Tom McCarthy - Remainder

“He wants to be authentic, is all. That’s the reason.”

The weird man repeated his line again but, although the words were the same ones, they somehow came out as Harder and harder to lift up. There was a gush of blue goop, then the two ambulance men were back, sifting through wreckage.

“History,” said one. “It’s lethal, all this debris. Look: propeller, head.”

“Flotsam,” said the other. “Jetsam. All these little bits, repeating. The real event he can’t even discuss.”

Their voices and the image of the wreckage faded out again, and I found myself fully conscious, staring at the model Roger had made of the first shooting. The model had been demoted from the coffee table to the carpet on which I also turned out to be lying, so it was level with my head-only its vertical plane was my horizontal one and vice versa. Right in front of my eyes was the patch of road the two men had stood on as they fired, the spot where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. Roger’s model hadn’t reproduced this pattern, but I had a clear memory of it. As the imprint of the hexagons grew stronger in my mind, so did my memory of the moment, the particular moment, when the two black men and I had stood there just prior to the re-enactment: when I’d walked them over to the spot and told them to fire from there. I’d told them to stop there, to keep firing, but not to advance any further. The one with a strong West Indian accent, the taller one, had told me You’re the boss and then I’d asked Naz if he’d managed to buy us more time. Now, as I lay on the floor beside Roger’s model remembering this moment of instruction, the moment assumed an intense significance.

I sat up, reached for my phone and called Naz.

“Are you back with us?” he asked.

“I’d like you to organize another re-enactment,” I said.

“I wasn’t aware there’d been another shooting,” he said.

“I should like one,” I explained, “of that moment just before we re-enacted the first shooting, when we stood in the road, me and them, and I told them where to stand. I want to re-enact that moment.”

There was a pause while the thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred. Then he said:

“Excellent. In the same space?”

“Possibly,” I told him. “Let me ponder that one.”

“Fine,” said Naz. “I’ll contact the two re-enactors, and we’ll get the…”

“No!” I said. “Not the same ones. We need other people to re-enact their roles.”

“You’re right,” said Naz. “Completely right. I should have seen that. I’ll get straight on to it.”

An hour later he phoned me back:

“I’ve found two people. And people to play the back-up people. You should have them re-enacted too.”

“My God!” I said. “You’re right! I’ll need new re-enactors to re-enact standing around in the background. We can’t have the same people doing that either.”

“There’s more,” said Naz. “I’ve instructed our back-up people not to tell them why they’re to go through the sequence that they’ll re-enact. It makes it more complex, more interesting.”

“Yes, you’re right again,” I said. “It does.”

I realized as I hung up that Naz was changing. He’d always been dedicated to my projects, ever since that first day that I’d met him in the Blueprint Café-but back then his dedication had been purely professional. Now, though, his in-built genius for logistics was mixed with something else: a kind of measured zeal, a quiet passion. He defended my work with a fierceness that was muted but unshakable. One afternoon, or morning, or evening perhaps, as I hovered round the edges of a trance, I heard him arguing with Doctor Trevellian.

“The re-enactments have to stop,” Trevellian was saying, keeping his voice beneath his breath.

“Out of the question,” Naz was answering in the same tone.

“But they’re clearly exacerbating his condition!” Trevellian insisted, his voice rising.

“Still out of the question,” I heard Naz say. His voice was still level, calm. “Besides, that’s beyond your remit.”

“Curing him’s beyond my remit?” Trevellian’s voice was a snarl now.

“Telling him what to do and what not to do is,” Naz said, calm as ever. “He decides that. You, like me, have been hired to ensure he can continue to pursue his projects.”

“If he’s dead he won’t be able to,” Trevellian snarled again.

“Is there a danger of that?” Naz asked.

Trevellian said nothing, but after a few seconds I heard him snort and throw an instrument into his case.

“We shall expect you here,” Naz said, “at the same time tomorrow.”

Despite the state that I was in, I knew then that Naz was completely onside. More than onside: he was as involved in the whole game as I was-but for entirely different reasons. I understood this more fully two days later, during a lucid patch. Naz was sitting with me in my living room, going over the logistics for the re-enactment of the moment during the shooting re-enactment, the moment when I’d told the two men where to stand. He was fine-tuning the details-who needed to do what, when, the varying amounts of information different participants needed to know, where the real back-up people should stand as their original places were taken by the back-up re-enactors and so on. He had these notes and lists and diagrams laid out in front of him across the coffee table-but for the last five minutes he hadn’t been looking at these at all. He’d just been staring straight ahead, into space. He looked vague, kind of drunk; for a moment I thought that he was about to slip off into a trance.

“Naz?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer at first. His eyes had glazed over while the thing behind them processed. I’d seen them do that before, several times; only now the processing seemed to have stepped up a gear-several gears, gone into overdrive, become almost unbearably intense. It amazed me that his head didn’t explode from the sheer fury of it all. I could almost hear the whirring: the whirring of his computations and of all his ancestry, of rows and rows of clerks and scribes and actuaries, their typewriters and ledgers and adding machines all converging inside his skull into giant systems hungry to execute ever larger commands. Eventually the whirring slowed down, the eyes became alive again, Naz turned his face to me and told me:

“Thank you.”

“Thank you?” I repeated. “For what?”

“For the…” he began, then paused. “Just for the…” He stopped again.

“For the what?” I asked.

“I’ve never managed so much information before,” he eventually replied.

His eyes were sparkling now. Yes, Naz was a zealot-but his zealotry wasn’t religious: it was bureaucratic. And he was drunk: infected, driven onwards, on towards a kind of ecstasy just by the possibilities of information management my projects were opening up for him, each one more complex, more extreme. My executor.

One day I came out of a trance to find myself lying on my sofa. At the same moment that I became aware of where I was I also understood that there was someone else in the room. I looked up and thought I saw Doctor Trevellian. Doctor Trevellian was a short man, as I mentioned earlier, with a moustache and a battered leather briefcase which was always by his side. This short man was standing in my living room, but this time there was no briefcase, and no moustache either. He was short, but he wasn’t Doctor Trevellian, or anyone else I knew-although I thought I recognized him vaguely. He had a notebook in his hand, with the top page flipped open. He was looking at the notebook, then at me, then at the notebook again. He stood like that for some time; then, eventually, he spoke.