“I know,” she said. “I’ve known for years. But I didn’t want to admit that to myself, because I have no idea how to help him.”
“I want to do something to help him,” I said.
“Great. What? Whatever you want to do, I’ll fund you to do it.”
Her corporate-law job made this an eminently achievable goal.
I tried brainstorming out loud, but none of my ideas sounded very impressive even to me. She didn’t respond, and after a while she seemed to stop listening. Finally, her eyes, red from crying, lit up with an idea.
“Write a book,” she said. “You’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve always known you’re incredibly talented. So why don’t you write a memoir about your relationship with Ismail? I’ll support you while you write.”
At first, I thought she was just making a bitter joke. Writing a book seemed more like self-indulgence than self-sacrifice.
“Make it clear what a smart and decent person Ismail was. Is. People just hear his name and assume he’s guilty. Make people realize that he’s a real flesh-and-blood human being. Be honest about your role in what’s happened to him. You’ll be doing penance for what you did to Ismail, but you’ll also be fulfilling yourself as a person. You’ve always wanted to write and you should write. This is perfect.”
I was not certain that I had always wanted to write. I had always wanted to think of myself as a genius—or at least as someone who could compete with Ismail—and writing had always seemed a way to do that. But apart from what I had written for Vladimir Harrican, I had barely made any attempt to write since college.
But Rebecca’s faith in me made me think I had talent after all.
There was a part of me, of course, that knew just how DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS I was proving myself to be by making my first serious attempt to become a writer just because Rebecca told me I should, but there was a bigger part of me that was happy to take Rebecca’s money and sit at home with my computer all day.
Maybe that previous sentence does not do me justice. When I first sat down to write about Ismail, I did so in good faith and with great energy. Rebecca was excited about the project, my father was excited about the project, I was excited about the project. I thought about calling Ismail’s mother and telling her what I was doing, maybe even interviewing her, but I thought she was more likely than not to blow me off, or maybe take legal action against me. So I just decided to sit and write what I remembered about Ismail.
Unfortunately, sitting at home with my laptop turned out to mean reading blog posts about the problematic portrayals of women in popular culture in one tab and watching porn in another. After a few months, I joined a writer’s space in Long Island City, near the apartment Rebecca had purchased for us. The writer’s space was called The Oracle Club, a name that carried uncomfortable echoes of the epiphany machine, though the owners, a dispiritingly gorgeous couple named Julian and Jenna, claimed not to have been thinking of the device when they chose the name. Neither of them had epiphany tattoos, which led me to devise a theory that truly beautiful people had sufficiently high self-esteem that they did not feel the need to use the device, a theory that lasted me through the first five pages of an essay, until I realized that the idea was ridiculous, and that of course beautiful people use the machine all the time, and that many beautiful people have extremely low self-esteem. I deleted the file and tried to write about Ismail, but I couldn’t think of any interesting details, which made me feel annoyed that I had not kept a notebook as a teenager. Or rather, I was annoyed that I had kept a notebook as a teenager, but had hardly written anything in it beyond a handful of abstract pseudo-intellectual gibberish, like that thing about how my bed felt so empty that it felt like the grave. I wished that I had “kept a notebook” in the way that I now defined “keeping a notebook,” meaning making concrete observations about what I saw from day to day. I wished I had the discernment to spot important details and the discipline to write them down. In other words, I wished I were Ismail. I was certain that if the situation had been reversed, if I had been in prison and Ismail had been writing about me, he would have done a much better job turning me into a convincing character on the page, a thought that made me feel envious and resentful, and also extremely guilty, since I had deprived the world of a great talent and substituted my own mediocrity.
I began and abandoned several more projects until I remembered “The Undead,” the mashup I had written in high school of “The Dead” and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I asked my father to find it and send it to me. He did so—“I had to go through about ten boxes in the attic, but it was worth it. I read it and this is great. I always knew you were a genius!”—and when I read it again, I was amazed by the insight and the passion, by the humor and the honest emotion, by what a good writer I had been in high school. Getting it published, I reasoned, would be a good way to establish my name, after which I could more easily get people to pay attention to what I wrote about Ismail. Rebecca read “The Undead,” and she loved it so much she jumped up and down and shouted, though the next morning she reminded me not to lose focus and to keep writing about Ismail. I took four months, lengthened it, polished it, and then sent it off to a dozen agents. I received exactly one response, which read: “Not bad, but the whole drop-vampires-into-classic-literature thing peaked a couple of years ago.”
After this, I was severely depressed and spent my days at The Oracle Club brooding over the fact that I had had at least some talent and had wasted it, while Julian, a published and respected novelist, typed happily and constantly at the desk next to mine. Jenna, an astonishingly gifted and prolific portrait painter, worked downstairs. Their three-year-old son tap-thumped back and forth between them, making a fuss until they agreed to play Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the millionth time on their antique record player. It made me uncomfortable to find such a great fan of the Beatles in this toddler—this tiny child who grabbed my knee and shouted “JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo” every time I made myself some French-press coffee. This struck me as Adam’s way of haunting me, but I had signed up to work at a place called The Oracle Club, so perhaps I was looking for Adam to haunt me. In any case, a large percentage of my time was spent watching this child dance to this old record, all the history and cultural significance of which he was blithely unaware. I wished I could once again feel that total absence of self-consciousness, and I knew that I would, but only when I no longer had a self to be conscious of, a prospect I found terrifying and, maybe for the first time, near.
These thoughts would often swirl around in my head while I stared at my computer in The Oracle Club. Passersby would look at me through the window, and, not knowing that I could hear them, would speculate about what the place was and what I was doing.
“Is this a library? Is that guy real? Is he a statue?”
“It’s a zoo for unemployed people.”
Believe me or don’t believe me, but I tried very hard to write about Ismail.
• • •
One morning when I couldn’t make myself sit at my computer—there were many such mornings—I took the train into Manhattan to walk around the Upper East Side, near Adam’s old neighborhood. Where Adam Lyons’s old building had been, there was now an empty lot and green construction barriers. This was where my parents met, where my personality had been formed or revealed or both, where I had led my friend into ruin, where I had spent countless hours with a man whose voice I would never get out of my head or off of my arm. But none of those things amounts to a legal claim on property.
I looked down the street and could see my father catching up to a woman in a fox fur coat. I could see myself and Ismail coming up the street, pizza and dreams on our tongues, Ismail’s arm still bare. Turn around, Ismail, have another slice and then get on the train. I looked again at the empty lot and wished the building had been leveled decades earlier, and also wished that the building was still there and would stand
until the end of the world. I looked again and felt annoyed that construction barriers are always green, lulling us into thinking of renewal, a return to the earth, rather than the imminent appearance of another sterile condo.
But it was not a condo that replaced Adam’s building, which I discovered had been purchased and leveled by Vladimir Harrican. It was the flagship Epiphany store, to which people would come to use the new “smart” machines, which, applying a proprietary algorithm to a user’s Internet history, crafted a general summary of life trajectory and personal proclivities.
Four other stores appeared in New York shortly afterward: one on the Upper West Side, one in SoHo, one in Williamsburg, one in Park Slope. Each store was a giant glass cylinder that was mostly empty space. “It’s supposed to look like a forearm, but it looks more like a dick,” somebody wrote online. There were terminals where users registered and synced their Internet history; there was a s’mores station. In the middle of the store were translucent orange plastic chairs that resembled catcher’s mitts; the chairs vaguely suggested some kind of elegant future, however uncomfortable they were to sit in in the present. Users waited in these chairs until their names appeared in epiphany font on a giant digital board in the center of the room. Beneath this board were massive screens displaying live feeds of the store’s “epiphany stations,” at which “epiphany artists” guided needles onto skin. The stations themselves faced the street, so passersby could stop and gawk at each tattoo as it formed, thrilling to the reactions of the users reading their tattoos for the first time.
Soon, the only time there wasn’t a user in the epiphany station was the time it would take an epiphany artist to change needles or ink, or the five-minute break epiphany artists were permitted every two hours. Every chair in the waiting area was filled, and there was a line of users down the block. As much as Vladimir disliked altering his vision even slightly, he agreed, once cold weather hit, to install another row of chairs in each store to reduce outside waiting times. “We don’t want anybody’s arm to freeze off before they can get their tattoo,” he said.
There were many impassioned articles and posts decrying the total surrender of privacy that these new machines signified, but soon these articles and posts sounded stodgy, irrelevant, of concern only to the old, to the paranoid, to the belligerent, to everyone with something to hide. Who else would not be curious?
Vladimir put the matter this way, in a statement that was scandalous for the year or so before it became accepted wisdom: “If you’re afraid of the machine, maybe we should be afraid of you.”
Many who proclaimed themselves (and may have honestly considered themselves) early risers and diligent workers were informed that they PREFER SLEEP TO LABOR. Because the machine revealed personality traits that job candidates might not volunteer in job interviews, employers started requiring prospective employees to receive these tattoos—what to the recipient of a tattoo might appear to be a violation of privacy, after all, was to everyone around that recipient useful data. Within two years of the first appearance of these machines, it was essentially impossible to get a retail job without one, since stores believed that they were an excellent way to identify potential thieves. Early consensus that white-collar professionals should avoid the machine at all costs, on the theory that tattoos and office jobs did not mix, soon gave way to advice that getting a tattoo before one’s company required one would demonstrate openness and self-confidence, unless of course the tattoo said that you were CLOSED OFF AND SELF-DOUBTING, in which case, well, you might as well know. Soon coworkers were reaching over cubicle walls to show each other their tattoos and speculate about what was being kept secret by those who declined to roll up their sleeves.
The New York restaurant industry was a holdout, largely because so many of its employees were aspiring actors who did not want to get tattoos that would ruin whatever chances they had of one day “making it.” But soon enough, patrons demanded tattoos on waitstaff to ensure that their waiters did not have heinous hygiene and were not prone to taking revenge on complicated special orders by, say, ejaculating in the soup. (Even Julian, the proprietor of The Oracle Club, who moonlit as a waiter at a high-end brunch spot on the Upper West Side, was compelled to get a tattoo, though his tattoo was the enviable WILL NOT STOP WILL NOT LOSE FOCUS. Some people have all the luck, or all the merit, while the rest of us try desperately to convince ourselves that those two are not the same thing.) Soon, too, audiences came to expect that even actors would have epiphany tattoos; a lack of which came to suggest caginess, a suspicious unwillingness on the part of actors to share themselves with their fans. Today, magazines speculate about why certain stars refuse to receive or display epiphany tattoos, what affair or proclivity they might be hiding.
Some political pundits have suggested that, during the next presidential election campaign, candidates be asked on the debate stage to roll up their sleeves and show their tattoos. But I think that these pundits are joking, at least for now.
It sounds from the way that I am writing this that I was deeply engaged with these changes as they were occurring. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I first heard about the stores, my reaction was to dismiss them as Harrican overreach. Rebecca and I both laughed about them, which was nice, since, with the hours that she worked at her law firm, we hardly saw each other anymore and so had little opportunity to laugh about anything. I lost track of the new machine almost entirely for a period in which my mind was preoccupied by an Iranian-American documentary filmmaker named Roxanne Salehi.
CHAPTER
42
Roxanne emailed me proposing an interview for a project she was doing about post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions; I looked her up and saw that she was a highly respected filmmaker. I thought that talking to her about how guilty I felt about Ismail, and about how certain I now was about his innocence, would be good for Ismail and good for the book I was writing about Ismail. She came to interview me early one morning at The Oracle Club, and as her assistants set up lights, she seemed reluctant to look me in the eye. She asked me a few general questions about the machine, about my friendship with Ismail, about the day that Ismail used the machine, about the day that the FBI came to interview me about Ismail, about Ismail’s fate, about Citizens for Knowledge and Safety. I sensed that my answers were terrible, but the truth was also terrible, if in a slightly different way.
When I watched the documentary, which also prominently featured interviews with Leah and Ismail’s mother, even I hated myself, this shifty little weasel who can’t take responsibility for having destroyed his friend’s life. And then, The Phone Call, overlaid on a still photo of me with Ismail circa 1998: “Hey, Roxanne, it’s Venter, I’ve been thinking about that stuff I said, and I’m really worried about how it will make me look. I mean, not that I only care about how I will look. I think that it will help Ismail if I look good, if that makes sense?”
As the credits rolled and Netflix suggested something else that we should watch, Rebecca said quietly, “It’s not that bad,” and then she said she had a lot of work to do and had to go back to the office. I called my father, who was not pleased that I had talked about the case on camera without a lawyer present. Though he had declined to be interviewed, he did not come off well either. The interview with Leah made my father’s choice to stand by his son look like an act of corruption rather than an act of love, though of course it was both.
Within a weekend of the documentary’s release, it was declared a cultural phenomenon by people who declare things cultural phenomena. I was excoriated on television, I was excoriated on podcasts, I was excoriated everywhere on the Internet.
Too bad venter is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS since literally everyone in america thinks he sucks!!!!!
he’s the one who should be in prison
do we have any evidence that venter lowood did NOT collaborate with osama bin laden?
I wanted to—as an Internet comment recommended I
do—crawl into a hole and let maggots eat me while I was still alive. Somebody threw rotten eggs at the window of The Oracle Club while I was writing; then somebody spray-painted DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS onto the windows. Julian said he didn’t want to ask me to leave, which I interpreted to mean that I should leave. I started spending all my time in my apartment.
And for the first time in many years I was happy. I was exposed as the terrible person I was—the opinion of others was now the correct one. More important, Ismail would be freed, or at the very least his sentence on the trumped-up charges against him would be radically reduced—that much seemed assured. Ismail’s mother was interviewed on the Today show along with Roxanne Salehi and several legal experts, notably not including my father. Roxanne said she wished that the reaction to her documentary had been focused more on Ismail and less on Venter Lowood, but nonetheless she was pleased that it had resonated, and confident that the American people now understood it was unfair to jail someone for a tattoo.
Rebecca’s reaction was similar to mine. She was ecstatic that Ismail would soon be free; she considered it worth the price of having people shout things at us in the grocery store. For months, we had the best sex we’d had since college.
And we waited, and waited. There was a lot of discussion in the media of possible legal avenues for Ismail, but it seemed that, even though everyone agreed that they hated me for caring what they thought about me, there was still widespread disagreement about what should be done about my friend.
“After all,” somebody wrote online, “there’s no clear evidence that Ismail is not a terrorist. And if he wasn’t a terrorist when he was arrested, how can we be certain that this experience hasn’t made him one?”
I wrote an op-ed calling for Ismail’s immediate release. The op-ed was debated online for a few days, it seemed like it was important, and then somehow it just seemed to be forgotten.
The Epiphany Machine Page 36
