Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  “Harder and harder to lift up.”

  I froze. Harder and harder to lift up, she’d said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up. I liked it. It was very good. As she got older, her bag of rubbish was becoming harder and harder to lift up. She smiled at me, still slightly stooped. It felt just right: all just as I’d imagined it. I stood still, looking back at her, and said:

  “Yes. Every time.”

  The words just came to me. I spoke them, then I moved on, turning into the next flight of stairs. For a few seconds I felt weightless—or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it—gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water. It felt very good. As I reached the third or fourth step of this new flight, though, this feeling dwindled. By the fifth or sixth one it was gone. I stopped and turned around. The liver lady’s head was disappearing back into her flat and her hand was pulling the door to behind it.

  “Wait!” I said.

  The door stopped closing and the liver lady poked her head back out. She looked quite nervous. A noise came from behind her, inside the flat.

  “That was excellent,” I said. “I’d like to do it again.”

  The liver lady nodded.

  “Okay, dear,” she said.

  “I’ll start at the top of the first flight,” I told her.

  She nodded again, shuffled back out towards her rubbish bag, picked it up, then shuffled back into her flat again and closed the door. I started up the staircase—but before I’d reached the bend I heard her door open again behind me and a faster, heavier person step out onto the landing.

  “Wait a minute,” said a man’s voice.

  I turned round. It was one of Annie’s people.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “If you’re going to start from the top of your own flight rather than back in your flat,” he said, “how will she know when to open the door?”

  I thought about this. It was a fair question. Annie appeared behind this man.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked.

  I told her. She pondered it for a while, then said:

  “We need someone to watch you and signal to us when the time comes to send her out. But no one can really do that without getting in the way themselves.”

  “The cat people!” I said.

  “Of course!” said Annie.

  The people who’d pushed the cats onto the facing building’s roof would be able to see me from the top-floor windows of that building as I turned the staircase bend: there was a window there.

  “They need to watch for me, and radio you when I’m on the—let’s see: when did the door open?” I walked back to the step I’d been on when the liver lady’s locks had clicked and jiggled. “The third one down,” I said.

  “I’m not directly linked to them,” said Annie, holding up her radio. “We’ll have to go through Naz.”

  She radioed him and the chain of communication was set up. The cat people would watch me from their building as I passed the window on the banister bend and, when I hit the third step of the next flight, give the order to open the door—this via Naz, who’d act as the join between the two parties from his office a few streets away. It took ten or so minutes to set this up. When all the links were in place, everyone apart from me went back into the liver lady’s flat, her door was closed again and I walked back up the stairs to the top of the first flight.

  I stood there for a while, rocking very slightly forwards and backwards on my planted feet. I felt the point of pressure shifting from my heels to my toes via the arched tendon in between, the plantar fascia, then back again, a three-part chain. I rocked slightly back then slightly forward several times, then headed down the stairs again.

  This time I paused in front of the window by the first bend. I even leant against it, resting my forehead on the glass like I had one floor up on the day I’d found the building. I couldn’t see the spotters in the facing building, the two cat men—but I knew they were there. If they’d been marksmen, snipers, they’d have had a clear shot at me right now. I slid both arms slightly up against the window pane. The tingling started in my right hip and seeped upwards, up my spine. I looked at the top branches of a tree below me in the courtyard: a light breeze was buffeting its leaves, making them dance.

  I pulled my head away and made to move on down—but hesitated when I noticed a small patch of black moving quite fast against the facing building. It was gone so quickly that I thought it must have been another optical effect, a quirk of the kinked glass. I tried to reproduce it by pressing my forehead back onto the window pane and pulling it away again, but couldn’t make the black patch reappear. I tried it several times without success. I hadn’t imagined it, though: there’d been a streak of black moving fast against the facing building.

  Eventually I gave up and moved on down. As I hit the third step I heard a buzz or scrape that came from behind the liver lady’s door. It could have been a radio or it could have been her rubbish bag scraping the floor. An instant later came the jiggle of her latch; then the door opened and she shuffled out again, her rubbish bag in her hand. Once more she stooped to set her bag down, holding her left hand to her lower back as she did this; once more she looked up at me and pronounced her phrase:

  “Harder and harder to lift up.”

  I answered her as before. Again I felt the sense of gliding, of light density. The moment I was in seemed to expand and become a pool—a still, clear pool that swallowed everything up in its calm contentedness. Again the feeling dwindled as I left the zone around her door. As soon as I’d reached the third step of the next flight I turned round, as before, and said:

  “Again.”

  We did it again—but this time it didn’t work. She’d steered the rubbish bag through its horizontal arc around her legs and, stooping, started to lower it to the ground when suddenly it slipped out of her hand and fell with a loud clunk. She bent over to pick it up but I stopped her.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s broken the…you know: it won’t be right. Let’s take it from the top again. Someone should clean that patch up, too.”

  Her bag had leaked from its bottom right corner, leaving a wet, sticky-looking patch on the floor. Someone came out and mopped this up.

  “It looks too clean now,” I said when they’d done this.

  Annie came out again and looked.

  “We’ll have to dust and sand it again,” she said.

  “How long will that take?” I asked.

  “A good hour till it looks just like it did before.”

  “An hour?” I repeated. “That’s too…I need it to…”

  My voice petered out. I was quite upset. I wanted to slip back into it now, right now: the pool, the lightness and the gliding. There was nothing I could do, though: it wouldn’t be right if the floor wasn’t the right texture. I gathered myself together and announced:

  “Okay: do it. I’ll move on.”

  I’d come back to the liver lady later. And besides, she was just part of the re-enactment: I had a lot still to do, a lot more space to cover.

  I walked past the pianist’s flat. The sound of his music grew crisper and sharper as I passed his door, then once again soft and floaty as I moved down from his floor. On the landing below his I passed the boring couple’s flat. This is where the Hoover noise was coming from. The Hoover was being shunted back and forth across a carpet, by the sound of it. The wife re-enactor would be doing it. I moved on, through a patch of neutral space, down past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. His clangings were still coming from the courtyard, but with less of an echo now: maybe the trees and the swings were getting in the way down here. I carried on down to the lobby.

  Here the sensation started returning: the same sense of zinging and intensity. My concierge was standing as instructed—standing quite still in the middle of the lobby with her white ice-hockey mask on. Behind
her, to her left—my right—there was a cupboard; beside that, another strip of white, neutral space. As I walked around her in a circle, looking at her from all sides, her stumpy arms and featureless face seemed to emanate an almost toxic level of significance. I cocked my head to one side, then the other; I crouched to the ground and looked at her from there. She looked like a statue in a harbour, towering above the granite—or a spire, a reactor, a communications mast. Being this close to her I felt overexposed after a while—so I opened up her cupboard door and stepped inside.

  Here were the broom, the mop and bucket and the industrial Hoover, all in the positions that I’d first remembered and then sketched them in. There was another object, too: a strangely shaped machine for cleaning granite floors. It hadn’t come to me initially—but then when I’d found it stored in there one morning it hadn’t seemed wrong, either, so I’d kept it. I stayed in the cupboard for a long time. In here it felt intimate, warm. I felt I’d burrowed to one of the innermost chambers of the vision I had realized all around me. It was a good position: well placed, with good sightlines. The cupboard door was slightly ajar: I looked out through its slit at the concierge standing in the lobby. She was standing with her back turned to me, the mask straps fastened at the back of her head. Her shoulders rose and fell as she breathed. The view I had of her was like a murderer’s view—hidden, looking through a thin slit at her back.

  After a while I stepped back out of the cupboard, crossed the strip of neutral space and came back to the bottom of the staircase. I was about to step into the garden when I heard the main door open behind me, the one that led onto the street. I turned round. A small boy had just walked in: he was one of the pianist’s pupils, arriving for a lesson. He walked across the lobby, towards where the concierge was standing—then caught sight of me and hesitated. He must have been ten or eleven years old. On his back he wore a little satchel—one of Annie’s props, that. He had straight, brown hair and freckles. We stood facing one another, me and him, completely still—three people completely still there in the lobby: myself, this small boy and the concierge. He looked frightened. I smiled at him and said:

  “Just carry on. It will all be fine.”

  At this the small boy started moving again. He walked past me and started up the staircase. I looked at his satchel as he passed me, his scuffed leather shoes. I watched him walk up and away from me, turning and dwindling. He disappeared from view on the second floor and his footsteps stopped. I heard a muffled bell ring; then the piano music stopped too. I heard the pianist’s chair being scraped back, then his footsteps heading for his door. I waited till the boy was safely in before I went out to the courtyard.

  This was full of outdoor noises: distant cars and buses, trains and planes, the general subdued roar that air in cities has. Upstairs on the third floor the child started playing scales. These spilled out of the pianist’s window but, not walled in like his own playing had been in the stairwell, dissipated in the summer air. I could see smoke piping from the vent outside the liver lady’s kitchen almost directly above me. I could see my bathroom window sill but not the glass itself: the angle was too sharp. I looked down again. The motorbike enthusiast was three yards to my left. He had stopped banging at his bolt and was now turning it, unscrewing something. On the earth beneath the engine of his bike a patch of oil had formed: it looked kind of like a shadow, but more solid. I stood by his bike for a while, looking at the patch, then said:

  “Leave that there when you’ve finished.”

  “Leave what?” he asked, looking up at me and slightly squinting.

  “Leave that patch,” I said.

  “How leave it?” he asked.

  “Don’t let it be smudged or covered over. I might want to capture it later.”

  “Capture it?” he asked.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t let it get wiped out. Understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Okay.”

  I left him and walked over to the swings. It wasn’t his business to make me explain what I meant by “capture”. It meant whatever I wanted it to mean: I was paying him to do what I said. Prick. I did want to capture it, though: its shape, its shade. These were important, and I didn’t want to lose them. I thought of going back up to my flat to get a piece of paper onto which to transcribe the patch, but decided to do it later, when he wasn’t there. If it rained, though…I sat down on one of the swings and looked up at the sky. It didn’t look like rain: it was blue with the odd billowing cloud. I slid off the swing after a while, pushed it so it continued swinging to and fro and lay on my back beneath it, watching it swing above my head against the sky. The billowing clouds were moving slowly and the swing was moving fast. The blue was still—but two high-up aeroplanes were slicing it into segments with their vapour trails, like Naz and I had done to the city with our pins and threads. Lying on my back, I let my arms slide slightly over the grass away from my sides, turned my palms upwards till the tingling sensation crept through my body again. I lay there for a very long time, tingling, looking at the sky…

  Later that evening I was lying in my bath, soaking, gazing at the crack. The pianist’s last pupil had gone, and he’d started composing, playing a phrase then stopping for a long time before playing it again with a new half-phrase tagged onto the end. Liver was crackling and sizzling downstairs. I could smell it. It still wasn’t quite right—still had that slightly acrid edge, like cordite. I brought that up again with Naz when we spoke after my bath.

  “We’ll try to get that right,” he told me. “Apart from that, though, how did you think it went?”

  “It went…well, it went…” I started. I didn’t know what to tell him.

  “Was it a success, in your opinion?” he asked.

  Had it been a success? Difficult question. Some things had worked, and some things hadn’t. My shirt had slightly caught against the cutting board, but then the fridge had opened perfectly. The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she’d tried to re-enact her movements for a third time. Then there was the question of the smell, of course. But had it been a success? A success at what? Had I expected all my movements to be seamless and perfect instantly? Of course not. Had I expected the detour through understanding that I’d had to take in order to do anything for the last year—for my whole life—to be bypassed straight away: just cut off, a redundant nerve, an isolated oxbow lake that would evaporate? No: that would take work—a lot of work. But today my movements had been different. Felt different. My mind too, my whole consciousness. Different, better. It was…

  “It was a beginning,” I told Naz.

  “A beginning?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. “A very good beginning.”

  That night, I dreamt that I and all my staff—Naz, Annie, Frank, the liver lady and the pianist and the motorbike enthusiast and concierge and piano pupil, plus all Naz’s, Frank’s and Annie’s people, the coordinators lurking behind doors, the spotters in the facing building and their back-up people too—I dreamt that all of us had linked ourselves together: physically, arm in arm and standing on each other’s shoulders like a troupe of circus acrobats. We’d linked ourselves together in this way in the formation of an aeroplane. It was an early, primitive plane: a biplane, of the type an early aviator might have used for a record-setting transatlantic flight.

  We’d taken off in this formation and were flying above my building and the streets around it. We could look down as we flew and see the courtyard with its trees and swings, its patch of oil beneath the engine of the motorbike. We could see ourselves, our re-enacted doubles, in the courtyard too: the motorbike enthusiast, banging and unscrewing; myself, lying beneath the swings. We could see the cats slinking around the red roofs. If we banked north and glided for a while we could see Naz’s building with its blue-and-white exterior, the aerials on its roof. Through its top windows we could see doubles of Naz’s office team coordinating events in my building. We could see these even
ts too, through walls which had become transparent: the liver lady laying her bag down, talking to me as I passed her, the pianist practising his Rachmaninov, the concierge, the pupil—the whole lot.

  We banked again and saw the sports track with its white and red and yellow markings. There were athletes running around this, just like there had been in my coma. I was commentating again. Everything was running smoothly, happily, until I noticed, lying beside the goalposts, these old, greasy escalator parts—the same ones that I’d seen laid out at Green Park Station. As soon as I saw them the whole thing went out of kilter: events in my building, Naz’s people, the athletes and the commentary—the lot. Athletes tripped over, crashing into one another; my flow of words faltered and dried up; the liver lady’s rubbish bag broke, scattering putrid, mouldy lumps of uneaten liver all over the courtyard; the swings’ chains snapped; black cats shrieked and chased their tails. And then our plane—the plane that we’d formed from the interlinking of our bodies: it was stalling, nose-diving towards the ground, whose surface area was crumpling like old tin…

  Just before the crash I woke up cold with sweat to the unpleasant smell of congealed fat.