The Ticking Is the Bomb

by Nick Flynn

  The next morning I go to the morgue with Joy, who’s worked at the shelter for years, who knows everyone, but even to Joy he’s John Doe.

  The day after John Doe dies, after my trip to the morgue, I meet with the therapist. The appointment was set up weeks earlier. It’s just a coincidence that someone died on me a few hours earlier, and that it’s the anniversary of my mother’s suicide. As part of my intake the therapist asks me what’s going on, why I am there. I tell him about the anniversary, I tell him that my father is going on two years homeless, that my friend and roommate Richard was diagnosed HIV positive a year before, that everyone in my building is a junkie, that my ten-year relationship is nearing the end, and now John Fucken Doe, alive one minute and dead the next—I spoke to him, made a decision, drove away. I leaned in toward Kate, and thereby away from him.

  The therapist smiles, shakes his head, asks if I think he’s a miracle worker. I smile. A few days later I find out that hypothermia, in its extreme form, mimics drunkenness.

  worksong

  Here, God says, here is your cupful of days.

  If you don’t believe in God, you still get your cupful of days. Some will be spent making love, some will be spent high, some will be spent reading Ulysses, and some will be spent alone. Some will be spent around a table, a meal about to be passed, a steaming bowl of rice, some sautéed kale. It’s someone’s birthday, someone you have known for ten, no, twenty, years. To your right is a woman you slept with seven years ago—at the time, you thought it might work out, but it didn’t. Across from you is the woman you are with now, and at this point it could be forever, whatever that means.

  Some of the days you are given will be spent in a strange city, and at the end of the day you will know that you have spoken to no one except the girl you got your coffee from, no one except her. There will always be days like this.

  horror vacui

  (1988) After John Doe died, the higher-ups in the shelter decided we all needed CPR training. They also offered a “Death and Dying Workshop,” though this was optional. What I remember of the workshop was that at some point the facilitator had us write out a list of the ten most important things in our lives. This list could include people, objects, things we liked to do, a memory that was important to us. She gave us a few minutes to make our list, and then she spoke a little about dying—dying is a process, she said, death is an endpoint. Or a threshold, if that’s what you believe. When we are dying, she told us, one by one we have to let go of those things that are precious to us, things we thought we needed to make it through our days. And so she had us cross three things off of our list, those things we would be able to let go of first, because we couldn’t move forward, toward the end, with everything. I looked at my list. I felt like I’d been tricked. I’d already distilled everything in my life down to these ten things, and now I had to distill further. Muttering, I crossed off Paris, I crossed off photography, I crossed off my truck. The facilitator let us talk to the person next to us about what we had let go of. Now I would have to bicycle everywhere, now I would never make it back to Paris, now I would have to live with the photographs I’d already taken. Now, the facilitator said, cross off three more. Hater. I crossed off the ocean. I crossed off the shelter. I crossed off all my ex-and future lovers. I was down to four—my friends (I shifted my then-lover over to this list), my writing, my body, and the one photograph I had of me with my mother. I felt desperate. The facilitator said to cross off two more. Vengeful god, this posed a real problem. If I crossed off my body, could I still exist? Without friends who would catch me when I fell? Could I hold the image of my mother in my mind, without that photograph, when my memory was so bad? If I could no longer write, would anything ever make sense?

  Ten years later I will begin writing the book about working with the homeless, but I will leave out the part where I killed a guy. “Kill” is a strong word, I know, I know—I didn’t put my boot on John Doe’s head and push him under the waves, but I also know that I wandered through the next many years feeling as if I had.

  proteus (sciamachy)

  Since we invaded Iraq, when I give a reading, I often read a poem by Saadi Youssef, simply to have an Iraqi voice in the room with us.

  America, we are the dead.

  Let your soldiers come.

  Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.

  We are the drowned ones, dear lady.

  We are the drowned.

  Let the water come.

  Fanny Howe writes:

  What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work….

  There is a Muslim prayer that says, “Lord, increase my bewilderment,” and this prayer belongs both to me and the strange Whoever who goes under the name of “I” in my poems—and under multiple names in my fiction—where error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story….

  Bewilderment breaks open the lock of dualism (it’s this or that) and peers out into space (not this, not that).

  Bewilderment as a way of entering the day. My terror with being a father, with having a child, if I can name it, is not the threat of some abstract maniac snatching her—it is that I will look at her and not feel a thing. That she will appear and nothing will change. That I won’t be able to take her in, I won’t be able to enter the day, not fully. That I might simply get in my car one day and drive, away from her, away from myself, that I won’t remember. My fear has always been with myself, it has always been the fear of my own shadow. Maybe “Proteus” is simply another name for “shadow”—the shadow you drag behind you with every step, except when you walk in darkness, when you yourself become the shadow. The question, then, is not how Proteus knows what most terrifies you, but how it has come to pass that you don’t recognize your own innermost fears—Let the water come.

  four

  istanbul

  (2007) Inez and I are based in L.A. for a few months while she works on a new tv series (Inez is an actress). During the weeks of taping she starts to show, subtly at first, then undeniably. At one point the scriptwriters consider writing in that she has an eating disorder, but in the end they simply make her pregnant.

  In August I fly from L.A. to New York, to connect with another airline, which will carry me to Paris, then on to Istanbul. Istanbul, I know, is far away—half in Europe, half in Asia—but still, I didn’t expect it to take three days to get there, and it wouldn’t have, if the jet from L.A. hadn’t run out of gas on the way to New York. I’d never been on a jet that ran out of gas. It felt like when I was sixteen and would put fifty cents in my tank to make a run to the package store. We had to touch down in Rochester to refuel—“touch down,” the pilot said, but seven hours later we were still stranded, and I had missed my connecting flight.

  I’d been invited to Istanbul by a lawyer who is gathering testimonies from ex-detainees of Abu Ghraib. This lawyer is putting together a lawsuit against two American companies that have allegedly profited from torture—when I heard this I’d tracked her down. The lawsuit may or may not ever come to trial, which is why she invited me, along with a handful of other artists—she recognizes the need to get the information out through various alternative, nontraditional channels, not just through the courts. Now, if asked, I’ll sometimes say that I went to Istanbul to bear witness, though at the time I was somewhat bewildered as to my role. I sat at a table and took notes, and then I went back to America and told people what I’d heard. By the time I made it home, my daughter was two weeks closer to being born.

  istanbul (dream, reality)

  By the time I land in Istanbul I’m so jetlagged, so bone-tired, that in the taxi to the hotel I’m almost hallucinating. We pass men in their underwear swimming in the Bosphorus, we pass fields of weekend picnickers sprawled out on ornate fabrics in the sun. Traffic sounds, a muezzin, a pop song on the radio—everything is calling us to prayer.

  The taxi drops me off at the Armada Hotel. I check in and ask where the
lawyers are, and within a few minutes I knock on the door to room 223. After brief introductions I find myself sitting next to a man telling the story of how he ended up in a photograph, a photograph I have seen many times by now, a photograph the whole world has seen. A photograph is like a house—once it is made we then start counting the days and then the years from when it was made. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the light. Tell me what happened next, the lawyer whispers.

  I had a dream about this room before I found myself here. In the dream the room was the size of a barn, with six spaces divided by hastily built half-walls. In each room there was a shackle screwed into the floor, nothing more than a large eyebolt, really, and I worried that this eyebolt wasn’t strong enough. It needed to be strong enough to hold a man. It needed to be like the shackles I had seen in the photographs, cemented into the floors. The rooms were dark, empty, the prisoners hadn’t been brought in yet. I thought to leave a candle, and a lighter, but then I thought the man would use the lighter to set fire to his shackles, or to himself, or to the whole barn. In the dream I ended up leaving the candle and lighter in a corner, and if the man could reach them, if he knew to look, then come what may.

  The room turns out to be utterly mundane—well lit, carpeted, a hotel room that one could find in any major city. The bed has been removed, and in its place is a table. The lawyer sits at the table, across from the ex-detainee. Another lawyer sits next to her, typing out the transcript of the conversation on a laptop. The translator sits at the head of the table, between the lawyer asking the questions and the ex-detainee. There is also an artist present, seated away from the table, near the window, painting a watercolor portrait in a large book, its pages folded like an accordion. When he isn’t painting the portrait, he fills in the white space around the painted head with bits of what is being said. The seat next to the ex-detainee is empty, and this is where I sit, my notebook open.

  transmogrification

  When I was younger I worked for gangsters for a few years—mostly they just smuggled drugs, though there was a story of a kidnapping, and another story of a body found in the trunk of a car. My mother dated one of them—he’d disappear a couple times a year, come back two months later, flush with cash. After high school, when it was clear I was going nowhere, he got me a job down at the pier, unloading fishing boats. In my mind I was being groomed to make a run, to take a boat down to Colombia, pilot it back full of marijuana, and likely this was true. It was simple—I’d grown up broke, we were still broke, and these gangsters, our friends, had found a way out.

  Years later, when I move to New York, I will live in Brooklyn with an artist—David—who will become one of my closest friends. David grew up with money. Once we’d known each other for a few years, I told him about my misspent youth, about my plan of making a run, all of which he had a hard time processing, especially the part about how I knew I’d put myself in a position where I might have needed to carry a gun, which meant I might have needed to use it. No way, he said, you’d never do that. I tried to explain that it wasn’t something I was proud of, it wasn’t something I would have wanted to have done, but at that point, when I was eighteen, nineteen, I was willing to put myself in the position where it might happen.

  What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don’t know what it is I’m capable of transforming into. When I was nineteen I knew the consequences of getting onto a boat laden with drugs, I knew the consequences of carrying a gun, and part of me was willing to do it anyway, or at least to consider doing it. Why? As a fictionalized John Lennon said, in a fictionalized version of his life, when asked how he’d managed to drive himself so hard, for so many years—I was just fucken desperate.

  istanbul (the happy-bus)

  It is likely you have seen the photograph of the naked man being dragged by a leash out of a cell by a girl named England—let’s call him Amir. This is the third time the lawyers have met with Amir. The first time was in Amman, Jordan, where he told about his years in Abu Ghraib. The second time was six months ago, in Istanbul, when a team of doctors examined him, to corroborate his scars. This time is for him to look through the binders of the now-infamous photographs, to identify who and what he can. A painting on the wall behind his head depicts a scene from Turkey’s past—peacocks and lions mingling together in a sultan’s garden, a dark-skinned slave tending over it all.

  Amir was a businessman awaiting a shipment of air conditioners from Iran when the CIA broke into his hotel room and arrested him. He was in his late twenties then. When we get to the photograph of him being dragged by the leash, he stops. I remember that night, he says, I remember everything. And then he tells us the story. The lawyer never takes her eyes off his face as he speaks, softly repeating, And then what happened, and then what, as he tells of his body being dragged from room to room, cell to cell.

  It is only a year since Amir was released from prison. The soldiers called the day of his release “the happy-bus day.” Tomorrow you will get to ride on the happy-bus, they told him. Today, a year later, Amir shakes his head as he looks at the photographs of himself from that time—I cannot recognize myself as that man, he says. Can you?

  two dogs

  Two dogs live inside me, a woman in Texas tells me, and the one I feed is the one that will grow. She tells me this as a way to explain why she won’t have coffee with me, ever—married, kids, happy, but sometimes her mind wanders, sometimes she thinks that another man, one that looks at her with kindness, one that seems to listen, is the answer, though she is unsure of the question. The thing is, her husband does all these things for her—he listens, he’s kind, there’s desire, everything’s fine.

  But still, still, these two hungry dogs.

  Wait—this woman didn’t say her dogs were hungry, did she? But aren’t all dogs hungry? Here Shadow, here Eros. Here Thanatos, here Light. The one she feeds is the one that will grow, but does that mean that the other one will grow smaller? Will it grow so small as to vanish? Do the dogs that live inside her come from some Alice-in-Wonderland world? Are they fighting inside her, does she love them both, does she sometimes think if one died it would be easier? But then she’ll have one dog inside her and the corpse of another dog—what good will that do, in the long run, what with all the other corpses we eventually end up dragging around inside us?

  istanbul (the word made flesh)

  There is a moment in Amir’s story, as there will be in every story, when words are not enough, a moment when the only way to tell us what happened is to show us what they did to his body. At this moment he pushes back from the table and stands—They hang me this way, he says, and raises his arms out to his side as if crucified in the air. Something about him standing, about his body suddenly rising up, completely unhinges me, something about it makes his words real in a way they hadn’t been before. At this moment I get it: these words are about his body, it was his body this story happened to, the body that is right here beside me, in this room I could barely even imagine just yesterday, his body that is now filling the air above our heads, our eyes upturned to see him. Amir stands there like that, arms outstretched—the scribe has nothing to write, the painter has nothing to paint, the interpreter has nothing to interpret, the lawyer’s eyes are fixed on his eyes, all his words have led to this moment, when his body is finally allowed to speak. The lawyer shakes her head slightly. And what happened next, she says softly, and he lowers his arms and sits.

  all living things have shoulders

  (1996) For those few years when I worked in New York City public schools as an itinerant poet—Crown Heights, Harlem, the South Bronx—I’d lug a satchel heavy with books on the train every morning. Much of what I taught was directed toward finding out what the students saw every day. It was a way to honor their lives, which isn’t generally taught in public schools. The beginning exercises were very simple: Tell me one thing you saw on the way into school this morning. Tell me one thing you saw last night when you got home. Describe something you see every day, des
cribe something you saw only once and wondered about from then on. Tell me a dream, tell me a story someone told you, tell me something you’ve never told anyone else before. No one, in school at least, had ever asked them what their lives were like, no one had asked them to tell about their days. In this sense it felt like a radical act. I tried to imagine what might happen if each of them knew how important their lives were.

  In the schools I’d visit, I’d sometimes pick up a discarded sheet of paper from the hallway floor, something a student had written in his notebook and then torn out. Sometimes, I could tell that he’d been given an assignment, and that he’d tried to fulfill it, and by tearing it out it was clear that he felt he had somehow failed. Out of all the ephemera I’ve bent down to collect from black and green elementary school linoleum floors over the years, one has stayed with me. Likely it was part of a research paper, likely for biology. It started with a general statement, which was, I imagine, meant to be followed by supporting facts. The sentence, neatly printed on the first line, was this: All living things have shoulders—after this there was nothing, not even a period, as if even as he was writing it he realized something was wrong, that he would never be able to support what he was only beginning to say, that no facts would ever justify it. All living things have shoulders—the first word is pure energy, the sweeping “All,” followed by the heartbeat of “living”—who wouldn’t be filled with hope having found this beginning? Then the drift begins, into uncertainty—“things”—a small misstep, not so grave that it couldn’t be righted, but it won’t be easy. Now something has to be said, some conclusion, I can almost hear the teacher, I can almost see what she has written on the blackboard—“Go from the general to the specific”—and what could be more general than “All living things,” and what could be more specific than “shoulders”? He reads it over once and knows it can never be reconciled, and so it is banished from his notebook. All living things have shoulders—this one line, I have carried it with me since, I have tried to write a poem from it over and over, and failed, over and over. I have now come to believe that it already is a poem.