The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  “It’s flat from here on,” Tooly said, continuing down the ridge.

  “You walk!” Wheeze. “So!” Wheeze. “Fast!”

  “Not that fast. Do I?”

  Afterward, Prue thanked her. She never asked to come again.

  Partly, Tooly had engineered it this way. Friends required a life story. Your past mattered only if others sought to know it—it was they who demanded that one possessed a history. Alone, you could do without.

  That was why she and Fogg got along so well. He accepted her evasions, never pried.

  “What are you mastering tonight, then?” he inquired.

  She held up her ukulele.

  “To be brutally honest, I’m not familiar with a large oeuvre of ukulele compositions,” he said. “What led you to pick up the instrument?”

  “Just decided one day,” she replied. “When you lock up, bring in the barrel, I think.”

  Already on the drive to Monmouth, rain poured down. At the home of her teacher, she rushed from the car, ukulele and sheet music under her shirt. On her request, they practiced “The William Tell Overture.” She played one part, her teacher accompanied, then they switched. What delight, this synchrony, the development, leaning into the phrases, a melody emerging from black dots on the staves, marks inked there in 1828, communicating across all this time! It was such excitement that, at times, she could barely strum.

  She drove home jerkily fast, foot tapping the rhythm on the gas pedal, singing at full voice—“Dada-dum, dada-dum, dada-dum-dum-dum!”—accompanied by the flapping plastic sheet over the passenger window. At the parking lot across from World’s End, she nosed the car around for a free spot—at night, the place filled with patrons headed to the Hook.

  What about dropping in there for a glass of something to amplify her good cheer? She took a wander up Roberts Road, the rowdy banter growing as she approached the pub. A group of laborers—faces worn by sun, dirt, and cigarettes—sat at the picnic tables outside, gripping sloppy pints, eyeing ladies out on a hen night, heavy gals in stilettos, ankles tattooed, thighs goosebumped, floppy bosoms held up with underwire scaffolding. On the opposite side of the road was the legion bar, reserved for veterans of foreign wars. Now and then, a boy who’d fought in Iraq or Afghanistan took a break from darts and glowered at the pub across the way, at the wobbly girls giggling over spilled cider.

  As Tooly passed between these two drinking holes, hawkish men on each side registered only her short haircut, pale lips, and sexless fashion, which rendered her invisible to them. If ever a man fancied her these days, she suspected him of low standards, of being a goat in heat. Were she to enter the Hook, she’d find many such goats. A tipsy one might make for brief amusement. But in a village you couldn’t avoid your mistakes. Best to return home. She wanted only a glass of mild intoxication tonight. A bottle of Pinot Noir was already open in the kitchen.

  She filled her glass too high and, lips to the brim, slurped it to a more seemly height, then nibbled crackers and cheese, humming “The William Tell Overture” with wine-purple lips. What a marvel, this drink! Past a certain age—about twenty-six, was it?—after the last flickers of the younger self, a pressure grew inside her during the course of each day, butting against the limits of her existence. Until, at her first nightly sip, she dilated, the tightness eased, and she floated in thoughts, outside time. She cupped a hand over her brow and gazed out the latched window at the farmland beyond Caergenog, all blackness at this hour. She took a pace back, watching a reflection of the kitchen and of herself, wine level decreasing over the minutes.

  Down the stairs she went, treading tipsily through the darkened shop. Within arm’s reach were so many sublime minds—she could awaken them off the shelf (no matter the hour, they were more alert than she), bid them start, and encounter a soul fitted with perception like hers, only sharper. But tonight it was the computer that lured her. She cradled the keyboard in her lap, giving a little shiver as the machine blinked and whirred, icons populating the desktop, her face lit by the screen.

  Tooly had long shied away from computers, associating them so strongly with Paul. And she’d managed to avoid them better than most, living as she had, disconnected from wires, traveling city to city, job to job, taking positions that required minimal technological skills. The longer she’d gone without a computer of her own, the more mystifying all the digital hubbub became.

  But World’s End, for all its bound paper, came with a few microchips, too, in the form of this clunky old desktop, a senior citizen at age four. Fogg had taught her how to enter sales on it, and had insisted on showing her around the Internet, too, extolling its marvels and scope by searching for her name—though he was rather crestfallen to discover no results whatsoever.

  For more than a year, Tooly had remained aloof from that computer. At most, she tried simple Web searches like “ukulele,” nearly scared at the landslide of hits. Then, gradually, she explored a little further. Eventually, hours vanished there. Like a black hole, the Internet generated its own gravity, neither light nor time escaping. Cats playing the piano, breasts and genitals popping out, strangers slandering strangers. The lack of eye contact explained so much of what happened online. Including her own new habit: prowling through the past.

  In recent weeks, she had started searching for names, old ones, of lost friends, former schoolteachers, fellow pupils, acquaintances from cities she’d left years before. Through the online murk, she spied their lives, piecing together what had happened: colleges, employers, married to, activities, interests. An employment history on LinkedIn might suggest a glittering start—Trainee to District Manager to Vice President—followed by an unexplained Self-Employed. The “Lives In …” on Facebook provided unexpected locales: Oslo or Hanoi or Lima. If she and they had maintained contact, the progressions from school to career to family would have passed so gradually as to be unremarkable. But online profiles converted the increments of life into leaps, transforming schoolchildren into graying parents in an instant.

  How odd to have quit so many places and people, yet be preoccupied with them now, as they were surely not concerned with her. Still, Tooly never contacted those she peeped at, conducting her compulsive searches under the pseudonym Matilda Ostropoler, which combined her proper first name with the last name of a former friend.

  All this nostalgic prowling—invariably after a few drinks—promised gratification yet left unease. It was as if a long spoon had been dipped inside her and stirred. Unlike in books, there was no concluding page on the Internet, just a limitless chain that left her tired, tense, up too late.

  Time to switch off. Time to go to bed, look at the rafters, restore the memory of her music lesson. If she closed her eyes thinking of the fingerboard, would her brain practice while she slept?

  She half stood—then roused the computer, testing its promise of satisfaction behind each next click. At the top left of the screen appeared a flag, a Facebook friend request. Because of her pseudonym, such requests came only from lurking weirdos. She clicked it, intending to decline.

  Except she recognized this name: Duncan McGrory.

  Tooly walked away from the computer, down the closest aisle, tapping nervously on books as she went. It had been years since her last contact with Duncan. How had he found her? Mouth dry, she stood with her finger over the mouse button. Read his name again. She clicked yes.

  Within moments, he had messaged her: “Desperately trying to reach you. Can we talk about your father???”

  She clenched her clammy hands, wiped them on her shirt. Her father? Whom could he mean?

  1988

  “DON’T.”

  “Don’t what?”

  Before Paul had walked in, Tooly was jumping on her bed, watching the view of Bangkok fly up and down through the window. Upon hearing him, she bent her knees and grasped the covers in a breathless crouch, feet flexing on the quivering mattress. “I’m not wearing any shoes,” she said in her defense.

  “Don’t be argumenta
tive about everything.”

  She took a ballet leap off the bed and crashed to the floor, tumbling across the cool tiles, landing on her belly, then rolling onto her back to show that she was unhurt.

  “People live below us. Stop that.”

  Paul was particularly tense that morning, expected at the U.S. Embassy in less than an hour to start his latest contract. He was an information-technology specialist for Ritcomm, a private company hired by the State Department to upgrade diplomatic communications overseas. The larger American embassies, such as here in Bangkok, had mainframe computers with telecom links to Washington, allowing them to check the latest “bad-guy list” whenever a foreign national sought to visit America. But many smaller U.S. outposts had never been linked to the network, and were obliged to consult ancient documents on microfiche. Paul was overseeing upgrades around the world, traveling to each dinky consulate, where he conducted a site survey, installed the Wang VS able to open up a 3270 emulation, ran BNC cables to every desk terminal. Finally, the staffers could connect at 9.6 bps via the phone line, type in a name, date of birth, place of birth, and wait for a hit.

  Each of his assignments lasted about a year, during which he based himself at a hub like Bangkok and traveled throughout the region, doing his best to avoid time at the suffocating embassies. Diplomats there often styled themselves a ruling class, treating support staff like servants. Paul might be assigned to fix a faulty dot matrix, for instance, or told to exorcise gremlins from the ambassador’s monitor. On embassy days, he tried to vanish among the swarms of staff and visitors—just another guy slouching out of the cafeteria with a Styrofoam box for lunch. He avoided others’ company by choice, although this was not the only reason he made himself unknown.

  Tooly watched him hobbling around in one black Velcro shoe, his polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis. He sniffed—air-conditioning congested his sinuses—then swallowed, Adam’s apple rippling, neck dotted with razor-burn blossoms. “Where’s my other shoe?” His anxiety pervaded the apartment, and her. The disquiet of others was an undiscovered force alongside gravity that, rather than pulling downward, emanated outward from its source. Unfortunately, she was excessively attuned to his nervous pulses. She joined the hunt and discovered his lost shoe under the couch. Disastrously late now, he grabbed for floppy disks and printouts. At the door, he stopped. “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “Where are you today, Tooly?”

  “What?”

  “What are you supposed to be doing? I can’t just leave you here.”

  “Isn’t there a housekeeper coming?”

  “Not till Thursday.” Paul always endeavored to keep them prepared, yet the narrowness of his attention caused lapses. He was a man who could grind at a programming conundrum for thirty hours and resolve it elegantly, then look up to find all else in decay. “Goddamn!”

  “I don’t mind staying on my own.”

  “I mind,” he said.

  “Can I jump on the bed?”

  He checked the time. No choice but to leave her there. He came near to an apology, then locked her inside.

  This new apartment was large and modern, constructed in the late 1970s, ceilings low, furniture sparse. The windows hummed with AC units, which blew up the skirts of the curtains. In Paul’s room, open suitcases lay on the bed. His computer, a high-performance DEC workstation, was always shipped ahead. She was forbidden to touch it alone, yet did so now, turning the dial on the cube monitor and flicking the I/O switch, floppy-drive light flickering. Within minutes, a green cursor fast-blinked on the black screen.

  He had taught her a program once, and she typed it in now, then hit Return. The words “Hello world!” flashed onscreen. Tooly imagined that the machine was alive, and typed back “hello.” But the cursor blinked dumbly. She was only talking to herself.

  She left everything exactly as before and ventured into his en-suite bathroom, closed the toilet lid, and climbed up. Tooly parted her unbrushed hair as if it were curtains and peered between, voicing imagined dialogues with acquaintances from previous cities: stewardesses, travelers, and other forms of grown-up. In the mirror, she inspected herself, ears protruding, forefinger fish-hooked in her mouth. All her clothing was rolled up at the hems. She was supposed to grow into it, but remained little. In every class photo, Tooly was at the front—next to whichever resentful boy genetics had consigned to a similarly low altitude.

  It didn’t feel as if that reflection in the mirror was really her.

  She slid open the mosquito-screen door to the back balcony. The morning sun glared through smog. Beyond the apartment complex stood rusty corrugated shacks and banana trees where birds chirped. She fetched Paul’s binoculars, sneaking them off a high shelf, popped the eye caps, and wiped the lenses on her T-shirt, the glass squeak-squeak-squeaking. With a finger raised (“Careful!”), she returned to the balcony.

  Tooly deplored birding, among the dullest activities ever conceived by adults. Animals were endearing when they were crude versions of people, but birds weren’t human at all. Paul said birds had evolved from dinosaurs, which was hard to believe, given that dinosaurs were notably interesting. Nevertheless, she looked everywhere for birds. On the occasions that she spotted one, the sighting pleased Paul, and she wished for that rare effect. Generally, she seemed to irritate him.

  “Which do you like best,” she’d once asked him, “birds or people?”

  “Oh, birds,” he responded emphatically, adding softly, “Definitely birds.”

  Back inside, she clasped in each fist a corner of her T-shirt, stood under the ceiling fan, the propeller chopping air. She remained motionless, her heart rate increasing until she sprang forward, sprinting through the living room, leaping onto her bed, landing on her knees, then bounding off again—through the kitchen, into the empty maid’s quarters, squealing till she remembered that she oughtn’t. She jammed a handful of shirt into her mouth, fabric dampening as she galloped around, sucking breaths through her nose. On the front balcony, she halted, looking down onto their lane, where construction workers toiled, bicyclists queued before a food stall, a street tailor hunched over his pedal-operated sewing machine. All those people down there and she up here—how strange that there were different places, events happening at that moment, and she wasn’t in them. There were people she’d once known doing things on the other side of the world at that instant.

  She ran back inside, grabbed her book, and belly-flopped onto the couch. With the thick paperback of Nicholas Nickleby spread before her, Tooly went still. When reading, she appeared comatose and deaf. Yet inside she moved all the faster, hurrying along a tall wooden fence through whose knotholes she observed extraordinary scenes: a whip-bearing butcher cleaning his hands on a leather apron, say; or a pickpocket with a stump for an arm; or a crafty innkeeper eavesdropping on clients. Sometimes she found her view blocked by a mysterious word—what, for example, was an “epitome”? Nevertheless, she hastened forward, finding the next knothole, having missed only an instant. To disappear into pages was to be blissfully obliterated. For the duration, all that existed was her companions in print; her own life went still:

  “May I—may I go with you?” asked Smike, timidly. “I will be your faithful hard-working servant, I will, indeed. I want no clothes,” added the poor creature, drawing his rags together; “these will do very well. I only want to be near you.”

  “And you shall,” cried Nicholas. “And the world shall deal by you as it does by me, till one or both of us shall quit it for a better. Come!”

  She considered the word “shall,” wishing to utter words like that to stammering friends who inquired, “May I—may I go with you, Tooly?” To which she’d reply, “You shall!”

  Paul stood beside her, lips moving, words emerging but not sounding yet, her ears still switched off. A stick of dried spaghetti in her mouth, she finished the chapter, then closed the book. “I saw a tree babbler,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In a t
ree.”

  He lowered himself into an armchair, rubbed his face. “Don’t eat raw spaghetti.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Why are your lips green? Were you tasting toothpaste again?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Just have something normal from the fridge.”

  “There wasn’t anything normal.”

  “What was there?”

  “Nothing.”

  He frowned disbelievingly and rose to check. But why would there have been food? They’d only moved in the day before. Every cupboard was empty, the fridge unplugged. He had left her alone for ten hours. “Nothing since breakfast?” he asked.

  “I didn’t have breakfast.”

  He opened all the cupboards again, ashamed of his oversight and uncertain how to respond. He checked the clock. (In place of numbers, its display had birds; instead of chiming, it twittered on the hour. By now, they could tell time by birdsong.) “It’s blackbird past owl,” he said. “I have to feed you.”

  “You shall.”

  She described the tree babbler but fell silent when the elevator doors closed after them—he opposed talking in elevators, since outsiders could hear. They crossed the building’s courtyard, which was lined with frangipani trees and flanked by twin fountains, spray misting the hot evening air. “Nothing at all?”

  “That spaghetti,” she replied. “When I was on the balcony, I saw places down the road where they have food.”

  “We’re not eating things from the street, Tooly.”

  “Can I try?”

  “There’ll be proper restaurants,” he said. “They probably have Italian in Bangkok. You like spaghetti.”

  “Can I see down our street first?”

  “You saw from the window.”

  “Only from high up.”

  “Well … okay. But follow me and stick close.” He stepped from the complex and onto the soi, directly into the path of a motorcycle, which swerved around him, its whoosh fluttering her T-shirt. Walls ran along both sides of the lane, hiding the expat apartment buildings, while electricity cables hung from utility poles like vines. They walked single file toward the main road, Sukhumvit, passing a cart of tropical fruit on ice: papaya spears in plastic bags, skinned pineapples, hairy rambutans. The shopkeeper attacked a mango with a butcher knife, severing it on a tree-stump cutting board.