The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  “I can’t really sight-read music,” she explained. “I just battle at this piece by Rossini. It’s all I know.”

  “I mean play Xbox.”

  “What does that involve?” She found herself being pulled upstairs.

  Still puzzling over game-controller buttons, Tooly was already riddled with bullets. Duncan appeared in the doorway, eating a microwaved burrito and checking his BlackBerry, still in suit and tie. “How’s it hanging?” he asked, mouth full, flopping on the couch and turning the plasma screen to a news channel.

  “We were playing!” Mac complained. Finding no recourse, the boy departed.

  Duncan switched among CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC, appearing to scrutinize Tooly with faint irritation. “Do you work out?”

  “I walk. Does that count?”

  “I sit on the train. Does that count?” It seemed to: he had spread, especially in the sitting regions. “You notice many changes in your body from walking?”

  “To be honest, Duncan, I make it a policy not to look below my neck. I try to keep all this area”—she indicated from collarbones down—“free of major injury, but I don’t see any reason to actually look at it. Hey, it might be terrible to ask this, but you don’t have a small drink I could steal, do you?”

  “Wait here.” He rose from the couch. He thumbed in a text. He looked at her. “Why did I just get up?”

  “Drinks.”

  “What? Oh, right. Some old wine in the fridge, possibly? I could open something.”

  “Not just for me,” she protested, her voice fading from lack of conviction. She did want a drink; this day had constricted her.

  He returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Beck’s for her, then lay on the floor, raised the volume on CNN, and checked both cellphones at once, each intermittently bleeping, as if the two devices were communicating with each other. “The girls just texted me that you play the ukulele. What’s up with that?”

  “That’s thanks to you—you’re the one who got me into music.”

  He pointed the remote at a couple of debating pundits. “The Bush crew were right on one count: people in this country don’t live in the reality-based community.”

  Bridget appeared in the doorway. “I sense a state-of-the-Union rant,” she warned Tooly. “Listening not advised.” She asked her husband, “Are we going to have your decline-of-Western-civilization thing now, where you end up railing against call centers?”

  “I’ll try not to drag the call centers into it. But, parenthetically, call centers do mark the decline of Western civilization.”

  Tooly laughed.

  “I’m not actually kidding.”

  Bridget looked at Tooly. “He’s actually not.”

  “Explain,” Tooly said.

  “ ‘Explain’ is the single most dangerous word to utter in front of my husband.”

  “Okay, here’s my theory. So, like, in the past,” he began, “when the American people acted like dumb-asses, it actually didn’t matter. Because we were being led by smart-asses, right? But now we’re basically run by lobbyists and pollsters, while Congress is a bunch of squabbling brats. So when the people act like dumb-asses today it matters. We had the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan. We’re going broke buying these billion-dollar drones to chase a bunch of clowns through the Pakistani tribal areas. Meantime, every serious country is burning past us.”

  “You make it sound like a race,” Tooly said.

  “That’s what it is. There’s, like, one point two billion Chinese, and they want what we got. They become as rich as we are? Well, they just can’t. We’re at war already. You hear this stuff about hacking? I guarantee you, China has a zillion geniuses stapled to their desktops figuring out how to ram us. Look how they’re hoarding our debt. We basically mortgaged this country to Beijing.”

  “I remember people saying doomsday stuff like this in the 1980s,” Tooly noted. “How America was falling apart and Japan was going to run the world.”

  “Japan was a boutique. China is the whole shopping mall,” he replied. “Our country was in charge of the world for a few seconds. So what did we do? Bitch-slapped Milosevic and Saddam, let global warming go out of control, and convinced the world that we’re a bunch of whack-job crusaders. And went broke doing it. That’s the story of our generation—the peak and the collapse, all in twenty years.”

  “I don’t actually mind the U.S. not being in charge anymore,” Bridget commented. “Not like we did such a great job with that whole superpower thing.”

  “You think that we suck at it?” Duncan responded. “Check out the competition. You want Russia and China running stuff? Russia is, like, the scariest place in the sort-of-free world. And the Chinese will sabotage every climate-change proposal till they’ve had their fair turn at fucking the planet.”

  “Language.”

  “But, Duncan, I don’t get where you stand,” Tooly said.

  “He’s an against-everyone guy,” Bridget said.

  “All politicians in this country are forms of Blagojevich,” he said.

  “Obama isn’t,” Bridget said, trying to wrestle the remote from him as he switched to Fox News.

  “Obama’s from Illinois,” he said. “A politician cannot come from Illinois and be clean.”

  “Isn’t that where Lincoln was from?”

  “Yeah, and you saw what they did to him.”

  “Well, I think Obama is clean,” Bridget said.

  “His feet are clean from all that water you think he walks on,” Duncan said. “Today’s leaders aren’t at the standards of the past. Nowhere near.”

  “Hmm,” Tooly began hesitantly, wondering whether to speak her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just, I always wonder if all this stuff about decline is false nostalgia—as if the old days were full of people opening doors for each other and memorizing poetry and playing the piano.”

  “That’s exactly how I imagine the old days!” Duncan said, laughing.

  “People in the old days were as rotten as people now, don’t you think?” she continued. “They were probably more ignorant and violent. There were great people back then—I’m sure your grandparents were very nice, especially to you, their grandson. But people from the Greatest Generation also spent a fair bit of time abusing and enslaving each other. No?”

  “You think this current period is so fantastic?” he retorted. “Everything is progress everywhere?”

  “Not progress or decline. I just think most people probably have a few years at their peak, and attribute to that period all the hope and wholesomeness they had then. Once their moment has passed, everything seems in decline.”

  “You’re saying I’m past my peak,” he said, amused.

  “That’s exactly what she just said,” Bridget affirmed, clapping.

  “Except, except, except,” Tooly interrupted, “you’re actually even weirder, because you believe all the best stuff happened in a period you didn’t even live in.”

  “Come on—you’re way worse,” he said. “At least I embrace the techy zeitgeist. You own a frickin’ bookshop, my dear. Do you even have a computer there? Are you familiar with these newfangled machines?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have one. And now I’ve got that cellphone you lent me.”

  “You have a tablet yet?”

  “I’m waiting till the stone ones come out, the ones that come with a chisel.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “No, you’re right in a way,” she acknowledged. “I don’t feel involved in a lot of what’s going on. But that’s always been true for me.” So much of her childhood had revolved around the lessons of the Soviet Empire and World War II that, once Tooly set out on her own, she’d needed a while to acclimatize to the present. It wasn’t 9/11 that did it so much as the Iraq War; sometime around 2003, the twenty-first century seemed to detach from the twentieth. “And I’m still not sure which century I fit in. Maybe neither.”

  “That’s such a cop-
out. We’re the same age, pretty much. You’ve been part of the same period I have. Secretly, you’re a declinist like me. You just don’t want to sound negative. Any period is not as good as any other, just like any place is not as good as any other.”

  “You could rank times and places?”

  “Easily.”

  “Then you’d have to admit that this time and place are pretty good,” she said. “No chance of war breaking out in Darien, Connecticut. You’re well-off, educated, healthy. Your kids take filmmaking and modern dance at day camp. They’ll live long and happy lives. So everything is in decline?”

  He shook his head, annoyed—her summary failed to explain why everything was so irritating nowadays. “Missing the point,” he said.

  He was right to notice something missing. She had not stated her fundamental view: that, for Duncan, time and place, fortune and misfortune, had only a glancing impact. He was temperamentally condemned to embitterment and would revert to that condition regardless of circumstances, just as lottery winners, after the euphoria, ended up as morose or cheerful as they’d ever been. People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.

  All fell quiet, except the background chatter of a peppy news anchor: “… from the back of the bus—and the front of it, too!—with a story up close and personal, a no-holds-barred look at the success of Michele Bachmann’s bus tour. Stick with us, for the last word in fair and …”

  He turned off the television. “All these people should be put in jail,” he said. “Not just any jail but some nightmare place where they get beaten around the clock.”

  “I’m putting the kids to bed,” Bridget said.

  Tooly excused herself, too. “I need a good sleep tonight.”

  Duncan remained, staring at the black screen. The rant had quenched nothing. He awoke his two phones, each bright and ready to behave, just as the outside world never would.

  IN THE COMING days, Humphrey’s mood varied—talkative one visit, distant the next. Overnight, he stumbled around his room, restless but afraid to venture outside, even to use the shared toilets. By morning, his late-night activities were evident in the piles of toppled books, bedcovers strewn with documents, food on the floor.

  Yelena came early to ensure that no disasters had befallen him, made breakfast, washed him. Tooly took over around midday, occasionally crossing paths with the Russian woman’s son, Garry, an engineering student who was trying to resolve Humphrey’s problems with the television remote.

  Once everyone else had gone, Tooly turned off the blaring TV and posed questions about his accent and about their past. But each query distressed Humphrey—he wanted to help, but failed to summon what she wanted. A few times, he snapped at her. At other times, he was endearing, such as when he offered her a bunch of cherries that Yelena had left.

  “Grapes,” Tooly corrected him. “Thank you. I’ll have a few.”

  Whenever she succeeded in dipping into his memory, it was his childhood, not hers, that came out—climbing a statue, or milking a cow, or throwing an apricot pit and fearing he’d blinded a girl. They were reminiscences she already knew, but he insisted on recounting each to the end. Occasionally, an unfamiliar anecdote emerged, such as when he recalled, as a very little boy, lying atop his mother while she did read-throughs of plays and falling asleep to the flip of pages.

  “She was involved in the theater? But you never say your parents’ names, do you, Humph. Where did all this happen?”

  “I lay there and heard pages turning.”

  “Does it feel,” she asked, “when you’re telling these stories, does it feel like it’s you? Or does it feel like a different person back then?”

  “I’m the same as I was,” he said. “Only later.”

  After a minute, she asked, “Would you like a walk down to Emmons Avenue? We can go slowly. You set the pace.”

  But he never wanted to leave his room, just sat in his armchair, staring toward the window. Tooly settled on his bed, leafing through books, yet struggled to concentrate. When leaving for the day, she closed the door after herself and stood in the hallway, often for more than a minute. Felt abominable to leave. She arrived back in Connecticut later and later. The McGrorys stopped expecting her for dinner.

  Besides Yelena and Tooly, he had no visitors. But phone calls came often, always from medical-bill collectors, badgering him over a small fortune owed for a hernia procedure several years earlier. Humphrey believed he had paid, so Tooly asked them to send an itemized bill. The invoice was four pages and incomprehensible. Nobody—least of all those demanding the money—could explain what anything was for, only that the bill was correct. Pool your family resources, they told her, and pay (including for inexplicable items, such as $12,184 for “Assorted”). The cost would have been less—though still unaffordable for Humphrey—had he been enrolled in Medicare. But nobody could find any document attesting to his identity, citizenship, even his right to be in this country. The medical-bill pestering made him refuse further checkups, including those he needed on his eyes, hearing, and memory. He kept pill bottles—for high blood pressure, cholesterol, memory acuity, glaucoma, a vitamin deficiency—under the cushion of his armchair and claimed he took his doses in her absence, though she disbelieved him.

  This was proving to be a disaster. Venn would know what to do about it—he’d even know how to handle those bill collectors. “Do you remember anything about where he went?”

  “Those lights,” Humphrey responded. “What are those lights?”

  She followed his sight line to the switched-off TV. “Nothing. A reflection.”

  “Is it time for dinner?”

  “Look. Bright outside.” She pointed out the window, then at the wall clock. “See, twelve-fifteen P.M.”

  “You take its word over mine?”

  Two weeks passed, and her scheduled return to Wales neared. She had understood nothing here. The mystery of his accent remained, as did the puzzle of Venn’s disappearance, and all the questions about her abduction. She tried not to think of her impending return, and would not have, had it not been for a call from Fogg. Mr. and Mrs. Minton—the academics who’d founded World’s End Books and still owned the property—were raising her rent. Trouble in the stock market had halved their retirement savings; they couldn’t afford to rent at a loss any longer. Nor could Tooly afford to pay more.

  World’s End Books would last perhaps three months. She could keep employing Fogg that long, but no more. He needed to find employment elsewhere. Perhaps this was better for him—the shop had been too cozy a niche. She freed him of any obligation to keep it going till her return. After all, it wasn’t even certain when she’d be back.

  “Wait, you’re staying? I thought he wasn’t telling you anything.”

  “He’s not. But I can’t leave right now,” she said. “I’m sorry, Fogg. You’ll have a great reference from me.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, quiet a moment. “Shame, really.”

  He’d grown up in that shop. There was no other bookstore in the village. But he might apply for another kind of service job—at the minimarket, perhaps.

  For two days, Tooly felt nauseated by all this. But she reminded herself that one mustn’t get attached. Thereafter, if Fogg called with work questions she kept the conversations short. When he asked after Humphrey, she conveyed little, withdrawing her private life from public view again. His calls stopped. The bookshop—indeed, Caergenog itself—faded from reality. The McGrorys were delighted to learn that she was extending her stay. It spared them finding a new driver for Mac.

  Among Humphrey’s books, Tooly kept returning to her old copy of Nicholas Nickleby, the same bashed-up paperback she had when they first met. The smell of it recalled so powerfully Mr. Priddles’s vile classroom, where she’d hidden in these pages.

  “Can I read you a bit?” she asked Humphrey. “I know you don’t like made-up stories, but this one is nice. You won’t have to worry about your eyes. Just close them and listen. Okay
?” Before he could refuse, she began:

  There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Eyes closed, Humphrey nodded gravely. She went on, her attention only half on the text, the remainder contemplating her old friend. To her knowledge, he had achieved nothing to outlast his life—no offspring, no legacy. Nor had he believed in anything more than this existence. No afterlife, in the religious sense of harp-strumming on clouds, nor in the secular sense of worldly accomplishment.

  What he had done with eighty-odd years was absorb the cleverest minds to translate themselves into print; he’d played chess; he’d pondered. And why not just use life as one pleased? Why spend an existence tormented by alarm clocks? Or did his failure to produce anything amount to tragedy, a waste of the fact that his particular consciousness, among the infinite possible variations, had popped into being?

  If he had achieved little, this resembled Tooly’s own path to date. Her twenties had rushed by. Now her thirties were well upon her. She had the sense of never completing any stage, of failing to grab any single year and take hold. In teen years, people yearned to be liked; in their twenties, to be impressive; in their thirties, to be needed. But she had jumbled it, some phases too early, others not at all.

  “I like that man,” Humphrey interrupted as she read on. “What’s his name?”

  “That character? He’s called Newman Noggs.”

  “You feel that you could see him! With the thing about his buttons.”

  Before much else could be learned of Mr. Noggs and his buttons, Humphrey was snoring. After an hour, she readied his macaroni-and-cheese dinner on the counter, sticking a sign on the microwave in giant capitals to explain again how it worked. She hesitated in the hallway. The night before, he had dropped his dinner and eaten only a few bites salvaged from the floor. She sighed to picture him on his knees, reaching shakily under the bed for a chunk of dusty chicken.