The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  I volunteered to read an excerpt aloud in class the next day and Mr. Sullivan loved it. More important, Leah loved it, too, so much so that she followed me out the door of class to tell me how much she loved it. Ismail followed close behind, saying that I had missed the point of both Buffy and “The Dead.”

  “Buffy isn’t afraid of sex,” Ismail said. “Whereas Lily clearly is. Michael Furey didn’t show up at Gretta’s house in the middle of the night because he was in love with her—it was a booty call that went bad. And Gretta ages. If Michael Furey were a vampire, he’d be looking to bite some young hot flesh. Like Leah’s.” He tried to pinch Leah’s neck, but she batted him away.

  “That’s a cynical way of looking at it,” I said.

  “She was worth dying for in her youth. Now she looks old. Joyce even says so himself.” He dug in his bag for his underlined copy, knocking into a couple of people who were hurrying to class. “Sorry, sorry. Here. ‘He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.’”

  “Right,” Leah said. “Gabriel is thinking that. Arrogant, full-of-himself Gabriel is the one who sees his wife as no longer beautiful. Hot vampire Michael would be happy to feast on Gretta, just like Venter says.”

  Ismail sputtered. I, of course, was enjoying this. “You’d rather believe pretty things than the truth,” he said, finally.

  “You don’t know things anywhere,” she said, quoting her character in The Glass Menagerie. “You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions.” She batted her eyes at Ismail in the mockingly flirtatious way she had that I had been in love with for most of high school, which is to say most of my sexual life.

  “One day you’ll see the world for how it is,” he said, before disappearing into a classroom. When he was gone, she rolled her eyes and asked me if I could believe him. Then she said something I definitely could not believe:

  “Will you take me to use the epiphany machine?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I know both of your parents used it. I read Steven Merdula’s book. It’s really not his best work, nowhere near as good as Only the Desert Is Not a Desert, but it still made me curious about the machine. Also, I’ve been reading a lot about John Lennon’s experience with it. I want to use it. Will you take me?”

  “Well, I, um . . .”

  “I can’t make it this weekend,” she said. “Take me next weekend.”

  “Okay.”

  “Great. It’s a date.” She kissed me on the cheek and walked away.

  By the time I got home and was pulling into my garage, I was convinced I had a girlfriend. When I heard my father bounding down the steps—he was not usually home at this time—the first thought that crossed my mind was that he was coming to congratulate me on my upcoming date with Leah.

  “We’re getting you a cell phone,” he said with exasperation, as though he had been arguing for years that I should get a cell phone, which in the late nineties were still rare.

  “Move over,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

  “Dad, what’s the matter?”

  “Your grandmother’s in the hospital. They’re putting her on palliative care.”

  “What? I thought she was just a little sick.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s a little more than a little sick.” He shooed me into the passenger seat, and I obeyed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me how sick she was?”

  He was pulling out of the driveway now. “She’s been sick for years. If you wanted to know, you would have known.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, “and you’re an asshole.” What I was actually thinking was that it was true and that I was an asshole. I had noticed that my grandmother was sick and had paid no attention. I had barely even asked what was wrong with her.

  “You’ve never had much talent for paying attention to the world around you,” my father said.

  For a man who often seemed hardly to think about me, my father had a way of knowing exactly what I was thinking at any given moment.

  We said very little for the rest of the car trip, and even less as we walked through the halls of the hospital. He led me to my grandmother’s room, where a doctor who was just leaving greeted us and told us that she was doing much better.

  “We’re going to keep her for a couple days,” he said. “Hopefully, you’ll be able to bring her home on Monday.”

  My father thanked him, and for a moment seemed to collapse with relief.

  “It would have been impossible to raise you without her,” he said to me.

  We sat together silently as she slept until we both felt awkward, and he got up to take a walk around the hospital, leaving me alone with her. After a few minutes, she roused from her sleep.

  “Nick,” she said.

  “I’m Venter, Grandma.”

  “I know who you are. I know your stupid hippie name. Nick is the man I should have spent the last years of my life with, rather than taking care of the son my daughter abandoned after giving him a stupid hippie name.”

  “Grandma, I know you’re suffering. I know you don’t mean the things you’re saying.”

  “This is the first time since I married your grandfather that I’ve said what I meant. And you’re going to listen to me.”

  TESTIMONIAL #1

  NAME: Theresa Rose Schuldenfrei

  DATE OF BIRTH: 11/25/1915

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: N/A

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 04/24/1998

  My own mother died in 1934, before I had turned nineteen. She had never been much of a mother to me—during Prohibition she spent all night at speakeasies, supposedly working as a waitress, but I think my father knew that she went for the men. Because of the Depression, I had long since dropped out of high school and already had a job cleaning houses, a job I was lucky to get. I had saved up enough money to get my own place with a few other girls, but my father told me that I couldn’t move out, because now that my mother was dead I had to stay home and take care of him. He wasn’t completely wrong; he probably would have starved to death staring at the stove before he figured out how to light it. Totally helpless, just like you and your father will be now without me. And I thought, well, if he can’t take care of himself, that means I have to take care of him. I also took care of my older brother, Harry, who spent all day at the gym and called himself a “bodybuilder” to cover up the fact that he was an unemployed bum.

  Being so busy gave me an excuse for why I wasn’t dating, but deep down I was certain that I wasn’t dating because I was ugly. Bucktoothed and fat. There was a boy named Nick I chatted with a little whenever I would see him working at the grocery store, and he took me out a couple of times, by which I mean he walked with me around the block while we surreptitiously nibbled on whatever candy he could swipe without his boss noticing. Once we were sitting on a stoop and he wiped some chocolate from my mouth and kissed me. It was heaven, honestly. Then one day he wasn’t in the grocery store, and I stopped hearing from him. He was totally gone. I was sad, very sad, but I couldn’t spend days crying because of a breakup, unlike kids today—and unlike my brother Harry then. Every time things didn’t work out with a sweetheart, Harry would spend days crying in bed while I brought him soup. Me, I just got back to work. Years went by like that, until my father got remarried and his new wife started treating me like a servant. By then, I had spent everything I’d saved on Harry and my father, and I couldn’t afford my own place anymore. So I had to live with them, and now I was breadwinner, housekeeper, and cook for three people rather than two. When Harry finally did get married, he told me I wasn’t allowed to be in the wedding party because I was too ugly. He actually said those words to me. I showed up to the wedding in a black dress, got drunk very quickly, and when I gave a toast, I said: “I give this marriage six months!” T
urns out I underestimated the marriage. It lasted eight months. Joke was on me, though, because he moved back in, totally dependent on me again until the war started and he got drafted.

  The war was the best thing that ever happened to me. Not only did it get Harry out of the house; it opened up a job for me on the assembly line of a radio factory. The girls on the line could tell I was smart and tough, so they made me union representative. I went down to Washington to negotiate a better contract. The night before the meeting the men took me out drinking, probably thinking they could take advantage of me in more ways than one. Well, I drank them under the table, and the next day they were hungover, and I came back to my girls with a very good contract. Plus, I loved the work that we did, I loved seeing the radios come together, one after the other. And I made enough money to move out and get away from my father and his wife. I wanted the war to go on forever so the men would never come back.

  Of course, the war ended, and with it any hope I had of rising to a top union position. I could have kept working, maybe. Could have been one of the first career girls. Instead, I decided to listen to Ellen.

  The conversation that I never should have had with Ellen took place at the same grocery store where I had met Nick all those years earlier. Ellen, who was fourteen at the time, told me that she needed a mother, so I should marry her father. I knew the family from around the neighborhood; I’d known her father since we were children. Her mother was one of those people who’s always making huge swerves in life, trying to get away from themselves. First she had gotten engaged to Ellen’s father; then she broke it off to become a nun; then she dropped out of her training to marry Ellen’s father after all; then after Ellen was born she left them both to run away with a neighbor. Ellen’s father, William, had been a single father and was supposed to get a draft deferment, but the draft board had no idea what to do with single fathers, so after fighting with them he just gave in and enlisted in the Navy, leaving Ellen to bounce around between aunts and cousins for the rest of the war. Now her father was back and she wanted a mother and a home, so she invited me to dinner that night.

  To my surprise I said yes to dinner. William didn’t know what his daughter was up to, but I think he was happy for adult female company, and we had always gotten along well. He cooked sauerbraten; a man who cooked anything was amazing and wonderful to me. We ate and laughed until late that night, and then around ten or so Ellen said she had some homework to finish before bed, so it was time for her father and me to go ahead and get engaged. Her father looked at me and said that he’d be honored to have the most beautiful woman in Ridgewood, no matter how strange their engagement was. I said yes. Okay? I said yes.

  Three months later we were married; I got pregnant on our honeymoon. I think Rose was two before it became obvious that William would always be a very heavy drinker. The sauerbraten was never repeated. He hardly even ate the sauerbraten I made. He went to work, he went to the bar, he came home only to pass out. Ellen gave me a little help with Rose, but she met a boy—an army boy—and got married when she was nineteen. They moved around various army bases in the South, and I practically never saw her again. She was the whole reason I married your grandfather, and I practically never saw her after she was nineteen. Eventually she even took her own mother in and cared for her in her old age. That really made me mad.

  Anyway, I did my best to raise your mother, even though she was a malingerer who pretended to be sick all the time. Not that that was her fault, exactly; the nuns told her that her father and I were going to Hell because he had gotten remarried after a divorce. She was smart and preferred to read books on her own rather than listen to ignorant people tell her horrible things. But what they said got to her anyway. She admitted to me once that she prayed for her father to die so I could go to confession and be saved. I slapped her and tried to hide that it made me cry to learn how much she loved me. I did try to keep from her that her father was a drunk, but I’m not a magician.

  Around that time, I saw Nick again, back in that same grocery store. He asked why I had never returned his phone calls. What phone calls, I asked. Apparently, he had left abruptly when we were teenagers because of a sick relative in California, and he had called a couple of times because he wanted me to go with him. Turns out Harry hadn’t given me the messages, since he didn’t want me to get married and stop supporting him and my father. I was never going to speak to Harry again, that was for sure. Nick asked me to go away with him now, and it was the most wonderful thing anyone had ever asked me. Then he said I would have to leave my daughter behind, because he didn’t want to take care of another man’s child. I decided on the spot to say “yes,” but when I opened my mouth, the word that came out was “no”—I wasn’t going to abandon Rose. This time I cried for about two days.

  William’s drinking only got worse, and he kept on getting demoted at work, so I had to make do with less and less money. Being a housewife is a lot like running a business whose finances you have no control over. Rose offered to get a job when she was fourteen, but I wanted her to devote herself to her schoolwork and to all those books she read. She still planned to be a secretary, like every other girl she knew, but she had one teacher who told her that she was smart enough be a lawyer, a doctor, a writer, an architect, whatever she wanted. She came home that night and told me she was going to be a lawyer. It annoyed me that all the encouragement I had ever given her had had no effect and she just listened to a teacher, a man, but that’s the way it was. Eventually, she went to college, using the small inheritance I received from my father when he died. Before he died, by the way, I had spent a couple years essentially as his nurse, since his second wife had died long ago. I also had to referee his constant arguments with Harry, who had lost his job and was once again living at home, and whom I now saw all the time despite my promise never to speak to him again. And believe me, every single time I saw Harry, I saw the life with Nick that he had deprived me of. Then Harry got cancer, and I felt guilty for hating him, and he and your great-grandfather died within weeks of each other. All the time that I spent caring for the two of them as they died made my relationship with my husband even worse, if that was possible. By now, he was drunk and angry whenever he wasn’t sleeping.

  I decided to divorce my husband the summer after Rose graduated from college, but he died before I could do that. That was my first thought when I heard that he had had a heart attack in the middle of the street: “Damn it, now I can’t divorce him.” My second thought was that now there would be no income at all.

  Rose got a job as a paralegal, eventually going to law school at night. She started to resent me very quickly, annoyed that she had to spend her youth supporting her mother; she denied it, but it was easy to see. I was no longer employable, and the alternative to living off of her was living on cat-food casserole. Then one day she comes home and shows me that tattoo on her arm.

  ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST

  When I saw it I burst into tears, because I knew that God had meant it for me, not her. The daughter for whom I had abandoned everything that mattered most had obviously wasted all the money I had spent on her college tuition, because she was still stupid enough to join this wacko cult run by an obvious liar.

  I called Nick to see whether he would still have me, but by this point, he had a wife and children of his own. Between that and the fact that it was too late to have a career, there was no question of my getting back what was most important. So I continued to be supported, first by your mother, who dropped out of law school and quit her paralegal job to become assistant cult leader, and then by your father, who eventually went to law school and, unlike your mother, actually finished. And eventually your mother and father left the cult, though they were still sufficiently influenced by it to give you your stupid name. I think they thought you were the ventilation that let their spirit free or something.

  Shortly after you were born, Rose asked me if I would take care of you for a f
ew hours a day, so that she could get some work done. I had no idea what kind of work she was talking about, and I don’t think she did either. I said absolutely not. I was done caring for other people. Then, the night before we were going to throw a little party for your first birthday, she came to me in tears, saying that she had abandoned what was most important to her in order to take care of someone. Yes, that would be you, buckaroo. I thought she meant that the most important thing to her was the epiphany machine, which made me want to throw her out of the house her husband was paying for me to live in. But Rose said no, what was most important to her was not the epiphany machine. She didn’t know what was most important to her; she still needed to find out what it was.

  People of my generation laugh at talk like this, but I thought about how much I regretted leaving the radio factory, and I told her that she had to live a life that fulfilled her, even if that meant leaving you to cry in your crib. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant that she should stay up a little later at night to work on whatever she wanted to work on, and that if you started to cry, she should just ignore you. I certainly didn’t expect her to leave a note the next morning essentially saying: “Good-bye forever, I hope Venter grows up okay!” I felt so guilty that I threw myself into caring for you, even though you have no sense of gratitude and don’t seem to notice me or anything else.

  That’s why, Venter, my dying wish is that you use the epiphany machine. You have to learn who you are before it’s too late. The big mistakes people keep making in life—the pattern is so obvious to everyone except the people themselves.

  Now, please—get out of my sight. Don’t make me die while I’m taking care of you. I’m throwing you to Lyons.

  CHAPTER