I write this as my daughter is about to turn one year old. Rebecca and I are still together. Though it is impossible to know what anyone else’s relationship is like, it does not seem unreasonable to guess that our relationship is in the lower fifty percent of relationships. I do know that raising Baby Rose as a stay-at-home dad has been the only time of my life that I can truly say has been worthwhile. I love bouncing Baby Rose around in my arms through our apartment at three in the morning; I love taking her out on the balcony to gaze out at the UN building. I love the falling sigh she makes when she stops crying, like the deflating of a balloon three times her size. I love the dainty, nearly polite way she shakes spaghetti from her fingers. I love it when she bites the arms of any adult we introduce her to, as though she is checking to make sure they are not counterfeit. I love watching television with her in my lap, particularly what seems to be her favorite show, a self-consciously “gritty” new CIA drama, which stars an old friend of her father’s: Leah. As the eponymous hero of Jane Payne—theoretically but not actually based on her play—Leah plays an agent who tortures terrorists, all of whom are guilty, because her character is never wrong about what is in people’s souls. One critic wrote, “If the show endorses torture, at least the waterboarding is swimming in feminism.” Leah’s dream had been to star in something that would attack America’s war on terror, something that would open the audience’s eyes to the evils of torture and of subverting the judicial system. She got much closer to her dream than most people do.
Often I walk Rose down the Long Island City riverside, recently converted from a dock into a park carefully constructed to suggest bliss, a lovely way of living. Occasionally I imagine that there are whispers about me. Even in the unlikely event that I am right, and I am being judged, and judged harshly, for having nothing else to do with my time or life but raise a child, that could not dampen my commitment to Baby Rose. Never have I felt less DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.
Well, there is one person whose opinion I’m dependent on—Baby Rose’s. I want her to think, many years from now, that I was a good father to her. This is an opinion I am grateful to be dependent on.
I also have another Rose, my mother, at my side on many days to help me with the baby. In the mornings, my mother sits on the living room sofa with a laptop and writes—she, or rather Steven Merdula, is finishing a second book about the epiphany machine—and in the afternoon, she sits with me and the baby. She has barely held a baby since she held me, and yet she has an effortlessness with Rose that I am jealous of, and am ashamed to talk about in my parenting classes—as I write that, I realize I am still, to some degree, DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS. I think I’m also jealous of Baby Rose, as strange as that sounds, because she will grow up knowing my mother. But I try to put all of this out of my mind, since Rose’s presence will be good for my daughter. And it’s good for me, too, to have adult conversation every afternoon, however strained that conversation may sometimes be.
“Why didn’t you ever at least, like, check in with me?”
“That would have just made it harder.”
“It didn’t seem to bother you to make things harder for me.”
“Actually, I meant it would have made things harder for me. I was pretty sure that you were what mattered most to me, and I didn’t want to have to keep abandoning you over and over again. And if I came back to you and then found out that I had abandoned my writing, and that that was what mattered most to me—well, it wouldn’t have been good for either one of us if that’s what I had found.”
“Is that supposed to be heartwarming? Because it makes you sound even more self-centered.”
“You asked me a question and I answered it. Staying away and doing my work and letting you develop on your own seemed like the best option.”
“If you hadn’t left me, I wouldn’t have gotten tattooed. And if I hadn’t gotten tattooed, Ismail wouldn’t have gotten tattooed.”
“That’s possible. Why are you putting it like that?”
“I’m putting it like that because it’s the truth.”
“You put it like that because you’re trying to cause me pain over something you know I feel guilty about. There was a time when I held myself personally responsible for what you and the state did to Ismail. It’s all over that story I wrote about him, probably the weakest thing I’ve ever written. But it’s not my fault at all, as we’ve already discussed. You’re your own person, Venter. You may be DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, but you have no one but yourself to blame.”
I suppose I should leave this part out, as my mother and I reached something close to resolution on this back at the hospital. But there’s no such thing as resolution, no such thing as closure, no such thing as an insight that makes the past less painful, and as a recovering epiphany addict I should be honest about all this. What she said made me mad, which made me storm into my bedroom, which in turn woke the baby, who let out a sharp, angry cry. My mother beat me to the baby, and almost as soon as she picked her up the baby was quiet, and then giggled as my mother recited a passage she had memorized from Ulysses. The scene looked so perfect, and it occurred to me that the world would have been better had I never existed, had Rose skipped me entirely and gone straight to Baby Rose.
On many afternoons, we are joined by my father, semiretired and having, like the culture itself, mostly abandoned his desire to fight for privacy. He and my mother get along so well that I wonder what it would have been like had they stayed together throughout my childhood. There is no way to know how my life would be different had she stayed; there is plenty of reason to think it would have been worse. She might have locked herself in a room and written a story imagining that she had abandoned me when she wanted to. She might even have written that novel in my voice.
This book, which I have completed while Baby Rose naps, will be my only book, assuming it is even published. Publication does not look likely, considering that when I was writing it I thought the major appeal would be Ismail. I doubt there’s anyone in America who still thinks that Ismail is guilty of anything, and that is precisely the reason why he will stay in prison, at least for a long time; seeing him free would mean seeing what we have done to him.
Nor is there likely to be much interest in the testimonials that I gathered for my project, almost all of which tell of experiences with Adam Lyons’s machine. As the new machines grow more and more prominent, Adam Lyons’s device seems like a quaint curiosity, of interest primarily to tedious old men obsessed with Beatles trivia.
Baby Rose does have one parent whom I believe is fated to achieve literary glory, sooner rather than later: Rebecca. While she was on maternity leave from her firm—a shockingly ungenerous three months—Rebecca wrote several stories, and my mother read them and reread them and said that they were brilliant. Now that Rebecca has gone back to work, she wakes up impossibly early to write for two hours every morning, and once a week she and my mother go to a café to discuss Rebecca’s stories. One of these stories will be published in a forthcoming issue of a prestigious journal in which I always dreamed of getting published—sometimes so dreamily that I barely wrote for years at a time. Last month, she signed a two-book contract for a collection of short stories, to be followed by a novel.
Yesterday afternoon I took Baby Rose to see the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Arming the Self: The Epiphany Machine in American Life, 1960−2018. Much of the exhibition consisted of photos of epiphany tattoos, some disembodied, others as part of full-figure portraits. There were photos by amateurs and photos by professionals, Polaroids taken in 1975 and iPhone selfies taken last year. Roxanne Salehi’s documentary was playing on a loop.
“Hey, you’re the guy from the documentary! You suck!”
I gave this guy a nasty look, which he captured in a photo. “Free Ismail!” he said, probably the caption he would use when he posted that photo online, where it would be liked, widely shared, and promptly forgotten.
In the center of the hallway, three people sat with their bare arms entangled; a sign below them, printed in Adam’s font, read: MEET MICHAEL BRANDON AND SHANICE FEEL FREE TO STARE AT THEIR TATTOOS BUT THEIR TATTOOS WILL STARE BACK.
Through Brandon and Shanice, I saw a lifelike sculpture of Ismail’s mother on the deck outside. This struck me as tasteless until she pulled her arms tightly against her chest to keep warm, and I realized that it was actually Ismail’s mother. She saw me before I reached the glass doors (on which were written the words OUTSIDE IS STILL INSIDE THE EPIPHANY MACHINE), and she stared at me with an expression I could not even read as disgust.
“There are a million reasons why I shouldn’t keep coming here, starting with the fact that I can barely afford the admission fee, because I lost my job,” she said as I opened the doors. “But, also because I lost my job, I have nothing else to do with my days. They gave everybody the choice of getting an epiphany tattoo or resigning. I wasn’t going to let that thing near my arm.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything to make this right.”
“There is something you can do, and you know that there is. But you also can never know what it is. That’s the closest you’ll come to punishment. Not nearly close enough. My best wishes for your daughter.”
And then she walked away.
Baby Rose made a gurgle that sounded like a question. To stop myself from sobbing I pointed out some buildings to her, in this city that Adam Lyons once dreamed of changing. I walked with her to the plexiglass barrier that halted any patrons tempted to leap to their deaths in distant sight of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty. I thought about Ismail and his joke about driving us into this very river, north of here. If we had gone over the bridge that day, my arm would have been clean when I gave it to the water. Maybe it would have been severed somehow in the wreckage, and it would have floated all the way down to this final stretch of New York, where it would have bobbed and pointed to the sky, a miniature version of the massive faded green arm above it, suggesting only promise and possibility, without words to limit either.
The way we were constantly learning and forgetting things—the way that I constantly learned and forgot my culpability for what had happened to Ismail is only one small example—made me feel that the human race was pitiful and should be annihilated. I looked up at the blue sky and I hated everything underneath it, including this tiny child who would soon ask me why the sky was blue. It occurred to me to hurl my baby over the plexiglass, to bring about the fulfillment of any number of prophecies, and to bring upon myself the calumny and disaster I deserved. Baby Rose would hit the pavement and become part of the pavement never knowing the words that described her.
Of course, many prophecies had already been fulfilled. My father should never have become a father, and my mother had abandoned what mattered most—her sense of decency—to accept as her son a man who had betrayed his best friend.
Baby Rose reached up and put her forearm in my face. Terrified of myself, I kissed her forearm and took her back inside the museum.
Current trends suggest she will get a tattoo when she turns eighteen, or maybe even earlier, if only to fit in with friends who might look at her askance if she refuses. But maybe she will refuse. Maybe she will seek out Ismail’s mother—or even a finally freed Ismail. Or she will just watch the documentary. Even the broadest outlines of the case will be enough to make her hate me. Stronger than my father and mother, my daughter will never allow me to win her back, leaving me with only my tattoo.
I kissed the top of her head, and then kissed it again, and again, as though if I kissed her head often enough I could stop any negative thoughts about me from forming in it. Eventually she started to wriggle hard enough that I could see I was smothering her, my kisses pushing her face into my forearm. I eased up and she cried a nasty cry, still staring at my forearm, as though she could read my tattoo. I tried to murmur soothingly, but she wailed louder, drawing attention, and out of embarrassment, I looked over her head at another looped video installation. Titled The Epiphany Machine Is Good; The Epiphany Machine Is Bad, it consisted of interviews with people on the street giving their opinions about what the epiphany machine meant for human hopes, while the words they spoke were inscribed on the screen, not disappearing like normal subtitles but instead inching up until they obscured the faces of the people who spoke them. Then the words obscured each other, blending together until they covered the screen as one unreadable tattoo.