CHAPTER

41

I felt very proud of myself for having stood up to Vladimir, and also terrified by the question of what to do next. Simply losing my job due to circumstances beyond my control had been a relief. Choosing not to accept Vladimir’s offer obligated me to do something important. Actually, it obligated me to do what I was obligated to do anyway: free Ismail. Somehow.

The first thing I said to Rebecca when she came home that night was that Ismail was innocent, that I had been persecuting him for years for no reason. Without responding, she put her bag down, poured herself a glass of pinot grigio, and—one of the first times I had ever seen her do this—burst into tears.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve known for years. But I didn’t want to admit that to myself, because I have no idea how to help him.”

“I want to do something to help him,” I said.

“Great. What? Whatever you want to do, I’ll fund you to do it.”

Her corporate-law job made this an eminently achievable goal.

I tried brainstorming out loud, but none of my ideas sounded very impressive even to me. She didn’t respond, and after a while she seemed to stop listening. Finally, her eyes, red from crying, lit up with an idea.

“Write a book,” she said. “You’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve always known you’re incredibly talented. So why don’t you write a memoir about your relationship with Ismail? I’ll support you while you write.”

At first, I thought she was just making a bitter joke. Writing a book seemed more like self-indulgence than self-sacrifice.

“Make it clear what a smart and decent person Ismail was. Is. People just hear his name and assume he’s guilty. Make people realize that he’s a real flesh-and-blood human being. Be honest about your role in what’s happened to him. You’ll be doing penance for what you did to Ismail, but you’ll also be fulfilling yourself as a person. You’ve always wanted to write and you should write. This is perfect.”

I was not certain that I had always wanted to write. I had always wanted to think of myself as a genius—or at least as someone who could compete with Ismail—and writing had always seemed a way to do that. But apart from what I had written for Vladimir Harrican, I had barely made any attempt to write since college.

But Rebecca’s faith in me made me think I had talent after all.

There was a part of me, of course, that knew just how DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS I was proving myself to be by making my first serious attempt to become a writer just because Rebecca told me I should, but there was a bigger part of me that was happy to take Rebecca’s money and sit at home with my computer all day.

Maybe that previous sentence does not do me justice. When I first sat down to write about Ismail, I did so in good faith and with great energy. Rebecca was excited about the project, my father was excited about the project, I was excited about the project. I thought about calling Ismail’s mother and telling her what I was doing, maybe even interviewing her, but I thought she was more likely than not to blow me off, or maybe take legal action against me. So I just decided to sit and write what I remembered about Ismail.

Unfortunately, sitting at home with my laptop turned out to mean reading blog posts about the problematic portrayals of women in popular culture in one tab and watching porn in another. After a few months, I joined a writer’s space in Long Island City, near the apartment Rebecca had purchased for us. The writer’s space was called The Oracle Club, a name that carried uncomfortable echoes of the epiphany machine, though the owners, a dispiritingly gorgeous couple named Julian and Jenna, claimed not to have been thinking of the device when they chose the name. Neither of them had epiphany tattoos, which led me to devise a theory that truly beautiful people had sufficiently high self-esteem that they did not feel the need to use the device, a theory that lasted me through the first five pages of an essay, until I realized that the idea was ridiculous, and that of course beautiful people use the machine all the time, and that many beautiful people have extremely low self-esteem. I deleted the file and tried to write about Ismail, but I couldn’t think of any interesting details, which made me feel annoyed that I had not kept a notebook as a teenager. Or rather, I was annoyed that I had kept a notebook as a teenager, but had hardly written anything in it beyond a handful of abstract pseudo-intellectual gibberish, like that thing about how my bed felt so empty that it felt like the grave. I wished that I had “kept a notebook” in the way that I now defined “keeping a notebook,” meaning making concrete observations about what I saw from day to day. I wished I had the discernment to spot important details and the discipline to write them down. In other words, I wished I were Ismail. I was certain that if the situation had been reversed, if I had been in prison and Ismail had been writing about me, he would have done a much better job turning me into a convincing character on the page, a thought that made me feel envious and resentful, and also extremely guilty, since I had deprived the world of a great talent and substituted my own mediocrity.

I began and abandoned several more projects until I remembered “The Undead,” the mashup I had written in high school of “The Dead” and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I asked my father to find it and send it to me. He did so—“I had to go through about ten boxes in the attic, but it was worth it. I read it and this is great. I always knew you were a genius!”—and when I read it again, I was amazed by the insight and the passion, by the humor and the honest emotion, by what a good writer I had been in high school. Getting it published, I reasoned, would be a good way to establish my name, after which I could more easily get people to pay attention to what I wrote about Ismail. Rebecca read “The Undead,” and she loved it so much she jumped up and down and shouted, though the next morning she reminded me not to lose focus and to keep writing about Ismail. I took four months, lengthened it, polished it, and then sent it off to a dozen agents. I received exactly one response, which read: “Not bad, but the whole drop-vampires-into-classic-literature thing peaked a couple of years ago.”

After this, I was severely depressed and spent my days at The Oracle Club brooding over the fact that I had had at least some talent and had wasted it, while Julian, a published and respected novelist, typed happily and constantly at the desk next to mine. Jenna, an astonishingly gifted and prolific portrait painter, worked downstairs. Their three-year-old son tap-thumped back and forth between them, making a fuss until they agreed to play Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the millionth time on their antique record player. It made me uncomfortable to find such a great fan of the Beatles in this toddler—this tiny child who grabbed my knee and shouted “JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo” every time I made myself some French-press coffee. This struck me as Adam’s way of haunting me, but I had signed up to work at a place called The Oracle Club, so perhaps I was looking for Adam to haunt me. In any case, a large percentage of my time was spent watching this child dance to this old record, all the history and cultural significance of which he was blithely unaware. I wished I could once again feel that total absence of self-consciousness, and I knew that I would, but only when I no longer had a self to be conscious of, a prospect I found terrifying and, maybe for the first time, near.

These thoughts would often swirl around in my head while I stared at my computer in The Oracle Club. Passersby would look at me through the window, and, not knowing that I could hear them, would speculate about what the place was and what I was doing.

“Is this a library? Is that guy real? Is he a statue?”

“It’s a zoo for unemployed people.”

Believe me or don’t believe me, but I tried very hard to write about Ismail.

•   •   •

One morning when I couldn’t make myself sit at my computer—there were many such mornings—I took the train into Manhattan to walk around the Upper East Side, near Adam’s old neighborhood. Where Adam Lyons’s old building had been, there was now an empty lot and green construction barriers. This was where my parents met, where my personality had been formed or revealed or both, where I had led my friend into ruin, where I had spent countless hours with a man whose voice I would never get out of my head or off of my arm. But none of those things amounts to a legal claim on property.

I looked down the street and could see my father catching up to a woman in a fox fur coat. I could see myself and Ismail coming up the street, pizza and dreams on our tongues, Ismail’s arm still bare. Turn around, Ismail, have another slice and then get on the train. I looked again at the empty lot and wished the building had been leveled decades earlier, and also wished that the building was still there and would stand until the end of the world. I looked again and felt annoyed that construction barriers are always green, lulling us into thinking of renewal, a return to the earth, rather than the imminent appearance of another sterile condo.

But it was not a condo that replaced Adam’s building, which I discovered had been purchased and leveled by Vladimir Harrican. It was the flagship Epiphany store, to which people would come to use the new “smart” machines, which, applying a proprietary algorithm to a user’s Internet history, crafted a general summary of life trajectory and personal proclivities.

Four other stores appeared in New York shortly afterward: one on the Upper West Side, one in SoHo, one in Williamsburg, one in Park Slope. Each store was a giant glass cylinder that was mostly empty space. “It’s supposed to look like a forearm, but it looks more like a dick,” somebody wrote online. There were terminals where users registered and synced their Internet history; there was a s’mores station. In the middle of the store were translucent orange plastic chairs that resembled catcher’s mitts; the chairs vaguely suggested some kind of elegant future, however uncomfortable they were to sit in in the present. Users waited in these chairs until their names appeared in epiphany font on a giant digital board in the center of the room. Beneath this board were massive screens displaying live feeds of the store’s “epiphany stations,” at which “epiphany artists” guided needles onto skin. The stations themselves faced the street, so passersby could stop and gawk at each tattoo as it formed, thrilling to the reactions of the users reading their tattoos for the first time.

Soon, the only time there wasn’t a user in the epiphany station was the time it would take an epiphany artist to change needles or ink, or the five-minute break epiphany artists were permitted every two hours. Every chair in the waiting area was filled, and there was a line of users down the block. As much as Vladimir disliked altering his vision even slightly, he agreed, once cold weather hit, to install another row of chairs in each store to reduce outside waiting times. “We don’t want anybody’s arm to freeze off before they can get their tattoo,” he said.

There were many impassioned articles and posts decrying the total surrender of privacy that these new machines signified, but soon these articles and posts sounded stodgy, irrelevant, of concern only to the old, to the paranoid, to the belligerent, to everyone with something to hide. Who else would not be curious?

Vladimir put the matter this way, in a statement that was scandalous for the year or so before it became accepted wisdom: “If you’re afraid of the machine, maybe we should be afraid of you.”

Many who proclaimed themselves (and may have honestly considered themselves) early risers and diligent workers were informed that they PREFER SLEEP TO LABOR. Because the machine revealed personality traits that job candidates might not volunteer in job interviews, employers started requiring prospective employees to receive these tattoos—what to the recipient of a tattoo might appear to be a violation of privacy, after all, was to everyone around that recipient useful data. Within two years of the first appearance of these machines, it was essentially impossible to get a retail job without one, since stores believed that they were an excellent way to identify potential thieves. Early consensus that white-collar professionals should avoid the machine at all costs, on the theory that tattoos and office jobs did not mix, soon gave way to advice that getting a tattoo before one’s company required one would demonstrate openness and self-confidence, unless of course the tattoo said that you were CLOSED OFF AND SELF-DOUBTING, in which case, well, you might as well know. Soon coworkers were reaching over cubicle walls to show each other their tattoos and speculate about what was being kept secret by those who declined to roll up their sleeves.

The New York restaurant industry was a holdout, largely because so many of its employees were aspiring actors who did not want to get tattoos that would ruin whatever chances they had of one day “making it.” But soon enough, patrons demanded tattoos on waitstaff to ensure that their waiters did not have heinous hygiene and were not prone to taking revenge on complicated special orders by, say, ejaculating in the soup. (Even Julian, the proprietor of The Oracle Club, who moonlit as a waiter at a high-end brunch spot on the Upper West Side, was compelled to get a tattoo, though his tattoo was the enviable WILL NOT STOP WILL NOT LOSE FOCUS. Some people have all the luck, or all the merit, while the rest of us try desperately to convince ourselves that those two are not the same thing.) Soon, too, audiences came to expect that even actors would have epiphany tattoos; a lack of which came to suggest caginess, a suspicious unwillingness on the part of actors to share themselves with their fans. Today, magazines speculate about why certain stars refuse to receive or display epiphany tattoos, what affair or proclivity they might be hiding.

Some political pundits have suggested that, during the next presidential election campaign, candidates be asked on the debate stage to roll up their sleeves and show their tattoos. But I think that these pundits are joking, at least for now.

It sounds from the way that I am writing this that I was deeply engaged with these changes as they were occurring. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I first heard about the stores, my reaction was to dismiss them as Harrican overreach. Rebecca and I both laughed about them, which was nice, since, with the hours that she worked at her law firm, we hardly saw each other anymore and so had little opportunity to laugh about anything. I lost track of the new machine almost entirely for a period in which my mind was preoccupied by an Iranian-American documentary filmmaker named Roxanne Salehi.