The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  He shuddered so intensely that she undid her duffle coat and draped it over his shoulders, forcing her residual warmth onto him. Duncan objected weakly while trying not to look directly at her figure, now more evident without the coat. He fastened his attention elsewhere—tree bark, the pig, a fence—then found her, head cocked, looking directly at him, smiling. “Nice and bracing,” she said. They remained there for a minute, breath clouds alternating, his gradually synchronizing with hers.

  He tried further questions, asking where she was from, noting her odd way of talking, inquiring about her age. Tooly gave her birth date, which surprised him—he’d taken her for older. His other queries she dodged, which punctured the exchange and left them in silence till they reached his building. This time, Tooly wasn’t talking her way in; to do so twice would look suspicious.

  “Well, I should go,” she said, touching his hand, which was cold and fettered with the leash. She took back her coat, stooped to pat Ham, and strolled off. At the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, she glanced back, catching sight of him struggling to push the pig toward the building. Ham remained doggedly, or perhaps piggedly, in place. Amused, she turned away.

  But Tooly did not complete her pivot on that icy sidewalk.

  Her legs kicked up, her arms flailed, her behind slammed into the concrete. Rather than springing gracefully to her feet, she waited, her breaths dissolving upward, backgrounded by the nimbus of a streetlamp.

  A pig snout entered this tableau.

  “You okay?” Duncan asked breathlessly, having run over.

  “I’m broken for life.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Not seriously. I’ll just have a purple bruise that, when I try to admire it in the mirror later, will be too far around to see.”

  The pig sat on her.

  “Argh!” she said, laughing. “Crushing me!”

  Minutes later, Tooly was inside his room, just as she’d planned.

  Duncan dropped a compact disc onto the tray of his stereo, which swallowed the album and sighed to life. “I’m obsessed with this song right now,” he said.

  She closed her eyes to appear appreciative, but had a long-standing aversion to music, dating back to school days. When she looked up, Tooly found herself being observed and turned away—shyness still caught her out sometimes. “Can’t figure what he’s saying,” she said, sipping a beer Duncan had pilfered from the shared fridge. “Is it ‘Comma—please arrest that girl’? Seems a bit extreme to imprison her for using a comma.”

  “It’s ‘Karma police/Arrest this man.’ ”

  “No way. And even if, in the most crazy of situations, you were right—”

  “We can check the liner notes.”

  “Don’t. I hate ruining my opinions with facts. Even if your version is right, what’s it mean? It’s madness!”

  He smiled, began to say something, then went for another disc, stacking CDs on the stereo, finger hovering above the Play button. She let him beaver away there with his cueing and reviewing, and kicked off her Converse, sitting cross-legged on his unmade single bed. The space looked so different. Perhaps it was the effect of sitting here, viewing everything from the inside, rather than as she’d met this place, peering in.

  He kept starting tracks, promising they’d be amazing, then losing confidence and switching discs. To her, some songs sounded pointy and others round. When Duncan discussed music it was by reeling off band names, singers, guitarists—legends to him, nobody to her.

  What occupied Tooly was not the sounds but the sight of his animation. He wobbled his head, mouthing lyrics that he lacked the courage to sing aloud, telling her, “You need to hear it a bunch of times before you get into this. It’s this bit here—listen. Where the drums kick in? Whenever I hear that, it’s …” Anticipation thrilled him: to know what neared, the chorus approaching, almost there, and then—yes! He spun to look at her, eyes warm.

  How did this boy see her? For that matter, how was she this time? With any new man, Tooly exhibited a self slightly different from that presented to the previous guy (not that there had been so many). She found herself inhabiting a new character, uncertain whether this edition was more or less true, and whether there was a pure state of Tooly-ness at all. Even when alone, she wasn’t sure what she was like.

  Given her lack of musical knowledge, Duncan wanted to burn her a mix CD. However, she had no compact-disc player at home. There was a radio at her apartment, but with a tape recorder?

  “I’ll do you a cassette. But you have to tell me what you’re into.”

  The only music she knew was from parties, jukeboxes at bars, muzak in stores. She never remembered the name of anything. “I used to like the Ghostbusters song.” He took this as a joke, though it hadn’t been.

  Tooly gave a little shiver. “Now I’m getting a bit cold.” She lifted his hooded sweatshirt from the floor. “Would it be okay?”

  “No prob. Go for it,” he answered, bashful at the implied intimacy, looking hard at his stereo.

  She slipped it on, excused herself to the bathroom, and drew his wallet from the kangaroo pocket—she’d noticed him stowing it there when they were outside. Tooly read his college ID, the Connecticut driver’s license, his credit cards. She wasn’t taking them. Stolen goods were shabby, like walking around with evidence against yourself. But information had worth, held invisibly in your head—provided you could memorize long numbers. To Venn’s chagrin, she wrote things down. “Hey,” she said on her return to Duncan’s room. “You have a pen I could borrow?”

  “Got tons.” He opened a box, inadvertently spewing ballpoint pens everywhere. He scrambled around on all fours, collecting them off the floor. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.”

  His shame punctured her. She watched a moment, then took off his hoodie and folded it in his closet, the wallet inside.

  “Why’d you need a pen?”

  “Just to write down the song names.”

  “I can do that. If you’re into it, I can put down notes on each band.”

  “Actually, I should go.” No point sticking around. Yes, anyone could be mined, but not everyone should be.

  He looked up, spurned. “You don’t want your tape?”

  She sat on his bed, sipping his roommates’ beers, while Duncan toiled. Making a mixtape took longer than expected, particularly when its creator believed that each track implied something and that the compilation as a whole contained greater meaning still, the entirety of himself distilled onto a ninety-minute Maxell XLII. Tooly grew tipsier and sleepier and chillier, dipping her feet under his duvet, then pulling it up to her knees, her waist, finally drawing the covers to her chin.

  She awoke in darkness, a sheet over her nose quivering as she breathed. She recalled a song ending but none replacing it, lights turning off, covers shifting. The two of them remained fully dressed, chastely back-to-back, he compressed into a gentlemanly sliver of mattress against the nightstand. She blew the sheet away, swallowed dryly, and gazed at the ceiling. The room was boiling now, radiator pipe hissing snakishly.

  She got out and stood in the apartment corridor. Voices came from the room of the student she hadn’t met yet, Emerson, who was bickering with his girlfriend. All was dark save a thread of light under Xavi’s door, a rustle of textbook pages, the squeak of highlighter pen. Was he worth looking into? Just kids here. Tooly looked through a window at the street—how forbidding her cold walk home. She touched her behind, bruised from the choreographed crash landing on the pavement, and sneaked back under the covers, pulling herself close to him.

  The next morning, she found a cavernous hollow under the sheet where Duncan had been. He tiptoed back into the room, hair wet, patting his jean pockets, readying for class. “Time I got up,” she said, pushing off the covers, only to pull them back. “When do you leave?”

  “Well, my class is at Vanderbilt,” he said, thinking aloud. “I’ll need to take the one or the nine train down to Christopher Street, so … out of here in nineteen minutes.”
>
  “I’ll be gone in eighteen.”

  “I dreamt someone arrested me,” he said.

  “It’s about time someone arrested you. Hey, when’s your class start?”

  “Ten.”

  “You’ve got ages!”

  “Do you even know what time it is?”

  “No. But I think you’re too late for it anyway—they’re starting without you. You should come back under the covers. It’s cozier than the subway.”

  “Can’t.”

  “It’s an emergency.”

  He hesitated, then pulled off his dress shoes and slipped in beside her, sticking to his side of the bed, one foot touching the floor. She sat up, leaning the point of her elbow into her pillow, and considered Duncan. She reached her hand toward him. He started, embarrassed by his own surprise when she flattened her palm across his cheek.

  The strangeness of other people—so solid when near; alive, but objects, too. This close, his features lost detail, absorbed in fuzziness. A sensation rose in her, a surge outward and a crush in, a need to push him away, pull him back, to rush to the window and throw her clothes onto frosty 115th Street, leap naked back into the bed, goosebumped and shivering. Instead, she held still.

  This time she left with plans to meet again, and with his number, too, which she’d add to her phone book.

  “What’s yours?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “I’m moving and don’t have my new line yet.”

  “Moving where?”

  “To be decided,” she said, twitching her nose at him.

  His lips parted, but he didn’t ask more.

  BACK HOME IN Brooklyn, she took a nap, weary after a night in that cramped single bed. When she awoke, a hush had fallen, the storage space trembling as an overloaded truck rumbled down the Gowanus Expressway. Humphrey entered her room with a cup of instant coffee, a trail of brown drops specking the concrete floor all the way back to the kitchen.

  She sat up and took the mug with thanks. No need to explain her overnight absence—he covered his ears if she alluded to romances. Humphrey declined to acknowledge her transition from little girl to grown woman, still treating her as he had when she was young: like his comrade and intellectual equal. Anything else was private. Which was fine, since she preferred to keep sexuality to herself, persisting with the neutered fashions—mothball-scented men’s clothing and boyish sneakers—that she’d adopted in early adolescence. By now, these outfits made her comfortable; a dress was unthinkable.

  “What is your name again?” Humphrey asked, sitting at the foot of her mattress.

  “Tooly.”

  “Who you are?”

  “Shut up,” she said, smiling.

  “You remind me of Leibniz.”

  “Of who?”

  “German philosopher from years 1700 and after. He has messy haircut like you also, and dies after foot stuck in avocado.”

  “How do you die from an avocado?”

  “If you cannot understand, I’d rather don’t explain. If you are not intellectual, is not my business.”

  She shut her eyes, entertained, then stood right there on the mattress, stretched her arms toward the ceiling, squeaked. “I walked a pig today,” she said. “Or yesterday. When is it now?”

  “Tomorrow. Now go wash,” he told her. “I have items to discuss.”

  She knew this ruse well. He wanted company, had been lonely overnight without her, probably waiting up till after midnight, listening for the door. They had lodged together for years, sharing homes in a dozen cities. The cause of each move had been Venn. Abruptly, he’d be leaving town and invited Tooly to meet him a few weeks later in his next city (best not to travel all together). Humphrey liked to accompany her, no matter how this complicated matters—all his books to ship! In some cities, Tooly met up daily with Venn, and was his companion, confidant, ally. He even cooked for her sometimes, or took her out with his associates, guys who would otherwise have snubbed her but whom he silenced to let her speak. He and she might walk for miles, people-watching and kidding around—such vivid periods, those were, that days passed and she read not a word. At other times, it was just Humphrey for weeks.

  She showered and, given the late hour, got right into her pajamas. Humphrey awaited her at the Ping-Pong table, the right pocket of his slacks stuffed with balls to save himself stooping when one bounced away—if any shot required rapid movement, he called it “out.”

  “It’s not out just because you don’t bother returning it, Humph.”

  “If not then,” he asked, “when?”

  But after just two points he put down his paddle and returned to the couch. “We need to go somewhere else.”

  “Go where?”

  “We go somewhere civilized together. Why,” he continued, “we must follow Venn always?”

  “What would you and me do,” she teased, “if we went our own way?”

  “Like now: items and activities.”

  “Ping-Pong, reading, and chess?”

  “What more there is in life?”

  “And where, even if we had money?”

  He looked at his shoes.

  “Come on, Humph. Don’t get mad at me.”

  “This is most stupid thing.”

  “What is?”

  He found no cause for anger, so became low. “Don’t be exasperate with me.” Humphrey toed his way through heaps of reading material, picking up decrepit works and dumping them on the couch. He sat heavily, books leaping from his impact and landing open, as if waking with a start. Fingers laced over his belly, he turned to her. “Sit, sit.”

  She was on the verge of doing so when he raised his hand with alarm. “You nearly sit on John Stuart Mill!”

  She removed the volume by this esteemed gentleman, then plopped herself on whosoever happened to have the misfortune to remain under the shadow of her bruised backside. “Don’t care if it’s Plato or Aristotle.”

  “Is not my fault you are not intellectual,” he lamented, and handed her a copy of the closest book to hand, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.

  Since they met more than a decade earlier, Humphrey had supplied her with books in this random fashion. Works on the Bronze Age, the cosmos, the First World War, the Renaissance, Greek myths, the race to build the atom bomb, Roman emperors, Voltaire and Locke, Muhammad Ali and David Niven, architecture, diaries of the infamous, gambling scams, economics, Groucho Marx. They passed thousands of hours pleasantly page-turning together, he determining which facts and mystifications were to constitute her education.

  Only one form of book did Humphrey disdain: made-up stories. The world was far more fascinating than anyone could imagine. In made-up stories, he contended, life narrowed into a single tale with a single protagonist, which only encouraged self-regard. In real life, there was no protagonist. “Whose story? Is this my story, with my start and finish, and you are supporting character? Or this is your story, Tooly, and I am extra? Or does story belong to your grandmother? Or your great-grandson, maybe? And this is all just preface?”

  “I’m not having kids.”

  “Sure you are. And then whose story? Your grandson’s? Even what we say now, this is only background to his story, maybe. What about that? No, no, no—there is no hero. There is only consciousness and oblivion. Nothing means anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Be afraid of people who say there is meaning from life. Meaning only comes when there is ending.”

  “I don’t agree with that.”

  “Because you read too many tall stories when you are short girl. You believe things end in beauty. You think loose strings tie up.”

  “Not necessarily.” She stretched out on the couch, stuffing her socked feet under him for warmth. “Did you talk to anyone yet today?”

  “Many persons.”

  “Who?”

  “John Stuart Mill, for example. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Maybe you hear of them?”

  “I don’t count dead philosophers. And before
you tell me those aren’t philosophers but eighteenth-century thinkers, then—”

  “John Stuart Mill not even born till nineteenth century, darlink.”

  “Did you talk out loud to anyone today?”

  “I talk to you now. Are you not counting as twentieth-century thinker?”

  “Not sure I qualify as a great thinker of the twentieth century, no.”

  “Whatever century you are not a thinker in, I talk to you. Satisfied?”

  She grabbed him around the middle. He fought weakly to escape, Ping-Pong balls popping from his pockets, bouncing everywhere. “How long cuddling must last?”

  “Torture, is it?” She knew herself to be the last person on earth who still embraced this musty old man. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “Incredible what I put up with around here,” he grumbled. “I wouldn’t believe, if I did not see it with my own ears.” He looked at her. “Tooly, I must tell you serious items.”

  “Items and activities?”

  “Stop teasing. I have things to say.”

  “About?”

  “About …” He stood unsteadily, turned as if caged, took his seat.

  The history of Humphrey was a convoluted one. In certain accounts that she had heard, he’d escaped the Soviet Union as a young man and left his parents behind, never to see them again. But in another story he was playing poker with his father, mysteriously present in South Africa. Confusing the situation were myths that circulated: that he’d lived in China and worked for Mao (too industrious to be credible); that he’d been a croupier in Macao (surely not—his arithmetic was abysmal); that he’d dealt in stolen penicillin in postwar Vienna (he did seem to know a lot about pharmaceuticals); that he was privately rich (no evidence of this); that he was destitute (ample signs); that he was a Jewish aristocrat whose Mitteleuropa family had lost everything in the war (there was nothing aristocratic about the man).

  According to Humphrey himself, he grew up in Leningrad in the 1930s, in a secular Russian-Jewish family. Like most Soviet citizens, they suffered appalling privation during World War II. However, wartime constituted something of a gap in his tale. One of his chess friends when they lived in Marseille, a rabbi who’d served two years in prison on a charge of money laundering for a Colombian drug cartel, once asked Tooly what sort of war Humphrey had had. “He’s a Jewish person from Europe,” the rabbi noted. “He’s the right age. In my community, you often don’t know what sort of a war they had till after they die. Then someone mentions something at the funeral.”