The Ticking Is the Bomb Page 2

  Some people tell me that once the baby comes I will feel a new love, a love like I have never felt before. Hearing this, I smile and nod, but it always makes me uneasy. What if I don’t feel this love, what if it doesn’t happen to me? I’m sure it doesn’t—can’t—happen to everyone, and that the ones who don’t feel it simply don’t talk about it. What if I turn out to be one of them? What if I feel it one day and then don’t the next day? What if it’s fleeting?

  Sometimes, if asked, I’ll say that I’m writing about the way photographs are a type of dream, about how shadows can end up resembling us, and sometimes I’ll say I’m writing a memoir of bewilderment, and just leave it at that, but what I mean is the bewilderment of waking up, my hand on Inez’s belly, as the fine points of waterboarding are debated on public radio. But maybe talking about torture is easier than talking about my impending fatherhood, the idea of which, some days, sends me into a tailspin.

  Maybe I should tell anyone who asks that I’m writing about Proteus, the mythological creature who changes shape as you hold on to him, who changes into the shape of that which most terrifies you, as you ask him your question, as you refuse to let go. The question is, often, simply a variation of, How do I get home?

  pleiad

  (1999) For two weeks one summer I swam every day in a small lake on top of a mountain in Vermont. The lake’s name is Pleiad, which made me think of the Seven Sisters, the star cluster. I’d wake up early each morning, drive up the mountain, park on the side of the road, and hike fifteen minutes up a narrow trail, all so I could be in the water by seven. No one else was ever there, not at that time, the sun just catching the outcroppings of granite at the far corner, wisps of steam rising off the surface. I was at a writers’ conference, and it seemed that everyone was drinking except me. I’d had my last drink ten years earlier, a couple years after my father had ended up on the streets (maybe because my father had ended up on the streets). Swimming, I’d tell anyone who asked, was my Prozac.

  The reason for my anxiety was, in part, that the long-term relationship I was in, with a woman I’ll call Justine, was limping to its painful, perhaps necessary, end. That it was ending badly (I still cannot imagine a way it could have ended well, though I know this isn’t true) drove me to my knees—no, it drove me to swimming pools, to ponds, I threw my body in and swam, hour after hour, I swam for as long as it took, until I had a good thought, just one good thought. Some days, most days, it would take a long time, but finally it was as if I could see it coming across the surface of the water toward me, and as I pulled myself toward it, my body would slowly return—I could feel it again, my body, I could feel myself returning to it, and then, as that one good thought reached me, as I let it wash over me, my body would slowly dissolve. I could feel it—everything—if briefly, and it was enough, it had to be enough. If I didn’t make it to the water, if I missed a day, then I knew I wouldn’t have that one good thought and, I feared, maybe never have another one again. By certain—most—reckoning, I was to blame, though for a long time I actually held on to the desperate belief that I’d been the one most wronged.

  To escape the writing conference, some days, I’d go to Pleiad Lake twice, if someone else wanted to go, if we could find another hour in the afternoon. Some of those who went with me wouldn’t even go into the water. They were happy to just hike in and see the lake, which is how I found out that some people don’t like to swim, or, more accurately, that some people are afraid of water. I began to ask about this fear, which is how I found out that even some of those who swam were afraid. One told me that she preferred to swim in pools, where you could always see where the water ended. One said he preferred to swim in the ocean, where the salt kept him afloat. One was afraid of what was submerged beneath the surface, of the hidden branch that might snag her leg. Many seemed to be afraid of some unnamed creature that would reach up, bite them, pull them under. Leeches were a fear, though I met no one who had ever been bitten by one. One seemed to be afraid of himself, afraid he would just give up and sink in the middle of the lake. One was afraid of running out of energy and getting pulled over the tiny waterfall. One was afraid of his heart failing and not being able to make it back to shore. From talking about it I realized that I was also afraid, only not of what was there, but of what wasn’t there—my fear was more a type of horror vacui, the fear of empty space, the fear of the nothing that is. With my goggles on I could see into the darkness rising up from the unseen bottom, and it was as if I were looking into the universe, the way it just seemed to go on and on. Looking into this empty space, all I could hear was my own breathing, as if that was all there was, and it just didn’t seem enough.

  the banishment prize

  (2001) A year after the relationship with Justine ends, I get a poetry grant, which has one stipulation: in order to get the money I have to leave North America for one year—the Banishment Prize, I call it. I end up based for the next two years in Rome. I find a big cheap apartment near Piazza Vittorio, where I plan to finish up the book on homelessness and my father. I buy a beat-up Vespa, and begin dating an Italian playwright. It’s hard to complain, except that I’d left a support system I’d spent the last ten years building up, a web of friends and routines that seemed to have kept me, mostly, on an even keel. Without knowing it, and without seeking it, once I landed in Rome this support system began to slowly unravel, to break apart, like those photographs of Antarctica’s icecaps falling into the sea. It should also be said that this personal crisis was nearly invisible to those around me, especially since the one who had been closest to me for the past eight years—Justine—was no longer there. But this might be another delusion, the delusion that no one else could see how fucked-up I was, when it is just as likely I came across as an utter mess.

  Before I left for Rome, as summer ended, I had a month to swim in a pond in Truro. In the spring, when the pond was swollen with rain, there was no beach, but now, at the end of summer, with the water low, there was a small strip of sand two or three people could crowd onto. For a week or so, every day, I sat next to a woman on this tiny strip of sand, and sometimes we’d talk, and it turned out we knew people in common. On the last day, she invited me to her house for tea, then or whenever I felt like it. I’d like that, I said—I’ll come by after my banishment ends. And I would have, I wanted to but, incomprehensibly, she’d been in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.

  both towers

  When both towers were still standing I stopped in a parking lot on Great Jones Street with the rest, watching smoke pour from the one we could see. What happened, I asked a stranger, as masses of people streamed past us, all heading north up Lafayette, but he didn’t know. At that point no one knew—we were all mere onlookers at that point, smoke filling the sky. Whatever had happened was still happening. In my mind the people streaming northward were all coming from the burning tower, and I was relieved that everyone had made it out alright—that’s how my mind translated that beautiful blue day punctured by smoke.

  A few minutes later the guy I get my coffee from told me that airplanes had crashed into both towers. Both towers? A few minutes after that I stood with another crowd of strangers inside an appliance store on Broadway and watched the first tower fall on a bank of televisions. I could have stood on the sidewalk outside the store and seen it fall, but I thought there might be some words coming from the televisions that would make it all make sense.

  proteus

  Proteus lives at the bottom of a steep cliff, down a treacherous path, at the edge of the sea. From the top of the cliff you can see him, lolling on a flat rock, staring into the endless nothing of the sea, but to reach him is difficult. You’ve been told that he has the answer to your question, and you are a little desperate to have this question answered. As you make your way down you must be careful not to dislodge any loose gravel, careful not to cry out when the thorns pierce your feet. You must approach him as quietly as you can, get right up on him, get your hands on him, around his n
eck. You’ve been told that you have to hold on while you ask your question, you’ve been told that you can’t let go. You’ve been told that as you hold on Proteus will transform into the shape and form of that which most terrifies you, in order to get you to release your grip. But the promise is that if you can hold on, through your fear, he will return to his real form and answer your question.

  welcome to the year of the monkey

  (2004) I hear word of the photographs before I see the photographs, I hear about them on the car radio. The man on the radio says the words abu ghraib, words I’ve never heard before—at this point I don’t know if abu ghraib is one word or two, a building or a city, a place or an idea. The man on the radio has seen the photographs, he talks as if they are there in front of him, as if he is thumbing through them as he speaks—The photographs are from our war, he says, and they are very, very disturbing.

  My first semester of teaching in Houston has just ended, and I’m driving north, headed back to New York, where both Anna and Inez live. At this point Anna and I are already involved—Inez and I have yet to meet. I’m driving a 1993 Ford Escort wagon—reliable, unsexy, cheap—a basic a-to-b device, bought in Texas with the idea of taking it north because, unlike in the northeast, a used car from Texas will be unlikely to have rust. You just have to make sure it was never in a flood. Houston, built on a swamp, is known for its floods. Houston, also, is seemingly endless—I hear about the photographs again and again even before I make it to the city limits. What connects the photographs, the man on the radio says, is that each depicts what appears to be torture, and that the people doing the torturing are wearing uniforms, or parts of uniforms, and that the uniforms appear to be ours. The man on the radio describes the photographs—prisoners, guards, dogs. Hallways, cinderblocks, cages. Leashes. Smiles. Many of the prisoners are not wearing clothes, he says. The reason for this, he says, is that there appears to be a sexual element to what’s happening, as I float past a church the size of a shopping mall.

  The man on the radio is a reporter. The first time I heard his name was nearly forty years ago, when he broke the story of a massacre in Vietnam—My Lai—the name of a hamlet that came to symbolize all that was wrong with that war. Nearly four hundred unarmed men, women, and children—civilians—rounded up, executed, many of them herded into ditches and shot. Photographs document that day as well, and the photographs made their way to his hands, and eventually to the pages of the New York Times. WELCOME TO THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY, banners over the streets of Saigon read that spring of 1968.

  I finally break out of the vortex that is Houston, and now I’m heading east on I-10, approaching the exit for New Orleans, where I’d planned to stop—I haven’t been there for years—but I decide to push on, to make it to Tuscaloosa before nightfall, where friends have offered shelter. And I never get to see New Orleans again.

  two

  they came back

  (2007) That time of year again—short days, long nights—almost Christmas, but first comes the anniversary of my mother’s death, a nail in the middle of the snow. Happy Deathday, I say, though the room is empty. Every year around this time I’m filled with a dark energy, so I watch zombie movies, and if you were to see a photograph of me from one of those nights you might think I was a zombie myself. Hold up one hand, that’s how many days I have until the deathday passes, that’s how many more zombie movies I can watch. Hiroshima Mon Amour. After Life. American Psycho. In Dawn of the Dead the zombies return to the mall, like those eerie photographs the newspapers run every year at this time, the poor lined up outside a Wal-Mart, waiting for the sale to begin. In last night’s feature a father became a zombie and spent the rest of the movie chasing his children through the empty London streets—he had told them their mother was dead but she was not dead. Tonight I chose a French one—They Came Back—subtle, I think, for the genre: the only thing the dead do is act dead, shuffling listlessly to work and back. They do not want our blood, or our brains, to keep going. They seem unsure if they even want to keep going.

  Night of the Living Dead was my first zombie movie. My mother took my brother and me—I was ten. For months afterward we’d reenact our favorite scenes in the kitchen, shuffling up behind each other, arms dangling lifelessly by our sides, or scratching at the screen door, our eyes never blinking. At dinner I’d put a life-sized severed rubber hand on my plate, drizzle it with fake blood, stab at it with my fork. My father had been gone since I was six months old—he wasn’t even a distant memory at this point. My mother was still young, not even thirty. Over the years she’d had a series of boyfriends, decent enough guys, at least the ones she brought home. One of them, a year or so after our Night of the Living Dead, would take me to the drive-in to see zombie and mayhem movies—Bloody Mama, Scream and Scream Again. That Christmas he gave me a book on the history of torture. The font used for the title, as I remember it, was Old English, the type of lettering now used by heavy metal bands and for A.A. slogans—One Day at a Time. Motörhead.

  (1999) For a few years after my mother died, I found it best to simply disappear for the whole of December—Muslim countries were best, where I wouldn’t be tormented by Christmas carols. I had a friend working in Cairo, so one winter I fled there to escape the cold of New York and a failing relationship. My second morning there I woke up next to a woman I would eventually fall in love with, but she lived in Copenhagen and I lived in New York and we were both with other people and perhaps neither of us was ready to be in love. Jetlagged, we took a walk to an enormous cemetery that had become a city for the dispossessed. Families lived in the crypts, and no one knew if it was their dead they were mourning, or merely an empty crypt. This city of squatters, this zombie city, had been there so long that some of the crypts had become shops, and the passageways had lights strung up along them. When we got to the edge of it, we crossed a highway to an area that was simply white on our map. It was dusk. At an outdoor stand we bought an entire fried fish, and ate it as we walked. At one point, in an alley, some children began to follow us, and they began to swing long thin sticks in the air, which cracked near our faces. I knew the phrase “Go away” in Arabic, which I’d already used on occasion with beggars, feeling miserable each time. Go away, I hissed, and stamped my feet, and grabbed one of their switches, and tossed it over a fence. Go away.

  (2003) After two years in Rome, where I’d finished the book on homelessness and my father, I made my way back to Brooklyn. While I’d been away, the building I’d lived in for ten years had been bought by the artists who’d lived below me, and they’d quadrupled the rent. I had some money left from my book advance, enough to either rent a place in Brooklyn for a year, or buy a house upstate. I bought the house, a rundown Victorian in a pretty village on the Hudson River, two hours north of the city. Rip Van Winkle country—my neighbors really had seemed to have fallen asleep for twenty years. I closed in December.

  At this point the relationship with the Italian playwright wasn’t going very well. We had plans for her to join me once I settled in, but it often seemed she was angry with me, some days for not being able to promise I’d meet her in eternity. I accepted that this was how she interpreted her Catholicism, but it worried me. A few months earlier, by chance, I’d been commissioned to write a one-act play—no big deal, but I figured I could learn something from the process. On the anniversary of my mother’s death, the playwright told me, by phone, that she’d rather see me kill myself than write a play. Apparently she felt threatened. I’d been trying to reassure her, but with her words—I’d rather see you kill yourself—I knew the relationship was over. I hung up the phone. Then, looking around me, perched on a salvaged couch in a trashy house in a town that time forgot, I wondered what I’d done. Had I really poured all my money into something that would take years to bring back to life? Maybe I could simply fall asleep in it, never wake up.

  What I couldn’t know then was that Inez lived a few miles down the road.

  (2007) In a dream last night Inez was wa
lking away from me, through a prisonlike complex. A guard stopped me, said I couldn’t follow her. I watched on a video monitor as she walked down a hall, took a right, and then I lost sight of her. The guard had a dog, and it pinned me to a table, and this was how the dream ended. I woke up from the dream in a white room in Brooklyn, the apartment Inez and I moved into two months ago (surprisingly, this is the first time that I have ever lived with a woman). Inez is asleep beside me, this is our bedroom. When she opened her eyes, I closed mine, so I could tell her the dream. It also involved driving a car very close to the edge of a cliff.

  Our baby is due in a month.

  Last week the Danish woman sent me a photograph of herself, very pregnant. Yesterday, I ran into another lover from the past, but I confused her with her twin sister. Years ago, when I came back from Egypt, I went back to Brooklyn, to my failing relationship with Justine, but she looked at me like the woman in the French zombie movie, when her lover returns from the dead. You came back, she looked like she wanted to say, but we both knew I hadn’t, not really. In fact, now, when we meet up, years later, it’s to talk about how badly I’d handled everything. Do you know how hard it was for me then? I woke up next to the man I loved and he’d transformed into a psychotic killer.

  Just a zombie, I want to say.

  who died and made you king?