Flagged Victor (38 page)

I looked back on Conrad’s
Lord Jim
and was struck for the hundredth time how brief the incident that generates the book is compared to the book itself. The accident on the ship that sets off Jim’s shame is but twenty pages long. The discussion of that shame, and the making amends for it, comprises the rest of the long story. Conrad got heaviness. He knew that we who are heavy are haunted by our failings for the rest of our lives. We make amends, as we can, perhaps by telling a Marlow, perhaps by becoming one.

My own Marlow now, I try to write it well enough to get it down. As Conrad wrote, There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and wrong of this affair.

And so, I need to make this final brief confession in a book and a life spent avoiding it. It was not Chris’s fault that he was caught on his last robbery, it was mine. It was not his lightness but my weight that doomed us both. The heaviness settled on me not from the day we began to do the robberies but from the
day we cut down that tree fort, from the moment I walked out of the forest by the lake with my cut chin. My relationship with Drury started then, when he picked me up in the squad car and asked me to tell him who else was in on it.

He asked me, so I told him. I would have told him anything to avoid the shame of him telling my father. And years later, after a string of robberies had occurred, and his suspicions of Chris became overwhelming, Drury approached me again.

I tried to resist. I tried to tell him that I wouldn’t turn my friend in, that I would take the rap myself. And he let me believe that, and he gave me the time and space to become very afraid.

Once he teased that fear out of me, he had enough of a grip to yank out the rest. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell him. Interrogation did its work. The story that spilled out on the walls of the police station was the first draft of this novel.

But heavier than my confession was the need for my complicity. Like Judas, I had been necessary. Drury needed to catch Chris in the act. So I helped make that happen too. Pushing Chris to do what he did not want to do, calling Drury when he was about to do it.

Do what you need to do quickly.

Afterwards, the horror of what I’d done was measured by the immensity of my cowardice, and I tried anything to prove that cowardice a lie.

Worse, I was even successful. I let Susan think that she’d abandoned Chris, when the abandonment started with me. I let Chris spend years in prison alone, and let him think he’d been caught because of his own mistakes, not mine. I left my parents and poisoned my childhood and became an exile from
my hometown. I shed all that weight with the money Chris had saved and the freedom he’d sacrificed.

How bitter that made the money.

How heavy that freedom felt.

I
write. I look back on the wreckage of my life. I read about the files unearthed that exposed Kundera’s faltering, and know it doesn’t matter whether he did it or not. We’re all complicit.

Chris, bearing the weight of what we did, lives lightly. He has a good life. He’s done well for himself and his family.

Given more time to think through my decisions, or less time to falter, I might have made different, perhaps better choices. But as Chris has joked about all the time he served inside as the result of his mistakes, Where would I be now?

And as I falter further, as I grow tired of the burden I’ve been carrying so long, I wonder if I should lie down and sleep, or whether this is the very moment when I should rouse myself and live.

Life when you are pinned to the eternal cross of consequence is very long. Life when you are light seems as though it might be terribly short. Which is the life worth living?

There is the chance, the certainty even, that I will make more mistakes, make millions of them, perhaps even a few monstrous ones, as terrible as the mistakes I made back then. I ask my interrogator, Are they all worth making?

You tell me! You tell me.

Without Chris, no book. It has been one of the great
pleasures of my life talking crime and punishment, both real and imagined, over so many years. Without Rosemary, no book. We’re in it together, in every line. I’d also like to express my gratitude to a number of people for their support and guidance: Jennifer Lambert, Jane Warren, Chris Bucci, Janna Rademacher, Helen Heller, Frank Wuliger, Jon Rubinstein, Jon Pettigrew, Eric Fleming, Nate Hamilton, Kira Obolensky, Matt Romanelli, Beth Hollihan, and Karen Grady.

KEITH HOLLIHAN
has worked as a business analyst and a ghostwriter. Born in Canada, he has travelled widely and lived in Japan, the Czech Republic and the United States. He now lives with his wife and sons in St. Paul, Minnesota. Flagged Victor is his second novel, following his acclaimed debut, The Four Stages of Cruelty. Find him online at keithhollihan.com.

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