The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  Were there messages from Adam to me? Maybe they were all in my head, or Ismail’s, or Leah’s. The play took the form of Adam convincing someone offstage to use the machine, and the names he named—Lennon, Chapman, Merdula, as well as the subjects of some of my testimonials—did not include mine. But it was hard to miss the significance of lines such as “I wish you could buy an insurance policy that would cover Protégé Abandonment” (nominally in reference to a different, fictional former protégé) and “Maybe there’s only so much you can do for a boy rejected by his mother” (nominally in reference to a real user who had killed himself shortly after using the machine). Adam was trying to tell me that I had hurt him, and he was trying to hurt me in return, if only to get me to come back to him. It was probably the most moved I’d ever felt.

  This time I was going to wait for Ismail and Leah. That also meant I was going to have to make awkward conversation with Rebecca, who, it turned out, was not there with the handsome dark-haired guy after all, which surprised me, since I had been certain that I was deluding myself into thinking that there was any chance they weren’t together.

  “Leah’s getting really good,” Rebecca said.

  “So is Ismail.”

  “I wish he’d give her more to work with. She does a really good job walking around as an old man, but she shouldn’t have to.”

  “It really pissed me off that he wrote about my mom and me.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t thinking about you. Just because you’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS doesn’t mean that other people have an opinion about you.”

  “Here we go.”

  “I’m sorry. I actually meant that to be comforting, but I know it didn’t come out that way. Also, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I really liked your story.”

  “Really?”

  I had given her a new story shortly before we had broken up. I had later decided the story was terrible and that it should be read by no one, but by that time, we were broken up and I assumed she would not read it anyway.

  “Oh yeah, it’s definitely the best work you’ve done. I know you wrote it when things were really bad between us; maybe that deepened your perspective.”

  I thought about the story again, and suddenly I could see how the characters were sharper than any other characters I had written. At this moment, Ismail came up to me from behind and hugged me.

  “You’ve got to admit, I’m getting better,” he said.

  “Ismail, man, you’re going to be the playwright of our generation.” I had said this before but it had been puffery; now it seemed like I was making a very safe prediction, like saying that the earth would continue to rotate around the sun ten years from now.

  “You were so great,” Rebecca said, grabbing Leah and putting her face close to hers. “You were in total command up there. But you should play a woman next time. I’m kidding!” She hadn’t been kidding, but I was glad she had said she was, so as not to imperil the evening. “Let’s go get pizza.”

  Over pizza—which Ismail ate with one hand while making notes about the play with the other—Leah and Ismail said that they were going to Adam Lyons’s apartment afterward to do a private performance for him.

  “We tried to get him to come tonight, but you know him, he never goes anywhere,” Leah said. “You guys should come!”

  “Sounds fun,” Rebecca said. “I’d love to meet Adam.”

  “No way,” I said. “No way.”

  “‘No way,’” Leah said, doing an impression of me that made both Ismail and Rebecca laugh loud enough to attract glances from the other NYU students gathered around. “‘No way.’”

  “Venter, man,” Ismail said. “Your grudge against our dude is getting boring.”

  “‘Our dude’?”

  “He’s totally our dude,” Leah said. “He was so helpful when we were putting this show together. Although the main reason was probably to get to you. Can you even articulate why you refuse to see him?”

  “I’m not going, and I don’t have to explain myself. Coming, Rebecca?”

  “I’m not your girlfriend anymore, Venter.”

  I had somehow forgotten this.

  “All right, fine,” I said. “Let’s go see Adam.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  As we approached Adam’s building, I thought I saw Si Strauss walking in the opposite direction, but I couldn’t be sure it was him, and besides, it wasn’t as though I was going to flag him down for a chat. Adam did not answer when we buzzed apartment 7; that should have provided me with the excuse I was looking for, but I felt compelled to do this now, and it’s difficult not to open a door when you have the key.

  When we arrived upstairs, Adam was sitting on the floor, his eyes closed and his white-haired belly bursting out of his shirt buttons. I thought he looked like the Buddha, and though I chastised myself for this bit of cultural appropriation like the dutiful liberal arts student I was, nonetheless he looked so beatific I could not understand how I had ever doubted his peculiar divine inspiration.

  “Is it okay that we’re here?” Ismail asked. Adam opened his eyes and saw me before he saw anyone else.

  “Is it okay that I’m here?” I asked.

  He was always terrible at hiding his delight. “I’m glad Venter’s here to see the show,” Adam said. “And I’m glad to see you all brought a new friend. Thank you for visiting my humble apartment. Let’s see if Leah can do something I’ve never been able to: do a convincing job of being me.”

  Leah repeated this, simultaneously charming Adam and beginning the show. Immediately, she was Adam again, so much so that the Adam who laughed and gasped seemed an intrusive Adam impersonator begging for attention. Ismail scribbled notes. I don’t want to give the impression that I had placed him under any kind of informal surveillance, but I was standing right next to him, so I snuck some glances at what he was writing.

  —L. thinks faster than you do, cut mercilessly and she will carry your meaning.

  —Is this whole play a forced gimmick?

  —Looking at her own breasts when talking about breastfucking—too easy a joke?

  —Are you letting American capitalism off the hook?

  —Revisit idea of prop arm? Maybe a whiteboard with erasable marker. We can use (velvet?) curtains to make it look like an arm.

  —Only so far you can go with one character.

  Midway through the performance, which Adam was without question loving, Leah-as-Adam did an impromptu version of “Your Mother Should Know,” inviting Adam to get up and dance with her, which he did eagerly. If he was perturbed at the prospect of dancing with himself—and Leah stayed unquestionably in character—he didn’t show it. Leah was dancing like Adam and Adam was dancing like Leah. This thought struck me so strongly that I was torn between the impulse to stop the dance so we could all talk about how brilliant my insight was, and the impulse to join in the dancing and not think at all.

  While I was debating which of these to try, Ismail dropped his notebook on the bar and started dancing, too, removing his button-down shirt to reveal his WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP tattoo. Now I wanted to start dancing, but I was afraid that doing so would make me look like a follower. So I just watched until Rebecca pulled me away and toward the purple velvet curtain.

  The thought that Rebecca intended to use the machine dawned on me only very slowly—only as we were actually passing through the curtain—and to my great horror. When she took off her sweater I looked at her forearm and pictured the OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES tattoo that she was walking toward, and I told her, as calmly as I could, that she should not be doing this.

  “What? It’s not like you’ve never seen me in a bra before.”

  I had been so focused on her forearm that I hadn’t registered that her torso was bare except for her bra.

  “That’s the machine? It doesn’t look as impressi
ve as I’d hoped,” she said.

  “A lot of people say it’s not the machine that’s impressive, it’s Adam.”

  “Adam? He seems okay. Funny, kind of like how my uncle is funny. I’m not sure what the big deal is, honestly.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment, and then we started kissing. I started fantasizing about fucking her on top of the machine, and as our hands moved that seemed to be what she wanted, too.

  Adam opened the velvet curtain. “About to have sex on my machine!” he said, laughing heartily. “That would be a first. Sorry I interrupted.”

  I hadn’t fully taken off my jeans or underwear, but my embarrassment was probably as visible as my erection.

  Rebecca was not embarrassed. “I’d like to use the machine now,” she said.

  “Is that a euphemism?” Adam asked.

  “No. My name is Rebecca Hart and I would like to use the machine.”

  Adam looked to me for some indication she was joking. I looked at Rebecca for some indication of whether she had told Adam her last name out of defiance, or as a way of getting out of using the machine.

  “It’s just a name,” Leah said, appearing through the velvet curtain.

  Adam looked to Leah and then to me again, and as soon as he realized that Rebecca Hart was in fact Rebecca Hart, his face melted into a rage I had never seen before.

  “You let a girl named Rebecca Hart get this close to my machine? Is this some kind of revenge you’re trying to take on me, Venter?”

  “If I’m going to kill my kids, shouldn’t I know that?” Rebecca asked.

  “If you’re going to kill your kids, I don’t want you within ten miles of my machine.”

  “That’s all just silliness,” Leah said, putting her chin on Adam’s shoulder. “You should let her use the machine so she can see that she has artistic aspirations—obligations—that she’s not fulfilling.”

  “I asked for the machine’s opinion, not yours,” Rebecca said. “And I wouldn’t talk about not fulfilling artistic obligations if I were you.”

  “Excuse me? You just saw me give me the performance of my life, twice.”

  “Playing an irrelevant windbag,” Rebecca said. “A total waste of your energy.”

  “This irrelevant windbag wants all of you out of his apartment,” Adam said. “Now.”

  “Adam,” I said, “we were all just fucking around.”

  “Exactly. And this is not a place for that. If you haven’t noticed that no matter what the appearances might be I am above all always serious, you haven’t noticed anything. You were right to cut off contact, Venter. Let’s stay estranged this time.”

  Angry at Adam and each other, Rebecca, Leah, and I made our way glumly through the apartment. At the doorway we were joined by Ismail, who had been in the bathroom. I told him that Adam was an asshole, and he agreed, though when I tried to elaborate both Rebecca and Leah disputed my version of events. I could tell Ismail was taking notes in his head, workshopping his play, and it made me hate him.

  “Writing makes you a bad person,” I said to Rebecca in the cab uptown. “It stops you from actually being in the world.”

  “I think that’s bullshit,” she said. “It’s bullshit if you have talent. And you do. Listen, Venter. A friend of my dad’s is letting me have his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen this summer, while I intern at the UN. I want you to live with me and write a novel. I want you to do nothing but write a novel. I’ll cover rent, groceries, whatever. Don’t argue. You’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, and my opinion is that you can and should do this.”

  Now that she mentioned it, this seemed like exactly what I should do.

  CHAPTER

  27

  So that summer, Rebecca had an internship, I had a novel that she was sure I could write, and we had an apartment, albeit one that belonged to a friend of her father’s, who had left a great deal of food behind along with a Post-it note exhorting us to enjoy it. On our first night in the place, we had vigorous and prolonged sex, in the course of which she shoved every appropriately sized vegetable in the kitchen inside herself, and also rubbed her (by then quite juicy) vagina on the arm of the sofa, against the standing lamp, and, in an impressive split, down the center of the glass coffee table in the living room while I lay underneath and gazed up. She got herself off, finally, by rubbing her clit up and down the long turquoise spine of a coffee table book about Majorca. I say finally, but she then wanted to put her pussy on each individual page of the book. I pulled her down to the carpet, both because by this point I was extremely aroused and because I was concerned about paper cuts. I pushed into her and it felt the way truly great thrusting can, like the mucous membrane of the world is helping you break through itself into something new and less petty.

  “Come in the ice-cube tray,” she said.

  “Huh?” I said, not only because she was on the pill and I usually came inside her.

  “The ice-cube tray,” she said. “Open the freezer and come in the ice-cube tray.”

  “Can’t I just . . .”

  “GO.”

  I hopped up and trotted the twenty feet from the living room to the freezer. My first instinct had been to open the freezer door and masturbate into the empty ice tray while it was sitting right there partially covered by frozen enchiladas, but obviously I wasn’t tall enough to do that, so I took the ice-cube tray out and put it on the counter. Rebecca grabbed my dick from behind with one hand, and with her other hand grabbed the ice-cube tray and turned on the faucet for a few seconds before shutting it off. Then she dropped the tray in the sink and stroked me hard. I was so turned on by whatever was happening that I came almost immediately, spraying and then dribbling into the ice-cube tray. Carefully, Rebecca put the ice-cube tray back in the freezer, and then she told me to go down on her on the floor.

  There’s nothing more CLOSED OFF than for a man to think that his own ejaculation means that sex is over, and though it probably is DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS to think about how hypothetical other people would judge my sexual performance, I nonetheless redoubled my effort to turn in credible cunnilingus.

  Surprisingly, this worked, or seemed to. Maybe she was so aroused that my poor showing didn’t matter. In any case, within a couple of minutes we were both into it. After I was done she nuzzled happily against my chest for a long time before jumping up again and pulling a Sharpie from her purse. She wrote VENTER’S ADORING SLUT on her forearm, attaching a little heart to the final T.

  I kissed her deeply, and then she told me that she wasn’t done. She told me to close my eyes, and when she told me to open them, she was holding glasses of whiskey for each of us, with ice cubes only in hers. She swirled the ice cubes around, waiting for them to melt. Waiting was threatening the mood, so she drank the whole thing in one gulp, ice cubes and all.

  “Yes!” she said, raising her hands in the air and shaking her breasts more than enough to make me want to continue our evening. “This place is fucking mine!”

  For the first time in my life, my body felt like something more than a duffel bag for my neuroses. Rebecca and I had had sex before, of course, but we had never become sex in the way we just had. Or maybe we had, but I hadn’t noticed it because up until now I had been too DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS to actually inhabit my body. This was the last time I would think about any of those words; from now on they would be illegible on my arm, as though I had gotten tattooed with Chinese characters I couldn’t read, as did so many Americans I had long disdained but now understood. The worst thing about words is that they mean something.

  • • •

  When I woke the next morning, Rebecca was in the bathroom, scrubbing at her arm as though it were cheese she was trying to grate. I had seen plenty of people scrubbing at their arms trying to get words off, but this was the first one that broke me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I�
�m sorry about what we did last night.”

  She put down the sponge and turned off the water. “I’m not sorry about what we did. I just wish I had used a different marker. Whatever, I’ll just wear a shirt and a blazer instead of a dress. That’s probably what I should do anyway. You’ve forced me to be a man, Venter, and for that I thank you.” She pecked my cheek and jogged past me, and got dressed very quickly. After asking me to make sure I did the dishes, she was gone.

  I was extremely angry about the way that she had just treated me, even though I couldn’t exactly say what was wrong about the way she had treated me, or even what that way was. All I knew was that what had happened, whatever it was, was too emotionally intense for me to start working on my book. I was tired, and also unsure about whether Rebecca felt that I had exploited her the previous night, which I did not think I had, although the most exploitive men are always certain that they are not exploiting anyone. Maybe what I should write about was whether or not I was an exploitative prick. But I could already tell I was going to write this in a stream of consciousness that would be an obvious rip-off of David Foster Wallace, who had visited Adam’s apartment in the early nineties but decided at the last minute not to get a tattoo, an incident that inspired many irritated monologues from Adam, in addition to the nineteen-page footnote in Infinite Jest in which Don Gately almost gets an epiphany tattoo.