by Tom McCarthy
I knew the formation—knew it intimately. I knew which bit moved where and how the whole thing changed shape as it flowed across the ground. I’d created it; I’d dreamt it up. I’d watched it from the outside, sketched and measured it from sideways on and from behind. I’d projected its components and its angles onto Naz’s tables, pyramids and flow charts, seen them gather and disperse in wisps of steam rising off my bath’s surface. I’d taken my position in it time and time again, moved through it, stepping, turning, swinging till each part of me knew where to go, instinctively, at every point on its trajectory. But none of that compared to now. As I and the others swept in through the door to take up our positions in the phalanx, I knew I was somewhere different—that I’d reached an intimate cell, a chamber far beneath the surface of the movements and positions. I was right inside the pattern, merging, part of it as it changed and, duplicating itself yet again, here, now, transformed itself and started to become real.
The defile yawned open. All edges—of objects and surfaces, the counters and the screens, the carpet, the edges of seconds too—seemed to draw back while remaining where they were; normal distances and measures became huge. I could have done anything: before another person’s eyes had completed a single blink, I could have run about all over, gone and moved cars around in the street outside, swapped babies in their pushchairs, climbed the bank’s walls and walked across its ceiling or just stood there upside down. As it was, I stayed inside the moment at which I was passing Robber Re-enactor One as he stood over Guard Three just inside the doorway. I lingered in that moment, in the instant I was sweeping past him, for a long time, taking in the posture of his leg, the angle of its knee, the straight line of his left arm as it held the guard below him while the right arm, lifted so its hand was at head level, held a gun to the guard’s head. I drank it all up, absorbing it like blotting paper or like ultra-sensitive film, letting it cut right through me, into me till I became the surface on which it emerged.
Then sound came in: the sound of the shotgun firing off the frightener. The sound was elongated, stretched out so much that it became soft and porous, so it seemed to have slowed down, right down into a hum, gentle and reassuring. Plaster crumbled from the ceiling and fell gently, bitty powder snow. Robber Re-enactor Two was delivering his line:
“Everybody lie down.”
He didn’t shout the line, but rather spoke it in a voice without inflection—deadpan, neutral, just like the voice in which I’d made the tyre-boy re-enactors speak their lines during the blue-goop re-enactment. This line, too, was elongated; it seemed to stretch out on both sides of itself, to build itself an inner chamber in which it could be spoken almost imperceptibly within the longer speaking of it—spoken intimately, a tender echo.
Then it was quiet. The customers and clerks, the real ones who’d replaced the customer and clerk re-enactors we’d stood down, were lying on the floor like babies being put to sleep. Above them, like a mobile hanging from a cot, Robber Re-enactor Two’s shotgun swung. I swung mine too, made it describe an arc across the lobby, an arc like a clock’s pendulum transported to a horizontal plane—a grandfather clock’s pendulum, slow, steady and repetitive.
Another sound came now: the tinkle of glass splintering as Four re-enacted the smashing of the airlock’s first door; then, growing out of that sound, a second as Five re-enacted the smashing of the next door. The glass was high-tech modern glass that crumbles into bits and falls rather than breaking into jagged segments; it fell softly, tinkling like a music box—an old, antique one tinkling out a slow and high-pitched tune, a lullaby.
I started on the sequence that I had to re-enact at this point: moving across the floor and through the broken airlock to join Four and Five, pick up one of the bags and carry it back over to the door and out into the street. This, too, I’d practised endlessly—but it was different now. The bag, just like the van, was more imposing than the bags we’d used before—its weave more regular and repetitive, its thread more fibrous, the small, isolated clusters of letters and numbers dotted about its surface more cryptic than those on the ones I’d carried in rehearsals. It was baggier. It bulged just like the liver lady’s rubbish bag had—bulged irregularly, in a slightly awkward way. It was hard to lift up: I felt it stretching, felt its weight being dispersed around my upper body, the way it acted on each muscle. All my muscles were articulated now, working together, merging as I carried it, merging without my having to tell them how to merge.
“A system,” I said to the cashier. “And I don’t have to learn it first. I’m getting away with it.”
I was getting away with it. For me, the bag held something priceless. Its money was like rubbish to me: rubbish, dead weight, matter—and for that reason it was valuable, invaluable, as precious as a golden fleece or lost ark or Rosetta Stone. I glided across the floor with it towards the door. Four and Five glided in front of me. Two was still standing static, moving his gun from one corner of the bank towards the other and then back again, slow and regular as a lawn-sprinkler. I raised my bag slightly as it and I cleared the airlock’s stump, then lowered it again and let it glide above the carpet like a crop-spraying aircraft gliding over fields of wheat. I let my eyes follow the carpet’s surface as we glided, let them run along its perfectly reproduced gold on red, its turns and cut-backs, the way these repeated themselves regularly for several yards then quickened, shortening as the carpet crinkled in the rise up to the kink on which Five, gliding two feet in front of me, was about to re-enact his half-trip. My eyes moved forward to his foot and lingered there, watching it anticipate the kink; I saw the foot surge forwards, its toes pointing downwards, backwards, turning over like a ballet dancer’s toes…
But there was no kink in this carpet. Why should there have been? There had been one at the warehouse, but that had just appeared there. In the rehearsals, after Five had tripped on it that one time, I’d told him to half-trip each time he passed it. I’d even had Frank slip a small piece of wood under the carpet, to make sure the wrinkle stayed there. Five had got so used to half-tripping on it over the weeks of rehearsals—ten, twenty times each day, over and over—that the half-trip had become instinctive, second nature. Now, as we did the re-enactment itself, he applied the same force, gave it the same forward thrust, the same turn of the toes—only there was no kink. The carpet was flat. I saw his foot feel for the kink, and feel more, staying behind while the rest of him moved on. The rest of him moved so far on that eventually it yanked the foot up into the air behind it. His whole back leg rose behind him until it was horizontal, then continued rising until it was so high that his shoulders went down and he toppled over.
He toppled—but before he did, his upper body flew forwards above the carpet unsupported, carried by its own momentum. His arms were pulled back like the arms of a free-falling parachutist; his chest was pushed out like a swan’s chest. It reminded me of a ship’s figurehead I’d once seen—an old ship’s figurehead with lifted head and body thrust out to the waves. I could see that he was about to crash straight into Two. I thought of carrots, and of air traffic controllers, and watched the collision unfold.
It was his head that made first contact. It went into Two’s stomach, which gave in the same way the buffer on the end of a segment of train gives as a new segment is coupled with it. Five’s head drove into Two’s stomach, but his neck seemed to move the other way—to contraflow, its flesh wrinkling back in waves towards his shoulders. It looked like the crumple zones they build into the fronts of modern cars. Two let out a grunt as his own shoulders hunched forwards; his left hand released the barrel of the shotgun, rose into the air, then fell onto Five’s back, where it stayed, tenderly, holding Five’s body in place as the two of them started to go down.
Their fall was long and slow. Two’s left leg had risen from the ground as soon as Five crashed into him; his right leg, though, stayed planted, and for a while held up the whole tangled composition of two heads and torsos, four arms, three legs, a bag and a gun. I
t seemed to be willing itself to believe it could support the knotted constellation, all this levitated matter, keep it buoyant, carry it on into some imaginary future. It couldn’t, of course: gravity was against it. I watched it buckle like a giraffe’s legs do in old films when the giraffe has been shot by hunters, then give up, resigning itself to its inevitable impact on the ground.
Not all of Two gave up, though: as the rest of him, all his parts and the new parts he’d acquired, Five’s parts, landed over a large area of carpet—twisting and folding as they hit, compressing further in some cases and in others unlocking, breaking apart—his right hand remained raised. The gun was still held in it, the palm wrapped around the butt, the index finger hooked across the trigger. It must have been an instinct to tug back against the last solid thing there was that made him pull this. The gun went off. Four, just in front of me, crumpled and toppled too.
Now the whole scene went static, like it had been on my staircase when the liver lady and I had slowed down so much that we’d come to a standstill. Two and Five lay static on the floor, half joined and half unjoined, like acrobats frozen in mid-manoeuvre. Four lay fetal, curled up, still. I stood still on the floor behind him. The only thing that moved was a deep red flow coming from Four’s chest. It emerged from his chest and advanced onto the carpet.
“Beautiful!” I whispered.
Whines spread across the lobby, running in ripples from the staff and customers, a collective murmur in their sleep as the dream they were all dreaming hit this patch of turbulence. Robber Re-enactor One walked over from the doorway, slid his mask off, looked at Four and said:
“Oh my God!”
His face was white. He slipped Four’s mask off. Four’s face was white too. His eyes were empty. He was pretty dead. One looked up from him and announced in a loud voice:
“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:
“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.
