Tom McCarthy - Remainder

Occasionally I’d let my eyes run out to corners, looking, like the other re-enactors, for an edge, although I knew there was no edge, that the re-enactment zone was non-existent, or that it was infinite, which amounted in this case to the same thing. Mostly I’d make my head move slowly forwards past the door frame where the metal gave over to glass, advancing it so there was more window in which more street was revealed. It kept on coming, rolling in, expanding, more and more of it: people, trees, lampposts, cars and buses, shop fronts with reflective windows in which more cars, buses, people and trees flowed and luxuriated, all rolling in slowly, coming to me, here.

“It’s arriving,” one of the re-enactors said; “the van’s arriving.”

I’d listened to him speak those same words countless times already, in rehearsals. I’d scripted them myself; I’d told him to say exactly those ones, to repeat the word “arriving” and replace “it’s” with “the van’s” in the second half, although the “it” already was the van. I’d heard them over and over, spoken in exactly the same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch-but now the words were different. During our rehearsals, they’d been accurate-accurate in that we’d had the replica van turn up and park in the replica road as the re-enactor practised speaking them. Now, though, they were more than accurate: they were true. The van-the real van with real guards inside-was arriving, pulling into the real stump-road and parking. It had turned up of its own accord, and turned the words into the truest ever spoken. The van did more than turn up: it emerged-emerged into the scene, like a creature emerging from a cave or like a stain, a mark, an image emerging across photographic paper when it’s dunked in liquid. It emerged: started out small, then grew, and then was big and there-right there, where it was meant to be.

I watched it, utterly fixated. It was a perfect likeness of the van we’d used up at the warehouse. More than perfect: it was identical in make and size and registration, in the faded finish on its sides, the way its edges turned-but then it was more, more even than the sum of all its likenesses. Sitting above the rubbed-out and rerouted yellow line, resting on its bulging rubber tyres, its dull, pobbled steps waiting to be trodden on, its dirty indicators and exhaust protruding from its rear-sitting there, it seemed bigger, its sides more faded, its tyres more bulging, its edges more turning, its steps more pobbled, more ready to take weight and relinquish it again, its indicators and exhaust more dirty, more protruding. There was something excessive about its sheer presence, something overwhelming. It made me breathe in sharply, suddenly; it made my cheeks flush and my eyes sting.

“Wow,” I whispered. “That’s just…wow.”

The van emerged into the scene; men emerged from it and the whole event emerged, like a photo emerging. I didn’t even need to see it. I closed my eyes and let it all develop in my mind. I pictured the scene inside the bank: Guards One and Two were being checked in at the far end of the counter; they were passing through the airlock, through the first and now the second set of doors, into the inner area. They were handing the sacks of new notes to the cashier; the cashier, in perfect imitation of our stood-down cashier re-enactor, was preparing a receipt for them and calling up the bags of old notes from the vaults downstairs, the ones we wanted. They were waiting; we were waiting; the guard in the van was waiting, and so were its pobbled steps, its indicators and exhaust; the street was waiting: yellow and white lines, kerbs and pavements were all waiting, waiting while the lift emitted its little electric whine, its cables taut with the strain of bearing these lumps up from the building’s insides, shoving them out into the world.

My eyes still closed, I watched the bags emerging now, being lifted from their tray. A lifting feeling moved up through my body; I felt my organs lift inside me. I watched the tight-end accomplice re-enactor peel out of the line by the enquiry desk and, watching this, felt weightless, light and dense at the same time. As he peeled out his shoulders inclined so that the left was slightly lower than the right; they inclined, cut a banked semicircle through the air above the carpet and then straightened again as he glided just behind the other people queuing, parallel to them, and headed to the door.

I pushed my breath out in a sigh, a rush, opening my mouth like someone who’s come up from underwater to emerge into the daylight-and as this breath rushed out of me I opened my eyes and unpacked the whole scene, breathed it all out into the daylight too. It all came out just right, everything in position, where it should be, doing what it should: the bank, the street, its lines, the van. The tight-end accomplice re-enactor was emerging from the door. Then I was emerging too, emerging from the car and gliding across the street towards the bank door as I slipped my ice-hockey mask on, my gliding and slipping mirrored by the four other robber re-enactors gliding from four different positions-two sides of two cars-towards the same point, the same door, like synchronized swimmers gliding from the corners of a pool to fall into formation in the middle.

I knew the formation-knew it intimately. I knew which bit moved where and how the whole thing changed shape as it flowed across the ground. I’d created it; I’d dreamt it up. I’d watched it from the outside, sketched and measured it from sideways on and from behind. I’d projected its components and its angles onto Naz’s tables, pyramids and flow charts, seen them gather and disperse in wisps of steam rising off my bath’s surface. I’d taken my position in it time and time again, moved through it, stepping, turning, swinging till each part of me knew where to go, instinctively, at every point on its trajectory. But none of that compared to now. As I and the others swept in through the door to take up our positions in the phalanx, I knew I was somewhere different-that I’d reached an intimate cell, a chamber far beneath the surface of the movements and positions. I was right inside the pattern, merging, part of it as it changed and, duplicating itself yet again, here, now, transformed itself and started to become real.

The defile yawned open. All edges-of objects and surfaces, the counters and the screens, the carpet, the edges of seconds too-seemed to draw back while remaining where they were; normal distances and measures became huge. I could have done anything: before another person’s eyes had completed a single blink, I could have run about all over, gone and moved cars around in the street outside, swapped babies in their pushchairs, climbed the bank’s walls and walked across its ceiling or just stood there upside down. As it was, I stayed inside the moment at which I was passing Robber Re-enactor One as he stood over Guard Three just inside the doorway. I lingered in that moment, in the instant I was sweeping past him, for a long time, taking in the posture of his leg, the angle of its knee, the straight line of his left arm as it held the guard below him while the right arm, lifted so its hand was at head level, held a gun to the guard’s head. I drank it all up, absorbing it like blotting paper or like ultra-sensitive film, letting it cut right through me, into me till I became the surface on which it emerged.

Then sound came in: the sound of the shotgun firing off the frightener. The sound was elongated, stretched out so much that it became soft and porous, so it seemed to have slowed down, right down into a hum, gentle and reassuring. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling and fell gently, bitty powder snow. Robber Re-enactor Two was delivering his line:

“Everybody lie down.”