CHAPTER

3

The epiphany machine only truly came into focus for me around the same time that I met Ismail. If one or both of us had not been assigned to Ms. Scarra’s ninth-grade Global Studies class, then you might be watching a play written by Ismail rather than reading a book written by me. I fell in love with Ms. Scarra as soon as I walked into class on the first day, and I was determined to lose my virginity to her, a goal I probably chose because I had seen the scenario in a few of the nudie movies I had only recently discovered on late-night cable. At the very least, I was determined to make her think I was a genius. So I was annoyed that her early favorite was another boy. Though unreligious, I had a great interest in the world religions we studied early in the year, and would have been the star of any other class. But Ismail’s command was undeniable. He was extremely knowledgeable about not only Islam, his own religion, but also Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and particularly Zoroastrianism, of which his late father had been a scholar. When I say Islam was Ismail’s own religion, I mean it was his own religion in the way that Judaism and Catholicism were my own religions, ambiguously inherited from parents who had not themselves been believers. Ismail made it very clear one day that he thought that religion was “stupid” and that “anyone who doesn’t hate thinking knows there’s no God,” which angered a lot of the other kids, most of whom had already embarked on lifelong careers of believing in God whenever they needed comfort or forgiveness that they did not want to ask another human being for. The nasty tenor of his remarks gave me some hope that I would become the teacher’s favorite despite being outmatched, hope that was bolstered the next day when Ms. Scarra asked him to stay after class, maybe to lecture him about respecting the beliefs of the other students. Then she asked me to stay as well, so I got to listen as she praised Ismail effusively and he looked on with a barely respectful smirk, almost certainly harboring the same fantasies about Ms. Scarra that I did and appearing to have at least a slightly higher likelihood of fulfilling them. Finally, she turned to me and said a couple of nice things about me—not as nice, I thought, as what she had said about Ismail—and asked us to serve as co-presidents of the Coexistence Club, an afterschool group that would be devoted to harmony among religions. Ms. Scarra said that religious intolerance was cultural intolerance, and that since between the two of us we had cultural ties to the three major monotheistic religions, we were the ideal co-presidents. I think Ismail was as unhappy with the situation as I was, since there were strong flavors of tokenism, condescension, and illogic in the whole endeavor. We might have asked her about the arbitrary focus on monotheism and why she didn’t want to include a co-president who was actually religious—the idea of two atheists coexisting seemed strange. We might also have asked what she might possibly have thought the purpose of the club was. But Ismail and I both said yes, since the club was obviously going to look good on the college applications we were already looking forward to filling out. More important, Ms. Scarra was a female who was willing to talk to us.

In addition to co-presidents, Ismail and I were also the only members of the Coexistence Club, so we would just sit in Ms. Scarra’s room after school on Thursdays, she would bring doughnuts, and we would talk, occasionally about issues connected to religion. I think we had been doing this for six weeks or so when she brought up the epiphany machine.

Not that the machine was an entirely random topic to bring up at the time. This was the fall of 1995, and the second Rebecca Hart killings had occurred the previous June. Even those who considered Adam Lyons nothing more than a huckster now felt the suspicion in the back of their necks that the man was touched with genuine black magic. Other kids’ parents who saw me at the grocery store looked at me like I had somehow cheated death, which was not something done by a trustworthy person.

“Venter,” Ms. Scarra said after she had said the words “epiphany machine” to me for the first time. “Your mother used the epiphany machine. What’s your opinion of it now?”

“It’s something that people resort to when they’re lonely, gullible, and numb,” I said. “That was my mother. Some people who are lonely, gullible, and numb are also capable of murder. That was not my mother.”

“I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that the two women were named Rebecca Hart,” said Ismail. “The second one happened to be crazy, too, and she was probably obsessed with the first Rebecca Hart and decided to be just like her.”

“But then,” Ms. Scarra said, “how did she get the same tattoo?”

“I’m sure that whatever he says, this guy Adam Lyons will give you whatever tattoo you want if you pay him enough.”

Ms. Scarra gave Ismail a pitying smile that I found weirdly erotic. “That’s the skeptic’s perspective. Which is only one among many.”

“It’s the correct perspective,” Ismail said.

“A lot of people who aren’t crazy and who aren’t stupid have used the machine,” Ms. Scarra said. “John Lennon used it. You don’t think John Lennon was lonely, gullible, and numb, do you?”

“I have no idea what John Lennon was like,” Ismail said.

“You don’t think there’s any reason why people who are not lonely, gullible, or numb, but are as wise and full of feeling as any of the three of us, might realize that it’s in human nature to be self-deceiving, to not see important things in our own lives, and so seek external guidance to correct that?”

“I’m not self-deceiving,” Ismail said. I could see in Ms. Scarra’s eyes that she thought this was naive, but I admired how confidently Ismail had spoken. I said that I wasn’t self-deceptive either, though I may have stammered a bit.

Ms. Scarra retreated to her desk and picked up a manila folder, from which she produced two photocopies of two chapters from an idiosyncratic 1991 book called Origins and Adventures of the Epiphany Machine, written by a reclusive writer whose real identity was unknown and the subject of much speculation, but who went by the name Steven Merdula.

“Only the Desert Is Not a Desert is Merdula’s masterpiece,” Ismail said. “I read it last year and loved it. I hear this one is crap.”

“Just read what I photocopied,” Ms. Scarra said. “I’m going to get some coffee.”

I had been firmly forbidden by my father and grandmother from ever reading this book. But I was ashamed now of having complied, and I certainly wasn’t going to let myself look cowardly in front of Ismail and Ms. Scarra. So I read the strange and mutually contradictory chapters, feeling as I read each sentence as though I were being pulled by something malevolent into the sea.