Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“But you’re lucky,” Sarah said, scrutinizing Tooly like a car tire. “With that shape, you could wear anything. Bitch.”

Tooly twisted away. “So could you.”

Sarah walked to the back window, surveying the unedifying view: vehicle lights inching along the expressway. “Beautiful winter’s night,” she said, running her finger along the windowsill, across the wall, across the kitchen cupboard. “Love your new place.” She righted a toppled chess piece, pawed without interest at periodicals and books on the couch, organizing them into piles, then entered Tooly’s bedroom, plucking a sweater off the floor. “Where do you find this stuff? The Salvation Army?”

“Yes.”

Sarah gave a false smile, sustained by impatient muscles. “Was thinking the other day of the ice bar. And my Honda Dream. Remember that big cop?”

“You were cool as a cucumber.”

“Oh, hooray! How nice to hear.”

Sarah cited old times to affirm their bond, as if shared events united people, regardless of the content. Yet the occurrences Sarah cited were not exactly those that had taken place. Hers was a record of merriment and constancy, populated by heroes and villains, rather than the ambiguous blurs that others constituted. She erased scenes, especially disasters precipitated by her mistakes, attributing those to enemies, a growing army as years passed. If someone disputed these accounts, dark clouds formed in her eyes. Venn alone baldly refuted her claims and survived. But Sarah herself barely made it through such exchanges, taking his comments like so many stabs.

By now Tooly was less interested in the statements than in the person before her, who had once been so mesmerizing, a scintillating woman in a world composed largely of men. How often Tooly had wished for Sarah to swoop in like this and spirit her off for an adventure that — at the time — seemed the pinnacle of sophistication. Buzzing around some Mediterranean city on the back of a motor scooter, attending parties in Prague, learning Sarah’s postural rules of attraction: you know a man is attracted if he turns his body toward you when passing in a narrow corridor; if he studies your face when you speak, though you are looking elsewhere; or if he stands straighter as you approach. The prospects for any affair, Sarah stated, were all in the degree to which the male slouched.

How captivating Sarah had been. Yet whenever Tooly had most longed for her company was when Sarah proved most elusive. She would turn up promising adventure, then be gone by nightfall. It happened in Jakarta, after Sarah traveled in on the same flight as Tooly and Humphrey, only to disappear at the airport. Then she’d joined them in Amsterdam, with the emotional pull-push that became the hallmark of her dealings with Tooly. In Malta and Cyprus that summer, she sought to transform the teenage girl into a mini-Sarah. But when she found them in Athens she gave Tooly the cold shoulder for two weeks. In Milan, Tooly witnessed Sarah snorting cocaine for the first time, and heard incessantly about her turbulent relations with a married millionaire. She and Sarah clashed in Budapest, made up in Prague. The woman had exploded in rage in Hamburg, smashed a window with her little hammer and stormed out, then located them months later in Marseille, as if nothing had happened.

For years, Tooly’s opinion of Sarah had swung between adulation and contempt. But recently had Tooly recognized her mistake: all these comings and goings, of which she had long believed herself the principal object, concerned her only peripherally. Sarah returned for Venn, sought a pretext to be with him, even though he had rejected her years before. Each time Sarah failed anew, she shifted her attention to Tooly, meddling with the girl to bother Venn, knowing how close they were.

Today, she talked and talked. Tooly shut her eyes, concealing the thoughts behind them.

“What?” Sarah asked. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing’s funny,” she answered, shaking her head. “Just thinking.”

“See, you’re the same — still laughing at life! That’s what’s extraordinary about people. Nobody changes! At heart, everyone’s the same at eight as at eighty.”

Tooly nodded as if this were surely true (though surely it was not). Abruptly, Sarah switched rails, careening into a convoluted account of misfortunes that, by no fault of her own, had led here. “And when I went in — this will stun you — they’d taken everything. Changed the locks even, pricks.”

“So how did you get in at all?”

“I didn’t. I told you — they changed the locks.”

“So how’d you know they took everything?”

“You haven’t met these people,” she responded. “I’m telling you, the woman is psychotic. You don’t realize how things are in that part of the world. People will take you into the forest, machete you, and sell you for bush meat. The police are corrupt. You have no recourse. I was told — you’re not going to believe this — I was told they’d put me in prison (imagine a prison there !) for up to six years. I’d not even done anything. It’s enough to make you … No?” A classic end to a Sarah story: she, unjustly cast out, mistreated, slandered. Amazingly, she believed what she said, which became truer by repetition. But to claim victimhood again and again without seeming a fool obliged her to depict humanity as increasingly malign. Needfully, her worldview darkened year after year.

Sarah’s latest plan was to move to Rome and reconquer a city abandoned a half century earlier by her father, a former Fascist now long dead. There was a leather-goods store that belonged to an Italian friend, Valter, a married accountant whom she’d often mocked because he loved her. Sarah had an eye for fashion, she said, so would run the place. “Best part is you’re coming with me! You’ll be my assistant. Aren’t you excited? You’re almost twenty-one now. Time to move on. You’ll fly back with me, agreed?”

“Sarah, I’m not luggage.”

“What a thing to say! I’m trying to help you. Came all this way for you.”

“I’m fine here.”

“Well, never say I didn’t have your best interests at heart. Okay? Anyway, I’m staying a few days.”

“I need to check with Humph.”

“Check what?”

“Just let him know you want to stay.”

“You’ve got a huge mattress — there’s not space for me for a couple of days? Remember when we used to share your tent? Seriously, I don’t see why you’re making a big deal of this. Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“No, Sarah. Last thing I want.” Tooly reached for her, was pushed away, then placed her hand on Sarah’s upper arm, stroked it, as if soothing an animal.

“You’re so happy to see me!” Sarah said. “How cute!”

Tooly had spent so many years adjusting to the storms of Sarah that the habit of tranquilizing her overpowered the wish not to. To break the pattern, Tooly stepped away and rested her hand on the kitchen counter. Sarah placed hers atop, nails blood red.

“You all right?” Tooly asked.

“I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “God, I don’t know.” At times like this, verging on the confessional, she evoked an aging actor before the dressing-room mirror, regarding the sagging vacancy. There was vulnerability in Sarah.

“I hope,” she said. “I hope that bitch gets her comeuppance. I really do.”

Tooly had lost track of all the bitches, found no need to seek clarification on this one, another among the legions opposing Sarah. And it was partly true. The world did thwart her, but not because it conspired to that end. Obstacles materialized because they did for all. Her paranoia was a form of egoism, that merciful failure of the imagination. But the truth of her condition was worse: nobody plotted against her because nobody thought of her at all.