First Person by Richard Flanagan

Author:Richard Flanagan [Flanagan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781784742195
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-11-01T23:00:00+00:00

3

During one of those dream-days, when we had been talking about—or I had been trying to talk about—ASO’s collapse, Heidl asked me if I had ever seen a dead man; the sort of non sequitur he sometimes made and to which no real reply was possible.

We now had less than two weeks left. Time wasn’t so much running out for the book as disappearing at the speed of light. Heidl’s conversation had begun taking on a different, harder edge. The toxo and other obsessions had faded to be replaced by talk about the impending crash, undercover ruses and front companies, Cold War spookery, ’80s junk-bond trading tales, and a figure—Siegfried Heidl—who was always and ever a lone wolf acting for good.

Looked at a man who has just died in agony? Heidl pressed further.

Listening to him, I realised how much I knew nothing. I tried to reassure myself I was only there to chronicle, but it seemed wrong that I had no intimacy with the world of which he spoke; a world manipulated by some terrible darkness that might manifest itself as a secret police organisation, a tyrannical government, an international corporation, or a shadowy merchant bank. Its forms, finally, were not the point. It was this animating spirit of darkness that seemed to determine his world, and which was beginning to seep into my own thinking.

At times, I had caught myself trying to join in the conversation. If there were a thousand and one things about which I knew nothing—the Hmong alliance, hot-money laundering, or the favoured pistol of Carlos the Jackal—it wasn’t that which was so pathetic about my posturing.

No; it was my fawning gratitude when Heidl—adopting the tone of a mentor inducting me into the arcane craft mysteries of the shadow world of espionage, arms, and violence—would add a small detail in such a way as to make me feel that he was in some way a gracious superior.

I told myself he had never watched a man die. But his dead eyes caught mine and I realised he was watching me, looking into me, and I was no longer so sure who was bluffing, him or me. I was trying to bring him into a book, but he wanted me to think he had stared at dead men and he was having none of it. Heidl’s mouth formed a smile, gap teeth tombstoning out, as my sentences began to sputter and I lost my way in them as I was lost in my thoughts. I heard Heidl saying how he understood, how he could see books were important to me.

But watch a man die slowly, he said, and you’ll never see a book the same way. You think this world is about victories, progress. It’s not. It’s about defeat. The only purpose in life is to be defeated by ever greater things until your own death becomes inevitable.

He had a sly look and I marvelled at him yet again. I felt as I so often did with Heidl: voiceless, bewildered, outplayed.

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