by Nick Flynn
I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last time Anna and I would ever speak. Maybe Anna knew, because she chose that moment to confess something—I think I’m a drunk, she said. Over the past two years, she told me, after we’d part, when we didn’t know when we’d see each other again, she’d sometimes drink herself into oblivion. At night, after we hung up the phone, when we couldn’t be together, not fully, or after I left, she’d take a few shots, wander down to some desolate patch of train tracks. Pain devil, she’d mutter, leave me in peace.
It may be hard to understand, but that Anna was drinking, that she ever drank, was not something I knew, not consciously. In my presence she’d never so much as take a sip, though I wouldn’t have cared if she did. My family had all, to varying degrees, drowned themselves in alcohol—father, mother, grandmother, grandfather—I carry the weight of what alcohol has done to my family (or, more accurately, what my family has done to themselves with alcohol)—some days lightly, some days less so—but I have nothing against drinkers. Anna knew this, which is why her words were a revelation, a light turned on in a dark room. If it was true, if she was a drunk, if she drank alone, in secret, then it might go toward explaining the inexplicable distance I’d always felt, the unnamed shadow, hovering between us. Her confession was a light turned on in outerspace, and even then, as we tried to say goodbye, again, as our bodies floated over each other like doomed astronauts, those few words—I think I’m a drunk—connected us like tubes of oxygen.
dear reader (oblivion)
I bought my ticket, I got on this train, it seemed like I had some place to be. The train, at some point, went into a tunnel, one by one each car entered the hole dynamited clean through the mountain. It sounded like someone shuffling a deck of cards, it sounded like when the projectionist falls asleep before reel one ends, the acetate slapping the lens. As the train entered the mountain some part of me knew it would emerge again, in a few seconds or a few minutes, but once inside that tunnel I no longer cared if I ever came out the other side. In that darkness I felt held, I didn’t want it to end. If the train broke down, if it stranded me in the darkness, I’d be blameless, like when I was a child, coming home from the drive-in, my mother steering us through the night, with me curled up in the backseat, lost in my kingdom of sleep. I could have stayed like that forever—my mother at the wheel, the radio softly playing, Laura Nyro or the Standells or Bobby Bland. I can open my eyes, even now, and she will be there, we will still be together, passing through dark streets—shadows of trees, shadows of telephone lines, breaking up the sky above us. When we pull into our driveway she will carry me inside, put me into bed, either hers or my own. I can’t argue, maybe it’s true, maybe I spent too many nights in her bed, trying to hold her to this earth, to quiet that voice inside her, calling her back from the darkness. Sometimes she’d go toward it, sometimes she’d get into her car after midnight, I’d hear it start up, I’d hear her pulling out, and later I’d hear her pulling back in, the gravel under her wheels.
I don’t know how it is for you, but sometimes still I walk through my days, fighting the urge. Sometimes still I go on a little run, after so many years of being clean. I take a hit, I make a call. I knock on a door, someone answers, seemingly happy to see me. I say Yes and yes and yes. I say, Why not? I say, Stay, the bed is huge, we can share it. I take a hit, make a call, a month goes by, I take another, then maybe I take a hit every night for a month—nothing much, a fistful of marijuana, and then I don’t pick up for a year. Then I call you from the bathtub, we make a plan. Then I hang up and call someone else.
What I’m trying to say is that one December day I reached the age my mother had been when she passed into nonbeing (goodnight nobody, goodnight mush), when she finally stepped through the door she’d had her hand on all those years. I don’t know, maybe some part of me decided I should try to find her—she couldn’t have simply vanished. And so, after years without drugs, I took a hit. Then I took another. I was alone in Sleepy Hollow, it was always after midnight, maybe some part of me believed it was the only way I could find my way back to her, but I didn’t know it at the time—it’s not something I could have ar-tic-u-la-ted. Others speak of the fireworks that come, once they fall off the wagon—the police at the door, the four-point restraint—but I use the same way my mother did. For both of us there were no fireworks. A glass of wine, a tiny pill, the flame to the pipe, whatever we did, however we did it, it merely eased us into the night, into our private oblivion, our quiet desperation. We both always had jobs to go to the next day, we both felt bad at the idea of just not showing up. We always showed up, until one day she just didn’t.
Maybe what I’m trying to say is that Anna’s words—I think I’m a drunk—made me realize that I hadn’t been so clean myself. Before that moment, if anyone asked, I’d say that I hadn’t had a drink in years, which was true, but I’d add that I sometimes took a hit of pot. I wasn’t pretending to be sober, not exactly, but I wasn’t saying I was out again either—I was min-i-mizing it. Then, after two years of getting high again, off and on, the voice inside began to murmur, softly at first, almost like an echo off a distant cliff, that everything would be better if I were dead. The suffering, my own and the suffering I was causing, would end. Step by step, inch by inch, hit by hit, lie by lie, slowly I turned. I brought myself to her door (my mother’s? Anna’s?), I put my hand upon it, a voice just on the other side, all I had to do was push it open, step through. I knew I would meet her there. I knew we could stay like that forever.
A few minutes or a few months after my mother died, my Paradise Lost professor ran into me one afternoon, putting gas into my motorcycle. I might have been on my way out of town, it might have been the last day I set foot on that campus. Ah, it’s nice to see you up on your steed again, she said. I smiled. I liked her, I was sorry I’d stopped showing up for her class. I’m doing a lot better, I said. I looked at my motorcycle—Lost, I thought, that’s the name of my fucken steed. I was fueling up, I was on my way, I would spend the next few lifetimes seeking it out. It isn’t hard to get there—one left turn, down the end of the alley, down the cellar steps, knock on a door after midnight, your then-lover already in bed, waiting. The dragon is not dead, merely subdued beneath the hoof, beneath the tip of the lance. Two dogs live inside us. Say yes and yes and yes.
roulette
My grandmother does have one story she tells about her roadtrip to Mexico, though she never mentions my grandfather when she tells it. She was walking down a village street, the village in the shadow of a volcano, and a boy came running up to her, a ball of hot lava in his hands. The boy shaped the lava into a monkey right there in front of her, then held it out to her. It sits now on a shelf in her kitchen, this small lava monkey, it’s been there forever. She takes it down and works it with her hands whenever she tells this story, as if it were still warm, as if she could still transform it.
(2005) That spark I’d felt with Inez, our first night together, the glimmer that we could have a child together, was still flickering, but it was having a hard time finding purchase inside me. It felt unfamiliar, scattershot, it would flare up, at times, depending upon who I was with. Anna. Inez. At some point, after a year of being paralyzed, of being unable to choose, in what I now see as a sort of bottom, a sort of madness, I decided that whichever one got pregnant first would be the one I’d end up with—roll the dice. I would like to say that as soon as I heard this voice in my head I knew it was wrong, that I knew it was a very bad idea, that I saw how deeply I was lost, but that would not be true. This bad idea rumbled around inside me for months, it would flare up at times, seem perfectly reasonable, and then fade, but only for a while. Finally, dimly (starkly?) aware of how unquiet my mind had become, and starkly (dimly?) aware of how those around me were suffering, I committed to meditating every day for half an hour. I did this every day for almost two years, and once my mind had cleared, Anna and I were no longer in touch. In some ways, it seemed, Anna had only ever known
my shadow, because that’s all I’d been able to offer her.
nine
three dreams (before the baby comes)
1.
I’m in a beach house, kissing a blond woman I don’t know very well. I get up from the bed and begin running swiftly down the beach, toward another woman. Three dogs begin to chase me, and they catch up, and one bites onto one hand, one onto the other, and one bites my ass. I keep running, trying to shake them off, but it hurts. The dogs’ owner, a third woman, comes over and tells me not to worry, that they won’t hurt me. I look at my hands and see that the dogs’ teeth haven’t broken the skin. This woman leads me up a path and we talk, but I can’t remember about what. I end up in a bar, and the woman I was making out with is now bartending—in the harsh light I can see that her face is very pockmarked.
2.
I am looking for Anna, who lives on a boat in a protected harbor. I stow away aboard a schooner, and we sail around for a while. The others on the boat ignore me, speak as if I am not there. When we sail near to Anna’s boat I jump onto it, then wander from cabin to cabin, but no one is inside. The trashbarrel under her galley sink is full, so I take out the bag and tie it up. In the bottom of the barrel is a black notebook, which has the words “Black Betty” in gold scroll on the cover. I hope to find some words inside, but inside all the pages are black. This disappoints me, but then I notice that each page is made of very fine silk. It feels incredible to touch them.
3.
Inez and I are trapped in a fascist country, and something bad is about to happen—arrest? I pay a man fifty dollars to get us out, across the border, but instead he takes us to a warehouse, and we end up in a room with a torturer, who takes Inez into the next room and begins raping her. I can see them from where I am, but I can’t get to them—the man who brought us there blocks my way. This man, it becomes clear, is going to rape me as well. I get my hands on a gun, kill the first man, then I go into the next room and begin to torture the torturer—I shoot him in the knee, I shoot off his hand. Then I bring his son into the room and shoot him in the leg as well. I have become a monster.
too loud a solitude
(2006) June. Back north from Texas for the summer, I spend two days in Boston, cleaning out my father’s studio apartment while Inez distracts him, playing Fay Wray to his King Kong. He has been in this apartment for the past sixteen years, since he got off the streets. Inez takes him to lunch, walks him around the block, listens to the same stories I’ve heard a hundred times before, all to keep him occupied while I drag trashbag after trashbag of his clutter down to the basement. I never wanted any of my friends to meet him, but a year ago I ran out of options. Verging on eviction, once again, and even Eileen, his saintly caseworker, says he’ll be shit out of luck if he loses this place—Nowhere will take in someone who drinks like he does. If he loses this apartment he will be back out on the streets. I’m Irish and Russian, he reminds us, I’d be insane not to drink.
It’s been a long year with my father. The landlord has been calling me, warning that his apartment has become a fire hazard, and I can’t argue with this. My father, besides being an alcoholic, is also a hoarder—a not uncommon tick for the formerly homeless. But after sixteen years it has become nearly impossible to even open his door—every inch of floor space is stacked with newspapers, some of the stacks over six teetering feet high, leaving only narrow passageways from his bed to his bathroom, from his bed to his kitchen sink, which lately is overflowing with black, fetid water. Something has to be done, the landlord, a decent enough woman, warns me.
So here we are. I ring his bell (the bell with my last name still taped to it), he buzzes us in. I introduce Inez to him again, as his memory of her has been erased since our last visit, a couple months earlier. Inez? he asks. A pleasure to meet you. The plan is to invite him out to lunch, but on the way there I’ll tell him that I’ve suddenly remembered something I have to do, suggest they go on ahead, that I’ll meet up with them later. Then I’ll let myself back into his apartment, a box of heavy-duty trashbags in my backpack. At the mention of lunch he perks up and puts on his jacket.
His collection of newspapers dates back to the first Bush presidency—his “research materials.” Perhaps they once were, but I know he hasn’t written a word in years. Ten years ago, maybe, we could have moved it all into storage, into a “unit,” and he could have sold his blood to pay the rent on it, if it came to that. But he no longer has that option—at this point no one wants his blood, and, besides, he has refused to let go of a single yellowed headline. This is my property, he hisses. If he gets himself evicted he’s too old, too frail, to survive another winter outside. I’ve gotten too old to survive it either, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’ll make it through the night, looking up at the sky, wondering if it might snow. I’d hoped, for some unfathomable reason, that I could reason with him, that I could get him to take the looming eviction seriously, but it wasn’t so. He threatened to kill himself, he threatened to kill the landlord, he threatened to kill me. After months of trying to reason with him, after the eviction notice had been filed, I spent two days with him, going through one small pile of newspaper, sheet by sheet, and we ended up getting rid of one small bag. It would take thirty years, at that rate, and we only had thirty days. And so I was forced to ask for help. And so here I am, sneaking back in while Inez distracts him.
Since January, I’ve hauled out sixty contractor bags. Yesterday I also dragged out a wing chair, the seat of which had collapsed under sixteen years of newspaper. I also cleaned out his kitchen sink, the toxic spore breeding ground—I’ve been soaking my infected finger in saline solution since.
In the months since January, I’ve called a lawyer, the mayor’s office, his caseworker, anyone who might be able to help. A doctor I knew from my days of working with the homeless—Jim—came to my father’s apartment, took his vitals. Jim arranged for my father to have a full checkup, so I brought him into the hospital a few weeks later. It turned out he was in better shape than I was—low blood pressure, low cholesterol, perfect liver function. How could this be?
Nothing I do, in the end, will keep my father inside. By stuffing the contractor bags without his consent, I settled the fire hazard issue, but in a few months he will wander into his landlord’s office, threaten to murder everyone, including a seven-year-old black boy sitting in the waiting room with his mother. The landlord will call the police, and when she does, my father will threaten to cut his own throat, which the landlord knows by now is an idle threat, but the police overhear him, and they have to take such a threat seriously, and they do. They come, put him in restraints, and have him committed to a psych hospital for an evaluation.
When I finally broke down, when I finally asked for help, it was there—Inez, Jim, Eileen—it was as if everyone had been there all along, waiting for me to ask. If I’d been able to ask Anna for help I know she would have come, but I didn’t ask her.
lexington, kentucky
When I’d see my father, those last few months, desperate to keep him from homelessness, again, I was unsure if he knew who I was. From moment to moment, it seemed, I’d fade in and out of focus. When I’d try to explain the urgency of his immanent eviction he’d interrupt me—Dryballs, he’d yell, Will you let me speak! “Dryballs”—this was new, this was a twist. It had its desired effect, at least the first dozen times he used it, in that I’d stand before him, completely unnerved—I didn’t, after all, have a child at this point. Will you let me speak! And then he’d launch into one of the handful of stories that I’ve heard a hundred times before, sometimes the one about his time in federal prison:
They left me alone in a dark room for days on end, shackled to the floor, and when they moved me, which they did constantly, and for no reason, they shackled me even more—penis included.
I didn’t want to imagine how one shackles a penis, let alone my father’s, which I didn’t want to imagine at all.
Over the year of trying to keep my fath
er inside, after I’d ransack his apartment for a couple hours, I’d meet him and Inez in the park or at a restaurant. Then we’d walk him back to his apartment, see if he’d notice what was no longer there. He’d look around his room furiously for a moment or two, and then let it go, as if some part of him knew we were just trying to help. As we’d prepare to leave, my father would turn to Inez—who he took to calling “Buttercup”—gesture toward her. Are you leaving the woman? he’d ask hopefully. Are you leaving Buttercup with me?
(2006) A historian is on the radio, talking about the history of the CIA’s fifty-year involvement in developing the torture techniques we saw enacted in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The most effective technique, they found, was to combine sensory deprivation with self-inflicted pain (the so-called light methods)—think of the now-iconic photograph of the man on the box, hooded, his arms outstretched. This technique is not new, and it certainly wasn’t invented by a few rogue nitwits on the night shift. It’s a highly sophisticated stress position, developed, with the aid of the CIA, during Brazil’s dirty war, and is known, among the professionals, as “The Vietnam.” These days, when Iraqis pass around the photograph of the man on the box, they simply refer to it as “the Statue of Liberty.”