by Tom McCarthy
9
FAT BECAME QUITE A PROBLEM, as it goes. Over the next days and weeks the liver lady fried her way through a small mountain of pig liver. She had three or four frying pans on the go at any given time. She might not have been doing it herself: it might have been the back-up, Annie’s people, tossing it all on, slab after slab, letting them slide around and sizzle, turning them over and taking them off again. Whoever was doing the actual cooking, the sheer amount of vaporized fat rising from the frying pans hung around the building. It clogged up the extraction fan, whose out-vent pointed towards my bathroom window. To have this outer part cleaned turned out to be difficult: you couldn’t get at it from inside. We had to hire those window cleaners you see dangling from the tops of skyscrapers to come and scrape the fat out while they hung beside it. It was pretty nerve-wracking to watch. I had the courtyard below them cleared, just in case. I know all about things falling from the sky.
These men didn’t fall—but the cats did. That’s what I’d seen on the day of the first re-enactment, when I’d pressed my cheek against the window by the turning between my floor and the liver lady’s and then pulled it away: the black streak I’d thought was an optical effect. It wasn’t: it was one of the black cats falling off the roof. By the end of the second day of re-enactments three had fallen. They all died. We’d only bought four in the first place; one wasn’t enough to produce the effect I wanted.
“What do you want to do?” asked Naz.
“Get more,” I said.
“How many more?”
“At a loss rate of three every two days, I’d say quite an amount. A rolling supply. Just keep putting them up there.”
“Doesn’t it upset you?” Naz asked two days later as we stood together in my kitchen looking down into the courtyard at one of his men sliding a squashed cat into a bin bag.
“No,” I said. “We can’t expect everything to work perfectly straight away. It’s a learning process.”
A more serious problem was the pianist. This one did upset me, plenty: I caught him out red-handed one day, blatantly defrauding me. I’d spent an afternoon concentrating on the lower sections of the staircase, studying the way light fell from the large windows onto the patterned floor. The floor had a repetitive pattern, as I mentioned earlier: when sunlight shone on it directly, which it did on the second floor for three hours and fourteen minutes each day, it filled the corridors of white between the pattern’s straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion. I’d already observed this happening on the top floors, but was working on the lower floors now. I’d noticed that the light seemed deeper down here—more dense and less flighty. Higher up it had more dust specks in it: these were borne upwards by the warm air in the stairwell; when they reached the top floors they hung around like small stars in massive galaxies, hardly moving at all, and this made the air seem lighter.
So anyway, I was lying on the floor observing this phenomenon—speculating, you might say—while the piano music looped and repeated in the background when I saw the pianist walk up the stairs towards me.
This, of course, was physically impossible: I was listening to him practising his Rachmaninov two floors above me at this very moment. But impossible or not, there he was, walking up the stairs towards me. As soon as he caught sight of me he jolted to a standstill, then started to turn—but it was too late: he knew the game was up. He became static again. His eyes scampered half-heartedly around the floor’s maze as though looking for a way out of the quandary he found himself in while at the same time knowing that they wouldn’t find one; the bald crown of his head went even whiter than it usually was. He mumbled:
“Hello.”
“What are you…” I started, but I couldn’t finish the sentence. A wave of dizziness was sweeping over me. The piano music was still spilling from his flat into the sunlit stairwell.
“I had an audition,” he murmured.
“Then who…” I asked.
“Recording,” he said, his eyes still moping at the floor.
“But there are mistakes in it!” I said. “And loopbacks, and…”
“A recording of me. I made it myself, especially. It’s the same thing, more or less. Isn’t it?”
It was my turn to go white now. There were no mirrors in the building, but I’m sure that if there had been and I’d looked in one I would have seen myself completely white: white with both rage and dizziness.
“No!” I shouted. “No, it is not! It is just absolutely not the same thing!”
“Why not?” he asked. His voice was still monotonous and flat but was shaking a little.
“Because…It absolutely isn’t! It’s just not the same because…It’s not the same at all.” I was shouting as loud as I could, and yet my voice was coming out broken and faint. I could hardly breathe. I’d been lying on my side when he came up the stairs towards me, and had only half-risen—a reclining posture, like those dying Roman emperors in paintings. I tried to stand up now but couldn’t. Panic welled up inside me. I tried to be formal. I forced a deep breath into my lungs and said:
“I shall pursue this matter via Naz. You may go now. I should prefer to be alone.”
He turned around and left. I made straight for my flat. No sooner had I got there than I threw up. I lurched into the bathroom and stood holding the sink for a long, long time after I’d finished puking. When I could, I raised my eyes up to the crack; this oriented me again, stopped me feeling dizzy. The building was on my side, even if this bad man wasn’t. When I felt well enough to move, I went into the living room, sat down on my sofa and phoned Naz.
“It’s totally unacceptable!” I told him after I’d explained what had just happened. “Completely totally!”
“Shall I fire him?” asked Naz.
“Yes!” I said. “No! No, don’t fire him. He’s perfect—in the way he looks, I mean. And in the way he plays. Even the way he speaks: that vacant monotone. But give him hell! Really bad! Hurt him! Metaphorically, I mean, I suppose. He has to understand that what he’s done just won’t fly any more. Make him understand that!”
“I’ll talk to him immediately,” Naz said.
“Where are you now?” I asked him.
“I’m in my office,” he said. “I’ll come over. Can I bring you anything?”
“Some water,” I said. “Sparkling.”
I hung up—then phoned him back straight away.
“Find out how often he’s pulled this one, when you talk to him,” I said.
Naz turned up with the water after half an hour. Apparently the pianist was sorry: he hadn’t realized how vital it was that he should actually be playing the whole time. He’d only used the cassette two times before, when he’d needed to do something else, and…
“Something else?” I interrupted. “I don’t pay him to do other stuff! Three times, no less!”
“He’s agreed not to do it again,” Naz said.
“He’s agreed, has he? That’s nice of him. Shall we give him a raise?”
Naz smiled. “Shall I stick a surveillance camera on him?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “No cameras. Find some other way of making sure he’s doing it properly, though.”
The thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred for a while and then he nodded.
It wasn’t unreasonable to expect this guy to play when he’d been paid to play—been paid enormous amounts of money, at that. And the hours weren’t that bad: I generally put the building into on mode for between six and eight hours each day—mostly in stretches of two hours. Sometimes there’d be a five-hour stretch. Once I went right through a night and half the next day. That was my prerogative, though: it had been written in the contracts that all re-enactors and all back-up staff had signed—written right there in big print for them to read.
I moved through the spaces of my building and its courtyard as I saw fit, just like I’d told Naz I would when we’d first met. I roamed around it as my inclination led me. On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring,
transcribing. So I’d copy the patch of oil beneath the motorbike, say—how it elongated, how its edges rippled—then take the drawing over to Naz’s office, have it photocopied several times, then stick the copies in a line across my living room wall, rotating the patch’s formation through three-sixty. I captured lots of places this way: corners, angles against walls, bits of banister. Sometimes instead of sketching them I’d press a piece of paper up against them and rub it around so that their surface left a mark, a smear. Or I measured the amount of time it took the sunlight to first flood and then drain from each floor in the afternoon, or how long it would take for the swings, if pushed with such and such a strength, to come to a complete standstill.
At other times I lost all sense of measure, distance, time, and just lay watching dust float or swings swing or cats lounge. Some days I didn’t even leave my flat: instead, I sat in my living room or lay in my bath gazing at the crack. I’d keep the building in on mode while I did this: the pianist had to play—really play—and the motorbike enthusiast hammer and bang; the concierge had to stand down in the lobby in her ice-hockey mask, the liver lady fry her liver—but I wouldn’t move around and visit them. Knowing they were there, in on mode, was enough. I’d lie there in my bath for hours and hours on end, half-floating while the crack on the wall jutted and meandered, hazy behind moving wisps of steam.
I worked hard on certain actions, certain gestures. Brushing past my kitchen unit, for example. I hadn’t been satisfied with the way that had gone on the first day. I hadn’t moved past it properly, and my shirt had dragged across its edge for too long. The shirt was supposed to brush the woodwork—kiss it, no more. It was all in the way I half-turned so that I was sideways as I passed it. A pretty difficult manoeuvre: I ran through it again and again—at half-speed, quarter-speed, almost no speed at all, working out how each muscle had to act, each ball and socket turn. I thought of bull-fighting again, then cricket: how the batsman, when he chooses not to play the ball, steps right into its path and lets it whistle past his arched flank millimetres from his chest, even letting it flick the loose folds of his shirt as it shoots by. I put the building into off mode for a whole day while I practised the manoeuvre: striding, half-turning as I rose to my toes, letting my shirt brush against it—grazing it like a hovercraft does water—then turning square again as I came down. Then I tried it for real the next day, with the building in on mode. After the two days I had three separate bruises on my side—but it was worth it for the fluent, gliding feeling I got the few times it worked: the immersion, the contentedness.
I worked hard on my exchange with the liver lady too. Not that anything—dropped bag apart—had been wrong with it on the first day we’d done it: I just felt like doing it again and again and again. Hundreds of times. More. No one counted—I didn’t, at any rate. I’d break the sequence down to its constituent parts—the changing angle of her headscarf and her stooped back’s inclination as I moved between two steps, the swivel of her neck as her head turned to face me—and lose myself in them. One day we spent a whole morning going back and back and back over the moment at which her face switched from addressing me with the last word of her phrase, the up, to cutting off eye contact, turning away and leading first her shoulders then eventually her whole body back into her flat. Another afternoon we concentrated on the instant at which her rubbish bag slouched into the granite of the floor, its shape changing as its contents, no longer suspended in space by her arm, rearranged themselves into a state of rest. I laid out the constituent parts of the whole sequence and relished each of them, then put them back together and relished the whole—then took them apart again.
One day, as I stood by my kitchen window looking down into the courtyard, I had an idea. I phoned Naz to tell him:
“I should like,” I said, “a model of the building.”
“A model?”
“Yes, a model: a scale model. Get Roger to make it.” Roger was our architect. “You know when you go into public buildings’ lobbies when they’re being developed and you see those little models showing how it’ll all look when it’s finished…”
“Ah yes, I see,” Naz said. “I’ll get on to him.”
Roger delivered the model to me a day and a half later. It was brilliant. It was about three feet high and four wide. It showed the courtyard and the facing building and even the sports track. There were little figures in it: the motorbike enthusiast next to his bike, the pianist with his bald pate, the liver lady with her headscarf and her snaky strands of hair, the concierge with her stubby arms and white mask. He’d even made a miniscule mop and Hoover for her cupboard. You could see all these because he’d made several of the walls and floors from see-through plastic. On the ones that weren’t see-through he’d filled in the details: light switches and doorknobs, the repeating pattern on the floor. The stretches of neutral space he’d made white. Sections of wall and roof came off too, so you could reach inside. As soon as Roger had left my flat I called Naz.
“Give him a big bonus,” I said.
“How much?” Naz asked.
“Oh, you know: big,” I told him. “And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“I’d like you to…Let’s see…”
The figures of the characters were moveable. I’d picked up the liver lady one while talking and was making it bobble down the stairs and out into the courtyard.
“I’d like you to get the liver lady to go down the stairs and visit the motorbike enthusiast.”
“Now?” he asked.
“Now,” I said, “yes.”
Two minutes later I was standing at my window watching her—the real liver lady—shuffling out into the courtyard. I dragged Roger’s model over to the window so I could see both it and the courtyard at the same time. I picked up the motorbike enthusiast figure and placed him on one of the swings.
“Now,” I told Naz, “I’d like the motorbike enthusiast to go sit on the swing closest to him.”
Not half a minute later I saw the real motorbike enthusiast look up towards my building’s doorway. He was talking to someone; I couldn’t hear what was being said because the pianist was playing his Rachmaninov—but then I didn’t need to. The motorbike enthusiast looked up towards my window, then rose to his feet, walked over to the swing and sat on it.
“I’d prefer him to kneel on it,” I told Naz.
“Kneel?”
“Yes: kneel rather than sit. He should kneel in exactly the same position as he kneels beside his bike in.”
The figure had been cast in that position. Its limbs didn’t move. A few more seconds, and the real motorbike enthusiast changed his position on the swing so he had one knee on the seat.
“And now…” I said. “The pianist! He can go and watch.”
I made the pianist figure do just that: cross over to his window and peer out. Seconds later the piano music stopped below me; then the sound of a chair being pushed back, then footsteps—then his real bald pate popped out of his real window. I lifted the model up and rested it against the window sill so I could look down on the model’s head poking out at the same time as I looked at the real one. The distance made them both look the same size.
Before I sent them all back to their posts, I had the motorbike enthusiast give the swing a hard push. As he did this I did the same thing to the model swing. I watched them both swing. The model swing swung about two and a half times for each time the real swing swung. It also stopped before the real one did. I stayed at my window for a long time, watching the diminishing movements of the real swing. I remembered wind-up musical toys, Fisher Price ones, how they slow down as their mechanism unwinds right out to its end, until it seems that no more music will come from them—but then if you nudge them just a little, they always give one last half-chime, and another half-half-chime, and still more, less and less each time, for up to hours—or weeks—after they first ground to a halt.
The next day I placed my model on my living-room floor. I moved the figures around once mor
e and issued instructions down the phone to Naz as I did this—only today I didn’t go and look. Just knowing it was happening was enough. I had the concierge pick up the liver lady’s rubbish bag, the motorbike enthusiast kneel in the lobby for two hours, the pianist sit on the closed lid of his piano facing his window for another two—and all the while, as they did this for real, I sat in the same spot on my living-room floor. The day after that I lay beside the model looking at it from the same angle as the sun did. My gaze burst in through the upper staircase window and flooded the floor’s patterned maze, then slowly—very slowly, almost imperceptibly—glazed, lost its focus, darkened and retreated, disappearing from the furthest edge of floor four hours and seven minutes after it had first entered. I did this for each floor I’d previously measured: four hours and seven minutes for the top down to three hours and fourteen minutes for the second.
I only left the building—the whole re-enactment area, I mean: the building and the courtyard and the stretch of streets between there and Naz’s office, with its bridge and sports track—twice during the next month. The first time was to go shopping. I’d been having all that done for me, but one day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report. The second time was when I noticed that my old, dented Fiesta which was parked beside the sports track had a flat tyre. I hadn’t driven it in months, and didn’t plan to any time soon—but when I saw the flat tyre I remembered the tyre place beside my old flat: the one I’d paused beside the day the Settlement came through, uncertain whether to go home or press on to the airport.
As soon as I’d remembered it, I started seeing the tyre shop clearly in my mind: its front windows, the pavement where its sign stood, the café next to it. I remembered that a garish model baked-beans tin was mounted on the café’s roof beside a pile of tyres. More tyres had been lined up on the street outside, parked upright in a rack. As these details came back to me, the whole place—which when I’d lived beside it had seemed to me so mundane that I’d barely even noticed it—took on the air of something interesting. Intrigued, I decided to visit it. I borrowed some tools from the motorbike enthusiast, replaced the flat tyre with the spare one and then drove back to where I used to live to have the flat one fixed.