First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  No. No, I never said that. I didn’t need to. They wanted to think that. They wanted to think that they were looking at over two hundred million dollars in big long boxes. I showed them up close one full steel box, and then at a distance two hundred and seven empty ones. And as we circled in the chopper, helmeted and earphoned and miked-up, I’d say through the chopper’s wireless, There—they’re all ours! Which was true. They would say, So you put them to similar use? And I’d reply, We put them to excellent use. They’re a wonderful source of income, I’d say, and give a thumbs-up. And up would come their thumbs like a row of pulled carrots.

  Back on the ground, jolly over, they’d open their briefcases, delighted to hand over the papers that gave me another multi-million-dollar line of credit. We’d sign, and have a drink. And always they’d talk about how the most impressive thing was the sight of those orange and blue shipping containers on the football field.

  When I said I still didn’t get how it could have gone on for so long, Siegfried Heidl fixed me with an expression of surprise as though I were the stupidest man on earth.

  Don’t you see? he said, leaning forward onto his desk. I made it up. Every day, just like you. Like a writer.

  He rapped the desktop with his knuckles.

  I’d go to the office. Each and every morning. Again, and again, and again. Make it up, and then make it up some more. And that was enough. More than enough. It just kept on growing. And you know what happened? People began flowing through my door—more and more people—bankers, journalists, TV crews, politicians, police commissioners, ex-generals, CEOs, ambassadors, academics. And I learnt the less I told them, the more they made it up. In the end, I didn’t have to make up anything. I was a prophet to them. And you know what Tebbe says about prophets?

  I had no idea what Tebbe said about anything.

  The greatest of prophets has but the vaguest of messages, Heidl said. The vaguer the message, the greater the prophet.

  2

  I halted my typing. For once, I almost believed him. Was it possible that there really was no CIA, no large myth, but rather something so obvious it couldn’t exist in a book?

  There are two realities, really, aren’t there? Heidl said, holding up a finger to lend his words the illusion of conviction.

  There’s this office made of concrete and glass, and there’s a story called STP. And you know what? The story of STP is more real, more powerful than this concrete. Because the concrete can’t destroy STP but STP can demolish the concrete. And that’s because people believe in the story of STP. Around the world there are accountants and editors and CEOs and sales people, and all that unites them is this belief that STP exists. And that belief is a story.

  I was, I admit, lost. Heidl, on the other hand, was just finding his theme for the day.

  Look, Heidl said. There are seas and lands and animals and plants, and there’s a story called the Cold War. And I tell you, that story nearly destroyed those seas and lands and plants and animals.

  The screen had frozen.

  What do you think a businessman is? A politician? They’re sorcerers—they make things up. Stories are all that we have to hold us together. Religion, science, money—they’re all just stories. Australia is a story, politics is a story, religion is a story, money is a story and the ASO was a story. The banks just stopped believing in my story. And when belief dies, nothing is left.

  You lied, I said, as I switched the Mac Classic off and on and waited for it to reboot.

  But he was doing that odd awful thing he sometimes did with his tongue, running it over his lips as his cheek tick-ticked away like some fantastic diaphragm.

  I told stories, he said.

  Not everything, Siegfried, is a story.

  And people wanted them.

  You lied, I said.

  Truth is a story. But good wine needs cheap glass to hold it. Truth needs lies so we can grasp it.

  The truth is you’re going to go down in the courts for lies.

  I don’t think so, Heidl said.

  It was hopeless. I was typing but no characters were appearing. I realised none of what he was saying would ever make it into his memoir, because a memoir was a series of selected lies, and Heidl was again, bizarrely, speaking to something that approached truth. And I felt sick with bewilderment, or vertigo, I don’t know what, I just felt sick, as if I were falling through some portal into another life, because somehow I had begun to think like Heidl, and something of Heidl was becoming—

  We are the miracle, I heard Heidl say. God created the world, but man creates himself every day. And our stories bring us together for as long as we believe in them.

  And, for the briefest instant, I had the strange sense I saw everything, my life to that point, my life to come, all of it in that poor, hapless executive’s office, amidst the veneered chipboard and glossy pictorials that were even in that bright fluorescent light already fading into the colours of nostalgia—the yellow of rotting viscera and the lost green of aged rot, the russet of dried blood—like the spilled brains of some dying monster.

  And then? I asked.

  And then you sit down with a ghost writer and look for a new story.

  3

  To the extent he was at work, Heidl tended to keep conventional office hours, mostly arriving about 10 a.m. and leaving by 5 p.m. Because interstate calls were still a matter of some expense, when Heidl was not about I would call Suzy on the work phone. The morning following I called home before Heidl arrived. As I waited for Suzy to answer, the odour of the work phone—scented as it always was with Heidl’s aftershave, halfway between cleaning spirits and baby powder, the smell of a mortician—was so strong I had to hold it away from my face.

  It was Bo who answered. She sang for me over the phone, then tearfully asked when I would be home. I heard Suzy saying four sleeps, and promise her they would go to the park later that morning if she would let Mummy now speak.

  Suzy told me her visit the previous day to the obstetrician had scared her. Small things. Nothing, really. But scary. She cried when I asked her why she hadn’t rung me straightaway. She said I’d seemed so busy. She was worried about the phone bill. She hadn’t wanted to trouble me. Some early signs that might indicate pre-eclampsia. Nothing, really.

  I jotted down the name of the condition, so that I could look it up later.

  Nothing too worrying yet, Suzy had said; the doctor wasn’t concerned and nor was she.

  And she began crying again.

  When Heidl and Ray arrived I said nothing about Suzy’s call as I said nothing ever about myself or my family to Heidl. It was late morning—I was typing and Heidl was reading the paper—when there was a knock on the office door and Gene Paley’s secretary delivered a folded message for me.

  I opened it. It was a handwritten note from Gene Paley.

  Kif, Got your message about trial. Forget delivering outline tomorrow. Just write best book quick as you can. GP

  What does Gene want? Heidl asked, putting his newspaper down.

  It’s not Gene, I said.

  He stared at me. I panicked.

  It’s my wife, I stupidly said.

  You know, one day, he said as he picked up a piece of paper from his desk and stared at it, I think I’d enjoy meeting Suzy and—he paused, and, as he put the paper down, his lips formed a round smile before popping the word out as if it were a bullet—Bo.

  I involuntarily shuddered. How did he know her nickname? How?

  Yes, I heard him saying.

  In spite of my wariness, in spite of working hard to deny Heidl any access to my private life, I realised Heidl had slowly, relentlessly accumulated knowledge about me.

  I think that would be so very interesting, he said.

  I didn’t allow my face to show any recognition or emotion.

  To meet your daughter.

  I broke. Out of fear, or anger, I can’t say.

  Brigid, I said coldly. Her name is Brigid.

  A beautiful name, Heidl s
aid. And Suzy? How far away now are the twins? I mean, it must be so very close. And hard, what with you being here and she being…there.

  I had had enough. Two weeks of what was now a five-week project had already vanished and I had little more than a few notes, some incoherent pages, but nothing approaching coherence as to what the book was about either in my mind or on paper. For no good reason, I thought of the dark stories of his book keeper, Brett Garrett, the shadow of whose unsolved disappearance hung over Heidl and which he did not seem to discourage hanging over him.

  I’ve been thinking, Kif—well, more than thinking. I spoke to Paley earlier today about me coming to Tasmania rather than you coming here. That way you can be close to Suzy.

  There’s no need, I said. Suzy’s fine.

  Oh, she’s not fine, Heidl said. Is she, Kif?

  I felt panicked. What did he know?

  You’ve a lot on your plate, Kif. Gene agrees.

  Agrees what? I said.

  That perhaps I should come to Tasmania to finish the book.

  It’s not necessary, I said.

  Oh, it is. Believe me, Kif. It is. We can work where you’re comfortable—my hotel room, your home, wherever feels easiest.

  That’s very kind, I said. But I’m comfortable here.

  And it would be good for me to meet your family, to get to know you better, Heidl went on. How was Suzy this morning when you called?

  I kept typing.

  The obstetrician, Heidl said. A few worries?

  I stared at the screen so he wouldn’t see my face. He couldn’t know. And yet whether I said something or nothing, whether I met his gaze or avoided it, it was as though every gesture of mine further helped create a sinister complicity between us, sweeping us towards some doom I could only vaguely apprehend.

  Pre-eclampsia, Heidl said. Nasty.

  It had begun.

  It’s a worrying condition, he said.

  His slow taking over of me.

  I began a new line of questions: I need to get this clear, I said, even if it doesn’t go in the book.

  Of course, Heidl said.

  I could think of nothing to stop him, but I tried.

  Did you ever have anyone blown away?

  I don’t know why I asked that question. I don’t know why I used the euphemism blown away rather than killed. It sounded melodramatic, stolen from movies, and I felt foolish. Yet my embarrassment only made me angrier with Heidl.

  Is that the sort of thing you think my memoir should be? Heidl said.

  That wasn’t my question, I said, my voice shrill. Answer me!

  Inside me I felt something nameless. Swelling. Growing. I couldn’t control it.

  Answer me! I suddenly yelled. Answer me! Answer me!

  Heidl leaned back in his chair and surveyed me as if I were a specimen in a zoo, almost as if it were he who was composing a book about me.

  Because I need to know! I heard myself shrieking. Answer me! I have to know!

  For God’s sake, Kif, Heidl said, smiling. I was a CEO. Not Don Corleone.

  But, as ever, he’d persuaded me to answer my question for him.

  4

  And that was his way: to let you create your lie from his truth. And confronted with my own complicity, I gave up and stopped talking. Besides, I had run out of energy, questions, the will to press on. In spite of Gene Paley’s urgings and my own desperation, I would never finish the book. It was becoming clear to me that Heidl’s procuring of me in no way meant any commitment on his part to finishing the memoir. If anything, it meant the opposite. I feared it was solely to give Gene Paley the impression that he was now working on finishing the book on time, whereas the very opposite was true. Heidl was, I had come to realise, criminally indisposed to fixing detail on paper. Besides which it was work, which bored him, and a book and history and posterity, so many things that I had learnt meant nothing to him.

  Whatever he had told me was, in any case, mostly unusable. Less experienced liars would have sought consistency in their untruths. But life is never consistent, and at some point, long before I met him, he had realised that the vast ineptitude of his illusions was by some alchemy their most convincing proof. My problem was how to impose order on these unorderable recollections. Heidl, like God, got all the great stories, but a book had to make do with the merely plausible and possible.

  I sat there, silent. And almost as if knowing what I was thinking, Heidl stepped into this abyss that had opened up between us. Finally, he began to tell tales of what had happened. They weren’t the most revealing stories, but they were beguiling, even a little useful, and he kept telling them. He talked like a creek flooding after a drought, and the room swam with his stories as the clock hands began moving faster and faster, until it was mid-afternoon, until it was late afternoon, until through the curtainless windows there came upon us the ochre cataclysm of dusk, transforming into catastrophes of colour and shadow as night fell and that kitsch room became a place of transcendent wonder.

  And still Ziggy Heidl talked on.

  Some people tell stories lightly, a trotter with a light sulky racing along behind. Others are like an elephant slowly dragging a train, but slowly the train moves. And then there are the truly great storytellers like Heidl. They ride you, and you gallop faster and faster, thinking only ever that is what you want and you are never aware—until it is too late, far too late—that on your back is a rider, that you are being ridden to your death, and that there is now no way of stopping the story becoming you.

  5

  I stood in the city’s night light readying myself to leave the office, and I remembered when Ray and I were young and we would go hunting with .22 rifles, traps, snares, and ferrets. Kids ten and eleven we were. We killed birds, rabbits, possums, wombats, and any other poor creature that happened into our rifle sights. It was amazing what we killed and made suffer. When we could find nothing to kill we shot up cows, which presumably suffered greatly from the wounds we inflicted on them. We had a vague sense of wrongness, but it was very vague and frequently absent; and when it was there it was exciting, another adult taboo we might break. Mostly we were fascinated by the world, the way we lived, the freedom we had, and the ways things died—the many ways—blood dribbling out of mouth corners, dulling dark eyes, twitching legs, spasming bodies. We often stood over dying things, mesmerised.

  That we were lords of death never occurred to us as we ran and laughed, making our way through paddocks and woodlands. Watching something die was often fascinating, but how quickly it was also forgotten until those nights lying on Sully’s floor feeling Melbourne rising up within me. Mostly though I remembered the sense of freedom.

  How beautiful! It’s vanished now and it’s like it never happened. I can see the sun those days, rising over what was still a new planet as we set off at dawn, lighting the white mist into which we walked until it glowed and then gave way and abruptly vanished, leaving the light so brilliant against the frost-rimed paddocks that we would close our eyes and just keep advancing into that light. I can still feel the wetness of the long grass slowly dampen my shoes and chill my feet as the sun warms my face, the green of the bush, the redness of the oily soil, like a food you might eat, the overwhelming wonder of a rivulet we are wading up. That sound of water spilling in a perfect line over a diagonal log. I can hear it. Beautiful things, holy things, but I did not know it. What happened?

  If killing was a form of knowledge, it also at a certain point offered no more interest and grew boring, and we would walk off, leaving a twitching dying thing outside of itself. Not always though—I recall once I shot a wombat that had been waddling across a paddock. We rushed over to its wounded body, gazed in awe at the blood matting its dense fur, the fine slag of blood drooling from its mouth, the still-sentient eyes, aware or unaware of us it was hard to say, but conscious perhaps of something infinitely larger.

  We watched, silent. It would not die.

  I’m off, Ray said. I don’t like this one.

&
nbsp; I stayed, staring at the wet leather of its large nose working hard to breathe, pinching in and out in an unnatural rhythm. Its large black eyes now fixed on the earth below. And still it would not die.

  Cmon, Ray yelled.

  It was a mystery that we had reduced to something commensurate with our need to know. And what we needed to know above all things even at that age was death, for there was a loud blast and simultaneous jerk and I looked up to see Ray had shot it through its head at close range.

  For fuck’s sake, he said, let the poor fuckn cunt die. You sick or what?

  6

  Sometimes I think about all those terminated lives thinking about me. Standing over them, staring as they die. Sometimes I see them gathering over me. But I try not to. They crowd all around me, birds, animals and fish, and I have an ever-greater fear of enclosure, of small spaces, of lifts, of aircraft seats, of crowds, with these creatures folding over me, pushing me down, smothering me, staring dully into the earth as they do so.

  Of a night now the bedroom furniture moves, it lives, it transforms into them and they are coming for me once more. Suzy wanted to live with me. I just had trouble living with myself. You know, there’s always something left. Something alive. Always. What that thing is you can’t say. But it’s real. This is why you keep going. People always ask me that: Why? Why do you keep on doing what you’re doing? You know, making all these shows, always a new series, another project, when you could just retire. Why? And I say: I love it—who wouldn’t want to do this?

  But the truth is that if I stopped for even a moment and thought about the things I’d done I’d have to kill myself.

  And maybe that was Heidl’s fear too.

  I was standing at the office window staring at the endless lights when it began to rain. I realised it had grown late. The lights blurred and my thoughts were lost with them. The dreary flatlands of Port Melbourne passed from a monotone to a voluptuous wash of gold and red, and then to a dizzying black speckled with car lights and building lights and crane lights, vivid whites and reds and blues and yellows, a shock of motion as colour, as beauty, like an underworld of the dead where dark and light, good and evil, were all finally reconciled. I felt lost in a way I never had, and at the same time intoxicated by something that felt seductive and beautiful, something that was at once my fate, the executive’s kitsch office, and the night-time city, and yet was also beyond explanation. I felt the warm wash of air rising from the central heating, a slightly sweet, slightly sickly smell of something rotting, as below me occasional figures moved along the street with the unwavering and certain mystery of ghosts.