Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“You are the most adorable thing. Say whatever you like around me.”

“Where were you born, Sarah?”

“On a game park in Kenya.”

“Did you see lions?”

“Thousands.”

“Did you pat one?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did he bite you?”

“He licked my hand and smiled.”

“Lions smile?”

“If you pat them nicely. Do you like animals?”

Tooly nodded enthusiastically.

“Know where we should go?” Sarah said. “That crazy market with the wild beasts. Shall we?”

“We shall!” Tooly said intrepidly, then: “Am I allowed?”

A tuk-tuk driver deposited them before Khlong Toey, at the fringe of the open-air bazaar, which reeked of panicked fowl. Sarah took Tooly’s book bag so the girl could walk freely into the throng. On either side were tarps to keep sunlight off the produce: purple eggplants, green gourds, tamarind pods, cassava roots, taro. Vendors called across the market aisles, negotiating and laughing, while laborers in coolie hats dragged carts up and down. Tooly looked upward between adult bodies, and the sky dazzled her. Sarah shaded the girl’s brow, pointing to a stack of warty vegetables. “Ugliest thing you’ve seen in your life. This is fun, isn’t it,” she said, clutching Tooly’s arm. “Just you and me. Lead the way!”

Tooly pushed on, peeking into buckets filled with fried baby crabs, red chilies, oyster mushrooms, mouse-ear fungus. Under netting were live toads (eyeing her) beside flayed toads (pink-muscled, arms flung back). On a butcher block lay pig heads. In a metal basin, shiny fish flopped, two leaping over the edge as if in coordinated jailbreak, only to land pointlessly on the concrete floor. A fishmonger tossed them back into the squirming mass. The paving stones were specked with feathers of the live geese crammed into cages, necks bent to fit inside, the metal wires caked with droppings. Sarah must have read Tooly’s expression. “Ready to leave?”

But seeking the exit only drove them deeper inside the market, each aisle offering a different wriggling horror. “That way?” Tooly suggested, and went ahead to prove herself brave. She paused at a bamboo cage of long-beaked birds. “Look!” she exclaimed. “Pied kingfishers!”

“What?”

“They hover over the water. I’ve seen them before. Their wings go five hundred times a minute, and they look like they’re standing in the air. Then they see a fish and they go down into the water and bite it.”

“They’re beautiful,” Sarah said, studying the overstuffed cage. “I’m tempted.” She glanced down at Tooly. “Tempted to open it and free them.”

“The owner’s right there.”

“Fuck him!”

Tooly had only heard children swear; it was astonishing to hear a grown-up trying it. “Won’t they fly off?”

“I hope so. Now, listen; here’s the plan. Don’t run when I do it. We’ll just walk slowly away, cool as can be. They’ll never know it was us.” She fiddled with the cage latch. The kingfishers flapped with anticipation. The door sprang open.

But the birds stayed inside.

“Why aren’t they going?” Tooly asked in a whisper.

One ventured out, fluttering to the ground.

“Run!” Sarah shouted, snatching Tooly’s hand, urging her on. “Quick! Quick!” They bolted, Tooly scrambling to keep up, suppressing wild nervous laughter as they barged into carts and flunkies. The netted toads watched them rush past.

By the road, Tooly grabbed the knot at the back of Sarah’s cornflower-print dress. Like a horse reined, Sarah slowed from canter to trot to a clopping stop. They caught their breath, grinning at each other. Sarah wiped sweat from her forehead, then reached for Tooly’s face, plucked off a fallen eyelash, rolled it on her fingertips. They watched it float to the sidewalk.

After the tuk-tuk ride back to Sukhumvit Road, Sarah gave an affectionate yank of the girl’s long frizzy hair and returned her book bag. Goodbye was implicit. Tooly nearly followed her, but she hadn’t been invited. Sarah blew a kiss and spun off down the road.

Tooly looked down her soi , at the end of which stood Gupta Mansions, where Paul would be waiting in high agitation because of her tardiness, with Shelly upset because dinner was cold. A wordless night, a thin sleep, another school day tomorrow. Tooly wished not to exist, to be erased, imprisoned as she was in this unpopular little junk of a girl, exhausted by the constancy of herself.

Bangles clinked, followed by the scratch of a lighter flint. Tooly spun around. Sarah stood there, eyebrows raised, blowing white smoke, a plume swaying left and right. “I’m stealing you.”

“Are you allowed?”

“If people only did what was allowed, how dull.”

“But,” Tooly said, faltering, “I don’t know who you are.”

Sarah tucked Tooly’s hair behind her ear. At this affectionate touch, the girl’s face turned down.

“You know me, Tooly,” Sarah said. “We’ve known each other forever.”

DUNCAN HAD BEEN LIVING at 115th Street for months before his parents visited. Naoko urged her husband to go, but Keith left Connecticut only grudgingly. Finally, she prevailed — it was this or invite their son’s new girlfriend to Darien for the holidays. So he agreed to tolerate New York for one day, attending a midday Christmas concert at the Met, then scheduling a drop-in at Duncan’s apartment to meet this female. At each metropolitan inconvenience Keith encountered — holiday shoppers, the impossibility of parking, the accent of a garage attendant — he turned irritably to his wife, as if she were to blame for the world.

In the week before their arrival, Duncan had considered tidying his room but opted for passive rebellion. His defiance dissolved when Naoko called from a phone booth outside Lincoln Center to say they were on their way. He spent the next twenty minutes stuffing soiled laundry under his mattress, wiping down the bathroom basin with paper towels, hiding dirty dishes in the cupboards.

“I can offer you white wine or …” Tooly said, hands clasped before her, looking from Naoko to Keith, then back at Naoko, who presented the more sympathetic countenance. “Actually, white wine is all we have. That okay?”

“Plus, we got three types of chips,” Duncan added.

Keith, an unblinking lump of middle-aged Scottish clay, looked askance at the sofa, where his wife invited him to sit. “I only drink if I’m getting drunk,” he said. “And I’m not getting drunk with my son.”

“I’ve gotten drunk with him,” Tooly said, “and I can recommend it.”

Duncan gave an embarrassed cough.

“Diet soda,” Keith ordered. “Can we get the TV going?” He did the honors, switching to NBC Nightly News , which was broadcasting a segment on New Year’s security measures after the arrest of an Algerian caught with explosives at the border, possibly for a terrorist attack in Los Angeles.

“Wrong,” Keith told the television, when the anchor spoke of the upcoming Year 2000 celebrations.

“What is?” Tooly asked, handing him a soda can.

“The Year 2000,” he said. “If the counting starts at one A.D., you don’t reach the millennium till 2001. Not like there was a Year Zero. How hard is that for people to understand?” He looked at the TV again, which now showed footage of Bill Clinton joshing with a foreign dignitary. “Can this guy just go?” Keith said, meaning the president.

Naoko’s wandering gaze suggested that it wasn’t the first time she’d heard such laments.

“It’ll take industrial cleaners to get this guy’s stench out of the Oval Office,” Keith continued. “It’s time to restore dignity to our country.”