First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I think I’m going to do better than that, Ray said. Maybe another four months. Maybe even more. But I am gone.

  The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

  He laughed. He laughed a lot that night—about hospitals, about doctors, about himself. He talked too, mostly about Meg, with whom he had moved in a year before the diagnosis.

  Do you know what really does my head in? he said, and not waiting for an answer he went on. The goodness of people. Bad shit I understand. But Meg?

  And he couldn’t stop laughing about such good fortune as he clearly felt was his at meeting Meg, at life’s wonder and its cheating nature, at what was allowed him and what was so soon to be denied him forever. It was as if facing death, he had somehow transcended it.

  As Ray laughed I smelt his foul breath, a reek of chemicals, with an under-scent of a cloying putrefaction. Each time he muttered Meg a stale and metallic odour escaped his mouth.

  He smelt wrong. But perhaps it’s just my ageing nose. Things smell differently when you are young. People smell different and the young smell different. Late of a night now I download songs from my youth. I hope in listening to them I might again, however fleetingly, smell those same scents of people and places and times—of love, of joy, of jealousy and fear and confusion—that now seem important, that now seem, well, my life.

  Why this relationship between sound and smell I can’t say. But there it is. I listen not to hear things, but in the hope of smelling them. It rarely happens. Still, these smells—on the rare occasions I manage to successfully conjure them up from my past—would, if I could communicate them, be a far more accurate and complete reconstruction of that time than these words. You would understand how young I was. And other things, besides. Suzy would be a strong smell. A tree after a storm, maybe. Our kids’ wild wet animal odour. Everything smelt, and every smell was a universe. Even the road outside our front door of a morning, even that bitumen and spilt oil smelt intoxicating to me.

  Meg told me she even liked that smell of the chemo oozing out of me, Ray said. Because, she said, when it’s gone, then…

  But Ray didn’t go on. He turned his face away, and when he turned it back he was smiling.

  You know what keeps me going?

  No.

  When I’m really fucked up?

  No.

  I imagine a set of tits in front of me, Ray said.

  And he laughed, because it was both true and a ridiculous lie, because it was a vision of beauty and a vulgar joke, and because, really, what fists could he now oppose the world with other than his laughter?

  Do you think Meg dreams of cocks? I asked.

  I hope so, he said. As long as it’s mine.

  He winked, his eyelid as obscene as white salamander skin.

  When I’m going under, Kif, he said, you’ll know what I’m seeing.

  And just for a moment I thought I could smell Ray once more as a young man.

  3

  When I went to leave half an hour later, lying that I had a conference call with cable executives in Los Angeles, Ray was unexpectedly emotional.

  You came! I can’t tell you how much it means to me, mate.

  He was genuinely moved. I don’t know why. Our lives diverged after Heidl, or maybe my life snapped or broke or went somewhere else. For the past decade I had only seen him once, and that was by accident walking down the main drag at Bondi Beach. And now he looked at me with such openness I had to keep looking away. He had somewhere acquired an old man’s capacity for candour, and, worse, trust. There’s no other way to put it: I felt awkward there with him.

  I think of those years I had with Heidl, Ray said. We were doing things. Real things.

  Yeah, I said. Real things.

  We were standing at the hotel entrance. The room was somehow stuffy and cold at the same time, and as the front doors swung open and shut the blasts of chill, sharp air blew in.

  He had a vision, Ziggy did. Not many people have that. That’s what’s important. These fuckn idiots now—what do they know?

  No idea, I said.

  Exactly. Ziggy knew, mate. Ziggy knew.

  I saw Ray and Ziggy Heidl together once more, Ray alert for the assassin, not knowing I was already there.

  We loved him, Ray said.

  Yes, I said. People loved him.

  You knew him.

  I invented him, I said, but it’s not the same thing.

  He felt something for you—I could see that. He wouldn’t have kept you on otherwise.

  What choice did he have? I said.

  You just don’t fuckn know. You knew him as well as any of us. Maybe better. Didn’t you?

  It seemed a frightening possibility that might just be true. I tried not to think about it. I tried to say no, but Ray’s gaze—those mesmerised eyes mesmerised when? by whom?—seemed to be intently focused on my lips, compelling them to dance to his desire, to his bright-eyed belief.

  I couldn’t, I said, searching for some anodyne formula of words, but those eyes kept boring in. Help…but to…

  Admire him, Ray said.

  Admire him?

  Was it so bad? Ray said. That’s what I say when people ask me. What’s wrong with creating jobs, employing people, saving lives? You can’t disagree with that.

  No, I said.

  I felt something close to panic—the wretched room, the fluoro light, the cold, the heat, the others there, chiding each other as they played pool, what did they know of it all?

  No, I said. You can’t disagree with that.

  What he was doing, it was the sort of thing, the attitude we need now.

  His lashless eyes were unnerving; they had about them a wet gleam, a desperation, I suppose, to hold on to anything—some meaning, some hope—when nothing held; a reason to live, or at least to have lived.

  Yes, he said, you can see it! I know you can, being in TV and all that. Look at politics! It’s a disgrace.

  It is, I said, but I had no idea. As I had grown older I was increasingly amazed that you turned a tap and there was drinkable water, that you flicked a switch and there was power. These seemed not inconsiderable achievements given what human beings were, and deserved, I felt, no small measure of gratitude.

  We need a man like Ziggy now, Ray continued. Someone who does, someone who gets it done. Not for himself. For others. For us. So he fucked some banks over—all the banks fuck us over. Maybe they should be fucked over some more. People looked up to him, you know. You just had to look at all he achieved. To realise it wasn’t for himself. If you had seen his home, it was nothing flash.

  I saw a photo at the end, I said. I was shocked by what I saw.

  There you go. That’s why people were attracted to him. They saw themselves in him.

  You think so?

  Absolutely, Ray said. Didn’t you?

  In him?

  The best, Ray said.

  Yes, I said. The best.

  See? Ray said. You know! He was a great man.

  And as he continued on about Heidl, his slow, slightly slurred voice was becoming confused in my mind with the sound of a black jay’s wing cutting the air above—

  It was an example, Ray was saying. He was—Ray was searching for words here—an idea.

  And perhaps to keep my attention, he said, An idea—like you writers have.

  But what writer ever boasted such achievements? I wondered. The great books were but the works of amateurs compared to the inventions of Ziggy Heidl. With them, he mesmerised financiers, torched merchant banks, consumed law courts, and fascinated a nation. And yet the writers’ names live on while his is forgotten, and even the annals of ignominy have long since dispensed with the story of Ziggy Heidl for the simpler, brutish and more banal tales of thugs and killers, vanities of those with nothing to teach anyone.

  An idea, yes, I said. I suppose he was.

  Sometimes it’s like it’s now. Like he’s standing here right before me, Ray said, raising a hand, before dropping i
t. I can see him. Pedro Morgan reckons he saw him last year, alive, coming out of a Bunnings store on the Gold Coast.

  I wanted to get away.

  Pedro said he’d lost a lot of weight, Ray said.

  I am sure he had. Do you want a drink?

  I can’t drink.

  I’ll get you another Coke, I said.

  If I drink any more of this I’ll piss myself, he said, holding up a half-empty pint glass of cordial. He put it down and, fixing me with a strange look, said, Sometimes I wonder about his death.

  Ray’s grotesque eyes, globular and opaque, stared at me. The blasts of night air were cutting them into tears. He didn’t seem aware of this, or if he was he ignored it.

  About how he died.

  4

  I guess he died as he wished, I said.

  He went out free, Ray said, as if that mattered, his cheeks glistening.

  I have no idea.

  You saw him at the end, Ray said. You saw it.

  I suppose I did.

  You remember it? That last day in the office?

  I am not going to forget it.

  So you know the truth.

  The truth?

  He could have been a great man, a leader. We believed in him.

  He could make people do things, it’s true.

  It’s rare, Ray said. It’s a gift.

  Ray. I’ve got to tell you something. I think Heidl—

  I halted. But there was no way to say it except by saying it.

  —that he, like, killed the accountant. Garrett. Brett Garrett.

  The book keeper, you mean?

  Yeah, the book keeper. I think Heidl killed him.

  That’s not true.

  How would you know, Ray?

  Because I did.

  We caught each other’s eyes.

  I shot him.

  It would be untrue to say this filled me with many questions. Rather, it felt like an answer I’d always feared. Ray was looking straight at me with complete trust. It was an awful thing.

  That’s how it is mate, he said. His voice was very soft.

  Why? I asked.

  There is no why. I just did. Heidl wanted us to go pig shooting. Ziggy said Garrett was holding him back. Blackmailing him. I dunno. He had all these stories. I’d never been pig shooting.

  And after?

  What do you mean after? After, Heidl said he’d fix it with the body. I left him to it. I don’t know why it happened. You know how he just sort of led you step by step until you couldn’t see where you’d come from or where you were going?

  I shuddered.

  Just to see what he can make you do, how much he can control you?

  I shook my head.

  Like that. It was my first time in the Gulf Country. Weird fuckn jungle. Fuckn rain. Fuckn mud. I felt shit, nothing. Worthless. What he always said.

  Who said? Heidl?

  No, Ray said, incredulous. The old man. He always said I was a loser. And Ziggy made me feel…good. You know? That I was someone. But he scared me. He said he needed me to do it. For him. You understand, Kif. You know how he kept at you.

  I said if we stood any longer in that freezing doorway, Ray might die of the cold instead of cancer. He didn’t seem to hear.

  He kept at me. All that mate shit. Like I had to do it. Like it helped him. You want details? I can give you details. But you don’t want details. No one wants details other than cops and nosy women. What do details mean anyway? I shot him, he fell in the mud, he got up covered in this green mud, I shot him again. That’s it. I left and flew home that afternoon. The point is when I pulled the trigger it felt—

  Ray’s lips began trembling, and his face, now little more than a tear-glazed snout and hairless eyes, looked as if he had seen a ghost and the ghost was him.

  It felt good, he finally stammered.

  He was shaking his head as if in disbelief or horror or despair, the deep lines in his harrowed face etched silver with moisture. He kept talking.

  It did, Kif. It felt good. I always wanted you to know. It felt like this weight was finally off me, that something had changed, that I was finally free, like I’d finally stood up for myself. But I had fuck all. That’s what I realised after. Fuckn fuck all. And I realised he would kill me too if I ever told anyone. I started feeling worse and worse. And I really thought about killing Heidl, I wanted to kill him but to kill him was what he wanted. So I wouldn’t do it. Not after Garrett. Does that make sense?

  I didn’t know what to say.

  If I killed him or helped kill him, he’d own me forever.

  It was as if Ray was describing my life.

  I don’t understand it, Kif. I don’t really think about it, except talking now. You feel so good then you feel so guilty and after a while you really don’t feel anything at all. Nothing, really. Garrett was dead before I shot him.

  I wanted to flee Ray, to run out of that wretched hotel bar into the sleet outside, to fly home as soon as I could.

  I was just a tool, Ray said. Like a gun or a bullet.

  I felt such guilt, but it’s hard to say why.

  I still remember all the good things Heidl did, he was saying. And maybe that’s what’s really important.

  I couldn’t tell Ray what I had done.

  You’re the clever cunt, Kif. You tell me. The good things, that’s what matters. Isn’t it?

  I left not long after. Was my silence Heidl’s curse too? But then, even all these years after, I’m less and less sure myself of what I did. It’s too hard and I can’t hold it together and make a picture of it. And, all up, I find it better if I don’t try.

  That night I didn’t sleep well. The airless hotel room, I suppose, or the pillow. I awoke, or dreamt that I awoke, terrified, the sheets wet, a fetid musk upon me. Around me crowded a desolation of wounded birds, dying animals, corpses in trees, beneath cars, corpses on bark and leaves. In their pitiless derangement, seeking their vengeance, they pressed in, they folded over me, they dragged me further into their darkness, they pushed me down and under, smothering me, staring dully ahead as they did so.

  22

  1

  FINALLY, I was fully awake, and in the particular blackness of a hotel room I could only think of Heidl, of how maybe Heidl was in his way a leader, a leader of the future, a leader of a coming age and its dawning obsessions, and like all great leaders he had a certain humility about himself and always concentrated on the task at hand—survival, robbery, fraud, imposture, perversion and domination.

  I dare say some of these things will be reckoned crimes—certainly, the courts of the day were readying shopping trolleys of words to prove them so—but I thought that a thin and inadequate way of reckoning him, though how you might ever reckon him properly is beyond me.

  In my darker moments that night I wondered if I wasn’t his greatest challenge, his last and perhaps most extraordinary achievement. To persuade me to do what I did but to take the credit for his own death—what questions that poses! About who we are and what we might yet do? And what a final victory for him!

  He was the closest thing to a man of genius I ever met.

  But I’ve always been inclined to vanities, and perhaps this was just one more. Maybe he just knew the game was up. Maybe he was a coward. It’s hard though not to see in what his life was and with what my life became—the repetitions, the skills and tricks, the conceits—a certain continuity. It’s not too much to say everything about me has changed, that in those days I was a different person, and that what once seemed another’s life I now see as my own. In any case, he stays with me—perhaps at a certain point he became me, and perhaps, worse, we him. Who can say?

  Perhaps a genius is the man closest to being himself.

  He swindled the banks of seven hundred million, but soon enough the world would be swindled by so much more, the racket disarmingly the same taking and making money out of shipping containers that were so empty they didn’t even have a physical existence—junk bonds, no doc loans, deri
vatives. The shipping containers had names like Enron, Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. Along their walls were stencilled the bills of lading purporting to show what was being transported within: trickle-down economics, the rising tide lifting all boats, inspirational opportunity, aspirational economy, and democracy for all. And so on and so forth, and every one of them impressive from far away, the promise of good things.

  And up close empty, rusting black holes.

  Heidl’s philosophy had about it a resonant truth that no one would dare name in the coming decades. His bemusement at the utter need of others to believe—his determined pursuit of that need perhaps in curious experiment to see at what point such belief might finally break, to see what will break such belief, only to discover the great truth: it never breaks. Rather each mad test of belief, as the jihadists were later to discover, even when fatal—even more so when suicidal—only strengthens belief.

  At some point, a fire started that was to engulf us all. Time tires of all things, perhaps even itself, and it may be that our malicious future was already with us. Homes, towns, lands laid waste; the unlucky tortured, the innocent slain, the children drowned, the bewildered mourning, a world of compounding fear. And maybe that was Heidl’s real mistake—the one we all make: thinking life is a sprint when it is a marathon. If he had just jogged along until the new century he might have brought whole countries down rather than just his own business and a few investment banks.

  Oh, I know he was not the first and very far from the greatest of corporate criminals. Still, I feel I am not alone in thinking he deserves better—more, if you wish to put it that way. Mankind is incapable of dreaming collectively, but if it did, would it—as Pia had wondered—dream Ziggy Heidl? Who can say? Who can answer? But of everything that came after Ziggy Heidl I can say this much: nothing surprised me.

  2

  All I could see were Ziggy Heidl’s dulling eyes looking up into the sky, but when I lifted my head and stared upwards there was nothing there, and when my eyes returned earthwards, to Hobart, to Tasmania, to my life, all the people I had known, all the laughter and the friendship, the kindnesses and the love, all that too had long ago vanished along with all the subservient stupidity and hate, the idiocy that ruled Tasmania as its fiefdom, the island of stupidity. There was nothing here; there had never been anything.