The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  His arms are raised and he cannot lower them. He can look down at his nakedness, he can look around the room at this empty cell, he can look and see his tattoo, extending up toward the heavens, though it will not reach the heavens, because God will stop Ismail’s arm in the atmosphere, and the arm and the tattoo and Ismail will be incinerated. Then perhaps God will incinerate all tattoos—there is good reason why tattoos are forbidden by Jews and Muslims, they are filthy, disgusting things that make it impossible to ignore just how filthy and disgusting the body itself is. Then perhaps God will incinerate billboards, graffiti, Qur’ans, Bibles, all books, anything with words. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge rather than the tree of life, which they would never have done had God made them correctly in the first place. Words are the worst thing about the universe, they are even worse than bodies. The word “naked” is even more disgusting than nakedness itself. The ability to read is nothing more than a euphemism for the ability to misread.

  It is cold. It is dark. It is painful. It is cold. It is dark. It is painful.

  The man comes again, with a needle, and Ismail is sorry that he has ever seen a needle—pens, needles, penises, anything that can be used to mark or puncture or penetrate should never have been invented.

  “This is truth serum,” the man says, just before he jabs it into Ismail’s raised arm. Ismail knows or comes as close as he can to knowing that there is no such thing as truth serum, but he hopes that it is real, for then he will tell the truth, and if he tells the truth then he must know it, and if he knows the truth then surely he can tell it to himself. The first truth will have to be the truth of where he truly is. In an insane asylum. On stage with Leah. It cannot be true that he is where he is.

  He is slapped by his interrogator. His interrogator tells him that he must tell the truth, that he has no choice, and he does his best, he tries to tell the interrogator the truth that the interrogator is looking for, but the truth now seems hazy, out of reach. Truth and lies, like brightness and darkness, no longer look different, or rather they only look different. He can hear in his torturer’s voice increasing panic, fear that he is torturing an innocent person. But nothing will come of this, because the torturer will not be able to tolerate the knowledge that he is torturing an innocent person, and therefore Ismail will be guilty.

  The torturer leaves, assuring Ismail that he will return. It is cold. It is hot. It is dark. It is bright. The seasons are evoked and parodied as though Ismail is on stage. He is on stage and he will be on stage. Leah will be him with him. Venter and Venter’s mother will both be in the audience, and at the end of the play Ismail will call them to the stage. Venter and Venter’s mother will assume it is a joke, a gag about breaking the fourth wall, but Ismail will keep insisting until Venter and his mother find it more embarrassing not to take the stage than to take it. He will help them both up, Venter will start crying, overwhelmed by this gesture of forgiveness, and then Ismail will pull a knife from his pocket and slit Venter’s throat, and then he will slit Venter’s mother’s throat. Their blood will mingle as it flows off the stage and they will try to grab each other’s hands, but Ismail will kick their hands away from each other, for each of them deserves to die alone. And then Ismail will slit Leah’s throat and slit his own throat, because he and his love both deserve the truth, and the knife is the only implement that can bring forth the truth.

  But none of this will happen, because that would constitute a story, and he has been removed from the realm of stories.

  It is dark. It is cold. It is hot. It is bright. It is cold. It is dark.

  It is bright. It is bright. It is bright. It is bright. It is bright.

  CHAPTER

  34

  I read this at my desk in a state of mounting fury. What did Steven Merdula, that anonymous coward, know about me, or about my mother, or about Ismail? He had obviously read the handful of interviews Leah had done in the weeks after Ismail’s arrest, and had obviously read—and believed—the most salacious accounts available on the Internet of Ismail’s treatment. Merdula had combined this small amount of information with a total blind faith in Ismail’s innocence that thoroughly contradicted, even betrayed, the suspicion of certainty that marked Merdula’s best work. It was also, I thought, written badly.

  The rest of my workday consisted of trashing this piece with my coworkers; every half hour or so someone else would pop up from a cubicle to share a thought on something else that was wrong with the piece, or another psychological theory for why Merdula had gone so wrong. A lot of people suggested that I sue, and I said that I was definitely going to, but I already knew that I absolutely would not, since nothing Merdula had written about me was exactly untrue, and I didn’t want to sit through depositions that would establish that fact. (Merdula and the editors of Needle Quarterly had probably counted on my making this calculation. There are few feelings worse than knowing that you’re going to do exactly what your enemy wants you to do.) I called Rebecca in the afternoon and she was as outraged as I was, though most of her outrage was directed toward Leah, whom she was convinced had given Merdula additional information. Rebecca and I each wrote emails to Leah, who responded in one email to us both that she had not spoken to Merdula, nor did she know who Merdula was, but that as far as she was concerned, Merdula had let Rebecca off way too easily by not mentioning her, and had let me off way too easily by making it sound as though I were the victim of an evil, abandoning mother, when it was more likely that my mother had abandoned me because I was evil. Also, Ismail thought Kafka was overrated and would have thought Merdula’s entire approach gimmicky and annoying. She concluded:

  I’m actually glad that Ismail won’t be permitted to read this shitty story. I do kind of like the ending, but, Rebecca, I’d swap you in for Venter’s mom, just like Venter has. Let me know if the two of you want to get your throats slit on stage at my next performance.

  The next morning, I was, if anything, even madder, so I wrote an angry email to Steven Merdula and sent it to him care of Needle Quarterly, even though I knew there was no chance he would respond. To my great surprise, he responded by the end of the day.

  Dear Venter,

  You are a badly lost young man. You must know that your friend is entirely innocent of wrongdoing and is the victim of injustice that—to use a rare legal term that actually evokes rather than obfuscates human experience—shocks the conscience. The meaning of Ismail’s tattoo, to the extent that a phrase as vague as WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP has any meaning at all, clearly refers to benign rebellions against family and convention. What little I have learned about you in investigating Ismail’s case suggests that you are of at least average intelligence, so you must grasp this. Perhaps you are at the mercy of the hysteria that has seized so many, but your particular fealty to this hysteria is notable in that it has led you not only to betray your friend, but to betray him over and over again, forty hours every week. Mr. Harrican is a lot like you—at the mercy of a multigenerational family struggle with the machine that influences his behavior in ways that he does not understand—and I think that working for him is reinforcing your worst tendencies. My theory—one that may offend you but that I hope you will give the consideration it deserves—is that you are “playing up” to your tattoo. You are exaggerating the degree to which you are DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, and so you are acquiescing to the baseless belief held by so many that Ismail is a terrorist, despite your personal knowledge that this belief is wrong.

  I feel sympathy for you given the many strikes against you, starting with your mother, who by any reasonable standard sounds like a terrible woman. So far, the miserable life you have lived cannot be said to be entirely your fault. But you must take control of what you do from now on. It is not your fate to acquiesce. Do your best to free Ismail, and do it now.

  With concern and good wishes,

  Steven Merdula

  This email, and its nasty remarks about my mother,
made me angrier than I had ever been. I wanted to throw my coffee mug at my laptop, but I didn’t want to be known for having an anger problem, so I took the mug into the breakroom and threw it on the floor, an aggressive act I could plausibly claim was an accident.

  Surprisingly, almost nobody outside my office seemed to read Merdula’s story, because nobody wanted to read about torture. The episode left me unharmed, but with my commitment redoubled to writing what I knew I needed to write.

  [DRAFT]

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  Paid for by Citizens for Knowledge and Safety

  AMERICAN PORTRAIT: BILLY H.

  Let’s imagine a boy named Billy H., who likes to dig in his parents’ backyard looking for dinosaur bones. At night, he clings to a stuffed purple triceratops that he once found in his parents’ attic and without which he cannot go to sleep. The man who lives by himself next door, a Mr. M., has an epiphany tattoo that says DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES, a tattoo that is correlated with child molestation. Mr. M. is canny enough to wear long-sleeved shirts exclusively and has evaded the attention of Billy H.’s parents, of local law enforcement, and of other community leaders. One day Billy decides to ring Mr. M.’s doorbell to ask whether he can dig for dinosaur bones in his backyard. Mr. M. says that Billy would be more than welcome to do so, and that in fact he has heard rumors about dinosaur bones in his backyard, so Billy will have a lot of work to do and should first come inside for a glass of lemonade.

  Imagine if Mr. M.’s telltale tattoo had been in a database, allowing law enforcement officials to keep track of whether he had, say, moved next door to a child. Unfortunately, Billy lives in a country that will defend an abstraction called “privacy” even if that means delivering him into the hands of a man who means him the worst of harm.

  But let’s say that Mr. M. does not mean Billy the very worst of harm. Let’s say that Billy is only molested, rather than molested and murdered. He graduates high school and college with excellent grades, though also with persistent social and particularly sexual difficulties. Perhaps he pursues graduate work in paleontology at Columbia University, and pursues it successfully. One beautiful spring day, on that campus’s storied steps, he strikes up a conversation with Angela R., who is pursuing an MFA in fiction. They share a taste for worlds that either no longer exist or never did. On their fifth or sixth date, he tells her of his molestation, and she listens with great sympathy but does not, as other girls have tended to, treat him like a wounded bird. As they both near completion of their thesis work, they move in together into a small apartment in Astoria; there are promises of postdoctoral fellowships and the strong prospect of a tenure-track position for him, and impressive publication in The Paris Review and Granta for her.

  On the morning of their graduation, Billy puts on his cap and gown and looks forward to hugging his parents, looks forward to telling them that despite all that has happened he has forged a meaningful, fulfilling, and joyful life, something he could never have done without their unwavering support. Though he has blamed them in the past, he understands that they would have done anything that they could have to save him from Mr. M., if only they had known about Mr. M.’s tattoo.

  Seeing Angela in her cap and gown, Billy tells her, quite truthfully, that she looks beautiful. He takes her hand, and together they walk to the subway. A train arrives just as they reach the top of the steps, as though it has been chartered just for them. As soon as they sit down, Angela puts her head on Billy’s shoulder, and they both gaze at the Manhattan skyline. She is reaching up to brush his tassel out of his eyes when they are both suddenly reduced to bloody bits of viscera.

  Several hundred other people on board the train are blown apart immediately, or burn to death slowly, each of them with their own families, hopes, delusions, triumphs, disappointments, and aspirations.

  It will later be discovered that the bomber had an epiphany tattoo that read: WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP.

  Perhaps there are valid reasons to keep epiphanies secret. Perhaps these reasons outweigh the right of Billy H. not to be abused as a child and murdered as an adult. But if you believe that they do, we would ask: Would you want to be the one to tell Billy’s parents—who, as the bomb goes off, have just arrived at Columbia University to celebrate with their son—how they will be spending the day instead?

  CHAPTER

  35

  I handed my father this piece when I met him for dinner at an Italian restaurant adjacent to Grand Central where I knew he frequently dined with Leah. It had been many months since I had seen him; the dinner had been my suggestion, mostly so I could show my father what I had written. He read it while we waited for our bruschetta. I wasn’t sure whether I was picking a fight or whether I was irrationally hoping that he would approve of my work, but as he read his face appeared to be doing something that I could describe only as “beaming with pride.”

  “I know you think I did everything wrong when I raised you,” he said when he was finished, “but I must have done something right to raise a son capable of writing such high-quality horseshit.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “The compliment is genuine. Reading this, it . . . it does something to me. I should want to laugh you out of this restaurant for writing something this contrived, cloying, cynical, shameless. But somehow I’m actually moved by this nonsense. Where are they publishing it?”

  “They’re not publishing it. They told me to write shorter, not to use writers as characters, and to try for a more straightforward tone. But they said they’re cutting it down and using it as the basis for a thirty-second commercial. They’re very happy.”

  “That’s very good. I’m very glad that they’re happy with you at work.”

  I squished a dry piece of bread into a tiny bowl filled with olive oil. “Are they happy with you at work?”

  My father, despite his conflict of interest, was informally advising Ismail’s defense team—“defense team” seemed like a strange term for the group of lawyers trying to force the government to actually file charges against Ismail that they could defend him against, but it was the closest term available. Whatever those lawyers should be called, my father’s law partners wanted him as far away from them as possible.

  “They’ll probably be even less happy with me once they’ve seen the commercial based on your piece,” my father said. “Hell, when I read this, even I think: How could that bastard Isaac Lowood place the rights of child molesters and terrorists above the life of Billy H.? I want to give myself a lethal injection for serving as an accomplice in the murder of this dear sweet boy, this cherubic Billy H., and if someone were to say that I can’t be given the death penalty for participating in the murder of a character in a sentimental paranoid fantasy, I would sue them for making defamatory comments about Nonexistent Americans.”

  “Enough, Dad.”

  “Is it enough? Do you have any idea what you’re doing by working for Vladimir Harrican? If I were someone who had not been following the debate closely and I saw something like this, I would be in favor of forcing Adam to make epiphanies a matter of public record. I would be in favor of requiring everyone to get epiphanies. This is going to solidify the idea that just because Adam looks at you and thinks you want to blow things up—which even he says can mean a lot of different things—that means you’re a terrorist. You’ll be wrecking Ismail’s life all over again.”

  “Come on, Dad. Nothing I write could ever have the impact you’re talking about. Poetry makes nothing happen.”

  “Right, but this isn’t poetry. This is ad copy. Ad copy can make a whole lot happen.”

  Of course, I had written it because I wanted to make something happen. I wanted to make sure that no one ever again met the fate of the Soricillo twins or the victims of Ziad Jarrah, murdered by men who had already been caught by the epiphany machine.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  “If,” my fath
er said, “you care about the childhood friend who, because of you, was tortured and who, because of you, continues to sit isolated in a cell, or for that matter if you care about anything at all, you will quit this job tomorrow morning.”

  “If I quit, then I’ll have to live off of you.”

  “There are worse things than living off your father, you know.”

  This was so surprising that I asked him to repeat it. He did not repeat it but instead said: “Destroying the lives of the innocent, for instance.”

  “Are you offering me money? Because I’m not going to take it.”

  “Why not? I’ve always known that you’re very talented, and even though you’re using your gifts for evil right now, this proves it. Quit your job and write. It’s why you’re here on earth. It’s also why Ismail is here on earth, from everything I hear, but unfortunately I can’t immediately put Ismail in a position to write. You, I can immediately put in a position to write. Giving you money was why I have made way too much of it for way too long. If anything is supposed to happen, it’s this.”

  “I’m sorry, but I just want to have a job. I want to have this job.”

  And I did. Waking each morning with a clear purpose for the day, firmly believing (much of the time) that my work had clear value, getting paid a salary that it would not have humiliated me to publicly admit—I took such delight in all of these things that the unhappiness I had felt for so long had transformed into an exceedingly rare kind of unhappiness: one that could be lived with.

  “Why are you doing this, Venter? Why did you show me this?”

  “Because it’s work I’ve done and I want to share it with my father.”