First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I threw the manuscript pages into the corridor. I hated every word. I hated the computer on which I worked, I hated the table I had fixed up on which the computer sat. I looked at the scattered pages on which was written not a book, but the mounting evidence that I could not write a book. How stupid I had been! I told myself that I could have had a hundred other jobs and careers—though when I thought on exactly what job or career none immediately came to mind. Perhaps, I thought, that was what a writer was. Someone for whom writing had once been a passion and now it was the only thing they knew how to do.

  Except, I realised with horror, I didn’t know how.

  3

  I went to our bedroom. I needed the comfort, the oblivion of Suzy. She was awake, the twins were moving inside her, and she was unable to sleep.

  You should be at your desk, writing, Suzy said. Not here with me.

  And with that all my feelings of tenderness, of love, transformed into hate. It was becoming a familiar fall: sometimes it was enough for her to pour a cup of tea or put a fork to her lips for me to hate her. And, sometimes, I hated her even more for insignificant things than important ones—the way she did Bo’s hair, or, for God’s sake, how she arranged the kitchen utensils in a drawer. Love and hate were with me becoming so close and so strongly entwined that they sometimes felt the same thing. And this reassured me: for even at my worst, I consoled myself that this hatred perversely proved that, surely, some love must remain. What I began to fear was what suddenly seemed far worse, a moment when there might no longer be hate or love, a looming moment when I might feel nothing for Suzy.

  Suzy would sometimes fight back, but in a way that was measured and reasoned, and that only angered me more. She would say she understood me. That she understood my fears. And that was the worst.

  Because if I didn’t understand what was happening to me how could she? If I couldn’t name the dread that I felt surrounding me, soaking into me, rising within me like a silent scream, how could she be so confident she knew?

  At times I could see how much Suzy was suffering from my outbursts, and I would be satisfied. But only for a short time. After, I would be horrified at what I had done and who I had become, and I would not understand myself. And amidst the growing rubble of my life, Heidl appeared before me as a guide with his nostrums about a world that one could only sample and exploit, but never take root in.

  The evidence is with me.

  It was. And I was terrified.

  Go back to work, Suzy said.

  I exploded. Bo was staying a few nights at Suzy’s parents in order that Suzy might get some rest, and with the restraint of a child sleeping nearby gone, I now heard myself yelling at Suzy, What the fuck would you know about writing?

  I watched her crying with a sense of desolate satisfaction. When I left the house she was still sobbing. It was pleasant to walk the cold streets and feel the chill wind on my face blowing off the mountain snow far above. I found a dingy, late-night bar. And as I downed drink after drink, I told myself that it had been necessary to make clear to Suzy the many burdens I bore as writer.

  On going to the grim outdoor toilets, I walked into a spider’s web freshly spun across a doorway corner. I was seized by an odd panic. I brushed and then tore at my cheeks, but when I returned to the bar I could still feel the sticky threads as if they were enshrouding me. And suddenly Heidl didn’t seem a job, or money, but somehow inescapable like the spider’s web, something enclosing and claustrophobic. As my fear grew my anger evaporated and there arose in me a sense of Suzy as my only refuge. I had to admit that Suzy had not meant anything by what she’d said, while what I had said began to seem to me so unnecessary, because, really, what was unbearable about being a writer if you were writing and your writing was about to be published?

  And, for some reason, as I scratched at my sticky face I became convinced that the only way to escape these wretched threads was to go back to tell Suzy how much I loved her. And then I remembered how I’d made her cry, how hurt she had looked. When I thought how vulnerable she was, and how bullying I had been, my pride soured into shame because I had been cruel. I realised nothing could justify what I had done, and without finishing the drink I’d just paid for, I rushed home to apologise.

  But when I got home our bed was empty. Suzy was gone.

  4

  On the kitchen sink I found a note from her in a jerky hand. It said her waters had broken and she was driving herself to the hospital. Overcome with guilt for all that I had done, horrified by my cruelty, and worried for Suzy in labour, I rushed to the hospital in a taxi. But when I finally found Suzy lying on a gurney in a corridor, she was oddly peaceful and relaxed, and it was as if I had never abandoned her when she had needed me.

  She took my hand, an uncharacteristic gesture, and told me she was in the early stages, her contractions occasional and not much worse than a bad cramp. Mercifully, she said nothing about all that had passed earlier. I was too ashamed and too addled with drink and remorse to apologise. I sat on a plastic chair next to her and she abruptly fell asleep. I stared at the waxiness of her closed eyes until mine closed also, thinking of Heidl and trying not to think of Heidl. Instead, I tried to focus on how I might get a second cot, a new washing machine, and as time passed, Heidl became less real and the world of the hospital, its fluorescent lights, its smell of disinfectants, its constant clatter, became more concrete and finally grew comforting.

  I woke to Suzy pacing the corridor as a fresh set of contractions came and went. I rushed to hold her and as I did so she looked through me and moaned. I felt a stranger. Fearful, I went to get help. At the far end of the corridor I found some nurses chatting at a ward station. I asked them to do something. But what was frightening for me was everyday and mundane to them. When I begged them to help Suzy, a chubby-faced midwife fobbed me off, saying that they would send someone down shortly.

  Defeated, I returned to Suzy. After what felt to me an eternity, a nurse came with two orderlies and wheeled Suzy to a four-bed ward—dimly lit, hushed, empty—a peaceful haven in which to await the birth. Not long after, a young girl in labour was brought in. No more than fifteen, she could not stop sobbing.

  Her cries of loneliness and desolation were unbearable, but still she kept on, sometimes a low whimper, sometimes a stretched moan. A middle-aged woman arrived with a boy who appeared to be the prospective father. He had some fluff under his nose, a cigarette pack poked out from under his rolled-up flannelette sleeve, and with his spindly sticks of torso and limb he affected the slightly arthritic swagger of the older man. He didn’t know what to do or what to say. Not once did he touch her. Perhaps he was born the same way, falling first into this same terrifying void, and perhaps, thereafter, the fall never ended. After ten minutes of awkwardness he left, and after half an hour so too the middle-aged woman. The child-mother started to sob once more.

  Her howling grew terrible, the wretched lament of a child lost and alone. On and on it went, sometimes a screech of despair, sometimes a dull whimpering of terror. Sitting in the dark, listening to her cry, I thought people are not even born equal. They are born in misery, they are born in sadness and despair, they are born in terrible fear. She was right to be frightened, to not be grateful. The world was only beginning for her, and every day it revealed itself as crueller. I thought again of Heidl’s dark visions of the world, and shuddered. In the morning she was taken away to a birthing room and I never saw or heard of her again.

  5

  As public health patients we were not entitled to any specific doctor. An older white coat told us everything was going perfectly well, but his successor, a young white coat, decided Suzy should be induced. He dismissed me with a wave of the hand when I told him his predecessor’s opinion, and when I pointed out that Suzy was already in the early stages of labour he shook his head. He told me this was about the health of my wife and two unborn children and we weren’t going to play games with that—were we?

  A tall nurse appeared with a sta
nd from which hung a sack of clear fluid. She inserted a cannula into Suzy’s arm, connected the sack, set the machine, and the drug began to drip. We were transferred to a birthing room. For some time nothing happened. We wondered what the point of it all was. But when the contractions began to come like blows of a sledgehammer, we knew. The slow, gracefully building tempo of the body was gone and in its place Suzy now had to ride a chemically induced catharsis in which the pain came too quick and too hard.

  Suzy began journeying deeper into her solitary world of torment, her mottled face drained of all emotion, silent and exhausted beyond imagining, before her screams started all over again. Yet, other than her growing cries, which were accepted as commonplace and unimportant, a perverse serenity reigned in which all was good and as it should be. Around Suzy people smiled, even joked and discreetly gossiped.

  But in her screams I began hearing his laughter.

  Making an excuse that I needed the bathroom, I rushed outside to get away from it all: Suzy’s screams, Heidl’s laughter. In the abruptly bright corridor outside I found another world where life was lived as ever; some nurses were laughing about a fading rock star’s plastic surgery while two doctors were arguing about a Middle Eastern war. So different was it that I caught myself looking at my watch wondering if I needed to reset it for a new time zone, a different place where it was unexpectedly morning or evening, but never what you understood it to be. Yet just metres away, separated by a thin wall, I knew there was another country.

  On the other side of that wall so many wondrous things were happening and accepted as part of the process of birth that it would not have surprised me if a swarm of blue butterflies had filled the room and covered Suzy’s face, or if Suzy was to be found floating upside down from the ceiling, and all these phenomena would be drolly dismissed as everyday and normal and part of what I was told was the birthing process, and all was fine as long as they observed their natural and correct order, and the blue butterfly swarm came at this time and lasted for so long, and not less and not more, and Suzy floated in the air this way but not that, and so on and so forth. Everything was miraculous, and yet any indication that each miracle was anything other than ordinary and everyday was dismissed by the professionals as the hapless naivety of the father.

  6

  Hours became minutes and minutes days. At some point it was night and at another time morning and then night again, or perhaps it was always night or always day. And yet in all that long time, some thirty-six hours as I was later to learn, I secretly struggled with myself. The room seemed full of such goodness, of people seeking to bring life into the world, yet I kept hearing Heidl’s voice saying the world was not good, that it was evil. And to drown out that voice in my head I mopped Suzy’s brow, consoled her, rubbed her back, worried and fretted for her.

  No matter how much I tried to be there for Suzy, through the beeping of heart-rate monitors, the murmur of low conversation, through her screams, I kept hearing Heidl, and, as ever, he would not shut up: There is no right thing. You will lose. And my growing terror was that Heidl was right; that none of my emotions was genuine, that my real instinct was at best a vague physical curiosity and at worst a morbid indifference, that I was simply playing a role—the husband, the father, the good man.

  And suddenly unsure of who I was, every gesture I made seemed despicable, every word I uttered seemed false. My anguish for Suzy became muddled with my terror as to who I might be, and I almost felt her contractions as blows to my own body.

  At times, her suffering came close to overwhelming me. Suzy was in such agony and yet everyone understood that the only path out of that agony was the birth. And so, to that end, there could only be more pain and more suffering. Suzy was offered pethidine, I begged her to take it, but she wouldn’t. Perhaps she feared that losing some physical sense of pain might mean losing her babies. I don’t know. I realise now it was just one of so many things we never talked about.

  She began crying but her tears were overwhelmed by the next set of contractions that left her groaning in agony.

  It hurts, Suzy growled in a register so low it was hard to believe it was Suzy. It hurts, Kif.

  Her lips had grown thin, her face flushed, her eyes, usually dreamlike, were now bright and hard, starkly intent. She was becoming something else, something fundamental. And I understood she would not give up, that her whole being was summoning up and concentrating all her agony and strength to push.

  The birthing room had begun to fill with a new tension and more and more white coats: two obstetricians, two pediatricians, assorted others, one for each twin. And though nothing was said I became aware that all that had previously been good had somehow become bad. Suzy, who had been in pain but strong, was now, I realised, in worse pain and growing weak. In the rippling whirlpool of contraction and rest, Suzy’s moments of coherence were fewer and fewer until she was not even aware of my presence, but seemed to have sunk to another place where I could no longer reach her.

  7

  A strange hiatus settled upon us. We were all now waiting. I sensed the diminishing smiles and conversation, and I understood whatever it was that was happening was no longer something preordained to end happily, but a moment where everything lay finely poised between life and death. A doctor, an athletic young man, walked up to me, and, looking at me as if I were the doorman, without introducing himself, said, tell your wife to push harder. Fresh contractions were hitting Suzy’s body with a rising violence, the breaking of which were marked by long, low moans of exhaustion. The doctor sniffled.

  She’s trying as hard as she can, I said. I was defensive. But more than that I was, for the first time, frightened for Suzy.

  If we don’t see some change in the next ten minutes we’re going to have to do an emergency caesarean, the doctor said, and sniffled again.

  I asked what exactly was happening. Wiping his fine aquiline nose with a crumpled red polka-dotted handkerchief he told me they thought the twins’ limbs had become locked together in the birth canal and they were jammed. The longer it went on the further down the birth canal the babies would be forced and the more inextricable the jam would become, making a natural birth impossible. Getting them out might require a major procedure.

  He spoke softly, quietly, as if he were a teller advising me my bank account was overdrawn. He added the usual caveats, that this was only their opinion and a natural birth remained possible. However, to wait any longer than ten minutes might mean babies and mother would all be risking grave consequences.

  When we go in, he said, we’ll be going in with the mother’s life our first priority.

  And the babies?

  He wiped his handsome nose again. Behind the crumpled handkerchief I saw a grimace.

  We’ll do all that we can, he said.

  I walked four very long steps back to Suzy, lost in her agony.

  Suzy, I said. Please. Please listen. This is serious.

  It sounded false; worse, an insult. Yet Suzy’s eyes finally fixed on me, looking at me with an almost infinite trust, as though I alone might rescue her from her suffering. It seemed wrong to ask of her what I now did.

  You must try harder, Suzy.

  I am trying hard, she stammered, and I knew that I had upset her and, equally, that she was disappointed with herself. As hard as I can, she whispered, her voice scarcely audible.

  Try harder, I said. I felt such shame asking it of her.

  I can’t, Suzy was saying in guttural gasps as a new wave of contractions slammed into her. I can’t, Kif! No! she suddenly cried, Please don’t! Please! No!

  She began a low moaning, a strange animal sound, and I was again losing her; she was tumbling into some void as her body heaved and convulsed. Her face was scarcely recognisable. I leant in close, telling her again that she could do it. But it was becoming clear she couldn’t. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see the handsome doctor. I walked with him to a far corner of the room.

  Your wife is exhausted, he sa
id, sniffled, and continued. The babies are increasingly stressed. We have to operate.

  Five minutes, I begged. Just five more, that’s all I’m asking.

  8

  I went back to Suzy. I pointlessly wiped her face once more, and once more I begged her. She was very far away. Her whole being seemed caught in some primal struggle that was not hers to share. She suddenly screamed in a way that I had never heard before, deeply, terribly, as much an unrooted gasp of horror as a primeval cry. It was as if from somewhere deep within she was finding a strength additional to all that she had spent, summoning some will to push her exhausted flesh further.

  And as that awful screaming continued—a sound suspended between a moan of death and a plea for pity, an acceptance of what life was and a rage against it—as a mood of terse attention took hold of the room, everyone continued on as if it were everyday work, which it was also, and still measurements were taken and still vital signs were checked, and still people chatted softly.

  Suzy reached for my hand. It seemed an insignificant thing. Her grasp was not strong, hardly a grasp at all; rather it would be truer to say she rested her hand in mine, no more than that. But when I tried to place her hand on the bed, her body jolted, and her grip tightened into a lock. She was adrift in some vast elsewhere and I understood I was not to let her go.

  An excited sound cut through the room’s hushed babble. I looked up from Suzy to see a sudden interest among the white coats.

  She’s crowning, I heard the plump-faced midwife say.