The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

“If you party like it’s 1999,” Xavi said, “we all leave, and you log on to a chatroom with people from Finland.”

  Noeline uncorked the wine and everyone gathered to inspect the label, playing at being grown-up. Perhaps that was all adults did anyway, only some of them convincingly.

  Duncan banned everyone from the kitchen, his pasta sauce faintly bubbling. Tooly leaned in, offering assistance—but only if needed!

  “Actually,” he replied, pulling her in.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears, clasped her hands behind her back, and looked over Duncan’s shoulder into the pot, where his sauce had reduced into a tomato glue. She tapped her lower lip, turned to him, and, overwhelmed by affection, kissed his cheek.

  He couldn’t find her an apron but offered a dish towel, which she had him tuck into the top of her sweater. To preserve herself from Humphrey’s cooking, Tooly had taught herself dishes over the years, typically from cookbooks collected at charity shops. She set to work now, dicing and sautéing and simmering, he watching with elbows on the counter, chin cradled in his palms, thanking her repeatedly, muttering that he was an idiot, then falling silent and frowning like a little boy. So much did he convey this impression that she reached over and touched his nose with her fingertip.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “For?” She returned to the pot. “I’m not promising deliciousness, given the limited ingredients. But edible, I can predict.” The meal was meatless spaghetti bolognese since Emerson had recently become a vegan.

  She had Duncan deliver the serving bowl to the table, at which point there was a belated scramble for the vinyl chairs, with textbooks and mail-order catalogs flung to the floor.

  The chatty bunch of them fell quiet while blunting the sharp edge of appetite. Tooly plunged her fork into a tangle of spaghetti, left it upright, throat clenching as she swallowed saliva. She watched them eating for a moment, relishing her role, the capable cook, really part of this place.

  Xavi opened his full mouth to tell Duncan, “I love you, brother, but you did not have a hand in making this. It is highly good.”

  Only Emerson offered no praise, nose wrinkled as he picked out flakes of dried oregano. “I know this is vegan, supposedly. But were any animal products used at all?”

  “Do you consider the onion an animal?” Xavi asked.

  “I don’t.”

  “You may be safe, then.”

  As their inebriation increased, Xavi pinged Emerson with provocative questions, urging him to tell the table about his upcoming seminar: “Originary and Beyond: The Gap in Alterity Discourse.”

  “And by ‘The Gap,’ ” Xavi asked, deadpan, “you mean the clothing company?”

  “Not the store, you cretin. The figurative gap: gaps on the page, gaps between words, the gap between the thing and the originary.” With anyone outside the department, Emerson spoke slowly, as if English were their second language. “The gap in the Lacanian mirror.”

  “The gap in your teeth in the mirror?”

  “I don’t have a gap in my teeth, you dick. Look,” he continued, “all gaps are essential, in the true sense of the word ‘essence,’ when we presuppose an overarching gap between the Self and the Other.”

  “The other what?”

  “The Other. L’autre,” he said. “You can go back to Hegel on this. Look at the master-slave dialectic; it’s all right there. You need to sit down with Heidegger, Badiou, and the Marxist psychoanalytics for a few hours. Otherwise, what is there to talk about?” For him, opinion gained validity only if footnoted by one of the university-press pinups—Kristeva, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Saussure, Lacan, Derrida, and others whose careers offered hope to those seeking gainful employment without communicating a single clear thought. He yearned to be venerated for brilliance but lacked it, so found support among others with similar needs. Theirs was a religion of obfuscation, composed of several gods and many priests, but not a single ordinary believer.

  As Emerson prattled on, Xavi clapped and laughed, his face hidden behind his long fingers. Impressively, Emerson persisted, moving on to his doctoral thesis, of which he had produced two hundred eighty-three pages, meaning that he was still miles from finishing. His work had something to do with the hermeneutics of roller-coasters in Continental literature.

  “Do you spend a lot of time riding them?” Tooly asked.

  “Why would I?”

  At first, Emerson had toyed with writing his thesis without the letter e, in tribute to Georges Perec, the wild-eyed Frenchman known for composing a novel without that devilishly useful letter.

  “You should write it without any vowels at all,” Xavi suggested. “Without any letters even. Just numbers.”

  “You idiot. You’re totally missing the point,” Emerson said.

  Noeline had the capacity to shut down this silliness within seconds. What she lacked was the floor: each time she spoke, Emerson talked over her. Only when the conversation drifted to politics did she sit up straighter, lean forward, make her voice heard. “You don’t really believe that,” she told Xavi.

  “Of course I do,” he confirmed, smiling. “I love this mayor.”

  “You’re not allowed,” Emerson said. “Giuliani is a fascist. Amadou Diallo could’ve been you, mon frère. I’m sorry, but a black man cannot be a Republican. You know what those guys stand for?” He pushed on, lecturing Xavi about right-wing isolationism and racist indifference to the developing world.

  “So I should go crazy for your big buddy Bill Clinton?” Xavi responded.

  “At least he believes in humane globalization,” Noeline said. “Say what you like, but we’re living under the most principled leader this country has known in ages.”

  “So principled,” Duncan quipped, “that you can pay cash to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.”

  “Once you put aside the right-wing smear campaigns, what is there?” Noeline continued. “This administration is presiding over the biggest boom in the postwar period. Clinton has evolved the United States from a fundamentally self-interested state to one that intervenes morally around the world. No one in history has promoted the human right to democracy like he has.”

  “President Clinton bombed countries to distract people from impeachment,” Xavi rejoined. “If he is such a humanitarian, why do nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda?”

  “Hey,” Emerson interjected, “Clinton apologized to Africa for that.”

  “He was honest enough to act in Kosovo despite impeachment,” Noeline argued.

  “Got so boring in the end,” Duncan said. “Lewinsky and her beret—please don’t make me watch that clip again.”

  “I’m on your side; that was insanely cruel,” Noeline said, though this wasn’t quite his point. “The Republicans obsess over tawdry bullshit because they’ve got nothing. They actually want stuff to get bad for the country. Seriously, you cannot support these people.”

  “What do you think?” Duncan asked Tooly.

  Events of the present day felt so distant to her. She’d been taught (by Humphrey, though she never mentioned him here) that the truth about humanity had been revealed in the rise of the Nazis, in the Holocaust, Soviet totalitarianism, the mindlessness of groupthink. Only outsiders had a chance at decency. The nature of any group was to annihilate the integrity of its members. “I always wonder what it’d be like if we were in wartime,” she said. “I mean, if we’d been living back then. Like you guys were students at a university and you were teaching at one, Noeline. Except that this was Nazi Germany, and I didn’t tell you anything about who I was because—”

  “You already don’t tell us anything about who you are,” Xavi said, causing the others to laugh, since she had a deserved reputation for secrecy, evading questions about where in Brooklyn she lived, whom she lived with, what she did beyond hanging around here.

  But Noeline wanted to hear this out. “Let her finish. So the scenario is Nazi Germany?”

  “Right. And imagine that I was secretly Jewish. But during the me
al you found out. That’s the sort of thing I wonder: Who would turn me in? I ask myself that about practically everyone I meet.”

  “So,” Xavi asked, “would we?”

  They all looked at her.

  Tooly sat higher in her chair, flattered by the attention. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” She turned first to Emerson.

  “I am one of the righteous Gentiles,” he said.

  “You, I think, would not save me. Actually, you’d turn people in.”

  “Fucking cow!”

  Xavi clapped and laughed. “Me next. Come on.”

  “I think that … you would protect me if it wasn’t too dangerous. If it was really risky, then no.”

  “That’s fair. I can accept that.”

  Noeline said, “Afraid to hear what you think of me.”

  “Yes, you’d help me,” Tooly said. “You’d stand up for me. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Hope so; I think so.”

  “Me?” Duncan asked.

  Her mouth went dry. Tooly had been so vain about their interest that she’d failed to know her answers beforehand. She realized what the next would be, and couldn’t stop it. “No,” she told Duncan. “In honesty, I don’t know that you would.”

  He gave a short fake laugh.

  She added, “But I don’t know.”

  It was too late. She had wounded him, and knew it by the smile he tried to raise.

  The conversation continued. Emerson took the floor again, droning on about kairos and chronos, Nietzsche and Bergson’s fonction fabulatrice. “Eschatological fictions of modernism require action. Just as—speaking of the Nazis again—Hitler’s myths required the purging of the Jews.”

  “Required the purging?” Tooly said. “That’s a casually unpleasant thing to say.”

  “You’re not Jewish for real, are you?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Have I offended you?”

  “You have.”

  “So,” he concluded, “you are Jewish.”

  Noeline, avoiding eye contact, stood. “I’m doing the cleaning-up tonight.” She carried their plates into the kitchen, failing to upbraid Emerson, which she could have done so effectively. It was true—when you joined a group, even a couple, you lost integrity.

  The room altered before Tooly, its occupants assuming the forms they exhibited when first she’d encountered them: young, cocky, vulnerable. They were drunk tonight, capable of viewing only themselves in blurred magnification. Listening, nodding, laughing, she had two epiphanies, and couldn’t decide if they were contradictory: that she could never belong to this milieu, which was beyond her understanding and experience; and that she could master all these people.

  2011

  GRAFFITI BLOTTED OUT the train window, so she had to peer through scrawl to view the outskirts of Rome gliding past. The express to the coast picked up pace through the sun-bleached Lazio countryside, past thirsty vineyards, camper vans in empty fields, ragged horses in minuscule paddocks. Every few minutes, litter increased on the tracks, climaxing at the next station.

  At Anzio, she lugged her bag off the train and crossed an empty boulevard, following a cobbled lane that descended toward the sea. The vacation apartments were shuttered, summer high season yet to arrive. She strode through a ghost town.

  The building lobby was cool marble. A breeze wafted through open windows in the stairwell. In a week, there would be the cacophony of family chatter here, stairs gritty from beach sand, slapped with wet sandals. At a third-floor door, she knocked. From the other side, a voice responded in English—“Yes, yes, coming! Don’t leave!”—as if Tooly might otherwise spin on her heels and run.

  Merely opening the door, Sarah burst forth in a gush of personality, posing three questions and hearing none of the answers. Her warmth was evident, as were the physical changes since their last encounter, her features assuming an increasingly manly configuration as she neared her mid-fifties, despite evident attempts to cling to earlier decades, with dyed strawberry-blond hair down to her waist, a Mickey Mouse halter top, and pendulous earrings that stretched her lobes, like two hands waiting to drop their luggage.

  “Let me give you a kiss,” Sarah said.

  “Let me come in first,” Tooly replied.

  “How are you? Make your cheek available—I’ll give you a peck. Stuff all over my hands.” She held up her fingers, sticky with dough. “I must warn you, the place is a disaster area.” Yet the apartment—airy, with turquoise tiles and French windows—seemed perfectly neat. “Come,” Sarah said, turning with difficulty toward the kitchen, her right leg treading awkwardly.

  “You all right?”

  “It’s just my hip,” Sarah said, leaning against the kitchen doorjamb. “Have I really not seen you since my car accident? That’s ten years ago now. They can’t seem to fix me. Did you notice right away?”

  “Only because I’ve known you so long.”

  “Hmm,” Sarah responded, staring a little too long. “Liar.”

  Tooly deposited her bag by the door, taking a moment to gather herself for more Sarah, who insisted on immediately giving a tour. Guest bedrooms radiated off the living room, everything furnished in a seaside theme—a glass vase filled with dried starfish and cockleshells, a menagerie of ships in bottles, the walls nautical blue, decorated with childish paintings of red yachts on green seas under pink skies.

  Sarah flicked a switch that sent the terrace shutters grinding upward, midday dawning in the salon. “Damn this thing,” she said of the slow-rising contraption, and wrenched apart the French doors—such a hungry, insatiable welcome. “Go out, look.”

  The view gave onto other holiday apartments much like this one, with gaps between the structures offering glimpses of the Mediterranean, waves cresting soundlessly.

  “Come see what I’ve made. Or should I keep it a surprise? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face? You’re not happy to be here. I can tell.”

  “I flew halfway around the world to be here.”

  “I have been so so so so so so so looking forward to you coming,” she said, grabbing Tooly’s hand. “To show you where I live—the town, too. There’s this restaurant we can try on the waterfront—I’ve been wanting to go for ages. The best in Anzio, and I never get to try it. Only thing is that we have to be gone from the apartment by next weekend.”

  “Sarah, I’m not staying.” Coming here was worth it, Tooly reminded herself. Just be patient—you rushed Sarah at your peril. Survive a few hours, get what’s needed, then get out. “I have a hotel in Rome booked for tonight.”

  “I don’t charge for rooms here. Pick whichever you want. Which do you like? Are you hungry? How was the flight?” Sarah kept posing questions like this, never allowing for answers: where Tooly lived now, what she did, who that man was who had phoned. It was Fogg who had found her, having dialed various scratched-out numbers in Tooly’s old phone book before achieving the desired combination of a working line and a respondent who didn’t hang up. This led to another number, then a third. Several calls later, he reached Sarah.

  “Had a lovely Welsh accent,” she said. “And he’s your guy?”

  “No, no. Just works for me.”

  “Sounded yummy. I picture him as a rugged man of few words.”

  “Yes, Fogg is exactly like that.”

  Although Sarah passed to other questions, Tooly answered those that had been asked and forgotten, describing the bookshop and life in her village. Caergenog never felt as if it were her village when she was there, but very much so when she was away. She mentioned her classes: drawing badly and playing music worse. (Sarah laughed—people often responded that way when Tooly mentioned the ukulele.) She hurried her answers, since Sarah exuded such impatience, fidgeting, longing to speak again, only to ask something else.

  “And you cut your hair short. Why?”

  Tooly mussed it. “Easier to deal with.”

  “Bit severe, no? Is that the impression you want men to have?”
Sarah nibbled orange polish off a chipped fingernail, her lashes lowered, baring violet eyelids like two little plums. She looked up. “You aren’t at all interested in what I cooked?”

  They entered the kitchen, which smelled of lemon zest, whipped cream, vanilla extract. “Can I see?” Tooly asked.

  “No! Don’t look in the oven!”

  Tooly made as if to dodge around and peek.

  “Don’t!” Sarah said, giggling, unable to spin because of her bad hip, instead grabbing Tooly’s shirt. “I’ve made tons of everything, so I want you to overeat. Promise you will. Time?”

  “It’s about noon.”

  “Been up since dawn.”

  “What for?”

  “Well, you were coming.” She opened the fridge, unloaded plate after plate. “And potato salad, too. You remember who absolutely adored potatoes?”

  “I do.” She wished Sarah hadn’t alluded to Humphrey, which punctured the illusion of travel, that places you left just stopped in your absence.

  Sarah continued, “I bought fish. Sogliola. What’s that called in English? I never remember fish names. Anyway, it’s the most expensive they had, so I got two. Look, each has both eyes on the same side of its head.” She unfolded the waxed paper to display two soles.

  “Four eyes, staring at us.”

  “Did I show you my new glasses yet?” Sarah disappeared into her bedroom and returned holding spectacles. “Unattractive, aren’t they.”

  “Can’t tell if you don’t put them on.”

  Sarah did so.

  “They look fine.”

  “The same as Sophia Loren wears,” Sarah noted, gaining confidence. “The saleswoman told me that. Must admit, they do make everything clearer.”

  “That’s often a benefit.”

  “Try them on.”

  Tooly obliged.

  “I hate you—you look beautiful. I’ll never be able to wear them now.” Sarah valued looks above all other human traits, perhaps because she’d chanced into good ones, a corruption more dangerous than riches, given that the body’s wealth always runs out. Her wearisome preoccupation had led Tooly to vow never to care about presentation. But it hadn’t ended up quite so. She did have preferences: a distaste for tended beauty; a fondness for scruffiness, for the sort of men Sarah would have considered unkempt peons; and a strident neglect of her own, admittedly ordinary, endowments.