The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “I’m not sure I’m right for this job,” I said to Adam one night after everyone had left. I had told myself that I was wasting my time by listening to people talk about their boring lives in the faint hope that one day my mother might walk through the door; really, I just wanted to avoid talking to people.

  “Like Shakespeare said to Nathan Hale, I always get my man,” he said.

  When I arrived the next evening, Adam told me, with a self-consciously lascivious grin, that a woman was waiting for me in his bedroom.

  “This is Catherine,” Adam said. “You’ve probably read her books.”

  I did recognize Catherine Pearson, though I had not read her books. I had read a review of her last book in my father’s copy of The New York Times Book Review that called her the heiress to Chekhov, and a review in my father’s copy of The Village Voice that called her “a hack who repeats herself, constantly resorting to the same epiphanies, all as cheap as the one that adds her arm to her list of disfigurements.” (I would much later read an essay or a blog post condemning this reviewer as misogynistic, citing this review and many other examples.)

  “Ms. Pearson!” I said. “I’m a big fan of your work.”

  “Everybody I meet tells me that,” she said. “You must have something more original to say if Adam picked a child to do something as important as record the oral history of the epiphany machine.”

  I looked at Adam and got an Adam Shrug in return.

  “I don’t have anything to say,” I said, figuring this out as I was saying it. “I think that’s why Adam picked me. Ma’am.”

  “Hey, that’s not bad. Now tell me about the tattoo on your arm.”

  “It says that I am DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, which I know is not exactly the best epiphany for me to have, given that I want to be a writer, since obviously it’s even more important for a writer to have his—or her—own opinions than it is for other people, since obviously we’re supposed to see the world in our own way, but given that I do have this problem, I think it’s good that I know now, so that I can correct it and not waste time deny—”

  “Adam, are you sure you’re not making a mistake?” Catherine asked.

  “You were on the right track a little earlier, Venter,” Adam said. “When you said you didn’t have anything to say.”

  “So you just don’t want me to talk?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Catherine said. “Who’s your favorite writer? Don’t say me, because you obviously haven’t read a word I’ve written.”

  “Am I not supposed to answer the question?”

  “Not answering a direct question is rude.”

  “Steven Merdula,” I said.

  Catherine shrieked with laughter and looked at Adam, who already looked furious. I had known this would bother him; I had said it mostly to see his reaction.

  “You like Merdula?” Adam said. “You hate your mother enough to like Merdula?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your mother used the machine. Fine, maybe she turned against it. But if you like Merdula, you’re basically saying that your mother—and now you, I might add—used a device invented by the Nazis.”

  “Oh, lighten up, Adam,” Catherine said. “You know that that’s not what Merdula says. That was one chapter in a book that imagines many different scenarios for how the epiphany machine came to be.”

  “Yeah, and they all make the epiphany machine sound evil.”

  “Go write a doctoral dissertation about the bigoted representation of the epiphany machine in Western literature.”

  “It could have been worse,” Adam said. “He could have said Carter Wolf.”

  “That would have been worse. I might even have walked out if he’d said Carter Wolf. But since he didn’t, why don’t you pipe the fuck down so I can do what you invited me here to do and educate this young man?”

  “Fine,” Adam said, and left the room, slamming the door on us.

  “Is he never going to talk to me again?” I asked Catherine.

  “Who cares? Don’t be so DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. But he’ll be fine. Adam gets mad sometimes, particularly when somebody mentions Steven Merdula, but he always settles down. He even likes it when people talk to him that way; he’s the FIRST MAN TO LIE ON, meaning that he’s very easy to lie down on. He gives up quickly. But all of this brings us back to the question that I asked you and to how you should have answered it. Remember that if you’re going to be interviewing people about their epiphanies—and I really don’t know why Adam asked you to do this job, rather than somebody who has at least finished college—then your interviewees, even if they’ve used the machine and have gotten something out of it, are going to be looking for excuses not to talk about anything important. ‘Who is your favorite writer?’ is a question that allows you not to talk about anything important. It leads either to a boring argument like the one we just had or to completely brain-dead agreement. Reading Fitzgerald is an important experience; standing around at a party saying how much you love Fitzgerald, trying to look smart and interesting by saying you prefer Tender Is the Night to The Great Gatsby—that’s just a waste of your time on earth. Remember your objective, which is what?”

  “It’s . . .” I felt as confused as I had long ago with my father in the cemetery talking about baseball.

  “You’re coaxing people to talk about what the epiphany machine has meant to their lives. That’s important, and nobody wants to talk about what’s important. The only way to get people to talk about something important is to leave them with no other option.”

  TESTIMONIAL #6

  NAME: Catherine Pearson

  DATE OF BIRTH: 11/15/1966

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 11/15/1994

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: 06/01/1998

  Before I used the epiphany machine, I was essentially Carter Wolf’s amanuensis. Not literally, exactly. It’s not as though I took dictation from him. But I did organize my day around making sure that he had no distractions. I made him oatmeal for breakfast and brought it to the corner of the bedroom that he called his “study”; I made him a peanut butter sandwich—no jelly—for lunch, and brought that to his study, too. Sometimes he would join me for dinner, usually not. Theoretically, I had all the time in the world to do my own writing, but somehow preparing meals and cleaning a house and seeing to someone else’s needs, whether or not you care about doing these things well, almost invariably takes up the entire day.

  Maybe that’s an excuse. Maybe the reason that I couldn’t do any of my own work was that I just didn’t have anything to write. Or maybe I was suffocated by a genius. I married him when I was very young, twenty-four. The funny thing is that we met after he sent me a fan letter. He read a story I had published in an obscure literary journal and he sent me a two-page, handwritten fan letter. My heart stopped for pretty much the entire duration of those two pages. When I accepted his invitation to meet, I knew I would probably sleep with him, but I never would have thought I would marry him. Middlemarch was one of my favorite novels, and I had no intention of becoming a Dorothea to a Casaubon. The difference, or one difference, is that Carter, unlike Casaubon, was sexually vital and insanely productive. He would get up two hours before me to write his one thousand morning words, then come back to bed for a morning fuck, then write another thousand words, then an afternoon fuck, then read for hours, on most days devouring an entire book, before fucking me one more time before we fell asleep. I didn’t think I would suffer from the problems that Dorothea suffered from. I thought, okay, all that typing will inspire me to type stuff of my own. Instead, it just paralyzed me. I wanted to blame it on the noise, but really there was no noise. Carter was a very soft typist. Just knowing that he was typing made it impossible for me to type. In my college circle, and even in my MFA program, I had unquestionably been the best writer—it had even kind of turned me on to know
that I was so much better than the boys—but I knew that what Carter was writing was just on another level entirely from what I was writing.

  What I just told you is a Carter-friendly version of this story. It’s not completely inaccurate—it’s how I understood our situation for most of the time we were together—but it leaves out the part where, after I gave a reading at a bar that only my friends showed up to, he said: “At least only your friends heard that piece.” It leaves out the part where, even though I responded with copious comments on every draft he showed me, he had only this to say on both occasions I showed him a draft: “Early drafts often look like this.” As it often is, it’s hard to say whether he was being honest or just being a dick. I hated everything I wrote, and I was also invested in thinking that I was tough enough to accept any truth about myself and my work, so I chose to believe that he was being honest.

  On the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, I remember thinking that my writing was finished for good, and I also remember missing it. Physically missing it. I think I used the epiphany machine mostly to get words back into my body. I also got the tattoo to humiliate Carter, I guess. He was receiving an award at a dinner that night, so that was how we would be spending my birthday, and he had mentioned he wanted me to wear a sleeveless gown. That’s what I would have worn anyway, most likely, but it bothered me how blatantly he was letting me know that he thought of me as the pretty wife two decades his junior to be shown off to all his friends and admirers. He wanted to say: Not only do I have the Prestigious Award, but I also have this hot, sexy girl. Well, I thought: I’ll show you. I’ll show up with an epiphany tattoo, and essentially tell all your friends and sycophants that the hot, sexy girl you married is a cult member.

  There were a lot of people here on the day I used the machine. People were chattering all around me, looking for reassurance that they weren’t crazy. I offered the little grunts of sympathy that are useful for getting people to tell me things, meaning that they’re useful for finding the raw material for stories. Only while I was waiting in that line did I realize that this was a major reason why I was so successful writing fiction in college: because people were eager to empty their secrets onto me. Three a.m. confessions fueled six a.m. writing sessions at least four times a week, back when my body could support my philosophical aversion to sleep. Now this was almost exactly the same situation. All these people standing around, telling me their stories, telling me what had led them to the epiphany machine and what they hoped to learn. What they feared they would learn. I would listen to what they were not telling me, and whole short stories would emerge in those gaps.

  By the time I got to the front of the line, I didn’t want to sit down and use the epiphany machine. I wanted to rush back home and start writing again. But everyone was looking at me, both the people behind me in line and the people who had already used the machine and were taking their first confused steps toward understanding their tattoos. All of these people were expecting me to use the machine, and I worried that if I told their stories without using the machine myself that I would be using them.

  I don’t know why I let that bother me. A man wouldn’t let that bother him. Carter, if he had been in my situation, would have happily walked out of line and opened his laptop at the nearest coffee shop. He probably would have danced the white-boy shuffle on his way down the stairs. In any case, I didn’t get out of line, and I got a tattoo.

  That’s how I got this tattoo that you’re scared to read out loud. DOES NOT LOVE HUSBAND. That I already knew this, but did not know that I knew it, is only part of what makes the machine so valuable. The machine doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong with your life; it forces you to change it. You can’t really avoid a divorce when you have a tattoo on your arm that says DOES NOT LOVE HUSBAND. But I guess I still wanted some sort of revenge, because I called Carter and told him I would meet him at the dinner rather than beforehand to toast my birthday as we had planned. I got there early, and by the time Carter arrived, I was already at our table, absorbing the stares of all the writers in line for the open bar. I was also being hit on by a writer even older than Carter. When Carter saw the tattoo, he looked at it and asked what he had done to deserve it. As soon as he used the word “deserve,” I knew that he and the word “deserve” were the two things that were keeping me from what was mine.

  As far as I know, he hasn’t been able to finish anything since, while I have written two books in four years, the second of which won the award Carter won that night.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Talking to Catherine did not change everything for me. The biggest challenge with trying to get testimonials at salon nights, I discovered, was that even though the announced intention of salon nights was for people to come in and discuss their experiences, in practice, people talked about what people always talk about: serious matters like gossip, trivial matters like the fate of the planet. They also wanted very much to talk about and to Adam.

  Something that nobody who knew Adam could deny: he was an unparalleled conversationalist. After his standard introduction (“Madam, I’m Adam”), he would often begin talking about something inappropriate, not infrequently his enthusiasm for breastfucking, which he considered the supreme form of heterosexual sex, as it carried no possibility of impregnation, was substantially easier to execute than anal sex, and, unlike oral sex, made possible mid-coital conversation. Guests would be so disarmed by his candor—and so eager to point out that nobody actually wants to talk in the middle of sex, or that breastfucking is no fun at all for the woman—that they would feel a little bit less worried about divulging whatever was most repellent in them. When I write this down it sounds offensive; somehow, said in his warm, blustery manner, it wasn’t. I have never met anyone with more infectious openness than Adam Lyons. Adam was quite amenable to being kidded—“Only on our arms,” I remember one obviously adoring acolyte saying, “is history written by a loser.” Even Adam’s own epiphany, FIRST MAN TO LIE ON, could be read as a product of his openness; even those who regarded him as a giant fraud had to give him credit for not letting the theory that he was a giant fraud become an elephant in the room. He loved to explain that his tattoo meant that his purpose was to provide his guests with someone to lie on. “I am the great bed of humanity,” he liked to say. “You can sleep on me when you need to recharge, or even better you can toss the coats of your self-delusion and shame onto me while you go join the party.” Over the course of any given salon night, Adam might tell a story about a late-night pizza run with John Lennon in 1978, pitch the machine to a first-time visitor, list a few reasons why Steven Merdula was a terrible writer who didn’t understand the first thing about the epiphany machine, then tell a story about procuring cocaine for a famous photographer whose name he wouldn’t mention so that the photographer could snort the cocaine off the arm of the machine while she was receiving her tattoo.

  Prying one of Adam’s fans away from all this to tell his or her life story to a teenager was difficult, and I never really did figure out how to do it. Eventually, Adam started pointing to people and telling them that it was their turn to give me a testimonial. Almost every one of them complied, although in many cases they were too drunk or stoned for their testimonials to be usable. Either that, or their problems and solutions bored me—maybe they were too clogged with op-ed-style pontification or irrelevant detail for me to find any essence to distill, or maybe I couldn’t relate to a given speaker—and I would procrastinate on transcription until I had lost their tapes.

  In theory, my hours were from six p.m. until midnight; in practice, I worked from six p.m. to six a.m. One night shortly after the school year ended, I passed out on the floor next to Adam’s bed, and by the time I woke up, a little before one in the afternoon, Adam was already seeing guests, so I took a shower and helped out. We didn’t discuss it, but I basically lived there for the rest of the summer. (My father didn’t care that I was gone.) Adam had a huge collection
of videotapes of old movies, not that different from my grandmother’s, and sometimes when there were no guests we’d watch My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby. We would have long chats, wherein he would defend himself and the epiphany machine.

  “Sometimes people say, the first Rebecca Hart, that was understandable, but the second Rebecca Hart, you should have known better. How was I supposed to know that there would be two batshit-crazy women named Rebecca Hart? What was I supposed to do, prevent anyone named Rebecca Hart from using the machine? Wouldn’t that be discrimination? I mean, now I don’t let anyone named Rebecca Hart use the machine, but that’s only to keep people off my back. Basically, I’m just being a coward. But at least I’m not enough of a coward to deny the machine to people who aren’t named Rebecca Hart. Really, any doubts that anyone had about the machine should have been completely laid to rest after the machine accurately predicted that those two women would kill their kids. Some people are convinced I’m a fraud but still want me to share epiphanies with law enforcement, as though that position makes any sense.”