A Short History of Richard Kline Read online

  ‘Are you okay now? Are you ready?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Go.’

  The descent might almost have been routine, had it not been for my epiphany. Not that it was a true epiphany, more like the photographic negative of one, and it was this. Halfway down, hanging from a fine nylon cable, I realised that I was bored. This was such a surprising thought that I froze, legs braced against the ochre rock.

  After some time – it couldn’t have been long – Julian leaned over the edge, his hands cupped over his mouth, and shouted, ‘Are you okay?’

  Yes, I was okay, whatever that meant (but then again, maybe I wasn’t, though not for any reason Julian might imagine). How tedious all this was. Yes, I was okay, I knew I was not making a fool of myself, but so what? That was the question: so what? Here I was, swinging over one of the great escarpments of one of the great mountain ranges in the southern hemisphere, and realising, with the acid clarity that only crystalline sunlight and a perfect blue sky could induce, that I was, at that moment, bored.

  How could this possibly be? I could hear someone shouting at me from above, a column of words cascading down into the canyon, but I was too distracted to take it in, too absorbed in the revelation of the moment. There was something wrong here. Clearly I should be having one of two reactions. Either I should be consumed by excitement, the sheer thrill of it, or I should be terrified, all sweaty palms and a desperate anxiety to feel my feet on solid earth. Either way, I should be pumping adrenaline at a million miles a minute. But no, here I was, a young man, reasonably fit, with a mild hangover and a shocking indifference.

  And then I saw myself, as if from a great height, legs braced against the cliff-face, and the thought came to me: I am a pendulum, a stuck pendulum. And with that, I pushed off again from the rock.

  On the ride back to the lodge I sat next to Melanie, by now calm but morose about her failure to make the descent. Making as light of it as I could, I attempted to console her. It was all a silly game and meant nothing. She was one of the best people I had worked with in an office: constructive, diplomatic, quietly efficient and an A-grade team worker (all of which was true). Being able to abseil meant you had a head for heights, that’s all, and the rest was mumbo-jumbo. These consultants were making a small fortune coming up with new gimmicks that were just glorified kids’ games.

  ‘You’re so calm, Rick,’ she kept saying, ‘you’re so good under pressure.’

  No, I’m not, I thought. There’s something wrong with me. It’s just that I know how to hide it.

  Back at the lodge we trooped upstairs to shower and change for dinner. In my room I went robotically through the motions and stood for a long time under the shower, resting my forehead against its opaque Perspex enclosure. Spacey. Light-headed. I knew the others would begin to assemble soon in the bar downstairs, and right now I couldn’t face it, all that alcoholic banter, the way everything had to be made into a joke.

  It was just after six when I emerged into the front garden with the intention of going for a walk. Beside the hotel was a narrow bush track that, according to the signpost, led to a lookout over the Jamison Valley. It was only a short distance through a thicket of banksias and within minutes I was on a precipitous rock platform, leaning against a steel fence at waist height and looking out over the great purple maze of ridges and canyons. At dusk the grandeur of it was somehow soothing, the way it fell down into infinity below. All around me the yellow line of sandstone cliffs caught the fire of the setting sun so that they shone with a soft orange gold, and for a few minutes I stood, breathing deeply, inhaling the smell of eucalypts and the spicy scent of the bush. The shadows were deepening and the air had the first hint of chill. I thought of how easy it would be to jump. If you were going to kill yourself, this was the place to come; you would fall through the muted glow of sunset, your body absorbed secretively into the dense rainforest below. It would be a more poetic death than most, and to those left behind, morally inconclusive, since they could never be sure that you hadn’t blacked out or, in a moment of absentmindedness, slipped into the drop.

  For a long time I stood there, gazing down into the blurred blue haze of eucalypt and mountain ash, and then I heard a dry, quarking sound above my head. Quark, quark, quark, it went, sly and insistent. I looked up, expecting to see crows, but there over the darkening escarpment were two cockatoos, soaring high above the canyon, their wings fully extended, two fluid white forms outlined against the charcoal sky.

  And then suddenly it was dark, and I turned back.

  In the dining room the others were in the early stages of an elaborate banquet. All through dinner they traded rowdy stories of their bravado, and teased Melanie, who by now was sheepish but cheerful. Some went to bed early, exhausted. The stayers returned to the red-velvet womb of the bar and drank themselves into a stupor.

  When I tried to explain to Jo how I had felt, braced against the cliff-face, she laughed at me. It was the evening I arrived home and she was sitting in front of the mirror, brushing her hair.

  ‘You’re always hard to please,’ she said, tartly. And then, seeing how troubled I was, she earnestly attempted to psychologise my ennui into something else. ‘You were just scared out of your brain, Rick, but your pride wouldn’t allow you to admit it. So you closed down and pretended to yourself that you were bored.’

  Good try, I thought, but the fact was I had felt no fear. I knew what fear was and had no problem admitting to it – not to her, anyway. But it simply hadn’t been there. But nor had I felt exhilaration. And why not? Nothing in the logic of my personal universe could account for it. I had hung over one of the most beautiful valleys in the world and felt indifferent. Here it was again, that question: what was my lack?

  This fugue, this inverse epiphany on the cliff-face, was something that wouldn’t go away. For days I brooded on it, until Jo became exasperated.

  ‘Come on, Rick,’ she said, ‘of all the things in your life, this is a minor thing.’

  What could I say? Objectively assessed, in the wider scale of things, it might be a minor thing. But for me, looking out from the knot of complication that represented my thinking self, for some inexplicable reason it was the thing. At night just before sleep, the image of my body as a stuck pendulum kept coming back to haunt me.

  When finally Jo and I agreed to separate, the feeling of loss was greater than I could have imagined. It ambushed me almost immediately. I expected relief, a surcease of pain, as the poets had it, and instead felt instantly bereft, full of a hazy, unfocused sense of failure. When I came home to my apartment at night the feeling of emptiness, of energy withdrawn, was unnerving. I would sit out on the small balcony and brood on her good points: her loyalty, her honesty, her energy … but most of all her voice. At odd moments I would hear snatches of her singing around the house … in the shower, in the kitchen, in the car. It was uncanny. Once I had liked to read and resented her chattering, her interruptions; now I couldn’t bear to open a book. It reminded me that I was alone. And yet I had sought this, had fantasised this … this freedom.

  My first impulse was to go on a scarifyingly self-centred binge. If sex couldn’t save me, it could certainly console me: the closeness of another body, the annihilation of taboo. One was a positive force, the other negative, but I needed both, the light and the dark, so that some dark matter could be burned off in the body’s fires. The danger was that if you burned too intensely and for too long, you burned out. I knew this but thought I could finesse the odds. I had it under control. I told myself that I wasn’t by nature obsessive. Or was I?

  One night a friend came around to announce that he had split with his wife. We sat hunched over the low coffee table, drinking our way through a bottle of Bundy until he began to cry. As I watched his body crumple, shoulders heaving into a boneless, watery hump, I struggled with a rush of contradictory feelings: on the one hand, disgust, and on the other, awe. I couldn’t bear to see any man in that state; it made my skin go cold. And
yet when he had gone, I found myself reflecting on this scene with a kind of furtive envy. Yes, envy. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried. I was incapable of it.

  All through my relationship with Jo I had asked myself if I loved her, deciding in the end that I didn’t know what love was. There was a comfort zone, sexual and social, and there was pride, not least in possession. And then there was that deep yearning to lose yourself in someone, or something, that had called to me for years. But what Jo and I had between us, was that love? My intuition told me it was not. Why, then, was I hit so hard by separation? Where would I find union? Was it possible? I was haunted by the idea that I would never find a soulmate; that no-one would ever truly understand me. I heard myself bleating: my wife doesn’t understand me. And then I wondered why I could never have a thought, or experience an emotion, without some little voice in my head commenting on it at the same time. Who or what was this other self that stood back and mocked what ‘I’ was feeling? Was it like this for other people? Never mind; in the end it was all words, words, words, and I was a dangling abseiler stuck halfway down a cliff-face, hanging from a thin cable like a human pendulum and waiting for a shove.

  One afternoon, as I gazed out my office window at the sun glinting off the trees, my project boss, Leigh, called me over. ‘I’m going down the shaft for a gasper.’ he said. ‘Fancy some fresh air?’

  This, I knew, was not a casual invitation. We rode down in the lift together, all twenty-eight floors to street level and the charmless grey concrete plaza where office workers hung out for a smoke. It was here that Leigh told me about a position with a hot new IT firm in the UK.

  ‘It’s a great opening,’ he said. ‘I’d go myself but the wife won’t come at it. Too much upheaval for the kids.’

  I could see that he wanted to go, could see it in the fraught, frowning way he dragged on his cigarette. He was only in his late thirties but already his life was fixed.

  I must have looked stunned, for Leigh patted me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ he grinned. He dropped the butt of his cigarette to the asphalt and ground it underfoot. ‘I’ve already filled them in on your background. They want a phone interview,’ he added. ‘How are you placed tonight around eleven?’

  Within a month I was on a flight to London.

  the villa

  The essential thing was this: in the old world, Europe, there was enough novelty to drive his brooding self underground. He stopped asking questions; he stopped asking why, and what is the meaning of all this. He was too distracted to think about whether or not he was happy. He wasn’t bored, because everything had the electric charge of the new. He could see why people travelled; it refreshed the senses, it broke the cycle of repetition.

  His new employer, Panoptica, was just two years old. It was owned by an American, Jim Hagen, an ex-hippie and Stanford dropout with a gift for developing software that enabled ever more dazzling special effects in movies. ‘We are masters of the reality effect,’ Jim had boasted to Rick somewhere in the middle of his late-night London–Sydney telephone interview, which went on for almost four hours, a free-association rave that made him wonder if Jim was on something.

  But once he arrived he found that Jim was okay. He met Rick at the airport, where he danced around him like some manic sprite, all arms and quick, jerky gestures and a staccato patter that Rick couldn’t absorb because he was bleary-eyed from jet lag. Jim packed him into an open-top silver Porsche and dropped him at a hotel in Chelsea, where he lay awake all night. In the morning, Jim rang around six to say he would be collecting Rick at seven and to be outside on the sidewalk. When Jim pulled in to the kerb in the Porsche, Rick could only stare at him in a daze; strung out from lack of sleep, he felt light-headed, with a curious sensation of having been relieved of a burden. Before long he was being guided through a glassed-in atrium down by the docks, where Jim had his offices. They walked onto a wide sunlit floor, where Jim shouted, ‘Hey, listen up, everyone. Here’s our new man. This is Rick. Rick from Australia.’

  He suspected that Jim might be some kind of genius. Aged in his early fifties, he had a long, narrow face, a beaky nose and pale eyes behind rimless spectacles. His sandy hair was thinning and he chewed his nails to the quick, yet he was shrewd and sharp-eyed, with the air of a predatory child. He treated his programmers not as employees but as junior siblings and confided in them about his hectic past, and how he had moved to London to get away from a cocaine-fuelled work culture that had destroyed his second marriage. Jim was an unreconstructed baby boomer and had never given up on the idea of utopia. He even had a utopian view of the workplace. With a detestation of what he called ‘corporates’, he had installed his company in a spectacularly renovated warehouse on the Thames. It was less like a suite of offices than a home away from home – if you could call a brick cavern with a soaring glass roofline a home.

  ‘As close to heaven as heaven can be,’ Jim would say, which made no sense at all.

  One of the Canadian programmers, Carl, told Rick that he had once corrected Jim on this. ‘You mean “earth”?’ he had said. ‘As close to heaven as earth can be?’

  ‘No,’ Jim replied, ‘earth doesn’t come into it.’

  So this saying of Jim’s, which had become a catchphrase, was a kind of enigmatic nonsense, but to the degree that it was both lyrical and generous it seemed somehow in the spirit of his vision, and they were all happy to bask in the luxury of Jim’s dream space. There was ergonomic furniture designed in Milan. There was a coffee machine in the middle of the first floor with a full-time barista, a young cockney with a line of patter that could prove distracting. At one end of the second floor there was a performance space, where a stark glass wall overlooked the docks. There, every Friday afternoon, Jim arranged for some musicians who played at his favourite pub in Deptford to perform for the staff.

  ‘Treats,’ he would smile, in his high, boyish, transatlantic accent, ‘treats are the key to happy, happy workers.’

  The net result of Jim’s civilised work site was that for most of the gang the office was a more inviting space than home. They would get to work by seven, take their meals in the coffee lounge and leave around eight at night.

  And the work was absorbing; they were the artists of their profession and thought of themselves not as programmers but as virtual sculptors. The sculptures existed in the mind’s eye of the analyst and were traced into virtual reality via the pathways of Booleian logic. These pathways enabled the materialisation of the endpoint, the image on the screen, but this was just a thin layer that sat on top of the core. They, the analyst programmers, constructed the core. Jim, with his manic elan, would frequently refer to them as the Lords of Creation.

  With work like that, who needed a private life? They were mostly young single men and they banded together like a pack of work-crazed siblings. You were in the zone, and it was hard to share anything with those who were outside it. Time and the conventional routines of a working day were disassembled, not so much rearranged as dissolved. The normal boundaries became fluid; you could eat and drink, work and nap whenever you pleased. Some days it felt as though you were suspended in a space station, living in permanent daylight.

  It was not long before Rick was invited to the Hagen mansion in Notting Hill. Jim was perched on a corner of his desk where he had been spouting forth plans for a new project. ‘Come to dinner,’ he said, suddenly.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. Come tonight. Meet Leni.’

  Everything with Jim was about now. He had an idea, he acted on it. So it was that just after eight Rick climbed out of Jim’s car, double-parked in a leafy street of grand Victorian façades.

  That night he met Leni, Jim’s third wife, a former art curator from Boston whom Jim gave every appearance of worshipping. Leni was a small, elegant woman with an angular jaw and sleek blonde hair cut in a bob. She was whippet-thin but strong-boned, and her shoulders had an almost military set beneath her elegantly tailored silk shirt. Her fine to
rtoiseshell-rimmed spectacles suggested precision, and there was a quality of refined androgyny about her.

  Rick could not help but be impressed by her poise, which was such a contrast to Jim’s jerky animation and the way he seemed at times to dance around her. And yet, despite their differences, or perhaps even because of them, they appeared to have realised a kind of affectionate symbiosis; there was something about the way their bodies related to one another that was beyond even the sexual: they were like two limbs of the one animal. They existed in their own private aura.

  The dining room was an internal room painted a deep terracotta red, with elaborately wrought fruit and vines moulded in plaster and so realistically tinted they appeared to be growing out of the walls. At one end of the room hung two spotlit portraits of Leni’s children, an angelic-looking boy and a slightly younger girl with dark eyes. It was a warm night and one half of the huge dining table was laden with food, though there was only one other guest: the Hagens’ architect, Marc Peltier, a Belgian. It was Marc who had renovated the warehouse for Jim. A year later, in the gloom of a London winter, Jim had presented Leni with the keys to a villa in Tuscany and Marc had been commissioned to restore it.

  Leni sat at the head of the table like a presiding magistrate. She had a quality of stillness, of willed composure, the very opposite of Jim, who sat on his hands with shoulders hunched, rocking back and forth with a kind of nervy glee. Though the food that night was delicious, it seemed somehow secondary, a mere courtesy extended to the guests. Neither Leni nor Jim ate anything, not so much as an olive or a crouton, and Rick began to understand why they were both so thin. Marc the architect ate heartily, as did Rick.

  Leni got out a photograph of the villa to show Rick so that he could follow the discussion of Marc’s plans. It was assumed that he would find them absorbing. The villa was not what he expected; there were no arches or verandahs, only a compact cube, faced with white stucco, sharply geometrical in form with no window-frames or mouldings. Leni explained to him that the villa had no gardens; that it had for a long time ‘stood aloof’ from nature. But she and Jim had plans to put in a formal Renaissance garden, perhaps with a wild area to one side – a barco or hunting park.