The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

“That can’t excuse everything. That can’t excuse the fact that he destroyed Ismail.”

  “Maybe if the world were a fair place it would not, but it isn’t, and it does.”

  It took me a second to realize that this was the nicest thing my father had ever said about me. It took me a little bit longer to realize that, when Leah walked away and my father did not follow her, this meant that he had chosen me over her, his misguided son over the surrogate daughter with whom he had bonded over the past several years. This did not strike me as a wise choice, but it was one that meant a lot to me.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “Do you think we can find a diner around here that serves pound cake?”

  CHAPTER

  40

  The week of Adam Lyons’s death was also my last week at Citizens for Knowledge and Safety, which was being dissolved since it was no longer necessary. One by one, we were being called upstairs to be fired. Most of the meetings were with HR; for some reason, probably because he wanted to yell at me personally for how little I had accomplished, my appointment was scheduled with Vladimir Harrican. Sitting at my cubicle, waiting until it was time for me to go upstairs for my appointment, I received another email from Steven Merdula. It was simply a forwarded article with the plainest of attached comments: “Seen this?”

  Somehow I knew what the link would be before I clicked it. The case that had prompted me to work for Citizens for Knowledge and Safety had been based on a lie. Jonathan Soricillo, his conscience apparently stirred by the news about Si Strauss and Adam Lyons, had admitted in prison that he had raped and murdered his sons. He had murdered and immolated his neighbor, Devin Lanning, in order to frame him. Everything Soricillo had said about Lanning’s epiphany tattoo had been a lie; Lanning had never gotten an epiphany tattoo, DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES or otherwise.

  Reading this made me react as Merdula must have known it would. I went to the men’s bathroom and cried and threw up. Then I looked into the mirror. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most pathetic stooge of all?

  I thought about breaking the mirror, picking up a shard, and cutting out my tattoo. I pictured myself doing it, and then pictured myself doing it again. But I couldn’t actually do it, so I headed to the elevator, my tattoo intact.

  When the elevator doors opened onto Vladimir’s floor, I crossed paths with an old man in a suit who looked shocked and embarrassed to see me, a young man about to be fired. Little did he know how little concerned I was with my fate; I was thinking instead about Lanning and the Soricillo family. So much were they on my mind that this old man, despite his expensive suit and perfect grooming, reminded me of the grandfather who had burned me in the park, the grandfather who had endured so much tragedy and was now learning that his own son was a monster beyond all reckoning.

  “Are you Steven Merdula?” I asked Vladimir as I walked into his office.

  Vladimir laughed. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Are you Steven Merdula? Have you been fucking with my head this whole time?”

  “That’s two questions. The answer to the first is a definite no.”

  “I know you’re going to fire me. But first I have something to say.”

  “You think I’m Steven Merdula and you think I’m going to fire you. You’re not the prophet your mentor was.”

  Vladimir proceeded to offer me a job as the director of content at the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation, which he was acquiring from the chaos of Adam Lyons’s estate.

  “I want you to keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Vladimir said. “But now the emphasis will be different. You’ll be telling the stories of people who have had their lives transformed by the machine in a positive way. Like the testimonials you were doing when you and I first met.”

  “Why? Adam Lyons is dead and the epiphany machine is broken.”

  “We’re releasing a new version soon. It will be linked to users’ Internet history.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The websites they visit, terms they type in to search engines, emails they send, preferences they express in various ways—it all gets fed into an algorithm, and the algorithm generates an epiphany that it then tattoos on the user.”

  “That sounds evil.”

  “Adam Lyons had a rare gift; that gift was why I admired him and why, until the day he died, I always harbored hopes that he would one day come around and agree to work with me. That’s part of why I hired you, his supposed protégé. His gift was that he listened to what people thought they were saying, but he heard what they were really saying. That’s what the Internet does. Of course, the Internet does it a lot better.”

  “You could name this device anything. Why call it the epiphany machine?”

  “I happen to like the name and the design. And I have a sentimental family attachment.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more about this idea, which sounded doomed. Besides, I had a pressing matter to discuss that, since he was not Steven Merdula, Vladimir might not be aware of. “Devin Lanning was innocent.”

  “Yes, so I’ve heard. Assuming that Jonathan Soricillo is telling the truth now, which is a big assumption. But we can’t get everything right, can we?”

  At this, he gave the worst shrug that I, a connoisseur of shrugs, had ever seen in my life.

  “We should officially apologize for everything Citizens for Knowledge and Safety did,” I said. “We should apologize to the family of Devin Lanning. Most important, we should proclaim unequivocally that Ismail is innocent and must be immediately released.” It was not until this moment that I suddenly realized I knew that Ismail was truly, unquestionably innocent.

  Vladimir did not follow my logic and asked me to take him through it.

  I tried to build an argument that Vladimir would respond to. “You want people to have positive associations with the machine. Because of the work we’ve done—the work I’ve done—a lot of people associate the epiphany machine with terrorists and child molesters. Breaking that connection might make people feel better about the machine.”

  “No. The epiphany machine can keep people safe from predators like Ismail and Devin Lanning, and it’s important for people to remember that, so you’ll keep telling those stories. They just won’t be the emphasis anymore.”

  “But Devin Lanning was innocent. We just said so.”

  “You just said so. I don’t know. And in the public imagination, he’s a predator who got what he deserved, but should have been stopped earlier. From a marketing perspective, that’s what we have to work with. So that’s the perspective you’ll write from.”

  “No. I refuse.”

  For the first time since I had known Vladimir, he looked genuinely surprised. “This is one of the most important innovations of our time. Do you want to be known as the guy who passed up a chance to take part in it?”

  “I don’t care how I’m known.”

  “We both know that’s not true. I’m the only person who’s ever believed in you,” said Vladimir. “Just think what people would think about you if they knew how ungrateful you are.”

  I thought again about the man at the elevator. “The man who accosted me in Central Park. The man I thought was the Soricillo twins’ grandfather. You hired him. You paid him to burn me.”

  Vladimir smiled. “I didn’t tell him to burn you. He added that. I think he was frustrated. He had been going to Riverside Park every day for weeks. You told me you ran there all the time. I should have known you exaggerated.”

  “Why? Why did you do that?”

  “I knew you needed a little push to come work for me.”

  “The murder of the boys, you didn’t . . .”

  Vladimir’s laugh reminded me how high the ceiling in his office was. “Venter, don’t be ridiculous. I learned of the murder of the two boys and of Devin Lanning the way I told you I did, from someone on my staff. I thought it would help you see th
e importance of working for me.”

  “Why am I so important to you? I don’t know how to do anything.”

  “I’m beginning to finally see that. I think I’m having an epiphany of my own, right here in this office. My father’s tattoo told him to MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS, and you know what that use was? To hold me. My father was a great violinist and could have been a greater one still, but instead he gave his career up to hold me until I was ready to stand on my own. Adam Lyons tricked him into doing that by playing on my father’s proletarian delusions. This made me look at Adam Lyons as a kind of god, no matter how much I denied it to you and myself. Or maybe I viewed him as my real father. I thought I needed him for what I needed to do, and I thought you could help me get to him. And maybe, in some strange way, I thought of you as a kind of little brother. A shiftless, unimaginative little brother who needed to be guided. But Adam was never necessary to the machine. That’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made; it delayed my development of the real epiphany machine by years. The second biggest mistake was thinking you could be of any use to me whatsoever. Go, get out of my office. Go see what people think of you now that you’re no longer working for Vladimir Harrican.”

  “Their opinion of me probably won’t be any worse than it already is,” I said. “Freedom’s just another word for everybody thinking you’re a schmuck.”

  I had a s’more on the way out.

  TESTIMONIAL #95

  NAME: Matthew Cole

  DATE OF BIRTH: 02/10/1982

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 10/09/2011

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 12/01/2014

  Three years after we broke up, my ex-girlfriend sent me this email:

  You’re nothing but a lying, manipulative loser.

  She knew that the worry that I was a loser had been a major facet of my life since I was a child, so her use of that word was itself manipulative. No one is as reliably correct as a hypocrite.

  A crazy woman, this ex-girlfriend of mine. The entire time we were together, she badgered me to use the machine, even though, right there on her arm, were written the words BADGERS PEOPLE TO PUSH THEM AWAY BUT IS STRONGER THAN TERRORISTS. About two years after we broke up, so about one year before she sent me this email, she sent my mother an email that said:

  I’m really offended that you’re not my friend anymore just because your son and I are no longer having sex.

  Here I am not lying, but I am manipulating you. This is the line I always use when I want to demonstrate to someone beyond a shadow of a doubt that this ex-girlfriend is crazy. When I tell that story, I can count on a gasp, and if you get a gasp when you want a gasp, you know you’ve made your point, particularly if your point is that a woman is crazy, which is something people tend to want to believe. But the truth is that I had done lots of things to make my ex-girlfriend crazy. I had told her I wanted to stay friends, then did not return her calls and emails; I had told her I needed a break from talking and would contact her in a few weeks, then did not contact her for months.

  Now I’m trying to manipulate you again. I’m trying to demonstrate to you that I’m self-critical, that I’ve reformed. Confession is basically manipulation, at least for me, and since I’m the only person whose consciousness I have access to, I have to assume that everybody else thinks the way I do.

  I cheated on this girlfriend many times while we were together. She was going to school in Boston and I was living in New York, so I had plenty of opportunity. Mostly, I was just miserable with myself, stuck in a cubicle job I despised because I knew I was perfect for it; it was an ideal job for a man who didn’t really want to do anything. I didn’t even really want to cheat on her, but after all, a man has to do something. On the bus to visit her, I would strike up a conversation with a girl—something I was not usually good at doing—and I would tell her that my girlfriend had used the epiphany machine and was trying to coax me into using it as well.

  “You shouldn’t use that thing,” the girl would say. “The epiphany machine is a cult.”

  “I know,” I would respond. “But my girlfriend says that I shouldn’t judge the machine without using it first.”

  “That’s insane! You have to join a cult to figure out whether it’s a cult?”

  We would argue about this back and forth, and I would manage to get the girl’s number and meet up with her back in New York, or in Boston when my girlfriend had a class. Once I got a handjob right there on the bus, underneath a blanket the girl had packed. Another time, I had sex in the disgusting restroom of the disgusting Chinese restaurant where the bus stopped. My girlfriend used to react with mock-horror when I told her that I had eaten at the buffet. “Ugh, I can’t believe I kissed you after you ate that.” So I took particular pleasure when she said this after I had licked that girl’s clit (or at any rate the general vicinity of her clit—in my defense, we only had a few minutes and she hadn’t shaved). There was an entire year when all the energy of my soul was focused on cheating on my girlfriend in the sleaziest, most soul-depleting ways possible.

  Now I’m manipulating you and lying to you. None of what I just said about cheating was true; I’ve never cheated on anyone in my life. A few weeks after she sent me that email about me being a loser, my ex-girlfriend sent me an email apologizing. She was mad, she said, and she was trying to hurt me. But buried inside that email was the accusation that I had cheated on her several years earlier. I responded, truthfully, that I had never cheated on her, and she responded that she had no reason to believe me, since I had admitted to her that when I was a teenager I had been a pathological liar. This was infuriating, in part because it was, in a twisty way, entirely fair.

  I’ve gotten back at her just now, sort of, by lying to you and saying that I did in fact cheat on her. And really, it’s disappointing, after you’ve broken up with someone, never to have cheated on them. If the relationship doesn’t work out, you might as well have had some exciting cheating sex. Or at least I assume cheating sex is exciting. I’ve done a lot of lying, which is the worst part about cheating, and the only part I know.

  The way I actually spent those bus rides was reading, by which I mean staring at a page while thinking. “Thinking” might be too exalted a word for the scroll across my brain: WHY CAN’T YOU BREAK UP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT? WHY CAN’T YOU BREAK UP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT? Finally, she broke up with me for being too passive and for needing too much reassurance. She begged to get back together with me after she moved back to New York, because other men in New York were so much worse than I was. After my relationship with my next girlfriend followed exactly this pattern, I decided that maybe I should use the epiphany machine after all.

  By this time, I had come to a point in my life when what little integrity I still sensed in myself felt like it was slipping away, so submitting to the machine did not seem terribly unreasonable. I used the new model of the machine, the one that actually works, the one that’s connected to your Internet history. Obviously you can see my epiphany, and even if you hadn’t seen it before you came up to me on the street, you probably could have guessed it just from the story I’ve told.

  Now when I date, I date with this tattoo. It’s not a great tattoo to have in the winter, because I’m bundled up and the tattoo isn’t immediately apparent when I’m first talking to a girl, so I have to make a decision about whether I’m going to mention it up front or whether I’m going to wait until we go home together and I’m taking my shirt off. Either way, it tends to kill the mood to discover this tattoo on the cute-ish guy you’re either considering hooking up with or in the first stages of hooking up with. Summer’s much better, because everybody is showing their arms anyway, and these days there are usually at least three or four epiphany tattoos in any given crowd, usually more, and since almost all of them sound bad, none of them really sound bad. My tattoo can be a conversation starter rather than a conversat
ion ender.

  That’s even more true with Epyfa. The girls who see my tattoo on that dating app and then contact me are interested in how I deal with the tattoo; they tend to be the best girls, smart and curious and with low self-esteem. I can make some self-deprecating jokes about my craven, caddish past, and about how I’ve moved on and have committed to not lying anymore. I get them home, we have a great time, and I go on a date with a different girl the next night.

  Some Saturdays I have two dates, one for brunch and one for dinner. Then I’ll say I had a great time, I’m totally going to text you. And if I feel like it, I will. If I don’t, I’ll say my mom’s dog got sick and I went home for the weekend to help her take care of it. Then, weeks later, if I feel like seeing that particular girl again, I’ll text her that my mom’s dog died, and I had gotten really close to it, so I had been grieving and that’s why I hadn’t been in touch.

  See, when most people get an epiphany as bad as mine, they try to contort themselves to change. They try to be different. I, on the other hand, have embraced who I am, and I’ve discovered that there are ways to really enjoy your life when you’re a LYING, MANIPULATIVE LOSER.

  CHAPTER

  41

  I felt very proud of myself for having stood up to Vladimir, and also terrified by the question of what to do next. Simply losing my job due to circumstances beyond my control had been a relief. Choosing not to accept Vladimir’s offer obligated me to do something important. Actually, it obligated me to do what I was obligated to do anyway: free Ismail. Somehow.

  The first thing I said to Rebecca when she came home that night was that Ismail was innocent, that I had been persecuting him for years for no reason. Without responding, she put her bag down, poured herself a glass of pinot grigio, and—one of the first times I had ever seen her do this—burst into tears.