The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  “It’s nearly one P.M.—throw caution out of window.”

  “If I threw caution out the window, I’d have to open the window. It’s too cold,” she said. “But I should get ready.”

  He knew this meant a meeting with Venn. “Why you should go? Stay here. Is more comfy. You wait and I find you nice job.” Another of his pastimes was writing on her behalf to grand organizations, informing them of a young lady they must employ. She wished he’d stop this, but few of his correspondents answered anyway. When they did, Humphrey claimed it as the nearest miss. Yes, perhaps the U.N. secretary-general hadn’t hired her, but he had answered on proper letterhead.

  “It wasn’t Kofi Annan who wrote back,” Tooly noted. “Some person in his office. An intern, probably.”

  “Small details,” he said. “I beat you in chess?”

  “I really have to go.” She sneezed, and his face lit up. Humphrey kept pharmaceuticals under his cushion, and prescribed to anyone who as much as cleared his throat. He especially loved treating her—he had done so often when she’d been sick in childhood. But Tooly couldn’t oblige with an illness today. “It was only dust.”

  “Fine, fine—you must go to meeting? Go,” he said. “Just because I can at any moment fall, and my heart stops, and nobody here to call help? No problem. I wait on floor trying to breathe till you come home.”

  “I ban you from falling over and dying while I’m out.”

  “I die very quietly. I try not to bother you.”

  “I know you’re joking, Humph, but I’m actually starting to feel bad.”

  “Do what you like.” He leaned on her, rising unsteadily to his feet. “But I am going out. Cannot sit around all day. I have items and activities.”

  “You idiot,” she said, grabbing him for a cuddle.

  “Leave me, crazy girl!” He squirmed away, sweeping the mussed gray-black hair off his forehead. “You don’t go to see him. You come with me on book consult. No?”

  “Sorry, Humph. And I’m walking there, so I should leave.”

  “At least you take subway with me. It’s very colding outside.”

  “For a Russian, you’re so whiny about the weather.”

  “I am low-quality Russian.”

  “I’ll accompany you to the station. But that’s it.”

  When they stepped outside, she inhaled deeply and the cold air seemed to awaken her a second time. A burning smell was in the air—welding at the ironworks across the street. Their corner was dotted with industrial workshops, many in red-brick garages inside padlocked chain link fences crowned with razor wire. They cut down Hamilton Avenue, walking against the flow of passing vehicles. A few bereft brownstones gave onto the rusted expressway undercarriage, with the Red Hook projects on the other side.

  Outside the station, Tooly stopped. “I have my own things to do, Humph.”

  “How you can walk all way to Manhattan?”

  “Stop trying to keep me here!” she said, laughing.

  “I make law that it is illegal for you to walk today.”

  “I veto your law.”

  “Who gives you veto power?”

  “You did.”

  “I un-give.”

  “I launch a coup d’état and write a new constitution that says I can go. There, done.” She kissed his wrinkly cheek; he wiped it away.

  Striding off, she marched hard up the block, speeding to outpace her guilt. But it caught up, dragged her to a halt. Tooly drummed her lower lip. Couldn’t just leave him. She spun around and went back, fed her token into the turnstile. She found him seated on the platform, leafing through Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political.

  “My darlink,” he said. They sat in silence. The low ceilings and joists down here, paint peeling—it was like stepping inside a mechanical object. “You are so capable and clever, darlink,” he told her. “You will do wonderful things in your life.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “You come back for me—very nice. But you go now,” he said. “You walk. I survive. Muggers don’t dare fight me.”

  “You’d hit them with David Hume.”

  “Worse: I read it to them.” His old brown eyes reflected her momentarily, then gazed up the tracks. A train rushed into the station, its scratched-up windows etched with gang signs and initials. She watched as he boarded alone.

  She resumed her hike, dodging pedestrians and overruling traffic lights all the way up Smith Street, through downtown Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, her mismatched sneakers moving fast—red, then black, cold air gusting up her corduroys—pace increasing almost to a run, as she tried not to beam too stupidly at the thought of who awaited. On arrival at the Bowery, she looked for him; not here yet. Sweat budded across her upper lip, glittered on her forehead.

  To occupy herself, she took out her felt-tip pen—a few new streets to add from this latest hike—and fumbled in her overcoat pocket for the map. But it was missing. Had it slipped out somewhere on the road? Damn! Weeks of effort wasted. Never get attached to objects, Venn always said. Aargh—where was he? She stood at the corner of Hester Street, shivering.

  Minutes passed, and she promised herself to leave after just one more. That one passed; another began. She looked to the left, the right, behind her, back again.

  “Well, well,” Venn said, cheeks broadening as he swept her alongside him in a one-armed hug. “Why’d you keep me waiting, duck? Come on.”

  Whenever they met, his voice resonated in this way—it was as if he spoke directly inside her. His wild beard was shorn these days, though reddish-brown stubble still bristled on his cheeks when he smiled, fan lines crinkling around his eyes. Despite the cold, he wore no overcoat, just a navy turtleneck that smelled of cedar.

  She intended to be furious, but he’d made her laugh already. Anyway, indignation fizzled when directed at Venn. “Can we go indoors immediately,” she asked with mock annoyance, “or walk very fast, preferably huddling together? I’m seconds from hypothermia here.”

  “Hypothermia is good for you—everything goes warm. You moaner! Come on.” He took her hand and threaded it into the crook of his arm, his body dwarfing hers. Venn was like a devilish older sibling, offering that brotherly combination of wholly unreliable and utterly trustworthy. As they walked, she glanced obliquely at him, grinning. She allowed herself to be led along, paying no mind to her route for a change, the city shrinking away.

  She’d seen so little of Venn since their arrival here from Barcelona. He’d come a couple of weeks earlier to set up the basics of whatever business had lured him to New York. So far, they’d had only one other meet-up in this city: a walk around Central Park, followed by drinks and talk and laughter at a bar under the Empire State Building. Cities changed; never their friendship.

  But after that she’d not seen Venn for weeks, and realized that New York might be one of those places where he’d prove a rare presence. Patiently or not, she’d have to wait. He never had a fixed telephone number or a permanent address where she could find him, instead residing in the bed of his latest girlfriend, which changed frequently. Tooly had met many of them over the years, always variations on the same towering floozy. As an adolescent, she had viewed these perfumed ladies as womanhood personified, a state she’d one day achieve. Tooly was grown now and still hadn’t reached it, but she retained a sense that those were proper women, not she.

  Venn led her along Canal Street, past a bakery selling cha siu bao, and pushed open the next glass door, entering the foyer of a six-story building. He pressed the call button for the freight elevator, whose sliding door opened upward with a clatter, revealing a wizened black man in calfskin jacket and woolen suit pants. Warmly, he greeted Venn, ushering them in, and turning the half-wheel that operated the elevator, dry cogs grinding, the rickety cage hoisting them toward the top floor.

  “How are you, my friend?” Venn asked, hand resting on the elevator operator’s shoulder, his other surreptitiously slipping a ten-dollar bill into the man’s pocket.
r />   “It’s all good,” he replied shyly, loving the attention from Venn.

  “You don’t go crashing this elevator with my girl here, all right? We want a nice soft landing.”

  “Nothing but the best, my man.”

  They stepped out into a large industrial space, once a nineteenth-century factory, converted to a sweatshop at the start of the twentieth, and lately transformed into cubicles. A smutty skylight provided scant illumination, while the windows were blacked out to prevent reflections on the computer screens, producing a permanent dusk, just the flicker of TVs on the walls, broadcasting financial news. The space was divided into steel-and-glass units, each containing desks, telephones, beanbags, dartboards, and chattery young professionals kneading stress balls and procrastinating. The centerpiece, however, was a yellow school bus, whose interior had been stripped to turn it into the conference room.

  Tooly wondered about the purpose of all this, but a gathering crowd required Venn’s immediate attention. He led them into the school bus, adults tripping on kid-size steps, banging their heads inside the darkened interior. For several minutes, Tooly waited by the goods elevator, hands clasped behind her back, tapping a rhythm on her behind.

  An emaciated bike courier for a dot-com grocer appeared, shouting, “Some dude called Rob ordered a box of sour keys?” A dozen people barged from the bus and a feeding frenzy ensued around the candy, leaving Venn to deal with the stragglers.

  A short guy with a long goatee drifted to his cubicle near Tooly. He stared at her. “And you are …?”

  “Nobody,” she answered.

  “Okay, let me tell you something. You’re standing right by my box, okay? I pay for it, right? And you’re, like, distracting me right now. If you don’t work here, then—with utmost respect—could you get lost?”

  Hearing this, Venn squinted across the room at her, shook his head, then approached. “Dear, dear, dear,” he said, causing the man with the goatee to turn hastily. “You don’t talk to her like that. When you deal with Tooly,” he warned, “you’re dealing with me.”

  The man swallowed hard. “Sorry, brother. Totally didn’t realize this was your friend.” Blushing, he turned to her. “Apologies. That was out of line. Just, you were—”

  Venn interrupted, addressing her. “Ready to move on, duck?”

  “Ready!”

  With that, he led Tooly gently away, winking at her.

  “What the hell?” she whispered. Venn had certainly landed on his feet here—she’d never seen him in an office like this. In Barcelona, he’d spent most of his time at a grim factory on the outskirts, where an associate produced metal hooks to hang jamón. The man employed illegal immigrants from Romania, which had inadvertently involved him with some serious criminals. He was just a small-business man, and Venn was the only person he’d ever met who dealt with tough guys like that, so he’d asked for help. Venn obliged, yet ended up sympathizing more with the factory laborers than with his own associate, so he’d moved on. Next stop, New York.

  Glancing around demonstratively, Tooly asked, “But this place isn’t yours, is it?”

  “Mine? I never own anything, duck.”

  “Well, you seem to be running it.”

  “Don’t I always?” He winked.

  The property, Venn explained, belonged to a venture capitalist named Marco “Mawky” Di Scugliano, an ex-Bear Stearns guy, brought up in a family-run restaurant in Hammonton, New Jersey, called Spaghett’About It, where he had been shot in the stomach at age eleven for resisting an armed robbery. The bullet, Mawky claimed, had introduced him to Jesus. Also perhaps to the use of profanity, given his motto (printed on the back of every business card): “This is the fucking time.” The school bus had been his idea, a lifelong fantasy that required movers to bust open the roof and lower the vehicle in by crane, costing forty-five thousand dollars, though Mawky told people “almost a hundred grand.” This was to have been his headquarters, but the plan flopped owing to the impossibility of lighting a room with such high ceilings; plus, people were always banging their heads inside the bus, and it proved impossible to get ISDN up here, the only option being dial-up. So he’d dumped the place for a new one on Twenty-sixth Street, overlooking the East River, a space so massive that employees were issued Razor scooter boards just to reach the bathrooms. He had asked Venn to make something of this junker, and that led to the Brain Trust, a cooperative that cost members five thousand dollars to join, plus two thousand a month to rent “a box,” as the cubicles were known.

  “Okay,” she said, “but what are they actually doing?”

  “It’s a lab. Anything these guys come up with—any idea that turns into something—the creator gets a controlling stake in the resulting company. At the same time, all members of the Brain Trust own a piece, too. If a person is wealthy but unoriginal, they benefit—they just ante up for more shares. If they’re rich in ideas and poor in cash, they can sell their Brain Trust shares to someone else. They bet on themselves, but on the group, too. Unlike in a normal office, everyone here wants their colleagues to succeed. Anyway, that’s the theory.”

  He led her to a nearby box of two young women, former junior ad execs who’d quit to apply their wits to personal enrichment. One explained click-through ads to Tooly, rambling about “being first in the space,” “bricks-and-clicks,” and “online play.” Tooly responded with what must have been an absurd question, since the woman asked with dismay, “Wait, are you even on email yet?” (Tooly had tried it a couple of years earlier, but she avoided computers.) The ad women droned on about how a million clicks at six cents each would equal six million dollars in profit. Venn suggested that they check their calculations, and led Tooly to another box.

  “This guy is interesting,” he said, tapping on the glass.

  A programmer in a T-shirt depicting a Rasta mouse smoking ganja rotated in his desk chair. “Big guy! Wassup?” he said to Venn, indifferent that the monitor behind him was on an AltaVista search for “Maria Bartiromo” and “naked.” His idea was a website called www.totally-annoyed.com, on which anyone could post complaints about companies and receive real-time apologies. Presented as a service for customers, the site was secretly funded by corporations, offering them a way to hive off clients who pestered help lines and drown them in a never-ending blah of automated apology, all generated by an algorithm called A.S. (Artificial Stupidity) that varied the regrets automatically, leading customers down an unctuous road to nowhere.

  The next box contained four chubby guys in button-downs, their workstations piled with ravaged pizza slices, Big Gulps, and Mentos wrappers. Theirs was a spot-the-celebrity start-up, in which members of the public would phone in with tips about the location of famous people around New York (and later, Hollywood, London, so on). The info would be fed to subscribers on their pagers or to cellphone update services. The guys had already spoken with an angel investor who’d bandied around the figure of two million dollars. The site, www.spotcha.com, was to go live by year’s end, and was guaranteed to become “the kick-ass brand of the twenty-first century,” they promised, slapping high fives.

  Venn led her onward.

  “They’re not seriously getting money for that, are they?” she asked him.

  “Nearly anyone is getting money who’s not an absolute clown.”

  “And they don’t qualify?”

  “These VCs sit around plotting how to earn off all the nerds they used to beat up,” he said. “They move these guys into offices, give them free Handsprings, Nerf guns—one geek could equal their yacht.”

  “And the cooperative thing? That works well?”

  “Not really,” he said, amused. “They’re all at each other’s throats. That’s what they were talking to me about before. This place is a comedy. But it has a view from the roof.” He led her up a narrow staircase.

  It was windy up there, with glimpses of City Hall, the distant antennae of the World Trade Center, and water tanks on surrounding high-rises. The roof was cover
ed with tar paper, its low wall overlooking Canal Street six stories down. Venn was a man of a thousand acquaintances and hundreds of lovers, yet she was his only friend. If Tooly had an area of expertise in the world, it was Venn; she had studied him for years.

  He was brought up on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, a speck of rocky brushland eight hours from Vancouver via three ferries and an interminable drive through the forest. A hundred people lived on this island year-round, castaways by choice, many on a commune called the Happening, founded by American draft dodgers and a changing cast of artists and loafers. Traditional relationships were forbidden in the Happening—nobody “possessed” anyone in matrimony or otherwise, and parents didn’t exist, just brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, certain women favored certain children, and from this one deduced bloodlines. The boys were banned from owning toy guns and girls were allowed no dolls, though a jolly Swede produced marvelous little vehicles from wood, until a drug dispute forced him off the island. Around the nightly bonfire, the adults held forth about the world with a mixture of logic and lunacy, being at once highly educated and highly stoned. As the kids roasted marshmallows, the adults toked, recited poetry, danced badly, sang full-throatedly to the wilderness. Soon the children were sampling their parents’ stashes and sneaking into the cabins of seasonal residents. The preteens swam to the adjacent island, hopped the ferry to Vancouver Island, hitchhiked down the coast and slept on beaches, rolling tree leaves to see if they might be smoked to any effect.

  In time, the Happening happened less: its founders were short on supplies; the kids got cranky. The adults could have sought employment on the mainland, but society was exploitative. So they pilfered from it, applying to the Columbia Record Club under false names, reselling the albums to a store in Campbell River. One mother and son specialized in defrauding chain restaurants in Victoria, while others burglarized island retirees whose homes they cased under the guise of neighborly visits. When someone heard that provincial law gave children under eleven immunity from prosecution, the parents had their youngsters shoplift to order in Vancouver. Unfortunately, most of them bungled and were caught, prompting two RCMP officers to visit the Happening for a stern chat. This petrified the other kids but not Venn. By his teens, he’d become the commune’s chief provider, a hero by dint of his gumption. A few of the grown-up women even made advances to him. But by age fifteen he’d wearied of this narrow life, surrounded by adults with unfinished college degrees, working as incompetent handymen and pseudosculptors, somewhere at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.