The Ticking Is the Bomb

by Nick Flynn

  Sure, she says, looking directly at me—you can come by anytime.

  A few minutes later I overhear Yin say the word “torture.”

  I’m writing about torture, I say, jumping in, interrupting.

  Not that kind of torture, Yin says, and turns away.

  story of o

  In Story of O, the sadomasochistic French novel, the O of the title is an abbreviation of the narrator’s name (Odile), but the O has also been read to mean nothing, zero, emptiness. A cipher, a hole, a cunt. O is the first letter of the word “object,” thereby, some argue, signifying a woman objectified. I bought it twenty-five years ago, right after my mother died, and then it took twelve years to finally open it, and now it sits unopened, once again, on my desk. Shortly after I first read it, thirteen years ago now, the identity of the author was revealed, and if I remember correctly she was the lover, the mistress, of a married man, high up in the literary world. She wrote the book as a way to seduce him, to hold him, when it seemed he was going to give up on the affair, and, the story goes, it worked. In Story of O a woman obliterates herself, or allows herself to be obliterated, for the love of a man.

  Here’s something I try not to think about much:

  In the body of her suicide note, on the second or third page, my mother described herself as “a real Story of O.” This, still, is not something I have found a way to understand, not fully. My mother, as I’ve mentioned, had several boyfriends when I was growing up—I met most of them, liked many, but her sexual life, her predilections, were not on display. As far as S&M goes, there was no evidence in what I saw of her relationships, but much of the business of relationships, obviously, takes place in the shadows. I only have this one reference to a book in the last thing she would ever write—a glimmer that pulls on my (sub) consciousness still, but a glimmer of what?

  Story of O opens with O being driven by her lover to a chalet in the countryside on the outskirts of Paris, and once there she is subjected to torture and rape, to which she eventually submits. I reread the beginning of it just now, and was surprised that it wasn’t more consensual, as I’d remembered it. O, from the outset, is coerced, and yes, she submits, but under threat. The book is, as a whole, charged, erotic, and incredibly depressing. When I read it the first time, it struck me as both a parable and a critique of Catholicism. O takes certain Catholic concepts—mortification of the flesh, the crucifixion as love—to their logical conclusions. O is in love, and her lover asks her to sacrifice, until by the end of the book she is being led around a party on a leash, naked but for a feathered mask.

  Here’s something else I try not to think about much:

  While making love, sometimes, Anna wanted me to get a little rough, but I couldn’t, not really, not what she wanted, not for long. One night she put my hands to her throat, wrapped her hands over mine, squeezing my fingers tighter until it—I—made her gag. Erotic asphyxiation, California dreaming, suffocation roulette, I knew what it was, but it confused me, or maybe what I felt was closer to terror (Proteus, listen, this is what terrifies me—how did I, how will you, turn into this?). I pulled my hands away, kissed her eyes, murmured, Your body’s so precious, so precious, a contrite Gollum. We never talked about it, and now I wish we had—I wanted us to be enough, without hurting each other any more than we already were, than we soon would.

  On the last few pages of Story of O, maybe the last page, O asks her lover to kill her, or to let her kill herself—I forget if he, or she, does, or doesn’t. I seem to remember an alternative ending, but I cannot recall if both are in the text or not, nor can I remember which one I read. And I am not ready, not just yet, to open it again, not ready to enter into it again, not fully.

  I don’t know why I chose today to begin.

  I open the book. I put it down.

  proteus (dissolve)

  (2004) This is the first year everyone tells me that I look different, that I look my age. You used to be a pup, one woman says—now you’re a dog. I’ve made it past the age my mother was, the last year she reached, which was the same age my father was when he entered his first bank and robbed it. I think these things, but I don’t say them. But even thinking them suggests that I imagine life as simply a roomful of boxes—a box marked glass, a box marked papers, a year magic-markered on each. Boxes of tax receipts, boxes of old love letters, one year has to be the last year, and then the next year there will be no box, no year scrawled on the side.

  The last thing I’ll say about my mother’s suicide note (even I don’t believe this is the last thing I’ll say) is that she wrote it twice—what I mean is that she began it once and then either reconsidered or else whatever she took didn’t shut out all the lights, so two weeks later she picked up the pen again, after she’d taken some more pills and walked down to Peggotty Beach, but once there found herself unable to throw her body into the ocean. I know all this because this is what she wrote in her letter. Back home she picked up the pen again, maybe she took some more pills, because the longer she wrote the more her handwriting began to break up, as the pills began to dissolve, to seep into every pore, making her words, by the last page, hard to decipher. She stood at the edge of the ocean, then she found her way back home, she must have found her way back, because that’s where my brother found her.

  six

  the falling is the rain

  (2007) The due date is an approximation, an estimate—She can come any day now, the doctor tells us. Manifest already, her hand waving against the tight skin of Inez’s belly, but to me, somehow, it is all still deeply abstract. One day, soon (we hope), she will make her way into this world, she will open her eyes and breathe and cry, but beyond that I don’t know a thing. What I mean is, I have no idea what will happen within me at that moment. Will she suddenly become real to me? Will something heretofore unknown bloom inside my body? Right now it feels like I’m on the slow ascent of a rollercoaster, the car climbing the rickety hill, just before the fall. And so, for now, when I’m not reading transcripts from Abu Ghraib—from the soldiers who were following orders, to the man on the end of the leash, to the private contractors who wish it could all be more professional—I’m reading what I can about children. It is joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found, Winnicott reminds me.

  The week after I get back from Istanbul, I go on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and teacher. I’ve been studying with him off and on (mostly off) for eighteen years now. The plan is to sit for a week in silence, to listen as he speaks, but I end up talking more than I’d expected. My dharma discussion group’s focus is addiction, and a handful of us addicts climb a great maple tree each afternoon to talk among the branches until sunset.

  Thich Nhat Hanh says it is a mistake to say “the rain is falling,” to say “the wind is blowing.” What is rain if it is not falling? What is wind if it is not blowing? The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind.

  The next day, in the tree, I bring it up.

  He’s talking about impermanence, someone says.

  It’s the same reason we climb trees, someone else offers—to remind us that we were all once monkeys.

  lightning, pond

  (2004) When we first got together, I told Anna that I’d likely see other people, and when Inez and I first got together, I told her about Anna. I’m being upfront, I tell myself. A few months into seeing Inez, over the phone, in a lurching, imperfect attempt to maintain clarity, I tell Anna that I am on my way to the train station to pick up a friend (Inez) who’ll be staying with me for the weekend. Anna asks if she’s a lover. Yes, I tell her. Anna is silent for a long time. I ask if she’s alright, and she answers, I’m afraid I might hurt myself. I don’t think about her words much at the time, not consciously, not because I take them lightly, but because they sink in so deeply. It’s the way I walk through the world, carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame. Maybe her words did to me what they sometimes do, maybe they flipped the swi
tch inside me, the switch that starts the tape, the tape that murmurs over and over, You can save her, over and over, This time you won’t fail. Or maybe her words flipped the other switch, the one that starts the other tape, the one that murmurs, Go ahead. The one that hisses, I’m not going to miss you if you do.

  One night that August I have a dream: I’m in a crowded courtroom, on trial. Someone is being sentenced before I am to be sentenced—I can’t remember if his sentence was light or if it was death. Next it is my turn. The judge asks if I should be under house arrest, or if I should go to prison for two days. I say that I should go to prison, and the courtroom erupts into sustained applause—I have said the right thing, everyone knows that I deserve to go to jail. A friend is being sentenced after me, and he chooses to go to prison as well, because I have. The dream ends with me fearing I have made a mistake, fearing the violence that awaits us.

  As summer slips into fall I spend a week in Provincetown. As the ocean gets too cold, I drive myself to the pond every day. One day, undressing at the shore, the sky dark and getting darker, I hear a distant rumble. I step into the water, and it gets louder. I was hoping for the calm a swim usually brings, hoping to quiet the noise in my head, but instead I find myself imagining the storm, imagining lightning, imagining a bolt striking the water. I imagine racing it to the other side, and what will happen if I don’t make it. I wonder how close it will have to strike for me to feel it, but I know that if it strikes the pond anywhere it will find me. Imagining lightning striking a pond as you swim across it is not like buying a gun, or even imagining buying a gun, but how does one measure how far it is from buying a gun? I swam all the way to the other side.

  I show up at Anna’s door a few more times that fall, even after my lurching attempt at honesty. Why are you here? she’d ask, and then she’d take my body into her hands. Much of what transpired in the following year took place in different cities, the two of us alone in this apartment or that, alone in strangely familiar hotel rooms, together or if not then talking on the phone after midnight. If the tape was still running in my head, I could no longer hear it. Whatever you want me to do I will do.

  the invisible city

  The first book I called mine, the first book I remember, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey—an old Chinese legend adapted by a thirteen-year-old prodigy, Plato Chan, and his sister, Christina. The monkey in the story, as I remember it, was a misfit—lost, wandering, aimless, trying to find his way home. He finagles his way into a walled school and there finds that he has magical powers, powers of transformation—he can change into a tree, a bird, a waterfall—but each thing he transforms into has a price, a complication. The tree becomes rooted, the waterfall slips away, the bird must constantly fly. I’m making this all up now from memory. I have the book on my bookshelf but I’m afraid to open it, in case I find out that the power it held over me proves to be thin, silly, superficial.

  (2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements—abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out. I’d walk along them, naming each building (tower of man-pretending-not-to-be-homeless), each neighborhood (the heights, the lowlands, the valley of lost names), each passageway (path of those-claiming-happy-childhoods). In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.

  One morning, shortly after landing in Rome, I woke up ill—it felt like the flu. I needed to go out for juice and Tylenol, then I needed to get back into bed. I shuffled through the streets of the paper city, stepped out into the actual hallway, the door clicked shut behind me—at the sound of the click I knew I’d left my key inside. I had my cellphone, but it was still early, and the landlord, who’d become a friend, would not be awake for hours. I got some juice at the café, left some messages, and ended up sleeping on a bench in Piazza Vittorio. The city I’d been building, the book about my homeless father, was locked in the apartment I’d lost the key to. I woke to a group of schoolchildren marching past me. One asks his teacher, Perche quell’uomo dorme fuori?

  unknown, known

  (2005) When I bought the house upstate, a friend said it would change my life. You will own a piece of the earth, he said. You will feel rooted. But it didn’t work out that way, not for me. Yes, I could appreciate the way the clematis strangled the maple, the way the doorknobs were all mismatched, but my natural-born restlessness only seemed to grow the more days I spent there. Rooted? I ended up staying in the house only to work on it, and then I’d leave. The idea that I owned a piece of the earth meant nothing. I knew that if one day I walked out the door and never came back I’d barely even remember it. I moved around more those first two years of owning a house than I ever had—I was vapor, I was air, I was nowhere.

  Inez slept over one night, one of the few nights I slept in the house, and in the morning she drove to the local convenience store to get some cream for her coffee. Before she left she stood in the dining room, asked if I needed anything, said she’d be back in a minute. When I looked up a minute later she was still standing there, only it wasn’t her—it was Anna. At dawn she’d driven up from Brooklyn, and let herself in when she saw Inez go out.

  Tears in our eyes, she asked if I was in love with her.

  I’m in love with both of you, I told her.

  One day you will need to come up with a story about an old lover, as a way to understand, to explain, why it didn’t work out. The one you woke up beside, dreaming of someone else. The one who wouldn’t take you in her mouth. The one who wanted you to promise to meet her in eternity. The one who was angry with you every other day. The one destroying herself slowly. The one with two other boyfriends. The one who left a Polaroid of another man on the bedside table for you to find, standing there naked, his erection in his hand. And then there will be the more bewildering stories, the stories of lovers that should have worked out but didn’t: The one you swore you’d swim to the bottom of the ocean to find and kiss back to life. The one who still fills every cell when you hear Macy Gray sing “I Try.” The one you felt known with, finally known.

  Whatever else I might say about my time with Anna, when I was with her I felt known, perhaps for the first time. Known? What that meant to me, if I had to define it, was that when we were together it seemed I could drag some part of my shadow into the light, especially the part that was uncertain about the next breath. Those rooms we shared became a space in which to reveal a darkness I carried inside me, a heaviness that needed to be dragged into the light, or it would sink me. Trouble was—maybe—that we shared the same dark impulses (here eros, here thanatos). In the end, maybe, our knowing lacked perspective, so, in the end we risked merely sinking each other. God’s loneliness and desire to be known set creation going. Known—it was only later I realized it was the same word my father had used in his first letter to me, the same word my mother had used in her last letter to anyone. Everyone knows each other so much longer—these were her last words, the last words her hands would touch, the last few stones dropped into her deep, deep well. The violence of God’s sense of isolation sent the heavens into a spasm of procreating words that then became matter. Then she put down her pen, then she picked up her gun—here, bullet—words that then became matter, the violence of God’s sense of isolation.

  seven

  lava

  A friend tells this, perhaps apocryphal, story: while living in Hawaii, a volcano erupted, and after the initial blast, which
destroyed the top of the mountain and everything else in the vicinity, the lava continued to ooze slowly out, over the next several months, so slowly that you could walk up to the wall of it, put your hand on it, feel its warmth. How high was it? Twenty feet, I imagine, more or less. So high you’d have to tilt your head back to see the sky. The town my friend was staying in was downhill, spared the initial blast, but the lava kept coming. Then the scientists came, to calculate its movement, to predict how long it would take to reach the village, to mark which house would be the first to be swallowed beneath the slow-motion wave. Some argued that it was better than a flood, better than a fire—lava gives you time to move out what you most value, time to move everything, if you are able. If you are able you could move the entire house, but I had the idea that the island was small, the village against the sea, the only option would be to uproot your house and put it on a raft and float it to the next island. I had the idea that most simply went each day to the wall of lava, put their hands to it, hoped it would slow down, hoped it would run out of juice, hoped it would simply stop.

  sheepfucker

  (2003) The outcome of the current crisis is already determined—our president assures us of this, a few months before we invade Iraq. His certainty, it seems, is one of the traits his admirers are drawn to. Through the first few months of the war this phrase becomes my (cynical) mantra—the outcome of the current crisis is already determined—I hate carrying it around, muttering it to myself. I hate my self-satisfaction when each act of violence and chaos in Baghdad seems to prove the president and his certainty wrong. Until I begin to wonder if, just maybe, violence and chaos are precisely the outcome he intended.