The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  It was true I had seen no evidence that Ismail had ever been involved in anything like this, but then again, We Are All Unknowable, Et Cetera. To think you know anyone, I reminded myself, is the height of hubris.

  The alternative to accepting this logic was accepting that Ismail had, with my assistance, been put in a dungeon for no reason at all. I chose the first option.

  I was a hero, I decided.

  The important thing was that I had spoken up before it was too late; yes, I had spoken up in time to save the lives of countless people who might otherwise have been murdered by my suicide-bomber best friend. In that sense, I had even saved Ismail’s life, since now he would not be able to blow himself up. His mother would one day thank me.

  Calls started coming in from reporters, but I ignored them. Calls also started coming in from Leah, and I ignored those, too, though I couldn’t ignore her when she called up to my room from the security desk. I was afraid she would attract attention, so I told the guard to send her up.

  I held the door open while I waited for her, and I got some suspicious looks from people on my hallway who had hugged me on 9/11, and I thought I probably deserved those looks for having been friends with a terrorist. I tried to smile at Leah when I saw her, but she did not smile back. I got her into my room and shut the door as quickly as possible.

  “You told them about Ismail’s tattoo, didn’t you?”

  “Lots of people at NYU must have known about that tattoo.”

  “You’re the one who told the FBI about it.”

  “I’m the one they asked. What was I supposed to do? If I had lied, they might have thought I was a terrorist.”

  “And you need them to think well of you because you’re so fucking DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.”

  “Am I dependent on the FBI having the opinion that I am not a terrorist? Yes.”

  “Ismail’s dependent on that opinion, too.”

  “And if he’s innocent, I’m sure they’ll let him go.”

  “If he’s innocent? You know what that tattoo meant.”

  “I thought I knew what it meant.”

  “Are you seriously this much of a piece of shit?”

  “If they’re holding him, they must have something.”

  “Yeah, they have a tattoo and a play that he was writing. Apparently that’s enough.”

  “Why wouldn’t he show you the play?”

  “Venter.”

  “They must have more.”

  “You’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Does it bother you that I think you’re an evil, stupid, pathetic little bitch who ruined my boyfriend’s life?”

  Saying this seemed to make her feel better, but then sobs ripped apart her face. I put my arms around her, and to my surprise she let them stay there.

  “They questioned me for fifteen hours yesterday. They wouldn’t let me have a lawyer. Who knows what they’ve made him say.”

  It was impossible not to ask myself where Ismail was at that second, and what was being done to him. But there was no way to know for certain that he was not being treated well.

  After a moment, Leah seemed to realize that I was touching her, and she swatted me away like I was a rat crawling on her shoulders.

  “I hope there is another terrorist attack,” she said, “just so you can burn in it.”

  And then she was gone, and I cried more or less nonstop for two hours. Then I decided to go to a party I had heard Rebecca and her roommates were having in their suite, probably because I was in the mood to make another bad decision.

  As soon as I arrived, I got the sense that everyone had just been talking about me. Nothing necessarily odd about that; after all, I was the host’s ex-boyfriend. People kept on backing away from me whenever I tried to join a conversation, again not wholly inexplicable. I stood in a corner by myself fingering a lime slice into a Corona Light when Rebecca came up to me.

  “So. My ex-boyfriend’s best friend is a terrorist. That’s not going to look very good on my State Department disclosure forms when I apply for an internship.”

  “Why would you put that on a form? It’s not like you dated Ismail.”

  “You want to be as far away from somebody like that as possible.”

  “Well. Now you are.”

  “I reread that email he sent me, and it’s scary. It shows a definite hatred of female sexuality.”

  “Maybe he was just angry.”

  “Maybe that email didn’t strike you as so terrible because you weren’t its target.”

  “Maybe you’re just over—”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t finish that sentence. Maybe you should have reported Ismail as soon as he got that tattoo.”

  “I didn’t think he literally wanted to blow things up.” It occurred to me that I still didn’t think that. I was certain that Ismail was innocent, if “innocent” is even an appropriate word for someone who hasn’t even been accused of anything specific. But I tried to remind myself that just because I was certain about something did not make it true. Only a few hours before, I had been certain that Ismail was a terrorist. For once, the worthlessness of my certainty was comforting.

  “What if that really is what it meant, though?” Rebecca said. “They’re not just holding him because of a tattoo.”

  Our mutual need to believe this—our mutual need to believe that our friend was not being persecuted without cause—was so strong that I thought we were about to kiss each other. But then she turned away.

  “So why is your dad defending him?”

  I put down my Corona Light. “What?”

  “Your dad was on CNN saying that Ismail is a close personal friend of his family and that this is a gross violation of American values.”

  “My dad barely knew Ismail and hasn’t spoken to him in years,” I said. “My dad has barely spoken to me in years.”

  “Cults are cults, that’s all I’m saying.” This non sequitur came from Rebecca’s roommate, a red-haired chemistry major who had never liked me.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “The epiphany machine is a cult that defies reason to give people a sense of ultimate meaning. The same thing is true of Al Qaeda.”

  I said that I had heard enough of this and returned to my room, where I called my father.

  “Venter!” he said, sounding truly happy to hear from me. “We’re going to fight this and we’re going to win. I’ve been on the phone ever since I heard. I’ve been finding out that a lot of the smartest lawyers I know are, inconveniently, cowards who have no interest in standing up against the total dismantling of the rule of law. I’m probably too close to the case to take it myself. But we’ll find someone. We’re not going to abandon your friend.”

  “Don’t call him my friend, Dad. Why are you on TV reminding people that I know a terrorist?”

  There was silence on the other end for a few seconds, and then some very disappointed sighing.

  “There’s no reason to call him that,” he said. “And no matter what, he has the right to a lawyer.”

  “You’re acting like we still live in a world that has room for law.”

  “That’s the only way to act.”

  “They wouldn’t have arrested him if he weren’t guilty.”

  “Venter, come on. I know there’s a lot of pressure right now to believe some ridiculous things about what we should be doing as a country, but you can’t seriously be this DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.”

  I hung up the phone.

  • • •

  The next week, I was called in for a meeting with a dean who told me that a number of students had reported that they “did not feel safe” with me living in their dorm or attending their classes; there were two or three weeks when I thought that I was going to be kicked out of school for my association with Ismail. But like s
o many things, this just stopped being mentioned.

  A Time magazine article made an argument similar to the one Rebecca’s roommate had made, except it drew a closer connection: “There is a reason why Ziad Jarrah and Ismail Ahmed were drawn both to the epiphany machine and to Al Qaeda. Both cults, after all, hinge on the mortification of the flesh, and tell their members that this mortification will take them to paradise.”

  And so on. Other articles drew connections between Ziad Jarrah and Mark David Chapman, or between Ismail and one or both Rebecca Harts. There was even speculation—some of it from relatively reputable sources—that Adam himself had somehow been involved in 9/11. This speculation led to his harassment by the media, who’d begun waiting outside his apartment.

  “It’s not my fault my machine works,” Adam said in one interview. “Maybe if more people came to see me, and came to see me earlier, they could get the help that they need and terrible things like this wouldn’t happen.”

  A lot of people got mad about this and demanded that Adam apologize. He did not, and refused renewed calls to share epiphanies with law enforcement.

  “Every epiphany is different and specific to the person who receives it,” he said. “There are a lot of different ways to want to blow things up. Like this kid, Ismail, that they have locked up somewhere—I know him, he’s a good kid and he’s innocent. But nobody cares about my opinion, they only care about the machine’s opinion, even though they think that I am writing the epiphanies—care to explain that to me?”

  Adam had not sent me any more emails, but I felt I had to say something to him about this. I wrote:

  A lot of grandstanding on TV, but what about what you do to people with DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoos? Maybe Ismail is getting what’s coming to him, just like you think those people are getting what’s coming to them.

  After sending this, I felt very agitated, so I went downstairs to the dorm food court to get some Taco Bell. When I came back upstairs, I had received this response:

  I know our friend is not a terrorist, and I also know that all those people with DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoos deserved what they got. Not all of us are DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, buddy.

  Mine,

  A.L. (Qaeda, if you think the way everybody else thinks, and obviously you do)

  CHAPTER

  30

  My father devoted all of his (very limited) free time to Ismail’s defense, such as it was. He would not be allowed to defend Ismail because of conflict of interest issues, though these issues proved irrelevant since Ismail was being denied any kind of lawyer at all. I was extremely angry with my father about this, but I spent winter break in Westchester anyway. I was terrified of being attacked in Manhattan, either by Al Qaeda or by people who were angry at the epiphany machine and wanted to take it out on me. (Some drunk, fratty types had tried to knock down my door one night.)

  My father had turned my room into what amounted to a giant filing cabinet—papers everywhere—so I slept in what had been my grandmother’s room, the house’s second master bedroom. I spent a lot of time draping myself in the bright, itchy afghans she had painstakingly knitted throughout my childhood. I realized how extraordinarily fortunate I had been to have had an intelligent woman devote herself to taking care of me, and I realized, too, how little I had appreciated it.

  I was occasionally aware that I was thinking about my grandmother as a way of not thinking about Ismail, but feeling sad over someone you’ve lost is a very effective way of distracting yourself from what a prick you are. Or maybe I’m just speaking for myself.

  On Christmas Day, Leah rang the doorbell, holding a cardboard box under one arm.

  “I’m not here to see you,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re here. Whatever the truth is about Ismail, we should be here for each other.”

  “Venter, this box is heavy and I’d like you to get the fuck out of my way.” I did as she asked and tried to take the box from her, but she yanked it out of my reach and carried it to the dining room.

  “Mr. Lowood, I have some documents for you,” she called out. The door to my father’s den slid open.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Ismail’s emails to me. A lot of the writing that he’s done in the last few years.”

  “And what are you hoping to prove with all this?”

  “I don’t know. That he was a human being, maybe.”

  “Being a human being isn’t going to count for much in court,” I said. “And besides, Ismail has been refused a lawyer.”

  “Leave us alone, Venter,” my father said, entering the room. “We have work to do.”

  • • •

  Exiled as though I were half my age, I had nothing to do but watch television. At some point that day, or at any rate that week, I saw Adam’s commercial for the first time.

  The commercial, which looked like it had been shot using incredibly cheap equipment, showed Adam standing in the epiphany room, patting the machine like it was a child or a dog, and holding a coffee mug that, for all I knew, did not contain whiskey.

  “You’ve heard a lot about this baby in the past few months, and not all of it has been good,” he said. “In fact, none of it has been good. It’s all been very bad.” There was a dissolve now to one of those gauzy shots of the World Trade Center that were already becoming the second-most common images of the new century, right after images of the planes hitting the buildings. A few notes of soft patriotic treacle played on the soundtrack. “Just like those in our government, I think day and night about what I could have done to stop that tragedy. Of course there’s no way for me to go back in time. But here’s something I can do.”

  Adam put his hand over the sweat stain on his left shirt pocket.

  “For the next six months, I will refuse all donations. I will not accept a dime from anyone who comes to see me to use the machine. A monster used my machine and it told him he was a monster. New Yorkers are strong, and right now they need to hear that they’re strong. So come let the machine tell you how strong you are, in a way you won’t forget.”

  Big smile, missing tooth, dissolve to black, next commercial.

  Well, I thought, Adam’s done now. This will not salvage the machine and will lead to many attacks on Adam for using a tragedy to gin up publicity.

  Those attacks did come—but so did many people eager to use the machine.

  The New York Times, April 25, 2002

  IN CURIOUS OLD SHOP,

  SOLACE FOR WOUNDED CITY

  BY ALICE GRAVES

  When a friend suggested to Lydia Sardi that she use the epiphany machine to help treat the anxiety and depression she had been experiencing in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, her first thought was that she should never speak to this friend again. After all, the controversial device—which tattoos cryptic koans on the arms of its users, koans praised by proponents as important, possibly supernatural wisdom and derided by critics as generic platitudes—had been in the news because it had been used by Ziad Jarrah, one of the terrorists who perpetrated those very attacks, as well as by Ismail Ahmed, an NYU student detained in connection with a plot to blow up the Queensboro Bridge.

  But two weeks later, after a string of particularly debilitating panic attacks caused her to miss work for three straight days, Ms. Sardi, 38, a pulmonary nurse who lives in Washington Heights, decided to try the device. She looked up the Upper East Side address of Adam Lyons, the guru who for decades has kept the epiphany machine in a dedicated room in his apartment.

  Expecting to be the only person using the epiphany machine in the middle of the afternoon she chose for her visit, Ms. Sardi encountered a line outside Mr. Lyons’s building that extended down the block.

  “I guess there are a few million people in New York right now who will try adventurous solutions to feel better,” Ms. Sardi said.

&nbs
p; The number of New Yorkers who have used the epiphany machine in the last few months might not be quite that high, but Ms. Sardi is certainly not alone.

  “I went out to dinner last weekend with some friends, and I looked around the table and I saw that I was literally the only one without an epiphany tattoo,” said Jennifer Dayles, 26, a management consultant. “They had all been so frazzled, just like me, and now they seemed a lot better. So I got the address, hopped on the 6 train, and got in line.”

  On a recent Saturday night, Ms. Sardi and Ms. Dayles drank whiskey together at a “salon night” at Adam Lyons’s apartment. The purpose of salon nights, which Mr. Lyons hosts at least twice a week, is for those who have used the machine—or “guests,” as he calls them—to gather, talk about their tattoos, drink alcohol, and bring friends who might be interested in using the machine themselves. Of the approximately two dozen attendees who filed in and out throughout the night, twelve had used the machine, and of these, eight had used the machine since September 11 of last year.

  Throughout the night, Mr. Lyons, 61, told stories, listened to stories, drank whiskey, and showed every sign of having the time of his life. This is a sharp turnaround from a few short months ago, when he appeared irritable and defensive when approached by reporters, almost all of whom wished to discuss Mr. Jarrah or Mr. Ahmed.

  Taking a swig of her drink, Ms. Dayles proudly showed off her tattoo. “PRETENDS TO FEEL SORRY FOR SELF TO JUSTIFY EASY LIFE isn’t exactly what I would have chosen to have permanently inscribed on my arm,” she said. “But it just makes what comes next, BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS, that much more believable.”

  The last phrase of this tattoo was identical—some might say suspiciously so—to the last phrase of the tattoo received by Ms. Sardi: TAKES PLEASURE IN PUTTING IN NOT QUITE ENOUGH EFFORT BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS.