The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “I think you gave it to me for a different reason. I think you knew that once I read this indecent filth you’re writing for that indecent man, there would be no way that you could remain my son.”

  “I thought you said you thought it was good.”

  “I do think it’s good! That only makes it worse. You seem to find fulfillment in destroying your best friend. Do you?”

  “I find fulfillment in exposing terrorists. If Ismail weren’t a terrorist, he wouldn’t still be locked away.”

  “Do you know what it’s been like for me these past few years, hearing stuff like that from people I respect, and from one person I love? Hearing over and over that people are guilty because they’ve been arrested? Hearing that something is true just because it’s written on somebody’s arm? And now people are saying that even if Ismail was innocent when he was arrested, he has to be kept a prisoner because he’s surely been turned against the United States by now. Can you empathize with what it feels like to hear that nonsense presented as hardheaded logic? It makes me feel like I’m the crazy one.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  This was the closest to crying I had ever seen him. “Well,” he said, putting his napkin down. “Then I guess we have nothing more to say to each other. The machine was wrong about Ismail, but it really was right about me. I never should have become a father. Nothing I can do about that now except wish you the best. So long.”

  He stood up and turned away, leaving Billy H. at the table along with money for food and tip. “Oh, one more thing,” he said. He pulled an envelope from his pocket and dropped it next to my bread plate. “I brought these for that problem you’re having with Rebecca. You’ll want to take one pill one hour beforehand. There might be a bluish tint to your vision, but that’s okay. My doctor says it works better on an empty stomach, but I don’t know whether that’s true because I’ve never used them. My doctor hands out free samples to all of his male patients over fifty.”

  By now I could make out the outline of little triangular pills pushing against the envelope.

  “Dad,” I said. “Are you giving me Viagra?”

  “I can’t be your father anymore, but I still want you to have a tolerable life.”

  “How did you know that Rebecca and I are having problems?”

  “‘Problems’ is the wrong word. You have a medical issue and I’m offering a medical solution.”

  “Rebecca called you and told you?”

  “I wouldn’t have to embarrass us both like this if you had just gone to the doctor with Rebecca like she asked.”

  I felt torn between wanting to run away and wanting to burrow a hole deep in the ground and never leave it.

  “This is such a betrayal,” I said.

  “This is such a betrayal? Don’t you see that after everything you’ve done I’m still trying to help you? Don’t take them. Don’t worry. They’re the last thing I’ll ever give you.”

  Now he was on his way and he was really gone. Hatred for my father and Rebecca sloshed in my stomach along with too much bread.

  I walked out into the lobby, which echoed with the steps of the handful of late commuters. I could now claim the distinction of having been definitively rejected by both of my parents, one in infancy and one in adulthood—a stronger indication than anything else in my life that I was marked for the great, special destiny of which I desultorily dreamed.

  I suddenly realized that what I had needed was a clean break from everyone I had thought I loved. My father, Rebecca: I would continue to be dependent on their opinions for as long as they were in my life.

  Rebecca did not pick up her cell phone, so I left a voice mail breaking up with her.

  I stepped onto the escalator that would take me down into Grand Central proper and then release me into a city that, however many humiliations I had suffered in it, was still an only slightly sagging breast of the new world. I was impotent before my twenty-fifth birthday, and yet a great glad light shone from within me, because I knew, with total serene certainty, that I would never see Rebecca or my father ever again.

  CHAPTER

  36

  Rebecca and I were married three years later, in July of 2009. The wedding was held in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which offered a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline, at least theoretically—our wedding day was rainy and foggy and we couldn’t see much. Our guests couldn’t hear much, for that matter, with our vows drowned out by the D train. I was grateful for that, because what I had to say was only for Rebecca, and were the sorts of truths that become lies if too many people hear them. I told her that she had made me a much better person, much more relaxed with myself, and she had done this by giving me someone to care about more than I cared about myself. Because of her, I told her, my tattoo now really was false, because she had liberated me from caring about the thoughts of anyone other than her, and what she thought was so important that the word “opinion” was completely inadequate. I kissed her and then we were married.

  I felt better than I ever had before—certainly better than I had felt when I swore off Rebecca three years earlier, a moment that, given how much I loved Rebecca right now, I was very grateful had passed.

  After leaving my father that night at Grand Central, I had wandered around New York until, deciding that I had no real friends left with whom to stay, I found myself at the apartment of Cesar Solomon. I had the address because I had been invited to his housewarming party, but had not gone because I did not want to be asked how it felt to have once been the roommate of a now-famous novelist. My image of his apartment included lots of shiny silver surfaces, a vast kitchen and a vaster couch, and a roster of women wearing only Cesar’s button-down shirts. The reality was that Cesar’s apartment, though it was bigger and nicer than mine, was not all that much bigger or nicer than mine, and there were no women, at least when I arrived. There was not even the sound of furious typing, followed by a groan of frustration at the interrupting knock at the door. Instead, Cesar just looked wan, depressed, unlike I had ever seen him.

  Cesar explained that he was having a crisis of faith, both in his fiction and in fiction in general. He had come to the conclusion that fiction no longer had any power to affect anyone’s consciousness, if it ever did. He needed to find a new way of engaging with the way people thought. It occurred to me to be disappointed in this banal crisis, and also once again to wonder what Ismail would have written by now, whether it would have been better or at least more searching than what Cesar had written, but I decided I wanted to be more generous to Cesar and to not think at all about Ismail. Also, I reminded myself, Ismail’s plays hadn’t even been all that good. After Cesar and I had talked for two hours—during which I said almost nothing—he told me that he considered me the best friend he had ever had and one of the smartest people he had ever known, and I thought again about our friendship, which suddenly seemed much deeper and more rewarding than it ever had before.

  I crashed on Cesar’s sofa for two months, through a flirtation with my coworker Kristen. On our first date, at a diner in Brooklyn, I ordered chicken fingers and a milkshake. We joked about how this is what I would have ordered when I was a child (pound cake was not on the menu), and I made a bunch of other easy jokes, and she laughed and seemed very much into me. All I could think about was how Rebecca would have been pushing back against my shtick and how much I missed that already. I went on some more dates with Kristen, and then she suggested that we do something crazy and move in together, so we did. Kristen and I talked about some studies that suggested that one’s mid-twenties were the optimal time in one’s life to get married. A few months passed, and we talked about how other studies suggested that waiting until one’s thirties was much better, both for happiness and income, and of course we also talked about how all these studies were meaningless, since the only thing that mattered was whether Kristen and I were in love, though actually that wasn’t the thing that ma
ttered, since passion never lasted, and according to many studies what really mattered was a solid foundation of friendship, though it couldn’t just be friendship, since there also had to be a solid foundation of passion. Kristen wound up going to graduate school in sociology across the country, and I wound up getting back together with Rebecca, who took me back and dismissed our most recent breakup as an understandable aftershock of my final falling-out with my father.

  Now I was married to Rebecca, the ceremony was done, and it had almost been perfect. Almost because I had, until the very second the rabbi told us we were married, somehow managed to harbor the hope that I would catch a glimpse of an aging, fox-fur-clad woman on the carousel, watching the wedding from a distance, and that I would know instantly that this was my mother. But no such old woman was anywhere to be seen.

  The absences of my father and mother left their very different marks, but for the most part, in the immediate aftermath of the ceremony, as people were congratulating Rebecca and me and I was looking at Rebecca’s beautiful, happy face, I was thinking about how happy I was, and also about the remarkable fact that thinking that I was happy was not destroying my happiness.

  Then I noticed Ismail’s mother coming toward us, her graying hair uncombed, her white dress unwashed.

  “I curse you! You must face justice!”

  I looked around, trying to see whether the guests were on her side or mine, but none of them seemed to notice, and they just kept chatting among themselves, making only the most obvious jokes about sex. She got closer and continued to yell at me, and then I realized that it was not Ismail’s mother but merely a crazy homeless woman. I breathed in relief, as anyone can survive being yelled at by a crazy homeless woman, regardless of whether the crazy homeless woman is right.

  Ismail had finally received a trial, of sorts. Though the government did not even try to charge him with actually planning an attack, Ismail was convicted of material support for terrorism; according to the government, some of the money that he had earned at Blockbuster in high school to send to Bosnia and Chechnya had ended up in the hands of, if not Al Qaeda, then other jihadist groups. Ismail had been silent throughout the trial, refusing to speak even to Leah or his mother. The sentence was a staggering seventeen years. I somehow took this as validation for having turned Ismail in in the first place. Lacking the courage of my convictions, I took courage from Ismail’s conviction.

  Perhaps it was imperative that I face justice. But I would never face justice and so I faced my bride instead.

  Apart from a handful of Rebecca’s friends and my coworkers at Citizens for Knowledge and Safety, the receiving line consisted almost entirely of Rebecca’s family, who would be my family now. But the people in her family were as pleasant as any people, which is to say not very, but tolerably. And, in Rebecca, I had all the family I needed.

  My new bride and I were sharing a lobster dish with some sort of creamy sauce—a secret joke about our sex life, which had long since returned with full vigor and no more than half a Viagra—when my new father-in-law got up to give a toast.

  “For much of the last decade I’ve lived with one big question,” her father said. “What did I do to drive my little girl into that guy’s scribbled-on arms?”

  He looked around for laughter and he got it, including from me.

  “Of what did I give her too much or too little?” he continued. “Love? B vitamins? Exposure to death? Should I have stopped her from quitting the field hockey team? Why, when I raised her to be an independent woman in control of her own destiny, did she fall for this cult reject?”

  This time when he looked around for laughter, he did not get it. He was attacking me, but I still felt sympathy for him. There’s nothing sadder than not getting a laugh.

  “Skip the toasts and stick to ears, noses, and throats!” some cousin shouted out, and this got a laugh.

  “Let me finish,” her father said. He took off his coat and handed it to the DJ, who accepted it because he did not know what else to do. Then he removed a cufflink and let it clank onto the floor. “So then I suddenly realized: all I had to do to get my questions answered was ask the epiphany machine!”

  He pushed his sleeve up and held his arm high.

  DISGUISES REGRET WITH CONTEMPT

  He proceeded to say a lot of things about how this sounded like a generic cliché, but it was absolutely true of him. He said how relieved he was to have this out on his arm instead of cooped up in his head. He said all the things I had heard so many people say, each thinking it had never been said before. I was fairly certain that he was insulting me, whether he consciously intended to or not, but since he and everyone else were looking at me expecting to feel moved, I tried to feel moved.

  “Most important,” her father said, “this tattoo has made me realize how lucky I am that my daughter has found such a wonderful man, who is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. For a long time, I thought this dependency was a mark of cowardice, of an inability to think for himself, but now I know that I was simply projecting onto Venter my own unhappiness with the path my professional life has taken. I always wanted to become an Augustine scholar, but I never tried, because I was afraid of rejection and failure. I thought that Venter’s tattoo suggested personality flaws similar to mine, that my daughter would end up with a husband as spineless as her father.

  “Nothing could have been further from the truth. The fact that Venter is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS has led him to the highest peaks of bravery and of selfless accomplishment. If he had followed his own instincts, he might have tried to cover up for his best friend, unable to admit that his best friend was a terrorist.” Rebecca’s breathing changed; she was not happy that he was bringing up Ismail. “But Venter is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION of the American people, and this led him to do the right thing and turn his friend in. This same dependency on the opinion of the American people led him to give up his self-centered dreams of being a writer and devote himself instead to the selfless if not especially lucrative cause of exposing terrorists and child molesters before they can hurt people.

  “And now, Venter will be DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION of the most important people of all, his new wife and their future children, all of whom, I am confident, will always have the highest opinion of him.”

  Now there was very loud applause, including from Rebecca, who probably wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. I stood up and applauded hard, surprised to find that I was crying.

  Then, to delighted gasps from everyone assembled, my father-in-law ran across the dance floor, climbed up onto our table, and extended his arm for me to join him. Nobody else in the room seemed to think he was insulting me so probably he wasn’t, and besides, everyone thought I should do what he wanted me to do. I took his hand and, trying not to step on any plates, joined him on top of the table. I quickly realized that the crowd was not going to let me get out of undoing my cufflink and rolling my sleeve up, so I did that, too.

  Flashes from cell phone cameras assaulted my eyes, which gave me an excuse to close them and imagine myself as the brave man my father-in-law had spoken of.

  TESTIMONIAL #92

  NAME: Ismail Ahmed

  DATE OF BIRTH: 10/07/1981

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 07/25/1999

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: N/A (Letter Written by Ismail Ahmed to Venter Lowood from * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * , Date: * * * * * *

  (Redacted by Order of the United States Department of * * * * * * )

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