“What do you mean, ‘eliminate’?” I asked him.
“Eliminate,” he said again. His voice was shaking so much it reminded me of spoons in egg-and-spoon races, the way they shake and rattle-as though the task of carrying what it had to say were too much. It still shook as Naz continued: “Remove, take out, vaporize.”
“Oh, vaporize,” I said. “A fine mist, yes. I like that.”
Naz stared straight at me now. His eyes looked as though they were about to burst.
“I could organize that,” he said, his voice a croak now.
“Oh, yes, fine, go ahead,” I told him.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
I looked at him, trying to understand. He could organize for channels to be vaporized. Channels meant people. He spoke again, more slowly:
“I…could…organize… that…” he croaked again.
Beads of sweat were growing on his temples. Vaporize, I thought: Naz wants to vaporize these people. I pictured them again being fed through a tube and propelled upwards, turned into a mist, becoming sky. I thought first of the re-enactors who’d be with me in the bank, pictured them dematerializing, going blue, invisible, not there. They’d be the first ones to be vaporized. But then the other ones, the ones who’d been stood down: they’d have to be vaporized as well. And then-
“How many channels would you need to vaporize?” I asked.
He looked back at me, sallow, manic, ill, and croaked:
“All of them. The whole pyramid.”
I looked at him again, and tried to understand that too. The whole pyramid meant not just the re-enactors: it meant all the back-up people-Annie, Frank, their people and the people that liaised between their people and the other people’s people. The sub-back-up people too: the electricians, carpenters and caterers.
“The whole lot of them!” I said. “Everyone! How would you…”
“When they’re in the air,” Naz said, his voice still croaking. “We get them all up in the air-all of them, every last member of your staff-and then…”
“Every last member! That means my liver lady and my pianist! And my motorbike enthusiast and my boring couple and my concierge as well!”
“It’s the only way,” Naz repeated. “We get them all up in an aeroplane, and then…”
He stopped speaking, but his eyes still stared straight at me, making sure I understood what he was telling me. I looked away from them and saw in my mind’s eye a plane bursting open and transforming itself into cloud.
“Wow!” I said. “That’s beautiful.”
I saw it in my mind again: the plane became a pillow ripping open, its stuffing of feathers rushing outwards, merging with the air.
“Wow!” I whispered.
I saw it a third time-this time as a puff, a dehiscence, a flower erupting through its outer membrane and exploding into millions of tiny pollen specks, becoming light. I’d never seen something so wonderful before.
“Wow! That is really beautiful,” I said.
We sat in silence for a while, Naz sweating and bulging, I running this picture through my mind again and again and again. Eventually I turned to him and told him:
“Yes, fine. Go ahead.”
Naz stood up and walked towards the door. I told him to put the building into on mode; he left; then I got into my bath.
I lay there for the rest of the night, picturing planes bursting, flowers dehiscing. I felt happy-happy to have seen such a beautiful image. I listened to the pianist’s notes run, snag and loop, to liver sizzling and the vague electric hum of televisions, Hoovers and extractor fans. I listened to these fondly: this would be one of the last times. My pyramid was like a Pharaoh’s pyramid. I was the Pharaoh. They were my loyal servants, all the others; my reward to them was to allow them to accompany me on the first segment of my final voyage. As I watched steam drifting off the water and up past the crack, I pictured all my people lifted up, abstracted, framed like saints in churches’ stained-glass windows, each eternally performing their own action. I pictured the liver lady bright-coloured and two-dimensional, bending slightly forward lowering her rubbish bag, her left hand on her hip, the pianist sitting in profile at his piano practising, the motorbike enthusiast flat, kneeling, fiddling with his engine. I pictured the back-up people framed holding bright walkie-talkies and bright clipboards in bright, colourful Staff Heaven, the cat putter-outers reunited with the cats they’d posted there before them while extras hovered round the edges like cherubic choruses. I pictured this all night, lying in my bath, watching steam rising, vaporizing.
Naz chartered planes: a huge one for all the others and a tiny private jet for us. He told them whatever he told them: one thing to Layer Two, another to Layer Three and yet another to Layer Four and so on, each of his stories calculated to slot in with the others so that the behaviour of group B, seen from the viewpoint of group D, wouldn’t seem inconsistent with Story Four, nor the knowledge-pool of C, grounded in Story Two, spill over into that of A and short-circuit that group’s behaviour towards-and so on and so on, every angle forecast and anticipated so as to get them all onto their plane before the cracks in the story (the overarching yarn involved a trip to North Africa, some project there, another re-enactment, sums of money so vast no one could refuse) showed, up into the air so they could vaporize, dehisce. He sneaked away for furtive meetings with airport staff and with Irish Republicans or Muslim Fundamentalists or who knows what, and came back looking, as always these days, sallow, manic, driven.
I didn’t follow all that-I didn’t need to, didn’t want to: I was totally absorbed by our rehearsals, by the routes and movements, the arcs, phalanxes and lines, the peeling out, cutting, stopping, turning back. We’d rehearsed the getaway so many times that the cars’ tyres had scored marks across the tarmac, just like the Fiesta’s tyres had in the other re-enactment, the cascading blue-goop one. The black patch was still there next to them: the big, dark, semi-solid growth of engine oil or tar. I stopped finding it annoying and started wondering what had made it: something must have happened there, some event, to have left this mark. After we’d finished practising one day I went over to it, crouched beside it, poked it with my finger. It was hard, but not brash or unfriendly. Its surface, viewed from just an inch away, was full of little pores-cracked, open, showing paths leading to the growth’s interior.
“It’s like a sponge,” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Samuels, who’d appeared beside me.
“Like a sponge. Flesh. Bits.”
Samuels looked down at the patch, then told me:
“Nazrul wants you to go with him somewhere.”
This was the day, Naz reminded me as we sat in the car being driven back to Chiswick, on which we were to tell the driver re-enactors that we’d switched the re-enactment’s scene back to the actual bank.
“They’re Layer Two, remember?” Naz said. “They have to practise driving through the streets. The story they’ve been given is Story Three, Version One-which it is vital not to mix with Version Two.”
“Fine,” I told him. “Whatever.”
We practised driving through the streets around the real bank. We only did the turning, cutting and stopping bit immediately outside the bank one time, and even then in a subdued way so as not to attract attention-but all the other streets we wove through time and again. It was autumn; trees were turning brown, yellow and red. If I let my eyes glaze over and unfocus the colours merged into a smooth, continual flow. In a few weeks, I thought to myself, the leaves would fall, then lie around in piles until someone carted them away.
“Like artichokes,” I said.
“This is Route Seven,” Naz was telling Driver Re-enactor One. “Route Seven, Version A. Remember that.”
“Or they might just decompose. Merge with each other and the tarmac.”