“Did they seem like they were in love?”
“In love? They often stood outside my places of business making out, but I’m pretty sure that that was just to annoy me. Brainwashed people can’t be in love.”
“Did you notice their relationship changing at all?”
“They kept on harassing me until I left the state. When I came back to New York, they weren’t around anymore. That was pretty much all I noticed. I wasn’t a marriage counselor or a Peeping Tom.”
“What do you think your epiphany would be, if Adam tattooed you?”
“My epiphany? Oh, it would obviously be WASTED HIS ARTISTIC GIFTS or whatever Adam thought would hurt me the most.”
“What if you never had any artistic gifts at all? What if you’ve always known that? What if HIDES FROM LACK OF TALENT IN CYNICISM AND LIES would be your epiphany?”
“Then it would be just like everyone else’s epiphany: something that could apply to anyone.”
I decided to try one last thing. “What if your sister could have done more valuable things with her law degree than help you keep your shop? How many people who needed her help did she not help so you could inscribe people’s delusions onto their own skin?”
This question had, to my surprise, precisely the effect I hoped it would, and for a moment I thought Goldberg was going to knock all the candy over again. “Actually, I don’t have to wonder about that. Years after the legal trouble faded away, my sister got an epiphany tattoo. She was depressed; she had cancer. She gave a fake name, and since her hair was gone and she looked very different, she didn’t think Adam recognized her. But of course he did. He wrote WASTED LIFE TRYING TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY on her forearm. She had always been much smarter than I was, but those chemicals must have made her dumber, because she thought that that proved the epiphany machine was real; it had proved that she had wasted her life idolizing me for no reason. I guess Adam figured that would be pretty solid revenge against me. What he doesn’t know is that before he gave her that tattoo, she asked me to choose a tattoo for her, so that she could live out her final months knowing what I thought of her. I refused, because choosing tattoos for my customers is not my bag, but what popped into my mind was WASTED LIFE TRYING TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY. So all Adam did was save me some ink.”
CHAPTER
17
Okay. Ismail now. One hot Sunday morning the summer before I was to enter college, Adam was sitting in the corner when I arrived, and he was still sitting there two hours later, ignoring the line that had formed, ignoring the people leaving the line, ignoring the people arguing over whether Adam sitting on a stool was just some kind of cult mindfuck, or a sign that they had actually done something wrong, or a sign that the epiphany machine was broken. Finally, I asked him what was wrong, and he just sat on his stool and stared impassively. It wasn’t unusual for Adam to stare impassively, but now he was missing that glint in his eye that told you that he was just going to let you argue with him until you started arguing against yourself.
“You’re going to leave me, you know,” Adam finally said.
I looked into Adam’s eyes and saw true terror and pain, which both touched and bemused me. The thought of no longer working for him had not occurred to me.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“It’s the natural way. The natural way always leads to death. In this case, the death of you and me.”
“I’m going to Columbia. I’ll just be uptown. It’ll be much easier for me to get here than it is now.”
“You’re going to be ashamed of me. You’re going to be hanging out with lots of cool young people, and you’ll decide that you’re too cool for me.”
“Nonsense! I’m not too cool to hang out with anyone.”
“Sure, but you won’t want your classmates to find that out.”
“Hey, Adam. Let’s stop sitting here feeling like crap. Let’s go see a movie. Way downtown.”
I was expecting him to say something about not being able to leave his post, but instead he slapped his knees and said: “Okay. Let’s go.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said let’s go. You name the movie.”
Taxi Driver was playing at Film Forum, so that’s what I suggested. The fact that he accepted wound up ruining at least one life.
Adam so rarely left the Upper East Side that he had never even heard of MetroCards, and he wanted to use a token instead, but I insisted that he learn.
“This is terrible!” he said. “This is even worse than making epiphanies public. I’d rather have the government know who I am than where I am!”
If he could still get mad, I thought, he must be more or less okay.
“Everyone in this car is going to use the machine,” he said, almost as soon as we stepped onto a train. He didn’t seem to notice that a woman was reading Steven Merdula’s Only the Desert Is Not a Desert, but that was just as well. “But only after we lose control of it. It’s going to be taken from me, and then they’ll use it.”
“You mean Vladimir Harrican? The machine chose you, not him, and so did I.”
“In a few years, no one will care what you or the machine think. There will be tattoos, but they will be fake, assigned, the way that people think that I fake and assign tattoos. Whatever god speaks through the machine will return to silence and will be replaced with the chatter of false prophets. But maybe that’s just what these people need! What’s wrong with a golden calf? It’s made of gold! Who wouldn’t choose that over two hunks of rock with words tattooed on them?”
He was speaking loudly, and though the twenty or so people in the car were all practiced in ignoring people who spoke too loudly on the subway, a few necks gave snap-swivels of attention at a couple of points in the speech. I looked for a friendly arm but they were all clean. As we got off the subway, I was starting to see myself through the eyes of the people around us; I was starting to wonder what I was doing with this crazy old man. The hot walk down Houston did not improve my mood. I hoped an afternoon at Film Forum would make us both feel better, despite the fact that we would be watching a movie about a disturbed man who thinks he is on a mission to save the city.
We had to line up outside, and I wanted to make sure that Adam was okay and didn’t need to lean against a wall, which may be why it took me a couple of minutes to notice that Leah and Ismail were standing in line a little ahead of us. To my shock, they were holding hands. In a moment, Ismail was smiling and Leah was punching him, and when a guy is smiling and a girl is punching him, you know that they’re in love.
“Venter!” Leah said, gesturing for me to cut the people ahead in line and join her and Ismail, and I complied, since either cutting the line or refusing her invitation would have been rude and I tend to err on the side of doing what I’m told. “We haven’t seen you in so long.” Actually, I had seen both of them at graduation little more than a month earlier, where we had barely acknowledged each other. If Leah and Ismail had been dating at the time, I certainly hadn’t noticed. I was surprised that Leah was being so friendly now, and I couldn’t tell whether she was magnanimously treating me like an old friend or consciously rubbing her love for Ismail in my face.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with this guy right here,” I said, gesturing for Adam to come save me from an awkward three-way conversation. “Adam Lyons, this is Leah and Ismail.”
They each shook Adam’s hand, warily. Then Ismail grabbed my shoulder and looked into my eyes like a cop trying to figure out whether I was on drugs. “I’ve missed you, dude,” he said.
“I didn’t know the two of you were dating,” I said. “Mazel tov.”
“We haven’t told a lot of people,” Leah said. “Ismail’s mother would not approve.”
“And you’re rebelling against your mother,” Adam said. “Very American of you.” I wanted to kick him for this condescending remark.
Leah laughed and beamed, like she thought she was dating Lenny Bruce.
“Adam, I’ve read and heard a lot about you,” Ismail said. “Venter and I had a teacher who was obsessed with your machine. Do you think it’s true that Wernher von Braun invented the machine?”
“Where’d you hear that nonsense? In that garbage Merdula book?”
“The Wernher in the story wasn’t Wernher von Braun,” I corrected Ismail. “That was just a hypothetical Wernher.” Of course he knew this, and was just trying to—to use an appropriate metaphor—get under Adam’s skin.
The line was moving now, so we were moving, too. I started thinking about Ms. Scarra and how she was doing in prison, but I made myself stop.
“You give your life to something important,” Adam said, “and people will make up lies about it.”
“You tease a man very gently,” Leah said, “and he will pronounce important principles very solemnly.”
I tried to think of something to say to preempt whatever offensive thing Adam was going to say next, but instead he laughed, rather heartily, I thought.
“I’m right about Merdula,” Adam said, “but I’d rather be wrong than solemn.”
We all chatted amicably after that, and Adam laughed throughout the movie, mostly at inappropriate times.
I think it was during the confrontation between De Niro and Albert Brooks that Ismail whispered in my ear that he wanted to talk to me about something after the movie. I wasn’t in the mood to hear any kind of lecture about how it wasn’t too late for me to be deprogrammed from this cult, so I gave a noncommittal answer.
“The part where Bob shoots off the guy’s finger,” Adam said, as we were walking out. “Originally, Marty was going to use that for Harvey’s death scene. But the night before they were going to shoot that scene, Marty, Harvey, and Bob all got drunk and came and got epiphany tattoos. Harvey didn’t want to lift his arm the next day because it was too painful.”
“Are you kidding?” Leah said. “There are literally thousands of actors you could have chosen for that lie who would have been better than Harvey Keitel. He’s naked on screen, like, all the time.”
“Ever hear of post-production?”
“You’re saying that in The Piano and Bad Lieutenant and probably a million other movies the tattoo on Harvey’s arm is blurred out, but so seamlessly that the audience can’t notice?”
“Filmmakers are very good at hiding the truth. And so are people who remove tattoos. Why do you think Harvey is more compelled to display his body than any other male actor? You don’t think that his need to show off his epiphanyless body is psychologically suspicious? Look closer at his arm the next time you watch one of his movies. And why do you think Marty and Bob made Cape Fear, if not to show Bob’s epiphany tattoo by not showing it, by showing so many other tattoos? They both felt a need to display Bob’s body as a palimpsest.”
Leah clearly thought Adam was crazy or lying or both, but she couldn’t help asking the obvious follow-up. “So what did their tattoos say?”
“I’m not going to tell you that. That would be a violation of my personal code of ethics.”
“Which is what?”
“Not to disclose information about my guests.”
I tried to catch Adam’s eye so we could have a silent chat about what he had done to people with DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoos, but he did not look my way.
“Didn’t you already violate that by telling us that the three of them used the machine?” Leah asked. “Shouldn’t you keep that a secret?”
“You don’t believe me, so I haven’t divulged anything. As far as you’re concerned, I’m just some crazy guy making shit up.”
“You give your life to something important—like, say, making one of the greatest movies ever made—and people will make up lies about it.”
Adam laughed again, and I decided that he was back to normal. The fact that I registered this annoyed me; if I were as strong as I should have been, I should have been less focused on the fluctuations of an old man’s mood and more focused on the fact that my best friend was dating the girl I was in love with. Or my former best friend was dating a girl I had once been in love with. I had barely thought of either Ismail or Leah in more than a year, except to be annoyed with them for not believing in the machine, but my total lack of justification for being upset only made me more upset.
“I want to see the epiphany machine,” Leah said.
I had thought that she was, at best, humoring Adam, so I was surprised when she said this, and also personally offended. “You hate how epiphany tattoos look,” I said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to see epiphany tattoos,” Leah said. “I said I wanted to see the epiphany machine.”
“You don’t like how the tattoos look?” Adam said. “Most people do. Maybe something is blocking you from seeing beauty.”
“Or maybe, unlike our mutual friend, I’m not DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.”
“Nobody thinks they’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS,” I said.
“Which is why, Leah, you should come uptown now and get a tattoo,” Adam said.
“Hold on, that’s not what I said.” I was mad at Leah, but I did not like the idea of her giving her arm to Adam.
“It wouldn’t matter if that was what you said. I wouldn’t get an epiphany tattoo.”
“Then why do you want to see the machine?”
“I like attending Catholic Mass with my Catholic friends. I like the ceremony. That doesn’t mean I have any intention of taking Communion. I like to observe religion, not let it into my body.”
“I’m not usually a fan of fans,” Adam said. “I prefer people who want to get involved. But maybe a body as beautiful as yours should be left intac—”
“Adam,” I said.
“Don’t bother showing me your teeth, Grandma,” Leah said. “I am the fucking wolf.”
“Leah,” Ismail said, “why do you want to see this thing? I don’t understand.”
“I want to see just how desperate people are for meaning. Plus, I want to do things that are interesting, and seeing it is more interesting than not seeing it. Plus, I’m a Lennon fan, just like everybody else.”
Leah enjoyed showing Adam how to use his MetroCard, since of course he had forgotten in the time since I had shown him. I expected Ismail to be concerned for Leah, but instead he again whispered in my ear that he wanted to speak with me privately when we had the chance.
We were hardly inside Adam’s apartment when Adam rolled a joint for Leah, who happily accepted.
“Where is everybody?” she asked. “I want to see somebody use the machine. Aren’t cults supposed to have, like, followers?”
“I don’t know what the machine would tell you, but I’m tempted to tattoo NEEDS TO BE FUCKING PATIENT on you myself.” He was smiling broadly as he said this, unself-consciously displaying his missing tooth and clearly enjoying being teased by Leah, and I felt a surge of jealousy, maybe not because Adam was behaving lecherously toward Leah, but because he was treating her with a kind of cantankerous deference, like she was his daughter.
“Venter, let’s go take a walk,” Ismail said.
“Yeah, Venter, go take a walk,” Adam said. “Some exercise might help with your nerves. It can’t be good for your health to hang out with an old man in a cramped, smoke-filled apartment all day.”
I didn’t see any way to say no, so I did not say no. Many of the biggest decisions we make in life, I’ve observed, are the ones we barely make at all. The ones where we just get maneuvered into doing something we’re barely aware of doing, or do just to be accommodating. Or maybe it’s just me.
On the staircase, Ismail tried to engage me in a conversation about The X-Files, but
I wasn’t having it.
“Aren’t you worried about what Adam is going to do with Leah?”
“Leah can take care of herself. I need your advice on something.”
“My advice?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, dude.”
“I thought you weren’t DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.”
“I’m not. That doesn’t mean that no one else’s opinion is ever useful. Even the opinion of somebody who is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS can be useful on rare occasion.”
“You’re really making me want to help you, brother.”
“You know why the machine is so popular?”
“Okay.”
“‘Okay,’ you know why it’s so popular?”
“No. ‘Okay,’ I’m giving you an opening for you to spin your theory.”
We were in the lobby now, and as I opened the door to the vestibule, we caught each other’s eye and smiled.
“We should definitely be pleased with ourselves and these ballbreaking, verbally dexterous characters we’re playing for each other,” Ismail said. “Speaking of which, I need you to break up with Leah for me.”
We were on the sidewalk now, abreast of each other and abreast of garbage.
“What? Why?”
“I just don’t want to be with her. And we’re teenagers! I shouldn’t have to explain myself.”
“Except that you want me to break up with her for you, so you should probably explain yourself to me.”
“Leah’s your friend, too. Do you want her to be with a guy who doesn’t want to be with her?”
“Fair point,” I said, though it wasn’t, since it wasn’t clear that Leah was still my friend. “But why are you asking me to break up with her instead of breaking up with her yourself?”
“You distracted me earlier, so I never got to tell you my theory about why people use the epiphany machine.”
The Epiphany Machine Page 15