better. He is stumbling and dazed. Only I know. I have Bart’s gun, just in case.
The suit is pressed. Bart helps with the tie. He fusses, tying and re-tying. Sergei’s eyes have started to show fear. He tries to talk casually to me, to Bart. He is asking what is happening but Bart is so far away that his mind is totally filled with the simple problem of tying the tie, its loops and folds provide intricate problems of engineering and aesthetics.
I never liked Sergei. He never treated me with respect. He showed disdain.
I will donate him a briefcase. I have a beautiful one left me by the old general manager. It is slim and black with smart snappy little chrome clips on it. In it I place Sergei’s excellent references and about five hundred dollars worth of cash. It is a shame about the money, but no one must ever think him poor or helpless.
I order him to hold the briefcase. He looks so dapper. Who could not believe he was a senior executive? Who indeed!
It is time now for the little procession to the gate. The knowledge of what is happening hits Sergei on this, his walk to the scaffold. He handles it well enough, saying nothing I remember.
High on the wire the dead boy stands like a casualty of an awkward levitation trick.
I have the main gate opened and Sergei walks out of it. The guards stand dumbly like horses in a paddock swishing flies away. I am watching Bart’s eyes but they are clouded from me. He has become a foreign world veiled in mists. I know now that we will not discuss Dylan again or get stoned together. But he will do what I want because he knows I am crazy and cannot be deceived.
He seems to see nothing as the great wire mesh gate is rolled back into place and locked with chains. Sergei walks slowly down the gravel road away from us.
A grey figure slides out from the scrub a mile or so away. They will welcome him soon, this representative of management with his references in his briefcase.
The fact of Sergei’s execution could not possibly be nearly as elegant as my plan. I return to my office, leaving the grisly reality of it to the watchers at the gate.
13.
In the night they put Sergei’s head on the wire. It stares towards my office in fear and horror, a reminder of my foolishness.
For now it appears that I misunderstood the situation. It appears that he was acting on Bart’s instructions, that the siphoned funds were being used to rebuild the inside of the factory.
To please me, dear god.
How could I have guarded against Bart’s “What if…” or protected us all from his laconic “easy-peasy”? If one lives with dreamers and encourages their aberrations something is bound to go wrong. Now I understand what it is to be the parent of brilliant children, children reared with no discipline, their every fantasy pandered to. Thus one creates one’s own assassins.
The factory tour is over now and Bart sits in my office eyeing me with the cunning of a dog, pretending servility, but with confused plans and strategies showing in his dog-wet eyes.
He understood nothing of factories nor my fear of them. His model factory is a nightmare far more obscene that anything my simple mind could have created.
For they have made a factory that is quiet. They have worried about aesthetics.
Areas of peaceful blue and whole fields of the most lyrical green. In these ideal conditions people perform insulting functions, successfully imitating the functions of mid-twentieth century machinery.
This is Bart and Sergei’s masterpiece, their gift to me. They have the mentality of art students who think they can change the world by spraying their hair silver.
They make me think of other obscenities. For instance: a Georg Jensen guillotine made from the finest silver and shaped with due concern for function and aesthetic appeal. Alternatively: condemned cells decorated with pretty blue bunny patterns from children’s nurseries.
In order to achieve these effects they have reduced profit by 6-5 per cent.
In here it is very quiet. No noise comes from the staff outside. I have seen them, huddled together in little groups at the windows staring at Sergei. They seem anaesthetized. They have the glazed eyes of people too frightened to see anything that might get them into trouble. Thus they avoided Bart’s eyes. He pranced through like a spider, his hand on his gun, the fury in his veins bursting to fill the room like black ink in water.
Now in the silence of my office I see the extent to which he is afflicted by hurt and misunderstanding. Trying to talk to him, I put my hand on his arm. He flinches from me. In that terrible instant I am alone on the pack ice, the string inside me taut and all that lonely ice going in front of me no matter which way I turn. And he, Bart, looking at me guilty and afraid and angry and does he want to kill me?
Yes, he does.
He will learn to use his burning cat. He hates me because I killed his friend. It was a misunderstanding. It was his fault, not mine. If they hadn’t cheated I would never have made the mistake. His friend Sergei, the little turd, he thought he was clever but he was a fool. Sergei, his stupid mouth dribbling black blood on the top of the wire fence. If only his siphoning of funds had been more subtle. There were two other ways to do it, but he did it like a petty cash clerk. It was this which upset me the most. It was this which put me over the line and left me here, alone, threatened by the one person I thought my friend.
He may wish to kill me.
But I, alone on the ice, have eyes like the headlights of a truck. I have power. I will do anything. And I have made enough bad dreams that one more dying face will make not the slightest scrap of difference. Anyone who wants to cling on to their life won’t fuck around with me too willingly, though their hand might easily encircle my wrist, though they have the strength to crush me with their bare arms, for I am fearful and my fear makes me mighty.
And I am not mad, but rather I have opened the door you all keep locked with frightened bolts and little prayers. I am more like you than you know. You have not inspected the halls and attics. You haven’t got yourself grubby in the cellars. Instead you sit in the front room in worn blue jeans, reading about atrocities in the Sunday papers.
Now Bart will do as I wish for he wishes to live and is weak because of it. I am a freight train, black smoke curling back, thundering down the steel lines of terrible logic.
Peter Carey
Peter Carey is the author of eleven novels and has twice received the Booker Prize. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years.
www.petercareybooks.com
