The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  Accusations that the tattoos are generic have plagued the epiphany machine since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when John Lennon and other spiritual seekers found guidance in a device that claimed to have insight into their souls at a time when traditional sources of authority appeared to be collapsing. But never before has the device used identical language for so many of its users within such a short time frame.

  Michael K. Severn, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, said in a telephone interview that the appeal of this language should come as no surprise.

  “People are terrified right now and looking for comfort. The epiphany machine’s secret has always been that however nasty its judgments may be, they’re still easy answers. Add this new phrase to those easy answers, and you have a perfect moment for the machine.”

  Asked about this comment at the Saturday gathering, Mr. Lyons appeared unfazed.

  “There’s a very simple reason why the machine has been saying a lot of New Yorkers are stronger than terrorists: it’s because there are a lot of New Yorkers who are a lot stronger than terrorists.”

  Another attendee, Tyler Bryce, 33, a computer programmer, echoed Ms. Dayles’s assessment that the machine’s often unpleasant personal judgments lent weight to its rosier outlook on security.

  “If Adam Lyons just wanted to tell people a happy story, that’s what he would do. Instead, the machine takes a hard look at you and is honest about your strengths and weaknesses,” said Mr. Bryce.

  Appearing agitated, Mr. Bryce lit a cigarette, with which he almost burned the sleeve he proceeded to roll up.

  “Look at this! KNOWS CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN CHEATED IS ITSELF CHEATING BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS. Now, I really do believe that I was cheated out of a dot-com idea I had in ’96, but I do have to admit that the machine is right that I sometimes dwell on it as a way of avoiding my other responsibilities. That level of insight makes me confident that I am also STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS.”

  Mr. Lyons dismissed all objections with an insouciant flick of his cigar.

  “There have always been people convinced that I’m the bad guy. I broke up the Beatles, I made your mother abandon you, I killed John [Lennon], I turned your wife into a lesbian, I caused AIDS, I made a couple women named Rebecca Hart kill their kids, 9/11 is my fault. People who insist on seeing me as a monster should just remember that Van Helsings come and go, but Dracula lives forever.”

  The accusations surrounding Mr. Lyons and his machine caused a steady roll of laughter around the bar. The only attendee who expressed any reservations was a young woman who said that Mr. Lyons seemed awfully cavalier about making 9/11 jokes. Mr. Lyons gave a pronounced shrug and protested that he was not making fun of the victims of 9/11, but rather those, primarily in the media, who suggested that 9/11 was in some way his fault.

  He and the woman, who declined to give her name, continued to bicker for several hours. In the end, he persuaded her to follow him behind the velvet curtain at the far end of the apartment to use the device that is said to have inspired the Beatles song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from the velvet curtain with a tattoo. It read: HIDES IN PROPRIETY BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Anything that I learned in college after Ismail’s arrest could easily fit on to my forearm. Most likely, it could fit on my pinky. I more or less stopped paying attention in class and doing my reading, even during a seminar I took my senior year on the work of Steven Merdula, though I did pay close attention to Merdula’s chapter on Andrew Blue, since the actual Blue was experiencing renewed popularity, frequently cited in the aftermath of 9/11 as a model of strength and vision. My final paper for that class argued more or less what Ismail had argued years earlier—that Merdula’s portrait of Andrew Blue as a crazed anti-Semite whose foresight was a matter of luck amounted to puerile libel, libel that ignored both the depth of Blue’s learning and the careful thinking evident in Blue’s every turn of phrase. I also said something about the “strange cosmic justice” inherent in the fact that Richard Reid, the famous proponent first of disastrous war and then of appeasement, was finding his name echoed in that of the terrorist who attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe. My professor—whose interest in Merdula and the epiphany machine had led her to an interest in me that quickly dissipated—gave me a B−, saying that I hadn’t sufficiently engaged with Merdula’s underlying themes and that my reading of Blue was “marred by fealty to currently fashionable journalistic trends.” I did take some validation in the fact that, about a month or so after I got that B−, an article in The Atlantic Monthly argued the same thing that I had argued, adding “the idea that Blue, a man allergic even to superstitions far more durable than those that have arisen around this hokey hunk of tin, would ever have used such a device, let alone paid the slightest attention to whatever arbitrary platitude it happened to scribble on his arm, is a patently sinister absurdity.” The piece added that it was “unsurprising that at least two jihadists have used the epiphany machine; it is jihadists, not Andrew Blue, who possess the medieval credulity and barbarism that would draw someone to Adam Lyons’s needle.”

  Most of these last two years in college I spent thinking about Ismail. Sometimes I would prepare a monologue that I would deliver when he was released, something about how I had been scared, both by the FBI and by the prospect of terrorism, and that I had never even for a moment seriously thought that he was a terrorist. This fantasy would end with him either sticking a knife in me or embracing me, either of which, I suppose, support the argument that I was homoerotically obsessed with him.

  Other times I would spend hours on the Internet reading everything I could find about Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, and I would feel certain that Ismail was in fact guilty—that his email to Rebecca suggested a man who hated women, that his suspicions of American culture, which on the surface I agreed with, were in fact the tip of a much more dangerous iceberg—and I would fantasize about the lives I had saved that otherwise would have perished on the Queensboro Bridge, even imagining mothers thanking me for saving their children, if they could somehow know that their children would have been on the Queensboro Bridge at the time that Ismail would have blown it up had it not been for my intervention.

  Early in my senior year, past the first anniversary of the attacks and approaching the first anniversary of Ismail’s detention, I got a call on my dorm room phone from a man who asked me to hold for Vladimir Harrican. I held, and when Vladimir came on the line the first thing he said was that there was a job with my name on it at an organization he was starting.

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with the epiphany machine anymore,” I said. “I just want to forget it. I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with mass-producing it.”

  “I’m not interested in mass-producing it at the moment,” he said. “My thoughts have changed a lot since 9/11. I’m not immune from the general flow of things in that regard. Ziad Jarrah and your friend Ismail have made it clearer to me than ever that Adam Lyons knows something about human nature. I want to use what he knows to save lives.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’ve started an organization to put pressure on Adam to make epiphanies public. I think you could be helpful in that regard.”

  “How so?”

  “You know more than anyone else about Adam Lyons and Ismail. Except perhaps for Ismail’s girlfriend, and she refuses to take my calls. You can tell your coworkers about what Adam does, who Adam is. You can give us insight that we can transform into results. Usually when I talk about ‘results’ I’m talking about profits or stock price, but now I mean stopping terrorists and saving lives.”

  Knowing what Leah would think of me if I agreed to accept Vladimir’s offer made me doubt that I could accept it. Knowing what my father would think of me made me know I could not.

>   “Absolutely not,” I said. “And I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”

  “Maybe you’re not the person I thought you were, Venter,” he said, and while I was trying to figure out whether he meant this as a compliment, he hung up.

  I continued to drift about for the rest of my senior year, one minute thinking that Ismail was innocent and it was my duty to try to free him, the next minute thinking that he was guilty and that it was my duty to accept Vladimir’s offer. No minute did I spend doing anything productive. Honestly, all I wanted was definitive word on Ismail’s guilt or innocence to magically appear on my arm.

  What appeared on my arm instead was fire. Just a little fire, but a little fire is enough.

  Shortly before graduation, trying to blow off steam from my fear of my own total lack of post-graduation plans, I was running in Riverside Park—one of my many abortive attempts to make a habit of doing so—when an old man called out my name. The surprise of hearing my name was enough to slow me down, though I wasn’t going very fast to begin with and was mostly worrying about what all the people who were passing me were thinking about how slow I was going. The man who had spoken was wearing a rumpled suit and smoking a cigarette, and looked like he hadn’t showered or slept for several days, so I thought that I had misheard and he hadn’t actually said my name.

  “You work for the epiphany machine,” he said. My picture had been circulated online briefly after 9/11, so I figured that that was how he recognized me.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “And not for years.”

  “You were friends with that terrorist, Ismail Ahmed,” he said.

  “‘Friends’ isn’t the right word.”

  “Are you a terrorist, too? Let me see your tattoo.”

  In retrospect, I’m still shocked that I was so eager for this random disheveled man to feel assured that I wasn’t a terrorist that I complied and extended my arm, which he proceeded to burn with his cigarette. I screamed and looked for help, but there was no one in that stretch of the park except for a young boy chasing pigeons, and his father watching him do so. They were too far away to hear or just didn’t want their day interrupted.

  “See that man?” asked the man who had just burned me. “That’s what my son should be doing. Playing with his own boys. Instead, my grandsons are dead, and my son is in prison. Because you people hid a monster. That’s what you people do. You hide monsters.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t even know, do you? Go home and look up Devin Lanning. He should have been named Devil Lanning, but it’s Devin Lanning. D-E-V-I-N L-A-N-N-I-N-G. Want me to burn it into your arm?”

  “I got it, thanks.”

  He walked away, slowly enough that I could have tackled him. I certainly could have filed a police report. But he seemed to think I deserved what he had done to me, and I had the unnerving sense that he was right.

  I did as he asked. I went home, did some googling, and discovered that the man who had assaulted me was probably the father of Jonathan Soricillo. Jonathan Soricillo’s twin sons—so, the grandsons of the man who had assaulted me—had been discovered in the woods, each of them raped and murdered. Certain that his neighbor Devin Lanning was guilty, Jonathan Soricillo tied up Lanning in his basement, poured gasoline on him, and lit him on fire. A terrible story, of course, but I couldn’t see what it had to do with me. It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph that I saw that Soricillo said that Devin Lanning had an epiphany tattoo. Soricillo, who had seen the tattoo only in his fit of murderous rage, said he was unable to remember what the tattoo had said, but that it suggested that Lanning should not be trusted around children.

  I sent Adam the link and asked him whether Devin Lanning had gotten a DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoo. He responded:

  I remember everyone who gets that tattoo, and I don’t remember the crisp in question. My guess is that the father was just trying to use the machine to justify the horrible thing he did. Easier to understand him than it is to understand most people who use the machine to justify the horrible things they do. Cough, cough.

  A.L. (Absolutely Lucky (to be rid of you) )

  It was Adam’s response that was self-justifying bullshit. The neighbor had obviously gotten a DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoo. Adam hadn’t noticed or had decided to ignore it, and as a result, he had allowed this pedophile to rape and murder these two little boys. My thinking was solidified when Adam sent another email a few hours later.

  The more I think about this the less sure I am that this guy Devin Lanning didn’t use the machine. Ever since 9/11, my mind has been tearing holes in itself, and maybe this guy got through one of those holes.

  A minute later, he followed up again.

  Honestly I didn’t mean “this guy got through one of those holes” as a double entendre. That would be disgusting. This whole thing is disgusting. You have no idea how terrible I feel.

  I looked at my arm, now purple with the burn. In a way, I had allowed this pedophile to rape and murder these two little boys. Whether the machine possessed some kind of supernatural knowledge, or Adam was a preternaturally strong judge of character, I knew that people who get DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoos were pedophiles, and I had done nothing to protect the children those pedophiles would harm.

  I wrote a short email.

  OK, it’s time to share epiphanies with law enforcement.

  He responded immediately.

  Can’t do it, buddy. Privacy’s a bird. You let it fly away and it’s gone forever.

  I typed a long email in response to this, but deleted it.

  I took another run through Riverside Park, hoping to see the man who had burned me, so I could apologize to him. But he wasn’t there. He probably didn’t want to hear from me, at least until I had done something to make this right.

  A feeling settled in me as I glided past tree after tree that I had not felt in a long time, or maybe ever. As I tried to identify the feeling, I looked past the trees at the river and the cliffs of New Jersey, at the river and the cliffs that had been here before New Jersey, before New York, before—no matter what its true origin story was—the epiphany machine. I looked at the river to the bottom of which Ismail had once threatened to take us—probably jokingly, but not definitely, since after all no joke is ever definitely a joke. And that is when I realized what the feeling was. Joy, certainty, purpose, the sudden possession of knowledge available to all but accessed by only a few—if I hadn’t yet learned that all of those things were the same, then I truly had wasted all the time I had spent thinking about epiphanies. I knew what I had to do, and I knew that I was going to do it.

  Did it occur to me that this feeling was actually just my relief at hiding from guilt and doubt, a choice of the widely approved pursuit of child molesters and terrorists over the wildly unpopular and probably doomed attempt to free a man considered a terrorist? Of course this occurred to me. Every epiphany contains an opposing epiphany. Which is why I acted as quickly as I did, before I—or someone else—could change my mind.

  CHAPTER

  32

  Vladimir Harrican’s offices looked westward, over Manhattan but mostly past it. The buildings were just so much tall grass to be bent aside and the cliffs of New Jersey that I had stared at on my run were anthills to be stomped as Vladimir surveyed the vast plains of America that, as far as he was concerned, were still virgin territory and his to conquer. Or perhaps he believed that his conquering would be so beneficent that he would erase all the conquering that had come before. He would wake the country up from the nightmare of history, cradle it to his chest, and say that it was all right, Daddy’s here, it was just a dream. Until then, there was a s’mores station in the waiting area. Graham crackers, dark chocolate, and marshmallows that could be roasted over the plexiglass-protected firepit in the center of the lobby. When I was led into his office, Vladimir was unhappy to hear that I
had declined his assistant’s offer to make myself one, and he lectured me for two minutes on the underrated health benefits of dark chocolate.

  “Nothing else we could talk about today could be as important as dark chocolate,” he said once that lecture was over. “But tell me the second-most important thing we have to cover.”

  Simultaneously insulted and disarmed, I stammered a bit before coming to the point.

  “I saw something in the news that I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

  “The guy who burned the sicko who killed his kids,” he said.

  I was totally shocked. “How did you know?”

  “The epiphany machine prophesied it on my arm. Just kidding. I have somebody keep track of all news related to the epiphany machine.”

  “Epiphanies should be made public,” I said.

  “A clear point of view, clearly stated. But before we get there, let’s back up a bit. Why did you come here?”

  “Because I want to accept the offer you made. The one about working to make epiphanies public.”

  “Okay, let’s back up a little further. The epiphany machine asks two questions of us. What are they?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Sure you do. The epiphany machine asks two questions of us: Will you believe the truth about yourself if it is presented to you, and what will you do about it? Of these two questions, only the second is interesting, since plenty of people know the truth about themselves but do not have the energy and, in most cases, any real desire to alter their habits in any way. Now, people who do improve their behavior for the better have some things in common. What are those things? You must have noticed when you were taking those—what did you call them?—testimonials.”