Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“You’d be a wreck without me.”

“Exactly right. I was saying before how I test myself by going without, right? Doing that shows me what I do need.”

“Which is?”

“Just walks like this. Conversations like this. Humor like ours.” He looked at her, earnest now. “I depend on you.”

She nodded fast, heart racing. He walked on, and she kept in stride. “But Venn,” she asked, “do you like this Wildfire idea?”

“I’d give your African friend a cubicle at the Brain Trust for nothing. Unfortunately, they’re not mine to give. I only look after that place.”

“For your venture-capitalist guy, right? Maybe he’d be interested.”

“Mawky is looking for companies that are ready to launch — not looking to hand-hold, as he puts it. But if your friends are serious, if they can rustle up basic funding and get this moving, it might be interesting.”

“You like the idea, then?”

“Listen, send me the African kid. We’ll have a chat. Then if you and your friends raise enough for membership and a few months’ rental, I’ll find a place for you. And if you get that far I’ll put you together with Mawky.”

“Seriously?”

“I’ll always help you, Tooly.”

“But not if you’re just being nice. Not as a favor. I want us to do a proper project together.”

“My project with you, as far as I’m concerned, is our friendship.”

“Who cares about your lousy friendship.”

“I know, you want glory. Why not? You’re in New York. Ambition is the municipal pastime. If you want, just keep tickling those boys uptown. It’ll produce something.”

“You think?”

“The lawyer’s parents must be shelling out fifty thousand a year for NYU already. If their son loves you, they’d be open to funding your future.”

“Don’t know if going through Duncan is a good idea. The father is a massive lump of jerk.”

“That part, duck, is up to you.”

Alive to the tremors of her mood, he patted her cheek, which made her smile. “Tooly, neither of us is interested in stuff like this. You won’t find anybody who cares less about money than me. How much do I need for a year of living well? How much do I spend? Nothing. Money is totally uninteresting. What you and me want is freedom from fools. The less cash, the more you have to deal in fools. Money is dull. But independence? That is interesting.”

Her life among the students seemed so distant and frivolous when she was with Venn. Those kids had no clue — all their debates about the left and the right, as if ideology mattered anymore. Despite their dinner-table bravado, none of them would have stepped in to help that battered man back there, though all would have wanted to. But Venn intervened. He didn’t act for praise; he cared nothing of what people thought. Nor did he fear spittle or punches, if suffering them was necessary in order to live as he intended.

They reached Times Square, where the glittering ball drop and the fireworks installations were in place, vendors hawking Year 2000 paraphernalia, tourists stumbling around in sensory overload. She and Venn passed unnoticed through the crowd. They could have chosen almost any of these strangers and spun them in knots within minutes. Venn and she had engineered many people in the past. It was intoxicating, the unholy control of another human. They never did so with cruel ends, however — engineering another’s fate was not necessarily destructive. Often, Venn knew better than they what was best. After all, he had been engineering her for years.

AFTER HER ANZIO TRIP, Tooly phoned Duncan. She wanted to see Humphrey again and was coming back. Duncan was relieved—“Got worried you’d left me with this situation,” he said — and insisted that she save on New York hotels by staying in their basement. She, in turn, insisted on helping out while there.

This proved timely because Bridget was about to start her new part-time job, which left a gap in the ferrying of Mac to his summer courses at the YMCA each morning. Thankfully, the triplets didn’t require a driver to their day camp, enjoying transportation courtesy of various peer admirers, whose moms shuttled them everywhere. “Abi, Mads, and Chlo are the rockstars of third grade,” Duncan explained. Mac enjoyed no such fan base. He had not even been invited to a birthday party in several years.

That first day, Tooly dropped him outside the Y and parked the family minivan at the train station, commencing her two-hour commute to south Brooklyn. She intended to get Humphrey reading again, out of that room, out of his torpor. He still had moments of clarity, according to Duncan.

“Hello,” she said, closing the door after herself. “I came back.”

“Okay,” he replied from his armchair.

“Not pleased to see me?” She stood at his window, daylight silhouetting her. “I flew back over the ocean so we could spend a few days together and talk. I’d like to discuss some things with you, Humph. Okay? And we can go out, too — fresh air, walks, chess possibly. When you’re ready, we’ll talk.”

“Don’t know what you’re saying.” She found his hearing aid by the sink and helped him insert it. He stuffed his hands between his thighs, blinking toward the convex reflection in the switched-off television. “Is there coffee?”

“Let me make you a cup.” She did so in the communal kitchen, returning with two mugs of Nescafé, his abundantly sugared. He raised the coffee, lips twitching to meet the mug.

She looked into her own cup, stared at the black liquid. Hearing him speak — Russian accent gone — incensed her anew. She mentioned her visit with Sarah. “You know who I’m talking about,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Frankly,” he responded, “I find your questions strange.”

She left him for a few minutes to finish his drink and occupied herself by organizing his books by subject. Yelena had lined them up by size — tall with tall, short with short — creating peculiar neighbors: Plato’s Republic beside The Ultimate Food Processor Cookbook beside Selected Cautionary Verses by Hilaire Belloc, each a long-lost acquaintance of Tooly’s (“The Chief Defect of Henry King/Was chewing little bits of String”).

Humphrey mumbled something.

“What?” she asked, arms laden with volumes.

“Relieved to see you again.”

“What’s that?” she said, stalling because the remark upset her.

“I’m relieved to see you.”

“That’s nice, Humphrey.” She spoke louder than intended.

“I have a problem with my memory,” he said. “It’s uneven. Depends what cells are attacked. Blood doesn’t flow in that direction. But I don’t want to exaggerate the problem.” His lips smacked together; he took a breath.

Her pocket rang. She took out the cellphone: Bridget calling, with an apology and a plea. Starting her new job was requiring nightmarish admin, and the tech guy still hadn’t set up her laptop. As an exceptional favor, could Tooly pick up Mac this afternoon?

So, all the way back to Connecticut she went. Outside the main doors of the Y, the pudgy boy waited. She tapped the horn of the minivan, opened the passenger door. He failed to notice, so she parked and walked over. Mac recognized her only when she was three steps away. “Oh,” he said shyly. “Hi.”

“Were you waiting long?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Went well today?”

He nodded, and she handed him a banana, having bought two from a grocery store outside the Sheepshead Bay subway. Mac peeled his oddly, not like a blooming flower but removing a single strip all the way down, then finding nowhere to put it. He looked for a garbage can, as if one might materialize amid the parking spaces. In distraction, he dropped the rest of the banana on the tarmac, then crouched and resumed peeling, one strip at a time, right there on the ground. How odd, this boy. “Come on,” she said gently. To spare his evident embarrassment, she kept walking toward the vehicle.