Tom McCarthy: Remainder

He didn’t shout the line, but rather spoke it in a voice without inflection-deadpan, neutral, just like the voice in which I’d made the tyre-boy re-enactors speak their lines during the blue-goop re-enactment. This line, too, was elongated; it seemed to stretch out on both sides of itself, to build itself an inner chamber in which it could be spoken almost imperceptibly within the longer speaking of it-spoken intimately, a tender echo.

Then it was quiet. The customers and clerks, the real ones who’d replaced the customer and clerk re-enactors we’d stood down, were lying on the floor like babies being put to sleep. Above them, like a mobile hanging from a cot, Robber Re-enactor Two’s shotgun swung. I swung mine too, made it describe an arc across the lobby, an arc like a clock’s pendulum transported to a horizontal plane-a grandfather clock’s pendulum, slow, steady and repetitive.

Another sound came now: the tinkle of glass splintering as Four re-enacted the smashing of the airlock’s first door; then, growing out of that sound, a second as Five re-enacted the smashing of the next door. The glass was high-tech modern glass that crumbles into bits and falls rather than breaking into jagged segments; it fell softly, tinkling like a music box-an old, antique one tinkling out a slow and high-pitched tune, a lullaby.

I started on the sequence that I had to re-enact at this point: moving across the floor and through the broken airlock to join Four and Five, pick up one of the bags and carry it back over to the door and out into the street. This, too, I’d practised endlessly-but it was different now. The bag, just like the van, was more imposing than the bags we’d used before-its weave more regular and repetitive, its thread more fibrous, the small, isolated clusters of letters and numbers dotted about its surface more cryptic than those on the ones I’d carried in rehearsals. It was baggier. It bulged just like the liver lady’s rubbish bag had-bulged irregularly, in a slightly awkward way. It was hard to lift up: I felt it stretching, felt its weight being dispersed around my upper body, the way it acted on each muscle. All my muscles were articulated now, working together, merging as I carried it, merging without my having to tell them how to merge.

“A system,” I said to the cashier. “And I don’t have to learn it first. I’m getting away with it.”

I was getting away with it. For me, the bag held something priceless. Its money was like rubbish to me: rubbish, dead weight, matter-and for that reason it was valuable, invaluable, as precious as a golden fleece or lost ark or Rosetta Stone. I glided across the floor with it towards the door. Four and Five glided in front of me. Two was still standing static, moving his gun from one corner of the bank towards the other and then back again, slow and regular as a lawn-sprinkler. I raised my bag slightly as it and I cleared the airlock’s stump, then lowered it again and let it glide above the carpet like a crop-spraying aircraft gliding over fields of wheat. I let my eyes follow the carpet’s surface as we glided, let them run along its perfectly reproduced gold on red, its turns and cut-backs, the way these repeated themselves regularly for several yards then quickened, shortening as the carpet crinkled in the rise up to the kink on which Five, gliding two feet in front of me, was about to re-enact his half-trip. My eyes moved forward to his foot and lingered there, watching it anticipate the kink; I saw the foot surge forwards, its toes pointing downwards, backwards, turning over like a ballet dancer’s toes…

But there was no kink in this carpet. Why should there have been? There had been one at the warehouse, but that had just appeared there. In the rehearsals, after Five had tripped on it that one time, I’d told him to half-trip each time he passed it. I’d even had Frank slip a small piece of wood under the carpet, to make sure the wrinkle stayed there. Five had got so used to half-tripping on it over the weeks of rehearsals-ten, twenty times each day, over and over-that the half-trip had become instinctive, second nature. Now, as we did the re-enactment itself, he applied the same force, gave it the same forward thrust, the same turn of the toes-only there was no kink. The carpet was flat. I saw his foot feel for the kink, and feel more, staying behind while the rest of him moved on. The rest of him moved so far on that eventually it yanked the foot up into the air behind it. His whole back leg rose behind him until it was horizontal, then continued rising until it was so high that his shoulders went down and he toppled over.

He toppled-but before he did, his upper body flew forwards above the carpet unsupported, carried by its own momentum. His arms were pulled back like the arms of a free-falling parachutist; his chest was pushed out like a swan’s chest. It reminded me of a ship’s figurehead I’d once seen-an old ship’s figurehead with lifted head and body thrust out to the waves. I could see that he was about to crash straight into Two. I thought of carrots, and of air traffic controllers, and watched the collision unfold.

It was his head that made first contact. It went into Two’s stomach, which gave in the same way the buffer on the end of a segment of train gives as a new segment is coupled with it. Five’s head drove into Two’s stomach, but his neck seemed to move the other way-to contraflow, its flesh wrinkling back in waves towards his shoulders. It looked like the crumple zones they build into the fronts of modern cars. Two let out a grunt as his own shoulders hunched forwards; his left hand released the barrel of the shotgun, rose into the air, then fell onto Five’s back, where it stayed, tenderly, holding Five’s body in place as the two of them started to go down.

Their fall was long and slow. Two’s left leg had risen from the ground as soon as Five crashed into him; his right leg, though, stayed planted, and for a while held up the whole tangled composition of two heads and torsos, four arms, three legs, a bag and a gun. It seemed to be willing itself to believe it could support the knotted constellation, all this levitated matter, keep it buoyant, carry it on into some imaginary future. It couldn’t, of course: gravity was against it. I watched it buckle like a giraffe’s legs do in old films when the giraffe has been shot by hunters, then give up, resigning itself to its inevitable impact on the ground.

Not all of Two gave up, though: as the rest of him, all his parts and the new parts he’d acquired, Five’s parts, landed over a large area of carpet-twisting and folding as they hit, compressing further in some cases and in others unlocking, breaking apart-his right hand remained raised. The gun was still held in it, the palm wrapped around the butt, the index finger hooked across the trigger. It must have been an instinct to tug back against the last solid thing there was that made him pull this. The gun went off. Four, just in front of me, crumpled and toppled too.

Now the whole scene went static, like it had been on my staircase when the liver lady and I had slowed down so much that we’d come to a standstill. Two and Five lay static on the floor, half joined and half unjoined, like acrobats frozen in mid-manoeuvre. Four lay fetal, curled up, still. I stood still on the floor behind him. The only thing that moved was a deep red flow coming from Four’s chest. It emerged from his chest and advanced onto the carpet.

“Beautiful!” I whispered.

Whines spread across the lobby, running in ripples from the staff and customers, a collective murmur in their sleep as the dream they were all dreaming hit this patch of turbulence. Robber Re-enactor One walked over from the doorway, slid his mask off, looked at Four and said:

“Oh my God!”

His face was white. He slipped Four’s mask off. Four’s face was white too. His eyes were empty. He was pretty dead. One looked up from him and announced in a loud voice: