The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

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  CHAPTER

  37

  I returned from my honeymoon determined to compel Adam, at long last, to make epiphanies public. I wanted to prove that my father-in-law’s belief in me had not been misplaced.

  There was no question that, up until now, Citizens for Knowledge and Safety had accomplished almost nothing. My father had not been completely wrong all those years ago about the ad—the commercial loosely inspired by what I had written had generated some hysterical cable-news segments calling for use of the machine to be required of all teachers to make sure that they weren’t pedophiles. But as often happens, what we had expected to happen simply did not happen. Probably the most tangible effect of that ad, at least according to a blog post, had been an apparent uptick in wealthy parents requiring that prospective nannies use the machine, at the nannies’ own expense, before permitting them near their children. So far, there had been no real momentum toward forcing Adam to divulge the epiphanies. That, I was determined, was going to change.

  I was writing Adam an email to this effect—telling him that he was going to have to turn over epiphanies, that I was going to make sure of it myself—when our executive director looked over my shoulder and said that any communication I had with Adam was subject to a review process. My email was commented on and revised by the executive director, the communications director, and an intern who was said to have “a gift for conversational tone in formal email.”

  The process wound up taking three weeks. The result received this response from Adam:

  Dearest V[D],

  Since you’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give us so many reasons to think you’re a prick.

  Maybe not mine but sure as hell not yours,

  A.L. (At a Loss—for why I wasted so much time on you)

  My sense of clarity, purpose, and urgency was once again clouded. For the next week or so, I still fretted about the children that Citizens for Knowledge and Safety was failing to save, but mostly I fretted over whether to get lunch at the Quiznos across the street or the Pret A Manger a few blocks away.

  I remember distinctly that I had just chosen Quiznos and returned from lunch to settle in for a long afternoon of avoiding mostly uninteresting work by looking at completely uninteresting things online when the office erupted in a “Holy shit!” chorus.

  The New York Times was reporting that real-estate billionaire Si Strauss had been arrested. Apparently he had been accused of sexually abusing at least a dozen boys whom he had met through his baseball charity.

  One of my coworkers, sounding a little winded, asked me if I had gotten to the eighth paragraph yet.

  The eighth paragraph stated that when Si Strauss had been arrested, slightly after dawn in his apartment, he had not been wearing a shirt, and on his forearm was a faded tattoo that read: DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES.

  I thought back to his testimonial. Of course he had lied about his tattoo. Nobody gets a tattoo as nice as BURNS WITH DESIRE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. For a couple of minutes, I believed that I had known the truth all along.

  The next morning, I woke up thinking I should write to Adam again. Instead, I checked the news and discovered that he had killed himself.

  From Further Adventures of the Epiphany Machine(s),

  by Steven Merdula (2018), Chapter 9

  Adam Lyons is taking a walk through Central Park, trying to ignore the proximity of Strawberry Fields, when his phone buzzes with the news that Si Strauss has been arrested. In the minutes afterward, it is unlikely that anyone notices the ashen old man taking slow, painful steps, as the park is full of ashen old men taking slow, painful steps. Maybe there are three or four who recognize Adam Lyons as the magic-tattoo dude, and another one or two who recognize him as the Man Who Killed John Lennon, but no one says, “Hey, your patron is a pedophile.” No one emerges from the bushes with a baseball bat to give him what he deserves.

  Or maybe this is what he deserves, to walk unrecognized through the city that is so different from the one to which he introduced the epiphany machine, and yet has been so unaffected by it. The park would have fallen first to the muggers and the junkies and second to the blissful jogging bankers even if he had left the machine in the trash heap.

  Did Adam know what Si Strauss was doing to the kids in his baseball charity? We do not know the answer, any more than we know whether Adam in fact faked all the epiphanies, or what really happened to him in his past. But I suspect a shameful answer: he knew and he did not know, just like everyone who came to him.

  There was one thing that Adam did unquestionably know—he knew, just before Si Strauss received his epiphany all those decades ago, that Si was an angry rich kid who, if he was happy with his epiphany, could solve Adam’s legal woes. Adam also knew that Si, as he was settling into the epiphany chair about to be tattooed, babbled strangely about the children he watched beneath his office window. Perhaps more crucially, Adam continued to know this immediately after Si Strauss received his tattoo, and for years afterward. Eventually, Si ceased to be a rich kid who could solve Adam’s legal woes and became a rich man who often did solve Adam’s legal woes—as well as create some legal woes for people Adam didn’t like—but the basic facts remained the same: Adam knew what Si’s epiphany was, and he said nothing.

  With good reason! What did DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES mean, after all? It sounded like a compliment. It was a compliment. No one who achieved anything worthwhile understood boundaries. Certainly, Adam never understood boundaries: the boundary between huckster and prophet, the boundary between deceiving someone and enlightening them, the boundary between never lying and lying with every word. Not even he was sure whether the machine was real. He would often get a sense of what the machine was going to write before it wrote it, but that did not necessarily mean he was unconsciously guiding the epiphanies; it could just mean that whatever entity was writing the epiphanies was giving him, clearly its chosen emissary, some advance notice.

  True, two men before Si who had received DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES tattoos had later been arrested for what they had done to children. This had made Adam paranoid about that tattoo. Eventually, Adam started taking matters into his own hands—or more precisely the hands of some guys he had known growing up—but that had led to beatings for at least four people who were almost certainly innocent. Probably innocent. He couldn’t be sure, which is why, or part of why, he never said anything about these false positives to anyone who worked for him, though surely they must have known that a one-to-one correlation of tattoo to villain was too clean to be true. One man had been crippled in his beating, and afterward no evidence could be found against him other than his tattoo. If the machine was not real, all Adam was doing was ordering the assault of people about whom he had some nebulous negative feeling. True, Adam cringed every time Si mentioned his baseball charity, which he did all the time, but hurting or exposing Si might very well be hurting or exposing an innocent man. It would also mean putting an end to all the good work that Si was making it possible for Adam to do. And yes, true—yes, true—Adam had worried about what the downfall of Si might mean for the machine’s reputation.

  Now the machine’s reputation was ruined forever. For the last several years, Adam has thought it would be worth
it for the machine’s reputation to be ruined, if a ruined reputation meant a free Ismail. But Ismail is still locked up and the machine’s reputation is ruined anyway.

  It does not seem very long ago that Adam first discovered the machine. It does not seem very long ago that Adam was a child, himself a potential victim for earlier incarnations of Si Strauss. Adam spent his childhood as a literal kid in the candy store his father owned on the Lower East Side. Candy Lyons. Adam’s father said that he changed the family name to Lyons from Loewenstein because it sounded better for the store, evoking child-pleasing images of lions made of candy, ferocity made sweet, as well as rhyming with “dandelions,” which is every child’s favorite flower even though it is a weed. Uncle Yoav, a rabbi, said that Adam’s father “changed his name to please the goyim,” but for much of Adam’s childhood that seemed okay, since the goyim came to Candy Lyons, and the more goyim came to Candy Lyons, the more candy there was for young Adam Lyons. What’s in either a name or a rose when one has sweets? Adam spent his childhood days growing happily fat, ringing up customers and swiping candy, all while listening to the backroom whir of his mother’s sewing machine, on which she sewed ever-larger clothes for him.

  Then, slowly, Adam learned what had happened across the ocean when he was a toddler, and it made him want to spit out every piece of candy he was given. He looked at the goyim who came into his father’s store, and he wanted to ask why they had waited until the last possible moment to lift their chocolate-stained fingers for his people.

  “Your name is Adam Loewenstein,” Uncle Yoav said, “and you are a man of the Jewish people.”

  “My name is Adam Loewenstein,” Adam said to his father, “and I am a man of the Jewish people.”

  To Adam’s disappointment, his father did not slap him. He merely gave a big shrug. “I have this store, and your uncle Yoav has his synagogue, but we are both giving people the same thing: distractions.”

  “Distractions from what?”

  “From the fact that it’s all a big nothing. Some people say life is a joke, but they’re wrong. Jokes have a point.”

  Adam asked Uncle Yoav about this, and Yoav gave an identical shrug and said: “Your father only says life is meaningless because it’s easier to say that than it is to face the truth, which is that he is a man of the Jewish people, just as you are.”

  This word “truth” held great power for Adam. He sensed that there was indeed such a thing as truth, submerged but waiting to be brought to the surface, on which it should be written in big letters so that everybody could see it. He returned to his father. “My name is Adam Loewenstein and I am a man of the Jewish people,” he said.

  Again his father shrugged. “Better cut out the bacon and the cheeseburgers.”

  Maybe only to prove that he could, Adam did cut out the bacon and the cheeseburgers, and started spending every Friday night at the synagogue where Uncle Yoav was a rabbi.

  A curious thing happened with Adam’s Jewish education. There was so much tradition, and so much commentary on the tradition, that Adam felt constantly confused. The Book of Ecclesiastes sounded exactly like Adam’s father—all is vanity, there is nothing new under the sun. Adam wished that there would be something in the Torah or the Talmud—or somewhere—that would sum everything up. Of course this was Adam’s fault—Yoav told him that he had eaten too much of his father’s candy, that he had gotten too used to the American sweet tooth, to the American taste for easy answers—and he strived to be more like Uncle Yoav.

  “You want to be just like Uncle Yoav?” his father said. “Here.” He reached behind the counter and tossed Adam a pair of dice. “Hope you’re better with these than he is.”

  Adam was twelve by now, only a few months away from his bar mitzvah, old enough to understand that his uncle was a gambler, and perhaps he did understand that—certainly, when he and the other boys practiced reading the Torah for Uncle Yoav, he understood that those big men sitting in the back row were not there to hear Adam’s stumbling Hebrew. But it was nonetheless a surprise, shortly before Adam’s fifteenth birthday, when Adam’s father informed him that they had to sell Candy Lyons to pay for Yoav’s gambling debts. It was somehow less of a surprise when, less than a year after that, Adam’s father dropped dead of a heart attack.

  “You killed my father,” Adam told his uncle when he came to sit shiva.

  “Candy killed your father. Candy and bacon and cigars and whiskey. But mostly it was not having faith in God.”

  “You bankrupted my father, you killed my father, and now you insult him?”

  His uncle shrugged widely. Since he was very young, Adam had been imitating this shrug that his uncle and father shared. Now he could not seem to shake it.

  “You’re a smart kid and you read a lot of books,” Uncle Yoav said. “You should have figured out by now that gambling is God’s vice. He makes bets that people can be good, and He keeps losing bigger and bigger, but He hasn’t left the table yet.”

  Adam imagined himself strangling Yoav right there in the living room. Instead, Adam said nothing and did not move, and Yoav excused himself to console Adam’s mother. Adam’s mother had always found Yoav distasteful and irritating, and that did not change after the death of Adam’s father. One thing that did change: his mother, who had spent so much time cheerily scolding children in their store for buying too much candy, now spent all of her time hunched over her sewing machine, mending clothes for people in the neighborhood for a pittance, while Adam dropped out of high school to work as a short-order cook.

  The job was hot and the hours were long, and Adam was amazed at the amount of fat and sugar and salt it took to persuade people to nourish themselves. Did they really hate life so much that they had to be blackmailed with a rush of pleasure just to agree to sustain it?

  Dice held great appeal for the other guys who worked at the diner, but none for Adam, so when his shift was over, he would go home and sit at his typewriter until he could see streaks of dawn light over the alleyway below his Upper East Side window. Under the influence of Hemingway, Adam hoped to type one true sentence after another until those things linked together to form a novel that would make him famous and earn him enough money to buy a house for his mother, where she could sew or not sew as she pleased. But he found that everything he wrote was dead.

  Soon he found that his mother was dead, too. Actually, he found his mother dead, slumped over her sewing machine, her cold nose pressing a piece of cloth. Adam called Uncle Yoav and asked for money for the funeral, but Yoav said no, it would be better for Adam’s character to pay for the funeral himself.

  Adam could have screamed in anger. Instead, he silently hung up the phone and carried his mother’s sewing machine back to his apartment, picked up his typewriter, carried the typewriter and the sewing machine to a pawnshop along with some of his mother’s jewelry, and had her in the ground by sunset the next day, as required by Jewish law. The next morning, he resolved never to follow Jewish law again.

  Now he started playing dice. Amazing, the way the other guys would say certain words they thought were lucky or turn their hats a certain way, as though what they were hoping for was not a few bucks but a demonstration that someone or something out there cared whether they won a few bucks. For Adam, the appeal was the reverse: he reveled in the randomness. Throwing dice in an alley was a beautiful, even artistically noteworthy concentration of the randomness of the world. Throwing dice was a joke without a point, and that was what made it worthwhile. Another thing that made it worthwhile was that he won. A lot. So much that if he ever started keeping track, which he wouldn’t, he was pretty sure he would find that he was doubling his salary from the diner. So much that the other guys thought that he must be cheating.

  Mostly out of boredom, he took a second job, as a mover. One day, Adam was one of two men carrying a bed for a girl who was moving out of her parents’ apartment and into one she would share with a
roommate. While the other mover watched television with the roommate, Adam was invited into the bed he had carried.

  Shira knew more than Adam did—she knew where to go in Greenwich Village to hear poetry and music, she knew that Joyce was better than Hemingway, and Kafka better than Joyce. He wanted to think she was wrong, but then he read Joyce and Kafka and he saw that she was right. He focused on the word “dead” in “The Dead”; he focused on what Gabriel Conroy learned, and thought about whether it might have made a difference if Gabriel had learned what he learned decades before he did.

  Stop playing dice, Shira said. But God was sending him some kind of message, something about chance and fate, and Adam needed to learn to read it. A few months later, Shira moved in with a dentist in Greenwich Village. (Years later, Shira and the dentist moved from Greenwich Village to Greenwich, Connecticut, as it became more acceptable for Jews to do so. Shira and the dentist had three children, none of whom, as it happened, ever used the epiphany machine.)

  Adam played more dice.

  On the evening of his twentieth birthday—October 9, 1960—Adam won twenty dollars and got very drunk. Walking home, he wandered by a trash heap in an alley, and his eye was caught by what looked like a pink baby’s blanket wedged between two garbage bags. This is understandable, as our eyes are made to be caught. But they are also made to wriggle free, and he should have seen very quickly that there was no baby discarded in the garbage. And yet now he was pawing at the blanket, trying to get a hold on it but knocking over the garbage instead. Within a minute, he had a banana peel in his hair and an antique sewing machine in his arms. There was no reason for him to think the sewing machine was the one that had belonged to his mother, the one he had sold to pay for her funeral. There was no reason for him to cradle the sewing machine like it was a baby.