First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  Sensing a way of thinking that excluded the factor of Heidl’s character and my loathing of it, by putting self-interested concern ahead of hate, I found myself running back up the track, through the ironbarks and towards the top of the hill.

  The thought that he might be dead somehow hastened me and I ran harder. I had to know. Yet as I came close to the summit I lost all haste, my dread vanished, and was replaced by a fear of it all being an elaborate trap on the part of Heidl. I slowed and concentrated on quietening my breathing, on walking softly, watching that I didn’t crack sticks underfoot.

  As if they were frames of aged technicolor film the black-trunked ironbarks broke the world into countless near-identical images, through which I glimpsed a flickering red figure. I dropped to my knees behind a clump of redbox.

  Heidl slowly shaped out of the striated Australian light like a mirage or heatwave made incarnate, walking back and forth. He would halt, turn, and take a few steps in another direction with as much purpose and concentration as if he were pacing out instructions to the site of hidden treasure or a secret grave.

  After a minute or two I began crawling slowly towards him, circling around as I did so. When I was perhaps a hundred metres away and hidden behind a bush, I halted.

  He continued pacing back and forth for some minutes before stopping. He was talking to himself, waving his arms around, though I was too far away to make out what he was saying. At last he seemed to have found the spot marked X. He stopped pacing and talking, stood still, and looked out on such view as that small hill afforded of what he imagined was Australia.

  It is hard to say what he saw—hope, failure, a land that in the end confirmed to him his own meaninglessness? Or perhaps he saw something beyond all that, all that was moving through the clouds and the restless land itself. Whatever he saw, it wasn’t enough. Maybe he wanted more. Maybe he saw more. Maybe he saw tomorrow. Who can say? The great deceiver stood before me, alone, unknown to all, even those who presumed to know him, most particularly me. Maybe even himself.

  He dropped his head, reached inside his red baseball jacket and again pulled out the Glock. He stared at the gun as if it were some object he had never seen before, something that had just magically appeared in his hands and for which there was no explanation. He rolled his hand this way and that, examining that strange weapon and the new power it bestowed, as though only now he understood that it was not metal and stippled polymer grip, but something else, something greater. He straightened up, and stretched his gun arm out straight, his other hand steadying it beneath his elbow. In a single movement of grace—perhaps the only movement of grace I ever recall him making—he pulled the gun up in an arc and placed it inside his mouth. He tilted his head backwards, eyes skywards, and adjusted the angle.

  Something cracked.

  With a cry of astonishment Heidl jerked up and back. His legs buckled. For the briefest moment his collapsing body took the form of an inverted question mark, before falling to the ground. He beat around in the dirt for several seconds, thrashing and convulsing, an Australian berserk. Abruptly he stopped, and his body was still.

  I forgot how much I hated him. Maybe at that moment I loved him. I wanted to run over to him. I didn’t move. I could hardly breathe. I was frightened it was some sort of test or trap; if I ran over to him would his corpse stand up and shoot me dead? And I was terrified that if I didn’t move he would jump up and walk over to where I lay cowering behind a scrubby bush and gun me down like a dog. I wanted to run away and yet I didn’t; I feared also that if he came over to shoot me I would be unable to move, and that I would die as meekly as a goat.

  He made no movement.

  My confidence grew.

  After ten minutes or more, I slowly and carefully began crawling towards Heidl. From forty metres out I could see flies were collecting over his head, dipping in and out of the grey matter and blood that was forming a grisly porridge on the bark and eucalypt leaves.

  I rose from a crawl to a crouch, and as I came closer from a crouch to a hunch, ready to hide, to drop, to run, should Heidl suddenly rise and start firing at me.

  From twenty metres away I saw the shocking exit wound that had previously been obscured. The blood, the spilling brain, that violent void, jagged and bloody, in his head—the head that was no longer a head, a part missing, as if there were a jigsaw piece that I might be able to pick up and place back to make it all right again.

  And then I was standing above him, half-torn Adidas Vienna at his head. Small black ants crisscrossed the red-flecked gruel near his ear. There was a smell of shit. I forgot the book, the money I was owed, my rage at his laziness and lies. Overhead a black jay was circling.

  And that’s the worst part.

  His eyes were moving, following the bird above.

  He was alive.

  2

  A gust of wind lifted the leaf and bark litter and moved the eucalypt branches overhead in a rising hush. And in the momentarily whispering and moving dirt Heidl lay mute and still as despair, and all the while the ants continued with their immortal labour, devouring the spilled brains of one more thing waiting to be reborn, patiently now taking on the burden of the toxo, Tebbe, the CIA, and homicidal banks, bearing it all back to their own nest. A bit of blood dribbled out of his mouth, but not so much as you might expect from the movies. The afternoon sun rested on a clutch of eucalypts not far away. It was peaceful and the beauty of the day was overwhelming.

  Why would he not die? He made no noise other than what I came to recognise as a growing struggle for air that slowly transformed from a quiet, leaky rasp to a strange and terrible whistle. There were intervals of silence when I thought him dead only to be proven wrong when the rasping and whistling resumed. Sometimes his breathing would alter to a sort of snoring, except his eyes were open.

  His awful gaze remained fixed on the circling black jay, as if determined not to arouse the anger of his wound, of his appalling, spilling head. His face—more a mask now, really—was childlike, plastic, unformed. There was nothing there. His whole life had been a lost search. It was as if Heidl had never found his true métier, a grandeur or passion as endless and uncaring, as intoxicating and as indecipherable as the vast lands below that fatal hill, spreading away from where he lay to places more distant than Moscow is from London but which were still also Australia, an invention as absurd as himself, a country that he continued to claim to the end was his birthplace.

  And perhaps in some fundamental way it was. It was a land not infinitely perfectible, just infinitely corruptible. There was nothing of itself it wouldn’t sell, and always cheaper than last time. In such a land he should have gone a long way—all the way, really. He must have wondered why it was ending this way.

  I wanted to talk with him because it seemed rude at such a time not to, and it seemed ridiculous to think that talking would now mean anything. I knew that, and I also knew he must have too many things to say, or not know how to say even one simple thing.

  It’s a dream, I wanted to say, because it felt to me that way. And I felt the terrible emptiness of things, an emptiness that we can only defend ourselves against by being with each other. But I couldn’t tell him I was with him because he might yet misunderstand and kill me, and he couldn’t tell me he was with me, because really he wasn’t. What was a dream and what was real, that was the problem, that was the question, and we needed to ask each other about these things, because maybe he knew the answer dying, or maybe I knew the answer in watching him die.

  He said nothing, and he just kept on dreaming or thinking, or dreaming he was thinking or thinking he was dreaming. It was hard to say and impossible to know. A mosaic of sulphur-crested cockatoos dragged a winking pattern of white wings across the sky and Heidl’s eyes with them until the moment the flock vanished and the blue void returned.

  It was then that I heard a barely audible voice croak. Looking down I realised with horror that it was Heidl. I stared at his eyes gazing at the sky, his lips scarce
ly moving, more trembling really, each word wet, slurred, slow and mucusy with something—saliva? blood?

  Shoot…me, he murmured.

  I did nothing. I just watched. I hated him. As I stared into his eyes I needed him to know it. I am not sure he did, or if he did that he cared. His body made short choking noises then halted.

  Finish me off, he said, or I think he said.

  It was hard to know. His voice was that faint. Each sentence was a rasp of breath, a goat bleat. He started choking again. I could have run back to the homestead to get help. Maybe saved his life. At the least I could have consoled him.

  I didn’t want to console him. I didn’t want to save him. I wanted him to die. To break the spell. To be rid of him and be free.

  Please, he begged.

  I felt things but I understood I had to conquer my feelings.

  You bastards with your books! he suddenly shouted, his voice momentarily strong, spitting out the words. You’re the worst! You have no pity!

  His right arm jolted up, a blue palm stretched outwards, fingers outstretched and taut, shuddering, reaching for something—a final hope? a curse upon us all? somebody to salute or strangle? The gesture was incomprehensible and terrifying.

  His arm dropped back into the dirt. His dog black eyes wore a fierce varnish; his nostrils flared angrily, in different rhythm to his twitching cheek. His voice trailed off into babble and incoherent grunts. Perhaps threats, or curses. Perhaps prayers, though I doubt it. Perhaps nothing. But the effort seemed to exhaust him and he fell silent. I held my gaze. He continued to exist. I let him look deep into me and know all that I felt. His mind seemed confused, lost in shadows.

  Suddenly his head shuddered in a terrible spasm as though he had had some dreadful premonition, some intolerable vision.

  It’s coming! he hissed. It’s coming!

  I strained to hear what else he might say. But that was it. Ten, fifteen minutes later—maybe longer, I can’t say—his eyes stopped moving. His cheek was still.

  And I knew.

  Even dead I didn’t trust him. I waited, not daring to move. But my body was ahead of my mind. It slowly turned, took one step, then another. And I kept going, walking slowly, weary beyond imagining. No shot, no sound came. I began running and I didn’t stop.

  3

  Night threw itself over me like a mugger’s coat. Night filled the world into which I rushed headlong with tar and headlights and the rushing wind of trucks and cars passing by. Heidl’s wailing angered the universe; air horns sounded warnings to the heavens as I overtook on blind corners and careered through black space towards the city and the publisher’s car park and the sea over which I flew a few hours later, buried in the clammy gut of the night sky as behind me jets of fire hurtled me to my destiny.

  Seated, belted, contained, I was amazed to discover the world was no different, that those dozing or reading around me were perfectly content to sit with a man such as me, and that the plane and the seat I was sitting in now, the trees, the bitumen and road trains and sheep in the paddocks I had just fled past, the deep chasmed creeks I had bridged and the bleak ravines of concrete sound barriers I had descended into as I made it to the city were all just the same as they had been earlier that day.

  Rainblear, cloudink, wingstutter, breath mist on porthole plastic.

  So much was so much the same that it stood to reason that so too was I, and it seemed for long periods afterwards that nothing had happened, that nothing had changed, but every time that feeling began to form itself into hope another stronger feeling took hold of me. Everything was changed. Because I had changed. Because it had happened.

  Headspun, soulfucked, lifelost.

  And yet what had happened was unclear to me—had I gone back to help him live, as I was still trying to convince myself, or to make sure he died? Had I killed him, or had he killed himself? Or had I gone back because he wanted me to know that finally he controlled me and I had killed him as he had wished?

  The plane shuddered earthwards.

  There was a sickening fug of fresh glue in the taxi I took from the Hobart airport. The car radio was on. A newsreader was saying Siegfried Heidl had been found dead with a gunshot wound to the head.

  I wound down a window. As the air gusted in I gulped. I gulped and I gulped. It was as if something had taken hold of me, somehow enslaved me, and I couldn’t even vomit it away.

  There’s a bloody story for you, the taxi driver said.

  The police were asking for help with their investigation, the newsreader continued, and were keen to talk with anyone who saw Heidl in his final hours.

  Who’d do that? the taxi driver asked.

  That’s me, I said, pointing ahead. Just past the crossroad, thanks.

  I kept hearing his terrible final whisper, those two meaningless words full of some incomprehensible foreboding, hissing over and over in my ears. I wanted to say something more in reply, but I felt sick from the flight, from lack of sleep, from fear, and when I opened my mouth to speak it just filled with rushing air. I tried to remember the word Gene Paley had used the first time we had met, and as we pulled up at my home and I took my bag from the taxi driver, it finally came to me.

  Nègres.

  17

  1

  TWINS SLUNG over my shoulders, wailing, I walked back and forth in our lounge room watching the late-night TV news while Suzy dozed on the couch. It was all Heidl and Heidl was all. In the middle of footage of the ASO—choppers, fires, Heidl receiving his Order of Australia, passing-out parades of young uniformed men, Heidl in handcuffs running a media gauntlet after being captured—the phone rang.

  I thought it would be the cops, but it was Gene Paley. He told me my identity was being kept a secret so that I would not have to deal with any unwelcome media intrusion and I could get on with my writing.

  He went quiet, waiting for me to answer. I didn’t. In the background I could hear the reporter saying that the police were at this stage ruling nothing in or out. I wanted to be reassured, but I wasn’t. I felt resentful. Confused. On edge. Guilty. Frightened. I felt too much.

  Excuse me a moment, I said. I went over to the TV and switched it off. Gene Paley seemed to misunderstand my leaving the phone as hiding some grief. I wondered what grief I might be hiding. I had no idea what emotion I was even feeling.

  I know this would be very hard for you, Kif.

  I thought Gene Paley knew, but, of course, Gene Paley knew nothing. He meant only the book. He was a publisher. He only ever meant the book. I was immensely relieved. Then I was disappointed that he didn’t know, that he didn’t even suspect, that he wouldn’t ask. Me, I wanted to say. Me! What a fool I felt Gene Paley was with his wispy arms and horrible red-moled flesh, all raddled and wrong, white as death.

  It’s fine, I said. I’m fine.

  But all I could see were his lips trembling, his eyes, the circling black jay overhead. Trying to steady the phone with my other hand, I noticed the dirt still under my fingernails from crawling through the bush only a few hours before.

  A good writer needs dirty hands, Kif.

  It is going well, Kif? Gene Paley asked.

  It’s coming, I said.

  I was feeling something in me changing, something growing both cruel and pitiless in a way that frightened me.

  How much is locked in?

  Maybe a third.

  And the rest?

  He’s dead, I said.

  Gene Paley went quiet a second time. I was angry, as if he had somehow made me do what I had done and was now forcing me to confess that there was no book.

  I’m sorry, Gene Paley said. Kif, I know you are—were—fond of…Siegfried.

  Fond? I said, feeling something I worried I might not be able to control coming up through my chest into my neck and shuddering my mouth.

  Siegfried…Gene Paley said, coughed, and went on. Siegfried…never cleared—anything?

  Maybe because I felt I needed to offer some hope for us both, or just me, I s
ort of said he had. I certainly didn’t say he hadn’t. I don’t know why I lied, but I did. Maybe I just wanted Gene Paley off my back and off the phone.

  He signed the clearance form? Gene Paley said, his voice rising, insistent. The form saying there was a final manuscript and the final manuscript was true and accurate?

  My world was heavy and I was irritated with so many things.

  What did I just say? I said.

  Well, that’s the best, Kif, the very best news.

  The problem, I said, isn’t that there isn’t a document authenticating the final manuscript as true and accurate. It is that there is no final manuscript to authenticate.

  Kif, I understand that. But you have a signed clearance.

  There’s no one now to say what his life was, I said.

  Death isn’t a full stop, Gene Paley said. It’s an em dash with an empty page below.

  That’s the problem.

  There was a short silence.

  See it as an advantage, Gene Paley said. Fill the page.

  2

  By the morning Heidl’s death was front-page news everywhere. Throughout the day he remained the lead on the radio and TV news bulletins as the connections and comparisons he had for so long craved and tried to promote were finally made by others—commentators, academics, experts and journalists. They used all the words and phrases he had wished for: Nugan Hand, murder, CIA, spy, Allende, conspiracy, Whitlam, assassin, Cold War, clandestine ops. They went on and on about the inexplicable nature of so much of the ASO and its activities and its paramilitary trappings and fuck knows what else. And knowing, I realised, nothing. Gene Paley was everywhere, being quoted as saying Heidl had left a tell-all memoir, full of sensational details which, when pressed, Gene Paley refused to divulge.