The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  I looked at Douglas, thinking of how I would explain away what had been the most intense several seconds of my life. But he hadn’t noticed. Instead, he was staring at the flyer. Or rather at the drawing on the flyer.

  “We have to go to this address,” he said.

  Adam opened the door smelling of whiskey, which was more or less how I expected men to smell, and acting immediately like Adam, which was not how I expected men to act. I was mildly charmed, but mostly I was impatient for Douglas to stop talking about all of his doubts about whether the music of the dead was a waste of his life. I just wanted the right moment to strike for me to ask about the girl who handed us the flyers. But Douglas hardly stopped talking until he was in Adam’s chair. It all happened so quickly that I barely had time even to figure out what the epiphany machine was. I pointed out to Douglas that letting a stranger put a needle in your arm could not be a good idea for a violinist, if it was a good idea for anyone, but he couldn’t be dissuaded. When I saw his tattoo, MUST MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS, I blushed and thought of my prayer. Douglas jumped up and down and said that this was true, he had to emigrate to the Soviet Union so that he could work with his hands in a factory and join the liberated proletariat.

  “Slow down,” Adam said, laughing. “Sit with your epiphany; let it work its way into you. Don’t make any sudden changes. And where are our manners? We should offer the lady a turn.”

  There was no way I was going to let that thing anywhere near my arm. But this was my opportunity to ask about the bald tattooed girl. And I didn’t take it. I knew that if I asked about her it would change the course of my life, and I just wasn’t ready. Not being ready cost me years of my life.

  Douglas talked a lot about his plan with me that first night—he was going to defect during an upcoming tour of the Eastern Bloc—but he stopped mentioning it after that, and it never occurred to me that he was actually going to do it. I didn’t think that this boy who was still so obsequious with my father had it in him. When I stepped outside one morning during the tour and saw his face all over the newsstands, tattooed with headlines accusing him of treachery, I felt happy for him that he had actually had the courage to do something, and much happier for myself that I wouldn’t have to marry him.

  The following months did not make me happy. I was the jilted fiancée of Comrade Harrican, and everyone wanted to interview me and/or tell me how sorry they felt for me. It didn’t make sense to me why Douglas had done something so silly, but I could see now how fame could make you insane.

  Speaking of which, around this same time John Lennon used the machine. Douglas’s use of the machine was not yet known—I had no interest in telling anyone about it, and neither, apparently, did Douglas—so no one connected the two cases at the time. I had no interest in Lennon or his music either before or after his use of the machine. Lovesick boys who are mad in equal measure at war and at girls who don’t return their affection have never held much appeal for me. But I did notice some reports that Lennon had been handed his flyer by a bald girl with a tattoo.

  I thought a lot about going back to Adam’s apartment and asking about her. There were times when I got in a cab and got out in front of his building. But I could never bring myself to ring the buzzer for apartment 7.

  There wasn’t much else I could bring myself to do, either. I had no purpose in life except to find a husband, and I knew by now that I would never have any interest in doing that, so I didn’t have any interest in doing anything. For a few years after that, no one in our circle wanted to be seen with me, for fear that I carried some kind of Soviet contagion. I mostly lay in bed in my room in my father’s penthouse, waiting to pass from sought-after prize to invisible old maid. I preferred that role, although I would have preferred no role at all. I read a lot of novels, less to find a model of a person to be than to experience life without being any kind of person at all. The world is such an interesting place to spend two or five or seven or ten decades, and it struck me as a shame that I had to spend those decades as one person, with particular proclivities and experiences. So limiting. So I tried to live without those things.

  Eventually my circle’s memory of Douglas wore off. By this time, my attachment to my books and my bed had grown enervating, just like, I thought, any long-term relationship.

  Occasionally, my father insisted I go to dinner with the son of one or another of his friends, including a date with Si Strauss. I had heard rumors that Si was now funding the epiphany machine, but he was very cagey and would not admit his involvement. I wanted with my entire being to ask him about the bald tattooed girl, but instead I just let him talk the whole time about a youth-league baseball team he was coaching. Sweet but boring.

  Another rich man’s son I was compelled to let take me to dinner was Caleb. As far as I could tell he was doing nothing with his life, but he spent most of our first date talking about how much he despised the poor. When he ended our first date by proposing to me, I wondered what he thought our connection was, and then I suddenly realized that neither of us had anything to offer beyond our family’s wealth, and that this was as strong a bond with another human being as I was likely to find. I wanted to cry, but instead I said: Sure, okay.

  My father was happy, though he reminded me not to give up my virginity before my wedding night. I didn’t mention that I had already lost my virginity to Douglas, and I certainly didn’t mention that I would prefer never to have sex with any man again, either before or after marriage. I just said: Sure, okay.

  Once again, wedding preparations. Caleb got very jealous very quickly. Every time a man looked at me I could count on Caleb flying into a rage. I told him over and over again that none of those men appealed to me, which was extremely true, but he refused to believe me. I did have a brief affair with a coat-check girl, but he didn’t notice that. He started accusing me of marrying him for his money, which was absurd given my father’s wealth. He started getting obsessed with Douglas, thinking I had never gotten over the man who had left me for Russia. Exasperated with this particular avenue of his paranoia, I told him that I had lost any interest I had in Douglas when he used the epiphany machine, a bizarre device for the dumb and credulous.

  It turned out that Caleb was a devoted fan of John Lennon—a fellow pathologically jealous guy—and was ecstatic to learn that I knew where the epiphany machine was. He said that this could solve all of our problems. All I had to do was use the epiphany machine to prove to him that I loved him.

  It’s hard to say why I didn’t just refuse and leave him. But breaking off another engagement would mean another round of pity and scorn from everyone I knew, and I just couldn’t face that. So I agreed to go with Caleb to Adam’s apartment.

  Adam recognized me immediately and gave me a very gentlemanly, if probably mocking, kiss on the hand. This did not seem to make Caleb jealous, since this man was John Lennon’s prophet and therefore his own. My tattoo was GIVES AWAY WHAT MATTERS MOST, which I immediately knew was completely accurate and therefore made me completely furious.

  Caleb thought this was confirmation that I was marrying him for his money and cheating on him, so he called off our engagement. My father thought it was confirmation that I had had sex with Caleb, and he was livid with me, but far angrier at Adam for tattooing on his daughter what he took to be a declaration of her whorishness. He hadn’t seemed to care about Si’s rumored involvement with the epiphany machine when he insisted I go to dinner with him, but now that his daughter had this filthy thing on her arm, he was furious at the Strauss family for funding this monstrous operation; he told me he wanted to sue. I was angry and adrift enough that I agreed.

  Preparing for the lawsuit gave me something I hadn’t had in a long time: purpose. I wanted to be as involved with the firm we hired as I could. I especially liked one paralegal working on the case, a girl named Rose, who tried hard to disguise her Queens accent and—I remember distinctly—wore a brand-new fox fur coat.
I was very surprised when she showed up at my apartment one night and told me I had to drop the lawsuit.

  She told me that Adam’s work was important, and the epiphany machine had showed her who she was. She took off her coat and showed me her tattoo: ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST. I told her that this was very similar to my tattoo and just provided evidence that Adam was a charlatan, who made vague, interchangeable judgments.

  “‘Abandons’ is very different from ‘gives away,’” Rose said. “I don’t know you very well, but you seem like someone who gives away. I abandon.”

  I did not find this persuasive and asked her to leave my home. I was saddened that Adam had brainwashed this bright, hardworking girl, and I did not relish the prospect of calling the firm to tell them to fire her, but I did so the next morning. They told me she had already quit.

  A few weeks later, I came home to find Rose waiting outside my building. My first instinct was to call the police, but then she took a couple of steps toward me and I saw a bald head and blue eyes behind her. I immediately recognized those eyes.

  Lillian and I went to a coffee shop and stayed until closing. People stared at Lillian, and I tried to shoo them away, but she told me that she didn’t care about the way that they were staring at her, because of the way that I was staring at her. She had felt the same connection that I felt that night with Douglas, and she had been waiting for the epiphany machine to find me again. When Adam told her that I was the same woman who had been engaged to Douglas, she knew it had finally happened. We walked together all night. She told me she thought that the Beatles got at universal longings that lay beyond personality, and it was her desire to get past personality that led her to adopt her androgynous, anonymous look. She was proud to be the inspiration for Loretta Martin and Polythene Pam. To this day I think that the Beatles get at nothing more universal than subjugating women and stealing from black people—so, universal for heterosexual white men—but the Beatles are still pretty much the only thing we’ve ever disagreed about. She told me she had been working for a few years as a sous chef in a French restaurant, and we immediately started making plans to open a restaurant together.

  I brought Lillian home to my father and told him we were in love, expecting that he would throw me out and we would never speak again and I wouldn’t have a penny to my name. That was almost what happened, but he was so eager to get me out of New York and away from the eyes of his friends that he gave me enough money to get started. Lillian and I opened up a small French restaurant in Phoenix that is thriving to this day. For a while, Lillian and I were the only employees; eventually we brought on a third, but that’s as big as the operation has gotten. I come to New York every once in a while for business, but mostly to thank Adam. If my arm were clean, my life would be so squalid.

  CHAPTER

  25

  The pressure to be constantly happy at the best time of our lives often made both Rebecca and me cranky and quick to find fault, particularly after we returned for sophomore year. We were two kids who liked to fuck and who hated each other.

  Exactly why we hated each other was too difficult to decide. But Rebecca offered many ideas:

  “I hate you because you have your head so far up your ass you don’t even know why I hate you.”

  “I hate you because this isn’t Annie Hall and I can’t bring out James Joyce to tell you he hates you.”

  “I hate you because you act like you’re a goddamn hero when you wash your fucking towels.”

  “I hate you because you put in just barely enough effort in bed to make me feel guilty for criticizing you, and literally no more effort than that.”

  “I hate you because this isn’t Annie Hall and I can’t bring out Steven Merdula to tell you he hates you.” She was fond of this construction.

  “I hate you because you joined a cult to search for your mother and then you barely bothered to try to find her.”

  “I hate you because you’re scared of everything. And to be scared is to scramble the sacred.”

  To this one I responded: “Which self-help writer is that?”

  “Do you have any idea how much I could be accomplishing right now if, instead of listening to you belittle me for reading self-help, I was doing literally anything else? I could be having much more adventurous sex, and with lots of different guys. I could be getting really good at sex. I could be studying my ass off every minute that it wasn’t getting fucked if only I wasn’t sitting around in your room dozing off to Friends or Fellini all the fucking time. I could be doing so much better in school. For the rest of my life, I’m going to regret every minute I’m spending with you.”

  “So then why do you spend so many minutes with me?”

  “I don’t know. I promised my therapist that I was going to break up with you. She told me she won’t keep seeing me if I don’t break up with you by the end of the month.”

  “Are therapists supposed to do that?”

  “People do all sorts of shit they’re not supposed to do, Venter. You’d know that if you weren’t so fucking DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Or maybe CLOSED OFF. That would be a good epiphany for you, too.”

  And so on. I said a lot of mean things, too, but I remember those less well. One night in the first few weeks of sophomore year I got so mad at Rebecca that I emailed Adam asking whether I could bring my girlfriend—I didn’t mention her last name—to use the epiphany machine. By the time I woke up, Adam had already responded.

  Hey buddy,

  Things have been boring as hell since the Great Rift. I like to say sometimes that Hollywood is the real epiphany machine, and Hollywood is right on target that when you’re my age and you’ve found a surrogate son, you can defuse three nuclear bombs before breakfast and then breastfuck three blondes at night, and it won’t mean a goddamn thing if you lose that surrogate son. The other day, a guy came to a salon night, a guy who used the machine a few years ago and had gotten a tattoo that was something like WILL REGRET NEGLECTING OFFSPRING, and he came up to me and he had tears in his eyes and he kept thanking me over and over, telling me that because of the tattoo he had volunteered to coach his daughter’s soccer team, and that now they were close, and he could hear an obvious difference in the way his daughter said “I love you,” like she really meant it now, and he just kept on thanking me over and over again for breaking whatever it was in him that was keeping him from his daughter. He was exactly the reason I do what I do, and I just wanted to punch him in the face so bad. Why does he get to have someone who carries on his legacy, and I don’t? Why did I sacrifice the most profound relationship I’ve had since John died? I should have been easier on you when you were trying to look cool for your friend. I hoped you wouldn’t act like a teenager, which is too much to ask even of old men like me. Everybody likes to act like a teenager.

  Anyway, bring your girl over anytime. Can’t wait to meet her, and to see you again.

  Yours, [not my usual signoff]

  A.L. (Asshole Liar, if that’s what you want my initials to stand for)

  By that morning, my desire to inflict pain or knowledge on Rebecca had evaporated, and it felt rude and manipulative of Adam to treat me as though I were still the person I had been the previous night. In a way, responding to the email would have shown that I cared what he thought about me, which would have meant that I was DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Sometimes not responding to an email is the only way to ethically engage with the universe. In any case, I didn’t respond.

  I didn’t respond to his follow-up emails either. It became a weekly ritual: every Tuesday morning, an email from Adam. Each unreturned. Not returning Adam’s emails was, in some ways, the closest I had ever felt to taking an action to stay true to myself.

  Hey buddy,

  I’m impressed that you keep ignoring me. Takes balls to be a dick for no reason. Keep doing it until you’ve proven to yourself whatever you need to prove to yourself. I’
ll keep writing.

  Yours,

  A.L. (Alien Lighthouse)

  These emails from Adam continued up through the premiere of Ismail’s play about him, which Ismail did wind up writing and which did star Leah. The two of them spent much of our sophomore year with Adam, preparing for the play. To get as full a sense as possible of the machine and how it affected people, they even took up my testimonial project. They kept on trying to get me to come with them to see Adam, and I kept on refusing. Rebecca intermittently expressed interest, but Ismail and Leah demurred from bringing her; no one was sure how Adam would react to meeting another Rebecca Hart.

  By the time of the play’s premiere in April, Ismail and Leah had gotten a lot of attention within NYU, and this play was much, much better attended than the first one I had seen with Rebecca. Rebecca and I were both in the audience for this one, too, but we technically weren’t there together, since this was during another period when we were broken up and barely speaking. (We had a tense phone conversation about her attendance in advance: I considered Leah and Ismail my friends rather than our friends; Rebecca pointed out that they both liked her better than they liked me, which struck me as true but still, somehow, irrelevant.) I arrived after her to find her sitting next to a dark-haired guy who looked like a more handsome version of me. He said something that made her laugh, though that didn’t mean that they were there together, since the theater was packed.

  Ismail’s Adam was not exactly mine—his Adam was less ambiguously a Falstaff rather than a Rasputin, always straightforwardly well-meaning even at his most grandiose and garrulous. But it was hard to deny the clarity and force of Ismail’s writing. I knew he had received some mentorship from Catherine Pearson, both on how to write dialogue and how to capture Adam, and this mentorship had clearly paid off.

  One major caveat to the quality of the play: some of the diatribes against American culture—the “I don’t know if the past was better, but the present is definitely worse” stuff—tipped heavily into speechifying, with long, didactic stretches about things like perfume ads and action-movie sequels, things so obviously terrible they were more interesting to defend than to attack. When I later read these passages again in press coverage of Ismail, it did seem to me that Ismail had soured on America in a troubling way. But, during the performance, I was focused less on Ismail’s writing than on the brilliance of Leah’s portrayal. Her impersonation of a portly sixty-year-old man should have been gimmicky at best, but she moved across the stage with calm command of his literal and metaphorical weight, and though her voice sounded nothing like his, it sounded more like him than he sounded like himself.