Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Who else would you be? Anyway, who cares, my dearest darling thing. Memories are so boring. They’re always wrong, and only cause trouble. Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior. Anyway, your childhood is over now.” She scanned for a busboy. “Got to work to keep your cup full in this place. Waiter!”

He replenished hers, black coffee slopping into the enamel saucer, dripping when she raised the cup to her lips. “Whole time I’ve been here, Venn hasn’t bothered to call.”

“I haven’t heard from him, either,” Tooly lied. “He’s busy.”

“Now that I’m not here with money to give him, he’s nowhere to be found.”

Tooly rolled her eyes. “You with money for him? Please. Get serious. He looks after you, and you know that.”

“If that makes you feel better.”

“Not feel better. It’s true.”

“I’m a liar now? Can’t believe you just called me a liar.”

“I didn’t say that. I said—”

“It is what you said.” Sarah slammed down her coffee cup, chewed nail polish off her pinkie. “You want me gone? Well, you can just … All right? Because …” A tear trundled down her face, cleaning a line through her makeup. “I’m the one who kept all this going. I could have snapped my fingers,” she said, “and your world tour would’ve been over years ago. You want to think I’m awful? Fine. You’ve turned twenty-one now, so I can’t stop you.”

“What difference does it make that I turned twenty-one?”

“That’s why I came back here.”

“So we could go shopping on my birthday?”

“Not for that. Because, after twenty-one, everything changes for you. I’ve been trying to tell you. My only advice is make yourself indispensable to him.”

“Sarah, I don’t have the messy feelings you have about Venn. I am not you. Not everyone is you. Okay?”

“Pay attention. Otherwise, things are changing.”

“Seriously. It’s stuff like this that makes him avoid you. Stop acting up, okay?”

“Acting up? You are, my dear. Not me. You are the one who’s humiliating yourself. You don’t understand half of what’s going on here. Don’t think you’re above me. Because you are the worst kind of manipulator. You can’t even look me in the eyes. There we go, that’s better. Oh — gone again.”

“Because I don’t want to look at you.”

“What a disappointment. We all liked you, Tooly. What a disappointment.”

“You’re saying things just to be hurtful now.”

“I,” she said, pointing at Tooly, “I was here before you. Okay? And I get you completely . Each time you make out like you’re all nice and sweet , remember in the back of your head: I know you. I know what you’re like inside.” Sarah spun around, sweetly asking the hipsters for another cigarette. The guy in the porkpie hat, who’d supplied her before, did so again, though he declined to keep her company. When outside, she beckoned to him through the window. He pretended not to notice; his two friends stifled laughter.

Tooly resolved never ever to see Sarah again. She submitted to a hug and a peck on the cheek, paid (Sarah claimed to have no American currency left besides cab fare for the airport), and speed-walked back to the apartment to escape the pollution of that woman.

When Tooly came home, Humphrey placed his finger on the page before him and issued a woebegone sigh, which was his way of communicating serenity, an impossible sentiment while Sarah had been in residence. He dragged the chess set from under the Ping-Pong table and set it up on the couch, laying out all the pieces, placing each at the precise center of its square. “When is last time you win me?” he asked Tooly.

“The last time we played.”

“If I play tennis against monkey, he also wins sometimes, because I am very surprised he even holds racket.” He scrutinized her a moment, perceiving that she longed to go, to be uptown with the students, not here with him. “Why I bother?” he said. “You do not even sit and read anymore. Trivial being — that is what you are now. Trivial being, like everyone.” He shifted about on the couch, eyebrows bumping into each other like two butting caterpillars. He had to retract his charge. “Even to say you are trivial being, darlink, breaks my heart.”

“I should go.”

The muscles of his face stilled. His brown eyes clouded, gazing fondly upon her. He gave another sigh.

“What?”

“I am happy. This is all. Not happy you are going; I am sad you go away, of course. But I am happy you are here now.” He smacked his lips together. “Remember, I am counter-revolutionary and nonconformist. Why I should care about time? Why I should care that later you are not at this place? We are together at same time and in same place for many hours, even if mostly it is in past. What difference? Those events are still there, even if I am not.”

“What are you talking about, Humph?”

“Trivial beings think there is only present — that past is gone and future is coming. But past is like overseas: it still exists, even when you are not there anymore. Future time, too. It is there already.”

“Well, I’m not there yet. But I do need to get moving.”

“First, I have idea I must run over you.”

“To run past me?”

“No, I run idea right at you, and you tell me what you think. Okay?”

“I’m all ears.”

“I work up to it.”

“Humph, I have to go!”

“Do you accept I jump from window?” he said. “Or you get angry with me?”

Humphrey had a long-standing fascination with suicide, alternately romanticizing and recoiling from the idea. It was the ultimate expression of will, he claimed, the mind overcoming the body. Yet the act was tragic, too, given how often suicide was due to the Moron Problem: that simpletons could and did harm intellectuals, that foolish ideas became crazes, that babble was mistaken for brilliance. The Moron Problem made Humphrey want to quit life. Yet this granted victory to the morons. It was a dialogue he had conducted with himself for decades — a debate rendered absurd by the impossibility that he would ever act on it.

“If you jump from here, Humph, you’d just break your leg. We’re only one floor up.”

“This is accurate statement.” He knitted his hands over his belly. “You become like Venn now, always going somewhere. Why this is?”

“I have things to do. I know you like doing nothing, but don’t make me watch. Can you accept that?”

During her reproach, he curled his head till his chin grazed his chest, as if it snowed on him.

She prepared to leave. Had no duty here — they had been company to each other over the years, but she refused to pity him. Pity was the opposite of friendship. Venn had said that, and she repeated it in her head, arming herself against Humphrey’s hunched silence. She fastened her duffle-coat toggles, feigning indifference to him, until something changed, and the indifference felt real. There — perhaps you could turn off sympathy.

DUNCAN APOLOGIZED FOR failing to invite her to his family home for the Christmas holidays — this whole break, he’d felt like crap.

“I was fine,” she said. Indeed, she’d have hated it there, a stranger among those who’d known one another forever. Plus, Duncan’s remorse had worth — Venn always advised her to watch for others’ guilt, which had many practical uses.

She took a sweater from his closet. “And Xavi,” she asked, pushing her head through the neck hole, “where’s he?”

“Back later. He said you guys held a couple of meetings about his business idea.”

There had been four such meetings, including a New Year’s Eve party of B-school types. “His online-currency idea is really smart, actually,” she said. “Just needs funding.”