Flynn - The ticking is the bomb : a memoir

a telegram made of shadows

(2007) This black and white photograph in my hand is an image of my unborn daughterthis, at least, is what Im told. Its actually a series of photographs, folded one upon the other, like a tiny accordion. I was there when the doctor or technician or whoever he was made it with his little wand of sound. I sat beside him, looked into the screen as he pointed into the shadows Can you see her nose, can you see her hand? Can you see her foot, right here, next to her ear? I was there when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal. Its as if I were holding a photograph of a dream, a dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I loveIll call her Inezthe woman who now walks through the world with two hearts beating inside her.

At this same moment, or outside of this moment, outside of us, out there, in the world, exists another set of photographs. One depicts a naked man being dragged by a soldier out of a cell on the end of a leash. Another depicts a pyramid of hooded, cowering men, also naked. A soldier stands behind this pyramid, his arms folded, smiling. In yet another photograph a blue-eyed girlalso smilinggives a thumbs-up over a corpse. Hundreds of such photographs exist, by now weve all seen them, by now weve all held them in our hands, but they also have the texture of dreamsshadowy, diaphanous, changeable.

Grain upon grain.

One day I hope to be able to tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while , this story will begin, but then we found our way .

This, at least, is the version I hope to be able to tell her.

a field guide to getting lost

Heres a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasnt happened to you yet consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame someone elsean errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood. Or it may be easier to blame the map you were givenfolded too many times, out of date, tiny print. You can shake your first at the sky, call it fate, karma, bad luck , and sometimes it is. But, for the most part, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. Life can, of course, blindside you, yet often as not we choose to be blind agency , some call it. If youre lucky youll remember a story you heard as a child, the trick of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, the idea being that after whatever it is that is going to happen in those woods has happened, you can then retrace your steps, find your way back out. But no one said you wouldnt be changed, by the hours, the years, spent wandering those woods.

(2005) A year after the Abu Ghraib photographs appear I wake up in Texas one morning, in love with two women, honest with neither. I am finishing up my second semester of teaching poetry at the University of Houston, getting ready to fly back to New York, where both these women are waiting for me, or so I imagine. Id been dating for a few years, since the breakup of a long-term relationship, and more than once it had been made abundantly clear that I was not very good at it. For me, dating often felt like reading Tolstoyexhilarating, but a struggle, at times, to keep the characters straight. The fact that the chaos had been distilled down to two womenone Ill call Anna, the other was Inezfelt, to me, like progress. For months Id been speaking to one or the other on my cellphone. Her name (or hers) came up on the tiny screen, and each time my heart leapt. It was the end of April. Id come to the conclusion (delusion?) that if I could just get us all in the same room we could figure out a way it could work out. Another part of me, though, would have been perfectly happy to let it all keep playing out in the shadows.

The book A Field Guide to Getting Lost came out around this timeit is, in part, a meditation on the importance, for any creative act, to allow the mind and body to wander. The title jumped out at memaybe I could use it as sort of an anti map. Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing . Another book that came out around this time was Why We Get Lost and How We Find Our Way , but I didnt pick that one upperhaps I wasnt ready not to be lost. Lost, at that moment in my life, manifest itself as feeling bewildered, confused, bereftits not that I didnt know where I was, I just didnt know what I was doing there. On a deeper level, I knew that my bereftitude was only partly due to my self-inflicted disasters of love. Beneath that surface tension was the inescapable fact that Id just crossed the threshold of being the same age my parents had been when theyd imploded, each in his or her own way. My mother had killed herself when she was forty-two, shot herself in the heart. When my father was forty-five, he felldrunkfrom a ladder while painting a house, an accident which may or may not have left him with a permanent head injury. A year later hed enter a bank and pass his first forged check, the start of a small-time run that would eventually lead him into federal prison. After doing his time, after being released, hed drift even deeper into his life of wandering, until he ended up living on the streets for a few years, which is where I got to know him.

And now, here I am, waking up in Texas, just past the age my mother never made it beyond, the same age my father was when he went off the rails. The dream Im having is already dissolving, and Im left, once again, with my unquiet mind, which for some months now has been straddling these two beautiful women. It has nothing to do with fate, karma, or bad luck.