by Nick Flynn
don’t be cruel
(2008) Elvis (The King) showed up on a hotel television recently, as I tried to channel surf my way into sleep. I was in California for two days, away from Inez and Lulu for the first time. In the film (Roustabout? Spinout?) Elvis played a musician needing to talk to the taxman—in terms of plot, that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t take my eyes off him—oozing this big, dumb animal magnetism, he seemed to embody America.
Plato (more generously than I) put it this way:
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light…and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.
By the time Elvis made this film he was perhaps already well on his way to bewildering himself through drugs, or perhaps he could simply sense the bewilderment to come—stranded on his la-z-boy, his silver chalice of pills, his fried peanut-butter sandwiches. As I watched him on screen I wondered if the drugs were already seeping into every pore. Sometimes all we have is our shadows, sometimes whole years of our lives can pass, mere shadow talking to shadow.
(2004) During the televised presidential debates, a few months after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, we got a glimpse of our president’s shadow, when he referred to his daughters, who had recently spent a night or two in the drunk tank, as he had when he was their age (and, in the spirit of full [full?] disclosure, as I had as well):
LEHRER: Ninety second response, Senator.
KERRY: Well, first of all, I appreciate enormously the personal comments the president just made. And I share them with him. I think only if you’re doing this—and he’s done it more than I have in terms of the presidency—can you begin to get a sense of what it means to your families. And it’s tough. And so I acknowledge that his daughters—I’ve watched them. I’ve chuckled a few times at some of their comments.
(LAUGHTER)
And…
BUSH: I’m trying to put a leash on them.
(LAUGHTER)
KERRY: Well, I know. I’ve learned not to do that.
(LAUGHTER)
I’m trying to put a leash on them. This, as you remember, was only a few months after the Abu Ghraib photos were made public, several of which showed Lynndie England dragging (albeit halfheartedly) a naked Iraqi (Amir) by the neck on a leash. It is the only vague, indirect mention of torture in the entire debates, when many were still trying to find a way to put these shadows back into their boxes.
(2006) Bush is discussing the Supreme Court ruling in the Hamdan case with reporters. Please, Bush jokes, remember that Elvis classic when you ask me your questions—Don’t Be Cruel. Bush is standing beside Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan (Koizumi is, apparently, an Elvis freak). Each man smiles into the cameras. They have just come from Graceland. Don’t be cruel, Bush jokes, and the reporters, his parrots, laugh, and then they ask their empty questions, and Bush, essentially, answers nothing—his shadow has already spoken. Don’t be cruel, Elvis sings, and now his shadow keeps singing, but it isn’t a plea not to be cruel to everyone, it never was. Don’t be cruel, Elvis pleads, to a heart that’s true. Elvis sings, Bush sings, his parrots sing, Koizumi sings, and now I find myself singing along as well, a song so deep, yet uninvited, in my head.
(2008) Two days ago the president announced, through a spokesman, and without apparent shame, that we have tortured in the past and we will torture again. When it is revealed that his top aides met to discuss specific torture techniques, Bush will claim, petulantly, to have been in on the discussions as well. Endgame—no more smoke and mirrors, no more claiming state’s secrets, it’s cards-on-the-table time. Nearly four years since the photographs were released—This is who we are now, the president seems to say, this is who we’ve always been. Once there was plausible deniability, but really they—we—haven’t tried to deny anything, not very much. We all know what was done, we always knew, and now (the word made flesh) it has merely been uttered.
Solaris (house of strange fathers)
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, an astronaut wakes up on his first morning on a spaceship, his wife asleep beside him, her arm over his chest. The only problem is that his wife had committed suicide some years earlier, so this woman, it seems, is a product of his imagination, or of his neurosis—the physical form of his desire, or of his guilt. The spaceship, to use Zizek’s phrase, has become an “id machine.” As Zizek says: It’s relatively easy to get rid of a real person. You can abandon him or her, kill him or her, whatever. But a ghost is much harder to get rid of. It sticks to you as a sort of spectral presence. Another astronaut, as the dead woman picks herself up from the floor of the spaceship for the umpteenth time, simply shrugs—It’s horrifying, isn’t it. I’ll never get used to these constant resurrections.
A year after Lulu is born I learn that “Abu Ghraib” translates in Arabic to House of Strange Fathers—maybe this is the key, maybe it’s as simple as that, the reason I’ve felt compelled to wrestle these shadows. My mother’s father was dying, I was shepherding my father closer to his last breath (or at least out of his apartment), and I was on the threshold of becoming a father myself. My parents’ lives have always acted as a map, but it’s been so hard to follow sometimes—much of it seemed to simply mark out places I should avoid. Yet these were the places I always found myself in—where else would I go?
Last night I got a call from Eli, a friend I spent many days and many nights with when I was living in Rome. Eli had set me up with my apartment when I first landed. Eli’s father died a year ago. I ask him how he’s faring, and he tells me that it feels strange to admit, but he actually feels more grounded now that his father is gone. Grounded—it’s the same word I’ve been using when I try to articulate the changes that Lulu has brought into my life—grounded. Buying a house didn’t do it, writing a book didn’t. Maybe “grounded” simply means an awareness of being one step closer to being put into the ground, maybe that’s why I’ve resisted it all these years. Or maybe it was just my nature, to live on the water, to wander. Now, watching Lulu lift herself off the floor, it all feels right, to have my legs under me, for once.
The calendar by the register in the café where I go to write is from The Far Side. The page for today is this: Two prison guards lead a clown down a hallway to the electric chair. One says to the other, I don’t think I’ll be able to tell my kids about this one. This year the Nobel in physics went to three Japanese astrophysicists who, as I understand it, proved that the universe only exists because of a mistake—if the laws of the universe were in perfect harmony, nothing would have come into being. The Big Bang wouldn’t have happened, because everything would have been fine as it was. This proves there’s no perfect theory of the universe, the radio commentator tells us.
here comes the sun
Every Christmas, for a few years, which seemed and still seems forever, the new Beatles album waited beneath the tree. Some years there were even two—1968, the Year of the Monkey—two perfect squares wrapped in red and green tissue paper. We already half-knew most of the songs, but we didn’t know all the words. One opened up like a kid’s picture book: John Paul Ringo and George looking out at us in the uniforms of some psychedelic army; John Paul Ringo and George walking across a street in white suits and black suits and barefoot and in jeans. Before that day we’d had to sit in the car and wait for “Here Comes the Sun” or “Hey Jude” to end—no one, until that moment, had ever heard “Hey Jude,” but from that moment on it would always be there, from then on it would never not be there.
A few years after the Beatles broke up, I had a paper route, delivering the Boston Globe before the sun came up. Sometimes my mother would drive me, if it had
snowed in the night, if I was late for school, her car warm and waiting after I trudged back between houses, the radio playing low. Most mornings I was alone, on my bike or walking, and I would pause under a certain streetlight to see what was happening in the world. I would follow a story for the days or weeks it would appear, first as a headline, then as it moved further and further into the body of the paper. Vietnam. Watergate. Patty Hearst. One morning the photograph on the front page was of a plane that had crashed at Logan Airport, thirty miles to the north. The plane had tried to take off but something had kept it on the ground—maybe there was ice on the wings, maybe one of the wings was broken, maybe a screw was loose. Or maybe it had crashed trying to land, maybe it overshot the runway, maybe it’s brakes failed—I can’t remember now. All I know for certain is that everyone died—everyone, that is, except one man, and this one man, this survivor, was the reason I read the paper everyday, searching for news of him. Let’s call him Manuel. He stayed alive for days, which became weeks, horribly burnt, wrapped in gauze, immobilized, but alive. I searched the paper every day for word of him, every day my mother would ask me if there was anything in the paper about him. I wanted him to pull through, for some reason I was desperate for one person to walk away from this impossible disaster.
fifteen
pond
(2008) Hungry, Lulu cries her small cry with the first light (cell by cell the baby made herself). A few minutes before this she’d let out a coo (the cells made cells), a coo which became the texture of the dream I was having (that is to say the baby is made largely of milk), a coo which meant that everything was going to be alright. I get out of bed, step into the cold of the barn, and make my way over to her room, which we insulated and now heat with an oil-filled electric radiator, like our room will be, one day, once—if—we get around to hanging the doors. The rest of the barn, which I pass through quickly, is essentially the same weather as the outside world, and this morning the outside world is cool, and thick with fog. Since living in the barn, there have been nights where I’ve woken up to take a piss and been stopped on the way to the toilet, the dark air around me filled with fireflies. Or if there was lightning outside, then inside the barn would brighten with lightning as well. But those were summer nights, when we’d sleep with the big sliding doors left open.
After I change Lulu and feed her we play together quietly for a while on the carpet—our favorite game, right now, is daddy’s gonna get you. Then we make our way down to the pond, let Inez sleep in a little longer, Lulu’s little body strapped to my chest like a parachute.
We’d moved into the barn last May so that we could rent out the house. Money got tight after the baby came, so in the spring I’d offered to fix the barn up, since I knew how to do it, or at least I knew enough friends I could call on to help. For years, before I even met Inez, the barn had become a place to gather junk: a lawn mower that doesn’t start; a hundred mismatched windows; another entire barn, dismantled and neatly stacked; a padlocked refrigerator.
The barn is a hundred and fifty years old, held together by huge sixty-foot-long hickory beams, a quality of tree that hasn’t grown here, maybe anywhere, for nearly a hundred years now. The roof is slate, kestrels (windhovers) live in the cupola—anything could happen in that barn. It could be a theater, it could hold an airplane. You could build a room inside it, a hidey-hole for when things got bad. By the time Lulu and I make it to the pond my boots are wet with dew. Steam is rising from the water, the surface utterly still.
Until a month or so ago, the land had become so overgrown that you could only glimpse the pond as you walked along the narrow path connecting one meadow to the next. At night you could hear the bullfrogs, but at night it’s hard to locate where sound is coming from. It seemed to come from the low point in the land, the place a pond would be, if there was a pond. I asked Inez about it, but all she’d heard was in the winter one couldn’t skate on it because it was so deep it wouldn’t freeze, and in the summer you couldn’t swim in it because it wasn’t big enough. This seemed contradictory, but not being able to see it clearly, I couldn’t verify either claim. Every year the wild roses had grown thicker, sending out their long tendrils of thorns, which tore at your arms if you tried to pull them back to see a little more. From what I could glimpse it was possible that the pond was no bigger than a bucket, which would mean it wasn’t a pond at all. In all likelihood it was simply vernal, evaporating in the summer, leaving only a muddy patch. In the summer, when the undergrowth was thickest, this seemed completely possible.
Shortly after we moved into the barn I decided to try to clear it.
The land hadn’t been brush-hogged for eight years or so, which is why the wild roses and the locusts and the sycamore had taken over. I found someone who had the machine that could do the job. By the end of the first day he’d gouged a path to the pond’s edge, and I was able to walk up to it and look across to the other side. Hundreds of frogs splashed the surface as I approached, the water tea-colored, a few trees draped their branches into it, their leaves floating on the surface. The pond wasn’t large—one could swim the length of it in about ten strokes, I estimated, once a little more was cleared away.
I would spend the next several weeks, whenever I had a free hour or so, usually when Lulu was napping, clearing away the pond’s mucky edge, which the brush hog hadn’t been able to reach. It was now August, and a friend was renting the house. Later he’d tell me that he’d look out at me, hacking away at the undergrowth, and wonder if working on the book about Lulu and torture hadn’t driven me a little mad. From his window the pond was still invisible. All he could see was that after an hour or so I would come back up the hill, shirtless, sweat dripping off my nose, my legs muddy, my arms bleeding from the thorns. At night we’d have dinner and I’d talk about the pond, how beautiful it was, how lately, at dawn, Lulu and I had been seeing a heron, or perhaps it was a bittern, sitting on a branch, watching over the water. I didn’t know if the heron had always been there, no one knew, because until that moment no one had even seen the pond, not for many years. In the weeks I worked on clearing it I didn’t write a word, and it is very possible that I didn’t have a thought in my head, beyond the thought of Lulu (my Fairy Queen), and that pond.
the lord god bird
(2004) In February a birdwatcher in Arkansas claims to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, also known as the Lord God Bird, a species listed as extinct for sixty years now. If true this would be a very good thing—it would be as if a lover you thought long dead rang your doorbell. Then, at the end of April, around the same time the Abu Ghraib photographs appear, another Arkansas man claims that he has made a four-second video of an ivory-billed woodpecker in flight. Ornithologists weep (If you don’t weep now, when will you weep?). One says, It shows there’s hope, against all odds. But shortly thereafter an albino dolphin, a species unique to the Yangtze, known to the locals as the spirit of the river, washes up on shore, and it is feared to be the last. And then the honeybees begin to leave their hives, as if they have forgetten their way home, as if they are lost. “Hive Collapse Syndrome,” the beekeepers dub it, and offer several possible reasons. One is that the electromagnetic waves from cellphone towers are confusing them. Another is the effects of a super pesticide, a nicotine derivative, which doesn’t merely sit on the leaves, but actually becomes part of the plant, causing the predatory insects (and humans as well, presumably) who eat them to lose their memory, act erratically, and die.
(2009) My father now has a bed by a window, now his clothes are always clean, now he eats three meals a day. He’s living in a “long-term care facility,” a nursing home. He is still on a little Ativan, which seems to dissolve his anxiety. The doors to the outside are kept locked, so he can’t wander off and get any liquor. This is the first time I have ever known him to be sober—his stories are different, he no longer tells the same handful, over and over. But his mind is shot. He knows who I am, dimly, but he cannot remember when he last saw me, or anything abou
t my life. I could tell him a hundred times that he is now a grandfather, and it simply will not sink in. The last time we visited we brought Lulu, so they could meet. Maybe then she would become real to him. We even took a photograph of him holding her, and, at least for that one moment, they both look joyful. But as the hour progressed, my father had a hard time keeping it all in his head. Was Lulu his daughter or his granddaughter? Was Inez his sister or his wife? At one point he takes me aside. I have to talk to you, he says—they’re treating me like I’m a millionaire, and I got no money. I don’t know what I’ll do when they find out. I pass a few folded dollar bills into his hand. I’m working on it, I assure him.