Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Me,” she said, shutting the door. At the shudder of its closure, he turned, sloshing a glass of vodka in his hand.

“Don’t need to shout.” He failed to orient toward her voice.

“Why are you looking over there?”

He swiveled uncertainly.

“Humphrey? Can you see me? Point to where I am right now.”

“I don’t like tests,” he said. “I keep my chair here behind the door. When people come in, they have to stand in front of me, and the outside light makes a shadow around them. But it’s too dark now.” He spoke to her midriff. “Some people were here before.”

“Me and Duncan.”

“Was that yesterday?”

“Today.”

He harrumphed, unconvinced, and moved the vodka glass to his lips, puckering to meet the splash of liquid, which dribbled down his chin.

“You’re enjoying that,” she said.

“I intend to drink myself into oblivion.”

“Don’t say that.”

“There’s no point in staying. Nothing anybody can do.”

“I didn’t come here to help you.” She sat on his bed, watching him. “In some ways, Humph, you seem like you used to. But you talk … Maybe it was a joke or something. I’m — were you pretending before? I mean, it was years that we knew each other. But this is you talking now, right?”

He sipped his drink.

“So,” she asked, “where are you actually from?”

“Me?”

“Who else is in this room? Yes, you.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not going to say? Why not?” she asked. “How many times did you tell me how you’d been ‘cornered by history,’ that you would have been some great intellectual but your era had ruined everything? That was crap, I guess. Thanks.”

“I’d tell you,” he said. “But something blocks it out, blots it out. Things that I know very well. These blanks in my memory.”

“How am I supposed to believe this?”

His attention roamed. “Can I offer you a coffee? I have a thing of it somewhere.”

She held up a full container of Nescafé that she had bought while outside.

“Yes, that’s the one,” he said.

Tooly excused herself to the communal bathroom down the hall. A fluorescent beam flickered in there. A hole had been kicked in the wall under the hand dryer, baring dusty pipes and insulation. Residents had thrown trash in there: a used tampon, an empty bottle of white rum. She entered a toilet stall, its door hanging by one hinge, a bloated cigarette bobbing in the bowl.

When she got back, Humphrey was making instant coffee using water from the faucet.

“Wait, wait. Isn’t there a kettle?”

He shook off the question, handing her a lukewarm mug.

She stepped toward the bed, inadvertently toppling a stack of books. “Reminds me of my shop in here. But you had way more books than this. What happened to your collection?”

He shrugged.

“You still read all day long?”

“My eyes don’t work. Someone got me a magnifier with a light on it. Makes no difference. I can’t hold things. Something wrong with my hands.”

“You don’t read at all ?”

He frowned in disgrace.

“But, Humphrey,” she asked urgently, “can you talk to me honestly?”

“How do you mean?”

“First, where’s Venn? Do you know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I haven’t heard from him in eleven years now. It makes no sense,” she said. “I’d assume he didn’t want anything to do with me. But even after everything fell apart in New York he kept helping me. Remember the bank card?”

After parting from Venn, she had used that “magic bank card” only in emergencies, considering it his money. Each time she spent from that account, the balance jumped back up. When the card expired after five years, a replacement arrived at her then-address, an apartment in Caracas — even from afar, Venn was looking out for her. Thereafter, she spent token amounts in every city she visited, so he’d always know her location. Eventually, the balance stopped bouncing back. And when that second card was to expire no replacement came. To safeguard his money, she used the balance to buy an asset: her business. When he returned, she’d sell it and repay his loan. Except that the value of World’s End had only diminished these past two years.

In any case, Venn never appeared. Had something befallen him? Was he in trouble somewhere and needed her? “Seriously,” she said. “You have to explain. Starting from Bangkok. I was too young to understand it then. And I never wanted to discuss what happened with Paul. But I think about all of that now. A lot.” She looked at him. “Humphrey?”

He shifted in his armchair, flustered. He ought to understand what she wanted — he recognized that much.

“Are you and Venn in contact still?” she asked.

He had no answers. She kept asking but he kept failing, growing increasingly distressed.

They sat in silence for a minute. No point humiliating him.

“I own a bookshop now,” she said.

“Did I make you coffee yet?”

She prepared it this time, taking their mugs to the stinking communal kitchen, where she scrubbed an aluminum pot left by another resident and boiled water. When she delivered his steaming mug, he perked up, took it from her, splashing coffee on his hands, though not seeming to register pain. “Sometimes I get sugar from the kitchen,” he said. With difficulty — how unsteady he’d become — Humphrey led her back, directing her to a box of sugar with a spoon sticking out. The sugar was crawling, ants marching up and down.

“That’s infested, Humph.”

“It’s not mine,” he replied, serving into his coffee a heaping spoonful of wriggling black-and-white sugar.

“Humph! Don’t!”

He gulped a fast sip, beaming, by far the jolliest she’d seen him, and went for another scoop.

“Wait.” Gritting herself, she flicked off ants, adding a clear spoonful to his coffee, stirring.

He sipped, compressed his rubbery lips, exhaled—“Marvelous! Absolutely delicious and delightful!”—then gulped the rest in two swallows. He plunked his mug on the kitchen counter, eagerly accepting her offer of another, which he drained while the coffee still scalded, his words emerging in steam: “Oh, I like you.”

“You approve of my coffee-making?”

“I like you as a person, as a human being. I quite love and adore you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ve known you a long time.”

“A long time ago ,” she corrected him.

“Was it?”

“Remember all the crazy stuff you taught me when I was small? Saying there was that explorer who got kidnapped in the jungle and the natives put ice cream on the soles of his feet, then brought in a goat to lick it off — the worst torture ever invented. I used to lie in my tent thinking of goats.”

“No, no,” he scoffed, though he appeared pleased to have concocted such bunkum. “If you like, you can tell me things I did. There are parts I don’t recall. You can tell me what happened.”

“What happened when?”

“What I did.”

“In your life? Humphrey, I have almost no idea.”

“But I thought we knew each other.”

“I came here so you could tell me things. Not the other way around. And I’m not your daughter, and you know that, so stop telling Duncan that.”

He bowed his head.

“Is this just a game, Humph? I can’t tell if this is real now.”

“Nothing, not even dictionaries, can tell you what anything means,” he said. “The reality of things is just sad, for the most part.”

“What do you mean?”

On he went, speaking as the snow-blind stumble downhill. She struggled to follow his course, her eyes tightening till she gave in, led him back to his room, her arm tensed behind him in case he stumbled.