by Tom McCarthy
The two men had brought their guns out again and were raising them to point at me. I was swinging my right leg over the saddle of my bicycle, looking at them and the space around us. There was only one way out: the strip of pavement on the far side of Belinda Road. It led past the black bar with no name to the bridge and then away along Coldharbour Lane. Separated from the road by a line of bollards, it looked like a sluice, a ramp, a runnel—one that opened to another place where there were no men with guns pointing at me. That’s why my man had chosen that direction. By the time he’d reached the dip into Belinda Road, passing the puddle into which his blood would soon flow, he’d have realized that he’d never make it out that way. That’s why he changed direction. I went over the bike’s handlebars this time serenely, calmly, taking time to greet the now familiar moments of landscape that came at me.
The sky, this time round, had become totally consistent, clouds running together into an unbunched white continuum. The black bar’s outer wall was detailed with reliefs and ridges and long lines of painted gold. The grill over the window of Movement Cars, reflected in the puddle and viewed from this angle, looked like the gridded ceiling of a dodgem ring. The letters were behind it. They weren’t Greek or Russian at all: they were the A and r of Airports reversed by the water’s surface. To the puddle’s left two bottle tops lay on the ground. I lay there looking at them. My man would have seen these too. They were beer bottle tops. He would have looked at them and thought about the men who’d drunk the beers and wondered why it couldn’t be him drinking them right now, these beers, off in some other place, around a table with friends perhaps, or at home with his family, instead of lying here being killed. Beyond these was a plastic shopping bag. On the bag’s side were printed the words Got yours? Just before I stood up for the last time I murmured, to the puddle, the white sky, the black bar and the pockmarked, littered road surface around me:
“Yes, I got mine.”
My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold. Lying on it once more, I looked over at the phone box. It was horizontal now; the stencilled messenger was on his side, his arms spread out, a forensic outline just like I would be within an hour or so. I turned my head the other way. Everything was tilted: bollards leant away from me as they rose like plinths, like columns of temples or Acropolises. The black bar’s exterior ran diagonally down the street, the golden markings on it forming dots and dashes. Its fire doors were closed; two blue-and-white signs on them bore the words Fire Escape Keep Clear—two times, repeated. When I let my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him towards the puddle? Escape?
Above the word Escape, cloud, white and unbroken. There was no movement anywhere. I lay there doing nothing, staring. I lay there for so long that I wasn’t even staring any more—just lying there with my eyes open while nothing happened. Shadows became longer, deeper; the sky grew slightly darker, more entrenched. There was no noise anywhere, no noise at all—just the massed silence of whole scores of people waiting, like me, infinitely patient.
I never left. Not actively, at least. I have vague memories of being lifted, held above a bed of some sort, handled tenderly and delicately, but I can’t really trust these. All I can report with any degree of authority is that I found myself back in my living room some time later, and that that same doctor, or perhaps another one, was shining his little torch into my eyes.
13
I SPENT THE NEXT THREE DAYS drifting into and out of trances. They were like waking comas: I wouldn’t move for long stretches of time, or register any stimuli around me—sound, light, anything—and yet I’d be fully conscious: my eyes would be wide open and I’d seem to be engrossed in something. I’d remain in this state for several hours on end.
I know about these trances because Naz and Doctor Trevellian described them to me. Trevellian was the name of the doctor with the leather suitcase and the little torch—one of them at least. Perhaps they’ve run together, all these doctors, in my mind. At any rate, a Doctor Trevellian, who had a little torch and various other accessories which he kept in a battered leather suitcase, was often in my flat, observing me. I couldn’t do much about it: I was too weak to throw him out and so prone to lapses back into my trance that I couldn’t even issue orders properly. The funny thing is, though, that I didn’t mind his presence. He kept very still. He didn’t flap around, pace up and down or even move his arms much when examining me. He stood still observing me from a few feet away, as passive as a statue—or closer, frozen above me with his torch held steady in his right hand, casting down a beam of yellow light. He would talk about me to Naz, describing my condition:
“He’s manifesting,” I heard him explain, “the autonomic symptoms of trauma: masked facies, decreased eye blink, cogwheel rigidity, postural flexion, mydriasis…”
“Mydriasis?” Naz asked.
“Dilation of the pupil. All these suggest catecholamine depletion in the central nervous system. Plus a high level of opioids.”
“Opioids?” Naz repeated. “He’s certainly not taking drugs. I’d know if he were.”
“I’m not suggesting he’s been taking drugs,” Trevellian answered. “But response to trauma is often mediated by endogenous opioids. That is to say, the body administers its own painkillers—hefty ones. The problem is, these can be rather pleasant—so pleasant, in fact, that the system goes looking for more of them. The stronger the trauma, the stronger the dose, and hence the stronger the compulsion to trigger new releases. Reasonably intelligent laboratory animals will return again and again to the source of their trauma, the electrified button or whatever it is, although they know they’ll get the shock again. They do it just to get that fix: the buzzing, the serenity…”
“You think he’s doing the same?” Naz asked.
“He wasn’t shot, was he?” I heard Trevellian counter. “In real life, I mean?”
“I don’t think so,” Naz replied.
I sat there without speaking or moving, listening to them discussing me. I liked being discussed: not because it made me seem interesting or important, but because it made me passive. I listened to them for a while; then their conversation faded as I drifted back into a trance.
Things carried on like that for three days, as I mentioned earlier—although it didn’t seem like three days then. It didn’t seem like any period. Each time I passed the edges of a new trance time became irrelevant, suspended, each instant widening right out into a huge warm yellow pool I could just lie in, passive, without end. What happened further in, towards the trance’s centre, I can’t say. I know I experienced it, but I have no memory of it: no imprint, nothing.
On the fourth day, when I was strong enough to move around my flat again, I had the papers brought to me. Two of them carried reports of another shooting. It had taken place in Brixton on the day we’d done our re-enactment, not half a mile away. Two men on foot had shot another in a car. They’d walked up to the window, raised their guns and shot him through the glass while he waited in traffic. He’d died instantly, his head all blown across the seats and dashboard. It was connected to the first shooting, apparently: revenge, a countermove, something like that.
I phoned Naz:
“Have you heard about the second shooting?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Strange, huh?”
“I should like you to repeat the procedure you went through last week and set up a re-enactment of this one, too.”
“I thought you might,” Naz said. “I’ll get on to it.”
I walked
out to the corner shop to buy more papers. It was mid-afternoon. The evening paper, stacked up on the counter, carried the headline:
Brixton: Third Man Shot as Turf Wars Escalate.
I was confused. As far as I knew only two men had been shot: my guy on his red bicycle and then this other man in his car. Perhaps there’d been two men in the car and both had been shot. But then why say “third man”? Surely “second and third men” would make more sense. Besides, it was today’s paper. Feeling a tinge of dizziness, I bought it.
All soon became clear: it turned out that yet another shooting had happened, just off Brixton Hill. The killers had used a motorbike this time. The victim had been returning to his flat, and they’d ridden up to him and shot him without taking off their helmets or dismounting, then sped off again. I liked that: a motorbike, its weaving movements as it cut past cars and posts onto the pavement where the man would have been fumbling with his keys outside his building. Then the way he’d have seen his own face reflected fish-eye in the visors of his killers, like a funfair’s hall of mirrors. The attack had been revenge for the revenge, another countermove. Turf Wars. I thought of those patches in garden centres, piled up in squares, then of squares of a chessboard, then of a forensic grid. I walked back to my flat and phoned Naz again:
“Did you know there’s been another one?” I said.
“I do,” said Naz. “We just spoke. You’ve asked me to set up a re-enactment of it.”
“No,” I said. “I know that—but there’s been another other one.”
There was a silence at Naz’s end.
“Hello?” I said.
“Yes,” said Naz. “Well, shall we…”
“Absolutely,” I told him. “We’ll re-enact it too. And Naz?”
“Yes?”
“Could you get Roger to…”
“Of course,” said Naz. “I’d thought of that already. He’s delivering the second one to me tonight. I’ll get him to model the third one too.”
An hour later I switched my building into on mode. Before we started, I held a meeting in the lobby. All the re-enactors were there—plus Frank, Annie and their people, and these people’s back-up with their radios and clipboards. I stood on the second step, addressing them.
“I want to slow it down,” I told them. “Everything slower—much, much slower. As slow as it can be. In fact, you should hardly move at all. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your things, perform your actions. I want you to be performing them, but to be performing them so slowly that each instant…that each instant…as though it could expand—you understand?—and be…if each instant was—well, that bit doesn’t matter; you don’t have to know that. But the point is that you have to be doing your actions very slowly, but still doing them. Is that clear?”
People looked around at one another and then back towards me, vaguely nodding.
“So with you, for example,” I continued, pointing at my pianist, “you need to hold each note, each chord, for as long as possible. You have a pedal for that, right?”
The bald pate of my pianist’s head went white and he raised his eyes from the floor to my feet.
“A pedal?” he repeated glumly.
“Yes, a pedal,” I said. “You have two: one that muffles the sound and another that extends it, don’t you?”
He thought about this for a while; then his head went even whiter as he nodded sadly.
“Good,” I said. “Start out at normal—no, at half speed—and when you slow down, when you’re in the most slowed-down bit of all, just hold the chord for as long as you can. Hit the keys again if you need to. Understood?”
My pianist looked down at the floor and nodded again. Then he started shuffling back towards the staircase.
“Wait!” I said.
He stopped, still staring down. I looked at his bald pate for a few more seconds and then told him:
“Okay, you can go.”
I turned now to the concierge.
“Now, you,” I told her, “are already static. I mean, you just stand there in the lobby doing nothing. Which is good. But now I want you to do nothing even slower.”
She looked confused, my concierge. She had her mask off and was holding it in her hand, but her face was kind of mask-like—like those theatre masks they had in ancient times: worried, haggard, filled with a low-level kind of dread.
“What I mean,” I told her, “is that you should think more slowly. Not just think more slowly, but relate to everything around you slower. So if you move your eyes inside your mask, then move them slowly and think to yourself: Now I’m seeing this bit of wall, and still this bit, and now, so slowly, inch by inch, the section next to it, and now an edge of door, but I don’t know it’s door because I haven’t had time to work it out yet—and think all this really slowly too. You see what I mean now?”
The dread on her face seemed to heighten slightly as she nodded back at me.
“It’s important,” I told her. “I’ll know if you’re doing it right. Do it right and I’ll make sure you get a bonus. I’ll give you all bonuses if you get it right.”
I broke the meeting up and told people to go to their positions. I went up to my flat and looked at the crack in the bathroom while I waited. I hadn’t gone through this in quite a while. A smell was hanging in the air: the smell of congealed fat. I poked my head out of the window and looked down at the liver lady’s out-vent. It had clogged up again. The fat caking its slats was turning black. New vapour was starting to squeeze its way out, accompanied by the sound of liver starting to sizzle. Within a few seconds the new liver’s smell had reached me. It still had that sharp and acrid edge, like cordite. We’d tried and tried to get rid of it, and failed—besides which, no one else but me smelt cordite. I did, though, beyond question: cordite.
The phone rang in my living room. It was Naz, telling me that everything was ready.
“Slowed right down, right?” I asked him.
“Slowed right down, just as you requested,” he replied.
I left my flat and walked down the first flight of stairs. I started walking down them really slowly; but then after a few steps I got bored, so I went back to normal speed. I wasn’t bound by the rules—everyone else was, but not me.
The pianist, playing at half speed as I’d asked him, made his first mistake and repeated the passage, then again, then again, more and more slowly each time. I stopped beside the window at the stairs’ first turning and looked out. I held my eyes level with a kink in the glass pane, then moved my head several millimetres down so that the kink enveloped a cat who was slinking along the facing rooftop. I let my head slide very slowly to the side so that the cat stayed in the centre of the kink, as though the kink were a gun’s viewfinder and the cat a target. By jolting my head slightly to one side and back again I found that I could make the cat move back to where it had been a second earlier. I did this for a while: the more the cat moved forwards, the more I kinked it back to where it had been before, minutely moving and jolting my head as I looped it. Eventually it disappeared from view and I moved on.
My liver lady was emerging from her flat. I slowed down on the staircase as her eyes caught mine. I looked at her and breathed in and out slowly. Moving at half speed, she lowered her rubbish bag to the floor, released her hold on it and turned her head to face me. I slowed down further and she slowed down too, so much that she was almost static—stooped, her right hand hovering half a foot above the rubbish bag. She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. The pianist’s notes had merged into a single chord which he was holding just as I’d instructed him. I stared at her and felt the edges of my vision widening. The walls around her door, the mosaicked floor that emanated from its base, the ceiling—all these seemed to both expand and brighten. I felt myself beginning to drift into them, these surfaces—and to drift once more close to the edges of a trance.
We were both moving so slowly by now that we were, technically speaking, not moving. We stayed that way for a long time; then, still h
olding the liver lady’s eyes with mine, I very slowly, very carefully moved my right foot backwards, up one step. My liver lady moved her right hand slowly back towards her rubbish bag. Still moving so slowly it was almost imperceptible, I changed direction again and brought my right foot back down. She moved her right hand away from the bag again, at the same speed. I repeated the sequence, kinking the fragment of the episode that we were lingering on back to just before it had begun; she came back with me. We did this several times—then became completely still, the two of us suspended in the midst of our two separate ongoing actions.
We stayed there for a very long time, facing one another. The pianist’s chords stretched out, elastic, like elastic when you stretch it and it opens up its flesh to you, shows you its cracks, its pores. The chords stretched and became softer, richer, wider; then they kinked back, reinstating themselves as he hit the keys again. I and my liver lady stood there. We were standing, and still standing—then I was back in my bath, watching hot steam swirl around the crack. Then I was being lifted, held, laid down. Then nothing.
The next day I went and watched the sunlight falling from the windows onto the patterned floor of the staircase. I lay on the small landing where the stairs turned between the second and third floors and stared. The sunlight filled the corridors of white between the pattern’s straight black lines like water flooding a maze in slow motion, like it had the first time I’d observed it some weeks back—but this time the light seemed somehow higher, sharper, more acute. It also seemed to flood it more quickly than it had before, not slower.
