First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  Still, I told myself, it was a job. And all those things that went with a job—patterns, timetables, schedules, rituals, and workmates—I found not unpleasant. As I met others in the tea room, or corridor, I persisted with the lie of the poetry anthology. The ruse was a burden, a joke, and an excitement, but looking back it’s hard to believe anyone would have been interested enough to care whether it was true.

  A book of mediaeval German folk verse was admittedly an odd project, but for a few years yet, publishing could still be an assortment of odd projects and make money. Within the house people each had their own books and their own worries—books to edit, design, market, sell, distribute. What did they care about an arcane project some transient editors were working on that would be published to simultaneous acclaim and oblivion? In a culture of follies, it loomed smaller than most. Now I look back on it and I think, of course, people there knew our cover was rubbish. The only person who truly believed in the deceit was me. Heidl had me from the beginning.

  7

  I hadn’t felt good leaving Suzy alone in Hobart, heavily pregnant, and with Bo to look after. But from the moment that I accepted the job, it was clear to us both that it would be the only way we could keep our home. It wasn’t a matter of what was best, but what was necessary. And this seemed of a piece with the pregnancy, which was a force spinning me both into Suzy and wildly spinning me away from her, a violent power at once centripetal and centrifugal. We became cruel to each other for reasons that were never clear, and our fights grew more frequent. Perhaps that was because there was from the beginning something wrong about us, though we were unable to see what it was, as we were unable to see so many things.

  And after we fought there was often intense sex. What had become erratic and perfunctory had returned with an odd desperate ferocity, the more so perhaps because Suzy seemed almost entirely fixated on her own pleasure. It was as if sex was all we had to explain and understand all that was inexplicable and beyond understanding. Her jolting body. Her soft lips after. Her command: Love me. I heard people say that she was beautiful. They had no idea. Yet what brought us momentarily together somehow only succeeded in leaving us more divided, and empty, and alone. Each time it only confirmed something that neither of us wanted to express.

  We covered the opening abyss and our own eyes with rice-paper words: love, mostly. Family, often. Those sorts of words. The lies that blind, you could say. And yet, the words were as true as they were false. Raised by an alcoholic father, Suzy wanted a family, stability, a home. Perhaps I wanted similar things. Certainly, I used similar words to keep fear at bay. Like Suzy, I wanted a family, some peace; yet behind it all lurked death, my fear of death, a fear driven deep within me in the middle of a wild sea when death kept wanting me, when death kept dragging me down. And now my desire to taunt death, to remind death I was still alive, to taste if only a little of life before I was gone was an overwhelming force within me.

  But how to live?

  That was what haunted me. And Heidl made me think I answered the question wrongly. For I also wanted, with a force almost violent, to be free, alone, and, beyond all that, to escape what I could feel was coming to me and enshrouding me like a spider’s web. Perhaps I was always planning my escape. It would be unfair and wrong to say I lied to myself. I lied to myself completely.

  Yet sometimes when I was alone of a night in Melbourne lying on a foam mattress on Sully’s floor and thought of Suzy, of our children born and unborn, of that strange necessity which joined us, I would feel a pain grip my stomach with such agonising force it would leave me panting.

  8

  I made it home for the weekend mid-Saturday. Suzy picked me up from the airport, and though weary was in unexpectedly good health. We had again and again been warned to expect the worst, but other than the practical difficulties of vastness, which were not inconsiderable, Suzy suffered no ill health beyond lack of sleep and occasional indigestion. She was also extraordinarily serene, as if the carrying of twins had led to a double dose of whatever soothing hormones a woman’s body releases at such times. Mostly she smiled and laughed.

  The doctors had said that Suzy might go into labour at any time from the six-month mark. But the sixth month had calmly given way to the seventh through which we had waited anxiously, and then the eighth came and still we waited for the waters to break, still we waited for the first contraction, for all the strange unknown unknowable things that signalled birth. Yet, amazingly, week after week passed, and now the ninth month was upon us, and the health of both Suzy and the unborn twins remained excellent. We scried Suzy’s body for signs of the beginning of birth. But other than Suzy growing even larger than she already was, nothing happened.

  To prepare us for the likelihood of a premature birth the hospital had a few months earlier arranged a special tour of the neonatal intensive care unit. A midwife had taken us through the humming and clicking machines, the tubes, the bright fluorescent lights, the air of heightened efficiency, to a humidicrib. There a tiny neo-reptilian creature lay encased, translucent skin beneath which florettes of fine capillaries sustained life.

  This is Jo-Anne, she said. She’s our pin-up girl. Nine weeks prem, and now three weeks old.

  Jo-Anne seemed too much of a name for so small a puckered thing, two rash-red bulbs, one slashed with eyes, the other, larger, sprouting four tiny tendril limbs occasionally spasming. The most distinctly human thing about the baby were her wisps of fingers clutched in defiant fists.

  Everything that can happen has happened to Jo-Anne, the nurse said. But she boxes on.

  Twins, we were told, invariably come not just early but mostly far too early, the simple reality of the combined mass of two embryos tripping the body into contractions. The consequences were unpredictable. Many bad things, which other parents in the modern world no longer considered possibilities, were of real concern to us. And these things were mostly about death, or the cruel price that must be paid if you escape death.

  As we gazed at the stomach-clutching sight of tiny babies twitching inside slightly opaque perspex humidicribs—kept levitating above death by a tangled vermicelli of monitor wires and feeding and draining and breathing tubes—we were told that twins, one or both, could die in the course of labour. And if they survived birth their struggles were far from over.

  The risks were outlined in dreary, forbidding detail by a cheery woman in her late twenties. Feeding difficulties. Breathing difficulties. Developmental difficulties. Once, death of both twins common. No longer. Now death of one not uncommon. Lifelong health problems for the survivor. Impaired intellectual development. Therapy. Prem death, early death, maternal death.

  We seemed to have walked out of life into a war zone, where there were no longer guarantees, happiness, the simple joys—if they were that—of parenthood and family; but rather trauma, triage, at best survival. And everywhere there still lurked death, death’s possibility, death’s likelihood. In consequence, the new breeze of more intimate birthing—with far less medical intervention, in low-lit rooms—which was sweeping the western world in the late twentieth century, was not to be ours.

  The reality of twins pushed us back to another time, another era when the men in white coats called all the shots. We were powerless, fearful for our unborn children, and we said yes to all their rules and all their injunctions. What choice had we?

  9

  Early on the Sunday afternoon, a few hours before my flight back to Melbourne, Gene Paley rang to say he had read the draft chapter. He declared it good as far as it went. Though he felt I had conveyed something of the psychology of Heidl, what he needed now was a story. Readers need a story. The trade, he went on, needs a story.

  So, as I was saying, he said, we build on what you have, and you forward me an outline for the entire book by Thursday.

  It was the first time he’d said anything like this.

  But…the chapter? I asked, irritated that having demanded it, Gene Paley now seemed to find it of almost no cons
equence. I am not sure what I had expected as feedback. The letters of Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet? All that, I guess. And more. But I had Gene Paley, and Gene Paley paused, as if having been asked to explain an empty plate.

  Oh, he said. But that’s done. What we really need now is an outline.

  It was becoming clear to me that I would have to pass several hurdles before I was safe as the writer of the book. What wasn’t clear then but what I can see now was that Gene Paley was as desperate as Heidl and me. We had all gone too far with something we all regretted, as if the three of us now stood in front of a shallow grave that had to be filled. Trying to repress a growing resentment, I asked what sort of an outline.

  You know, Gene Paley said—a rough outline. That sort of thing. Something of each chapter. CIA? Banks? Sales are pressing me for something concrete, and they’re right to press me. Twenty or thirty pages are plenty. But I’ll need it by Thursday so we can know whether we have a book.

  After the call ended I felt angry and sick at the same time. What sort of thing was that sort of thing? Twenty pages wasn’t much. It was also a mountain. When it came to Heidl’s life, I didn’t even have enough to fill a page. Over the week Heidl had talked much and told me next to nothing. By some miracle, I’d concocted a chapter out of tone, voice, the oddities of intonation and a handful of concrete details. It seemed a cruel joke to think that a further few days would produce substantially more.

  I told Suzy what Gene Paley’s next demand was. I said I didn’t know how I might meet it, how it felt beyond me. She told me she knew that I would do it, that I always did. I was in despair and her consolations infuriated me. How could she know when I didn’t? She just did, she said. How stupid was she not to see how impossible it was? It wasn’t impossible for me, she replied. And in this way we began arguing.

  My growing anger with Heidl, my deepest fear of failure, all grew into a rage with Suzy. I was fiddling with a kitchen knife on the sink. I was yelling how I couldn’t do what Gene Paley expected of me, couldn’t she understand? Using my hand to emphasise a point, without thinking about it, I drew the knife up above shoulder height, blade in, angling down.

  Don’t you see! I was shouting when I saw Suzy’s expression change. She was staring above my head. I looked up to see a knife hovering over us, angled ready to cut and hack. And I was holding it. I don’t know what I meant to do with the knife. I never had such a terrible feeling.

  Kif?

  And in rage, in demonstration of something I even now don’t care to give words to, or in terror, or shame, I slammed that knife down in front of Suzy with such brutal force that I drove it through the stainless-steel trough.

  The knife sat there upright, tip jammed hard into the steel, shivering with the slightest thrum, an accusation awaiting its crime. A vibration seemed to swirl out from that knife long after it was still, its whirlpool-like rings enveloping me. Against my will, I could feel myself beginning to be pulled down and becoming someone else, a stranger who, nevertheless, seemed familiar.

  Perhaps we hurt each other in the hope of discovery, only to discover all the things we wish we had never known. I turned to Suzy. I heard myself talking. I heard myself trying to defend the book, my hours, my ambition to be a writer, my neglect of her. And with each word I uttered I felt the emptiness of everything I was saying.

  And lacking words that might matter I walked out of the kitchen and went up the stairs to return to writing words that didn’t matter at all.

  7

  1

  IF MY FIRST WEEK HAD, in spite of its difficulties, proved modestly productive, the second week began badly and, as far as Heidl’s interest in the memoir went, only worsened. My questions elicited nothing beyond the curtest of responses from Heidl, who sat behind his desk, quiet, absorbed in the newspaper, or making phone calls.

  I remember, for example, asking him about Brett Garrett, the long-time ASO book keeper who had disappeared in 1987. I spoke of how distressing that must have been for what was still a small staff, as Garrett was said to have been much liked. I was hoping it might spark some memories.

  Sad? Heidl said. He went back to reading the paper—he was fond of newspapers—and some time later, without looking up from the page, as though he were asking for help with the crossword, two words for satisfaction in eight letters, he said, Very sad.

  I began to wonder if Heidl felt any real emotion. Or, if rather than emotions he had a gallery of poses in his mind, and when he felt it appropriate he could go to that gallery and cloak his mind in whatever was needed—sympathy, say; or anger; rage or affection. Or perhaps he felt nothing, perhaps he lived in some world beyond love, beyond grief, beyond pain. Perhaps he watched the world and he played with the evil he found in it as he played with us—Ray, Gene Paley, me.

  He pointed to an article he was reading about the Queensland government denying media reports that it was working on a clandestine rocket launch project with NASA that employed Siegfried Heidl. He shook his head, dismissing the claim as wrong in its details, the statement of idiots who knew nothing about the shadow world. It was all said in such a way that it implied there was a NASA connection, the existence of which, along with the space station, he had denied when I had previously asked him about it.

  At lunch he impressed on me that Cape York was a big project financed by a venture capital firm out of Seattle, while an hour later he said it was all a ridiculous media beat-up. By mid-afternoon it was the pet project of a Singapore media mogul whose anonymity he needed to protect.

  He contradicted his own lies with fresh lies, and then he contradicted his contradictions. It was as if he couldn’t exist except in the tumult of self-denial. The necessarily incomplete nature of Heidl’s stories, rather than denying their supposed truth, instead confirmed it. I am not saying Heidl consciously made sure his slow-drip stories never quite matched, and were often entirely opposed. But as an instinctive ruse it was more than effective. For the challenge to reconcile such outrageous lies lay not with him, but with you, the listener.

  There was so much in this that I could see might help me as a writer—so much that I hadn’t known; so much that confirmed to me that I hadn’t understood my craft at all. I was now with a man who had no interest in books other than stealing as many as he could, yet who instinctively understood so much more about them than I ever had.

  When I began questioning Heidl once more about who the real backers were of his launch station scheme he switched again. He hinted that he had worked with the CIA on the deposing of Whitlam as the Australian prime minister in 1975, learning from the mistakes we had made deposing Allende in Chile.

  Chile was another incantory refrain of Heidl’s, not as frequently intoned as the toxo, but more disturbing. Sometimes it was as if he wished to claim as his own legacy all the tortured bodies and bloating corpses that were the Santiago national stadium and its aftermath—to say nothing of the secret war on Laos and the forgotten Laotian dead, to which he also alluded; and on and on, the incinerated and butchered and forgotten dead of Indonesia, of Haiti, of Nicaragua, of so many other countries, the endless forever forgotten dead—so many dead, in fact, so much so abhorrent and wrong, and all of which he seemed to need to proudly imply was in some way his own handiwork, but about which he would never say anything.

  Sometimes when he talked like this, so softly, so reasonably, I wondered if there was no evil in which he did not wish to be implicated. It was almost as though he saw himself as a being who could multiply infinitely to visit a universal horror on the world. It was in equal measure ludicrous, laughable, and disturbing. And yet the moment you pressed him for a detail he could spin away from such nonsense, seguing into a run of questions that often felt malevolent. At such times, he talked simply, in the way the best writers write simply; his words nothing, the undertow of them everything, and I felt the weight of something cold, and cruel.

  Do you love your wife? he asked that Monday in reply to my pressing him about the space station, his
soft voice the voice of a priest, of a confessor, of a cop working patiently to entrap you in a crime you never committed.

  And when I made no reply, a silence which also somehow felt a betrayal, he grinned slyly.

  Do you, Kif?

  2

  Siegfried, I said (I was still respectful in those first weeks), if you know something about the CIA’s involvement with deposing Whitlam, just say it.

  I was thinking more on my idea, Heidl replied. How perhaps it would be better for you—and, to be frank, the book—if I came to Tasmania.

  Just one fact, I said.

  We could work at your home.

  Just say it.

  And you’d be there to help your wife.

  But don’t bother me about my private life.

  What’s her name again? Suzy?

  That’s not the subject of this book, Siegfried.

  Suzy, he said. That’s it. You know, Kif, you’d make a lousy CEO.

  You’d make a great novelist.

  A good CEO shares. That ability to open up with colleagues.

  His terrifying smile. His pulsing cheek. His corpse eyes.

  How can I, Heidl said, be loyal to someone who won’t even tell me his child’s name?

  That was too much for me.

  How can your wife be loyal to her husband, I said, who won’t even tell her his real name?

  This aggression of yours, Kif, Heidl went on, it is so unnecessary. If you were working at home you wouldn’t feel so stressed. I’ll speak to Paley about it.

  I said nothing, forlornly hoping, perhaps, that he might weary. He didn’t. He couldn’t.

  You shouldn’t take their side, Kif, accusing me of wicked things.

  Whose side?

  The banks. You’re meant to be helping me tell my story.