Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

As for which legal discipline to pursue, he was leaning toward something noble, because the NYU do-gooder ethic pushed students that way. Public defender was a possibility. Still, he wasn’t sure. If you had brains, they said, you did international corporate law.

He shuddered so intensely that she undid her duffle coat and draped it over his shoulders, forcing her residual warmth onto him. Duncan objected weakly while trying not to look directly at her figure, now more evident without the coat. He fastened his attention elsewhere — tree bark, the pig, a fence — then found her, head cocked, looking directly at him, smiling. “Nice and bracing,” she said. They remained there for a minute, breath clouds alternating, his gradually synchronizing with hers.

He tried further questions, asking where she was from, noting her odd way of talking, inquiring about her age. Tooly gave her birth date, which surprised him — he’d taken her for older. His other queries she dodged, which punctured the exchange and left them in silence till they reached his building. This time, Tooly wasn’t talking her way in; to do so twice would look suspicious.

“Well, I should go,” she said, touching his hand, which was cold and fettered with the leash. She took back her coat, stooped to pat Ham, and strolled off. At the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, she glanced back, catching sight of him struggling to push the pig toward the building. Ham remained doggedly, or perhaps piggedly, in place. Amused, she turned away.

But Tooly did not complete her pivot on that icy sidewalk.

Her legs kicked up, her arms flailed, her behind slammed into the concrete. Rather than springing gracefully to her feet, she waited, her breaths dissolving upward, backgrounded by the nimbus of a streetlamp.

A pig snout entered this tableau.

“You okay?” Duncan asked breathlessly, having run over.

“I’m broken for life.”

“Seriously?”

“Not seriously. I’ll just have a purple bruise that, when I try to admire it in the mirror later, will be too far around to see.”

The pig sat on her.

“Argh!” she said, laughing. “Crushing me!”

Minutes later, Tooly was inside his room, just as she’d planned.

Duncan dropped a compact disc onto the tray of his stereo, which swallowed the album and sighed to life. “I’m obsessed with this song right now,” he said.

She closed her eyes to appear appreciative, but had a long-standing aversion to music, dating back to school days. When she looked up, Tooly found herself being observed and turned away — shyness still caught her out sometimes. “Can’t figure what he’s saying,” she said, sipping a beer Duncan had pilfered from the shared fridge. “Is it ‘Comma — please arrest that girl’? Seems a bit extreme to imprison her for using a comma.”

“It’s ‘Karma police/Arrest this man.’ ”

“No way. And even if, in the most crazy of situations, you were right—”

“We can check the liner notes.”

“Don’t. I hate ruining my opinions with facts. Even if your version is right, what’s it mean? It’s madness!”

He smiled, began to say something, then went for another disc, stacking CDs on the stereo, finger hovering above the Play button. She let him beaver away there with his cueing and reviewing, and kicked off her Converse, sitting cross-legged on his unmade single bed. The space looked so different. Perhaps it was the effect of sitting here, viewing everything from the inside, rather than as she’d met this place, peering in.

He kept starting tracks, promising they’d be amazing, then losing confidence and switching discs. To her, some songs sounded pointy and others round. When Duncan discussed music it was by reeling off band names, singers, guitarists — legends to him, nobody to her.

What occupied Tooly was not the sounds but the sight of his animation. He wobbled his head, mouthing lyrics that he lacked the courage to sing aloud, telling her, “You need to hear it a bunch of times before you get into this. It’s this bit here — listen. Where the drums kick in? Whenever I hear that, it’s …” Anticipation thrilled him: to know what neared, the chorus approaching, almost there, and then — yes! He spun to look at her, eyes warm.

How did this boy see her? For that matter, how was she this time? With any new man, Tooly exhibited a self slightly different from that presented to the previous guy (not that there had been so many). She found herself inhabiting a new character, uncertain whether this edition was more or less true, and whether there was a pure state of Tooly-ness at all. Even when alone, she wasn’t sure what she was like.

Given her lack of musical knowledge, Duncan wanted to burn her a mix CD. However, she had no compact-disc player at home. There was a radio at her apartment, but with a tape recorder?

“I’ll do you a cassette. But you have to tell me what you’re into.”

The only music she knew was from parties, jukeboxes at bars, muzak in stores. She never remembered the name of anything. “I used to like the Ghostbusters song.” He took this as a joke, though it hadn’t been.

Tooly gave a little shiver. “Now I’m getting a bit cold.” She lifted his hooded sweatshirt from the floor. “Would it be okay?”

“No prob. Go for it,” he answered, bashful at the implied intimacy, looking hard at his stereo.

She slipped it on, excused herself to the bathroom, and drew his wallet from the kangaroo pocket — she’d noticed him stowing it there when they were outside. Tooly read his college ID, the Connecticut driver’s license, his credit cards. She wasn’t taking them. Stolen goods were shabby, like walking around with evidence against yourself. But information had worth, held invisibly in your head — provided you could memorize long numbers. To Venn’s chagrin, she wrote things down. “Hey,” she said on her return to Duncan’s room. “You have a pen I could borrow?”

“Got tons.” He opened a box, inadvertently spewing ballpoint pens everywhere. He scrambled around on all fours, collecting them off the floor. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.”

His shame punctured her. She watched a moment, then took off his hoodie and folded it in his closet, the wallet inside.

“Why’d you need a pen?”

“Just to write down the song names.”

“I can do that. If you’re into it, I can put down notes on each band.”

“Actually, I should go.” No point sticking around. Yes, anyone could be mined, but not everyone should be.

He looked up, spurned. “You don’t want your tape?”

She sat on his bed, sipping his roommates’ beers, while Duncan toiled. Making a mixtape took longer than expected, particularly when its creator believed that each track implied something and that the compilation as a whole contained greater meaning still, the entirety of himself distilled onto a ninety-minute Maxell XLII. Tooly grew tipsier and sleepier and chillier, dipping her feet under his duvet, then pulling it up to her knees, her waist, finally drawing the covers to her chin.

She awoke in darkness, a sheet over her nose quivering as she breathed. She recalled a song ending but none replacing it, lights turning off, covers shifting. The two of them remained fully dressed, chastely back-to-back, he compressed into a gentlemanly sliver of mattress against the nightstand. She blew the sheet away, swallowed dryly, and gazed at the ceiling. The room was boiling now, radiator pipe hissing snakishly.

She got out and stood in the apartment corridor. Voices came from the room of the student she hadn’t met yet, Emerson, who was bickering with his girlfriend. All was dark save a thread of light under Xavi’s door, a rustle of textbook pages, the squeak of highlighter pen. Was he worth looking into? Just kids here. Tooly looked through a window at the street — how forbidding her cold walk home. She touched her behind, bruised from the choreographed crash landing on the pavement, and sneaked back under the covers, pulling herself close to him.