The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  I said that I was, but that I could take a detour if she had another destination in mind—the closest I’ve ever come to earnestly using a pickup line, and, appropriately, she rolled her eyes at it. She told me to just come up to Adam’s and have some whiskey, and she gave me this smile that was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.

  Anyway, Rose, whose name I now knew, took me up to see Adam, and the place did not have the hypnotizing effect on me it has on so many—I thought, This place is supposed to be the navel of the world? This place captured Lennon’s mind? I looked at the line to use the machine and saw somebody coming out holding a gauze pad to his arm chanting the old mantra “This isn’t true! This isn’t true! This isn’t true!” I think his epiphany had something to do with expecting his wife to be his mother, or something similarly generic.

  It took me a moment to notice the man who was draping a meaty arm around this man’s shoulders. The man with the meaty arm was saying: “Don’t worry about whether it’s true. From now on, just look at what you do, look at how you feel about what you do. Just look: that’s all the machine tells you to do.”

  Of course, that was the first time I saw Adam Lyons. I wound up staying well after everybody had left to chat with him and Rose. That night is when I first heard about his enthusiasm for breastfucking, his hilariously absurd theory that T. E. Lawrence was assassinated by the British to cover up the fact that he was gay, his fear that the CIA was trying to assassinate him, his preference for Dylan over Lennon, and his continuing disappointment that Dylan would not use the machine. But mostly I talked to Rose while Adam smoked a few joints. Adam knew how to get out of our way while not getting so much out of our way that we felt uncomfortable or pressured. We talked about how she had been taking care of her mom since her dad died, and about her decision to quit law school to work for Adam. That did not make a lot of sense to me, and I thought she might be brainwashed, but she said that law school taught you to use words to win a game, whereas Adam wanted you to stop playing games with words. That probably should have sounded cultlike, but I was so enamored of her that I thought there might be something to it. Toward the end of the night, they showed me the machine, and I was so scared that I blurted out that I was there to investigate the epiphany machine as a potential subject for my dissertation. To my surprise, Adam was flattered and said I could come to visit the apartment whenever I liked and take notes.

  The next night I had dinner with Rose, and of course I was struck by her extraordinary wit and intelligence and Queens accent. At one point, she made a reference to “war-torn Europe,” and I said that that phrase was hackneyed—mostly because I thought that girls liked it when you’re smarter than they are. She told me that the next time I belittled her would be the last time I saw her. Believe me, I never belittled her after that.

  I think that initially what I had in mind, Venter, was not entirely dissimilar from the testimonial project that you did for a while—I think Adam may have asked you to do that in part, or maybe entirely, because of me, either to get my goat, or because he thought that, as my son, you would be a good candidate to do the work that I talked about doing. I did interview a few people, but I lost all those tapes long ago. Mostly I tagged along with Rose and did whatever she did—chat with people waiting in line and assuage their fears, occasionally put up cryptic flyers around the city, harass tattoo artists who were doing fake epiphany tattoos.

  I was just in love with Rose and following her around like a besotted puppy. But I was genuinely amazed by the impact Adam seemed to be having on the lives of most people who used the machine. More than one heroin addict came by and got a tattoo that said something like THIS IS THE ONLY MARK THAT BELONGS ON THIS ARM, and I can think of three separate junkies who kept coming back and seemed to have gotten clean. Husbands stopped cheating on their wives, often because of something they had been told about their fathers. I was on board in every way. According to forms I filled out for my department, but also in my own mind, all of this was field research. I think even in Adam’s mind I was doing field research. He talked to me a lot about his past, and he never suggested that I use the machine.

  And then one day I stopped calling Rose or stopping by Adam’s apartment. I couldn’t think of any real reason; I just didn’t feel like going anymore, or writing a dissertation about the machine, or continuing to date Rose, so I just stopped going and started looking for another dissertation topic and another girlfriend. I also changed my number so Adam and Rose couldn’t call me.

  Three weeks later, Adam showed up at my apartment. Venter, Leah, both of you knew Adam, so you’re fully aware how rare it was for Adam to leave his own apartment, let alone show up unannounced at anyone else’s. The first thing he said was: “Rose would kill me if she knew I was here.” The second thing he said was: “I think you should use the epiphany machine.” I told him that of course he thought I should use the epiphany machine; his entire trip was telling people that they should use this device he had found in a trash heap. He told me that if that was what I thought, then I hadn’t been paying attention at all, because his role was to stop people from using the machine unless they felt absolutely compelled to use it and were using it for the right reasons. I had never seen him turn anybody away, so this struck me as standard cult-leader hogwash. I didn’t tell him so, since I figured that if I did, he would just throw cult-leader hogwash on me, and then he would repeat the process until I was so drenched in hogwash that I would mistake it for clean water and start bathing in it and drinking it. So, instead, I told him that I didn’t need to use the machine, because I already knew what my epiphany would be: CANNOT COMMIT TO ANYTHING. I had run away from the epiphany machine, not the first dissertation topic I had run away from, and I had run away from Rose, definitely not the first girl I had run away from.

  Adam started shaking his head about midway through this, and by the end, he was doing a full, untethered Adam Shrug.

  “You think my machine would waste its time talking about your commitment problems? Commitment problems are like the sniffles: everybody gets them sometimes, most of them aren’t worth paying attention to since they usually go away on their own, and if they are worth paying attention to, that’s only because they’re symptoms of a much deeper problem. Do you go to a surgeon and expect him to hand you a tissue? I thought you were a smart guy. What the epiphany machine will tell you almost certainly has to do with your father.”

  I protested that I had only mentioned my father to him once or twice.

  “Exactly,” Adam said. “That’s exactly what gives you away. You’re training to become a professor, just like your father is a professor, so clearly you must have a very strong tie with your father.”

  I told Adam that my father, as a mathematician, had an extremely low opinion of sociology, which he called “a let’s-pretend-it’s-science science.” He loved to remind me that I had once wanted desperately to be an astronomer, had even given lectures on the constellations at my hometown planetarium throughout high school, but I just hadn’t been good enough at math to be an astronomer. I had been good enough at math to handle statistics, but not good enough at math to be an astronomer. So I had given up questions about the biggest systems in the universe for questions about the smallest ones. That was how my father had put it, anyway. Of course, I could have pointed out that he was hardly the world-famous mathematician he desperately wanted to be, that the only teaching job he had been able to find was at a terrible college in Indiana, meaning that his students actually needed him, but all he ever did was complain about how stupid his students were—he used that word constantly, his students were stupid, stupid, stupid, and of course he called me stupid, too. His stupid students and his stupid son—they were keeping him from greatness. For a long time, he blamed anti-Semitism for his lack of success, so he changed his name to Lowood from Loewenstein—we have no relation to Adam, Venter; I’ve investigated the issue—but anti-Semitism had nothing to do with it. And when
my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when I was in college, my father saw that as the perfect time to lock himself in a room and finish the great mathematical opus he had delayed throughout his entire life, leaving me to care for my mother. I’ve never really been able to explain how that felt, sitting by my mother’s side, doing whatever I could to comfort her, while my father stayed at home and “worked.” Of course I did not understand what he was working on, since, as he loved to remind me, my mathematical skills were not up to that task. And of course he never finished. He died about a year after my mother, leaving his room cluttered with pages and pages of what one of his colleagues described to me at his funeral as “gobbledygook.” I punched that colleague in the nose—he was talking about my father, after all, and at my father’s funeral, no less—but what he said had pleased me.

  In short, I told Adam, I hated my father, so nothing I did had anything to do with him.

  This engendered in Adam a very, very big Adam Shrug. I knew what it meant even before he did it—of course I was obsessed with proving that I was better than my father, so obsessed that it was stopping me from committing to any relationship that might keep me from greatness, in just the way that my father thought his own personal relationships kept him from greatness. And my desire to find the perfect dissertation topic was stopping me from finding any dissertation topic.

  All of this was obvious, but it is the obvious things that we are least likely to see. I thanked Adam for showing all of this to me and told him that I didn’t think it was necessary for me to use the machine, since I had just had this gigantic, gigantic epiphany.

  “It’s in pencil,” Adam said. “Let’s go write it in ink.”

  So I went back with him to his apartment and I went through the pain and fear and my tattoo said SHOULD NEVER BECOME A FATHER.

  I said that that seemed awfully harsh, and Adam said that it was possible that it meant SHOULD NEVER BECOME FATHER, meaning that I should not become my father—it was possible that the indefinite article was just a smudge, so it was indefinitely an indefinite article. On the other hand, Adam said, it might mean that I would be able to lead a happy and productive life only provided that I did not have a child, since the wound in my soul from my own father would cause me to be an equally bad father. I didn’t like this at all, and like many people who have just used the machine, I deeply regretted having done so.

  “Look at it this way,” Adam said. “At least you can be with Rose.”

  I immediately went to Rose’s house, introduced myself to her mother, and asked her permission to marry her daughter. She called up to Rose and told her that one of the moonbats from her moonbat religion was here. Then I asked Rose to marry me, and she laughed and said she wasn’t remotely ready to get married, but she was perfectly happy to take a walk. We took a walk past St. Aloysius, the Ridgewood church she had attended as a child. I showed her my tattoo, still covered in Saran Wrap, and she said that it was perfect. She wanted to work with the epiphany machine for the rest of her life, and children would be a distraction from that.

  Adam got erratic in the late seventies. I don’t want to psychoanalyze him in light of what we’ve learned in the past few days, but now I wonder whether he had learned something about Si Strauss, and took to cocaine as a refuge. Or maybe Si Strauss just bought him a lot of cocaine, and cocaine did what cocaine does. But it was more than that. Through the sixties and most of the seventies, Adam had thought his device was going to solve everything, he thought it was going to end war and sexual repression and all the varieties of self-loathing that make people so horrible to each other. By the end of the seventies, he was realizing that he was not going to rewrite the world, and it made him angry. I started to find Adam disappointing in ways that I didn’t think had anything to do with my dad.

  Even meeting John Lennon was disappointing—not disillusioning the way meeting your idols is supposed to be. He was just pleasant and charming and unremarkable and eager to use jokes to cut off subjects he did not want to talk about and a little tedious whenever he was not joking, just like everyone else in the world, and I was not transformed by the presence of his genius in the way I had once naively hoped to be.

  In any case, the machine stopped being fun, and I started to worry more and more about what would happen in a society in which everybody’s secrets were written on their forearms, and my graduate study wasn’t getting any more interesting—slowly, I came to see that the entire reason I was doing graduate work was to try to prove something to my dad. So I dropped out and entered law school, with the vague intention of providing Adam with legal help when I graduated, but really I just wanted to get away.

  Then Rose got pregnant. Adam wanted us to get an abortion, ostensibly because of my tattoo, but really, I think, because he was scared of losing Rose. Which I can understand, because I, too, was always scared of losing Rose. But Rose and I wanted a child at this point. Adam was mad—he kept on telling Rose it wasn’t too late, it wasn’t too late, it wasn’t too late. Then, when Rose was six months pregnant, Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon, and we decided that we had just had enough.

  What was tattooed on me had catastrophic effects on my relationship with you, Venter. I spent a couple of decades seesawing between trying to prove the tattoo wrong and just trying to accept what it told me, and at times that made me as poor a father to you as my father was to me, a fact that I’m tempted to say kills me, except that it doesn’t, because I’m alive and so are you, and I’m so glad we have time to spend together. Even if we don’t spend it together, even if you decide that you never want to see me again after tonight, I am grateful that we have the time to squander.

  We have no more time with Adam, and you may be wondering why I have spent so much of this eulogy criticizing him. I’ve said what I’ve said because he would want me to tell the truth, and everything I’ve said is true, but there is always more to the truth than what is said. At the risk of betraying the legal profession, there may be such a thing as the whole truth, but it certainly cannot be told. What I can tell you is this: I am grateful for you, Venter, more grateful than I am for anything else in my life. Though I do not approve of what you do, I cannot help but be filled with happiness simply by your existence. Without Adam, there would be no you. Adam or his device—the difference between them is, finally, trivial—made me look at the truth about myself, about how terrified I was of becoming my father. Not only that. The fateful indefinite article, my scarlet A, played a very productive trick on me. It made me think that as long as I did not become a father, it was safe for me to commit to love, and that is what allowed me to commit to Rose, and then, against its explicit advice but maybe in accordance with its implicit command, to have you. In a sense, Venter, the epiphany machine created you. I cannot imagine a higher accomplishment.

  CHAPTER

  39

  My father’s speech left me in tears, and to my surprise, it also left Leah in tears. I jumped onto the stage and hugged my father, and unlike every other hug we had ever shared, there was nothing hesitant in it.

  The three of us went to a bar across the street, a bar where there were many older and many younger people, and none of the three of us looked out of place. Leah talked about some plays she had seen, which she said she was disappointed by for their lack of political engagement, then she started talking to my father about a conversation she had with one of Ismail’s lawyers about a possible appeal, and then she looked at me and stopped herself. She said she was going to bring whiskey shots for all of us. I had never known that my father had been left alone with his mother while she was dying, and knowing this made his shielding me from my mother’s mother dying make much more sense to me, so I asked for more details, and I also asked for more details about both of his parents, since I had heard very little about either one. Eventually, Leah returned, and she toasted Adam and his enthusiasm for breastfucking. She drank her shot, slammed the glass on the bar, and clapped her hands to
gether.

  “Well, thanks so much for this incredibly shitty night, guys.”

  “What’s the matter?” my father asked. He put a hand on her shoulder that she pushed off.

  “Sometimes I think the problem is me, sometimes I think that I should just accept that the love of my life is a terrorist, because the government says he is, and they wouldn’t say that if he wasn’t. I thought that at least you understood, Isaac. I thought you understood what it means that Ismail is still in prison for no reason. I thought you understood how terrible that is.”

  “I do.”

  “So how can you be so chummy with the son of a bitch who put him there?”

  “Don’t use that word about Rose.”

  “Are you serious? I wasn’t even thinking about Rose, it was just a random, totally inadequate insult for Venter, but are you serious? It bothers you that I would use the word ‘bitch’ to describe the woman who abandoned you with an infant son who obviously grew up very, very wrong?”

  “My wife is my wife, my son is my son.”

  “A clock is a clock, right, Venter?”

  “Venter is my son,” my father said. “That’s all I need to know.”