Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“I can’t go to college. I was a disaster at school.”

“What were your grades like?”

“I got C’s.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I’m glad you have this misconception about the size of my brain. If I could open up my skull, you’d find a little peanut in there. I never even graduated from high school.”

“Bullshit.”

“I only went till I was ten.”

“What? How is that even legal?”

“My life to date hasn’t been entirely legal.”

“Divulge. Right now.”

Tooly shook her head, laughed downward.

“I’ll pry it out of you, young lady!” Noeline said. “How the hell do you talk like you do if you dropped out at ten? You’re, like, the only person I know who says words like ‘scoundrel’ in conversation and makes it sound normal. My students — kids who can, like, reel off SAT words— never say things like ‘scoundrel.’ ”

“I read a lot, I guess. Lots of words that I say, I’ve only seen in print — I’m probably mispronouncing half the stuff.”

“I noticed. But all college is, Tooly, is reading. It’s reading lists, plus professors checking that you read the reading lists. Well, that’s not entirely all. But a lot of it. You’ve never been to my place on West End Avenue, right? You have to come over.”

“Can I see your books?”

“That is my favorite question ever. Tea and books?” She clinked Tooly’s cup. “Then, afterward, I can see your place, right?” she teased. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s happening — I don’t get to visit the batcave, do I. How about you introduce me to your mystery man?”

“Wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“I’d fall in love with him?”

“Very possibly.”

“I have to meet him, then. And you guys live together, right?”

“No.”

“Just testing. But you grew up in that apartment on a Hundred and fifteenth, which was how you came to meet Duncan, right?”

“I lived there for a few years when I was a kid, yeah.”

“That composer dude with the pig downstairs, Gilbert — I was talking to him one time, and he’s been there thirty years. He’s the last remaining rent-control resident from before Columbia bought the building. I mentioned how I knew this girl — meaning you — who lived in the building as a kid. I calculated that it must’ve been in the eighties. He said that’s impossible; the whole building was single-room-occupancy back then. No kids allowed. You weren’t allowed to sleep more than one person per room.”

“That’s weird.”

“More than weird,” Noeline said, smiling. “Come on — I just confessed to, like, forging a thesis or whatever. That’s the end of my career, if anyone knew.”

So Tooly confided part of the truth: that she had never lived in that apartment; that she was fascinated with seeing inside strangers’ homes, so she had a hobby of talking her way in. Originally, her house visits were conducted with that guy, the aforementioned male friend, who occasionally needed to look around someone’s home. “Way easier for a little girl to get in than a grown man.”

“But sorry— why were you guys doing this?”

“It’s interesting meeting complete strangers, seeing what their apartments are like. Haven’t you ever wished you could just peek into someone’s place?” Tooly said. “And people are different at home. You can figure out stuff.”

“What stuff? Which things to burglarize?”

“We never did that. I never did that.”

“So why, then?”

“Opportunities come from knowing people.”

“Is that why you hang around at Emerson’s place? Opportunities?”

“Maybe.”

“Wow. You are cold. Well, if you end up burglarizing their place, please take Emerson’s tofu. It’s the object that means most to him in the world.”

Tooly laughed.

A week later, they bumped into each other again. Noeline stepped from the bathroom at 115th Street in pajamas, sheepishly bypassed Tooly in the corridor, and hastened into Emerson’s bedroom.

SHE TOOK HIM.

Mac was scheduled that morning for floor hockey, a sport at which he demonstrated absolute ineptitude and corresponding dread. Tooly clicked him under the passenger-side safety belt, tossed a bag of their belongings on the backseat of the minivan, and drove right past the Y, taking the turnoff for interstate south. He looked at her. “Is this the right way?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. Today was quarterfinals.” He stared out the window, incurious about the change of plans. Mac tracked their mileage through Westchester, checking the odometer against the highway signs. After a silent patch, he said, “Trees don’t count as being alive because they don’t have heads.” He returned to his open window, warm air fluttering his belt strap, the late-July sun intensified through the windscreen.

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” she asked.

He shrugged. They drove that whole morning, playing car games and listening to the radio. She inquired about his moviemaking class, and he explained his Flip videocamera, with the combination of patience and inexactitude that young children exhibit when informing their elders about the present day. He fell asleep for a couple of hours, miles rushing beneath them, past Philadelphia and Wilmington, southwest around Baltimore, before they turned off for Lodge Haven, Maryland.

That name had always felt privately hers, the place of birth listed on every form and passport of her life. But she remembered nothing of the place, just a Washington, D.C., suburb that she’d left as an infant and never seen since. She woke Mac gently, houses sliding past, a neighborhood of long lawns, basement romper rooms, college stickers on car windows.

“It’s okay that I kidnapped you?” she asked him.

“It’s okay.”

“We can travel around and I can show you all sorts of things. No piano lessons required, and no Seroquel.”

He looked down, ashamed of his medications. “I like my piano lessons.”

“In that case, we’ll find a piano teacher and kidnap him, too.”

“Where are we right now?”

“We’re going for lunch with my father.”

“With the banana split?”

“No, not him. My real father,” she said, scanning the street for the address.

At a distance, she spotted him kneeling on the lawn outside his home, pruning a flower bed beneath the bay windows, his back to her, trowel in hand, a long strand of white hair on his balding head flapping back and forth in the wind, like an arm waving Mayday. She lowered her window. Paul turned, smoothing the hair across his head, raising the trowel in greeting. “That you there?” he asked, shading his eyes with gardening gloves, his arms sun-freckled, polo shirt tucked into khakis. “Park in the driveway, or on the street. Nobody tows here.”

An urge to stamp on the pedal and zoom away came over Tooly. She pulled to the curb, cut the engine, and reached over to Mac. “Shake my hand for luck.”

“Why?”

“Just an old habit.”

But he wouldn’t, so she unclicked his seatbelt. “Hungry for lunch?”

As they crossed the road, she watched Paul’s thin mouth, which wavered rather than spoke, as if the lips were engaged in a dispute over how to greet her. “So,” he said, “you found the place.”

During all these years apart, Paul had existed for Tooly as a character in her story, one who had left the stage. Now he stood before her, a little man around sixty, awaiting a response. Custom suggested she inform him that the drive was easy, the traffic sparse, his flower bed lovely. Instead, she said, “It’s such a pleasure for me to see you again,” and touched his forearm, whose slenderness discomposed her, a warm, brittle limb. He was so much smaller than he ought to have been. His arm tensed at her touch.