CHAPTER

20

Over the first couple of months of school, I did my best to bury myself in reading, since, after all, I was looking at the great ancient Greek texts that addressed all the questions the machine purported to answer. Unfortunately, the great ancient Greek texts seemed to teach only that one should not have sex with one’s mother or challenge a god, both of which seemed kind of obvious and, since I had neither a mother nor a god, irrelevant.

In November, a girl came up to me and asked whether I was the guy who had used the epiphany machine. I did not want to answer yes, but she was already at my arm and my sleeve had rolled up a bit, revealing most of the final letter, S. My embarrassment must have been pretty easy to spot as I pulled my sleeve down, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me if I wanted to get a beer. I had a lot of reading to do before meeting up with Ismail and Leah that night—the first time we would be hanging out since school started, as I had kept putting off seeing them ever since they had, as I had predicted, gotten back together. So I told the girl no, I had to get to the library, but kept walking with her.

She talked rapturously about a band I had never heard of, and it was fun to listen to her talk, until she asked me what my favorite band was. I was so nervous I could not even think of a band name.

“The Beatles,” I said.

She laughed and clapped. “The Beatles! Of course. God, you’re so natural, you’re so . . . yourself. Most guys would try to impress me by picking some really obscure band, but obviously those bands aren’t anywhere near as good as the Beatles. I asked you what your favorite band was, and you told me the answer and didn’t worry about how it would make you look.”

“Are you making fun of me? Do you already know my tattoo?”

“I’ve just heard you’ve used the machine, that’s all. Can I see?”

“I’d really rather wait to show you.”

“I get it,” she said. “You’re not that kind of girl.”

I continued insisting that I had to go to the library, but we sat down at the West End, a bar at which I had dreamed of drinking ever since I had read in tenth grade or so that Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had once drunk there, as though drinking beer at this particular bar would constitute taking my place in the line of literary greats rather than simply taking my place in the line of college students who drink beer.

There was a lull in the conversation, and I couldn’t think of anything to ask except for the most boring question of all. “What do you want to do with your life?”

“Let’s see,” she said. “For a little while I thought I was going to be a writer—a few weeks, my whole life, I’m not really sure—but I’m taking a fiction workshop this semester and I can tell my professor thinks I’m not very good, even though he won’t come out and say so, and his negative comments are absolutely on target, so I’m never going to write again.”

“That seems extreme.”

“When you realize a great truth, you have to accept it and then act on it. You must believe that, or you wouldn’t have used the epiphany machine.”

“There’s a lot of disagreement about whether you should or even can behave differently because of what the machine tells you. Adam Lyons contradicts himself a lot on that.” I wished I could confront Adam on this contradiction, which made me miss Adam, which in turn made me annoyed with myself.

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“I think the epiphany machine is for losers who need other people to tell them what to do.”

“I like things that are for losers,” she said. “I don’t like the way we think of winning and losing.”

I recognized the way she was talking. Someone who wanted to be talked into using the machine.

“You could hail a cab and have a needle in your arm in, like, half an hour,” I said.

“I feel like I’ve used it already, and I’ve gotten my one big important epiphany. There are other things I’d like to know, but I don’t want to get greedy.”

This struck me as a throwaway not-really-joke, so I didn’t pursue it. Besides, an idea had just occurred to me that I did want to pursue.

“Listen, do you want to come downtown with me tonight? I’m getting drinks at nine with two friends from NYU.”

This was forward of me, but I decided it would be more tolerable to hang out with Ismail and Leah if I wasn’t wondering whether they were thinking that I was sexless and pathetic.

“Sounds fun! But I’m supposed to have dinner with my parents tonight. Want to come to that first and then we’ll meet up with your friends?”

I looked at her, expecting her to tell me that she was joking, not not-really-joking. But she didn’t.

“I mean, I guess I could,” I said. “Even though . . .”

“Great! It would be depressing to spend tonight having dinner with no one but my parents, since it’s my birthday.”

“Oh. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Since it’s my birthday, would you mind coming back to my room with me and going down on me?”

She grabbed my hand, my answer being obvious.

Once we were inside her room, I barely had time to take in her bookshelf—Virginia Woolf, Catherine Pearson, Sylvia Plath, several books on mastering the craft of writing fiction, a prominently placed copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and, yes, both Only the Desert Is Not a Desert and Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine—before she pushed me down on her single bed. She took my shirt off and I winced as she read my tattoo, mostly expecting her to throw me out. And she did give me the disappointed look I was expecting.

“DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS? Is that even an epiphany? Isn’t that true of, like, everybody?”

This felt like exactly the sort of acceptance I needed, like I could just kiss her and the movie of my life would fade to black and the credits would roll.

I kissed her, and the movie continued.

She pulled down my pants and boxers in one unbroken movement, an act that felt as abrupt and strange as this entire afternoon, but as soon as she put my penis in her mouth, I was very glad that I had accompanied her home. Very rarely does life give you unambiguously positive feedback; in fact, I’m not sure that such feedback comes in any form other than oral sex. When my turn came to give her the same feedback, I pled for mercy by saying I had never performed oral sex before. (I decided not to mention that I had never received it either.) Her loud moans felt like the overly effusive praise one gives a fifteen-month-old child trying to walk across a room. She yanked at my hand until I figured out that she wanted me to put first one finger inside her and then another, and once she had control of two of my fingers she seemed to start genuinely enjoying herself. Once we were finished, her cheeks were a very bright red. I told her she looked like a lobster, and she giggled and covered her cheeks. We exchanged theories of the universe and then I went down on her again.

After her second, more subdued orgasm, I kissed my way back up her torso, hoping that this orgasm had been more genuine, and that I was fulfilling the sacred duty of lovers and Americans: Getting Better. But when I reached her chin and pulled myself up to make eye contact, she avoided my gaze and stared at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll keep working at it.”

“That’s not it,” she said. “You should probably know my name is Rebecca Hart.”

“You’re not serious.”

“That may be true. But it’s definitely true that my name is Rebecca Hart.”

“You must hate the machine.”

“No, I’m grateful for it. It hasn’t written on me, but it gives me my epiphany every time I write my name. I would kill any children I have, so I’m just not going to have children. And I didn’t even have to get a tattoo! No tattoos, no children. Nothing permanent for my body.”

“You can’t actually believe that just having the name ‘Rebecca Hart’ makes you want to kill your children.”

As I was saying this, she jumped out of bed and put her shirt back on. “I just met you, so I’ll let it slide this time, but please never, ever tell me what I can and can’t believe ever again. Now let’s go meet my parents.”