McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Remainder

2005

"It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off."

Surplus matter. I'd forgotten all about that phrase, those classes--even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually--but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important. Sports, for example, got a good spot. Before the accident I'd never been particularly interested in sports. But when my memory came back I found I could remember every school basketball and football game I'd played in really clearly. I could see the layout of the court or pitch, the way I and the other players had moved around it. Cricket especially. I remembered exactly what it had been like to play it in the park on summer evenings. I remembered the games I had seen on TV: overviews of the field's layout with diagrams drawn over them showing which vectors were covered and which weren't, slow-motion replays. Other things became less important than they had been before. My time at university, for example, was reduced to a faded picture: a few drunken binges, burnt out friendships and a heap of half-read books all blurred into a big pile of irrelevance.
(pp. 91-2)

Animals::Birds::Pigeons

Reading

Tom McCarthy, Remainder (New York: Vintage, 2005).

01/11/2014