The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  TESTIMONIAL #90

  NAME: Leah Marx

  DATE OF BIRTH: 04/10/1981

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: N/A

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 11/23/1999

  I loved Coke when I was a child. The soda, not the powder. If I could get my hands on a can of Coke, I just popped it—I loved the sound of that popping—and then I pointed the bottom to the sky and I kept drinking until it was empty. I loved feeling overpowered by that particular blend of sugar and unholy chemicals. You can laugh if you want, but I think it’s morally perilous to laugh at childhood joy, no matter where that joy comes from. Certainly my parents laughed about it, particularly about the fact that I would throw a tantrum if someone offered me a Pepsi instead. “I guess Pepsi isn’t the choice of a new generation!” But even then, I could tell that the jokes weren’t really jokes. My father told me I was going to get fat, then said he was sorry for saying something “so horrible.” When I told him I didn’t care if I got fat, that really scared him. He forbade me from drinking Coke, or any soda at all. Like any good heroine of any good love story, I was inflamed by my father’s disapproval of my beloved. Nothing could stop me from drinking Coke now. Meeting in secret just made our couplings more intense. I spent a good portion of my first sleepover in the birthday girl’s bathroom, pouring a six-pack down my throat can by delicious can. This probably should have made me a weird pariah; instead, the sugar gave me enough energy and verve to plunder the girl’s mother’s makeup, and that made me a fucking child celebrity. A couple of the girls tried to make fun of me for being fat, but I was too in love to care, and that love radiated out of me and made the other girls love me. And loving me meant bringing me to their houses, which, for them, meant latching on to my bold, sugar-fueled adventures, and, for me, just meant drinking Coke.

  I don’t have to tell you what I looked for in the vending machines the week my father spent dying in the hospital. Or what I drank almost nonstop for several hours after he took his last breath. Or what I drank more of than ever in the weeks and months after he died. I knew that I was supposed to deny myself the only thing I enjoyed in order to mourn this man who denied me the only thing I enjoyed—this man who tried to make me feel bad about taking up a little too much space on the planet. I knew that if he were alive he’d still be horrified at how much Coke I was drinking, and definitely at how fat I was getting, and I liked knowing that.

  Then I had no taste for Coke at all. Starting around the time I turned eleven, it just tasted like water into which somebody had poured sludge. I didn’t want Coke; I didn’t want anything. I stopped doing my schoolwork, or even getting out of my bed without my mother physically dragging me out.

  I took to acting, because you got to inhabit these weird fake people who were so artificially constructed that they wanted things, as though anybody in real life wants the same thing for more than like a minute or two. Judging from the reaction to my performances, people really believed that I wanted things when I was on stage, and that was really funny.

  You know what I used for every emotion I showed on stage? I knew my love for Coke was dead, but sometimes I would get some other junk food from the vending machines, just to see if I could reproduce the feeling. Kit Kats, Doritos, whatever. I could never tolerate more than a bite or two. But every once in a while, whatever I had bought would get stuck, and then, at least for a couple of minutes, I would experience strong emotion. Desire, frustration, hope, anger, everything you see on stage. Nobody ever wants a person the way they want a bag of chips they’ve already paid for that refuses to fall at their feet. Or maybe people want people in exactly that way. Funny.

  I snorted coke a few times, since that seemed like it would have some appropriate symmetry, and coke is supposed to make you want more coke, which at least is wanting something. But that kind of coke didn’t do anything for me, and I would just kind of look at the other people doing coke, and they would all just be funny to me.

  I got a job in a pet store, hoping that would make me feel something, since I did like dogs. The thing with the puppy mills, the thing I wrote about for Mr. Sullivan’s class, made me feel sad, but not sad enough to make me do anything. The sadness of those dogs just reinforced the idea that life was a joke.

  I was friends with you guys mostly because you were funny, and it amused me to watch you fall over yourselves for me. It even persisted into the beginning of the time I was first dating Ismail. The epiphany machine was funny to me, you were funny to me, Ismail was funny to me. I started dating Ismail because he was funny to me. And then Ismail got his tattoo and everything was different, for him and for me. I could see that he really did want to blow things up—not only his relationship with his mother, but, I don’t know, every single convention of contemporary theater. He wants to destroy everything old and create something new, really wants to do it. And seeing him want to make great art makes me want him, and want to join him.

  Here’s the thing, though: I feel guilty that all I’m doing is helping Ismail achieve his own artistic vision. I feel guilty for not writing myself. And yet for some reason it feels important to me that the words I speak on stage aren’t mine—I love being deluged by them, even gagging on them, in the same way that I loved being deluged by and gagging on Coke. Something’s only mine when it’s not mine, if that makes sense.

  Maybe it doesn’t make sense. But if it doesn’t make sense, I don’t want to know that it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I don’t want to use the machine myself.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Just before winter break, Rebecca and I attended Ismail’s play, which was terrible. Eighty minutes of Leah talking about nothing in several voices. This brought me no joy whatsoever; what I mostly felt was rage at Ismail for wasting all the energy that Leah brought to the small black-box stage. There was one moment in the play, when for some reason she was playing The Odyssey’s Penelope, doing what Penelope does every night—which is to say, sitting at her loom, undoing her day’s work on her father-in-law’s burial shroud—when I could see the loom, see the shroud that was being undone (though there were no props, only Leah, her black sweater, and her blue jeans), and most of all I could feel Penelope’s anguish at having to undo the only thing she did all day, but what I could not do was understand what Penelope was doing in the middle of what amounted to an eighty-minute monologue about writer’s block, or why Ismail had written an eighty-minute monologue about writer’s block.

  I was careful not to look at Rebecca, since she and I were the only ones in the audience and I was fairly certain that Leah would be able to see if Rebecca and I exchanged “This sucks” looks. When it was over, we both applauded as though we had just seen the twentieth century’s final great work of art, and I waited until we were out on the street before I said: “Well, maybe his next one will be better.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rebecca said. “It was really good.”

  “Are you kidding? It was just about being blocked. Incredibly boring.”

  “Being blocked is everything.”

  “Do you want to talk about the fact that you’re blocked?”

  “I’m not blocked,” she said. “I’ve given up writing.”

  “How do you know the difference?”

  “I don’t know, because I don’t approach my heart like it’s a jigsaw puzzle?”

  “I could never give up writing,” I said.

  “Maybe you should. That story you gave me was shit, Venter.”

  “You said you hadn’t read it.”

  She looked at me like she couldn’t believe she was hooking up with someone this stupid.

  “You lied to me? I don’t think I can date a liar.”

  “You’re going to break up with me because I didn’t like your story?”

  “I’m going to break up with you because you’re a liar.”

  “You’re going to break up with me because I didn
’t like your story, and you can’t handle that. DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, man. There’s a limit.”

  We argued for a few more minutes, in the course of which we both realized that we were each going to have to break up with someone for the first time in our lives. It was exhilarating and it turned us both on. We didn’t wait for Ismail and Leah, and instead got on the subway and headed uptown, where we fucked in my room before vowing never to see each other again.

  CHAPTER

  24

  The vow never to see each other again was our official policy for winter break and for the first several weeks of spring semester; Rebecca and I appeared to have an unspoken agreement that seeing each other between the hours of midnight and five in the morning did not count. Then one morning I fell asleep in her bed after sex and we woke up at noon, after which we got lox and bagels and decided we might as well be a couple again.

  We probably would not have stayed together very long if it hadn’t been for Ismail and Leah, whom we started seeing three or four times each week. On days when they didn’t see us, Ismail and Leah often saw Adam, and I suppose that part of the reason I wanted to see them was so that I could keep hearing about Adam. Leah mentioned a “creepy guy named Vladimir Harrican,” who had come by Adam’s one night and apparently asked about me; Adam had responded, “Get lost, Douglavich.”

  Mostly, Rebecca and I wanted to hang around Ismail and Leah for how they made us feel. Ismail and Leah would take us to plays, most of which were quite bad, and then we would get pizza or just two plates of French fries and make fun of the plays.

  “I think the lead girl is my new idol,” Leah said, after one ridiculous production. “Every time I give Ismail a blowjob from now on, I’m going to interrupt myself to look at the wall and deliver a monologue about how women are brainwashed by the media into thinking that male sexual pleasure is more important than female sexual pleasure.”

  Her mockery, she had explained to me, had a clear place in her scheme to stop finding everything funny: she was going to keep holding art to high standards and laughing at art that failed to meet those standards, while genuinely laboring to meet those standards herself. And her use of the word “brainwashed” made me miss Adam acutely.

  “And then I’ll be like the guy,” Ismail said, “and apologize to the wall on behalf of all men, and then go down on you.”

  “I love that the author of the play was a man,” Rebecca said. “You know that he was like, ‘Holy shit, this is going to make all the girls ask me to go down on them.’ Why don’t you write a play, Leah?”

  The shift was jarring, and Leah took a moment to recover.

  “I’m an actor, not a writer,” she said. “Why don’t you write a play?”

  “I’m neither an actor nor a writer,” Rebecca said.

  “So I guess we’ll have to leave the writing to the boys,” Leah said. “Since they’re better at it, obviously.”

  This made me uncomfortable, so I was grateful when Leah continued speaking.

  “You should write about Adam,” she told Ismail. “And I’ll play Adam.”

  “Why would you play an old man?” Rebecca asked. “Why don’t you play a woman?”

  “For the challenge. Why would I want to play myself?”

  “I never know whether I want to slap you or salute you,” Rebecca said.

  “They’re not mutually exclusive,” Leah said, either play-flirtatiously or flirtatiously-flirtatiously. Rebecca looked a bit flustered, and maybe—if I was reading her right, always a big if—a bit turned on.

  “Slap her!” Ismail said. “I’m too scared to do that myself. Write about Adam. What a dumb idea.” Ismail said this in a way that made it obvious that he had already decided to do it.

  “Adam has been covered way too much,” I said. “You should pick a worthy subject.”

  “‘You should pick a worthy subject,’” Leah said, imitating me and making Rebecca and Ismail laugh and laugh.

  After that conversation—and on many, many other nights that stretched out for the rest of the school year and through the next—the four of us wandered around downtown. Rebecca and Leah shared a particular fondness for Greene Street; they liked to do these stumbling waltzes on the cobblestones. Often, they would get far ahead of us and fall into what looked like intense conversations, and Ismail and I would hang back and try to guess what they were talking about, at least until we got frustrated and started talking Beckett or The X-Files.

  As the sun rose, Rebecca and I would take a cab back uptown on the West Side Highway, exhausted by the knowledge that we were two young people watching the dawn light on the Hudson, and that clearly this was the best life could get, so we better enjoy it.

  TESTIMONIAL #N/A

  NAME: Georgette Hoenecker

  DATE OF BIRTH: 12/10/1945

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 06/15/1971

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY ISMAIL AHMED AND LEAH MARX: 02/11/2001

  I had little choice but to fall in love with Douglas Harrican. I was nineteen, with no directive in life other than to marry a man my father would approve of. I wasn’t raised to have any pursuit of my own, and for the most part I didn’t have one. I did have a passion for French cuisine, which I was very serious about and to which I devoted a great deal of time from a young age, but this was regarded even by close friends as just my way to snare a man, no matter how I protested otherwise.

  Douglas had very little money, at least by my father’s standards, but he was a famous, and famously handsome, British violinist, and even though my father could not have cared less about classical music, he recognized that there was great prestige in being a famous violinist, in being handsome, and in being British, and prestige was what my father really cared about. If my father had ever gotten a tattoo, I think it would have been DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. In any case, I hated all the men I knew who had money, and I certainly hated all the men I knew who had old money, so when I met Douglas at a party and he was taken with me, I thought: He’ll do. He was a genius, after all, not only a spectacular musician but staggeringly well-read and fluent in French and Italian and German and Russian. I thought that that made him my best option, even though his conversation was pedantic and tedious and I found him about as sexually compelling as a piece of cardboard. All the other girls swooned for him, of course, and they were all jealous that I was the one he picked. I pretended to swoon, too, since doing otherwise would likely have made me seem a sore winner. Of course, it was only because I was cool to him that he picked me.

  We had been dating only a couple of months when he proposed, and I accepted, glad to be finished with what I had thought would be a lengthy game in which I’d have to pretend to be pretending not to be interested in him. I was also happy that we would be discussing wedding plans, which, boring though they would be, would be far preferable to Communist theory, the minutiae of which was the only thing he cared to discuss when we were alone. I couldn’t figure out why. I would have liked to hear his thoughts on Bach and Schubert, subjects about which he had more than secondhand knowledge, but he said that he spent all day talking about music and that at night he wanted to talk about his true passion, the deplorable present conditions of the Western worker and the glorious future that awaited. I hoped that he would bring this up when my father was present, since that might have gotten me out of the engagement and at the very least would have been entertaining, but with my father, he spoke only of dining options in European capitals, leaving out any reference to the Communist parties that were then active therein.

  Instead of wedding plans, Douglas moved from my acceptance of his proposal directly to preparations for the taking of my virginity. I was now his fiancée, and so he expected me, essentially, to put out. My father had impressed on me the importance of keeping myself intact until my wedding night. I didn’t much care either way. I yielded to Douglas, thinking it could not be all that unpleasant.
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  It was very unpleasant. I had heard that there was often pain involved for the woman the first time, so I expected it to get better the second, third, or tenth time. It did not. The pain lessened, I suppose, but it was replaced not by pleasure but by discomfort. It felt like getting shoved out of the way on the street, over and over, only you were expected to make noises signaling how much you were enjoying it. The only part of our lovemaking I found tolerable was when he put his fingers inside of me, but despite my urging, he always rushed through this prelude on his way to the thrusting fortissimo. As inappropriate as I knew it to be, it was after one of these sessions that I said one of the only prayers I’ve ever said: that Douglas would take his time and finger me.

  The wedding was coming up and I was trying to devise some kind of plan to get out of it when, walking home one night from one of his performances, we were all but literally shoved out of the way on the street. It took us a moment to understand what was happening: a completely bald man was shoving flyers at us. Then I saw that the bald man was in fact a bald woman, a girl about my age, with these blue eyes that, when they met mine, somehow locked my feet in place. We stood there staring at each other, and it took me a moment even to notice her tattoo, HORRIFIES TO CREATE LOVE, which struck me as very strange, not just because it was very unusual in those days to see a woman with any kind of tattoo, but because I did not understand how she could horrify anyone. Though I could certainly understand how she could create love. I think I was about to tell her this, consequences be damned, when she turned and continued down the street.

  “The epiphany machine!” she called behind her. “Know thyself.”