First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  This is an awful drink, I said.

  I think I’ve had too much, Pia said.

  Really awful.

  Do you ever feel that way? Pia asked.

  I did. Often.

  No, I said, and smiling I beckoned a waiter for another two drinks. Pia put her hand over her glass.

  So lonely, Pia said, paying someone to touch you?

  Now it was my turn to look away, at the bar, the already dated subway-tiled trim, the faces, the swirl of people.

  Do you, Kif?

  I was momentarily overwhelmed by the babble of strangers, but Pia’s voice cut through.

  I think some days I want to be dead, Pia said. At peace. I think how glad I’d be to be dead. Dead as only the dead can be. With a vengeance.

  A woman who turned out to be one of Pia’s writers sidled up and said hello, saving me from awkwardness. Her name was Emily Coppin, and after she moved on to talk to someone else she knew at the bar, Pia whispered how she was connected with the Brooklyn set.

  We bill her as one of the voices of her generation, Pia said. Hoho.

  I said how lucky Pia must be here, though I didn’t exactly mean it, how many extraordinary people she must meet. She replied that it wasn’t exactly so, that while she met many people and knew some, she would have to be honest and say few were extraordinary and none were real friends. They have a word here, she said, transactional.

  Pia cackled heartily, throat throttling.

  People are your transactional friends, she said, and this time we both laughed.

  What does that mean? I asked.

  She told me it meant they used you and you used them. It’s not really a word, she said. It’s a horrible idea. It’s so horrible that no one can see how horrible it really is. People don’t even have the courage to use an honest word for it.

  Robbery? I said.

  Consensual rape, she said.

  Like that.

  She paused and looked around and seemed to be considering something. After some time she turned back to me and fixed me with a gaze that allowed no relief.

  4

  Pia wanted to talk about what had happened back then, but about what had happened I had ever less idea. Luckily, Emily Coppin returned with a friend, a bearded young man whose role seemed to be to agree with Emily Coppin in all things, and for Emily Coppin all things were all things Emily Coppin.

  I asked her what she wrote.

  Autobiography. It’s what everyone writes now. Knausgaard, Lerner, Cusk, Carrère. All the best writers taking literature somewhere new.

  Pia politely interjected to say how the third volume of Emily’s memoirs was in this week’s New York Times bestseller list.

  Congratulations, I said. That’s incredible.

  Why did I come to a dead end writing novels? Emily asked.

  She talked as if giving a TEDx presentation. Direct looks, definite hand gestures, questions that were only pretexts for moments of extended faux thought.

  Because, she continued, like, as a mode of narrative it’s dead. I mean, we all know that.

  Emily Coppin was perhaps late twenties, with that strange face of the striving class of New York—an elemental erosion, preternaturally aged yet aping adolescence. Down her left upper arm ran the tasteful tattooed half sleeve, razor-wire spirals sprouting red roses, an adornment to an unspoken privilege posing as its antithesis. She appeared to have an agreement with the world that she was attractive, even if, on closer inspection, her glamour was the groomed cuteness and big-eyed stare of a palace’s pet capuchin monkey. I say these things, but perhaps she was beautiful and at that moment I just hated her. Certainly, she understood her own limited experience as the full extent of the universe. Perhaps she had no sense of the fragility of things. It was hard to say.

  It’s fake, inventing stories as if they explain things, Emily was saying. Plot, character, Jack and Jill going up the hill. Just the thought of a fabricated character doing fabricated things in a fabricated story makes me want to gag. I am totally hoping never to read another novel again.

  Novels disempower reality, the beard said.

  Emily mimed putting two fingers down her throat and made violent choking sounds. The beard laughed heartily. Emily turned and stared at him. A fruit fly buzzed around her head.

  Whatever, Luke, she said, trying to swipe the fly away.

  The beard went quiet. For the first time I noticed her eyes, the dull colour of old snail shells, as she returned to her theme.

  Everyone wants to be the first person. Autobiography is all we have. I mean, isn’t that what you do in reality TV?

  I don’t know what I do, I said. I just go in each morning and make it up.

  That’s where we’re different then, Emily said. I don’t make it up. I hate stories. We all hate them. We’ve heard them all before. We need to see ourselves.

  It sounds like literary selfies, I said.

  What’s wrong with a good selfie? Emily said.

  The beard laughed again. Emily Coppin turned her gaze on him as if he were a natural history specimen in a museum.

  Luke’s a successful narcissist, she said. Great sex for him is me watching him jerk off. He’s got a lot of followers. He tells them all about it. The more he tells the more likes he gets. The more likes the more he tells.

  Pia tilted her head towards mine.

  Luke’s life is to Mark Zuckerberg what the bison plains were to the railway barons.

  The beard brightened. Post. Share. Die, he said, and smiled.

  I’ve learnt a lot from Luke, Emily Coppin said. She waved a hand at the fly.

  Somewhere, somehow, over some acrid mojito that wasn’t really a mojito but a slightly rancid concoction called the house specialty because mojitos were passé, the conversation wandered on to the recent disappearance of two young sisters, one four, the other six. Someone used the word evil. I don’t remember who.

  Evil? Emily said. Hey, don’t tell me you believe in evil?

  She shook her head and smiled. Emily had many strong opinions on many things. I was no longer sure what I thought about anything.

  It’s not a question of belief, I said.

  I totally get it, Emily said. Not. But it doesn’t exist, right? Evil is an idea, that’s all. But what is evil? You can’t see it, you can’t touch it.

  The beard agreed. Emily Coppin nodded sagely.

  And that’s the thing, she went on. I feel there’s, like, environment, reasons, a lack of respect. Right? Like, biology? Neural elasticity. But neural elasticity’s not evil. It’s terrible if it happens to you, but, you know, a serial murderer? Crazy. But that’s what it is, a chemical imbalance, some misfiring of neural transmitters—a malfunction of brain soup. Can you call a bad minestrone evil?

  No, Pia said. You call it lumpy ketchup.

  My point exactly. Thank you, Pia.

  I wanted to tell Emily Coppin about seeing a flayed corpse. About what you can become. About reading stories to Bo. But it was inexplicable. Unknowable. Unsayable as autobiography. All I could manage to say was that I didn’t agree.

  Evil’s a relative notion, Kif, Emily said, fixing me with the determined gaze. Her snail-shell eyes were duller and more distant than ever, pavement-hued vortices.

  You think so?

  The science is in. Evil is just a construct of the old Judaeo-Christian order. What you talk about when you talk about a white god—a black devil.

  The beard smiled. Emily smiled. She was after all an American writer, her purpose was uplift, answers, certainty, knowledge, characters whose origins and psyche were all reducible to neat explanation and final judgement, one more moral grammarian.

  And what could I say? That I had been frightened, that I was still frightened, that something happened, that something changed for me and nothing was as it had been? That something had broken in me and me with it?

  What would I know? I said, smiling, hands opening out. I’m just an Australian reality TV producer.

  It wasn’t the
moving epiphany I presume Emily wrote so well, but something I could see she sensed as even better. Having made of a conversation a contest and having made of the contest a victory, the natural order of things had been restored. The beard’s hand shot out, grabbed at the air, and opened to drop a crushed fruit fly. Emily laughed, and together they left us for the far end of the bar and a group that had formed around a well-known actor telling stories.

  5

  1992 seems so close, I said, glancing at the far end of the bar. But there are people running the world today who weren’t even born then.

  The way I remember it, Pia said, time suddenly, crazily sped up back then. Crazy fast. Suddenly everything changed. People were insanely optimistic; they said they knew that time was racing towards something. They didn’t really know towards what but the thing was that it was going towards something. If you pressed them they’d mumble words like democracy.

  Freedom, I said.

  Pia smiled. Yeah. Those sorts of words, she said. The main thing was that everything was going forward so fast that time itself was about to stop. The end of history.

  One of history’s better jokes.

  Sure, Pia said. The thing is we thought we were gaining the world when really we were losing something fundamental. Do you remember that slide carousel? Sometimes I think of it going backwards, looking at Heidl’s life in reverse.

  The washed-out Kodachrome colours came back to me, and I too could see the flickering images of the parachute jumpers giving way to an ever-younger family, hair growing on Heidl’s head, the bonnet of a red and white LandCruiser in front of which his family posed for the camera.

  Maybe that was what was happening, Pia said. No one could see that it wasn’t really progress at all, but regress. No one could see some breakdown beginning, or returning, some universal collapse of values that was also the beginning of the acceptance of a new violence and a new injustice.

  You need to see Cherry twice a week, I said.

  Pia fixed me with her editor’s eye: she wasn’t done; she needed me to listen, not speak.

  What was so shocking, Kif, wasn’t the violence, not the injustice, but the acceptance of the violence and the injustice as natural. And with it all a culture of solipsism, a pandemic of loneliness, a politics of hate; an invitation to join in making up murderous stories that finally robbed us all.

  I didn’t like thinking about the past or present the way Pia did.

  It was a coma, Pia said. A coma that lasted for decades.

  I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just swap stories, laugh, and enjoy an evening together. I didn’t like the way she was so worked up. I tried to take the conversation back to Cherry.

  Fuck Cherry. I want to talk about what haunts me, Kif, Pia said. If the world could have dreamt its future as one man, do you think it would have dreamt Ziggy Heidl?

  But I didn’t agree with what she was saying. I couldn’t. I had to believe he was just a man. How do you compare the crimes of a petty criminal with some breakdown, some collapse so immense that even now its contours remain unclear? Some terrible violence that was coming to us all. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that there had been any sort of collapse. And so I said no, that what she was saying seemed an American sort of idea and Heidl’s wasn’t an American story but an Australian one.

  What’s an Australian story? She laughed. Or German? Or American?

  No, I said again, I don’t agree, and I said nothing more about it, because maybe she was right, or maybe she wasn’t, and I just made some jokes and ordered some more drinks.

  And then Pia asked if I remembered the last slide.

  6

  The image came back to me in an unpleasant rush—the harsh light that made the musculature particularly pink, the striations of subcutaneous veins an awful blue.

  I remembered we looked at that swinging corpse for a long time, not because we wanted to but because we were too shocked not to look at it. Of course, the corpse was not swinging—how could it, a frozen image, do such a thing?

  Pia remembered a feeling she had in the conference room—as if something else in that room was moving. Or the room was moving, or even something beyond the room.

  I knew what she meant about that feeling of something large moving—history perhaps, the future, or our souls, or all these things—and feeling sick with a momentary knowledge that vanished almost as quickly as it was granted me.

  We observed it closely, Pia was saying, I remember you up there at the screen staring at it.

  I ordered Aperol spritzes, which I find always help to rescue me from such conversations. But Pia had things she wanted to say, had perhaps wanted to say for a long time, things that grow calluses around them in another country and we carry unspoken, until we find another person from that distant time, that faraway place—that other country—and mistakenly think that with them at least—at last—we can communicate the incommunicable.

  But we can’t.

  Still she continued, head bowed slightly, a strange and singular determination I hadn’t recognised in her before.

  I was hoping, Pia said, that what we were seeing was some trick.

  The waiter returned to say that they didn’t do Aperol spritzes, but that they did do their own artisanal take on a negroni.

  Pia said how at first she wondered if it was the fault of the projector or our eyes, and thought it would transform into something else, something benign and unobjectionable.

  Two non-negronis, I said to the waiter.

  I wondered if it was some waking dream, Pia said.

  And I thought how perhaps it was—of a world where something had ended and something else, something unimaginable, was beginning, against which we were powerless to act, but could only observe, waiting to wake up and scream, never knowing that we were in fact being condemned to a waking nightmare that never ended, a world where not one heart knew how to touch another.

  Pia looked up at me with a look that was full of tenderness. The sort of look people give when they know they’re losing someone. The sort of look that is wrongly confused with love. She leant forward, and put her hand on mine.

  I saw that she wanted to say something; that it was important to her to say it, and nothing I would say would dissuade her from what she was about to tell me.

  Can I say something, Kif?

  Of course.

  I don’t care, I really don’t. I might have done the same thing in your place.

  Pia leant further in, her eyes gazing at me with an odd intensity. It was a moment before I recognised what she felt. It was, in equal parts, admiration and despair. I noticed there were tears catching in the wrinkles around her eyes. She tilted her head back and blinked two or three times.

  I think you killed him, Kif. But you can’t kill it. Can you?

  I saw that Pia believed this implacably; that it was important to her to believe it.

  No, I said. You can’t kill it.

  21

  1

  EVERYONE I MET that night was a stranger. They claimed to know me, they greeted me affectionately as an old, dear friend. But I had trouble recognising them. Their cruelled bodies were a battle of bloat and collapse, their faces strangely slackened. At first they all seemed to be wearing masks—oddly set things often with a look of fixed astonishment. Everything that was superfluous had eroded. Something had happened and they had not known it and now it was already done. As if a final judgement, virtues and vices reduced and were wrought as drooping face, dull and watery eye, crusted skin. Their arms they put around me were flabbily fleshed, their cheeks sunken and strangely dry, and there was in them all a mood, an attitude, that I can only describe as weary acceptance. And when I saw myself reflected similarly in the pub window that night it was with horror that I realised that time had claimed me also, that it had made its judgements about me as well as them, that it had condemned me as surely as everyone else in that room. Too many years had passed and I now was someone else.

  There is no going back
.

  On looking across the bar, I didn’t recognise the almost albino figure shuffling towards me, smiling brightly and holding up an arm in greeting. Even allowing for the decades that had passed it was almost impossible to recognise him. He was shorter, rugged up in a scarf and a ski beanie. He had no hair. But neither did he have eyelashes or eyebrows, all lost to the six rounds of chemo he had so far undergone. Even in dying, as in living, Ray remained a man of determined excess.

  2

  I had flown down to Hobart for this night. Old, hard, shitty Hobart. Ray’s farewell—his billing—was in a brightly lit beer barn, the only redeeming feature of which were the pool tables. Outside, sleet occasionally gravelled the windows, blurring the traffic into dissolving rainbows.

  Ray looked like a dying turtle—bug-eyed and carcinoma-faced, his great chest now a mandolin shell. But none of that was what was surprising about him. What was shocking was his gentle good humour.

  I’m a much nicer bloke than I was, he said. Which is nice for Meg.

  Meg was his new partner and his only concerns were for her. And with her, he seemed to have found himself.

  Meg looks after my weight, he said. I lose it and she feeds me these awful protein shakes to put it back on. So I am a few kilos lighter but still as fat in all the wrong places.

  He laughed, and as he laughed our eyes caught for the first time. If his mood was remarkably upbeat, his understanding was clear. His oncologist had sent him to a counsellor who had wanted to discuss with Ray his worries.

  I don’t have any worries, Ray told the counsellor. I’m going to be dead in six months.

  He called the cancer Tassie.

  It’s a lazy shit of a thing, he said. Meant to be highly aggressive. Oncologist has never seen a case like it. Tassie tumour, I said. Only works once a week, and even then not very well.

  The six rounds of chemo were, he told me, purely palliative. He wanted to live for as long as he could, but he was still going to die. They had given him till December.