Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

The next morning, she found a cavernous hollow under the sheet where Duncan had been. He tiptoed back into the room, hair wet, patting his jean pockets, readying for class. “Time I got up,” she said, pushing off the covers, only to pull them back. “When do you leave?”

“Well, my class is at Vanderbilt,” he said, thinking aloud. “I’ll need to take the one or the nine train down to Christopher Street, so … out of here in nineteen minutes.”

“I’ll be gone in eighteen.”

“I dreamt someone arrested me,” he said.

“It’s about time someone arrested you. Hey, when’s your class start?”

“Ten.”

“You’ve got ages!”

“Do you even know what time it is?”

“No. But I think you’re too late for it anyway — they’re starting without you. You should come back under the covers. It’s cozier than the subway.”

“Can’t.”

“It’s an emergency.”

He hesitated, then pulled off his dress shoes and slipped in beside her, sticking to his side of the bed, one foot touching the floor. She sat up, leaning the point of her elbow into her pillow, and considered Duncan. She reached her hand toward him. He started, embarrassed by his own surprise when she flattened her palm across his cheek.

The strangeness of other people — so solid when near; alive, but objects, too. This close, his features lost detail, absorbed in fuzziness. A sensation rose in her, a surge outward and a crush in, a need to push him away, pull him back, to rush to the window and throw her clothes onto frosty 115th Street, leap naked back into the bed, goosebumped and shivering. Instead, she held still.

This time she left with plans to meet again, and with his number, too, which she’d add to her phone book.

“What’s yours?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I’m moving and don’t have my new line yet.”

“Moving where?”

“To be decided,” she said, twitching her nose at him.

His lips parted, but he didn’t ask more.

BACK HOME IN Brooklyn, she took a nap, weary after a night in that cramped single bed. When she awoke, a hush had fallen, the storage space trembling as an overloaded truck rumbled down the Gowanus Expressway. Humphrey entered her room with a cup of instant coffee, a trail of brown drops specking the concrete floor all the way back to the kitchen.

She sat up and took the mug with thanks. No need to explain her overnight absence — he covered his ears if she alluded to romances. Humphrey declined to acknowledge her transition from little girl to grown woman, still treating her as he had when she was young: like his comrade and intellectual equal. Anything else was private. Which was fine, since she preferred to keep sexuality to herself, persisting with the neutered fashions — mothball-scented men’s clothing and boyish sneakers — that she’d adopted in early adolescence. By now, these outfits made her comfortable; a dress was unthinkable.

“What is your name again?” Humphrey asked, sitting at the foot of her mattress.

“Tooly.”

“Who you are?”

“Shut up,” she said, smiling.

“You remind me of Leibniz.”

“Of who?”

“German philosopher from years 1700 and after. He has messy haircut like you also, and dies after foot stuck in avocado.”

“How do you die from an avocado?”

“If you cannot understand, I’d rather don’t explain. If you are not intellectual, is not my business.”

She shut her eyes, entertained, then stood right there on the mattress, stretched her arms toward the ceiling, squeaked. “I walked a pig today,” she said. “Or yesterday. When is it now?”

“Tomorrow. Now go wash,” he told her. “I have items to discuss.”

She knew this ruse well. He wanted company, had been lonely overnight without her, probably waiting up till after midnight, listening for the door. They had lodged together for years, sharing homes in a dozen cities. The cause of each move had been Venn. Abruptly, he’d be leaving town and invited Tooly to meet him a few weeks later in his next city (best not to travel all together). Humphrey liked to accompany her, no matter how this complicated matters — all his books to ship! In some cities, Tooly met up daily with Venn, and was his companion, confidant, ally. He even cooked for her sometimes, or took her out with his associates, guys who would otherwise have snubbed her but whom he silenced to let her speak. He and she might walk for miles, people-watching and kidding around — such vivid periods, those were, that days passed and she read not a word. At other times, it was just Humphrey for weeks.

She showered and, given the late hour, got right into her pajamas. Humphrey awaited her at the Ping-Pong table, the right pocket of his slacks stuffed with balls to save himself stooping when one bounced away — if any shot required rapid movement, he called it “out.”

“It’s not out just because you don’t bother returning it, Humph.”

“If not then,” he asked, “when?”

But after just two points he put down his paddle and returned to the couch. “We need to go somewhere else.”

“Go where?”

“We go somewhere civilized together. Why,” he continued, “we must follow Venn always?”

“What would you and me do,” she teased, “if we went our own way?”

“Like now: items and activities.”

“Ping-Pong, reading, and chess?”

“What more there is in life?”

“And where, even if we had money?”

He looked at his shoes.

“Come on, Humph. Don’t get mad at me.”

“This is most stupid thing.”

“What is?”

He found no cause for anger, so became low. “Don’t be exasperate with me.” Humphrey toed his way through heaps of reading material, picking up decrepit works and dumping them on the couch. He sat heavily, books leaping from his impact and landing open, as if waking with a start. Fingers laced over his belly, he turned to her. “Sit, sit.”

She was on the verge of doing so when he raised his hand with alarm. “You nearly sit on John Stuart Mill!”

She removed the volume by this esteemed gentleman, then plopped herself on whosoever happened to have the misfortune to remain under the shadow of her bruised backside. “Don’t care if it’s Plato or Aristotle.”

“Is not my fault you are not intellectual,” he lamented, and handed her a copy of the closest book to hand, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.

Since they met more than a decade earlier, Humphrey had supplied her with books in this random fashion. Works on the Bronze Age, the cosmos, the First World War, the Renaissance, Greek myths, the race to build the atom bomb, Roman emperors, Voltaire and Locke, Muhammad Ali and David Niven, architecture, diaries of the infamous, gambling scams, economics, Groucho Marx. They passed thousands of hours pleasantly page-turning together, he determining which facts and mystifications were to constitute her education.

Only one form of book did Humphrey disdain: made-up stories. The world was far more fascinating than anyone could imagine. In made-up stories, he contended, life narrowed into a single tale with a single protagonist, which only encouraged self-regard. In real life, there was no protagonist. “Whose story? Is this my story, with my start and finish, and you are supporting character? Or this is your story, Tooly, and I am extra? Or does story belong to your grandmother? Or your great-grandson, maybe? And this is all just preface?”

“I’m not having kids.”

“Sure you are. And then whose story? Your grandson’s? Even what we say now, this is only background to his story, maybe. What about that? No, no, no — there is no hero. There is only consciousness and oblivion. Nothing means anything.”