Tom McCarthy: Remainder

“Will we have to pass through a metal detector?” I asked Naz.

Naz stared ahead of him in silence.

“Naz!” I said again. “Do we have to…”

“No,” he answered. His voice had changed so it was somewhere between the same monotone my pianist spoke in and the one I’d instructed my various re-enactors to use.

“That’s good!” I said. “You’re getting into it.”

I folded my shotgun and placed it inside a bag. I liked it now, wanted to keep it with me, carry it around like a king carries around his sceptre. I was feeling even more regal than normal: with Naz out of action I’d assumed direct executive command of everything-logistics, paperwork, the lot. I proclaimed to the car in general:

“There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s a very happy day. A beautiful day. And now we shall all go into the air.”

We left the car, processed across the car park and entered the terminal building, the others lumbering along behind me. I called a halt, mustered them all together and was about to send the two re-enactors off to where they had to go when something caught my eye. It was one of those coffee concessions, the Seattle-theme ones. We were in a different terminal to the one where I’d met Catherine, but this terminal had a concession too-although not in exactly the same spot. The counter, till and coffee machines were arranged differently as well, although they were all the same size and shape and colour as the ones in the first terminal’s concession. It was the same, but slightly different. I approached the counter.

“I’d like nine small cappuccinos,” I said.

“Heyy! Nine short-nine?” he said.

“Yup,” I told him, showing him my loyalty card and handing him a twenty-pound note. “I’ve got nine more to go. So: nine, plus one.”

He started lining the cups up, but a thought struck me and I told him:

“You can strip the other eight away. The other nine, I mean. It’s only the remaining one I want. The extra one.”

He looked perplexed now.

“I can’t really stamp the card and give you your extra one unless I make the other nine.”

“Oh, I’ll pay for the nine,” I said. “But it’s just the tenth I want. You can keep the nine, or throw them out, or do whatever you want. I’ll get nine more next time round.”

“Next time round?” he asked.

“Whatever,” I said.

I paid him; he stamped my card and handed me a new one with the first cup on it stamped, then gave me my extra coffee. I walked back over to where the others had been mustered. Only Naz was still there, standing all locked up and vacant.

“Where have the re-enactors gone?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer, of course. I don’t think he even understood the question.

“Oh, well,” I said. “They can leak. That’s good. So where’s our check-in desk?”

I looked around the terminal. There was a newsagent’s shop a few yards away. Outside it, a free-standing billboard had the evening headline stuck to it. Shares Tumble, it announced.

“That’s good too!” I said. “No: that’s brilliant! It all accrues, then tumbles. Like the sun.”

I found our desk. It was wider than normal desks, which is strange given that the planes people checked into from it were smaller. We checked in; the woman asked us if we had any luggage; I said no, just this little bag; I’d take it with me as hand luggage. We were led through a little door onto the concourse and driven in a strange electric car a bit like a golf buggy out across the airport towards a strip on which a bunch of little planes were lined up. Then we got out, walked a few feet across the tarmac and climbed some steps into a tiny private jet. A stewardess stood at the door to greet us.

“Is your friend alright?” she asked me as we passed her.

“Oh, he’s had a shock,” I said. “He had it coming, though. In all, it’s a very happy day.”

The cockpit was only a few yards from where our seats were. It was separated from the cabin by a small partition door, which was ajar. As we walked past this door the pilot half-turned round and said:

“Welcome aboard, folks.”

I liked the way he half-turned, how he let his upper body swivel without fully revolving. The way he said his line as well. He said it just like pilots are supposed to say it. I’d have to get the whole thing re-enacted one day. We sat down. The stewardess said we’d been cleared to take off straight away, but would we like a drink once we were airborne? She had wine, spirits, tea, coffee, water…

“Coffee!” I said. “I’ll have coffee again.”

Naz didn’t ask for anything. He just stared straight ahead, like a statue. The stewardess asked him to fasten his seatbelt; when he didn’t react to her request, she leant over and fastened it herself. She checked mine too, then gasped and said:

“Oh! You’ve got blood on your wrist. There’s a bit on your face, too. Let me bring you a cloth.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s just fine. I’ll take a bit of mess into the air with me. It’s only fair.”

She smiled back at me a little awkwardly, then went and strapped herself into her own seat. We taxied across the ground; then we turned, paused, turned again and started accelerating into the long runway, the plane tingling, levitating. We took off, banked, rose, broke through a small, isolated bit of cloud, then stabilized. The stewardess brought coffee. She handed it to me on a tray, like Matthew Younger’s secretary had-but it was in a straight cup, not the three-part type. I sipped it, then looked over at Naz. He was still staring straight ahead-but now he was sweating and mumbling nonsensical half-words beneath his breath. Poor Naz. He wanted everything perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed away so that it wasn’t mess. He had to learn too: matter’s what makes us alive-the bitty flow, the scar tissue, signature of the world’s very first disaster and promissory note guaranteeing its last. Try to iron it out at your peril. Naz had tried, and it had fucked him up. I tried to make out what it was that he was mumbling. It seemed to be data: figures, hours, appointments, places, all abandoning their posts and scrambling for the exits, sweating their way out of him, rats scurrying from a sinking ship.

The pilot’s radio crackled in the cockpit. It made me think of Annie and her back-up people. They’d have taken off within the last hour; perhaps their plane had already exploded. I wondered if it would be over sea or land. If it was land, perhaps a bit of debris might even fall on someone and leave me an heir. I imagined a team of aviation accident investigators reconstructing the plane over a period of months, gathering each scrap of fuselage, piecing them all together like a jigsaw, reconstructing the positions of the passengers and baggage-who’d sat where, whose bag had contained what and so on. Back at the bank the police forensic team would already be running through their paces, the chief investigator choosing a search pattern, his subordinates making sketches and gathering prints while detectives interviewed the witnesses, interviewed eventually the two re-enactors someone would find gibbering insanely in the terminal toilets, making them go over the whole episode again and again and again. Reconstructions, everywhere. I looked down at the interlocking, hemmed-in fields, and had a vision of the whole world’s surface cordoned off, demarcated, broken into grids in which self-duplicating patterns endlessly repeated.

The vision faded as the stewardess emerged from the cockpit. She looked out of sorts.

“The tower have asked if we’d mind turning back,” she said.

“Turning back?” I repeated. I thought about this for a while, then smiled at her and told her: “I suppose not. It might be quite good.”