Remainder - By Tom McCarthy Page 0,78
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.