When I showed it to my mother, tears came to her eyes and she said that it was very sweet. That is not, to put it mildly, what I intended it to be, so the message that I took away was that I should not be a writer, because I had no talent for making people understand me through things I had written down.
All of this obsessed me for a few days and then it was out of my mind for years. Rebecca Hart’s crime was mostly faded by the time I heard about it—sure, like a faded tattoo, knock yourself out with that metaphor, Venter. “Rebecca Hart” was still what everyone deserves: a name that’s easy to forget.
The second Rebecca Hart changed that. I had just finished my math homework—plus the even-numbered questions that the teacher hadn’t even assigned—when I turned on the television and saw the anchorwoman talking about Rebecca Hart, who was now the second woman with that name to drown each of her children in the bathtub after receiving an epiphany tattoo that read OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES. My first thought was: “Damn, this is how I’ll be known at school.”
As I predicted, the next morning I was greeted by taunts about the previous night’s news. Not quite as I predicted, my math teacher didn’t even give a shit about my math homework and instead just wanted to give me a hug and tell me not to worry about my name. I was annoyed, because I had done a really good job on that math homework.
“Rebecca Hart is my hero,” I said. She released me from the hug, and then I was by myself and in need of an explanation. I imagined a witch beside me telling me to say what I had said. I imagined this was the same witch from my story—by now I had learned that the approved word for “girl superhero” was “witch”—and this witch had also told the two Rebecca Harts to kill their kids. I didn’t have much of an opinion at all about Rebecca Hart, or even know which Rebecca Hart I was referring to—the first one or the second one—but whichever one I was talking about, I did have a strong affinity for her, and the thing that’s annoying about having a strong affinity for anyone you are neither related to nor want to fuck is that you have to explain it.
“Her kids were boys,” I said. “They probably would have done something to deserve it.”
Within the space of something like twelve hours, I had gone from “Math Nerd” to “Girl Who Shares the Name of a Baby Killer” to “Girl Who Shows Disturbing Tendencies and Needs to Be Placed Under Surveillance.” Suddenly teachers talked to me differently. I was used to teachers talking to me differently, but instead of talking to me like I was the one smart friend they had in a group of hostile morons, they started talking to me like I was an unfamiliar dog that might bite.
I don’t know what my teachers thought I was going to do. Maybe they were worried that I was going to have my first kiss, get pregnant, and, then, in the middle of gym class, while performing a dance that some other girls and I had choreographed to “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” expel the baby from my vagina and immediately strangle it with the umbilical cord.
So that’s what I did.
A few months earlier, I would have found any excuse to hide in a corner of the gym and read while I was supposed to be practicing the dance, and when I had to perform, I would have made it clear with every resentful rhythmic jerk of my leg that I was too good for this. But feeling myself the object of fear made me feel much more energetic, much more intensely and even exclusively physical, than I could remember ever feeling before. The other girls were much prettier than I was and they were much better dancers than I was, but I danced much better than they did, because as I danced I imagined delivering and killing my baby. As we practiced, the girls tried to sap my confidence by making fun of me, by whispering about me loud enough for me to hear, but I did not care. On the day of the performance, nobody—not the boys, not the girls, not the mildly pervy gym teacher—was looking at anybody but me. I was united with the imaginary baby that I was giving birth to and killing; it was part of my body, and so was the dance. There’s a good reason why dance is so closely associated with witchcraft. Or at least there was while I was dancing underneath a middle school basketball hoop.
Immediately after the dance, I ran home and tried to write down what had happened, but the words on the page didn’t come close to evoking what I felt. For the second time, I swore never to become a writer.
I thought that my name and whatever came over me during that dance would be the two things that I was known for, but fairly quickly, people at school forgot to be afraid of me. My essential mildness also asserted itself around this time—incompatible tendencies toward aggression and timidity made me vague and dull, as they do for most teenagers. I think I daydreamed from time to time about getting pregnant just to live out the urban legend of killing my baby at my prom, but nothing could have enticed me to go to my prom.
Am I being glib? Of course I’m being glib. But I think I did actually believe that there was a curse on my name, that there was a witch who would materialize if I ever did have a child and entice me to kill it. Or maybe I just made myself believe that, to ensure that I would remain unencumbered by a child. Sometimes the most cunning thing you can do is believe the worst about yourself.
Almost as soon as I got to Columbia, I started hearing rumors about a guy in our freshman class who had used the epiphany machine, who even worked for Adam Lyons. I don’t think I would have let myself get interested in you in the first place if I hadn’t been taking a disappointing creative writing class, the professor of which, Carter Wolf, had nothing to say about my work other than that I should try to choose more serious topics than witchcraft. That was the third time I decided not to be a writer, and I directed my energy toward stalking you.
I don’t know what I was expecting—either somebody who was immaculately dressed, suit and bow tie and buzz cut, or somebody in smelly rags and really long, unwashed hair. Instead, you just looked like a regular slob, like every other college boy. I thought you were cute, okay? I didn’t expect to ruin my goddamn life over you.
You and I were on and off for so long, and somehow that consumed almost all the energy I had in college. I mean, I had interests and I pursued them, and I was smart and I excelled, but I was thinking about you pretty much the whole time. Somehow I got the idea that you were a brilliant writer, though as I’m telling you this story right now I’m starting to realize that the only reason why I told myself you were a brilliant writer is that I wanted to be a brilliant writer, and I just handed you my ambitions and hopes as though that would make them stop calling out to me in the night.
Remember when that news anchor gave a speech at our graduation about how his best moment in college had been reading Ulysses, and he talked about Molly Bloom’s closing line “yes I said yes I will Yes,” and he basically exhorted us to say yes to life? At that point you and I had broken up long ago, but I remember sitting a few rows behind you and looking at the back of your neck throughout the ceremony, thinking about how sorry I was for you, how much it sucked for you to be so lost. But as the news anchor started talking, I started feeling sorry for him, because here is a guy who has been incredibly successful throughout his entire career, but who like everybody else just has to please other people all the time, and so you try to give pleasing other people the pleasing spin of “saying yes to life,” and you do that so well that people ask you to give a speech to college graduates, and obviously you’re not going to tell them that life is basically a long, incredibly boring avant-garde play in which you watch your own brain trying to figure out what other people are thinking about you, and you, the audience member, are given this one line to shout out at your brain over and over, “Relax and be yourself!” but obviously your brain can’t hear you, which is too bad, because if it could, it would calmly explain to you that none of this matters very much, because soon enough “yourself” won’t be anything at all, except maybe heartburn for a worm. Wormburn. Obviously you’re not going to tell college kids that; they want you to make uplifting noises while they tune you out and brood over all the beauti
ful people in the crowd that they have just spent the last four years failing to fuck. So you recite something about saying yes to life, and you get all excited because you can tie it to Ulysses, which is totally appropriate, because maybe a few kids, while they’re brooding about those people they failed to fuck, will hear the word “Ulysses” and then spend a few seconds brooding over failing to read Ulysses. And I thought: Jeez, I hope I can just get my brains fucked out for the rest of my life, if only so that I never accomplish anything that would inspire somebody to ask me to give a graduation speech, or to say anything at all. To silently fuck until I am dead, that was what the purpose of life seemed to me to be at that moment, Venter, and I felt so grateful to no longer be in a relationship with you, so that I could get to the fucking that I hoped might make my life just a tiny bit fucking satisfying. Then I felt annoyed at myself for spending my graduation ceremony—my graduation ceremony—thinking about you and the news anchor, two men I did not care about. Throughout my childhood, even though for the most part I didn’t think I was going to be a writer, I had thought that any purpose my life found would have something to do with finding words for the world other than the words that men were always carving into it, and here I was thinking about two men, with no idea what to do with my life other than to spend it fucking, hardly a terrible idea but hardly an original one, either. The witch had left me.
A major problem with my plan to have a lot of sex: I’m like you, Venter. I live almost completely in my head and that makes it difficult to enjoy sex all that much. Whenever I’m having sex, I’m thinking about sex, how I wish I were better at it and how I wish the circumstances were hotter. You’re supposed to say yes, yes, yes, you’re supposed to try to connect with the other person. That’s why I took improv classes for years, even though I’m pretty sure you never noticed even after we got back together. In improv classes they talk a lot about saying yes. Not only yes but “yes and.” It’s not enough to affirm something; they make you add to it. Exhausting, totally not me.
I think the appeal of the epiphany machine and my name is that I wouldn’t have to say yes to this awful experience that you’re supposed to say yes to, the experience of having kids. I married you in large part to never have kids. Another reason I married you is that we kind of see the world the same way, meaning hazily, through this thick filthy scrum of our thoughts about ourselves. The difference between you and me? I think about myself all the time just like you do, but I also think about my work.
I’m not going to kill my kid. Obviously. In retrospect, I don’t think I ever thought I was. On the one hand, I thought the witch was going to swoop in as soon as I gave birth; on the other hand, I knew she was going to stand me up.
Now get your fucking iPhone out of my face and stop recording me. I’ve given you enough. I’m not going to keep translating the sense that my life makes for me until it makes sense for you. I’m not going to talk about Leah and how much she meant to me. That’s for me. You know what else is for me? Me. Almost anything could be tattooed on my arm and I would recognize it as a murmuring from the deepest part of my soul, because at some point or other I’ve wanted everything; I’ve wanted to be everyone. There have even been rare occasions when I have wanted what I am supposed to want and have wanted to be what I am supposed to want to be: respectively, you and myself. That’s the entire reason the machine seems to work; anything that you can claim is in somebody’s head has probably been there at some point. People feel a shock of recognition at the truth, but they feel a shock of recognition at a lot of other things, too.
I’ve already given you myself, Venter. It’s too much to ask me to tell you who that is. I won’t do it. No I’m saying no I won’t No.
EPILOGUE
I write this as my daughter is about to turn one year old. Rebecca and I are still together. Though it is impossible to know what anyone else’s relationship is like, it does not seem unreasonable to guess that our relationship is in the lower fifty percent of relationships. I do know that raising Baby Rose as a stay-at-home dad has been the only time of my life that I can truly say has been worthwhile. I love bouncing Baby Rose around in my arms through our apartment at three in the morning; I love taking her out on the balcony to gaze out at the UN building. I love the falling sigh she makes when she stops crying, like the deflating of a balloon three times her size. I love the dainty, nearly polite way she shakes spaghetti from her fingers. I love it when she bites the arms of any adult we introduce her to, as though she is checking to make sure they are not counterfeit. I love watching television with her in my lap, particularly what seems to be her favorite show, a self-consciously “gritty” new CIA drama, which stars an old friend of her father’s: Leah. As the eponymous hero of Jane Payne—theoretically but not actually based on her play—Leah plays an agent who tortures terrorists, all of whom are guilty, because her character is never wrong about what is in people’s souls. One critic wrote, “If the show endorses torture, at least the waterboarding is swimming in feminism.” Leah’s dream had been to star in something that would attack America’s war on terror, something that would open the audience’s eyes to the evils of torture and of subverting the judicial system. She got much closer to her dream than most people do.
Often I walk Rose down the Long Island City riverside, recently converted from a dock into a park carefully constructed to suggest bliss, a lovely way of living. Occasionally I imagine that there are whispers about me. Even in the unlikely event that I am right, and I am being judged, and judged harshly, for having nothing else to do with my time or life but raise a child, that could not dampen my commitment to Baby Rose. Never have I felt less DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.
Well, there is one person whose opinion I’m dependent on—Baby Rose’s. I want her to think, many years from now, that I was a good father to her. This is an opinion I am grateful to be dependent on.
I also have another Rose, my mother, at my side on many days to help me with the baby. In the mornings, my mother sits on the living room sofa with a laptop and writes—she, or rather Steven Merdula, is finishing a second book about the epiphany machine—and in the afternoon, she sits with me and the baby. She has barely held a baby since she held me, and yet she has an effortlessness with Rose that I am jealous of, and am ashamed to talk about in my parenting classes—as I write that, I realize I am still, to some degree, DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. I think I’m also jealous of Baby Rose, as strange as that sounds, because she will grow up knowing my mother. But I try to put all of this out of my mind, since Rose’s presence will be good for my daughter. And it’s good for me, too, to have adult conversation every afternoon, however strained that conversation may sometimes be.
“Why didn’t you ever at least, like, check in with me?”
“That would have just made it harder.”
“It didn’t seem to bother you to make things harder for me.”
“Actually, I meant it would have made things harder for me. I was pretty sure that you were what mattered most to me, and I didn’t want to have to keep abandoning you over and over again. And if I came back to you and then found out that I had abandoned my writing, and that that was what mattered most to me—well, it wouldn’t have been good for either one of us if that’s what I had found.”
“Is that supposed to be heartwarming? Because it makes you sound even more self-centered.”
“You asked me a question and I answered it. Staying away and doing my work and letting you develop on your own seemed like the best option.”
“If you hadn’t left me, I wouldn’t have gotten tattooed. And if I hadn’t gotten tattooed, Ismail wouldn’t have gotten tattooed.”
“That’s possible. Why are you putting it like that?”
“I’m putting it like that because it’s the truth.”
“You put it like that because you’re trying to cause me pain over something you know I feel guilty about. There was a time when I held my
self personally responsible for what you and the state did to Ismail. It’s all over that story I wrote about him, probably the weakest thing I’ve ever written. But it’s not my fault at all, as we’ve already discussed. You’re your own person, Venter. You may be DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, but you have no one but yourself to blame.”
I suppose I should leave this part out, as my mother and I reached something close to resolution on this back at the hospital. But there’s no such thing as resolution, no such thing as closure, no such thing as an insight that makes the past less painful, and as a recovering epiphany addict I should be honest about all this. What she said made me mad, which made me storm into my bedroom, which in turn woke the baby, who let out a sharp, angry cry. My mother beat me to the baby, and almost as soon as she picked her up the baby was quiet, and then giggled as my mother recited a passage she had memorized from Ulysses. The scene looked so perfect, and it occurred to me that the world would have been better had I never existed, had Rose skipped me entirely and gone straight to Baby Rose.
On many afternoons, we are joined by my father, semiretired and having, like the culture itself, mostly abandoned his desire to fight for privacy. He and my mother get along so well that I wonder what it would have been like had they stayed together throughout my childhood. There is no way to know how my life would be different had she stayed; there is plenty of reason to think it would have been worse. She might have locked herself in a room and written a story imagining that she had abandoned me when she wanted to. She might even have written that novel in my voice.
This book, which I have completed while Baby Rose naps, will be my only book, assuming it is even published. Publication does not look likely, considering that when I was writing it I thought the major appeal would be Ismail. I doubt there’s anyone in America who still thinks that Ismail is guilty of anything, and that is precisely the reason why he will stay in prison, at least for a long time; seeing him free would mean seeing what we have done to him.
The Epiphany Machine Page 39