CHAPTER

15

Once school started again, I didn’t have any time to spend at Adam’s, but I spent all my time there anyway. I chose my classes mostly to avoid seeing Ismail and Leah, and though it was impossible to avoid them completely in the hallways, it was easy to keep our conversations perfunctory. Occasionally, I would have to field rude questions from near-strangers about my tattoo and/or the cult I had joined—a good way, really, to break myself of being DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, since these people all thought I was a wackjob and I thought they could go fuck themselves—but this was rare and got rarer as the year progressed, so mostly I would spend my classes thinking about the epiphany machine, and then I would get on a Metro-North train and be at Adam’s by 4:30.

The stream of guests was fairly steady during the week, usually around ten per night, even on nights that were not salon nights. My reputation was growing among former guests, and sometimes they returned just to tell me their story. These people mostly had the most boring stories to tell, canned and self-congratulatory, their tapes for all intents and purposes lost before they had finished speaking.

One Saturday morning, I saw a New York Post cover about Michelle Scarra, a high school teacher in upstate New York who had been arrested for having sex with a fifteen-year-old student.

“Did you have anything to do with this?” I asked Adam, who was already smoking a cigar.

“That headline? ‘Hot for Teacher’? I could have done better than that.”

“Did you report her?”

He took a puff. “I had a guy look into what she was doing. Found her in bed with this kid. My guy would never have called the cops. He was just going to talk to her. I don’t mean that as a euphemism; he was really just going to talk to her. But she called the cops on him when she caught him outside her window. When they arrived, she stupidly told them everything about the kid she was fucking. The whole thing’s a shame, but predators are predators, buddy.”

“How do you know she was harming this kid? He probably liked it.”

“He probably loved it. She still belongs in prison.”

“Sounds awfully puritanical for a guy smoking a cigar and drinking Scotch at ten o’clock in the morning. This is a woman’s life.”

“Which she shouldn’t have thrown away by fucking teenagers.”

“Teenager. One. She resisted the urge with me.”

“Venter, I hate to break this to you, but there were probably others. You should consider yourself lucky that she found you resistible.”

“She quit her job because she couldn’t trust herself around me! She wanted to do the right thing. She tried to do the right thing.”

“If trying to do the right thing were the same as doing the right thing, nobody would ever feel the need to use the machine. But a lot of people do feel that need, and a lot of them are coming today. So would you like to help me get ready?”

I argued for a bit longer, but I already knew I was going to give in, and I did.

•   •   •

I have to admit it was always fun to watch Adam field a difficult question from somebody who had come only to ask Adam a difficult question.

“If you’ve figured out the secret to life,” one guy asked, “then why aren’t you married?”

Adam put out his cigar and rubbed his palms together. “So many assumptions in one simple question. Venter, would you like to enumerate?”

“He’s assuming that it’s you rather than the machine who’s doing the figuring out.”

“Boom!” He put up one finger. “That’s the first assumption. What’s the second?”

“He’s assuming that what’s being figured out is one thing, rather than many things.”

“Nothing but net!” He put up a second finger. “Now let’s make it a hat trick, whatever a hat trick is.”

“He’s assuming that what’s being figured out is about life in general, rather than the specific life of the specific guest.”

“And that is . . . correct! Now, do you want to take your winnings and go home, or do you want to try our bonus round?”

“He’s assuming that the machine deals in secrets, rather than in truths so obvious we can’t help but forget them.”

“Shazam! Brilliant. Speaking of which, you’ve left out the most obvious one.”

“That enlightenment necessarily leads to marriage?”

“That’s good, too, but I was thinking of something more obvious.”

“Just because you’ve used the machine, and just because you own the machine, you’ve benefitted from it?”

“There we go. You see,” he said, “I make no claims to knowing anything more about myself than anyone else knows about themselves. You never really know yourself, even if you’ve used the epiphany machine, worked hard to understand what it has told you, and then worked even harder to adjust your behavior to account for what your tattoo has revealed as lies, evasions, and nasty delusions. Even if we do all this, our sense of ourselves will still be far from perfect. Even in the best outcome, I will still be the missing link in my own evolution.”

He took a long drag from his joint, and then looked at the man who had asked the question. “So,” he said. “The needle or the door?”

•   •   •

Later that night—maybe another night, almost certainly another night, the nights blur—as I was vacuuming the epiphany room as Adam had requested, he stood in the threshold, draping himself in the velvet curtain, and stared at me.

“Am I vacuuming wrong?” I asked.

He laughed a gently mocking laugh I had never heard before. “I’m amazed at just how much like themselves people can be.”

“Would you rather I not vacuum?”

“Can you tell me something?” he said. “Are you any closer to finding your mother than you were the first night you came to see me?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“What have you done to find her?”

“Very little.”

“Very little is not nothing. Give me an example of what you’ve done.”

I tried to think, one of my favorite ways of not thinking. “I always hope when I interview somebody who used the machine in the seventies that they might have kept in touch with my mother or something.”

“Do you ask them if they know your mother?”

“I figure that if they do, they’ll tell me.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re trying to find your mother.”

“I guess I’m not sure if I want to find her. If she were worth finding, she would have returned to my grandmother before she died. I don’t know how she would have known my grandmother was sick. It’s not rational. But I don’t have to explain to you about believing things that aren’t rational.”

“So why do you keep coming here?”

“I guess I’m hoping that if I see enough models for how people have used their epiphanies, I’ll figure out how to use my epiphany.”

He gave me a look that told me he liked this answer. Maybe the search for this look from authority figures has always been the major search of my life.

“More of my guests should think about using their epiphanies,” he said. “Too many people think they can just come here, get something written on their arm, and their lives will magically change. You’re a very special young man, Venter.”

I was not sure that I had learned anything from other people’s epiphanies; in fact, I was sure that I had not. But I said nothing about this to Adam. His faith in me was misplaced, but not unwelcome.

When it became clear that I was not going to respond, Adam continued. “I don’t think anyone has understood the machine so well since your mother.”

This made me cry, even though I wasn’t sure what it meant. Adam lifted his arms into something other than a shrug and embraced me.

“Your mother was the smartest person I’ve ever met. You should have heard her observations about the people who used the machine. I should have written them down. She should have written them down.”

Adam’s feeling for me was starting to come into focus: he had been in love with my mother and therefore regarded me as his son.

“Be honest with me,” I said. “Do you know where my mother is?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “If I did, I would tell you.”

“How about Si Strauss?” I asked. “He must have been paying her salary, right? She must be making money somehow, if she’s still alive. Maybe he’s still giving her money.”

Adam released me from his embrace. “I paid Rose with my own money.”

“But that money was provided by Si, right?”

Now Adam was angry. “People who want to destroy the machine always exaggerate Si Strauss’s role in what I do. I could be doing all of this without him. The wild conspiracy theory you’re spinning sounds like something out of that goddamn Merdula book.”

I looked at Adam and felt sorry for him, that his dreams were dependent on a rich man’s whims, though I knew that that was true for almost everyone.

But this was an opportunity to ask a question I had been wanting to ask for a long time.

“Is Vladimir Harrican Steven Merdula?”

“Douglavich?” I could see in his eyes that he suddenly found this plausible. “He would have been around twenty when Merdula started publishing.”

“Not impossible.” I still had vague hopes of publishing my first book when I was around twenty.

“It’s not worth thinking about,” he said, headed again for the velvet curtain. “Get back to vacuuming. Nobody wants to hear from the heavens when there’s dirt on the floor.”

•   •   •

One more story and then I’ll have to get to the day Ismail came to Adam’s apartment. On a night when I had missed the last Metro-North train, Adam and I walked to a drugstore to get some candy. Another aisle over was a guy shopping for shampoo, a beefy guy with thick, messy white hair and a tattoo on his forearm that depicted his own head with a snake wrapped around it. (The hair in the tattoo was equally messy, but black.) I saw him see Adam and keep on glancing over while Adam was deciding between a bag of M&M’s and a bag of Kit Kats.

“Another fan,” I said.

Almost as soon as Adam looked up, he grabbed a Toblerone and threw it at the guy, missing and knocking some Head & Shoulders from the shelf.

“Counterfeiter!” Adam yelled. “Fraud!” He was shaking, something I’d never seen him do.

The white-haired guy picked up the Toblerone off the checkered floor, calmly unwrapped it, and took a bite before deliberately dropping it again.

“I’m the fraud? People come to you for the meaning of life and you give them tattoos. People come to me for tattoos and I give them tattoos.”

“Goddamn it, Goldberg. Don’t you realize that these are people’s souls you’re playing with? Doesn’t that make any difference to you?”

“Doesn’t it make any difference to you? Nobody expects to leave my shop knowing any more about themselves than they did when they came in. Though they often do leave knowing more. You’d be surprised how much people can learn about themselves just by discovering what they ask for.”

“You’re asking for it, all right.”

The only term for what happened next that feels either accurate or fully immersed in the context of the moment is that Adam lost his shit. That is what I thought while Adam pulled Twizzlers and Skittles and Hershey’s Kisses from the shelves: “Adam is losing his shit.” The security guard would have been entirely justified in calling the police, but, out of generosity or laziness—the two most underrated human qualities—he just looked at me and said: “Can you control your old men, please?”

I said I would, and that I would clean up the candy. Adam was settling down, like a toddler after a tantrum, and I sent him home. Goldberg stuck around to help me pick up the candy. And of course he told me his story.