The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s not start that again,” Ismail said. Two men, no matter how intelligent, can talk for only so long before they start to sound like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, or like Abbott and Costello doing the “Who’s on First” routine.

  “I don’t think people use the epiphany machine because they want to learn about themselves. I don’t think that anybody, deep down, wants to learn about his or her own stupid, tiny soul. I think everybody’s hoping that the machine will break up with people for them. ‘I’m too CLOSED OFF for you.’ ‘You wouldn’t want to be with someone who is ADDICTED TO DISSATISFACTION, would you?’ ‘Sorry, baby, I’m DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, so you’re better off without me.’”

  “You are just so good at talking me into helping you.”

  “See? This is what happens when you’re honest with people.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re asking me for advice. It sounds like you’re asking me to do something you’re too cowardly to do.”

  “You got me.”

  “Let’s get some pizza and talk about it.”

  It’s true that in that moment—and, I think, only in that moment—I was wondering what treacherous thing I could do to Ismail. But it’s not as though I tricked him into thinking that he was still in love with Leah when he wasn’t or that the epiphany machine was the only way out of his predicament. By the time we found a pizza place a couple of blocks away, Ismail was deep into a discussion of how staying up all night sewing a dinosaur costume with Leah for a production of The Skin of Our Teeth had been one of the greatest experiences of his life, but the time had come for that kind of silliness to end. He was going to be pre-med in college, and, in a decade or so, as a young doctor, he would have his pick of women.

  It seemed obvious and obviously unfair that he would have his pick of women and I would not, just because he was going to pursue a necessary career that required great skill and I was basically a caretaker for a tape recorder, with a dream of becoming a writer that might very well remain a dream.

  “Sounds to me like you’re in love with Leah,” I said.

  Ismail took a bite that pulled all the cheese from his pizza, and then told me that I was very smart. When you summarize what people say back to them, they often tell you that you’re very smart. Still, I liked to hear him say it.

  “But we can’t be together,” Ismail said. “We just can’t. You have to tell her that.”

  “Why do I have to tell her?”

  “Because I want to be with her and I won’t be convincing.”

  “Why can’t you be together?”

  “Because I can’t date a non-Muslim. My mother won’t allow it.”

  “What does she care? She’s not a believing Muslim.”

  “It’s not about believing. Heritage is complicated.”

  “Why can’t you disobey your mother?”

  “Because,” he said, taking a long, stringy bite, “disobeying your parents just leads to misery. Clear, firm guidance, even when it’s wrong, is better than stumbling around with no idea about how you’re supposed to live. Look around you and you can see that that’s true. The machine is a parent for people who think they’re too good for their parents.”

  “Didn’t you have a different theory a few minutes ago?”

  “I am a multitude-containing motherfucker.”

  “Have we talked about how dickish it is to say ‘I contain multitudes’ when somebody catches you in a contradiction?”

  “I do contain multitudes, though. That’s why I got that part-time job at Blockbuster to send money to Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya, even though I don’t consider myself a Muslim any more than my mother does.”

  “Do you still have that job?”

  “No. It was taking away time that I wanted to spend with Leah.”

  “It sounds to me like you want to use the machine.”

  “I take it back. You’re not very smart.”

  “When I was a little kid and I wanted something,” I said, “the most important decision I had to make was whether to ask my dad or ask my grandma. When I wanted to watch TV, I asked my grandma, since my dad hates TV, but when I wanted a toy, I’d ask my dad, since my grandma would take any request for a purchase as an excuse to talk about the Depression.”

  I wasn’t sure whether this was actually true—I could think of plenty of times when my father had turned on the television for me and then retreated into his den, and plenty of times when my grandmother had bought me a toy I hadn’t known I wanted until she bought it for me. But this was not a story that was supposed to contain multitudes; this was a story that was supposed to have a point.

  “So my point is . . .”

  “That I need to ask permission from the right source,” Ismail said. “And you think the right source is the epiphany machine.”

  Ismail’s quickness annoyed me.

  “But there are other issues,” he said. “I’m going to Stanford and Leah is going to NYU.”

  “I’m sure if we sit here for another ten minutes you can come up with twenty more excuses.”

  “Tattoos are forbidden in Islam. That might sound like an excuse to you, given that you have no meaningful connection to any religious community, but it means something to me.”

  “If the tattoo tells you to be Muslim, you can always get it removed in order to become the Muslim it tells you to be. I talked to a Jewish guy a while back who did that.”

  “What if it just tells me that I shouldn’t be with Leah?”

  “Then it will be on your arm and you won’t forget,” I said.

  In the years that followed I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly why I suddenly wanted so badly for Ismail to use the epiphany machine. Maybe I wanted to hurt him. I was annoyed with the smugness and condescension of the stuff he had just said about “religious community,” especially given the smugness and condescension with which he had treated religion when we first became friends, so I wanted to ruin any future he might have had with Leah and/or ruin his relationship with his mother.

  Or maybe I did not want to hurt him, and just wanted to make myself feel better. Maybe I thought if he used the machine, I would know for a fact that I had not been a fool to use it myself.

  Or maybe I honestly thought I was helping my friend. Maybe I thought that using the machine would clarify things for him, would set him on a clear path for the rest of his life. If this is what I was thinking, I was not exactly wrong.

  Ismail slammed his waxed paper cup on the table and wiped some grease from his mouth. “Let’s do it.”

  • • •

  There you boys are!” Leah said when we returned. “Adam was just telling me about a Secret Service agent who got a tattoo in the early seventies. This agent had been jogging alongside the car when Kennedy was shot, and he told Adam with one hundred percent certainty that Oswald was not the only shooter. He caught a glimpse of a gun on the grassy knoll a few seconds before the shooting, but, despite his training, he thought it was a cigar until it was too late. If Adam would go public with what he knows, then this great question of American history would finally be answered.”

  “No, it would not,” Adam said. “Because no one would believe me. It would just be: ‘Blah blah blah the huckster who hypnotized John Lennon is telling this wacky lie about the Kennedy assassination.’”

  “We still wouldn’t know who the second shooter was,” I said.

  “Nobody cares about that,” Adam said. “Not really. What America needs is acknowledgment that a bullet cannot be magic.”

  “But a needle can be,” Ismail said.

  “When God wants to alter the trajectory of a life, he doesn’t alter the trajectory of a bullet. A gun is just man’s sorry attempt to build his own epiphany machine. Marty told me that that’s what Taxi Driver is about.”


  “What was the tattoo?” Ismail said. “The Secret Service agent’s tattoo, I mean.”

  “TAKES TOO LONG TO NOTICE WHAT’S IMPORTANT,” Adam said, making us all laugh. “He hugged me and thanked me, told me that he had been ignoring the fact that his wife was unhappy with their humdrum lives and that he was immediately going to take her on the trip to Europe that he had been too depressed to take ever since the assassination. He rushed out of this place on his way to a travel agent.”

  “Aren’t you breaking that rule or code or whatever you were talking about earlier?” Ismail asked. He had taken a place next to Leah and was stroking her back.

  “Again, you think I’m making it all up. Nobody is as free from all bonds of law and custom as a crazy old crank. You all have something to look forward to.”

  “Don’t worry, Ismail,” I said. “Whatever your epiphany tattoo is, it will be completely safe with us.”

  Adam and Leah expressed surprise in unison. Also in unison, they told Ismail that he could not use the machine.

  “Ismail is going to use the machine so he can be told to stay with the woman he loves.”

  “Wait, what?” Leah said.

  “Venter, what are you doing?” Ismail said.

  “You’re already in danger of forgetting everything you said at the pizza place. That’s why you need to have it written on your arm.”

  “Venter is practicing his salesmanship,” Adam said. Adam was an excellent conciliator, though this was one of the hardest things to notice about him. “The sale shouldn’t be quite this hard, Venter, and besides, your friend is a little young to use the machine.”

  “Maybe I should wait awhile and see if I still want to use the machine,” Ismail said.

  I got the sense from everyone in the room that I was pushing too hard, that I should relax. But I wanted to keep pushing, in part because I also wanted to do what they wanted me to do and stop pushing, and yielding to that impulse would once again demonstrate that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.

  “If you wait to use it, you’ll never use it. You’ll just keep saying that one day you’re going to use the epiphany machine. You’ll probably even tell the maternally approved woman you’re not all that psyched about marrying that you’re going to use the epiphany machine one day, and she’ll nod her approval and tell you that you can use the epiphany machine whenever you want to, and you’ll both know that the only reason she’s telling you this is because you both know you’ll never do it.”

  Adam grunted in approval and put his hand on my shoulder. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were actually listening to those testimonials you record. But you should test your skills out on somebody who’s sure about using the machine.”

  “I am sure,” Ismail said. “Venter just convinced me.”

  “You’re not actually thinking about doing this,” Leah said.

  “I’m not thinking about it. I’ve made up my mind.”

  “This guy is a lunatic and the machine is bullshit! We’re here because it’s funny bullshit, and we both like funny bullshit. I thought we were on the same page about that.”

  “If I weren’t a hardened, soulless huckster out to defraud humanity,” Adam said, “that might hurt my feelings.”

  “I want the machine to tell me that I have permission to keep seeing you,” Ismail said, ignoring Adam.

  “Do you hear yourself? You need the machine’s permission to keep seeing me?”

  “I mean I’m not getting my mother’s permission.”

  “Why do you need anybody’s permission?”

  “Everybody needs somebody’s permission,” I said. “Everybody is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. That’s what is going to make me a great writer. The great problem that stares us all in the face is written on my arm.”

  “Easy, buddy,” Adam laughed.

  “This is the guy whose advice you want to follow?” Leah asked Ismail.

  “You want me to follow your advice instead? All I want to do is what I want to do, but I don’t know what I want to do because everybody keeps talking. Maybe that’s the point of the epiphany machine: to shut everybody up.”

  “So you’re telling me to shut up.”

  “No, I’m not! You’re just trying to find any excuse to keep me from getting a tattoo because you don’t like how the tattoos look. Maybe you’re just a very shallow person.”

  It was essentially in one movement that Leah gasped and turned around and walked out. Ismail ran after her, apologizing desperately, and they stopped just outside the door of the apartment to argue. All we heard was murmuring, not the words they used. But a great truth that writers try not to understand is that precise wording is never important for understanding something; precise wording is only important when you’re trying not to understand something.

  “Should we drink whiskey to your success?” Adam asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m serious. You wanted to break them up, and you succeeded.”

  “I wasn’t trying to break them up.”

  He took a sip of whiskey and licked his lips. “There it is. The look I’ve been waiting for.”

  “What look?”

  “The look of disgust with me. It’s what I was talking about earlier.”

  I was annoyed with him, but I couldn’t help finding his fatherly fear of abandonment endearing, especially since I had seen so little of it from my own father.

  “I’m not going to abandon you, Adam.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The door opened. It was Ismail, who did not meet my eye when he passed me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To use the machine, obviously. Now that I’ve apparently broken up with my girlfriend over it, I at least want to see what it has to say.”

  He walked past Adam and through the purple velvet curtain.

  “I don’t think he’s ready,” Adam said. “I don’t want any part of this.”

  At this point, I think—though of course I can’t be sure—that I wanted Adam to throw Ismail out. But instead Adam just stood there, probably testing me, to see what I would do. It annoyed me to be tested, but I followed Ismail through the curtain.

  Ismail was hunched over the machine, examining it like it was a puppy he was thinking of buying.

  “It looks exactly the way you described it,” Ismail said. “That’s disappointing.”

  “Would you like me to describe it poorly in the future?”

  “So Adam doesn’t have to be the one to operate it?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone else operate it. Adam keeps the machine steady, and I don’t think anyone wants it to shake.”

  “But you can operate it? I think I’d trust it more if you operated it.”

  I looked over my shoulder, expecting Adam to walk in, but it was quiet on the other side of the curtain. I reloaded the ink and told Ismail to have a seat in the dentist’s chair—the chair we’re all trying to reach as soon as we leave the womb, Adam liked to not-really-joke. Ismail settled in and let his arm float upward and to the side, in the direction of the machine. I put on latex gloves, and unwrapped and loaded a needle. This was going to happen. I was going to learn whether the machine was real, or whether Adam composed the epiphanies himself.

  “All right, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, step away from the machine.” Adam popped through the velvet curtain. He didn’t seem mad that he was being usurped, he didn’t seem nervous that he was about to be exposed as a fraud; he just looked happy to get back to work. He took my place, ran his finger along the machine, and, not pausing to put on latex gloves, pressed it down into Ismail’s arm.

  The pain took Ismail immediately, and he did not like it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me how much this was going to hurt?”

  “Think your thoughts,” Adam said. “Now’s the time.”r />
  He said this frequently while tattooing, and now I understood why. Thinking, like any other drug, can be a useful distraction from pain, as long as it’s carefully managed and does not become an addiction.

  Maybe I should have been angry that I had been robbed of my opportunity to see whether the machine was real, but all I felt was awe. As Ismail groaned and squirmed, and Adam composed or channeled, the machine dragged and looped its needle along Ismail’s arm like a calm figure skater. If Adam was a charlatan, if he did in fact design and build the machine himself, he was underrated as an engineer. The machine was either made by God to write a final testament onto the rotting bodies of his creations, or it was a testament to human grace and skill. Either way, only the small of soul would decline to worship it.

  The whirring slowed and quieted, and Adam lifted the arm. Ismail looked up and met my gaze for a moment, still in pain and probably not wanting to look at what the machine had written. I wondered again why the machine wrote in English, and I wondered why I had learned English, or any language, since surely the point of words is something other than to understand them. I wished that I did not know the meaning of the words the machine had written on me, and I wanted Ismail never to learn the meaning of the words on his own arm. I wanted each of us to be like a kid with a “Kick Me” sign taped to his back who had no idea what the words “kick me” meant, who just enjoyed the sensation of a slip of loose-leaf paper flapping against his coat.

  But Ismail did look down at his arm, of course, and his eyes widened in bewilderment, just as I had seen so many eyes do. I was waiting for the scream, for the refusal, for the useless threats of lawsuits. Instead, he jumped in the air and embraced first Adam and then me.

  “Thank you so much for making me do this!” he said. “This epiphany is perfect.” He stretched his arm out for our reading pleasure.

  WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP

  I looked at Ismail’s epiphany, or more precisely, I looked at the brown skin around Ismail’s epiphany. My first thought was that Adam had committed a hate crime.

  “This is telling me exactly what I need to hear!” Ismail said. “It’s telling me that I need to go to NYU, not Stanford!”