by Tom McCarthy
“Can I go now?”
“No,” I said. “Stay there.”
I stared at his bald pate more, letting my vision blur into its whiteness. I stared for a long time. I don’t know how long; I lost track. Eventually he was gone, and Naz was trying to grab hold of my attention.
“What?” I said. “Where’s my pianist?”
“Listen,” said Naz. “There’s only one way.”
“One way to what?” I asked.
“One way to guarantee there’ll be no information leakage.”
“Oh, that again,” I said.
“The only way,” Naz went on, his voice quiet and softly shaking, “is to eliminate the channels it could leak through.”
“What do you mean, ‘eliminate’?” I asked him.
“Eliminate,” he said again. His voice was shaking so much it reminded me of spoons in egg-and-spoon races, the way they shake and rattle—as though the task of carrying what it had to say were too much. It still shook as Naz continued: “Remove, take out, vaporize.”
“Oh, vaporize,” I said. “A fine mist, yes. I like that.”
Naz stared straight at me now. His eyes looked as though they were about to burst.
“I could organize that,” he said, his voice a croak now.
“Oh, yes, fine, go ahead,” I told him.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
I looked at him, trying to understand. He could organize for channels to be vaporized. Channels meant people. He spoke again, more slowly:
“I…could…organize… that…” he croaked again.
Beads of sweat were growing on his temples. Vaporize, I thought: Naz wants to vaporize these people. I pictured them again being fed through a tube and propelled upwards, turned into a mist, becoming sky. I thought first of the re-enactors who’d be with me in the bank, pictured them dematerializing, going blue, invisible, not there. They’d be the first ones to be vaporized. But then the other ones, the ones who’d been stood down: they’d have to be vaporized as well. And then—
“How many channels would you need to vaporize?” I asked.
He looked back at me, sallow, manic, ill, and croaked:
“All of them. The whole pyramid.”
I looked at him again, and tried to understand that too. The whole pyramid meant not just the re-enactors: it meant all the back-up people—Annie, Frank, their people and the people that liaised between their people and the other people’s people. The sub-back-up people too: the electricians, carpenters and caterers.
“The whole lot of them!” I said. “Everyone! How would you…”
“When they’re in the air,” Naz said, his voice still croaking. “We get them all up in the air—all of them, every last member of your staff—and then…”
“Every last member! That means my liver lady and my pianist! And my motorbike enthusiast and my boring couple and my concierge as well!”
“It’s the only way,” Naz repeated. “We get them all up in an aeroplane, and then…”
He stopped speaking, but his eyes still stared straight at me, making sure I understood what he was telling me. I looked away from them and saw in my mind’s eye a plane bursting open and transforming itself into cloud.
“Wow!” I said. “That’s beautiful.”
I saw it in my mind again: the plane became a pillow ripping open, its stuffing of feathers rushing outwards, merging with the air.
“Wow!” I whispered.
I saw it a third time—this time as a puff, a dehiscence, a flower erupting through its outer membrane and exploding into millions of tiny pollen specks, becoming light. I’d never seen something so wonderful before.
“Wow! That is really beautiful,” I said.
We sat in silence for a while, Naz sweating and bulging, I running this picture through my mind again and again and again. Eventually I turned to him and told him:
“Yes, fine. Go ahead.”
Naz stood up and walked towards the door. I told him to put the building into on mode; he left; then I got into my bath.
I lay there for the rest of the night, picturing planes bursting, flowers dehiscing. I felt happy—happy to have seen such a beautiful image. I listened to the pianist’s notes run, snag and loop, to liver sizzling and the vague electric hum of televisions, Hoovers and extractor fans. I listened to these fondly: this would be one of the last times. My pyramid was like a Pharaoh’s pyramid. I was the Pharaoh. They were my loyal servants, all the others; my reward to them was to allow them to accompany me on the first segment of my final voyage. As I watched steam drifting off the water and up past the crack, I pictured all my people lifted up, abstracted, framed like saints in churches’ stained-glass windows, each eternally performing their own action. I pictured the liver lady bright-coloured and two-dimensional, bending slightly forward lowering her rubbish bag, her left hand on her hip, the pianist sitting in profile at his piano practising, the motorbike enthusiast flat, kneeling, fiddling with his engine. I pictured the back-up people framed holding bright walkie-talkies and bright clipboards in bright, colourful Staff Heaven, the cat putter-outers reunited with the cats they’d posted there before them while extras hovered round the edges like cherubic choruses. I pictured this all night, lying in my bath, watching steam rising, vaporizing.
Naz chartered planes: a huge one for all the others and a tiny private jet for us. He told them whatever he told them: one thing to Layer Two, another to Layer Three and yet another to Layer Four and so on, each of his stories calculated to slot in with the others so that the behaviour of group B, seen from the viewpoint of group D, wouldn’t seem inconsistent with Story Four, nor the knowledge-pool of C, grounded in Story Two, spill over into that of A and short-circuit that group’s behaviour towards—and so on and so on, every angle forecast and anticipated so as to get them all onto their plane before the cracks in the story (the overarching yarn involved a trip to North Africa, some project there, another re-enactment, sums of money so vast no one could refuse) showed, up into the air so they could vaporize, dehisce. He sneaked away for furtive meetings with airport staff and with Irish Republicans or Muslim Fundamentalists or who knows what, and came back looking, as always these days, sallow, manic, driven.
I didn’t follow all that—I didn’t need to, didn’t want to: I was totally absorbed by our rehearsals, by the routes and movements, the arcs, phalanxes and lines, the peeling out, cutting, stopping, turning back. We’d rehearsed the getaway so many times that the cars’ tyres had scored marks across the tarmac, just like the Fiesta’s tyres had in the other re-enactment, the cascading blue-goop one. The black patch was still there next to them: the big, dark, semi-solid growth of engine oil or tar. I stopped finding it annoying and started wondering what had made it: something must have happened there, some event, to have left this mark. After we’d finished practising one day I went over to it, crouched beside it, poked it with my finger. It was hard, but not brash or unfriendly. Its surface, viewed from just an inch away, was full of little pores—cracked, open, showing paths leading to the growth’s interior.
“It’s like a sponge,” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Samuels, who’d appeared beside me.
“Like a sponge. Flesh. Bits.”
Samuels looked down at the patch, then told me:
“Nazrul wants you to go with him somewhere.”
This was the day, Naz reminded me as we sat in the car being driven back to Chiswick, on which we were to tell the driver re-enactors that we’d switched the re-enactment’s scene back to the actual bank.
“They’re Layer Two, remember?” Naz said. “They have to practise driving through the streets. The story they’ve been given is Story Three, Version One—which it is vital not to mix with Version Two.”
“Fine,” I told him. “Whatever.”
We practised driving through the streets around the real bank. We only did the turning, cutting and stopping bit immediately outside the bank one time, and even then in a subdued w
ay so as not to attract attention—but all the other streets we wove through time and again. It was autumn; trees were turning brown, yellow and red. If I let my eyes glaze over and unfocus the colours merged into a smooth, continual flow. In a few weeks, I thought to myself, the leaves would fall, then lie around in piles until someone carted them away.
“Like artichokes,” I said.
“This is Route Seven,” Naz was telling Driver Re-enactor One. “Route Seven, Version A. Remember that.”
“Or they might just decompose. Merge with each other and the tarmac.”
“At this point,” Naz said, “you can switch over to Route Eight, depending on the variables. There are three…”
“Leaves leave marks too, sometimes,” I said. “Outlines on the tarmac, their own skeletons. Like photos. Or Hiroshima. When they fall.”
Later, as we were driven back towards the warehouse, Naz said to me:
“Two days to go. The mechanism is being set in place this evening.”
The image of the plane dehiscing played across my mind again. I watched it, smiled, then looked back out of the car’s window. The West London traffic was slow. I turned my head forward and stared through the sound-proof glass at the chauffeur’s shoulders. He’d soon be dematerialized as well. I felt very affectionate towards this man. I stared hard at his jacket, letting its blue curves and wrinkles sink into my mind so that I’d remember them afterwards, when he was gone. We passed Shepherd’s Bush, then broke out onto the motorway and speeded up. As we did, Naz turned to me and asked:
“When was it that you came into contact with cordite, then?”
“Cordite?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been near cordite.”
16
THE DAY CAME, finally. Then again, perhaps it didn’t.
In one sense, the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already. They’d happened countless times: in our rehearsals at the warehouse, in the robbery training drills the real bank staff and real security guards had been through, and in the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of robberies that had taken place ever since mankind first started circulating currency. They’d never stopped happening, intermittently, everywhere, and our repetition of them here in Chiswick on this sunny autumn afternoon was no more than an echo—an echo of an echo of an echo, like the vague memory of a football being kicked against a wall somewhere by some boy, once, long after the original boy has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced by countless boys kicking footballs against walls in every street of every city.
In another sense, though, it had never happened—and, this being not a real event but a staged one, albeit one staged in a real venue, it never would. It would always be to come, held in a future hovering just beyond our reach. I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.
I don’t know. But I know one thing for sure: it was a fuck-up. It went wrong. Matter, for all my intricate preparations, all my bluffs and sleights of hand, played a blinder. Double-bluffed me. Tripped me up again. I know two things: one, it was a fuck-up; two, it was a very happy day.
To start, then, from the moment—the long, stretched-out moment—during which we waited, set in our positions, for it to begin, to start again: we sat, seven of us, six robber re-enactors and two drivers, in two cars, one parked on each side of the street outside the bank. We sat in silence, waiting. The other re-enactors in my car looked through the windows fascinated, watching shoppers, businessmen, mothers with pushchairs and traffic wardens walking up and down the pavement, entering and leaving shops, crossing the road, milling around at bus stops. They watched them intently, looking for cracks in their personas—inconsistencies in their dress, the way they moved and so on—that might show them up as the re-enactors they’d been told they were. Their eyes followed these people round corners, trying to spot the re-enactment zone’s edge. They’d been told that the zone would be wide and not demarcated as clearly as the shooting ones had been; that its edges would be blurred, buffered by side and back streets as they merged gradually, almost imperceptibly, with real space. They’d been told this—but they still looked for some kind of boundary.
I watched too, with the same fascination. I stared amazed at the passers-by: their postures, their joints’ articulation as they moved. They were all doing it just right: standing, moving, everything—and this without even knowing they were doing it. The pavement’s very surface seemed as charged, as fired up as my staircase had been when I’d moved down it on the day of the first building re-enactment. The markings on the surface of the road—perfect reproductions of the ones outside my warehouse, lines whose pigmentation, texture and layout I knew so well—seemed infused with the same toxic level of significance. The whole area seemed to be silently zinging, zinging enough to make detectors, if there’d been detectors for this type of thing, croak so much that their needles went right off the register and broke their springs.
Occasionally I’d let my eyes run out to corners, looking, like the other re-enactors, for an edge, although I knew there was no edge, that the re-enactment zone was non-existent, or that it was infinite, which amounted in this case to the same thing. Mostly I’d make my head move slowly forwards past the door frame where the metal gave over to glass, advancing it so there was more window in which more street was revealed. It kept on coming, rolling in, expanding, more and more of it: people, trees, lampposts, cars and buses, shop fronts with reflective windows in which more cars, buses, people and trees flowed and luxuriated, all rolling in slowly, coming to me, here.
“It’s arriving,” one of the re-enactors said; “the van’s arriving.”
I’d listened to him speak those same words countless times already, in rehearsals. I’d scripted them myself; I’d told him to say exactly those ones, to repeat the word “arriving” and replace “it’s” with “the van’s” in the second half, although the “it” already was the van. I’d heard them over and over, spoken in exactly the same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch—but now the words were different. During our rehearsals, they’d been accurate—accurate in that we’d had the replica van turn up and park in the replica road as the re-enactor practised speaking them. Now, though, they were more than accurate: they were true. The van—the real van with real guards inside—was arriving, pulling into the real stump-road and parking. It had turned up of its own accord, and turned the words into the truest ever spoken. The van did more than turn up: it emerged—emerged into the scene, like a creature emerging from a cave or like a stain, a mark, an image emerging across photographic paper when it’s dunked in liquid. It emerged: started out small, then grew, and then was big and there—right there, where it was meant to be.
I watched it, utterly fixated. It was a perfect likeness of the van we’d used up at the warehouse. More than perfect: it was identical in make and size and registration, in the faded finish on its sides, the way its edges turned—but then it was more, more even than the sum of all its likenesses. Sitting above the rubbed-out and rerouted yellow line, resting on its bulging rubber tyres, its dull, pobbled steps waiting to be trodden on, its dirty indicators and exhaust protruding from its rear—sitting there, it seemed bigger, its sides more faded, its tyres more bulging, its edges more turning, its steps more pobbled, more ready to take weight and relinquish it again, its indicators and exhaust more dirty, more protruding. There was something excessive about its sheer presence, something overwhelming. It made me breathe in sharply, suddenly; it made my cheeks flush and my eyes sting.
“Wow,” I whispered. “That’s just…wow.”
The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn’t even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind. I pictured the scene inside the bank: Guards One and Two were being checked in at the far end of the counter
; they were passing through the airlock, through the first and now the second set of doors, into the inner area. They were handing the sacks of new notes to the cashier; the cashier, in perfect imitation of our stood-down cashier re-enactor, was preparing a receipt for them and calling up the bags of old notes from the vaults downstairs, the ones we wanted. They were waiting; we were waiting; the guard in the van was waiting, and so were its pobbled steps, its indicators and exhaust; the street was waiting: yellow and white lines, kerbs and pavements were all waiting, waiting while the lift emitted its little electric whine, its cables taut with the strain of bearing these lumps up from the building’s insides, shoving them out into the world.
My eyes still closed, I watched the bags emerging now, being lifted from their tray. A lifting feeling moved up through my body; I felt my organs lift inside me. I watched the tight-end accomplice re-enactor peel out of the line by the enquiry desk and, watching this, felt weightless, light and dense at the same time. As he peeled out his shoulders inclined so that the left was slightly lower than the right; they inclined, cut a banked semicircle through the air above the carpet and then straightened again as he glided just behind the other people queuing, parallel to them, and headed to the door.
I pushed my breath out in a sigh, a rush, opening my mouth like someone who’s come up from underwater to emerge into the daylight—and as this breath rushed out of me I opened my eyes and unpacked the whole scene, breathed it all out into the daylight too. It all came out just right, everything in position, where it should be, doing what it should: the bank, the street, its lines, the van. The tight-end accomplice re-enactor was emerging from the door. Then I was emerging too, emerging from the car and gliding across the street towards the bank door as I slipped my ice-hockey mask on, my gliding and slipping mirrored by the four other robber re-enactors gliding from four different positions—two sides of two cars—towards the same point, the same door, like synchronized swimmers gliding from the corners of a pool to fall into formation in the middle.