The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He dreams of his house in Beirut, the bedroom that he pretended was a cockpit. When he wakes up, he thinks of the Palestinian refugee camp.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Another dentistry student is also a preacher. Even in class, Aysel says, this student is loud, full of opinions that have nothing to do with the mouth, though his mouth is always open wide. And yet there is something about him and what he says. He conducts services in a small cinderblock mosque known as “The Box.” Aysel does not want to go.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. The Box is very dark and the services last for a very long time. At midnight, Ziad wants to leave and drink beer, but the dental student preacher yells at him, tells him to stay. Ziad does not know why he complies, but he does. The dental student preacher continues talking, and slowly something happens to the room. By the end, which must be three in the morning, Ziad feels as though he has been suspended high in the sky in a very small space.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He goes to the Box again, and then again.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. This world is nothing compared to the next, and yet what happens to Muslims in this world cannot be tolerated.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. It is Islam or Aysel. The Box or the box. This joke makes him feel cruel, but sometimes to do God’s work it is necessary to be cruel. He tells Aysel that they cannot see each other anymore.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He cannot sleep for the lack of Aysel. He cannot pay attention in class or even during services. He asks Aysel for forgiveness, and they are reunited.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Aysel’s clothes show too much skin. She talks too much. She drinks too much. She is not a suitable companion. She must be corrected or forsaken.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He loves her and he is sorry for the things he has said. He loves her and wants to study dentistry like her. He will be going to Hamburg to study dentistry like her. They will live apart but stay together.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. A mouth is like a cockpit. It is a small space and there will be pleasures in learning to control it. But there is nothing more repellent than what is inside a mouth.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. A mouth is like a cockpit at the bottom of the world.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Aysel’s mouth is not like a cockpit at the bottom of the world.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. They marry but continue to live apart. Aysel insists that he sign a contract stating that she is entitled to continue her medical studies. Later he will try to make her quit her medical studies anyway; she will take the contract to an imam, who will side with her.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Cover yourself, Aysel.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. When Aysel visits him, he does not introduce her to his new friends in Hamburg because they would not approve of the way she dresses, or of her.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Of his friends, the obvious leader is a man so rigid and humorless it is difficult not to laugh at him. How can you laugh when there are people dying in Palestine, this man says. Once, they all hear this rigid and humorless man urinating in the bathroom. When he comes out they point at him and mock him, and he blames what has happened on a faulty door made by Jews. He is not joking. Of course he is not joking.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He wants to dismiss this rigid and humorless man as the buffoon he appears to be, but he keeps thinking about the Palestinian refugee camp a few blocks from the bedroom he pretended was a cockpit.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. His friends live together, but he lives alone. Living with the others would mean giving up sex with Aysel; it would mean giving up Aysel altogether.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He says to Aysel’s friends that today he is with them, but tomorrow he will kill them. He is trying to scare them, of course, but he does not know whether he is trying to scare them only because he is bored.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He hits Aysel.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Aysel writes to tell him that she has had an abortion.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He tells her he is going to return to Beirut, to figure out what he wants to do with his life.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He does not go to Beirut.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Aysel hears rumors that he has gone to Afghanistan. Panicked, she makes phone call after phone call to try to find him. She receives phone calls from men she does not know who tell her that Ziad is fine. This does not ease her worries.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. She receives a letter from him with a Yemeni postmark. He says he misses her. He says he wants to have a child with her. He writes the word “child” in three languages.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He shows up at Aysel’s door, his arms filled with gifts, including a skirt much shorter than ones he once told her were too short. For the first time in a long time he does not have a beard, so it does not scratch when they kiss.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He will not tell her where he has been or what he has been doing. But he seems relaxed. She senses that some battle has been waged in his mind between her and his terrible friends, and that she has won. There is more good news: he has decided what he wants to do with his life. He is going to fulfill his childhood dream and become a pilot.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Aysel is ecstatic. She imagines their life together. They will finally live together while he studies flying. Then she will be a dentist, he will be a pilot, they will have children. They could live in Istanbul, in Beirut, anywhere where the skies are occasionally blue and the teeth inexorably rot. What could be more perfect?

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. There is a message on the answering machine for him from a flight school in Florida. Aysel is furious; he explains that he can get his license more quickly in the United States than anywhere else.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He is the first to arrive in Florida, living by himself and at long last sitting in an actual cockpit. Not quite an actual cockpit, a flight simulator, but the cockpit will come soon. Maybe some part of him hopes that the others will die in a plane crash over the Atlantic, and he will be left alone in America, but this does not happen and the others arrive.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He logs flight hour after flight hour. He does not want to stop logging flight hours.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. With some friends he has made in flight school, he flies to the Bahamas. He sits with them and watches the sun over the ocean and the sand and the girls in bikinis rub suntan lotion on each other, and he wonders why such a sight is supposed to offend. The rest get very drunk, and they ask him to fly them home.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. It is a very small cockpit, a very small plane, a very short flight, but nonetheless it is a cockpit and a plane and a flight. The controls, they are all in his hands, and the wings are in the sky because of what he has done. The nose does as he tells it. He looks down at a cloud and wonders whether God is watching him, and for just a moment he does not care.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He moves in wi
th two of his classmates, sleeping on their couch. Or rather not sleeping, because he is thinking of what he loves, flying and Aysel. He loves talking to his classmates. They are certainly more fun than the others, particularly the rigid and humorless man whom he cannot avoid forever.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Maybe it is not too late to back out, to refuse to go through with the plans.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. One of his classmates questions his flying ability. He does not respond well.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. His father has heart surgery. He flies to Beirut to visit. He tells his father he is living in America and learning to be a pilot. His father is worried but says he is proud of him. America and the sky: What better places were there, really? On his way back to Florida, he stops in Germany to see Aysel. He tells her he wants to have children soon so that his father can see them before he dies.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Children scream and throw crayons throughout the flight back to Florida. There is an attractive woman in the seat next to him. His father is probably fine.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. The rigid and humorless man keeps pushing back the plans, which means that Ziad does not have to make a decision, and he has to admit he finds this agreeable. He is surprised to find himself becoming just another lost, floating American, but he is not sure he dislikes it.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Plans, all plans, start to look childish. All he has to do all day is sit in a cockpit, exactly what he has always wanted to do, and yet he is now bored by his own dreams. He lets the others know that he is out. He expects that he will be killed, but he keeps on waking up alive. Perhaps they have not planned for this contingency. He goes to Nevada, to California.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. America is too big and uncontained. Maybe they are always taking more and getting bigger because they are looking for some tight, secure space they have overlooked.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He has forgotten where he is when he stops in a diner for sausage and eggs and requests bacon in addition. A few tables away, a man starts talking about his time in the Gulf War. The waitress thanks him for his service, as though she has any idea what he did there. Ziad considers taking his knife and slitting both their throats. She admires a tattoo on the man’s biceps. A real marine’s tattoo, she says. You’re not like one of those fancy New York types with an epiphany tattoo.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. This is not the first time he has heard of epiphany tattoos. But it is the first time he has felt confused enough to consider getting one. Any tattoo is forbidden by Islam, which makes getting one terrifying, and possibly appropriate.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. New York is full of very tall buildings, of course, but the building that houses the epiphany machine is only seven stories tall, and the apartment where the machine is kept is only on the second floor.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. The man who appears to be in charge of the epiphany machine, whatever it is and whatever that means, is very warm and welcoming. He is talking about how the worst thing you can do is make assumptions about people. You don’t know people, the man is saying; that’s what the machine is for. Ziad slowly realizes that the man is a Jew despite the innocent-sounding surname, but that hardly fazes him anymore. America is full of them, after all. The man talks about breastfucking. Ziad wishes he could introduce this man to the rigid and humorless man. He accepts a glass of the man’s whiskey, and then accepts another.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Adam leads him through the velvet curtain; he is surprised to find, on the other side, a dentist’s chair and a sewing machine. Perfectly symbolizing what Aysel is and what she should have been.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. I don’t think I would be here, Ziad says, if I hadn’t fallen in love with the wrong woman.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. I hear that a lot, Adam says.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. The needle is the greatest pain he has ever felt. It is worse, somehow, even than the most rigorous and demanding of the training in the camps. The needle is in his arm and it is not coming out. Maybe he has fallen victim to an elaborate Jewish plot to assassinate him. Okay, then. He is in a small room in a small building, but there is no such thing as small martyrdom.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Yes, yes, this is all he has ever wanted. Now if only the Jew will let him out.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. Be careful, Adam says as he lifts up the arm or the neck of the machine with an oven mitt. There’s probably only one thing in your life you want to get rid of.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He looks back over his shoulder at the towers as he drives over the George Washington Bridge. It’s not fair that the towers belong to the rigid and humorless man; it’s not fair that the rigid and humorless man is the one in charge. But that’s the way it is. He will pray to God to chew his pride so that he might swallow it. And Ziad will have the Capitol building, the seat of American government! Which—the thought makes him smile—looks like a giant breast. He buys a prepaid calling card from an all-night convenience store and lets the others know he is fully in, fully committed.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. On the morning that it is to be done he is thinking of Aysel. Suddenly he realizes that he cannot do this, he cannot leave her, at least not for good. He will go back to sleep, he will let the others do whatever they do, and then he will go back to her. He calls her to find that she has just woken and is getting ready for her day. I love you, he says. I love you. I love you. I will see you soon.

  A boy wants to take a cockpit to the top of the world. He hangs up and looks at his tattoo. How silly it is, how silly religion is, how silly anything must be if it needs words to be expressed. He feels total commitment to Aysel in his heart. He continues to feel total commitment to Aysel when he gets out of the shower. But he knows, because he has learned at least something about himself, that sooner or later he will not feel total commitment to Aysel in his heart. She deserves better than him, just as the world deserves better than domineering, sweet-talking, abusive, fickle America.

  A boy has taken a cockpit to the top of the world. Symbolically, the box cutters were unfortunate; he wanted to close himself in rather than open something up. But now here he is, sealed in the open sky. No more doubts, no more regrets, only up and down, the only things that would still exist without words. He can hear the commotion in the cabin, he can hear the passengers coming for him, he can sense that he will not reach America’s breast any more than he will ever again reach Aysel’s, but in a sense it does not matter. He feels kinship with them now, the people who will kill him and whom he will kill; they share a tomb and they share a sky, and in the great tiny box of the world’s mind, all of them will always be in this cockpit.

  CHAPTER

  28

  That morning, I woke briefly to the sound of car alarms or firetrucks or something, but when I was in college, it took more than an emergency to get me out of bed in the morning. When I woke up for good it was nearly ten. As always, the first thing I did was check my email. Adam had sent me a message at 8:57 a.m.

  Hi, Vent. I’ve been thinking about it and I’m really sorry about that night you came by. You had just missed Si Strauss, lucky you, and seeing Si Strauss always gets me out of sorts for reasons I’m not even sure the machine could explain.

  Not that I’m expecting a response or anything, but I do think it’s a little funny to hear on the radio
this morning that Monica Lewinsky is taking psychology classes at Columbia. Instead of giving head, she’ll learn how to shrink one! Good for her, I guess. A blowjob is no breastfuck, but it will still do somebody a lot more good than therapy or probably even my beloved device for that matter if you ask me, which you probably won’t.

  Sorry if that sounds bitchy, buddy. Can’t help it if I miss our chats. If you ever want to resume them, you know where to find me.

  Yours,

  A.L. (You can call me Al)

  P.S. Holy shit, I was just about to press send when I saw on the news that a plane hit the World Trade Center! You should see the pictures.

  The bit about the plane hitting the World Trade Center piqued my prurient interest but did not especially alarm me, since I assumed he was referring to a single-engine plane that had somehow gone off course. Before I could check out the pictures, I got an IM from Leah.

  Have you heard the news?

  You mean about a plane hitting the world trade center or about monica lewinsky taking psych courses at columbia?

  There was a long silence from Leah, replaced finally by a message in italics saying UhyeahLeah is typing. This was up for a while; then it was replaced by UhyeahLeah has entered text. Then a message appeared.

  jesus CHRIST you’re an asshole

  Then she signed off, and none of my other friends were online. I switched over to the New York Times website, where I saw the towers and the fire that would transform the buildings into ruins that I suddenly realized would stand as husks of themselves for thousands of years. I refreshed the browser and one of the towers had fallen. I refreshed the browser again and the other had fallen.

  I don’t know exactly what I did after that—most likely, I stared at my computer and pressed things that made things appear. I spoke to my father briefly. Then I got up and walked to the common area, where good friends and people I could barely tolerate and people I was too intimidated to talk to had gathered to come face-to-face, for the last time in history, with a sight commensurate to their capacity to gather around a single box and cry. Within an hour or so, I had heard the name “Osama bin Laden” for the first time, and instantly he had been my enemy since before I was born. We were all around twenty years old, legally adults only because the law takes pleasure in asserting things that are manifestly untrue, but we all agreed that this event had automatically and truly transformed us into men and women, hoping that by pronouncing each other adults we could magically increase the number of people capable of protecting us.