The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  “They look unread,” she noted.

  “Delirium amazonus,” he said. “I buy off Amazon in the middle of the night. Stuff turns up two days later and I’m, like, ‘I’m not reading this!’ Help yourself.” He paused. “What’s your number here, by the way?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your cellphone.”

  “I don’t have one; I’m the last person on earth without.”

  “This must be rectified.” He fetched an old mobile and charger they kept as a spare. “If you have a problem in the night, phone us upstairs.”

  “Thank you, Duncan, but I’ve been making it through the night without help since approximately age thirty.”

  “Feel free to call home or whatever. It’s just a Nokia dumbphone, but it’s got credit on it.”

  “Thank you. Very kind.”

  “The bed down here is squeaky, we were told by the last occupants.”

  “I’ll get in and remain motionless.”

  “So,” he said, standing taller, “before I go back upstairs, we need to touch on the big issue.”

  “Yes, absolutely, please. This mugging,” she said. “What happened, exactly?”

  “He doesn’t even remember it, so we’ll never know. To give you the background, I’d been dropping over to your dad’s once in a while, just checking in on him. Sheepshead Bay is way the hell out there, and I was—”

  “But wait. I still haven’t heard the whole story of how you two know each other. You said you found him after I left New York?”

  It was Xavi who had figured out where Tooly lived, from a marked-up map she had misplaced at their apartment. They’d trekked out to this street in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Expressway and found some old guy looking out the window. They waved for his attention, pressed the buzzer. Did he know where Tooly was? Was he a relative? Her father?

  Yes, maybe he was her father, but who were they? They explained themselves, and Humphrey buzzed them in.

  “So weird to think of you, him, and Xavi playing chess there,” she said.

  After that first meeting, Duncan went back alone, hoping to interrogate Humphrey. But he had no more success—the old man truly didn’t know where she’d gone. When law school got crazy, Duncan quit looking. He met Bridget, and that helped. He graduated, passed the bar, joined Perella Transom Fife LLP, started a family, moved back to Connecticut, and never thought of this guy, the father of an ex-girlfriend. Until, one afternoon, they bumped into each other at a hospital. Duncan had been visiting someone there, while Humphrey had minor surgery scheduled. They spoke briefly, then the old man—mortified—asked a favor. The hospital required an emergency contact number. Could he use Duncan’s?

  “I was the only person he knew in the whole city to put down,” Duncan said. “He honestly did not have one other number. A few days later, I’m at the hospital again. He’s recovering from surgery, so I drop in. He promised that, once he got better, he’d take me for dinner. I said, ‘Sure,’ in the way that you do, not expecting people to follow through. After the operation, he actually calls me. Since he’s too sore to travel, I drive down to where he’d moved in Sheepshead Bay. That’s when I saw how he was living. You’ll get a look tomorrow. After that, we kept in touch here and there.”

  “Incredibly nice of you. I know how busy you are.”

  “It was either me or nobody,” he said pointedly. “Anyhow, I hardly ever went down there. But flash-forward to last year. I happened to be in Brooklyn one Saturday morning, so decided to drop in. I get there, and find your dad sitting in the stairwell of his building. He goes, ‘They’ve taken everything!’ He doesn’t have his hearing aids in, so he can’t hear me. I have no way of asking anything. He’s got these marks on his throat like someone choked him. I get a piece of paper and pen, and write in big letters, ‘What happened?’ He looks up and goes, ‘Your writing is terrible. You’ll never get a job as a secretary.’ ”

  She smiled sadly. That was Humphrey, all right.

  Since the attack, he had declined. “I’m not saying he’s lost it,” Duncan specified. “Part of the problem is his hearing and his sight. That cuts him off. When a place is noisy, he can’t hear properly, which he finds upsetting. He stays mostly at his apartment. Goes deep into himself. I need a fishing line to reel him back to the world.”

  “This is sounding way worse than you described in your messages. How is he even managing on his own?”

  “There’s a Russian woman I pay a few bucks to clean up, get his groceries, hang out with him most mornings.”

  “That’s really generous of you.”

  “Basic decency,” he said.

  “And I guess they can talk Russian together.”

  “Didn’t know your dad spoke Russian,” he said. “I apologize, by the way, if I downplayed the situation. Just, this thing has consumed way too much time these last few months. My wife is upset, my kids are upset. I’ll be honest: I was getting desperate. Tried everything to find you.”

  “How did you?”

  “He mentioned how your actual first name is Matilda. I typed that in.”

  “With his last name.”

  “With Ostropoler, yeah,” Duncan confirmed. “Sorry if you were trying to get away from him, but you need to be involved.”

  “Wasn’t trying to get away.”

  “Well, sort of unusual not to talk to your dad for years, or even know where he was. Or him you.”

  This made her sound so callous. She wanted to justify herself. But that required saying too much about their own past. Neither wanted to get into that.

  “Sometimes I used to tell Bridget—I’m not even kidding—I told her I was working late on a case and actually snuck to Sheepshead to check on him,” he said. “It’s like I was having an affair. I’m the only guy in the tristate area who cheats on his wife by visiting a man of eighty-three!”

  “But he knows I’m here, right?” she said. “And he wants to see me?”

  “Of course. And it should be fine.” Duncan paused on the stairs, uncertain whether to say more. “But still,” he warned her, “you might want to brace yourself.”

  1988

  LUXURY CARS BLOCKED the entrance to King Chulalongkorn International School, engines snarling as a pair of sweat-soaked Thai guards checked credentials and pointed families toward the parking lots. The vast complex—elementary school, middle, and secondary, over acres of southeastern Bangkok—was on display for International Day, an annual celebration of the diversity of bankers, diplomats, journalists, shady expats, and spies rich enough to send their children here.

  Once inside, the kids ran wild, unleashed by parents and yet to be harnessed by teachers, with classes not starting till the following week. Some had arrived in school uniform; others wore street clothing, with Izod Lacoste and Polo Ralph Lauren in abundance. Childhood hierarchies reasserted themselves, abandoned during summer and tweaked now according to the growth spurts, the arrival of new dweebs, the repatriation of schoolyard idols.

  “Tooly?” Paul asked, as they waited outside the administrative offices for a tour. “Were you in those same clothes yesterday?”

  She wore shorts from which her little legs jutted, one sport sock pulled high, the other at her ankle, deck shoes squashed at the back to allow entry without lacing, T-shirt specked with soup stains from the Chinese restaurant.

  “You didn’t wear that to bed, did you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He glanced around, assaulted by high-pitched shrieks everywhere. The children segregated themselves according to gender but, since this was elementary school, the boys’ voices were just as shrill as the girls’.

  “You don’t smell, do you?”

  Before she could answer, a young teacher with ginger hair approached across the open-air courtyard.

  “Let me do the talking,” Paul told Tooly, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, thinking better of it, wriggling it free, then pocketing it again, lip curling upward to catch a sweat droplet. “Don
’t draw attention. All right?”

  Mr. Priddles smiled at each of them in turn, sandy eyelashes fluttering. He had been assigned to sell them on enrollment here, and led Paul and Tooly through the impressive facilities—playgrounds, band rooms, canteens, an aquatic center—describing the plethora of pursuits available.

  They passed a pond with rainbow carp bulleting through the water, and Tooly paused. A tortoise stood at the pond’s edge, looking at her. “Is he alive?”

  “That’s our new school pet, basically,” Mr. Priddles told Paul, ignoring her. “We’re running a competition to name it. Oh—excuse me, one sec.” He hustled off to chasten a rowdy trio of second graders for running near the pond.

  Entry forms were stacked by a ballot box, with a pencil hanging from a string. “What’s a good name for a tortoise?” she asked Paul, picking up the pencil and chewing the end.

  “Don’t. That’s not clean.”

  “What?”

  He took the pencil. “Tim?”

  “Who?”

  “Tooly, pay attention. Naming the turtle: Tim.”

  She hesitated, disliking his suggestion but not wanting to reject it.

  Two small boys bumped up against Paul, like a couple of waist-high mobsters. “What’s the difference between a tortoise and a turtle?” one demanded.

  Paul blinked. “Hmm, is it like the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?”

  “Nooooooo!” the boy howled. “Tortoise has round shell and turtle has flat. Turtle has web feet and tortoise has normal. Bet you don’t know how old tortoises get.”

  “Hmm, twenty?”

  “Nooooooo! Tortoises live to, like, a hundred and fifty-five years old. Bet you don’t know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane.”

  “One is a strong wind and …” Paul speculated, plucking at pit stains forming on his shirt. “Or is that a hurricane? I didn’t mean that. Is it …?” He shut his eyes, rummaging for facts untouched in years.

  The boys ran off.

  “Is a typhoon where …?” Paul opened his eyes, finding his interrogators gone, only Tooly before him, filling out her entry slip. He fumbled for his inhaler. “Children,” he remarked, “they know facts about things. How do they know these things?”

  “I don’t know the difference between a hurricane and a thingy.” She dropped her entry into the ballot box, having written “Jasper,” which suited a tortoise. “Can I pick him up?”

  “Who up?”

  “The tortoise that doesn’t have a name.”

  “We’re not allowed, Tooly.”

  “Why not?”

  “The teacher said.” He’d said no such thing, but Paul often concocted regulations to bolster his authority.

  When Mr. Priddles returned, he asked if Tooly wished to touch the animal. She did, and stroked its shell, tortoise limbs paddling slowly in air.

  “Just one remaining issue, basically,” Mr. Priddles said. “We received a dossier from her previous school in Australia, but it seems to be about a girl in ninth grade.”

  “Tooly’s nine years old,” Paul noted, “not in ninth grade.”

  “Yes, I realized when we spoke by phone. Alas, their error caused us to reserve her a place in ninth grade. We do welcome your daughter. Just not sure where to put her. Strict limit on class size and—”

  “I’m starting fifth grade,” Tooly interjected, fearful that someone’s mistake might consign her to a class of teenagers doing algebra exams and cross-country running.

  Mr. Priddles flashed her an artificial smile, then resumed his exchange with Paul. As the men spoke, she ventured in ever-larger circles around them, drifting farther from their orbit until she was able to spin through a doorway and out onto a playground, where she watched older girls playing volleyball. A teacher ordered them to the main field for the International Day festivities, and Tooly trailed a distance behind.

  At each new school, in each new country, she presented a new personality. It crystallized during the first weeks of school, after which there was no changing—people wouldn’t let you. In the end, you became what they expected you to be. At previous schools, she’d been diabolical, girly, a tomboy. But this time she had little urge to invent a new self, knowing it would be wiped away once they left. Even close friendships at her previous schools never lasted more than a few pen-pal letters after her departure, each note shorter than the last, until the responses stopped. It was just her and Paul; all else passed.

  Among new children, she always spotted the outcasts first, and had read enough novels to prefer them. Sometimes this let her down—certain kids deserved social banishment. But hidden among the losers, she suspected, were her kind. What she longed for was a person who’d say, as none ever had, “This is all so fake, isn’t it? Wink at me sometimes and it’ll be our sign.”

  The main field lacked cover from the scorching sun, so parasols were out, hats were on, and hands shaded brows. Parents occupied the plastic seats before the temporary stage, while hundreds of children sat on the grass around them. Tooly scanned the crowd. She found Paul nowhere.

  The principal, Mr. Cutter, tapped the microphone, exhorting the kids to simmer down and take a seat. Tooly knelt on the grass, layering hair over her face to block the sunlight. After a tedious welcome, the principal inaugurated the International Day parade, in which kids from the fifty-two countries represented at the school tromped across the stage in traditional outfits from their homelands, sweating under headdresses, tripping in curl-toed boots, stating into the malfunctioning microphone “Welcome!” in different mother tongues. The procession—every nation in alphabetical order to avoid charges of political favoritism—concluded with the lanky daughter of Zaire’s ambassador, who whispered her greeting and scurried away.

  Principal Cutter retook the microphone to announce the winner of the pet-naming contest. “After much discussion, we decided not to allow names of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sorry, boys,” he said. “Drum roll: our school pet for the year 1988-89 is henceforth known as …” He drew out the suspense. “Her name is … Myrtle the Turtle!”

  “Myrtle?” snorted the parent of a losing entrant. “Are you kidding me?”

  “A turtle?” another grumbled. “Isn’t it a tortoise?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  While this perplexing question rustled through the crowd, hundreds of kids scrambled for the picnic tables, aware that a potluck lunch was soon to materialize.

  “Not all at once, you guys!” Principal Cutter said, to no avail.

  Thai support staff distributed plastic plates and forks, paper napkins, bottled water. Many mothers and the occasional father opened Tupperware containers of homemade (maid-made) food across the tables. Tooly entered a queue at random and exited holding a plateful of parsley-flecked meatballs with spicy sauce for hats, the native dish of a country she never identified.

  She weaved through the crowd, attempting to appear headed somewhere, then sneaked into a building, past an Olympic pool, through the girls’ changing room, down a long hallway of lockers, passing a Thai janitor to whom she said hello, though he only looked down. The cafeteria was empty except for six boys younger than she, all boasting of disgusting food they’d eaten, including (they said) elephant and live snakes. One claimed to have eaten human being, though this turned out to be only his own toenails. At the presence of a girl, they fled.

  Alone at the long refectory table, Tooly chased a slippery meatball around her plate, then parted her hair curtains and consulted the wall clock. A teacher had once told her that, viewed in the timespan of the universe, a human life lasts just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. Her life didn’t feel like a fraction of a second; things took ages. Time may pass quickly for the universe, but she had never been a universe.

  When she returned to the administrative offices, Paul had still not materialized. The secretaries paged him with no result, finally dispatching a search party of sixth graders. A Malaysian girl found him locked in
one of the basketball courts. “Like a labyrinth in there,” he muttered in the taxi home.

  “I’m not in ninth grade now, am I?” Tooly asked.

  “No, no—they’ll find space in fourth or fifth.”

  “Fourth?” she exclaimed, looking at him. “Didn’t I do most of that already?”

  “Let’s not make a fuss. There’s not a huge difference.”

  But how could grades be compared? Each person you fought or befriended would be different, every teacher changed, your life unfolded in another way. Instead of escaping school after eight more years, she’d be sentenced to nine. An extra year of life wasted.

  Being young was so unfair, and you couldn’t leave. That was the difference between childhood and adulthood: children couldn’t go; grown-ups could. Paul made them leave every year. Just packed up—another city. Whatever you hated disappeared.

  She looked out the taxi window. “I only …”

  He waited. “Finish your sentence, Tooly.”

  “They named the tortoise.”

  “What?”

  “Tim,” she lied.

  “That was your suggestion,” he said. “Good, Tooly.”

  “You thought of it.”

  “Well, it was our idea.” He reached over to shake her hand. “Let’s take it as a sign—this is the school for you.”

  CLASSES DIDN’T START till the following Monday, so Tooly found herself confined to the apartment again, though the live-in maid had now arrived. Previous housekeepers had been beloved friends to Tooly, so she greeted this woman with much optimism. Shelly was a Lao speaker from the northeast with a slight hunchback, possessing every skill required to endear herself to a Western household: she ironed flawlessly, kept purified water in the fridge, knew how to make spaghetti bolognese and to fry eggs, kept the floors sparkling, the surfaces dustless. Yet she proved a less-than-calming presence. When Paul or Tooly entered a room, Shelly bowed her head, pressed her palms together in the wai praying gesture, and hurried away as if someone had stamped at her.