Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,57

it as my inclination led me. On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing. So I’d copy the patch of oil beneath the motorbike, say—how it elongated, how its edges rippled—then take the drawing over to Naz’s office, have it photocopied several times, then stick the copies in a line across my living room wall, rotating the patch’s formation through three-sixty. I captured lots of places this way: corners, angles against walls, bits of banister. Sometimes instead of sketching them I’d press a piece of paper up against them and rub it around so that their surface left a mark, a smear. Or I measured the amount of time it took the sunlight to first flood and then drain from each floor in the afternoon, or how long it would take for the swings, if pushed with such and such a strength, to come to a complete standstill.

At other times I lost all sense of measure, distance, time, and just lay watching dust float or swings swing or cats lounge. Some days I didn’t even leave my flat: instead, I sat in my living room or lay in my bath gazing at the crack. I’d keep the building in on mode while I did this: the pianist had to play—really play—and the motorbike enthusiast hammer and bang; the concierge had to stand down in the lobby in her ice-hockey mask, the liver lady fry her liver—but I wouldn’t move around and visit them. Knowing they were there, in on mode, was enough. I’d lie there in my bath for hours and hours on end, half-floating while the crack on the wall jutted and meandered, hazy behind moving wisps of steam.

I worked hard on certain actions, certain gestures. Brushing past my kitchen unit, for example. I hadn’t been satisfied with the way that had gone on the first day. I hadn’t moved past it properly, and my shirt had dragged across its edge for too long. The shirt was supposed to brush the woodwork—kiss it, no more. It was all in the way I half-turned so that I was sideways as I passed it. A pretty difficult manoeuvre: I ran through it again and again—at half-speed, quarter-speed, almost no speed at all, working out how each muscle had to act, each ball and socket turn. I thought of bull-fighting again, then cricket: how the batsman, when he chooses not to play the ball, steps right into its path and lets it whistle past his arched flank millimetres from his chest, even letting it flick the loose folds of his shirt as it shoots by. I put the building into off mode for a whole day while I practised the manoeuvre: striding, half-turning as I rose to my toes, letting my shirt brush against it—grazing it like a hovercraft does water—then turning square again as I came down. Then I tried it for real the next day, with the building in on mode. After the two days I had three separate bruises on my side—but it was worth it for the fluent, gliding feeling I got the few times it worked: the immersion, the contentedness.

I worked hard on my exchange with the liver lady too. Not that anything—dropped bag apart—had been wrong with it on the first day we’d done it: I just felt like doing it again and again and again. Hundreds of times. More. No one counted—I didn’t, at any rate. I’d break the sequence down to its constituent parts—the changing angle of her headscarf and her stooped back’s inclination as I moved between two steps, the swivel of her neck as her head turned to face me—and lose myself in them. One day we spent a whole morning going back and back and back over the moment at which her face switched from addressing me with the last word of her phrase, the up, to cutting off eye contact, turning away and leading first her shoulders then eventually her whole body back into her flat. Another afternoon we concentrated on the instant at which her rubbish bag slouched into the granite of the floor, its shape changing as its contents, no longer suspended in space by her arm, rearranged themselves into a state of rest. I laid out the constituent parts of the whole sequence and relished each of them, then put them back together and relished the whole—then took them apart again.

One day, as I stood by my kitchen window looking down into the courtyard,