CHAPTER

9

A Metro-North trip through Westchester late at night was usually a dreary thing, with packs of drunk, loud teenagers conducting experiments alongside packs of drunk, loud middle-aged men to see whether drunkenness became more or less obnoxious with age, each one, like me, exiled from a city that had deemed them too unserious to spend the night. But the tattoo on my forearm seemed to infect the world with interesting things, things that I had been too DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS to notice. Now I felt happy simply to observe the people around me, not worrying, on the one hand, about what they were thinking of me, and also not worrying, on the other hand, about how I could distance myself from them so that imaginary other people would know that I was better than these loud, drunk, obnoxious losers. The gaggle of bankers who were all agreeing with one another that if the police had one problem it’s that they treated black people too gingerly: these racist idiots were not irretrievably awful; they could be guided toward a less-obstructed view of the universe. All they had to do was receive and heed messages on their forearms, rather than wave around beer cans the size of their forearms. And if they could be redeemed, then certainly so could the teenage girl wobbling around asking for aspirin through the shields that solo passengers had constructed for themselves out of newspapers. All it would take to get this girl to stop chasing the desiccated remnants of fun available to a society that was simultaneously decadent and repressed was for the epiphany machine to tell her that that was what she was doing.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m talking to you.”

This was when I realized that she was in fact talking to me, rather than to the dozing woman in the row behind me.

“Do. You. Have. As. Pir. In.”

“No,” I said, remembering my decision not to hide from anyone ever again. “But I do have this!”

I rolled up my sleeve and held up my arm. She laughed so hard that she stumbled and had to catch herself on the back of a seat.

“Did your mom make you get that so that girls will know that you need her permission to go on dates? Because I don’t think that’s going to be an issue.”

“It means that my natural tendency is to be too worried about what people think of me to show my true self. But I can use this tattoo to fight against that natural tendency, even when I probably shouldn’t, like now.”

“Oh, shit!” she said, shrieking and raising her hand to her mouth. “Is that an epiphany tattoo?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“That changes everything. I was afraid you were a freak.”

After some burpy laughter she toddled on her way, like the childish pre-epiphany person I had been a few hours earlier. Shame sloshed around in my stomach, as it always did after I had been mocked, and reflexively I looked around to see whether anyone in the car was laughing at me. But even though I noticed two or three people who might have been actively averting their eyes rather than simply not looking at me, I did not care as much as I usually did, because I knew that I was on track to not caring what people thought.

Rather than continue to engage with strangers, which I was probably not ready to do, I tried to focus on the physical pain that the needle had left me in, since physical pain is a famous cure for concern about the opinion of others.

From the train station, I drove straight to the hospital and somehow kept taking the wrong turn in every hallway. Eventually, I found my father sitting with a stack of papers in a lounge in a part of the hospital completely different from the one I was trying to get to.

“You took my car without asking,” he said without looking up at me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Your grandmother is dead.”

“What? But I just left a few hours ago.”

“Right. When you leave someone who’s about to die, that person might be dead by the time you come back. That’s the way it works.”

“But I thought I’d have more time.”

“I have no trouble believing that you thought that.”

He still wasn’t looking up, and I felt emboldened to make him hate me. “She asked me to use the epiphany machine,” I said. “And I did.”

I rolled up my sleeve and received the same exasperated look I had seen as a child when I told him I had broken something. I thought he would scream or laugh or maybe be silent forever, never speak to me again.

“The worst epiphany of all. The one that tells the world you can’t think for yourself. A son who would think for himself is all I ever wanted, though Adam is right that I don’t have one. He was also right that I never should have become a father. Whatever else he is, the man is certainly perceptive.” Then he looked back down at his papers.

For the second time in nine or ten hours, I turned around and walked out of the hospital, or through it and around it and finally out of it. I drove straight home and lay in bed until the sun came up, thinking about a time when I was small and I asked my grandmother if we could stay up all night until the sun came up, and she told me that I was too young to stay up all night, but she promised me that we would do that one day, or one night, maybe the summer after I graduated from high school. I thought that this should make me sob, but it did not.

I called Adam Lyons at a number he had given me. He did not sound surprised that I was calling.

“You do important work,” I said. “I want to come work for you. Be your assistant.”

“Like mother, like son?”

“I just want to help you do what you do. I don’t want to go to college, or even go back to high school. I don’t want to do anything except help you.”

“I am not letting you drop out of high school. The biggest mistake I made with your mother was letting her drop out of law school to work for me full-time. This would be a lot worse than that.”

“Part-time, then. Let me do something.”

It occurred to me that the best thing I could do to address my own epiphany was to stay away from the machine, since remaining near a source of advice and reassurance might keep me DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. Adam took a long time to respond, possibly thinking this as well.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I have something.”

Honestly, I probably would have agreed to become some kind of hit man for him; I would have hunted any enemies he had. Instead, he just suggested that I become the official oral historian of the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation; essentially, my job would be to take down the stories of people who used the machine. I would come on Friday and Saturday nights, “salon nights,” when people who had used the machine over the years would hang out, smoke, drink, and discuss how their tattoos had affected their lives. If so inclined, they could bring potential new users, and sometimes those new users would wind up using the machine. Many nights, salon nights and otherwise, were like the one I had just witnessed, with so much traffic that a line formed. (I would find that there were also often salon nights on Thursdays, Tuesdays, whenever Adam felt like it. And guests would come to use the machine at all hours on all days. Adam never really closed.)

“Who knows,” he said. “Even Rose might show up eventually.”

I accepted the position before he had finished explaining it.