The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  The medical examiner's men arrived and reticently put us on notice that they would soon be removing Sarah. The relatives all milled into the bedroom and queued to kiss Sarah's face, and at last departed the room so that I could remain with her. I noticed increasingly her look of faint astonishment, not an astonishment of sudden pain or unpredicted treachery, but the surprise of a person who has received a sudden gesture of friendship and grace. She had decided, for some reason, in the last moment, that death had been kind to her. This idea struck me as so pitiable and innocent that I covered her face with kisses and tears, and Dr. Colless came in and held my shoulder, and swore it would not be the last time I saw her. He swore that when her body was released, she would look as she did now. So we watched the men enter and carry her away, and I could hear her aunts and her mother in the doorway of the flat, telling each other that at this hour of the night they should try and control their tears for the sake of other residents. Since I was incapable of it, Grace Kennedy gathered some things of mine, and again I embraced Jimmy Manners and his mother, and my elderly uncle, and we all stumbled down the cold steps together, fleeing the site of the tragedy.

  In the car I said to the Kennedys, I'm liquored up. Please don't dope me up any more. I need to be clear in the head.

  But they assured me, No, we won't. Promise, Alan. Unless you ask us.

  And Andrew shook his head over the steering wheel.

  In our country it was customary, even though refrigeration made the rushing of the dead into the earth unnecessary, to bury the deceased quickly. It seemed a denial of God's will to spin out the process, and even the medical examiner's people, urged along by Dr. Colless and Jimmy Manners, worked fast. By Tuesday I was visited at the Kennedys' by Dr. Colless, who brought the news at last that the medical examiner had released Sarah's body. It had been a cerebral aneurysm that had hemorrhaged. She had died of a massive and nearly instantaneous stroke. Hence the headaches, he said—the aneurysm would have caused those before it burst. A tragedy, he said. She should have come to him earlier, and organized the CT scan. Her blood pressure must have been abnormally high for her age group—genetics would have influenced that. Hadn't her father died of a stroke? It was rotten luck. He took my arm in both of his hands. There was nothing that could be done when a subarachnoid hemorrhage came on like that. Had she somehow lived through it, she would have been . . . well, a breathing shell. She wouldn't have been there at all.

  Colless must have known a trick or two about the irrationality of mourning, because I did find in this reflection a sort of marginal comfort.

  Since I had Colless's word that the system which underpinned Sarah's existence had massively failed, I opted for the bourgeois practice of embalming, which was frowned upon by all but the most liberal clergymen. Inanely, I did not want the most corruptible regions of the body to hasten decay. The Mannerses' local clergyman, within the limits of what the older Mediationist clergy told him, was a decent fellow and it would not worry him. Religion was not frantically practiced in the cities in any case, and most people were intermittently devout. The centuries-old split between Intercessionists, who believed their priests spoke for God not merely on matters moral and social but even on politics, and the Mediationists, who merely saw their clergy as somewhat better informed than the average person on matters theological, was something I had not bothered studying in detail, and so I was unsure what would be required of me ritually now.

  I insisted on a pure white coffin, though Jimmy said they were generally for girls. She's my girl, I told him. He had meant, of course, virgins, but then Sarah and I had barely begun on our agenda of marriage. I did not know her as a widower of eighty might know his lost wife. I felt she had taken most of her supply of secrecy with her into premature death.

  Jimmy Manners, whom I was beginning to appreciate more and more, and dear Grace Kennedy prepared the flat for Sarah's body to spend its last morning at home. She was brought into the living room in her coffin, and it was placed on trestles. She lay fully enshrouded and bound except for a fringe of her hair and her face and temples.

  Occasionally members of the family would adjourn to the kitchen to drink tea or, in Jimmy's and Andrew's case, brandy. All the old friends came to say how beautiful she looked: Wilf and his companion, Paul; Toby Garner, the architect who'd avoided being shot for gaps in walls; the McBriens, Matt having already acquired a good suit and a new bureaucratic dignity. He regarded me across the room as if weighing how much like me he might become should his Sonia drop down dead.

  Mrs. Manners, reasonably enough, still spoke of the congenital flaw which had deprived her of a husband and her daughter, two of the finest people she had ever known. Then, towards eleven, there was at last a knock on the door—the undertaker's men were here. Her mother kissed her a last time, Jimmy, the aunts and uncles, Grace Kennedy. Then they left me alone with her for a final time. The undertaker called softly, Just tell us when, Mr. Sheriff, and closed the door behind everybody, leaving me within.

  I gazed at Sarah, but whatever they had done to her, it had removed the girlish look of surprise from her face. In a funerary sense she was now a statue, an artifact, and yet the only artifact I owed anything to. I went to my desk in the living area and packed up what had been until then my life as defined in the public sense, the printout of my novel in the original and in English and the two disks on which it was stored. Then I called up the ten files of the novel on the hard drive and obliterated them one by one as a funerary tribute. Later that night, I thought, I would drop the laptop in the river so that nothing could tempt me to retrieve the cyber ghost of my work. I had barely begun to think that I might owe the publisher the advance. If the publisher wanted it, I would pay it back perhaps. And I would not receive the further payments for delivery and publication. That did not matter against the fact that I already intended to end my life too. If not, I would be a lifelong laborer to repay Random House. But the manuscript did not belong to them anymore. Only Sarah had heard and read this tale of the tyranny of sanctions, and the cruel jokes of the black market under the broader tyranny of Great Uncle. I put the whole thing and the disks in a huge envelope and took it to Sarah's capacious white coffin, which I had doubted, at the point of purchase, would fit her, but within which she was a waif. I owed her my work, plain as it might be, to fill out the space, and, of course, I owed her myself.

  Now I went to the door and invited the undertaker and his men in, and they clamped down the coffin lid over Sarah, removing her and my banal offerings to her from the world's light. The mourners on the stairs made way and then followed the white sepulchre, jolting on the bulky shoulders of balding but experienced men, down the stairs. Mrs. Douglas joined us meekly on her level, muttering condolences to me. She was so beautiful, she looked so young. And such an actress!

  We passed through the lobby, sobbing, and piled into cars, myself and the family into the undertaker's limousines. But before we reached the gates of the cemetery, according to the gracious custom, we all got out, appropriately for a species so flawed that its most dazzling member could be obliterated by a little venous defect, and so we walked the last quarter mile, the sun burning the bared scalps of the men of the party, behind the pallbearers and into the cemetery gates, where the Reverend Cooper and, a little more distantly, the white tent set up for the funeral feast waited.

  When I was a student I predictably thought that clergymen invoked our helplessness chiefly as a means of keeping us in our place. But this was the right morning for me to hear that all our splendors were accidental ones, and could be so easily erased, leaving only God remaining in a universe in which all other voices had been quenched. I could almost imagine myself a believer. Later, at the funeral repast in the tents on the edge of the cemetery, I saw Dr. Colless give Grace a prescription, and she came up to me and said, Now it's final, Alan, you must take something. You must sleep.

  For I had been wide-eyed and mute for days, held in insomniac suspension between disbelief in and the cer
tainty of this hour we had now reached. I would certainly take soporifics. I would take the lot.

  I drank grape juice into which Jimmy had humanely inserted a considerable quantity of vodka. I had resolved my destiny. I was, in my head, halfway in the presence of my love. Colless had kindly written up a means of exit. Comforting myself with the certainty of my own obliteration, at ease with the idea that nothing could cause me fear or delight, I was surprised by the sudden jolt of blood brought on by the sight of someone from the past, the antique times of a week or so before. Mrs. Carter wore a shawl, and was coming to comfort me. In my crazed condition, I was convinced that she carried on her face a look of awful appeasement, and was delighted to welcome me, her substitute son, into the cold ring of victimhood. She appeared to me pleased that though I had had the impudence to avoid becoming one of the lost of Summer Island like her son, Sarah's faulty human vascular system had evened the score for me. The idea of her coming touch, of her taking my hand, filled me with terror. I dropped the glass of fortified fruit juice I had held, and rushed from the tent without apology. I weaved amongst graves to make pursuit difficult, then out the cemetery gates, and into the small garden farms beyond. Andrew Kennedy caught up with me as I stood gasping by an irrigation culvert.

  Don't worry, he said. Get your breath. Everyone understands, Jimmy and Sarah's mother understand. You're lucky in your in-laws.

  I didn't have any in-laws anymore. Andrew assured me we could go back to the car from here without risking any contacts. No one expected more of me.

  Since nothing much had been demanded of me for some days, I forgot about my laptop and about drowning it, and spent the rest of the day and early evening in the Kennedys' screening room—it wasn't large, but it was curtained and had one of those huge television screens generally seen only in the international hotels in town. I watched famous soccer games, war and murder movies. I sneered at love stories, laughed bitterly at everything—every depicted human concern and demise. Andrew sat next to me for a good part of the time, drinking whiskey, and Grace brought tea and food.

  As, towards midnight on the day of the burial, we watched a rerun of the last World Cup final between Brazil and Italy, Andrew filled me in on the details of the last time we failed to make the World Cup. The Others from across the straits had beaten us 3–2 with a penalty kick and, almost instantly afterwards, a goal, after we had been ahead 2–1 with five minutes to go. When our team arrived back at the airport in town, they and their officials were collected instantly by the Overguard, even before they had claimed their baggage, and driven in a bus from the tarmac to the Winter Hill Palace. Bemused wives, girlfriends, and children, gathered to console the heroes, still waited at the airport, expecting them to emerge from Customs, even as they were ushered into Great Uncle's presence. According to Andrew's story, Great Uncle sat behind a polished table with the Minister for Sport, one of his dumber stepbrothers, Albert Jenkins. He reproached the team and its management, particularly eyeing off Red Campbell, his remote kinsman, and Tony Barker, the unpopular team manager, known for a certain close-lipped arrogance. They all felt humiliated, one of the team's young defenders told Andrew later. It was a terrible thing for any man, simply in terms of his self-regard, to be despised and chastised by his head of state. They also felt a professional weight, knowing they would need to play with unchallengeable brilliance for the next four years if they wished to contest another World Cup. One would have thought they were adequately punished by now, said Andrew.

  But then Great Uncle called in Sonny, sometimes known in our polity as Football Sonny because of his passion for the sport—though he could also have been called Cocaine Sonny or Bimbo Sonny. If Great Uncle had been unhinged by power, having once been a halfway normal though rather thuggish social democrat, according to all available evidence Sonny had been quite crazy from childhood. His father's fierce tribal nature had been restrained by powerlessness, his childhood governed by want and lust for literacy. Sonny had experienced none of these constraints. Though Great Uncle was rarely photographed unless he wore a holstered pistol, and in some pictures held in his hands his legendary old AK-47 from the days of the revolutions (two of them), Sonny seemed to carry an arsenal, and was seldom photographed without a joyously caressed M16. When he came into the team's presence that night, Sonny looked grim, but they knew him from many a locker room visit he'd made, and expected nothing more than angry words.

  Instead, the young man came from behind his father's desk and shot Red Campbell through the head. Then Tony Barker, who had stood firm, either defiant or stunned, was similarly shot. Some of the players had blood and gobbets of cerebral matter on their clothing. Members of the Overguard came and removed the bodies, Sonny had a quiet word with his father and then went off to a party, and the rest of the team was ushered to their bus again and driven back to the airport. They had instructions to tell Mrs. Barker and Mrs. Campbell that their husbands had been delayed at Ankara, and a story was published in the Gazette that the manager and the captain had been arrested by the Others in Straits City for crimes against underage girls. Other team members soon enough told the bereaved families the truth, but by mutual consent the story quickly died. The widows received a sumptuous pension, and lest recruitment of young players stop, the Minister for Sport was authorized to tell the national side, on an informal basis, that they had nothing to fear, that the Campbell-Barker case had been a special one.

  The national side had never looked back, making the quarterfinals six years ago, and being beaten in the semis at the last World Cup. Semis were good enough for national credit. After all, Great Uncle didn't want absolute victories. He wanted only a showing of honor. One way or another, said Andrew with an acid laugh, it couldn't be denied that the cement of the national team was fortified with the blood of Campbell and Barker.

  Later still in the night, Grace brought in the sleeping tablets she had had made up. She laid them on the table beside a glass of liquor I had nearly finished. Then she took both my hands in hers. Alan, she said, I'm not going to treat you like a child. But you have to promise you'll use these tablets purely to help you to sleep. God knows you need it. Do you promise me that? Andrew and I can't afford to lose you.

  Of course I gave my promise. I had spaces of time ahead of me in which to act. I had the leisure of choosing the moment.

  Don't forget, she told me, you have a book to publish. You can dedicate it to Sarah, and through it she will live.

  I nodded. It would be a miserable enough gesture, my book momentarily in the world. That was why I had decided to give it to her pitiful, violated shell. But for Grace's sake, I drunkenly decided that yes, it would be a bad thing, or more accurately uncivil, to make an end of things here, in the Kennedy household. Like most potential suicides, I thought upon my exit purely in terms of causing minimum inconvenience. I did not believe that anyone would be too aggrieved. I had typically ceased to believe in the mystery of human affection.

  I could not impose on the Kennedys too long. Nor did I want to become their child, though I had a sense that they were willing, from the kindest motives, to transform me into a damaged son.

  After I had watched a few more of Andrew's videos, and received and absorbed some more of his diverting Great Uncle tales, I intended to go up north to Scarpdale, where an old friend, a doctor, had a state medical post. I could stay with him in what I thought of as that city of crystalline air, beneath mountains of blue snow, on avenues as straight as my intentions. I was coming, Sarah, to where you were, to the nothing you enhanced. Was delay fatal to the would-be suicide? I did not believe so.

  When I went home to pack, I waited till eight at night and took my laptop out across Republic Bridge, and without hindrance from the Overalls or anyone else, dropped it into those deep, ancestrally owned waters which had carried three thousand years of culture down to the sea and would have no trouble destroying the cyber ghost of my novel.

  I caught a plane up to Scarpdale, and the city did not seem as pris
tine or well planned as it had been in my imagination. (Why not abandon an earth whose cities let a man down?) My friend and I drank too much together in the thin air. But he had a very pleasant government villa to do it in, and was occasionally visited by a brown-eyed woman friend, the young widow of an officer killed in an ambush by one of the tribal liberation fronts in the mountains far beyond the city. She possessed a wistful expectation that she and my friend would marry, but he told me when we were drinking together that he did not choose to acquire a ready-bred family. It was not the widow who frightened him—it was her boy and girl, with the memory of the brave father in their eyes.

  Oh how we drank! I came to the conclusion my friend was a sot—as was I, but that didn't count, since I had abandoned all expectations of health. He was good at disguising his daily intake of alcohol. He told me that in Scarpdale a great deal of alcoholism prevailed amongst bureaucrats and officers. The ski run reserved purely for military officers and officials went underused. Scarpdale was one of those places bad for morale, a town in which people felt exiled unless they were natives of the region, as indeed Great Uncle had been when young. One took a mere three days to examine comprehensively Scarpdale's fourteenth-century temples. Then the chill of being remotely posted on a flank of mountains began to enter the bones.

  When we were deep in drink one night, he suggested we visit a brothel. If he thought the idea would appall me, it didn't, and there was enough nihilism and drift in me to go along, as disgraceful as such an idea was. I was so far gone with vodka that I spotted little connection between any intimacy I had ever shared with Sarah and what I might be expected to do with a stranger on a whorehouse's linen. My friend joyously called ahead and ordered two women—for sharing, it seemed, in the same room. He wanted to welcome me back to the commerce of flesh, and treat my grief with orgiastic therapy. A more serious, less childlike man than he would have laughed at the idea. This, in fact, helped make it a matter of indifference to me whether I went with prostitutes or not. Later, with a clear head, I could see he had probably planned the night, rather than falling into it by impulse, but had then eased me along to the right point of stupefaction.