First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  And then the police said that they were confident that there were no suspicious circumstances. Over the succeeding days, the fascination with Heidl began fading and other stories blossomed in its place. As if it were a mathematical progression from celebrity to anonymity, Heidl’s story slipped from page one to page two, and then page four, and each day each story was half the size of the story of the previous day. One day I came across a small column, buried mid-newspaper at the bottom of the page, speculating on what Heidl may have revealed in his forthcoming memoir. Above it sat an advertisement for washing machines and next to it a much larger item about a Melbourne contract killer. It was the photo that caught my eye: Bertie’s Pizza ’n’ Pasta Takeaways, Glen Huntly. Its owner, an Alberto Ricci, had been arrested and charged with four murders. His front had been the pizza shop, where messages were left on an answering machine. I didn’t read beyond the second paragraph.

  6

  Things grew molten. I had thought the point of writing was to fix words with their exact meaning, but the fun seemed to be in freeing them to perform outrages and miracles, watching them commit acts of indecency and being surprised by their unexpected moments of grace and revelation. I had been told words were a mirror, but I found them a moon that let everything in their quicksilver light turn into something that always hovered on the edge of mystery. Nothing held. More and more I let myself slip with them.

  I had thought it was about writing what I knew, but after a time I discovered the more I acknowledged all that I didn’t know, the closer to some truth I seemed to get. I loathed Heidl yet I was now condemned to writing an entire book in his voice, hoping to lead readers to the point I had reached: that this man—who was Heidl and yet not Heidl; who was me and yet not me—was evil. And I had to do it in a way that might keep them reading until the last page.

  He kept dying before my eyes every day and every day on every page I perversely resurrected him in vengeance, in triumph, in amazement. No, the son had not forsaken the father, nor yet the father damned the son; did it any longer matter who was who? For we were now a holy trinity—subject, book, author—undivinable and indivisible.

  Heidl wasn’t stopping, he wasn’t done with invention, not even now he was dead—perhaps more so, now he was dead, when I didn’t have to check his inanities, his outrageous and preposterous stories with him, seeking somehow to reconcile my new lies with his old lies. Now he was dead he could live more than ever through me, my story veined with the odd rhythms and pompous kitsch he claimed to be; that marvellous creation that had at once been him and the invention of him, and was now my invention and the invention of me.

  I was St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

  Gone was the confusion, as well as the anger; all that divided me from him evaporated, and with it all that separated me from the truth about myself. I could see and hear and think, but not as I had once seen and heard and thought. I had passed my whole life in a valley of mist and now the mist had cleared, and the deepest reality of the world was finally clear to me and it was nothing like the world I had formerly thought was real. The book I was writing was my story and, no longer myself, I was finally me.

  In this way, eleven days and twelve nights passed.

  And then it was done.

  I took out my bright orange ear plugs. Outside the rain was smashing on the roof. I should have felt euphoric, but really, I just felt nothing and that felt good enough.

  I posted the disks; two days later the second-hand fax machine in my writing room–wardrobe began to shudder as it dropped a long toilet roll of paper covered in an unpleasant gloss coating that smelt of burning chalk, and on it the first of the many pages covered in Pia’s copyedit. Within a week, as per our schedule, the editing was done, and four days later I flew to Melbourne to discuss some final matters—the proofed galleys would be there ready for me to sign off, and we would close on cover copy and internal images.

  18

  1

  PIA AND I made our way down the corridor, past the executive’s office in which—for a short time that had seemed such a long time—I had felt imprisoned forever. But that was a death ago, already another world and another life. The door of the office was open. Inside I glimpsed a large, possibly obese man being photographed carving a ham that sat on the desk behind which Heidl had so recently attempted to fabricate one last empire of illusions.

  Jez Dempster, Pia said. Photo shoot for his new cookbook.

  I thought he wrote fiction?

  He writes cheques and we cash them. If he did anal imprints we’d whack them in clapboards and set to work flogging them as a book.

  A book!—in the end Heidl had failed even to make that. And no longer having Heidl to deal with I felt partly relieved and partly triumphant, because somehow, I too, like Jez Dempster, had written a book of which, for a short time yet, I felt proud. Glimpsing that office again, that desk, the Francis Bacon screaming chairs, the view beyond the windows of an infinitely replicating despair, my old feelings of incarceration and dread seemed already a distant memory. And I felt an emotion the opposite of mourning, a joyful rebirth. I was writing an autobiography whose author was now dead, knowing I only had to answer to the logic of a book, not the madness of its supposed creator.

  Chin tucking the carousel into her chest, Pia used the slide projector she carried to push open the door to a windowless conference room.

  Nice new shoes, she said, pointing at my feet as we went in.

  I thanked her, and while at one end of a long meeting table she set up the slide projector, I found the switch that released a screen from the ceiling. As she clicked the slide carousel into the projector, Pia explained how Heidl had left the carousel and some other photos with her his last day in the office. She spilled a large manila envelope full of snaps onto the table.

  Dreary shit, Pia said.

  And dreary they were: a melange of conventional shots of Heidl and his family, so redolent of the ’70s—HQ Holden wagons and auto tents, tight shorts, terry-towelling caps and peeling skin, old four-wheel drives in the bush.

  We picked those images that promised the best hope of reproduction and moved on to a second envelope’s contents. These were of his time working with the ASO—promotional stills, professionally taken black-and-whites of the paras jumping, marching, training; a uniformed Heidl watching, ordering, smiling. Corporate glossies of the ASO board as well as of Heidl with dignitaries—police chiefs, local and national politicians, ambassadors, and CEOs. We culled the least incriminating. Still, for a book that needed photos there was little of real interest. I crawled under a side table, found a power point and plugged the carousel projector in. Pia switched the conference room lights off.

  In the darkness it took Pia a few moments to master the machine. Once under way, the colour slides were as unenlightening as the stills we had just looked at—the same unpromising mix of amateur family snaps and the sharper but no more interesting pictures taken by professionals of ASO paras leaping out of planes, climbing oil rigs, and fighting fires.

  Your book, Pia said, does make him sound more interesting than I think he was.

  And maybe it was true, I thought, as Pia kept clicking on with the wired remote, as the carousel kept whirring and clunking as unremarkable image morphed into unremarkable image. Other than cleaning the banks out of seven hundred million it was possible to believe that Heidl was as dull as his pictures.

  At least he did some work putting this together, I said. They tell a kind of story.

  And they did. If they were banal, they still had a coherence Heidl rarely managed in his conversations with me. They progressed from genial family man to employee at the ASO, to man of action, to man at the centre, the action CEO.

  I know he got off on the idea of evil, Pia said. But maybe it was a shroud to cover up the fact he was just a dirty little con man.

  She clicked and the screen shone bright white. There was no slide. Dust particles danced in the cone of light.

  Show’s over
, Pia said. No more slides.

  I stood up and went over to take the carousel off and pick out the few slides we had chosen for possible reproduction in the book.

  I think there’s one left here, I said, pointing at the carousel. One empty slot and then a slide.

  Pia pushed the remote again, and in my mind something clicked and rolled forward with the slide carousel. I felt I finally understood Heidl, Heidl who had for so long troubled and disturbed me, Heidl whom I had to shower away every night, Heidl who was now, I realised, so much less than I had ever thought. He wasn’t evil. That was too grand an idea when his truth was much more mundane. He was just pathetic.

  I looked up from the carousel to see a blurry image of dark trees appear on the screen. Pia jiggled with the focus, the trees reached forward and as quickly fell back, before forming into the soft image of a rainforest with a tropical tree at its centre from which something was dangling. I turned to Pia.

  You’re so right, I said. Heidl, the dirty little con man.

  Kif—Pia began, and halted.

  She was staring straight ahead at the screen, playing with the focus with a sudden intensity, perhaps hoping it might somehow airbrush away what she was seeing and make it morph into something else.

  I looked back at the screen.

  It did no good. No amount of focusing would. I walked towards the end of the table in disbelief.

  Oh my God, Pia whispered.

  On the screen a naked corpse was hanging from a tree.

  I am the forest.

  I stood close to the screen, staring.

  And a night of dark trees.

  It was oddly bloodied. After some moments I realised why.

  He has no skin, I said.

  We stared at the picture of the flayed corpse, repelled, fascinated, sickened, silent. There could be no doubt: the corpse’s skin had been peeled off his body. On the far left of the image I could just make out what I first thought was a large tropical bush, but what on closer inspection seemed to be the blurry red and white bonnet of a 55 series Toyota LandCruiser.

  We could have put things together. But we didn’t.

  I think about that even now. Why? I suppose we had a job to do and that wasn’t our job. And for us, who had the vanity of believing we were creative people, it was a reality too hard to imagine. What if it was just one final con from beyond the grave, a last joke on us? Maybe it too was nothing, just one more empty container. We were trying to reduce something to the smallness of a book, not open ourselves up to the largeness of life. That’s what I tried to think anyway. We wanted it ended, not opened; our prejudices neatly confirmed, not laid bare.

  Heidl’s dead, I said.

  2

  Pia pressed the remote as if in silent agreement. The shutter dropped. The carousel awkwardly rolled forward another place. The screen went white. The room around us was lit in its lunar reflection, stark and austere in a way that was still then new and yet to become ubiquitous.

  In its functional surfaces, its lost cables disappearing under a side table, its off-white tones, it spoke of a future of cosmic emptiness. In that mercurial light, it was—in its pure functionality, its powder-coated matte black steel, its melamine and Laminex and fireproof industrial carpet that dissolved into almost complete abstraction—a place where the gravity of the present was growing weak and that of the future was growing strong.

  I had travelled a great distance from my wretched study, somewhere even beyond the faux teak bookshelved office, to a floating realm, a vertiginous world that was at once somewhere and nowhere, both that morning so long ago and the future. The windowless void in which we sat fixated on the hanging screen seemed only to exist to have shown us this one image. It was as if we were to travel through that void, an empty infinity, forever after.

  Alone, so alone.

  We felt these things, but we ignored them. We talked instead in hushed voices, professional voices, about what our final cull of photos for the book would be. Neither of us spoke to the other again of the slide of the flayed corpse. Maybe it was too much to take in so soon after Heidl’s death, or too hard to acknowledge what it might mean if we did. The book had reached its end and an end was an end, right?

  If the image before us didn’t fit with what I had written or what we thought, well, it simply didn’t make the cut. Another dud image. It took too much imagination, would cost too much pain to conceive of it as anything other than a curious accident. But the book we had with such care cobbled together from his inventions and my own now clearly was—I could see—just one more evasion, another untruth.

  And once more, Heidl somehow seemed in that room with us, taunting us, or worse. My good humour gave way to a clammy tightness. Was it his photo or someone else’s? If it wasn’t his, where would he get such a photo? After all, this was 1992, there was no internet, and it wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of a slide of a hanging flayed corpse. A machine for piping a sewer line of all the world’s horror into your home wasn’t yet viewed as progress. Why, at the end of the story of his life, would he want to put that picture of all pictures in the carousel? To prove that he was, after all, a killer? That he had been Iago all along?

  My dreams were for a time haunted by that hanging corpse whom I recognised variously as Pia, as Heidl, as myself, or, sometimes, as me and Heidl somehow morphing in and out of each other. Perhaps, like all dreams, it was something there and not there at the same time, something that I thought was transitory, whereas it was what we were all becoming.

  Pia would go on to survive the clearfelling of publishing companies that proceeded apace over the next few decades, finding at each point in the ever-diminishing forest another, higher tree which to climb. She ended up working at Penguin Random House in New York, the last of the great publishers in the last of the great European cities and all the things we once thought mattered.

  She had risen far beyond even the wildest aspirations of Gene Paley, was bound to publish famous authors and hack writers, accumulate prizes, publishing divisions, libel suits, unearnt advances, bestsellers, spreadsheets and corporate memoranda, and at the end of it all die not of the dementia she feared, but of stomach cancer at fifty-six, miserable that life had never amounted to more than a corporate table strewn with paper and, later, a monitor, with emails and messages and alerts that metastasised over her screen and spread into her soul and gut where, released, they killed her. Her manuscripts, once her love, were finally a misery to her, and then no solace at all.

  And me?

  I am still alive.

  I would go back to Hobart and wait for a moment that would never come with my novel.

  3

  On the way out from the conference room we ran into Jez Dempster. Pia introduced me to the great man. It was the first time I had ever met another writer as a writer. I was flattered, and I was appalled that I was flattered.

  You must try my jamon, Jez Dempster said, ushering us back into the office I had last stood in staring at Ziggy Heidl’s revolver. I have a farm in the Otways, he continued, his manner so pleasant, so easy after Heidl. Wessex saddlebacks, he said. I feed them the Spanish way—only acorns—and this jamon is the result, the first in Australia.

  Jez Dempster was a man as ahead of the times in boutique agriculture as he was in girth, as he was in so many things. A neatly trimmed beard sat on his spreading cheeks like cracked pepper on pork rind waiting to be roasted. Although the cookbook was purportedly by the great man himself, the recipes in the book were those of his anorexic Andalusian chef, Jez Dempster told us, adding, in a voice sonorous with sincerity, that the chef had been rewarded handsomely for his anonymous efforts.

  It’s the best book I’ve never read, he confided.

  He wanted to talk about his pig farm and invited me once more to try his jamon. With a long, flat-bladed knife—so thin it bent like paper as he cut—he sliced for me an impossibly thin piece of jamon. He held it out to me on the flat of the blade. I stared at the cut flesh as fine and pink as
skin.

  Once you try it you’ll never go back, he said. They live in a beautiful dark forest and have a lovely life and a quick death.

  It was as if it were a sacrament.

  Did it suffer? I asked, because it suddenly seemed to matter. Somehow in my mind’s eye the corpse we had just seen dangling from a tree and images of pig carcases dangling from an abattoir rack merged into one.

  Jez Dempster smiled benignly, as if to suggest life was too sweet to think such things.

  I was upset. The pig, I said, because at that moment I sided with the pig against Jez Dempster. Did it? I asked again.

  Ignoring my question he went on to instruct me how to taste the meat, where to place it in my mouth as I chewed and sucked.

  People don’t rate the saddleback for jamon. It’s impossible with such a pig! they said. But that’s because the Spanish never tried. Never! It’s like our literature—the Europeans, the Americans, they say we should abide by their rules, their ways—but I never let it define me. We must have our own Australian letters, don’t you think, Keith?

  I said nothing, feeling only an incommunicable horror. At that moment, I sided with the pig against even literature which, after all, had done many brilliant things but had done nothing for the pig or all the dead pigs; I was on the side of all the dead pigs against Australian literature, against all literature, against publishers’ numbers, against what was as bad or worse, my own wretched ambition that had led me to a moment of shameful complicity in something larger and broken and wrong.