Before I used the epiphany machine, I was essentially Carter Wolf’s amanuensis. Not literally, exactly. It’s not as though I took dictation from him. But I did organize my day around making sure that he had no distractions. I made him oatmeal for breakfast and brought it to the corner of the bedroom that he called his “study”; I made him a peanut butter sandwich—no jelly—for lunch, and brought that to his study, too. Sometimes he would join me for dinner, usually not. Theoretically, I had all the time in the world to do my own writing, but somehow preparing meals and cleaning a house and seeing to someone else’s needs, whether or not you care about doing these things well, almost invariably takes up the entire day.
Maybe that’s an excuse. Maybe the reason that I couldn’t do any of my own work was that I just didn’t have anything to write. Or maybe I was suffocated by a genius. I married him when I was very young, twenty-four. The funny thing is that we met after he sent me a fan letter. He read a story I had published in an obscure literary journal and he sent me a two-page, handwritten fan letter. My heart stopped for pretty much the entire duration of those two pages. When I accepted his invitation to meet, I knew I would probably sleep with him, but I never would have thought I would marry him. Middlemarch was one of my favorite novels, and I had no intention of becoming a Dorothea to a Casaubon. The difference, or one difference, is that Carter, unlike Casaubon, was sexually vital and insanely productive. He would get up two hours before me to write his one thousand morning words, then come back to bed for a morning fuck, then write another thousand words, then an afternoon fuck, then read for hours, on most days devouring an entire book, before fucking me one more time before we fell asleep. I didn’t think I would suffer from the problems that Dorothea suffered from. I thought, okay, all that typing will inspire me to type stuff of my own. Instead, it just paralyzed me. I wanted to blame it on the noise, but really there was no noise. Carter was a very soft typist. Just knowing that he was typing made it impossible for me to type. In my college circle, and even in my MFA program, I had unquestionably been the best writer—it had even kind of turned me on to know that I was so much better than the boys—but I knew that what Carter was writing was just on another level entirely from what I was writing.
What I just told you is a Carter-friendly version of this story. It’s not completely inaccurate—it’s how I understood our situation for most of the time we were together—but it leaves out the part where, after I gave a reading at a bar that only my friends showed up to, he said: “At least only your friends heard that piece.” It leaves out the part where, even though I responded with copious comments on every draft he showed me, he had only this to say on both occasions I showed him a draft: “Early drafts often look like this.” As it often is, it’s hard to say whether he was being honest or just being a dick. I hated everything I wrote, and I was also invested in thinking that I was tough enough to accept any truth about myself and my work, so I chose to believe that he was being honest.
On the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, I remember thinking that my writing was finished for good, and I also remember missing it. Physically missing it. I think I used the epiphany machine mostly to get words back into my body. I also got the tattoo to humiliate Carter, I guess. He was receiving an award at a dinner that night, so that was how we would be spending my birthday, and he had mentioned he wanted me to wear a sleeveless gown. That’s what I would have worn anyway, most likely, but it bothered me how blatantly he was letting me know that he thought of me as the pretty wife two decades his junior to be shown off to all his friends and admirers. He wanted to say: Not only do I have the Prestigious Award, but I also have this hot, sexy girl. Well, I thought: I’ll show you. I’ll show up with an epiphany tattoo, and essentially tell all your friends and sycophants that the hot, sexy girl you married is a cult member.
There were a lot of people here on the day I used the machine. People were chattering all around me, looking for reassurance that they weren’t crazy. I offered the little grunts of sympathy that are useful for getting people to tell me things, meaning that they’re useful for finding the raw material for stories. Only while I was waiting in that line did I realize that this was a major reason why I was so successful writing fiction in college: because people were eager to empty their secrets onto me. Three a.m. confessions fueled six a.m. writing sessions at least four times a week, back when my body could support my philosophical aversion to sleep. Now this was almost exactly the same situation. All these people standing around, telling me their stories, telling me what had led them to the epiphany machine and what they hoped to learn. What they feared they would learn. I would listen to what they were not telling me, and whole short stories would emerge in those gaps.
By the time I got to the front of the line, I didn’t want to sit down and use the epiphany machine. I wanted to rush back home and start writing again. But everyone was looking at me, both the people behind me in line and the people who had already used the machine and were taking their first confused steps toward understanding their tattoos. All of these people were expecting me to use the machine, and I worried that if I told their stories without using the machine myself that I would be using them.
I don’t know why I let that bother me. A man wouldn’t let that bother him. Carter, if he had been in my situation, would have happily walked out of line and opened his laptop at the nearest coffee shop. He probably would have danced the white-boy shuffle on his way down the stairs. In any case, I didn’t get out of line, and I got a tattoo.
That’s how I got this tattoo that you’re scared to read out loud. DOES NOT LOVE HUSBAND. That I already knew this, but did not know that I knew it, is only part of what makes the machine so valuable. The machine doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong with your life; it forces you to change it. You can’t really avoid a divorce when you have a tattoo on your arm that says DOES NOT LOVE HUSBAND. But I guess I still wanted some sort of revenge, because I called Carter and told him I would meet him at the dinner rather than beforehand to toast my birthday as we had planned. I got there early, and by the time Carter arrived, I was already at our table, absorbing the stares of all the writers in line for the open bar. I was also being hit on by a writer even older than Carter. When Carter saw the tattoo, he looked at it and asked what he had done to deserve it. As soon as he used the word “deserve,” I knew that he and the word “deserve” were the two things that were keeping me from what was mine.
As far as I know, he hasn’t been able to finish anything since, while I have written two books in four years, the second of which won the award Carter won that night.