There’s an undeniable pattern between specific epiphanies and violent crimes. But unlike them, Venter gets close enough to Adam to learn a dark secret. Like his parents before him, Venter is quick to fall under the spell of the device’s sweat-stained, profane, and surprisingly charming operator, Adam Lyons. So when Venter’s grandmother finally asks him to confront the epiphany machine and inoculate himself against his family’s mistakes, he’s only too happy to oblige. This stigma follows them when they move upstate, where Venter can’t avoid the whispers of teachers and neighbors any more than he can ignore the machine’s accurate predictions: his mother’s abandonment and his father’s disinterest. And, oddly enough, so might the device.A small stream of city dwellers buy into this cult of the epiphany machine, including Venter Lowood’s parents. This particular one’s been circulating New York since the 1960s. It’s an old con, playing on the fear that we are obvious to everybody except ourselves. The product: a junky contraption that tattoos personalized revelations on its users’ forearms. Everyone else knows the truth about you, now you can know it, too.
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