From Further Adventures of the Epiphany Machine(s),
by Steven Merdula (2018), Chapter 6
There is no evidence that the second Rebecca Hart ever read my book. There is certainly no evidence that it was in any way responsible for her killing her children. But she did say, after she murdered her children, that she wanted to be as famous as the woman who shared her name, and my book had increased general chatter around the machine. The slightest possibility that my book played the slightest role in her carrying out the murders sometimes makes me wish that I had never been born, or at least that I had never become a writer, and had instead made myself happy with some ephemeral pursuit, such as raising a child.
But the second Rebecca Hart is not my fault. The fact that she said she murdered her children for “fame” suggests that she is grasping for a word or a handful of words to tattoo on the chaos of whatever is in her that made her kill her children, just as the rest of us are. “Curse,” “brain chemistry,” “a society that systematically drives women insane,” “a book by Steven Merdula”: these are all just words, used as incantations to make order flicker before it disappears again.
I had more words to add to these about the first Rebecca Hart; about the second I have none. Choose your own words to describe her. Tattoo them on your forearm. Chant them out loud. See if they can make order stick around. When you find that they can’t, feel free to write me a letter that I will not read.
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Rebecca told me she was pregnant by telling me she was going to get an abortion.
“I want to kill the baby before I can kill it,” she said. She said she wanted to go have a drink, and though I was tempted to stop her, I did not. She came home very drunk and said she wanted to have the child.
She told me that she had had drinks with her boss, Julie, who told Rebecca something that she had not previously told anyone at the firm: that her ex-fiancé had broken up with her after the epiphany machine told him that he, as he put it, had to marry a Jewish girl. This left Julie depressed for a very long time, but eventually she found a man she loved and was now married with three children in addition to being senior partner. And she had long since realized that her ex-fiancé was a pompous, cowardly ass who would have made her miserable. Julie said that she had hated the machine for years, but now she was grateful because Joshua’s use of the machine had, very circuitously, led her to exactly where she wanted to be. Maybe the whole Rebecca Hart thing had just led Rebecca to become a mother at exactly the moment that was right for her.
“If I kill our kid,” Rebecca said, “maybe you can write a book about that.”
I was certain that Rebecca was not going to kill our child, and I told her so, and I told her I was happy. And I was happy. I posted online that Rebecca was pregnant, and people I barely remembered congratulated me. High school acquaintances who had written horrible things about me on their personal pages after Roxanne Salehi’s Ismail documentary congratulated me, said that this news was exciting, included many exclamation points. Almost everyone agrees that becoming a parent is what life is for, and that was what I was doing.
My happiness about becoming a father did not, perhaps predictably, last. I imagined my child asking the very reasonable question of what Daddy did for a living, and having no better answer than that Daddy was still writing his book, a book that would never end and that would include every lesson that every human being had briefly thought they had learned, and simultaneously distill everything that all these people had learned into one short phrase to be tattooed on the forearm of humanity. I imagined her blinking in response.
One day in Rebecca’s third month of pregnancy, I googled Ms. Scarra’s name and discovered that she had hanged herself in prison two years earlier. I took a long walk and found a construction site, where I tried to feel some of the emotion that I was fairly certain I had felt the last time I stood by a construction site, the one at Adam’s old building. Then I returned to my laptop and stared into the infinite space of which I was some kind of ridiculous little king.
Kulturkampf, September 23, 2016
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE FEEL
A LITTLE CONFLICTED ABOUT DOUGLAVICH
BY ANNA VILLANUEVA
I would like to report that Douglavich, the Vladimir Harrican biopic and debut fiction film by the renowned documentarian Roxanne Salehi, is an effective critique of the epiphany machine. Over the past several years, Harrican’s efforts to squelch the project out of his obsession with his own privacy have been almost as intense as have his efforts to flush out any privacy for anyone else. The same person who wants every keystroke to leave a mark on the stroker’s arm would prefer that the basic facts of his own background not be known. Harrican’s lawsuits against Salehi were so numerous that it sometimes seemed that not even one day could go by without a new one. That the film was produced and has received even paltry art-house distribution is a minor miracle.
If anyone seemed equipped to take on Harrican, it was Salehi, whose documentary Ismail, about accused terrorist Ismail Ahmed, made it clear not only that Ahmed is entirely innocent of wrongdoing or even wrong-thinking, but that Harrican has been instrumental in Ahmed’s continued persecution.
Unfortunately, the film serves mostly to further mythologize the already vastly over-mythologized Harrican. Taking as its title Harrican’s hated patronymic, Douglavich focuses on Harrican’s early childhood and troubled relationship with his father. In the opening scene, British violinist Douglas Harrican uses the earlier, much sketchier incarnation of the epiphany machine operated by the perverse, later disgraced guru Adam Lyons and is inspired to leave his fiancée and the West to defect to the Soviet Union. Douglas, in the film as in life, then marries Anya, the daughter of a party leader named Anton Vasiliev. The three proceed to engage in screaming matches for most of the rest of the film, as gifted young Vladimir looks on and is molded into a sociopath obsessed with his family demons and with making the epiphany machine his own.
The problem with this approach is that we cannot help but feel sorry for Vladimir, and we leave the film impressed with his ability to triumph over his trauma and launch the great venture we know is to come. A more effective critique might focus not on his dark personal history, which makes Vladimir unique among contemporary captains of the tech industry, but on his bland professional focus, which makes Vladimir look banal and typical. Every tech billionaire wishes, like Vladimir, to collect as much information as possible about the innermost souls of everyone on the planet, because that information can be used to reap unfathomable profit, but mostly because they just want it. Vladimir’s true shameful secret is that he is the most boring thing of all: just another man who wants to know everything.
It’s probably necessary to disclose here that this will be my last post for this blog, which has itself been purchased by Harrican, who has been buying up media outlets large and small. (If you know of any jobs for outlets not yet owned by Harrican, please email me!) As of Monday, this blog will be folded into a site run by Cesar Solomon, formerly a respected novelist and now a Harrican hack, at which point this post, and all others pertaining to Harrican and the machine, will likely be deleted. I think this makes me more hostile to Harrican and therefore predisposed to be sympathetic to Salehi, but I suppose it’s possible that I am already identifying with my captor and am doing Harrican’s work by criticizing a work that attacks him. Harrican and I: I don’t know which of us has written this post.
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In Rebecca’s last weeks of pregnancy, there was a huge resurgence in her libido. Maybe her fear that she was going to kill our baby expressed itself in arousal, or maybe she just got horny while she was pregnant, as a lot of women do. In any case, I responded in full force. Maybe I was afraid she was going to kill our baby, but I don’t think I was. Maybe what I was writing in support of Ismail had removed the guilt from my body, or at least diluted it to manag
eable levels. True, on any given day I was mostly not writing, and what I was not writing was unlikely to help Ismail even if I managed somehow not to not write it, but at least I was no longer actively working against him. Guilt, misery, and a dead child seemed like what I deserved, but given a choice between what I had and what I deserved, I would take what I had. And what I had was the living room rug below and my wife on top of me, her person-filled stomach bouncing down on my Doritos-filled one.
One morning, after a particularly intense bout of fucking, I took one of thousands of showers I have taken that have not removed my tattoo, though it did a decent job with the lube. Toweling off got me hard again and I hoped that Rebecca would be ready for another round. Instead, she was on the phone with her father, arranging for him to come pick her up and take her to the hospital.
“I thought our birth plan was for me to get an Uber,” I said.
“I trust my father more than I trust Uber drivers.”
I felt a rush of affection for her, and a rush of respect for her recognition that I was not to be trusted with even trivial tasks once they became important. I also felt a rush of pride in myself for not being offended at her realistic assessment of me.
Rebecca, having examined both the thinness of the evidence against epidurals and the lowness of her own threshold for pain, asked for a shot as soon as we reached the hospital. Her friends had tried to pressure her into some kind of natural birth, and I was glad that she had resisted; I was glad that she was not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. As a needle was prepared by an old man in green who, despite my squinting, looked nothing like Adam, Rebecca told me that she had called Leah—“I wanted her to be here more than I wanted you to be here, I think”—but that Leah had hung up without responding. After the epidural was administered, I excused myself to find a vending machine, and I wandered around the halls for a long time, thinking seriously about walking out and never coming back.
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I was still wandering around the hospital hallway when I got a text from my father saying that he had arrived. After a lot more wandering, I found him standing by a vending machine and deep in conversation with a white-haired woman. When he saw me, he took a deep breath, and he put his hand on the woman’s back. It was only then that I noticed that she was wearing a faded fox fur coat.
“Venter, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. Though technically you’ve met.”
“Rose,” she said, extending her hand to me in a businesslike fashion. “But we’ve corresponded under my pen name. Steven Merdula.”
I put my hand on the vending machine, blotting out the SunChips.
“You’re joking,” I said.
She smiled, and I saw either Adam or myself in her smile.
“When I chose the name, back in the eighties, it was almost impossible for a female writer to be taken seriously. From what I understand, it’s a little better today, but not much.”
I looked at my father to see whether this was some kind of prank, but if there is one thing I can recognize in my father’s face, it’s when he is not joking.
“You abandoned me to become a famous writer,” I said to Rose.
She gave what had to have been a conscious Adam Shrug. “Men have been doing that to their children for centuries.”
“There will be plenty of time to talk about all of this later,” my father said. “But right now, Venter, we have some very big news. Your mother and I are getting back together.”
“What?”
“We ran into each other about a year ago at a Film Forum screening of Taxi Driver, which we saw together with Adam when it was new,” my father said. “We couldn’t hear the movie that time because Adam kept on talking about how he had tattooed half the cast and crew one night. This time we heard the movie. We’ve been dating since.”
“Dating since?”
“I saw her as we were going into the theater and I almost left. But I didn’t. I sat a few rows behind her and watched the back of her head the whole time. Which was a creepy thing to do. It made me feel a little bit like Travis Bickle. But I couldn’t stop looking at her. I’ve never wanted to stop looking at her. I invited her out for a drink afterward, mostly so I could yell at her, and I did yell at her, but we just kept talking, and I felt what I hadn’t felt in decades, but also had never really stopped feeling.”
“And I felt the same way,” Rose said. “After I left you, Venter, I moved to Phoenix and moved in with Georgette Hoenecker and Lillian Secor, and I helped run their French restaurant when I wasn’t writing. I loved my life. The two of them got married a little over a year ago, now that they finally can, and I got ordained online so I could officiate their wedding in the restaurant. The wedding was so beautiful, and it made me realize that I had to end my life with someone who loves me. I moved back to New York, telling myself it was because I missed New York, but really it was because I missed Isaac. If I hadn’t run into him there, I would have called him eventually.”
“You’ve been dating for a year and you didn’t tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to see you,” Rose said to me. “You’ve lived your life disgracefully.”
It did not even occur to me to contest the charge. “And whose fault is that?”
“Whose fault do you think it is, Venter?”
I could get lost in the hospital again, I could flee the hospital, New York, Rebecca, our child, but I couldn’t escape the fact that I knew the answer to this question. “Mine. Who I am is my fault and no one else’s.”
“I couldn’t stop myself from coming today. I wanted to meet my granddaughter. And whatever else you are, you are my son. Even reminding myself about the terrible things you’ve done can’t stop me from needing to see you, whether or not I want to.”
“What a moving statement of motherly love.”
“It’s more than you deserve.”
This was true.
I turned to my father. “So you knew that she was Merdula this whole time?”
“She only told me that first night after the movie. But it wasn’t a surprise. I’ve strongly suspected for decades. Haven’t we talked about this before?”
“No, Dad. We haven’t.”
“Huh. I guess it just never came up.”
It occurred to me that I could start a long feud with my father over the fact that he was so distracted that he had never discussed with me the possibility that my mother was a famous pseudonymous writer, but it also occurred to me that I could also not do that, and just let the issue go. I could ask lots of people for their advice on how to proceed and get many conflicting opinions, or I could ask no one and just accept my father as he was.
It also occurred to me that it was completely fucking obvious that my mother was Merdula and I should have figured it out years ago.
“Tell me about Rebecca,” Rose said.
“I don’t deserve Rebecca,” I said. “I don’t deserve my child. I deserve to be in Hell for what I did to my friend.”
“Neither your mother nor I disagree with you, exactly,” my father said. “But Hell does not exist, and your daughter is about to.”
I looked at my mother, her sweet ashen face, and I knew for the first time both that I had always hated her and that I had no supportable reason to.
“Tell me about Rebecca,” my mother repeated. I suddenly realized that I knew nothing about Rebecca. I hoped that this would be the rare sudden realization that I would not forget and would do something about.
I turned my back on Isaac and Rose and looked at the waiting area. There were expectant grandparents and siblings and friends of the new parents. Many of those around my age had tattoos from the new model. DEVOTES EVERY SPARE MINUTE TO HONING SKILLS on the arm of a young woman reading an economics textbook; DESPERATE TO APPEAR COOL anxiously jabbing at his cell phone. The epiphanies did not seem as penetrating as those I rem
embered from Adam’s era, but I was aware that this was most likely nostalgia.
TESTIMONIAL #100
NAME: Rebecca Hart Lowood
DATE OF BIRTH: 11/18/1981
DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: N/A
DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 01/06/2017
I was seven when I heard about the first Rebecca Hart. I was sitting on the floor in my father’s office, stabbing my doll with a curette to remove her earwax, when my father introduced me to a patient as his daughter, Rebecca. “Oh, Rebecca Hart? Like that cunt who killed her kids?” My dad threw the guy out, probably the only patient he ever threw out. He wouldn’t tell me what the word meant or what the guy was talking about, only that he was a bad man and I shouldn’t worry about what he was saying. I didn’t worry about it, exactly, but I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head.
After asking an older girl who asked her mom and reported back, I figured out exactly who Rebecca Hart was and more or less what a cunt was. I remember thinking that my dad should have done more than throw his patient out for saying that word in front of me; he should have killed him. I remember thinking that maybe Rebecca Hart had murdered her children—her sons—because she was afraid they would end up like my dad’s patient and was taking necessary precautions. After all, my dad’s patient had a mother, and I can’t imagine she would have been pleased to learn that her son would grow up to be a man who would use that word in front of a seven-year-old girl. So I wrote a story about a girl superhero who flew over our town, saw this man on the street, swooped down, embraced him tightly, flew up to the sky with him still in her arms, showed him buildings down below, and whispered in his ear about the amazing things she could see and hear women doing inside those buildings with her superpowers of sight and hearing. While he was crying about how much better all these girls were than he was, she dropped him over the Atlantic Ocean.
The Epiphany Machine Page 38
