In addition to co-presidents, Ismail and I were also the only members of the Coexistence Club, so we would just sit in Ms. Scarra’s room after school on Thursdays, she would bring doughnuts, and we would talk, occasionally about issues connected to religion. I think we had been doing this for six weeks or so when she brought up the epiphany machine.
Not that the machine was an entirely random topic to bring up at the time. This was the fall of 1995, and the second Rebecca Hart killings had occurred the previous June. Even those who considered Adam Lyons nothing more than a huckster now felt the suspicion in the back of their necks that the man was touched with genuine black magic. Other kids’ parents who saw me at the grocery store looked at me like I had somehow cheated death, which was not something done by a trustworthy person.
“Venter,” Ms. Scarra said after she had said the words “epiphany machine” to me for the first time. “Your mother used the epiphany machine. What’s your opinion of it now?”
“It’s something that people resort to when they’re lonely, gullible, and numb,” I said. “That was my mother. Some people who are lonely, gullible, and numb are also capable of murder. That was not my mother.”
“I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that the two women were named Rebecca Hart,” said Ismail. “The second one happened to be crazy, too, and she was probably obsessed with the first Rebecca Hart and decided to be just like her.”
“But then,” Ms. Scarra said, “how did she get the same tattoo?”
“I’m sure that whatever he says, this guy Adam Lyons will give you whatever tattoo you want if you pay him enough.”
Ms. Scarra gave Ismail a pitying smile that I found weirdly erotic. “That’s the skeptic’s perspective. Which is only one among many.”
“It’s the correct perspective,” Ismail said.
“A lot of people who aren’t crazy and who aren’t stupid have used the machine,” Ms. Scarra said. “John Lennon used it. You don’t think John Lennon was lonely, gullible, and numb, do you?”
“I have no idea what John Lennon was like,” Ismail said.
“You don’t think there’s any reason why people who are not lonely, gullible, or numb, but are as wise and full of feeling as any of the three of us, might realize that it’s in human nature to be self-deceiving, to not see important things in our own lives, and so seek external guidance to correct that?”
“I’m not self-deceiving,” Ismail said. I could see in Ms. Scarra’s eyes that she thought this was naive, but I admired how confidently Ismail had spoken. I said that I wasn’t self-deceptive either, though I may have stammered a bit.
Ms. Scarra retreated to her desk and picked up a manila folder, from which she produced two photocopies of two chapters from an idiosyncratic 1991 book called Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine, written by a reclusive writer whose real identity was unknown and the subject of much speculation, but who went by the name Steven Merdula.
“Only the Desert Is Not a Desert is Merdula’s masterpiece,” Ismail said. “I read it last year and loved it. I hear this one is crap.”
“Just read what I photocopied,” Ms. Scarra said. “I’m going to get some coffee.”
I had been firmly forbidden by my father and grandmother from ever reading this book. But I was ashamed now of having complied, and I certainly wasn’t going to let myself look cowardly in front of Ismail and Ms. Scarra. So I read the strange and mutually contradictory chapters, feeling as I read each sentence as though I were being pulled by something malevolent into the sea.
From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,
by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 9
Let’s say that the epiphany machine was invented by a Nazi rocket scientist. Let’s call him Wernher, not because I’m thinking about Wernher von Braun, but because Wernher is the first German name that comes to mind. Wernher was sitting with his wife one night, trying hard to focus on the story she was telling about the time at their wedding—Hochzeit, or high time, is the German word, meaning that nothing will ever be as good again—when Wernher’s mother accidentally, or maybe on purpose, stuck her with a hatpin. But Wernher was not listening. He was too distracted by what he was always thinking about: rocket trajectory. His wife noticed that he wasn’t paying attention to her, so they quarreled, but he couldn’t pay attention to their quarrel, and naturally this made her even angrier, and she stormed off to bed.
Wernher was, despite making weapons for the Nazis, in no way a heartless man, and it upset him to upset his wife. He found that he could not concentrate on his work, and decided to clean the closet, on the pretense of making things easier for his wife but really as a way of doing what he was always doing: creating a certain kind of weapon. See what a good husband I am, I even do the work you are supposed to do, what do you have to complain about? He removed a few coats he would never wear again, and then he removed an old pair of rain boots from the floor, and underneath these he saw the sewing machine that his mother had given his wife as a wedding gift. This was the sewing machine that Wernher had spent many childhood hours watching his mother operate, torn between feeling annoyed that she was not playing with him and feeling enthralled that she was transforming nondescript pieces of cloth into dresses and pants. The impulse to imitate his mother—the impulse to create things that would envelop, overpower, and define human bodies—is what led him to rocket science.
But perhaps rockets were, well, too airy. Perhaps the true place for him was here with this sewing machine; perhaps this sewing machine would lead him to what he was destined to invent. There was no reason for him to believe this, but suddenly he did. Where the idea for the tattoo came from is anyone’s guess, though the use of tattoos to mark a person’s worth was an idea that was, shall we say, not foreign to Nazi culture.
For the next year or so, he tinkered with the machine every day after work, not really knowing what he was doing, but driven by something, something that he was convinced would lead him to complete a work of genius and that, in any case, completed his neglect of his wife. Either he was aided by some supernatural force or he wasn’t, but he turned the sewing machine into the epiphany machine. Perhaps he discovered what he had created only after his wife, finishing some cross-stitching, asked him to pass her a book—Mein Kampf, if we are being nasty, or even if we are simply playing the odds, since Mein Kampf was given to every German couple on their wedding day during the Nazi years. He reached across the machine, accidentally activating it. His wife watched as the needle found his arm and dug in, and certainly she was horrified, though perhaps, also, she thought that he deserved it. He screamed, terrified of the ink forming on his arm; he must have thought that it was God’s retribution for the Holocaust, which he must have known about even if he did not know about it. Then the needle disengaged and he saw what was written on his arm, and he saw that he was right, that it was God’s retribution.
Now the question is: What did the needle write? Let’s say it wrote: IGNORES WIFE FIXATED ON MOTHER AND WORK. An accurate assessment of Wernher, one that might even have led him toward a more fulfilling relationship with his wife. Possibly, if you’re in a generous mood, you might say that it served the purpose of distracting Wernher from his work for the Nazis. The epiphany machine may have saved the world from the Nazis, and would therefore have to be counted as the greatest-ever technological boon to humanity. And yet the tattoo itself is clearly monstrous. In lieu of any serious engagement with Wernher’s culpability for the evil in which he participated, the tattoo mediates a turgid Oedipal dispute and tells Wernher, incorrectly, that there are more important things than work. It ignores completely the nature of that work, which, so far as the tattoo is concerned, might as well be the construction of a toaster.
From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,
by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 12
In the last years of the nineteenth century, with the dark d
ecades ahead not yet visible, Andrew Blue and Richard Reid were classmates at Eton. Andrew and Richard were famous for the vigor and erudition of their debates over military history, a subject about which they knew much more than any of the other boys, all of whom knew a fair amount about military history. Red and Blue, as they were called, even though Richard’s last name was pronounced “reed,” treated the question of when and how war should be fought as a sacred inquiry. Much blood had been spilled into the earth, almost all of it needlessly, and yet there were undeniably times when blood belonged to the earth, and to keep it locked up and sloshing around in the bodies that lurked above it was nothing more than cowardice. On the list of terms that Andrew and Richard wanted never to be applied to them, “coward” was a close second to a cluster of terms they preferred not to think about. The conversations between the boys would last long into the night, and they spent their summers together at Andrew’s estate, where they swam, played tennis, read on the lawn or in the capacious library, went riding, and—though they would not have used this word, or any word at all—gave each other handjobs. The handjobs occurred after their daily swim, and afterward they put their hands in the stream, watching their semen stretch and join and separate and disappear. Theirs was hardly an unusual arrangement among Etonians in any aspect other than the depth of their feeling for each other, and neither of the boys felt it necessary or permissible to acknowledge that they would one day face a choice between what they wanted and what they were permitted to want, and that that day would come soon.
Richard was brooding on this subject in the middle of an August night when he woke at three and could not find a way back to sleep. A change had come over Andrew over the last several days—he had started to talk a great deal about God and was not interested in swimming. Richard worried that they had already embarked on the unlivable life that awaited. For lack of anything else to do, he walked through the woods at first light. In a mostly futile attempt to revive a feeling of innocence and guiltless curiosity, he took a stick and, just as he had when walking through the woods as a small boy, cut worms in two or three. Several worms into this pastime, his stick struck something metallic. He poked some more, enough to determine that whatever it was was large and buried deeply. He rolled up his sleeves and removed handfuls of dirt until he had determined that it was a sewing machine. Odd that one of Andrew’s servants had buried a sewing machine out here. Perhaps it was broken, and whoever had broken it did not wish to have the cost of replacement garnished from her wages.
Richard decided that he was going to carry it back and determine who was responsible, not because he cared but because he felt an urge to ruin someone’s life for no reason. He pulled at the device and then pulled again, and tried one angle and then another. Finally, he reached the neck (or the arm, or whatever metaphor we wish to use) of the machine, and this is when the needle tore into his forearm. He screamed, but there was no answer; he tried to pull away but the needle merely dug in further, sliding down the neck of the machine and dragging itself down his arm. Deeper into the flesh, deeper and deeper and deeper. His arm belonged to the needle now, and he realized it must intend to kill him, whatever it was, most likely as punishment for his unnatural love for Andrew.
Finally, the machine fell silent and the needle stopped moving, just sitting still in his arm as though it had gone to sleep. The desire to remove this horrible thing from his skin outweighed the terror of what would happen once he did, and he ripped his arm free to find these words inscribed on him:
WILL NOT CHOOSE WAR
He sat there in the dirt, looking at this tattoo. He was crying, not because of the pain, though the pain was considerable. The message was vague and had no meaning at all, and certainly had no special meaning for him, except that of course it did. He pushed dirt back onto the device and then returned to his room to lie down.
At supper, Richard spoke to Andrew only enough to make it clear that they weren’t going to have any kind of fight over Andrew’s recent distance. The boys took their meals together for the remainder of the summer, but in the balance of their time, they read in their own rooms.
Many years went by, and both Andrew and Richard found success. By their early thirties, they were respected journalists whose work was rumored to be read by the most important members of Parliament. The tattoo on Richard’s forearm precluded any leisure activity that might have required him to bare his arms, and it certainly precluded marriage, a shame given that Richard had matured beyond the regrettable predilections of his adolescence and would have fully been prepared to be a man were the presence of a tattoo not certain to repel any woman worth having. But his social isolation left more time for work.
Richard and Andrew often dined together, and one occasion when they did so was shortly after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Richard had spent many hours over the past days alone in his flat, naked or close to it, staring at his tattoo. It had always seemed to mock him, but never more so than now. The idea that this tattoo contained any magical knowledge was patently absurd; it was clearly some kind of Gypsy trick. Looking now into Andrew’s sharp yet gentle eyes, Richard thought that there was no clearer moral duty than to fight, even when fighting went against reason.
“Any serious man has to admit that there must be war,” Richard said.
Andrew turned his gaze down and chewed his steak thoughtfully, and when he finished chewing, he wiped his mouth and spoke softly. “I don’t believe that England should be party to any war that results from any of this.”
Richard was shocked. “Why?”
“You’ll have to read my column.”
Richard tried to discern whether the reference to a “column” was some sort of double entendre, an invitation to return to school days. Such a double entendre seemed more likely than the one that Richard feared: that he would not learn of Andrew’s thoughts until they were coming off on everyone else’s hands.
“I know you too well,” Richard said. “If you truly had any serious arguments, you would subject them to my scrutiny.”
“Richard, however much you’ve always enjoyed arguing with me, I’m afraid I’ve never enjoyed arguing with you. Not even when we were boys.”
The statement was presented so bluntly that Richard found himself, much to his own surprise, having to fight back tears. This fight, like the war, was one he would choose, his tattoo be damned. He told Andrew that his mental acuity had peaked at Eton, and that persuading a mob of idiotic, cowardly members of Parliament to behave as idiotic cowards could hardly be considered an impressive feat, should he manage to pull it off. He left with his eyes dry and his dignity, he was reasonably certain, intact.
Andrew remained at the table for some time, fighting back tears of his own. Surely his friend must have seen through that preposterous lie; arguing with Richard constituted one of the very few genuine pleasures of Andrew’s life. And yet evading the conversation had been the only option. Richard would have had a very easy time dismantling any points Andrew could somehow manage to cobble together against the war, a war Andrew considered self-evidently necessary. But he was going to do everything he could to make a convincing case against the war, and everything he could was usually quite a lot. He certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone the truth: that God had buried an instrument on his family’s estate for Andrew to find, and, using that instrument, had written on his arm the instruction not to choose war.
There was another reason Andrew stayed at the table: he did not want to return home to Elizabeth, who would see through him.
Elizabeth was the only other person who knew about Andrew’s tattoo. He disliked that she knew about it, or knew anything about him at all, though he did everything he could to forgive her for wasting her life on him. He had entered into the marriage in something approaching good faith; they had gotten along very well, and he certainly enjoyed talking to her more than he had ever enjoyed talking to anyone who was not Richard, even if her o
pinions on Napoleon were fairly pedestrian. He thought he would find it relatively easy, when the time came, to show her the tattoo on his arm. On their wedding night, after they had arrived in their marital suite, she excused herself to use the washroom, and he began to unbutton his shirt. He hesitated and moved slowly, but he would have gotten his shirt off if she hadn’t emerged from the washroom naked, throwing him off completely. He no longer felt equipped to take his shirt off at all, and when she moved to do this for him, he stopped her. He did manage to get his pants and underwear off and launch a credible assault at consummating their marriage, but the whole ordeal proved too much, and the night ended in failure. So did several succeeding nights, on each of which he took his pants off but kept his shirt on. Eventually, they stopped trying altogether. Elizabeth kept asking sweetly whether there was anything she could do, and he hated this so much that her sweetness seemed like an obscure threat.
The Epiphany Machine Page 3