Tom McCarthy: Remainder

“Stop the re-enactment!”

No one answered. One looked around him at the whining people. He took three steps in the direction of a corner where two customers were lying. Sensing him approach, they whined more, wriggling, burrowing into the ground. One leant down, placed his hand on one of their shoulders and said:

“He’s hurt. We’ve got to stop the re-enactment now!”

The customer let out a squeal and bucked with fear. One turned away from him and shouted to the staff behind the counters:

“It’s stopped! The re-enactment’s stopped! We have to stop it now!”

Nobody moved. Of course nobody moved. Stop what? This re-enactment was unstoppable. Even I couldn’t have stopped it. Not that I wanted to. Something miraculous was happening. I looked at Two and Five lying on the floor. They seemed now less like acrobats than sculptures. The bag that had slipped from Five’s hand and the gun that now lay beside Two’s looked to me like wedges of surplus matter stripped away to reveal them. Something else was being revealed too, something that had been there all along, present but hidden, now emerging, everywhere. It was palpable: I could sense this new emergence in the very air. The others could sense it too: Five, One and Two were looking around the bank, at the customers and staff and at each other, their eyes widening, their bodies growing more and more alert, inquisitive, aroused. Then One, his voice quivering with slow terror, said, so quietly it was almost to himself:

“They don’t know.”

“What?” said Five.

“They don’t know,” One repeated. “These people don’t know that it’s a re-enactment.”

There was silence for a moment while Five and Two digested what One had just said. One turned to me and, voice still quivering, whispered:

“It’s real!”

The tingling really burst its banks now; it flowed outwards from my spine’s base and flowed all around my body. Once more I was weightless; once again the moment spread its edges out, became a still, clear pool swallowing everything else up in its contentedness. I let my head fall back; my arms started rising outwards from my sides, the palms of my hands turning upwards. I felt I was being elevated, that my body had become unbearably light and unbearably dense at the same time. The intensity augmented until all my senses were going off at once. There was noise all around me, a chorus: screaming, shouting, banging, alarms ringing, people running around bumping into things and each other. I knelt down beside Four. The blood was advancing from his chest in a steady, broad column, marching on across the carpet’s plain, making its gold lines crinkle like flags in a breeze. His bag had slouched into the floor just like the liver lady’s bag had; its contents, no longer suspended in space by his arm, had rearranged themselves into a state of rest. The blood was flowing round it, dampening one of its edges, eddying into a pool behind a crinkle, as though the bag and not he had leaked.

Further on, the blood column had pulled to a halt and pitched camp in the formation of an elongated oval, a deep red patch. On its surface I could see the wall reflected-and the broken glass doors of the airlock, the counter’s edge, part of a poster on the wall, the ceiling. Four had opened himself up, become a diagram, a sketch, an imprint. I lay down flat so that my head was right beside this pool and followed the reflections. The objects-the doors’ stump, the edge, the poster’s corner-had become abstracted, separated from the space around them, freed from distances to float around together in this pool of reproductions, like my staff in their stained-glass window heaven.

“Speculation,” I said; “contemplation of the heavens. Money, blood and light. Removals. Any Distance.”

I moved my head over to Four’s body and poked my finger into the wound in his chest. The wound was raised, not sunk; parts of his flesh had broken through the skin and risen, like rising dough. The flesh was both firm and soft; it gave to the touch but kept its shape. When I brought my eyes right up to it, I saw that it was riddled with tiny holes-natural, pin-prick holes, like breathing holes. Much bigger, irregular cracks had opened among these where bits of shot had entered him. I could see some way into the tunnels that the cracks’ insides formed, but then they turned and narrowed as they disappeared deeper inside him.

“Yes, really like a sponge,” I said.

Then I was walking from the bank. I walked quite calmly. No one tried to stop me. They all ran and screamed and bumped and fell-but I had a cylinder around me, an airlock. I was walking calmly through the bank’s door, out into the daylight again. I was walking across the street, passing the yellow and white lines, the spot where the raised patch wasn’t. Then I was in the car again and it was pulling out, cutting an arc across the middle of the street, pausing, then gliding on. The street was rotating slowly round: the mothers with pushchairs and the traffic and the traffic wardens and the people at the bus stops and the other windows full of their reflections-rotating around me. I was an astronaut suspended, slowly turning, among galaxies of coloured matter. I closed my eyes and felt the movement, the rotation-then opened them again and was overwhelmed by sunlight. It was streaming from the sun’s chest, gushing out, cascading, splashing off cars’ wheels, bonnets and windscreens and off shop fronts, trickling along the road’s lines and markings, pulsing past people’s legs and along gutters, dribbling from roofs and trees. It was spilling everywhere, overflowing, just too much, too much to absorb.

“So maybe it’s okay for it to fall,” I said.

“Where are the others?” asked the driver re-enactor.

“They have the same texture,” I told him.

“They have what?” he asked. “What was the second gunshot?”

“The same texture,” I said. “Light and blood.”

Two of the other robber re-enactors had joined us in the car now: Five and Two I think, or maybe Five and One. Not Four, in any case. We turned and bumped into another car, paused for a moment and then glided on.

“He dented me and just drove off,” I told them. “The guy in Peckham. I was angry at the time, but that’s fine now, though. Everything’s fine-even the shard in my knee. The half.”

It was fine-all of it. I felt very happy. We’d left the main road and were weaving through side streets, the same ones we’d practised weaving through two days ago. The same trees lined the road on both sides-oaks, ashes and plane trees whose red, brown and yellow leaves were merging again into a flow of colour; some leaves were falling, flickering in the sunlight as they drifted downwards. There was one fir tree too, that wasn’t molting.

“A reciduous tree,” I told the others, pointing it out as we passed it.

They weren’t listening to me. They seemed very unhappy. They were shouting at the driver re-enactor, screaming at him, telling him the whole thing had been real and not a re-enactment, over and over again. I turned to them and told them:

“But it was a re-enactment. That’s the beauty of it. It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink, mainly-the kink the other kink left when we took it away.”

This didn’t seem to calm them down at all. They shouted, yelped and whimpered as we drove on through the falling coloured leaves. One of them kept asking what they should all do now.

“Oh, just carry on,” I told him. “Carry right on. It will all be fine.”

I remembered saying this to the boy on the staircase. I recalled his worried face, his satchel and his shoes. I looked straight at the re-enactor who’d asked me the question, smiled at him reassuringly and said: