Tom McCarthy: Remainder

“You can’t go back there. They won’t understand. Come on with me and everything will be resolved.”

I think he understood that I was right. Of course he couldn’t go back to the bank. What would he do? Explain that it had all been a performance? Throw in the stuff about fridge doors and cigarettes and carrots and De Niro for good measure? He didn’t even know about all that, and didn’t look as though he could have articulated it very coherently even if I’d briefed him on it. He was pretty agitated. They all were. They moaned and wept and yelped and shrieked. I listened to them for a while, trying to work out the rhythm of the various sounds, the moans and wails and yelps-which followed what, how long it took for the whole sequence to repeat itself-but gave up after a while. It was too complex to pin down right now; I’d have to get it re-enacted later. I looked back out of the window at the merging, falling leaves. These faded into concrete, into bridges, stilts and over-passes as we merged with the motorway past Shepherd’s Bush. The concrete, too, was merging, flowing all around us, tilting and swivelling above us, inclining away below, dwindling and disappearing, then emerging again a little later to flow back, converge-these flowing blocks, these columns, all this matter.

Naz met us at the warehouse. He was standing outside it, just inside the compound gates. He opened the car door and looked at me.

“You’ve got blood on you!” he said.

“Money, blood and light,” I told him, beaming as I stepped out of the car. “Naz, it was brilliant!”

Naz stuck his head inside the car where the wailing, yelping re-enactors were still sitting. When they started wailing at him, telling him what had happened, a strange change came over him. It wasn’t dramatic or hysterical: it was more like a computer crashing-the way the screen, rather than explode or send its figures dancing higgledy-piggledy around, simply freezes. He pulled his head out of the car; his body stiffened and his eyes went into suspension while the thing behind them tried to whir. I watched him, fascinated, and saw straight away that it couldn’t whir any more: it had frozen. The others were haranguing him, shouting at him that he’d known, he’d set them up, Four’s dead, they’re murderers, this, that, the other. He just stood there on the tarmac, all locked up. The sunlight streamed around him, falling and cascading everywhere. When his eyes switched on again-half-on, as though in shut-down mode already-he asked where the other re-enactors were.

“Who knows?” I said, stepping into the warehouse. “En route, caught, still at the bank. I don’t know. Hey, nice work!”

The duplicate bank had been razed. You could still see where counters and walls had risen from the ground: their stumps were still there-those and a few bits of rubble, a few splinters, a few tears and holes. It was like a smashed-up and rubbed-over ground plan, a ghost replica. I ran my eyes slowly across its surface. I let them linger on the spot from which the tight-end accomplice re-enactor had peeled out, then on the spot where I’d stood, planted, as my gun had described an arc above the floor. I still had my gun now. I was standing in the spot where Robber Re-enactor Two had stood, facing the counters and the airlock. I raised the gun’s barrel with my left hand and made it describe an arc again, slowly sweeping it from side to side. I ran my eyes on to where the lift had borne up the three bags for us to carry; then I ran them back across the ground where the carpet had been, projecting back onto this bare concrete floor its golden lines, the way they turned and cut against the red, repeating.

I glided my eyes over it at a low altitude again-but this time in reverse, the way Two would have seen it as the three of us approached him with our bags. He, too, would have seen Five’s foot feeling for the kink, then seen him topple, seen his torso hurtling towards him, borne by its own momentum. He also would have known that a collision was imminent, that nothing could be done to stop it. Two, the real Robber Re-enactor Two, had come into the warehouse. He’d entered, like I had, from the spot where the duplicate lift had been, the inner area. He was crying, lumbering forwards slowly, aimlessly. I’d got so into replaying the whole event from his perspective that I’d started to overbalance. I let my left leg come up and my left hand leave my shotgun’s barrel; I sucked my stomach in and hunched my shoulders forwards; I let my right leg buckle, straighten and then keel over backwards, carrying the rest of me with it-carrying all of me except my right hand, which stayed raised, its palm still wrapped around the shotgun’s butt, its index finger hooked across the trigger.

Two was as far from me as Four had been from him when he, Two, had shot him, Four, in the bank. He was still moving forwards, lumbering towards me. So I shot him. It was half instinctive, a reflex, as I’d first suspected: to tug against the last solid thing there was, which was the trigger-tug against it as though it were a fixed point that the body could be pulled back up from. But I’d be lying if I said it was only that that made me pull the trigger and shoot Two. I did it because I wanted to. Seeing him standing there in Four’s position as I stood in his, replaying in first my mind and then my body his slow fall, I’d felt the same compulsion to shoot him as I’d felt outside Victoria Station that day to ask passers-by for change. Essentially, it was the movements, the positions and the tingling that made me do it-nothing more.

The new blast echoed round the warehouse. It made its walls tingle too-its walls, its ceiling and its floor. They tingled and hummed and sang and seemed to levitate. Sawdust took off from the floor and swirled around circling in the air; small lumps of rubble jumped. Two levitated too: he took off from the spot where he was standing-took off like a helicopter rising straight up, only he rose up and slightly backwards at the same time. He hovered for a while in the air and then crumpled back into the ground.

I got up, walked over to where he lay and looked down at him. He was lying on his back.

“He should be on his side,” I said, to no one in particular.

I knelt down beside him and pulled him into the same fetal position Four had ended up in. Two’s eyes, too, were empty. He was pretty dead as well. His blood was also flowing-but it wasn’t as clean as Four’s blood. It had these bits in it, these grains and lumps. I poked at his exposed flesh with my finger. It was a lot like Four’s flesh: it had that same sponge-like texture, soft and firm at the same time.

Naz had come into the warehouse. He was moving really slowly. Eventually he stopped a few feet from me, and his eyes tracked across the floor where Two’s blood was gathering in a pool.

“Wow, look at it,” I said. “It’s just a…a thing. A patch. A little bit repeating.”

I prodded Two’s exposed flesh again, felt it first slightly give and then resist.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” I said to Naz. “You could take everything away-vaporize, replicate, transubstantiate, whatever-and this would still be there. However many times.”

Naz didn’t answer. He just stood there, locked up, closed down, vacant. He was pretty useless. I had to lead him back to the car and drive it myself the short distance to the airport terminal with the two remaining re-enactors moaning and quivering around me. We parked in a long-stay car park. I asked Naz to hand us all our tickets. He just turned his head halfway towards me and said nothing. I reached into his jacket, found the tickets, handed the re-enactors theirs and kept hold of mine and Naz’s. I told everyone we’d enter the terminal together and then separate, the two re-enactors heading for their gate while Naz and I went to the special check-in desk for private planes.