Tom McCarthy - Remainder

When I went back into the living room, Naz was there and the flat’s door was closed. Naz said:

“I think it would be a good idea for you to…”

“Where have you managed to get us to?” I asked him.

He’d got the re-enactors, the car and bicycle and the replica sub-machine guns. He’d rung up to tell me all this, but I hadn’t answered.

“When did you ring?” I asked him.

“Several hours ago. Didn’t you hear the phone?”

“No,” I said. “Not that one.”

I did have a vague memory of ringing-but it was of the phone the black man with the bicycle had used in the phone box outside Movement Cars. His last words would still have been buzzing in his head as he left the phone box, and in the head of the person he’d talked to, their conversation only half-decayed at most. Then he’d have caught sight of his killers. Did he know them? If he did, he still might not have known they’d come to kill him-until they took their guns out. At what point had he realized they were guns? Maybe at first he thought they were umbrellas, or steering-wheel locks, or poles. Then when he realized, as his brain pieced it together and came up with a plan of escape, then changed it, he found out that physics wouldn’t let him carry out the plan: it tripped him up. Matter again: the world became a fridge door, a broken lighter, two litres of blue goop. That’s when he was first hit: as he went over. The first round of bullets struck him in his body, not his head, the report said. They didn’t even make him lose consciousness. He would have known he’d been hit but not really felt it, nor the scrapes he’d received from hitting the ground as he went over the handlebars-would have just vaguely understood that something had occurred, something had changed, that things were different now.

“…and a further licence from the local police,” Naz was saying, “which won’t be a great problem now the Council have given the nod, although the status of the event needs to be determined pretty quickly.”

“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?”

Naz looked at me strangely, then started again:

“Lambeth Council are happy to give permission for the re-enactment to proceed, but there’s confusion about what type of licence they need to give us,” he said. “It’s not a demonstration and it’s not a street party. The activity that it most closely resembles is filming.”

“No,” I said. “No cameras. No filming. You know that.”

“Yes,” said Naz, “but we should apply for it under filming. We need to designate it as a recognized type of event so they can grant us permission to do it. Filming’s the easiest route. We apply to use the area for a film shoot and then just don’t have any cameras.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “As long as we don’t actually film. How soon can we do it, then?”

“Next week,” said Naz.

“No, that’s not soon enough!” I said.

“There’s not much we can…”

“It needs to be done sooner!” I said. “Why can’t we do it tomorrow?”

“Licence certificates can take days to process,” he explained, “even with the type of bribes we’re paying.”

“Pay bigger bribes, then!” I said. “It won’t last if we wait a whole week!”

“What won’t last?” he asked.

I looked past his head. I could see three cats on the red roof on the far side of the courtyard, which meant that the people over there had replaced the one I’d seen falling. I looked back at Naz.

“Day after tomorrow at the latest!” I said. “The very outside latest!”

He got it all together for the day after that. He got the licence from the Council and the licence from the police, organized all the staff and back-up staff, the caterers and runners and who knows what else. It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics. I decided that in the caste scale of things, people who dealt with logistics were higher even than the ones who made connections. I decided to get Matthew Younger to invest in the logistics industry, if there was one.

While I waited I also got Roger to build me a model of the area in which the shooting had taken place: the phone box, pavement, bollards, street, shops and pubs. The model had little cars that you could move around, and a little red bicycle. It also had little human figures: the two killers with their sub-machine guns, the victim. Roger delivered it to me the evening before we did the re-enactment. I removed his model of my building from the coffee table in the living room and placed this new model there instead. I stayed up all night looking at it. I placed the human figures in the positions indicated by the forensic report’s diagrams. I made the two killers park their car, step into the street and advance forward. I made the dead man leave the phone box, climb onto his bicycle, fall off, stumble a few steps forwards and collapse. I watched each phase of the sequence from all angles.

Why was I so obsessed with the death of this man I’d never met? I didn’t stop to ask myself. I knew we had things in common, of course. He’d been hit by something, hurt, laid prostrate and lost consciousness; so had I. We’d both slipped into a place of total blackness, silence, nothing, without memory and without anticipation, a place unreached by stimuli of any kind. He’d stayed on there, gone the whole hog, while I’d been sucked back, via vague sports stadiums, to L-shaped wards and talks of Settlement-but for a short while we’d both stood at the same spot: stood there, lay there, floated there, whatever. Persisted. We’d both stood at the same spot in a more plain sense, too: in the phone box I’d called Marc Daubenay from the day the Settlement came through, this cabin out of whose miniature duplicate I was making the little model of him step again and again and again. Our paths had diverged as soon as we’d left it: I’d stepped out-two times, then passed by it a third and gone up to the airport, whereas he’d stepped out and died; but for a while we’d both stood there, held the receiver, looked at the words Airports, Stations, Light.

To put my fascination with him all down to our shared experience, though, would only be telling half the story. Less than half. The truth is that, for me, this man had become a symbol of perfection. It may have been clumsy to fall from his bike, but in dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he’d done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him-and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He’d stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour. Then both mind and actions had resolved themselves into pure stasis. The spot that this had happened on was the ground zero of perfection-all perfection: the one he’d achieved, the one I wanted, the one everyone else wanted but just didn’t know they wanted and in any case didn’t have eight and a half million pounds to help them pursue even if they had known. It was sacred ground, blessed ground-and anyone who occupied it in the way he’d occupied it would become blessed too. And so I had to re-enact his death: for myself, certainly, but for the world in general as well. No one who understands this could accuse me of not being generous.

In the part of the night where it’s quietest, around three or four o’clock, I started wondering where this black man’s soul had disappeared to as it left his body. His thoughts, impressions, memories, whatever: the background noise we all have in our head that stops us from forgetting we’re alive. It had to go somewhere: it couldn’t just vaporize-it must have gushed, trickled or dripped onto some surface, stained it somehow. Everything must leave some kind of mark. I scoured the thin card surfaces of Roger’s model. They were so white, so blank. I decided to mark them, and went to the kitchen to find something to stain the white card with.