CHAPTER

8

Adam sent away most of the people waiting in line, telling them to come back later or not at all.

Even after the last of them had filed out, I didn’t get to see Adam right away; he agreed to see those who had been waiting in line for ninety minutes or more. So I picked up a copy of the pamphlet “Things to Consider Before Using the Epiphany Machine” from the bar and sat down to read it on a stool in a corner of the apartment that served as a waiting area. After I read it I put it down and picked up a book, but my head was too full to read a book, so I put the book down and read the pamphlet again, and then again. The pamphlet had been only lightly revised since the seventies version I included at the beginning, but two differences were significant. The entry on Rebecca Hart now referred to Rebecca Harts, plural, and the entry on sharing epiphanies now read as follows:

11. Our position has not shifted: under NO CIRCUMSTANCES will epiphanies be shared with law enforcement.

Adam had to nudge me awake when he was finished with the night’s final epiphany. As soon as I had roused, this last customer kept me awake by saying: “This is not true! This is just not true. PLAYS MARTYR TO EVADE RESPONSIBILITY! What does that even mean? It’s so general that it doesn’t mean anything at all! I would never have come here if I wasn’t so devoted to you, Amy!”

“Let’s just go,” said the woman I assumed was Amy.

“See what I did to try to become a better husband? Defaced myself. Or disarmed myself, or something.”

“Okay, John.”

John continued berating Amy as they walked out the door. Once they were gone, Adam lit a joint, then looked at me and chuckled.

“There’s no way his tattoo could be that accurate unless you were guiding the machine,” I said.

“Except in the unlikely event that I’m telling the truth.” He offered me the joint, but I declined. The apartment felt very empty, with almost no sound save for a faint whirring that I thought might be the machine but was just the air conditioner.

“So what other steps have you taken to find your mother?” he asked.

“None. My father and grandmother didn’t want me to find her. My grandmother really didn’t want me to find her.”

“But she does now.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, actually? But family members are supposed to reconcile when one of them is dying, right?”

“Supposed to? According to whom?”

“I don’t know. People.”

“And why do these people say that family members are supposed to reconcile before one of them dies?”

“So that they can die at peace.”

This was the first time that Adam gave me one of his wild-eyed that’s-the-stupidest-fucking-thing-I’ve-ever-heard shrugs. The Adam Shrug. “You think that seeing her daughter now is going to help your grandmother die at peace? After Rose forced her to raise you?”

“She did not force her to raise me. Wait, how do you know she forced her to raise me?”

Adam grinned. “I ran into your dad once. Manhattan is a small town.”

I looked at his yellow teeth, at the chipping paint all over the room. The door to another room was open, and through it I could see a very unassuming-looking bed, as well as a nightstand on which there was nothing but an alarm clock and a book. A TV and a computer monitor appeared to be propped up on the boxes they came in. If this were an underling’s quarters, that might have made sense. But it was clearly where Adam slept. This did not look like the apartment of a man who had gotten rich peddling lies.

“I’m not going to use the epiphany machine,” I said.

“Nobody asked you to,” he said. “And frankly I don’t think you should. But it can’t surprise you that most of the time when people say that to me, they’re no more than an hour away from asking to use the machine.”

“The machine is self-help bullshit and it took my mother away.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘self-help,’” he said. “Could you be more specific?”

“Everybody knows what self-help means. It’s something that . . . you know . . . tries to help you make yourself better.”

“And you think that’s a terrible thing.”

“I mean, not when you put it like that.”

“You put it like that,” Adam said.

“Stop trying to confuse me.”

“You’ve been sitting here for a long time, reading that pamphlet when you weren’t sleeping. Your mother wrote the original version. Epiphanies are not necessarily actionable. We tell people who they are. Sometimes that helps people become better. Often not.”

“I don’t care. I just want to find my mother.”

“Do you consider your mother to be your servant?”

“I consider my mother to be my mother.”

“And if she sees herself differently?”

“She has obligations. She wasn’t supposed to just abandon me.”

“And you think your life would have turned out better with the daily presence of a mother who did not want to be your mother?”

“Do you have any idea how angry this is making me?”

“Some. But you’re controlling it well, considering how tired and emotional you are. I’m proud of you.”

“What do you mean you’re proud of me?”

“I mean that I’m proud of you.”

“You’re my real father, aren’t you?”

Adam looked at me for a second and then guffawed. With some difficulty—his joints did not appear to be in the best shape—he crouched down by my stool.

“No, Venter. Your mother was very attractive, and I would have gladly had sex with her, but I guess her tastes ran toward men who buttoned their shirts.”

“Stop talking about my mother having sex.”

“Difficult subject to avoid when you’re trying to establish your paternity.”

I was, I had to admit, relieved. Whatever problems I had with my father, I did not want to stop thinking of myself as his son.

“So my mother has never tried to contact you, and you have no idea where she might be?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick one of my needles in my eye.”

“Then I guess I’m wasting my time with you. I should be spending this time with my grandmother.”

I stepped off the stool and briefly cast a shadow over Adam.

“Why did you come here?” he asked. “You couldn’t really have thought I could help you find your mother, at least not in time for her to see your grandmother.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have to imagine that if you had thought that I had information you could use, you would have tried harder to get it out of me.”

“My grandmother told me to come here.”

“Why? Does she think I know where Rose is?”

I searched his face for any sign that he knew why my grandmother had sent me here.

“She told me I should use the epiphany machine.”

Adam let out some kind of cough in disbelief. “Rose’s mother is doing recruitment for me now?”

“It seems to be her dying wish.”

“I definitely did not see that one coming. Guess I’m not much of a prophet.”

I peered through the foyer into the room beyond, at the far end of which was the purple velvet curtain that shielded the room with the epiphany machine. “Was that curtain up when my parents used the machine?”

“The very same one.”

“Does it have some kind of meaning?”

“Meaning?”

“Like ritualistic significance or whatever.”

He laughed. “No. No ritualistic significance. Although my mother did sew it, so that might sound like significance to you.”

“So when am I going to use the machine?”

Adam put his hand to his mouth, evaluating me. “You’re seventeen.”

“So?”

“Tattooing is finally legal again in New York City, but you have to be eighteen. I’ve found my way into the light of the law, and just as I’m blinking and my eyes are adjusting you’re asking me to scurry back into the darkness. Come back on your eighteenth birthday.”

“My grandmother’s not going to live to see my eighteenth birthday,” I said. I hadn’t realized this until I said it, and the knowledge reduced me to sobs.

“Good,” Adam said. “I’m glad to see you’re upset. Up until now I’ve wondered whether you have a heart at all. To be honest, I’ve been worried that you’re just going to get a CLOSED OFF epiphany, which would be a waste of my ink and your arm.”

“Please,” I said. “Can I just use the machine?”

Adam gave a different shrug, a more shruglike shrug than the Adam Shrug.

“I’m just a boy who can’t say no,” he said.

He led me over and around the piles of books on the floor, and through the purple velvet curtain. On the other side of the curtain was a small room that looked like a medical office. In the far corner there was a dentist’s chair; closer to me were white cabinets that hung above a sink. I noticed that there was a device obscured from my view by the dentist’s chair, and as I walked toward it, I could see that it really did look like an antique sewing machine.

“Do you want the tattoo on your right arm or your left arm?”

“What do most people say?”

“Most people want it on whatever arm they don’t favor. It’s like wearing a watch.”

“I’ll take it on my left arm.” I rolled up my sleeve.

He tugged the device around on its rolling stand and told me to sit in the chair. He hit a button on a CD player and “Instant Karma” started playing. He washed his hands, put on a pair of latex gloves, and unwrapped a needle. He put an oven mitt on one hand. Then he was by my side, lifting up the arm of the device and sliding the needle into it. He pointed to a track on the underside of the arm, and explained that the needle would slide down the track to give me my tattoo. He told me to put my arm on the base and I complied. I was still getting used to the cold feel of the metal slab when he lowered the arm of the device, and then the needle was inside me, hurting me and telling me things. I was the needle and the ink, somehow; together, we were some sort of trinity that had come together to save me. I was also the paper in my own polygraph test. The metaphors were endless and so was the machine. I knew that my epiphany would be LONELY GULLIBLE AND NUMB. Or maybe it would be CLOSED OFF, because it was true, I was closed off, I didn’t know the first thing about myself and I made it impossible for anyone to tell me. Or maybe it would be CARES NOTHING FOR ANYONE OR ANYTHING EXCEPT BEING THOUGHT A GENIUS, and this one in particular seemed so terrible that I was certain it was going to be my epiphany.

Thoughts about myself and who I was were enough to distract me from the pain until they weren’t. I saw what was happening, a foreign object was ripping open my skin and leaving behind a trail of ink that would never come out. The needle zagged and dragged and finally froze.

When the machine stopped whirring and Adam lifted the needle from my arm, the pain did not subside. My eyes were closed now, and I wanted to keep them closed because I didn’t want to see that horrible word GENIUS.

This was what I actually saw when I opened my eyes:

DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS

“No, no, no,” I said. “This is the one I saw on the guy who was leaving as I was coming in. This must have gotten stuck in the machine or something.”

“It applied to that guy, too.”

“But this is the worst possible thing you could say about someone. I’d rather be a monster than a sheep.”

“If Rose were here, she would explain more delicately than I can that the worst possible thing you could think of to say about someone will almost certainly be your epiphany.”

“Why isn’t she here? Why hasn’t she been here all my life?”

“I’ve never been a big fan of mother-blaming, but what do I know?”

For the second time that night, I burst into tears.

“Epiphanies tend to cause the most anguish to the most intelligent,” he said.

“Really?”

And this was the first time he looked at me sourly. “What do you think it says about you that you’re so happy that I just suggested you were intelligent?”

I knew where he was going with this, but I couldn’t take it.

“I’m getting tired of being asked leading questions that are designed to get me to admit that I suck.”

“Good!” he said. “Good. That’s an impulse to cultivate. But be careful, because it can also lead you back into servitude. Now, for the sake of the Christ who never existed, stop worrying about what I think of you and get back to your grandmother. Do you want gauze or Saran Wrap?”

Later, I was to learn that Adam was conscientious about needle protocol, but mostly indifferent to hygiene as soon as the machine had done its work. The room was well stocked with soap and two options for anyone who wanted to keep their tattoo safe from the elements in the hours after using the machine, and Adam intermittently insisted that one of the two options be used, but usually showed limited interest. I would also learn the politics: guests who were proud of their tattoos, or who wanted to appear proud of their tattoos, chose Saran Wrap; guests who wanted to shield the tattoos even from their own eyes (or who were truly serious about hygiene) demanded gauze pads; still other guests were so upset that they fled before either option could even be offered. Adam’s lax attitude should have led to infections, but it was surprisingly rare that infections were reported to Adam. This could have been because, as Adam liked to not-really-joke, “The god in the machine keeps the tats clean,” or it could have been because those who had gotten infections were afraid that if they came back they would have their minds further fucked with, so decided to just go to a doctor and get some antibiotics.

My first instinct, of course, was to ask for a gauze pad. But then I realized that if I asked for a gauze pad, I would be showing Adam that I was worried what people would think about me. And I was determined never to worry about that again.

“I’ll take the Saran Wrap,” I said.