The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  This was not terribly far off. Though proudly still a virgin, she had been looking forward to sex for many years, with fantasies of the erotic bliss that awaited the only effective defense against the stirrings inside of her. She had always felt contempt for girls who were scared of their wedding nights, the ones who had to be instructed to lie back and think of England. And here she was, married, with nothing to do at night but lie back while Andrew talked of England. At long last she confronted him, saying she did not understand why he would not at the very least completely disrobe. After some grumbling he agreed to take off his shirt, warning her in advance of his disfigurement.

  Elizabeth was puzzled, but she was also relieved. The marking was unsightly, perhaps, but not terribly so, and she could not understand why thus far he had chosen the shame of a sexless marriage over the shame of showing it to her. If it was true that he WILL NOT CHOOSE WAR, if he felt a commitment to pacifism so strong that he had once felt a need to display it to the whole world, or at least the tiny portion of the world that might see him without his shirt, then this made her very glad. Britain was always launching stupid and pointless wars, and she was happy to have a husband who might persuade the men who made the decisions not to send her future sons to die. But not to be on the side of war seemed to make him nervous, so it was her duty to calm him. She was attempting to do just that when he told her that he believed his tattoo was a direct message from God.

  “I don’t know what it means yet,” Andrew said. “But whatever it means, this message is the most important part of my life.”

  Elizabeth’s husband now displayed two qualities—impotence and insanity—that would each justify an annulment according to even the strictest standards. But Elizabeth found, perhaps oddly, that she loved him anyway, and she promptly kissed the tattoo on his forearm, lingering on and finding adorable the tiny mole in the upper left-hand corner of the second W. When this did not immediately lead to further intimacies, she decided to give their sexual difficulties the only thing she had: time. This did not prove enough.

  That she would never have sex with Andrew became clear only very slowly, and by the time it did, she had already given herself over to becoming a novelist. Perhaps Andrew was on a mission from God, even if that mission was merely to descend into a celibate madness, and perhaps she had a mission of her own. Not having sex, she started to believe, would prove a major advantage for her writing, as the erotic energy built up in her body would have to find its way on to the page. Even more important was that one thing she had, which she would now have more of. All the time she would save by not being poked at until people started tunneling out of her, people to whom she would be expected to devote all of her time to, all that time now stretched out before her, and she could put it all into her work.

  After all, there was one more thing she had in addition to time: language, the true love of her life, even if she loved language too much to put it quite that way. Every morning she sat in her room with pen and paper, putting sentences down. But the sentences did not come out right, they did not express what she wanted them to express, and she found it difficult to concentrate. It occurred to her that perhaps she wasn’t writing well because she wasn’t getting what she needed from her husband; this thought made her hate Andrew, but it made her hate herself even more, since it meant that she had already failed in her work and was looking for excuses.

  At some point—perhaps because she was hoping to meet publishers, perhaps because she was looking for distraction—she had become a hostess, apparently a prominent one, and before long this was her only source of enjoyment in life. Though she rebuffed the men who made insinuations to her—the words “for worse” had been included for a reason in the promise she had made to God—she nonetheless found these insinuations agreeable. She was frustrated that she could not seem to make the brilliance she summoned in conversation stick on the page, but, though it caused her pain to think explicitly in these terms, the adoration of her friends was worth much more than the veneration of hypothetical people who would read her hypothetical work only long after her decidedly nonhypothetical death.

  All of this meant that Andrew was correct: his opposition to this imminent war made Elizabeth furious. Not that any good would come from this war—which looked, if anything, even more transparently pointless than most—but she could already see that the war was going to happen no matter what, and that all their friends would support it. Since Europe was going to be set on fire no matter what they did, they might as well choose the path that would not cost them all their friends. Since he had given her no sons to lose, Andrew owed her at least this much. But Andrew’s mind was made up, and within a few months they had in fact lost all their friends, including even round-faced, pockmarked Richard. Mutual friends had hinted to Richard that he must change Andrew’s mind or break off contact with him, and Richard, having brought himself to choose war once, simply could not do so again, and acquiesced to the general will. He felt guilty, but he need not have. No longer seeing Richard brought with it a certain kind of peace that Andrew had not known since childhood, a peace that he ascribed to defying the general and indeed correct consensus in favor of the error that was God’s obscure plan for him.

  Of course, the consensus changed, the war was almost universally deemed a catastrophe, and by the early 1920s, Andrew Blue was regarded as a prophet, invited to give lectures in the most prestigious halls and the most exclusive salons. Very often, men and women would stop him on the street, and tell him that England should have paid him heed when it had the chance, for if it had, then their sons would still be alive. In the years that followed, London pricked up its ears at his every utterance.

  Over these same years, Richard found his reputation falling. His support for the war had not distinguished him from virtually any other journalist, almost all of whom had supported it as well, but most of whom did not have any pathological tendencies that might have caused them to remember this fact. Richard felt sheepish about expressing opinions after having been so wrong, and suspected he should be silent on questions of state; as a result, he was trounced in arguments and his prose read as pusillanimous and watery. As the twenties became the thirties, Richard also discovered that he had a strong physical resemblance to Adolf Hitler, an embarrassing fact that might have had any number of effects; the effect it did have was to make Richard feel all the more humiliated simply to exist. It seemed to Richard that Hitler should be stopped—in fact he hated Hitler—but he did not have the will to choose war against his friends by choosing war against this man, his hatred of whom was probably just an expression of his hatred of himself.

  Andrew, for his part, was predisposed to admire Hitler. He thought that the Nazis were absolutely right about the Jews. Everything he had learned recently suggested that Jews had been responsible for the Great War. Someone needed to keep them in line.

  But should they be kept in line by this man? Andrew found himself staring for long nighttime hours at newspaper clippings of Hitler’s strange round face, which seemed to circle the Earth like an angry moon. As everyone remarked, Hitler looked a great deal like Richard, and Richard was so evil that he had tempted even a man as virtuous as Andrew toward unnatural acts. Andrew felt something intense for both men, and of many possible names for this feeling he chose “hatred.”

  It pained Andrew to advise any action that might benefit the Jews. Further, the message that he had received from God had been unambiguous in its directive that he not choose war. On the other hand, that message was now fading; the NOT in particular had grown so faint that it seemed possible God had erased it. Perhaps his tattoo now said WILL CHOOSE WAR. Andrew had to squint a bit to see the message this way—when he squinted another way it looked like ILL HOO WA—but of course any message from God could be deciphered only by labor, discipline, and faith.

  The logic was clear: it must be war.

  Elizabeth and Andrew did not discuss Hitler, or anything else—by
this time they had essentially not spoken in years, except in the company of others, though they continued to live in the same house. When Elizabeth read Andrew’s column calling for war—which deployed an elaborate metaphor of the importance of destroying monsters in adolescence, before they have reached adulthood—she considered taking a letter opener, finding him in his study, and slitting his throat. Their social position was better than it had ever been, and now he was once again endangering it. She tried appealing to his madness, telling him that he was on a mission from God and that he must fulfill it. But it was no use; he merely said that he had made up his mind, and that he had nothing to add to his column.

  As soon as she left his study, Elizabeth resolved to write a memoir about the lunatic who had imprisoned her in his delusions, the lunatic who believed that God had issued a kind of pacifist Eleventh Commandment on his forearm, and who then decided to defy this commandment. For the first time in years, she locked herself in her study and began to write. But each sentence that sounded brilliant in her head sounded stiff and leaden as soon as her fingers hit the keys of her typewriter. The truth was that she no longer had any idea what good writing was. She had tried reading the newer writers, Joyce and Woolf and a few others, but the language was so strange that she could only conclude that no one had anything to say anymore and that these writers were going to extraordinary lengths to disguise this fact. Either that, or time and language had gotten away from her, just as everything else had.

  That she never finished her memoir turned out for the best, for she was soon known as the wife of one of the most brilliant men in England, one of very few men who had been right about both wars. Everyone wanted to see them now. Andrew even seemed eager to entertain—rather than taking one drink with guests before retiring to his study, as he had always done in the past, Andrew now merrily chatted long after Elizabeth felt drowsy. In his twilight years, he considered it his duty to share his wisdom with the vigorous young men who sought it. When he thought about his own life, the fading tattoo played only the most minor of roles. It no longer seemed likely that the tattoo was a message from God; it seemed even less likely that the message had influenced his thinking on war, which, after all, had proven more sophisticated than anyone else’s thinking and could not be distilled into a simple slogan. What had influenced his own thinking had been his own learning and insight, his own strength and independence of mind, his own—there was no point in denying it—genius.

  One evening, while Andrew was being treated to dinner by a group of those vigorous young men and Elizabeth was alone, a visitor called. Elizabeth gasped when she opened the door to find Adolf Hitler, who, having somehow escaped from Berlin, had shaven his moustache and arrived at her threshold. She apologized immediately, mortified not to have recognized her husband’s oldest friend, but even as she led him into the parlor, it was difficult not to see the man who had murdered millions. She squinted at him as sympathetically as possible, but he still looked pallid and hunted.

  “Elizabeth,” Richard said. “Did your husband ever mention playing some sort of prank on me when we were boys?”

  Elizabeth responded, quite truthfully, that she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Did he bury some kind of unholy Gypsy device on the grounds of his estate, something that looked like a sewing machine, so that it would defile me and lead me into ruin?”

  At this he moved to undo his cufflinks and push up his sleeve. She knew what she was going to see before she saw it. The tattoo was just as faded as her husband’s, though with a liver spot serving as an ungrammatical period:

  WILL NOT CHOOSE. WAR

  “Why did he do this to me?” Richard asked. “How did he predict exactly what effect this would have on me, and how did he know which war would be worth fighting?”

  This was a man who had suffered greatly. This was a man who deserved compassion. “Oh, Richard,” she said. “You know the answer. He was smarter than you. That’s all.”

  Richard broke into sobs, letting his forearm dangle like a useless penis.

  “But you don’t understand,” he said. “Andrew and I had . . . something.”

  She was going to make him say it.

  “We were in . . .” He drummed his fingers on his tattoo, which did not contain the word he was looking for.

  “You were in . . .”

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Richard. You have been wrong about a great deal. So what? Plenty of men are wrong about a great deal. It’s hardly some sort of deep secret that flooded your life with shame and drained it of joy.” She had lost too much not to enjoy herself a little. “I’ll tell Andrew you stopped by. My love to . . . oh, I’m sorry, you live alone.”

  After he was gone, she poured herself some Scotch. She wasn’t sure what she had learned, exactly. Perhaps she had learned that her own misery could have been avoided, or that all men are governed by obscure longings and failings. Perhaps she had learned something about the absurdity of lengthy, agonized debates over war, since war is as natural as sex and, like sex, will be engaged in enthusiastically barring humiliating dysfunction, even if it is often regretted later. But of course she had always known all of this, and knowing it had not gotten her anywhere. Perhaps she had learned that if she had used this device, she too would have received the tattoo WILL NOT CHOOSE WAR, and that this is what linked her to these unhappy men. But really she had learned nothing other than that a perfectly good sewing machine had been wasted on the task of informing two men of the obvious fact that they were cowards.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Ismail, a faster reader than I, started complaining about the Wernher story before I had reached the third paragraph. He was particularly bothered by the obvious inconsistency of a German scientist inventing a machine that, by all accounts, wrote exclusively in English. My problem was more with the whole thing, which was transparently ridiculous. Also, no matter how much I hated the machine, I didn’t particularly like the idea that my parents had been defaced by the Nazis.

  The other chapter made Ismail far angrier. He had read many of Andrew Blue’s essays, which he said were full of great intellectual clarity and even greater moral decency; these were the qualities that led to Blue being right about both wars. Merdula had no insight into Andrew Blue whatsoever.

  “The only reason anybody reads Merdula’s epiphany machine book,” he said, “is because everybody loves Only the Desert Is Not a Desert. But now that I’ve read these two chapters, I’m wondering whether I was wrong about Only the Desert. It can’t be that good if it was written by this idiot, whoever he is.”

  He said a lot more, but I wasn’t really listening. The two chapters could not both be true—if the machine was invented by a Nazi, it was not discovered on a British estate at the turn of the twentieth century, and vice versa—which suggested to me that neither chapter was worth paying attention to. I was focused on the questions I wanted to ask Ms. Scarra when she returned, beginning with whether she had used the epiphany machine. I was pretty sure, though I could not be certain, that she was wearing a long-sleeved blouse that day. It was possible that she exclusively wore long-sleeved blouses; I had no idea, since even though I had paid great attention to her breasts, her eyes, her lips, her hair, her neck, her ass, I had never noticed her arms.

  We waited in her classroom for forty-five minutes, but Ms. Scarra did not return, and eventually we were chased out by a janitor. By this point Ismail and I were engaged in a long conversation about what it meant to be right or wrong about history, devising many insights that seemed brilliant to us both at the time, and we continued the conversation as we left school. If Ismail had not invited me to come over to his house, everything might have been different for him. But he invited me and I accepted, and that’s just the way things happened.

  Ismail’s mother worked at a pharmaceutical company in Armonk, so the house was empty. As soon as he reached the ki
tchen, he offered me some Entenmann’s pound cake.

  “Your mother likes that?” I asked. “My grandmother loves it.”

  “It’s the blandest thing I’ve ever bitten into,” he said. “But you have to offer something to guests, and this is all we have.”

  He sliced off a piece for me, and I wasn’t finished chewing the first bite when I suddenly realized that it was in fact as bland as he said, and that I had convinced myself that I liked it because I wanted to make my grandmother happy, as she had invested so much in the idea that she provided me with food I craved. I felt annoyed with and constrained by my grandmother, and felt retroactively justified for having recently noticed her only when she accidentally kicked me off an online chatroom by picking up the phone. My father had been taking her to the hospital a lot over the past several months and I had hardly asked why, a fact that had made me feel guilty but that now struck me as a necessary distancing of myself from my grandmother. I couldn’t spend my entire life pretending to like pound cake.

  Or maybe I did like pound cake but didn’t want to look unsophisticated in front of Ismail, and so was renouncing this mass-produced pleasure.