The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  The background Fogg calmed her. She had no desire to read more about the unfortunate Anne Boleyn. She knew how that story ended.

  1999

  TOOLY TOOK THE MAP from her duffle coat and let it expand like an accordion, then compressed it back to sense, folding the island of Manhattan into a manageable square at which she squinted, then glanced up, finding no relation between the printed grid before her and the concrete city around. Maps were so flat and places so round—how to reconcile them? Especially here, where manholes billowed, crosswalks pulsated stop-red, and the sidewalk shuddered from subway trains clattering underground.

  Up Fifth Avenue she tramped, through tides of foot traffic, glimpsing strangers as they brushed past, their faces near for an instant, then gone forever. At the fringe of Rockefeller Center, she stood apart from the crowd and bit off the lid of her blue felt-tip pen, wind icing her teeth. She removed her mittens, let them dangle from the string through her sleeves, and drew another wobbly line up the map.

  Tooly intended to walk the entirety of New York, every passable street in the five boroughs. After several weeks, she had pen lines radiating like blue veins from her home in the separatist republic of Brooklyn into the breakaway nations of Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx, although their surly neighbor, Staten Island, remained unmarked. Initially, she had chosen neighborhoods to explore by their alluring names: Vinegar Hill and Plum Beach, Breezy Point and Utopia, Throggs Neck and Spuyten Duyvil, Alphabet City and Turtle Bay. But the more enticing a place sounded the more ordinary it proved—not as a rule, but as a distinct tendency. A few rambles had frightened her, past bombed-out buildings and dead-eyed boys. In Mott Haven, a pit bull darted into the road in front of an oncoming truck, was struck, and died on the sidewalk before her.

  She turned down Fifty-first Street—the buildings pronged with sleepy American flags, neon glaring from the Radio City Music Hall marquee—and stopped there, balling her fists till they’d warmed. Suddenly she burst into a sprint, dodging office workers, leaping around a blind corner, nearly colliding with a tourist couple. After two blocks, she halted, breathless and grinning because of her secret: that she had nowhere to run, no place to hasten toward, not in this city or in the world. All these people strode past with intent. Citizens had locations and they had motives, families, meetings. Tooly had none.

  She resumed her urban hike up Broadway on its northwesterly diagonal past Central Park and through the Upper West Side, gravitating to the tables of used books for sale—fusty old volumes of the sort Humphrey loved. She checked the prices, but could afford nothing. She explored side streets, adding each to her map, admiring the fancy residences. Zabar’s deli exuded the scent of cheese and the tinkle of classical music. “Yeah, I’ll take a quarter pound of …” someone said. Tooly’s meal was already decided—in her coat pocket, a squashed peanut-butter sandwich, wrapped in a newspaper page whose ink had imprinted the white bread, thereby offering the possibility of reading one’s lunch.

  A few students wandered past: the runoff from Columbia University dribbling south to these parts. They were around her age—twenty—talking loud and teasing each other. She looked at one, then a second, hoping they’d say something to her. Instead, they passed, banter growing faint behind her. So, uptown she went, investigating where they’d come from. Above 100th Street, the pizza parlors began in earnest, selling cut-rate slices to the college crowd. Beggars sat on the pavement, watching urgent sophomores, their cheeks still chubby and their foreheads spotty, rushing to exams, chattering about starting salaries.

  Tooly meandered through the iron gates of the Columbia campus and ambled down the red-brick path of College Walk, as kids arrowed off in all directions. Might they take her for one of them? A doctoral student in zoology, perhaps, or a master’s candidate in criminology, or a postgrad in organic chemistry—though she had no idea what such occupations entailed. She drifted out of the main campus, wandering toward a desolate sidewalk that overlooked Morningside Park, the public space down there abandoned to crack addicts and the heedless. Birds tweeted from tree canopies. Beyond the foliage, a strip of Harlem rooftops was visible; occasional distant honking.

  A pig waddled up the stone stairs from the park, walked toward her, and barged into her ankle—it was an intentional jostle, not a misjudgment. She laughed, astonished at its effrontery, and stepped aside. The creature was black and potbellied, its gut dragging against the pavement, wiry hairs and a snub nose, not unlike the middle-aged human trailing afterward, holding a leash that led to a studded collar around the pig’s neck. The two crossed Morningside Drive and turned onto 115th. Tooly followed.

  Whenever she encountered creatures, Tooly yearned to stoop and pat. She’d never owned an animal herself, the disorder of her life having prevented it. The owner of the pig stopped before a six-story residential building, took a final puff of his cigarette, flicked it into the gutter, and turned for the entrance, which was framed with converted gaslights and wrought-iron curlicues. The snorty pig strutted in first, then the man. Tooly hurried after, sidestepping inside the building before the door swung shut.

  The elegant façade belied an interior of dirty marble walls, dreary metal mailboxes, and a convex mirror by the elevator, ensuring that no one hid around the corner with a pistol. A sign demanded NO MOVING ON SUNDAY. She pictured residents going rigid—no moving!—every Sunday. The pig glanced at her, tracking her with suspicion. Its owner reached his apartment door, then turned aggressively. “You live here?”

  “Hi,” she answered. “I used to. A bunch of years ago. I was just taking a look around. Hope it’s okay. Won’t bother anyone, I promise.”

  “Where’d you live?”

  “The fourth floor. Can’t remember our number, but right near the end. I was here as a kid.”

  Tooly took the stairs, each landing tiled in checkerboard, each apartment numbered with a brass badge above a peephole. On the fourth floor, she chose a door and stood before it, envisaging what lay on the other side. This was her favorite part, like shaking a wrapped present and guessing its contents. She knocked, pressed the bell. No answer.

  All right, then—this was not to be her long-lost childhood home. She’d pick another. She scanned the hallway, and noticed keys hanging from a scratched Yale lock. The door was ajar. She called out softly, in case the occupant had merely stepped away. No response.

  With the rubber nose of her Converse sneaker, Tooly prodded the base of the door, which opened tremblingly upon a long parquet corridor. A young man lay there on his back, surrounded by shopping bags. He stared upward, eyelashes batting as he studied the corridor ceiling, utterly unaware of her in his doorway.

  1988

  “YOUR PAJAMAS ARE INSIDE OUT,” Paul remarked.

  “Whatside who?”

  “Late to be roaming, Tooly.”

  She checked the wall clock. “It’s only sparrow past gull.”

  “You’re sleeping in your socks.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Need to take your socks off before bed, Tooly.”

  “Why?”

  “Well.” He contemplated this at length. “Well, no good reason—leave them on.”

  “I was thinking before.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Was feeling worried.”

  “About?”

  “Not really worried.”

  “You’re the one who said worried.”

  “I got stuck thinking about—” She pointed to the empty cabinet, walked over to it as if drawn along by her forefinger, pressed the tip hard into the varnished wood surface, just above her sight line, yanked away her finger and scrutinized it, dead white from pressure, then regaining its blood flush. She did this again, pressing harder, and—

  “What, though?” he interrupted.

  “What what?”

  “What were you worried about?”

  “That I was going to die, and turn ten.”

  “Die? Why would you die?”

  “In the end,
I will.”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “And turn ten.”

  “Can’t do both, Tooly,” he said. “Well, you can. But there’ll be a long gap in between.”

  As if to illustrate the notion of a long gap, she went quiet, her cheeks swollen till a breath puffed from her. “When I die, I’ll be dead for infinity.”

  “When you’re dead, there is no infinity. When you’re dead, there’s no such thing as anything.”

  “Nothing happening forever?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Oh, but one thing else I was wondering,” she said, unperturbed by this talk of eternal nothingness and buoyed by her ability to engage him in conversation and thereby delay bedtime, that nightly trip to infinity. “Mr. Mihelcic was saying how when—”

  “Who’s Mr. Mihelcic?”

  “My science teacher. Who I said the hippopotamus looked like.”

  “Not to his face?”

  “I said it to you. But I like hippopotamuses.”

  “Hippopotami.”

  She shivered at her mistake. “Hippopotami.” Then, resuming, “Mr. Mihelcic said when you fall into a black hole you get stuck and it’s impossible to get out. Like quicksand.”

  “Black holes are to be avoided, Tooly. As is quicksand.”

  She pressed her finger white against the cabinet, watching it slowly regain life, pressing it bloodless again.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then frowned at a software manual in his lap, to which his full attention now returned.

  She made three laps around the coffee table, stepping over his legs each time, and wandered down the dark hallway to her bedroom. Hippos had yellow teeth that zookeepers needed brooms to clean, using giant tubes of toothpaste. What was it like inside a hippo’s mouth?

  After less than a year in Australia, this was their final night. Every surface in her bedroom was bare, only dust silhouettes where her possessions had been. She dragged the suitcase from her room, wiping her forehead in mime, though no one was present to see. Taking a run-up, she slid back down the polished hardwood floor to the threshold of the living room.

  “You’ll get splinters.” He put down his work and folded his arms awkwardly. “Can you go to sleep now?”

  She flopped into a pile, as if finger-snapped into slumber. Her closed eyelids flickered.

  “Go to bed, please.”

  Tooly slouched away, stumbling on a suitcase strap in the hallway, banging her shin against the doorframe to her room. She leaped onto the bed, rolled to her back. Reaching under the covers, she drew out a book but left the bedside light off for a minute, pausing at the sound of Paul speaking from the hall.

  “The next place,” he said, “the next place is going to be better.”

  1988: The End

  TOOLY PRESSED HER NOSE against the airplane window and breathed, steam on the glass expanding, receding. With the back of her hand, she wiped off the fog, then peered downward as far as possible into the night, finding no splashing seas below or colored countries as on wall maps, just darkness. Following takeoff, they’d flown over the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, above endless Outback emptiness, over the twinkling lights of Bali and Sumatra. There was nothing beneath them now, as if this weren’t a flying machine but a metal tube fitted with seats, windows shrouded, stagehands on the other side replacing backdrops, ushering in a new cast, prepped to yank away the cover.

  An orange curtain dividing economy from business class danced, jostled by stewardesses on the exclusive side. A glassy laugh pierced the burr of jet engines. The dinner trays had been removed; the movie screen had retracted; the cabin crew had dimmed the lights. Most passengers slept, but the occupants of this bank of three seats—Tooly, Paul, and an unknown young woman on the aisle—remained alert. At any engine noise, the woman flinched. Meanwhile, Paul stared fixedly at his tattered hardcover, The Charm of Birds, illuminated by the overhead light, though he hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Tooly spread her long, tangled hair over her face, blowing strands, then chewing them, all the while observing the woman.

  She wasn’t alone in spying: a wolfish man across the aisle watched the pretty young lady, too. When he lit a cigarette, its toasty smell caught her attention and he offered one, springing open his Zippo lighter, swaying its flame at her.

  Due to his asthma, Paul normally requested seating far from the smoking section. But the flight had been overbooked and the only two seats together were these. As smoke billowed closer, he leaned away. Tooly burrowed into the seat-back pocket for his throat lozenges. He sucked one desperately, lips puckered, cheeks lean.

  “Why is it,” Tooly asked to distract him, glancing at the dark window and finding a reflection of the two of them, “that when you look at the horizon it just stops? Why don’t you keep seeing?”

  “Because the world is round.”

  “So why doesn’t it look bendy at the edges?”

  He couldn’t find an answer, so just frowned, and blew his nose into one of the many tissues clutched in a knot within his palm.

  Paul was a pair of red spectacles with a man behind, arms tucked close to his body, as if to occupy as small a portion of the planet as possible. He’d resembled a youth for too long—till nearly thirty—and this had marked his confidence. As a young man, he used to wish for wrinkles, clenching and unclenching his face before the mirror. Years later, lines had materialized, but without the desired effect: a furrow creased his brow even when he slept, and a bracketed wrinkle sat between his eyebrows, like a parenthesis containing worrisome thought. His hair had gone entirely white, though he wasn’t yet forty.

  “When you see the blue part above the horizon,” Tooly continued, “is that space?”

  “The blue bit is sky,” he answered. “The blue bit is the atmosphere.”

  “What comes after the atmosphere?”

  “Outer space.”

  “When a bird goes into outer space, what happens?”

  “It can’t.”

  “But if it did?”

  “It can’t.”

  “But if one did once?”

  The young woman in their row disentangled herself from the wolf across the aisle and stubbed her cigarette, thumbing the lipstick-smeared filter into the armrest ashtray shared with Paul. He held his tube of lozenges obliquely in her direction. With thanks, she accepted, assuming the gift to be flirtation, though it was merely a plot to divert her from another cigarette. As a conspiracy it failed, since the young woman took a second smoke from the wolf, lighting up while toying nervously with a Polaroid camera, asking Paul if flying was always like this.

  He leaned toward her as if slightly deaf, interjecting “Uh-huh” or “Okay” to signal attention, though this interrupted her and gave the false impression that he wanted the floor. When this was surrendered to him, he realized it with alarm, removed his glasses, and shut his eyes tightly to locate an answer. Tooly, using her bare fingers, wiped his thumb smudges off the spectacles. He slid them back on, lenses tilting forward, which caused him to tilt back, as if aghast at the world. “What was your question?” he asked, sniffing.

  “Can I try out my camera on you two?” She stood and focused it on them, much to his unease. When the print issued from the Polaroid, the young woman flapped it till the image appeared, holding it out for them to see. Paul took the photo, thanking her for the gift, which it hadn’t been, and slid the snapshot into his book.

  To block sight of such embarrassing scenes, Tooly shook out her hair and reached into the seat-back pocket, pulling out her novel and sketchpad. Each of her drawings began with a curl intended to resemble a nose. However, other facial features were beyond her, so noses accumulated page after page. She contemplated adding a few more, then opted to read instead, opening The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, one of many volumes Paul had picked up during this never-ending voyage of theirs. He himself had no interest in novels, but bought them for Tooly whenever he found English-language sections in ai
rport bookshops. He purchased indiscriminately, therefore she read that way: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Cujo by Stephen King, I’ll Take Manhattan by Judith Krantz, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, White Fang by Jack London, Shōgun by James Clavell, plus many works by Dickens, including this volume, which told of a dignified nineteenth-century Englishman compelled to teach at a brutish school for outcasts. Tooly had read the book already but, as with all her favorites, she’d stopped before its ending. It was dispiriting to witness her printed companions concluding their lives with a blank space at the bottom of the final page, so she halted earlier, returning months thereafter, flipping back several hundred pages to find them as they had been, deep in conversation, conceiving dastardly plans and sharp retorts.

  She slipped from her seat, crouching in the floor space. Between strands of her hair, she contemplated these lowered surroundings: the carpet, filthy seat frames, carry-on luggage, castaway shoes. An old Indian lady behind her, who earlier had fought to open the tray table and shuddered Tooly’s seat, extended her bare feet, rings on two toes. Impulsively, Tooly patted one. The toe twitched, shifted grumpily, then went back to sleep on a crumpled newspaper that was headlined with talks between Reagan and Gorbachev, alongside a photo of monkeys in South Korea employed to pick pine nuts and, the caption claimed, “working the equivalent of 100 men.”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  She looked up, eyes dry with fatigue. “What?”

  “I’m going to use the facilities,” Paul said. “Stay put.”

  Tooly obeyed just long enough to watch his knees excuse themselves into the aisle. With him gone, she took a proper look at the woman in their row: blond hair in a ponytail on the side of her head, acid-washed jeans with ankle zips. The mysteries of the adult female—all sophistication and bewildering toiletries—intrigued Tooly. She’d had scant exposure to women besides teachers, maids, other children’s mothers. The story of her own mother—that is, the account they told outsiders—was that she remained behind in the United States dealing with personal matters but would join them soon. Such a woman never did arrive. Another year passed, Tooly and Paul moved again, and repeated the tale anew.