First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I was sitting in my hire car the day after Ray’s farewell, wanting to leave, but that’s the thing about a prison island, and that’s why islands are such wonderful prisons—you can always move on but you can never escape. I had some sort of brightly coloured sports convertible, it the sort of car and me the sort of driver I would have once derided. But I never claimed to be consistent. I had rung Huw, one of the twins, but he was busy and didn’t have time to catch up, while Henry, he said, was out of town. We have a cordial if distant relationship, cordial because it is distant. Bo—

  Bo died.

  Have I mentioned it? I think I have mentioned that. I never talk about it. I can’t stop thinking about it. A car accident when she was twenty. It was nothing I could have done anything about. We hadn’t spoken for some years, I don’t remember how many. I have her hairbrush. I blame myself entirely. Eight years ago she died. Her hair: black and glossy as bird feathers.

  Sitting in that rented car I felt the intolerable weight once more of all the dead things gathering around me, pressing down on me. And so, flight postponed and having a morning to kill before the next plane out, perhaps seeking the greatest expanse possible so that I might breathe again, I drove to the top of the mountain that looks out over Hobart and beyond to much of the south of the island. Or maybe I drove there because the roads on which I found myself seemed to lead that way and I followed them; but really, I wasn’t seeing roads, or shitty Hobart shittier than ever, another small ugly building boom having left some more small ugly eyesores, as the road rose out of the city. I was trying not to see anything.

  When Ray and I were young we had often walked and sometimes run up remote tracks to the mountain top. Run! It was inconceivable now. The joy, the wonder of it all. The beauty that was our gaze. Everything we saw sparkled in its glory. The loveliness of it, the sweetness of it. We could not believe that such beauty was ours. We had nothing and we had this. It was beyond explanation. We did not know the beauty was us.

  We had made a philosophy out of our world as we had experienced it—the beaches, the sea, the rainforests, the wild rivers and the mountain that was our path to the sky—the sky that seemed to draw out of the rock its monumental uncaring and the stones that brought down from the sky the tender indifference of its brilliant light. And in our wild world we found we were not, as we had been led to believe, passive slaves of destiny, defined by our history as forever less. No. We discovered that we were free to choose with every step and every decision, and all hope was ours, all hope was within us, for so long as we never forgot.

  Why had we forgotten? What had happened? Why did we trade our freedom? Were we dizzy with it, were we lost with it, were we unequal to it, were we frightened of it? I don’t know. At twenty we had decided to live. And later? Later we chose differently.

  All we could do was run hard and laugh and run harder and harder, over the rocks, up those boulders of the Zig Zag Track as it grew steeper, wilder, more forbidding, in heat, in snow; running, panting, barking, burning, rising and running and never stopping running. The wildness we felt all around us was powerful, almost overwhelming. Beyond the mountain peak there lay a wild land that extended all the way to the island’s west and south-west without the interruption of road or settlement, and it was possible to walk for ten days and meet no one and see nothing other than that world until you finally reached a wild sea. We ran and we ran and we were somehow nothing and yet of everything. It was incomprehensible. It was incommunicable. You could run it and laugh it. But you could not describe it. Words were and are inadequate to all that we felt, all that we knew, all that I have lost. Words were part of it, but they were also cages in search of a bird.

  And we were the birds flying, higher, quicker, harder.

  3

  I drove. But it was not the same thing. The wildness was gone. Some unremarkable large trees gave way to some unremarkable smaller trees, then shrubs, then, as the car climbed higher, stones.

  Not far from the car park at the mountain’s summit was a decaying viewing platform looking out over Hobart and beyond. No platform looked in the opposite direction to the once great wild lands, some partly logged and napalmed by woodchippers, the rest in torment as they dried up and burnt in the new age, as the incinerated rainforest gave way to the future: a damp desert, moss and tundra and wet, charred gravel.

  In the bracing cold, I wandered over to the platform along a stony path, slapping my hands as I went. The only other people there were three Chinese tourists with a selfie stick, and a short man with a three-legged greyhound. The platform’s celebrated view was tawdry and ordinary. I looked at the mundane interpretation panels with scenic features outlined and named, seeking, I suppose, to fill the void that was so apparent.

  Bo and I never spoke after her seventeenth birthday. I don’t know why. An argument—but about what I can’t remember. Suzy, her, me—I guess. What you have to understand, Suzy told me after, is that it’s not personal. It’s just how they are.

  Some people are free. I had been, and I had not known it. I had been free, and I had traded it for something else. Why could Ray and I not keep running? Why could I not sit again in that little kitchen with Suzy, Bo and the twins? Why? Why was Bo dead and me alive? Why was it all gone? Vanished? After she died I needed some meaning to go on. I begged for a purpose, a reason, an explanation, an idea. And there was none, and I went on. That’s the horrible truth. On and on and on.

  Far below me spread a town, a past, a future, an airport. Down there my sons would have nothing to do with me. Down there Ray was dying. Down there my daughter was dead. I wanted that torment of a wild world at my back, more wounded than we, to rush past me, tumble down the mountain side and overrun it all. I longed for that terrible uncaring world to roll over me, to crush me and destroy everyone else in its final agony. To take us back to some moment of humility. I wanted, above all things, to return, to be grateful and show gratitude and be comforted.

  I waited for such a long time.

  Dark clouds moved over the mountain top and gathered beneath me. I searched the darkening sky for hope. I longed to hear an almost forgotten sound within me.

  I was Adam awaiting entry to His City.

  And I knew I never would.

  A black jay scavenging on a glacial moraine looked up, its head slowly jerking around as if answering to a great flywheel of divine clockwork. It trapped in its amber eyes a century broken before it began and screeched the end of time.

  No one had told me I was dead.

  4

  Why?

  There is no why.

  I hardly even remember the how. The details I—well, perhaps I make them up. I don’t really know any more. I only remember the last thing; those odd last words.

  Looking back on it I often wonder though. Why did I agree to go through with the execution? Why, when he pushed the revolver into my hand did I not drop it, give it back, or put it down? But there is no why. I just did. I just did, and I did and I did, and at each point, the further along Heidl’s path I went the more likely I understood it was that I would just do the next thing. Some bond of trust, or agreement, or understanding, something deeply human was growing between us, and it felt wrong to break with it—a betrayal, if you like. Maybe I didn’t want to upset Heidl. It seemed bad manners to say no—I understood what Ray had meant—a rudeness to interrupt the steps to death just because it might lead to death. It was so much easier to agree, to say yes. It always is.

  In any case, something had changed, I was no longer in charge, he was, and we were walking that rocky path to oblivion, him leading, me following; me: desperately wanting to break free and not knowing how.

  I wanted to write a book. That’s what I told myself. That was all. But writing that book was at that time also everything. And maybe I thought what I was doing that day would help me write the book. Or that it was experience, that most illusory of art’s myths, the nonsense that we must go beyond ourselves to discover the world, when all the time it’s
only by going within ourselves that we discover the truth of anything.

  Tebbe: the quest for experience is the lie that the life we have is less.

  Fuck Tebbe.

  What was coming? I sometimes wonder. And there’s no answer. Or the only answer, I guess.

  Mostly though I don’t think about it. To be honest, I hardly think about it at all. I should say I have regrets.

  I only remember his last words.

  It’s coming! It’s coming!

  I have no regrets.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard Flanagan’s novels—Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, for which he was awarded the 2014 Man Booker Prize—are published in forty-two countries. He lives in Tasmania.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide

  First Person by Richard Flanagan

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about First Person, the mesmerizing new novel from Richard Flanagan, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

  Discussion Questions:

  1) Explore the ways in which First Person satirizes the publishing industry. How would you describe the atmosphere at STP Publishing? To what extent does Kif Kehlmann view his work on Siegfried Heidl’s memoir as a symptom of the industry’s decline? How does the novel’s epigraph comment on this theme?

  2) What is toxoplasmosis? Why do you think Heidl is so fascinated by it?

  3) Who is Ray? How do he and Kif know each other? Why does he advise Kif not to tell Heidl anything about himself? How does his relationship with Heidl alter the course of his life? How would you characterize Ray’s attitude in the final conversation he and Kif have?

  4) What do we learn about Heidl’s crimes? What remains opaque? Why might Flanagan have chosen not to reveal all of the details?

  5) Examine the connection between deception, truth, and trust as it is depicted in the novel. Is there such thing as absolute truth? To what extent is truth defined by belief? How does Heidl exploit the trusting nature of others?

  6) Describe the effect that Heidl has on those around him. How does he draw them into his orbit? What happens to people once they become close to him? Consider, as you answer this question, his relationships with Kif, Ray, and Pia Carnevale.

  7) Who is Brett Garrett? Who is Eric Knowles? What were their connections to Heidl? What clues does Flanagan offer us about their fates?

  8) Describe Heidl’s worldview. How does he understand goodness, evil, and morality? What motivates him? What reasons does he give for wanting to end his life?

  9) Explore the theme of memory as it is depicted in the novel. How does memory operate? Are memories ever reliable? What purpose do memories serve?

  10) Who is Tomas Tebbe? How would you describe his philosophy? Why do you think his words resonate so deeply with Heidl?

  11) Describe the final slide Pia and Kif view on the carousel. What is its significance? Why do Pia and Kif decide to ignore it? What does the photo come to represent to Kif?

  12) Examine Kif’s relationship with Suzy. What first draws him to her? How does his work with Heidl—and his role in his death—affect their relationship?

  13) Explore the theme of success as it is depicted in the novel. What constitutes success and what are its markers? What is the cost of success? Does Kif ever achieve success? Consider, as you answer this question, Kif’s work with Heidl, his own unpublished novel, and his work in the television industry.

  14) Examine Kif’s career in television. How does he get his big break? How does he characterize the culture of the industry? Does he find happiness working in television? Why or why not?

  15) What is Dying to Know, and why do you think Kif calls it “the closest [he’s] ever come to autobiography” (this page)?

  16) Consider the novel’s title. To whom—or what—do you think it refers?

  17) How do you interpret the conclusion of the novel? Is this the ending you expected? What does it suggest about Kif’s reliability as a narrator?

  Further Reading:

  Amnesia by Peter Carey

  Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

  The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt

  Invisible by Paul Auster

  The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

  Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

  Zero K by Don DeLillo

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