Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Morning, Tooly.” He shook her hand, as was his morning custom. These daily handshakes were the only occasions that he touched her. Even passing the salt, Paul avoided her fingers, placing the shaker close to, rather than in, Tooly’s hands.

“Where are we?”

“Your new bedroom. Our new apartment.”

“But where?”

He parted the curtains, revealing floor-to-ceiling windows, the city spread out beyond. “This is Bangkok.”

AT THE SQUEAK of Tooly’s sneaker, the man on the floor sat upright and torqued around, staring at her.

“You okay?” she asked.

He leaped to his feet, stumbling over bags of groceries on the parquet around him. He was in his early twenties, brilliant black hair, paper-white skin, blood-flushed cheeks. “I’m fine,” he replied. “Fine. Please, could you close my front door, please?”

She did so, reverting to the solitude of the building hallway, twirling away. She passed other closed apartment doors, considering each — then glanced back. His keys still dangled in the lock. She returned and silently removed them.

Could take these to use another time. But better to be invited in right now. She knocked.

He opened immediately — must’ve been at the peephole — and scanned her. Tooly’s wardrobe was striking for its mismatches: a red duffle coat over an oatmeal cable knit and lime bell-bottom corduroys, all smelling of mothballs (their previous lodgings having been racks at a Salvation Army thrift store in Long Island City, Queens). Beneath these layers was a figure consisting of bony sections and soft sections, not necessarily ordered according to the preferences of fashion. Her shoes were Converse low-tops — one red, one black — and, hidden under her corduroys, she wore men’s thermal socks up to her knees. Her face was bright, as if just splashed with water, freckles on the bridge of her nose, and she wore no makeup, never having learned its correct application. Indeed, she forgot to consult a mirror most mornings, encountering the world in a state of discomposition until she glimpsed her reflection somewhere, shivering with amusement, then catching the tips of the brambly bob cut between her lips and chewing. A damp strand adhered to her cheek now.

She flicked it away and smiled. “You left your keys in the door.”

He took them, nodding in thanks. “I’m an idiot.”

She made no move to leave.

“Thanks,” he said hesitantly, beginning to close the door.

“One second,” she said. “Just that — sorry if I intruded. Just — this is a bit weird. But I used to live here, actually.”

“How do you mean?”

“I grew up in this apartment. Haven’t been back to New York in years, but I was walking by the building and … Is it insane if I ask to peek in? Tell me if it’s insane. I’m getting a flood of memories just standing here.”

“Place is a bit of a mess right now.”

“In that case, I’ll feel right at home.”

He began to object but gave in, and took a step back, nearly losing his footing on the abundance of Chinese delivery menus scattered on the floor. They exchanged names, shook hands awkwardly.

The building belonged to Columbia University, which rented out apartment shares like this to its students. Yet, of the three men residing here, only one actually attended Columbia. Duncan himself studied law—“But not here,” he said confusingly, leading her past the first bedroom, rented out by an MBA student named Xavi (pronounced “Savvy”), who was currently at class. The other roommate, Emerson, was also away, attending a literary-theory seminar.

Duncan nodded dismissively toward the bathroom, but she went right in for a look. Its filth affirmed this as the domain of young heterosexual males: a dirty basin surrounded by empty gel jars and cardboard toilet rolls; pubic hairs and dried urine on the rim of the open toilet; a mildewed shower curtain concealing a grimy tub. “I did clean that once,” Duncan noted, almost with surprise.

“How come?”

“I needed to use it. The doctor told me to.”

“The doctor told you to take a bath?”

“For my nose.”

“Couldn’t you wash your nose in the basin?”

“I …” He looked over, laughed shyly.

Each roommate had chores, but to clean was to surrender. “Emerson volunteered to do the floor once, which was pretty interesting. We didn’t see that one coming at all.”

Duncan led her to his room: dirty laundry bursting from the closet, glasses of bubbly old water, a laptop and modem beside legal casebooks. On a rickety stand was a Yamaha electric piano. The walls bore just one poster, depicting the countryside in Japan, where he’d taught English for a year.

She looked around the room. “Really brings back memories.”

“Sorry everything’s so chaotic.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I like squalid boy places.”

“In that case …” He led her to the kitchen, the sink heaped with dirty dishes and pans, oven clock blinking an eternal 12:00. One cupboard was filled with scrunched plastic bags, while another contained sinister jars of pickle juice and a packaged stew that had expired in 1998. “Normally, when girls come over they never come back.”

“Fools.” She drifted onward.

“Guess you know your way around,” he mumbled, following her into the living room, the dining table piled with junk mail for kids who’d long since graduated but had yet to inform the mass-mailing departments at Victoria’s Secret, Macy’s, and L.L.Bean. She raised the window—“I loved going out here”—and stepped onto the rickety fire escape, inadvertently flipping an ashtray there. Below were bare trees and parked cars, the potholed tarmac painted with XING SCHOOL.

“My elementary school was right near here,” she improvised, returning inside. “Went there from eight till eleven.”

“How was it?”

“Heaven.”

“Not a word I normally associate with elementary school.”

“Oh, yeah? You didn’t like yours?” She took this opening and burrowed in, inquiring into his schooling, his plans, and those of his roommates. Emerson, an unpopular member of the household, was doing a doctorate in comparative literature. Xavi, who came from Uganda originally, was Duncan’s best friend and had been since high school in Connecticut.

“That’s where you come from, Connecticut? From one of those posh old families there?”

“No, no. First generation.” His dad, Keith, hailed from Glasgow, an architect who’d transferred to New York three decades earlier to build skyscrapers or die trying. Today, he was the director of design at a partnership in Stamford, Connecticut, specializing in atriums at shopping malls. As for Duncan’s mother, Naoko, she’d reached New York from Kobe, Japan, in 1973 to study art at Parsons. She and Keith met as foreigners in the big city, their accents bemusing locals, though they understood each other perfectly — that is, they misunderstood each other sufficiently. As a child, Duncan read of kilts and haggis and the treachery of the Campbells, played snare in a fife band, kept a Scottish flag in his room, and effaced his Japanese half. This reversed in junior high, once ethnicity had become chic. By college, he described himself as Japanese. After graduation, he moved to Yokohama, intending to teach English and become fluent in his mother’s tongue. It proved a disaster. “I don’t normally get into this.”

“Come on,” she said. “You’ll never see me again.”

He’d had no friends in Japan, and learned little of the language, except how impossible it was, with honorifics and respectful forms and humble forms — and myriad ways to get it all wrong. After years of claiming to be Japanese, he learned how un-Japanese he was. Wasn’t anything anymore. “This suddenly required me to have a personality. I hadn’t planned for that.”