Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“I got stuck thinking about—” She pointed to the empty cabinet, walked over to it as if drawn along by her forefinger, pressed the tip hard into the varnished wood surface, just above her sight line, yanked away her finger and scrutinized it, dead white from pressure, then regaining its blood flush. She did this again, pressing harder, and—

“What, though?” he interrupted.

“What what?”

“What were you worried about?”

“That I was going to die, and turn ten.”

“Die? Why would you die?”

“In the end, I will.”

“Not for a long time.”

“And turn ten.”

“Can’t do both, Tooly,” he said. “Well, you can. But there’ll be a long gap in between.”

As if to illustrate the notion of a long gap, she went quiet, her cheeks swollen till a breath puffed from her. “When I die, I’ll be dead for infinity.”

“When you’re dead, there is no infinity. When you’re dead, there’s no such thing as anything.”

“Nothing happening forever?”

“You could say that.”

“Oh, but one thing else I was wondering,” she said, unperturbed by this talk of eternal nothingness and buoyed by her ability to engage him in conversation and thereby delay bedtime, that nightly trip to infinity. “Mr. Mihelcic was saying how when—”

“Who’s Mr. Mihelcic?”

“My science teacher. Who I said the hippopotamus looked like.”

“Not to his face?”

“I said it to you. But I like hippopotamuses.”

“Hippopotami.”

She shivered at her mistake. “Hippopotami.” Then, resuming, “Mr. Mihelcic said when you fall into a black hole you get stuck and it’s impossible to get out. Like quicksand.”

“Black holes are to be avoided, Tooly. As is quicksand.”

She pressed her finger white against the cabinet, watching it slowly regain life, pressing it bloodless again.

He opened his mouth to speak, then frowned at a software manual in his lap, to which his full attention now returned.

She made three laps around the coffee table, stepping over his legs each time, and wandered down the dark hallway to her bedroom. Hippos had yellow teeth that zookeepers needed brooms to clean, using giant tubes of toothpaste. What was it like inside a hippo’s mouth?

After less than a year in Australia, this was their final night. Every surface in her bedroom was bare, only dust silhouettes where her possessions had been. She dragged the suitcase from her room, wiping her forehead in mime, though no one was present to see. Taking a run-up, she slid back down the polished hardwood floor to the threshold of the living room.

“You’ll get splinters.” He put down his work and folded his arms awkwardly. “Can you go to sleep now?”

She flopped into a pile, as if finger-snapped into slumber. Her closed eyelids flickered.

“Go to bed, please.”

Tooly slouched away, stumbling on a suitcase strap in the hallway, banging her shin against the doorframe to her room. She leaped onto the bed, rolled to her back. Reaching under the covers, she drew out a book but left the bedside light off for a minute, pausing at the sound of Paul speaking from the hall.

“The next place,” he said, “the next place is going to be better.”

TOOLY PRESSED HER NOSE against the airplane window and breathed, steam on the glass expanding, receding. With the back of her hand, she wiped off the fog, then peered downward as far as possible into the night, finding no splashing seas below or colored countries as on wall maps, just darkness. Following takeoff, they’d flown over the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, above endless Outback emptiness, over the twinkling lights of Bali and Sumatra. There was nothing beneath them now, as if this weren’t a flying machine but a metal tube fitted with seats, windows shrouded, stagehands on the other side replacing backdrops, ushering in a new cast, prepped to yank away the cover.

An orange curtain dividing economy from business class danced, jostled by stewardesses on the exclusive side. A glassy laugh pierced the burr of jet engines. The dinner trays had been removed; the movie screen had retracted; the cabin crew had dimmed the lights. Most passengers slept, but the occupants of this bank of three seats — Tooly, Paul, and an unknown young woman on the aisle — remained alert. At any engine noise, the woman flinched. Meanwhile, Paul stared fixedly at his tattered hardcover, The Charm of Birds , illuminated by the overhead light, though he hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes. Tooly spread her long, tangled hair over her face, blowing strands, then chewing them, all the while observing the woman.

She wasn’t alone in spying: a wolfish man across the aisle watched the pretty young lady, too. When he lit a cigarette, its toasty smell caught her attention and he offered one, springing open his Zippo lighter, swaying its flame at her.

Due to his asthma, Paul normally requested seating far from the smoking section. But the flight had been overbooked and the only two seats together were these. As smoke billowed closer, he leaned away. Tooly burrowed into the seat-back pocket for his throat lozenges. He sucked one desperately, lips puckered, cheeks lean.

“Why is it,” Tooly asked to distract him, glancing at the dark window and finding a reflection of the two of them, “that when you look at the horizon it just stops? Why don’t you keep seeing?”

“Because the world is round.”

“So why doesn’t it look bendy at the edges?”

He couldn’t find an answer, so just frowned, and blew his nose into one of the many tissues clutched in a knot within his palm.

Paul was a pair of red spectacles with a man behind, arms tucked close to his body, as if to occupy as small a portion of the planet as possible. He’d resembled a youth for too long — till nearly thirty — and this had marked his confidence. As a young man, he used to wish for wrinkles, clenching and unclenching his face before the mirror. Years later, lines had materialized, but without the desired effect: a furrow creased his brow even when he slept, and a bracketed wrinkle sat between his eyebrows, like a parenthesis containing worrisome thought. His hair had gone entirely white, though he wasn’t yet forty.

“When you see the blue part above the horizon,” Tooly continued, “is that space?”

“The blue bit is sky,” he answered. “The blue bit is the atmosphere.”

“What comes after the atmosphere?”

“Outer space.”

“When a bird goes into outer space, what happens?”

“It can’t.”

“But if it did?”

“It can’t.”

“But if one did once?”

The young woman in their row disentangled herself from the wolf across the aisle and stubbed her cigarette, thumbing the lipstick-smeared filter into the armrest ashtray shared with Paul. He held his tube of lozenges obliquely in her direction. With thanks, she accepted, assuming the gift to be flirtation, though it was merely a plot to divert her from another cigarette. As a conspiracy it failed, since the young woman took a second smoke from the wolf, lighting up while toying nervously with a Polaroid camera, asking Paul if flying was always like this.

He leaned toward her as if slightly deaf, interjecting “Uh-huh” or “Okay” to signal attention, though this interrupted her and gave the false impression that he wanted the floor. When this was surrendered to him, he realized it with alarm, removed his glasses, and shut his eyes tightly to locate an answer. Tooly, using her bare fingers, wiped his thumb smudges off the spectacles. He slid them back on, lenses tilting forward, which caused him to tilt back, as if aghast at the world. “What was your question?” he asked, sniffing.