Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

But it was Humphrey who had now popped back into her life. Was it crazy to think Venn might be involved? If she went out there, might he be waiting?

Tooly gazed up the hillside, straining for a last glimpse of the ponies. But she absorbed little of her surroundings. None of this mattered. Her bookshop. Nothing. The past simply outranked the present, and it awaited her in New York.

THE PLANE DESCENDED toward the city, its winged shadow gliding over the ocean surface. Tooly, who’d flown so often in her life, had become nervous about planes in recent years. She clenched at each wobble now — when the engines roared into action, when they fell silent.

In the terminal, a Homeland Security officer with elephantine legs and a crackling walkie-talkie watched the hordes plod by, bleary JFK arrivals dragging bags and babies and time zones behind them, their shoulders and hopes sinking at the monumental immigration lines — fault of the terrorists or fault of the response, depending on one’s politics. She recalled how nervous Paul had been whenever they crossed a border. At the counter, a thick-shouldered agent with a dapper little mustache took her American passport, flipped the pages slowly. “Welcome home, ma’am.”

The outer boroughs of New York rushed past the window of the yellow cab, with Tooly crammed behind a bulletproof divider implanted with a blaring television that she couldn’t shut off. The driver chatted on a hands-free, and Tooly kept looking up, thinking she was being addressed, only to realize that he was speaking Punjabi.

In her two-star midtown hotel, she awoke in the dark — that under-the-soil blackness of a hotel room with the curtains drawn. Syncopated police sirens blooped faintly from the street below, as if a kid were in there pressing buttons. Demonic red digits glowed beside her: 4:31 A.M.

Cupping basin water to her mouth, she roused herself, parted the curtains, and discovered an Orion’s belt of office lights. On the television, she read descriptions of pay-per-view movies: “A former marine falls in love with a native of a lush alien world”; “Two NYPD detectives must retrieve a valuable baseball card.” Every commercial seemed to be for pharmaceuticals. Possible side effects included unpleasant taste in mouth, dizziness, abnormal thoughts and behavior, swelling of the tongue, memory loss, anxiety, getting out of bed while not being fully awake and doing an activity you do not know you are doing.

Would she disturb those in the next rooms if she practiced her ukulele? To be among people again, in close quarters, required an adjustment. When she left Caergenog, placing Fogg in charge, he had insisted there was no such place as “away” these days, because of technology. But this seemed “away.”

In about twelve hours, she’d see Duncan. How would he be? Angry? He had never been that way when they were together. But in their online exchange he was curt, mentioning coldly his wife, kids, job. When she requested a phone number for Humphrey, he told her to just come out there. Your father needs you. Not just a phone call.

Hours later, she awoke again, a different self on second rising, parting the hotel curtains on a different city, too: sunlight gleaming off skyscrapers, geometric patches of sky. It was Saturday, but in the offices across the street a few human shapes approached their desks, rubbing their faces as Windows started. In the hotel lobby, a brass revolving door swallowed Tooly, spat her into the metropolis, her entrance punctuated by doormen whistling for cabs and the bap-bap-bap of horns. She navigated without a map, knowing her way without knowing how, the topography within her still, though latent for more than a decade.

In her absence, New York had been invaded by cupcakes. Joggers ran barefoot now. Hipsters wore nerd glasses and beards. And walking had become an obstacle course, pedestrians inebriated on handheld devices, jostling one another as they passed, glancing up dimly at the shared world, then back into the bottomless depths projected from shining glass.

When she lived here, people were always lamenting how New York had changed, how Mayor Giuliani had cleansed Times Square of its gritty charm, turned it into a bland Disneyland. But the city had gentrified further since. Maybe it was just the experience of knowing New York over time, that it kept tidying up. Or perhaps it was the experience of living generally, that you hitched yourself to a particular period but places refused to remain anchored, jarring you at each re-acquaintance.

She arrived at Grand Central for her 4 P.M. train, people fast-walking in all directions, an explosion of humanity with rolling bags. In Caergenog, the church parking lot would be full right now, Saturday-night drinkers at the Hook, ponies wandering the windy ridge. It would be dark up there, lights dotting the valley.

Upon her arrival in Stamford, she hesitated before the station exit, surprised at her nerves on seeing Duncan again. A silver BMW pulled up; the passenger door clicked open. He nodded at her. “Welcome to sunny Connecticut.”

He’d become rather middle-aged: a hunch and a paunch, skin dull, eyes fatigued. She saw already the elderly man he would become, while the youth she’d known grew faint. “Jet-lagged?” he asked, glancing from Tooly to his lap, where he balanced an iPhone on one thigh, a blinking BlackBerry on the other. A notepad lay on the dashboard. She hadn’t seen his handwriting in years. Architectural block letters on graph paper evoked him so powerfully — even more than the man himself, somehow.

Driving toward his home in Darien, he pointed out the sights: a pond where he’d ice-skated as a boy, plus the old Post Road, a stagecoach-mail route in the early years of the republic that now offered SmartLipo, laser hair removal, and Bob’s Unpainted Furniture Gun Exchange.

Duncan was a partner at a Manhattan law firm now, head of a household, and self-possessed as he’d endearingly not been when younger. She perceived irony in the way he spoke to her, as if he’d discussed her earlier, perhaps with his wife — had said that Tooly was just so, and now before him she was proving exactly that. What had Duncan said she was? A little false? A little untrustworthy?

He turned sharply into a driveway. “Home.”

Before exiting, she said, “About tomorrow?”

“There’ll be time to discuss that later,” he said, getting out. “Meet my family now.”

“Sure. Of course.” She took out four cellophane bags of wrapped Swiss chocolates. “I brought presents for the youngsters. They each get a bag, I thought, to avoid civil war.”

“They’ll explode if we let them eat all that,” he said, struggling to unlock the house door with a mobile phone in each hand. “May have to take control myself.”

“Will not, you thief. I’m handing them out now, and you’re not interfering.”

“Three of them over there,” he said, back-kicking the door shut and nodding toward his seven-year-old identical triplets, who lay on an Oriental rug in the living room, one bopping to huge white headphones, her genetic double playing a game on a smartphone, the third goggling at an iPad. All three were dressed as fairies, in leotards with gossamer wings.

“Abigail?” Tooly said. “Which is Abigail? Stand and identify yourself — this is for you. Actually, doesn’t matter who gets which. Are you Chloë? And you’re Madlen? Eat them fast, before your father confiscates.”

Each girl snatched a package and ran to the couch.

“Four candies each and save the rest for later,” he said. “All right, girls?”

The triplets settled cross-legged, picking through their respective hauls, wings quivering as they dug forearm-deep into crinkly cellophane.

“And your boy?” Tooly asked, raising the final gift bag.