by Nick Flynn
At one point in the interview McCoy mentions the medical wings of federal prisons as the sites of early experimentation. Apparently the CIA used federal prisoners to test the limits of what the body, the psyche, could withstand. Two of the main sites of these clandestine and illegal experiments were the prisons in Lexington, Kentucky, and Marion, Illinois, both of which my father passed through during his stint behind bars.
I’ll be damned.
Still, no Ishmael has come forward (not yet) to say, Yes, I was there, I was with him, what your father says is true. I have not found that person, if he even exists, who was strapped into the bed next to my father in the medical wing of Marion Federal Prison. I have not found anyone who can say that they heard my father scream, or saw him chained. I have not found a document with his name on it, numbers written into the margins—how long he was kept awake, how long he was made to kneel, how cold the cell was at night. All I have is a paranoid old man, who somehow tells the same stories I now hear on the radio.
the gulag archipelago
For years my father (the self-proclaimed greatest-writer-America-has-yet-produced) has compared himself to Solzhenitsyn, first in the letters he sent me from prison, and now face-to-face—Solzhenitsyn will be green with envy when he reads this shit, my father says, thumbing his unpublished manuscript.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested in the Soviet Union in 1945 for writing a derogatory comment in a letter to a friend. Accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58, he was sentenced to eight years in the gulag. My father, arrested in 1976 for passing forged checks, was sentenced to three-to-five years. Solzhenitsyn’s books on his time in prison include The Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago. In The Gulag Archipelago he writes:
…they gave precedence to the so-called light methods (we will see what they were immediately). This way was sure. Indeed, the actual boundaries of human equilibrium are very narrow, and it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive the average human being out of his mind.
You might wonder, perhaps, if my father got confused reading Solzhenitsyn, confusing whatever he went through in prison with what Solzhenitsyn went through. It’s certainly possible that my father read Solzhenitsyn’s accounts and transposed himself into his skin, his chair, his chains. But the secret history of the CIA’s experiments on federal prisoners begs the question—did someone at the CIA also read The Gulag Archipelago and think, Ah, the key? Solzhenitsyn spends three pages documenting the various tortures he was subjected to, and concluded that these “light” methods (sensory deprivation, prolonged standing, extremes of temperature, forced sleeplessness) were the most effective, at least at breaking one’s will and causing long-term damage. The CIA, it seems, came to the same conclusions. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in the Soviet gulags were his way of dragging into the light what had happened to him, in part so it would never happen again. As for his tormenters he writes:
But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them into a “swan dive,” nor keep them on sleepless “standup” for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls in iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage—we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly:
“Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”
Solzhenitsyn’s point seems to have been lost, at least on some—his book has been used, by some, as more of a blueprint than a warning.
my augean stables
(2007) When—if—my father is finally released (banished?) from the psych hospital, it is unclear whether he will be able to return to his apartment. The landlord has grown tired of him, the neighbors have all complained. I’m sorry, his caseworker tells me, by phone. He reeks of piss every time I see him. He’s more belligerent, more out of control. She sighs. I’ve tried everywhere. Nobody will take him. I hear exhaustion in her voice. He has no options.
What she’s actually saying, I think, is that he has two options—either back on the streets, or move in with me, neither of which I’m ready to fully take in. I hear he’s been on meds in the psych ward, I tell her, that they’ve made him somewhat more docile. What if he stays on his meds, I ask, what if we find a pill that can calm him the fuck down? Eileen considers this. I couldn’t go there everyday and give it to him, she says, and I don’t know who could. I look around my house, try to imagine my father rattling around these rooms. Maybe once a week, I offer, maybe we could get one of those little pill boxes, the seven-day ones, and once a week you or me or someone goes in and doles out his pill, and we put up a little sign over his bed, or on his mirror, that says, TAKE YOUR PILL, and we get someone to come in once a week and hose him down, isn’t there someone like that, that could make sure he showers, make sure he takes his pills, at least once a week? I feel like I’m not breathing. Well, we could maybe hook him up with a home health care person, Eileen admits. We could try that, she says, but, really, she sounds even less hopeful.
Which is why I’m on this train from New York to Boston, for one last push to clean out his apartment. The plan is to hunker down until I can clear out what still remains—the three hundred pounds of moldy clothes that have lived in his bathtub since I first came to see him ten years ago, his kitchen cabinets crammed with uneaten food, the towers of magazines blocking access to his refrigerator. I’ll pack his collection of metal geegaws and piles of unfinished manuscripts and framed photographs of famous strangers (along with one of me as an infant in his arms) into a few boxes, so that one day someone, nurse or saint, might be able to enter, hose him down, hand him a pill.
Two days later, it’s all gone—his entire apartment, his entire life, now in boxes. All his writing, all his photos, packed up, the rest of it dragged to the trash room in the basement. If, someday, he wants what I’ve salvaged, if he remembers, if he misses it, I will bring these boxes to him. But I know, deep down, that he’s never coming back, to this or to any apartment. As it turns out, this is a one-way trip—he will be transferred from the psych ward to a rehab unit to a long-term care facility. From blood tests it will turn out that he’s had some kind of stroke in the past year—he’s incontinent, his mind is shot, he’s no longer able to live on his own. I don’t know this when I am cleaning out his apartment, but I will come to accept it, a month or so later, after I talk to Eileen and his doctor.
In the midst of transitioning my father into his new life, Inez and I decide to have a child together. Or, at least, we decide to try. It’s a leap, for both of us, empty-handed into the unknown. For me, maybe the time I spent with my father these last several years, maybe the days I spent in his apartment these last few weeks, on my hands and knees, dealing with his detritus, maybe it made me see how everything one collects over the course of one’s life turns to dust, in the end. Even the book you spend your whole life writing will one day end up in a box, if you’re lucky, or on the sidewalk, if you’re not. I’d spent so much time, so many years, trying to prop my father up, trying to keep him from dying on the streets, I can’t even say why, any more than a salmon could tell you why it needed to return to the river where it had been conceived. Maybe it was some combination of these forces, of seeing how a life can fall apart, alongside the animal instinct to hold it all together, maybe this had something to do with deciding that now, with Inez, I could try to have a child. Maybe it was that I’d asked for her help and she’d been there, maybe it was simply that some part of me knew it would be alright. Maybe some part of me knew Inez would be a good mother, and that Inez and I could figure a way around whatever obstacle we came upon. Still, though, part of me felt like when I was a teenager, standing on a bridge on a summer day, getting ready to dive into the river below. Back then I�
�d discovered that the whole trick was to simply take one step into the air, then let gravity take over. The whole trick was to become disembodied, but that trick no longer worked, not as well as it once had.
Whatever my reasons, after those final two days of trying to make my father’s apartment more human, I needed to return to New York, because now my presence was required on a certain day each month. The day was upon us. I’m not talking about it much, in case it doesn’t work out, so as not to make it too real, but I do tell my friend Philip. Philip has three kids of his own.
Trying? he smiles. Enjoy the ride.
Back home, my car crammed with my father’s boxes, a pile of unopened mail waits on my dining room table—bills to be paid, books to be commented on. At this moment I don’t know when—if—I will get to any of it. I send an email to my pal Sarah:
…my old man got committed to a psych ward last week. I had to make two trips to Boston to finish the emptying of his apartment, on my hands and knees in an inch of spilt soil from long-dead plants, the dirt soaked with piss, the toilet smeared with shit, sweeping up dead rodents, along with three crack pipes (a crack whore—“Fancy Nancy”—would stay with him at the beginning of each month, help him spend his Social Security check), and hundreds of bright green rat poison pellets. Twenty-year-old newspapers were stuck to the carpet, in dust thick with cackling faces. I did it in the deluded hope that if his apartment is more human he won’t live like such an animal, that he might be able to stay off the streets, for at least another winter. I want him to enter his apartment on some magic happy pill and forget the way he has lived his whole life. I want him to forget all those years he’s been living in his own dirt, what’s that song? like a monkey in a zoo….
I’d taken a few books for myself from his apartment, including a copy of The Big Book from Alcoholics Anonymous, one of several that people had apparently, and to little effect, put into his hands over the years. I also took his worn copy of The Gulag Archipelago—And it turned out that each of us had been imprisoned for nothing much.
ten
two strong men
My dharma teacher relates a story the Buddha told about a boy who lived in a small village, and on the edge of his village was a huge pit filled with burning coals. It troubled the boy, this pit, the idea that he might one day wander too close, fall in. And so the boy leaves his village, begins his life as a wanderer. This is the Chinese version of the story, the teacher tells us, but in the Indian version the boy, before he can leave the village, finds himself one day being dragged toward the pit by two strong men. We are left to assume that they either throw him in or else he escapes. The two strong men might be our desires, the teacher tells us, and to be aware of our desires can sometimes be enough.
(2007) Inez is two months pregnant. I bike into the city one night to give a reading at a New York bar called KGB. Afterward a young woman comes up to me, holds out her closed hand, asks if it’s okay if she gives me a gift. We’d never met before, but she’d seen something in a store just before the reading, and thought of me. When she opened her hand, there in her palm was a small bronze statue of a monkey, standing on his hind legs, his two hands clasping his chest. Only he wasn’t merely pointing to his heart, like Jesus—he was ripping his chest open. I saw it and thought of you, she said (in one of my poems Jesus rips open his shirt to show us his heart, all flaming & thorny). Not even as long as my pinkie, I recognized him as a Hindu god, but I couldn’t remember his name. What’s his name? I asked. Inside his open chest I can see a tiny heart.
A few days later I look it up: the monkey god is Hanuman—The planets are under control of Hanuman’s tail, and whoever worships him is granted fortitude and strength. The girl who held her hand out to me, offering me this tiny god, was very beautiful. Fortitude, strength—can I say I didn’t want this girl to take me home with her? Can I say it doesn’t pass through my mind now? But if she were to appear before me, which version of me would she find?
lisbon
(1986) After two years of working in the shelter, I decide I need to take a winter off. I fly to Europe and end up spending six months wandering, first in Paris, where I find a squat for two months, and then I push on, first to Spain, then into Portugal, then on to Morocco. By the end, on the edge of the Sahara, part of me wants to just keep going, to never go back home. I couldn’t know it at the time, but after I return to Boston, within a year of being back to work at the shelter, my father will show up at the door, and he will end up sleeping there, off and on, for the next five years.
In Lisbon, my first day there, I meet a woman—Carmo—and end up staying with her for a month, helping her to renovate her apartment. Lisbon had only recently emerged from its totalitarian nightmare, and it still seemed suitably gritty, which is how I like my cities—if there’s still some grit it seems they can absorb a wider range of people, not just the rich. One day I took a train with Carmo north, to the town of Sintra, where she had to appear in court to clear up a minor traffic violation. While waiting for her in the hallway outside the courtroom, shafts of sunlight streamed through the dusty Gothic windows, both illuminating and enshrouding the few people awaiting their turn before the judge. I took my camera out, snapped a picture. As I put the camera down, I noticed that one of the people in the hallway was wearing a uniform, and that he was now walking toward me. I put my camera back in my bag. This soldier stopped directly in front of me, blocking my way, though I wasn’t attempting to go anywhere. Half a foot shorter than I was, he whispered something menacing into my face that I didn’t understand. Sorry, I said, I’m just a tourist, no problem, hoping Carmo would appear and translate my way out of whatever was happening. But she didn’t, and the soldier took my arm and directed me toward a door. Once we passed through it we were in another hallway, where six or seven men had on the same uniform. The small soldier put his face close to mine and murmured Pelicula, pelicula, pelicula, which I understood was the word for film, as I had just bought some earlier that day. He gestured for me to hand it over. Just a snapshot, I said, just a tourist, no problem, and that was when he punched me in the stomach. It didn’t hurt, not as much as you might think—it was more of a shock. I looked around at the other soldiers—some looked at their shoes, some smoked their cigarettes, some smiled and looked away. I held up my hand. No problem, I said, and reached into my bag and took the camera out. As I did he punched me again, in the same spot, the spot the doctor had pulled my spleen out of a few years back. This time the whole thing was more of a dance—he leaned into it more, I rounded my back, pushed my weight up on my toes, absorbed it. The sentence, I am far from home and getting beaten up by a soldier, ran through my mind. I now had the camera in one hand—Pelicula, he hissed, gesturing, and I started to rewind the film—I didn’t want to open the camera to the light and ruin the whole roll. When done I popped the camera open and handed him the roll, and as he held it in one hand he punched me one last time. After that it seemed we were finished, so I pushed my way past him, back out through the door. Carmo was in the hallway, wondering where I’d been. Shaky, I explained quickly that I’d lost the film, and that we should leave immediately, before the door opened again. Unfortunately, on the same roll were some photographs documenting the work we’d been doing on her apartment, and she needed these photographs to get reimbursed by her landlord. So she knocked on the door, and the little soldier came out, and she explained the situation, but he refused to give us back the film. My friend asked to speak to his commanding officer, and soon we were outside, talking to a little general in a little jeep, which is how it is that I have a photograph of the soldier who punched me three times in the stomach. It is the other soldiers, though, the soldiers outside of the photo, the ones who merely smiled and looked away, that now trouble me more.
locusts
(1968) When I was eight my family flew to Montana to stay with my uncle’s family—my mother’s brother and my aunt and cousins who, in the way of our family, I barely knew. Two things from that trip stay
with me—first was the locusts, which that summer filled the sky with their frenzy. During the day the cousins and I built tiny Lego cells in the driveway, which we filled with locusts, and then we’d watch with our own increasing frenzy as they ripped each other apart. The air was thick with them—at one point we took a road trip to Glacier National Park and had to stop at every gas station, to clear their splattered corpses from the windshield.
The other thing I remember from Montana is coming home from Glacier, stopping at a “trading post,” the kind of place that sold turquoise bolo ties and rubber tomahawks. It also had a few animals in cages out back—ROADSIDE ZOO—a handpainted arrow pointing the way. The animals were kept in tiny cinderblock cages, and the one I remember was the bald eagle, which could barely lift its head as I fluttered my hands before the bars.
a trail of breadcrumbs
(1969) A neighbor of my grandmother is carried out of her house on a stretcher, the stretcher covered with a white sheet, a blossom of red where her head should be. To get here I’d cut through some scraggly woods at the edge of my grandmother’s lawn, then ran across Kent Street. The house is a run-down place perched on the marsh, teetering on the lowlands. When I’d heard the sirens I did what my mother had taught me—I followed the sound, I stood on the sidewalk, I waited.
Later that night, when I asked what had happened, my mother told me that the woman had been sitting at her kitchen table, and that she’d asked her two sons to help her with something—peeling apples, I imagined. I imagined she was baking a pie, like my mother did.
Do it yourself, one son answered.