The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  But it was Humphrey who had now popped back into her life. Was it crazy to think Venn might be involved? If she went out there, might he be waiting?

  Tooly gazed up the hillside, straining for a last glimpse of the ponies. But she absorbed little of her surroundings. None of this mattered. Her bookshop. Nothing. The past simply outranked the present, and it awaited her in New York.

  THE PLANE DESCENDED toward the city, its winged shadow gliding over the ocean surface. Tooly, who’d flown so often in her life, had become nervous about planes in recent years. She clenched at each wobble now—when the engines roared into action, when they fell silent.

  In the terminal, a Homeland Security officer with elephantine legs and a crackling walkie-talkie watched the hordes plod by, bleary JFK arrivals dragging bags and babies and time zones behind them, their shoulders and hopes sinking at the monumental immigration lines—fault of the terrorists or fault of the response, depending on one’s politics. She recalled how nervous Paul had been whenever they crossed a border. At the counter, a thick-shouldered agent with a dapper little mustache took her American passport, flipped the pages slowly. “Welcome home, ma’am.”

  The outer boroughs of New York rushed past the window of the yellow cab, with Tooly crammed behind a bulletproof divider implanted with a blaring television that she couldn’t shut off. The driver chatted on a hands-free, and Tooly kept looking up, thinking she was being addressed, only to realize that he was speaking Punjabi.

  In her two-star midtown hotel, she awoke in the dark—that under-the-soil blackness of a hotel room with the curtains drawn. Syncopated police sirens blooped faintly from the street below, as if a kid were in there pressing buttons. Demonic red digits glowed beside her: 4:31 A.M.

  Cupping basin water to her mouth, she roused herself, parted the curtains, and discovered an Orion’s belt of office lights. On the television, she read descriptions of pay-per-view movies: “A former marine falls in love with a native of a lush alien world”; “Two NYPD detectives must retrieve a valuable baseball card.” Every commercial seemed to be for pharmaceuticals. Possible side effects included unpleasant taste in mouth, dizziness, abnormal thoughts and behavior, swelling of the tongue, memory loss, anxiety, getting out of bed while not being fully awake and doing an activity you do not know you are doing.

  Would she disturb those in the next rooms if she practiced her ukulele? To be among people again, in close quarters, required an adjustment. When she left Caergenog, placing Fogg in charge, he had insisted there was no such place as “away” these days, because of technology. But this seemed “away.”

  In about twelve hours, she’d see Duncan. How would he be? Angry? He had never been that way when they were together. But in their online exchange he was curt, mentioning coldly his wife, kids, job. When she requested a phone number for Humphrey, he told her to just come out there. Your father needs you. Not just a phone call.

  Hours later, she awoke again, a different self on second rising, parting the hotel curtains on a different city, too: sunlight gleaming off skyscrapers, geometric patches of sky. It was Saturday, but in the offices across the street a few human shapes approached their desks, rubbing their faces as Windows started. In the hotel lobby, a brass revolving door swallowed Tooly, spat her into the metropolis, her entrance punctuated by doormen whistling for cabs and the bap-bap-bap of horns. She navigated without a map, knowing her way without knowing how, the topography within her still, though latent for more than a decade.

  In her absence, New York had been invaded by cupcakes. Joggers ran barefoot now. Hipsters wore nerd glasses and beards. And walking had become an obstacle course, pedestrians inebriated on handheld devices, jostling one another as they passed, glancing up dimly at the shared world, then back into the bottomless depths projected from shining glass.

  When she lived here, people were always lamenting how New York had changed, how Mayor Giuliani had cleansed Times Square of its gritty charm, turned it into a bland Disneyland. But the city had gentrified further since. Maybe it was just the experience of knowing New York over time, that it kept tidying up. Or perhaps it was the experience of living generally, that you hitched yourself to a particular period but places refused to remain anchored, jarring you at each re-acquaintance.

  She arrived at Grand Central for her 4 P.M. train, people fast-walking in all directions, an explosion of humanity with rolling bags. In Caergenog, the church parking lot would be full right now, Saturday-night drinkers at the Hook, ponies wandering the windy ridge. It would be dark up there, lights dotting the valley.

  Upon her arrival in Stamford, she hesitated before the station exit, surprised at her nerves on seeing Duncan again. A silver BMW pulled up; the passenger door clicked open. He nodded at her. “Welcome to sunny Connecticut.”

  He’d become rather middle-aged: a hunch and a paunch, skin dull, eyes fatigued. She saw already the elderly man he would become, while the youth she’d known grew faint. “Jet-lagged?” he asked, glancing from Tooly to his lap, where he balanced an iPhone on one thigh, a blinking BlackBerry on the other. A notepad lay on the dashboard. She hadn’t seen his handwriting in years. Architectural block letters on graph paper evoked him so powerfully—even more than the man himself, somehow.

  Driving toward his home in Darien, he pointed out the sights: a pond where he’d ice-skated as a boy, plus the old Post Road, a stagecoach-mail route in the early years of the republic that now offered SmartLipo, laser hair removal, and Bob’s Unpainted Furniture Gun Exchange.

  Duncan was a partner at a Manhattan law firm now, head of a household, and self-possessed as he’d endearingly not been when younger. She perceived irony in the way he spoke to her, as if he’d discussed her earlier, perhaps with his wife—had said that Tooly was just so, and now before him she was proving exactly that. What had Duncan said she was? A little false? A little untrustworthy?

  He turned sharply into a driveway. “Home.”

  Before exiting, she said, “About tomorrow?”

  “There’ll be time to discuss that later,” he said, getting out. “Meet my family now.”

  “Sure. Of course.” She took out four cellophane bags of wrapped Swiss chocolates. “I brought presents for the youngsters. They each get a bag, I thought, to avoid civil war.”

  “They’ll explode if we let them eat all that,” he said, struggling to unlock the house door with a mobile phone in each hand. “May have to take control myself.”

  “Will not, you thief. I’m handing them out now, and you’re not interfering.”

  “Three of them over there,” he said, back-kicking the door shut and nodding toward his seven-year-old identical triplets, who lay on an Oriental rug in the living room, one bopping to huge white headphones, her genetic double playing a game on a smartphone, the third goggling at an iPad. All three were dressed as fairies, in leotards with gossamer wings.

  “Abigail?” Tooly said. “Which is Abigail? Stand and identify yourself—this is for you. Actually, doesn’t matter who gets which. Are you Chloë? And you’re Madlen? Eat them fast, before your father confiscates.”

  Each girl snatched a package and ran to the couch.

  “Four candies each and save the rest for later,” he said. “All right, girls?”

  The triplets settled cross-legged, picking through their respective hauls, wings quivering as they dug forearm-deep into crinkly cellophane.

  “And your boy?” Tooly asked, raising the final gift bag.

  But Duncan was shouting upstairs for his wife. “Hail to the chief! Bridget!” No response. “Girls,” he asked, “where’s Mommy?”

  They ignored him, gorging themselves.

  “Bridget!” he shrieked, calling down to the basement now. “Bridge!”

  “Mommy!” one of the triplets cried.

  Another added, “Mom-my! You got uh vis-i-tuhhhh!”

  Soon all were yelling. Houses with children—Tooly had forgotten about the shouting.

  Chloë started dialing her ph
one.

  “Honey,” Duncan told her, “don’t call Mommy. She’s probably just studying upstairs.”

  That’s where they found her, earbuds in, which explained her fright when Duncan tapped her shoulder. “Oh jeez, hi,” she said, clasping her necklace. “Why didn’t you tell me your guest got here?” She clipped back her dirty-blond hair, nudged up black-rimmed glasses, and offered a handshake. Tooly would never have put her with Duncan. She was considerably taller, for a start. Not that this precluded a match, but it wasn’t what you expected.

  They found the eldest child, Keith (known as Mac), playing Kinectimals on his Xbox 360 in the den. Whenever he moved, it controlled a cutesy puppy onscreen. Though, when you saw the eight-year-old falling on his back, then on his hind legs, it looked rather like the machine was doing the controlling.

  “Seriously, Mac, isn’t that kind of a baby game?” Duncan asked.

  Chastened, the boy turned it off. Whereas the triplets had traces of Asia in their slender features, with long black hair swishing like prideful little ponies, Mac was a plump boy who shared his mother’s pale Irish-German coloring.

  “You didn’t hear us calling?” Duncan said. “We were all calling.”

  Mac accepted his bag of chocolates and thanked Tooly, standing barefoot before her, his big toes crossed over each other.

  “We’re about to eat dinner,” Duncan said. “You can try them after. Just be patient.”

  “Oh, let him have some,” Bridget said.

  Duncan counted out just two, then placed them on the table.

  Dinner proved raucous, not just owing to the cross-purpose conversations but because of the laptops. Checking email was discouraged at mealtimes but—fortunately for Abigail, Chloë, and Madlen—there was no rule against playing Justin Bieber videos on YouTube. The triplets kept jumping from their seats and setting off new clips.

  “Aren’t there nine planets?” Duncan said. “Can someone Google that? Not with your knife and fork, Mac. You’re getting sauce in the frickin’ keyboard, man!”

  “I’m not Googling. It’s Wikipedia.”

  “How on earth,” Bridget said, “did people find out stuff before Google?”

  “The library?” her husband suggested.

  “Like on iTunes,” one of the triplets said.

  “Not an iTunes library, Maddy,” Duncan told her. “Like an actual library.”

  “Whatever, dork ass,” she responded.

  The family exploded into laughter, Duncan above all, and Madlen beamed, staring in red-faced delight at each adult in turn.

  “Keyboard’s filthy, you guys,” Duncan said. “Let’s try and not total that computer in, like, its first six months of life.”

  “How do you spell ‘planets’?” Mac asked.

  Bridget answered, “Like it sounds, honey: plan-ets.”

  Mac whispered those sounds to himself, typing each letter as if depressing a key might explode something. He read it back, looking to his mother: “P-L-A-N-I-T-S?”

  “With an e,” Duncan said. “She told you: plan-ets.”

  “An e where?”

  “An e … aargh!” He dropped his spaghetti-spun fork and leaned over to type it himself. Aloud, Duncan skimmed the Wikipedia entry. “Only eight planets now? What the hell? When did that happen?”

  Mac wandered away from the table.

  “We’re still eating, Mac.”

  Tooly helped clear the dishes and, on her second return trip to the kitchen, bumped into the triplets, who were taking turns licking the pasta scoop. “Can I try one of those chocolates I brought you?”

  They stood before the fridge door, guarding their bags from her.

  “Not even one?” Tooly remembered girls like this from school days—nasty little things in pretty little costumes. To be outfoxed by seven-year-olds again!

  Bridget insisted on finishing the cleanup and dispatched Tooly and Duncan to the den, where he flipped among cable news channels.

  She could have raised the matter of Humphrey again, but Duncan seemed intent on first asserting his current station in life, as if to efface how he’d been when she knew him. “So tell me more about what you do now,” she said. “I know law, but what, exactly?”

  “Transactional-slash-corporate.”

  “You slash corporations?”

  “The corporations do the slashing. I’m their humble servant. Lots of preparing contracts, setting up stacks of paper for the business folks when they come in for their big meeting. When I’m in the middle of a major deal, I’ll do like a hundred-hour week.”

  “You enjoy it?”

  “I do, weirdly. Anything is interesting if you look at it long enough. The worst part is the people I’m hired to work for. Not unusual to get a call Friday afternoon from some jerk of twenty-three at a private equity fund going, ‘Sorry, guy, but I need you to spend every minute of your weekend doing this. Need it on my desk nine A.M. Monday.’ ”

  Bridget entered. “Is he moaning about making partner?” She patted his thigh, inadvertently knocking the BlackBerry between his legs.

  He collected it, reading emails as he spoke: “So, I made partner on schedule in January, right? It’s supposed to be the brass ring after eight years, okay? But now I’m getting shit on just as hard as I ever was. Senior partners still telling me what to do. Haven’t gotten a significant raise.”

  “What you’re witnessing,” Bridget said, “is the first time Duncan has been present on a weekend in four months.”

  “Oh dear,” Tooly said. “Just as you guys get a break, I turn up and force you to host me.”

  “No, no. It’s cool to have guests,” she said. Bridget had also studied law at NYU, but hadn’t worked as an attorney because of the kids. To her delight, she was about to start part-time at a firm on Wall Street, which explained her studying. “It’s piecemeal to start—paid by the hour to sit in a room with a bunch of other contract attorneys, scrolling through a database of millions of emails. But they could order me to do photocopies and I’d be, like, ‘How many?’ Actual conversations with actual grown-up human beings again. Yay!”

  Duncan switched to a different news channel. “Yes, yes,” he muttered at the pundits. “Unsatisfied with ruining the economy, you dickweeds are now going to fix the world.”

  “He’s not allowed to say things like that around people at work,” Bridget explained. “Hence the ranting at home.”

  “Tragically accurate,” Duncan said.

  As they sat there, sipping Shiraz, bathed in the light of cable news, Tooly contemplated him. It seemed so improbable that their two bodies had ever had sex. How did people get to that stage, the clothes-pulling part? The whole endeavor struck her as absurd for a moment.

  “What’s the smile for?” he asked.

  “Just thinking about your old place. With Xavi and Emerson.”

  “Right.”

  “And Ham the pig downstairs.”

  “Hmm.” He returned his attention to the TV, evidently not wanting to discuss the old days.

  They insisted that she stay overnight—it was late, and both McGrorys had drunk a bit much to drive her to the station. Duncan showed her to the basement suite, passing a workbench piled with dusty luggage and compact discs.

  “Still big on music?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said sarcastically, “I’m so cutting-edge that I learn about bands from my daughters.”

  Mac, who had followed them down to the basement, stared up at his father.

  “How much do I have to pay you to get a repeat performance of ‘Free Bird’?” Tooly asked Duncan, smiling.

  “Not happening.”

  She clasped her hands pleadingly. “Just a bit? You have to! Your son needs to see this!”

  Duncan shook his head gruffly, as if she’d done something offensive.

  “What’s ‘Free Bird’?” Mac asked.

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  The boy looked to Tooly, then back at his father.

  “Seriously, Ma
c. Time for bed. No discussion.”

  The boy trudged upstairs.

  “Now,” Duncan said uneasily at the door to the suite, “before you go to bed, I should hear what you’ve been up to these years. You just vanished.”

  She had ample practice derailing such inquiries. But Duncan, having known a younger Tooly, retained access to that version of her. Plus, she’d eaten his food, drunk his wine, was staying in his basement. So she found herself summarizing the past eleven years. How, in her early twenties, she’d worked her way across America, taking all manner of short-term jobs: waitress, clerical, shop clerk. She spent a year in Chicago, three more on the West Coast, then traveled around Latin America, falling for each new place, poring over property sections in the local newspapers. Until, weeks later, she yearned to escape that place, and did. At one stage, she participated in a one-month expedition down the Amazon, but left when the man who’d invited her proclaimed one morning, “The sight of you making your tea, getting it just right, makes me want to pull my hair out. I’m sorry. I had to say it finally.” She tried Europe, working briefly at an expat listings magazine in Paris, then went to Brussels, where she took a job at a souvenir shop and dated a Congolese musician. Next, she toured Spain alone, developing an ache she couldn’t explain. At a flamenco hall in Seville, she met an Argentine woman and they spoke all night about books and travel. Afterward, as Tooly walked back to her hotel, tears came into her eyes. So, so lonely. In defiance, she hadn’t met with the woman as planned, instead traveling onward to Portugal. She stood on a train platform in Lisbon one evening without any reading material, so picked up a scrunched literary journal whose articles were so dull that she perused the classifieds, happening upon one that stated, “Bookshop for Sale.” She had been nearly thirty then—perhaps time to try something rooted.

  “I get to read all day long,” she said.

  “Cool.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you saw my life—very uncool.”

  From professional habit, she ran her finger down a stack of glossy hardcovers on the workbench, each volume a recent doomsaying bestseller about the profligacy of a culture whose capitalist soul Duncan himself serviced. This was his “apocalypse porn,” Duncan said. Nonfiction titles like Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.