The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  When she looked up, a boy yawned at her, his mouth wide like a lion’s. “Brimstone,” she repeated.

  Mr. Priddles snatched the book from under her desk. She watched it being led off by its front cover, which almost ripped under the weight of the hanging pages. He dumped the volume, Dombey and Son, in the trash can and—to his pupils’ uproarious joy—spent the rest of class pouring drips of his Pepsi over it.

  She boarded the microbus home, realizing only in traffic that she’d forgotten her book bag in the classroom, which meant that she’d fall even further behind, and—worse—that Mr. Priddles had her private things, including her sketchbook of noses. She’d have to beg for it. Tomorrow fused in her mind with its successors, a chain as infinite as a mirror reflecting a mirror. She dreaded days and wanted no more of them.

  That evening, Paul brought out another wrestling video. She asked permission to watch a bit of the Seoul Olympics, which kids had been talking about at school. But he was boycotting the Games because of the opening ceremony, during which the South Korean organizers had released doves that settled on the Olympic cauldron. Instead of chasing away the birds, the organizers just lit the flames, roasting the doves on live TV. This, he believed, said all that needed saying about the Olympic spirit. Consequently, as the world witnessed Ben Johnson beating Carl Lewis in the hundred-meter dash, Paul and Tooly watched a videotape of the Iron Sheik throttling “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.

  “How was school?” he asked.

  School was a country and home was a country, and the two sent each other letters but never met, Tooly the emissary shuttling between.

  “In art,” she said, “we did paintings of a volcano. Everyone had to draw themselves on the side of it, having a picnic, and then we all died. But everyone had to die of something else, not from the volcano.”

  “Hard to believe: during a volcanic eruption, dying of something else. Incredible bad luck, at a minimum.”

  “It was just pretend.”

  “I realize. But still. Or-or-or, what’s the point, really?”

  “I got killed by a slingshot.”

  “That’s not going to happen. If there’s magma and toxic gases, no one would have the presence of mind to fire a slingshot.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a reminder of how dangerous they are.”

  “Volcanoes?”

  “Slingshots. But, yes, volcanoes, too.” He returned his attention to the muted wrestling on TV.

  As the roast chickens in tights bounced each other off the ropes, Tooly wandered into her bedroom. When the door closed, she flopped forward onto the mattress, remaining facedown for a minute. She sat on the floor before the air-conditioning unit, chilled teardrops blown across her cheeks. In the bathroom mirror, she studied herself, curious to see her face, the crumpled expression, dull bright eyes, these features so arbitrarily affixed to her nature.

  She heard the television click off; a hiss sounded from Paul’s inhaler; he flipped noisily through a book on birds. “You coming to read with me?” He had so little to communicate, yet always wanted her beside him. She sat on her bed, resisting the force of his will. Air conditioners thrummed. Shelly’s mop slopped. Paul blew his nose.

  “You’re really settling in at this school,” he said when she returned. “Better than the last one.”

  On her way home the next day, the microbus idled under the sun, heating the metal chassis and broiling the children inside. They were two blocks from Gupta Mansions and, with this gridlock, it would have been quicker to walk. But they weren’t allowed out before their home addresses. She reached her arm through the open window, hand swiping torpid air as the bus shuddered in place, exhaust coughing from its tailpipe.

  On the sidewalk was a tall Western woman who took a small hop with each step of her leather sandals, straps wound around her ankles. She wore genie pants and a shirt with a mandarin collar, her slender arms clinking with bangles. She drew both hands behind her head, twisting and winding her chestnut hair into a chignon, stabbing the pile with a pencil plucked from her lips, then approached Tooly’s window. “Hello, you.”

  Tooly stared, unsure whether to reply.

  The woman added, “You’re just the person I’ve been looking for.” She placed her hand on Tooly’s tanned forearm, ran her fingers down its length to the little hand, which she held.

  Tooly knew she should pull back but did not, instead looking directly at the stranger, whose head was cocked with such fondness that Tooly could not look away. Neither could she hold the gaze, so glanced shyly down, then back up.

  The microbus lurched forward, tires turning less than a rotation, leaving the woman a step behind in the road. A couple of other kids looked at Tooly for an explanation. She turned from them, searching for the woman, who approached again, her face softening in a smile. “So hot today,” she said. “But I love it like this. It’s our sort of weather.” She winked. “Want to come out and walk for a bit?”

  “We’re not allowed.”

  “No? Ah, well.” The bus pulled ahead again. “Goodbye,” the woman called out, and walked away.

  “Okay,” Tooly replied softly. So empty that word sounded to her. A motorbike buzzed past. Pedestrians in flip-flops hurried through gaps in the traffic.

  But the woman—her mother—was gone.

  1999

  TOOLY HAD PICTURED college life as wild and wanton. But Duncan and his roommates proved disappointingly straitlaced, notwithstanding the squalor of their apartment. They spent hours at classes and the library, toiling further once home. When darkness fell, they scarcely noticed, lit by the glow of their laptops, until someone walked into the room and flicked on a light.

  Occasionally, Tooly passed a whole day alone there, perusing the bookshelves in their rooms, listening to music that Duncan had introduced her to. She ran the length of the parquet corridor in her socks and slid into the living room, where she browsed mail. In part, she lingered to avoid her home in Brooklyn, overwhelmed as it was by Sarah and her mercurial moods. In part, she lingered to find something of value. But there was another reason, of which she was a little ashamed: she liked this lifestyle—her version of college, which included neither examinations nor tuition fees, just people her age who had read books and had something to say about them. In the evenings, she lounged on Duncan’s bed and helped him decipher the findings in, say, Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball. Or she wandered into the common areas to watch TV with Xavi. She prepared meals for Duncan while he studied; sometimes she fed all of them.

  But days passed before anything qualifying as “sexual relations” occurred between her and Duncan—not that it was entirely certain in these times of the Clinton-Lewinsky administration quite what constituted “sexual relations.” Anyway, he attempted nothing, as if unsure what was permitted and that he might be accused of criminally misinterpreting her signals. He lamented that, even in this age of gender equality, men still had to make the first move—guys were the ones who risked catastrophe. She disputed this, pretending to be unaware of any subtext, though she lay nude under the covers. Finally, she got fed up and took action.

  “You’re quite good-looking,” he responded, as if in warning, “and I’m really not. You are aware of this?”

  “I have a thing for ugly boys.”

  “Wasn’t expecting that answer.”

  “From now on, McGrory, I make it against the law for you to malign yourself. Only I get to.”

  “And you make the laws?”

  “Yes,” she said, kissing him. “I am the legislative body.”

  She had slept with young men like him before, and they tended to fall into two categories: boys who concealed their astonishment at being allowed to touch female parts; and boys who sought to demonstrate their virility, as if Olympic judges awaited in the closet with scorecards. Often, young men sought reviews, wanting (not wanting) to hear how they rated and ranked—though not how many others that ranking might include. “Tell me. No, wait—don’t tell me. No, do … Why did you tell me?” Their se
lf-absorption was not infrequently followed by professions of love. When quitting such types, she was surprised how they argued the matter, as if affections were up for negotiation. In Duncan’s case, he had such a low opinion of himself that all he expected was for her to withdraw.

  But he had ample cause to esteem himself. Aside from his growing legal expertise, he had an exhaustive knowledge of music, played the piano decently (though he loathed practicing), and could draw effortlessly, able to reproduce in two dimensions anything that confronted him in three. On a sheet of inkjet paper, she sketched a nose. Within seconds, he had elaborated it into the nuanced face of a man with a pencil between his lips. He placed the pencil between his own lips and looked at her, trying not to smile.

  “I’m so envious,” she said.

  “It’s a useless skill.” Growing up, he had expected to apply this talent to becoming an architect like his father. But Keith McGrory had discouraged it, and Duncan conceded. “Anyway, architecture in New York is just for developers nowadays,” he told Tooly. “There’s almost an anti-design aesthetic—like they have to make buildings look cheap to demonstrate that they’re being efficient. This city is built for the market, not for beauty.” He began to gain momentum, then halted. “These aren’t even really my views. Just stuff my dad says. But I do sort of believe it.”

  Even after a couple of weeks, he remained timid, preferring to have sex half clothed. She was struck by how many guys were ashamed of their bodies, when that was supposed to be an exclusively female preoccupation. Men were not only shy but shy about being shy. His self-consciousness had been exacerbated by the comments of his first girlfriend, who’d seen him in boxer shorts and remarked that a woman would kill for legs like his.

  Tooly suspected a further cause for his awkwardness: he suffered from a conviction that women had for centuries lain miserably beneath hairy copulating oafs, with their liberation arriving sometime around 1968, after which every dignified man was obliged to compensate for the preceding millennia of orgasmic self-interest. This made sex a matter of due diligence. But she liked to giggle during—the act was so near silliness, in addition to being so near ecstasy. He remained powerfully embarrassed anytime he gained pleasure, as if he’d revealed himself as a shill for the patriarchy.

  One time, it was different. He failed to put on a condom. Both noticed but neither interrupted the act. On the contrary, they continued more intensely, his self-consciousness gone for those minutes. The omission was ridiculous. For her to lose control of the situation—to risk tying herself to him—spooked Tooly. It aroused her, too.

  Legs around him, both of them sitting up, she necked with him at length—not as a prelude to further activities but as an end in itself. No other animals did this, did they? Lips and tongues, eyelids fluttering, the disappearance from place and time. His eyes were swimming when she opened hers.

  “Hello, you abomination,” she said.

  “Hello, you beast.”

  “You are a blotch on the soul of humanity.”

  “Thank you, cannibal.”

  “You’re welcome, evolution-defying organism.”

  He hesitated, thinking up another endearment.

  “Are you stuck, you botched cubist experiment?” she asked.

  “I’m not stuck, you absurdist painting.”

  “You’re copying me on the art front, you moral vacuum.”

  “I’m not, you monstrosity.”

  “You are, horrifying blobfish from the deepest depths of the abyss.”

  That won—he laughed, kissed her chin.

  In the background of this new affair, a civil war raged in that apartment between Emerson and Xavi, centering around the refrigerator. Emerson—in Billabong shorts and Reef sandals, plucking his chin beard indignantly—claimed someone was stealing his food, and applied raging Post-its (“Theft Is Wrong”) to his tofu burgers, Ben & Jerry’s frozen yogurt (“Not Yours”), even the Brita jug (“EMERSON water”). This played into the hands of Xavi, who took giddy pleasure in needling his roommate. Emerson resented Xavi’s and Duncan’s very presence, considering them interlopers in Columbia housing. He believed this justified his treating the common areas as his own, riding his mountain bike into the apartment, dumping it in the living room, mud-caked wheels spinning.

  Of the three roommates, Xavi studied hardest yet also managed to be the most sociable, constantly off to parties, always dressed astonishingly: purple ascot, red jeans, paisley pocket square. He had moved to the United States at age seventeen, sponsored to attend high school in Connecticut and in possession of one battered suitcase, two silver suits, three black-and-white photos of his fiancée, a favorite Parker pen, and a toothbrush. Duncan—hardly a social success at that high school—befriended the new African kid, ate lunch with him, drove him around on weekends. By graduation, Xavi had become cultishly popular. He won a scholarship to Rutgers, and persuaded Duncan to enroll, too. In the dorms, Xavi proved a further success and always told his fans what an awesome kid Duncan was, insisting there was way more to the guy than it seemed.

  There was more to Xavi, too, though he hid it. His family belonged to the Tutsi tribe, a group mistrusted across the African Great Lakes region as an intellectual elite. In the summer of 1994, when he started at Rutgers, extremists from a rival tribe, the Hutu, were seeking to exterminate every Tutsi in Rwanda. Most of his boyhood friends joined a rebel force to fight the Hutu supremacists. Perhaps he should have gone back to fight. But he had not, submerging himself in American college debauchery instead, learning the rules of beer pong, promiscuity, and the backward baseball cap. After the genocide—eight hundred thousand of his people and their allies slaughtered within weeks—Xavi still failed to return. Indeed, he stopped writing letters to his fiancée, then to his family. Yet all his college cavorting ended. Five years later, any party he attended was for networking, a word he’d learned in B-school. Xavi willed himself to success, which alone could rationalize what he had and had not done.

  Her other pal there was Emerson’s girlfriend, Noeline, often found marking essays in the living room. A recently appointed assistant professor in the English department at Columbia, she was about thirty, with multiple earrings, a discreet nose stud, platform sandals, and toe rings. She and Tooly shared cigarettes on the fire escape, taking them from a soggy pack of Camel Lights, although Emerson—a health freak—made it known that the stench of smoke on Noeline disgusted him. Born to a Dutch mother and an American father, she’d grown up shutting between The Hague and Houston. Her parents were biologists who had conceived her while at Harvard, only to find university positions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. As an undergrad at Smith College, Noeline had engaged in a three-year affair with a female professor. For grad school, she attended Columbia for comparative literature, embarking on her first romances with men there, with a mixture of misgivings and enthusiasm. She’d met Emerson at a graduate seminar, and maintained that it was just a fling, their relationship a feminist irony: with all the clichés about the older male prof seducing the co-ed student, she had reversed roles. (Though, as her ex-lover at Smith observed, in that cliché the professor spirals into disgrace and ruination.)

  As for Emerson, he believed he was certain to follow her path to a faculty position. But he was more cocksure than scholarly. To save time, he avoided reading books, preferring reviews, especially vicious ones, which filled him with relief, while raves made him sullen and sent him to Yonkers and back for a restorative bike ride. (He ran, biked, and swam unworldly distances.) In Emerson’s view, every important thinker had one key work, and he sought to own a copy. However, his chief activity seemed to be arguing with Noeline. “Either address the issue or don’t,” he said. “But, please, spare me your drive-by bitching.”

  That such a bright and layered woman had fallen for Emerson—a mediocrity in search of an admiration society—was a cosmic vote for pessimism. So Tooly avoided talking to Noeline about him, dwelling instead on what linked them: books. They had read hundreds of
the same works, yet in a completely different way. Tooly took a book as the creation of one particular brain, while Noeline viewed text as context, each work the fruit of its times, sown by manifestos, fertilized by historical events, harvested in orchards that petered out, burst forth again, producing a landscape known as the Culture. Such classification, Tooly argued, wrecked a work—akin to seeking the soul of a girl by dissecting her body.

  Thankfully, Duncan had no objection to Tooly’s extended sojourn there—if anything, it offered relief from his terror of the December exams. Casebooks rose on his desk, higher than his hairline. “I am, quite literally, over my head,” he said, surfacing every few hours with an attempted witticism about Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois, then returning to what he called “my pit of litigated despair.”

  Despite (or because of) his anxiety, Duncan wrote his exams without apparent disaster. Afterward, he swore that he wouldn’t read another word of case law until the end of the millennium, by which he meant just over two weeks.

  Soon everyone would be leaving for winter break, and Tooly suggested a year-end meal. All were invited, warring parties included. Duncan insisted on cooking, since she had fed him throughout his exam period. Xavi was responsible for bringing strawberry cheesecake. Emerson and Noeline provided the Merlot.

  The apartment assumed an air of goodwill that had been absent in preceding weeks. With the worst of their stress gone, the students recalled their status: they belonged to the educated elite, damn it, and it was time someone cleaned the toilet! Gallantly, Emerson volunteered, yellow rubber gloves up to his elbows. Xavi did his part, too, scrubbing the kitchen, while Duncan swept the common areas, disposing of soda cans, take-out menus, month-old sections of The New York Times. They set up Emerson’s boom box in the living room and played Prince’s “1999,” whose chorus prompted Duncan to request that they not party like it was 1999. “I didn’t party at all this year.”