The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “How do you know she was harming this kid? He probably liked it.”

  “He probably loved it. She still belongs in prison.”

  “Sounds awfully puritanical for a guy smoking a cigar and drinking Scotch at ten o’clock in the morning. This is a woman’s life.”

  “Which she shouldn’t have thrown away by fucking teenagers.”

  “Teenager. One. She resisted the urge with me.”

  “Venter, I hate to break this to you, but there were probably others. You should consider yourself lucky that she found you resistible.”

  “She quit her job because she couldn’t trust herself around me! She wanted to do the right thing. She tried to do the right thing.”

  “If trying to do the right thing were the same as doing the right thing, nobody would ever feel the need to use the machine. But a lot of people do feel that need, and a lot of them are coming today. So would you like to help me get ready?”

  I argued for a bit longer, but I already knew I was going to give in, and I did.

  • • •

  I have to admit it was always fun to watch Adam field a difficult question from somebody who had come only to ask Adam a difficult question.

  “If you’ve figured out the secret to life,” one guy asked, “then why aren’t you married?”

  Adam put out his cigar and rubbed his palms together. “So many assumptions in one simple question. Venter, would you like to enumerate?”

  “He’s assuming that it’s you rather than the machine who’s doing the figuring out.”

  “Boom!” He put up one finger. “That’s the first assumption. What’s the second?”

  “He’s assuming that what’s being figured out is one thing, rather than many things.”

  “Nothing but net!” He put up a second finger. “Now let’s make it a hat trick, whatever a hat trick is.”

  “He’s assuming that what’s being figured out is about life in general, rather than the specific life of the specific guest.”

  “And that is . . . correct! Now, do you want to take your winnings and go home, or do you want to try our bonus round?”

  “He’s assuming that the machine deals in secrets, rather than in truths so obvious we can’t help but forget them.”

  “Shazam! Brilliant. Speaking of which, you’ve left out the most obvious one.”

  “That enlightenment necessarily leads to marriage?”

  “That’s good, too, but I was thinking of something more obvious.”

  “Just because you’ve used the machine, and just because you own the machine, you’ve benefitted from it?”

  “There we go. You see,” he said, “I make no claims to knowing anything more about myself than anyone else knows about themselves. You never really know yourself, even if you’ve used the epiphany machine, worked hard to understand what it has told you, and then worked even harder to adjust your behavior to account for what your tattoo has revealed as lies, evasions, and nasty delusions. Even if we do all this, our sense of ourselves will still be far from perfect. Even in the best outcome, I will still be the missing link in my own evolution.”

  He took a long drag from his joint, and then looked at the man who had asked the question. “So,” he said. “The needle or the door?”

  • • •

  Later that night—maybe another night, almost certainly another night, the nights blur—as I was vacuuming the epiphany room as Adam had requested, he stood in the threshold, draping himself in the velvet curtain, and stared at me.

  “Am I vacuuming wrong?” I asked.

  He laughed a gently mocking laugh I had never heard before. “I’m amazed at just how much like themselves people can be.”

  “Would you rather I not vacuum?”

  “Can you tell me something?” he said. “Are you any closer to finding your mother than you were the first night you came to see me?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  “What have you done to find her?”

  “Very little.”

  “Very little is not nothing. Give me an example of what you’ve done.”

  I tried to think, one of my favorite ways of not thinking. “I always hope when I interview somebody who used the machine in the seventies that they might have kept in touch with my mother or something.”

  “Do you ask them if they know your mother?”

  “I figure that if they do, they’ll tell me.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re trying to find your mother.”

  “I guess I’m not sure if I want to find her. If she were worth finding, she would have returned to my grandmother before she died. I don’t know how she would have known my grandmother was sick. It’s not rational. But I don’t have to explain to you about believing things that aren’t rational.”

  “So why do you keep coming here?”

  “I guess I’m hoping that if I see enough models for how people have used their epiphanies, I’ll figure out how to use my epiphany.”

  He gave me a look that told me he liked this answer. Maybe the search for this look from authority figures has always been the major search of my life.

  “More of my guests should think about using their epiphanies,” he said. “Too many people think they can just come here, get something written on their arm, and their lives will magically change. You’re a very special young man, Venter.”

  I was not sure that I had learned anything from other people’s epiphanies; in fact, I was sure that I had not. But I said nothing about this to Adam. His faith in me was misplaced, but not unwelcome.

  When it became clear that I was not going to respond, Adam continued. “I don’t think anyone has understood the machine so well since your mother.”

  This made me cry, even though I wasn’t sure what it meant. Adam lifted his arms into something other than a shrug and embraced me.

  “Your mother was the smartest person I’ve ever met. You should have heard her observations about the people who used the machine. I should have written them down. She should have written them down.”

  Adam’s feeling for me was starting to come into focus: he had been in love with my mother and therefore regarded me as his son.

  “Be honest with me,” I said. “Do you know where my mother is?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “If I did, I would tell you.”

  “How about Si Strauss?” I asked. “He must have been paying her salary, right? She must be making money somehow, if she’s still alive. Maybe he’s still giving her money.”

  Adam released me from his embrace. “I paid Rose with my own money.”

  “But that money was provided by Si, right?”

  Now Adam was angry. “People who want to destroy the machine always exaggerate Si Strauss’s role in what I do. I could be doing all of this without him. The wild conspiracy theory you’re spinning sounds like something out of that goddamn Merdula book.”

  I looked at Adam and felt sorry for him, that his dreams were dependent on a rich man’s whims, though I knew that that was true for almost everyone.

  But this was an opportunity to ask a question I had been wanting to ask for a long time.

  “Is Vladimir Harrican Steven Merdula?”

  “Douglavich?” I could see in his eyes that he suddenly found this plausible. “He would have been around twenty when Merdula started publishing.”

  “Not impossible.” I still had vague hopes of publishing my first book when I was around twenty.

  “It’s not worth thinking about,” he said, headed again for the velvet curtain. “Get back to vacuuming. Nobody wants to hear from the heavens when there’s dirt on the floor.”

  • • •

  One more story and then I’ll have to get to the day Ismail came to Adam’s apartment. On a night when I had missed the last Metro-North train, Ad
am and I walked to a drugstore to get some candy. Another aisle over was a guy shopping for shampoo, a beefy guy with thick, messy white hair and a tattoo on his forearm that depicted his own head with a snake wrapped around it. (The hair in the tattoo was equally messy, but black.) I saw him see Adam and keep on glancing over while Adam was deciding between a bag of M&M’s and a bag of Kit Kats.

  “Another fan,” I said.

  Almost as soon as Adam looked up, he grabbed a Toblerone and threw it at the guy, missing and knocking some Head & Shoulders from the shelf.

  “Counterfeiter!” Adam yelled. “Fraud!” He was shaking, something I’d never seen him do.

  The white-haired guy picked up the Toblerone off the checkered floor, calmly unwrapped it, and took a bite before deliberately dropping it again.

  “I’m the fraud? People come to you for the meaning of life and you give them tattoos. People come to me for tattoos and I give them tattoos.”

  “Goddamn it, Goldberg. Don’t you realize that these are people’s souls you’re playing with? Doesn’t that make any difference to you?”

  “Doesn’t it make any difference to you? Nobody expects to leave my shop knowing any more about themselves than they did when they came in. Though they often do leave knowing more. You’d be surprised how much people can learn about themselves just by discovering what they ask for.”

  “You’re asking for it, all right.”

  The only term for what happened next that feels either accurate or fully immersed in the context of the moment is that Adam lost his shit. That is what I thought while Adam pulled Twizzlers and Skittles and Hershey’s Kisses from the shelves: “Adam is losing his shit.” The security guard would have been entirely justified in calling the police, but, out of generosity or laziness—the two most underrated human qualities—he just looked at me and said: “Can you control your old men, please?”

  I said I would, and that I would clean up the candy. Adam was settling down, like a toddler after a tantrum, and I sent him home. Goldberg stuck around to help me pick up the candy. And of course he told me his story.

  TESTIMONIAL #82

  NAME: Daniel Goldberg

  DATE OF BIRTH: 10/05/1942

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: N/A

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 07/15/1999

  Most tattoo artists hate the epiphany machine, and for good reason. It’s a cheap perversion of what we do. If Adam Lyons were peddling some kind of magic dance that healed your soul, don’t you think choreographers would hate him? If he ran a magic barbershop, don’t you think barbers would start daydreaming about what they’d do with their scissors if they could get him in their chair? Furthermore, the epiphany machine negates the most important aspect of tattooing: choice. Real tattoos are a kind of marriage vow you make with your current self; you’re saying that who you are is who you will always be and what you want is what you will always want. A lot of marriages go bad, but there’s still something beautiful in marriage. There’s something beautiful in saying: My heart has stopped in exactly this position and will stay in this position until it stops for good. Epiphany tattoos are arranged marriages, except without the consolations of community. They’re like being fixed up by a stranger with another stranger on a blind date that lasts the rest of your life.

  But I’ve always loved the epiphany machine because, boy, is it good for business. At the height of the epiphany craze, in the late seventies, before Chapman and AIDS, over eighty percent of my business was epiphany-related. A lot of people came to me asking for tattoos in the epiphany font saying things like LOVES HIS WIFE DEEPLY or DOES NOT MISS HER CAREER or—let me see if I can remember this one verbatim—WOULD ABSOLUTELY PUT HIS FATHER IN A BETTER NURSING HOME IF ONLY HE HAD THE MONEY. Some of them, like that last one, have to be written in a font too small for other people to read them, but I guess other people are not the point. My favorite—and we got some variation on this probably twice a month—was EVEN BETTER IN BED THAN HE THINKS HE IS.

  Adam—or, rather, Si Strauss—sent a bunch of lawyers after me to harass me, since tattoos were illegal in New York City at the time. Si and Adam did permanently shut down a couple of other places that did what I do, so I guess I should be grateful to him. I had to move my shop around a lot, but they kept sending henchmen to find me. A henchman and a henchwoman, actually—there was this woman who always wore a fox fur coat, even in May, and her boyfriend, who had a Jew-fro—and they were always finding people with my tattoos and tracing them back to where I was operating. Finally, I moved to Jersey for a while. I thought that would be enough to get them to leave me alone, but then they went after me for copyright infringement, which is pretty rich considering that Adam claims to be taking dictation from God. But I survived.

  I want to say that I survived because I’m stubborn, made of harder stuff than Adam or Si. And I do think that’s true, but I’ll never really know because the big reason I was able to survive is that my sister was a lawyer. A brilliant lawyer. She loved me and she hated the machine, and she was fucking brilliant. She argued that my service was completely different from Adam’s. He offered the judgment of a higher authority, while I offered slogans, advertisements for oneself. The beauty of it was that of course Adam was a lying tank of ink, of course he was offering the same thing I was, but he could not say that. The only difference between what Adam offered and what I offered is that if you came to me, you got to choose what was written on your arm, and if you went to him, he got to choose. That’s a pretty big difference, but it’s not one that Adam should be proud of.

  Sure, my staff and I mocked the tattoos we were making for people. I bet that prisoners making vanity license plates make fun of them, too. Human vanity is always funny, and if you paid attention either at Friday-night services or in life, you know that all is vanity. But at least my customers made the choices about what they put on their bodies. It wasn’t Adam sitting up there in his rent-controlled, landlord-coddled tower sitting in judgment. I mean, honestly: fuck that.

  The only person who ever really took me seriously as a craftsman was my sister. She used to sit watching me work for hours—hours that no lawyer has. She was convinced that I was a great artist. Sometimes that was almost enough to convince me that I was a great artist. In my youth, I used to have artistic pretensions, which is why I have this stupid tattoo on my forearm of my own head as an apple squeezed by a snake. I had dreamed of doing the best tattoos in the world, of just completely altering the way people thought about what could be on their bodies. Any out-of-shape forty-year-old could be my Sistine Chapel. I loved being a rebel who worked in an art form more or less banned by my religion. I wanted to be famous, I wanted to be anonymous, all that stupid stuff. Slowly I came to accept myself as a hack, meaning that I created what people wanted me to create. As though that’s something to be ashamed of.

  All of this doesn’t even mention that I did a serious public service for the people who knew my clients. Somebody gets a tattoo saying COMPLETELY OPEN AND HONEST, you know not to trust him. Your husband comes home with a tattoo that says NOT CHEATING ON WIFE, you start to think, Maybe this asshole is cheating on me. On the other hand, if Adam Lyons talks to a guy, decides he’s hiding something, and then gives that guy a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, what does that tell his wife? Seeing that tattoo every time you make love or soap up your husband in the shower or brush your teeth side by side is going to make you suspicious. No matter how much you try to banish the thought, it’s going to make you think: What is he hiding? But what does it really tell you? It tells you that Adam Lyons made a judgment, a judgment that could be right or could be wrong. In other words, it tells you jack shit.

  And yes, it’s true that when Adam gave some guy a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, that guy might come to me. That particular one is tricky grammatically. A CLOSED OFF tattoo, you can just add a NOT in front, but with a HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST tattoo, you have to do something like HIDES WH
AT MATTERS MOST FROM EVERYONE WHO IS NOT IMPORTANT, or something else that sounds stilted and is not going to fit on everyone’s forearm. You can get a tattoo or a bunch of tattoos over it, but aesthetically that’s going to make you wince every time you look in the mirror, and you can usually make out the original tattoo underneath anyway. You can tattoo a black bar of redaction over it, but that looks suspicious. So you interpret the tattoo to make it go away. You just say that FROM EVERYONE WHO IS NOT IMPORTANT is implicit in HIDES WHAT MATTERS MOST. Now you’re in the realm of trying to read something so that it says what you want it to say, which I guess is the realm everyone has been in since the invention of writing.

  What I’m saying is that once you’ve made the mistake of seeing Adam Lyons, there’s really nothing I can do for you as a tattoo artist. Your tattoo can truly be erased only by the worm that will one day eat it, or by the fire that will one day turn it into ash.

  CHAPTER

  16

  By the time Goldberg was finished talking, we were finished picking up the candy, and the candy display was the same as it was before we had come in. This story had made me as angry at Goldberg as Adam was—Goldberg was the enemy of life and knowledge, he was selling plastic fruit in the Garden of Eden—and I wanted to hurt him. But I needed to find out if he knew anything about my parents.

  “Wait,” I said. “That couple that you said harassed you. The woman had a fox fur coat. Tell me more about them.”

  “They would just track me and find me, yell at me to leave, call the cops, then repeat until the cops kicked me out. They made my life miserable for a couple of years and it didn’t seem to bother either of them. I tried to engage them in conversation a few times, real conversation, but they were too brainwashed to reveal anything about themselves.”