Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“I’ll fetch you dinner, get it ready, then take off. Okay?”

But he wanted no food, nor help getting into bed.

“Anything I have to do before leaving?”

Humphrey sat in his chair, staring at the dark window, as if he’d flipped the CLOSED sign over himself and there was no further business that day. She made her way around him, and glanced back. This was to be her last sight of this old friend: a tuft of cotton-wool hair above the back of the armchair. She closed the door, stood in the hallway, hand on the knob.

Tooly hastened down Voorhies Avenue, heading not for the subway but south toward the water. She yearned for one of her exhausting hill walks, without intersections or pedestrians. The best she could do was the Brighton Beach boardwalk.

It was dark at this hour, perhaps dangerous. Someone could rob or assault her. Neither scared her right then; neither seemed possible, distracted as she was. Anyway, she had nothing for anyone to take. Except, she recalled, Duncan’s spare mobile phone. She held it by her side, ready to fling it into the sand if anyone menacing approached.

Tooly made it safely to the Coney Island end and back, striding fast to the edge of Manhattan Beach, where she stopped, listening to the lapping ocean in the dark. Had someone asked where on the planet she was, she’d have required a moment to respond. Wind flicked her hair. The tide pushed a lip of foam up the beach.

Her hand lit up and a voice came from it. She raised the phone to her ear.

“What’s the whooshing?”

“Why are you on my cell?” she responded.

“You just called me,” Fogg said.

“Did not.”

“I promise you.”

“Must’ve hit speed dial by mistake. Sorry.”

“What’s that whooshing?” he repeated.

“I’m at the beach.”

“Living the high life,” he said enviously. “On the beach, drinking margaritas.”

“What time is it there, Fogg?”

“Where? Here?”

“Yes, there. I know what time it is where I am.”

“To be brutally honest, Tooly, I don’t even know.”

“Thank you for being brutally honest about that.”

“I’m a night owl,” he informed her. “Still, can’t say I’m accustomed to many calls at this hour. Makes me feel right important.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Now,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Nothing — this is a mistake call.”

“Shall we end it, then?”

She said nothing for an instant. “I need to fly back.”

“You only just got there.”

“I know, but …” To explain required telling him more. She offered an abridged version of the truth. That the old man here was not her father. That, as a girl, she’d been taken from home. That she wasn’t sure why. She cringed to say this — her past cohered so poorly. All she heard was inconsistencies, blank patches, and the questions surely occurring to Fogg now: What had become of her parents? And these people who’d brought her up — who were they?

“This old man is one of them that raised you?”

“To say Humphrey raised me is — well, he did a bit. But a strange sort of upbringing. I never asked him to. I don’t owe him anything.”

“You sound a bit upset about it.”

“Not upset. I had just hoped he would help me. But he can’t, so I should go. I feel sorry for Duncan. But if he wants to be rid of this situation he has to let Humphrey manage on his own,” she concluded. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Sounds a little harsh, in truth.”

“I know. But I came here to figure stuff out. And I—”

“Who else could help?”

“Who else could explain this? Nobody I’m in touch with anymore.”

“Have you searched online?”

“These aren’t people you find on the Internet. And I’ve tried,” she added. “We never registered for anything, never signed in anywhere. If you saw my phone book from back then, you’d get a sense. Page after page of scratched-out numbers — we never stayed anyplace, nor did anyone we knew.”

“Why not try calling a few of the old numbers?”

“First, I didn’t bring that phone book here. Second, I’m on a borrowed cellphone and can’t do endless long-distance. Third, those numbers are ancient, Fogg. This was long before mobiles — back when there still was such a thing as ‘away.’ Speaking of which, I need to get off this line.”

“Is your phone book at the shop?”

“No, it’s in the attic.”

“I could try a few numbers for you.”

“I’m not having you cold-call random people from my past.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Fogg, it’s pointless. The only person in there who’s relevant is someone I’m not dealing with. If I trusted her to say anything useful, I’d have tried ages ago.”

“Go on — give us a name.”

“Even if you got her, she’s never saying anything by phone. And I’m not taking a pilgrimage to wherever she is now. She’d make me, for sure. Keep in mind that whatever I spend on travel comes straight out of World’s End — you know that, right? Its funds are mine. If I go broke, that’s it for the shop. This isn’t worth it.”

But that was untrue. The mere prospect of meeting someone from that time had already brought her rushing out here. And this visit with Humphrey — even speaking aloud the name Venn again — had stirred up such disquiet, all the puzzles as upsetting as ever. And Sarah had been there for all of it.

“Let’s find the lady,” Fogg proposed. “Then you can decide what’s to be done.”

“You must be enjoying it alone,” Tooly said. “Doing everything you can to keep me away.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Only, it’s a bit of a mystery story now.”

PAUL PARTED HER bedroom curtains, then shook Tooly’s hand to bid her good morning. At 6 A.M., she moved like a confused snail, but there was no time to dawdle. The school microbus arrived soon outside Gupta Mansions, trawling the expat warrens of Sukhumvit for students lacking chauffeured cars. Even at this hour, traffic was thick: sooty vans piled with rice sacks, green-and-orange taxis, motorbikes twisting through the gridlock. She rested against the bus window, contemplating the weird city inching past.

The teachers at King Chulalongkorn International School were much like her previous ones. There were the gentle and the spiteful; those who gazed out classroom windows muttering about years till retirement; those who believed themselves capable of transforming each child — of being the one whom every pupil would remember.

Her fourth-grade homeroom teacher was Mr. Priddles, who’d given Tooly and Paul their school tour and then had snapped her up for his class — at least until a spot opened up in fifth grade. She had completed this level of coursework before, he reasoned, which promised high marks, an elevated class average, and better prospects for his second consecutive Teacher of the Year award.

Mr. Priddles — a thirtyish Englishman with trendy denim shirts and gelled ginger hair — was adored by his pupils, which made Tooly’s a lonely and secret loathing. Part of his popularity came from playing a ghetto blaster during class and having the kids transcribe pop lyrics. “It’s about engaging with the written word,” he said. “Two poems written a hundred years apart, yeah? Both are poetry. One is not better. To say that someone called W. B. Yeats is ‘better’ than someone called Sting is a construct, basically.”

Each day, Tooly arrived praying that a fifth grader had left — that someone’s dad had become president of somewhere, they’d flown home, and she could escape her horrible class. Yet inwardly she doubted her readiness even for fourth grade. Much of each class, she sat awed by the knowledge rattling around in other kids’ heads and absent in hers. To conceal her incompetence, she rarely spoke, which led the other pupils to deem her stuck-up and perhaps smelly.