She put her hand on mine, and it did feel electric. A major reason why I loved Rebecca, and by far the biggest reason why we fought all the time, is that we tended to reflect our confusions back at each other. Right now it seemed absurd to think that the machine knew anything, or that Adam knew anything, or that Vladimir knew anything. Ismail was innocent, and I had devoted my life to persecuting him. “I’m doing terribly,” I said. “The best friend I’ve ever had is in Hell because of me.”
She took her hand away. “Venter, when you get dramatic like this you’re really evading responsibility. I’m not in Hell. I just think we should try getting back together. Jeez.”
I thought about correcting her mistake. I also thought that if I did not correct her, but we wound up having sex, I would feel guilty. I also thought that if I corrected her because I did not want to feel guilty if we had sex, that would be presumptuous. I worried about various combinations of correcting her and not correcting her and having sex and not having sex until, that night, on the pretext of helping her unpack, I met her at her new apartment, where we did not unpack, I did not correct her, and we did not have sex.
Our not having sex, I should be clear, was not for lack of trying. We started kissing almost as soon as we walked into her apartment. I’m not exactly sure when the word “impotent” entered my mind, but as soon as it did it might as well have been tattooed on my dick and all over Rebecca’s body, because I saw it everywhere. Panicked, I told myself to stop thinking of the word, but of course that just made me think about it more.
Despite this, when we stopped trying, I said I didn’t know what was wrong with me, as though the diagnosis were mysterious.
“I’m just happy to be with you again,” she said, nuzzling my neck and pulling one and then two of my fingers inside her. I enjoyed touching her. Afterward, we wrapped our legs around each other, both confident that we had found what we needed to find.
We got back together, and I continued to have difficulties getting erections. (I know, I know, it was hard to get hard. Ha, ha, ha.) It’s not that we never had sex, but when sex worked, it usually worked only after many stops and starts, and sometimes I would lose my erection while inside her, a very big death indeed.
“I think it’s because I feel guilty about Ismail,” I said to her after one failed attempt. “I can’t think about anything else.”
“Why do you feel guilty about Ismail?”
“He wouldn’t be where he is if it weren’t for me.”
“He wouldn’t be where he is if he weren’t a terrorist.”
“There have been reports that he has been tortured.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be tortured.”
“That doesn’t make you mad? He was our friend.”
“We never really knew him, obviously. I spend all day reading about women being raped and hacked to death. I just don’t have any spare room in my heart for a terrorist who’s being made uncomfortable.”
“I still think it’s why I’m too depressed to have sex.”
“Are you sure that’s the reason? Maybe you need to accomplish more professionally.”
I sat upright in bed. Suddenly, I realized that this was exactly what I needed to do. Rebecca always had a knack for knowing what I should be doing at any particular time, even if I failed to do it, as with that summer when I failed to write a novel. I had not been disciplined in practicing my certainty; I had let my certainty get flabby.
I needed to practice my certainty by accomplishing something. Rather than sit at my cubicle trying to get started on the memoir, I needed to take a concrete step to stop future Ismails, future Ziad Jarrahs, future Devin Lannings.
I was right that I was impotent because I felt guilty, but I didn’t feel guilty because I was persecuting Ismail; I felt guilty because I was acting impotently, not doing enough to stop people like Ismail.
This was the sudden realization I needed. This one, I was certain, would stand. An embarrassing double entendre, but a crucial one.
“I’ve actually been thinking that I’d like to write a more direct call to action,” I said. “Rather than just write this endless memoir, I should write something that convinces people that epiphanies need to be made public.”
“I was thinking you should get back to writing fiction,” Rebecca said.
I barely even heard this, because I was already thinking about the project that I was sure would bring me praise. I arrived at work the next morning ready to begin it, but as soon as I booted up my computer I discovered that Steven Merdula had published, in the literary journal Needle Quarterly, his first short story in many years.
Never to Be Doubted
BY STEVEN MERDULA
Somebody must have been telling lies about Ismail A.
Maybe this joke occurs to Ismail shortly after he is lifted off the sidewalk in front of the Tower Records near NYU and thrown into an SUV, in a movement so assured that any passersby who have noticed probably think he is just any college student, being ushered by friends off to adventure. He is handcuffed and hooded. His first thought is that this is Al Qaeda, perhaps here as part of some campaign to execute random Muslim apostates on the streets of New York. But his captors have American accents, and like many people with American accents, they shout at him and do not listen to what he says in return. What is happening to him is awful, it is hellish, it is, yes, Kafkaesque, but he tells himself it is also that most American of things: OK.
Perhaps when he is released, he will write an adaptation of The Trial, one that entwines his own experience with that of Josef K.’s.
Or perhaps he makes no plans. Perhaps he already knows that what has him will not let him go.
When the SUV stops, he demands—for the first time, partly because his mouth is covered with cloth, and partly because he is always slow to say what needs to be said, this is precisely the quality that draws him to write plays—to speak to a lawyer, to speak to his parents, to speak to his friend Venter’s lawyer father, to speak to Leah. His captors do not respond, but shove him out of the SUV and then push him, from the best that he can hear and smell, into a building. A hallway, an elevator. He calls out “Leah,” not because she will hear but because he needs the sound of the name “Leah” to fill the space he cannot see.
He hears a door lock behind him, and then he hears nothing else for a long time. Ten minutes? An hour? Ten hours? He cannot tell time in a hood, but this will all be over soon. It must be over soon; his country may be inhaling hysteria along with ash, but it is still his country, one in which there are things that the government will not permit itself to do.
“Leah,” he says to the darkness. If he were writing a play, he would squish out this sentimental moment, but he is not writing a play. He can see her in front of him; it is like she is there.
And then it is not like she is there. What is there now is darkness. Not the absence of light but a physical thing. The darkness is like a brick wall, or like water.
Finally, he hears the door open. “When were you first contacted by Ziad Jarrah?”
“Who?”
“Or was it Atta?”
“Can you take this hood off, please?”
“I’ll take the hood off if you’re honest with me and tell me when Atta contacted you.”
“Why are you doing this to me? You have to let me see! You have to let me know what time it is, and when I will be allowed to speak with a lawyer.”
“When did you first learn about the September 11 attacks?”
“Right after the planes hit, just like everybody else who lives downtown.”
“Don’t pretend. I can’t help you if you’re not honest.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“When I send you to Hell, you will have seventy-two lawyers.”
The darkness pressing down on his shoulders does not improve bad jokes.
“One will be
fine. But I want one now.”
“Have it your way. We’ll send a lawyer soon. Keep your eyes open.”
The door closes and does not reopen for a long time. Ismail longs to read something, anything, even just the tattoo on his arm, over and over.
When he realizes that he is here because of his tattoo—WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP—he is surprised that it has taken him this long to figure it out. For the first time in a minute or an hour or a day he feels hope. He bangs on the door and says he wants to speak to someone, and then keeps saying it until the door opens.
“Venter Lowood,” Ismail says. “He’s the one I got this tattoo with. It just means I wanted to ‘blow up’ my relationship with my family. Venter will vouch for me.” He could have mentioned Adam Lyons or Leah Marx, but he assumes they know about Leah, and he is not certain he trusts Adam. “V-E-N-T-E—”
“Venter Lowood is the one who told us that you’re a terrorist.”
Hearing this makes Ismail long for silence.
“You’re lying,” he says. “Venter is my friend. He would never tell lies about me.”
“Venter Lowood chose his country over a terrorist.” Then the door shuts again.
Of course Ismail should knock again, ask them to ask Adam Lyons. But he is too depressed to do anything now. As much as he does not want to believe it, he knows how comically easy Venter must have been to manipulate. Venter Lowood—Venter, both of whose parents used the machine; Venter, whose mother abandoned him and all but left him to die of exposure on top of the machine; Venter, who nonetheless used the machine and received the tattoo DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Until a moment ago, Ismail had long considered Venter his best friend, despite how fragile and suggestible he was, because anyone could see that Venter was fundamentally a smart and good-hearted person who had been unlucky enough to have a horrible, selfish mother. Ismail had even allowed Venter to convince him to use the machine, maybe in part to boost Venter’s confidence, to make him feel accepted. But someone else, someone looking to round up as many terrorism suspects as possible—CIA, FBI, someone—must have made Venter feel accepted.
Somehow Ismail feels a rush of affection and sympathy for Venter—affection for the late nights they spent talking about Kafka, sympathy for this poor guy who had been abandoned by his mother and as a result searched for whatever authority might approve of him—and then that rush is gone. Almost immediately, he feels a painful nostalgia for the time—surely it is not quite gone, surely there are a few seconds or a few centuries of that time left—when he felt anything at all for anyone other than total, vibrating hatred for Venter.
Sometime later—there is no saying when, or at least Ismail cannot say when—he is grabbed by the shoulders and pushed somewhere, and then pushed somewhere else. Doors open and close, beyond his hood there is some hazy suggestion of brightness, but then this brightness is extinguished forever as a door slams shut behind him, and now he realizes he is in a vehicle and that vehicle is moving. Finally, there are the sounds of a helicopter, the feeling of air and the smell of the sea, the sensation of being lifted, and Ismail suddenly realizes that he will be dropped into the sea. The government will not want to admit that it has held him for days or weeks or hours on nothing but a tattoo, so he is going to be dropped into the sea and forgotten forever.
But he is not dropped into the sea. The helicopter’s whirring, which reminds him very slightly of the whirring of the epiphany machine, slows and stops, and then he is alone and it is quiet again. He is alone, he is taken somewhere, it is quiet for a long time. He would like to be stronger but he weeps into his hood and he begs to be let go.
“I can’t help you unless you’re going to tell me the truth.” The same voice that spoke to him hours or weeks ago.
“The truth is that I’m innocent.”
“That is not the truth we’re looking for.”
The cloth chafes and he tastes it in his mouth, and he thinks, They are going to suffocate me, I am never going to be allowed to breathe again, much worse, I am never going to be allowed to speak again. But he is not suffocated with his hood. It must have gotten stuck in his mouth on its way off his face, because his hair is pulled and then the hood is removed.
Immediately it is too bright to see. He can barely see the outlines of the four men in the room with him, and he can see nothing of their faces, which are obscured by strange translucent plastic rectangles, strange translucent plastic rectangles he will see many more of.
These men remove the rest of Ismail’s clothing.
He shuts his eyes so that the darkness to which he has become accustomed will return, and he asks the men when he will be granted access to an attorney. There is no answer, save for thudding feet and a slamming door.
There are three things in the room: a toilet, a sink, a steel frame that looks like a bed. But it cannot be his bed, because there is no mattress. Surely they would, at the very least, give him a mattress.
They have not given him a mattress. This is his bed.
It doesn’t matter, though, because he cannot sleep, no matter how tired he may be. It is too bright to sleep. He calls out asking for the lights to be turned off, but the lights are not turned off.
At some point, it is made very cold. He shivers, he is naked, he asks for heat and for clothes and there is no answer. The lights are turned off. He can’t even see enough to find his bed, though it wouldn’t matter if he could, because it is too cold to sleep. Then it grows warmer, warmer, and warmer, and then far too hot. It is dark and hot, dark and hot, dark and hot, dark and hot.
If there were a clock, he could not see it, but he wishes that there were one, its presence would be reassuring.
Bright and cold bright and cold bright and cold dark and cold dark and cold dark and cold.
He imagines Leah, he imagines holding her. He imagines Venter, too, he imagines hitting him in the face. He imagines finding Venter’s mother and strangling her.
When he is released, he and Leah will turn this into a play. He imagines Leah’s intelligent, furious eyes as she paces around a stage that they will make to look exactly like this room. Leah will play him, she will inhabit him, she will make the audience feel what it is like to be here right now.
It is bright and hot. It is bright and hot. It is bright and hot. His eyes hurt and his skin feels so sweaty and disgusting and he wishes he could take his body off.
It has been two days, three days. He does not know whether they bring him three meals a day or one meal every other day. If there are rules in this place, he has not been permitted to know them.
A man enters and this man starts talking without offering Ismail clothes or a shower.
“Who came up with the plot to blow up the Queensboro Bridge?”
“What?”
“Atta? Bin Laden? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We found the plans to blow up the Queensboro Bridge on your computer.”
The man’s words are confusing, either because the words are confusing or because Ismail’s mind is deteriorating, or both.
“May I have some clothing?”
“You can have some clothing when you start being honest. We can’t trust you to cover yourself up if you also cover up the truth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The man slaps him.
It is still difficult to believe this is happening.
“You were going to incinerate everyone who happened to be on the bridge. School buses. Ambulances. Mothers returning to their children at the end of the day.”
“Are you talking about my play?”
“Don’t bother trying that. The whole ‘playwright’ business was a lie.”
“Who told you that? Venter? None of it’s true.”
“We have many of your friends in custody. They’ve all told us th
e truth.”
“I wrote a play. Fiction. Fiction. There’s a difference between reality and what’s made up.”
“We have some of your writings in which you say that, given that the world is itself a fiction, there is in fact no such thing as fiction, there is only reality.”
“Huh?”
The man starts to recite something, and its source is mysterious until it is not: it is from a paper that Ismail wrote for a literature class. The paper was called “Don Quixote and the Uncertain Nature of Reality.”
For the first time in this time that cannot be measured, Ismail laughs.
“The murder of innocent people is funny to you?” the man asks. “We have the minutes from your meetings with your coconspirators in which you discuss your plans to launch an attack on the Queensboro Bridge.”
“The minutes from my meetings? You mean the dialogue from my play?”
“Keeping up that lie won’t help you improve your treatment. Only telling the truth will improve your treatment.”
“I am telling the truth.”
The man was silent for a long time. “Do you think America is an evil country?”
“No, I do not believe that.” To Ismail’s surprise, this is still a true statement.
“But the United States is detaining you without charge, denying you access to a lawyer, stripping you naked, subjecting you to extreme temperatures, depriving you of sleep. The United States would have to be certain that you are its enemy to justify what it has done. If you are innocent, a country that would do what it is doing to you would unquestionably be evil. If you are saying you are innocent, you are saying the United States is evil. And if you believe the United States is evil, then you are an enemy of the United States. So whether you are saying you are innocent or guilty, you are saying you are an enemy of the United States, and we are required to continue treating you this way.”
“I have nothing to say,” Ismail says. This, again to Ismail’s surprise, is also a true statement.
Without saying anything else, the man leaves. The heat is turned up again. Other men come in, grab Ismail’s arms, shackle him, and chain him to a wall.
The Epiphany Machine Page 29
