The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Um, no, I don’t.”

  “Do you have a daughter named Lucy with whom you like to be alone? Is that why you’re strangely obsessed with that song?”

  “I have a daughter I named Lucy because I like the song. Are you suggesting that I behave inappropriately with her?”

  “I would suggest that you do not behave inappropriately with her. Unfortunately, the machine believes that you are behaving inappropriately with somebody’s children, if not your own.”

  Peter grabbed the gauze from my hands and held it to his tattoo. I was too shocked and confused to do anything. “I’m leaving. And I’d like my money back.”

  Adam flung some bills from his shirt pocket onto the floor. “There. Maybe use it to pay for a hooker so you leave kids alone.”

  Peter took a hard swing at Adam, for which I couldn’t exactly blame him. Adam fell back into the epiphany machine chair and I held Peter back from taking another punch. He struggled free easily, but he calmed down a little.

  “I don’t know what your deal is,” Peter said, “but your arm is certainly right that you’re the first man to tell lies. You’d better not spread this completely baseless bullshit around.” He stomped through the curtain, leaving the bills on the floor.

  “What was that?” I asked Adam. “Do you know him?”

  “I’ve never seen him before, and I hope never to see him again.”

  I pulled out another gauze pad to apply to Adam’s lip.

  “So why did you freak out like that? That tattoo seemed pretty harmless.”

  “Only child molesters get that tattoo.”

  “What are you talking about? My freshman-year Global Studies teacher got that tattoo, and she’s not a . . .” I stopped myself, thinking about what had happened in the bathroom when I was fourteen.

  “She? Your freshman-year Global Studies teacher? Michelle Scarra?”

  I was surprised that he knew her name, since I had never mentioned her. “She told me she had gotten that tattoo, and then she left school so as not to be tempted. But honestly, if I was traumatized, it was only because nothing happened.”

  “That’s jejune bullshit, Venter.” I tried to put the gauze on his mouth but he waved me off. “An adult should not be making advances on a high school freshman.”

  “But ‘boundaries’ could mean practically anything. Why do you think that tattoo meant that Peter is molesting his kids?”

  “Because every time somebody gets one of those tattoos they turn out to be a child molester. This is the fourteenth time it’s happened. Fifteen if you count Scarra. I was hoping she’d be okay.”

  “And you’re sure it’s every time? That’s not a common epiphany?”

  “Fifteen instances is pretty common.”

  “But aren’t epiphanies open-ended?”

  “As far as I know, every epiphany is open-ended except for this one. If I could ask the god who’s writing these things why this particular tattoo has been chosen for this particular purpose, I would. But I know that these people are child molesters, so I do something about it.”

  “How do you know they’re child molesters?”

  “I pay attention to these tattoos. There have been arrests. Now I don’t wait for the arrests.”

  “So what do you do? Report them to the cops?”

  Adam laughed, which hurt his mouth. “I would never report anyone to the cops. I have principles.”

  “Call Child Protective Services?”

  “I don’t think they take calls from people they consider cult leaders.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “You don’t need to worry about it,” he said, walking to the curtain to let in the next guest. I blocked his way.

  “What do you do?” I asked again.

  “I call a friend.”

  “And what does your friend do?”

  “Whatever he thinks is appropriate.”

  “Adam, are you killing people?”

  “You think if there were a bunch of corpses that all had the same tattoo, that wouldn’t get attention? Trust me, you would have heard about something like that. What happens to guests with that tattoo is what happens to all my guests: they are given an opportunity to change. It’s just that in their case, the importance of changing is impressed on them more firmly.”

  “So you’re going to have somebody beat Peter up?”

  “That man is a pervert.”

  “Adam, this is totally wrong and unethical.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Nobody cares more about privacy than I do. Except maybe your dad, and he’s a freak. A man’s tattoo is his own business. But this is different, this is kids.”

  “But isn’t this a slippery slope?”

  “Yes. So we’ll just have to work harder to keep our balance. The other option is not doing anything at all, and just allowing kids to be abused. Is that what you want?”

  There was no evidence that Peter Stevens was a pedophile; he was just somebody who liked to bore people with his half-baked theories, and if we were going to start killing everybody in New York who did that, the skyscrapers would soon be returned to the vines, an image that would be phallic if there were any men around to see it, which there wouldn’t be. And yet the thought of what I would say to a kid who had been molested, whom I not only hadn’t helped but had actively stopped from being helped, made it impossible to say anything. Except for one thing:

  “Don’t do anything to Ms. Scarra, okay? She never touched me. She left her job so she wouldn’t touch me.”

  “I’m not going to have a woman beat up.”

  And that was it. He disappeared through the curtain and brought another guest in. A few days later, while we were cleaning up, we heard a story on the radio about a Hartford insurance executive who had been assaulted in a parking lot. Adam gave me the smallest of smiles before turning the radio off.

  From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,

  by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 20

  People who are not famous think that fame means many things, some good, some bad. John knows that fame means one thing: arms. Arms everywhere and all the time. Arms at his face, as though his eyes are diamonds to be snatched. Arms at his chest, as though there is a famine and his heart is food. Arms at his belt, as though every girl who fucks a Beatle wins a spot on the last bus to God. Arms holding pens, sign my notepad, sign my guitar, sign my program, sign onto my program, sign this contract, sign my soul.

  An army of handlers to keep him from arms and hands.

  An armored van saved this man from the arms and ardor of his fans.

  Now, at this stadium, in heat that would be oppressive even without the sweat and skin of other people, there are more arms than ever: 111,200. All of them reaching out to John. Girls screaming, weeping, grabbing the batting cage like refugees trying to flee themselves and their lives in search of whatever they imagine John can give them.

  On his way to the stage, he tosses a pack of Gauloises cigarettes—an empty pack of Gauloises cigarettes—and he watches what the pack does to the arms and what the arms do to the pack. What the pack does to the pack. John is nearly blind without his glasses but he can see enough. The arms push each other, slice at each other. The arms would do any harm to each other or the people they’re attached to to claim the great prize of John Lennon’s garbage. These people may think they’re people, but their arms know better. Either you’re John Lennon, or you’re a thing that grabs for things touched by John Lennon. And in the process of grabbing, you turn John Lennon into a thing.

  He wanted to be the king and was the last to learn that the king is a thing of nothing.

  As soon as he has shaken the clammy hand of the undertaker who embalms the music of the young, John feels tempted to do his cripple routine, h
obble around the stage with his arms curled up into grotesque claws. He’s been doing this act all his life. As a child, he imitated cripples on buses. Any joy he feels in performing has this mockery at its root. He thinks about doing this for the entire show and not playing any music. But John the cruel bully is not the John for which these arms have pressed cash into other arms.

  Then they start to play, and everything is better. The John who places his arms at the service of his guitar, his lungs at the service of the song, and his entire being at the service of the group, this is the John that he is supposed to be, and it is much more fun to be this John than any John wants to admit. Singing with Paul and clowning with Paul is obviously what he is here—here in this stadium, here in the universe—to do, and he wishes that he could do these things and only these things and make every other aspect of his life and of his mind disappear. There are even moments when he succeeds, even tonight. At one point, introducing a song, Paul gets confused about which record it came from, their last record or the one before that, and John throws his arms in every direction, and the crowd laughs, and it is wonderful. The show would be better if John were doing air traffic control for the planes that periodically fly overhead, since the screaming makes it impossible for anyone in the crowd to hear anything. He could spend the entire concert telling everyone to go fuck themselves—he could actually speak the thoughts in his head—and no one would know the difference.

  Maybe he could have more fun if it weren’t for the arms in this stadium. It looks like a vision of Hell, a mountain of limbs stacked high.

  Girl after girl rushes onto the field, running with arms extended for the stage. John beckons them, mostly for the fun of seeing pair of reaching arms after pair of reaching arms get enveloped by the meatier arms of the cops.

  But one girl almost gets through. It takes him a moment to realize that it is a girl, because her head is shaved and there is a tattoo on her arm. Her bald skull transfixes him.

  The mountain of arms, which cheered the other girls, jeers this one. The cops embraced the other girls eagerly, probably the closest the cops have come to fucking in years, but they approach this one diffidently, as though she might bite. One almost has her, but she slips away. There is a piece of paper in her hand.

  At this point she is so close that even blind John can read her tattoo. Or almost. He is actually misreading it, slightly. What he reads is HORRIFIED TO CREATE LOVE.

  This is the woman for him. All this love he has created, and he is horrified by it. Together they will create more love to be horrified by. She will jump on stage and John will ask if there is a preacher in the house—surely there must be one—and then they will be married. Technically it will be bigamy, but Cynthia can be dealt with later.

  Inches from the stage, the girl is caught by cops. She kicks and kicks and flings the piece of paper on to the stage, where it lands at John’s feet. He reads her tattoo over and over as she is dragged away, and he picks up the piece of paper between songs. The words “The Epiphany Machine” are written below a drawing of a sewing machine. Below that is an address, not terribly far from their hotel.

  He puts the paper in his pocket and he feels elated for the rest of the set, casting his guitar aside and banging madly on the organ throughout “I’m Down,” not playing anything coherent, not thinking of the army of arms—no one in the audience can hear the music over the screaming anyway—but thinking only of the night ahead.

  After the show, he asks to be dropped off at the address on the paper. The others don’t want to hear it—they suggest that someone be sent to bring the girl back to the hotel—but he is not in a mood to be denied.

  To his surprise, the door is opened not by the girl but by a bearded, paunchy man about his own age—exactly his own age, they will later discover, born on the same day. The man has large, half-moon sweat stains under his arms. His arms themselves are matted with sweat; on one of them is written FIRST MAN TO LIE ON.

  “Your sister in?” John asks.

  “My sister?”

  “The bald, tattooed lady. She your wife? I’m afraid I can’t let you stay in the room during the act, if that’s your thing.”

  “Are you a sheriff?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your badge.”

  John looks down and sees that he is still wearing the Wells Fargo badge that all four of them were given after the ride in the armored van from the helicopter to the stadium.

  “No, I’m not a sheriff.”

  “I was joking. You don’t have a sheriff’s air of authority. You look desperate and lost, like almost everybody else who comes to use the epiphany machine. Do you want some whiskey?”

  To his own surprise, John follows the man inside. “I’m not here to use the epiphany machine. I’m here to use—see—the bald girl.”

  “Lillian?”

  “Is Lillian bald? Is she here?”

  “Want to take off your jacket? It’s very hot.”

  “I’ll leave it on. Do you know where Lillian is or not?”

  “No. She came by yesterday for one of my flyers, said she was going to a concert. The Beatles, I think. Is that where you met her?”

  “Yes. Great show.”

  The bearded man gives a long and heavy shrug. “I’m much more of a Dylan fan.”

  So, to John’s annoyance, is John.

  The bearded man pours two glasses of whiskey, and then he pulls out some rolling paper and a bag of marijuana.

  “You know, I got high with Dylan,” John says.

  “Oh? Do you work somewhere he performed?”

  “I’m John Lennon.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ve heard my name.”

  “Oh, are you one of them? The only name I can remember is Ringo.”

  “I’m a big fan of Ringo’s. No Dylan, but he’s still pretty good.” He takes a drag on the joint that Adam has just rolled. “Thanks for this, but if you don’t know where Lillian is, I’ll be on my way.”

  “You didn’t come for Lillian,” the bearded man says. “You came for the epiphany machine.”

  “What is the epiphany machine?”

  “It’s the universe, when the universe wants to hold your hand.”

  “You do know my music.”

  “I can’t get away from your music, just like I can’t get away from inane giggling babies. That’s what you and your friends sound like to me, inane giggling babies. Don’t you want to be more than that?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Adam Lyons. I’m the guy who, very shortly, will operate the epiphany machine while it tattoos the truth about you onto your arm.”

  “So, that’s what the girl’s tattoo was. Well, let me tell you right now that there’s no way I’m using your daft machine.”

  “As you might say: yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  They talk for hours, but John knows already that he will use the machine.

  It is two o’clock when John finally removes the tan jacket he has been wearing all night, and which is now drenched with sweat. He settles into Adam’s chair and gives his arm to Adam and the needle.

  The pain is tolerable. What is not tolerable is what he starts to think of as he stares at his arm: hitting Cynthia. He is able, often, to forget for weeks, months, years at a time that he has ever done so, but now, now that he keeps on looking at his arm, he cannot deny that that arm is his and that it has hit Cynthia. That he has hit Cynthia.

  SEES NOTHING FROM THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN

  Of course. Of course. For a long time—forever?—he has focused on how little other people see and has not focused on how little he sees. He has a view of the world that almost no one else has ever had, and from that view he sees nothing.

  The nothing that he sees all looks different now. All the arms that reach for him, they are not reaching for him, they are reaching up in
surrender, not surrender to him but surrender to something that has no name. What could be more beautiful? Those 111,200 arms crowded together to become one with each other, and with everything else. That is what he has to offer: through him, the universe brings all of its wayward children back to it. Until now—until now—he has been left out. Now, now he is no longer selfish. Now he no longer has a self. Now he is what everyone is and should be: a Beatles fan.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Once school started again, I didn’t have any time to spend at Adam’s, but I spent all my time there anyway. I chose my classes mostly to avoid seeing Ismail and Leah, and though it was impossible to avoid them completely in the hallways, it was easy to keep our conversations perfunctory. Occasionally, I would have to field rude questions from near-strangers about my tattoo and/or the cult I had joined—a good way, really, to break myself of being DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, since these people all thought I was a wackjob and I thought they could go fuck themselves—but this was rare and got rarer as the year progressed, so mostly I would spend my classes thinking about the epiphany machine, and then I would get on a Metro-North train and be at Adam’s by 4:30.

  The stream of guests was fairly steady during the week, usually around ten per night, even on nights that were not salon nights. My reputation was growing among former guests, and sometimes they returned just to tell me their story. These people mostly had the most boring stories to tell, canned and self-congratulatory, their tapes for all intents and purposes lost before they had finished speaking.

  One Saturday morning, I saw a New York Post cover about Michelle Scarra, a high school teacher in upstate New York who had been arrested for having sex with a fifteen-year-old student.

  “Did you have anything to do with this?” I asked Adam, who was already smoking a cigar.

  “That headline? ‘Hot for Teacher’? I could have done better than that.”

  “Did you report her?”

  He took a puff. “I had a guy look into what she was doing. Found her in bed with this kid. My guy would never have called the cops. He was just going to talk to her. I don’t mean that as a euphemism; he was really just going to talk to her. But she called the cops on him when she caught him outside her window. When they arrived, she stupidly told them everything about the kid she was fucking. The whole thing’s a shame, but predators are predators, buddy.”