Tom McCarthy - Remainder

My building was in there, being carried along somewhere in the complex interlacings. I caught glimpses of it as it slipped behind another building and was whisked away again to reappear somewhere else. It would show itself to me then slip away again. The belts were like magicians’ fingers shuffling cards: they were shuffling the city, flashing my card, my building, at me and then burying it in the deck again. They were challenging me to shout “Stop!” at the exact moment it was showing: if I could do that, I’d win. That was the deal.

“Stop!” I shouted. Then again: “Stop…Stop!” But I timed each shout just wrong-only a tenth or even hundredth of a second off, but wrong nonetheless. I’d shout “stop” each time I saw my building, and the system of conveyors would grind to a halt-but this took a few seconds, and by the time it was completely still my building had become submerged again.

After a while I closed my eyes, my dream-eyes, and tried to sense when it was coming up. I sensed the rhythm things were moving at, the patterns they were following, and let my imagination slip inside them. I could sense when my building was about to come by. I waited for it to go by twice, and just before it reappeared a third time shouted:

“Stop!”

I knew even as I shouted it that it would work this time. As the conveyors ground to a halt again, my building came to rest directly in front of me. I stepped forward and entered it. I got to see it all even more clearly than I had on the night of David Simpson’s party-got to move around it, relishing its details: the concierge’s cupboard and the staircase with its worn floor, the black-and-white recurring pattern in it, the oxidizing wrought-iron banisters, the black handrail with its spikes. I saw the pianist’s door and the door of the lady who cooked liver, the spot beside it where she placed her rubbish as I passed her, my own flat above her with its open kitchen and its plants, its bathroom with a cracked wall and a window that looked out across a courtyard to a building with red roof tiles and black cats. I got to fully occupy it-not for long, but for a while, until the scene changed and I found myself inside a library negotiating travel prices with a grumpy waitress who was Yugoslavian.

In the morning, after I’d woken up, I started understanding why I hadn’t found my building in the four days I’d been working on it: I’d been rational about it. Logical. I needed to go irrational on the whole thing. Illogical. Of course! I’d probably passed it at some point over the last few years already-which meant that it would be recorded somewhere in my memory. Everything must leave some kind of mark. And then even if I hadn’t passed it already, I’d only manage to stalk it down if I moved surreptitiously: not in straight lines and in blocks and wedges but askew-diagonally, slyly, creeping up on it from sideways.

I cooked myself some breakfast and pondered how best to make my search irrational. The first idea that came to me was to I-Ching the map: to close my eyes, turn round a few times, stick a pin in blindly and then go and look in whatever area it happened to have landed on. The more I thought about that method, though, the less sly it seemed. Random’s not the same as sly, is it? I tried it with my A-Z, just to see what would happen: Mitcham. I tried it a second time: Waltham-stow Marshes. So much for the Wisdom of the Orient.

Colours was the next idea I had: following colours. I could decide to go where, say, yellow things went: a van, an advertising hoarding, someone’s clothes. I could start somewhere, anywhere, and walk down the street the yellow van went down, then wait beside a yellow shop front till a woman wearing yellow trousers went by and I’d follow her. It was completely arbitrary-but it might prompt something, get me looking at things in a way I wouldn’t normally, open chinks up in the camouflage behind which my place was hiding.

Then, following on from that idea, I thought of walking jerkily, erratically. I don’t mean in my walk itself, my gait: I mean that I would start off down one street, then double back suddenly, like I had when I’d set out to Heathrow to meet Catherine but realized that I’d left her flight details behind. Or I’d pretend to be heading one way, waiting to cross a certain road by a pedestrian crossing-then, when the green man appeared, I’d veer off in some other direction, like a striker when he takes a penalty in football and sends the goalkeeper the wrong way.

I also considered following a numerical system: starting from point zero I’d turn down the first street on the right, then take the second left, the third right, fourth left and so on. The system could be much more complicated than that, of course: I could bring in fractions and algebra and differentials and who knows what else. Or I could devise a corresponding process using the alphabet: go down the first street I came to whose name starts with a, then carry on until I find a b, a c etc. Or I could apply numeric principles to an alphabetic process: start on a street that began with an a, then advance along the alphabet by the same number of letters contained in the street’s name and find the nearest street whose name began with that new letter. Or I could…

The phone rang while I was in the middle of these deliberations. It was Matthew Younger.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Fine,” I told him. “I’m looking for a building. What’s top-slice?”

“Ah!” he answered, his voice booming down the line to me. “Top-slicing is what you do when your shares in a certain company have appreciated-risen-and you slice the profit off by selling some until the value of your holding represents what it did when you bought it.”

“Why would you want to do that?” I asked.

“In order,” he explained, “to invest the top-sliced money in another company, thus diversifying your holdings. Now your shares in the technology and telecommunication companies we selected recently have risen overall by a staggering ten per cent in little over one week. While I know how much you favour those two sectors, I just felt that if we top-sliced that ten per cent profit we could invest it in another sector while in no way diminishing your commitment to technology and tele…”

“No,” I told him. “Keep them where they are.”

There was a pause at his end. I pictured his office: the polished mahogany table, panelled walls and corniced ceiling, the portraits of frail and wealthy men. After a while he came back:

“Fine,” he said. “Jolly good. Just touching base, really, with a suggestion-but it’s your call entirely.”

“Yes,” I answered.

I hung up and went back to pondering methods of looking for my building in an irrational manner. I’d thought up so many by midday that I’d lost track of half of them. By early afternoon I’d realized that none of them would work in any case, for the good reason that implementing any one of them methodically would cancel its irrational value. I started to feel both dizzy and frustrated, and decided that the only thing to do was walk out of my flat with no plan at all in mind-just walk around and see what happened.

I left my flat, walked down the perpendicular street past my dented Fiesta, then turned into the ex-siege zone, passed the tyre place and café, then the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from. I walked to the centre of Brixton, the box junction between the town hall and Ritzy. Normally I’d have turned right to the tube at this point, but today I carried on up towards David Simpson’s road. I don’t know why: I felt like carrying on that way, is all. And then to stay south of the river: that felt sly. All Naz’s people were on the north side; anywhere south was well out of the search’s official radius, and therefore more fruitful hunting ground. If someone knows people are looking for him in a certain place, he finds another place to hide in.