The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  7

  When she spoke, my grandmother’s breathing was labored, so her sentences were shorter than the ones I’ve written above. And I wasn’t taking notes, of course; the only thing I wrote down was Adam Lyons’s address, which she gave to me. Also, I’ve fleshed out what she said with bits and pieces that she’d told me over the years. And I’ve made some things up. But I think that you get that strangest of things: the gist.

  I had little to say in response, and said none of what I did have to say. I just looked into her eyes, which were asking me what I was going to do, and then I turned around and headed through the hallways and elevators that seemed designed to lead you to the suffering of people irrelevant to you. Eventually, confused and lost as I was, I found my way to the parking lot and my father’s car, which I drove to the train station. There were some people I recognized on the platform, but fortunately they didn’t see me, or didn’t want to talk to me any more than I wanted to talk to them.

  It was close to nine when I arrived at Adam Lyons’s apartment and rang the unmarked buzzer. I realized as I did so that it was possible, even probable, that the address had changed in the last several decades, or that my grandmother had remembered it wrong. Almost immediately a gruff voice said, “Hello.”

  “Hello, I’m here to see Adam Lyons.”

  The buzzer sounded and the door opened when I pulled it. Two short men in business suits were drunkenly walking down the stairs, one leaning on the other.

  “I’m not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS,” said the one doing the leaning. “Right?”

  What a sad and pathetic man.

  Almost as soon as I started to climb the stairs, I could hear music—Magical Mystery Tour—and I could smell pot. Thoughts of my grandmother and even of the machine fell away, and my head danced with the idea that I had found a slice of the secret and therefore the authentic Bohemian New York I had been dreaming of gaining admittance to since the first time I’d listened to Rent on CD.

  The door to apartment 7 was opened a crack by a muscular guy in his mid-forties who looked like the bouncer he seemed to be, or maybe seemed to have been ten or twenty years earlier. On his forearm was written DOES NOT STAND GROUND. “Password, please,” he said.

  “Password?”

  “Anyone unaccompanied by an epiphany alum is required to know the password.”

  “I’m not here to use the machine,” I said, though all I had been thinking about on the train was using the machine. “I’m here to speak to Adam Lyons.”

  “Adam Lyons does not speak to those who have already decided not to use the machine, though he wishes you well in your decision. There is no point in opening a door to a closed mind.”

  I thought about pushing my way through, based mostly on a hope that he would indeed not stand his ground. But he was awfully muscular. Plus, for me to believe that he did not stand his ground might be an admission of sorts that I believed in the machine. Plus, he was awfully muscular.

  “Maybe I’ll use the machine after speaking to Adam Lyons,” I said.

  “Very well. The line is right behind me.”

  I couldn’t see very far into the apartment, but nonetheless I could see that the line to use the machine was long.

  “It’s Friday night,” I said. “Why are so many people here?”

  “On Friday nights, people either distract themselves from the serious questions about their lives, or they decide not to distract themselves.”

  “And which one of those is drunkenly getting a tattoo?”

  “If Adam Lyons’s guests just wanted tattoos, they could find more aesthetically pleasing ones elsewhere.”

  “Fine. Look. I’m just here to ask Adam Lyons some questions about my mother. Her own mother is dying and I would like to find her so that they can reconcile.” I hadn’t known that that was why I was there until I said it out loud, but it sounded reasonable, even noble, certainly the reason I should have come.

  “So you’re not here to use the machine.”

  “I’ll make up my mind later.”

  “Why would Adam Lyons know where your mother is?”

  “She used the machine and then went to work for him. Then she abandoned me.”

  “Your behavior does not flood me with confidence that you’re going to wait in line.”

  “My grandmother is dying, I would like her to see my mother before she dies, Adam Lyons may be able to help me find her, and I do not want to wait in line.”

  People waiting in line now looked back at me and then quickly turned their heads forward, as though I were the poorly adjusted one.

  “Why do you think you use such hostile language?”

  “Because you won’t let me in.”

  “I’m sorry, but I never said anything like that. I merely asked you to wait in line like everyone else.”

  “I’m not like everyone else.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m looking for my mother.”

  “And you consider this unusual?”

  “I consider it different from being a loser who would actually pay for a tattoo saying that he doesn’t stand his ground. I consider it different from being a loser who would actually hold that tattoo up to people when he’s getting in their way.”

  I tried to push through, but he blocked me without ruffling a single salt or pepper hair.

  “So you’re saying that you’re not a loser?”

  I straightened my shoulders, since I had read somewhere that you should keep your shoulders straight in a confrontation. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “And you want to cut in front of all these people whom you consider losers. Are you sure you want to cut the line because you think you’re better than everyone, and not because you think you’re worse?”

  “All right, George,” said the gruff voice I had heard on the intercom. “That’s enough.” A heavy man with close-cropped, mostly white hair and a close-cropped, mostly white beard—as well as unruly and completely white chest hair sprouting from the plaid short-sleeved shirt he had buttoned no more than halfway up his torso—appeared from around a bookcase. He smiled, showing a missing tooth. “You’ve made us sound like a cult,” he told George, “which you want to watch out for. That thing about open doors and closed minds was over the top. And what the hell are you talking about, password? There’s no password.”

  It annoyed me that I hadn’t noticed until just now that everyone kept on looking off to the side, obviously at the man whom I had come here to see.

  “But I need to learn to be firm,” George said. “Otherwise I’ll never be able to say no to my son, and I’ll keep letting him lie on the sofa playing video games all day.”

  “And it’s good that you stood your ground with this kid, a decent stand-in for Ian, though you should remember that Ian has a considerably stronger will. Ian won’t tolerate the cult stuff; you’ll have to win him over with the force and plausibility of the dark portrait you’ll paint of the future he has in store if he keeps doing nothing but playing video games.”

  “I should be a better father already. I should already know how to stand my ground.”

  “Does it sound to you like you’re doing justice to your epiphany? Go home and . . .”

  I wedged myself between them. “Adam Lyons, my name is Venter Lowood. I’m the son of Isaac Lowood and Rose Schuldenfrei.”

  “I know who you are, Venter. I could tell from your voice when you buzzed up; you sound just like your father, who also had a tendency to interrupt important conversations.”

  “I need to talk to you now.”

  “You’ve managed to make it seventeen years without doing the due diligence of coming to see me. You can wait a few more minutes.”

  “My grandmother is dying and I need to find my mother.”

  “It can’t be news to you that your grandmother i
s mortal. Your sudden urgency is hypocritical.” He turned the hairy back of his neck to me; if I had a razor I would have cut off the hair and the neck. “Now, George. Practice saying no to your son. Go upstairs, and if he’s playing a video game, suggest that the two of you sit on a sofa together, each with your own book, and read.”

  “I hate reading.”

  “Good! Then stop reading your epiphany over and over again as though it’s eventually going to say something different. Put on workout clothes and go for a late-night jog with your son through the Upper East Side. Run down through the Lower East Side, and across the Williamsburg Bridge. Run all night and come back at dawn. You’ll be shocked at the way you see the city, and each other, afresh.”

  “But then what am I going to do tomorrow?”

  “What were you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Work on remodeling my kitchen while Ian plays video games.”

  “And what are you going to do now?”

  “Ian likes video games. He showed me an article with convincing evidence that playing video games is beneficial to the mind. I should encourage that kind of active approach to making a case for himself and what he wants to do.”

  Some people in line snickered at this.

  “Hey!” Adam yelled inside to the crowd. “This is where you will all be after using the machine, if and only if you’re as committed to change as George is. I know you are all frustrated that I am observing George rather than attending to you, but you would all do well to practice patience. If you think you’re frustrated now, just wait until after you’ve gotten your tattoo and you try to improve your life. You think you just get the tattoo and you’re different?”

  The crowd was quiet.

  “George! Sorry we keep getting interrupted. Just keep trying to be honest with yourself about your tattoo. One common mistake my guests make is to assume that whatever is on their arm is necessarily what they need to change. Sometimes the tattoo points you in the direction of what you most resent about yourself and think you should change, but is in fact the best part of you. Maybe what your son needs is for you not to stand your ground. I certainly don’t know that. I don’t know anything. The machine doesn’t know anything. Only you know. Your tattoo is there to help you know what you know.”

  George started weeping with the force of something having been settled or released, even though, as far as I could tell, nothing had been settled or released. He gave Adam a deep hug, and then took slow and weepy steps up the staircase. Adam finally turned his attention to me by putting his dirty fingers over my lips until he heard George’s door close.

  “Venter Lowood,” Adam whispered finally, hugging me tightly with his tattooed arm. “Sorry, George is my new superintendent, so it makes my life a lot easier to keep him on board with what I do. Your mother was great with the super back in her day. I used to tell her that she was super with the super, and she even forgave me for that pun. Quite a woman, your mother. I don’t think I understood before she came to work for me that the epiphany machine really does make everyone’s, absolutely everyone’s, lives better, regardless of whether they’ve even heard of me. The ripple effect, you should read about it. God, I miss that woman. Not as much as you do, of course, although maybe I miss her much more, since unlike you I actually knew her.”

  There was some grumbling from the line.

  “Oh, pipe down!” he called inside. “You’ll get your tattoos in a minute. Ignorance is bliss, so enjoy it while you can. How much time does your grandmother have, Venter?”

  “Probably a few days. Maybe a week or two.” The doctor had seemed to think she was going to be fine, but I was not convinced I was lying.

  “I would do anything to talk to your mother once in a while. At the very least I’d like to have some idea of what she’s doing. But I have no idea where she is.”

  “There must be something you can tell me. You were her confidant, or her confessor, or her boss, or whatever.”

  He took a step into his apartment, and when I followed, he put his hand up to stop me. “You know, I caught a glimpse of you when you were a baby,” he said. “It was after your parents told me to go stick my dick in my own machine. Your mother was pushing you in a stroller through Central Park, and I happened to see her and say hello, and then I leaned down to get a look at you. She pivoted you around and started running, furiously but not very fast, like your stroller was a wheelbarrow and you were a bag full of gold coins she had stolen. ‘Never come after him,’ she called behind her. I responded that I would never, under any circumstances, come after you.”

  “Let me in,” I said.

  He lowered his hands and stepped aside. I looked at the people in line, their hungry and worried faces and their waiting forearms. I looked at Adam’s tattoo and thought of several interpretations of FIRST MAN TO LIE ON. Then I thought of several more. Then I entered his apartment.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Adam sent away most of the people waiting in line, telling them to come back later or not at all.

  Even after the last of them had filed out, I didn’t get to see Adam right away; he agreed to see those who had been waiting in line for ninety minutes or more. So I picked up a copy of the pamphlet “Things to Consider Before Using the Epiphany Machine” from the bar and sat down to read it on a stool in a corner of the apartment that served as a waiting area. After I read it I put it down and picked up a book, but my head was too full to read a book, so I put the book down and read the pamphlet again, and then again. The pamphlet had been only lightly revised since the seventies version I included at the beginning, but two differences were significant. The entry on Rebecca Hart now referred to Rebecca Harts, plural, and the entry on sharing epiphanies now read as follows:

  11. Our position has not shifted: under NO CIRCUMSTANCES will epiphanies be shared with law enforcement.

  Adam had to nudge me awake when he was finished with the night’s final epiphany. As soon as I had roused, this last customer kept me awake by saying: “This is not true! This is just not true. PLAYS MARTYR TO EVADE RESPONSIBILITY! What does that even mean? It’s so general that it doesn’t mean anything at all! I would never have come here if I wasn’t so devoted to you, Amy!”

  “Let’s just go,” said the woman I assumed was Amy.

  “See what I did to try to become a better husband? Defaced myself. Or disarmed myself, or something.”

  “Okay, John.”

  John continued berating Amy as they walked out the door. Once they were gone, Adam lit a joint, then looked at me and chuckled.

  “There’s no way his tattoo could be that accurate unless you were guiding the machine,” I said.

  “Except in the unlikely event that I’m telling the truth.” He offered me the joint, but I declined. The apartment felt very empty, with almost no sound save for a faint whirring that I thought might be the machine but was just the air conditioner.

  “So what other steps have you taken to find your mother?” he asked.

  “None. My father and grandmother didn’t want me to find her. My grandmother really didn’t want me to find her.”

  “But she does now.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, actually? But family members are supposed to reconcile when one of them is dying, right?”

  “Supposed to? According to whom?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  “And why do these people say that family members are supposed to reconcile before one of them dies?”

  “So that they can die at peace.”

  This was the first time that Adam gave me one of his wild-eyed that’s-the-stupidest-fucking-thing-I’ve-ever-heard shrugs. The Adam Shrug. “You think that seeing her daughter now is going to help your grandmother die at peace? After Rose forced her to raise you?”

  “She did not force her to raise me. Wait, how do you know she forced her to raise me?”


  Adam grinned. “I ran into your dad once. Manhattan is a small town.”

  I looked at his yellow teeth, at the chipping paint all over the room. The door to another room was open, and through it I could see a very unassuming-looking bed, as well as a nightstand on which there was nothing but an alarm clock and a book. A TV and a computer monitor appeared to be propped up on the boxes they came in. If this were an underling’s quarters, that might have made sense. But it was clearly where Adam slept. This did not look like the apartment of a man who had gotten rich peddling lies.

  “I’m not going to use the epiphany machine,” I said.

  “Nobody asked you to,” he said. “And frankly I don’t think you should. But it can’t surprise you that most of the time when people say that to me, they’re no more than an hour away from asking to use the machine.”

  “The machine is self-help bullshit and it took my mother away.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘self-help,’” he said. “Could you be more specific?”

  “Everybody knows what self-help means. It’s something that . . . you know . . . tries to help you make yourself better.”

  “And you think that’s a terrible thing.”

  “I mean, not when you put it like that.”

  “You put it like that,” Adam said.

  “Stop trying to confuse me.”

  “You’ve been sitting here for a long time, reading that pamphlet when you weren’t sleeping. Your mother wrote the original version. Epiphanies are not necessarily actionable. We tell people who they are. Sometimes that helps people become better. Often not.”

  “I don’t care. I just want to find my mother.”

  “Do you consider your mother to be your servant?”

  “I consider my mother to be my mother.”

  “And if she sees herself differently?”

  “She has obligations. She wasn’t supposed to just abandon me.”

  “And you think your life would have turned out better with the daily presence of a mother who did not want to be your mother?”