Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Thereafter, whenever she asked a question Mr. Priddles pretended not to hear. When she handed in work, he rejected it on any pretext: “Wrong color pen!” He ridiculed her before the others and — to their delight — once tied Tooly to her desk with a scarf after she stood up without permission to look out the window. If she approached him after class, he spoke sweetly, while looking as if he might spit on her. “Mustn’t moan all the time,” he said. “It’s all subjective anyway.”

“What does ‘subjective’ mean?”

“It’s when the person in charge decides.”

His contempt transmitted to the kids, who treated her as if she were diseased. One day, a boy sneaked up behind her in the hall and choked her for no reason. She stopped trying after that, read novels under her desk, and did her best to lower the class average. Whenever Mr. Priddles played pop songs, she exerted herself not to hear or to absorb the idiotic words. At lunch, she stole away to read her book, erasing an hour. Had it been possible to cut longer stretches from her life, she would have.

Later that week, during Mr. Priddles’s class about poor people, he played “We Are the World,” the lyrics printed on the blackboard:

It’s true we’ll make a better day

Just you and me .

The question was whether the final line, grammatically speaking, should read “Just you and I .” As Mr. Priddles rewound the cassette, Tooly mumbled a mysterious word—“brimstone”—from the book secretly open under her desk, realizing too late that she’d said it rather loudly.

“Pardon us?” he said.

Everyone looked at her.

She chewed a strand of her hair. “Nothing.”

“Share with the class.”

“Uhm,” Tooly began, “there’s just a thing, ‘brimstone,’ that I don’t know what it is.”

“You mean ‘grindstone,’ ” he corrected her. “It’s what you put your nose to.”

A boy asked, “Why do you put your nose to it, Mr. P?”

“It’s a totally cool saying, isn’t it?” he replied. “Basically, it means working hard.”

Tooly consulted the page on her lap — the word was indeed “ brim stone,” with neither grind nor nose in sight. “Brimstone,” she repeated.

“I. Don’t. Think. So,” Mr. Priddles said in a rising scale. “And what led you to this particular off-topic interruption?”

She didn’t hear his query until the paragraph she was reading came to an end, at which point Mr. Priddles stood, arms folded, before her, saying, “The whole class will wait…. Earth to Matilda?… Paging Miss Zylberberg?”

When she looked up, a boy yawned at her, his mouth wide like a lion’s. “Brimstone,” she repeated.

Mr. Priddles snatched the book from under her desk. She watched it being led off by its front cover, which almost ripped under the weight of the hanging pages. He dumped the volume, Dombey and Son , in the trash can and — to his pupils’ uproarious joy — spent the rest of class pouring drips of his Pepsi over it.

She boarded the microbus home, realizing only in traffic that she’d forgotten her book bag in the classroom, which meant that she’d fall even further behind, and — worse — that Mr. Priddles had her private things, including her sketchbook of noses. She’d have to beg for it. Tomorrow fused in her mind with its successors, a chain as infinite as a mirror reflecting a mirror. She dreaded days and wanted no more of them.

That evening, Paul brought out another wrestling video. She asked permission to watch a bit of the Seoul Olympics, which kids had been talking about at school. But he was boycotting the Games because of the opening ceremony, during which the South Korean organizers had released doves that settled on the Olympic cauldron. Instead of chasing away the birds, the organizers just lit the flames, roasting the doves on live TV. This, he believed, said all that needed saying about the Olympic spirit. Consequently, as the world witnessed Ben Johnson beating Carl Lewis in the hundred-meter dash, Paul and Tooly watched a videotape of the Iron Sheik throttling “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.

“How was school?” he asked.

School was a country and home was a country, and the two sent each other letters but never met, Tooly the emissary shuttling between.

“In art,” she said, “we did paintings of a volcano. Everyone had to draw themselves on the side of it, having a picnic, and then we all died. But everyone had to die of something else, not from the volcano.”

“Hard to believe: during a volcanic eruption, dying of something else. Incredible bad luck, at a minimum.”

“It was just pretend.”

“I realize. But still. Or-or-or, what’s the point, really?”

“I got killed by a slingshot.”

“That’s not going to happen. If there’s magma and toxic gases, no one would have the presence of mind to fire a slingshot.” He cleared his throat. “It’s a reminder of how dangerous they are.”

“Volcanoes?”

“Slingshots. But, yes, volcanoes, too.” He returned his attention to the muted wrestling on TV.

As the roast chickens in tights bounced each other off the ropes, Tooly wandered into her bedroom. When the door closed, she flopped forward onto the mattress, remaining facedown for a minute. She sat on the floor before the air-conditioning unit, chilled teardrops blown across her cheeks. In the bathroom mirror, she studied herself, curious to see her face, the crumpled expression, dull bright eyes, these features so arbitrarily affixed to her nature.

She heard the television click off; a hiss sounded from Paul’s inhaler; he flipped noisily through a book on birds. “You coming to read with me?” He had so little to communicate, yet always wanted her beside him. She sat on her bed, resisting the force of his will. Air conditioners thrummed. Shelly’s mop slopped. Paul blew his nose.

“You’re really settling in at this school,” he said when she returned. “Better than the last one.”

On her way home the next day, the microbus idled under the sun, heating the metal chassis and broiling the children inside. They were two blocks from Gupta Mansions and, with this gridlock, it would have been quicker to walk. But they weren’t allowed out before their home addresses. She reached her arm through the open window, hand swiping torpid air as the bus shuddered in place, exhaust coughing from its tailpipe.

On the sidewalk was a tall Western woman who took a small hop with each step of her leather sandals, straps wound around her ankles. She wore genie pants and a shirt with a mandarin collar, her slender arms clinking with bangles. She drew both hands behind her head, twisting and winding her chestnut hair into a chignon, stabbing the pile with a pencil plucked from her lips, then approached Tooly’s window. “Hello, you.”

Tooly stared, unsure whether to reply.

The woman added, “You’re just the person I’ve been looking for.” She placed her hand on Tooly’s tanned forearm, ran her fingers down its length to the little hand, which she held.

Tooly knew she should pull back but did not, instead looking directly at the stranger, whose head was cocked with such fondness that Tooly could not look away. Neither could she hold the gaze, so glanced shyly down, then back up.

The microbus lurched forward, tires turning less than a rotation, leaving the woman a step behind in the road. A couple of other kids looked at Tooly for an explanation. She turned from them, searching for the woman, who approached again, her face softening in a smile. “So hot today,” she said. “But I love it like this. It’s our sort of weather.” She winked. “Want to come out and walk for a bit?”

“We’re not allowed.”