Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Each of his assignments lasted about a year, during which he based himself at a hub like Bangkok and traveled throughout the region, doing his best to avoid time at the suffocating embassies. Diplomats there often styled themselves a ruling class, treating support staff like servants. Paul might be assigned to fix a faulty dot matrix, for instance, or told to exorcise gremlins from the ambassador’s monitor. On embassy days, he tried to vanish among the swarms of staff and visitors — just another guy slouching out of the cafeteria with a Styrofoam box for lunch. He avoided others’ company by choice, although this was not the only reason he made himself unknown.

Tooly watched him hobbling around in one black Velcro shoe, his polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis. He sniffed — air-conditioning congested his sinuses — then swallowed, Adam’s apple rippling, neck dotted with razor-burn blossoms. “Where’s my other shoe?” His anxiety pervaded the apartment, and her. The disquiet of others was an undiscovered force alongside gravity that, rather than pulling downward, emanated outward from its source. Unfortunately, she was excessively attuned to his nervous pulses. She joined the hunt and discovered his lost shoe under the couch. Disastrously late now, he grabbed for floppy disks and printouts. At the door, he stopped. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Where are you today, Tooly?”

“What?”

“What are you supposed to be doing? I can’t just leave you here.”

“Isn’t there a housekeeper coming?”

“Not till Thursday.” Paul always endeavored to keep them prepared, yet the narrowness of his attention caused lapses. He was a man who could grind at a programming conundrum for thirty hours and resolve it elegantly, then look up to find all else in decay. “Goddamn!”

“I don’t mind staying on my own.”

“I mind,” he said.

“Can I jump on the bed?”

He checked the time. No choice but to leave her there. He came near to an apology, then locked her inside.

This new apartment was large and modern, constructed in the late 1970s, ceilings low, furniture sparse. The windows hummed with AC units, which blew up the skirts of the curtains. In Paul’s room, open suitcases lay on the bed. His computer, a high-performance DEC workstation, was always shipped ahead. She was forbidden to touch it alone, yet did so now, turning the dial on the cube monitor and flicking the I/O switch, floppy-drive light flickering. Within minutes, a green cursor fast-blinked on the black screen.

He had taught her a program once, and she typed it in now, then hit Return. The words “Hello world!” flashed onscreen. Tooly imagined that the machine was alive, and typed back “hello.” But the cursor blinked dumbly. She was only talking to herself.

She left everything exactly as before and ventured into his en-suite bathroom, closed the toilet lid, and climbed up. Tooly parted her unbrushed hair as if it were curtains and peered between, voicing imagined dialogues with acquaintances from previous cities: stewardesses, travelers, and other forms of grown-up. In the mirror, she inspected herself, ears protruding, forefinger fish-hooked in her mouth. All her clothing was rolled up at the hems. She was supposed to grow into it, but remained little. In every class photo, Tooly was at the front — next to whichever resentful boy genetics had consigned to a similarly low altitude.

It didn’t feel as if that reflection in the mirror was really her.

She slid open the mosquito-screen door to the back balcony. The morning sun glared through smog. Beyond the apartment complex stood rusty corrugated shacks and banana trees where birds chirped. She fetched Paul’s binoculars, sneaking them off a high shelf, popped the eye caps, and wiped the lenses on her T-shirt, the glass squeak-squeak-squeaking. With a finger raised (“Careful!”), she returned to the balcony.

Tooly deplored birding, among the dullest activities ever conceived by adults. Animals were endearing when they were crude versions of people, but birds weren’t human at all. Paul said birds had evolved from dinosaurs, which was hard to believe, given that dinosaurs were notably interesting. Nevertheless, she looked everywhere for birds. On the occasions that she spotted one, the sighting pleased Paul, and she wished for that rare effect. Generally, she seemed to irritate him.

“Which do you like best,” she’d once asked him, “birds or people?”

“Oh, birds,” he responded emphatically, adding softly, “Definitely birds.”

Back inside, she clasped in each fist a corner of her T-shirt, stood under the ceiling fan, the propeller chopping air. She remained motionless, her heart rate increasing until she sprang forward, sprinting through the living room, leaping onto her bed, landing on her knees, then bounding off again — through the kitchen, into the empty maid’s quarters, squealing till she remembered that she oughtn’t. She jammed a handful of shirt into her mouth, fabric dampening as she galloped around, sucking breaths through her nose. On the front balcony, she halted, looking down onto their lane, where construction workers toiled, bicyclists queued before a food stall, a street tailor hunched over his pedal-operated sewing machine. All those people down there and she up here — how strange that there were different places, events happening at that moment, and she wasn’t in them. There were people she’d once known doing things on the other side of the world at that instant.

She ran back inside, grabbed her book, and belly-flopped onto the couch. With the thick paperback of Nicholas Nickleby spread before her, Tooly went still. When reading, she appeared comatose and deaf. Yet inside she moved all the faster, hurrying along a tall wooden fence through whose knotholes she observed extraordinary scenes: a whip-bearing butcher cleaning his hands on a leather apron, say; or a pickpocket with a stump for an arm; or a crafty innkeeper eavesdropping on clients. Sometimes she found her view blocked by a mysterious word — what, for example, was an “epitome”? Nevertheless, she hastened forward, finding the next knothole, having missed only an instant. To disappear into pages was to be blissfully obliterated. For the duration, all that existed was her companions in print; her own life went still:

“May I — may I go with you?” asked Smike, timidly. “I will be your faithful hard-working servant, I will, indeed. I want no clothes,” added the poor creature, drawing his rags together; “these will do very well. I only want to be near you.”

“And you shall,” cried Nicholas. “And the world shall deal by you as it does by me, till one or both of us shall quit it for a better. Come!”

She considered the word “shall,” wishing to utter words like that to stammering friends who inquired, “May I — may I go with you, Tooly?” To which she’d reply, “You shall!”

Paul stood beside her, lips moving, words emerging but not sounding yet, her ears still switched off. A stick of dried spaghetti in her mouth, she finished the chapter, then closed the book. “I saw a tree babbler,” she said.

“Where?”

“In a tree.”

He lowered himself into an armchair, rubbed his face. “Don’t eat raw spaghetti.”

“I shall not.”

“Why are your lips green? Were you tasting toothpaste again?”

“Maybe.”

“Just have something normal from the fridge.”

“There wasn’t anything normal.”

“What was there?”

“Nothing.”

He frowned disbelievingly and rose to check. But why would there have been food? They’d only moved in the day before. Every cupboard was empty, the fridge unplugged. He had left her alone for ten hours. “Nothing since breakfast?” he asked.