The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  Matt McBrien didn't want McKay used as an argument, and yet the question thoroughly sidetracked us. I don't believe the gossip that he's been punished by someone, said Matt. He had debts and a difficult marriage.

  Kennedy said, Perhaps that's so. He's just done a runner. Maybe.

  Besides, many a man disappears. That isn't any sort of punishment. It isn't exemplary enough.

  I asked McBrien, Exemplary?

  Yes, if you want to make an example of a man, you do something that readily becomes known.

  Kennedy seemed to agree with this. Like shooting a football manager, he suggested.

  That's right, McBrien said, nodding, it seemed to me, to reassure himself as well as us. Look, Alan, we've wasted ten minutes here and you still have to get your suit on.

  My shirtsleeves will be good enough for your minister, I asserted, purely bloody-minded, and angry with myself for having lazily lived on long enough to be in this position.

  It's not my minister, McBrien assured me in a lowered voice. Please.

  His Eminence the Principal Mediator, I suggested, snorting, nominating the elderly primate of Mediationist clergy.

  Don't be ridiculous, Alan, McBrien said. Someone else again.

  The idea that it might be Great Uncle for the first time brought an absolutely normal pulse of anxiety and even of anticipation.

  Come on, Alan! Andrew Kennedy urged me. You must go.

  If Andrew Kennedy kept saying these things with such a level-voiced intensity, then I knew I was stuck.

  Hell! I said, but I went back into my room, saved my subtitling file, went out to McBrien in the corridor, and walked with him upstairs and out of the building, Kennedy seeing us as far as the door. McBrien had a high-polished black car and a driver. Of course. As we drove off towards my apartment, I noticed Matt exercising his shoulders while breathing deeply, but he seemed to achieve very little muscular ease.

  Meanly, I teased him about his earlier remarks. You look like a man going to his executioner, I told him. Are you scared of exemplary or nonexemplary punishment?

  I won't dignify that question with an answer, he told me.

  A limousine and a Toyota full of Overguard were waiting outside my apartment building. McBrien's vehicle rode past them and parked, and I went upstairs as McBrien went to report to the officer in charge. I ascended the stairs and saw Mrs. Douglas's door, which was open an inch or two, slam shut. I knocked on the door and called, Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Douglas. They're just an escort.

  But then, they always were. With the time this took, McBrien and an Overguard officer and two of his men had nearly caught up to me on the stairs, and were able to enter my flat behind me as soon as I unlocked the door. They sought no invitation—they were accustomed to not needing one.

  Just get dressed, McBrien said. Better take a shower or a sponge first.

  The officer, who was very handsome and square-jawed, laughed. The Boss. Doesn't go for human odor.

  Is it true, asked McBrien, that the palace guards shower three times a day and use Tommy Hilfiger cologne?

  That's his favorite, the Overguard officer admitted.

  Was he talking about Great Uncle? He certainly seemed to tell the story as if it were an illustrative and endearing quirk of someone whose power was godlike and who could make all those Praesidians scrub and sprinkle themselves according to his wishes.

  I showered myself more attentively than I had since Sarah's death. I did my best to erase a certain vegetable musk which characterized my armpits—an indelible trace of my imperfect physical being. I used an aromatic stub of a deodorant to try to mask it, and I shaved thoroughly and applied an aftershave—not Tommy Hilfiger, but some birthday present bottle given to me by one of Sarah's aunts. I ensured every inch of skin was dry before I pulled my white shirt on. I had become a subject of the state again, and dressed observantly. Then my black suit, in which I had fled from Mrs. Carter, and my red tie. The red seemed to rescue the rest from seeming odd for the sort of visit McBrien and the Overguard officer were proposing.

  When I emerged from the bedroom, McBrien said, Splendid, and the Overguard, who'd been sitting around, reading some of my books—as if in parody of security forces, ones with pictures, historical tracts, and accounts of archaeological digs—stood up. By the way, said the tall Overguard officer, name's Chaddock.

  Pleased to meet you, Mr. Chaddock.

  Lieutenant. Passport with you?

  No, I said. Are we traveling somewhere?

  He smiled. No. But passport's needed.

  He would always prove a master of telegraphic speech. I fetched my passport from my desk and put it in my breast pocket.

  Down the stairs again, past Mrs. Douglas's mute and afflicted door, and into the Overguard limousine. Lieutenant Chaddock took the front seat with the driver, McBrien and I were allotted the midcar one, and two Overguard men took the seat behind us. The officer named Chaddock turned around smiling jovially. Lights out, he announced. With that the two men behind us slung something over our heads, and I thought of the garrotings in the Godfather films. I shamed myself with a huge gasp, and then I realized it was not the blackness of asphyxiation but a mere blindfold, which was then tied and adjusted around my head.

  McBrien had heard my fearful intake of breath. This is quite normal, he told me.

  The procedure made me sure that we were about to be taken to one of Great Uncle's twenty palaces, and I became fascinated by what I might see, feeling all the more sportive since I did not really fear one of Sonny's or the Overguard's bullets, though I preferred that it came notified rather than as suddenly as my eye mask.

  The journey was made faster by the Overguard's absolute right of passage at intersections. There were three palaces within roughly half an hour of my flat, but I had no means of telling how much time had passed, and all conversation had quickly, and perhaps by design, died in the vehicle. At one stage only did McBrien whisper to me, Thanks, Alan.

  He probably meant, for calming down. For going along.

  Our Overguard limousine paused now. I could hear conversations in remarkably discreet voices. Though Great Uncle came from a rural family, from hayseeds who liked at weddings or triumphant football matches to stand on a seat and let off celebratory shots at the ceiling or into the sky; though Great Uncle himself was sometimes known to celebrate in such a manner, Kalashnikov in one hand, pumping rounds into the ether, he was also known to like lowered tones from his subordinates, and the nickname of the palace branch of the Overguard, the Praesidia, was the Whisperers. This though they were generally recruited from raucous families, most of them related to him, in his own northern hills. Hence the hushed dialogue at the gate, and then our car rolled through, and drove slowly for perhaps half a mile, the music of fountains and the dominant tenor of the occasional designed waterfall reaching us from the opened front windows. Could any of this have been water Mrs. Douglas's nephew failed adequately to test? The oaf in me, who wanted greater security than this moment provided, had decided my hands would sweat. The sage was full of his normal insistent questions and timidities. Whereas the true “I” awaited events with something like a lively curiosity. I thought that revelation was close.

  As the limousine pulled up, the Overguard men removed our blindfolds. We were outside a white-columned building. The back doors of the limo were opened for us and the beaming Chaddock asked, All here? All right. Upstairs.

  He led Matt McBrien and myself up the front stairs and past Praesidian guards in glittering white helmets. Inside, however, there were normal-looking office doors, and I saw a Praesidian administration officer walking up the corridor towards us armed only with the revolver at his hip, almost like a normal clerk.

  Okay, he murmured, shaking hands with Chaddock and then with McBrien and myself. McBrien's eyes glistened with a touching, edgy fraternity, so that I was tempted to reach out and tell him it was all okay.

  Got your passport, Mr. Sheriff? asked the administration man. I presented
it and he briefly riffled its pages before clipping it to his other documents.

  What if I need it?

  You'll get it back in a month or so, he assured me.

  He dismissed Chaddock and led McBrien and me to a room with a settee and chairs, and a little table with a bowl of peaches, apples, and oranges.

  Help yourself if you get hungry, he said, implying we would be there for a little time yet. But McBrien had barely time to ask me whether I would behave myself when another, more heroic-looking Praesidian officer entered, and asked me to come with him. If I expected revelation soon, however, I was disappointed. I was taken to a bathroom—something akin to a bathroom in a good hospital. I was told to strip down and take a thorough shower. The guards left me alone to shower but asked me to knock on the door when I was finished. I was to wear only the towel they'd provided. They took my clothes out with them, muttering about how I would get them back afterwards.

  I showered thoroughly for the second time that day. I dried myself scrupulously with the towel, wrapped it around my loins, and knocked on the door.

  I'm ready, I cried. One of the Praesidia came in wearing rubber gloves and handed me a urine sample jar.

  Can you manage that? he asked. Or do you need a drink of water?

  I moved off towards the urinal.

  No, do it here. That's the rule. I have to see you. Don't worry about the floor, we'll wash it.

  Naturally, like any man raised in an urban tradition of personal modesty, I tried to piss the exact milliliters needed for the sample, and then to close off the flow. It was not entirely possible, however, and the guard, though he stepped back to avoid urine spots on his glistening boots, nonetheless said, Don't worry, don't worry. Can't be helped. Screw the top on and give it to me.

  He accepted my offering in his gloved hand and left. But instantly another man, a white coat over his khakis and gloves on hands, entered and asked me to prepare myself for an examination of my mouth and anus. I passed both tests.

  Next, the urine test man was back, wearing gloves still, with the sort of all-in-one sterile suit surgeons wear. I was told to put it on, and adjust the mobcap over my hair. So dressed, I found that my feet did not quite match up with the soles of the thing, which were designed for a bigger man, and escorted out of the shower room and down another corridor, I could only stumble along, a little like a man in chains. Around a corner I encountered uniformed technicians and a metal detection machine, and was asked to go through it, and once that test was passed, I was pointed to a tray with—as I was told—a basin full of permanganate solution on it, and asked to lower my hands into it for thirty seconds. That time up, an orderly actually dried my hands for me with a soft cloth, and when that was done, examined my nails.

  Now I was led off further, and entered a plain office door. Was I to be met while still wearing this silly costume? If so, I needn't have worried about my black suit and red tie.

  Here there was a desk, a bowl of fruit, a bookshelf largely empty. But on the wall in red was a script page from the Book of Mediation. I had heard that the President-for-Life had written with his own blood and in his own hand a page from that holy book. Through an open door I could see in the next room an edge of an army cot. Immediately I thought, This will not be Great Uncle. I have been dragged in here to see a bureaucrat. Thus, do I have an infectious fever I'm unaware of?

  But I heard boots on the parquetry of the room with the army cot, and through the door entered a man in military fatigues and shining boots who bore a potent resemblance to Great Uncle. There was a large belt around his waist in which was holstered a massive pistol, and he carried a peaked and braided military cap which he placed on the desk. It came to me in a rush, from the individual way he laid down his hat, the way he always laid it down during broadcasts—this was Great Uncle. Any rebels, rampaging through a palace, their eyes full of blood, would not look for the President-for-Life in such a humble place as this.

  There were so many rumors, reliable and unreliable, about Great Uncle and his mistress, Rhonda Lansdowne, Deputy Head of the National Bank, and Sonny's outrage that his large-boned northern mother, Susan Stark, was demeaned by Great Uncle's association with Dr. Rhonda. Yet Great Uncle seemed to have reduced all this lush gossip to the austerity of an army cot and a banal office. Despite myself, I felt my first surge of admiration. Such humble arrangements as this were never mentioned or praised on the Hour of Devotion. Did the peasants who wrote their doggerel for the show sense more about Great Uncle than I ever had? Or was this austerity imposed by some sudden disordered fear about Dr. Rhonda's personal hygiene?

  Great Uncle was a darkling fellow from the north. He had profound eyes, a mustache, full lips, the lotion-repaired look of someone who had just shaven. He also seemed a year or so older than the previous image of him in my head. There had been an irregularity in his stride, something to do with his injured back, but it was partially concealed by the vigor of the three steps he took to his desk.

  Good morning, Mr. Sheriff, said Great Uncle, as I remained standing rigidly in my strange costume. Sit down, Alan. Sit down.

  He sat himself.

  I never got a chance, he told me at once, in a voice which remained lowered and as if we were resuming a conversation, to let you know how much I enjoyed your book of short stories. I liked “The Women of Summer Island,” and the play your wife made of it. I regret the prudes closed it down after a few days. But the minister got various complaints, and Old Billy had to act on them.

  He looked at me with his limpid, dark eyes, hoping I would understand the complications of cultural statecraft.

  By the way, he said, I very much regretted for your sake and ours the loss of your exquisite wife. I knew she was not well because she had given up her television role. But I was hoping to see her on the small box at some stage when her health improved. I think that television was her forte, don't you?

  Yes, I told him, she liked that medium very much. Thank you, Mr. President. I was actually, and despite myself, flattered for her sake.

  Great Uncle joined his hands together and said further, Perhaps there is something you could do for her memory. By the way, have one of these apples. They're from the Piedmont area. Very succulent.

  He pushed the bowl of fruit to me. His dark eyes lay on me with the force of command. I picked an apple up. Had he brought me here, in my shroud, to poison me? My paranoia on that issue was on a scale to match his own reported paranoia about germs and assassination.

  Eat up, he said. You don't have to worry. They've been screened for radiation, insecticide, and toxins.

  I took a mouthful. If it were a poisoned apple, hadn't I been seeking one? But it was succulent, and the juice lay on the tongue more like nectar than acid.

  Great Uncle smiled across the desk at my obvious appreciation. You see? You see, Alan? Now, enough about apples! I believe you are contracted to an American publisher?

  I told him that it was Random House.

  Yes, he said. They were appreciative of us once, the Americans, weren't they? When we were fighting the Others for them. When my friend and cousin General Stark organized the Republican Guard and we drove our enemy and theirs out of the oil fields and back across the Hordern Straits. An enterprise in which you, Alan, took a brave part as an infantryman, I believe. Our existence as human beings meant something to the West then. Not now. Not with the sanctions. Which unit did you serve in, Alan?

  I thought of Mrs. Carter and reddened. In the Fifty-third Infantry, Mr. President. I rose in the end to the grand rank of corporal.

  He laughed. A rank not to be despised, he told me. General Stark was once a corporal, in the days when true nationalists were not likely to be promoted in an army full of Western lackeys.

  I remembered that General Stark also introduced the summary shooting of soldiers who retreated, and then a return of their bodies home in a black coffin with the word RENEGADE painted on it. But then I found myself close to thinking, in Great Uncle's austere, murmuring
presence, that perhaps such thorough methods were needed for the sake of sovereignty, for the survival of the nation with or without Great Uncle. Perhaps I owed my American dollars advance to General Stark's toughening of our army. Power, the sad habituality of it, shone in Great Uncle's eyes, and I was half intoxicated with that. What did one or two black coffins matter in those eyes, their immensity of reach?

  And of course the refineries and the Hordern Straits had to be retained. I would like to say, thus the arse-licking sage began to assure me. But no, it was no separate entity, no independent savant who tried to persuade me. It was myself, my reaction to the depth of his eyes, the rustle of his voice, the utter authority of his words. It had taken a mere minute for Great Uncle to enter the room and alter my view of things. This enchantment was, however, about to be challenged.

  Great Uncle said, I hear from Commissioner McBrien that your new novel concerns the home front, the impact of sanctions. And brave, ordinary folk.

  I must have frowned, for Great Uncle went on in his measured voice, This is purely literary gossip, of course. Forgive me if I have it wrong.

  Of course I did not want him to know the way in which the manuscript, virtually complete, had been placed as an offering to Sarah.

  I'm afraid, Mr. President, that the novel has been abandoned. It led nowhere—artistically, I mean.

  Do you have a typescript?

  I knew I must return his stare, but I confess it was hard to do. He was sure he guarded the state. I was convinced I must guard the grave. An image of a desecrating mechanical digger came to my mind.

  I burned it, sir, I said. By keeping my eyes directed at him, I hoped it would not seem the barefaced lie it was.

  I said, When a book goes bad on you, it seems to be the only thing to do with it. West and East, there are many, many burned manuscripts.

  Of course, said Great Uncle. I've read of many such cases myself. The artist wants to obliterate what he sees as his bad work. Sometimes, of course, he's being too hard on himself. Wouldn't you say that? That he's being too hard? Or perhaps too vain?