First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I realised Heidl had gone some time ago.

  I turned, went to his desk, picked up the phone, held it away from my face so I didn’t have to drink too deeply of Heidl—of Heidl’s scent and the scent and sound of all the horror of the world that might well up and smother me at any moment—and I was about to call Suzy when I noticed next to Heidl’s neatly folded newspaper a single piece of paper. I picked it up. Scrawled on it was a single word: pre-eclampsia. Next to it, in a separate hand, was an exuberant tick.

  I was about to put it down when I noticed something had been written on the back. Brett Garrett. And through those two words there ran, in the same green ink, a single line.

  11

  1

  AT TIMES at Sully’s place, though it was evening and Heidl was far away, I would stand up, walk to the windows, peek through the curtains, and only when I was sure no one was watching, return to the kitchen chair, the lounge suite, to talk in whispers, the tones of the conspirator against power. Had Heidl killed? Would he kill? One night I told Sully I thought Heidl was a coward, though I had no evidence that he was any such thing.

  A coward? Sully said, long body leaning back on the old torn and stained recliner that was his favourite chair, joint smouldering between his fingers, an unruly white eyebrow hair arcing out over his left eye, finely cracking his crumpled face. He pondered his own question for some time before answering himself. He said that a coward was the most terrifying man, because there was no end to the things he might do to prove both to himself and others that he had courage.

  I couldn’t help wondering if he was describing Heidl or me.

  Late of a night, when I was done with writing up my notes, I’d drink with Sully, beer and wine, blow a number or two, and when that was done and I was lying on his living room floor on my foam mattress on a threadbare rug, I’d take down a book from his shallow homebuilt shelves which surrounded me and were, like all good bookshelves, a rickety amalgam of scattered books, cards, fading mementoes and vanishing memories that briefly flared like a dying ember being blown on when picked up.

  On Sully’s shelves I found Nietzsche, for whom I had gone searching after Heidl kept quoting him. I would fall asleep reading him in the shadows and light thrown by the belly-dancing flame of a candle in a sparkling shiraz bottle. The night was wonderfully dark then and the dead lived in me when I read. Some things seemed possible that would never be possible again and occasionally in the darkness I hit up against something and felt it, and I knew I was alive.

  Sully had been a poet of a particular minor note that had been the fate of a young man suffering the malign influence of Baudelaire, Burroughs and Brautigan in early ’70s Melbourne. He used words like lachrymose and crapulent, and eked out a living as an archivist at the Melbourne City Council. Sully felt no one appreciated how funny Nietzsche was.

  No one ever writes that, he said. “After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.” That’s not bad, is it? “Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?” Good, eh?

  Sully thought Nietzsche was like the most outrageous stand-up, always pushing it beyond good taste to see how far he could go.

  I said being a philosopher in late-nineteenth-century Germany wasn’t—I guessed—the same thing as appearing as a stand-up comic in a Melbourne pub.

  Sully thought people didn’t realise Nietzsche was being funny.

  I said perhaps Nietzsche didn’t realise himself.

  And away Sully went spouting aphorisms as if they were gags.

  “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” “The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.” “The lie is a condition of life.” “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” “In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”

  I wonder if he went mad and started talking to horses just because no one realised what a seriously funny man he really was, Sully concluded.

  Sully was much older than me; he had told me he had these days a sense of vertigo, that his arse had gone, that he couldn’t go anywhere now without a wad of paper stuck between his buttocks. His voice was excessively calm as he spoke.

  If I laugh I shit myself, if I cry I shit myself, if I meet a woman I have to leave before I start laughing and crying all at once for fear of completely fucking humiliating myself. I feel I am falling and falling. There is so much so terrible in this world, and my work has amounted to nothing; it hasn’t altered one thing for the better. What do you make of that, Kif?

  I made nothing of it, there was nothing to make of it. I offered bland assurances, lies, comforts thin as his threadbare rugs. As I lay in the darkness I saw Sully as the future I didn’t want, the ghost of creativity spurned. Sully’s world had proven finally an illusion. Heidl’s world seemed the only real world. God didn’t dance after all. The interesting people were all in hell.

  2

  I would wake to the thrumming of the city coming alive, rising up through the wooden stumps and floor and foam mattress, and soon enough there would be the dazed drive past trams, along crowded streets, and onto the Esplanade where another world momentarily shaped out of the Melbourne winter greyness, a world of sea and sand and palm trees, and near its end the abyss of Mr. Moon’s open mouth and his giant dead eyes that I felt following me to work.

  There, in the office, Heidl passed his time making calls, cutting deals with Woman’s Day or breakfast television for interviews in which he promised fresh revelations, or meeting journalists and anyone else he was seeking to impress in our office as if he were still a man of substance, rather than what he was, a crook on bail about to go down.

  Put a corpse behind a desk and people will see their superior, he told me brightly as he put the phone down from another call to the media. I must have been staring at him, because he added:

  No need to mention these calls to Gene.

  He was only a few weeks away from a trial and jail, and being in breach of his publishing contract probably didn’t mean much to him. Still, he must have read something in my expression, for he smiled, and with a seeming pride that felt out of character he told me that for every con man born so too are a thousand fools willing to be deceived.

  If this project is so secret, I said, why are you doing interviews with every second journalist in the country?

  I’m not telling them about our project. They tell me things and I agree. Besides, it’s my life.

  It wasn’t really, or at least that’s how I felt, but it was my task, and I returned to it. My time with Heidl began taking on a strange hallucinatory atmosphere as one day oozed into the next and it became hard to know if it was the third day of the second week or the second day of the third, as Heidl performed, paraded, evaded, grew bored, played dumb, angry, annoyed, or just did the crossword. Instead of returning to Hobart, at Gene Paley’s insistence we worked through the weekend and into our fourth week, or, more accurately, I tried to write and Heidl yo-yoed in and out, leaving me and the book becalmed in the shadow line of the small monochrome sea of the Mac Classic monitor.

  Sometimes Heidl would grin with some inner knowledge he had happened on but would never share. Sometimes he seemed lost in some impenetrable thought. In spite of my misgivings, I felt a wisdom about him at such times that I would never know but wished to hear. I found him insufferable in his many stupidities and pointless distractions. Yet I couldn’t quite deny it to myself: his self-satisfied silences, his sly smugness, all bespoke a mystery I found myself wanting to enter and share.

  3

  During one of those dream-days, when we had been talking about—or I had been trying to talk about—ASO’s collapse, Heidl asked me if I had ever seen a dead man; the sort of non sequitur he sometimes made and to which no real reply was possible.

  We now had less than two weeks left. Time wasn’t so much running out for the book as disappearing at the speed of light. Heidl’s conversation had begun takin
g on a different, harder edge. The toxo and other obsessions had faded to be replaced by talk about the impending crash, undercover ruses and front companies, Cold War spookery, ’80s junk-bond trading tales, and a figure—Siegfried Heidl—who was always and ever a lone wolf acting for good.

  Looked at a man who has just died in agony? Heidl pressed further.

  Listening to him, I realised how much I knew nothing. I tried to reassure myself I was only there to chronicle, but it seemed wrong that I had no intimacy with the world of which he spoke; a world manipulated by some terrible darkness that might manifest itself as a secret police organisation, a tyrannical government, an international corporation, or a shadowy merchant bank. Its forms, finally, were not the point. It was this animating spirit of darkness that seemed to determine his world, and which was beginning to seep into my own thinking.

  At times, I had caught myself trying to join in the conversation. If there were a thousand and one things about which I knew nothing—the Hmong alliance, hot-money laundering, or the favoured pistol of Carlos the Jackal—it wasn’t that which was so pathetic about my posturing.

  No; it was my fawning gratitude when Heidl—adopting the tone of a mentor inducting me into the arcane craft mysteries of the shadow world of espionage, arms, and violence—would add a small detail in such a way as to make me feel that he was in some way a gracious superior.

  I told myself he had never watched a man die. But his dead eyes caught mine and I realised he was watching me, looking into me, and I was no longer so sure who was bluffing, him or me. I was trying to bring him into a book, but he wanted me to think he had stared at dead men and he was having none of it. Heidl’s mouth formed a smile, gap teeth tombstoning out, as my sentences began to sputter and I lost my way in them as I was lost in my thoughts. I heard Heidl saying how he understood, how he could see books were important to me.

  But watch a man die slowly, he said, and you’ll never see a book the same way. You think this world is about victories, progress. It’s not. It’s about defeat. The only purpose in life is to be defeated by ever greater things until your own death becomes inevitable.

  He had a sly look and I marvelled at him yet again. I felt as I so often did with Heidl: voiceless, bewildered, outplayed. Worse: stupid. Every time he spoke like he just had, I worried that there was within all this, in spite of his endless deceit, a genuine experience, or more, or less than that—an essence—that I should be capturing in the memoir.

  But that essence, along with my belief in my own ability, vanished the moment I tried to find words to capture it on the page. In the face of his mad intransigence, the book seemed further away than ever. I pointed out to him how if there was no workable manuscript by the end of the fifth week there could be no book and therefore no final payment of his advance.

  Heidl refused to believe me.

  Gene will pay me.

  Do you understand? No more money.

  Gene will pay.

  If it’s not clear to you, I said, it’s clear to me. He won’t.

  4

  I was finding it ever harder to be physically near Heidl. Everything about him revolted me, even the least offensive: the black-haired puffy fingers, his nose, his ears, the mouth that might swallow the moon. There was about him that intolerable sensuality you sometimes see in an animal. He made me uneasy with the way he leant in close. I didn’t have the confidence or whatever it was, the courage or contempt, to take a step backwards out of that strange aura of ’80s aftershave and low, slightly feminine voice that always led me to agree, no matter how much I disagreed. It was as if he might lick you like a pet, or kiss you.

  I know this makes him sound sexual in some distorted, closet way. But it wasn’t that, or that was only an aspect of something much larger which terrified me. It was more than his depthless eyes, always elsewhere and always on you; the way being with him felt like being locked in a room with a mad dog waiting for an instant of inattention when it might tear you apart. It was his need in some fundamental way to possess everyone he encountered. At times, he felt more a contagion than a human being. It was as if—as Ray had warned—he could enter you and once he was inside you would never be rid of him.

  This physical revulsion was so strong that when I had to go to the toilet I would use the bathroom two floors down to avoid the one he frequented. And it was returning from the other bathroom that morning when I saw Gene Paley walking towards me in the corridor. Often, he didn’t even stop, only nodded a greeting, but now he halted, asked me where the book was at, and went on to say, in a formulation that I found irritating, that “no pressure” but the response from the booksellers following the announcement of the imminent publication of the Heidl memoir had far exceeded expectations.

  So, have we turned a corner then, Kif? he concluded.

  I said we had. And even added the word several.

  And Siegfried? We’re getting good things from him?

  I said we were.

  Gene Paley seemed not quite convinced.

  I suggested Pia Carnevale was pleased with how it was coming together.

  This annoyed Gene Paley.

  Pia’s a wonderful editor…but a little fragile sometimes. Don’t you think?

  I didn’t think it. It had never occurred to me, but I agreed in any case, because it was Gene Paley’s point of view and when in the company of Gene Paley there was no other point of view.

  No longer annoyed, Gene Paley assured me that although Pia Carnevale was no Max Perkins, she would be more than adequate in doing the necessary shepherding work on the book, and that I could have every confidence in her.

  But the thing is, he went on, we need to know. How the scam worked. How he defrauded the banks of so much. Seven hundred million! As I was saying, it’s impressive. And the CIA? What things have you got out of him about that?

  I said a few. Enough. I may have again used the word several in the form of a question.

  But the thing is. Do we have a book? Are we in the game?

  I said we were in a game.

  Great news, Gene Paley said, his face a determined grimace. Wonderful. Look. I know I said forget the outline and just finish the book. But! Sales and marketing are chasing me. They want to know the rough direction the book’s taking. A draft by Thursday? Think you can do that?

  I could think of nothing to say. It was Tuesday. I had two days.

  Jez Dempster, Gene Paley went on, has a theory of writing. The Alpha Omega Program. You’ve heard of it?

  I hadn’t.

  Begin at the beginning and end at the end. That’s the alpha and omega of books. Okay?

  Okay? I repeated, as if learning an unknown word in a new language.

  Hold that thought, Kif. Thursday it is. I look forward to it.

  And he did his click-wink thing, leaving me feeling as if he had stapled me to a vast blankness of unfillable paper.

  5

  Just a minute, Heidl said when I returned to our office, raising a silencing hand, then dropping it to continue undoing the sleeve buttons on his red and white striped shirt and fold his sleeves back a strange one-fold while he continued talking on the phone, as though it were some theatre of rolling up his sleeves, of getting down to the work he spent the rest of the day evading. The moment he hung up, his smiling face transformed into a scowl.

  That fucking maggot Knowles. Five thousand to have him blown away. Cheap at ten times the price, eh?

  This strange interplay between Heidl’s seductive calls to media—backgrounding, seducing, dealing, cajoling, bargaining—and his now almost daily theatrical talk of having Eric Knowles murdered, was, to say the least, frustrating. But to my shame it also exercised a strange power of compulsion. Still, I must have seemed shocked.

  Look, Heidl said, scowl vanishing, dreadful smile appearing before me like that of a fun park clown, you should listen to what I am saying more carefully. You believe the world is good, Kif? That most people are good, that the world improves because of those good peop
le and good things? Yes?

  I made no reply, obeying my rule neither to talk about myself, nor be diverted into opinion.

  Goodness is like God, Kif, the worst lie. You think you are kind and good and you will be rewarded. If not with money, then with the good life. But look at the world. Do you think millions die of starvation, of war, because of the good? Many of them, maybe most of them, are good people. But they suffer, and they suffer terribly, and they die horribly.

  I wouldn’t be drawn. He continued, his tone suspended between a newsreader’s monotone and a sportscaster’s jubilation.

  Look around you, Kif—sickness, war, the poverty that makes people savage, the riches that make them worse. Do you think the evidence of the world is that the good are rewarded? Oh no! They’re punished. They’re beaten and tortured. They have the skin peeled off them and they’re left hanging in trees to die. The evidence of the world is that the world is evil. Cheats and liars win out, Kif. Money wins out. Violence wins out. Evil wins out.

  I refused to say anything.

  Think about it, Kif. The evidence of the world is with me.

  I said nothing.

  What is it Tebbe says?—the long arc of justice breaks beneath the blow of history’s hammer. Make your choice: be a fool, lie to yourself that the world is good, and go with the good. But you will lose.