The Epiphany Machine

by David Burr Gerrard

Genres: Literary Fiction; Science Fiction; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

*A Most-Anticipated book of 2017 by The Millions
*Best New Science Fiction for Summer by The Washington Post

Everyone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too.
 
That's the slogan. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users' forearms. It's an old con, playing on the fear that we are obvious to everybody except ourselves. This particular one's been circulating New York since the 1960s. The ad works. And, oddly enough, so might the device...

A small stream of city dwellers buy into this cult of the epiphany machine, including Venter Lowood's parents. This stigma follows them when they move upstate, where Venter can't avoid the whispers of teachers and neighbors any more than he can ignore the machine's accurate predictions: his mother's abandonment and his father's disinterest. So when Venter's grandmother finally asks him to confront the epiphany machine and inoculate himself against his family's mistakes, he's only too happy to oblige.

Like his parents before him, Venter is quick to fall under the spell of the device's sweat-stained, profane, and surprisingly charming operator, Adam Lyons. But unlike them, Venter gets close enough to Adam to learn a dark secret. There's an undeniable pattern between specific epiphanies and violent crimes. And Adam won't jeopardize the privacy of his customers by alerting the police.

It may be a hoax, but that doesn't mean what Adam is selling isn't also spot-on. And in this sprawling, snarling tragicomedy about accountability in contemporary America, the greater danger is that Adam Lyon's apparatus may just be right about us all.

Release date: July 18, 2017

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 432

Sample

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 David Burr Gerrard

Things to Consider Before Using the Epiphany Machine

1.   The epiphany machine will not discover anything about you that you do not, in some way, already know. But think for a moment about surprise. What is surprising is never what is revealed but the grace with which it has been hidden.

2.   The unexamined life is often entirely worth living. If there is nothing gnawing at you, put this pamphlet down and never think of us again.

3.   If there is something gnawing at you, that means you’re delicious. That gnawing is the universe trying to get at the tasty juice inside of you. Your entire unsatisfying life is just the rind. When you look at our device, think of it as a peeler.

4.   When most people look at our device, it reminds them of an antique sewing machine. Others think it looks like the fossilized jawbone of some extinct, single-toothed great cat. We could sit around and psychoanalyze you based on what you think it looks like, but that would take decades and cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Using the epiphany machine takes about fifteen minutes and costs a hundred bucks.

5.   The machine does not tell your future, or even specific facts about your present. It does not know who will win the World Series or whether your wife is having sex with your neighbor. Or if it does know, it has yet to display any propensity to tell.

6.   We limit each user to one tattoo. The device’s value lies in its limits. Any more than one epiphany and you might as well consult the vast libraries that are already available to you and that have clearly not done you any good.

7.   CLOSED OFF is a common epiphany. This is often cited as evidence that we are charlatans. We would argue that many people are closed off.

8.   There is only one manner in which you may receive your epiphany: a tattoo on your forearm. The design demands it; the jaw, as it were, can open only so far. You may want your epiphany on your stomach, but no matter how much you diet, your stomach will not fit. You can argue that the machine is less than perfectly designed for the human body; you can argue that the human body is less than perfectly designed for the machine. You can argue, you can argue, you can argue.

9.   In no way is the placement of the epiphany tattoo on the forearm intended to mock or otherwise evoke the Holocaust.

10. We do not shy away from tough questions, including those about Rebecca Hart. Ms. Hart murdered her three children about a year after using our device. What the machine told her: OFFSPRING WILL NOT LEAD HAPPY LIVES. This was a logical deduction derived from a reading of Ms. Hart herself, and we certainly take no pleasure in deeming it an accurate one.

11. This case aside—and despite malicious rumors—there are absolutely no circumstances under which your epiphanies or any other personal information will be shared with law enforcement, direct marketing companies, or any other persons or organizations. Though we are generally agnostic on political questions, this is a principle that we consider sacrosanct. Your secrets are as safe with us as they would be with a priest, therapist, or lawyer, give or take the necessity of acquiring a wardrobe full of long sleeves.

12. If you believe that you do not need to use the machine, but that your husband or wife or mother does, you may be right. Are you?

13. Some of you are here because of a lover, parent, sibling, or child. You are here because someone you care about came to us and got an epiphany tattoo that changed or clarified his or her life. You are here to investigate our facilities and prove to this person that the epiphany machine is bunk, that he or she has been, in the term you will probably use, “brainwashed.” (We plead guilty to scrubbing the thick film of self-deception from the thoughts of our users, but this is probably not what you mean.) We welcome you as we welcome all other visitors. We merely encourage you to ask yourself: Why? Why am I so suspicious of the newfound happiness or self-knowledge of this person about whom I claim to care? Am I truly committed to this person’s well-being, or do I miss the comfort of feeling unshakily superior? These are uncomfortable questions to ask yourself, so you might consider asking the machine instead.

14. We have little interest in defending the device, and less in explaining it. If you are intent today on thinking of the machine as a kind of Magic 8 Ball, then today you will think of the machine as a kind of Magic 8 Ball. We will risk being cheeky by inviting you to ask again later.

15. One way to think about your life is as an extended freefall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.

16. If you believe that the epiphanies you have seen tattooed on the arms of your friends suggest that your friends are better, luckier, smarter, or more virtuous than you are, bear in mind that many disreputable establishments offer counterfeit epiphany tattoos that are no more indicative of a person’s innermost mind than is a vanity license plate.

17. Then again, your friends may simply be better, smarter, or more virtuous than you, though they are probably not luckier. It is unlikely, though certainly not impossible, that the machine will remark on this. While always bracingly honest, the machine does display a certain quality that we might anthropomorphically describe as tact.

18. Your epiphany may be removed as any other tattoo may, which is to say: imperfectly.

19. You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you’ve been telling yourself—you know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot—you’re choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you’re going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?

Testimonial #101

Name: Rose Schuldenfrei Lowood

Date of Birth: 12/19/1947

Date of Epiphany Machine Use: 01/06/1972

Date of Interview by Venter Lowood: 01/10/2017

In those days I had contradictory feelings about almost everything, so I was delighted to find that I was only delighted to be bringing bad news to Adam Lyons, the notorious huckster behind the epiphany machine. Even the potholes and the slush that the cab driver did not try to avoid made me feel like I was a bold adventuress on a dangerous road. Granted, instead of a sword I was armed with a manila envelope full of legal papers, but one makes do with the weapons of one’s time.

Usually, when I was delivering envelopes like this one, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how it would feel to be sued, how it would feel to be forced to stand respectfully before a judge who was probably going to take your money away for no better reason than that you were a sleazeball. I sympathized with sleazeballs, since if you didn’t sympathize with the sleazeballs you were left with the nuns, and years of Catholic school had taught me not to sympathize with them. But Adam Lyons combined the worst aspects of the sleazeballs and the nuns, so he unquestionably deserved what I was delivering.

The driver pulled up into a filthy winter puddle at the address the client had given. The client was suing Adam over the tattoo on her arm, GIVES AWAY WHAT MATTERS MOST. Her fiancé, having goaded her into getting the tattoo in the first place, interpreted it to mean that she was marrying for money, and he consequently dumped her—her family was almost as rich as his was, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. The client’s father interpreted the tattoo to mean that she had been having sex with her fiancé prior to marriage, and was furious that somebody who lived in old converted maid’s quarters on the Upper East Side had scrawled this fact on his daughter. So the family was suing Adam Lyons for $40 million. A spoiled rich girl was certainly not someone I would have envisioned myself feeling honored to fight for, but I admired her refusal to go away without blood under her fingernails, and her father actually had the resources to go up against Adam Lyons, or more accurately whoever was propping up Adam Lyons, since nobody knew for sure how he could afford the legal bills from various lawsuits, or why he was permitted to run a tattoo business out of his apartment, even though tattooing was illegal in New York City at the time and you’re not supposed to run any business out of your apartment.

“Spending the morning with your boyfriend, Blondie?” This question from the cab driver confused me, because I had forgotten for a moment that I had dyed my hair blond. The driver was digging his thick fingers into the passenger seat and baring his yellow teeth at me. I said yes, I was spending the morning with my boyfriend. One of the worst things about men is that they make it dangerous not to lie to them.

I handed him a wad of bills, stuffing the five that was going to be his then generous tip back into the pocket of the fox fur coat I had bought for the same reason I had dyed my hair blond—because it was something I normally wouldn’t do. I was usually quite clumsy, but, maybe emboldened by the coat, I leapt from the cab over the puddle and onto the curb with an elegance that could only be described as foxy. Not a trace of slush on my coat or my shoes, not the slightest totter on my heels, a safe several inches from any of the dog shit that sits for weeks in the New York City slush.

The driver, seeing that I had stiffed him, called out the name of a body part that it was unlikely he had been permitted access to ever since he exited one, and he tried and failed to splash me as he pulled away. I gave him a little four-fingered wave and felt ready to make the wicked bleed.

Adam’s apartment was only one flight up, but the time it took me to climb that flight proved enough for all my self-confidence to evaporate. I think it was the sight of my coat against the dingy stairs. Something, anyway, turned me from feeling good about the coat to feeling horrible about the coat. Your grandmother had told me that the coat was a betrayal, a waste of what we needed to survive, especially given how little money we had with me going to law school at night. I could have answered that the reason I was going to law school at night was that I had, ahem, a mother to support, and that if we wanted to talk about bad money decisions we could start with her decision to marry a man who drank his salary every week for several decades prior to drinking himself to death at the age of fifty-seven. Or maybe we could start with her decision to give up the excellent radio-factory job she held during the war to become an ordinary housewife, forsaking the construction of complicated machines that fostered communication among millions so that she could spend her life talking to two people she would never understand: my father and me. But if I had said any of this, she would have pointed out that she had done all of this for me, which would have left me in the silly position of pointing out that I didn’t ask to be born, an unassailable point that only an adolescent would take seriously. Or she might have told me yet again that all of her friends had told her it was a waste of money to send a daughter to college, at least a daughter who wasn’t an obvious genius. Worst of all, I would have been inclined to agree, since it was humiliatingly easy for my mother to make me feel stupid and worthless. And if college had been good for anything, it should at least have given me the ability to outsmart a woman with an eighth-grade education. Rather than open any of this up, I just apologized for buying the coat, and then apologized again, and then apologized again. The conversation ended with my thanking her for forgiving me.

I arrived at Adam’s door raging at my inability to confront my mother, or at my inability to confront the extravagance and irresponsibility that she had diagnosed in me. I found myself hesitating to knock, overwhelmed simultaneously by a sudden rush of understanding for the anger and confusion that leaves people desperate enough to seek out a magic tattoo, and by an equally powerful and equally sudden rush of intense hatred for anyone stupid enough to actually go through with it.

I was still hesitating when the door opened to reveal a man who looked like an egg, an egg with a thick head of black hair, an egg with a beard—a beard better groomed than the Moses/Manson model—an egg with a short-sleeved, button-down shirt open two buttons to show a great deal of black hair on its eggy chest. He smiled, showing me the missing tooth that, he would later joke, was “the open window through which the truth rushes into my body.”

“Your name is Adam Lyons and you live in this apartment?”

“Two true statements. Let’s see if we can get you a third. Come in.”

He had confirmed his identity, so this was where I was supposed to just thrust the manila envelope into his hands and be on my way. But I followed him through the door.

The foyer of his apartment, which was also his shop, was overstuffed with books, mostly thick, well-thumbed works about philosophy and religion. There were a lot of books by and about Kafka, whom I had discovered at a bookstore when I was twelve, and who had made me want to be a writer for a few years until I realized that becoming a lawyer was a more practical way to spend your life staring at sentences.

Adam said that he would pour me some whiskey, gesturing to the bar that I was surprised to find at the center of a tattoo-parlor-cum-church. I responded that it was ten in the morning. Men need to be reminded often that it’s too early for oblivion.

“Have you ever gotten a tattoo before? It’s going to hurt. I’d suggest a drink.” He poured some whiskey and threw in a couple ice cubes with his tobacco-stained fingers.

“No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and put the glass down. “So what brings you here today?”

I knew that if I answered his question with any words at all, rather than with a manila envelope dropped silently into his hands, then sooner or later I would give him my arm. I started talking anyway.

Chapter 1

The first time I asked my father about the epiphany machine was also the only time that he hit me. What made an impression on me was not the actual physical contact, a gentle slap only slightly more abrasive than the wind that was blowing very hard for an October day. My father seemed no more likely to slap me than to slit my throat and watch me bleed out into the leaf-clogged gutter, so for all I knew that might come next. In my young mind, for him to have hit me at all meant that something must have been unlocked in him, something that would have remained boxed up had I not liberated it with the magic words “the epiphany machine,” and that would now never cease to pursue me until it had achieved my destruction.

He knelt down and looked me in the eye. “You have no idea how much I’ve gone through to protect you from that horrible thing.”

This made me sob.

“If you’re old enough to know about the epiphany machine, then you’re too old to cry.”

This only made me sob harder.

“Venter, you need to tell me who told you about the machine. Was it your grandmother? She promised me she wouldn’t say anything about it until we both agreed that you were old enough.”

“It wasn’t her. I just heard about it on TV.”

This was not technically a lie. One night, after I was supposed to be asleep, I had heard my grandmother weeping while watching an eleven-o’clock news report suggesting that the epiphany machine might be responsible for the spread of HIV, another thing I had never heard of. I connected this to the time when my father had made an excessively big show of not freaking out over the cover of a copy of a magazine that had been left on the table at a coffee shop: “Did a Tiny Cult in New York City Help Spread HIV?” But these events had happened weeks earlier—which might as well have been decades according to my sense of time—and were not why I had asked about the device. I had asked because, at recess that morning, I had heard one teacher whisper to another as I passed by, “His mother got a tattoo from the epiphany machine.” Now I wanted to know what it was. I was also wondering whether the epiphany machine had something to do with the tattoo on my father’s forearm—SHOULD NEVER BECOME A FATHER—that he had sat me down to talk about shortly before I was old enough to read it, claiming he had gotten it as a stupid prank when he was very young, long before I was born.

“On TV!” my father said, laughing. “My brilliant boy, I’m sorry I slapped you. Let’s take a walk.” We walked past the crematorium across from our house to the cemetery two blocks away. (Queens was and remains a city of the dead with some halfhearted gentrification from the living.) The cold October wind continued as we maintained silence for several rows of what my father and grandmother called “nails on a sum,” aping what they said had been my attempt, at the age of three, to say that gravestones looked like thumbnails. I got myself together and stopped crying, but then I suddenly realized that my father must be taking me to see my mother’s grave—that this was how he was going to tell me that my mother was dead, and had not merely run away. I started sobbing again. This time my father did not scold me, but he did not comfort me either. He just looked out at the traffic. Finally, he spoke.

“Do you know why your grandmother and I think that ‘nails on a sum’ is funny?”

“Because it’s silly?”

“Because it’s not silly. Because it’s actually exactly correct. They’ve told you in school what a sum is, right?”

“That’s in adding.”

“Exactly. Can you give me an example of a sum?”

“In two plus two equals four, the sum is four.”

“Good, my brilliant boy!”

This made me feel very, very good, as the fact that I hated him at the moment did not make me long any less for him to think that I was a genius.

“The sum is what things add up to,” my father continued. “Everyone wants his or her life to add up to something. All the people in this cemetery, all the people that we’re walking on, they all did lots of stuff, hoping to make the sums of their lives go higher and higher and higher. Maybe a few of them had sums that were very high, most of them had sums that were not so high. In every case, the gravestone is like a nail on that sum—not like the nail on your thumb, actually, but like the nails in a roof, the nails that say: no, house, you’re not going any higher. Gravestones are like nails on a person’s life, keeping the sum from getting any higher.”

Often, he couldn’t tell exactly at which level to speak to me, and so said things that made no sense on any level.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Okay. In a baseball game, there’s a score, right? At the end of the game, each team has gotten a certain number of runs. The sum that I’m talking about in a person’s life, that’s like a score.”

Something was stirring in me, a mature and morally serious version of the most childish emotion of all: impatience.

“Dad,” I said. “What is the epiphany machine and where is my mother?”

“I’m getting to that,” he said. “So the sum of one’s life is the sum of everything you’ve done. And as you get a little older you start to realize that sooner or later you’re going to end up here, in this cemetery or one exactly like it, and you want to make sure that your sum is as high as possible. The problem is that life is more confusing than a baseball game. In a baseball game, a run is a run and that’s that. In life, sometimes you’re not sure what counts as a run. Also, you don’t know what the teams are. Or whether you’re even playing. Sometimes you think you’re playing and you’re actually just sitting in the stands, watching other people play.”

“Dad.”

“Okay. All this means that you have to make up your own way of scoring. You have to decide what’s important. For a lot of people, it’s money. For a lot of other people, it’s some kind of religious fulfillment. You know what the most important thing is to me?”

I shook my head. I knew what he was going say, but I wanted to hear him say it.

“You are the most important thing to me. So whenever something good happens to you, or whenever I see you smile, or whenever you learn how to do something, that’s like a run for me. When something bad happens to you, that’s like a run for the other team. That’s why I had to do what I did just now. Even though I didn’t really hit you—it was really just a love tap, wasn’t it?—I still felt horrible while I was doing it. I felt much worse than you felt, believe me. But the epiphany machine is very bad and I have to do whatever it takes to keep you safe from it. It’s the sort of thing that could cause you to lose the whole game.”

“What?”

“I’m saying that figuring out what’s important in life and how to go about getting it is very difficult. Sometimes you get confused and you get tempted to just let other people make the rules. And some people are really happy to make the rules for other people. Adam Lyons, the man who runs the epiphany machine, is one of those people. There was a time when I let myself get confused enough that I let him write those words on me that you know aren’t true.”

“The epiphany machine writes things about people on their arms?”

“Exactly, my brilliant boy! I figured out that the machine was wrong. Your mother, on the other hand . . . well, Venter, it told her that she ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST. You weren’t born yet so she didn’t know what matters most. Then you were born and she abandoned you.”

“Why did she listen to the machine if you didn’t?”

“That’s the first question you should ask her if you meet her.”

“I don’t ever want to meet her.”

“That shows that you are a very smart boy.”

If I had actually been a very smart boy, I probably would have kept asking questions. At the very least I would have recognized his persistent flattery as a shutting-down of my curiosity no less violent than the slap. But I wanted his praise more than I wanted the truth.

That night I went downstairs to see my grandmother, who had laid out pound cake, my favorite. She was sitting in her recliner, knitting an afghan.

“Grandma, what do you know about the epiphany machine?”

I was expecting her to stop knitting and look up at me with fury, but she didn’t even slow her rhythm. My father had obviously warned her. She was silent for a moment, filling the room with the sound of her plastic needles hitting each other.

“The epiphany machine is why I no longer have a daughter and why you no longer have a mother. It is for people who are lonely, gullible, and numb.”

“What’s ‘numb’?”

“‘Numb’ is when you can’t feel anything. People who can’t feel anything do weird things to get their feeling back. They spend money they don’t have on a fox fur coat. They want the coat to make them feel warm and elegant, they want the coat to make them feel like a real somebody. Then the coat doesn’t make them feel anything. So they let some stranger put a needle in them, hoping that will make them feel something. Then they can’t feel the needle. That’s when they decide they don’t care about anything. They don’t care if the sight of their tattoo makes their mother sick to her stomach. They don’t care if they leave their mother, their husband, their son. They don’t care about anything because they can’t feel anything. Do you understand?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Okay. If your tongue were numb, you couldn’t taste pound cake. So there would be no point in me giving you pound cake. You can either be a pound cake boy or an epiphany machine boy. Which is it going to be?”

“I’m a pound cake boy,” I said.

I ate pound cake every night for months afterward and never once asked about the epiphany machine. I even pretended that I didn’t know that parents, terrified of AIDS, were telling their children to stay away from me, though of course I started hearing this every day at school. I pretended, too, that I had no idea that this was why we moved away from Queens to an affluent town in Westchester, in the hope that no one there would hear of our connection to the machine. It’s even possible that I flattered myself about how good I was getting at pretending not to know things, one important life skill at which I was most likely outpacing my peers.

Chapter 2

When we arrived in Westchester, I was under strict orders never to say anything about the epiphany machine to anyone. I was supposed to tell anyone who asked that my mother had abandoned the family, and say that I didn’t know anything more than that. This worked, and I was avoided because I was weird rather than because I was dangerous. It often occurred to me that I would have preferred the latter to the former, but for years I never said anything. I didn’t want my father and grandmother to move us again. (There was not a chance anyone would discover the tattoo on my father, since he wore a suit on the Metro-North platform, a sport jacket to the grocery store, and stayed clear of pool parties.)

Throughout these same years I don’t think I asked my father or grandmother a single question about the machine. I had decided not only that I knew what it was, which I didn’t really, but that I knew what it meant, which I didn’t at all. The machine was for people who were lonely, gullible, and numb, and believed in by people who stayed that way. My mother was one of those people. I said the words “the epiphany machine” only to my father or grandmother, and only when I wanted to please them by saying: “The only people who use the epiphany machine are lonely, gullible, and numb.”

Those were the three words I used when I finally did mention the epiphany machine at school, on the playground in fourth grade. There were a few boys who liked to bother me about the fact that I didn’t know where my mother was, chanting things like “Venter’s mother is a slut,” a word they knew despite likely having no more than the dimmest idea what sex was. Eventually I said: “My mom’s not a slut, she’s lonely, gullible, and numb.” I felt superior when they didn’t understand that the word “numb” wasn’t just what novocaine made your mouth when you went to the dentist.

“It’s a figurative use of the term,” I said, having heard my father say “It’s a figurative use of the term” once and deciding that it applied here. (To taxonomize myself, I was one of those smart children who wishes he were much smarter, and so compensates with a smug attitude toward other children and a toadying one toward adults. Honestly, I was probably bullied less than I deserved.)

These kids and others kept pushing me to explain what I had meant, and finally I said: “My mother used the epiphany machine!” I think I feared that we would be tarred and feathered and sent out of town, “tarred and feathered” being a phrase I had heard in movies I watched with my grandmother. But the kids hadn’t heard of the machine. I discovered slowly, over the next few months, that some of the parents had heard of it, but for the most part thought it was something to snicker over, not to fear. (I later learned that the link between HIV and the machine had been definitively debunked—the institute that had posited the link in the first place turned out to be a right-wing Christian operation unhappy with the strange theology of Adam Lyons.)

I am not sure that I actually felt the absence of my mother, a woman I had never meaningfully met. To be honest, the times I missed my mother most intensely were when a teacher would ask me whether I missed her. And even then the emotion I felt was probably a desire to impress the teacher w