CHAPTER

13

Si’s tattoo probably should have made me suspicious, since nobody gets a tattoo that good. But it didn’t.

There’s somebody else I have to mention at this point. One guy who often came to hang out was thirtyish, with boxy glasses, an untraceable European accent, and, quite noticeably, no tattoo. Usually, Adam would sidle up to quiet, untattooed people on their second visit; if they weren’t tattooed by their fourth, he would shut them out of conversations. This guy got to stick around, tattoolessly chatting with Adam at salon after salon. He didn’t say much, and didn’t register much emotion either, except when Adam called him “Douglavich,” which would make him briefly narrow his eyes and turn his nose away as though he had smelled something bad. He never talked to me until one day he did.

“It’s impressive that Adam Lyons likes you so much,” he said. “A lot of people want his attention, but you’re the only one who seems to have it. Everybody else is just a customer.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.” I was pretty sure it wasn’t true, and yet I wanted it to be true so badly that hearing it out of someone else’s mouth seemed to magically make it true. “And we call them guests.”

He smiled at this term to let me know it was dumb. “How would you like to help me bring the epiphany machine, a device that you and I both believe helps everyone who uses it, to people who can’t afford a trip to New York?”

“What, like a tour?”

“No. I don’t want to move the machine. I want to make new machines. Mass production.”

“How can you do that when not even Adam knows who built it or how it works?”

“Of course he knows who built it. He built it. And of course he knows how it works. He makes it work by making people think it works.”

“So you’re just a skeptic.”

“A skeptic is the last thing I am. The epiphanies aren’t magic, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”

“So you want to put random tattoos on people to guide their behavior?”

“It seems just as likely to make the world a better place as anything else that’s been tried.”

“Why would you need Adam Lyons to do this?”

“Because because because because becauuuuse . . . because of the wonderful things he does.” I thought that his accent enhanced that song’s most sinister qualities, and then I chided myself for being influenced by bad Hollywood movies with vaguely European villains. “He’s why people think the machine works.”

“In that case, what would be the point in mass-producing it? Not everyone could meet him.”

“And not everybody who buys Nikes can meet Michael Jordan. But every Nike customer feels Michael Jordan on his feet.”

“So you want to stock the machine in Walmart and put Adam’s face on the box?”

“Not exactly. But Adam’s endorsement would be helpful.”

“And you think I can get that for you.”

“I think you might be able to get that for me.”

“I believe in the machine,” I said. “Not just in Adam.”

“You believe it’s supernatural. You believe that there’s a literal god-in-the-machine who is guiding the tattoos.”

Put this way, it sounded silly. But by this point I was coming to realize that I was so impressionable that I could be convinced of anything, and therefore I might as well continue believing what I currently believed. So I just said: “Yes.”

“Not even my father was quite that stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

He put up his hands as though he were surrendering to my idiocy. “I should get going. Nice chatting with you.”

As soon as he was out the door, I found Adam near the bathroom. A skinny bald guy who was there a lot was leaning over to tell the story of his life, and Adam was nodding along.

“I need to talk to you in private,” I said to Adam.

The skinny bald guy looked up at me. “I was just in the middle of something.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m sorry for interrupting you while you tell Adam for the thousandth time about how sorry you are about being someone who CHOOSES GLAMOUR OVER CHILDREN. Maybe you can address that issue by actually going home and hanging out with your kids.”

This made Adam laugh, maybe not only because I was quoting verbatim from something he had said a few weeks earlier to a guy with an identical tattoo. The bald guy had that crestfallen look that people get in the few seconds before their personality decides for them whether they’re going to get sad or angry. He looked like he was tilting toward sad, so Adam took a puff on his cigar and slapped the man’s back.

“The epiphany machine is worthless to people who can’t take advice,” he said. “So my advice is not to be one of those people. Now go home to your kids.”

“Can I explain why I don’t think that’s a good idea after you talk with Venter?”

Adam did not hide the rolling of his eyes. “Fine.”

As soon as we were alone, Adam said to me: “That was good, man. Keep talking to people that way. Ward off other people’s opinions with your own.”

“The guy who was just here,” I said. “Be careful around him. He wants to mass-produce the machine.”

“Oh, you mean Douglavich? He talks that nonsense all the time. He’s harmless.”

How could you have been so stupid, Venter? “I should have realized that. He was pretty obviously just a crazy guy who could never have anything like that kind of money.”

“No, he has a lot of money. A lot. He could buy and sell me. He could buy and sell Si Strauss. His name is Vladimir Harrican. You should read about him; he’s an interesting guy. But don’t worry, we’re not selling out.”

I was, if anything, even more sympathetic than the average teenager to any argument against selling out, and to the argument that there was no difference between selling and selling out. But that’s not what I was concerned with.

“It wouldn’t be possible to sell out, right? Because the machine is the machine and can’t be copied once, let alone mass-produced.”

“Anything can be mass-produced,” Adam said, “as long as you don’t care about quality.”

The next day, I went to the library and was pointed to a recent (and rather lurid and gossipy) book about post-Soviet Russia that included a chapter on Vladimir Douglavich Harrican and his family. Vladimir’s father, Douglas Harrican, was a famous British violinist who defected to the Soviet Union in 1965. The book reported that Douglas may have used the epiphany machine while he was living in New York and that his tattoo might have inspired him to leave his fiancée and the West. (Adam refused to explicitly confirm to me whether Douglas had used the machine, saying only that he couldn’t be expected to remember every British tourist with some musical ability who wandered in looking for some divine advice in American spelling.)

Virtually the moment Douglas arrived in Moscow, a provincial party leader named Anton Vasiliev, sensing an advantage in an alliance with the prominent, dashing convert, introduced him to his beautiful daughter, Anya, and, it seems, all but forced a marriage between them. Anton prepared a lavish concert that was sure to enhance his status in the party. But on the eve of the concert, Douglas announced that he was not going to perform, at that engagement or ever again. His tattoo was MUST MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS, which Douglas read to mean that he had to work in a factory rather than play the violin. The party, which had relished the thought of parading this violinist around the Western capitals he had renounced, was greatly displeased, but it was decided that coercing, jailing, or expelling Douglas would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. Someone in the party who had evidently read about the machine and had a sense of humor put him to work in a factory that assembled, among other things, sewing machines.

Anton’s status in the party was greatly diminished by the episode, and he himself was sent to work in the same factory. Anton and Douglas worked side by side on the assembly line, cursing at each other under their breath all day in a mix of English and Russian, and then returned home to yell at each other all night. Vladimir’s early childhood was dominated by screaming matches among his father, grandfather, and mother, replaced by screaming matches between his father and grandfather when his mother died shortly after Vladimir turned six.

After several years, Douglas grew tired of making repetitive motions with his hands that did not require talent or skill, tired of his coworkers, most of whom took Anton’s lead in hating this strange tattooed Englishman who had appeared in their ranks, and he tried to return to playing the violin. But by now his hands were mangled. He had broken three of his fingers and worn the rest down, and he was judged unsuitable even to teach the violin to children. Finally, when Vladimir was thirteen, Douglas decided that the different use he must make of his hands was putting a gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Anton remained furious with Douglas, even then. But he was a cunning, resourceful, and determined man, not the sort to give up. Slowly, he rose to become manager of the factory, and he used this position to become, at the apparent prodding of Vladimir, one of the first to smuggle personal computers into the country, an endeavor that proved much more successful than even he could have imagined. As the Soviet system collapsed, Anton and Vladimir used their considerable and retroactively legitimate wealth to take control of a number of formerly state-owned companies. Anton died of a heart attack in 1995, leaving Vladimir a billionaire and his grandfather’s presumed successor at the pinnacle of the new Russian system. But Vladimir detested Russia and moved to New York, using his billions to make investments, mostly in the tech sector, which had made him more billions.

All this left me with many questions, not least of them why someone would want to invest in the mass production of a machine that looked like a device that his father had stood on an assembly line mass-producing until he killed himself, or why he wanted to hang out with the man who had given his father the tattoo that had led him to that assembly line in the first place.

His strange and dark upbringing, his complex psychological reasons for both hating and being fascinated by the epiphany machine, and the perfect English he had learned from his father all left me with a theory that I knew was far-fetched, but that I kept on thinking about and filling in details for: that he was Steven Merdula.

In any case, I intended to ask him many more questions the next time I saw him. But after that night he had talked to me, his frequent visits suddenly ceased, and I never saw him at Adam’s apartment again. I wish I had never seen him again at all.