Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

He had begged his parents to enroll him in this moviemaking course at the Y, and so refused to admit how badly he fared. His classmates were older and from a different school — when he spoke, nobody heard. To tell Bridget how miserable her son was would betray his confidence. So Tooly attempted, during the morning drive, to inflate him for the puncturing day ahead. She asked his opinion on matters that concerned her, like what she should do if Humphrey got a bit better; and where she might live after she left here, given that her shop was closing. She could live anywhere in the world now. Tooly took his answers seriously, so he gave them seriously.

“Live here. You could have your own house, but close.”

“Couldn’t afford to live in Darien. Not by a long shot, I’m afraid. But tell me something,” she said. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be? Even just to visit.”

He fiddled with the side mirror. The boy had a way of vanishing, not hearing questions — it was infuriating to teachers (“Needs improvement”), to other kids (“Earth to Mac?”), to his father (“Hey. Mac. Seriously now.”). She observed him, wondering about the inside of his head, whether it was far away and empty, or near and full. He was humming, and she recognized the tune.

“That’s ‘The William Tell Overture.’ I was practicing that on my ukulele.”

He denied that he’d been listening in.

“Come in next time. I don’t want you hiding in your own house.”

“Wasn’t hiding.”

“Oh dear. Everything I say is wrong, Mac, my friend.”

His chin pruned.

She hated to see him on the verge of tears, but turning away seemed worse. She gave a pull of his earlobe and had a rush of — what would she call it? — a wish to suffer harm in his place. “I’ll look after you,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

“Okay.”

“Things improve when you grow up. You’ll see,” she said, turning in to the YMCA parking lot. “Some people hate getting older, but it’ll suit you. There are people made to be children and people made to be adults. Since you spend most of life as a grown-up, it’s better to have the good bits then. Don’t you think?” Tooly had no idea if what she said was hogwash, so asserted it as confidently as possible. She reached across him and opened his door. “Spit on the ground for luck.”

He did so, smiling to be naughty. “I’m going to go in there with a good attitude,” he pledged, watching her. “Even if I’m the worst of everyone.”

“Be open to everything, listen carefully to what they’re saying. And if someone says something mean, don’t let them see you’re upset. Just let it pass through you.”

He nodded vigorously.

“They’ll worship you,” she said. “They all should. And if they don’t they’re morons! Must run, Mac. You must, and I must.”

Throughout her afternoon with Humphrey — another needy male, this one at the opposite end of his life — she dearly hoped all went well for Mac. What an ache: consequences where you are of no consequence.

That evening, Duncan dragged Tooly into the TV room for company and vented at MSNBC.

“Speaking of phonies,” she said, to divert his rage, “I was stretching my legs at the Coney Island boardwalk the other day and saw that big roller coaster. Made me think of Emerson.”

“Why did the Cyclone remind you of Emerson?”

“Wasn’t he doing a doctorate on the hermeneutics of roller coasters or something?”

“How do you remember this stuff?”

She had searched for Emerson online, and found him on a list of competitors at a triathlon in Coeur d’Alene, described as a college professor. She still felt lousy at having lost her friendship with Noeline. But she’d never known the woman’s last name, so had no way of finding her online. Tooly had had so few female friends; perhaps it was having been raised by men. But she had come to wish now for female companionship, for a best friend as others had. It seemed to be beyond her.

“Poor Noeline,” she said. “That was one relationship that was going to end badly.”

“Actually,” Duncan said, “they’re married now.” He held up his iPhone, swiping through pictures of Emerson and Noeline with their three kids at a cookout in Idaho, where they both taught college. They’d had a personal tragedy a few years earlier, when a disgruntled janitor opened fire at their child’s nursery school, wounding four people and killing one, their son. Duncan had heard through mutual acquaintances, and got back in touch.

“The kids in the photo?”

“Adopted. They ended up adopting after that.”

Tooly required a minute to absorb this story, to mesh it with her scorn of Emerson, which seemed callous now. Duncan muted the television.

“And Xavi?” she ventured. “I always thought he’d do something amazing. But I’ve Googled him, and all I get is some middle-aged white guy with a mustache in Ireland.”

“Definitely not Xavi.”

“No, I figured. Did he go back to Uganda?”

Duncan sighed. “I realize you don’t know any of this.”

“Any of what?”

“Xavi died.”

The summer after business school, Xavi had co-founded a digital-rights-management start-up. But when the project stalled he’d accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs. He was still dedicated to entrepreneurship, but planned to work his way up at Goldman first, then use contacts to go it alone. After health coverage for the new job kicked in, he visited a doctor about a few nagging problems — he’d had no insurance since B-school, so had delayed the checkup for ages. They found a tumor: testicular cancer.

His plan was to undergo radiation and chemo without telling anyone at the job. He worried how they’d perceive him if they knew — as an African, he already stood out. So he fitted the treatment around his work schedule, taking the chemo drip at dawn, using vacation days to undergo the first surgery. No one at Goldman found out for months. Incredibly, he became a star there. “This was during that weird post-9/11 haze in New York,” Duncan noted. “A few friends that he told about the diagnosis didn’t know how to respond — couldn’t absorb more scary news. A bunch faded away, especially when he got sicker. A lot of people saying, ‘Lance Armstrong got over it!’ Which was not helpful.”

Finally, Xavi collapsed at the office and awoke in a hospital. The cancer had metastasized to his lungs, liver, bones. There was no hiding the condition now. When further treatment failed, the oncologist stopped returning his calls. Xavi grew sullen, and came to irrationally suspect that living in the United States had somehow provoked this illness. Duncan recalled Xavi sitting for his umpteenth chemo infusion, watching a debate on CNN about the proposed invasion of Iraq. The military campaign was being promoted by men decades older than Xavi, people who aimed to shape the future, while he would never even know how the conflict came out. “Emerson and Noeline visited once, but it ended uncomfortably. They spent the whole time arguing with him about the case for war.”

“Xavi was for invading?” Tooly guessed. “They were against?”

“The opposite. Emerson and Noeline thought it was a just war.”

One day at the hospital, Duncan caught sight of a familiar figure: the old man he’d met three years earlier, after Tooly had disappeared and he and Xavi had gone looking for her using her map. Humphrey was there for a hernia operation. When he heard about Xavi, he insisted on wishing him well. Later, after healing from his procedure, Humphrey returned to the hospital with a chessboard, recalling that he and Xavi had played during their sole encounter. But chess wasn’t conceivable — Xavi was in intensive care then. Humphrey kept trying, even going to the hospice. “He used to sit in the water garden, alone with his rolled-up chessboard. Made cups of Nescafé for everybody. He’d go home, come back the next day. That’s partly why I helped your dad.”