The Ticking Is the Bomb

by Nick Flynn

  I’m busy, said the other son.

  These sons were delinquents, my mother explained, causing their mother no end of heartache. I’m sick of this, the woman said, putting down her apple or her rolling pin. I can’t take your ungratefulness. And then she reached into a drawer and pulled out her gun and put it on the table.

  I’m going to kill myself, she said.

  Go ahead, said the first son.

  You wouldn’t dare, said the second.

  Go ahead—it would take me years to realize that there was really no way my mother could have known the details of that conversation around that kitchen table, not then, if ever. Years later, in therapy, I remembered that as an even younger child I’d said the same thing to my mother, one snowy night, as I ran around the house naked, refusing to get dressed for bed. My mother had threatened to throw me outside in the snow if I didn’t do as she said. I answered, You wouldn’t dare, the thrill of a strange new power surging through me. She grabbed me and tossed me out onto the front porch. I stood there for a few seconds, shivering, trying to cover my nakedness, then I ran and hid behind the stone wall in the neighbor’s yard, the same place I’d stood just the year before, the night I watched the shadows of flames dance across the face of our house.

  heroic uses of concrete

  I never wanted to attach the name “addiction” to my mother’s suicide, I never wanted to allow something as tiny as a pill that power. Sometimes, if asked, I’d say it was a bullet, and sometimes I’d say it was confusion. Sometimes I’d say she’d worked too hard her whole life, and sometimes I’d say that raising two kids alone had worn her out. I looked up the word “suicide” in the dictionary after she died, and one definition said that suicide was an act of a sane mind: suicide (n.) 1. the act of killing oneself intentionally; in law, the act of self-destruction by a person sound in mind and capable of measuring his moral responsibility. I carried that definition around for years, as if some part of me needed to believe that what she’d done was an act of clarity. After I quit drinking—before my slip—I would sometimes call her an “addict,” but I never really believed it, not deeply. Her suicide had to have been caused by something more than what could be corked in a bottle or folded into tinfoil—nothing so small, so insignificant, could have taken her. You know how it is, how we don’t want to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone, how we don’t want to believe that a handful of maniacs with boxcutters could have taken down our towers. Our fear is so big, so real, that we want what we fear to be something formidable, not some skinny psychopath, not some misfits living in caves. Not our own shadows.

  Here, then, is one last fact:

  My mother took her life two weeks before her gangster boyfriend was to be released from prison—he was finishing up two years of a three-to-five-year federal sentence. A few years earlier we’d seen him on the evening news, in handcuffs, being led off a boat laden with marijuana. While the gangster had been locked up, my mother had gotten together with another man. I knew that part of her was tormented by that, by what she would do the moment when, if, they were all face-to-face. Call it guilt. Call it confusion. Call it monkey-mind. Call it samsara when, years later, I’m in love with two women, and suffocating under the weight of it all.

  the navigator (goodbye)

  The Navigator is a silent film about a man adrift on a large ship in the middle of the sea. Buster Keaton plays a rich man—lost in the way only the rich can be lost—who, until the moment he finds himself alone on this luxury liner, has had everything done for him. If I am remembering it correctly, Keaton had his chauffeur drive him to the ship for a gala, but he was a day early and the ship was empty—imagine the Queen Mary without captain, without crew, the deck chairs all lined up and empty. Keaton wanders the decks for a while, looking for the party, and ends up falling asleep in a stateroom. In the night the ship is cut loose from its dock, and he wakes up the next morning, no land in sight. Bewildered, he wanders the decks, looking first for everyone, then for anyone. In one scene he finds a can of food in the galley, and he spends a long time pondering it—he has never had to open a can. Eventually he puts the can in a vice and takes a fire axe to it. I don’t remember if he ever finds his way inside this can.

  (2007) After I’ve stopped using (again), after I’ve found my way back into folding chairs in anonymous church basements, after a year and a half of not hearing from her, five months into Inez’s pregnancy, Anna sends this note:

  I just woke up from a long night of dreaming about you: in the last dream, I was trying to get you to say goodbye to me, as I so often was in real life, and you instead were insisting we jump off a cliff with our pockets full of keys, a freefall. We jumped, and when we landed, we were separated, in rushing water, pockets empty….

  numerology

  (2008) It’s two days past the due date for our child to appear. Appear—is that even the right word? Hasn’t she been with us always, manifest, as the Buddhists say, like the flame in the match? Her due date was the fourth of January, the doctor told us months ago. We knew it was merely an approximation, more mathematics than gospel, but numerology, apparently, is a superstition I find hard to let go of—on the due date I was so full of energy that I could barely contain it.

  Last night I had a dream—my friend David had built a huge boat out of cardboard, like the boat in Fitzcarraldo, or in The Navigator. We motor it out along a wide river that opens in the distance to the sea. David took the wheel first, and when it looked like we were heading into the shallows I went to the bow and lay on my belly, on the lookout for submerged rocks. As I watched the eel grass sway, my eyes got heavy, and though I tried to resist, I fell asleep. When I woke up, David was gone. I was alone, the boat drifting aimlessly, near to the shoals. I take the wheel, but it turns uselessly in my hands, so I drop anchor, and then I fall asleep again. When I awaken, the rising tide has pulled the anchor up, and so the boat is again adrift. I find a switch, which starts the engines, and this time I am able to steer away from the shoals. The dream went on like this all night—me falling asleep, waking up, drifting into danger, starting the engine, dropping anchor, safe for a moment in clear beautiful water, the eel grass swaying, until I drift off again, and wake up in danger.

  For a long time after my mother died—ten years or so, off and on—I lived on a boat. When my father got himself evicted and ended up homeless, I was still on that boat, I still hadn’t made my way to shore. My twenties, you could say, were water, you could say I was, in a way, more ocean than earth. You could say that whatever was solid in me was slowly dissolving. I had read somewhere that nothing should change after a serious trauma, in the face of such a loss. I was away at school when I got the call, but when I came home it was no longer my home. I dropped out of school but I never spent another night in that house. If I tried I’d wake up, hungover, slouched in the front seat of my car, the car itself sideways in the driveway. The boat was on land in a friend’s yard, and I’d often go to it in the middle of the night, crawl aboard. We put her back in the water that spring.

  In my late teens, working for the gangsters, I spent a year or so knee-deep in ice and fish slime in the holds of various fishing boats. Hold—like a child in her mother’s belly, just before being born. Then she will be held in another way. It was my job to unload these boats, to shovel the icy corpses into a basket dangling off the dock from a winch. The DEA was filming us from nearby rooftops, but the boats laden with marijuana were being unloaded three hundred miles to the north, in Portland, Maine. Then, if it was that time of year, the kilos were packed onto the bottom of a flatbed truck, which was then loaded with Christmas trees and driven into the city—ho-ho. Now, two days after the due date, I bend down to Inez’s belly and murmur, We’re waiting for you, little one, the coast is clear.

  eleven

  piero della francesca

  (2008) I read the news today, oh boy—over thirty thousand Iraqis are now detained in U.S.-built prisons, twice as many as were jailed at the time
of the Abu Ghraib photos. And these are merely the ones we know about. This number includes women and children—at the time the Abu Ghraib photographs were taken we know that the youngest detainee was ten, kidnapped and held, the idea being to force his father to talk, though it is unlikely that his father had anything to say. It is now widely believed that no actionable intelligence ever came out of Abu Ghraib, and that even the U.S. military knew that 90 percent of those held were guilty of nothing. Which begs the question—why we are doing it, why did we open that box, shut for fifty years?

  (1455) The title of one of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes from the fifteenth century in the Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo is The Torture of the Jew. The Jew, in this case, is named Judas, but is not the Judas who betrayed Jesus with that kiss. From the plaque beneath it we now learn that this Judas was lowered into a hole, a well, without food or water for six days, in order to coerce him into revealing the location of “the one true cross.” A man in a blue tunic is in charge, his hand on Judas’s head, though it’s unclear if he’s pushing Judas down or pulling him out. The man in blue holds a stick in his other hand, striped blue and white—it’s the type of stick that would show the blood if he were forced to use it. Judas has one foot on the lip of the well, both hands brace his body, but, again, we don’t know if he is stepping out after six days beneath the ground or if he is trying to keep from falling in. Judas appears well dressed, clean, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine this is the beginning of his descent, the first moment, as it were—Judas at the threshold, Judas with his annunciating angels. Two men work a rope that is tied to Judas’s waist, lowering or raising him from a wooden scaffold. With its precise rendering of knots and scaffold it is the equivalent of a how-to manual.

  Piero della Francesca also painted more iconic depictions of torture, such as The Flagellation of Jesus, which hangs in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino. We have seen this flagellation portrayed before, it is one of the ways we know Jesus, through his suffering, which is sometimes called the Passion. The composition of this painting is classical, balanced. You could break it down into perfect triangles, talk about where the eye is led. Within this form there is the story—the two men who whip the bound Jesus are not asking him anything, they are not looking for an answer or for information, they are merely whipping him because of who he is or claims to be—the Son of God. A spray of blood hangs from both of Jesus’ shoulders, like wings. His expression is calm, as if it is happening to someone else and he is looking on with pity.

  the passion (misnamed)

  (2004) A few months before the Abu Ghaib photographs are leaked to the world, the film The Passion of the Christ is released. Human rights lawyers, and of course those in the military and those who make the rules for those in the military, already know what is going on in Abu Ghraib, as well as in all of the “black sites” around the world. The gloves have come off, we’ve been told, and we know what this means. I’m in Texas when The Passion opens. The mega-churches send busloads of the faithful to pack the theaters, helping to make it the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. It is rated R for its depiction of violence, which is relentless. Jesus spends nearly two hours being (almost) flayed. It is criticized, by some, for ignoring the central message of forgiveness in Jesus’ teachings. It is still in the theaters when the Abu Ghraib photographs appear, and some read it as a justification, of sorts—Look at what Jesus suffered for our sins, and you’re worried about a little smacky-face?

  the lion of babylon

  (2004) One story that circulated after the Abu Ghraib photographs appeared was that the Americans had used lions to intimidate and torture prisoners—one more small strange story in a clusterfuck of awful stories. The lion story, as I remember it, circulated on Arab websites, either because it had happened or merely as an allegory, to show the barbarity of the occupiers. In the West this story was used, by some, to show that nothing the former prisoners said could be taken seriously, or at least not without a healthy dose of skepticism—lions in the prisons? To some, this was clearly a fantasy taken straight from stories of the Crusades (our president, though, did refer to the invasion as a “crusade”), or from the history of Roman persecutions of Christians in the now-ruined Colosseum.

  The more I look into it, though, the more I wonder. I come up with this list of three (possibly paranoid) questions:

  — Is it possible that the source of this story isn’t a former Iraqi prisoner at all, but part of a CIA campaign of disinformation, for in the end it is so incredible that it allows all claims of torture to be doubted?

  — If you are forced to wear a hood and a soldier who doesn’t speak your language is siccing a dog on you, maybe even allowing the dog to draw blood, is it possible that the dog’s growl could be mistaken for a lion’s growl?

  — When we invaded Iraq in March 2003 there followed several days, then years, of chaos—museums looted, power plants dismantled, zoos neglected. What happened to the lions, assuming there were lions?

  I type the words “lion torture iraq” into a search engine, and discover this:

  Former Iraqi Detainees Allege Torture

  ABC News has an exclusive report of two released Iraqi detainees who allege shocking accounts of torture by U.S. troops. Aside from physical beatings, the men allege:

  “They took us to a cage—an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace,” he said. “And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, ‘We will give you one more chance to confess.’ And I would say, ‘Confess to what?’”

  As it turns out, there were in fact quite a few lions in Iraq when we invaded. Saddam’s son Uday kept several in his palace. It is alleged that he fed them on human meat, and that sometimes he even fed them live humans. As the search continues I find this:

  Coalition rockets and gunfire had nearly destroyed the palace grounds, and none of the troops expected to find anything alive. Then, in a small, war-scarred compound, Staff Sgt. Darren Swain peered into a room—and saw three lions, cowering, starving and abandoned.

  After these lions were discovered, despite urgings by international aid organizations to relocate them to other more secure and humane zoos, they were kept in the palace. Finally, I stumble upon this bit of history:

  Meanwhile, in a deserted Babylon tormented by sandy winds, the Lion of Babylon is still standing: it has not been stolen or vandalized. The Lion of Babylon—supposedly a trophy from Hitite times, middle of the 2nd millennium B.C., when Nebechadnezzar was king—is an enigmatic basalt statue representing a man who is about to be killed by a lion. But in fact the man is resisting: with one hand he tries to shove the lion’s mouth away, and with the other he fights one of the lion’s menacing paws. Legend rules that as long as the statue is there, Babylon will never be conquered.

  The Iraqis, it seems, have been fighting lions for a long time.

  invasion of the body snatchers

  At the end of Polanski’s Chinatown, John Huston turns to Jack Nicholson—But you see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact—the right time, the right place, and they are capable of anything…. In another favorite zombie movie of mine, the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Brooke Adams turns to Donald Sutherland as he drives her to the psychiatrist—Yesterday it all seemed normal, today everything seemed the same but it wasn’t. Brooke didn’t know, couldn’t know, not then, that Donald was gone, already gone.

  (1980) After the gangster my mother was dating got arrested, his crew figured out it was simpler to fly a few hundred pounds of cocaine in from Mexico than to sail back from Colombia in a boat laden with marijuana. They’d still do the occasional marijuana run, but cocaine
brought in a lot more money, a lot quicker, though it also sped up the unraveling. The gangsters began using, which meant that my mother’s boyfriend (before he was sentenced) began using, which meant that my mother began using. I began finding cut straws in her glove compartment—I’d imagine her sitting in her car in the bank parking lot, doing a line or two at lunch, then going back in to finish counting out the money. I’d split the straws open to lick out the bitter residue. Around this time she began hanging with a woman named Karen, the girlfriend of one of the other gangsters, and the two of them would be over at our house some evenings, wild-eyed and loud, getting ready to go out. Karen was hard around the edges, missing a tooth in the front of her face—she looked like she’d been using for a while, certainly longer than my mother, who was only just beginning to show some wear, mostly just around her eyes.

  a story that could be true

  (2006) A photograph of Ali Shalal Qaissi appears on the front page of the New York Times. Qaissi, a gray-haired Iraqi, his head bowed, is holding in his hands one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib—that of the hooded man standing on the box. The caption identifies Mr. Qaissi as the man depicted in this infamous, now-iconic photograph. A powerful image, a photograph of a photograph, with the hood now removed so we can see, for the first time, his face. It seems to capture a rare combination of humility and bravery, for this man to publicly acknowledge himself as a survivor of torture. Yet, even more than this, it is powerful because so few Iraqi voices from that time, that place, have been heard.