The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  But Duncan was a rare presence. He missed most family dinners, often returning after the kids were in bed and departing before they rose. When home, he was pursued by emails. His respite was what Bridget termed “anger hour,” a nightly rant at the cable news channels. It was peculiar: he spewed such vitriol in that house, yet acted with notable kindness outside it. Accounts emerged from Bridget of his decency toward new hires at the firm, toward strangers, and to Humphrey in the months before Tooly arrived. Bridget once cited an entire chapter in her husband’s life of which Tooly had known nothing, how he had nursed a sick friend till the person’s death. When she inquired about this, Duncan changed the subject—he couldn’t accept praise.

  Then, by breakfast, he was gone. It was Bridget who poured the kids’ cereal and orange juice. She was present, involved, interested. Yet it was Duncan’s absence that shaped the household. The triplets used obscenities because it made him chuckle. When they threw a dart at Mac and it stuck in his butt, Bridget had to clean the pinpoint wound with rubbing alcohol. “Not funny,” she said. But Duncan had smirked, and the girls noticed.

  Such dynamics caused tension between Duncan and Bridget, but the hostility abated when Tooly turned up. She had become the glue here, mending and maintaining, but exhausting herself in the process. She longed—longed!—for time on her own, snatching what minutes she could alone downstairs, indulging in ukulele practice to hold them back, until one or another McGrory couldn’t resist leaning into the music room, asking what she was up to. Aside from Mac, the most regular visitor was Bridget, who relished having a grown-up friend on-site.

  Each night, Tooly got into bed with a glass of red wine and an old newspaper, since she lacked the concentration for anything more involved. Throughout her waking hours, she was prodded by a sense of responsibility, assuaged only when need did present itself—Humphrey coughing, calling for water; Mac panicking about an imminent sporting humiliation—whereupon she could act. Afterward, her uneasy vigil continued, dissipating only in sleep. But going to bed tipsy produced a shallow slumber, interrupted by trips to pee.

  At dawn, she awoke weary—couldn’t sleep in as she had in younger years—and stayed under the covers, floating around Caergenog till the present gained focus. She glimpsed the wine bottle on the counter, not half drunk as intended but nearly empty. She had barely noticed the third and fourth glasses of the evening before. Tooly resolved to skip her nightcap that evening, and bought nothing on the way home. Then bedtime came again, and unease with it, leading her upstairs for a nip of something. She stood in the dark house, looking out the front window, full glass in hand.

  Sipping before one of the McGrorys’ laptops, she resumed her late-night hobby of peeping at the lives of those she’d known. Running through names from the past, she typed in “Jon Priddles”—still at King Chulalongkorn International School, it turned out: chairman of the board of trustees now, after “a beloved career as principal,” according to the school website. She found information on Gilbert Lerallu, too, the owner of that pig at 115th Street, now critically acclaimed (the man, not the pig) for an album of avant-garde harpsichord compositions. When she typed in Xavi’s full name, “Xavier Karamage,” nothing relevant came up.

  Of those she’d known in New York, he’d seemed the most likely to flourish: smart, ambitious, charming. There was no trace of him. She had tried to ask Duncan, but whenever she mentioned those days he cut the conversation short. She never pressed the matter. So many aspects of that period troubled her, particularly how she’d behaved.

  “SLEEP WELL?” she asked Humphrey, unloading a few ready-to-heat meals from shopping bags. Her attempts to pull him from torpor, to get him eating properly, reading again, to rouse his intellect—all this had fizzled.

  The former Humphrey grew harder to retrieve. Insidiously, the present Humphrey snuffed out the previous one, which came to seem implausible. People manifested so many selves over a lifetime. Was only the latest valid?

  “Let me open the curtains—gorgeous sun today.”

  He frowned at the white-and-black object she held. “What’s that?”

  She handed over her newspaper, and he pressed the front page to his nose, then extended it, struggling for focus. She fetched his glasses and perched herself on the arm of his chair.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, tapping the photo of a disgraced New York politician who had injudiciously distributed photos of his crotch. It was a bad summer for powerful men, she informed Humphrey, with the humiliation of Anthony Weiner, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the humbling of Rupert Murdoch, the ousting of Arab dictators.

  He pointed at another photo. “She looks strange.”

  “That’s a man.”

  They worked through the newspaper, not by the words but by the faces, making a game of guessing each expression. Abruptly, Humphrey stood, the paper falling off his lap and coming apart at his feet. “Look at the clouds,” he said, tottering toward the window. He shuffled back to his armchair, sat heavily, interlaced his fingers across his chest.

  “What are you thinking, Humph?”

  At length, he responded. “I don’t know what’s happening in the world.”

  “I’ll leave the paper here for you. You can go through it after I’ve gone.”

  The next day, that copy sat untouched. She had the latest edition with her. “I read this amazing article, Humph, about how thirty-five hours of new footage get uploaded to this website called YouTube every minute. Incredible, no?” But how absurd to speak of tech marvels to a man who’d never left the previous century. She attempted to explain: electronic pulses hurtled around the world, sending information, photographs, video everywhere. “Sorry, I’m explaining it badly. I’ll show you sometime.”

  He grunted at her description of the present. “I feel apprehensive,” he said. “What am I supposed to be worrying about?”

  “About nothing. I’m taking care of things.”

  He looked away, unconvinced. “Can’t find what I want.”

  “Well, you have a lot to remember, Humph. Your life has been going on since the 1920s.”

  “How old would you say I am?”

  “You’re eighty-three.”

  “Am I?” he replied, astounded. “That’s almost indecent!”

  “But you feel like you’re only six.”

  “Seven,” he corrected her.

  “You felt six the other day.”

  “I’m more grown-up than a six-year-old.”

  She kissed his cheek.

  “Gosh, I don’t know you that well,” he joked. “Can I make you a coffee?”

  “Let me,” she said, and leaped to her feet, elated at this glimpse of the old Humphrey. There were times when it was him again, burning through thick clouds.

  “Tricky spelling your name,” he remarked, when she returned from the communal kitchen. “How would you do that?”

  “What, spell it?”

  “Yes, all right.” He took the mug, drizzling coffee down his trouser leg.

  She gave her name letter by letter. “And you remember my nickname: Tooly.”

  “Well, I’m not going to argue over it. How long are you staying?”

  A horrible realization struck her: he didn’t recognize her. “I was thinking of when I was a little girl, and I met you,” she said. “You explained chess, and you let me cheat. You were very sweet to me.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “You were,” she insisted. “I was there.”

  Within an hour, Tooly stood at the window of a motel room on Emmons Avenue, overlooking the parking lot. On the bed behind her, Garry smoked. Every few days, they rented a room for four hours, which was affordable if they split the cost. The place made for a sordid rendezvous, wallpaper peeling, mattress covered with plastic, porn on Channel 33. Yet the awfulness amused them, and they competed to find the most repellent feature. Today, the winning entry had been dead cockroaches in the shower stall.

  Garry had a handsome face, eyes narrowing to sl
its when he laughed. He patted her bare stomach; a dull smack. “You are too thin.”

  To disprove this, she pinched a bit of fat, then gathered her underwear to cover her nakedness. She took a drag of his cigarette for the intimacy, the damp filter, and listened to his young-man chatter about the inevitability of his own success, described with knee-jiggling zeal. He had grown up in Novosibirsk, dreaming of a million bucks. “Today, I realize one million buys nothing.”

  They spoke as if conducting different conversations, she the older woman, he the younger man, both conscious of the gulf, which had such different meanings for each. Afterward, they sat in his banged-up Pontiac in the parking lot, and he unpacked a picnic, food taken from home, supposedly to keep him going while he studied at community college.

  “Doesn’t your mother notice when so much stuff goes missing?”

  He chewed with his mouth open. “She thinks I have a big appetite.” In passing, he mentioned an upcoming vacation in Russia with his fiancée.

  “Oh,” Tooly responded. “Didn’t know you had one.”

  “I planned this trip for ages.”

  “I mean,” she specified, “didn’t know you had a fiancée.”

  From a fling like this, Tooly expected only human contact and distraction. Both could be found elsewhere. “Let’s leave it at this,” she said, when he dropped her at the Sheepshead Bay station. She always felt a little relieved at an excuse to break up—one less thing to carry around.

  Tooly returned that night to find the McGrory siblings at war, videogames bleeping in the TV room, their mother chewing her fingernail in the glow of an iPad 2—“Hey, you,” Bridget said, “come hang out”—and since Tooly was a guest she had to, though what she needed was the opposite of their eyes. Then hers opened and it was time to rise and begin again, Mac staring at her, awaiting his drive to another unhappy day.

  He had begged his parents to enroll him in this moviemaking course at the Y, and so refused to admit how badly he fared. His classmates were older and from a different school—when he spoke, nobody heard. To tell Bridget how miserable her son was would betray his confidence. So Tooly attempted, during the morning drive, to inflate him for the puncturing day ahead. She asked his opinion on matters that concerned her, like what she should do if Humphrey got a bit better; and where she might live after she left here, given that her shop was closing. She could live anywhere in the world now. Tooly took his answers seriously, so he gave them seriously.

  “Live here. You could have your own house, but close.”

  “Couldn’t afford to live in Darien. Not by a long shot, I’m afraid. But tell me something,” she said. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Even just to visit.”

  He fiddled with the side mirror. The boy had a way of vanishing, not hearing questions—it was infuriating to teachers (“Needs improvement”), to other kids (“Earth to Mac?”), to his father (“Hey. Mac. Seriously now.”). She observed him, wondering about the inside of his head, whether it was far away and empty, or near and full. He was humming, and she recognized the tune.

  “That’s ‘The William Tell Overture.’ I was practicing that on my ukulele.”

  He denied that he’d been listening in.

  “Come in next time. I don’t want you hiding in your own house.”

  “Wasn’t hiding.”

  “Oh dear. Everything I say is wrong, Mac, my friend.”

  His chin pruned.

  She hated to see him on the verge of tears, but turning away seemed worse. She gave a pull of his earlobe and had a rush of—what would she call it?—a wish to suffer harm in his place. “I’ll look after you,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Things improve when you grow up. You’ll see,” she said, turning in to the YMCA parking lot. “Some people hate getting older, but it’ll suit you. There are people made to be children and people made to be adults. Since you spend most of life as a grown-up, it’s better to have the good bits then. Don’t you think?” Tooly had no idea if what she said was hogwash, so asserted it as confidently as possible. She reached across him and opened his door. “Spit on the ground for luck.”

  He did so, smiling to be naughty. “I’m going to go in there with a good attitude,” he pledged, watching her. “Even if I’m the worst of everyone.”

  “Be open to everything, listen carefully to what they’re saying. And if someone says something mean, don’t let them see you’re upset. Just let it pass through you.”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “They’ll worship you,” she said. “They all should. And if they don’t they’re morons! Must run, Mac. You must, and I must.”

  Throughout her afternoon with Humphrey—another needy male, this one at the opposite end of his life—she dearly hoped all went well for Mac. What an ache: consequences where you are of no consequence.

  That evening, Duncan dragged Tooly into the TV room for company and vented at MSNBC.

  “Speaking of phonies,” she said, to divert his rage, “I was stretching my legs at the Coney Island boardwalk the other day and saw that big roller coaster. Made me think of Emerson.”

  “Why did the Cyclone remind you of Emerson?”

  “Wasn’t he doing a doctorate on the hermeneutics of roller coasters or something?”

  “How do you remember this stuff?”

  She had searched for Emerson online, and found him on a list of competitors at a triathlon in Coeur d’Alene, described as a college professor. She still felt lousy at having lost her friendship with Noeline. But she’d never known the woman’s last name, so had no way of finding her online. Tooly had had so few female friends; perhaps it was having been raised by men. But she had come to wish now for female companionship, for a best friend as others had. It seemed to be beyond her.

  “Poor Noeline,” she said. “That was one relationship that was going to end badly.”

  “Actually,” Duncan said, “they’re married now.” He held up his iPhone, swiping through pictures of Emerson and Noeline with their three kids at a cookout in Idaho, where they both taught college. They’d had a personal tragedy a few years earlier, when a disgruntled janitor opened fire at their child’s nursery school, wounding four people and killing one, their son. Duncan had heard through mutual acquaintances, and got back in touch.

  “The kids in the photo?”

  “Adopted. They ended up adopting after that.”

  Tooly required a minute to absorb this story, to mesh it with her scorn of Emerson, which seemed callous now. Duncan muted the television.

  “And Xavi?” she ventured. “I always thought he’d do something amazing. But I’ve Googled him, and all I get is some middle-aged white guy with a mustache in Ireland.”

  “Definitely not Xavi.”

  “No, I figured. Did he go back to Uganda?”

  Duncan sighed. “I realize you don’t know any of this.”

  “Any of what?”

  “Xavi died.”

  The summer after business school, Xavi had co-founded a digital-rights-management start-up. But when the project stalled he’d accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs. He was still dedicated to entrepreneurship, but planned to work his way up at Goldman first, then use contacts to go it alone. After health coverage for the new job kicked in, he visited a doctor about a few nagging problems—he’d had no insurance since B-school, so had delayed the checkup for ages. They found a tumor: testicular cancer.

  His plan was to undergo radiation and chemo without telling anyone at the job. He worried how they’d perceive him if they knew—as an African, he already stood out. So he fitted the treatment around his work schedule, taking the chemo drip at dawn, using vacation days to undergo the first surgery. No one at Goldman found out for months. Incredibly, he became a star there. “This was during that weird post-9/11 haze in New York,” Duncan noted. “A few friends that he told about the diagnosis didn’t know how to respond—couldn’t absorb more scary news. A bunch
faded away, especially when he got sicker. A lot of people saying, ‘Lance Armstrong got over it!’ Which was not helpful.”

  Finally, Xavi collapsed at the office and awoke in a hospital. The cancer had metastasized to his lungs, liver, bones. There was no hiding the condition now. When further treatment failed, the oncologist stopped returning his calls. Xavi grew sullen, and came to irrationally suspect that living in the United States had somehow provoked this illness. Duncan recalled Xavi sitting for his umpteenth chemo infusion, watching a debate on CNN about the proposed invasion of Iraq. The military campaign was being promoted by men decades older than Xavi, people who aimed to shape the future, while he would never even know how the conflict came out. “Emerson and Noeline visited once, but it ended uncomfortably. They spent the whole time arguing with him about the case for war.”

  “Xavi was for invading?” Tooly guessed. “They were against?”

  “The opposite. Emerson and Noeline thought it was a just war.”

  One day at the hospital, Duncan caught sight of a familiar figure: the old man he’d met three years earlier, after Tooly had disappeared and he and Xavi had gone looking for her using her map. Humphrey was there for a hernia operation. When he heard about Xavi, he insisted on wishing him well. Later, after healing from his procedure, Humphrey returned to the hospital with a chessboard, recalling that he and Xavi had played during their sole encounter. But chess wasn’t conceivable—Xavi was in intensive care then. Humphrey kept trying, even going to the hospice. “He used to sit in the water garden, alone with his rolled-up chessboard. Made cups of Nescafé for everybody. He’d go home, come back the next day. That’s partly why I helped your dad.”