First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  So…six hundred pages? I said, a cud of despair rising, thinking surely not every American novel was that long or that bad. How many words is that?

  Oh, look, for this, one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five thousand words would be fine.

  I confessed I didn’t think there was a hundred thousand words in Siegfried Heidl. To be frank, I felt like saying I didn’t think there was a sentence in him.

  What, I asked, might be the minimum?

  Gene Paley pulled a face.

  Seventy-five thousand, I guess.

  The maths seemed not worth pondering. Still, I pondered it. A good day for me on my novel had been three hundred words. Times the twenty-three days I had left equalled 6,900 words. Which was a short story. Or less than one tenth of Gene Paley’s minimum memoir. And, as well, there still remained unwritten the outline Gene Paley had previously requested. I suddenly felt very cold.

  We can put in a lot of white space, Gene Paley said, thinking it through. There are tricks we can use. Make the typeface larger. Increase the leading. Use heavy paper stock to help with the illusion. There’s a danger with that approach though.

  Sorry? I said. I hadn’t really heard anything since 75,000 words.

  People might read it. But I’m confident, Gene Paley said as he opened the door, that you’re going to give us something even readers will like. By the way, he said with a sudden grimace, have you seen the latest Woman’s Day? Heidl talking about meeting John Lennon. Great story. Except it’s ours, not theirs. We have him exclusively. I wasn’t pleased, but Siegfried’s given me his word it won’t happen again.

  He waved a meek hand in farewell.

  I look forward to reading your outline tomorrow, Kif.

  The full horror of my situation swept over me. The outline had until now defeated me. I hadn’t a clue how to write even that. I was surfing a mudslide and trying not to fall off.

  Gene, I stammered. I don’t think tomorrow will be possible.

  You don’t?

  I’m sorry. You can see there are…absences. That take time to fill. That need—

  Gene Paley lifted his arm in the traffic cop gesture.

  Hold that thought, Kif, he said. The sales and marketing meeting is next Wednesday. I can give you until ten that morning, but no later.

  And with a final click and wink he was gone.

  7

  After Gene Paley left, I sat at the conference table. Seeing no alternative, I thought more on the maths. It was never my strong suit. Heidl left me feeling much the same as mathematics. The combination of calculation and his character were numbers less than reassuring. I had a little over four weeks left. Allowing a week each for the second and third drafts—ludicrous, I thought, and frankly, whatever way you looked at it, perhaps impossible—I had under three weeks to finish the first draft, which, on balance, was probably even more insane. For the first draft, I somewhat generously subtracted the confusion of notes that I had made, designating them, in a moment of optimism, as 8,000 words of finished manuscript. With this wishful arithmetic as my only compass I divided 75,000 by twenty-one days and realised I had henceforth to get 3,571 words written each day. 3,571! Still, nothing mattered now in the face of this almost impossible target—not my failings nor Heidl’s.

  I typed:

  HEIDL MEMOIR: SCHEDULE

  (daily total 3,571 wds)

  Week 1 25,000 wds (draft 1) (2 days gone)

  Week 2 25,000 wds (draft 1)

  Week 3 25,000 wds (draft 1)

  Week 4 Draft 2 75,000 wds (rewrite)

  Week 5 Draft 3 (fin) 75,000 wds (revise)

  Plan A, at which I was now staring, was clear and definite in demanding of me an industry that was beyond reason. 3,571 words a day? 3,571 words every day? 3,571 words seven days a week? I tried to think of a Plan B. Murder?

  Perhaps—just perhaps—if I had a willing collaborator—someone who was prepared to do the work, to answer my questions and fill out the details—I could do it. I hit the Delete key and watched the cursor unzip my timetable of infinite hope.

  I started typing again.

  HEIDL MEMOIR: SCHEDULE

  Week 1 grow feathers

  Week 2 fly to the moon

  Week 3 cure motor neurone disease

  Week 4 run fastest 100 metres in human history

  Week 5 write a book (fin)

  Then I deleted that too. I stared at the nightmare of the blank screen and the panting cursor. The most I had ever managed in a single day working on my novel were 562 words, and many of them had veered dangerously close to plagiarism. There again, I reassured myself, this job was solely plagiarism, for what was ghost writing but robbing from the life of someone else and calling it a book?

  I rechecked my figures. Perhaps I had it wrong. I mostly did. And once again I did the long division and once again I got the same number, the same answer, the same question: how was it possible? Because every way I looked at it, it wasn’t.

  8

  Heidl returned from his meeting a little after lunch, a subdued, silent Ray in tow. He heidled some more and none of it to any point or any use. And not five minutes later he announced that he was off again: another meeting, another journalist, he said.

  Another lie.

  More out of perversity than curiosity I asked who he was meeting.

  It’s secret, he said.

  I asked him why everything was a secret, and he shot me a look that might have been plaintive or might have been mocking, or both.

  Without secrets how are we to live? he said.

  And, with that, he was gone.

  I felt utter defeat. Exhausted by Heidl, hungover, I lay on the floor and almost immediately fell into a heavy sleep, without dreams. I woke at dusk to an extreme sunset. The sky was a series of bruises and purple welts. I watched the red sun drop like a beaten head into a gutter.

  9

  Over the last two days of that second week—as Heidl continued to bluster and prevaricate—it was as if I had finally accepted the heaviest of burdens, taken the full measure of its weight across my back and shoulders, and bracing every fibre of my being begun to stagger forward. In my more optimistic moments I thought I might even possibly make it.

  I now took down very little of what Heidl said. I was too poor a typist for that, and, in any case, most of what he said was babble. I found myself less and less interested in what Heidl might say and instead concentrated on the way he said it. To help me reach my word count for the day I took to drinking in the sound of him, straining to grasp the music of his voice on the phone in the background; striving to catch the odd clip of his sentences, a beat from which I might begin cantilevering out a flying buttress of clauses that could bear the weight of a sentence, and in turn begin building up a page with paragraphs of invention. My prose began rumpling into new shapes—those allusive, elusive arches of sentences composed of two opposing questions reaching out over emptiness: Maybe if I tell you this, or perhaps if I were to say that…

  They were arabesques of nonsense but there was a music in them. It was almost jazz. He was Thelonious Monk and I just tried to hang in, playing around his parts, filling in all the notes and beats that he didn’t bother with, rough inventions of childhood and career he needed me to find to make him whole.

  And in this way, I found the ludicrous figure of 3,571 words bringing on in me a capacity for invention I had never known writing my novel.

  But now I can see that all the time I thought I was simply mimicking a tone, catching a rhythm, something more was being deeply etched into me. For I was learning from him the power of suggestion rather than demonstration; of evasion rather than enlightenment; of giving only one fact—or really, just the rumour of a fact—and then letting the reader invent everything else around it.

  I was, without being aware of it, learning to distract from the truth by amusing the reader; to flatter the reader by playing on what they believed to be their virtues—their ideas of goodness and decency—whilst leading them ever f
urther into an alien darkness that was the real world and, perhaps, the real them; and, on occasion, I feared, the real me.

  And the more I saw of him, the more I found every smile, every gesture full of falsity, and each day the more frightened of him I grew. I would drive home in the Nissan Skyline, grateful to have escaped that room and him, but I hadn’t really escaped anything, for as soon as I was at Sully’s place I’d get in the shower, turn the taps hard on, and once more run Sully’s boiler out of hot water, too ashamed to tell him that I was all that long time simply trying to wash Heidl off me.

  And every night when I thought I was washing him away I was deluding myself. For he was entering me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I sensed it, how could I not? But I ignored it because the words were beginning to come. He was entering me and there were more and more words, and with each word somehow less and less of me. I was a man unmoored, once more adrift in a wild sea. Only this time, I did not know it. I had let him in. I did not know it, and all that time Heidl did.

  10

  If I were a better writer I’d reimagine this whole story as a vampire novel. But I am just reporting what happened. It’s not that I didn’t resist. I did. It’s just that I wasn’t as good at resisting as I thought. And that’s why the words con man always struck me as inadequate in describing Heidl. Con men are after your money. Perhaps that was true of him. Given his long list of criminal charges, I guess it was true of him. But Heidl was also after something more. Heidl was after your soul.

  And at first Heidl offered me friendship, warmth, a certain camaraderie—or as much as a man like Heidl could pretend to such things—and, in addition, what I perhaps craved more than anything else, respect as a writer. He even asked me to help him write a speech, a keynote address he told me he had been asked to deliver in a few weeks’ time at a national conference of auditors in Albury-Wodonga. Their theme, he told me, was “Auditing: Be Seen, Be Recognised.”

  Taken aback though I was that such an invitation would ever be made, incredulous as I felt when I read his speech “notes”—scatterings of words that only occasionally threatened to form a coherent sentence, I confess I found his drivel about integrity, the collapse of ethics in modern life and the criminality of contemporary society not without its own magnificence. To be frank, I felt it impossible to better his opening line: “Bleating sheep should not seek to howl with wolves.”

  That it was stolen from a ’70s New Age bestseller about a Basque shepherd I only discovered years later. There was, though, something almost admirably audacious in beginning a talk fraudulently to a conference of those whose job it is to root out fraud. A man of unexpected shallows, in another life he may have risen to be a self-help expert, topping the New York Times bestseller lists and giving absurdly priced motivational lectures. And who knows what else? Personal branding. Perhaps even fragrance lines. As it was, his prospects were sadly reduced to me, a memoir, and a gathering of auditors.

  I could see that for others he seemed aglow with some indefinable aura, a wickedness that was also a glamour; a conspiratorial mystery that somehow you and you alone felt invited to join, and at its apex, a gorgeous darkness that wasn’t quite evil and wasn’t quite not evil. No—I felt none of that, or at least not at first, perhaps because Ray had so frightened me with his warnings that I didn’t dare see any of Heidl’s exotic charm as other than subterfuge, deceit, manipulation. But I sensed that it was something more than these things, something else—the chance to submit and subjugate yourself to another, and, after all, isn’t that what so many of us secretly crave? To be told what to do, and what not to do? To not be alone? Who does not feel the immense attraction of being led?

  If I had been a reasonable man I might have liked him reasonably well and done a reasonable job in writing his story. But, much as I pretended to others and myself, I was very far from reasonable. And as the second week drew to its close, though there was growing within me a feeling towards him that was compounded of loyalty, sympathy, and complicity, there was also arising in me, and maybe in even stronger measure, a different, opposed emotion. And this other emotion made me shudder. Does hatred always begin in recognition?

  8

  1

  THE BEAST at eight on a Friday evening had about it the fetid languor of pubs of the era; that sticky fug of smoke and yeast and sweet acridity of odour, the ease in the early evening of a battlefield between bombardments. Ray drank steadily, with the grim efficacy of a kitchen appliance that existed solely to empty glasses.

  Heidl’s bullshitting you again, I said to Ray as he downed another pot.

  Even before I met Heidl, I had known from Ray that they had been working together on some project in Cape York for an extended period of time. Yet I had found it hard to believe Ray’s story of them searching there for a site for a rocket launch facility. It had seemed too far-fetched until the Queensland government’s refutation of it, which was, somehow, in the topsy-turvy view of Heidl that I was increasingly taking on, weird confirmation. But what Ray had just said left me once more in a state of disbelief.

  Heidl didn’t tell me, Ray said. I was at a party a few weeks ago and bumped into Pedro Morgan. The old ops manager at the ASO. There were a few other of the ASO senior commanders there. They were all close to Heidl. Best mates. And we got talking about Spaceportal.

  Spaceportal?

  The company that’s behind the proposal to build the rocket launching facility in Cape York. Ziggy set it up after he was let out on bail.

  I never got that Cape York thing. It’s a thousand k’s from anywhere.

  Exactly—that’s why it’s perfect. But because Heidl’s a bankrupt, and facing further charges, he can’t be a director or CEO of Spaceportal. He’s not allowed to borrow money.

  So?

  So, he gets six of the senior ex-ASO guys; he says if you’re mates—if you’re real mates—you’ll come in on this with me, because this thing is going to be worth a fortune. Satellites are where the world is going—communications, TV, you name it.

  But Heidl runs it.

  Not officially. He’s a bankrupt. He’s not allowed by law.

  But unofficially?

  Well, Ray said. Sure. He’s Ziggy Heidl. And he persuades them to remortgage their homes and put their money into capitalising Spaceportal. In return, they become the directors.

  So you’re telling me the Cape York thing isn’t financed by Singapore millionaires or NASA?

  What?

  Or the CIA?

  I’m just telling you what I know.

  It’s paid for by ex-ASO employees out of their life savings.

  If you want to put it that way. It sounded a good deal.

  So Heidl’s just scamming off his mates, I said.

  I dunno, Ray said, and went to the bar.

  It’s his last big con job, I said when he came back.

  I mean it could be, Ray said. But I don’t think so. They’re smart guys. They wouldn’t be putting their money in, risking their homes if they didn’t think it was a good idea to build a rocket launching station in Cape York.

  But why do they think it’s a good idea?

  Well, there’s a lot of evidence. It’s closer to the moon there.

  Ray looked to me as if I might reassure him on this point.

  Isn’t it?

  What? Australia?

  Cape York, Ray said. With less certainty, he mumbled, The equator? It’s…fatter there. Right?

  Fatter?

  Or something. He coughed, readied himself as if for a recital, and told me that the scientific consensus was that it was one of the best places in the world from which to launch rockets.

  Really, I said. Says who?

  The…eh, the consensus.

  What consensus, Ray?

  Ray looked at me quizzically and murmured, Scientists?

  What scientists, Ray?

  I don’t fuckn know. I’m not the expert, mate. But there’s a lot out there about it all.

  Have you
seen any scientific papers saying this?

  Not exactly.

  No?

  Not personally. Okay? But Ziggy has. He told me.

  Heidl told you?

  Several thoughts, all irreconcilable, seemed to hit Ray at once.

  Did he show you? I asked. Ray?

  He raised an empty glass to his lips and, realising his error, swore. When he next spoke his voice was furtive.

  He had these…papers…scientific papers in his briefcase.

  Did you read them?

  Ray thought about this. His mouth went to form several different words, as though there were a dozen fish hooks in his lips pulling them in opposing directions. It was as if he were once more in a remote New Guinea river gorge looking at a damp map of Irian Jaya.

  Well, not exactly.

  Not exactly?

  He told me then.

  And you believed him?

  His mouth did the fish hook thing again.

  I did. But when you put it…like that. I dunno.

  And his old friends were paying for all this?

  Mates. Well. Yeah.

  It was never going to happen, Ray.

  I dunno, mate. Besides, even if it didn’t, that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

  Can’t you see? It’s just another lie.

  Don’t you think it’d be an unreal thing for Australia? Its own Houston?

  It’s a good idea for Ziggy.

  What’s wrong with having good ideas? Anyway, the atmosphere is thinner up there in the tropics. Isn’t it?

  Is it?

  I think Ziggy told me that. I don’t know. Or Pedro.

  How would Pedro Morgan know?

  I guess Ziggy told him. I told you. He had the research.

  Heidl?

  Heidl, yeah. But wouldn’t it be great? I mean Australia having its own rocket launching base.

  Heidl? The only guarantee they’ve got is Heidl’s word?