“The sunlight’s not doing it right,” I said.
Neither of them answered at first. Then Annie asked:
“What do you mean, not doing it right?”
“I mean,” I said, “that it’s running over the floor too quickly. I measured the time the shaft falls from these windows onto the floor, from the first moment that it hits it to the time it leaves. I measured it when we first started doing these re-enactments, and I measured it today, and I can tell you without a doubt that it’s going faster now than it was then.”
There was another pause, then Annie ventured, in a quiet, nervous voice:
“It’s later in the year.”
“What’s later in the year?” I asked.
“It’s later now than it was when you first measured it,” Annie explained. “Later in the year, further from midsummer. The sun’s at a different angle to us than it was.”
I thought about that for a while until I understood it.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. I mean…of course. I mean, I knew that, but I hadn’t…I hadn’t, I mean…Thank you. You may go now, both.”
Frank and Annie slunk back to their posts. I stayed there in the dull light of the stairwell, looking up. I thought of the sun up in space, a small star no bigger in comparison with other stars than those tiny specks of dust I’d seen suspended at the stairwell’s top some weeks ago, when the real sun was closer to us. It struck me that the specks would be there now, right up above me, hanging from nothing, just floating in the neutral, neither warm nor cold air, and that when the sun disappeared completely they might fall.
The models arrived the next day: Roger’s models of the second and third shootings. They were beautiful, even more detailed than the first one. A shoe shop next to where the man was shot in his car had tiny shoes in its window, and there were trees lining the street where the third man had gone down. The forensic reports arrived later that day, and I read them carefully. Naz had everything ready for the first new re-enactment, of the second shooting, two days later. I’d rested plenty so as to be strong and hadn’t lapsed back into a trance for almost one week-but when we did the re-enactment, as soon as we slowed it down to half speed, I became totally weak and vacant and had to be carried home again.
A day of intermittent trances followed. Naz had scheduled the third re-enactment for the day after the second, but had to delay it for two days until I got my strength back. When we did it the same thing happened: I just drifted off. There was that widening-out of the space around me, and of the moment too: the suspension, the becoming passive, endless-then losing the motorbike, the trees, the pavement as I drifted further in, towards the core that left no imprint.
Two or three more days of trances followed this one. I’d surface like an underwater swimmer coming up for air, filling his lungs just so that he can dive again, plunge back towards his deep-sea caves and waving strands of seaweed and outlandish fish or whatever it was that has so captivated him. Sometimes I’d be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I’d find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind’s patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again.
Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee. I heard ambulance drivers discussing their experiences of treating people who’d been hit by different falling objects, and the varying chances of survival in each instance.
“Scaffolding’s not that bad,” one of them was saying. “Masonry, on the other hand…”
“Masonry’s lethal,” his colleague concurred. “But for my money helicopters are the worst. I arrived at a helicopter crash site once. The people on the ground don’t only risk being crushed; there’s also the rotating blade to think about. Cut you in two, it will. And the explosion…”
“Ah yes, the explosion,” the first one repeated. I could hear their voices clearly for a while, then they faded out.
Another bit of memory that got churned up was of some earth that had got onto my sleeve. It seemed to have come from plants, like the lush green ones the Portuguese woman had delivered to my building-only the earth from her plants hadn’t got onto my sleeve. This earth that I remembered in my trance had spilled all over me in all its inconvenient bittiness, a hundred bits all rolling around and staining things and generally being in the wrong place. This image gave over to a vision of the weird man from the Dogstar, asking, again and again: Where does it all go? as he stood by my table, glaring. Greg was there, explaining to this man:
“He wants to be authentic, is all. That’s the reason.”
The weird man repeated his line again but, although the words were the same ones, they somehow came out as Harder and harder to lift up. There was a gush of blue goop, then the two ambulance men were back, sifting through wreckage.
“History,” said one. “It’s lethal, all this debris. Look: propeller, head.”
“Flotsam,” said the other. “Jetsam. All these little bits, repeating. The real event he can’t even discuss.”
Their voices and the image of the wreckage faded out again, and I found myself fully conscious, staring at the model Roger had made of the first shooting. The model had been demoted from the coffee table to the carpet on which I also turned out to be lying, so it was level with my head-only its vertical plane was my horizontal one and vice versa. Right in front of my eyes was the patch of road the two men had stood on as they fired, the spot where the cracks branched out into a cell-like pattern of repeating hexagons. Roger’s model hadn’t reproduced this pattern, but I had a clear memory of it. As the imprint of the hexagons grew stronger in my mind, so did my memory of the moment, the particular moment, when the two black men and I had stood there just prior to the re-enactment: when I’d walked them over to the spot and told them to fire from there. I’d told them to stop there, to keep firing, but not to advance any further. The one with a strong West Indian accent, the taller one, had told me You’re the boss and then I’d asked Naz if he’d managed to buy us more time. Now, as I lay on the floor beside Roger’s model remembering this moment of instruction, the moment assumed an intense significance.
I sat up, reached for my phone and called Naz.
“Are you back with us?” he asked.
“I’d like you to organize another re-enactment,” I said.
“I wasn’t aware there’d been another shooting,” he said.
“I should like one,” I explained, “of that moment just before we re-enacted the first shooting, when we stood in the road, me and them, and I told them where to stand. I want to re-enact that moment.”
There was a pause while the thing behind Naz’s eyes whirred. Then he said:
“Excellent. In the same space?”
“Possibly,” I told him. “Let me ponder that one.”
“Fine,” said Naz. “I’ll contact the two re-enactors, and we’ll get the…”
“No!” I said. “Not the same ones. We need other people to re-enact their roles.”
“You’re right,” said Naz. “Completely right. I should have seen that. I’ll get straight on to it.”
An hour later he phoned me back:
“I’ve found two people. And people to play the back-up people. You should have them re-enacted too.”
“My God!” I said. “You’re right! I’ll need new re-enactors to re-enact standing around in the background. We can’t have the same people doing that either.”
“There’s more,” said Naz. “I’ve instructed our back-up people not to tell them why they’re to go through the sequence that they’ll re-enact. It makes it more complex, more interesting.”
“Yes, you’re right again,” I said. “It does.”
I realized as I hung up that Naz was changing. He’d always been dedicated to my projects, ever since that first day that I’d met him in the Blueprint Café-but back then his dedication had been purely professional. Now, though, his in-built genius for logistics was mixed with something else: a kind of measured zeal, a quiet passion. He defended my work with a fierceness that was muted but unshakable. One afternoon, or morning, or evening perhaps, as I hovered round the edges of a trance, I heard him arguing with Doctor Trevellian.