Tom McCarthy - Remainder

We’d taken off in this formation and were flying above my building and the streets around it. We could look down as we flew and see the courtyard with its trees and swings, its patch of oil beneath the engine of the motorbike. We could see ourselves, our re-enacted doubles, in the courtyard too: the motorbike enthusiast, banging and unscrewing; myself, lying beneath the swings. We could see the cats slinking around the red roofs. If we banked north and glided for a while we could see Naz’s building with its blue-and-white exterior, the aerials on its roof. Through its top windows we could see doubles of Naz’s office team coordinating events in my building. We could see these events too, through walls which had become transparent: the liver lady laying her bag down, talking to me as I passed her, the pianist practising his Rachmaninov, the concierge, the pupil-the whole lot.

We banked again and saw the sports track with its white and red and yellow markings. There were athletes running around this, just like there had been in my coma. I was commentating again. Everything was running smoothly, happily, until I noticed, lying beside the goalposts, these old, greasy escalator parts-the same ones that I’d seen laid out at Green Park Station. As soon as I saw them the whole thing went out of kilter: events in my building, Naz’s people, the athletes and the commentary-the lot. Athletes tripped over, crashing into one another; my flow of words faltered and dried up; the liver lady’s rubbish bag broke, scattering putrid, mouldy lumps of uneaten liver all over the courtyard; the swings’ chains snapped; black cats shrieked and chased their tails. And then our plane-the plane that we’d formed from the interlinking of our bodies: it was stalling, nose-diving towards the ground, whose surface area was crumpling like old tin…

Just before the crash I woke up cold with sweat to the unpleasant smell of congealed fat.

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!”