CHAPTER

40

The week of Adam Lyons’s death was also my last week at Citizens for Knowledge and Safety, which was being dissolved since it was no longer necessary. One by one, we were being called upstairs to be fired. Most of the meetings were with HR; for some reason, probably because he wanted to yell at me personally for how little I had accomplished, my appointment was scheduled with Vladimir Harrican. Sitting at my cubicle, waiting until it was time for me to go upstairs for my appointment, I received another email from Steven Merdula. It was simply a forwarded article with the plainest of attached comments: “Seen this?”

Somehow I knew what the link would be before I clicked it. The case that had prompted me to work for Citizens for Knowledge and Safety had been based on a lie. Jonathan Soricillo, his conscience apparently stirred by the news about Si Strauss and Adam Lyons, had admitted in prison that he had raped and murdered his sons. He had murdered and immolated his neighbor, Devin Lanning, in order to frame him. Everything Soricillo had said about Lanning’s epiphany tattoo had been a lie; Lanning had never gotten an epiphany tattoo, DOES NOT UNDERSTAND BOUNDARIES or otherwise.

Reading this made me react as Merdula must have known it would. I went to the men’s bathroom and cried and threw up. Then I looked into the mirror. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most pathetic stooge of all?

I thought about breaking the mirror, picking up a shard, and cutting out my tattoo. I pictured myself doing it, and then pictured myself doing it again. But I couldn’t actually do it, so I headed to the elevator, my tattoo intact.

When the elevator doors opened onto Vladimir’s floor, I crossed paths with an old man in a suit who looked shocked and embarrassed to see me, a young man about to be fired. Little did he know how little concerned I was with my fate; I was thinking instead about Lanning and the Soricillo family. So much were they on my mind that this old man, despite his expensive suit and perfect grooming, reminded me of the grandfather who had burned me in the park, the grandfather who had endured so much tragedy and was now learning that his own son was a monster beyond all reckoning.

“Are you Steven Merdula?” I asked Vladimir as I walked into his office.

Vladimir laughed. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Are you Steven Merdula? Have you been fucking with my head this whole time?”

“That’s two questions. The answer to the first is a definite no.”

“I know you’re going to fire me. But first I have something to say.”

“You think I’m Steven Merdula and you think I’m going to fire you. You’re not the prophet your mentor was.”

Vladimir proceeded to offer me a job as the director of content at the Rubicon Epiphany Corporation, which he was acquiring from the chaos of Adam Lyons’s estate.

“I want you to keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Vladimir said. “But now the emphasis will be different. You’ll be telling the stories of people who have had their lives transformed by the machine in a positive way. Like the testimonials you were doing when you and I first met.”

“Why? Adam Lyons is dead and the epiphany machine is broken.”

“We’re releasing a new version soon. It will be linked to users’ Internet history.”

“Sorry?”

“The websites they visit, terms they type in to search engines, emails they send, preferences they express in various ways—it all gets fed into an algorithm, and the algorithm generates an epiphany that it then tattoos on the user.”

“That sounds evil.”

“Adam Lyons had a rare gift; that gift was why I admired him and why, until the day he died, I always harbored hopes that he would one day come around and agree to work with me. That’s part of why I hired you, his supposed protégé. His gift was that he listened to what people thought they were saying, but he heard what they were really saying. That’s what the Internet does. Of course, the Internet does it a lot better.”

“You could name this device anything. Why call it the epiphany machine?”

“I happen to like the name and the design. And I have a sentimental family attachment.”

I didn’t want to hear any more about this idea, which sounded doomed. Besides, I had a pressing matter to discuss that, since he was not Steven Merdula, Vladimir might not be aware of. “Devin Lanning was innocent.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. Assuming that Jonathan Soricillo is telling the truth now, which is a big assumption. But we can’t get everything right, can we?”

At this, he gave the worst shrug that I, a connoisseur of shrugs, had ever seen in my life.

“We should officially apologize for everything Citizens for Knowledge and Safety did,” I said. “We should apologize to the family of Devin Lanning. Most important, we should proclaim unequivocally that Ismail is innocent and must be immediately released.” It was not until this moment that I suddenly realized I knew that Ismail was truly, unquestionably innocent.

Vladimir did not follow my logic and asked me to take him through it.

I tried to build an argument that Vladimir would respond to. “You want people to have positive associations with the machine. Because of the work we’ve done—the work I’ve done—a lot of people associate the epiphany machine with terrorists and child molesters. Breaking that connection might make people feel better about the machine.”

“No. The epiphany machine can keep people safe from predators like Ismail and Devin Lanning, and it’s important for people to remember that, so you’ll keep telling those stories. They just won’t be the emphasis anymore.”

“But Devin Lanning was innocent. We just said so.”

“You just said so. I don’t know. And in the public imagination, he’s a predator who got what he deserved, but should have been stopped earlier. From a marketing perspective, that’s what we have to work with. So that’s the perspective you’ll write from.”

“No. I refuse.”

For the first time since I had known Vladimir, he looked genuinely surprised. “This is one of the most important innovations of our time. Do you want to be known as the guy who passed up a chance to take part in it?”

“I don’t care how I’m known.”

“We both know that’s not true. I’m the only person who’s ever believed in you,” said Vladimir. “Just think what people would think about you if they knew how ungrateful you are.”

I thought again about the man at the elevator. “The man who accosted me in Central Park. The man I thought was the Soricillo twins’ grandfather. You hired him. You paid him to burn me.”

Vladimir smiled. “I didn’t tell him to burn you. He added that. I think he was frustrated. He had been going to Riverside Park every day for weeks. You told me you ran there all the time. I should have known you exaggerated.”

“Why? Why did you do that?”

“I knew you needed a little push to come work for me.”

“The murder of the boys, you didn’t . . .”

Vladimir’s laugh reminded me how high the ceiling in his office was. “Venter, don’t be ridiculous. I learned of the murder of the two boys and of Devin Lanning the way I told you I did, from someone on my staff. I thought it would help you see the importance of working for me.”

“Why am I so important to you? I don’t know how to do anything.”

“I’m beginning to finally see that. I think I’m having an epiphany of my own, right here in this office. My father’s tattoo told him to MAKE DIFFERENT USE OF HANDS, and you know what that use was? To hold me. My father was a great violinist and could have been a greater one still, but instead he gave his career up to hold me until I was ready to stand on my own. Adam Lyons tricked him into doing that by playing on my father’s proletarian delusions. This made me look at Adam Lyons as a kind of god, no matter how much I denied it to you and myself. Or maybe I viewed him as my real father. I thought I needed him for what I needed to do, and I thought you could help me get to him. And maybe, in some strange way, I thought of you as a kind of little brother. A shiftless, unimaginative little brother who needed to be guided. But Adam was never necessary to the machine. That’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made; it delayed my development of the real epiphany machine by years. The second biggest mistake was thinking you could be of any use to me whatsoever. Go, get out of my office. Go see what people think of you now that you’re no longer working for Vladimir Harrican.”

“Their opinion of me probably won’t be any worse than it already is,” I said. “Freedom’s just another word for everybody thinking you’re a schmuck.”

I had a s’more on the way out.