First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  Pia Carnevale?

  No one.

  Wonderful, he said as he picked up the Glock, and, head lowered once more, demonstrated how to place the gun in his mouth with the correct angle, as if he were a whitegoods salesman demonstrating an electric toothbrush.

  Wonderful, wonderful, he murmured cheerily. Now your turn.

  He got off his chair and onto his knees in front of me. And for a third time, I did what he wanted because it was easier than not doing it, and because I thought it bought me time. I took the gun.

  Here, he said, pointing with an index finger up into the back of his mouth.

  No, I said in shock, looking around the kitchen. Not here.

  And again what was meant as refusal sounded like agreement.

  Oh no, he said softly. No, not here. That would be too awful. We’ll do it elsewhere, where Dolly and the kids will never see the mess.

  No, I said, this time more firmly.

  You don’t like me, do you, Kif?

  And I had no choice but to reply: Of course, I do, Siegfried. It’s just—

  Do or don’t?

  I mean, I said, we’re friends, but I just don’t feel comfortable—

  A real friend?

  Heidl was cruel like that. The little sorcerer wasn’t just toying with me but with death, the stakes were infinitely raised, and yet the game continued on in the spirit of a game—daring, taunting, bluffing, serious and, at the same time, not beyond a wink, as if he were letting me in on the private joke the whole thing really was. In this spirit, we played on.

  Because if you’re a real friend this is what you do, Heidl said, kneeling before me. You are my friend, Kif?

  More out of embarrassment than anything else I now brought the gun to his lips and slid it into his mouth. Something brushed up against my leg and purred. I recalled what Ray had told me about the barrel placement, and, without being told, as best I could, I angled it up until I felt the resistance of his meaty palate. He brought his hand up to adjust mine a little. His touch was unpleasantly warm. I pulled the trigger so he would let go.

  Click.

  We played out this pantomime over and over—

  click

  click

  click

  click

  click

  —until I pulled the glazed barrel out and Heidl asked if I’d like a cup of tea.

  5

  His calmness was terrifying. But his certainty about the day I didn’t dare agree with.

  I’m fine, I said. And reaching into the box folder I pulled out my annotated manuscript as if it were a lifejacket.

  He dried the gun and holstered it back under his arm.

  Ziggy, I said, just a few questions.

  Please, he said, wiping spittle from the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. But as he made the tea he was much more fixated on the details of his actual death than those of his fictional life. He filled his mug, on which was written SIEGFRIED. A large grey Persian cat began a strange wailing by his side as he assured me that his death would be understood as suicide. As he sipped his drink, he told me how he had already written the suicide note, everything was thought through, really, I was just assisting him with his death, an act of mercy, he’d always thought of me as merciful from the first time we met, he’d always seen me as a good and merciful man.

  On and on he went, why the banks would kill him anyway now or kill him in jail, on and on about how much better it was to die free—did I not believe in freedom?—to escape, to have a friend rather than an enemy help him die, how he did not believe in suicide, how it had to look like suicide to make others question their persecution of him…on and on and on, an ever-thickening confusion of arguments, bewildering, illogical and logical, coherent and incoherent, and the more I listened the more those ideas seemed reasonable, incontestable really, part of my own thinking even if in my own heart I didn’t agree with any of them.

  I reminded myself of why I had driven to see him that day. While he drank his tea we managed to get through a few pages of manuscript and even resolve several major confusions with what felt neat deceits.

  After a good hour or so—a near geological time span for Heidl to concentrate—he stood up and walked over to the sliding glass doors at the back of his house, gazing out, with a clowder of cats swarming around his feet—small, large, old, kittens, cats of all colours and types.

  There’s a magnificent view from that hill up there I’d like to show you.

  As Heidl spoke the cats all began softly purring, though whether in expectation, or gratitude, or just hunger, it was impossible to know.

  It sounds crazy, but when I’m up there I feel I have all Australia spreading out below, radiating out from my hill. I’d love to show you.

  I just kept scrawling on the manuscript, evading the implication. Heidl sighed, turned his back to me and told the sliding glass door that we were due for a break and a walk would do us good.

  The ironbarks up on the hill are amazing, he said. The bark they drop fixes nitrogen in the soil for the next generation of trees, he said. You can hear the rings forming, he said. You can see a currawong’s wing holding the sky, he said.

  Ziggy Heidl had, as far as I knew, neither interest in, nor feeling for the non-human world, so his riffs about the charms of the forest, an unhappy melding of the faux scientific and cod poetic, felt forced. I refused to go for a walk, and he was for once oddly amenable when I led the conversation back to the manuscript.

  We worked for a further two or three hours. It was remarkable for him to show such patience and the work was almost pleasant. We were finally getting the book sorted—at last, I thought, at last! Heidl relaxed, and, after a time, so too did I. The bizarre pantomime of murder was not spoken of again, and I felt he was seeking to put it behind him, a mad manifestation of some terror. He was helpful in a way I had never known him to be, at one point going to a filing cabinet and returning with some amusing letters from bankers about the probity of ASO, and at another giving me his own well-thumbed copy of a book on “hot” money, so I might better understand a point he was making about laundering dirty cash.

  Only later did I see the combination of intrigue and luck that allowed for the events of that day and all that was about to happen. Ray’s day off; Dolly visiting relatives on Heidl’s advice, “to get away from it all”; the auditors’ conference he was meant to be speaking at that day—had it ever existed? And I too had been manipulated to come on that day of all days. But Heidl couldn’t control all things, and I am sure he knew it. It was a grand risk haphazardly built on the accident of my missing my flight, and at such moments he thrilled to bending reality to his way.

  While he made a late lunch of toasted sandwiches for himself—I wasn’t hungry—a fat tabby cat turned and eyed me from where it sat on the kitchen counter. Afterwards I couldn’t draw him back to work; he kept insisting we take the walk, as he called it. His use of the definite article should have been a warning, but I put it down to his odd English. He tried to cajole me, pressure me, and beg me. He talked of the walk being nothing more or other than a walk, and though I felt his idea of my murdering him was some strange fancy that had now passed, I still wasn’t eager to be alone in the bush with Heidl and a gun. I told myself I didn’t think he would kill me.

  But that wasn’t exactly true. I did think he might kill me, and everything up to this point was all some elaborate ruse to that end. So I can’t really explain why I agreed to go for the walk. Perhaps even at this late point I still bore the arrogance of the writer: after all, I carried the presumption he was my subject, not me his. In my heart I had no idea of what he was truly capable. He was set on the idea of the walk, he had been so helpful, sweet even, and it seemed a necessary part of the dance.

  Besides, as he once more pointed out as he slid the glass doors open, it would do us both good and refresh us for an afternoon’s work.

  As he zipped up his red baseball jacket, he told me we could sort out a few of the larger manuscr
ipt issues while we walked. He brightly promised he would attend to the other issues, sign the release form and any outstanding paperwork I needed him to deal with when we returned. For once he seemed free of his fears and worries, and his mood was almost joyful.

  Following him, I made my way through a throng of milling cats at the glass door, their purring now a blood crescendo, and we headed out.

  6

  He led me through a back paddock that crumbled into a bastard bush arisen from the devastation of a gold rush a century and a half before. We picked up a fire trail. Walking along it—the winter light vivid and strong, the air fresh, the day alive—he was talkative.

  You know what your problem is, Kif? he told me as we made our way along that eroded gravel scar into a broken country of crabbed redbox and twisted ironbarks that felt hard as a shattered axe.

  You want to live without enemies, Heidl said, that’s your problem. You think if I am good and kind and don’t speak ill of others I won’t have enemies. But you will, you just don’t know it yet. They’re out there, your enemies, you just haven’t met them. You can seek them out or pretend they don’t exist but they’ll still find you. Trust me. You want to be like a dog that everyone likes, but there’s not a dog alive someone doesn’t want to kick or kill. You want everyone to be your friend. Why? Why bother?

  His monologues grew stranger, and all leading to something that began to feel inescapable unless I turned and fled. And yet I continued to walk, to listen, and with every step go further with him into the enclosing ironbarks, their sinuous black trunks writhing and wrapping around me, brushing past clusters of round redbox leaves softly jiggling in the slight breeze, so many little blue-green pendants that somehow felt too many, and too familiar, wanting to touch me at every turn. He led me off the fire trail, onto another path, and deeper into that increasingly claustrophobic and oppressive woodland.

  People aren’t afraid of dying, Kif, he was saying. It’s living that terrifies us. We’re afraid that as we die we’ll realise we’ve never lived. Death is the revelation of our failure to live as we should. I won’t die that way. We are allowed a small moment to glow yet we forget.

  A fiery and deranged winter light began to take hold of the day, banishing the blue light of the foliage to shadow. It fell between the ironbarks’ black trunks making them blacker and stranger yet, as if they were so many upright, incinerated corpses. It freckled our faces, flecks of light dancing with darkness. Heidl looked up, the sun fell directly across his fleshy face as he smiled, and the tic in his cheek seemed to be strobing.

  I stole the sun, he said. Souls, I stole souls. I ate them whole and no one saw. I am eating the world. I am eating myself. I don’t understand what God wants from me.

  He seemed to be trying to climb onto words, as if he were a drowning man and words bobbing jetsam that might save him, yet with each word grabbed he only succeeded in sinking further into a deep ocean of meaninglessness.

  I walk, I eat, I drink, think, feel. I want, I know, I fear, I dream. But is it me, Kif? Is it? I want myself.

  His talk was now little more than a tone, but what that tone was I can’t describe. I tried to commit it to memory as best I could, hoping there might be something to later steal. Like everything of most interest about him, none of it was to prove useable.

  As the hill steepened, I do remember him saying how he never sought to control anything. His idea was to let everything out of control and see what happened.

  And what did happen? I asked.

  Some chaos, he said, but less than you might expect. People repeated themselves, reinventing all the old orders and hierarchies. I hoped for more, and after a while it impressed me how people always tended to be less.

  For the first time the thought occurred to me that he was insane. His floundering grew more desperate.

  I want grandeur, he said. To shit grandeur. At another point he said, I die you. And giggled.

  We had reached the hill’s summit and he stood there before me in his magnificent derangement and a red baseball jacket.

  Look at me and love me. I have been dying since I was born.

  And his head jerked strangely, he looked at me shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere, as though I were the aberration, and he murmured,

  Is it strange to be you?

  7

  He turned back to look out over hills, scrub, farmland.

  He said, It’s beautiful.

  I said that we should go back to work on the manuscript.

  Roger that, he said.

  But he may well have just shaken his head. His method of agreeing when he disagreed was always formidably played. There was about him at that moment some cosmic despair that was also a form of terrifying patience. We stood there saying nothing more for five or ten minutes. Maybe longer. I worried if I stayed too long he might just start again with all that weirdness about my killing him. I waited perhaps one or two minutes, perhaps twenty—it was like that, everything slowing down and speeding up at the same time.

  The book, I said.

  He was troubled by something or many things. He looked at his watch several times. He made no attempt to answer me.

  Rain spat the dry earth a little.

  Somehow it was over.

  I knew I had to leave. He terrified me. In truth—and in that eerie silence I only had truth to be confronted with—in truth I believed if I stayed I could be dead by nightfall. I gave up trying to reason with him about the manuscript. It wasn’t that I had enough material. I didn’t have close to enough. But I knew now I never would. I thanked him for his time and hospitality and told him I was going.

  This news seemed to break him. He spoke of how lonely he was; how much my friendship mattered to him; how he was sorry he had scared me so with the gun and his talk, his silly, mad talk. But he was frightened, he said, so terribly frightened, of what jail might hold for him. Of course, he didn’t want me to kill him. Never, not really; no, not that. That was just his fear talking. Nor would he kill himself. But he was so afraid of death, of the people who were coming for him. He began to weep. I knew better than to indulge him. He began talking in an ever more disconnected way about a vision he had had.

  The dream, Heidl said, the dream—I saw it, Kif! Just for a moment, I held it—I was it, wasn’t I, Kif? I was. All the rules, all the morals, all the mysteries, they didn’t apply. For a short time I flew above them, beyond them. I was the world and the world was me, Kif—you with me, Kif?—because I was, Kif, I was, and I wasn’t them and I wasn’t bound by the need to obey. Not their rules, not their morals, not their anything. I hid in plain sight pretending to be less, when all the time there I was, more and more, and more was never enough for me, Kif. Never.

  He talked a lot of shit like that.

  He pulled out the Glock from his jacket as casually as if it were a pen. I thought he was going to shoot me, that this was it. The end.

  You see, Kif? he said, waving the gun around. I know you see, I know it, I know you know. I am all there is, Kif. God is the hangman’s hood, Tebbe says. Maybe. But I am the noose. Everything they pretend to hold dear I trampled beneath me. You’ll have your end Paley wants to the book, me dead, and buried with me all wickedness. But we know it’s not really so. We know. I’ll go on.

  His back was to the north and the late afternoon winter sun behind him lit him up, a strange red-haloed black silhouette.

  Hell swarms with the ghosts I’ve sent before me and I’ll send after me, he said.

  He dropped his hand and held the gun at his hip in a non-committal way. Threat or invitation or both it was impossible to know. The sun was lost behind a cloud, the light behind him faded, and I saw his eyes were looking at me but they glistened and seemed to be focusing on something far away, so distant it perhaps hadn’t even yet been born.

  The world will burn. And why? Because of me, Kif.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off his arm, his hand, his finger resting on the safety of the Glock.

  Bec
ause I placed myself at the centre, Kif. Me. I am the way, the light, and the centre. And it frightens me, Kif.

  I said I had to go.

  I’m terrified, Kif.

  He was trembling.

  16

  1

  I FLED. I didn’t run. I turned around and walked away, and hearing nothing from Heidl, I kept on walking. And as I walked I was waiting for the sound of a shot that might mean my death or his. I tried to remember my high school science. If I heard it, did that mean he had missed me or did it mean that he had shot himself? Could you ever hear the sound of your own fatal bullet? But I heard nothing other than the blood-thud in my ears.

  I feared he was coming after me to kill me. Making my way down the hill, I sneaked furtive looks behind. There was no one. Halfway down I’d had enough. I stopped, turned around, and waited. Again, no one, nor sign, nor sound, of anyone. As I stood there scanning the bush for any movement, I thought that perhaps he was going to kill himself. Or that he had. Or that he was waiting for me to come back to kill him.

  I told myself that to kill another human being was loathsome, revolting, abhorrent. I told myself I wouldn’t kill him. Yet having practised it I won’t pretend that I didn’t think about it. Now that killing him was no longer a possibility it was a possibility that I could entertain. Of course, part of me had recoiled from the act not so much in horror but in fear—of being found out, of being tried and jailed, of losing my life to his madness. But, in truth, every time I thought about killing Heidl there had come such a feeling of excitement—the prospect, I suppose, of entering his world, that world he had taunted me with and held out to me as a hope, as a promise.

  As the future.

  I couldn’t decide whether I hated Heidl or admired him, if I was his friend or his enemy, if I wanted to save him or kill him. I was trying to hold on to some idea—of myself, of life, of something, anything—but what was the idea? I tried to steady myself by holding on to the book instead. I tried to think that the book remained possible. Yet all I could think was that Heidl was going to kill himself and I would be left with nothing. I had to keep Heidl alive because it mattered to me to get paid my ten thousand dollars. And for that to happen the book had to be finished and the release signed.