Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Still big on music?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said sarcastically, “I’m so cutting-edge that I learn about bands from my daughters.”

Mac, who had followed them down to the basement, stared up at his father.

“How much do I have to pay you to get a repeat performance of ‘Free Bird’?” Tooly asked Duncan, smiling.

“Not happening.”

She clasped her hands pleadingly. “Just a bit? You have to! Your son needs to see this!”

Duncan shook his head gruffly, as if she’d done something offensive.

“What’s ‘Free Bird’?” Mac asked.

“Nothing, nothing.”

The boy looked to Tooly, then back at his father.

“Seriously, Mac. Time for bed. No discussion.”

The boy trudged upstairs.

“Now,” Duncan said uneasily at the door to the suite, “before you go to bed, I should hear what you’ve been up to these years. You just vanished.”

She had ample practice derailing such inquiries. But Duncan, having known a younger Tooly, retained access to that version of her. Plus, she’d eaten his food, drunk his wine, was staying in his basement. So she found herself summarizing the past eleven years. How, in her early twenties, she’d worked her way across America, taking all manner of short-term jobs: waitress, clerical, shop clerk. She spent a year in Chicago, three more on the West Coast, then traveled around Latin America, falling for each new place, poring over property sections in the local newspapers. Until, weeks later, she yearned to escape that place, and did. At one stage, she participated in a one-month expedition down the Amazon, but left when the man who’d invited her proclaimed one morning, “The sight of you making your tea, getting it just right, makes me want to pull my hair out. I’m sorry. I had to say it finally.” She tried Europe, working briefly at an expat listings magazine in Paris, then went to Brussels, where she took a job at a souvenir shop and dated a Congolese musician. Next, she toured Spain alone, developing an ache she couldn’t explain. At a flamenco hall in Seville, she met an Argentine woman and they spoke all night about books and travel. Afterward, as Tooly walked back to her hotel, tears came into her eyes. So, so lonely. In defiance, she hadn’t met with the woman as planned, instead traveling onward to Portugal. She stood on a train platform in Lisbon one evening without any reading material, so picked up a scrunched literary journal whose articles were so dull that she perused the classifieds, happening upon one that stated, “Bookshop for Sale.” She had been nearly thirty then — perhaps time to try something rooted.

“I get to read all day long,” she said.

“Cool.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw my life — very un cool.”

From professional habit, she ran her finger down a stack of glossy hardcovers on the workbench, each volume a recent doomsaying bestseller about the profligacy of a culture whose capitalist soul Duncan himself serviced. This was his “apocalypse porn,” Duncan said. Nonfiction titles like Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back .

“They look unread,” she noted.

“Delirium amazonus,” he said. “I buy off Amazon in the middle of the night. Stuff turns up two days later and I’m, like, ‘I’m not reading this!’ Help yourself.” He paused. “What’s your number here, by the way?”

“How do you mean?”

“Your cellphone.”

“I don’t have one; I’m the last person on earth without.”

“This must be rectified.” He fetched an old mobile and charger they kept as a spare. “If you have a problem in the night, phone us upstairs.”

“Thank you, Duncan, but I’ve been making it through the night without help since approximately age thirty.”

“Feel free to call home or whatever. It’s just a Nokia dumbphone, but it’s got credit on it.”

“Thank you. Very kind.”

“The bed down here is squeaky, we were told by the last occupants.”

“I’ll get in and remain motionless.”

“So,” he said, standing taller, “before I go back upstairs, we need to touch on the big issue.”

“Yes, absolutely, please. This mugging,” she said. “What happened, exactly?”

“He doesn’t even remember it, so we’ll never know. To give you the background, I’d been dropping over to your dad’s once in a while, just checking in on him. Sheepshead Bay is way the hell out there, and I was—”

“But wait. I still haven’t heard the whole story of how you two know each other. You said you found him after I left New York?”

It was Xavi who had figured out where Tooly lived, from a marked-up map she had misplaced at their apartment. They’d trekked out to this street in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Expressway and found some old guy looking out the window. They waved for his attention, pressed the buzzer. Did he know where Tooly was? Was he a relative? Her father?

Yes, maybe he was her father, but who were they? They explained themselves, and Humphrey buzzed them in.

“So weird to think of you, him, and Xavi playing chess there,” she said.

After that first meeting, Duncan went back alone, hoping to interrogate Humphrey. But he had no more success — the old man truly didn’t know where she’d gone. When law school got crazy, Duncan quit looking. He met Bridget, and that helped. He graduated, passed the bar, joined Perella Transom Fife LLP, started a family, moved back to Connecticut, and never thought of this guy, the father of an ex-girlfriend. Until, one afternoon, they bumped into each other at a hospital. Duncan had been visiting someone there, while Humphrey had minor surgery scheduled. They spoke briefly, then the old man — mortified — asked a favor. The hospital required an emergency contact number. Could he use Duncan’s?

“I was the only person he knew in the whole city to put down,” Duncan said. “He honestly did not have one other number. A few days later, I’m at the hospital again. He’s recovering from surgery, so I drop in. He promised that, once he got better, he’d take me for dinner. I said, ‘Sure,’ in the way that you do, not expecting people to follow through. After the operation, he actually calls me. Since he’s too sore to travel, I drive down to where he’d moved in Sheepshead Bay. That’s when I saw how he was living. You’ll get a look tomorrow. After that, we kept in touch here and there.”

“Incredibly nice of you. I know how busy you are.”

“It was either me or nobody,” he said pointedly. “Anyhow, I hardly ever went down there. But flash-forward to last year. I happened to be in Brooklyn one Saturday morning, so decided to drop in. I get there, and find your dad sitting in the stairwell of his building. He goes, ‘They’ve taken everything!’ He doesn’t have his hearing aids in, so he can’t hear me. I have no way of asking anything. He’s got these marks on his throat like someone choked him. I get a piece of paper and pen, and write in big letters, ‘What happened?’ He looks up and goes, ‘Your writing is terrible. You’ll never get a job as a secretary.’ ”

She smiled sadly. That was Humphrey, all right.

Since the attack, he had declined. “I’m not saying he’s lost it,” Duncan specified. “Part of the problem is his hearing and his sight. That cuts him off. When a place is noisy, he can’t hear properly, which he finds upsetting. He stays mostly at his apartment. Goes deep into himself. I need a fishing line to reel him back to the world.”

“This is sounding way worse than you described in your messages. How is he even managing on his own?”