Tom McCarthy - Remainder

I phoned Naz:

“Have you heard about the second shooting?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Strange, huh?”

“I should like you to repeat the procedure you went through last week and set up a re-enactment of this one, too.”

“I thought you might,” Naz said. “I’ll get on to it.”

I walked out to the corner shop to buy more papers. It was mid-afternoon. The evening paper, stacked up on the counter, carried the headline:

Brixton: Third Man Shot as Turf Wars Escalate.

I was confused. As far as I knew only two men had been shot: my guy on his red bicycle and then this other man in his car. Perhaps there’d been two men in the car and both had been shot. But then why say “third man”? Surely “second and third men” would make more sense. Besides, it was today’s paper. Feeling a tinge of dizziness, I bought it.

All soon became clear: it turned out that yet another shooting had happened, just off Brixton Hill. The killers had used a motorbike this time. The victim had been returning to his flat, and they’d ridden up to him and shot him without taking off their helmets or dismounting, then sped off again. I liked that: a motorbike, its weaving movements as it cut past cars and posts onto the pavement where the man would have been fumbling with his keys outside his building. Then the way he’d have seen his own face reflected fish-eye in the visors of his killers, like a funfair’s hall of mirrors. The attack had been revenge for the revenge, another countermove. Turf Wars. I thought of those patches in garden centres, piled up in squares, then of squares of a chessboard, then of a forensic grid. I walked back to my flat and phoned Naz again:

“Did you know there’s been another one?” I said.

“I do,” said Naz. “We just spoke. You’ve asked me to set up a re-enactment of it.”

“No,” I said. “I know that-but there’s been another other one.”

There was a silence at Naz’s end.

“Hello?” I said.

“Yes,” said Naz. “Well, shall we…”

“Absolutely,” I told him. “We’ll re-enact it too. And Naz?”

“Yes?”

“Could you get Roger to…”

“Of course,” said Naz. “I’d thought of that already. He’s delivering the second one to me tonight. I’ll get him to model the third one too.”

An hour later I switched my building into on mode. Before we started, I held a meeting in the lobby. All the re-enactors were there-plus Frank, Annie and their people, and these people’s back-up with their radios and clipboards. I stood on the second step, addressing them.

“I want to slow it down,” I told them. “Everything slower-much, much slower. As slow as it can be. In fact, you should hardly move at all. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your things, perform your actions. I want you to be performing them, but to be performing them so slowly that each instant…that each instant…as though it could expand-you understand?-and be…if each instant was-well, that bit doesn’t matter; you don’t have to know that. But the point is that you have to be doing your actions very slowly, but still doing them. Is that clear?”

People looked around at one another and then back towards me, vaguely nodding.

“So with you, for example,” I continued, pointing at my pianist, “you need to hold each note, each chord, for as long as possible. You have a pedal for that, right?”

The bald pate of my pianist’s head went white and he raised his eyes from the floor to my feet.

“A pedal?” he repeated glumly.

“Yes, a pedal,” I said. “You have two: one that muffles the sound and another that extends it, don’t you?”

He thought about this for a while; then his head went even whiter as he nodded sadly.

“Good,” I said. “Start out at normal-no, at half speed-and when you slow down, when you’re in the most slowed-down bit of all, just hold the chord for as long as you can. Hit the keys again if you need to. Understood?”

My pianist looked down at the floor and nodded again. Then he started shuffling back towards the staircase.

“Wait!” I said.

He stopped, still staring down. I looked at his bald pate for a few more seconds and then told him:

“Okay, you can go.”

I turned now to the concierge.

“Now, you,” I told her, “are already static. I mean, you just stand there in the lobby doing nothing. Which is good. But now I want you to do nothing even slower.”

She looked confused, my concierge. She had her mask off and was holding it in her hand, but her face was kind of mask-like-like those theatre masks they had in ancient times: worried, haggard, filled with a low-level kind of dread.

“What I mean,” I told her, “is that you should think more slowly. Not just think more slowly, but relate to everything around you slower. So if you move your eyes inside your mask, then move them slowly and think to yourself: Now I’m seeing this bit of wall, and still this bit, and now, so slowly, inch by inch, the section next to it, and now an edge of door, but I don’t know it’s door because I haven’t had time to work it out yet-and think all this really slowly too. You see what I mean now?”

The dread on her face seemed to heighten slightly as she nodded back at me.

“It’s important,” I told her. “I’ll know if you’re doing it right. Do it right and I’ll make sure you get a bonus. I’ll give you all bonuses if you get it right.”

I broke the meeting up and told people to go to their positions. I went up to my flat and looked at the crack in the bathroom while I waited. I hadn’t gone through this in quite a while. A smell was hanging in the air: the smell of congealed fat. I poked my head out of the window and looked down at the liver lady’s out-vent. It had clogged up again. The fat caking its slats was turning black. New vapour was starting to squeeze its way out, accompanied by the sound of liver starting to sizzle. Within a few seconds the new liver’s smell had reached me. It still had that sharp and acrid edge, like cordite. We’d tried and tried to get rid of it, and failed-besides which, no one else but me smelt cordite. I did, though, beyond question: cordite.

The phone rang in my living room. It was Naz, telling me that everything was ready.

“Slowed right down, right?” I asked him.

“Slowed right down, just as you requested,” he replied.

I left my flat and walked down the first flight of stairs. I started walking down them really slowly; but then after a few steps I got bored, so I went back to normal speed. I wasn’t bound by the rules-everyone else was, but not me.

The pianist, playing at half speed as I’d asked him, made his first mistake and repeated the passage, then again, then again, more and more slowly each time. I stopped beside the window at the stairs’ first turning and looked out. I held my eyes level with a kink in the glass pane, then moved my head several millimetres down so that the kink enveloped a cat who was slinking along the facing rooftop. I let my head slide very slowly to the side so that the cat stayed in the centre of the kink, as though the kink were a gun’s viewfinder and the cat a target. By jolting my head slightly to one side and back again I found that I could make the cat move back to where it had been a second earlier. I did this for a while: the more the cat moved forwards, the more I kinked it back to where it had been before, minutely moving and jolting my head as I looped it. Eventually it disappeared from view and I moved on.

My liver lady was emerging from her flat. I slowed down on the staircase as her eyes caught mine. I looked at her and breathed in and out slowly. Moving at half speed, she lowered her rubbish bag to the floor, released her hold on it and turned her head to face me. I slowed down further and she slowed down too, so much that she was almost static-stooped, her right hand hovering half a foot above the rubbish bag. She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The pianist’s notes had merged into a single chord which he was holding just as I’d instructed him. I stared at her and felt the edges of my vision widening. The walls around her door, the mosaicked floor that emanated from its base, the ceiling-all these seemed to both expand and brighten. I felt myself beginning to drift into them, these surfaces-and to drift once more close to the edges of a trance.