Tom McCarthy: Remainder

I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease-this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn’t know its place. My undoing: matter.

AFTER THE ACCIDENT -some time after the accident, after I’d come out of my coma and my memory had come back and my broken bones had set-I had to learn how to move. The part of my brain that controls the motor functions of the right side of my body had been damaged. It had been damaged pretty irreparably, so the physiotherapist had to do something called “rerouting”.

Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along. It’s sort of like a government compulsorily purchasing land from farmers to run train tracks over after the terrain the old tracks ran through has been flooded or landslid away. The physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain-an unused, fallow patch, the part that makes you able to play tiddlywinks, listen to chart music, whatever.

To cut and lay the new circuits, what they do is make you visualize things. Simple things, like lifting a carrot to your mouth. For the first week or so they don’t give you a carrot, or even make you try to move your hand at all: they just ask you to visualize taking a carrot in your right hand, wrapping your fingers round it and then levering your whole forearm upwards from the elbow until the carrot reaches your mouth. They make you understand how it all works: which tendon does what, how each joint rotates, how angles, upward force and gravity contend with and counterbalance one another. Understanding this, and picturing yourself lifting the carrot to your mouth, again and again and again, cuts circuits through your brain that will eventually allow you to perform the act itself. That’s the idea.

But the act itself, when you actually come to try it, turns out to be more complicated than you thought. There are twenty-seven separate manoeuvres involved. You’ve learnt them, one by one, in the right order, understood how they all work, run through them in your mind, again and again and again, for a whole week-lifted more than a thousand imaginary carrots to your mouth, or one imaginary carrot more than a thousand times, which amounts to the same thing. But then you take a carrot-they bring you a fucking carrot, gnarled, dirty and irregular in ways your imaginary carrot never was, and they stick it in your hands-and you know, you just know as soon as you see the bastard thing that it’s not going to work.

“Go for it,” said the physiotherapist. He laid the carrot on my lap, then moved back from me slowly, as though I were a house of cards, and sat down facing me.

Before I could lift it I had to get my hand to it. I swung my palm and fingers upwards from the wrist, but then to bring the whole hand towards where the carrot was I’d have to slide the elbow forwards, pushing from the shoulder, something I hadn’t learnt or practised yet. I had no idea how to do it. In the end I grabbed my forearm with my left hand and just yanked it forwards.

“That’s cheating,” said the physio, “but okay. Try to lift the carrot now.”

I closed my fingers round the carrot. It felt-well, it felt: that was enough to start short-circuiting the operation. It had texture; it had mass. The whole week I’d been gearing up to lift it, I’d thought of my hand, my fingers, my rerouted brain as active agents, and the carrot as a no-thing-a hollow, a carved space for me to grasp and move. This carrot, though, was more active than me: the way it bumped and wrinkled, how it crawled with grit. It was cold. I grasped it and went into Phase Two, the hoist, but even as I did I felt the surge of active carrot input scrambling the communication between brain and arm, firing off false contractions, locking muscles at the very moment it was vital they relax and expand, twisting fulcral joints the wrong directions. As the carrot rolled, slipped and plummeted away I understood how air traffic controllers must feel in the instant when they know a plane is just about to crash, and that they can do nothing to prevent it.

“First try,” said my physio.

“At least it didn’t fall on anyone,” I said.

“Let’s go for it again.”

It took another week to get it right. We went back to the blackboard, factoring in the surplus signals we’d not factored in before, then back through visualization, then back to a real carrot again. I hate carrots now. I still can’t eat them to this day.

Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think That’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you’re wrong. Completely wrong. That’s just it, see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits-holding my head wrong, moving my foot before I’d bent my knee, who knows what else. He was like an obsessive trainer, one of those ballet or ice-skating coaches from behind the old iron curtain.

“Toes forward! Forward, damn it!” he’d shout. “More knee! Lift!” He’d bang his fist against the board, against his diagrams.

Every action is a complex operation, a system, and I had to learn them all. I’d understand them, then I’d emulate them. At first, for the first few months, I did everything very slowly.

“You’re learning,” my physio said; “and besides, your muscles are still plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“Plastic. Rigid. It’s the opposite of flaccid. With time they’ll go flaccid: malleable, relaxed. Flaccid, good; plastic, bad.”

Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed. Almost up to speed-I never got back to one hundred per cent. Maybe ninety. By April I was already almost up to speed, up to my ninety. But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.

After I’d been out of hospital for a week or so, I went to the cinema with my friend Greg. We went to the Ritzy to see Mean Streets with Robert De Niro. Two things were strange about this. One was watching moving images. My memory had come back to me in moving images, as I mentioned earlier-like a film run in instalments, a soap opera, one five-year episode each week or so. It hadn’t been particularly exciting; in fact, it had been quite mundane. I’d lain in bed and watched the episodes as they arrived. I’d had no control over what happened. It could have been another history, another set of actions and events, like when there’s been a mix-up and you get the wrong holiday photos back from the chemist’s. I wouldn’t have known or cared differently, and would have accepted them the same. As I watched Mean Streets with Greg I felt no lesser a degree of detachment and indifference, but no greater one either, even though the actions and events had nothing to do with me.

The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. I commented on this to Greg as we walked back to mine.