Then a Muslim man, an immigrant from Pakistan, opened fire on the café car of an Amtrak train as it pulled away from Wilmington. The shooter had a WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP tattoo, and though the tattoo was not an epiphany tattoo—he had tattooed himself, quite amateurishly—and though this obviously had nothing to do with Ismail, nonetheless it ended any remaining public discussion of Ismail’s fate.
Eventually, weeks and months went by without anyone attacking me on the Internet. I was surprised to find that I missed being attacked, maybe because I was so DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS that I preferred negative opinions about me to none at all, or maybe because I knew that I fully deserved even the worst of the attacks. In either case, I felt once again like I had suddenly realized something: that other people’s opinions actually do not matter, even when the world would be a better place if they did matter. I hoped I would never suddenly realize anything ever again.
I threw myself into a new writing project, or an old one, sorting through testimonials from machine users, and adding my thoughts and experiences. I also tried to collect new testimonials about the new model of the epiphany machine, and though I did do a handful of interviews, it was difficult to find willing subjects, since a Google search of my name revealed only people attaching nasty comments to my name. Maybe worse for my prospects was that Cesar Solomon, who had given up trying to write a second novel, had instead taken the job that Vladimir Harrican had offered me. Anyone who wanted to publicly discuss his or her experiences with the new epiphany machine could do so through Cesar’s site, so there was no reason to talk to me.
TESTIMONIAL #99
NAME: Cesar Solomon
DATE OF BIRTH: 10/01/1981
DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 01/12/2013
DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 10/15/2016
I’ve always felt bad that you fell out with Adam Lyons because of me. The epiphany machine struck me as weird—that iteration of the epiphany machine continues to strike me as weird—but the only reason that I insisted you break with Adam was that you were my roommate, and I was afraid that your involvement in the epiphany machine would reflect badly on me. I was eighteen just like you, man. Eighteen-year-olds don’t know anything. You don’t need magic or an algorithm or anything else to tell you that. I’m not sure it’s my fault that you thought I knew something, but I still feel guilty about it. At least from time to time.
Honestly, though, I’m impressed with what you’ve done with your life. At least until recently, you had contributed much more to the world than I had. Of the two of us, I won greater esteem, but you deserved far, far more esteem. What did I do? I wrote a pretty good novel. It made a lot of people think. What did it make anyone do? Maybe it made a couple of people with Asperger’s feel better about themselves, but I don’t think so; it was too nuanced, too ambivalent, too insistent on showing every last goddamn side of every last goddamn thing to make anyone feel better about anything. It made a bunch of people with Asperger’s angry that I was speaking for them; that was pretty much the most tangible effect it had. Consider what you were doing at the same time. I know you don’t want to hear this, but the work you put into Citizens for Knowledge and Safety helped keep your friend Ismail where he belongs. You say that he’s innocent, but honestly I think you’re once again letting other people do your thinking for you. Why do you think he’s being held? As part of some massive but simple conspiracy that is one day going to be revealed on somebody’s arm? Give me a break.
But we’re not here to talk about you, we’re here to talk about me. Okay. I’ve always been driven to make art and to reach as many people as possible. These are fundamentally contradictory impulses, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise. I sold a lot of copies of my novel, awards were shoved into my arms like they were children somebody was trying to get rid of, and that all felt incredibly, incredibly empty. You may or may not have heard this, but I fell in love with Catherine Pearson at AWP, a writer’s conference. We were both on panels that we didn’t go to. We stayed in bed the entire time. Unimaginable bliss. I asked her to marry me on the last day. She said she was never going to get married again, certainly never to another writer, not after her marriage to Carter Wolf, but if I wanted to meet her in Rome that summer I was welcome to. I did meet her in Rome, and we had what are still the six best weeks of my life, followed by the worst several months. We’re both very popular writers in Italy, so we’d go out to dinner and get treated like John and Jackie Kennedy, and then we’d spend the rest of our time in our hotel room, writing for the few hours each day we weren’t having some iteration of sex. I still wasn’t making any progress on my manuscript, but I cared less than I usually did. Catherine, on the other hand, was writing a ton, and I felt jealous of her, but it also turned me on like nothing else. I’d spend the entire afternoon under her desk, eating her out while she wrote. She’d type furiously, I’d work her into an orgasm, then we’d repeat. The sound of her typing around and above my head was a challenge, so I’d do my best to get her so aroused she couldn’t concentrate, and she would take her increasing arousal as a challenge to concentrate more intensely, and her concentration would increase, and she’d write and write and then have an incredibly powerful orgasm, and then we’d start again. Afterward, I’d read what she had written during these sessions, and it would be full of typos and inconsistencies and need to be substantially rewritten, but the power, the essence would be there. Then we’d switch and I’d write while she was giving me a blowjob, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the blowjob, a fact that made me feel bad about my writing, which in turn made getting a blowjob much less fun than eating her out. I think I was starting to learn that the particular way in which I could be useful to the world did not involve making art.
Sorry, I got carried away there. You probably want to edit that out. But do what you want.
The time came to leave Rome, and we had a difference of opinion: I wanted to stay together, and she did not. She said we could have a good fuck every year at AWP. I said no, absolutely not, I wanted all or nothing, if we weren’t together I never wanted to see her again. Then I saw her a few months later at AWP and begged her to come to my hotel room for one fuck, that’s all it had to be, one fuck. She said no, she said it would be cruel to fuck and run given how obvious it was that I was still in love with her. She was right, it would have been cruel. I wish she had been cruel.
To get under her skin, so to speak, I said I was going to use the epiphany machine. I knew this would annoy her, because I knew that she hated the new model of the epiphany machine.
I got so wrapped up in my sex life with Catherine just now that I haven’t even talked about the role of the epiphany machine in our relationship. Early on, of course, I had noticed that she had an epiphany tattoo—I had read about her tattoo somewhere, or maybe you had told me, long before I had ever met her—but I didn’t think very much about it. By that time, I had lost my teenage need to establish and broadcast my superiority to a false system of knowledge; I just figured, okay, this is something she’s into, that’s fine. Even in the first days we spent together, she talked a lot about how much she loved and respected Adam Lyons, how she thought he got a bad rap for his association with Si Strauss, and I was silent about the fact that I had met Adam.
In Rome, Catherine talked about how much the machine had energized her, about how it had led her to do what she most needed to do in life. She also said that the new iteration of the machine was “catastrophically impersonal,” which, to my mind, is another way of saying “objective,” “data-driven,” “accurate.” But she’d go on and on about how the new machine was betraying Adam’s vision by behaving like, well, a machine.
In any case, when I saw her again and threatened to use the new machine, I had no intention of actually letting that thing write on my arm. I just wanted to piss her off. Instead, she pissed me off, by kind of cocking her head at me and saying that I should use the
machine. I asked her if she was daring me, and she said no, absolutely not, okay, well, maybe a little, but for all she knew it might do me some good.
I cursed at her, I said the word “bitch” in a non-fun way for the first and definitely only time in my life, and then I called a car and had it drive me to the nearest Epiphany store. The tattoo impressed me so much that I called Vladimir Harrican, told him that I didn’t want to be a novelist anymore, was impressed with his device, and wanted to work for him. He didn’t believe it was me—actually, at first he thought I was you, playing a prank. But he called me into his office, I ate his s’mores, and we hashed out a job for me, basically the job that he offered you a long time ago.
What I do all day is find people who have used the epiphany machine and ask them to write down their stories, which I then feature on our website, although to be honest I could easily run the site on unsolicited submissions alone. People are really eager to talk about what happens to them, even when you think they should feel humiliated. But why should they feel humiliated? Why should anyone feel humiliated because of who they are? If you WILL SPEND ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY TO FEEL COOL FOR A FEW MINUTES, then be proud of that. Be proud of the money you’re funneling into the industries that are supporting your feeling cool for a few minutes, whether that’s the fashion industry, the alcohol industry, your local cocaine dealer, the independent bookstore from which you buy a ton of novels you never read, whatever it is. Be proud of the fact that you value that feeling of connection to a community over the pointless, probably incoherent ideal of personal integrity you might think you should value. Don’t feel ashamed of your behavior, unless your epiphany tells you that you CANNOT STOP FEELING ASHAMED OF OWN BEHAVIOR, in which case you should take pride in the fact that you’re ashamed. Shame is basically hypocrisy redirected against yourself—it’s holding yourself to a higher standard than you’re capable of meeting, rather than holding other people to a higher standard than you’re capable of meeting. So be proud of reaching for that standard you can’t meet, and be proud of beating yourself rather than other people up over the standard! And if you are a hypocrite, if what’s on your arm is EXHORTS OTHERS TO COMMITMENT AND FIDELITY BUT CANNOT STOP SENDING DICK PICS, then take pride in the happiness you’ll bring to anyone whom you inspire to achieve commitment and fidelity.
These are the kinds of conclusions that I encourage my writers to make. I want people to accept themselves as they actually are—which is what makes me so mad when I get a fake testimonial, when someone attaches a photo of someone else’s arm and then makes up a story. A story that is not true deforms our understanding of what is possible, and therefore is quite harmful to the world. I was so miserable when I was a fiction writer because invented stories almost inevitably lead to good guys and bad guys. Only true stories can make people love each other and themselves.
That’s why the testimonials I publish are so helpful. I also have a staff of people who write paid advertisements for the machines, listicles and that sort of thing, but those are less helpful, either for the writer or for the machine. Your testimonials were helpful, too; they provided the model for mine, which is why I agreed to sit for you rather than write one of my own, although now that I’m sitting here I’m wondering whether you have an ulterior motive. What is the point of this testimonial? You got me to do it by praising me, by making me think you looked up to me and envied me, but now I’m wondering whether you’re trying to trick me into making me feel bad about Catherine again. Talking about her makes me feel like I’m about to fall apart, and I haven’t felt like that in a very long time.
I didn’t even feel bad when I ran into Catherine last year at a mutual friend’s reading, and while we both sipped terrible white wine out of flimsy plastic cups, she told me that I was a traitor to the machine, to art, to the human spirit, and to her. I was also the “handmaiden”—a term she meant to be offensive, as though I would be offended to be likened to a woman or to someone who does things for other people—of Vladimir Harrican and the American capitalism that he is for some reason supposed to embody.
This is so much bigger than complaints about capitalism. The forearm is a clean surface to write on; what’s really important is the line beneath it, the line that runs from the brain to the fingers and empties into devices that we can track and measure, and so can be truly seen for the first time in human history. If that benefits Vladimir Harrican, what do I care? He was the first person to figure out what the machine could be made to do, so he deserves whatever wealth comes to him as a result. And I don’t buy that it necessarily benefits American capitalism. A basic tenet of American capitalism is keeping people ignorant of what they’re not really suited for, so that they think if they buy just one more thing everything will be awesome. American capitalism, at least in its worst forms, is in direct opposition to the new epiphany machine, as far as I’m concerned.
I said this to Catherine, or as much of it as I could before she turned her back on me and started talking to somebody else. If I were still a fiction writer, I’d probably slow down on that moment and describe the way the bookstore light looked in her hair as she walked away or some nonsense like that, all to create the impression that I miss her and long for her love, for her approval. Instead, I can just look at my arm and see all that, encapsulated by a concise assessment of my personality based on analysis of hard data.
My tattoo says what I’ve basically already told you it says. DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. I’d like to use the classic villain’s line here—we’re not so different, you and I—but that wouldn’t be true, Venter. We’re very different. I’ve suggested to Vladimir and to the engineers that a future model of the epiphany machine should include “happily” or “unhappily.” Obviously everybody feels multiple ways about the way that they are, but there’s almost always a dominant feeling about whether the way they are is good or bad, and that dominant feeling is a much more important part, both internally and externally, of who they happen to be than is who they happen to be. I am HAPPILY DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. If I were you, I’d try to be more like me, but I’m not you, and now we both know it.
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Posted October 10, 2014
14 THINGS PEOPLE WHO HAVE USED THE EPIPHANY MACHINE ARE TIRED OF HEARING
Why would you choose to get a tattoo that says that? I didn’t choose it, okay? It chose me.
The epiphany machine? Isn’t that just like a fortune cookie? Um, maybe you might have a point if fortune cookies were INSIGHTS INTO PEOPLE’S SOULS rather than lame ADVICE?
I think I know myself better than some hocus-pocus machine does. Hmmm, interesting. Why don’t we ask the people around you how well you know yourself?
You just got that tattoo for attention. Yeah, you got me. I paid for a needle to dig painfully into my skin just so that YOU and people like you would start unwanted conversations with me on the subway about my body.
See? You admit it! You CHOSE to put that tattoo on your body. Look, I didn’t choose to get THIS tattoo, but I did choose to get A tattoo. I chose to acknowledge that, because I am a human being, my understanding of myself is inevitably cloudy, and the epiphany machine’s needle is one tool I can use to puncture those clouds.
Are you saying that if I don’t get an epiphany tattoo, then there’s no way that I can know myself? Gah, I just said it is ONE tool! There are lots of others. The epiphany tattoo is just the one that works for me.
How about astrology? Only wingnuts pay attention to astrology, and I don’t see how an epiphany tattoo is any different from a horoscope. I tend to be very brooding, contemplative, and cautious, not really Gemini traits, so reading my Gemini horoscope doesn’t really tell me much. But I have a lot of friends who read their horoscopes every single morning and won’t make any important decisions without them. You know why? Because that works for THEM. It’s an unbelievably big universe, and th
ere are lots of ways to figure out how our unbelievably tiny selves fit into it.
But by your logic, how do you know you’re not just deluding yourself by not acknowledging that you have Gemini characteristics? Just because I acknowledge that I need SOME help discovering my true self doesn’t mean that I just walk away from the sense of myself that I have put together through hanging out with myself for my entire life. Any honest approach to the truth is going to be a collaboration between internal observation and external feedback.
If I joined a cult, I don’t think I’d advertise it on my body. Sometimes people tell you this while wearing a Yankees jersey AND a Yankees cap.
That tattoo is so vague it could apply to anyone. Right, but it DOES apply to me.
Can I touch your tattoo? Ugh, seriously? NO. Like, as a general rule, maybe don’t ask strangers if you can touch their bodies because you find them weird or exotic, okay?
Does the tattoo, like, burn through your clothes if you start to forget about it? People who ask this need to stop watching Indiana Jones movies on repeat.
Why do you want the worst stuff about you on the outside of your body, where everyone can see it? Why do you want the worst stuff about you on the inside of your body, where everyone can see it?
Forget what this machine says. What’s really wrong with you is . . . See, this is what’s really behind every anti-epiphany thing you hear. Everybody always wants to tell you what’s wrong with you. Because we all know on some level that there’s SOMETHING wrong with us, we tend to give these people a lot more credit than they deserve. Once you get an epiphany tattoo, what you really need to work on is written on your forearm, so any other criticism just slides off your back.
The Epiphany Machine Page 37
