Nick Flynn: The Ticking Is The Bomb

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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, 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 father 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?

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(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."

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.


Nick Flynn
The Ticking Is The Bomb