Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Phueng and Mai were freelancers — not bargirls tied to a particular nightspot but hairdressers who supplemented their income with “tips” from foreign boyfriends, hoping one would eventually agree to marriage and make the income permanent. As the night went on, they found customers, and Tooly was left alone. She visited with Jaime, who taught her about his trade: how you poured heavily early in the evening, then tapered off as the night went on; and how you managed the drunks, whom he referred to as los zombies . When the party reached fever pitch, Jaime spoke less and pointed more: get me that, hand me this, run upstairs, more ice. “Look at this one,” he said, of an approaching zombie, the woman’s eyelashes out of sync.

“C’mon, kiddo,” the woman snarled. “Pour it a little stronger, will ya.”

The two bouncers were supposed to keep the peace, but it was usually Venn who broke up fights. When he intervened, the combatants soon submitted — at most throwing a late punch over his shoulder, which only earned a hard slap from Venn. Even men twice his size reddened and apologized. During such scenes, he flashed Tooly the quickest of winks to show her not to be afraid, that this wasn’t real. All around were raised voices — including his own ferocious outbursts — while she, against a wall, glowed inside to know what was really happening. “I never lose control, duck,” he’d explained. “I choose to get angry.”

The roughest men adored Venn, and women were equally drawn to him, though many of his girlfriends derided the cult of Venn — rogues adopting his speech patterns and requesting the music he liked (schmaltzy seventies love songs). After a couple of weeks, they were even calling Tooly “duck,” as Venn did, treating her like a bar mascot, patting her head with coarse paws, offering low fives. Sometimes they inquired if her dad was around, by which they meant Venn. Once, she mentioned the disgusting piano player who, on her first night there, had kissed her. A dozen of the hardest men on the premises gathered for details on the culprit. She later heard that he’d “been sorted out,” and never saw him again. If anyone bothered her now, a wall of villains closed around her. This protection imbued her with an intoxicating power over grown-ups. But she avoided using it, since violence — even in her favor — made her whole body tremble.

From listening in, she learned that Humphrey rented this house, although the things in the storage room belonged to Venn’s associates. These included a Bulgarian ex-wrestler who bleached one-dollar bills in the bathtub, using desktop publishing to reprint them as hundreds; Nigerians who smuggled brown packets in disassembled televisions; and a Brazilian who showed Tooly a plastic tube surgically implanted in his left arm that, when he flexed, sucked air through a hole in his fingertip, allowing him to “disappear” pretty stones from a jewelry shop in Bang Rak. Such characters increased Humphrey’s wish to leave — if the police found this stuff, they’d blame him. But Venn was watching out. “Baksheesh for Bangkok’s finest” was how he put it, meaning bottomless drinks, nightly entertainment, and weekly envelopes for the precinct commanders.

After days of taking up Humphrey’s bed, Tooly obtained her own space, a camping tent in the storage room with a padlock on the inside for privacy. “You’re staying a little longer than planned,” Venn told her.

“Am I going to be in trouble?”

“Not a chance.”

The thought of Venn standing up for her with Paul was frightening — even to think of the mismatch made her guilty.

Now that Tooly was stowed in the storage room, she took the opportunity to snoop around, finding designer watches, golf memberships for Panya Resort, fax machines, a stack of U.S. marriage certificates and blank Canadian passports, twenty-four-inch color TVs with the insides hollowed out, packets of expired pharmaceuticals (where Humphrey had found her aspirin), an industrial sewing machine, restaurant tables. Finding herself among these objects, it occurred to Tooly that she, too, was a stolen good.

Each morning, she unzipped her tent and peeked out.

“Conversation and debate?” Humphrey asked, handing her a glass of Coke. As she sipped, he opened his notepad, pen in hand, its tip aimed at the ceiling, and wrote, ITEM I — MAKE LIST.

He immediately drew a thick line through this. “Done,” he said, and tossed the pad on his unmade bed. “Important to be productive. Already, I achieve something. Good mornink.” The pad — and, indeed, his productivity — made no further appearances for another day.

Sarah’s absence, so scary at first, grew less troubling. Tooly’s days assumed a pleasant routine. She raced around on the lower floor, leaping as she went, singing loudly and tunelessly — a long warbling note. The turning fan whirred slowly toward her, blowing her off balance. “What are you reading today, Humphrey?”

He responded at length, circumnavigating anything resembling an answer in order to hold her attention, tossing forth references, personal commentary, perplexing claims: that a man called Francis Bacon had experimented with the refrigeration of chicken in a snow drift, caught a cold, and died; that Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely when his mother heard that the Spanish Armada was sailing up the English Channel, thus condemning her son to a lifetime of poor digestion.

While speaking, Humphrey gesticulated wildly, as if skywriting the names of his idols. He was of the firm opinion that, had the Great Thinkers been around, had they stumbled across this house, they’d have become his personal friends. “Sir Isaac Newton and I, we are like two peas in a pond.” Sadly, it was trivial beings who were in abundance; the Great Thinkers proved so hard to find.

“Who’s your favorite writer, Humphrey?”

“Samuel Johnson, Yeats and Keats,” he said, pronouncing the two last names to rhyme, “Kafka, Baudelaire, Baron Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Demosthenes, Cicero, Rousseau, Aristotle, and Milton.”

“If you had to pick one .”

“That is who I pick.”

“It’s not one.”

“Also,” he added, as if the unmentioned might complain, “John Locke, Plutarch, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill.”

Much as he enjoyed rambling, Humphrey liked nothing more than listening to her. He wasn’t simply being polite — he thirsted for information and swallowed any she offered, even the plots of novels she’d read. She told him about the World Wrestling Federation, too, and the controversy over whether it was all fake, which intrigued him.

“Fabulous information you are giving,” he said, stirring his coffee with a ballpoint pen and licking it, unaware that the heat had breached the ink cartridge, dyeing his lips blue. “You know who you are reminding me of?” he said, wiping his mouth and spreading ink across the back of his hand. “John Stuart Mill. He was child prodigy like you, always eating watermelon.”

She sat cross-legged on the floor, half of a watermelon in her lap, digging into it with a wooden cooking spoon so ineffectual at chiseling that she gripped it with both hands, which meant the juice-slippery melon kept leaping from between her knees and bouncing across the floor.

With no sign of anyone retrieving Tooly, Humphrey soon took on her education, loading her down with reading material. Each time she returned to her tent, she found a fresh volume at its entrance.

“You have read Spengler yet, darlink?”

“What is Spankler?”

“You are ten years old, and you not read Oswald Spengler? How this is possible?” He placed a copy of The Decline of the West by the tent.

Humphrey had no friends at the parties, just a few trading partners. Their dealings were mostly in expired pharmaceuticals and medical prosthetics, such as a pair of flesh-colored plastic legs he was constantly trying to sell, each wearing a scuffed black dress shoe and a red sock. “How much I get for this?” he asked Tooly, placing one before her.