by Tom McCarthy
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.
“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.”
She smiled back awkwardly again and said:
“I’ll go and tell the captain, then. That you said it’s okay.”
With that, she disappeared into the cockpit. A few seconds later we banked and turned. My coffee cup slid to the side of the table top; coffee sloshed over the edge onto its surface. We righted again. The coffee trickled back into the middle of the table top, towards my sleeve. I didn’t move my hand out of the way; I wanted it to stain it. It was tarry. Matthew Younger had apologized and handed me a handkerchief. Shares Tumble, the headline had said. Five had tumbled, Four had crumpled. Naz was sweating, mumbling. I called the stewardess over.
“A napkin?” she asked, eyeing the spilt coffee.
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s that I should like us to turn back out again.”
“Out again?” she repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “I should like us to resume our original course now.”
She turned around and went back to the cockpit. After a few moments the plane banked again, but to the other side this time. I felt weight shifting in the cabin and my body, felt myself becoming weightless for an instant, a sensation of being held just above something. On the table top the coffee ran again. The plane turned and then straightened, heading back out. I smiled and looked out of the window. The sun was low on the horizon, making the few clouds in the sky glow blue and red and mauve. Higher up, lingering vapour trails had turned blood crimson. Our trail would be visible from the ground: an eight, plus that first bit where we’d first set off—fainter, drifted to the side by now, discarded, recidual, a remainder. In the cockpit the radio crackled again. The pilot called out to me:
“Now they’re ordering us to turn back.”
“Ordering!” I repeated. “That’s pretty cool.”
We turned and started heading back. The stewardess stood still beside the cabin door, avoiding eye contact with me. After a couple of minutes I called to the pilot.
“I should like you to turn back out once more,” I said.
“We can’t do that,” he called back. “I’m afraid the Civil Aviation Author
ity’s commands override yours.”
“That’s annoying,” I said. “Isn’t there anything…”
My voice trailed off as I pondered what to do. I liked this turning back and forth in mid-air, this banking one way, straightening, then banking back another, the feeling of weightlessness, suspension. I didn’t want it to stop. I looked around me—then I had a brilliant idea.
“Tell them I’m hijacking you,” I called back to the pilot.
I reached down into my bag, pulled out my shotgun and brought the barrel back up straight. The stewardess screamed. Naz did nothing. The pilot swivelled his upper body halfway round again, saw the gun pointing at the cockpit and shouted:
“Jesus! If you shoot that, we’ll all die.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “Don’t worry at all. I won’t let us die. I just want to keep the sequence in place.”
The radio crackled more. The pilot spoke into it in a hushed, urgent voice, telling the tower what was happening. The tower crackled back to him; he half-turned to me again and asked:
“Where do you want to go?”
“Go?” I said. “Nowhere. Just keep doing this.”
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Turning back, then turning out. Then turning back again. The way we’re doing it right now.”
He spoke into his radio again; it crackled back to him; he half-turned towards me and asked:
“You want us to keep turning, out and back, like this?”
“Yup,” I said. “Just keep on. The same pattern. It will all be fine.”
