Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

  “They won’t!” I said. “But it doesn’t matter: they’ve been trained to do exactly what the re-enactors have been trained to do. Both should re-enact the same movements identically. Naz? Are you there?”

  There was a long, long pause. When Naz eventually spoke, his voice was very deep and very slow.

  “That’s brilliant,” he said. “Just brilliant.”

  15

  NAZ WENT ALONG WITH it. Of course he did. It seems strange, thinking of it now, with the advantage—as they say—of hindsight, that he didn’t try to talk me out of it or bring our professional liaison to an end—just walk out, quit, have done. Going along with my decision put everything he had in jeopardy: his job, his future, even his freedom. In law, we’d be robbing a bank. There were no two ways about it. In the eyes of the staff, the customers and bystanders and police it wouldn’t be a performance, a simulation, a re-staging: it would be a heist—pure and simple, straight up. A bank robbery.

  Yes, looking at it from the outside, now, it does seem strange—but thinking back to when we were inside that time, intimately inside it, it doesn’t seem strange at all. Even before he acquiesced with that decision, Naz’s talent for logistics had become inflamed, blown up into an obsession that was edging into a delirium. If I woke up in the small hours of the morning and looked over from my building towards his, I’d see a dim light on and know that he was working there, alone, poring over his data like some Gnostic monk toiling away by oil lamp copying scripture. He looked unhealthy, sick through lack of sleep. His cheeks were pale and jaundiced. Like me, he’d become an addict—although to a different drug. This latest scheme, with its intricate complexities, its massively raised stakes, offered him a hit more perfect, more refined than before. No: I hadn’t stopped to calculate the chances of his accepting or rejecting my order before I issued it; it hadn’t even occurred to me—but if it had, if I’d been capable of stopping and calculating, I’d have thought it through and realized that there was no question but that he would go along with it.

  And me? Why had I decided to transfer the robbery re-enactment to the bank itself? For the same reason I’d done everything I’d done since David Simpson’s party: to be real—to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what’s fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate. I felt that, by this stage, I’d got so close to doing this. Watching the re-enactors’ movements as they practised that day, their guns’ arcs, the turning of their shoulders, the postures of the prone customers and clerks—watching all these, feeling the tingling moving up my spine again, I’d had the feeling that I was closing in on this core. After stalking it for months, just like I’d stalked my building—stalking it with my small arsenal of craft and money, violence and passivity and patience, through a host of downwind trails and patterns, re-enactments that had honed and sharpened my skills—after all this, I could smell blood. Now I needed to move in for the kill.

  But to do this required a leap of genius: a leap to another level, one that contained and swallowed all the levels I’d been operating on up to now. Samuels’s offhand comment about dry-runs had opened the gateway to that other level for me; pushing the three bath-foam clusters together, and the revelation this had brought on, had propelled me up there. Yes: lifting the re-enactment out of its demarcated zone and slotting it back into the world, into an actual bank whose staff didn’t know it was a re-enactment: that would return my motions and my gestures to ground zero and hour zero, to the point at which the re-enactment merged with the event. It would let me penetrate and live inside the core, be seamless, perfect, real.

  And so our goals aligned, mine and Naz’s. He needed me as much as I needed him. And need him I did, more than ever. In order for the re-enactment to pay off—to produce the defile Samuels had talked about, that sportsmanlike expansion in which we could move around and do our thing—we had to get everything coordinated absolutely perfectly. We’d have no chance to repeat it; there could be no slight mistimings, no slipping bin bags, leakage onto floors or falling cats—and certainly no skiving off and substituting tapes. And then not only was total control of movement and of matter necessary—every surface, every gesture, every last half-trip on a carpet’s kink—but so, too, was control of information. We had to treat information as matter: stop it spilling, seeping, trickling, dribbling, whatever: getting in the wrong place and becoming mess. That’s how bank robbers who get clean away from the scene of the robbery itself get tripped up, Samuels had told us earlier: someone speaks to someone who tells someone else who tells their girlfriend who tells three of her friends, and then soon it’s common knowledge and only a matter of time before the police get to hear about it.

  “If our heist were a real one,” Naz explained to me as we sat alone in his office one evening, surrounded by his flow charts, “a normal one I mean, there’d be eight people involved: the five robbers, the two drivers and the show-out man.”

  “The tight-end accomplice,” I said.

  “Right,” said Naz. “But in our operation there are thirty-four primary re-enactors, plus six immediate back-up people, ones that need to be there all the time, although these ones will stop being necessary from the moment that the location transfers to the real bank—as, of course, will twenty-seven of the primary re-enactors—although to call them ‘unnecessary’ is misleading, as it’s necessary they continue to believe that they’ll be necessary right up until the last minute. So with thirty-four, plus six, plus eleven secondary back-up people and a further twenty-eight (at a conservative guess) tertiary ones—caterers, builders, taxi drivers, basically anyone who’s visited the warehouse more than once—you can appreciate that the probability of information leakage, were we to put even a handful of these people in the picture over the next few days, is pretty much one hundred per cent.”

  “Well, then we just don’t tell them,” I said. “Any of them.”

  “A: that doesn’t work,” Naz answered. “The drivers will need to have learnt escape routes—and secondary routes in case the first routes are blocked up, and tertiary ones and so on. B: that in itself is only half the problem—no, one third. Beside outward leakage both before and after the event, there’s the need to safeguard against inward leakage—re-enactors learning of your change of plan. And then there’s sideways leakage. Look: I’ve marked it here.”

  He pointed to a flow chart in which arrows clustered round three circles. I thought of the foam clusters in the bath again, how I’d moved them apart and then together.

  “By sideways leakage I mean leakage between different staff groups: re-enactor-re-enactor, re-enactor-back-up, back-up-secondary-back-up and so on. The permutations are multiple.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said. “I’ve stratified all the participants into five NTK, or Need to Know, categories. Within each category there’s a twofold decision to be made: how much they need to know, and when they need to know it…”

  He went on for ages like this. I zoned out and lost myself among the curves and arrows of the charts, tracing in them arcs and pirouettes, entrances and escape routes, defiles. It was light when Naz’s lecture stopped. The outcome seemed to be that his NTK structure was like a pyramid: at the top, in the first category, me and Naz; below us, in the second, the two driver re-enactors, in the next the five other robber re-enactors and so on, widening with each layer. Layer Two would have to be informed of the change of venue before other layers. Layer Three could be told at the final minute, and even then wouldn’t be told that the real bank staff wouldn’t know that this was a re-enactment, or even be told that they were real bank staff. We’d just say we’d brought in new staff, public and security guard re-enactors to make it all seem fresher and more realistic. As for Layer Four…

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Let’s go back up to the warehouse.”

  I was impatient to get back to it all—back to the movement, t
he swinging arcs, the peeling shoulders. When we got there I announced:

  “We’re going to add a bit to the whole sequence now. We’re going to practise getting into cars and driving off.”

  “Oh yes?” said Samuels.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Widen it out a bit.”

  He choreographed this over the next two days: who ran to which car, which pulled out first, how one, turning, paused for a moment in the middle of the road to block the traffic so the other could cut off into a side street. We marked these roads’ beginnings out in paint, extending the carefully copied markings we’d done earlier out of the warehouse’s wide hangar-door entrance onto the concrete of the airport ground outside. I wanted the markings done as accurately as possible: the white Give Way dashes, the yellow lines. There was this one big, dark patch on the concrete where some engine oil or tar must have been spilt before we moved there; it was semi-solid, like black mould or a small growth or birth mark sprouting from the surface of the ground. I told Annie’s people to remove it, scrub it off. There wasn’t an oil patch on the road in Chiswick. They went at it with brushes, then with trowels, then with all types of chemicals, but it was unshiftable. On the third day of running through the getaway sequence, after I’d put a marker in for myself so that I could watch it from the outside—the cars turning, stopping, cutting, looping back—this dark patch kept snagging my attention as the cars cut past it. It was annoying me. I thought of something that the short councillor had said to me a few days earlier, and called Naz over.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’d like you to have the word ‘residual’ looked up.”

  “Residual?”

  “R-e-s-i-d-u-a-l.”

  Naz tapped a message into his mobile, then stood with me watching the cars turn and cut. His eyes, still sunk, glowed darkly. After a while he said:

  “We’ll need to disappear afterwards.”

  “Disappear?” I said. I looked up at the sky. It was blue. It was a bright, clear early autumn day. “How can we disappear?”

  “Get out. Cover our tracks. We should remove all traces of our activities here, and get ourselves and all the re-enactors well out of the picture.”

  “Where can we all go?” I asked.

  “It’s very complicated,” Naz said. “There are several…”

  Just then, his phone beeped. He scrolled through his menu and read:

  “Of or pertaining to that which is left—e.g. in mathematics.”

  “Left over like the half,” I said. “A shard.”

  “In physics,” Naz continued, “of what remains after a process of evaporation; in law, that which—again—remains of an estate after all charges, debts, etc. have been paid. Residuary legatee: one to whom the residue of an estate is paid. Resid…”

  “Accrued,” I said.

  “What?” Naz asked.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Residual analysis: calculus substituting method of fluxions, 1801. Residual heat of a cooling globe, 1896. Residual error in a set of observations, 1871.”

  “It’s because the time of year had changed. But that’s not how he used it.”

  “Who?” asked Naz.

  “The short councillor,” I said. “He used it like a…you know, like a thing. A residual.”

  “A noun,” said Naz. “What short councillor?”

  “Yes, that’s right: a noun. This strange, pointless residual. And he pronounced the s as an s, not as a z. Re-c-idual. Have it looked up with that spelling.”

  “What spelling?” Naz asked.

  “R-e-c-i-d-u-a-l.”

  Naz tapped at his mobile again. I looked away, back up at the sky. A mile or so away, on the main runways, aeroplanes were taxying, turning and taking off, these huge steel crates all packed with people and their clutter moaning and tingling as they stretched their arms out, palms up, rising. Planes that had taken off earlier were dwindling to specks that hung suspended in the air’s outer reaches for a while, then disappeared. I thought back to my stairwell, then to the tyre and cascading sticky liquid re-enactment that we’d done in this same warehouse. I’d told Annie and Frank to come up with something, some device, that would stop the blue goop from falling on me—make all its particles go up instead, become sky, disappear. Frank had thought of feeding it up through a tube towards the ceiling and then through the roof, transforming it into a mist.

  “We could do that,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Naz asked.

  “All vaporize and be sprayed upwards. When we have to disappear, like you said. Remove traces, all that stuff.”

  Naz’s eyes went vacant while the thing behind them whirred. Another plane passed overhead, moaning and tingling.

  “Or just take planes,” I said. “They’ll take us out of the picture.”

  Naz’s whole body tensed. He was completely static for a while, his musculature suspended while the calculating part of him took all the system’s energy. After a while the body part switched back on and he said:

  “Planes are a very good idea.” He thought for a while more, then added: “Two planes. No, three. We’ll have to separate the re-enactors who’ll have been at the bank from the others. They can’t mix before they board their flights.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “And then…” Naz began; his phone beeped. He looked at it, then slipped it back into his pocket and continued: “And then we’d also have to separate…”

  “Is that the dictionary people?” I asked him. “What do they say?”

  “Word not found,” he said.

  “What do they mean, not found?”

  “‘Recidual’: word not found,” he repeated.

  I started to feel dizzy.

  “It must be there,” I said. “A noun: r-e-c-i…”

  “I spelt it that way,” Naz said; “just as you told me. They say there’s no ‘recidual’ in the dictionary.”

  “Well tell them to go and find a bigger dictionary, then!” I said. I was really feeling bad now. “And if you see that short councillor here…”

  “What short councillor?” Naz asked.

  I leant against the replicated bank’s exterior, against a white stone slab. The stone was neither warm nor cold; it had an outer layer of grit that kind of slid against the solid stone beneath it. Nearby, the cars turned and cut.

  “I should like…” I started. “Naz…”

  Naz wasn’t paying attention to me. He was standing quite still, looking out across the runways. Luckily Samuels turned up just then, put his arm around my waist and held me upright.

  “You should go home,” someone said.

  I was driven back to my building. Naz came by a few hours later, in the middle of the night. He looked dreadful: sallow-cheeked and gaunt.

  “What have you found?” I asked him.

  “There’s just one way…” he began.

  “One way to what?” I said. “What’s this got to do…”

  “Just one way to stop information leakage. To be absolutely certain.”

  “Yes, but what about ‘recidual’?” I asked.

  “No: this is more important,” Naz said. “Listen.”

  “No!” I said. I sat up on my sofa. “You listen, Naz: I say what’s important. Tell me what they found.”

  Naz’s eyes rested on a spot vaguely near my head for a few seconds. I could see him running what I’d just said past his data-checkers, and deciding I was right: I did say what was important. Without me, no plans, no Need to Know charts, nothing. He turned his head sideways, reached into his pocket, took his mobile out and said:

  “They found similar words, but not that one. They looked in the complete twelve-volume dictionary. Do you want me to read you what they found?”

  “Of course I do!” I told him.

  “Recision,” he read; “the act of rescinding, taking away (limb, act of parliament, etc.). Recidivate: to fall back, relapse—into sickness, sin, debt…”

  “Matthew Younger think
s I’m too exposed,” I said. “But exposure is good. How could it all have happened in the first place if I hadn’t been exposed?”

  “Recidivist: one who recidivates; recidivous, of or pertaining to a…and so on. But that’s all,” Naz said. “No recidual.” He put his mobile back into his pocket and continued: “I have to discuss a matter of the utmost…”

  “I think it might be something to do with music,” I said. “A recidual. Hey! Call my pianist up. He’ll know.”

  “I’ll do that after we’ve been through this matter I have to discuss with you,” he said. “It’s absolutely vital. I’ve realized there’s only one way to ensure that…”

  “No. Call him up now!” I said.

  Naz paused again, then realized he had no choice but to comply, stood up and made the necessary call. Five minutes later my pianist was in my living room. One of his two tufts of hair was flattened, while the other sprouted outwards from his temple. His eyes were puffy; one of them was caked with sleep. He shuffled slowly forwards, then stopped three or so yards from me.

  “What’s a recidual?” I asked him.

  He stared glumly at my carpet and said nothing. I could tell he’d heard my question, though, because the top of his bald pate whitened.

  “A recidual,” I said again. “It must be something to do with music.”

  He still didn’t say anything.

  “Like capriccioso,” I continued, “con allegro—all those things that they write in the margins. The composers. Or a type of piece, its name, like a concerto, a sonata: a recidual.”

  “Therz a rosotatof,” my pianist mumbled sadly.

  “What?” I said.

  “There’s a recitative,” he said in his dull monotone. “In opera. Recitatif. Recitativo. Half singing, half speaking.”

  “That’s good,” I said, “but…”

  “Or a recital,” he continued, his pate whitening still more.

  “A recital,” I said. “Yes.”

  I thought about that for a while. Eventually my pianist asked: