The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  “I’m not hiding the truth about who I am. I just tend to get cold easily.”

  The temperature was warm during orientation week, so I was even more uncomfortable than I likely would have been otherwise. But the long-sleeved shirts did allow me to hide my tattoo even from my new roommate, Cesar Solomon.

  Cesar and I became good friends right away, talking endlessly about Kafka and Borges and Radiohead, conversations so absorbing that I barely noticed that I was ignoring emails from Adam about when I would visit. Cesar talked about his reverence for Merdula’s Only the Desert Is Not a Desert and had a couple of half-baked theories about Merdula’s identity; I was grateful when he didn’t mention the epiphany machine book. Then one night, just before we were supposed to go out to a party at a bar that would require fake IDs, I took a shower to freshen up. I was supposed to meet Cesar in somebody else’s room, so I thought I was safe, but he came back in while I was shirtless and drying off. I threw on a T-shirt but it was too late.

  “Holy shit! You have an epiphany tattoo.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a big fan of the machine that killed John Lennon?”

  “Mark David Chapman used the machine before he killed Lennon. It didn’t make him do it.”

  Cesar pounded out a few bars of “Working Class Hero” on the keyboard that he had brought and that took up most of our room. “Merdula’s epiphany machine book is crap. Doesn’t hold a candle to Only the Desert. Only the Desert gets to the heart of man’s essential isolation; the epiphany machine book is just a bunch of random stories that don’t add up to anything. The portrait of Lennon is two-dimensional and unconvincing. So this is why you only wear long-sleeved shirts?”

  I nodded.

  “Why did you choose that tattoo? It’s not going to be easy to hook up with girls if they see that thing as soon as you take off your shirt.”

  “I didn’t choose the tattoo.”

  “Right, the dude chooses for you. What’s his name? Adrian Lyne?”

  “Adam Lyons. Adrian Lyne is a movie director.”

  “Right. Fatal Attraction. Like your attraction to a device that killed one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.”

  “We’ve been talking about music for days. I didn’t even know you were a Beatles fan.”

  “I haven’t talked about oxygen either, but I like it and I think it’s important. I have to be honest with you: I’m a little weirded-out that my roommate belongs to a cult.”

  “I don’t ‘belong’ to it. And it’s not a cult.”

  “So you don’t belong to it, meaning that you went to this place and got your tattoo and haven’t been back since?”

  “No, that’s not exactly right.”

  “How many times have you been back? Once? Twice?”

  “I mean, a bunch.”

  “So, like, once every few months?”

  “More than that.”

  “Once every couple of months?”

  “I worked for him for a while, okay?” I was surprised to hear myself talking about working for him in the past tense. “It’s not a cult. It just offers guidance. It’s not like it hypnotizes people into doing its bidding.”

  “So Mark David Chapman just happened to get a tattoo.”

  “He might also have listened to John Coltrane that day. That doesn’t mean that John Coltrane is responsible.”

  “And we know that he was reading The Catcher in the Rye. A hit, a most palpable hit.” This was a line from Hamlet that Cesar had already established a habit of quoting every time I made a decent point. “So why did you use it?”

  “Both my parents used the machine, and I . . .”

  “And you never really questioned it?”

  “I questioned it all the time.”

  “But they forced you to use it?’

  “No! I never knew my mother.” At this point, I was more or less consciously using this to get him to back off. It didn’t work.

  “Okay. Your father forced you to use the machine.”

  “My father hated the machine, and so did I.”

  “Because you’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. If he had loved the machine, you would have loved it, too.”

  “I’d like to think I’m smart enough that I would have seen through it if my father believed in it.”

  “Of course you’d like to think that.”

  I did not like being someone else’s entertainment, but I felt that I needed to get through this so that he would continue to like me. Which obviously suggested that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. But I tried to ignore that.

  “Your parents are atheists and so are you,” I said. “Does that make you DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS?”

  “A hit, a most palpable hit. But eventually you started to believe in the machine. Which must have been why, when you moved in here, your father set up your computer in silence and then left.”

  “My mother abandoned me because of the machine. I went to Adam Lyons because . . .”

  “Because you felt like an orphan and needed his opinion of you.”

  “I wanted to find my mother.”

  “And did you?”

  “He had no idea where she was.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what he said.”

  “So what did you do to look for her after that?”

  Cesar must have seen the answer in my face, because he laughed.

  “So Adam Lyons diverted your mission to find your mother into a mission to, what, do some odd jobs for him, I’m guessing? This guy sounds like quite the magician. But instead of distracting you with a hot assistant, he distracts you with your own self-loathing.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Look, Venter, I’m sorry for laughing. I’m sorry for laughing, because this is serious. I’ve talked to you enough in the last few days to know that you’re a very smart guy. If Adam Lyons has made such an impression on you, he must be really dangerous. We need to break you free from him completely.”

  It’s not exactly to my credit that I went along with him. But, like most people who lead us astray, he had raised some good points.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Cesar and I arrived to a crowded and boozy salon night. The joyful revelers celebrating their self-knowledge immediately looked like a bunch of pathetic drunks. I felt a pinch of anguish, because I was not completely oblivious and understood that my newfound scorn was mostly the product of Cesar’s influence. I’m not even sure that the night was any boozier or more crowded than usual. Seeing what I saw now merely confirmed that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.

  “Venter,” said a drunk guy who grabbed my arm. I recognized him from previous salon nights but didn’t know his name. He was big and wore a big black fedora. I had previously thought he looked mysterious and wise, but now he looked like he was trying to substitute a Blues Brothers costume for a personality. “I want to give you my testament.”

  “Testimonial.”

  “Whatever. I want you to tell my story. I was born on November 15, 1956, and I used the epiphany machine on February 14, 1994.”

  “I don’t have my tape recorder with me,” I said. “I can’t do this now.”

  “Wait, do what now?” Cesar asked.

  “I knew it was my fault that Sarah had left me,” the guy continued. “No, wait, it was Anna who had left me, or maybe I left her. Anyway, Anna and Sarah, I loved them both and I lost them both. I had just moved to New York and had just lost my job—no, wait, maybe I lost my job after I used the machine.”

  “It was nice talking to you,” I said, “but I have to go find Adam.”

  Cesar stopped me and loudly read the tattoo on the guy’s forearm.

  WOULD RATHER BE RIGHT THAN HAPPY BUT IS USUALLY NEITHER

  “If you�
�re usually not right,” Cesar asked, “how do you know you’re right about this?”

  “I’m not right,” said the Blues Brothers guy. “The tattoo is right.”

  “Do you really think that’s specific enough to mean anything?” Cesar asked.

  “It might be true for a lot of people, but it’s definitely true for me.”

  Cesar turned to me. “‘It might be true for a lot of people, but it’s definitely true for me.’ Is that like a supplemental tattoo that everybody gets? Or does Adam proclaim it and convince everybody that they came up with it themselves?”

  This was hardly a new thought to me, but I had rejected and repressed it. Hearing it out of Cesar’s mouth made me feel stupid for rejecting and repressing it. But it had always felt small-minded not to reject and repress it.

  “He is good at making people think what he thinks,” I said.

  “He’s good at brainwashing people.”

  “Except for corners,” Adam said, emerging from the backroom. “I can never get the corners of people’s brains clean, no matter how hard I scrub.” He elbowed the ex-boyfriend of Sarah and Anna out of the way, and then he looked at me and mimicked my unhappy face. “The prodigal son returns and is he ever pissed. Who’s your friend?”

  “This is my roommate, Ce—”

  “You go to Columbia with this guy? I would expect a more sophisticated choice of words from an Ivy League student than ‘brainwashing,’ a nonsense term that people use to make themselves sound like they’re not scared. Tell me his name again.”

  “Cesar Solomon.”

  “Don’t tell him my last name,” Cesar said. “I don’t want to end up on any mailing lists for recruitment literature.”

  “Too late,” Adam said. “I already have your name, so I’m going to start mailing out recruitment literature for the sole purpose of harassing you.”

  I felt an urge to be conciliatory that I couldn’t explain, at least beyond the obvious fact that I wanted them both to like me. “It seems like the two of you are getting off on the wrong foot.”

  “That reminds me of the punch line to one of my favorite jokes,” Adam said. “Have I ever told it to you, Venter? It’s about two foot fetishists who are married to twin sisters.”

  Cesar laughed appreciatively, which surprised me.

  “If this cult-leader thing doesn’t work out,” Cesar said, “you have a career ahead of you as a Borscht Belt comedian fifty years ago.”

  “Venter, your friend’s remarks remind me a little of your friend Leah. But I have to admit that these stabs at witty banter are less appealing coming from a rude, smug eighteen-year-old boy than from a smart, open eighteen-year-old woman.”

  “Maybe I want to use the epiphany machine and I’m just nervous,” Cesar said, “so this is a defense mechanism.”

  “Oh, I would say that’s a strong probability. And admitting what you want under the guise of sarcasm is another ‘defense mechanism,’ if you want to call it that. Another thing to call it would be ‘a boringly typical way for a teenager to hide.’”

  “Why do you think I’m being sarcastic? Show me the machine and let me use it.”

  I looked at Cesar and tried to gauge whether he was serious. He seemed to be.

  “The epiphany machine is not a joke,” Adam said, “and I don’t appreciate it being treated as a joke. Venter, please get this guy out of here.”

  “Why don’t you want him to use the machine?” I asked. “Are you afraid he’ll see that the machine is a fake? That he’ll figure out how you’ve rigged it to write whatever you want it to write?”

  “Oh, yeah. Of all the people who’ve used the machine over the last four decades, this kid is the first one I’ve ever been intimidated by. This is the child who will bring the machine to ruin! He is the Chosen One.”

  The salon-night crowd let out a loud laugh at this, a mob laugh, a laugh joined in even by people who were too far away to have heard what Adam said, but who did not want to be the only ones not laughing.

  “Where’s my mother?” I asked.

  Adam patted his pockets, then dropped to his knees one creak at a time—a slow process that required some of his acolytes to step out of the way and look on nervously as they wondered whether to lend a hand. Once he was on the floor, he searched under the bar. “Rose? Are you down there? I think there might be an old bottle of rosé under here somewhere. Does that count?”

  “You’ve taken advantage of me, dangling hope that my mother will one day reappear while I do all this work for you.”

  With some difficulty, Adam pushed himself back to his feet. “When have I dangled that hope? I said that it’s possible she might come by at some point. That was true when I said it, and it’s true now. It’s certainly more likely she’ll come to see me than it is that she’ll come to see you. I’ve ignored my misgivings about you. As though anybody with a DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS tattoo could ever be anything other than a sniveling, toadying coward. I always knew I would be punished if I ignored my own machine, and I guess that punishment is you. Rose, on the other hand, always knew how to read people. She got you right from the minute you fell out of her.”

  I imagined myself taking a lunge at him, but I didn’t need an epiphany tattoo to tell me that I would just stand there as those words ate into me.

  “Building you up and tearing you down is classic cult behavior,” Cesar said. “He’s trying to make you feel like shit so that he can control you.”

  “It sounds like you’re trying to make him feel like shit so you can control him, Charlemagne Augustus or whatever your name is. It sounds like that’s why you came here. And it sounds like that will be good for everyone. I thought that if Venter interviewed enough people he would see that everybody’s foolish and nobody’s opinion is worth listening to, but it’s clear to me that he needs someone to tell him what to think, and I don’t want to be the one to do it anymore.”

  I sputtered incoherently for about a minute before Cesar tugged at my shirt and pulled me out of the apartment.

  “Good riddance!” shouted the Blues Brothers guy. “Don’t come back and beg for forgiveness.”

  “Oh, shut up, Jim. Go back to Sarah or Anna,” Adam said as Cesar slammed the door.

  “This is good,” Cesar said on the stairs. “You’ve closed the door, quite literally, on your pre-college life, and now you’re open to what comes next. I’m proud to have you as a roommate.”

  This was so stilted that even I noticed how stilted it was, especially since I hadn’t been the one who literally closed the door. Of course I can’t be sure, but I think I had a premonition of what was to come over the next several weeks: Cesar would decide that the cult stench clung to me, embodied by my tattoo, and press me to get it removed, which I would refuse to do, and then he would lose interest in me entirely, abandoning me as a rehabilitation project and, instead, relegating me to the “weird roommate” he could count on to make for a funny story when I wasn’t around.

  I knew I wasn’t going to get my tattoo removed. That was the one thing I knew that I would never do. Maybe I thought, without any reason to think so, that the tattoo served as some kind of beacon, and would one day lead my mother to me, assuming she wanted to find me. (I decided after the night I broke with Adam that I did not want to find her, if she did not want me to find her; this seemed nobler than simply being too lazy and diffident to properly search for her.) In any case, no matter how foolish I may be, I have some sense of when something has become part of my skin.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Over the first couple of months of school, I did my best to bury myself in reading, since, after all, I was looking at the great ancient Greek texts that addressed all the questions the machine purported to answer. Unfortunately, the great ancient Greek texts seemed to teach only that one should not have sex with one’s mother or challenge a god, both of which seeme
d kind of obvious and, since I had neither a mother nor a god, irrelevant.

  In November, a girl came up to me and asked whether I was the guy who had used the epiphany machine. I did not want to answer yes, but she was already at my arm and my sleeve had rolled up a bit, revealing most of the final letter, S. My embarrassment must have been pretty easy to spot as I pulled my sleeve down, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me if I wanted to get a beer. I had a lot of reading to do before meeting up with Ismail and Leah that night—the first time we would be hanging out since school started, as I had kept putting off seeing them ever since they had, as I had predicted, gotten back together. So I told the girl no, I had to get to the library, but kept walking with her.

  She talked rapturously about a band I had never heard of, and it was fun to listen to her talk, until she asked me what my favorite band was. I was so nervous I could not even think of a band name.

  “The Beatles,” I said.

  She laughed and clapped. “The Beatles! Of course. God, you’re so natural, you’re so . . . yourself. Most guys would try to impress me by picking some really obscure band, but obviously those bands aren’t anywhere near as good as the Beatles. I asked you what your favorite band was, and you told me the answer and didn’t worry about how it would make you look.”

  “Are you making fun of me? Do you already know my tattoo?”

  “I’ve just heard you’ve used the machine, that’s all. Can I see?”

  “I’d really rather wait to show you.”

  “I get it,” she said. “You’re not that kind of girl.”

  I continued insisting that I had to go to the library, but we sat down at the West End, a bar at which I had dreamed of drinking ever since I had read in tenth grade or so that Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had once drunk there, as though drinking beer at this particular bar would constitute taking my place in the line of literary greats rather than simply taking my place in the line of college students who drink beer.