Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  I didn’t slip into a trance this time—quite the opposite. I sat back up and wondered why it should seem faster when I’d made the whole building run slower. I decided to time it, went to borrow Annie’s watch—then realized I’d have to wait until tomorrow for the sunlight to flood across then leave that patch again. I stood the building down again, got some rest and staked out the spot at the same time the next day, Annie’s watch—with precision sports timer that measured down to tenths and hundredths of seconds—at hand.

  When I’d timed it before, the whole process had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. I remembered. Today, when the light’s front edge arrived, I started the watch, then watched the edge trickle furtively across the landing like the advance guard of an army, the first scouts and snipers. In its wake the bolder, broader block, the light’s main column, moved in and occupied the floor making no secret of its presence, covering the whole plain with its dazzling brilliance, its trumpets and flags and cannons. I lay there watching and timing, letting the watch run right through to the moment, several minutes after the main column’s eventual departure, when the sunlight’s rearguard, its last stragglers, took one final look back over the deserted camp and, becoming frightened of the massing troops of darkness, scurried on.

  When I’d timed this before it had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. This time it all took place within three hours. Within two hours, forty-three minutes and twenty-seven point four-five seconds, to be precise. I didn’t like this. Something had gone wrong. I called in Frank and Annie.

  “The sunlight’s not doing it right,” I said.

  Neither of them answered at first. Then Annie asked:

  “What do you mean, not doing it right?”

  “I mean,” I said, “that it’s running over the floor too quickly. I measured the time the shaft falls from these windows onto the floor, from the first moment that it hits it to the time it leaves. I measured it when we first started doing these re-enactments, and I measured it today, and I can tell you without a doubt that it’s going faster now than it was then.”

  There was another pause, then Annie ventured, in a quiet, nervous voice:

  “It’s later in the year.”

  “What’s later in the year?” I asked.

  “It’s later now than it was when you first measured it,” Annie explained. “Later in the year, further from midsummer. The sun’s at a different angle to us than it was.”

  I thought about that for a while until I understood it.

  “Right,” I said. “Of course. I mean…of course. I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t…I hadn’t, I mean…Thank you. You may go now, both.”

  Frank and Annie slunk back to their posts. I stayed there in the dull light of the stairwell, looking up. I thought of the sun up in space, a small star no bigger in comparison with other stars than those tiny specks of dust I’d seen suspended at the stairwell’s top some weeks ago, when the real sun was closer to us. It struck me that the specks would be there now, right up above me, hanging from nothing, just floating in the neutral, neither warm nor cold air, and that when the sun disappeared completely they might fall.

  The models arrived the next day: Roger’s models of the second and third shootings. They were beautiful, even more detailed than the first one. A shoe shop next to where the man was shot in his car had tiny shoes in its window, and there were trees lining the street where the third man had gone down. The forensic reports arrived later that day, and I read them carefully. Naz had everything ready for the first new re-enactment, of the second shooting, two days later. I’d rested plenty so as to be strong and hadn’t lapsed back into a trance for almost one week—but when we did the re-enactment, as soon as we slowed it down to half speed, I became totally weak and vacant and had to be carried home again.

  A day of intermittent trances followed. Naz had scheduled the third re-enactment for the day after the second, but had to delay it for two days until I got my strength back. When we did it the same thing happened: I just drifted off. There was that widening-out of the space around me, and of the moment too: the suspension, the becoming passive, endless—then losing the motorbike, the trees, the pavement as I drifted further in, towards the core that left no imprint.

  Two or three more days of trances followed this one. I’d surface like an underwater swimmer coming up for air, filling his lungs just so that he can dive again, plunge back towards his deep-sea caves and waving strands of seaweed and outlandish fish or whatever it was that has so captivated him. Sometimes I’d be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I’d find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind’s patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again.

  Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee. I heard ambulance drivers discussing their experiences of treating people who’d been hit by different falling objects, and the varying chances of survival in each instance.

  “Scaffolding’s not that bad,” one of them was saying. “Masonry, on the other hand…”

  “Masonry’s lethal,” his colleague concurred. “But for my money helicopters are the worst. I arrived at a helicopter crash site once. The people on the ground don’t only risk being crushed; there’s also the rotating blade to think about. Cut you in two, it will. And the explosion…”

  “Ah yes, the explosion,” the first one repeated. I could hear their voices clearly for a while, then they faded out.

  Another bit of memory that got churned up was of some earth that had got onto my sleeve. It seemed to have come from plants, like the lush green ones the Portuguese woman had delivered to my building—only the earth from her plants hadn’t got onto my sleeve. This earth that I remembered in my trance had spilled all over me in all its inconvenient bittiness, a hundred bits all rolling around and staining things and generally being in the wrong place. This image gave over to a vision of the weird man from the Dogstar, asking, again and again: Where does it all go? as he stood by my table, glaring. Greg was there, explaining to this man:

  “He wants to be authentic, is all. That’s the reason.”

  The weird man repeated his line again but, although the words were the same ones, they somehow came out as Harder and harder to lift up. There was a gush of blue goop, then the two ambulance men were back, sifting through wreckage.

  “History,” said one. “It’s lethal, all this debris. Look: propeller, head.”

  “Flotsam,” said the other. “Jetsam. All these little bits, repeating. The real event he can’t even discuss.”

  Their voices and the image of the wreckage faded out again, and I found myself fully conscious, staring at the model Roger had made of the first shooting. The model had been demoted from the coffee table to the carpet on which I also turned out to be lying, so it was level with my head—only its vertical plane was my horizontal one and vice versa. Right in front of my eyes was the patch of road the two men had stood on as they fired, the spot where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. Roger’s model hadn’t reproduced this pattern, but I had a clear memory of it. As the imprint of the hexagons grew stronger in my mind, so did my memory of the moment, the particular moment, when the two black men and I had stood there just prior to the re-enactment: when I’d walked them over to the spot and told them to fire from there. I’d told them to stop there, to keep firing, but not to advance any further. The one with a strong West Indian accent, the taller one, had told me You’re the boss and then I’d asked Naz if he’d managed to buy us more time. Now, as I lay on the floor beside Roger’s model remembering this moment of instruction, the moment assumed an intense significance.

  I sat up, reached for my phone and called Naz.

  “Are you back with us?” he asked.

  “I’d like you to organize another re-enactment,” I said.

  “I wasn’t aware there’d
been another shooting,” he said.

  “I should like one,” I explained, “of that moment just before we re-enacted the first shooting, when we stood in the road, me and them, and I told them where to stand. I want to re-enact that moment.”

  There was a pause while the thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred. Then he said:

  “Excellent. In the same space?”

  “Possibly,” I told him. “Let me ponder that one.”

  “Fine,” said Naz. “I’ll contact the two re-enactors, and we’ll get the…”

  “No!” I said. “Not the same ones. We need other people to re-enact their roles.”

  “You’re right,” said Naz. “Completely right. I should have seen that. I’ll get straight on to it.”

  An hour later he phoned me back:

  “I’ve found two people. And people to play the back-up people. You should have them re-enacted too.”

  “My God!” I said. “You’re right! I’ll need new re-enactors to re-enact standing around in the background. We can’t have the same people doing that either.”

  “There’s more,” said Naz. “I’ve instructed our back-up people not to tell them why they’re to go through the sequence that they’ll re-enact. It makes it more complex, more interesting.”

  “Yes, you’re right again,” I said. “It does.”

  I realized as I hung up that Naz was changing. He’d always been dedicated to my projects, ever since that first day that I’d met him in the Blueprint Café—but back then his dedication had been purely professional. Now, though, his in-built genius for logistics was mixed with something else: a kind of measured zeal, a quiet passion. He defended my work with a fierceness that was muted but unshakable. One afternoon, or morning, or evening perhaps, as I hovered round the edges of a trance, I heard him arguing with Doctor Trevellian.

  “The re-enactments have to stop,” Trevellian was saying, keeping his voice beneath his breath.

  “Out of the question,” Naz was answering in the same tone.

  “But they’re clearly exacerbating his condition!” Trevellian insisted, his voice rising.

  “Still out of the question,” I heard Naz say. His voice was still level, calm. “Besides, that’s beyond your remit.”

  “Curing him’s beyond my remit?” Trevellian’s voice was a snarl now.

  “Telling him what to do and what not to do is,” Naz said, calm as ever. “He decides that. You, like me, have been hired to ensure he can continue to pursue his projects.”

  “If he’s dead he won’t be able to,” Trevellian snarled again.

  “Is there a danger of that?” Naz asked.

  Trevellian said nothing, but after a few seconds I heard him snort and throw an instrument into his case.

  “We shall expect you here,” Naz said, “at the same time tomorrow.”

  Despite the state that I was in, I knew then that Naz was completely onside. More than onside: he was as involved in the whole game as I was—but for entirely different reasons. I understood this more fully two days later, during a lucid patch. Naz was sitting with me in my living room, going over the logistics for the re-enactment of the moment during the shooting re-enactment, the moment when I’d told the two men where to stand. He was fine-tuning the details—who needed to do what, when, the varying amounts of information different participants needed to know, where the real back-up people should stand as their original places were taken by the back-up re-enactors and so on. He had these notes and lists and diagrams laid out in front of him across the coffee table—but for the last five minutes he hadn’t been looking at these at all. He’d just been staring straight ahead, into space. He looked vague, kind of drunk; for a moment I thought that he was about to slip off into a trance.

  “Naz?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer at first. His eyes had glazed over while the thing behind them processed. I’d seen them do that before, several times; only now the processing seemed to have stepped up a gear—several gears, gone into overdrive, become almost unbearably intense. It amazed me that his head didn’t explode from the sheer fury of it all. I could almost hear the whirring: the whirring of his computations and of all his ancestry, of rows and rows of clerks and scribes and actuaries, their typewriters and ledgers and adding machines all converging inside his skull into giant systems hungry to execute ever larger commands. Eventually the whirring slowed down, the eyes became alive again, Naz turned his face to me and told me:

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you?” I repeated. “For what?”

  “For the…” he began, then paused. “Just for the…” He stopped again.

  “For the what?” I asked.

  “I’ve never managed so much information before,” he eventually replied.

  His eyes were sparkling now. Yes, Naz was a zealot—but his zealotry wasn’t religious: it was bureaucratic. And he was drunk: infected, driven onwards, on towards a kind of ecstasy just by the possibilities of information management my projects were opening up for him, each one more complex, more extreme. My executor.

  One day I came out of a trance to find myself lying on my sofa. At the same moment that I became aware of where I was I also understood that there was someone else in the room. I looked up and thought I saw Doctor Trevellian. Doctor Trevellian was a short man, as I mentioned earlier, with a moustache and a battered leather briefcase which was always by his side. This short man was standing in my living room, but this time there was no briefcase, and no moustache either. He was short, but he wasn’t Doctor Trevellian, or anyone else I knew—although I thought I recognized him vaguely. He had a notebook in his hand, with the top page flipped open. He was looking at the notebook, then at me, then at the notebook again. He stood like that for some time; then, eventually, he spoke.

  “So,” he said. “This is the man who is re-staging the deaths of local gangsters who have met with violent ends.”

  I could place him now: he’d been at the re-enactment of the first shooting—the man I’d seen standing behind the waiting BMW when I’d first arrived. He looked semi-official: smartish but a little ragged round the edges. Off-smart. He had a graphite-coloured jacket on and grey streaks in his hair. He must have been forty-odd.

  “Are you a policeman?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. He glanced at his notebook again, then continued: “This is also the man who has had set up a building in which certain mundane and, on the surface, meaningless moments are repeated and prolonged until they assume an almost sacred aspect.”

  His voice had a slightly Scottish edge. It was quite dry. He spoke in the kind of tone a lawyer might use to address a jury, or a serious professor of history his students. I lay there, listening to him.

  “He has, moreover, had the most trivial of incidents—a spillage that occurred during a visit to a tyre repair shop—played and replayed like a stuck record for the last three weeks, residual.”

  “I’d forgotten about that,” I said.

  “Forgotten about that, he says?” His tone rose slightly as he uttered this rhetorical question, then dipped again as he ploughed on. “No less than one hundred and twenty actors have been used. Five hundred and eleven props—tyres, signs, tins, tools, all in working condition—have been assembled and deployed. And that’s just for the tyre shop scene. The number of people who have been employed in some capacity or other over the course of all five re-enactments must be closer to one thousand.” He paused again and let the figure sink in, then continued: “All these actions, into which so much energy has been invested, so many man-hours, so much money—all, taken as a whole, confront us with the question: for what purpose?”

  He paused and looked at me intently.

  “Does he, perhaps,” he started again suddenly, “consider himself to be some kind of artist?”

  He was still looking intently at me, as though calling on me to give an answer.

  “Who, me?” I said.

  His eyes mockingly scoured the empty room, then came to re
st on me again.

  “No,” I told him. “I was never any good at art. In school.”

  “In school, he wasn’t any good at art,” he repeated, then struck off on another tack: “In that case, could it rather be that he sees these acts as a kind of voodoo? Magic? As shamanic performances?”

  “What’s shamanic?” I asked.

  Naz walked in just then. He seemed to know this man: he nodded at him, then started tapping at his mobile.

  “Who is this?” I asked him.

  “A borough councillor,” Naz said. “He kept us posted on the shooting and found us our police mole. Don’t worry: he’s sound.”

  I wasn’t worried. I felt quite at ease just lying there, passive, being talked about. The piano music spilled up from downstairs.

  “He’s listening to Shostakovich,” the short councillor said.

  “It’s Rachmaninov,” Naz told him.

  “Ah, Rachmaninov. And there’s a smell, a kind of…is it cordite?”

  “Yes!” I tried to shout to him, but my voice came out weak. “Yes: finally! It is cordite! I knew it!”

  Naz’s phone beeped. He read from its screen:

  “Of or pertaining to a priest-doctor of the Ural-Altaic peoples of Siberia. From the Tungusian saman.”

  “Cordite! Didn’t I say, right from the beginning…” I began, but then slipped off into a trance again.

  I saw this councillor again, the next afternoon, or perhaps the one after that. I was feeling a lot stronger and had ventured out of my building to take some air beside the sports track. I was leaning by the knitted green wire fence watching a football team train. They were practising shooting: their coach placed ball after ball on the green asphalt surface among all the intersecting lines and circles and they ran up, one after the other, and kicked the balls into the goal, or tried to. Some of the balls missed, ricocheted back off the fence and got in the next shooter’s way. The coach was shouting at his players to encourage them: