Tom McCarthy - Remainder

The last two days were “sweep” days. I, Naz, Annie and Frank moved through the building sweeping it for errors: inconsistencies, omissions. We found so many that we thought we’d have to delay the whole thing. The recurring black-on-white floor pattern had continued through a bit of neutral space on the second floor; the door to the concierge’s cupboard had been painted-things like that. Smaller details too: the tar-and-grease coat in the hallway, under the outmoded lights, had too much sheen; it was obvious that the putty holding the new old windows in place had been set only days ago; and so on. And then often fixing one thing just offset another. All the neighbours had been trained up by now and were practising their re-enacted gestures in situ-but then they’d disturb our carefully contrived arrangements as they moved around rehearsing. Crossed wires. One of Annie’s people even misunderstood the word “sweep”.

“What are you doing?” I asked when I found her literally sweeping down the staircase after we’d spent ages lightly peppering it with bus tickets and cigarette butts.

“I’m…” she said; “I thought you…”

“Annie!” I called up the stairwell.

Even after we’d got it all just right we did four more sweeps. We’d jump from one detail to another to see if we’d catch a mistake unawares. We’d move from the bottom to the top and down again, across the courtyard, up the façade of the facing building, back and up the staircase again, over and over and over.

“Feeling nervous?” Naz asked on the final day before the date we’d set to put the whole thing into action.

“Yes,” I told him. I was feeling very nervous. I hadn’t been sleeping well all week. I’d lie awake for half the night, running in my imagination through the events and actions that we were to go through in reality when the time came. I could run through them in a way that made them all work really well, or in a way that made them all mess up and be an abject failure. Sometimes I’d run the failure scenario and then the good one, to cancel the bad one out. At other times I’d be running the good one and the bad one would cut in and make me break out in a panicky sweat. This went on every night for a whole week: me, lying awake in my bed, sweating, nervously rehearsing in my mind re-enactments of events that hadn’t happened but which, nonetheless, like the little bits of history in Kevin’s pop song, were on the verge of being repeated.

THE DAY OF THE FIRST RE-ENACTMENT finally arrived. July the eleventh.

We’d decided to begin at 2 p.m. I spent the morning in Naz’s office, then ate a final light lunch with him. The air there was solemn, its heavy silence punctured only by the occasional ringing phone or crackling radio which one of Naz’s staff would answer in hushed tones.

“What is it?” I’d ask Naz each time.

“Nothing,” he’d answer quietly. “Everything’s under control.”

At half-past one I left. Naz’s people stood by the door as I made my way out-three or four of them on each side, forming a kind of tunnel-and wished me luck, their faces grave and sober. Naz took the lift down to the street with me, then, when the car pulled up, turned to face me and shook my hand. He was staying behind to direct all activities from his office. His dark eyes locked on mine while our hands held each other, the thing behind the eyes whirring deep back inside his skull.

Our driver drove me from the office to the building. It was just two minutes’ walk away, but he took me there in the car we’d gone around in while setting all this up. I sat in the back seat and watched the streets slide by: the railway bridge, the sports track with its knitted green wire fence, its battered football goals, its yellow, red and white lane markings, boxes, arcs and circles. I turned my head to look out of the rear window just in time to see the top of Naz’s office disappear from view. Then I turned back-and, as I did, my building slid up to the car and loomed above me like a sculpted monolith, the words Madlyn Mansions still carved in the stone above its front door.

The driver brought the car to a halt in front of it. Annie was waiting on the pavement. She opened the car door and I stepped out.

“All ready?” she asked.

I didn’t know what to answer. Was it ready? Everything had seemed to be in place the evening before. Annie had been there all morning: she’d know better than me if it was ready. Or had she meant was I ready? I didn’t know. How could you gauge these things? What standard would we have gauged them by? A slight ripple of dizziness ran through me, so I let these thoughts go. I smiled back at Annie weakly and we walked up the stone steps into the building.

The same quiet, uneasy atmosphere was reigning here as had reigned in Naz’s office. The bustle and hum of scores of people going about tasks that I’d grown so accustomed to over the last weeks and months had disappeared and been replaced by earnest, hushed, last-minute concentration. The concierge re-enactor was standing in the lobby, while one of the costume people fiddled with the strappings of her face mask. Her face had never come to me-or, to be precise, it had come to me, but only as a blank-so I’d decided she should wear a mask to blank it out. We’d got one of those masks that ice-hockey goaltenders wear: white and pocked with little breathing holes. I stopped in front of her.

“You understand exactly what it is you have to do?” I asked her.

There was a pause behind the mask, then she said:

“Yes. Just stand here.”

Her voice, behind the plastic, was unnatural: it rattled and distorted like those tinny children’s toys that emit cow sounds or little phrases when you shake them. I liked that.

“Exactly. Stand here in the lobby,” I repeated. I nodded at her and the costume person, then moved on towards the stairs.

The glum pianist was already practising up in his third floor flat. We’d chosen something by Rachmaninov for him to play-at first, at least. He’d played me sample pieces by several composers, and I’d liked this one by Rachmaninov best. It was called Second or Third Concerto or Sonata in A Major or B Flat, Minor, Major-something along those lines. What I liked about it was the way it undulated: how it bent and looped. Plus it was very difficult to play, apparently, which was good: he’d really make mistakes. I heard him hit his first snag as I moved onto the staircase. I stood still and grabbed Annie by the arm:

“Listen!” I whispered.

We listened. The pianist paused, then went at it again, slowing right down as he entered the passage that had tripped him up. He repeated it several times, then picked his pace up and returned to the beginning of the sequence, clocking it-then again, a little faster, then again and again and again, speeding it up each time until he was back almost at full speed. Eventually he accelerated out of the passage and on into the rest of the sonata.

“That’s just right,” I said to Annie. “Just right.”

We moved on, up past the motorbike enthusiast’s flat. He wasn’t there, of course: he was out in the courtyard tinkering with his motorbike. I hoped he was, at least: that’s where he was supposed to be. Then past the boring couple’s flat. On the floor above this, the fourth floor, we found Frank. He was standing on the landing with a diagram in his hands, checking the walls and floor-the distribution of filled-in and blank space-against this. Seeing me, he nodded his head in a way that implied he was satisfied with his check, let the hand holding the clipboard drop to his side and told me:

“Everything in order. Good luck.”

We continued upwards. Members of Frank and Annie’s crews were moving off the stairs, retreating behind doors with radios in their hands. We passed the liver lady’s door: I could hear several people shuffling around behind it, and the sound of soft, uncooked liver being laid out on cutting boards. Then we were on my floor. Annie entered my flat with me to check everything was right here, too. It was: the plants were scraggly but alive; the floorboards were scuffed but warm, neither shiny nor dull but somewhere in between; the rug was lying in the right place, slightly ruffled. Annie and I stood facing one another.