by Tom Rachman
Tooly nodded her assent.
He appealed to Sarah and Venn: “You can’t take her.”
“How much are we talking about?” Venn asked Sarah. “And monthly, right?”
Humphrey shook his head unhappily. “Look, look.”
“What?”
“If you do this,” he said, “I come.”
Venn smirked. “What do you have to do with anything?”
“I keep eye on her.”
“Sorry, but I don’t travel like that,” Venn said.
“We don’t need to all go together,” Sarah argued. “Just tell me where you’re headed. I’ll get there on my own. Me and Tooly will join you.”
“And Humph comes along and babysits whenever you wander off?” Venn said.
“I’m not wandering off. It’ll be a decent amount, Venn. It’s yours as far as I’m concerned.”
“Do what you like, Sarah. You, too, Humph. Makes no difference to me.” Venn winked at Tooly, who grinned back.
Sarah lit a shaky cigarette, blew a smoke cloud, and patted her thigh to call the girl nearer, hugging her tightly, kissing her cheek so hard that Tooly’s neck bent from the pressure. “What have you done?” Sarah whispered. “What have you done to your poor, poor father?”
2000: The Middle
AFTER WAITING AT THE CAFÉ nearly an hour, Tooly acknowledged that Venn was not returning. She walked once around the block, knowing it to be fruitless, then proceeded north. At 115th Street, she stood across from Duncan’s building, uncertain if she wished to be spotted. She studied the building’s façade, the vertiginous fire escape, and distinguished windows at whose other sides she’d stood, the rickety iron balcony where she’d sat, her legs curled beneath her, sharing a damp filtered cigarette, wondering if the bolts in the brickwork would hold.
She walked through Morningside Park, past a guy rolling a joint, his lizardy tongue sliding across the cigarette paper as he watched her. Through East Harlem, she continued, skirting the concrete projects, past adolescents in camouflage and skewed NY baseball caps, stuffing junk food and catcalling. She kept going for hours, crossing the footbridge to Randall’s Island, on to Queens, wending her way south to Brooklyn, reaching her street after midnight, traffic grumbling along the Gowanus Expressway. She entered the building, climbed to their floor, put her key in the front door, but didn’t turn it. She listened to the sound inside: a page crinkling as it turned.
“Tooly?” Humphrey asked through the closed door, then opened it. “Hello, darlink. You are asleep?”
“What do you mean?” she said, puzzled. “I’m standing up.”
“Certain animals sleep standing.”
“I’m not one of them.”
He made for his customary seat at the end of the couch, expecting conversation. But Tooly continued into her bedroom.
Awakening the next morning, she remained under the covers, wishing to escape herself in sleep. She reached for her watch on the floor, opened one eye to read it, daylight streaming around the edges of her bent blinds. A few minutes after noon.
In the shower, she pressed her forehead against the tiles, water whispering down her back, skin goosebumped. A strand of her hair remained stuck to the wall, a black S on the white tile. She wanted nothing for breakfast, took only a few gulps of water from the faucet. She microwaved yesterday’s coffee, hands shivering from caffeine and fatigue, which angered her obscurely. She abandoned her mug in the sink.
“He went,” Humphrey said, meaning Venn. “This is better.”
“We’re meeting up.”
“Where?”
“Haven’t decided,” she said. To avoid his gaze, she looked into her cupped hands.
So much of what Tooly thought, said, her mannerisms, attitudes, and humor, had come from Venn. There was no meaning to “Tooly” without him inside it. The two were akin: living among others but estranged from everyone, recognizing the pretense, forsaking a place of their own for the right, as Venn put it, “to relieve citizens of their transitory property.” He and she had no interest in riches, only in remaining free of the fools who reigned, and always would.
“We have items and activities to discuss,” Humphrey said.
“I’m not interested,” she said. “Not interested in hearing your conversations with the Great Thinkers. Just because you own books by smart people doesn’t make you smart. All you do is sit there. You’re wasting time.”
“I know that.”
“You are,” she said, repeating the charges not from conviction but in distress at her own cruelty. “All you’ve done is sit there, looking at what other people did. You don’t do anything; you never did anything in your life. I know you had a hard time a long time ago in Russia. I’m sorry. But I—”
“This is our last conversation. Can it be nice? Please? We were friends, and now you are sick of me. But everything you say I will think about many times after. And you are right. You are right. But you are going now.”
“Where am I going? I have nowhere to go.”
“You’re leaving.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I like you to go.” He went into her room, returning with her passport, which he placed on the Ping-Pong table.
She clasped her hands to hide their tremors at what she’d said, what was happening. This was what Venn had spoken of: cutting out the unnecessary, managing alone. She opened the passport, and a bank card fell into her hand. “That’s not mine,” she said.
“There’s money on it. You take it.”
“I’m not taking your money,” she said, unable to look at him.
“No? Well, it’s not money from me. Since when I have money? It is from Venn. He leaves it for you. He says, ‘Tell Tooly that PIN number is her birthday, month and day.’ That is what he says.”
She closed her hand over the card.
“He tells me he is leaving today,” Humphrey continued. “He says you should go, too. You must get on train and go somewhere very interesting, do something you always want to do.”
“It’s not our last conversation.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, leaned forward, eyes stinging, clutching the couch upholstery until her arm went weak.
He sat beside her. She took the book from his lap—essays by John Stuart Mill—turned it over, looked at him. “Don’t look sad, Humph. Please. I can’t bear it.”
“Sad? That is lie—it is complete and utter fabric.”
“Fabrication,” she said, sniffing, smiling.
He fetched his Ping-Pong paddle. “Game before you are going?”
She shook her head, but made two mugs of instant coffee.
He tasted his. “Where’s sugar?”
“I put in two heaping tablespoons already.”
“Must be more heaping.”
“Humph,” she said, “we’re always going to have lots of conversations. Okay?”
He smiled. “But, Tooly, I’m not really alive—I am already with my friends,” he said, pointing to his books. “I died already and I’m only watching now. You can go on with this twenty-first century. I am staying in number twenty. It is nicer for me.” The concerns of his century—inspiring millions, swindling them, murdering them—had once amounted to everything, then expired, as the species repeated itself in different generations, in different bodies, uniquely animated in each person, yet united by one fear: that upon their own deletion the world went extinct, too. The times to which he had peripherally belonged—a world war, the ideological battles thereafter—had ended, but his physical powers had not exhausted themselves, nor had the organism stopped. “I know what twentieth century has for breakfast,” he said. “It is too much work getting to know new century.”
“We’ll let everyone else test number twenty-one,” she suggested. “What do you think? If it looks nice, we’ll join them.”
“Is good idea.” He rose as if to give an after-dinner speech, then sat back down and patted her hand. “You so sweet, darlink. I go get fresh air.” He spent twenty min
utes locating his coat and roll-up chess set in case he wanted to study positions, plus a few dollars in loose change. All this he narrated loudly. Farewell unstated, he closed the front door after himself. Even then, he muttered on the landing for a minute before clomping downstairs, the building door squeaking open, crashing shut after him.
Ten minutes later, Tooly left, as he had intended her to do. Reaching the end of their street, she checked the contents of her shoulder bag, ensuring that everything was there: clothing, passport, bank card. “Oh, well,” she said, pressing a knuckle into her breastbone, pushing as hard as she could, as if to cave in her chest. “Oh, well.”
Her train left Penn Station, passing the smokestacks of New Jersey, factories with windows smashed, rusty bridges, residential streets, houses whose insides she filled with blaring televisions, pregnant silences, uproarious laughter, sex, showers, cigars, chatter. She had no location of her own and none in prospect—less in common with those home-dwellers than with the sinister types lurking at each station the train pulled into, its brakes squealing to a halt, air vents gusting, a bag of chips crinkling behind her. “Last call for …” Trenton and Philadelphia, through Chester, Pennsylvania, Wilmington, onward.
2011: The Beginning
THE PASSENGERS EXPLORED their trays of foil-covered treasure, but she turned down her meal, irking the airline steward, who kept telling her that it was free. She looked out the window, smelling rubbery eggs, watery sausages. Flying reminded Tooly of her father. Whenever they’d had a bank of three seats to themselves, they left an empty one between them, she at the window, nose pressed to the glass, Paul on the aisle, looking around for a stewardess to request another ginger ale for his daughter.
There were no empty seats on this flight from New York to London. The passengers were crammed in, bulging over the armrests onto each other. She read a copy of The New York Times, whose front page contained a report that neutrinos may have broken the speed of light:
Even this small deviation would open up the possibility of time travel and play havoc with longstanding notions of cause and effect. Einstein himself—the author of modern physics, whose theory of relativity established the speed of light as the ultimate limit—said that if you could send a message faster than light, “You could send a telegram to the past.”
The purported discovery was shaky, the article continued, but the idea was wondrous. How Humphrey would have loved pondering it! And how odd that events went on regardless, leaving behind those who should have witnessed them.
It seemed inconceivable that he existed nowhere. Even when they’d been apart for years, she’d heard his commentary each time she ate a potato or looked at a Ping-Pong table. The proxy Humphrey inside her continued talking even now that the original had gone from existence. He most definitely was, therefore it was jarring—almost impossible—to know that he was not.
Humphrey had talked once about block time, an idea of the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart, who in 1908 had posited that human perception deceives us: time only feels like a forward-moving flow because of the limits of our minds, whereas time actually exists, as does space, with everything in existence simultaneously, even if one is not there anymore. The events of twenty years earlier still exist, just as another country and its inhabitants exist even once you leave it. Block time was like turning backward in a novel, as Tooly had done in childhood, finding dear characters preserved, quipping and contriving as ever. Block time offered comfort to secular minds, for those who had no heaven in which to save vanished friends. Nevertheless, to Tooly there was something untrue about the theory; a slight comfort, but not true.
She returned to the article, recalling a conversation during which she (in an H. G. Wells phase) had lamented to Humphrey that people always talked of building a time machine to go back and see great moments of history, whereas she’d want to go forward and see what the world looked like then. He had been appalled: to see two hundred and fifty years hence would be devastating. “Maybe in two hundred and fifty years,” he cautioned, “nobody plays Ping-Pong.” His world would be extinct, even if humanity continued. Extinction, as he meant it, took place yearly, in increments small enough to tolerate, harder as they accumulated. To leap so many extinctions at once would be too painful. That conversation had been twelve years earlier, in a world already long extinct.
From Heathrow, she took the Tube to central London, then two trains onward to Wales, and a cab from the local station. She had the driver drop her at the top of Roberts Road, so she could stroll through the village.
Bag over her shoulder, she tapped on the window of World’s End and entered, the bell above the door tinkling. She had doubted that the shop would be open anymore. But Fogg remained there on his stool. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Are you back, then?”
Each sought the appropriate register to address the other. Before, it had been owner to employee, then during her absence—after phone calls and his assistance in her search—they’d become friends, only for her to drop all contact for weeks. Now they settled midway.
She explained her plan: to transfer formal ownership of the shop to him, then be on her way. If he didn’t want World’s End—and she’d understand—she would need to sell the stock, pay any outstanding bills, formally close the company, and lock up within a fortnight. These travels had decimated her savings. She’d be eating empty sandwiches for a while now.
That night, Tooly looked out the attic windows at the rain and the muddy pastures, sheep mewling in the darkness. Lying on her own mattress once again, she slept for eleven hours, utterly tranquil (a tweeting bird, sounds of distant construction, long stretches of oblivion between). Waking, she inhaled the smell of the rafters up here, which until her return she’d never realized had a scent. Her only unease was a hovering sense of responsibility—that she ought to be looking after someone. But there was no one anymore, just herself, which seemed so frivolous.
After opening the shop, she made an early sale.
“Find all you wanted, Mr. Thomas?”
“No, thank you.”
“Can I help you find something else?”
“No, thank you.”
“See you again, Mr. Thomas.”
“Well, best be off now.”
Fogg arrived with their shared newspaper, but without his customary cappuccino. He’d grown jaded about the quality of coffee at the Monna Lisa Café, he told her, so Tooly brewed tea for them both. He accepted his with thanks, flapping open the newspaper, front page devoted to rebellions around the world that summer. “Must be said,” he remarked, “that everyone should live through at least one revolution.”
It was such a wonderful Fogg comment—declaiming on global affairs as the two of them sipped tea inside a bankrupt rural bookshop. Yes, bring on the revolution!
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“Just the idea of a revolt here in Caergenog. Who would we overthrow? The fiendish village council with their dastardly plan to mend the overturned fence posts on Dyfed Lane?”
“Yes, yes, I know—you think I’m beyond stupid.”
“I was smiling because I liked what you said,” she protested. “Don’t say that—that’s an awful thing to say.”
Among Fogg’s charms was that nothing wounded him for long. “To be brutally honest,” he resumed, pursing his lips importantly, “I’m not even sure I’d know how to start a revolution.”
She suppressed her smile, lest he misread it once again. And perhaps she had inadvertently belittled him in the past. Why had she? That’s just how she was. But damn how she was! She didn’t accept that how one was is how one must remain. Consistency in character was a form of tragedy.
She resolved to blunt her flintier side, not to assume that she understood people entirely, and to accept that to be surprised or disappointed or even betrayed was not a catastrophe. It could be a revelation to learn that you were wrong, as she had been about Fogg, a notion he confirmed with what he said next.
“I have something to
show you.”
She walked around the servery to see what he indicated on the computer screen. It was a database of some sort.
“What is that?”
“It’s that,” he answered, pointing to each aisle of the shop in turn. “Took me millions of hours, and still not done.”
While she was away, he had occupied himself compiling a catalog of the entire stock and posting it online, then publicizing it on various bibliophile blogs. A notable American antiquarian had emailed for prices, expressing particular interest in the vintage cookery volumes and animal books that Tooly had amassed. For walk-in customers, Fogg would have settled on a pittance for most of these editions. But, shrewdly, he had consulted competing prices online, and adjusted accordingly. By the next afternoon, he’d made his first Internet sales, almost eight hundred dollars from a single email. The dealer, delighted with his purchases, gave a favorable write-up of World’s End Books on his blog, followed by a rave on Twitter that encouraged his followers to check out the shop’s wares. Now, Fogg explained, a good deal of each workday was spent handling overseas orders, responding to emails, going back and forth to the post office.
“Fogg,” she exclaimed, “this is incredible!”
“Actually earning a bit of money.”
“This means the shop is even more yours now.”
He raised counterarguments, but her attention kept drifting to the window. How she had ached for a proper hike while away—she must go for a scramble right this instant. “Sorry,” she interrupted, “but it’s going to rain later. Would it be okay if I dashed out for a walk? I’ll be back, and we’ll continue this. I promise.”
“Or I could come along.”
“What about the shop? Then again,” she remarked, “how much walk-in business are we really going to lose.”
When he caught up with her at the ridge summit, Fogg was breathless, raising his hand. “Completely out of puff.”
