather a drawer, in which he can store what he needs.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Fearing her father, she told her mother that she did not like to be called a princess. Only a very stupid little girl would not like to be called a princess, her mother responded. A princess was the best thing a little girl could be.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. She read books about Greek and Roman mythology. Long after she was supposed to have gone to sleep, she would read under her blankets, pretending that she was in a tent with Ulysses, plotting strategy against the Trojans. She did almost no schoolwork.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her mother insisted on taking her to see Sleeping Beauty, then insisted on taking her to see it again, and a third time, and then her mother had the gall to complain to her friends that Rebecca was forcing her to see it.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Rebecca did envy Sleeping Beauty her good fortune in getting pricked by a needle and sleeping for a hundred years, waking up to find a different world. When Rebecca pricked her finger with a needle, she found nothing but blood, and not even very much of that.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. One boy followed her home whispering rude things. She could provide the heart, he said, and he could provide something else. That was clever, she told him, that pun on her name, and she told him another pun on her name: “Hart” is a little-known synonym for “deer.” She told him the story of Actaeon, who spied on Artemis, the goddess of hunting, as she was bathing in the woods; in vengeance, she turned him into a deer, a deer who was then torn apart by his own hunting dogs. The boy turned away and left her alone. As her father often said, men do not like women who pose a threat.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Her guidance counselor told her he did not have time for girls who wanted to attend college, particularly girls with academic records as spotty as hers. She was not certain she disagreed; she was not certain she belonged in college. Perhaps she belonged in jail, having killed her guidance counselor. She did not kill h
er guidance counselor and went to college instead.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. This was almost the first thing that Elliot told her. The results of her tests and her work suggested that she was not likely to do much better than a B. The pleasure she took in Homer and in Athenian drama was admirable, but divorced from an ability to master the languages, her pleasure offered no hope of a future career in classics. Maybe she could be a high school drama teacher somewhere, make kids love Sophocles. But that seemed like it would be a shame; she was so beautiful that she should be a movie star. She was more heart than head, if she did not mind his saying so.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have cursed at him and left his office. It wasn’t even his office. He was just a graduate teaching assistant.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have taken his words as confirmation, even for a moment, that there was indeed nothing in her head. She certainly would not have agreed to go back to his apartment with him.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have found a way to find a doctor who would perform an abortion.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have left school.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have agreed to marry him.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have insisted that Elliot help out around the house in some way. Instead, whenever she asked him to so much as take out the garbage, he grumbled, “I’m an intellectual,” and refused to budge from his armchair. Seven months pregnant, she took out the garbage.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have been fooled even for a moment into thinking that she could be happy caring for this red, screaming thing.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have been surprised when the only permanent job Elliot could find was at a tiny college in a tiny town.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would not have calmed herself with a pursuit as mundane and as stupidly female as sewing.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. At faculty dinners, it was easy enough to watch professors and their wives come to this conclusion as soon as they saw her.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. And her head, already empty, somehow got emptier every time she wiped up spit or put her fingers over her eyes as though this would make her gone.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Hunched over her sewing machine, she resembled neither Helen nor Penelope, who had neither machines nor thoroughly worthless husbands.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. She pricked her finger and wished that that pricking would put her into a sleep from which she would not wake up, even in a hundred years.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. But there was another thing inside her womb.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Babies were supposed to be pleasant to look at. The first time around, she thought that maybe she just happened to get a rare ugly baby. Now she knew that all babies were ugly. Slightly less ugly than adults. But louder.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Two children, two years, no sleep. Any mind she once had was gone.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. That did not mean that she did not know that Elliot was having an affair with the coed who was in the living room, listening to him tell her how he envisioned her playing Antigone in a major Broadway production.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Jobs and rumors of jobs. Now there was a rumor of a job at Cornell. He was trying to get to Ithaca. Ha, ha, ha.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. For Elliot’s interview, they left the kids with Elliot’s parents and took a car trip to Ithaca. A large part of Rebecca hoped that a monster would devour her and Elliot en route.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. On the way back, they spent several nights in a hotel room near Central Park. The intent was to rekindle their relationship. They did have a lot of sex, granted by Rebecca mostly to interrupt Elliot’s monologue about how the faculty had set him up to fail so that they could hire somebody’s unimaginative nephew.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. On their last night in New York, Elliot fell asleep early and Rebecca went for a walk. Each step she took was a step away from Elliot. She could stay in the city forever, or get on a bus and by morning be in a town she had never heard of.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have kept walking when a man tapped her on the shoulder and told her she looked lonely and sad. She would have run away when he unbuttoned his sleeve and pulled it up to reveal a tattoo that said FIRST MAN TO LIE ON. She certainly would not have once again followed a man back to his apartment.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, when she went home with this strange man, she would never have used his machine, no matter how much she wanted to believe that there was something within her that, if only she could find it, might offer a way out of herself.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Otherwise, she would have seen OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES for what most of us agree it was: a fortune-teller’s guess.

  And maybe that’s how she did see it. Maybe that tattoo had nothing to do with what happened. Nine months after that trip to New York, she gave birth to a third baby, and three months after that, she drowned that baby in the bathtub along with his two older brothers. Maybe, as some have speculated, Adam Lyons was the baby’s father, and she felt shame for cheating on her husband. Most likely, something happened to the chemistry of her brain that left her with little of what we would call choice.

  There was nothing inside the head of Rebecca Hart. Maybe when, in Adam’s apartment, she saw her tattoo for the first time, she felt elated. She returned to the hotel, taking a comfortable stroll with no knowledge of what was already growing inside her. She had every intention of telling Elliot that she was leaving him. She would also be leaving Greek myths. There would be something for her beyond benighted people doing bloody things. She did not yet know what that was, but she would figure it out as soon as she was free of this man whom she had punished herself into marrying for reasons she could not even remember. But maybe she intended to tell Elliot she was leaving only after seeing her children one final time and giving them the sweetest news that a mother can truthfully give: that their unhappy lives were just beginning.

  CHAPTER

  14

  I will never forget the first time I saw someone receive a DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoo. I was assisting Adam in the epiphany room, and to the extent that I had noticed anything about Peter Stevens before seeing his tattoo, it was that he seemed to be a type of guest I was starting to recognize: the midlife-crisis guest. In his mid-forties and marked by a deep tan, Peter had driven in for the night from Hartford, where two decades earlier he had taken a job in the insurance industry in the hope of becoming the next Wallace Stevens, “a spiritual ancestor though not a literal one.” Peter’s poetry hadn’t thrived, but his insurance career had. He told me how he wished he were still writing about nothing happening beautifully and living in a hovel like this one rather than making bets about terrible things happening expensively and living in a mansion that he called “the opposite of poetry.” If I wanted his advice, he had told me while he was waiting in line, I should follow my dreams, because that way I would not have regrets. Then he started talking about the influence of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” on the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” saying that they were both about water and women, “two things we can’t
live without that are impossible to grasp.” I lost the thread of his argument and started thinking about whether believing it was important to “follow my dreams” meant that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, given that everyone else seemed to believe that, too.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Are you even listening to me?”

  He was an overtanned middle-aged rich guy in a polo shirt, looking like an actor who had gone from playing the rich asshole who loses the girl to playing the rich asshole who is the father of the girl, but he was still a human being, and therefore deserved to be listened to and not to be lied to. I decided to lie and say I was listening to him, but I don’t think he listened to my lie.

  “John Lennon was drawn here because he was a visionary,” he said. “There are always going to be people who destroy visionaries.”

  We kept chatting until it was his turn to use the machine. I nodded along as Peter explained for a second time his theory about “The Idea of Order at Key West” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (“The woman is the same! In the first she’s in the sea, in the second she’s been exiled to the river!”). I comforted him when the needle pierced his skin and continued to comfort him when he started screaming. I was getting gauze from the cabinet when I heard Adam make an unhappy grunt I’d never heard him make before.

  “DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES,” Peter said. “I love it! It’s true that I don’t understand boundaries. Nor should I. Boundaries are for the timid.”

  “How is your relationship with your children, Mister Stevens?” Adam asked. He didn’t call anybody “Mister” unless he hated them.

  “Very good,” he said. “I want to show them everything.”

  “Uh-huh. And what do you mean by ‘everything’?”

  “Excuse me?”