The Ticking Is the Bomb Read online

  the ticking is the bomb

  books by nick flynn

  Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

  Some Ether

  Blind Huber

  A Note Slipped Under the Door (coauthored with Shirley McPhillips)

  Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins

  the ticking is the bomb

  …………a memoir

  nick flynn

  w. w. norton & company

  new york london

  Copyright © 2010 by Nick Flynn

  All rights reserved

  Excerpts of this book, often in slightly different form, originally appeared in Esquire, Open City, The Book of Dads (Ecco Press), and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 (Mariner Books).

  disclaimer: This is a work of nonfiction, but it is also full of dreams, speculations, memories, and shadows. Many names have been changed.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Flynn, Nick, 1960–

  The ticking is the bomb…………a memoir /

  Nick Flynn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-393-07703-2

  1. Flynn, Nick, 1960–2. Poets, American—Biography.

  3. Fatherhood. I. Title.

  PS3556.L894Z468 2010

  811?.6—dc22

  [B]

  2009034764

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  for maeve, queen of the fairies

  the ticking is the bomb

  Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.

  —Beckett, Endgame

  Contents

  a telegram made of shadows

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  [some notes]

  [debts]

  [bragging rights]

  [permissions]

  a telegram made of shadows

  (2007) This black and white photograph in my hand is an image of my unborn daughter—this, at least, is what I’m told. It’s actually a series of photographs, folded one upon the other, like a tiny accordion. I was there when the doctor or technician or whoever he was made it with his little wand of sound. I sat beside him, looked into the screen as he pointed into the shadows—Can you see her nose, can you see her hand? Can you see her foot, right here, next to her ear? I was there when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal. It’s as if I were holding a photograph of a dream, a dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love—I’ll call her Inez—the woman who now walks through the world with two hearts beating inside her.

  At this same moment, or outside of this moment, outside of us, out there, in the world, exists another set of photographs. One depicts a naked man being dragged by a soldier out of a cell on the end of a leash. Another depicts a pyramid of hooded, cowering men, also naked. A soldier stands behind this pyramid, his arms folded, smiling. In yet another photograph a blue-eyed girl—also smiling—gives a thumbs-up over a corpse. Hundreds of such photographs exist, by now we’ve all seen them, by now we’ve all held them in our hands, but they also have the texture of dreams—shadowy, diaphanous, changeable.

  Grain upon grain.

  One day I hope to be able to tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, this story will begin, but then we found our way.

  This, at least, is the version I hope to be able to tell her.

  one

  a field guide to getting lost

  Here’s a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn’t happened to you yet consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame someone else—an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood. Or it may be easier to blame the map you were given—folded too many times, out of date, tiny print. You can shake your first at the sky, call it fate, karma, bad luck, and sometimes it is. But, for the most part, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. Life can, of course, blindside you, yet often as not we choose to be blind—agency, some call it. If you’re lucky you’ll remember a story you heard as a child, the trick of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, the idea being that after whatever it is that is going to happen in those woods has happened, you can then retrace your steps, find your way back out. But no one said you wouldn’t be changed, by the hours, the years, spent wandering those woods.

  (2005) A year after the Abu Ghraib photographs appear I wake up in Texas one morning, in love with two women, honest with neither. I am finishing up my second semester of teaching poetry at the University of Houston, getting ready to fly back to New York, where both these women are waiting for me, or so I imagine. I’d been “dating” for a few years, since the breakup of a long-term relationship, and more than once it had been made abundantly clear that I was not very good at it. For me, “dating” often felt like reading Tolstoy—exhilarating, but a struggle, at times, to keep the characters straight. The fact that the chaos had been distilled down to two women—one I’ll call Anna, the other was Inez—felt, to me, like progress. For months I’d been speaking to one or the other on my cellphone. Her name (or hers) came up on the tiny screen, and each time my heart leapt. It was the end of April. I’d come to the conclusion (delusion?) that if I could just get us all in the same room we could figure out a way it could work out. Another part of me, though, would have been perfectly happy to let it all keep playing out in the shadows.

  The book A Field Guide to Getting Lost came out around this time—it is, in part, a meditation on the importance, for any creative act, to allow the mind and body to wander. The title jumped out at me—maybe I could use it as sort of an antimap. Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing…. Another book that came out around this time was Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way, but I didn’t pick that one up—perhaps I wasn’t ready not to be lost. Lost, at that moment in my life, manifest itself as feeling bewildered, confused, bereft—it’s not that I didn’t know where I was, I just didn’t know what I was doing there. On a deeper level, I knew that my bereftitude was only partly due to my self-inflicted disasters of love. Beneath that surface tension was the inescapable fact that I’d just crossed the threshold of being the same age my parents had been when they’d imploded, each in his or her own way. My mother had killed herself when she was forty-two, shot herself in the heart. When my father was forty-five, he fell—drunk—from a ladder while painting a house, an accident which may or may not have left him with a permanent head injury. A year later he’d enter a bank and pass his first forged check, the start of a small-time run that
would eventually lead him into federal prison. After doing his time, after being released, he’d drift even deeper into his life of wandering, until he ended up living on the streets for a few years, which is where I got to know him.

  And now, here I am, waking up in Texas, just past the age my mother never made it beyond, the same age my father was when he went off the rails. The dream I’m having is already dissolving, and I’m left, once again, with my unquiet mind, which for some months now has been straddling these two beautiful women. It has nothing to do with fate, karma, or bad luck.

  handshake

  (2005) A few days after I land back in New York I go to a ceremony at Lincoln Center. I’d won an award from PEN, the literary and human rights organization, for a book I’d written that circled around homelessness and my father. I sat in the audience and listened as a citation was read for a writer whose work I was unfamiliar with—he’d won the sister award to mine:

  …Sam Harris analyzes the world with a humanist’s sympathy, but he has no time for those who murder and torture in the name of beliefs based on ancient concepts that are both unbelievable and, more important, unprovable….

  Abu Ghraib was still very much in the news at this point, and, like many others, I was still both confused and enraged by it all. At some point that night, Harris and I exchanged a few words. We’re photographed together, shaking hands, smiling. A few months later I read his book, The End of Faith, and find that it is, in part, a treatise advocating the use of torture:

  Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary.

  As I read those words, and others like them (dust off the strappado, or it’s become ethical to kill people for what they believe), a switch flips on in my brain. Harris, like anyone, is free to write and publish whatever he wishes, but why did a human rights organization choose to endorse it with an award? And why had they photographed me shaking hands with him, smiling like an idiot?

  all I have is a photograph

  Here is a photograph of my mother, walking away from a white house, carrying an open can of Schlitz, wearing a blond wig and oversized sunglasses, like Anjelica Huston in The Grifters. The man next to her is also carrying an open can of Schlitz—we can only see a sliver of him, but it is enough to recognize him as her brother, my uncle. A toddler is hiding behind this uncle, half his face visible, which is more than enough to recognize him as my brother. My mother’s wig, a sliver of an uncle, half a brother—so this is my family. But then, who else would these people be? After all, I found this photograph in a box of my mother’s things. The sweater my brother wears, a white v-neck with red and blue trim around the collar and sleeves, is the same sweater I had as a child, given to us by our grandfather, who was rich, who had money, who paid for our tennis lessons, though at home we had blocks of government cheese and a silver gallon can with the words PEANUT BUTTER stenciled on the side. We ate the cheese, but we never opened the can, saving it for the darker days to come.

  In the photograph they are walking toward the ocean across my grandfather’s yard on First Cliff, in Scituate, Massachusetts, my hometown. My mother calls his house “the big house” (as a child I didn’t know that “big house” is another way of saying “prison”). A tiny foot, nearly unnoticed, dangles from someone else’s arms, someone outside the picture—this could be my foot, I could be in the other uncle’s arms, or I could be in the arms of my mother’s boyfriend at the time, though I don’t know which boyfriend it would be. My foot is so small it is even possible I’m in my father’s arms, but he is the last one I imagine.

  Last night I had a dream: I’m on the phone, but the phone is broken—it is simply an earpiece, a black disc, wires sprouting from it, breaking up in my hands. I have to move it between my ear and my mouth to listen and talk. I am talking to my mother, we are making a plan for me to come to dinner. What can I bring, I ask her—salad? dessert?

  Bring food, she says, we need food.

  crank

  (2005) A photograph of me shaking hands with Sam Harris now exists. Now it will never not exist. After I read his book and discover that he is an advocate of the use of torture (specifically against Muslims), I become, seemingly overnight, a crank. I begin what will become several months of letter writing—to the New York Times, to PEN, to Harris, even to the judges who awarded him the prize, who wrote in their citation that…he has no time for those who murder and torture in the name of beliefs based on ancient concepts…I ask the judges if, among other things, they feel that Harris is, perhaps, more forward-looking in his protorture stance. The judges do not respond to my questions.

  I read the reviews of The End of Faith:

  One reviewer feels that the book has “…a pointed sense of humor.”

  Another writes that “…despite its polemic edge, this is a happy book.”

  My personal favorite describes it as “…a trip down Memory Lane.”

  A book that advocates torture is a trip down Memory Lane—perhaps an unintentionally accurate description of the secret history of America.

  At some point, in the following months, after the award and the photograph and the book reviews and the judges’ citation, I tell my friend Claudia that I’m feeling a little nuts, as if I’m seeing something that everyone else insists isn’t there.

  That’s how black people feel all the time, Claudia says with a shrug.

  my repertoire

  My mother told me a story, just once, of how as a girl she’d been tied to a chair, the chair teetering at the top of the attic stairs, her captors, her brothers, threatening to send her end over end, tumbling down. I don’t know if they did this more than once, and I don’t know what they wanted—a question answered, a promise made—beyond the usual childhood cruelties, or if they ever got it. Her family had money, so much money that an oil painting of her—in pigtails, standing beside a horse—hung over a mantel. She spent her afternoons in stables, was sent away to private schools, was called a debutante. Her father had grown up with money, her mother had grown up poor—both, alas, to varying degrees, were drunks. From my mother I got the sense that her childhood was one of sporadic chaos followed by long stretches of simple neglect. No one, in spite of—or maybe because of—all that money, was steering the boat.

  At seventeen she met my father, got pregnant, jumped ship.

  My father—ah yes, my father. A whole book could be written about my father (or so he thinks), and his stories. The two are nearly inseparable by now, the same handful, over and over—his repertoire. A liar always tells his story the same way, except some—most—of my father’s stories have, improbably, turned out to be true. The story of robbing a few banks. The story of the novel he’s spent his whole life writing. The story of his father inventing the life raft—all true. I first heard these stories, or pieces of them, during those five years he lived on the streets. I was working in the shelter where he’d sometimes spend his nights, and we’d sometimes talk, but he was—is—a grandiose drunk, and so I was not inclined to believe much of what he said. In one of his stories he claimed to be a direct descendant of the Romanovs, of the missing czarina—a delusion, in terms of popularity, just behind claiming to be Jesus. Or Satan.

  One of my father’s stories, one I found too bizarre to engage with at all, was of being locked up in federal prison for two years, which is true, but while there he claims to have been tortured—experimented on, sleep-deprived, drugged, sexually humiliated—and I don’t know if this is true or not. Understand, it is hard and getting harder to get a straight answer from my father, as his alcoholism slips into its twilight stage. When I ask him about his prison time now, he looks wildly around the room or park or coffee shop and whispers, I can’t talk about that here.

  my teufelsberg

  (2007) This morning, in my inbox, I find this note from a friend in Berlin:

  I was standing on the Teufelsberg (the Devil’s Mountain)
with a friend last night, listening to Patti Smith playing in the stadium below, and I thought of you. The Teufelsberg is made from all the junk of the war, the broken houses and so on. It is a big mountain, and we stood there looking out over my strange and terrible and beautiful city. Where are you?

  Teufelsberg. Devil’s Mountain. All the junk of the war.

  Here I am, I think, writing about my mother again (samsara). And here I am, writing about my father again, building my own Devil’s Mountain, piling up all the junk of the war. If asked I’ll sometimes say that I’m writing about torture, but I’ve found that if I say the word “torture” many go glassy-eyed, silent, as if I’d just dropped a stone into a deep, deep well. Sometimes I say I’m writing about my unborn daughter, about my impending fatherhood—five months to go, the clock’s ticking—but I don’t want to jinx it. I want this book to be behind me before she arrives. I don’t want my first days with her to be wrapped up in torture, in shadows. I’m lucky, though—when I turn away from the book, Inez is there, radiantly pregnant, seemingly more sure of what’s to come, and this calms me. The baby is, after all, inside her, inside her body—perhaps this makes it more real, for her. But then, Inez has always been this way—certain, or at least seemingly so. It confused me when we first got together, for it seemed that whether I was to stay or go she would be alright, that she would survive. When we were first together I had to face the uncomfortable realization that I wasn’t used to calling love something that didn’t involve disaster.