First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  Good stories, I said. Just a little…

  Vague?

  Vague? Possibly.

  As I was saying, you can write, Gene Paley said, eyes continuing to track the numbers arrayed below. But we need him to talk.

  His eyes were oddly hooded, and that, and his small face, his beak of a nose, the suggestion of a powdery odour, the sense he might bite deeply and unexpectedly, all put me in mind of Suzy’s pet Indian ringneck parrot that missed no opportunity to bite me.

  I need him to tell me something, I said. He’s—he’s just not interested in the book.

  Gene Paley raised his eyes and caught mine with an unforgiving stare.

  Mmm, he said, and with a quizzical gesture he held out at arm’s length his oversize fountain pen, as elaborate and nonsensical as a piece of chromed agricultural pipe, and dropped it on the several kilometres of numbers on the spreadsheets below. Decades of living through numbers such as these—the numbers printed, the numbers sold in, the numbers sold through, returned, and remaindered, the numbers he gave away as margin to booksellers, the numbers he lied about to other publishers and journalists, hellish real numbers, dreamt-of numbers, true numbers, false numbers, numbers lost to rapacious book chains, numbers clawed back off witless authors and vainglorious agents, the despair and beauty and sheer alchemy of numbers—their numbers, our numbers, bad numbers, good numbers, even, for God’s sake, numbers on numbers—all these innumerable numbers had over time honed in Gene Paley a sensitivity so great it verged on a sixth sense: to the possibility of profit and the terror of loss. And that sense was even then twitching with concern, perhaps fear.

  Your contract is not just to write, he said, his voice still kindly but somehow firmer—somehow resolute. It is to write with him for us. Your job is to make him talk. Without him talking there is no book. Without a book at the end of six weeks, there is no money for you. None. No. Yes?

  No, I replied. Yes.

  No, Gene Paley said. None.

  Yes, I replied. No.

  As he talked, Gene Paley folded the spreadsheets into a neat rectangular mound, stood up, and took off his shirt without shame or concern to reveal a white singlet, slack on his scrawny white body.

  They say there are only three rules for writing a book, Gene Paley said in what felt an anecdote greasy with retelling. Only no one can remember what they are.

  The slightly sagging undersides of his skinny arms were scored with a few bright red moles not much bigger than odd biro marks, approximately attached to a body that gave the impression of never having done any manual work. A man as seemingly unconcerned about being named Gene as Gene Paley, was, I realised, a man beyond the conventions of masculine self-doubt as I had been brought up to understand them. And after only three days of working on the Heidl memoir I was beginning to understand this narrowness in my own thinking as only one of my many limitations. Still, I could not help but think it a shameful body to reveal, the torso of a dachshund topped with the head of a cockatiel. You would need to have been Arcimboldo to do such a body justice.

  He opened a cupboard door from which he took out a freshly ironed shirt.

  But try finishing a first draft, Gene Paley said. Quickly. That’s my advice.

  Without any concern as to my presence, or as to what I might think, he put the shirt on, offering a single sentence that was apparently sufficient as explanation.

  Lunch, he said as he did up his buttons, with Jez Dempster.

  Jez Dempster’s books sold in the hundreds of thousands. Perhaps millions. Jez Dempster was big in the trade.

  As I was saying, a writer like you can learn a great deal from the Jez Dempsters of this world, Gene Paley said. Yes?

  Yes, I replied, or repeated—it seemed to amount to the same thing. Such as—?

  Such as, if you can only learn to write badly enough you can make a great deal of money. You live the alternative.

  I write well?

  You make no money.

  Although there was in Gene Paley’s slightly hooded gaze and his faint smile gentleness and even—perhaps—kindness, there hid in that skinny body, those flaccid arms, a stiletto-like instinct that was highly attuned to status and money. But above all, money. Perhaps that was what was most developed in him: his almost shamanic feeling for money—its needs and its demands, its ecstasies and torments, the supplication and the acts it required of him as an intermediary between its world and ours. There was about him a resolve that I understood even then could easily shade into cruelty, because a man who didn’t care what another man thought of his body was a man who didn’t care what any other man thought about anything or, for that matter, what fate might befall that other man.

  Jez Dempster tells me, he said, unbuttoning his trousers and easing his fly to half-mast, that a classic is a book that never finishes what it wants to say.

  He tucked his shirt flaps in and buttoned his trousers back up.

  You’re not writing a classic, he said. You’re writing a bestseller. And I want you to say everything that anyone would ever want to read in a book about Siegfried Heidl. And I want that book finished in six weeks.

  I must confess that the sight of Gene Paley changing shirts unnerved me. Something in his behaviour—like the kings who dealt with their courtiers and supplicants and matters of state while shitting—made our respective positions far clearer than anything he ever said to me. There was in him an absence of so many things that I understood men were meant to be, and yet it was clear that he thought himself superior. And much as I hated it in myself, I found myself in my awkward posture, my nervous replies, seeming, though I told myself I did not believe it, to somehow agree.

  Not thought, Ray said later, when I told him about the changing of shirts. Knows. Knows he’s better. And people like him are brought up to know it.

  Your shoes, said Gene Paley, now dressed and ushering me with extended arm to the door.

  His eyes dropped to my feet to where the leather of my right Adidas Vienna runner was tearing away from the sole. The shoe wasn’t exactly falling apart, or not just yet anyway, and if I lifted rather than rolled off my foot as I walked I had hopes of it lasting the full six weeks.

  Don’t you have another pair?

  All that time I had been looking at him he had been examining me and he had, I realised, found me wanting. And the truth was I didn’t have another pair, and I could afford none, but I was too ashamed to say that, or to say anything. All I could do was try harder to get Heidl to talk in order that I’d get paid and have some money for, among other things, a new pair of runners.

  4

  I went back down that long corridor, walking with a slight limp as I tried to preserve my Adidas Vienna a few days longer, and turned into the increasingly oppressive executive’s office where Heidl was standing behind the executive’s desk talking on the executive’s phone. He waved at me in a way that might best be described as managerial—at once dismissive, controlling, at ease; a gesture of power. I sat back down at the small conference table, with its three simple chairs, perhaps, I thought now, not so much complex Francis Bacon portraits as straightforward Edvard Munch screams, and as I booted up the Mac Classic I watched Heidl. He put the phone down and immediately began talking once more about toxoplasmosis, or the toxo, as he called it.

  The toxo fascinated Ziggy Heidl, or Ziggy Heidl said the toxo fascinated him. Either way, it was for him a frequent topic of conversation—how the toxoplasmosis parasite affected rats’ brains in such a way that rats lost their instinctive fear of cats. The newly emboldened rats would then be eaten by the cats, a carrier the toxoplasmosis parasite used to reproduce in during the next stage of their breeding cycle. The cats, in turn, would cultivate humans, on to whom they passed the parasite through faecal contamination.

  And what fascinated Heidl above all was exactly how the toxo—which fatally altered rats’ behaviour—might affect humans. He would speculate for hours on the way mad people so often had so many cats. Was the toxo using these peop
le to care for the cats in order to maximise the chances of the toxo surviving in the cats? Were the mad people mad always or had the toxo made them so? He would talk of how the toxo had been strongly implicated in suicides and schizophrenia. The question no one could answer was this: why would the parasite manipulate human beings to such extreme acts?

  If you could only stand listening to him he was, in his way, a beautiful talker, yet almost nothing of what he said was of any use to me. And as he talked of how dolphins were now being infected with the parasite from farm run-off, I began to worry that he was like the toxo that so fascinated him. I momentarily had the ridiculous notion that something might take hold of my mind and make it act against its own will, against its own interests. And with that, I realised how fearful I already had become, and how crazy my fear was.

  I resolved to focus on just getting a few more words done for the day. He told me the kid goat story a second time—or was it the first?—only this time he shot the kid in the head in such a way that the kid died very slowly and he just had to watch.

  This too you learnt from Heidl: how easy it is to remember; how hard to know if there is truth in even one memory. How candour aids the necessary lie and how the lie allows us to live.

  5

  I remember I went to the window after the goat story for the first or last time and looked out. In the distance, some cranes were hunching wearily, and behind them, there on the horizon, a red sun rolled low, spilling grey and bloody light on the world beneath. On the street three storeys below some khaki-clad workmen kicked a football to each other. I envied them their odd freedom. I didn’t know that I was still free. My gaze dropped to the entrance to STP Publishing where, standing far below, I saw Ray, leather bomber-jacketed, strapping up a rollie, looking bored.

  When I turned around, Heidl was still on the phone. I gestured that I was having a break and left the room, taking the stairs the three flights down to the foyer and the main entrance.

  Outside, as inside, everything was new. The instant turf strip along the pavement was without filth and cigarette butts. No graffiti had yet flowered on the grey concrete of the tilt-slab warehouses, nor damasked the umber and olive renders of the low-rise office buildings, the startling sameness of which filled the street and beyond as far as you could see. Everything was ordered and bright, waiting to be eroded into a uniform drabness, and it was all so new that some windows on a building opposite still had their protective film, twisted tails of blue plastic wagging here and there.

  The word shithole, Ray said, is too interesting for a shithole like this.

  It was all so new and yet something was already over. That’s how it felt. I longed to feel so many other things—excitement, ideas, emotions I might use to imagine Heidl’s imaginary childhood. But I just felt an enormous boredom. If I had been a real writer I might have found post-modern beauty or at least a few lines that pretended I did. But I was an islander from an island at world’s end where the measure of all things that mattered was not man-made, and such sights that moved modern literature did not move me. I came from what I had been told was a dull and provincial backwater, and I did not even know how to correctly see, and so how could I properly write?

  It’s just shit, Ray said.

  He was leaning on a long concrete planter box that was chest high. Along it ran an aluminium sheet on which was screen-printed the words STP PUBLISHING and the company’s celebrated colophon, a stylised breaching white whale.

  I said Heidl was back on the phone.

  The wind blew in erratic gusts, and when it hit my face it was gritty. The day smelled of damp stone. I suppose there were sounds but I don’t remember any. Maybe distant traffic. Maybe not. It was that sort of place where nothing made an impression, not noise, not silence.

  Well, this time we made it to Australia without nearly dying, Ray said.

  I was Australian, but I didn’t really know anything about Australia, having grown up in Tasmania, about which no one knows anything, least of all Tasmanians to whom it is only ever a growing mystery. Melbourne was a confident town, by its own estimate, if few others, a great city, which believed it was born out of gold rushes rather than an invasion by Van Diemonian settlers a few years prior to the discovery of gold, men who had made their mark running death squads on the Tasmanian frontier hunting down remnant Tasmanian Aboriginals and massacring them at night around their campfires.

  Some Tasmanians said Melbourne was like Tasmania, only bigger, which now struck me as stupid as saying Tasmania was like New York, only smaller, which was just as true and just as stupid. Really, the world was full of stupid things yet without them what would we have to talk about? Perhaps the only difference between man and animals is man’s capacity to fill his days and life with a universe of stupid things until the only real thing, death, finally arrives to end the nonsense. These days I envy anyone who has been told that they have this or that terminal disease. In my more hopeful moments I pray for cancer.

  I’m going for a walk, I said.

  The road’s bitumen was black and clean as a luxury apartment’s kitchen benchtop, fresh concrete dust dulled the still light grey kerbing, and the galvanised grates gleamed a silvery pearlescence. I could see, as Gene Paley had pointed out at our first meeting, how everything around these streets was about how the country was booming, how—in spite of the recession, in spite of interest rates—the nation was growing, or at least the economy was turning the corner. There was a lot of talk about the economy in those days, it was like Christ the Redeemer; people still believed in the economy like they had in politics before and God before that, mug punters would even talk about J-curves and floating exchange rates over a smoke, as though these words somehow explained them and their lives.

  But as I stood at the first intersection—wondering if I should take smoking back up if just for the duration of this book—the only curve I was conscious of was the growing bulge of loose leather that had torn away a little more from the sole of my right Adidas Vienna runner. Everywhere were more streets that were more of the same, a labyrinth of monotony so total that for a moment I was confused as to where I was and how I would get back to the publishers, which was, after all, only two hundred metres behind me. I limped back with my Vienna-prolonging gait and asked Ray for a smoke.

  Fuck me, Ray said, you need a hip replacement before a durrie.

  He was watching the workmen playing football on the street. One wore a cowboy hat: when he marked the ball he would stop, straighten up, lean down, pull up his socks, toss gravel into the wind, and, with great solemnity, kick back to his mate. As his mate marked he would run around in a small circle, waving a victory finger in the air.

  Fuck what? I said.

  Shit, Ray said slowly. He could invest a single meaningless word with the gravitas and mystery of a Nobel laureate glossing string theory.

  What?

  That’s it, mate.

  What’s it?

  It, he repeated.

  I had no idea what he was on about, but I rarely did.

  You know, mate, Ray said, leaning in.

  He was smiling now, rolling me a cigarette with his Champion Ruby tobacco, looking through me as if he had won another pub brawl. Or was about to start one.

  You fuckn know, Ray said and winked. Handing me the durrie, he leant further in so that our foreheads were nearly butting. He looked furtively around, and hissed.

  He thinks they want to kill him.

  6

  They want to say things, the dead. Ordinary things, everyday things. Of a night they return to me and I allow them in. I let them their tongue. They talk of what we watch, what we see, what we hear and touch, free as the moon to wander the true night. The unbodied air, wrote Melville. But there is no Ziggy Heidl. No Ray. No others. Back then, before I had written anything, I knew everything about writing. Now I know nothing. Living? Nothing. Life? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  2

  1

  THE BANKS, Heidl said on the fourth day,
as if in answer to my persistent thoughts. They want to kill me.

  After the fluster and hope and excitement of the first three days, things had ground to a halt. At best, Heidl answered in irritating riddles and, at worst, was distracted or, worse yet, entirely uninterested. His principal concern was how he might get Gene Paley to pay him the next instalment of his advance.

  You? I said. Why on earth would they want to kill you?

  Because of what I’ve done. And what I know. I know a lot that could cause—well—damage. Prominent people. Powerful people.

  He was almost droning, transfixed by the romance of his own destiny, when, as was his way, another thought seemed to strike him and he grew suddenly animated.

  Do you think Paley would pay me half the instalment if you could show him some pages now?

  I said there were no pages.

  Isn’t that your job?

  I shook my head.

  Make the pages? Isn’t that what you do? What you’re here for?

  I suggested that if he might just tell me something about his life I might just turn it into some pages and Gene Paley might just turn that into some money.

  Heidl ignored this, if for that matter he heard it.

  No bank would want to kill you, I said, seeking any form of engagement. They have you about to go to jail anyway.

  At such times he would look about conspiratorially, and, leaning forward, seem to be taking me into his confidence.

  Things I know they wouldn’t want you to know. Who can say what I might say in court?

  Like?

  Heidl laughed. His cheek dimpled furiously.

  I am not going to tell you anything. But that’s what they think—that I am going to tell you. And there are people feeding their fears.

  People?

  People like Eric Knowles. He knows about my links. My connections.

  Connections with whom?