The Ticking Is the Bomb Read online

  Two months before our daughter is born, Inez and I go to an infant CPR class. I have taken CPR classes before, but never specifically to save an infant. The woman leading it is passionate about safety, pumping us with gruesome details of what could happen if we fail to put our child in a secured car seat, if she swallows a penny, if we spill hot coffee on her. One day you will come upon your baby and she will be blue, this woman says. What will you do? A box of dolls at her feet, dolls with removable rubber faces, and chests that can be compressed only if the air passage is opened. As she speaks she wraps a face around a skull and assures us that each has been sterilized since the last class. I take them home and boil them, she says. She places a doll face-up on the table in front of each of us, along with a packet of alcohol, so we can give the doll’s mouth one last wipe before we attempt to revive her. By the looks on everyone’s face we are all a little freaked out (or maybe it’s just me). Take two fingers, the teacher says, place them just below your baby’s nipples, in the center of her chest, and push.

  I cannot imagine my mother and father in a room like this, trying to revive a doll. Were there even classes back then for expecting parents? I get the idea that when they were young pregnancy simply was, a state one dealt with, or not. I heard from my father, more than once, that my mother, at seventeen, pregnant with my brother, had considered having an abortion. I heard from one of her ex-boyfriends that, two years later, pregnant with me, she’d attempted suicide, or maybe it was right after I was born, and that—obviously—she’d failed. Or maybe she’d turned away from it in time. I don’t know if any of this is true, and there’s no longer any way to know. About the suicide attempt, I’ve only heard it once, and the source, this ex-boyfriend, seemed bitter, reluctant to talk, maybe even a bit paranoid. He was the first boyfriend I remember my mother being with. They were together nearly five years, though he claimed it was only two. Part of that time he was also living with his wife, and they had three kids of their own, so maybe he doesn’t count those early years. He and his wife eventually divorced, and, being Catholic, it wore on his soul. Years later, by the time I found him again, he could only mutter that it had all been a mistake. As for my mother’s early suicide attempt, if true it wouldn’t surprise me. It often felt like my brother and I—her kids—were tethering her to this world, while at the same time the burden of raising us alone was pulling her under.

  the book of daniel

  In one early scene in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, the eponymous main character, a fictionalized version of one of the children left behind when the Rosenbergs were executed, is driving back to his family home with his girlfriend. Nothing is said, they are not speaking, but since we have access to his thoughts we know he is full of rage. At some point he lets her know, somehow, what he wants, and, sobbing quietly, their child asleep in the backseat, she agrees. She kneels on the seat, pulls up her skirt, pulls down her underwear, and offers up her bared ass to him. He strokes it briefly, as if he might push his fingers into her, but instead he pushes in the cigarette lighter, and when it pops out he takes it and burns her with it as he steers with his other hand.

  (2004) A few days after the Abu Ghraib photographs appear, I pull into New York in the car I’d driven up from Texas, and I make my way to Anna. I tell her that I am in no shape to see anyone, not fully, that I will likely see others, though this will not stop me from going to her whenever I make my way to Brooklyn. And so, over the weeks, we grow closer, but at some point I meet someone else—Inez—though I am still not ready to be with anyone, not really, not fully. At first I tell Inez about Anna, and then I let each assume that I’ve stopped seeing the other, until I wake up that day in Texas, a year later, in love with two women, honest with neither, and in as dark a place as I’ve been in a long, long time—In the middle of my life I found myself in a deep dark wood, having lost the way. When I was with one, I dreaded a call from the other, so my phone was always silenced, when I spoke I used the name sweetie or honey or darling so as not to make a mistake. I’d spent the years since I’d quit drinking practicing being honest, and it stunned me how quickly that dissolved, how easily one lie folded into the next, how I could be on my cellphone telling one (which one?) that I was about to go to bed when in fact at that moment I was driving to Austin. Until I began to hear a voice in my head, I can’t pinpoint precisely when it started, quiet at first, comforting, murmuring, that if I was dead then the mess I’d gotten myself into would be lifted, the damage I was spreading would be made right.

  One night I tell Anna that I feel like Daniel in Doctorow’s book. I tell her about the cigarette lighter, how he tries to make her feel the pain he feels. I tell her this as a warning. I wasn’t offering or asking to burn her, it’s just I was having trouble committing—to her, to anything—and I was having a hard time articulating why.

  god’s loneliness (known)

  Soon—very soon—I shall be known: these are the first words my father, locked up for robbing banks, or something like robbing banks, wrote me. His return address was #9567328, Federal Prison, Springfield, Missouri. I often hear myself calling him a bankrobber, perhaps because the word “bankrobber” has more electricity in it than “fuckup.” His charge was “interstate transportation of stolen securities”—he’d entered a few banks and said a few words and passed a few bad checks and left with money that wasn’t his. In every bank he’d been photographed, smiling into the camera. Soon—very soon—I shall be known. Known? What else did anyone need to know?

  According to some Sufis, it was God’s loneliness and desire to be known that set creation going. When I was still drinking, though maybe not enjoying it as much as I once had (first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man), a lover turned to me, her palm flat on my chest—You know, she said, I don’t really know you at all. We’d been together for a few months, likely she was simply expressing a desire to get to know me better, to get invited inside the walls of my invisible fortress, the one I’d been building my whole life. The thing was, the whole point, was that no one was invited in. I might refer to this or that rough patch from my little box of tragedies, hold them up likes slides to a lightbulb—proof—but that was just to get whoever was listening to hold on to me a little tighter. It had nothing to do with them getting inside. Inside this fortress a man was wrestling with his own shadow, muttering that he’d never let himself be surprised, not again. Muttering that he’d never again let himself be tricked into getting so close to someone that he might risk missing her.

  God’s loneliness and desire to be known set creation going. Unmanifest things, lacking names, remained unmanifest until the violence of God’s sense of isolation sent the heavens into a spasm of procreating words that then became matter.

  The violence of God’s sense of isolation.

  Another lover, shortly after I quit drinking, told me that my eyes were dead. Maybe they were, but her saying it pierced that wall again, and at the time I still wasn’t ready for it to be disturbed. She was German, and so I forgave her bluntness (Your ears taste like poison, she’d murmur as we’d kiss). This was just days before the Berlin Wall came down, and when it did she flew home. A few months later I showed up at her door in Kreutzberg, something we’d talked about since our teary goodbye (You’re coming out of me now, she’d whispered at the airport, pulling my hand back to her crotch), but by then she was living with someone else.

  the allegory of the cave

  My mother, the story goes, set our house on fire one summer night. The house was a ruin, she did it to collect the insurance money, so she could then have it fixed up, re-no-vated (a big word, like re-pro-bate). I was five, my brother and I were sleeping upstairs at the time. I remember being carried outside in my ghoulish pajamas, left to stand across the street on the lawn of the neighbor we’d never met. I stood there, watching our house burn, then I watched the shadows of it burning, like one of those prisoners in Plato’s cave. It was only years later that I learned my mot
her set it, or was told she set it, by the boyfriend she was with at the time (the same boyfriend who told me she’d attempted suicide before, or shortly after, I was born). It made sense, when I heard it, though it doesn’t mean it’s true—not that our house caught fire, but that she set it. If true, then it might explain why thereafter we were fated to go toward sirens, it might answer the question of why every burning house pulled us toward it—maybe she believed she could tell by looking everyone in the eye as they came out of the house if it was a scam or not. Or maybe she just wanted to make sure all the children made it out okay.

  The Allegory of the Cave came from a dream Plato had. In this dream prisoners, locked-up in a cave since childhood, are chained in such a way that they cannot look away from the wall they are facing. Even their heads are fixed, somehow, in that one direction. Behind the prisoners, some still children, is a walkway, slightly elevated, and along this walkway the jailers, or their assistants, carry various objects back and forth. Beyond the walkway a fire burns, continuously, a large fire, and this fire casts light onto the objects, which then cast shadows on the wall for the prisoners to contemplate. The object might be something benign, a bunch of carrots, say, but as a shadow the carrots can appear frightful—each could be a knife. Or an apple could be a rock that could crush a man’s hands. Or his son’s testicles. Or a jar of milk could be a jar of acid, if all one sees, all one is allowed to see, are shadows. And the jailers grunt and snort, sounds that echo off the walls and so seem, to the prisoners, to come from the shadows themselves. And don’t forget the fire, which makes another sound, and which heats their backs, perhaps too much, and fills the cave with smoke, making it hard to breathe. It must seem a little like hell, with its silent goons carrying menacing shapes, with your head strapped into place, though this allegory comes from a time well before we perfected our modern-day concept of hell.

  (2001) A few days after the towers fall, the vice president (the second-in-command, who some claim is the first-in-command), goes on television to make a pronouncement—We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will…. it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

  A few weeks after the vice president invites us over to the dark side, a man named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is flown by the United States, via a secret program called “extraordinary rendition” (a euphemism for “state-sponsored kidnapping” or “outsourcing torture”), to a dungeon in Egypt, where he will utter a lie about chemical weapons and Saddam and Osama, a lie extracted under torture, a lie that will later be used to justify a war. A year later the secretary of state, who is believed by most, until this moment, to embody an above-average amount of integrity, will repeat this lie. He will repeat it at the U.N., on a world stage, the lie that he has the evidence, and the evidence is strong, that Osama passed chemical weapons on to Saddam, and that Saddam has the missiles to strike Europe with these weapons in fifteen minutes. The secretary of state, in an unusual moment of theater, will even hold up a small vial of a white powder, and say that if it were anthrax it would be enough to kill all of London—which is true, if it were anthrax, but this is a potential truth buried in a tangible lie. Most will believe him when he says that U.N. inspections haven’t worked, that there is an urgency to act. I will believe him, for a moment, until a document, folded into the same lie, referring to the purchase of something quaintly called “yellowcake,” reveals itself to be a clumsy forgery. Only later will it be revealed that the original lie, the one that connected Osama and Saddam, the one that led us into our long war, was extracted by torture.

  If Plato had seen me standing outside my burning house in my ghoulish pajamas that summer night, hypnotized by shadows, what would he have said? What would he have written if he had seen me transfixed by the Three Stooges, pummeling each other day after day? What insight would he have had if he saw me standing in a Best Buy on Broadway before a whole bank of televisions, watching the first tower fall, when I could have simply looked south and seen the real thing? Would he say I was caught up in the world as it appeared, unable to enter into its essence? Would he say my eyes were having trouble adjusting to the light? The Allegory of the Cave is often read as an allegory of perception, how we come to believe that the shadows on the wall, which terrify or entertain us, are real. But how did we end up in a cave, how did we end up, hour after hour, day after day, staring at shadows on the wall. And why don’t we simply look away?

  john doe

  Some mornings you wake up fully in your body, and you know this is all there is—the air, the shape your body makes in the air, your hand, the skin that covers your hand, the air that covers your skin, the light that fills the air, a few colors in the light, this one thought, this dream dissolving—it is a dream that, in your half-awake state, embarrasses you. You don’t tell it to the woman waking up beside you, the woman you love, because it is about another woman, whom you might also love. This is the dream you need to hold on to, this is your shadow speaking, attempting to bewilder you again. Sometimes, if you lay still, you can feel the air entering each cell, sometimes you can feel the blood in your lips. Sometimes, if you lay very still, you can feel the whole web tremble.

  (1988) Early December, and I’m working the Homeless Outreach Van with a woman I’ll call Kate. Kate’s a rookie, tonight is her first time out on the Van. I haven’t been in charge of the Van before, but I am tonight. It’s not quite freezing, but cold, touching forty. It’s also the anniversary of my mother’s death, six years earlier, and that dark energy is roiling through me. My father has been homeless for almost two years by this point, and it is impossible for me not to be aware that he looms ahead, somewhere in the night, his body curled up somewhere, breathing, or not.

  A couple hours into it we drive past a man on a bench at the edge of Boston Common. A black man in his forties, a man I’ve never seen before, wild-eyed and skittish, his jacket on the ground beside him. We pull up, get out, approach. He looks at us, tries to speak, his tongue thick, slurred—he is, seemingly, completely shattered. Amigo, I say, how about we go to the shelter, it’s too frikkin cold to hang out here. He shakes his head, or his head lolls, utters something unintelligible. Kate and I look at each other. If Jeff were here, maybe we’d just grab the guy and throw him in the Van, shanghai him, though it’s risky. The Van, after all, is a small, enclosed space, no cage separating the driver from the drunk. He could start using his hands, he could start swinging, it could be a nightmare. Kate and I stand beside each other, our breath steams out of us. I decide to try anyway, I tell Kate the plan. She looks doubtful, but we get on either side of him, murmuring like he’s an infant or a cat, Okay, here we go, nice and warm inside, we’re going to take you to a better place, let you sleep it off, in the morning it will all be a bad dream, upsy-daisy, here we go—but he starts to flail, swinging his head back and forth, he pulls away from us, slides from our hands into a pile on the ground, his shirt now pulled up over his chest. Great—now he’s in even worse shape than when we found him, lying on the asphalt, his bared skin exposed, still flailing. We kneel down, try to keep him from whacking his head, hoist him back up to the bench, step away. I send Kate to get a couple blankets, apologize for our manhandling, assure him that we’re the good guys. Not one word that comes out of his mouth is comprehensible. One of the talking comatose, a walking blackout. We wrap the blankets around his shoulders and he struggles against them, like they’re sandpaper. Kate and I look at each other, uncertain. It’s a cold night, a lot of other people to see. We tell him we’ll be back in half an hour to check on how he’s doing, and as we drive away, the blankets slide to the ground.

  An hour later Kate reminds me we should check on our John Doe, before we leave Downtown Crossing. He’d completely left my radar, overtaken by the dozen or so others we’d subsequently encountered. Overtaken by how well Kate and I are getting along. I’m due to see a therapist for the first time the next day, and I’ve told her about my upcoming appoi
ntment. As we drive back past Park Street Station, we see him, now flat out on the ground, the blankets nowhere near. I park beside him, get out, shake his shoulder, wait for him to mumble incoherently, to flail. Nothing. Unresponsive. I try rubbing my knuckles across his sternum, try digging a pen cap into his thumbnail. Nothing. I suddenly realize that I have no idea what I’m doing. I try to find a pulse, dig my fingers into his neck, like I’ve seen on tv. A bare, distant pulse, or maybe nothing, I don’t know, can’t tell for sure. I tell Kate to call 911, man down, not breathing. This is before the invention of cellphones, what we have is a little radio that connects us to the front desk at the shelter, and then they call 911. I don’t even know CPR, or if I do I can’t remember where to begin, though with even a minimal pulse I don’t think I’m supposed to begin. But do I know that for sure? An ambulance is there in minutes, amazingly, and the EMTs jump out, ask how long he’s been down. They check his pulse, immediately cut his shirt off so his chest is now exposed to the night. One already has the black box of electricity out and is uncoiling its wires. One rubs goo on John Doe’s chest while the other rubs the two little irons together (like a fly washing its hands, I think). Then the one with the irons shouts Clear, just like on tv, pressing the irons into John Doe’s ribs so his body lifts off the ground as if he’s been kicked—clear clear clear—an ear to the chest between each. Then nothing more. They strap him to a gurney and toss it into the back of their van and speed off, leaving Kate and me looking down at the blankets we’d placed over his shoulders an hour before.