The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor. I want to work in the theater. But I couldn’t admit that to myself, because it will alienate my mother. But I want to alienate my mother, if that’s what it will take to live the life that I want. If I have to blow up my relationship with my mother, then so be it. Relationship blown up.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Adam said. “This is exactly what the epiphany machine is supposed to do.”

  “Okay, but can’t you be a theater director if you go to Stanford?”

  “It will be easier if I’m in New York. Plus, this will send a clear message to my mother. I know that if I go to Stanford, she’ll keep wearing me down to take pre-med courses until I give in and become a doctor. The only way to do this is just to do it.”

  “I didn’t even know you applied to NYU.”

  “I kept it quiet. Sent in deposits to both NYU and Stanford.”

  A teenager deciding between colleges, ecstatic that the choice had been made for him. That’s what Ismail was.

  “Ismail, you’ve restored my faith in my own machine,” Adam said. “I’ll be first in line for your first play on Broadway.”

  “I guess this means you’ll be close to Leah,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t care about Leah. We broke up outside and we’re not getting back together.”

  I could tell from the way he said this that they’d be back together by the end of the week.

  “So you’ll both be going to college in the city,” Adam said. “Two young men on the edge of a millennium.”

  Sometimes I try to picture how Ismail and I must have looked to Adam in that moment. He probably did not register Ismail’s quixotic attempts at a moustache or the scabs that my incompetent shaving left on my cheeks and neck; what he saw was the word “promise” written all over our faces in invisible ink. And despite everything that happened afterward, it can’t be said that we lacked promise.

  From Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine,

  by Steven Merdula (1991), Chapter 2

  The epiphany machine was forged sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, on a plantation outside Charleston, by a slave employed, in a manner of speaking, as a blacksmith. There is no way to know his name, and in any case his name would not be his, but he is often called James. As a child James had, at the greatest possible risk, taught himself to read and write using a Bible that he had—to use a word that casts all words into confusion—stolen. After the Bible, James stole other books, mostly works of science and philosophy, often when called upon to make repairs to the furniture in the vast library in the main house. James hid his literacy from Richardson Johnson, the man whom the law designated his master. Richardson Johnson did not notice or care about the missing books—unlike his deceased mother, who had acquired most of the collection, he found reading dull—but he did take notice of James for his precocious gifts in carpentry. James had not turned seventeen when Johnson sent him away to be taught blacksmithing.

  James quickly established himself as a star pupil, able to concentrate on his work despite the constant prattling of the white man assigned to watch him, and—it was made very clear—whip him if he showed any sign of indolence. Despite having seen much of the world while serving in the British Navy, the man assigned to watch over him had almost nothing of interest to say, a fact that did not stop him from talking.

  If what James created was used to sustain, defend, or decorate a society of the greatest evil, that evil seemed somehow quarantined from the act of creation itself. Only in iron and fire was there reprieve from violence.

  After three years, James was returned to the Johnson estate to set up a shop, and soon his horseshoes—or, as they were known, Richardson Johnson’s horseshoes—were widely agreed to be the most dependable horseshoes that could be acquired in the Carolinas. His larger-scale work was even more impressive, and the gates and balconies that James forged for the Johnson estate earned Richardson the envy and admiration of his neighbors.

  Occasionally, another slave would suggest that James build weapons; he always declined, believing Richardson Johnson to be a fundamentally decent man who had been led astray by the satanic forces that ruled this region of the world. Richardson Johnson and his family did not deserve horror. Richardson Johnson’s young son, also named Richardson Johnson, often approached James and sweetly offered to help. True, this was a monumental hindrance to James’s work—he could not refuse the boy’s offer, and every offer meant a wasted day of tedious supervision. James was unsure whether he would be hanged if the boy slipped up and hurt himself, and he certainly had no intention of finding out. But even at his most innocently destructive, the boy was so eager, so curious, so impressed with what James was able to do. The boy treated James like a valued teacher, even like a second father. At times, James was able to forget himself and the world and see the boy as his son. In the boy’s eyes, James saw a future in which there was no slavery, and everyone respected each other. This respectful, openhearted boy could grow up to be a respectful, openhearted man. What Richardson Johnson’s family needed was education.

  James daydreamed about approaching the older Richardson with a branding iron that would inscribe MUST END BONDAGE on his master’s flesh, a message that might burn the demons away and help Richardson see clearly. But James was not a fool and knew that the whites would see this not as what it was—the only hope to save Richardson’s soul—but rather as an act of the purest aggression. He feared being hanged even for thinking it. And yet the thought would not go away.

  One day, heating metal in the furnace, James felt that the fire was speaking. This was not so unusual—he often felt that fire and metal were having a conversation, and that his job was to translate, as the Bible had been translated. But today he felt as if the fire were speaking to him. As soon as he started to listen, though, the fire’s speech was drowned out by the neighing of a horse waiting to be shod. In his anger, James stared at the horse, and then noticed something in the shape of its skull, and looked more closely.

  Within a month, James had crafted an object, the beauty of which Richardson Johnson could not deny, but the use of which he could not discern. James said that it was merely for decoration, rather than for sustenance or defense. Richardson said that he felt some primal urge to touch it, and of course James was not going to tell his master not to obey his urges.

  Richardson touched the top of the neck (or the arm, or whatever we want to call it), and said that it was very cold. He touched the base and said nothing. Then he touched the needle, and then he lifted it, and then it was in his arm and he was screaming.

  Finally, the needle stopped and sat in Richardson’s arm. James lifted the needle, and Richardson muttered about having James hanged, until he read what was written on his arm.

  “MUST END BONDAGE!” Richardson said, his voice joyful. “Of course! God Himself has sent this message to me. Thank you for serving as the messenger.”

  James bragged to the other slaves about what he had done, rejected their skepticism, and waited for word to arrive that they would all be free to go. But this word did not come. Only slowly did James realize that Richardson had formed (or possibly merely joined) a group that sought representation for the American colonies in the British Parliament and had invited the other members to use his device, which he said had been “prepared” by his slave. Each of Richardson’s friends received tattoos stating that they MUST END BONDAGE, and they were grateful for the reminder that they must free themselves of the tyrant King George. Richardson told James that he would not let his important contributions to Richardson’s work go unrewarded and that he would make special provisions in his will for James to be freed upon his death.

  Angered though he was by the way white men interpreted the message that he had coauthored with God, James nonetheless maintained hope that, once liberation from King George had been achieved, slavery would indeed be
ended. After all, as the eighteenth century wore on, very intelligent white man after very intelligent white man came to use his machine: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin. (It is rumored that the trail of black ink up his arm inspired the rattlesnake Franklin drew for his famed “Join, or Die” print, though the timing on this is fuzzy.) Surely anyone—surely one person—with that message on his arm would come to understand that MUST END BONDAGE meant MUST END BONDAGE, and that this could not possibly refer to the freedom of white people.

  James waited for the white man who would realize this, and continued to wait.

  Years went by and James forced himself not to lose hope. During the war, believing that freedom was at hand, James made weapons to be used against the British, rather than, as James’s friends continued to suggest, Richardson Johnson. In the unsettled years that followed the victory at Yorktown, James distracted himself by crafting balconies. He could have constructed the balconies poorly, and white people overlooking their slaves could have been surprised to find themselves falling, but nothing could have tempted James toward shoddy work.

  One night, James received word that Richardson Johnson had died. He expected to receive the freedom that Richardson Johnson had promised would be written in his will. But weeks passed and no word of freedom came. Finally, Richardson Johnson’s son, Richardson Johnson III, came to take a look at a gate that James was working on. This Richardson asked questions about the tools James used, obviously out of nostalgia for his own childhood, rather than out of any continuing interest in the tools themselves, and certainly not out of any interest in James. James asked about his freedom, and Richardson sucked in his lips.

  “Being on your own at your age would be nothing but frightening and confusing,” Richardson said. “This is what’s best for you. Don’t worry if you feel overworked. In a few years, my son will assist you, just like I did.”

  James hardly saw Richardson for more than a year after that—most of the work he was ordered to do came through overseers—until one day Richardson burst into James’s shop with the glorious news of the ratification of the United States Constitution. Richardson did not mention that this Constitution perpetuated slavery, but he did not have to.

  “To commemorate this occasion,” Richardson said, “I would like you to mark my breast with the phrase AN AMERICAN AND A GENTLEMAN OF SOUTH CAROLINA.”

  “Your breast?”

  “Over my heart.”

  “I can’t choose the marking.”

  Richardson laughed—warmly, he probably thought—at James’s foolishness. “Of course not. You cannot even read what it writes. But now that bondage has ended and we are a free people, I am confident that God will choose this marking for me.”

  “My device cannot open wide enough to write on your chest. Only your forearm.”

  “I’m sorry. I must have misheard. It sounded as though you called it your device.”

  James put down the hammer he was holding. “I am sorry. The Johnson Body-Pen.”

  “That’s better. Now, I expect you to resolve any minor difficulties quickly. I will visit you again on the first Monday of next month to receive the marking I have requested.”

  James looked at the device that he made so many years ago with so much hope. He attempted to lift it, with the intention of hurling it into the furnace along with himself, but his strength was not what it once had been. He turned to the furnace with nothing in his hands. He would not fit into the furnace, of course, but this was—how to put it?—one of those minor difficulties. He could feel the heat of the flames on his hands when he got a better idea.

  For the next days, he ignored the agony in his joints as he shaped and molded and twisted iron. One need not be at one’s best to do one’s best work.

  When the day arrived, Richardson Johnson III did not notice that this device was significantly larger than the Johnson Body-Pen, or if he did, he did not seem to care. The things white men failed to notice would fill the world they had ruined ten thousand times over.

  James had laid some linens over his worktable and otherwise cleared it save for the device.

  “I hope that those linens have been laundered,” said Richardson Johnson III.

  “Of course.”

  Richardson removed his shirt, and, with James’s assistance, lay down with the machine tucked underneath his left shoulder blade.

  “Now,” James said. “The machine will tell you who you are.”

  He tapped the neck or the arm of the machine and the needle pierced Richardson’s chest. It slid in, just as the needle of the smaller device did. Richardson protested that it hurt; James responded that it was a needle, after all. Desperately, Richardson ordered James to stop.

  “If I stop it now, the message will be incomplete,” James said. “I’m sure your father could have withstood the pain.”

  “Set me free!” Richardson shouted. As soon as he had done so, the needle stopped. Richardson could see—more or less, given that he was reading upside down, and the machine was still lodged in his chest and obstructing his view—that the machine had written exactly what he had asked: AN AMERICAN AND A GENTLEMAN OF SOUTH CAROLINA. Perhaps, as he read the script, he realized the irony of telling his slave to set him free. Unlikely, granted, but there are essentially no limits to the moral truths a person is capable of understanding for the few seconds it takes to forget them. We will never know what Richardson knew or for how long he knew it, though, because almost immediately the needle began to move again, rewriting AN AMERICAN AND A GENTLEMAN OF SOUTH CAROLINA, and then rewriting it again, each time cutting deeper and deeper into his flesh. “Set me free! Set me free!”

  Richardson kept screaming, and James could not quite say he was happy to be watching the man die. But there was more truth in the ripping of his repulsive pink skin than there could be in any words James’s device could possibly have written, more truth in the ink stains that formed on Richardson’s muscles as the needle tore them apart than there could be in any words the ink could possibly form.

  Richardson continued to scream, and white men arrived to come to his aid just as the needle was cracking Richardson’s breastplate on its way to puncturing his heart. Their first objective was to free Richardson from the needle in time to save his life, which they would not be able to accomplish; their next would be to hang James. The time had come to thrust his arms into the furnace. He took one last look at his beloved device—his true device, the one that could contain only an arm and the truth, not the cumbersome murder weapon that he had designed for a single use, the murder weapon that would have to be cracked open and destroyed to free the corpse of Richardson Johnson III. As the fire began to write on his forearms, James said a prayer to the God for and with whom he had created what neither called the epiphany machine. Whether the prayer requested that his device one day be used by those who could heed it, or whether the prayer requested that his device curse all who use it—or whether either prayer was heeded, or even heard—all of these questions are of course impossible to answer, and for James, they were perhaps even irrelevant. All that was relevant in the last seconds of his consciousness was that his arms were aflame and were embracing an overseer whose body would soon be ash, and that what had been written on the chest of Richardson Johnson III would soon be read by worms. All that was relevant was that James had brought to these uneducable people some tiny fraction of the misery and horror they deserved.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Now we come to what I have always thought of as the Suitcase Feeling.

  As I had told Adam, since I was going to Columbia, a short bus ride from his apartment, there was no reason for me to stop working for him. It would be no more inconvenient than many part-time jobs or other extracurricular endeavors. And I would certainly be more useful to him: studying at Columbia provided me with the opportunity to recruit my classmates to use the machine. Adam never brought that subject up, and
I had no reason to think he had ever thought about it. But it did provide me with the cover I needed to renounce him while I was packing.

  A caveat here: I’m not at all sure that I did renounce him while I was packing. It’s impossible to know at what point you decided to do something, though that rarely stops us from constructing stories about when we decided to do something. So, my story is that I stared at the stack of short-sleeved shirts in my suitcase and felt the Suitcase Feeling.

  What was the Suitcase Feeling? Naming our emotions is of course one of the most important things we do, and I do not know whether I felt revulsion or fear.

  The case for revulsion: I was packing for college, which I understood to be the time and place to ask fundamental questions about myself and the world, and yet I had aligned myself with a device that promised a shortcut around those questions. Worse, I was in a position to lure my classmates into that same shortcut if Adam ever asked me to, which he had not yet but might, in such a way that I would probably not register the request until I had already complied with it. Revulsion took over my body, revulsion with Adam, with the machine, with the entire apparatus of attitudes behind the machine. So I dumped all my short-sleeved shirts out of my suitcase and packed long-sleeved shirts instead.

  The case for fear: I would be entering college with a tattoo on my arm that advertised that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. If you need other people to think well of you, advertising that fact will guarantee the opposite result. And beyond my specific tattoo, my association with Adam would brand me as a follower, a weirdo, someone to whisper about rather than talk to. So I dumped all my short-sleeved shirts out of my suitcase and packed long-sleeved shirts instead.

  But all of this happened very quickly in my mind, and I can’t give an accurate accounting.

  No matter why I did it, my father walked into my room just as I was doing it. He looked at the short-sleeved shirts on the floor and gave me a look that I hadn’t seen from him in a long time: one of compassion and concern. “Venter,” he said. “You think you’ll be the only Ivy League freshman who’s DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS?”