When I’m here and somebody who just used the machine is crying and screaming their head off that they’re going to sue, I’m not too concerned. Even the ones who actually start legal proceedings, most of them drop their cases after a few weeks. If I weren’t intimately familiar with Adam’s supply chain, I would say that there’s something magic in the ink itself. Something that in a robust teenager such as yourself reaches the heart almost immediately, but takes longer to work its way through old blood. Young people absorb what the machine tells them faster because young people absorb everything faster. That’s why I have my baseball charity; I love to watch young boys as they learn. Their eyes get so intent and focused, and you can see what they’re learning go through their entire bodies. When older people use the machine, you can almost see them trying to block the path their epiphanies are taking from their arms to their brains. But just as blood keeps circulating until you’re dead, no matter how old you are, your epiphany gets to every part of you eventually.
Growing up, I wanted to be a center fielder, and through high school I was just good enough to keep that fantasy going. Sometimes I would stay out practicing until my hands bled, and when I got home my father would tell me I was lazy for not working in his office after school to learn the family business. I was spoiled, he said, lost like a typical self-indulgent American to the pursuit of a pastime, rather than to the cultivation of buildings, where people would live and work. Often he would yell at me for an hour. By college, it became clear that I’d never make the big leagues, but I still wanted to work in baseball. My father, one of the biggest guys in New York City real estate, could have bought a team for me if he had wanted to. But he definitely did not want to. He told me that there were men built for baseball and men built for buildings, and I was the latter. I agreed to go to work for his firm, telling myself that I wasn’t doing it because my father forced me to, but because I was going to be a slugger one way or another, and if I couldn’t use baseball bats I was going to use skyscrapers.
To get to the top of those skyscrapers, I started out low man on the totem pole, even though in practice everyone knew that I was the boss’s son and was extremely deferential. Almost immediately I missed baseball. I made a habit of getting drunk and smashing parking meters with baseball bats. Twice I got arrested; both times the charges mysteriously got dropped as soon as somebody saw my name, and I was back at my office the next morning.
Mostly my job was making sure that tenants were paying on time, and kicking out anybody who wasn’t paying market rate. Obviously Adam stuck out as an easy target. Not only was he running an illegal business, he was illegally running it out of his apartment. I had my lawyer send him an eviction notice and figured that would be the end of it. A couple of weeks later Adam mails me a photograph of my lawyer, who’s holding up this letter that, if you squint, you can see is a resignation letter. But it took a while to notice the letter, because I was more focused on the tattoo on my lawyer’s arm, which he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and jacket to display: NEEDS TO STOP SPEAKING FOR OTHERS.
Pretty obvious, to me anyway, that the tattoo was intended for me even more than for my father. I don’t think this term existed at the time, but I had what today would be called “anger management issues.” This lawyer was smart and hardworking, but he was generally inclined to be easier on tenants who didn’t belong in our buildings than I was, settling for getting them out in two years rather than fighting to get them out in two months. He had gotten used to doing things his way. I yelled at him. I yelled at him a lot, I guess. My father was always firm but gentle and soft-spoken with the people who worked for him, reserving his yelling for me. And I knew my father would take his anger at the lawyer’s resignation out on me, particularly given the circumstances.
I put the photograph down and walked to my window. The floor I was working on was still low enough that I could make out the outlines of the people. I remember I saw a few little kids pass by wearing Yankees caps, the hats of their heroes. Those kids, their faces, the way they moved, that’s what life was about, and I would never have that life again. I picked up a baseball bat signed by Willie Mays that I kept in my office, told my secretary to cancel my afternoon meetings, and drove straight to see Adam.
When I buzzed number 7, Adam asked who it was, so I told him who it was and I told him to meet me outside so he could act like a man. He asked why he should act like a man when, like everybody else, he was doing his best to become a god. I told him to just fucking come downstairs, and he stopped answering. I had forgotten my keys to the building, so I smashed the glass door. Yeah, I definitely had anger management issues. I cut my hand up, but I was still prepared to break down the door to Adam’s apartment, and probably would have if he hadn’t left it open for me.
I entered slowly, thinking maybe he had a gun or something. Instead, he was holding a drink, and he kind of smiled at my bloody hand before gesturing to his ice bucket and asking me if I needed some ice.
I looked at his missing tooth for a while before answering.
“Not only are you running an illegal tattoo parlor, but you’re selling liquor without a license?”
“I’m not selling the liquor,” he said. “Or the tattoos. My guests are my guests.”
“Nelson is a good lawyer,” I said. “He wouldn’t have gotten that tattoo if you hadn’t brainwashed him.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t have worked for your family all these years if your father hadn’t brainwashed him. Your father sounds like a son of a bitch.”
I agreed with him about my father, but that didn’t stop me from smashing a bottle of Scotch with the bat. It broke the bottle and drove a tiny shard of glass deeper into my palm.
“That was good Scotch,” Adam said. Without asking permission, he plucked the shard from my palm, and then offered me a rag to use as a bandage. I hesitated, but took it.
“This building belongs to my family,” I said.
“And so do you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think you know,” he said, “but just to make sure you don’t forget, let’s get it in writing.”
And that was it. A little more wrangling back and forth, and I agreed to use the machine. Everyone says that the machine hurts, and maybe the only reason I didn’t notice the pain is that I was already in so much pain, but honestly I think I was just completely relieved. Relieved and awed. All the wisdom in the universe was being shrunk down to a scale model of itself that would fit in my forearm. I don’t want to say that the actual tattoo was a disappointment, exactly, because it definitely wasn’t. BURNS WITH DESIRE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE immediately felt right, felt true. What was important to me was to make a difference in the lives of kids like the ones who had passed underneath my office, not necessarily to work in the sport they enjoyed.
When I was leaving the building, an elderly tenant was standing in the doorway, weeping over the broken glass.
“Those animals are taking over this city.”
I wasn’t under any illusions about what she meant by this. She was just an old racist. But she was right about what a handful of rich families, including my own, were doing to the city, had been doing for a long time. And you know who serves his family and doesn’t care about anyone else? An animal.
“Not if I can help it, ma’am,” I said, a bit grandly, of course, but I was really excited about the prospect of helping people. The first thing I did when I got back to my office was to call somebody to install a new door in Adam’s building. The second thing was to quit. By the end of the year, I had used much of my share of the family money to start Friends of the Epiphany Machine.
Supporting and defending Adam has easily been the best thing I could have possibly done with my life. There were some other things I sort of wanted to do—every once in a while I feel the urge to cash out Friends of the Epiphany Machine and buy a baseball team, and I still wake up from dreams where I’m a ballplayer wondering what might have happened if I had practiced even harder, or if I hadn’t given up in college. I look at what I’ve done with myself instead of playing baseball and I see that I’ve essentially been the pitching coach for the greatest metaphysical pitcher who ever lived. Or maybe I am the team owner after all. Pick your own damn metaphor, as Adam says sometimes. I also started a charity to help inner-city youths get involved in baseball, and that’s enough baseball for me. Seeing those kids slide through the dirt, my God. Those kids. The point is that I’ve made a difference, through Adam and my charity, and that’s the best life anybody can hope for.