Ismail took a pen and notebook out of his pocket and jotted something down.
“What are you writing?”
“When I think something is funny or weird, I write it down.”
“What was funny or weird just now?”
“You had this look on your face like deciding whether or not to eat a piece of pound cake was tearing you apart.”
“Was that funny or weird?”
“Um, both?”
I didn’t want to think about any of this, so I put the cake aside and suggested to Ismail that we play chess. As we did, he talked more about Andrew Blue. Every word that Merdula had written about Blue’s homosexuality, insanity, and anti-Semitism was pure libel. That Ismail obviously disapproved of homosexuality made me feel morally superior to him, which itself made me happy, because his knowledge of Andrew Blue had made me feel intellectually inferior, as did the fact that within a few moves it was clear he was going to defeat me soundly at chess.
After Ismail won and suggested that we try for two out of three, then beat me again and suggested three out of five, I started to wonder whether in fact he was attracted to me, and was denying Andrew Blue’s homosexuality in order to deny his own. And I wondered if I was attracted to him as well. But if either of us was attracted to the other, neither of us tried anything, even when I started going to his house nearly every day to do homework, listen to music, and watch The X-Files.
The Coexistence Club never met again after that afternoon with the manila envelopes—Ismail wrote to me in an email once that “our friendship kommenced after the krash of the koexistence klub.” Ms. Scarra was out for a week after that day, and we had a substitute who visibly struggled to refrain from putting on an offensive accent when discussing Confucius. Then, all of a sudden, Ms. Scarra was back one morning. Before class, when I had a free period and was wandering the halls, she pulled me into the teachers’ bathroom. I thought this was bizarre, of course, but I wasn’t exactly unhappy about it, given that Ms. Scarra was the closest thing I had either to a sex object or a mother figure—or at any rate a mother figure of childbearing age—and with Ms. Scarra on top of a bathroom sink was one of the virginity-loss permutations I had imagined.
“Do you know what I’m about to show you?” she asked as she unbuttoned the sleeve of her blouse. I must have, and yet I remember being surprised when she rolled up her sleeve and held out her forearm to me as though it were a rack of lamb:
DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES
“If it weren’t for this tattoo,” she said, “you would be in trouble right now. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“If I hadn’t gotten this tattoo, I would have been able to convince myself that I was capable of controlling myself around you. Now I know that I’m not. So I’m going to leave. I’m going to get in a car and drive away. Mr. Thompson will be your substitute for the rest of the year.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? It doesn’t bother you that I’m leaving?”
Whatever my feelings, it was becoming clear to me that Ms. Scarra was crazy.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know. I guess I deserve that. The point is that I understand that I don’t have boundaries with you. I only invited Ismail to be part of that stupid club because it would not have been appropriate to ask you to stay alone. And I would not understand any of that if I did not have this tattoo. But before I leave I have a question. What do you know about your mother?”
“She was lonely, gullible, and numb.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because people who join cults are lonely, gullible, and numb.”
“Which you say because . . .”
“It just makes sense.”
“You’re a smart kid. Do you really think that’s a persuasive argument? Why do you think that you think that people who join cults are lonely, gullible, and numb?”
“I’m going to be late for math.”
“Late for math? I’m trying to teach you how to add two plus two. You say what you say about cults because that’s what your father and your grandmother tell you to say. So what do you think that makes you?”
The answer, when it occurred to me, really did feel like a slap in the face. She tore off some brown paper towel and handed it to me for my tears.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Something you should always remember is that you should only feel shame before you feel shame. Once you feel shame, you know that you have to change. When you feel shame, you should really feel relief. You should say: ‘Hurray! Now I know what I have to change.’”
“Yes, of course, I see that now,” I said.
“‘Yes, of course, I see that now’? Look at how eager you are to prove to me that you understand. Before you can prove that you understand, you have to actually understand. Say what you are. Say it.”
“Lonely, gullible, and numb.”
“Now say: ‘Hurray! Now I know what I have to change.’”
I tried to, but instead I got caught in great, noisy sobs.
“Come on, Venter. We can’t stay in this bathroom forever, however much I want to.”
“Hurray!”
“Come on! Give it to me, Venter. Give it to me. Give it to yourself.”
“Now I know what I have to change.”
“And is that a good or a bad thing?”
“Hurray! Now I know what I have to change.”
“Good! Good, Venter. I knew you could do this. I wish I could stay around and watch you use the machine and flourish, but I’d probably wind up ruining your life by having sex with you. So: good-bye!”
After she left, I ducked into a stall to continue crying. She was crazy, of course, but she had revealed something to me. Then again, I reminded myself, she had revealed something to me, but she was crazy. I kept on reminding myself that she was crazy, and eventually this crowded out the fact that she had revealed something to me. By the end of the day, I was more certain than ever that I would never use the epiphany machine.
CHAPTER
5
For most of high school, Ismail and I were best friends, obsessed with the great things we would do as adults but also wanting to freeze time in a place when we could believe ourselves geniuses without having to prove it. Failure was something that might happen, but probably to other people, and death lay in a future so remote we would be long dead by the time it arrived. Once, he was driving us over the Tappan Zee Bridge when he noted that if he were a believer, now would be a time when he would have to pray. With the sunset drenching the Hudson in red, it wasn’t hard to figure out where Mecca was, so he closed his eyes, took his hands off the wheel, and started to pray in that direction, letting the car swerve toward the next lane. Every car around us honked, and Ismail interrupted his praying to remark that it sounded like the call to prayer. I grabbed the wheel and straightened the car, cursing at him. Finally, he opened his eyes, took the wheel, and laughed. “Killing us both would be one way for me not to have to become a doctor.” I was indescribably angry, but somehow I found myself laughing, too. The whole thing, I had to admit, had been a rush.
“Never forget,” Ismail said, “that there’s an infinitesimal chance that we are the first invincible people ever born, and that chance will be there until one of us dies.”
Invincible is how we felt when we were acting, which we started to do together near the end of freshman year. I was delighted when I was cast as Jim, the romantic lead in The Glass Menagerie, and he was cast as the secondary Tom, at least until I figured out that the play was actually about Tom learning to name the lies he was surrounded with, and that Jim was just a sweet but clueless catalyst for the lies to fall apart. For a few days, it looked like we were both going to fall in love with a girl named Laura, who was playing Laura, but instead we both fell in love with a girl named Leah, who was playing La
ura’s mother, Amanda. Leah brought such intensity and commitment to a character who refused to admit the truth that she seemed the embodiment of truth itself. Obviously, it’s impossible for me to definitively chart the evolution of my feelings and even harder for me to chart Ismail’s, but I’m fairly certain that we thought she was the embodiment of truth before we thought she was the embodiment of beauty. In any case, it wasn’t long before she was the only thing either of us thought or talked about. The unlikelihood of her actually dating either of us—she seemed exclusively interested in the lackadaisically predatory twenty-year-old guys who worked at the coffee place or the deli—was the only thing that stopped us from openly fighting over her, and led us instead to tacitly agree to just follow her around.
Our savage servility slid by in Grease, in which Leah played Sandy and we were stuck doing tech, since neither of us could sing. When Ismail was cast as the director in A Chorus Line, I was undeniably jealous, and I was also unnerved, because this—unseen, making judgments and rationing out fates from the back of the theater—was how I imagined Adam Lyons, the man who ran the epiphany machine, and it was also how I imagined my mother. I was stuck doing tech once again for the play, and Leah sang “Tits and Ass,” changed by our drama teacher to “This and That.” After rehearsals, the three of us would often hang out and smoke behind the auditorium, twenty minutes or so that I lived for and that seemed like the greatest pleasure imaginable, even if afterward I always hated myself for not making a move on Leah. Eventually, Leah started joining us at Ismail’s house to watch The X-Files. We were also joined by Ismail’s mother, a stern scientist who made us all laugh by identifying strongly with the skeptical Dana Scully, constantly insisting that the show would be much better if it “dropped all the alien nonsense” and were actually about Dana “doing the things Dana should be doing.” Once, as we were walking to our separate cars complaining about the absence from that week’s episode of the smoking man, who seemed to have some great secret knowledge that would explain the whole world, Leah turned to me and asked, very seriously: “Do you think his mom is worried about Ismail hooking up with you or with me?”
“I mean, I don’t think she’d be happy with either one. She’s cool and everything, but I think she’s kind of conservative.”
“She just wants him to be a doctor and doesn’t want him to get distracted by us arty kids. Smart lady.”
I drove home trying to figure out whether through thick layers of sarcasm Leah had paid me a compliment by calling me an arty kid.
CHAPTER
6
Our junior year, the three of us took a humanities class. In April, our teacher, Mr. Sullivan, announced a unit on epiphanies in literature. He asked us to define “epiphany,” and almost everyone in class looked to me for the answer. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t quite put it into words.
“Maybe this will help,” Mr. Sullivan said, passing out photocopies of a passage from James Joyce’s Stephen Hero. I read the passage several times but couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to say. It appeared to be saying that an epiphany was when you looked at a clock and saw that it was a clock. If an epiphany was realizing that a clock was a clock, it didn’t seem like you needed such a fancy name for it. On the other hand, this was Joyce, who I knew could be difficult to understand, so perhaps the fault was in me, a possibility I didn’t particularly like to entertain.
“This passage,” I said. “It’s brilliant.”
“Really?” Ismail asked. “It sounds to me like it’s just saying that a clock is a clock.”
“Isn’t it saying that a clock can have an epiphany?”
“Yeah, I thought that, too, for a second, but I think it’s saying a clock is a clock.”
Immediately I felt that Ismail was right, and I felt foolish and I wanted to agree, but I feared losing face in front of the class. “Only on the most superficial level.”
“Oh, fuck you, Venter,” Ismail said.
This made the class laugh—including, infuriatingly, Leah—and earned only the mildest rebuke from a clearly amused Mr. Sullivan. I felt angry and ashamed, but most of all I felt that I had been justly rebuked: I had been wrong and Ismail had been right to point out that I had been wrong. When still nobody in class had an answer for what an epiphany was, Mr. Sullivan asked us to do an in-class writing exercise explaining the concept.
“Sometimes your pen knows what your tongue doesn’t,” he said.
I wrote two pages about how, even when we think we know what something is, we don’t really know it. I also made a reference to Krzysztof Kieślowski, whose films about identity and connection Ismail and I had recently rented at the Blockbuster where he was working a part-time job, sending most of the money he earned to charities that supported Muslims afflicted by war in Bosnia and Chechnya. (He had been inspired to do so, he said, by Andrew Blue’s stirring essays exhorting his readers to fight fascism in all its forms.) I was the first to volunteer to read aloud to the class, which met what I read with silence occasionally interrupted by sighs. Even Mr. Sullivan was clearly not paying attention for the last several paragraphs.
Nobody else volunteered, so Mr. Sullivan called on Ismail, who said that he did not read incomplete thoughts out loud. Mr. Sullivan was annoyed but didn’t argue. He was about to move on when Leah volunteered.
She read a moving account of her part-time job at a pet store, a job she had taken because she needed the money and loved animals, but which required her to try not to realize that all the animals came from abusive puppy mills. When two Yorkies were nipping at and rolling over each other, pretty much the cutest possible sight, she was not supposed to think of their mother, who was probably poked to produce yet another round of these adorable creatures. So all Leah could do was look at the clock and wait for the shift to be over. That was the epiphany that Joyce was referring to, she said, that was why he had chosen to illustrate epiphanies with a clock: life was waiting for life to be over.
This ending was unquestionably teenager-maudlin, but Mr. Sullivan loved it anyway, and so did I, despite my anger that someone had done this assignment better than I had. Ismail pulled out his notebook and wrote furiously; I pulled out the mostly empty notebook I had bought in imitation of Ismail, but wrote nothing, since I was too embarrassed to admit on paper that I had been completely bested and couldn’t think of anything else to say. As we were leaving class, Ismail and I each tried to elbow the other out to tell Leah what a great job she had done.
“Oh, that?” she said. “I don’t even care about those puppies. I just figured Mr. Sullivan would like it.”
This made me even madder, and also more in love with Leah, since she had now outmatched me in the two things at which every teenager wants to excel: caring and not caring.
I went to Ismail’s house with a new sense of purpose, determined to use my family history to understand epiphanies on the deepest possible level. Our assignment was to read two stories in Dubliners—“Araby” and “The Dead”—and then write something in response. “Araby” left both Ismail and me a little cold—we both thought that the kid was being overly dramatic about buying something for a girl at a fair, the racial connotations of the word “Araby” made me uncomfortable in Ismail’s presence, and overall we just did not see how that story might relate to anything we found intellectually engaging. But “The Dead” was something else. Neither of us interrupted the other with commentary or with thoughts on something unrelated, as we usually did. Neither of us wanted to talk, particularly as we read the last few pages, as Gabriel Conroy lustfully scoops his wife, Gretta, up from the party, hoping for a rare night of middle-aged sex, but instead discovers that his wife has essentially spent their marriage pining for Michael Furey, a boy who had loved her and who had died when they were seventeen, having ignored his illness to brave the rain and see her. After we both finished, we found that neither of us could talk.
“I’m glad Mr. Sullivan made us
read this,” said Ismail, finally. After a few minutes of silence, I simply stood up and all but ran to my car. As soon as I was in my car and driving, and certain that no one could hear me, I shouted out loud: “DEATHBED! DEATHBED! DEATHBED!”
I made a promise to myself to whisper this underneath my breath every moment for the rest of my life.
The bed I was thinking of was not really my deathbed. It’s not that I thought I was immortal, exactly. I knew that swerving into the other lane would kill me, and the prospect of dying in a car crash held the same glamor—or maybe just the same safe impossibility—for me that it held for Ismail. But the bed I was thinking of was my present one, which was so empty that it felt—in wordplay I was so impressed with that I pulled over so I could jot it down in my notebook—“like the grave.”
I thought about driving to Leah’s house, kissing her, and telling her I loved her, but I wasn’t quite seventeen enough to do that.
Instead I went home and—in a fit of inspiration I still struggle to replicate—stayed up all night writing. Ismail, Leah, and I had recently added Buffy the Vampire Slayer to our TV-viewing regimen, and I rewrote “The Dead” to make Lily, Gabriel’s aunts’ servant, into a Buffy-like vampire slayer on a mission to kill Michael Furey, in my version a vampire who is attempting to kill Gabriel Conroy and reclaim his lost-love Gretta. To the story’s first sentence, “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet,” I added the phrase “by vampires.” There was a piquant new meaning when a harried Lily exclaims, “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.” Lily and Michael have their final battle in the graveyard outside the Conroys’ hotel room, and Lily puts the stake through Michael’s heart as Gabriel looks out the window contemplating disappointment and death; and though Gabriel does not see Michael, Michael sees Gabriel and feels an instant of kinship as he draws his last immortal breath. Naturally, I called the story “The Undead.”
The Epiphany Machine Page 5