Tom McCarthy - Remainder

We were both moving so slowly by now that we were, technically speaking, not moving. We stayed that way for a long time; then, still holding the liver lady’s eyes with mine, I very slowly, very carefully moved my right foot backwards, up one step. My liver lady moved her right hand slowly back towards her rubbish bag. Still moving so slowly it was almost imperceptible, I changed direction again and brought my right foot back down. She moved her right hand away from the bag again, at the same speed. I repeated the sequence, kinking the fragment of the episode that we were lingering on back to just before it had begun; she came back with me. We did this several times-then became completely still, the two of us suspended in the midst of our two separate ongoing actions.

We stayed there for a very long time, facing one another. The pianist’s chords stretched out, elastic, like elastic when you stretch it and it opens up its flesh to you, shows you its cracks, its pores. The chords stretched and became softer, richer, wider; then they kinked back, reinstating themselves as he hit the keys again. I and my liver lady stood there. We were standing, and still standing-then I was back in my bath, watching hot steam swirl around the crack. Then I was being lifted, held, laid down. Then nothing.

The next day I went and watched the sunlight falling from the windows onto the patterned floor of the staircase. I lay on the small landing where the stairs turned between the second and third floors and stared. The sunlight filled the corridors of white between the pattern’s straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion, like it had the first time I’d observed it some weeks back-but this time the light seemed somehow higher, sharper, more acute. It also seemed to flood it more quickly than it had before, not slower.

I didn’t slip into a trance this time-quite the opposite. I sat back up and wondered why it should seem faster when I’d made the whole building run slower. I decided to time it, went to borrow Annie’s watch-then realized I’d have to wait until tomorrow for the sunlight to flood across then leave that patch again. I stood the building down again, got some rest and staked out the spot at the same time the next day, Annie’s watch-with precision sports timer that measured down to tenths and hundredths of seconds-at hand.

When I’d timed it before, the whole process had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. I remembered. Today, when the light’s front edge arrived, I started the watch, then watched the edge trickle furtively across the landing like the advance guard of an army, the first scouts and snipers. In its wake the bolder, broader block, the light’s main column, moved in and occupied the floor making no secret of its presence, covering the whole plain with its dazzling brilliance, its trumpets and flags and cannons. I lay there watching and timing, letting the watch run right through to the moment, several minutes after the main column’s eventual departure, when the sunlight’s rearguard, its last stragglers, took one final look back over the deserted camp and, becoming frightened of the massing troops of darkness, scurried on.

When I’d timed this before it had taken three hours and fourteen minutes. This time it all took place within three hours. Within two hours, forty-three minutes and twenty-seven point four-five seconds, to be precise. I didn’t like this. Something had gone wrong. I called in Frank and Annie.

“The sunlight’s not doing it right,” I said.

Neither of them answered at first. Then Annie asked:

“What do you mean, not doing it right?”

“I mean,” I said, “that it’s running over the floor too quickly. I measured the time the shaft falls from these windows onto the floor, from the first moment that it hits it to the time it leaves. I measured it when we first started doing these re-enactments, and I measured it today, and I can tell you without a doubt that it’s going faster now than it was then.”

There was another pause, then Annie ventured, in a quiet, nervous voice:

“It’s later in the year.”

“What’s later in the year?” I asked.

“It’s later now than it was when you first measured it,” Annie explained. “Later in the year, further from midsummer. The sun’s at a different angle to us than it was.”

I thought about that for a while until I understood it.

“Right,” I said. “Of course. I mean…of course. I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t…I hadn’t, I mean…Thank you. You may go now, both.”

Frank and Annie slunk back to their posts. I stayed there in the dull light of the stairwell, looking up. I thought of the sun up in space, a small star no bigger in comparison with other stars than those tiny specks of dust I’d seen suspended at the stairwell’s top some weeks ago, when the real sun was closer to us. It struck me that the specks would be there now, right up above me, hanging from nothing, just floating in the neutral, neither warm nor cold air, and that when the sun disappeared completely they might fall.

The models arrived the next day: Roger’s models of the second and third shootings. They were beautiful, even more detailed than the first one. A shoe shop next to where the man was shot in his car had tiny shoes in its window, and there were trees lining the street where the third man had gone down. The forensic reports arrived later that day, and I read them carefully. Naz had everything ready for the first new re-enactment, of the second shooting, two days later. I’d rested plenty so as to be strong and hadn’t lapsed back into a trance for almost one week-but when we did the re-enactment, as soon as we slowed it down to half speed, I became totally weak and vacant and had to be carried home again.

A day of intermittent trances followed. Naz had scheduled the third re-enactment for the day after the second, but had to delay it for two days until I got my strength back. When we did it the same thing happened: I just drifted off. There was that widening-out of the space around me, and of the moment too: the suspension, the becoming passive, endless-then losing the motorbike, the trees, the pavement as I drifted further in, towards the core that left no imprint.

Two or three more days of trances followed this one. I’d surface like an underwater swimmer coming up for air, filling his lungs just so that he can dive again, plunge back towards his deep-sea caves and waving strands of seaweed and outlandish fish or whatever it was that has so captivated him. Sometimes I’d be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I’d find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind’s patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again.

Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee. I heard ambulance drivers discussing their experiences of treating people who’d been hit by different falling objects, and the varying chances of survival in each instance.

“Scaffolding’s not that bad,” one of them was saying. “Masonry, on the other hand…”

“Masonry’s lethal,” his colleague concurred. “But for my money helicopters are the worst. I arrived at a helicopter crash site once. The people on the ground don’t only risk being crushed; there’s also the rotating blade to think about. Cut you in two, it will. And the explosion…”

“Ah yes, the explosion,” the first one repeated. I could hear their voices clearly for a while, then they faded out.

Another bit of memory that got churned up was of some earth that had got onto my sleeve. It seemed to have come from plants, like the lush green ones the Portuguese woman had delivered to my building-only the earth from her plants hadn’t got onto my sleeve. This earth that I remembered in my trance had spilled all over me in all its inconvenient bittiness, a hundred bits all rolling around and staining things and generally being in the wrong place. This image gave over to a vision of the weird man from the Dogstar, asking, again and again: Where does it all go? as he stood by my table, glaring. Greg was there, explaining to this man: