The Ticking Is the Bomb
Page 8
(2005) Sam Harris and I have an email correspondence for a year or so after the photograph was taken of us shaking hands and smiling, after I’d read his book which advocates the use of torture. At one point I ask if he knows the sheepfucker joke:
A man, walking with a stranger through his village, points to the church—See that church, he says, I built those walls with my own hands, dug the stones from my own fields. The stranger looks up at the church, admires the craftsmanship. But do you think anyone calls me William the Church Builder? They walk a little farther, stop before the school. William points to it—I raised the funds to have a new roof put on that school, he tells the stranger, worked for weeks without pay, but do you think anyone calls me William the Savior of our School? William shakes his head. But you fuck one sheep…
I point out to Harris that there is much to admire in The End of Faith, but, like the poor sheepfucker, when he advocates one little torture…Harris’s certainty about the efficacy of torture to gather actionable intelligence surprises me, as it seems based on a blind faith, and his book is, ostensibly, against faith. The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty:
To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one’s own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.
The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.
the ticking is the bomb
Let’s say you’re a soldier in Iraq, assigned to a military prison. You are now Military Police, an MP, though you have not been trained for this. You’ve been told to soften up the prisoners before you, to get them ready to be interrogated the next day. Military Intelligence tells you this, though sometimes you are told it by CIA spooks, and sometimes by civilian contractors, whose names you don’t know and who answer to no one. Give them a bad night, you’ve been told, so you give them a bad night—you strip them naked, you throw cold water on them, you do not let them sleep. The rules have changed, you’ve been told, the gloves have come off. One guy, whenever you knee him in the thigh, he cries Allah—it becomes a game to see how many times you can make him cry Allah.
Or let’s say you’ve been trained as an interrogator. You’ve been told that one of the thousands before you has the answer that will save an American city from an attack. It might be the city your wife and child live in, you don’t know, you will never know. You walk into a room, a man is hanging from the ceiling by his wrists, his arms pulled behind his back, a sack over his head. You’ve been told that the bomb is ticking, and in this room you swear you can almost hear it. You remove the sack, you take hold of this man’s neck, you look into his eyes.
In order to continue to hold on, through your doubts and fears, you need to be certain of the outcome. You must push aside any bewilderment you have, ignore any questions besides the one question. The outcome of the current crisis is already determined—this is the kind of certainty you need to continue to hold on to the prisoner before you.
Imagine this:
You don’t even have a child, not yet, but as a “thought experiment” you are asked what you will do when she is kidnapped, specifically what you will do with her kidnapper, who you have somehow captured, who now sits before you, in a windowless room, tied to a chair, refusing to tell you where she is hidden, refusing to answer your question. The clock is ticking, they say—tick tick tick—can you hear it?
The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind.
So here I am—the maniac tied to the chair before me, let’s call him Proteus. I’ve been told that a bomb is about to go off, potentially killing hundreds, or even thousands, of innocent people. As I hold on, as I ask him my question, as I listen for his answer, he transforms—into a dog on a leash, into a man dancing with panties on his head, into a bruise, into a madman, into a waterfall, into a cockroach in a bowl of rice. Into a man strapped into a chair, into thirty men strapped into thirty chairs, refusing to eat, thirty tubes forced down their noses.
So here I am, my fingers tight around Proteus’s neck, asking my same question, over and over, as if the answer exists, inside the maniac, inside the prisoner, inside the beloved, inside my mother, inside my father, inside me, as if the answer is there and just needs to be released.
And here I am, holding my own head, dunking it into a bathtub full of water, repeating my meaningless question over and over, knowing that I will never get the question right.
And here I am, holding my breath, and then letting it go.
the fallen tower
(2006) In Assisi, in the lower basilica, is a series of Giotto frescoes—one depicts a fallen tower. Above this fallen tower another fresco depicts the Slaughter of the Innocents, and beside this a man speaks to a skeleton, and the skeleton appears to listen. In another panel a man dives headfirst from another tower—or perhaps it’s the same tower that eventually falls—and no one seems to notice but one man, in the foreground, who raises a hand to catch him, though they are far apart.
The fallen tower is five stories tall, but now only one side remains standing. What we see is the ruined side—it looks like a bomb smashed into it, but in Giotto’s time there were no bombs, were there? What could have brought it down? An earthquake? A catapult? The idea of a bomb? A third of the roof is intact, covering a third of the broken floor below it. On either side the bricks crumble, the wooden joists are cracked, the landscape strewn with a muddle of debris. A child is being carried from the wreckage. Sixteen mourners stand in the foreground, rubble at their feet. The first, on the left, closest to the ruin, looks on, his hands stroking his chin, as if he is trying to understand something important. A few look to the ground, as if the answer is there. Only one looks away. Most are focused on the child’s body—ashen with dust or death—on its back, held waist-high, the are flung or merely hanging to the side. This is how one carries a sleeping child, I think. A woman kisses his face, another woman bends toward him, her hands clasped in prayer, while another woman keens, her face turned toward the sky. Two men on either side hold her hair away from her eyes. These three women touch their own faces, as if to feel the breath coming out of their mouths.
I am in Assisi to teach a poetry workshop, though to call what I do “teaching” always seems somewhat inaccurate. It feels more like simply standing at the bow of a ship as it makes its way through the fog. Our group meets in the morning, and every afternoon I take the bus up the mountain to an outdoor public pool, to swim for an hour surrounded by young Italians and cypress trees. At night I wander the medieval city, past groups of pilgrims holding hands and singing “kumbaya.” One night in the lobby of the hotel we all watch The Battle of Algiers, the 1966 film about the disaster of the French occupation of Algeria. I’d never seen it, though it’s been in the news lately—the Pentagon recently screened it to its generals in order to understand why things were going so wrong in Iraq.
At the pool one afternoon I see a boy wearing an orange shirt, these words stenciled on the back:
GUANTANAMO
CAMP X-RAY
A CELL IN HELL
527–0985-339
Had torture really transformed, so quickly—and while hundreds were still locked up, indefinitely—into the stuff of knockoff fashion?
the battle of algiers
The Battle of Algiers begins with a man in a room surrounded by soldiers. The man is in a chair, his back is to the camera. A man in a suit enters the room. We got him talking, one soldier tells the man in the suit. In the next scene a man in a white djel-laba sits on a curb in a whitewashed city, his cart parked on the street beside him. An engine is strapped to the cart, the cart is on wheels. It is the size of a cart a hot dog vendor would push through the streets of New York, but this is not New York. We don’t know what kind of machine this is,
its purpose—maybe to heat tar, maybe to collect trash. All that is clear is that the man is weary, that he has pushed his cart to this spot, that he is resting.
After a few peaceful moments in the shade a white man in a white suit appears on a balcony above him, coming out into the sun tentatively, as if he has been hiding in the shadows, his eyes adjusting. He looks into the sky, as if to see if something is falling. He then looks down at the street, sees the Arab, points—There. Someone else emerges from the shadows, looks down, points. More come out onto their balconies, someone yells for the police to arrest him. The Arab is unaware for a while that he is the one they are yelling about—he doesn’t understand their words. Then he hears sirens. He looks up, sees it is him they are pointing at. He then stands and walks quickly away, leaving his machine. A police car appears at the end of the street, blocking his way. The Arab turns, another police car appears beside him, he cannot walk further. In the next scene, in the interrogation room, we see his name written on a form, we see his address, we hear him say that he has a wife and three children.
That night one of the interrogators is at a lavish outdoor party. When he leaves he is driven through the shuttered city, the car moving freely through the curfew-quiet streets. The car pulls up to a building, we see it is the same street number the Arab gave them. The interrogator takes a box from the trunk, carries it into the courtyard, leaves it at a door. The box has a fuse, he lights it and walks back to the car and gets in and as he drives away the bomb explodes and the building falls.
For an hour or so after this explosion the film reenacts the ensuing chaos, a predictable cycle of retaliation and repression, until a general faces a group of reporters. So let’s talk about torture, he says. What if the prisoner remains silent for twenty-four hours. Legality can be inconvenient. We’re neither madmen nor sadists. We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. If France is to stay in Algeria—if you say yes, then you must accept the consequences. The consequences, as we know, is that France could not win, even though they tortured thousands of Algerians, or perhaps precisely because they did.
The morning after watching The Battle of Algiers, I’m in my room, preparing for our workshop. Assisi is a hill town, the Umbrian valley spread out below. The television is tuned to CNN, and live from Lebanon I see the same scene I’d just seen the night before—a building reduced to rubble, a child carried from the wreckage, a woman crying. My friend Tarek was emailing me from Beirut with updates, and to let me know that he was okay. Later that day I went to the Basilica, and saw Giotto’s fallen tower, and stood before it for a long time.
istanbul redux
(2007) First the businessman, then the taxi driver, then the cleric (the translator calls him a “preacher”), then the ex-soldier, then the dentist—could they be any more ordinary? We collect their testimonies, the week goes on and on. Now it’s a thirty-year-old student, telling of being picked up in a sweep, part of the recent “surge.” U.S. soldiers kicked their way into his apartment in the middle of the night, while he slept with his pregnant wife. The soldiers pulled the both of them from bed, shone a light in their faces, asked him a question about a neighbor, a neighbor he didn’t know, a question he could not answer. They threatened to take his wife into the next room, alone—You know what that will mean, they told him, but still he had no answer. He was then beaten and shackled and hooded and dragged from the house, thrown into a humvee, driven to a landing strip, thrown into a helicopter, until he eventually arrived at a building he now believes is near the airport, either in Mosul or Baghdad. Once inside this building, he found himself in a large room, maybe the size of a gymnasium, filled with black boxes lined up in rows. Maybe a hundred boxes, maybe two hundred, hard for him to say—he was hooded nearly constantly and quickly lost track of night and day. The boxes are about two and a half feet wide, five feet long. He was thrown into one of these boxes, for days, which turn into weeks, unable to straighten his body, barely able to breathe. Every twenty or thirty minutes a soldier kicked the box, or hit it hard with a club, and it made his shackled body jump. Around him he could hear the screams and pleadings of his fellow prisoners—those with stomach pains, those with infections, those slowly going mad. Three years since the release of the photographs, and you can be assured that there will be no photographs of these boxes slipping out. What was once the vaguely directed actions of a bunch of amateurs on the night shift (if, in fact, that is what it was) has become professional, organized, sanctioned. Someone designed this room, someone fabricated these boxes, a memo went out telling the soldiers how often to bang on the side of the boxes, a memo we will likely never see. Among themselves the Iraqis call these boxes tawabeet sood, or nash sood—black coffins—I can’t help thinking of them as the shadows of the flag-draped coffins we were also not allowed—or couldn’t—or refused—to see.
eight
the broken bowl
In The Child’s Conception of Time, Piaget claims that at some point in his or her development a child cannot tell which comes first—the photograph of a cup on a table, or the photograph of the same cup broken on the floor. Until the age of four it is just as likely the broken cup comes before the whole cup, that the floor is just another table, that milk can be poured into the broken cup, that the broken cup can be put back on the table and it will be whole again. I tell myself to try to remember this, for the day my as-yet-unborn daughter pours her milk into her broken bowl.
ravaged
On the first page of Duras’s The Lover, a woman runs into a man on a Paris street, an ex-lover, someone she hasn’t seen for years. Everyone says how beautiful you were then, he tells her, but I prefer your face as it is now—ravaged. I was twenty-two when I read it, and it made me want an ex-lover to find me when I was old, to tell me that she preferred me as I was, standing before her, ravaged.
I found Duras’s The Sea Wall in a used bookstore a few years later, when I was living in Paris. As I remember it, a girl is living with her mother in a rundown estate in Indochina, the girl much like the girl in The Lover, who I took to be a version of Duras herself. The father is gone, missing, the money running out. And the sea, the China Sea, for some reason the sea is rising. Monsoons, maybe—yes, it’s monsoon season, every year the sea rises, which is why a wall is needed. Only the wall is in disrepair and the father is missing and there isn’t enough money to repair it. That’s how I remember the story, though it could be all wrong. Let’s just say it’s how I want, or need, to remember it.
paradise lost
(2007) Our thoughts create reality—I pass this koan spray-painted on a Brooklyn sidewalk on the way to a friend’s apartment. Later, in her studio, I saw a print of Saint Michael and the Dragon, painted by Crivelli in the fifteenth century. In Christian and pre-Christian iconography many saints are depicted slaying dragons, you’ve likely seen versions of this—a young man on horseback, or sometimes on foot, a dragon beneath his boot, his lance just piercing the dragon’s flesh, or its point pushing into the beast’s open mouth. In Paradise Lost, Milton wrote about Michael, the archangel who does battle with Satan in the Garden of Eden, just before he escorts Adam and Eve out. For years now, for some unknown reason, this dragon has found me, or maybe I’m simply drawn to him. One reason, perhaps, is that this dragon, this Satan, though subdued, is always still alive. He comes from that edge of perception where our shadow selves are almost tangible—we can never really kill this dragon, this shadow, because with it we will kill a part of ourselves. The trick is how to live with it without it consuming us, without allowing it to rise up so much that it takes charge. Underfoot, subdued, it keeps us in balance, it reminds us of the darkness we come from, of the darkness we are made of—if we don’t acknowledge it, if we don’t find a way to integrate it into our days, this darkness can manifest itself inside us as fear, then our fear can transform into rage, and we can find ourselves lashing out at shadows. Crivelli’s Michael is reaching behind his back for his sword, and Satan’s clawed hands are reaching up Michael’s legs,
almost caressing him. Michael and this devil stare into each other’s eyes, as if they are each looking into a mirror, one illuminated, one in shadow.
mexico (the war)
I have a packet of photographs from when my grandparents were first married, before they had children, or maybe they’d simply left the kids at home. The photographs are of a roadtrip to Mexico, clearly from a time before everything fell apart. In each of the photographs they are smiling—maybe it was after my grandfather got back from the war, or else it was just before he shipped out. It could have been in the thirties. They had money during the Depression, they could have afforded a roadtrip. These few photographs reveal more about their early life together than anything either one of them ever told me. In one blurry photograph my grandfather is flat on his back on a hotel bed, a bottle of what I imagine to be tequila rising straight up from his mouth to the ceiling, as if a flower is growing from his face, as if he is going to finally fill himself completely. I imagine my grandmother took this photograph, and I imagine her laughing gleefully as she did, having just taken a pull herself.
(2006) At one point, in the process of saying goodbye, or attempting to, once again, Anna and I spent a day together in my house in upstate New York. She saw a copy of Duras’s memoir The War on my shelf. I’d only glanced through it. It deals with torture, Anna said. At one point Duras, a member of the Resistance, is in the room with a collaborator, a Frenchman accused of feeding secrets to the Nazis. As Duras tells it, she tortures this man—whether to get information or revenge or just because she can, I’m unsure. Granted, this was before the Geneva Conventions banned all torture, but where do I put it? Duras, a writer who saw me through my difficult early twenties, now reveals herself, without apology, as a torturer.