CHAPTER

16

By the time Goldberg was finished talking, we were finished picking up the candy, and the candy display was the same as it was before we had come in. This story had made me as angry at Goldberg as Adam was—Goldberg was the enemy of life and knowledge, he was selling plastic fruit in the Garden of Eden—and I wanted to hurt him. But I needed to find out if he knew anything about my parents.

“Wait,” I said. “That couple that you said harassed you. The woman had a fox fur coat. Tell me more about them.”

“They would just track me and find me, yell at me to leave, call the cops, then repeat until the cops kicked me out. They made my life miserable for a couple of years and it didn’t seem to bother either of them. I tried to engage them in conversation a few times, real conversation, but they were too brainwashed to reveal anything about themselves.”

“Did they seem like they were in love?”

“In love? They often stood outside my places of business making out, but I’m pretty sure that that was just to annoy me. Brainwashed people can’t be in love.”

“Did you notice their relationship changing at all?”

“They kept on harassing me until I left the state. When I came back to New York, they weren’t around anymore. That was pretty much all I noticed. I wasn’t a marriage counselor or a Peeping Tom.”

“What do you think your epiphany would be, if Adam tattooed you?”

“My epiphany? Oh, it would obviously be WASTED HIS ARTISTIC GIFTS or whatever Adam thought would hurt me the most.”

“What if you never had any artistic gifts at all? What if you’ve always known that? What if HIDES FROM LACK OF TALENT IN CYNICISM AND LIES would be your epiphany?”

“Then it would be just like everyone else’s epiphany: something that could apply to anyone.”

I decided to try one last thing. “What if your sister could have done more valuable things with her law degree than help you keep your shop? How many people who needed her help did she not help so you could inscribe people’s delusions onto their own skin?”

This question had, to my surprise, precisely the effect I hoped it would, and for a moment I thought Goldberg was going to knock all the candy over again. “Actually, I don’t have to wonder about that. Years after the legal trouble faded away, my sister got an epiphany tattoo. She was depressed; she had cancer. She gave a fake name, and since her hair was gone and she looked very different, she didn’t think Adam recognized her. But of course he did. He wrote WASTED LIFE TRYING TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY on her forearm. She had always been much smarter than I was, but those chemicals must have made her dumber, because she thought that that proved the epiphany machine was real; it had proved that she had wasted her life idolizing me for no reason. I guess Adam figured that would be pretty solid revenge against me. What he doesn’t know is that before he gave her that tattoo, she asked me to choose a tattoo for her, so that she could live out her final months knowing what I thought of her. I refused, because choosing tattoos for my customers is not my bag, but what popped into my mind was WASTED LIFE TRYING TO MAKE SOMEONE ELSE HAPPY. So all Adam did was save me some ink.”