The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  Disheveled and fraught, Humphrey reached them. “You are hurt, little gurul?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, emboldened, glancing up at Venn.

  “I am relief,” Humphrey said. “Very relief to hear this.”

  “Do you know Sarah?” she asked Venn. “She invited me to this party, but I can’t find her now.”

  “I know Sarah. And I know who you are, Matilda.”

  He summoned the two bouncers and ordered them to guard the little girl—what the hell had they been doing, letting her walk around on her own? They were far larger than Venn, yet both listened, heads down. They led her by the hand to the front door, sat her on the floor, and amused her with silly jokes, letting her light their cigarettes. After an hour, she fell asleep, the toasty smell of smoke mingling with a dream about calculators.

  Upstairs, Venn found a group of backpacking former Israeli soldiers who were sharing a joint, and he deputized them to clear everyone off that floor so it could be used by the girl to sleep. As he carried Tooly up there, she stirred but kept her eyes closed. The delicious sensation of being placed on a soft bed—he slipped the book bag under her head as a pillow.

  “I’m a bit worried,” she said, sleepy eyes flickering. “I’m supposed to go home.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” he assured her, kicking the last stragglers downstairs and leaving her there to rest. “Nothing to worry about.”

  And she wasn’t worried anymore. She woke just once more that night, the house nearly silent by then, traffic distantly audible, dawn light rising pinkly through the holes in the wall.

  2000

  THE DINER WAS at the corner of Atlantic and Smith, in the shadow of the Brooklyn House of Detention, a high-rise jail whose grated windows concealed any sign of the torments within. In there, cuffs and toughs; out here, milkshakes and pancakes.

  Tooly took a booth by the window and opened the plastic menu, watching the street, delivery trucks trundling past. Since New Year’s Eve, the snow had melted away, as had the millennial panic. They’d said a computer glitch would humble the industrialized world come midnight December 31, 1999. But the Y2K problem proved no problem, notwithstanding the billions spent to avert it. Nor did terrorists blow up New Year’s celebrations in Times Square. The only notable events of December 31, 1999, were the conclusion of an airline hijacking in India, its passengers exchanged for imprisoned militants, who took refuge with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan; and the resignation of the Russian leader, President Boris Yeltsin, who’d overseen the replacement of Soviet Communism and now left his little-known prime minister, Vladimir Putin, in charge of the largest country in the world.

  But more immediate to Tooly’s concerns was Sarah. This was a goodbye lunch, after which Sarah was to depart for Italy, following weeks of unwelcome inhabitation. In typical fashion, Sarah had nagged about having a “girls meal out” before leaving, yet now appeared unlikely to turn up for it.

  After an hour, the remains of a fried-egg sandwich sat on Tooly’s plate. She raised her hand for the check. At which point Sarah walked in, yawning from one table to another as if to trumpet her entrance. She dropped her handbag on the banquette, shoved her suitcase under the booth table—she was heading to the airport straight from here. Rather than address Tooly, she turned to a group of hipsters in the next booth. “Don’t have a cigarette for me, do you?”

  One did, a short guy in a porkpie hat, who fumbled in his overalls pocket for a compressed pack of Parliaments, which he shook out before her, two smokes jutting. She took both, placing one in her lips, the other between his. “You have to keep me company now,” she told him. Out on the sidewalk, she twirled away as smoke ribbons rose, pranced on the balls of her feet down the length of the diner window and back, chatting with the young man. Amazing how Sarah—still furious that Tooly had been avoiding her—now reversed the burden of impatience.

  “What are we having?” she asked, sliding back into the booth. She took Tooly’s hand, rubbed it.

  “Are you doing that because you’re freezing?”

  “Hello!” Sarah said, waving to each member of the waitstaff, concluding with the head waiter. “We’ll have two large, hot coffees.” She behaved as if time began only once she entered a room, mindless of the dirty plate and half-drunk egg cream on the table. Tooly didn’t want coffee. Nor did she want to disagree this early on. So she sipped hers, which was tepid, sour, too long in the carafe.

  Sarah peppered her monologue with references to her rich boyfriend in Italy, Valter, as well as others involved in his leather shop. She had to keep an eye on certain characters, though it was never specified why. As with many of her tales, this one contained puddles of truth, but these accounted for little of her rainfall.

  “Sarah?”

  “Yes?”

  But Tooly had only wanted to interrupt the flow. She had nothing to say, so sounded like a child who states an adult’s name just to see if it works. She played with the metal milk jug, replaced it, invented a question. “Do I seem like the same person from when I was little?”

  “Who else would you be? Anyway, who cares, my dearest darling thing. Memories are so boring. They’re always wrong, and only cause trouble. Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior. Anyway, your childhood is over now.” She scanned for a busboy. “Got to work to keep your cup full in this place. Waiter!”

  He replenished hers, black coffee slopping into the enamel saucer, dripping when she raised the cup to her lips. “Whole time I’ve been here, Venn hasn’t bothered to call.”

  “I haven’t heard from him, either,” Tooly lied. “He’s busy.”

  “Now that I’m not here with money to give him, he’s nowhere to be found.”

  Tooly rolled her eyes. “You with money for him? Please. Get serious. He looks after you, and you know that.”

  “If that makes you feel better.”

  “Not feel better. It’s true.”

  “I’m a liar now? Can’t believe you just called me a liar.”

  “I didn’t say that. I said—”

  “It is what you said.” Sarah slammed down her coffee cup, chewed nail polish off her pinkie. “You want me gone? Well, you can just … All right? Because …” A tear trundled down her face, cleaning a line through her makeup. “I’m the one who kept all this going. I could have snapped my fingers,” she said, “and your world tour would’ve been over years ago. You want to think I’m awful? Fine. You’ve turned twenty-one now, so I can’t stop you.”

  “What difference does it make that I turned twenty-one?”

  “That’s why I came back here.”

  “So we could go shopping on my birthday?”

  “Not for that. Because, after twenty-one, everything changes for you. I’ve been trying to tell you. My only advice is make yourself indispensable to him.”

  “Sarah, I don’t have the messy feelings you have about Venn. I am not you. Not everyone is you. Okay?”

  “Pay attention. Otherwise, things are changing.”

  “Seriously. It’s stuff like this that makes him avoid you. Stop acting up, okay?”

  “Acting up? You are, my dear. Not me. You are the one who’s humiliating yourself. You don’t understand half of what’s going on here. Don’t think you’re above me. Because you are the worst kind of manipulator. You can’t even look me in the eyes. There we go, that’s better. Oh—gone again.”

  “Because I don’t want to look at you.”

  “What a disappointment. We all liked you, Tooly. What a disappointment.”

  “You’re saying things just to be hurtful now.”

  “I,” she said, pointing at Tooly, “I was here before you. Okay? And I get you completely. Each time you make out like you’re all nice and sweet, remember in the back of your head: I know you. I know what you’re like inside.” Sarah spun around, sweetly asking the hipsters for another cigarette. The guy in the porkpie hat, who’d supplied her before, did so again, though he declined to keep her c
ompany. When outside, she beckoned to him through the window. He pretended not to notice; his two friends stifled laughter.

  Tooly resolved never ever to see Sarah again. She submitted to a hug and a peck on the cheek, paid (Sarah claimed to have no American currency left besides cab fare for the airport), and speed-walked back to the apartment to escape the pollution of that woman.

  When Tooly came home, Humphrey placed his finger on the page before him and issued a woebegone sigh, which was his way of communicating serenity, an impossible sentiment while Sarah had been in residence. He dragged the chess set from under the Ping-Pong table and set it up on the couch, laying out all the pieces, placing each at the precise center of its square. “When is last time you win me?” he asked Tooly.

  “The last time we played.”

  “If I play tennis against monkey, he also wins sometimes, because I am very surprised he even holds racket.” He scrutinized her a moment, perceiving that she longed to go, to be uptown with the students, not here with him. “Why I bother?” he said. “You do not even sit and read anymore. Trivial being—that is what you are now. Trivial being, like everyone.” He shifted about on the couch, eyebrows bumping into each other like two butting caterpillars. He had to retract his charge. “Even to say you are trivial being, darlink, breaks my heart.”

  “I should go.”

  The muscles of his face stilled. His brown eyes clouded, gazing fondly upon her. He gave another sigh.

  “What?”

  “I am happy. This is all. Not happy you are going; I am sad you go away, of course. But I am happy you are here now.” He smacked his lips together. “Remember, I am counter-revolutionary and nonconformist. Why I should care about time? Why I should care that later you are not at this place? We are together at same time and in same place for many hours, even if mostly it is in past. What difference? Those events are still there, even if I am not.”

  “What are you talking about, Humph?”

  “Trivial beings think there is only present—that past is gone and future is coming. But past is like overseas: it still exists, even when you are not there anymore. Future time, too. It is there already.”

  “Well, I’m not there yet. But I do need to get moving.”

  “First, I have idea I must run over you.”

  “To run past me?”

  “No, I run idea right at you, and you tell me what you think. Okay?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I work up to it.”

  “Humph, I have to go!”

  “Do you accept I jump from window?” he said. “Or you get angry with me?”

  Humphrey had a long-standing fascination with suicide, alternately romanticizing and recoiling from the idea. It was the ultimate expression of will, he claimed, the mind overcoming the body. Yet the act was tragic, too, given how often suicide was due to the Moron Problem: that simpletons could and did harm intellectuals, that foolish ideas became crazes, that babble was mistaken for brilliance. The Moron Problem made Humphrey want to quit life. Yet this granted victory to the morons. It was a dialogue he had conducted with himself for decades—a debate rendered absurd by the impossibility that he would ever act on it.

  “If you jump from here, Humph, you’d just break your leg. We’re only one floor up.”

  “This is accurate statement.” He knitted his hands over his belly. “You become like Venn now, always going somewhere. Why this is?”

  “I have things to do. I know you like doing nothing, but don’t make me watch. Can you accept that?”

  During her reproach, he curled his head till his chin grazed his chest, as if it snowed on him.

  She prepared to leave. Had no duty here—they had been company to each other over the years, but she refused to pity him. Pity was the opposite of friendship. Venn had said that, and she repeated it in her head, arming herself against Humphrey’s hunched silence. She fastened her duffle-coat toggles, feigning indifference to him, until something changed, and the indifference felt real. There—perhaps you could turn off sympathy.

  DUNCAN APOLOGIZED FOR failing to invite her to his family home for the Christmas holidays—this whole break, he’d felt like crap.

  “I was fine,” she said. Indeed, she’d have hated it there, a stranger among those who’d known one another forever. Plus, Duncan’s remorse had worth—Venn always advised her to watch for others’ guilt, which had many practical uses.

  She took a sweater from his closet. “And Xavi,” she asked, pushing her head through the neck hole, “where’s he?”

  “Back later. He said you guys held a couple of meetings about his business idea.”

  There had been four such meetings, including a New Year’s Eve party of B-school types. “His online-currency idea is really smart, actually,” she said. “Just needs funding.”

  Duncan crouched by the stereo, working on a welcome-back tape for her, writing its label in smeared rollerball ink: “Year 2000 Mix by D-Mac.” She had still not played his previous mixtapes, since the radio-cassette player in her kitchen in Brooklyn turned out, on closer inspection, to be only a radio. His compilations remained forgotten in her coat pocket, the tapes jiggling in their cases at her every step around the city.

  She watched Duncan working the CD player and double-cassette deck, his eyes sinking shut at a favorite chorus, hands swatting the air during a drum solo. Observing him, she came unstuck from the present moment, experiencing it as if viewed a time hence, as if all this were long past, and he at this age resided only in memory. The song exploded, stopped dead. He spun around to look at her. “Amazing, no?”

  “Very amazing,” she responded, noting how he sought her approval. She pressed a kiss to his lips, slid her hands up his long-sleeved T-shirt and over his warm chest. She was the person of chief consequence in his world, but he was not that person to her.

  “I got totally into classic rock over Christmas,” he said. “It was like high school: headphones on in my old room, listening to my parents’ records.” He double-clicked a track on Napster, playing it through the laptop speakers: “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. He smiled, but the irony was lost on Tooly, and he had to explain that this was a notoriously clichéd rock anthem.

  She paid close attention, glancing sightlessly around the room, then shook her head. “Never heard it.”

  “How is that possible?”

  The song went on, the singer wailing, “Lord knows, I can’t change/Lord, help me, I can’t chay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-ange!” Abruptly, the tempo sped up, and Duncan did something unexpected. The meek law student leaped onto his bed and gave the most astonishing air-guitar performance she had ever seen: arpeggios along an invisible fingerboard, hard-strumming every downstroke, eyes scrunched, tongue out, head banging, licking an air pick for effect, stepping on invisible distortion pedals, bending a whammy bar, swinging imaginary rock-n’-roll hair from his face. This act—in addition to being incredibly funny—was absolutely fucking perfect. She watched, trying not to close her eyes.

  “What the hell, McGrory!” she shouted at the fade-out, he standing above her on the bed, breathless. “What the hell!” she repeated. “That was genius!”

  He tried not to smile too proudly.

  “I didn’t even know you knew guitar.”

  “That doesn’t,” he said, breathing heavily, “actually count as playing.”

  “You could start an air band.”

  He hopped off the bed and, fired up by her praise, fetched Emerson’s acoustic guitar from the living room to show what he could do with a real instrument, which amounted to power chords and the opening to “Smoke on the Water,” all of which impressed her. She gave it a try but the frets were too wide for her small fingers.

  “I used to play the ukulele in school,” she said, giving a tuneless strum.

  “You played well, I see.”

  “Music is not among my talents.”

  His bedroom door swung open. “Wildfire,” Xavi called to her.

  “I
know. We need to talk.” She left Duncan to finish her mixtape and went to discuss business in Xavi’s room. After an hour, Duncan entered and handed her the cassette.

  “Quit law school and join us,” she told him. “We’ll be rich beyond your wildest imaginings.”

  In coming days, her planning with Xavi took hours. Soon she was entering his room without a knock, hanging around late into the evening, long after there was no further work. Duncan gravitated to his friend’s room, too, though he still sought permission to enter. His comments were invariably negative—valid concerns but unwelcome, and Tooly dreaded his appearances.

  She consulted with Venn by phone, recounting her progress, which seemed rapid to her. He loved how she really believed in this project, though he noted that it still lacked funding—hardly a trivial oversight. However, they had identified a source.

  “Really don’t want to ask him,” Duncan responded.

  “You don’t ask,” she said. “You mention that there are these entrepreneurs starting a dot-com, and you actually know these guys. They don’t want outsiders involved because it could be huge. But they asked if you wanted to get in. That’s all true. You don’t ask for a thing. Let Keith think he’s come up with the idea.”

  “My father doesn’t operate that way.”

  “If he gets involved and it takes off, he’ll think of you differently forever.”

  “Differently how?”

  “Not as a kid asking for money but as a friend.”

  Duncan said nothing for a minute. “I really, really do not want to beg my dad.”

  Instead, he spoke with his mother, asking what his folks might consider contributing to Wildfire. Xavi made progress, too, meeting at length with Venn about the business plan. Venn showed him the view from the roof of the Brain Trust and an empty cubicle with a handwritten note: “Reserved for Wildfire.” Xavi filled out all the paperwork to join the cooperative—once the funds came in, they were set.

  2011

  SHE ATE DINNER alone in the basement suite, a window high in the wall providing grass-level views of the McGrorys’ backyard. The summer grew hot and light lingered far into the evenings now. Children’s bare feet rushed past and little faces peeped at her, squashed against the panes. She was part of their household now, tending to Humphrey by day, back to Connecticut by night. When she ventured upstairs, the family welcomed her. They counted on her steady mood, knowing that, no matter how grouchy they were, she was impossible to upset. Mac, in particular, glommed on to her—except if Duncan returned early from work, at which point the boy trailed behind his father like a faithful pooch.