Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Yeah, and you saw what they did to him.”

“Well, I think Obama is clean,” Bridget said.

“His feet are clean from all that water you think he walks on,” Duncan said. “Today’s leaders aren’t at the standards of the past. Nowhere near.”

“Hmm,” Tooly began hesitantly, wondering whether to speak her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just, I always wonder if all this stuff about decline is false nostalgia — as if the old days were full of people opening doors for each other and memorizing poetry and playing the piano.”

“That’s exactly how I imagine the old days!” Duncan said, laughing.

“People in the old days were as rotten as people now, don’t you think?” she continued. “They were probably more ignorant and violent. There were great people back then — I’m sure your grandparents were very nice, especially to you, their grandson. But people from the Greatest Generation also spent a fair bit of time abusing and enslaving each other. No?”

“You think this current period is so fantastic?” he retorted. “Everything is progress everywhere?”

“Not progress or decline. I just think most people probably have a few years at their peak, and attribute to that period all the hope and wholesomeness they had then. Once their moment has passed, everything seems in decline.”

“You’re saying I’m past my peak,” he said, amused.

“That’s exactly what she just said,” Bridget affirmed, clapping.

“Except, except, except,” Tooly interrupted, “you’re actually even weirder, because you believe all the best stuff happened in a period you didn’t even live in.”

“Come on — you’re way worse,” he said. “At least I embrace the techy zeitgeist. You own a frickin’ bookshop, my dear. Do you even have a computer there? Are you familiar with these newfangled machines?”

“As a matter of fact, I do have one. And now I’ve got that cellphone you lent me.”

“You have a tablet yet?”

“I’m waiting till the stone ones come out, the ones that come with a chisel.”

“My point exactly.”

“No, you’re right in a way,” she acknowledged. “I don’t feel involved in a lot of what’s going on. But that’s always been true for me.” So much of her childhood had revolved around the lessons of the Soviet Empire and World War II that, once Tooly set out on her own, she’d needed a while to acclimatize to the present. It wasn’t 9/11 that did it so much as the Iraq War; sometime around 2003, the twenty-first century seemed to detach from the twentieth. “And I’m still not sure which century I fit in. Maybe neither.”

“That’s such a cop-out. We’re the same age, pretty much. You’ve been part of the same period I have. Secretly, you’re a declinist like me. You just don’t want to sound negative. Any period is not as good as any other, just like any place is not as good as any other.”

“You could rank times and places?”

“Easily.”

“Then you’d have to admit that this time and place are pretty good,” she said. “No chance of war breaking out in Darien, Connecticut. You’re well-off, educated, healthy. Your kids take filmmaking and modern dance at day camp. They’ll live long and happy lives. So everything is in decline?”

He shook his head, annoyed — her summary failed to explain why everything was so irritating nowadays. “Missing the point,” he said.

He was right to notice something missing. She had not stated her fundamental view: that, for Duncan, time and place, fortune and misfortune, had only a glancing impact. He was temperamentally condemned to embitterment and would revert to that condition regardless of circumstances, just as lottery winners, after the euphoria, ended up as morose or cheerful as they’d ever been. People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were.

All fell quiet, except the background chatter of a peppy news anchor: “… from the back of the bus — and the front of it, too! — with a story up close and personal, a no-holds-barred look at the success of Michele Bachmann’s bus tour. Stick with us, for the last word in fair and …”

He turned off the television. “All these people should be put in jail,” he said. “Not just any jail but some nightmare place where they get beaten around the clock.”

“I’m putting the kids to bed,” Bridget said.

Tooly excused herself, too. “I need a good sleep tonight.”

Duncan remained, staring at the black screen. The rant had quenched nothing. He awoke his two phones, each bright and ready to behave, just as the outside world never would.

IN THE COMING days, Humphrey’s mood varied — talkative one visit, distant the next. Overnight, he stumbled around his room, restless but afraid to venture outside, even to use the shared toilets. By morning, his late-night activities were evident in the piles of toppled books, bedcovers strewn with documents, food on the floor.

Yelena came early to ensure that no disasters had befallen him, made breakfast, washed him. Tooly took over around midday, occasionally crossing paths with the Russian woman’s son, Garry, an engineering student who was trying to resolve Humphrey’s problems with the television remote.

Once everyone else had gone, Tooly turned off the blaring TV and posed questions about his accent and about their past. But each query distressed Humphrey — he wanted to help, but failed to summon what she wanted. A few times, he snapped at her. At other times, he was endearing, such as when he offered her a bunch of cherries that Yelena had left.

“Grapes,” Tooly corrected him. “Thank you. I’ll have a few.”

Whenever she succeeded in dipping into his memory, it was his childhood, not hers, that came out — climbing a statue, or milking a cow, or throwing an apricot pit and fearing he’d blinded a girl. They were reminiscences she already knew, but he insisted on recounting each to the end. Occasionally, an unfamiliar anecdote emerged, such as when he recalled, as a very little boy, lying atop his mother while she did read-throughs of plays and falling asleep to the flip of pages.

“She was involved in the theater? But you never say your parents’ names, do you, Humph. Where did all this happen?”

“I lay there and heard pages turning.”

“Does it feel,” she asked, “when you’re telling these stories, does it feel like it’s you? Or does it feel like a different person back then?”

“I’m the same as I was,” he said. “Only later.”

After a minute, she asked, “Would you like a walk down to Emmons Avenue? We can go slowly. You set the pace.”

But he never wanted to leave his room, just sat in his armchair, staring toward the window. Tooly settled on his bed, leafing through books, yet struggled to concentrate. When leaving for the day, she closed the door after herself and stood in the hallway, often for more than a minute. Felt abominable to leave. She arrived back in Connecticut later and later. The McGrorys stopped expecting her for dinner.

Besides Yelena and Tooly, he had no visitors. But phone calls came often, always from medical-bill collectors, badgering him over a small fortune owed for a hernia procedure several years earlier. Humphrey believed he had paid, so Tooly asked them to send an itemized bill. The invoice was four pages and incomprehensible. Nobody — least of all those demanding the money — could explain what anything was for, only that the bill was correct. Pool your family resources, they told her, and pay (including for inexplicable items, such as $12,184 for “Assorted”). The cost would have been less — though still unaffordable for Humphrey — had he been enrolled in Medicare. But nobody could find any document attesting to his identity, citizenship, even his right to be in this country. The medical-bill pestering made him refuse further checkups, including those he needed on his eyes, hearing, and memory. He kept pill bottles — for high blood pressure, cholesterol, memory acuity, glaucoma, a vitamin deficiency — under the cushion of his armchair and claimed he took his doses in her absence, though she disbelieved him.