First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I walked over to the window so that I didn’t have to look at him.

  Everyone and everything is destroyed in the end by evil. You can choose good. Or you can be like me and accept the world as it is.

  Heidl stood up, came over to the window and stood next to me. He pointed to the street below.

  See my new Cruiser down there?

  I realised he meant the LandCruiser Ray chauffeured him around in each day. At the time they were a very expensive car, and Heidl’s was loaded with every bit of boy-bling going: bull bars, roof bars, lights—a lot of lights—radios, winches and assorted toys.

  I prefer it to my Porsche. More fun. Because when I am gone I can get nothing. Why deprive myself of anything, that’s what I think. Would you like a car like that? A woman? Money? You would, wouldn’t you? What do you drive—some shit box, I imagine. A ten-year-old Valiant? A beaten-up Corolla?

  A Holden.

  A Holden. What sort?

  A twenty-eight-year-old EH Holden. I swapped a pushbike for it. I do better than most on depreciation.

  He left the window to browse a bookcase—anything but return to the desk and the possibility of working.

  You can choose to drive something else, Kif. But you think, I’ll choose goodness and drive a shit box. Because it’s the right thing. But what if there is no right thing? What if there are just good cars and bad cars? What if there is just what you can take and hold and enjoy? he said, taking a book down from a shelf. What if that’s all there is? Here, he said, proffering me the book, across the cover of which was emblazoned its title: Six Stepping Stones to Success: Free Yourself Now! Have this.

  I’m fine, I said.

  Because it will destroy you, Kif, he said as he put the book back. It will destroy me. It destroys us all. In the meantime, I’ll take what I can get—the money, the good times, the fun. And when it comes for me I’ll know I lived my life. Will you be able to say that?

  And with that he sighed, and, reaching up for a collected short stories of Jez Dempster, asked if I would prefer that.

  It was a large, heavy hardback, perhaps seven hundred pages, perhaps more. I felt not so much defeated as exhausted by his logic.

  We need to work, I said.

  Jez Dempster! They say he’s like the Great Barrier Reef. Maybe you’ve never looked at a word he’s written, but it’s great to know he’s there.

  Your time on the run, I said wearily. Tell me a little about that.

  I am not an evil man, Kif, Heidl said, stuffing the block into his briefcase. Please don’t think that.

  He went on about how he was an ordinary man who just happened to see the world a little more clearly than other men. And, almost without pausing, he began reminiscing about the times he and Ray had had choppering about Cape York Peninsula, the wild jungle below, landing on a beach with not a footprint or human being within a hundred kilometres.

  Though I tried to deny it to myself, to push it back down, I sensed I was jealous—after all, I was broke, isolated and self-isolating, with a family I couldn’t support and a dream I couldn’t realise. All the things that I valued suddenly seemed lustreless and worthless. All my ideas, all my beliefs, appeared sentimental, naive, and, worse, false. Heidl’s reasoning left me confused, but I would not surrender. The book! I told myself. The book!

  ASO’s early days, I pleaded. The book keeper. Brett Garrett. A good man?

  Any fool can endure being killed, Heidl said. It’s enduring killing that takes something else.

  And Heidl continued heidling: how goodness wasn’t the game, that the game was all life was, to enjoy playing the game or don’t play and be miserable—your call! Because it will destroy you, he said, almost gleefully. It will!

  He reached up into the bookcase and pulled out The Koala Kid, the Australian children’s classic. In a gesture that felt in equal measures touching, insincere, and implicating, he handed me the book, saying it was for Bo, to make up for his having stolen her dad away for so long.

  I don’t want it, I said.

  He put the book down on the table next to the Mac Classic.

  She’ll love it, he said.

  Your mother, I begged. Please tell me what she was like?

  But he was already calling someone, his lawyer, a journalist, another hitman, perhaps God or perhaps the Devil, and he had to go, he said, to a meeting with his legal team and would be back later, and a moment later he and Ray were gone, vanished, as if they had never existed.

  6

  They returned late afternoon. Ray seemed odd, even upset; he said he wasn’t feeling well, and left soon after. Heidl was strangely calm. He said nothing of his own volition, yet if asked a question he seemed—for perhaps one of only two times I ever saw him—to be seeking to answer it honestly. And following Pia’s advice I decided for once to go with him rather than against him. And so I asked about the murder threats he claimed were being made against him.

  What will they do, eh? Heidl told me. Everyone will know it was the banks that killed me. Just like Nugan Hand all over again.

  Meaning?

  Roger that. Who did kill me? That’s the question.

  I told him he was far more likely to die in an old-age home with a box of remaindered copies of his memoir under his bed.

  But the possibility of not being, of cheating the courts by dying before trial, all these things not only interested Heidl but seemed to come close to thrilling him. To say nothing of the melodrama of mystery that might accompany his passing.

  I’m not taken with old age, Heidl said. And in some heidling of near Tebbean intensity, he went on to say how dying of old age was unnatural to the point of being wrong; men, he argued, had since the beginning of time died at any age, but mostly not old, no; they had died from disease and misadventure, tragedy and stupidity, war, crime and accident. These deaths gave life its meaning; old age to the contrary proposed a settled flow of events, a progression. The idea of life as a movement upwards, as a career, he loathed. Ads for pension schemes, retirement villages and funeral plans drove him to fresh rages.

  I’d rather be murdered, Heidl said.

  I said that maybe I’d do it for him if we didn’t get the book done.

  To die of old age, Heidl continued, is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death. It is the last and extremist kind of dying. It encourages people to lead a life devoted to not dying, which is really another way of not living. To know death is coming and coming soon, to die soon, is to live better now. And isn’t that what we all want?

  He meant it. He meant every word of it. But I knew it couldn’t be true. It wasn’t possible to believe him; it was impossible to disbelieve him. That was what was so confusing about him—what was genuine? What was fantasy? What was fact? All I knew was that whatever or whoever he was, I was fed up with him.

  How do you think the book will go if I’m found dead? he finally asked, as if it were a question that genuinely preoccupied him.

  Exhausted by his unbelievable laziness, his lies, his greed, his selfishness, his lunatic melodramas, I felt my frustrations transform into a wild hatred.

  It will be a bestseller, I said.

  How big a bestseller?

  A number fucking one bestseller.

  It felt cruel to say, but it felt good saying it. And besides, I thought it was true, but truth, I was learning, was never really a defence for anything.

  The idea, far from angering Heidl, seemed to calm him and almost delight him.

  A great career move, I said.

  Exactly what I thought, he said.

  Heidl smiled. His cheek ticked harder than normal. I had pleased him, and somehow I was pleased that I had. I felt an unexpected complicity, a strange warmth, almost an intimacy. And in all this, there was an inexplicable happiness.

  7

  In my notes there is a question Heidl then asked me: Why do you want to be a writer, anyway?

  I don’t recall what I said, but I do remember thinking I couldn’t exactly say what being a
writer meant to me, or why it seemed so important. And that was odd. After all, no one had compelled me to be a writer. My mother still had hopes I might become a good plumber.

  Because you have a brain, Heidl went on. Really, the bankers I dealt with—you’d run rings around them. I respect writers. Writing matters. But is it fun?

  In truth, so far it hadn’t been.

  So much fun, I said.

  Because if you don’t have some fun, then what’s the point? I know you think the ASO was a racket—

  —I don’t say that.

  Ray told me that’s what you think.

  Ray didn’t tell you that.

  So you said it?

  So you lied about Ray?

  We made something. And we were the best. Ask Ray. The best. As good as the U.S. Seals. As anyone. And it was fun. You want to know the real rackets? The banks and corporations that financed us. Maybe every now and again someone just has to be sacrificed so that they can keep going. And I am that sacrifice.

  He leant back in his chair and rolled a pen between his fingers. It was as though he were offering me a promotion.

  You should give up writing, he said. Have some fun while you can.

  His cheek seemed to be twitching double-time, triple-time, almost trembling. I never forgot that. That, and what he then said, and how he said it, as if it had just happened out on the street and he was describing it to me, as though it were the most matter-of-fact thing on earth.

  Before you’re sacrificed.

  He went on, I can’t remember exactly what, and though I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, seeking to glean some sentence or phrase or idea I could use, they were increasingly sounds without sense, and the more they and his life blurred, the more my life came into focus with all its attendant poverty and pointless struggle. And everything Heidl said to me—even his lies and evasions—somehow proved to me what a fool I was for thinking my life was one worth pursuing.

  After Heidl had gone I picked up The Koala Kid from the table. It was a handsome fiftieth anniversary edition, of a type I could never afford to buy Bo. As I absent-mindedly leafed through it, I thought of how thin and small my world seemed—Suzy, our damp, decrepit tenement with my poor attempts at home handiwork, the limited, limiting lives of remote islanders. For while Heidl talked I had begun to see that my life was not the thing I had thought it had been, that it was not full or rich, but somehow mean and pinched; that in choosing to write I was closing myself off from the world.

  For the world was in Heidl—strange, perhaps undivinable, beyond good and evil—and I found myself both resentful of it and jealous and covetous as well. Biblical sins. I seemed to want to commit them all. And, though I refused to admit it to myself, I wanted in. Because the world had no need of me or my books, but I had need of it.

  Now I think that was precisely the point of all Heidl’s stories: to make me believe my life was based on illusions—the illusions of goodness, of love, of hope. And persuaded of that, I would betray something fundamental within myself and embrace his world as my real life.

  Perhaps then I would be granted that great vision I knew Ray sometimes glimpsed in Heidl. I wanted to know it too, but it frightened me because I could see it breaking something in Ray. And though I did not wish it to break me, though Heidl filled me with an ever-greater dread, I wanted in. I can’t explain it. With every passing day, more and more, I wanted fucking in.

  I closed the children’s book, put it in my backpack, and switched off the lights as I walked out.

  12

  1

  YOU THINK you can be something other than a two-headed, shit-eating Tasmanian, Ray said, when really all Tasmanians are two-headed shit-eaters and go back to doing what they were always meant to do, eating shit and eating it day after day after day.

  We had arranged to have a quick drink that evening. To my surprise, Ray fronted. I told him about Gene Paley’s demand for a first draft by Thursday, but Ray seemed elsewhere. Sullen. Angry. After his invective—although I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard what I’d said—I felt he had a point. We didn’t fit. We had drifted into that world of publishing and celebrity and were, we knew, in spite of my ambitions, likely to drift out of it at book’s close, leaving only an evaporating shadow of ourselves as an after-dinner anecdote, a story that truncates over time into an aside, a joke, a dying laugh—nothing and nobody of consequence except to amuse the world of publishers, and then only for so long until something or somebody else amused them more. A half-life of a year, a month, a week, a night, a drink.

  A drink?

  No, Ray said to his empty glass.

  Ray and I did not have whatever it was you needed to have. We did not have whatever it was that Gene Paley had. What Pia Carnevale had. What Heidl had. Was it some inner certainty? Something indefinable, but real? Some sense of equality, perhaps. But I recognised in Ray, in myself, even in Suzy some opposed emotion. We had only a terror. A Tasmanian terror. That we were nothing. What did Nietzsche or Tebbe or, for that matter, the world of publishing, know about shit-eating?

  Nothing, Ray said, when I asked him what he made of Heidl being pleased with the idea of the book being a bestseller if he was murdered.

  I said I thought it was weird.

  Ray seemed at once uncharacteristically bitter and adamant.

  It’s fuckn nothing, Ray said. Okay?

  How could I have known all that was playing on his mind? That he wasn’t talking about my self-pity and my failure, but something far more serious, something terrible?

  Fuckn nothing at fuckn all.

  And with that Ray skolled his beer, stood up, and walked out.

  2

  When I got home I did what I could with what I had. In my original conception the book was meant to be twelve chapters but I had written only one and a half. In the manner of Christ feeding the five thousand with two fish and five loaves I set to work on my task of miraculous thinking. I cut and reshaped my one and a half chapters—with a little padding that later read as the best thing in those pages—to form three chapters. I next set to work on rearranging Heidl’s own manuscript—chopping here, adding bridges and colour there, moving passages hither and thither until I had a further four vaguely coherent chapters. That made a total of seven. For the rest of Tuesday night I worked on a very rough draft of another chapter on the nature of the fraud. In this way, by three in the morning I had eight chapters done. But I still didn’t have enough, nor anything like enough.

  I made some progress Wednesday morning talking with Heidl about his early days at the ASO before he vanished for the day. Over the course of the afternoon and that night, fuelled by instant coffee and some speed Ray had, I managed to put together three more chapters, combining rough outlines with passages I had cut from his memoir, hybrids of passages stolen from my notes, some descriptions of bridges that were yet to be written, along with some ideas taken from my novel.

  By the time I had finished these, revised what I had so there weren’t too many obvious contradictions or repetitions, dawn was a blurred grey rope over Port Phillip Bay as I drove to TransPac’s Port Melbourne office. Despite my best intentions I passed out for a few hours on the office floor, to be woken by Heidl when he arrived a little after ten.

  That morning Heidl was oddly loquacious on the matter of his escape across the vastness of Australia when ASO collapsed. I say odd, because in his stuttering, cryptic language he spoke so differently from his usual gush. It was almost as if he were striving for the truth, but the truth was impossible to know, as if something happened out there that puzzled him. I had asked him how he felt about the massive manhunt that was chasing him. He told me he felt nothing. In that era of computer freezes and disks corrupting, Gene Paley made me make daily print-outs of all my notes and drafts. Among the several boxes of resulting papers I kept from that time I found this transcript.

  You know how it is out there on the Nullarbor, Kif? That road running straight through the desert for hundreds of ks. S
and. Saltbush. Nothing. I had this work ute. Holden V8. The more I gunned it, the further I went, the straighter the road became. The more the earth in front of me bent. You could see the curvature of the earth. Weird rising waves of heat haze. My head was sand. Felt if I kept driving I might fall off the edge of the world. So I’d stop the car. Get out. Throw myself in desert dust. Scratchy saltbush and empty beer cans and toilet paper. I’d dig my hands in dust. Trying to hold on. Lying there, you can feel it. The whole earth moving. Me on it. Riding it. Holding on. It was spinning faster and faster. Just holding on. Tighter and tighter. But I’d have to let go. It wasn’t safe. I’d have to move on. A few hundred ks until I’d feel I was about to be spun off the planet again. Stop. Throw myself back in the dirt and shit and try to hold on. That’s what I felt. Nothing. Just trying to hold on. The earth spinning faster and faster. Holding on, just holding on. But I’d have to move on.

  Even now, I feel an eerie glow of recognition re-reading it. And listening to Heidl that day he seemed to be saying things I actually understood, almost as if I’d lived his life myself, or as if he’d lived something of my life, or was going to live my life. But that moment passed, he lost interest or me focus, I can’t say which it was, but he was back on the phone, and not long after was heading out to yet another lunchtime meeting.

  For once I was happy when Heidl failed to return. I had promised I would have the draft to Gene Paley on arriving that morning, then midday, then 5 p.m., then 5:30. I say draft, but much of it was little more than notional outline, where whole sections were described in a paragraph, above which sat the italicised caveat—

  Yet to Be Written.

  In the space of that afternoon, feeling watery and tight and out of focus, getting by on more of Ray’s speed, I managed to transform the morning’s notes into a short draft chapter, bringing to twelve my total completed, albeit in the roughest form. I was wired and sick and began making things up, and though the writing seemed awkward and I felt both afraid and a fraud I kept making them up until I had another completed chapter. But when I scrolled through what I had, all I could see were gaping holes. By then it was five in the afternoon. In a panic I added another chapter composed of several unrelated passages linked by cryptic notes. To that I added the briefest descriptions of another four chapters, each of these papering over the worst holes in the chronology, so that it was now a seventeen-chapter book, of which perhaps two chapters could be considered close to finished.