Tom McCarthy - Remainder

The two men had brought their guns out again and were raising them to point at me. I was swinging my right leg over the saddle of my bicycle, looking at them and the space around us. There was only one way out: the strip of pavement on the far side of Belinda Road. It led past the black bar with no name to the bridge and then away along Coldharbour Lane. Separated from the road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel-one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me. That’s why my man had chosen that direction. By the time he’d reached the dip into Belinda Road, passing the puddle into which his blood would soon flow, he’d have realized that he’d never make it out that way. That’s why he changed direction. I went over the bike’s handlebars this time serenely, calmly, taking time to greet the now familiar moments of landscape that came at me.

The sky, this time round, had become totally consistent, clouds running together into an unbunched white continuum. The black bar’s outer wall was detailed with reliefs and ridges and long lines of painted gold. The grill over the window of Movement Cars, reflected in the puddle and viewed from this angle, looked like the gridded ceiling of a dodgem ring. The letters were behind it. They weren’t Greek or Russian at all: they were the A and r of Airports reversed by the water’s surface. To the puddle’s left two bottle tops lay on the ground. I lay there looking at them. My man would have seen these too. They were beer bottle tops. He would have looked at them and thought about the men who’d drunk the beers and wondered why it couldn’t be him drinking them right now, these beers, off in some other place, around a table with friends perhaps, or at home with his family, instead of lying here being killed. Beyond these was a plastic shopping bag. On the bag’s side were printed the words Got yours? Just before I stood up for the last time I murmured, to the puddle, the white sky, the black bar and the pockmarked, littered road surface around me:

“Yes, I got mine.”

My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so-all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral-neither warm nor cold. Lying on it once more, I looked over at the phone box. It was horizontal now; the stencilled messenger was on his side, his arms spread out, a forensic outline just like I would be within an hour or so. I turned my head the other way. Everything was tilted: bollards leant away from me as they rose like plinths, like columns of temples or Acropolises. The black bar’s exterior ran diagonally down the street, the golden markings on it forming dots and dashes. Its fire doors were closed; two blue-and-white signs on them bore the words Fire Escape Keep Clear-two times, repeated. When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?

Above the word Escape, cloud, white and unbroken. There was no movement anywhere. I lay there doing nothing, staring. I lay there for so long that I wasn’t even staring any more-just lying there with my eyes open while nothing happened. Shadows became longer, deeper; the sky grew slightly darker, more entrenched. There was no noise anywhere, no noise at all-just the massed silence of whole scores of people waiting, like me, infinitely patient.

I never left. Not actively, at least. I have vague memories of being lifted, held above a bed of some sort, handled tenderly and delicately, but I can’t really trust these. All I can report with any degree of authority is that I found myself back in my living room some time later, and that that same doctor, or perhaps another one, was shining his little torch into my eyes.

I SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS drifting into and out of trances. They were like waking comas: I wouldn’t move for long stretches of time, or register any stimuli around me-sound, light, anything-and yet I’d be fully conscious: my eyes would be wide open and I’d seem to be engrossed in something. I’d remain in this state for several hours on end.

I know about these trances because Naz and Doctor Trevellian described them to me. Trevellian was the name of the doctor with the leather suitcase and the little torch-one of them at least. Perhaps they’ve run together, all these doctors, in my mind. At any rate, a Doctor Trevellian, who had a little torch and various other accessories which he kept in a battered leather suitcase, was often in my flat, observing me. I couldn’t do much about it: I was too weak to throw him out and so prone to lapses back into my trance that I couldn’t even issue orders properly. The funny thing is, though, that I didn’t mind his presence. He kept very still. He didn’t flap around, pace up and down or even move his arms much when examining me. He stood still observing me from a few feet away, as passive as a statue-or closer, frozen above me with his torch held steady in his right hand, casting down a beam of yellow light. He would talk about me to Naz, describing my condition:

“He’s manifesting,” I heard him explain, “the autonomic symptoms of trauma: masked facies, decreased eye blink, cogwheel rigidity, postural flexion, mydriasis…”

“Mydriasis?” Naz asked.

“Dilation of the pupil. All these suggest catecholamine depletion in the central nervous system. Plus a high level of opioids.”

“Opioids?” Naz repeated. “He’s certainly not taking drugs. I’d know if he were.”

“I’m not suggesting he’s been taking drugs,” Trevellian answered. “But response to trauma is often mediated by endogenous opioids. That is to say, the body administers its own painkillers-hefty ones. The problem is, these can be rather pleasant-so pleasant, in fact, that the system goes looking for more of them. The stronger the trauma, the stronger the dose, and hence the stronger the compulsion to trigger new releases. Reasonably intelligent laboratory animals will return again and again to the source of their trauma, the electrified button or whatever it is, although they know they’ll get the shock again. They do it just to get that fix: the buzzing, the serenity…”

“You think he’s doing the same?” Naz asked.

“He wasn’t shot, was he?” I heard Trevellian counter. “In real life, I mean?”

“I don’t think so,” Naz replied.

I sat there without speaking or moving, listening to them discussing me. I liked being discussed: not because it made me seem interesting or important, but because it made me passive. I listened to them for a while; then their conversation faded as I drifted back into a trance.

Things carried on like that for three days, as I mentioned earlier-although it didn’t seem like three days then. It didn’t seem like any period. Each time I passed the edges of a new trance time became irrelevant, suspended, each instant widening right out into a huge warm yellow pool I could just lie in, passive, without end. What happened further in, towards the trance’s centre, I can’t say. I know I experienced it, but I have no memory of it: no imprint, nothing.

On the fourth day, when I was strong enough to move around my flat again, I had the papers brought to me. Two of them carried reports of another shooting. It had taken place in Brixton on the day we’d done our re-enactment, not half a mile away. Two men on foot had shot another in a car. They’d walked up to the window, raised their guns and shot him through the glass while he waited in traffic. He’d died instantly, his head all blown across the seats and dashboard. It was connected to the first shooting, apparently: revenge, a countermove, something like that.