The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

  If his forearm had not ended up beneath the needle, many lives might have been very different.

  FIRST MAN TO LIE ON

  Adam had long ago stopped believing in God, and yet he was immediately flooded with a feeling that this had been sent to him by something that was at the very least God-adjacent. The same God-adjacent thing—maybe the same lowercase g “god”—that had led him to win at dice. Adam had indeed been lying down on his responsibility to lead a meaningful life, and this god had come to show him the way.

  He carried the heavy machine the few blocks to his Eighty-fourth Street apartment, examined it, figured out how the ink was loaded, and then he sank down on his bed, heavy and giddy with the weight of the knowledge of how he was going to spend the rest of his life.

  He talked about the machine with a few guys he played dice with, on the theory that some of them would suspect he was supernaturally favored because he won so frequently. He made plans to meet a few of them after work one evening. One guy genuflected, and then another guy punched him in the face.

  “So you decided to make fun of us by getting a tattoo bragging that you cheat,” one of them said, while the fist of another one landed on his nose. More fists landed on his stomach, his eyes, his mouth. He was probably lucky to lose only one tooth.

  It took him a couple of weeks to heal, and then he got a job at a different diner. As though God (or the machine’s god) were testing him, around this time there was a scare around the city that tattoo parlors were spreading hepatitis B, and though this was not true, tattooing was outlawed in the city. Adam tried to make friends in the underground tattooing scene that cropped up in the aftermath of the law, but every tattoo artist thought he was a crank, a crazy person. He found ways to get needles and ink—thankfully, standard needles and ink worked in the machine and did not, as he feared the first time he loaded it, destroy it—but he had a strong sense that suppliers were overcharging him and an absolute certainty that there was nothing he could do about it.

  Adam asked for a late shift at the new diner, and he looked for lonely people who showed up and sat by themselves. He chatted with them, and eventually he invited them back to his place for whiskey. He got punched by a few men who thought he was making a pass at them; he disappointed a few other men who thought he was making a pass at them; and horrified several more who interpreted their tattoos to mean that they were queer. (In later years, he received grateful letters from members of each of these three groups for helping them come out.) Other men were told that they delayed their lives with fantasies of glory, or were compounding the misery of their lives by blaming those close to them for it, or were dependent on the opinion of others. (And two or three, yes, were told that they did not understand boundaries.) Only a few women used the machine in the early years, but of those who did, some were told that they had the strength to embark on careers they had dreamed of, or to leave men who beat or stifled them, and if Adam was a bit too proud of this, perhaps we may forgive him.

  Users experienced pain, of course, but Adam also recognized in them a gambler’s high. There was great excitement in giving yourself over to something, of closing your eyes and letting chance, a lover, artistic inspiration, heroin, or anything else have its way with you. Those few moments between settling in to the chair and reading the tattoo—that was the most life in many lives.

  Or a few lives. The total number of users in the first four years did not surpass one hundred. Though some (mostly mocking) attention was given to the mimeographed flyers he put up around the city—with a drawing of the machine and the words “THE EPIPHANY MACHINE—EVERYONE ELSE KNOWS THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU, NOW YOU CAN KNOW IT, TOO”—for obvious reasons he could not put his address on the flyer, and so apart from those he approached himself, users found him only through rumor and word of mouth. He probably would have died an obscure New York curiosity—or a New York curiosity even more obscure than the one he did die as—had it not been for a concert performed at Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965.

  Adam was entirely uninterested when he heard that the Beatles were playing a massive concert in Queens. Adam was an obsessive fan of Dylan, had seen some of his earliest performances in Village cafés, and had even approached him on two separate occasions about the machine, remaining a fan even after Dylan responded both times with open disdain. Adam also enjoyed and admired the Stones. But the Beatles, with their candy sound, held no appeal for him.

  The Beatles did hold appeal for Lillian Secor, a recent high school graduate who had shaved her head and gotten an epiphany tattoo mainly to get any kind of tattoo, to horrify her parents and even her friends, and had found herself transformed by her tattoo, HORRIFIES TO CREATE LOVE. Read one way, this was just the dismissive nonsense she ignored from her parents—that everything she did she did only for attention—but read another way, it told her that her refusal to do what was expected of her, to dress the way people wanted her to or do her hair the way people wanted her to or talk the way people wanted her to, was not solely an expression of anger, as even she thought it was, but rather a way to create love, a way to convince people to love things they were not expected to love, including themselves. This made her relax, at least a little bit, at least enough to attend a Beatles concert with thousands of identically screaming girls, where she intended to hand out flyers about the epiphany machine. She did not intend to run onto the field to hand one to John Lennon. But the love the crowd had for him was so intense that she wanted to create more of it—and if she ran onto the field, she would horrify the crowd in a way that would just make them love John more.

  It is possible to find an interpretation of virtually every Beatles lyric from Rubber Soul onward as an insult or a paean to Adam Lyons—he is Father McKenzie in “Eleanor Rigby,” he is Eleanor Rigby in “Eleanor Rigby,” he is Doctor Robert, he is the sugar-plum fairy, he is the egg-man, he is the walrus, he is the fool on the hill, he is the holy roller of “Come Together.” That the epiphany machine and John’s penis are the twin subjects of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is almost universally accepted.

  Most of these interpretations are probably nonsense, but in any case, John inspired many people to use the epiphany machine. (The precise number is lost to history; Adam never maintained a good record system and managed to lose the record book maintained by Rose Schuldenfrei Lowood, his assistant from 1972 to 1980.) It was almost impossible to stop the machine from attracting almost weekly attention from the tabloids, almost all of it fearful and alarmist. And it was absolutely impossible to stop the lawsuits.

  Which is why Si Strauss had been so important. That day that Si showed up at his apartment, Adam thought he was finished. Then Si agreed to use the machine, and Adam saw the future that did in fact come to pass, the future in which Si covered Adam’s legal bills and made it possible for Adam to enlighten more people. And then Adam saw Si’s tattoo.

  There was nothing Adam could have done—it’s not as though Si would have been arrested or even questioned had Adam gone to the police. Instead, Adam continued to help people—even Uncle Yoav, who came for a tattoo in late ’68 or early ’69. Yoav told Adam that young American Jews had, just like young American goyim, gotten themselves stuck in the quicksand of endless questions, and if Yoav was going to help them get out, he would have to step into the quicksand, and thus Yoav’s tattoo, under normal circumstances a serious offense against God, would be not only justified but necessary. The metaphor was nonsensical, but Adam felt a family affinity for nonsensical metaphors, and he felt a family affinity, too, for Yoav, an adrift gambler helpless before his compulsions, who needed an excuse, any excuse, to get a tattoo that might possibly set him on the right path.

  NEED NOT HATE HIMSELF FOR NOT BEING AS GOOD AS HIS BROTHER

  Yoav was angry about this tattoo, as so many were angry about their tattoos, but it did help him give up his gambling, and when he died he and Adam were friends.

  Adam and John, too, were friends whe
n John died. Most people forgot that, because John so often renounced Adam. He renounced Adam in favor of the Maharishi, and then, after a brief visit to the Maharishi, renounced the Maharishi in favor of Adam. At another point John renounced Adam for Arthur Janov and primal scream therapy. John decided that he had learned exactly the wrong lesson that night at Adam’s after Shea Stadium, and that what mattered were not his fans’ arms but their screams, the way their screams drowned out all of his stupid, pointless words and instead got straight to the loud bleating center of human need and desire. But eventually all that screaming started to sound to John forced and hollow, while his tattoo still looked almost as fresh as ever. Adam always knew that John would return; after all, Adam was fairly certain that without the epiphany machine, John would never have been drawn to the show of an artist known for her enigmatic phrases, most of them short enough to double as epiphany tattoos, or even shorter. Adam was certain that, without the epiphany machine, John would have never fallen in love when that artist handed him a card on which was written the word “Breathe.” Adam tried not to be offended when John told him how this word and the word that Yoko’s exhibit required him to climb a ladder and use a magnifying glass to read were far more brilliant, far more fundamental, than anything the epiphany machine might write. Breathe. Yes. These, John told Adam not only to hurt him, were the only words that mattered.

  Adam saw John and Yoko only very rarely once they moved to New York, though they were only a park away, but unlike so much of the world he always liked Yoko. (Yoko, for her part, seems to have thought Adam was funny and charming, though she has always refused to believe that even Adam himself intended the machine to be taken seriously. She regarded Adam as an artist, though perhaps one who might be well served to move on to a new work, rather than repeating himself over and over on new arms.) Adam felt very warmly toward both of them when, in December of 1980, a pudgy young man who couldn’t stop talking about John Lennon came to use the machine. It wasn’t unusual for a young man to come see Adam and talk a lot about John Lennon; nor was it unusual for a tattoo to be repeated. Adam even hoped that the young man would find motivation in receiving the same tattoo as his idol, and do something useful with his life. If he had known what Chapman’s mountain was, or what kind of nothing Chapman saw from it, he would have slit that lonely and terrible man’s throat without hesitation.

  And then there was Si and his baseball charity. Yes, Adam had sensed what Si was, even if he had always refused to admit this to himself. This is why Adam kept Si away from his guests and from Rose Schuldenfrei, and would certainly never let him anywhere near Lennon. What happened to the boys that Si hurt is not Adam’s fault, exactly, but Adam, for all his dismissive remarks about anything too long to fit on a forearm, has read a great deal of literature, and literature has exactly one thing to teach us: that it is our deepest and highest moral obligation to accept punishment for things that are not exactly our fault.

  Adam spends the rest of the night drinking whiskey while sitting on the floor. He thinks for a long time about Venter Lowood, that poor lost boy who had no one to guide him. Then he pushes the curtain aside to enter the epiphany room one last time.

  He lays his head down on the machine, sideways, so that his left ear touches the base. FIRST MAN TO LIE ON, indeed. He grabs the arm or the neck of the machine and prepares to pull the needle through his right ear.

  In an ideal world, he would be able to read what the epiphany machine will write on his brain, but in an ideal world, the epiphany machine would not need to write anything at all. So he will have to dream the message to himself, as the needle passes through his ear on its way to write the last words to which Adam will fail to listen.

  CHAPTER

  38

  It was not easy to read about the suicide of a man who still meant a great deal to me, particularly given the grisly nature of the suicide. According to news reports, first responders had, in order to free Adam’s corpse from the machine, been compelled to break the machine into several pieces. “Nothing supernatural was found inside,” wrote a journalist who thought he was being funny. Rebecca comforted me and did not try to lecture me about how Adam had shielded a pedophile for many decades and so deserved to die miserable and alone. The next morning, I got a very unexpected email from my father, the first in three years apart from perfunctory congratulations on my wedding, inviting me to a funeral service he had organized for Adam.

  The service was held in a small basement theater in the East Village. There was no one at the box office, though the door was open. No one in the lobby, either. I thought that I might have the wrong address, but I pushed through into the theater itself. At first that looked empty, too, but then I saw the back of a woman’s head. It looked like Leah. It was Leah.

  It occurred to me, briefly, that this was an elaborate plot to kill me.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here,” I said.

  “Adam spent the last several years trying to help Ismail,” Leah said, without looking at me. “And playing him made me come into my own as an actor. I’m grateful to him, and I always liked him. I liked him enough that I’m distressed to see someone he hated at his funeral.”

  “Not many of us get to curate our own funerals.”

  “That sounds almost like something he would say, except clunky, and somehow totally wrong. All that time you spent with him, and you have no idea who he is.”

  I didn’t want anyone to walk in to us arguing. “I’ve heard good things about your show,” I said.

  Leah was doing a one-woman show—probably in this theater, I now realized—called Jane Payne, the real-life code name given to a female CIA agent who photographed the mutilated genitals of a terrorism suspect whom the CIA had rendered to Morocco for torture. Leah’s dream had become to use theater to bring American torturers to justice, and to free Ismail, among others. I had checked some blogs and the reactions to the play were quite positive, though I didn’t know for sure how things worked in the theater world, and whether people only said positive things and blew smoke up each other’s asses all the time like in most other professions.

  “Thanks,” she said. She explained that the rabbi my father had hired had gotten cold feet because of Adam’s tattoo, because of his flagrantly blasphemous attitude toward the religion of his birth, because of his sacrilegious founding of his own quasi-religion, and because of the fact that his lifelong patron was a pedophile whom Adam had shielded.

  “When you put it that way,” I said, “it sounds like he shouldn’t get a Jewish funeral.”

  For the first time since I had walked in, she met my eye. “I’m not your wife, the one with the baby-murderer name,” she said. “I don’t find you or your jokes cute or charming. You’re a monster who put the love of my life in prison for no reason.”

  This was a cruel thing to say, but I could not exactly say I did not deserve it. My father arrived and hugged Leah, and then he looked at me, and we were both unsure whether to hug, so we didn’t. He apologized for being late—a judge had kept him longer than he had expected and then he had to make arrangements for Adam’s body to be cremated, since no living relatives could be found who were willing to take responsibility for it.

  He put his briefcase on one of the cheap, squeaky seats and then surveyed the auditorium.

  “Seems awfully empty, huh? Well, I guess this is what we were expecting . . .”

  With more grace than I could have managed, he took the stage and made us his audience.

  TESTIMONIAL #93

  NAME: Isaac Lowood

  DATE OF BIRTH: 08/14/1951

  DATE OF EPIPHANY MACHINE USE: 09/19/1974

  DATE OF INTERVIEW BY VENTER LOWOOD: N/A (Eulogy for Adam Lyons Delivered on 09/20/2009)

  I first met Adam when I was pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia. I was younger than any of my classmates because I had skipped a grade in school, and I felt pressure to find a perfect subject for m
y dissertation, one that would allow me to display my brilliance. I was fascinated by the success of this man who seemed to be operating a religion out of his apartment, a religion to which he had attracted at least one of the most famous men on the planet, along with many others whom no one could argue had been driven insane by paparazzi flashbulbs. I should say that I did not think John Lennon was insane. I thought he was the world’s greatest living genius, and if he thought there was something special about the epiphany machine, there must be something to it. Or maybe I was just tired of reading thick academic books and dense academic articles and wanted to read Adam’s forearm koans for a little while. I started searching for him by seeking out downtown tattoo parlors, which were themselves generally not easy to find, and when I did find them, I was reliably sworn at, since almost all tattoo artists hated Adam. Not infrequently, they threatened to do something like tattoo “Dumb Fuck” on my ass if I didn’t leave quickly enough. After a particularly humiliating encounter, I got on the subway feeling so demoralized that I couldn’t even concentrate on my assigned reading, couldn’t do anything except stare at the big bright graffiti that was all over the subway in those days.

  This is when I noticed: “GO KNOW YOURSELF IN THE BIBLICAL SENSE, ADAM LYONS!!! RUBICON EPIPHANY CORPORATION, 235 e. 84th st. Apt. #7 = THE GATES OF HELL. DON’T GO!!!!”

  Adam always denied that he was the one who wrote that, and he might even have been telling the truth, but saying a place is Hell is of course an irresistible advertisement. I might have gone even if I hadn’t already been looking for it.

  I did not have any real plans for what I was going to do, or whether I was going to tell Adam that I was there to conduct research on him rather than on myself. I felt so nervous as I approached Eighty-fourth Street that I think I might have kept walking past the building and found a different dissertation topic if I hadn’t fallen into step with a blond woman in a fox fur coat. I barely noticed her at first; on the Upper East Side in the seventies, it was hardly uncommon to see a blond woman in a fox fur coat. I’m not sure if I registered that she was on her way to the epiphany machine, but I may have, since word was that the machine was popular among bored rich girls. I do remember that she was the first one to speak; she said that she could tell from the way I was breathing that I was on my way to see Adam Lyons.